WE have some external evidence as to Dickens's solution of his own problem, from Forster. (2) On August 6, 1869, some weeks before he began to work at his tale, Dickens, in a letter, told Forster, "I have a very curious and new idea for my new story. Not communicable (or the interest of the would be gone), but a very strong one, though difficult to work." Forster must have instantly asked that the incommunicable secret should be communicated to HIM, for he tells us that "IMMEDIATELY AFTER I learnt" - the secret. But did he learn it? Dickens was ill, and his plot, whatever it may have been, would be irritatingly criticized by Forster before it was fully thought out. "Fules and bairns should not see half-done work," and Dickens may well have felt that Forster should not see work not even begun, but merely simmering in the author's own fancy.
Forster does not tell us that Dickens communicated the secret in a letter. He quotes none: he says "I was told," orally, that is. When he writes, five years later (1874), "Landless was, I THINK, to have perished in assisting Tartar finally to unmask and seize the murderer," he is clearly trusting, not to a letter of Dickens's, but to a defective memory; and he knows it. He says that a nephew was to be murdered by an uncle. The criminal was to confess in the condemned cell. He was to find out that his crime had been needless, and to be convicted by means of the ring (Rosa's mother's ring) remaining in the quicklime that had destroyed the body of Edwin.
Nothing "new" in all this, as Forster must have seen. "The originality," he explains, "was to consist in the review of the murderer's career by himself at the close, when its temptations were to be dwelt upon as if, not he the culprit, but some other man, were the tempted."
But all this is not "hard to work," and is not "original." As Mr. Proctor remarks, Dickens had used that trick twice already. ("Madman's Manuscript," PICKWICK; "Clock Case Confession," in MASTER HUMPHREY'S CLOCK.) The quicklime trick is also very old indeed. The disguise of a woman as a man is as ancient as the art of fiction: yet Helena MAY be Datchery, though nobody guessed it before Mr. Cuming Walters. She ought not to be Datchery; she is quite out of keeping in her speech and manner as Datchery, and is much more like Drood.
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