Two Mysteries for the Price of One

cdickensThe last novel written by Charles Dickens, one of the 19th-century’s most famous authors, was a thriller called “The Mystery of Edwin Drood.”

As with many of his works, Dickens wrote it as a serial to be published in 12 monthly installments in a London magazine. The writer produced a chapter for each monthly deadline. He was never late, but rarely early.

He had finished only six chapters – half the allotted number – when he suddenly and, from the editor’s standpoint, inconveniently died. That was July 8, 1870.

Readers on both sides of the Atlantic were left with “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” unresolved.

Or were they?

In 1872, a young printer with a vagabond streak wandered into the town of Brattleboro, Vt. His name was Thomas P. James. He soon developed a reputation in Brattleboro as a bachelor-about-town. One thing he did NOT impress anybody as being was particularly intelligent or literarily inclined.

At least, not until October of 1872.

It was then James confided to his landlady, who was a spiritualist (spiritualism having quite a vogue in the 1870s), that he believed the spirit of Charles Dickens was trying to get through to him. Indeed, Dickens already had been in touch with him.

For what purpose?

Well, confided the young ne’er-do-well, Dickens seemed to have in mind that he would be a perfect medium (for some reason) through whom to communicate the last half of his story, “The Mystery of Edwin Drood.”

The technique was to be by automatic writing. In other words, young James would go into a trance and the hand of Dickens would move the pencil and write with it.

The landlady suggested that a group of friends regularly meet once a week with James for a séance. These witnesses testified that during the séances an extraordinary thing occurred. The young medium apparently would lapse into a trance and wrote furiously with a pencil and pad for an hour or more.

The peculiar literary collaboration between worlds – if that’s indeed what it was – continued for six months.

Then, in October, 1873, a book appeared in the stores. It contained the first half of the “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” which Dickens had written before his death, and the second half, purportedly communicated from the Beyond to one Thomas James, an unheard-of-young printer.

Some skeptics shouted hoax. But, surprisingly, the book impressed many literary critics, who were more interested in its content than its origins.

A newspaper in Springfield, Mass., actually hailed James as “a worthy successor to Dickens himself.” A prestigious Boston newspaper went so far as to venture: “Thomas James couldn’t have written this book without help from Dickens – be it spiritual or otherwise, we do not know.”

In terms of literary style – idiomatic expressions, characteristic sentence structure and other verbal idiosyncrasies – the second half of the book was judged by experts to be virtually identical with the first half.

A number of critics predicted that James was a bright new literary discovery with many triumphs ahead, But James demurred. He maintained that out of trance he could not compose so much as a grammatical sentence on his own.

The half of the book he had written was not really his creation at all, he insisted, but Charles Dickens’.

And the curious fact is that Thomas James did not produce another scrap of published writing. He died some years later in obscurity.

By Allen Spraggett

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