The mystery of Edwin Drood and James Lobley's 'Little Nell.'

Most likely no one will ever know whether happiness or misery - life or death - would have been the prevailing impression of Edwin Drood had Dickens lived to finish it. He began planning the book in 1869. One of the rare moments of peace and contentment in the text as we have it comes in chapter XXII, when Mr Tartar and his man row Mr Grewgious and his ward Rosa Bud up river to Greenhithe, where Tartar has a yacht.

The paragraph which describes this event might well be called a 'prose poem', and is almost self-contained. Tender, ambiguous, and profound, it explores the theme of life and death and the idea of resurrection, to end on an elegiac note. Yet, while it is far more skilfully managed than anything in that early tear-jerker, The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), Dickens does seem to wish to remind us of the earlier work. Rosa and Mr Grewgious seem to mirror Nell and her grandfather, reborn in happier circumstances. Like the earlier pair, they escape from gloomy London, but in a magical boat, not dragging on weary feet. And whereas Nell finds death in a gloomy vault, Rosa escapes (for the day) even the memory of the gloomy vaults of Christminster. It is a moment in which to escape all the cities of gloom and death for 'osier beds' and 'an interval of rest under boughs (such rest!)'.(1) Surely Dickens intends us to recall here (and perhaps forgive) that original heart-stopper …