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It was not finished yet, but what were the effects of exhaustion and oncoming cerebral hemorrhage to Charles Dickens? The book was not yet finished. And it would be finished, sir, or he would die writing it. He would. Nevertheless, even he had a mysterious premonition of death and—as he would have done if he had been a character in one of his novels—he added a foreboding clause to his contract which he had never done before, making provision if the said Charles Dickens should die before the said work was completed.
Visibly and admittedly ill on that June evening after writing throughout the day, Mr. Dickens rose from the dinner table. His sister-in-law suggested that he lie down on the sofa. Turning as if to do so, he collapsed. “On the ground,” he said. Charles Dickens, aged fifty-eight years, was placed in the ground at Westminster Abbey without uttering another word, much less writing another word. When news of Dickens’ tragic death reached American shores, his friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote, “I hope his book is finished… It would be too sad to think the pen had fallen from his hand and left it incomplete.” The book was not finished. The manuscript of The Mystery of Edwin Drood remained on his desk as he had left it, incomplete.
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There is a poignancy in unfinished art that cries out with one of the purposes of art: to evoke the longing for completion, for perfection. Those masterpieces whose creation is cut short by the death of a master resound with both human experience and human existence. St. Thomas Aquinas’ Compendium, Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pietà, Mozart’s Requiem, and Dickens’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood all evoke that singular sense of needing to be finished that every human being must share until he finds a heavenly end. Such works, such mysteries, preach the Resurrection and the Life to those on the ground.
Sean Fitzpatrick is a graduate of Thomas Aquinas College and the Headmaster of Gregory the Great Academy. He lives in Scranton, PA with his wife and family of four.
http://www.crisismagazine.com/2016/ground-unsolved-mystery-mr-dickens
A very entertaining read.
Dickens, and the other novelists of Victorian England, …issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together…” Karl Marx
Four Months with Charles Dickens
November 1870 Atlantic
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1870/10/four-months-with-charles-dickens/306682/
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