Abstract
In the setting of the old cathedral town is placed the main character of The Mystery of Edwin Drood and the centre of the Mystery, John Jasper the choir-master. His part in the story has been a matter for controversy ever since Dickens died leaving the novel without its denouement. Jasper is a man with a secret life, his time divided between his duties in the cathedral and the opium den. ‘Religion’, said Karl Marx, ‘is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the soul of soulless circumstance, the heart of a heartless world. It is the opium of the poor.’ But this opium has ceased to work for the choir-master, and he has turned to the literal variety as an escape from ennui. He tells Edwin:
The echoes of my own voice among the arches seem to mock me with my daily drudging round. No wretched monk who droned his life away in that gloomy place before me, can have been more tired of it than I am. He could take for relief (and did take) to carving demons out of the stalls and seats and desks. What shall I do? Must I take to carving them out of my heart?1
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Works Consulted
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© 1989 Colin Gibson
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Robson, W.W. (1989). The Choir-master and the Single Buffer: an Essay on The Mystery of Edwin Drood. In: Gibson, C. (eds) Art and Society in the Victorian Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19672-2_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19672-2_4
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