"The Mystery of Edwin Drood" (1869) - the last work of Charles Dickens

Dickens’s last work, tragically interrupted by his sudden death from a stroke at the age of 58. It was a mystery novel, written to rise to the challenge of showing that he too could write in that new genre after the considerable success of his good friend Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860), generally recognized as being the first mystery thriller in literature — although Dickens himself had innovated in the genre with his creation of the remarkably resourceful and penetrating Inspector Bucket in 1853 in Bleak House.

The first five of a projected total of twelve monthly instalments of Edwin Drood were published during Dickens’s lifetime, and he finished the (magnificent) last page of the sixth instalment, that ended the first half of the novel, on the very day he died. So this work is the finished version of the complete first half of the novel.

Full of the atmosphere of a rather sleepy provincial cathedral town, this is excellent Dickens, although without the sociological depth of his major works, with a number of sharply-portrayed characters, sparkling dialogues and a steady stream of Dickensian humour and satire. A treat for any Dickens fan, or anyone else for that matter.

(94,000 words)

An e-book, with all of the images, is available for downloading below.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood (e-book)