Still the Cathedral Tower rises in the background, where it cannot be, and still no writhing figure is on the grim spike. Then, follow white elephants caparisoned in countless gorgeous colours, and infinite in number and attendants.

Ten thousand scimitars flash in the sunlight, and thrice ten thousand dancing-girls strew flowers. It is so, for cymbals clash, and the Sultan goes by to his palace in long procession. What is the spike that intervenes, and who has set it up? Maybe it is set up by the Sultan’s orders for the impaling of a horde of Turkish robbers, one by one. 'An ancient English Cathedral Tower? How can the ancient English Cathedral tower be here! The well-known massive gray square tower of its old Cathedral? How can that be here! There is no spike of rusty iron in the air, between the eye and it, from any point of the real prospect. The Inimitable Boz was back.īut what were readers to make of these cryptic opening lines, a phantasmagoric look into the mind of an opium user, beset by images sacred and profane, a blend of East and West, of glory and squalor? Here is the opening paragraph: But readers were hopeful, and when the first pages of The Mystery of Edwin Drood appeared on March 31, 1870, Dickens was thrilled to see that 50,000 copies sold, more in line with his great successes- Bleak House, David Copperfield, and the novel that had started it all twenty-four years earlier- The Pickwick Papers. Sales of Our Mutual Friend had disappointed fewer than 20,000 copies of the closing installment sold. Readers had waited almost five years since the end of his previous novel, Our Mutual Friend, for a new book-length story from the most famous writer in the English-speaking world. In February, 1870, Charles Dickens announced that a new novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, would start appearing in his favored format, stand-alone monthly installments, beginning at the end of March. I wish I hadn’t waited too long-it has some of Dickens’s most beautiful and strange writing. I have read all of his novels several times, but the last book I tackled was The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which I did not read until I was almost thirty. I have been reading Dickens for more than fifty years.

Friends of the Dickens Project Board Member and published author, Carl Wilson, describes Dickens's final novel's instant success, along with the effect of its sudden conclusion.

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