Drood
1) THE DISASTER
Staplehurst, June 9, 1865
On June 9, 1865 Charles Dickens, on his return from Paris, he became involved in a terrible train accident near Staplehurst , Kent, remaining almost miraculously unscathed. The bridge on which the convoy was passing yielded because of renovations, almost all cars (except the one on which he was traveling the narrator) plunged into the river below, killing 10 passengers and injuring 40 others.
Dickens himself took an active part in the first phase of relief: the event would have marked deeply influenced his psyche, and probably affected the decision to diminish the literary production and to devote himself mainly to numerous, highly acclaimed public readings of passages from his works. On June 9, 1870, exactly five years after the disaster of Staplehurst, Dickens died at his residence at Gad's Hill, exhausted in body and undermined by the exhausting tour of public readings to which it was submitted.
2). The Mystery of Edwin Drood
T Mystery of Edwin Drood h, 6 th volume, Chapman and Hall, September 1870
Over the past five years to life Dickens, in terms of literary he devoted himself to the completion of the novel Our Mutual Friend , intended to receive relatively lukewarm reception from critics and audiences.
Over the last year of life, after a long pause, literature, undertook the project The Mystery of Edwin Drood . The death came during the writing of Dickens's twenty-third chapter of the work, about half the length originally agreed. The publisher Chapman and Hall involved the publication of the novel in twelve monthly volumes: the date of the death of Dickens were published in three volumes beginning in April 1870. The next three, until you run out of material, were published posthumously in July, August and September.
The Mystery of Edwin Drood is a novel anomalous in the context of Dickensian literature and literary production of the Victorian era.
E 'must start by saying that Dickens was at the time, a popular character: his fame, because of the enormous circulation of his works in all strata of English society and culture, was further increased by exhausting lecture tour which Dickens had undergone during the last years of life. Moreover, it is very simplistic to define "reading" the happening of which Dickens underwent almost every night and always in different places. From the reports it appears that Dickens portrayed the character of individual scenes from his works in an absolutely overwhelming, with an extraordinary ability to identify and participation total by the public (to the point that many are reported fainting female representation at the scene of particularly cruel). Mesmerist amateur, Dickens was really convinced of being able to hypnotize the audience (and perhaps in some sense you could very well), using lighting techniques and the public that allowed him to look into the eyes every single viewer.
Direct contact with a large portion of his audience, he already knew by heart the most famous scenes he represented, he created an effect rockstar absolutely new for the times: a single character met itself the austere and popular author of novels of great success and captivating performer and magnetic .
The Mystery of Edwin Drood unfinished is the result of this strange and extreme Dickensian moment of literary production: novel cryptic in many respects, stages in the strange character whom Dickens exercise more sarcasm irony. If the description of the characters in earlier novels and his father was often complacent, in the Mystery of Edwin Drood is given find no mercy in the description of human weakness for the first time, For example, Dickens addresses and describes an opium den, the true scourge of Victorian London, and the characters who frequent it. Dickens had actually visited an opium den, getting the setting and the character of Princess Puffer.
The plot, in brief, is as follows: Edwin Drood, a young architect and beloved nephew of John Jasper, choirmaster of Cloisterham (fictional town, built on the model of Rochester), betrothed by sin 'childhood of the young orphan Rose, vanishes into thin air during a night walk along the River. Are found only at his watch and a pin. Neville Landless (sic), another young orphan entrusted with his sister Helena to the care of Reverend Crisparkle, is accused of murder, being the last person to see him in life and having previously had a heated argument with the deceased.
Drood, the mystery remained open for 140 years, obviously has different levels of reading: the first is the yellow (Edwin Drood has been killed or has just departed? If he was killed, who is the culprit?). Without going into detail as not to ruin the reading, saying only that there are various indications that Edwin Drood was murdered and that the name of the offender is already revealed in the first chapters of the novel. Dickens himself, who, as mentioned, published his work while he wrote to his daughter Kate turned to fear "that he revealed too much in the first chapters. When asked his daughter "Drood is dead or has disappeared?" He said in a cryptic "The book is titled 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood', not 'The Story of Edwin Drood ...'"
Ad further reading, the novel shows the triumph of the reaction to the inability to communicate and self restraint which had pervaded the Victorian London: the duplicity of conduct and the distance between the facade "neutral" and the inner tensions (Janus - Jasper) was perhaps the daughter of the duplicity of the same behavior that Dickens, for years, entertained a secret relationship with Ellen Ternan, an actress much younger than him, and this survived ( with her mother) of Staplehurst accident and cause of the failure of his marriage and his wife Catherine of removal from Gad's Hill.
The accident Staplehurst thus marks a moment of "loss of innocence" in the life and literary career of Dickens. The
death live and Dickens, in a letter, as "unthinkable" and "incomprehensible" (words, as noted by Simmons, completely unrelated to an author who had the imagination and comprehensibility their tutelary deities: one of them, " incomprehensible, "is the mantra repeated by one of the characters of the Mystery of Edwin Drood, and perhaps the key to deep breathing) and likely feel that the very Catholic Dickens could not prove to have been touched by the hand of the Lord, lead the Inimitable (as was described by his contemporaries) to reconsider its entire literary and artistic activities.
The fertile soil in which germinates the last work of Dickens is, for the first time, a land bathed in blood, full of envy, murder, crypts, opium, and the family is a hotbed of duplicity, rather than the place where they make up and solve personal dramas and tragedies. It 's a place completely devoid of "Great Expectations" and the possibility of redemption, however, had permeated the earlier work and that perhaps had been one of the reasons for their huge popularity with readers, members of the new social class called "middle class" . E ', of course, the novel Victorian dell'Inimitabile less.
3). MISTERO IL IN AND DROOD
Drood ; ; Mr. Wilkie Collins
Dan Simmons describes the last five years of Dickens's life through first-person narrative by the narrator made less reliable you can imagine, Mr. Wilkie Collins. Who was Wilkie Collins? Writer "sensationalist" successful and a great friend of Dickens from the very beginning, considered the father of detective story European opium addict tormented by visions and ghosts of his past, Collins got huge recognition audiences with the novel The Moonstone , published in installments in the journal of Dickens' All The Year Round ", of which Collins was the same contributor and editor for some time. Along with Dickens had acted in such works as "The Frozen Deep ", a drama written by Dickens himself with both hands on the wave of emotion that followed the disastrous end of the Franklin expedition in search of the Northwest Passage .
The history of the relationship between the two writers is the core of Drood Simmons: already in the incipit Collins turns to future readers (the novel is written in diary form to be published no earlier than 100 years after his death) declaring certain that very few now remember his name, while all certainly remember the name of Charles Dickens. Since the point of view, the novel traces the history of the Simmons relationship between Collins and Dickens, not vice versa: a report that includes, for part of Collins, envy and competition as well as the friendship and admiration. Everything in the reconstruction of the character that Simmons Collins provides the reader reconstruction is certainly not flawless but still historically well-founded. The motivations, actions and intentions of Collins, as part of a Victorian novel with gothic overtones, is perhaps too loaded, but the character of certain works for development of the plot as closely as "yellow." It is not the first time that Simmons uses a well-known writer as the main character: think of all'Hemingway The Crook Factory (foolishly unpublished in Italy) or the English poets of The Great Lover , between the trenches of the First World War. However, this is the first time Simmons depicts the relationship between the two authors . The process of identification Simmons / Collins is remarkable: in the description of the weaknesses of Collins and sympathetic, especially in the full knowledge, by Collins, that your work is destined to pass without leaving a footprint comparable to that of the giant - Dickens.
memorable in this respect is the scene (the only real spoiler, so I can not resist) that Collins, after the death of Dickens, tries to convince himself that his work is higher than dell'Inimitabile: then recovers some of the works of his friend / rival and makes grim analysis, both in order to plot the thickness of the characters. Almost satisfied, he comes across a passage that gives the measure of unparalleled genius of Dickens and the perverse satisfaction in the blank desolation dire:
" The book was the style and the style was the man. And the man was - was - Charles Dickens. "
The Drood by Dan Simmons is a novel intentionally incorrect: Dickens is present only in its manifestations, and mediated by the very special way more and more deformed optical Collins, the real protagonist in style Salieri. Dickens and Collins too little, then? No, very Collins and, through him, very Dickens.
The Mystery of Edwin Drood it is a prerequisite not needed as the Gothic plot is developed in several different directions, from the character named Drood, who invents Simmons and creates from scratch, perhaps showing (only in this respect) lack of respect towards dell'Inimitabile.
Yet the most accurate historical setting, the wealth of biographical and bibliographical details, a plot full of elements typical of the gothic novel / Victorian (such as mesmerism, fixing old Dickens, opium, then spread in all social classes, the real fascination and paranoia towards spiritualism and black magic, especially the home Middle East) and the usual writing of the highest level make Drood by Dan Simmons work, perhaps incorrectly, to be sure not to be missed.
Ugo Chickens
Ugo Chickens
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