Unending Dickens:

Droodian Absences

Abstract

As often noted, Dickens’s novels are filled with a multitude of Victorian material objects; neo-Victorian spin-offs of Dickens’s work not only have to come to terms with his representation of these objects but also those that persist as absences or traces. This essay deals with the ways the absence of the eponymous character in Dickens’s last novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) is presented, and considers how two recent neo-Victorian Dickens spin-offs, Dan Simmons’s Drood (2009) and Matthew Pearl’s The Last Dickens (2009), seek to come to terms with Dickens’s last fragment. Both Edwin Drood and the author himself, who died before he could finish the manuscript, are conspicuously absent from Edwin Drood, and these two absences have given rise to endless speculations and critical debates about the text’s possible and intended endings. Both neo-Victorian spin-offs address the Drood debate and its absences, and cater to the cultural desire to resurrect the dead Dickens while finishing (off) his novel – which is of course impossible to begin with. In doing so, they also address contemporary debates and concerns in their striving to offer acceptable and/or marketable endings