The other 1870 mystery: Thomas Hardy’s Desperate Remedies

You never know where Drood studies will take you. I was reading a 1973 article by George Wing last week comparing Dickens’s mystery story to Thomas Hardy’s mystery story. Stop the press – Thomas Hardy wrote a mystery story? Obviously, in the name of research, I had to go and check this out. Desperate Remedies, Hardy’s first …

The Coming Storm: The Meteorology of Edwin Drood

It was a dark and stormy night… No, don’t worry, it’s not a Dickens quote, but his friend Edward Bulwer Lytton in Paul Clifford, later used frequently as an opening line by Snoopy in his dogged attempts to write literature (pun intended). The line may have become a parody of itself by now but heaven knows …

Is this a scarf I see before me? Macbeth and Drood

By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes           There have been various inspirations suggested for Drood over the years, from The Moonstone to Adam Bede; Dickens frequently peppered his writing with allusions to other works so it is unsurprising that so many have been seen in parallel to …

The day the world talked about Drood

In Chapter 9, “Birds in the Bush”, Dickens describes how rumours of Edwin and Neville’s disagreement fly around the town and into Miss Twinkleton’s school in the blink of an eye: Whether it was brought in by the birds of the air, or came blowing in with the very air itself, when the casement windows …