Elliotson made a few too many claims for the medical application of hypnotism and as a result was ostracized by the conservative medical establishment. Dickens' doctor and friend was John Elliotson, a proponent of mesmerism who founded and ran the London Mesmeric Infirmary. Dickens cured Leech, however, with mesmerism. Leech took to his bed for some days, suffering from anxiety and insomnia.
Once, while vacationing with his illustrator John Leech on the Isle of Wight, Leech was hit by a large wave while swimming.
He practiced on his wife and Georgina, and began hypnotizing people at dinner parties for entertainment. He was intrigued and a little unnerved to discover his own knack for hypnotizing people. Charles Dickens, although neurotically adamant about such matters as conscious directive and the superiority of civilized Western man, was very interested in mesmerism. The Moon card reflects the power of the subconscious, the motives and meanings that move us subconsciously. Moving “eastward and still eastward” to his opium den dream, he compels Princess Puffer to “Look down! Look down! You see what lies at the bottom there?” What lies there one can hardly help but speculate – Jasper himself? Nothingness? Simply a lie? - but only one thing is certain: when Dickens died, what lay there for Jasper died with him. Outwardly, his ministering, avuncular concern for Edwin Drood is almost sycophantic, while inwardly his all-consuming wantonness for his would-be niece Rosa is utterly lawless. The Victorian and Dickensian trope of an older man taking a doubtful interest in a young nubile girl - from Kate Nickleby's uncle Ralph to Arthur Clennam's interest in Little Dorrit - reaches its apogee in John Jasper. With the help of Princess Puffer, Jasper stokes these dreams, rising like a puff adder from its basket at the hypnotic sounds of a snake charmer's flute. Jasper's lust for and fixation on Rosa may arise from nothing but a pipe dream, but it nevertheless drives him to the borderlines of sanity. As we have learned from the first 5 of the Minor Arcana, where there is smoke there is fire. The instant intimacy the girls share suggests a deep, subterranean connection between these nations and cultures, fed by the spiritual umbilical cord of the material and maternal female half of humanity.Īlso from the lower depths, there rises up an opium pipe.
#MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD CHARACTERS SKIN#
This antagonism on the part of the males, together with the symbolism of their home countries and skin colour, suggests the conflict of East and West generally and the ancient Indian culture with the new colonial British Empire specifically. Rosa and Helena became as immediate and fast friends as Neville and Edwin took immediate dislike to one another. The girls are in their nightshirts, suggesting they may be sleep-walking.
Stage left are the twin Ceylonese orphans, Helena and Neville Landless. Stage right are the orphans Rosa Bud and her fiance, the ill-fated Edwin Drood. Here, at the centre of The Moon card, we see the Cathedral of Rochester - the village of Ellen Ternan's birth, beloved by Dickens, and disguised in Drood as Cloisterham. The author made clear, inside and outside of the novel, that the murderer of Edwin Drood was his uncle, the opium smoking choirmaster John Jasper. While Drood's ending has been debated, speculated on, and filled in by others numerous times over the decades, the mystery as to who killed Edwin Drood is really – like all Dickens' literary “mysteries” – no mystery at all. This is somewhat ironic, since Dickens was a man incapable of keeping a secret. Essentially a psychological murder mystery, made popular by Dickens' friend Wilkie Collins, Drood has kept its mystery a secret. Charles Dickens died when half-way through the writing of The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
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