Matthew Pearl. The Last Dickens. Read by Paul Michael, Midwest Tapes, 2009.
The Last Dickens is an adventurous historical mystery surrounding a Charles Dickens mystery, namely The Mystery of Edwin Drood. James Ripley Osgood, partner of the Boston publisher Fields and Osgood (formerly Ticknor and Fields) tries to see if he can find the ending of The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
Readers may know that Edwin Drood was the novel Dickens was working on when he died. He had released six monthly installments, and his contract called for six more.
The novel has a good deal of material based on history. While it is set mostly in 1870 at the time of Dickens’ death, there are flashbacks to 1867 and Dickens’ second and last American tour.
The lively cast of characters makes for intriguing reading, and the pace increases as the novel develops. We know that certain places and characters in Dickens’ novels are based on real people and places. Inventing Scrooge, for example, tells us there was a gravestone Dickens noted to one Ebenezer Scroggie, “A Meal Man.” He imagined or misread the epitaph saying “A Mean Man” and changed Scroggie to Scrooge.
So here we discover the father of a deceased Edward True (or Trude, it was hard to tell since this was a reading). Edward was apparently murdered by a corrupt and devious uncle. Edwin Drood and his uncle both fall for the same woman, and then Edwin disappears. Because the story was unfinished, we never know if Edwin is dead or alive, if his uncle did indeed murder him, or if something else happens.
Even back in 1870, speculation was all over the place. A spiritualist claimed that the ghost of Dickens had dictated the ending to her. A play based on the novel had a different ending. In the novel, the pompous actor Grunewald does not like the ending written for the part of Drood because he dies too early in the play. The English publisher and Dickens’ agent disagree about it, too.
The situation is further complicated because there were no clear copyright laws in 1870. Though Fields and Osgood had the American publishing contract with Dickens, Harper Brothers would come out with pirated editions.
There was a small group of people working on the docks of New York and Boston known as bookaneers. Pearl, the author of The Dante Club, would later write a novel called The Last Bookaneer. They would steal manuscripts shipped in from Europe and then sell them to unscrupulous publishers who would then come out with competing editions earlier and cheaper because they paid no royalties. In the story, one of the Brothers Harper is not above employing bookaneers.
A courier for Fields and Osgood is murdered after picking up a manuscript from England on the docks. It is apparently the next installments of Edwin Drood. The lawyer who happens to discover the dead body helps himself to the manuscript, and soon someone murders him, too.
A society matron stalks Dickens in America, breaks into his hotel room, and apparently steals something. She may know something about Edwin Drood as well.
Lurking in the background is a cold-blooded killer who calls himself Herman. He nearly kills Osgood on a steamer that he and Rebecca Sand, a bookkeeper from the publishing firm and sister of the murdered courier, are taking to England. While there, they meet with Dickens’ British publisher and agent to see if there is any evidence for the final installments or what plans Dickens may have had for the characters.
He attends the Christie’s estate auction where Dickens’ possessions are sold. He meets a neighbor of Dickens who calls himself John Falstaff and runs an inn across the road from Dickens’ Gad’s Hill estate. Another person who appears helpful is a man whom Dickens helped (Dickens had a soft spot for charity cases) who calls himself Datchery—which the name of a character in The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
We also read fair representations of one of Dickens’ daughters and his sister-in-law who helped her sister raise Dickens’ family. Of course, by 1867 Dickens and his wife had separated. And we read quite a bit about Frank Dickens, a son who is stationed in India as a British constable.
The Mystery of Edwin Drood involves some opium addiction, and England at the time was trying to corner the legal market on the drug. Frank Dickens is investigating Indian opium smugglers who may be connected to some of the dockside action in England and America.
Although he is clearly beaten, the Fields and Osgood courier who is killed was was also given a lethal dose of opium hypodermically. His sister says he never touched the stuff, but the police wrote off his death as drug-induced.
When he visited America in 1867, Dickens was very interested in a famous crime committed at a Harvard laboratory. A Harvard professor murdered George Parkman, a prominent businessman and uncle of historian Francis Parkman. The professor was able to conceal the murder for some time because he had hidden the remains of the body inside a wall of the laboratory.
On that 1867 visit, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., the writer, took Dickens on a tour of Boston one day. Dickens wanted to see the laboratory where the murder had been committed. He also spoke to him about Poe and narcotics.
Did these things inspire The Mystery of Edwin Drood as well? What about Chapman, Dickens’ publisher, or Forester the agent? What do they know? Or the helpful British businessman who befriends Osgood on the steamer trip and then bails him out when he is arrested in London after investigating an opium den?
This is a very creative tale, a mystery, and a literary exploration. Readers of all types should enjoy it for a variety of reasons.
We listened to the recorded version which is very well done. Mr. Michael, the reader, does a terrific job with the voices of the various characters. The only quibble we have is that he mispronounces some of the Bostonian names: He got Quincy correct (kwin-zee not kwin-see) but missed Concord (sounds the same as conquered) and Houghton (hoe-ton, not how-ton).
We also note that the book was published by Random House. We cannot imagine why Harper wouldn’t touch it…