There are no new ideas in plots. "All the stories have been told," and all the merit lies in the manner of the telling. Dickens had used the unsuspected watcher, as Mr. Proctor shows, in almost all his . In MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT, when Jonas finds that Nadgett has been the watcher, Dickens writes, "The dead man might have come out of his grave and not confounded and appalled him so." Now, to Jasper, Edwin WAS "the dead man," and Edwin's grave contained quicklime. Jasper was sure that he had done for Edwin: he had taken Edwin's watch, chain, and scarf-pin; he believed that he had left him, drugged, in quicklime, in a locked vault. Consequently the reappearance of Edwin, quite well, in the vault where Jasper had buried him, would be a very new idea to Jasper; would "confound and appall him." Jasper would have emotions, at that spectacle, and so would the reader! It is not every day, even in our age of sixpenny , that a murderer is compelled to visit, alone, at night, the vault which holds his victim's "cold remains," and therein finds the victim "come up, smiling."
Yes, for business purposes, this idea was new enough! The idea was "difficult to work," says Dickens, with obvious truth. How was he to get the quicklime into the vault, and Drood, alive, out of the vault? As to the reader, he would at first take Datchery for Drood, and then think, "No, that is impossible, and also is stale. Datchery cannot be Drood," and thus the reader would remain in a pleasant state of puzzledom, as he does, unto this day.
If Edwin is dead, there is not much "Mystery" about him. We have as good as seen Jasper strangle him and take his pin, chain, and watch. Yet by adroitly managing the conduct of Mr. Grewgious, Dickens persuaded Mr. Proctor that certainly, Grewgious knew Edwin to be alive. As Grewgious knew, from Helena, all that was necessary to provoke his experiment on Jasper's nerves, Mr. Proctor argued on false premises, but that was due to the craft of Dickens. Mr. Proctor rejected Forster's report, from memory, of what he understood to be the "incommunicable secret" of Dickens's plot, and I think that he was justified in the rejection. Forster does not seem to have cared about the thing - he refers lightly to "the reader curious in such matters" - when once he had received his explanation from Dickens. His memory, in the space of five years, may have been inaccurate: he probably neither knew nor cared who Datchery was; and he may readily have misunderstood what Dickens told him, orally, about the ring, as the instrument of detection. Moreover, Forster quite overlooked one source of evidence, as I shall show later.
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