SOURCE: Thomas, Ronald R. “The Policing of Dreams: Nineteenth-Century Detection.” In Dreams of Authority: Freud and the Fictions of the Unconscious, pp. 193-253. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990.

[In the following excerpt, Thomas illustrates the similarities and connections between the investigative techniques employed by detectives in nineteenth-century literature and Freudian methods and theories of dreams and the unconscious.]

Upon the winding up of the tragedy involved in the deaths of Madame L'Espanaye and her daughter, the Chevalier dismissed the affair at once from his attention, and relapsed into his old habit of moody revery. Prone, at all times, to abstraction, I readily fell in with his humour; and continuing to occupy our chambers in the Faubourg Saint Germain, we gave the Future to the winds, and slumbered tranquilly in the Present, weaving the dull world around us into dreams.

—Edgar Allan Poe, “The Mystery of Marie Roget”

Once we happened to speak of Conan Doyle and his creation, Sherlock Holmes. I had thought that Freud would have no use for this type of light reading matter, and was surprised to find that this was not at all the case and that Freud had read this author attentively.

—The Wolf-Man, “My Recollections of Sigmund Freud”

Here, then, in the briefest outline, are the riddles for which the analysis had to find a solution.

—Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis”

It is not unusual for Doctor Watson to discover Sherlock Holmes in a drug-induced dream out of which the detective emerges to impose order on the confusion of an unsolved crime. The detective's custom is then to descend back into his dreamy state once the crime has been solved. In Watson's concern for his friend's health, he does not recognize that this pattern is more than a sign of aberrant social behavior or an instance of the master detective's eccentricity. It is a model for the entire project of crime and detection itself. Dreaming is as central to the fundamental texts of detection in the nineteenth century as the language of detection is to Freud's theory of dream interpretation. The mysterious theft in the first full-length English detective novel—Wilkie Collins's Moonstone (1868)—takes place during a dream. The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) opens in the fevered dreams of John Jasper, in which the dreamer presumably rehearses and replays the unsolved murder in Dickens's last and unfinished novel. The transformation of the respectable physician Dr. Jekyll into a violent criminal takes place, he says, “partly in a dream”; and it is in a dream that the detective figure, Utterson, first sees the twisted form of the murderous Mr. Hyde. In these and many other detective stories, the detective is as deeply involved in the world of dreams as the criminal. Dr. Watson notes with some concern the signs of this dark collusion in his own partner's delinquent behavior. “He had risen out of his drug-created dreams,” Watson says suspiciously of Holmes in the beginning of “A Scandal in Bohemia,” “and was hot upon the scent of some new problem.”¹

But the victim of the crime is often as deeply implicated in the dark underworld of dreams as the criminal or the detective. In the first of the Sherlock Holmes stories, A Study in Scarlet (1887), Holmes solves the case only after he discovers a crucial piece of evidence about the victim, who was apparently murdered while he was dreaming his last dream: at the victim's bedside was a novel he had been reading and an ointment box containing two pills. The key to this case is Holmes's realization that one of the pills was deadly poison, the other was not. The novel at the bedside, like the text of A Study in Scarlet itself and like the operation of the detective within it, is analogous to the box containing those two pills: it contains and controls the poison of the deadly dream not by eliminating it but by explaining it and sorting it out. The detective story might be said to contain a drug—a form of therapy and escape—as well as a form of enforcement and power. Like Holmes, it has a dual nature. It both threatens and heals. The story reveals what the dream of the crime had disguised, exposing what—or who—has disappeared in the crime, disciplining its perpetrator, and reestablishing the authority of the one who uncovers the criminal.

Having been through the remarkable analysis of his own dream with Freud, the Wolf-Man should not have been surprised to learn that Freud was an attentive reader of detective literature in general and of the Sherlock Holmes stories in particular. Freud explained dream interpretation as a “reconstruction” of “the process by which the dream was formed” and “the restoration of the connections” between the fragments of the dream which have been obscured by the dream work. The analogy between the methods of Freudian dream theory and those of the master sleuths of detective fiction has subsequently been noted not only by Freud's most famous patient but by literary critics and psychoanalytic scholars as well.² As the detective story “reconstructs” a crime and provides the missing explanatory links between apparently unrelated events, psychoanalysis reconstructs the web of dream thoughts that lead up to a dream, identifying the logic—or motive—that connects those thoughts. In both cases obstacles to the reconstruction must be overcome, obstacles Freud would refer to as the agencies of resistance, repression, and censorship. These terms, drawn from the world of law and politics, rather than the discipline of medicine, indicate how much Freud's therapeutic model is also a model of social enforcement, just as Holmes's model of law enforcement also serves a therapeutic function.

When Freud uses the discourse of politics to describe the processes operating in the individual subject's dreams, he represents the psyche as a kind of self-contained society intent upon both violating and policing itself through its dreams. This “political” portrayal of the self is the basis of a fundamental similarity between the claims of psychoanalysis and the criminal psychology of early detective fiction. These texts demonstrate that a “political” conception of the individual subject served to explain the dual nature not only of the criminal mind but of every mind. In addition to linking these civil and psychological concerns, moreover, the first great detective stories in England also managed to express anxiety over national crimes for which there was no simple political solution, exposing the same state of conflict within the national unconscious that existed within its individual citizens.³

Freud's most elaborate discursive linkage of political and psychological processes occurs in his explanation of the work of censorship in dreams. To describe censorship accurately, he says, he sought out a “social parallel to this internal event in the mind” and found it in the “political writer who has disagreeable truths to tell to those in authority” (Interpretation of Dreams, 141):

If he presents them undisguised, the authorities will suppress his words—after they have been spoken, if his pronouncement was an oral one, but beforehand, if he had intended to make it in print. A writer must beware of the censorship, and on its account he must soften and distort the expression of his opinion. According to the strength and sensitiveness of the censorship he finds himself compelled either merely to refrain from certain forms of attack, or to speak in allusions in place of direct references, or he must conceal his objectionable pronouncement beneath some apparently innocent disguise: for instance, he may describe a dispute between two Mandarins in the Middle Kingdom, when the people he really has in mind are officials in his own country. The stricter the censorship, the more far-reaching will be the disguise and the more ingenious too may be the means employed for putting the reader on the scent of the true meaning.

(142)

The dreamer functions here as both problem and solution, both divided kingdom under siege and political sage trying to heal the rift in the state. In dreams, the dreamer pits the “disagreeable truths” of desire against the injunctions of already internalized authorities. Dreams are “given their shape,” Freud says, by the operation of these two opposing forces that occupy every mind—the forces of revelation and censorship, of “truth” and “disguise,” of defense and attack. The unconscious of the dreamer is made up of these two contending “psychical agencies,” and Freud claims that they find their most “complete analogy in political life” (144). In the language of Freud's analogy, the dreamer is at once criminal and police, the force of law and the force of lawlessness, a dynamic and “political” society unto him- or herself. In order to hold those opposing forces together, the dreamer functions like a writer of political fictions, armed with an ingenious capacity for simultaneously conveying and disguising the truth.

Paul Ricoeur calls the “repressing agency” of Freudian censorship “the psychological expression of a prior social fact, the phenomenon of authority, which includes a number of constituted historical figures: the family, the mores of a group, tradition, explicit or implicit education, political and ecclesiastical power, penal and, in general, social sanctions.” He explains that in the psychoanalytic model of the human subject, “desire is no longer by itself; it has its ‘other,’ authority. What is more, it has always had its other in the repressing agent, an agent internal to desire itself.”⁴ The presence of the antagonistic other within the self is always a threat to the self's authority, just as the criminal is always a threat to the authority of a society. And each is always internal to the other. “Deprived of ordinary resources,” Poe's Dupin says in a comparable description of the function of the detective, “the analyst throws himself into the spirit of his opponent.”⁵ The agency of the detective, that is, contains and is contained within the agency of the criminal. “The man may be taken as being quite on the same intellectual plane as myself,” Holmes warns Watson of the arch-criminal Moriarty in the story aptly titled “The Final Problem.” And when Holmes informs Watson that he can predict the master criminal's behavior by remembering the principle that “Moriarty will again do what I should do,” Watson can only reflect, “One would think that we were the criminals” (1:475-76). Here, Watson has stated the basic assumption about the psychology of crime and detection, and about psychoanalysis itself. The “final problem” of both is that the agencies of “authority” and those of “disguise” are inextricably linked. They are engaged in a psychological conflict completely analogous to that of political life, a conflict to which there is no final solution. They both possess what Watson called in “The Red-Headed League” Holmes's “dual nature” (1:185). Authority is always already “an agent internal to desire itself.” In the unconscious of every individual, the criminal and the authorities conspire.

In this chapter, I examine how certain nineteenth-century detective novels anticipated the psychoanalytic representation of the psyche as a political entity. We have seen how Great Expectations and Jane Eyre made use of an economic model of the unconscious to urge the dreamer to own and work through psychic material in order to produce and master a self. We have also seen how the gothic novel represented the mind as analogous to a body infected by disease and how its dreams demanded to be treated as symptoms and efforts to recover psychic health, rather than as psychic capital to be invested. These texts have much in common with the detective novel, and all of them make extensive use of medical and economic models for the psyche, as well as political ones. But as a matter of emphasis, these gothic and autobiographical fictions exhibit a difference from detective narratives in the way they represent the mind, a difference that explains why the former are more likely to assume plots of demonic possession or economic survival whereas the latter deal more specifically with crime and, in some cases, punishment. In the standard detective story, the concern is not so much with the production or recovery of a self as with the unmasking and disciplining of an aberrant member of the society. The self is an essentially social and political entity in these narratives. The individual is not merely living in a society; a society is living within him or her. Appropriately, then, the dream in the detective story is associated with a crime that not only upsets the course of the dreamer's life but threatens the order of the entire community as well. The dream constitutes a mystery that must be discovered and solved, therefore, not by the dreamer and not for the sake of the dreamer's health or productivity alone, but by and for the sake of the entire community. The real mystery of the detective novel is that its dreamers express “a prior social fact, the phenomenon of authority,” and they seek to challenge that authority as well. The detective novel traces out a violation of social law in order to reassert that law through an explanation by the agencies of detection and, if possible, a confession by the criminal.

Explanation and confession are not only cooperative but synonymous acts of narrative completion in these texts. The crime that the community explains is a crime it is also guilty of; its collaboration to explain the crime is a kind of collective confession. The detective reconstructs the crime just as dream interpretation reconstructs the dream, not to cancel it and go on as if it hadn't happened but to assimilate its information into the narrative of the corporate psychic life of the community in the manner of a confession. The detective legally “censures” the act of criminal censorship by making public knowledge out of what had been the most private of secrets. This reading of the psychological significance of the detective novel opposes John G. Cawelti's claim that the analogies between psychoanalysis and detective fiction break down because of the detective story's failure to acknowledge collective guilt. Cawelti argues that whereas “Freud and other social and psychological critics such as Marx and his followers discovered everyone's guilts, Holmes and the other classical detectives absolved society by exposing the least-likely person or the master criminal.”⁶ I want to emphasize that while the detective plot normally fingers and exposes a single moral source of guilt, it also silently implicates (at least in psychological terms) the detective, the criminal, and the victim, by adumbrating a model of the psyche and of the dreams it produces as socially formed and politically organized.

The detective novel is, like psychoanalysis, centrally concerned with the acquisition of knowledge—with the gathering and interpretation of information about persons and the motives for their actions. But detective fiction and psychoanalysis are also both centrally concerned with power—with authority, with enforcement, with surveillance. That surveillance imposes limits on the conception of the self as independent, even as it seeks to preserve the “safety” of the individual within society. The goal of the detective story is not to produce a private memoir or a diary, therefore, but to provide a public explanation, an occasion when the community comprehends itself in the recitation of an accusation by the detective. Ideally, that public occasion includes a ritual of confession by the criminal as well as an accusation by the detective.⁷ These are complementary social and political acts, expressed in the intolerance of the detective story for the secret life it seeks to expose. In this genre, knowledge is literally power, and to lack knowledge is to be a victim of the one who has it. But the campaign against secrecy in the detective novel is also the other side of a persistent fascination. The Moonstone is a classic case of this ambivalence for the one who steals the gem in the novel does not even know it himself. Ignorance of this information severely impairs Franklin Blake's life, precludes his marriage, and renders the crime—and his fiancée—incomprehensible. The discovery of this information not only requires the consultation of the entire community but also takes place in a kind of theatrical public performance in which the community is both actor and spectator. In that performance, Franklin Blake redreams his dream, and the society redreams it with him. The community repeats the crime in which it has conspired and reinforces itself by exposing the secret self of one of its citizens. The agencies of detection, that is, perform the analogous acts of exposure and rehabilitation within the psyche of the individual subject and within the structure of the collective society as well.

The singular, independent authority of Sherlock Holmes and Chevalier Dupin might appear to be exceptions to this pattern of privileging social collaboration over individual achievement. They religiously keep their own counsel. But they may more properly be regarded as symptomatic denials of the very anxiety implicit in the genre. Their attempts to preserve their independence and isolation are strategic repressions of their own professional goal: the exposure and interpretation of the secret self. Holmes and Dupin have important differences from each other, but they are similar in that they are both reclusive iconoclasts. Both also work as part of two-man teams, however, and their work has a rather symbiotic—if ironic—relationship with that of the official police forces as well. In fact, Holmes is always careful to designate himself as a “consulting” detective whose work is dependent upon the failure of others. “I'm a consulting detective, if you can understand what that is,” he tells Watson (A Study in Scarlet 1:24). “Here in London we have lots of government detectives and lots of private ones. When these fellows are at fault, they come to me, and I manage to put them on the right scent. They lay all the evidence before me, and I am generally able, by the help of my knowledge of the history of crime, to set them straight.” As Holmes's self-description indicates, his explanations are based upon his ability to integrate the inconclusive work of others, who fail to accommodate all the findings. Holmes is a mediator between London's “public” and “private” detectives, setting them straight, bringing them together, putting them “on the right scent.” He helps them penetrate what they have disguised from themselves. “The stricter the censorship,” Freud had said, seeming to paraphrase this description of the detective's skills, “the more far-reaching will be the disguise and the more ingenious too may be the means employed for putting the reader on the scent of the true meaning” (The Interpretation of Dreams, 142).

Successful collaborating and consulting are what Holmes is uniquely capable of accomplishing in his adventures. He seems to be virtually called into existence when he is called into consultation. Outside of that activity, his private life merely occupies a dreamy, criminallike void in a lonely room on Baker Street. Dupin performs in much the same way. He relies on the inadequate reports of witnesses or newspaper accounts (in both “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Mystery of Marie Roget”) to form his “synthesis” of the crime material. His analysis, though it repudiates each of their individual conclusions, is also the synthesis of all their observations. “The popular opinion,” Dupin asserts in “Marie Roget,” “is not to be disregarded. When arising of itself—when manifesting itself in a strictly spontaneous manner—we should look upon it as analogous with that intuition which is the idiosyncrasy of the individual man of genius” (195). Both Holmes and Dupin, then, may be figures of individual authority, but the ingenious solutions they propose to crimes are also “analogous” to the “popular opinion,” which they seem to know intuitively and which they alone are able to express.

The detective novel developed in nineteenth-century Paris and London along with professional police forces and modern criminology.⁸ Many of the plots for the detective stories of Poe, Dickens, Collins, and others originated in the police reports of the London and Paris police departments. In his important essay “Dickens: The Two Scrooges,” Edmund Wilson identified the detective story (as it was conceived by Dickens) as a social fable. He maintained that such stories expose society to the realization that despite its deep connections, it is made up of private individuals living in isolated ignorance of their connecting links. The detective story reveals an anxiety about the virtue of the very individualism it idealizes and a desire to curtail the privacy and independence it seeks to preserve.⁹ The form found its home in these sprawling urban centers of London and Paris because, as Poe dramatized in a short story, “the man of the crowd,” surrounded by millions of people, could live a life of complete anonymity and seclusion. The modern world was the world of the stranger on the train, the man with the unknown past, where anyone might live a double life, where anybody might be “Somebody Else,” as Blake says of his own fiancée when he tries to explain her incomprehensible behavior.¹⁰ And he might have said the same of himself.

Detective fiction also developed at the height of European imperialism, when Britain saw itself as the policeman of civilization bringing order to the primitive worlds of what it called “the Orient”—the code word for any culture that was unknown, mysterious, different from itself. It is no mere stroke of exotic effect that The Moonstone opens in India and that it opens with an account of a violent assault by the British colonial forces on an Indian town. The first crime of the novel is committed during that attack when the Moonstone is stolen by Colonel Herncastle. That crime brings its revenge on the Verinder household and on English society with the counterinvasion of the Indians who eventually reclaim the gem and murder the man who holds it. The exoticism of the colonies penetrates the ordinary world of England in another way as well: in the form of opium. The theft of the Moonstone is traced back to the influence of opium on the unsuspecting Franklin Blake. And the solution to the crime came through the same agent. One goal of the detective novel may be to solve (possibly by repressing) the mystery of the Orient—the unknown territory outside the boundaries of civilization and the unknown territory within us all, which threatens to “subordinate your judgment and your will,” as Ezra Jennings puts it in The Moonstone (442). The exotic drugs of exotic states of mind weave together dreams of empire with nightmares of violent crime in these texts, pointing to the danger that may lurk within the very power that seems to express the strength of European society. Sherlock Holmes is, after all, a drug addict as well as a detective.

The connection between the dangers and mysteries of the political empire and those of the empire of the mind is reinforced in this figure who is the most famous development of the detective story in nineteenth-century England. The first Holmes novella, A Study in Scarlet, opens with an account of Watson's recollections of the British expedition in Afghanistan where he was seriously wounded in battle. The ailing doctor's meeting and teaming up with the consulting detective Sherlock Holmes may be seen as a direct result of the wounds inflicted by colonialism and as a form of recovery from these wounds. Watson soon recognizes that Holmes's remarkable powers of interpretation are connected with the dreamy state produced by his addiction to another exotic drug: cocaine. “On these occasions I have noticed such a dreamy, vacant expression in his eyes,” Watson says of Holmes, “that I might have suspected him of being addicted to the use of some narcotic, had not the temperance and cleanliness of his whole life forbidden such a notion” (20). But Watson's initial suspicions about Holmes's addiction are well founded. The first scene in the next Holmes novella, The Sign of Four, shows the detective injecting his customary 7 percent solution just before (and immediately after) he takes on another crime connected with the empire, this time the murders surrounding the theft of a treasure originally stolen by British colonial forces in India. Here, once more, the crime Holmes and Watson collaborate to solve is a complex blend of the essentially political and the essentially psychological. One set of hieroglyphs the detective form uncovers are those of the mixed motives behind European colonialism, expressing the danger of the culture's “dual nature” in the more manageable form of the individual criminal. Repeatedly, the empire returns to London with the curse of its own achievement—in the form of exotic drugs, deadly speckled snakes, corrupt colonialists, and the embittered victims and criminals of imperialism—to expose a kingdom at home divided against itself.

In the same cities from which European imperialists explored the mysteries of the Orient, and in other cities, Vienna most notably, the science of psychology was also being developed along new lines, exploring (by various names) the uncharted territory of the unconscious.¹¹ In this realm, it was theorized, one could be a stranger not only to others but to oneself as well. Long before Freud's work on dreams, James Sully would write in the Fortnightly Review that our dreams could reveal to us “the primal instinctive impulses” that reside in “the dim depths of our subconscious” and speak to us of a mysterious “side of ourselves which connects us with the great sentient world.”¹² Freud cited Sully's book-length study on dreams and hallucinations favorably in The Interpretation of Dreams and acknowledged his debt to the English scientist. F. W. H. Myers would later discern in our dreams the suggestion that there is a “cleavage between parts of the self” and that we may live in a state of “double consciousness” or “dimorphism,” in which “alternating personalities … present themselves at different times in different forms in the same person.”¹³ Concurrently, the discipline of criminal anthropology was being developed as a field of research combining techniques and theories from psychology, sociology, and criminology.¹⁴ Central to this discipline was the claim that conscious and unconscious intentions could be differentiated and that psychological and moral responsibility needed to be separated as well. The predominance of this view of the mind as a field of contending factions in the psychological literature of the period corresponded to the predominance of plots of double identity in the detective literature that emerged at the same time.¹⁵

If the detective novel is a social fable, then, it is also a psychological fable, and a political fable as well. An effective reading of such novels should bring to light these three crucial aspects and should point out how they interpenetrate one another—how, that is, knowledge and power are inextricably linked in the novels, and how psychological and social self-construction are figured as continuous processes. Collins's Moonstone, Dickens's Mystery of Edwin Drood, and Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde all trace those relations, each with somewhat different results. All these novels attempt to explain a crime connected with a mysterious and repressed dream, a divided personality, and a fragmented society. Meanwhile, through an often repressed and marginalized subplot dealing with a crisis in the British Empire, all these tales also inform us that the same competing efforts of division and containment are being exercised on an international scale. The repressed criminal dream of the individual dreamer appears, that is, as the reconfiguration of the repressed anxieties of a national polity. And in both realms, detective fiction engages the problems of balancing social and personal authority as profoundly as the other forms of Victorian fiction I have considered thus far.

The detective story is a literary form founded upon doubt and suspicion, conditions it seeks to control not by denying them or by establishing an absolute certainty in their place. Rather, by linking doubts together, the detective story provides a tentative but sustainable fiction of coherence to which the community can consent and with which it can cooperate in composing the shared dream that it interprets to itself. “Psychoanalysis,” Freud said in The Interpretation of Dreams, “is justly suspicious” (517). The same should be said of the practice of “justice” in the literature of detection and of its representation of the “political” configuration of the human mind. Like Freud and like a good detective, we should read this literature and the dreams within it “attentively” but suspiciously, remembering Watson's observation that the master detective Holmes has a “dual nature”—just as the criminal does—a nature that is capable of censoring and repressing as much of the “disagreeable truth” as it reveals. In the tactics of that censorship, however, in the terms the detective novel produces to represent the Victorian subject, the unavoidable truth of this literature is contained. The mysterious, unconscious realm from which dreams spring exhibits not only a psyche's medical and economic health but its political condition as well.

.....

THE UNINTELLIGIBLE DREAM IN THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD

It is not much of a dream, considering the vast extent of the domains of dreamland, and their wonderful productions; it is only remarkable for being unusually restless, and unusually real.

—Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood

The Mystery of Edwin Drood is best known for what it is not: complete. Dickens's untimely death provided scholars with the opportunity to speculate endlessly about how he might have ended the novel and why.¹⁶ But despite the effort spent on completing Drood, the novel has, just as it stands, a strange symmetry and a certain wholeness. The book begins and ends with the repetition of different parts of the same dream, dreamed by the presumed murderer, John Jasper. That dream appears first in the opening chapter, titled “The Dawn.” It recurs in what remains the final chapter, titled “The Dawn Again.” Jasper claims to have dreamed it “millions and billions of times” between these two scenes in a London opium den, and in the last accounting of the dream he implies that it contains the secret of the mystery of Edwin Drood's murder.¹⁷ But since Jasper's accounts of the dream are (like the novel) incomplete, we can only assume this is the case. Both times he dreams, Jasper struggles to keep the words he speaks in his opiated delirium “unintelligible” to anyone who might overhear them. “Unintelligible” is, in fact, the first word he speaks in the novel, and it is nearly the last. His last words—like his first—are spoken while he dreams. But in the final instance, Jasper ends his dream by saying, “It's over!” (271). And with that, he grows silent on the dream that haunts him and on the mystery that surrounds Edwin Drood.

The intelligibility of the crime in Drood apparently depends upon the intelligibility of a dream, just as it did in The Moonstone. Unlike The Moonstone, however, Jasper's success in suppressing the intelligibility of the dream has frozen the world of Drood into a state of incompleteness where the solution of the crime remains a mystery and the dream must therefore be compulsively dreamed “over and over again” (269). The “mystery” of Edwin Drood is not whether Edwin was really murdered or whether Jasper was the murderer. It is the making intelligible of this dream. The text itself, along with Dickens's notes for and direct statements about the novel, seems to make the murder question quite clear. Asked whether he had actually allowed Drood to be killed in the novel or whether the murder was only a snare like that of John Harmon in Our Mutual Friend, Dickens responded “I call my book the Mystery, not the History, of Edwin Drood.”¹⁸ Dickens even took pains to instruct the original illustrator of the novel to include a certain kind of double necktie in his representation of Jasper because, the artist claimed, Dickens informed him that this was to serve as Jasper's murder weapon.¹⁹ Throughout the novel Jasper is prominently portrayed as a villain under the sway of murderous impulses. He explicitly acknowledges the violent passion that drives him and for which he would willingly sacrifice his supposed loyalty to his nephew Edwin. He not only makes self-incriminating statements to Rosa, he records them in his diary. He devotes himself to framing the clearly innocent Neville Landless for the murder and to using whatever means he can to extort Rosa's agreement to marry him. Finally, over and over again in his dreams, Jasper replays some unspoken bloody deed that he has already performed. As Rosa concludes after one of her harrowing interviews with this man possessed of some hypnotic power over her, Jasper is undoubtedly “a terrible man, and must be fled from” (233).

Whether or not we regard all this evidence against Jasper as intentionally misleading, the real mystery of Edwin Drood is not “Who did it?” but “What is the nature of the person driven to this crime?” More than discovering or proving the guilt of the murderer, the novel is interested in acquiring knowledge of the forces that twist the criminal's personality, in learning, as the narrator says, to “read” the symptoms of “the criminal intellect, which its own professed students perpetually misread” (233). The novel is ultimately concerned, as is even Jasper himself, with making intelligible the real forces expressed in his unintelligible dream. And despite the narrator's claim that the criminal intellect as exemplified in Jasper is “a horrible wonder apart,” fundamentally different from “the average intellect of average men,” the same impulses that govern Jasper's dreams and his irrational behavior seem to be present in many of the more innocent characters in the novel too. Like The Moonstone, The Mystery of Edwin Drood proposes a model of the human psyche that can be most clearly seen in the figure of a criminal whose unconscious remains unintelligible to his conscious mind; but it is a model to which the “average intellect of average men” conforms as well. Also like The Moonstone, Dickens's detective novel suppresses beneath its murder plot the case study of a psyche in conflict, which is tied in an essential way to a repressed political plot. Once again the criminal mind is a symptomatic expression of a political situation originating in the Orient. Once again the linking of the criminal, the psychological, and the political anticipates Freud's description of the “political” activities of transgression, repression, and censorship as they are manifested in dreams. The “criminal intellect” in Edwin Drood is portrayed as a projection of the conflicted psyche of the community, just as the psyche of each member of the community is conceived in political terms. Here, as in The Moonstone, the mind is represented as a battlefield where psychic agencies enter into secret conflict with each other. But in contrast to Collins, Dickens indicates that even in its finished form, the Drood mystery would never be “solved”; if the criminal intellect continued to be regarded as “a horrible wonder apart,” the mystery would only remain a more elaborately repressed political and psychological secret.

More important to any story of detection than answering the question of who committed the crime is discovering how the detective and the community decode and assemble fragmentary clues into a complete account of a crime—how the unintelligible dream is made into an intelligible story. The importance of telling the story of the crime in Drood figures prominently in the account Dickens gave to John Forster of how he planned to conclude the book. He insisted that the idea behind the novel was “not a communicable idea,” but went on to say that he intended to end the book with a “review of the murderer's career by himself at the close, when its temptations were to be dwelt upon as if, not he the culprit, but some other man, were the tempted.”²⁰ Dickens's withholding of the identity of “the culprit” in these remarks may simply be attributable to his desire to preserve the suspense of the plot. But it may also indicate that the culprit's name is not the mystery; his psychological makeup is. As Dickens's remarks to Forster indicate, the culprit's “identity” is a “mystery” even to the culprit himself. When he does speak of himself, he does so as if he were “some other man,” as if (in the terms of The Moonstone) he were Somebody Else. Dickens explained that the final chapters of Drood “were to be written in the condemned cell” by the murderer, “elaborately elicited from him as if told of another.”²¹ These last chapters were to consist of a confession, in other words, but a confession of a very strange kind. It would elaborately disguise the self behind the mask of an alternative identity apparently unrecognizable to the “confessing” culprit. Beneath the confessional act of making the self intelligible in this novel, then, is the deeper unintelligibility of a self censored from itself, speaking with a voice not its own. Rather than a release from the hidden forces of compulsive, unconscious behavior (like the collective dream account of The Moonstone), this confession was to be an act of repression as well as revelation, a further sign of the opposing forces locked in contention within “the criminal intellect.” It was also to be a sign of the individual's inability to know and understand the operation of his or her own psychic agencies without the aid of the external agencies of detection. The psyche is a field of knowledge, that is, which is composed by its cultural situation in some fundamental way and can be fully known only in a cultural context—in this case, a prison cell.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood is the culmination of a series of “mystery novels” written late in Dickens's career in which the discovery of a secret crime is connected with the discovery of a secret identity and the exposure of some political institution. In Bleak House, Esther Summerson's paternity and identity became inextricably bound up not only with the secrets, lawsuits, and sexual crimes of the past but with the nightmare bureaucracy of Chancery Court and the murder mystery of the lawyer Tulkinghorn as well. Her discovery of the identity of her mother and her assertion of her own will in the novel are also accompanied by dreams, as Esther recovers from an illness that alters her appearance. Like her illness, the dreams seem both to scar her and to separate her from the “crimes” of her past—crimes which she has to confront after becoming the unwilling but indispensable assistant to the detective Mr. Bucket, who pursues her disguised mother and finds her dead body at the grave of Esther's unknown father.²² Pip's identity in Great Expectations, Arthur Clennam's in Little Dorrit, and John Harmon's in Our Mutual Friend are all interwoven with criminal plots and with the uncovering of some mysterious secret scheme or legacy to which their own personal destinies had been subordinated.

In The Mystery of Edwin Drood, however, the interest of the mystery turns away from questions of the legal system, paternity, or even romance toward questions about the psychology of the criminal and the psychological effects of a policy of imperial repression. The dark, divided John Jasper dominates the manifest content of the novel in a way that none of the criminal characters of the preceding novels did. Unlike its predecessors, Drood presents the double life of its criminal not as a dramatic revelation late in the novel but as an evident fact from the very outset. Jasper's dark complexion, his association with opium and the orient, and his mysterious past may recall the detective figure Jennings from The Moonstone, but he in no way resembles either of the “criminals” Ablewhite or Blake. In Drood the criminal's double life does not serve as a source of surprise to explain the mystery; rather, it is a source of psychological interest, which explains the mystery before the fact, but which itself remains mysterious. This fascination with the operation of Jasper's mind corresponds with a deepening public consciousness about the problem of criminal insanity during the period, a problem brought into focus by the developing science of criminal anthropology. Later in the century, Havelock Ellis's pioneer work in the field, The Criminal, would claim that “out of 100 insane persons brought to the bar of justice only 26 to 28 are recognised as insane.”²³ By 1889 the medical inspector of prisons in England would report that of the same number, “no less than 93 sentenced prisoners were found to be insane upon reception.”²⁴ Detective novels like The Moonstone and Drood both fueled and responded to this interest in the psychology of crime, the difficulty of defining “insanity,” and the implications for establishing appropriate methods for punishment and correction.

The very beginning of Edwin Drood focuses upon the importance of Jasper's state of mind, establishing his dream life as the central mystery of the novel. Drood opens with an unidentified voice engaged in a troubled dialogue with itself, asking a series of confused questions, offering uncertain speculations in response to those questions, and thereby dramatizing what Jasper himself later calls the “self-repressed” character of his mind (231):

An ancient English Cathedral town? How can the ancient English Cathedral town be here! The well-known massive grey 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 in the real prospect. 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. … Still, the Cathedral tower rises in the background, where it cannot be, and still no writhing figure is on the grim spike.

(37)

The novel begins here as if it were being told in the first person. But there is no first-person pronoun in the passage to confirm that it is. The voice interrogating itself cannot rest in any single point in “the real prospect”; it is like the phantom “writhing figure,” impaled on the spike that is imagined but not present, torn between a fantastic Oriental world and the more familiar prospect of an English cathedral town. The mind these words represent expresses itself as a divided kingdom in conflict with itself—at once English and Oriental, Christian and pagan. The mystery of who it is that speaks these words extends into the next paragraph, when another narrative voice identifies the previous passage as the ramblings of a “scattered consciousness” that has “fantastically pieced itself together” (37). The passage turns out not to represent spoken words at all, in fact, but the last dream thoughts of a man emerging out of unconsciousness—a man who is intent on not saying what is on his mind. As soon as the dreamer rises from his sleep, he approaches the other dreamers in the opium den and listens carefuly to the “incoherent jargon” of their dreamy mutterings, “reassured” when there is “no sense or sequence” to their words. “Wherefore ‘unintelligible’ is again the comment of the watcher, made with some reassured nodding of his head, and a gloomy smile” (39).

This scattered consciousness is later identified as belonging to the choirmaster John Jasper, and its “piecing together” is precisely what he apparently wants to avoid here. His goal in this scene and throughout the novel is to preserve the fragmentation of his consciousness, the split between how he is perceived and how he perceives himself. Jasper's own double life as the Cloisterham choirmaster in public and a London opium smoker in private enacts his struggle to prevent in his own life the “sense or sequence” that are the characteristics of a unified personality. Jasper is, therefore, placed at the center of this world where narrative and psychological coherence are breaking down, where neither the fragments of the murder mystery nor the scattered pieces of human consciousness can be put together again—fantastically or in any other way. He strives to keep his waking life, like his unconscious dream life, deeply unintelligible to the world. In contrast to The Moonstone, in which Franklin Blake's dream material at least seems to be involuntarily repressed, Drood represents this dream from the start as involving a conscious version of what Freud would call the “deliberate … dissimulation” of censorship (Interpretation of Dreams, 141). “The dreamer fighting against his own wishes,” Freud said in explaining the operation of the censorship in dreams, “is to be compared with the summation of two separate, though in some way intimately connected, people. …”²⁵ The studied duplicity of Jasper's waking life and the scattered consciousness of his dreams enact this description of two persons who are at once deeply separated and intimately connected, a psyche locked in contention with itself much as Franklin Blake was in his dream and as Henry Jekyll would more dramatically be in Jekyll and Hyde. In his dreams, Jasper is a citizen of two very different worlds.

The mystery of Edwin Drood goes unsolved not only because Dickens did not finish the novel but also because Jasper's dream remains unintelligible—because he does not allow its content to be directly related to his waking life. Even as it stands, the novel presents a comprehensive case study of what it calls “self-repression” in the “criminal intellect.” “The echoes of my own voice among the arches seem to mock me with my daily drudging round,” Jasper confesses to his nephew; he then immediately follows with a contradictory resolution: “I must subdue myself to my vocation” (48-49). This pattern of first revealing his self-alienation and then engaging in self-repression is consistent for Jasper. It is perhaps most evident in the book he is writing during the course of the novel—his diary. That book dramatizes the contending voices within Jasper, one urging him to disclose himself, the other to disguise himself. Like the culprit's words that were to conclude the novel, Jasper's words in his diary show his conflicting impulses. “My Diary is, in fact a Diary of Ned's life too,” he says to Crisparkle when he presents the text to him to read (132), betraying in this description the duality of his impulses—to tell his own life and to tell it as another's, to speak for himself and to disguise himself as someone else—in this case, the victim of his crime. In his diary Jasper also attempts to preempt the community's act of detection by accounting for the crime before the fact. He tries to make the case against Neville Landless so compelling that Neville's guilt would be the obvious and irrefutable conclusion to the mystery of Edwin's disappearance even before it takes place.

Jasper has chosen an appropriate instrument for this purpose. A diary is presumably a place where the writer puts away disguises and confronts his own thoughts and feelings candidly. Jasper's diary pretends, at least, to be doing just this. In giving it to Crisparkle, Jasper claims to be representing “what my state of mind honestly was” on the night that Neville and Edwin quarreled (132). In fact, he is intending to generate suspicion about Neville's violent state of mind toward Edwin. Even Crisparkle is able to penetrate Jasper's designs once the murder takes place, speculating to Grewgious that the diary was written to “expose” Neville “to the torment of a perpetually reviving suspicion” rather than to “expose” anything about Jasper himself (213). But the goal of Jasper's diary is rightly perceived here as continually “reviving suspicion” rather than actually establishing guilt or providing a complete and compelling explanation. It is in his interests to keep the mystery (and the meaning of his dream) in a state of suspension, to keep the novel unfinished as it were. Yet, in the very tactics of repression, the repressed material manages to make itself known. The deceptive words of Jasper's diary indict him perhaps more powerfully than they do Neville. Jasper describes the keeping of his diary to Crisparkle as “an antidote to my black humors,” but it functions more as a symptom of those dark psychological influences than as a cure for them because he never understands where those dark humors originate or what they signify (132).

The unconscious, irresistible impulse on the part of the criminal to indict himself by a telltale clue or by a compulsive return to the scene of the crime has become a conventional feature of the detective story and a fundamental principle of criminal anthropology and psychology as well. Novels such as The Mystery of Edwin Drood and The Moonstone perform this function for England just as Jasper's diary does for him. They return us to a scene of political criminality as well to a story of psychological distress. “The criminal's improvidence is,” according to Theodor Reik, “an unconscious piece of providence which aims at self-betrayal and is dictated by dark intentions unknown to himself. His secret is stronger than his will.”²⁶ The self-incriminating language of Jasper's diary operates as a paradigm for this kind of providential improvidence, as Jasper seems to be unconsciously aware when he declares his intention to destroy the diary. “A man leading a monotonous life, and getting his nerves, or his stomach, out of order,” Jasper tells Crisparkle, to defend himself against accusations of exaggeration, “dwells upon an idea until it loses its proportions. That was my case with the idea in question. So I shall burn the evidence of my case, when the book is full, and begin the next volume with a clearer vision” (181). Clearly more is out of order here than Jasper's stomach. In his threat to burn “the evidence of my case,” Jasper implicitly identifies the still-undisclosed “case” of the crime with his own case history as he has recorded it, betraying his intention to suppress them both. He is seeking in this action to render his own words as unintelligible as his dream and to guard against any admissions he might have made under the influence of ideas that he acknowledges are both out of control and out of proportion. And just as Jasper is doomed to dream his dream over and over, he resolves here to start writing his diary over again once he has destroyed the first version of it. Jasper's secret self is clearly stronger than his own will. The more he seeks to repress it, the more forcefully it evidences itself.

Jasper's accusations about Neville in his diary invariably rebound on himself with greater force. But they also reverberate into a general accusation of the British Empire. “The demoniacal passion of this Neville Landless, his strength in his fury, and his savage rage for the destruction of its object, appal me,” Jasper writes in the diary (132). What is really appalling for Jasper, however, is that he is himself driven by just such a “demoniacal passion,” as he admits on more than one occasion. He has already confessed to Edwin that the agony of his wretched, dull life has driven him to “carving demons … out of my heart” (48). “I have made my confession that my love is mad,” he says later to Rosa, and then lends to his mad passion a demonic element: “In the distasteful work of the day, in the wakeful misery of the night, girded by sordid realities, or wandering through Paradises and Hells of vision in which I rushed, carrying your image in my arms, I loved you madly” (228-29). In the same diary entry that refers to Neville's violently driven nature, Jasper admits, “I have a morbid dread upon me of some horrible consequences resulting to my dear boy, that I cannot reason with or in any way contend against” (132). Here and elsewhere, Jasper's diary resembles a gothic novel, as he refers over and over to his being driven by some irrational, “demoniacal” force that blends erotic and violent impulses. “So profound is the impression” upon Jasper of impending violence toward his nephew, he admits, in an apparent prophecy of his own murderous intentions, that he has twice “gone into my dear boy's room, to assure myself of his sleeping safely, and not lying dead in his blood.” Jasper has even gone so far as to warn Edwin that his life is in danger and to record that warning in his diary, following it with another allusion to his own helpless entanglement with uncontrollable dark powers. “I am unable to shake off these dark intangible presentiments of evil,” he says (132). Analogously, Jasper's own calculated words seem unable entirely to shake off his own guilt upon Neville Landless: his diary accuses when it pretends to confess and confesses when it seeks to accuse. As in his confused, unintelligible dreams and as in the confession that was to end the novel, Jasper speaks of himself in his diary as if he were “some other man.”

But that “other man” is not just Neville. It is all that Neville signifies. While Jasper recognizes he is being governed by his passions, he never realizes the political content and character of this domination. His most violent passions are political, even on the most literal level, since they are directed against a young man who is about to take a professional position in the empire and one who has just returned from it as a victim. Jasper's violence is consistently expressed in dreams that are connected with the empire. They are induced by opium imported from the East, and they are always engaged in with exotic characters from the Orient. As we have seen, the content of those dreams is also political, and Jasper's experience of them manifests itself as a form of foreign occupation by forces he is unable to “shake off.” Eve Sedgwick has pointed out that Drood and some related texts deploy the thematics of empire to alter the terms of gothic discourse about sexual matters.²⁷ But the very features that Sedgwick connects with this new “orientalized” gothic—exploitative sexual acting-out, mechanisms of psychic dividedness, opium addiction, “Oriental” technique—also specify key features of the detective genre in the nineteenth century. The linkage of domestic crime, psychic dividedness, and the politics of empire in the early detective novel brought to light the psychological repressions involved in British imperial policy as well as the empirelike repressions that characterize the operation of the “criminal intellect” in all of us.

Jasper's crime is political for more reasons than the analogy between “the criminal intellect,” torn between two worlds, and a fragmented civil state in rebellion against itself. While Jasper has repeatedly alluded to the “dark humors” that cloud his deathly boring existence, and he has admitted to Rosa that the “madness” of his passion for her might have caused him to turn against “my dear lost boy” and “swept even him from your side when you favored him,” he gives no indication of anxiety over any larger political issues (229). Ernest Mandel's study of the social history of the crime story criticizes its common suppression of political content from its analysis of the motives for a crime. He considers the frequent recourse to “blind passions, crazy plots, and references to magic, if not to clinical madness,” to be a way of explaining why criminals commit crimes by not explaining them. These stories generally attribute violent crime to what Mandel calls an implicit irrationality that undergirds bourgeois rationalism, rather than to real social conditions. Mandel argues that “even if individual passion were the dominant motive for crime, there would still be the question of why a given social context produces more and more madness while another does not—a question the classical detective story never raises.”²⁸

But the foundational British novels of detection do raise this question by linking the tactics of political and psychological repression in their plots. As was true of The Moonstone, the clue to the political dimensions of the Drood crime is encoded in the culprit's dream and in the conditions surrounding it. First, like Franklin Blake's dreams, Jasper's are induced by opium, a drug associated in the novel with the exoticism of India and of the Orient in general and with the potentially threatening effects of the colonies upon the homeland in particular. The opium den in which Jasper indulges his habit and entertains his murderous dreams is a dangerous world unto itself, peopled by “Chinamen” and East Indian “Lascars,” one of whom physically threatens Jasper in the opening scene. The content of Jasper's dream also combines visions of empire with those of violent crime: fantastic Oriental scenes (involving Asian hordes, thieves, sultans, and tortured executions) always follow the enactment of the unspecified “miserable thing” that Jasper rehearses and replays in his dream—presumably the murder of Edwin in the ancient cathedral town. The juxtaposition of images of the “unintelligible” crime, confused visions of an imperial kingdom, and the familiar landscape of England suggests a repressed relationship among them all. That relationship is made manifest in the victim of Jasper's unspoken crime and in the victim of his accusations about who is responsible for the crime. In Edwin and Neville, the implicit political aspects of the dream and the crime in The Mystery of Edwin Drood are made explicit.

The manifest explanation for Jasper's murderous thoughts toward Edwin and Neville is that these young men rival Jasper for the love of Rosa Bud. They are obstacles between him and the object of his mad passion. But there are more subtle explanations for his antagonism as well. Edwin is already engaged to Rosa because of an arrangement made in the wills of their fathers. Both have misgivings about the foreordination of their romance, however, and they eventually break it off (though Jasper is unaware of this development). But Edwin has inherited something other than a fiancée from his father. Seeming to begin his story where Pip's left off, he has also inherited a profession in the colonies. When Edwin enters the novel, he is about to depart for Egypt, where he intends to work as an engineer. “My small patrimony was left a part of the capital of the Firm I am with, by my father, a former partner,” he informs Neville proudly; “and I am a charge upon the firm until I come of age” (97). Earlier, Edwin complains to his uncle that his life is not something he has chosen but something he is obliged to carry on as part of an inheritance from his father. “You can take it easily,” he tells Jasper. “Your life is not laid down to scale, and lined and dotted out for you, like a surveyor's plan. You have no uncomfortable suspicion that you are forced upon anybody, nor has anybody an uncomfortable suspicion that she is forced upon you, or that you are forced upon her. You can choose for yourself” (47). Edwin's complaint refers explicitly to his engagement here, but by describing his life in the engineer's language of surveying and drawing to scale, he suggests that he may have some misgivings about the other part of his inheritance—about being forced upon the unwilling colonies as well as upon the unwilling Rosa. Edwin harbors an “uncomfortable suspicion” about more than his romantic engagement, as becomes more evident in his painful confrontation with Neville Landless, who speaks out directly against English imperialism and expresses his feelings most strongly to Edwin himself.

If Edwin, the object of Jasper's violence, is connected to the colonies by his future, Neville Landless, the object of Jasper's accusations, is connected to the colonies by his past. Neville freely admits to his tutor Crisparkle that he has a violent character, which he entirely attributes to being raised in Ceylon by a cruel and miserly stepfather. Neville's account of his “tyrannical” upbringing portrays him as both an agent and a victim of British imperialism, and his words both indict the empire and testify to the pathology of his own temperament.

I have had, sir, from my earliest remembrance, to suppress a deadly and bitter hatred. This has made me secret and revengeful. I have always been tyrannically held down by the strong hand. This has driven me, in my weakness, to the resource of being false and mean. I have been stinted of education, liberty, money, dress, the very necessaries of life, the commonest pleasures of childhood. This has caused me to be utterly wanting in I don't know what emotions, or remembrances, or good instincts—I have not even a name for the thing, you see!

(90)

This candid revelation of his own suppressed and violent nature joins Neville with the angry and passionate Jasper. But Neville's candor and directness here also distinguish him from the self-repressed machinations of Edwin's uncle. More important, however, Neville's litany of physical and emotional deprivation and exploitation culminates in his admission that he cannot finally express the precise nature of his victimization: it is “the thing” that cannot be named, the “unintelligible” anxiety of the imperial project which cannot be uttered. And he is at least in part victimized as a participant in that project, for sharing a prejudice against the “inferior race” of the Ceylonese with whom he believes he has “contracted some affinity,” from whom he has received a portion of their “tigerish blood” simply by being among them (90). The vengeful, dark-complected Neville represents a danger that is about to strike British society from within, and he in turn harbors a caged beast within his own psyche. He would have killed his own stepfather if he had the chance, he tells Crisparkle, an admission that “unspeakably shocks” and frightens the mild-mannered cleric who has been engaged to tutor the wild young man. “Nothing,” Crisparkle says indignantly, “could justify those horrible expressions you just used” (88). Neville's words are as objectionable to Crisparkle as his proposed bloody deeds. Such an indictment of the empire should not be spoken, the cleric implies, and it cannot be justified.

The argument between Neville and Edwin is also presumably provoked by their competing desires for Rosa, just as Jasper's resentment of Edwin's had been. But Edwin's imperial arrogance and racial prejudice are what really infuriate Neville and finally bring the two to blows. Neville reprimands Edwin for the vanity and conceit expressed in his imperial plans. “In the part of the world where I come from, you would be called to account” for such conduct, he challenges Edwin. “How should you know?” Edwin responds to his accuser. “You may know a black common fellow, or a black common boaster, when you see him (and no doubt you have a large acquaintance that way); but you are no judge of white men” (102). At this moment the fight erupts which Jasper later exploits to inflame suspicion of Neville and to provide a motive for Neville's supposed murder of Edwin. But it should be noted that the fury and competition between the two young men are specifically formulated as a racist and imperial issue. Their fight is the effect of a collision between their two worlds. As Edwin's caustic racist remarks make plain, Neville's dark, vengeful character is a judgment against Edwin as one of the white men who conduct the unjust operations of British imperialism. Neither recognizes, however, that the criminal intellect inhabits the empire of their own minds.

The violently juxtaposed images of England and the Orient in Jasper's recurring dreams portray this political conflict from the beginning of the novel, and they portray it as a repressed issue. The “reality” behind the dream and the reality of Edwin's murder are continually linked in the narrative. The political implications of the murder and the dream are at least tacitly supported by the critics who have proposed along with Felix Aylmer that Jasper's attack on Edwin may be connected to the Indian cult of Thuggee, whose members strangled unsuspecting victims as a form of devotion to the goddess Kali. Regarded as emblematic of the pagan barbarism of India, the cult became a principal target of British reform in the 1820s and 30s.²⁹ There is scant textual evidence to associate of Jasper with the cult, but if we regard his criminal pathology as a projection of the anxieties of English culture, his probable murder of Edwin and his resolution to destroy Neville may be viewed in a more compelling and important way as manifesting a desire to repress the impending costs of an imperial economy. The murder of Edwin and the execution of Neville would silence both the heir and the accuser of a tyrannical empire. The phantom writhing figure impaled upon the grim Oriental spike that “intervened” on the prospect of the English cathedral town in Jasper's dream may aptly stand for the missing colonialist Edwin and the mixture of pride and guilt that accompanied the late nineteenth-century expansion of the British Empire.

As we have seen, that expansion in India was a direct consequence of the increasing unrest among the Indians about the degree to which British rule was destroying their own culture. As we have also seen, Dickens viewed the most dramatic manifestation of colonial unrest—the Indian Mutiny—as an outrageous attack on the mother country. He maintained that the only appropriate response would be to kill off as many Indians as possible.³⁰ Since the article he commissioned Wilkie Collins to write on the question did not satisfy his sense of justice, Dickens proposed that the two cowrite another piece “to shadow forth the bravery of our English ladies in India.”³¹ In the resultant story, “The Perils of Certain English Prisoners,” Dickens managed to portray the rebelling natives as plundering imperialists in reverse—“villains who have despoiled our countrymen, barbarously murdered them, and worse than murdered their wives and daughters.”³² Patrick Brantlinger has demonstrated that this kind of reinterpretation of the political uprising as a purely “criminal” act on the part of the Indians was the rule in British literary representations during the decades following the mutiny.³³ But the years between 1857 and the publication of Drood in 1870 may have tempered and complicated Dickens's political views. The escalated aggression of the “doctrine of lapse” instituted by Governor General Lord Dalhousie had been exposed as a brutal, expansionist policy and was abandoned by 1860. Then, the even more brutal revenge taken by the British troops in the years after the mutiny radically undercut the claim that the British purpose in India was to benefit and civilize the barbaric colonies. Despite these changes in official policy, the economic and political effects of British rule grew more and more exploitative of the Indians. It became increasingly difficult for even patriotic Englishmen like Dickens to think of their colonial project as any kind of “burden” other than a burden of guilt. That burden may have found a displaced expression in the murder of the heir to empire in Edwin Drood, a violently repressed wish for the end of the violence of empire.

In Drood, Dickens's more complicated feelings about the psychology of empire and the empire of the psyche are played out in some detail. If Jasper seeks to project the guilt for his own crimes upon someone else, the novel may at least on the manifest level seek to cast guilt for the international “crime” of empire upon the “criminal intellect” that it maintains is a unique case, a pathological and “horrible wonder apart,” distinct from the intellect of “average men.” But the novel also demonstrates that such a projection can only be accomplished as an elaborate act of repression. Like Jasper's efforts at covering up his own crime, the duplicitous strategies of the novel also betray themselves. The “average” men and women of Cloisterham are not completely “apart” from Jasper at all. In fact, virtually everyone in Cloisterham has something to hide or cultivates a confusion about his or her identity. Mr. Sapsea, the voluble mayor and auctioneer of the town, prides himself in being mistaken for the dean of the cathedral, and encourages the confusion by “intoning” his voice to resemble the dean's. He goes so far as to “‘dress at’ the Dean; has been bowed to for the Dean, in mistake; has even been spoken to in the street as My Lord, under the impression that he was the Bishop come down unexpectedly, without his chaplain” (62). Sapsea's duplicity is accompanied by his patriarchal and imperial airs, which he expresses not only when he converts his wife's gravestone into a monument to himself but also when he describes his business. “If I have not gone to foreign countries,” he tells Jasper, “foreign countries have come to me. They have come to me in the way of business” (64). For Sapsea, foreign countries are his business, and only that; they are the things he can buy and sell at a profit with the authority and dignity of a man of the cloth. In a number of respects, the mayor of Cloisterham seems to be characterized by the same “unclean spirit of imitation” that possesses Jasper, another man to whom foreign countries have come—in the psychological form of his habitual opium dreams and in the human form of his rival Neville Landless (39).

But Cloisterham contains other, even more innocent characters engaged in “fraudulence” or self-division.³⁴ Miss Twinkleton, the director of the town's “Seminary for Young Ladies,” separates the phases of her life as rigidly as Jasper; she exists in “two states of consciousness which never clash, but each of which pursues its separate course as though it were continuous instead of broken” (53). Miss Twinkleton is stern and reserved with her pupils but romantic and ebullient in their absence. Her “two distinct and separate phases of being” are demonstrated in her insistent censorship of the very passionate passages that most interest her when she reads novels to Rosa: “She cut the love scenes, interpolated passages in praise of female celibacy, and was guilty of other glaring pious frauds” (263).³⁵ This censorship may well have produced rather deleterious effects in the demure Rosa Bud, who is herself a divided personality, displaying somewhat darker inclinations. She is vacillating and indecisive about her engagement to Edwin, but she also suffers from a “fascination of repulsion” toward the conniving Jasper (234). Although she is repelled by his advances, she is also irresistibly “compelled by him” (226). It is when Jasper “wanders away into a frightful sort of dream,” she says, that he “threatens most,” because “he himself is in the sounds” he whispers to her (95). That Jasper's erotic power, no matter how distastefully expressed, appeals to some suppressed, unconscious desire of Rosa's seems evident when the narrator says of Jasper's attempted seduction that “it had pursued her into her insensibility, and she had not a moment's unconsciousness of it” (231). The indecisive and impressionable Edwin also innocently claims an ominous psychological connection with his uncle when he says that no one was ever so “wrapped up in another” as Jasper was in him (167). Even our first vision of Crisparkle depicts internal conflict: he is shown boxing with himself before a mirror, “feinting and dodging” his own reflected image (78). We also learn that the attorney Mr. Grewgious has feinted and dodged his way around his passionate self; he has suppressed a secret, unconsummated, and unconfessed love affair with Rosa's late mother, which drives him to reproving the reflection of himself in a “misty looking-glass” as if he were someone else (146).

Even though they are expressed in these apparently benign and sometimes comic forms, the “self-repressed” features of the intellect seem anything but “a horrible wonder apart” in Cloisterham. Jasper is unquestionably more deeply at odds with himself than the others are, and he obviously possesses a more pathological and dangerous repressive agency. But everyone seems to have some share in these psychic strategies, and in one way or another they all share in this novel's “mystery”: the repression of violent deeds. Such complicity is perhaps most evident in another dream, that of the town stonemason Durdles, on the night he spends with Jasper in the cathedral tombs, when, according to Dickens's notes for the chapter, “the ground” is prepared “for the manner of the murder, to come out at last” (289). Durdles's self-repression recalls the planned ending of the murderer's proposed confession in his cell, for Durdles too “speaks of himself in the third person; perhaps being a little misty as to his own identity when he narrates” (68). In order to preserve the secrecy of his mysterious deeds in the tombs that night, Jasper drugs Durdles's liquor with a heavy dose of opium, inducing a dream that is “only remarkable for being unusually restless, and unusually real”:

He dreams of lying there, asleep, and yet counting his companion's footsteps as he walks to and fro. He dreams that the footsteps die away into distance of time and of space, and that something touches him, and that something falls from his hand. Then something clinks and gropes about, and he dreams that he is alone for so long a time, that the lanes of light take new directions as the moon advances in her course. From succeeding unconsciousness he passes into a dream of slow uneasiness from cold; and painfully awakes to a perception of the lanes of light—really changed, much as he had dreamed—and Jasper walking among them, beating his hands and feet.

(157)

The dream is remarkable, the narrator claims, because, as in Jasper's own dream, reality and illusion are hopelessly confused within it, because Durdles's waking life is “much as he had dreamed” it. Upon this shifting ground between consciousness and unconsciousness the mystery of Edwin Drood rests. Its solution might well have come through Durdles's fuller recovery and the deciphering of this dream. But the most disturbing image of the dream is that of Jasper “walking among” the other images, merging his own criminal mind with Durdles's as he does with everyone in the novel. Like the bewildering figures in any dream, no one is quite sure who anyone else is in this novel or who stalks their dreams. Everyone seems to remain at least “a little misty” as to their own desires and identities when they tell—or refuse to tell—about them. Young “Deputy” may be the most explicit manifestation of this psychological mystery. His nickname indicates that his identity is only a substitute for someone else's; he is known only by his function as a deputy. He has, in fact, been “deputized” by the stonemason to enforce Durdles's own will when he is too drunk to do it himself. Deputy personifies Durdles's repressive agency, literally driving him home by stoning him when his instincts overcome his intentions. “I never means to plead to no name,” Deputy tells Datchery. And when the legal authorities try to “put me down in the book,” he says that he responds by simply defying them to “find out” who he might be (276).

The mystery of Edwin Drood might be how to “give a name” to anyone. We are not even certain about who the detective is in this detective novel, much less who the culprit is. Mr. Dick Datchery, the mysterious figure who enters the book in its final chapters, is commonly regarded as the detective, but the range of speculation about him is appropriate to the confusion about identities in the novel. Datchery is variously said to be a disguised version of Helena or Neville Landless, Tartar, Mr. Grewgious, or even the resurrected Edwin Drood himself.³⁶ The most compelling case can be made for Grewgious's clerk Mr. Bazzard, whose absence from the office Grewgious notes “with great mystery” after Datchery appears in Cloisterham, stating only that his clerk has some “secret” and that he is “off duty here, altogether, just at present” (238). More important than the detective's name in this novel, however, is the fact that his identity remains as shrouded in mystery as the culprit's and that this novel ends with the detective figure performing an act that strangely echoes the act with which the culprit began it. Datchery, who has spent a good deal of time asking questions and making notations around Cloisterham, is shown in the last scene at his lodging expressing his appreciation for “the old tavern way” of keeping track of accounts: “Illegible except to the scorer” (278). The last line of fiction that Dickens ever wrote describes Datchery making just such a mark as he prepares to eat his dinner: “Before sitting down to it, he opens his corner cupboard door takes a bit of chalk from its shelf; adds one thick line to the score, extending from the top of the cupboard door to the bottom; and then falls to with an appetite” (280). This novel of detection, which was based on the author's incommunicable idea and which opened with the criminal's account of an unintelligible dream, ends with the detective making an illegible mark.

The secret illegibility of the detective's interpretations matches the secret unintelligibility of the criminal dreams in Edwin Drood; and both remain unaccounted for, locked in the mysterious incompleteness of Dickens's final novel. In the dream and the crime it leaves uninterpreted, The Mystery of Edwin Drood expresses a desire for an explanatory scheme that would open the illegibly marked cupboard door and decipher the “political” agencies of the unconscious—distorted, censored, and illegible as they are to the conscious mind. If Bazzard is the disguised detective in the novel, then his writing of a play to which he has given the title “The Thorn of Anxiety” is a most appropriate complement to the thorny, anxiety-plagued diary written by the chief suspect of the novel. The criminal dream from which this anxious community suffers remains uninterpreted because its citizens have not recognized the politics of their own “self-repression” and have not acknowledged that their own minds resemble “criminal intellects,” as deeply divided against themselves as aspects of the British Empire were. They have repressed their own repression, and this novel is both a distorted personal diary and a displaced public performance of the same divisions and anxieties. It is also a fitting final work for the novelist whose dreams prevented him from writing his own autobiography and whose last years were preoccupied with his obsessive public performances of the murder scene from Oliver Twist. In those performances, and in his last work, Dickens may well have been indirectly telling of his own anxieties and of his own criminal intellect, even if he presented them “as if told of another.”

The dreams in The Moonstone and Edwin Drood point out the existence of forces within the self that are produced by the dreamer and yet are entirely outside the authority of his or her conscious will. Those forces can erupt without warning. As Jennings told Blake, an ordinary dream can “subordinate to itself your judgment and your will.” In Drood John Jasper makes an analogous statement to Rosa. Because of our passions, he says, we “sometimes act in opposition to our wishes” (227). Psychological claims of this kind not only shaped the plots of detective fiction in the late nineteenth century but contributed to an overwhelming interest in the nature of the “criminal intellect” in criminal law and criminal anthropology as well.³⁷ In addition, they contributed to the development of a model of the psyche with, as Freud put it, a “complete analogy in political life” (Interpretation of Dreams, 144). For Collins, for Dickens, and for Doyle, that analogy was expressed in a growing anxiety over the costs of empire and the potentially destructive power of the repressed colonies in the East. Whereas the autobiographical novels I have considered represent dreams as opportunities for achieving unity and independent authority for the self, these detective novels present another, more disagreeable truth: dreams evidence a fundamental division within the self and an internalization of the “prior social fact” of an outside, public authority.

Carl Schorske, Terry Eagleton, and other commentators have shown how psychoanalysis suppresses history by reducing political realities to biographical details.³⁸ This suppression is consistent with a seemingly irresolvable nineteenth-century ambivalence about authority as it was expressed in the internalization and abstraction of social content chronicled in both The Moonstone and Edwin Drood. But psychoanalysis can also be deployed to reveal a dialectical relationship between the personal and the political, in which each sphere projects its influence back upon the other. Such a use of psychoanalysis is appropriate for a responsible reading of the repressed materials encoded in the dreams of these detective novels. Here the unconscious is an exotic place, an unassimilated foreign territory within the boundaries of the mind, censored and defended against by what Freud would later call “the repressive agency.” The psychological manifestation of this political fact is not only the situation with which the psychoanalytic theory of repression begins; it is where Stevenson's quintessential fictional account of the idea, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, begins as well. But Stevenson's tale is more than a detective story about Victorian repression. It is technically not a story at all, in fact. As its title indicates, it is the history of a “strange case.” In it the main character defines himself not as an individual but as an “empire,” a “polity” of independent forces “that contended in the field of my consciousness” (82). But the book is also an elaborate transcription of a nightmare that terrified its author. In both the fictional case history and autobiographical dream account, however, the political plot is completely absorbed by the politics of psychological processes, and the British Empire is reconfigured as a besieged internal empire of desire and repression.

THE SOLUTION OF DREAMS IN THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE

I received Lanyon's condemnation partly in a dream; it was partly in a dream that I came home to my own house and got into bed. I slept after the prostration of the day, with a stringent and profound slumber which not even the nightmares that wrung me could avail to break. I awoke in the morning shaken, weakened, but refreshed. I still hated and feared the thought of the brute that slept within me.

—Dr. Jekyll

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ends as a detective story customarily begins: with the discovery of a mysterious corpse, the unexplained disappearance of a character, and the appearance of an enigmatic text. In this case, the one who has disappeared is also the author of the text, Dr. Henry Jekyll. Left in his place are the disfigured body of the criminal Mr. Hyde, wearing Jekyll's garments, and Jekyll's “Full Statement of the Case.” That document, along with the letter written by the dead Dr. Lanyon is to be one of the “two narratives in which the mystery was now to be explained.”³⁹ But these two narratives confound rather than explain the mystery, and Dr. Jekyll's statement, though “full,” is by no means complete. Instead of explaining Jekyll's disappearance, the statement confesses his inability to do so. “Here, then, as I lay down the pen, and proceed to seal up my confession,” read the final words, “I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end” (97). In Jekyll's statement, we learn only that the “end” of his life corresponds to the end of his writing, recalling an earlier remark in the “confession” in which Jekyll seems to excuse himself from responsibility for the crimes of Hyde because, as he claimed, in his Hyde incarnation “I did not even exist” (86).

Right from the outset, Jekyll's confession sounds remarkably like the one that was supposedly to end The Mystery of Edwin Drood. In both cases, the culprit speaks of himself as someone else. “I cannot say, I,” Jekyll maintains as he insists on referring to the perpetrator of the increasingly violent and destructive acts in the third person (94). But only a few pages earlier Jekyll has identified himself with the criminal Hyde: “Of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness,” he remarks, “I was radically both” (82). This contradiction in Jekyll's own testimony demonstrates how the formal dualism typical of the detective story—in which an incoherent, fragmentary narrative sequence is replaced by a coherent and complete one—becomes a formal and psychological schizophrenia in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Here, contradictory and incomplete narrative lines exist side by side without reaching any resolution, much as the dual personalities of Jekyll and Hyde oscillate back and forth without ever being reconciled with one another. “This incoherency of my life,” as Jekyll calls it, which “was daily growing more unwelcome” (85), also finally overwhelms the mystery story in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and converts it into a case history. Utterson observes that the events he is involved in investigating constitute a “very strange” and “rather a wild tale,” and he is convinced that “things cannot continue as they are” (65, 42). In the confusion into which Jekyll's wild and strange life story dissolves, things don't continue or conclude. They don't weave themselves into a story. They just stop.

More explicitly than any other story of crime and detection, perhaps, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde takes as its subject the composition and operation of the criminal mind and the symptomatic failure of that mind to construct a coherent life story. Although the novella assumes the form of a murder mystery, its interests are much more deeply rooted in the divided personality of the criminal who eventually becomes his own victim than in the crime itself or even in its detection. Here, the “criminal intellect” is anything but a horrible wonder apart. On the contrary, the criminal is the most respected and upright of citizens. In his own closing statement of the case, Dr. Jekyll acts as both the accusing detective and the confessing criminal when he recounts his schizophrenic existence: “A moment before I had been safe of all men's respect, wealthy, beloved—the cloth laying for me in the dining-room at home; and now I was the common quarry of mankind, hunted, houseless, a known murderer, thrall to the gallows” (93). This direct placement within the same mind of the agencies of order and criminality distinguishes Jekyll and Hyde from the more ambiguous Edwin Drood and The Moonstone. In fact, the attempt to separate the “criminal” aspects of the mind from its “virtuous” aspects constitutes Jekyll's crime and costs him his humanity. Like its predecessors in detective fiction, Jekyll and Hyde locates the expression of criminality in the common experience of dreaming. But the increasingly involuntary alternation between the personality of the criminal and that of the upright citizen is represented in this “case” as a deepening confusion between waking and sleeping “states.” The murderous Mr. Hyde is finally described by the philanthropic Dr. Jekyll as “the brute that slept within,” a force that comes upon him at least “partly in a dream” and becomes “awakened” in his nightmares (94). “If I slept,” Jekyll says, “it was always as Hyde that I awakened” (95). These remarks seem to represent each of the two contending personalities as the dream of the other. And each of the dreams is also experienced as a political force—as a set of “powers,” Jekyll says, that could be “dethroned from their supremacy” by the force of the opposing power (83).

Mr. Hyde is first seen by Stevenson, he tells us, as a grotesque and mysterious figure in a dream.⁴⁰ This is also how he first appears to the detective figure Utterson—in a troubling dream about his friend and client Dr. Jekyll. From the point of this dream onward, Utterson is preoccupied by his attempts to discover the identity of the faceless figure in his dream and to provide an explanation for the strange behavior of his friend—to give an account of this troubling dream. The dream is provoked by the strange provision in Jekyll's will, which bequeaths his estate to an unknown Mr. Hyde in the event of Jekyll's “disappearance or unexplained absence” (35). Hyde is also the subject of a vague account of a crime, related to Utterson at the outset of the novella by his “distant kinsman” Mr. Richard Enfield, a story that suggests another mysterious and criminal connection between Hyde and Dr. Jekyll. The dream Utterson has after hearing this story calls attention to itself because it is about dreaming. But it is also about “power.” In his dream, Utterson sees Jekyll dreaming, and Mr. Hyde appears as the embodiment of that dream:

He would see a room in a rich house, where his friend lay asleep, dreaming and smiling at his dreams; and then the door of that room would be opened, the curtains of the bed plucked apart, the sleeper recalled, and lo! there would stand by his side a figure to whom power was given, and even at that dead hour he must rise and do its bidding. The figure in these two phases haunted the lawyer all night; and if at any time he dozed over, it was but to see it glide more stealthily through sleeping houses … through wider labyrinths of lamp-lighted city, and at every street corner crush a child and leave her screaming. And still the figure had no face by which he might know it; even in his dreams it had no face, or one that baffled him and melted before his eyes.

(37-38)

The images and action of the dream are characterized by power, stealth, and self-censorship. The power is, in fact, rooted in the censoring agency of the dream: it is because Utterson could not “know” the figure by its face “that there sprang up and grew apace in the lawyer's mind a singularly strong, almost inordinate, curiousity to behold the features of the real Mr. Hyde” (38). Hyde is as much Uttersons's dream as Jekyll's here. His “power” is exercised over both of them. Utterson is “the law” to Jekyll's crime, and his response to the dream demonstrates that he is as subject to its bidding as Jekyll is. “If he be Mr. Hyde,” Utterson resolves, “I shall be Mr. Seek” (38). Out of this dream the mystery of the story springs and the project of dispelling it begins.

The irresistible effect of the dream is to turn the lawyer into a detective, driven, like the criminal, by an “almost inordinate, singularly strong” compulsion. On his ensuing “nightly patrols” in pursuit of Hyde, Utterson feels as much like a criminal as a policeman, “conscious of the terror of the law and the law's officers which may at times assail the most honest men” (38, 48). Like the man he seeks, Utterson has internalized both forces, and he must therefore continually “combat the reinvasion of darkness” which seems to assault his mind (48). The further effect of his dream of Mr. Hyde is to confront Utterson as the embodiment of law with the “disagreeable truth” discovered by Jekyll as the embodiment of medicine: the psyche is best understood as a “polity” engaged in a power struggle analogous to political life. In Jekyll and Hyde, personal psychic health and official public policy contend for control of the dream.

The meaning of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is rooted in how the meaning of this dream is understood. Stevenson reinforces the essential relationship between the tale and its dreams in his essay “A Chapter on Dreams,” in which he describes his method of composition and the origin of this particular tale as well. He begins the essay by relating the story of a student he knew at Edinburgh College who had such an elaborate and powerful dream life that he began “to dream in sequence and thus to lead a double life—one of the day, one of the night—one that he had every reason to believe was the true one, another that he had no means of proving to be false.”⁴¹ The dreams consisted of two recurring scenes: first, a “surgical theatre,” where the dreamer witnessed the most “monstrous malformations and the abhorred dexterity of surgeons”; and second, a long staircase, which he continually climbed and where he encountered a series of bizarre, solitary faces, “stair after stair in endless series.” The student became plagued by the intensity and frequency of these dreams to the point that he could no longer distinguish between his dream and his waking experience. The merging of the two states so disrupted and disordered the student's life that he eventually was compelled to visit a doctor for treatment. The doctor prepared a potion for him, and “with a single draught he was restored to the common lot of man” (218). As was at least initially the case with Dr. Jekyll's mysterious draught, the drug taken by the student managed to release him from the power of his dreams, enabling him to keep his conscious life free of its troubling unconscious material.

Later in the essay, Stevenson explains the basis for his interest in the student's dreams. First he confesses that the dreamer referred to as a student acquaintance was really himself. Then he notes how intrigued he was that the dreams remained fragmentary; regardless of how often he dreamed them, they never reached a conclusion but repeated themselves endlessly. “My imperfect dreamer,” Stevenson says, was “unable to carry the tale to a fit end” (219). These remarks take on considerable interest later in the same essay when Stevenson describes how his own tale Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde originated in a dream. Like the student's, this dream was also divided into two distinct “scenes.” The first was “the incident at the window,” which in its incarnation in the story shows Jekyll “like some disconsolate prisoner” staring out the window of the chemical lab, which had been converted from a “surgical theatre” (60-64). The other scene was of Mr. Hyde, who, “pursued for some crime, took the powder and underwent the change in the presence of his pursuers” (224). These scenes, though different in certain details from those in the earlier dreams, also bear remarkable similarities to them. The surgical theater appears in both dreams as a setting for “monstrous malformations” of the self, and the pursuit of Hyde for his unnamed crimes in the later dream recalls the eerily obsessive climbing of the staircase in the younger Stevenson's dream (218). Finally, in both cases the dream and the waking life become uncontrollably interwined, and the scene of medical therapy (the surgical theater) becomes the site of social discipline (the prison cell).

The importance of the parallels between the two sets of dreams is rooted in the reasons Stevenson gave for his interest in the student's dreams: the dreamer he spoke of as someone else was really himself, and the dreamer could not make the dream “fit” with his waking life: he could not take control over and relate the parts of the dream in any coherent way. He was unable, in Freud's terms, to recognize the dream as his own disguised wish and to complete the act of “dream synthesis” by providing the missing connections between the fragments of the dream which were erased in the course of the dream work. Stevenson's essay has sketched out a theory of the distortion of censorship, and he has also revealed his own failure to decipher it. This is the same bind in which Dr. Jekyll finds himself with his dream, Mr. Hyde. Jekyll continually refers to his Hyde “nightmares” as “the horror of my other self,” and he finally dies in his frustrated effort to make a “Full Statement of the Case” of his increasingly incoherent life (94-95). The story of Jekyll and Hyde seems to demonstrate that Stevenson could only represent the “disagreeable truths” he discovered in the surgical theater of his own dreams by censoring and distorting them once more in the “innocent disguise” of this strange case history of a mad scientist and a curious lawyer, just as Jekyll could only speak of his own dark urges in terms of an alien personality living within him. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde finally acts as the “fit end” the younger Stevenson was unable to give to his dreams when he dreamed them. It is the gothic tale of a misguided scientist transformed into the detective story of an obsessed lawyer.

It may not be entirely proper to designate Jekyll's understanding of his dream a complete failure any more than it would be to so designate Stevenson's. Although Jekyll's criminal behavior in the person of Mr. Hyde represents a clear moral failure, his psychological discoveries in the person of the physician advance the nineteenth-century understanding of the complex operations of the “criminal” psyche. Jekyll's final statement acknowledges his moral guilt, but it also makes a truth claim about the political structure of the human mind—as morally scandalous and disagreeable as that truth might be. “From both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual,” Jekyll says, “I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two. I say two, because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point. Others will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines; and I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens” (82). Jekyll wants to make a clear distinction here between the “moral” and the “intellectual” aspects of his “discovery.”⁴² The very information that wrecked his own life and turned him into a criminal, he suggests, may contribute to an understanding of the self as a political entity composed of contending forces operating in apparent independence of each other. Despite the moral scandal this claim might entail, Dr. Jekyll's statement implies that this same information may help to accomplish the announced aim of his “scientific studies”: “the furtherance of knowledge” and “the relief of sorrow and suffering” (81).

That the mind is best understood in Jekyll and Hyde as a “polity,” modeled after a government whose constituents are in a state of “perennial war” is reaffirmed by Jekyll's self-descriptions throughout his confession (82). He speaks of himself as existing first “under the empire of generous or pious aspirations,” an empire that is then put under siege by the “insurgent horror” of Hyde, who “usurp[ed] the offices” of his authority, sold him as a slave, and finally “deposed him out of life” (95-96). It would appear that the marginalized political plots of the other novels of detection I have considered are completely subsumed into the densely political discourse with which Jekyll describes the self. This language is also symptomatic of Jekyll's increasing withdrawal into the conflictual operations occupying his own mind, which not only blind him to any larger social or political reality but eventually deprive him of any society outside himself whatsoever. By the end, his only “links of community” are between himself and the “beloved daydream” that has become his most dreaded nightmare (95, 82). Jekyll may have achieved his first aim of a “furtherance of knowledge” about the workings of censorship in the unconscious, but he does not accompany that knowledge with any therapeutic discovery that might give”relief” from his own psychological “sorrow and suffering.” In fact, since Jekyll continues to speak of Hyde as someone completely independent of himself, rather than as one aspect of his own complex personality, he fails to acknowledge the implications of his own discovery. Jekyll has discovered the forces at work within his dream, but he has failed to accept and master them. In him, the reign of one empire is simply replaced by that of another. His repression by the forces of social respectability is merely usurped by the more powerful psychological repression of the brute that sleeps within him.

Stevenson's “Chapter on Dreams” makes an explicit connection between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and the author's own confusion about his “identity” and personal “authority.” The essay demands that the mystery of one be seen in terms of the mystery of the other. In both the essay and the novella, a “mystery” surrounds the identity of the dreamer and the means by which that identity is either disguised or confused. Stevenson's presentation of his own dreams as someone else's in the essay corresponds to the way Jekyll speaks about and deals with the crimes of his alter ego Hyde. In both cases, the unconscious is represented not as a sign of the psyche's coherence in a single personality but as a sign of an essential discontinuity and multiplicity within the self. Whereas Jane Eyre sees her dreams as representations of something fundamental and central about who she is, Stevenson's and Jekyll's dreams manifest independent, oppositional forces functioning within them. And whereas Jane's and Pip's narratives serve to unify the apparently disparate pieces of their lives under their “authority” as the composers of their own life stories, Stevenson's and Jekyll's texts testify to the presence of many voices speaking through the unconscious of their authors. “For myself—what I call I, my conscious ego,” Stevenson says in “Dreams,” “I am sometimes tempted to suppose he is no story-teller at all.” Instead of the “teller,” Stevenson suspects he may be more properly regarded as a dissembler, as the agent of “some unseen collaborator, whom I keep locked in a back garret” (224). The shift between first- and third-person pronouns in this statement echoes Jekyll's confusion, and it enacts the uncertainty of both about whether they are the subjects or the objects of their own subversive texts.

Stevenson's “Dreams” essay, like his novella, connects the author with the scientist of the mind. When Stevenson includes in the same essay an account of another dream in which he murders his own father and conspires with his stepmother to suppress the evidence of the crime and then to marry her, he connects the author with the criminal. Finally, Stevenson's description of himself as a writer echoes both Jekyll's self-characterization and his remorse over it. “I am at bottom a psychologist,” he says elsewhere, “and am ashamed of it.”⁴³ In fact, Stevenson had intently explored matters of psychological import in his extensive correspondence with one of the leading figures of the Society for Psychical Research, F. W. H. Myers, and in his membership in the London branch of that society. Fanny Stevenson even claimed that her husband's development of the story of Jekyll and Hyde was directly based on his reading of a paper on “subconsciousness” in a French scientific journal.⁴⁴ Psychological theorist James Sully, Stevenson's friend and fellow club member attributed the basis of his essay “Dreams and Their Relation to Literature” to a conversation with Stevenson on the origins of Jekyll and Hyde.⁴⁵ Both in his story and in his “Dreams” essay, Stevenson specifically focuses on the “power” of the unconscious to dominate the conscious life, a power he relates to a repressive, censoring agency operating within the experience of dreams. The most complete analysis of this agency is in Jekyll's final statement, in which, as we have seen, he adumbrates a model of the mind as an “empire of aspirations” under siege from within. It is an apt description of the British Empire at the time Stevenson was writing Jekyll and Hyde, a subject about which he had strong feelings. “It is strange,” Stevenson's stepson Lloyd Osbourne once remarked, “how many of Stevenson's strongest opinions failed to find any expression in his books.”⁴⁶ But though Stevenson may have repressed any full statement of his political views in Jekyll and Hyde, those views find some distorted expression in the political language of the psychological allegory.

Stevenson's political ideas in the 1880s seem to have been as deeply characterized by double-mindedness and self-censorship as were his psychological theories. His views on the increasingly complicated political situation of the British Empire were an irreconcilable mixture of idealism and guilt. “I was not ashamed to be the countryman of Jingoes,” he wrote in protest of the Transvaal War in 1881. “A man may have been a Jingo from a sense, perhaps mistaken, of the obligation, the greatness, and the danger of his native land, and not from any brutal greed of aggrandisement or cheap love of drums and regimental columns. … But I am beginning to grow ashamed of being the kin of those who are now fighting. … We are in the wrong, or all that we profess is false; blood has been shed, glory lost, and, I fear, honour also.”⁴⁷ The sense of shame and lost honor which dominates Stevenson's political sentiments here repeats the shame expressed over his psychological views. And his pride follows the pattern of the very psychological aspirations—“perhaps mistaken” as they were—which led to Jekyll's acts of brutality, bloodshed, and shame. Brantlinger even calls Jekyll and Hyde an example of “imperial gothic” because it evidences a displaced engagement with the social and political problems of a declining empire. He agrees with David Punter's assessment that Hyde's behavior may be seen as an urban version of “going native,” behavior that is justified in Jekyll's mind by the same sense of moral superiority with which the British justified the brutality of empire.⁴⁸

The correspondence between political and psychological ambivalence in the novella is reinforced in other expressions of Stevenson's political views. While he seems to voice William Gladstone's liberal line in urging retreat from a policy of aggressive empire building in his sentiments about the Transvaal War, he was in fact deeply critical of Gladstone and his policies. In the same year in which he wrote Jekyll and Hyde, he spoke out vehemently against the liberal prime minister. Stevenson had been commissioned to write a tribute to Wellington, but ostensibly because he was so enraged at Gladstone's abandonment of Gordon's besieged troops at Khartoum, Stevenson rejected his publisher's urging that he consult Gladstone for his personal reminiscences of Wellington. “I do not really see my way to any form of signature,” Stevenson says in refusing to write a letter to propose such a consultation with Gladstone, “unless, ‘your fellow criminal in the eyes of God.’”⁴⁹ Stevenson's dread of being a “collaborator” in what he perceived as “criminal” double-mindedness and his shame over the whole issue of the empire were clearly expressed in a letter he did write to his friend John Addington Symonds soon after, in which he condemned Gladstone's policies and accused himself as well: “But why should I blame Gladstone, when I too am a Bourgeois? when I have held my peace? Why did I hold my peace? Because I am a sceptic: i.e., a Bourgeois. We believe in nothing, Symonds: you don't, and I don't; and these are two reasons, out of a handful of millions, why England stands before the world dripping with blood and daubed with dishonour.”⁵⁰ Stevenson continued to hold his peace. He never published any of his political views despite the vehemence with which he held them. His silence may be partially attributable to his fear of hurting sales and losing royalties, but it also reflects the dilemma of a whole nation that had built its empire on the principle of being the savior of the world but found itself turning into the bully of the world instead. In political terms, Britain's Dr. Jekyll was turning into a Mr. Hyde. The empire was speaking in two voices at once.

James Morris's history of the empire characterizes the generally divided state of mind in Britain during the latter part of the century in much the same way. As a result of the uprisings in various parts of the empire, the original impulse to liberate and illuminate the colonies was being replaced by the necessity to control and perhaps profit by them. “The British conviction of merit,” Morris says of this period, “was growing into a conviction of command.” In the 1830s and 1840s, Britain had seen the establishment of its empire as a generous and pious aspiration, as a moral imperative to extend and enforce the abolition of slavery in the colonies. Especially after the Indian Mutiny of 1857, however, that dream turned into an anxiety of control. It became apparent that the foreigners, and particularly the mysterious “Orientals,” might not be converted to British ways; they might remain violent and uncivilized. By the 1870s and 1880s, the nation seemed to vacillate between faithfulness to its loftier ideals and admiration for its own power, between preserving its honor and retaining its influence—a kind of political schizophrenia that was personified in the policies of its two leading prime ministers, Disraeli and Gladstone: “the one man would always be identified with patriotic dash,” Morris says, “the other with liberal humanity, but both were to find themselves in the end the agents of imperialism.”⁵¹

In his dreams, and in his psychological allegory of the “profound duplicity of life,” perhaps Stevenson did express the disagreeable truth of his and a whole generation's political views—divided, anxious, and self-contradictory as they were (Jekyll and Hyde, 81). And as the function of the empire increasingly became a policing function, the reading public at home became increasingly obsessed with the literature of crime and detection. When men like Doyle's Dr. Watson returned from Afghanistan, Collins's General Herncastle arrived from India, and Dickens's Neville Landless left Ceylon for England, the crimes of the empire came home, and the moral and political authority of the homeland were placed under attack. The detective novel that contained these figures also served an imperial function for the national psyche: it reassured the public that order could at least be preserved at home and that the wounds of the empire could be healed by native British intelligence and moral values.

Stevenson's political contradictions were perhaps most articulately expressed in the final years of his life when he retreated from the public world of Britain to the South Sea island of Samoa just two years after the publication of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. There he identified himself with the interests of the natives and championed their grievances against a corrupt white rule. But he did so by becoming a great white father who was endowed with supernatural powers and worshiped as a god. He acquired such dominance over the islanders that he “wielded the authority of a patriarchal chieftain of a Highland clan” according to Stevenson's biographer Malcolm Elwin. “His concern with their affairs awakened in him,” he continues, “that instinct to legislate and govern which has rendered the British the greatest race of empire-builders since the Romans.”⁵² Stevenson's retreat into the idealized island dream world of Samoa and his instinctive establishment there of an “empire of pious or generous aspirations” repeats the psychological retreat of Dr. Jekyll into an ideal “empire” of his own. Stevenson's unresolvable political conflicts and Jekyll's irreconcilable psychological impulses become synonomous. Both disguise a will to power with a call for piety and end up replacing the sense of lost authority and honor with an urge for power and domination. Both seek to control “the brute that slept within.”

I do not wish to press too hard for an interpretation of Jekyll and Hyde or of any other detective novel as a political allegory for the problems of the empire. Clearly, the appearance and immense popularity of the form in the latter part of the nineteenth century in England does correspond in compelling ways to the widespread public concern with the state of the empire and the shifting terms in which the imperial question was being contemplated and acted upon in England at the same historical moment. Moreover, the consistent references in detective stories to characters and events in the empire imply a profound connection. But I am more interested in the analogical significance of these political issues in a developing conception of the self—the ways in which psychological matters were being understood in political terms during this period. Specifically, such detective stories as the Holmes series, The Moonstone, Edwin Drood, and Jekyll and Hyde (in which divided personalities suffer from repression and censorship, dream of crime and detection, and find it difficult to recover and master these dreams on their own)—all contributed to a conception of the human psyche as a political entity. In each of these cases, the psyche is represented as composed of conflicting “agencies,” as Freud would describe them, and the agents of individual pleasure and acquisition are “policed” by internalized agents of social control. Appropriately enough, Freud's explanation of the censoring agency compared it to the work of a writer who has a politically controversial message to communicate and can express that message only in disguised form. The political writer always seems to speak about something else. The detective story may be regarded as acting in this subversive way on matters of both political and psychological significance.

Jekyll and Hyde is a fully developed version of the same kind of project. Yet it defies the expectations that detective stories conventionally offer even as it raises those expectations. The psychological interests of this “strange case” finally overwhelm its detective characteristics. As I indicated earlier, Jekyll and Hyde begins very much in the tradition of the detective story. Along with the lawyer Utterson, we are presented with a series of enigmatic scenes, stories, and crimes. As in Drood and The Moonstone, the detective function is taken over from the police officials—in this case primarily by Utterson. The lawyer investigates the baffling mysteries involving his friend and client, offers a series of mistaken explanations, and is finally presented with the two documents that presumably will provide the necessary links between the conflicting pieces of evidence. The last event in the novella is Utterson's withdrawal into his office “to read the two narratives in which this mystery was now to be explained” after he has discovered those narratives along with the body of Hyde in the same laboratory into which Jekyll had disappeared (73). Thus far, the tale conforms to the pattern familiar to the reader of the detective story.

But the content of the narratives themselves cancels these expectations. Rather than provide an explanation, they relate a failure—or refusal—to explain the mystery or account for the dream. These narratives are accounts of the triumph of censorship over revelation. They ultimately represent a frustration of the detecting process, and they supply the evidence for psychological breakdown rather than recovery.⁵³ The first narrative, that of the deceased Dr. Lanyon, begins by referring to the assurance Jekyll had given him that if he obeyed the bizarre instructions contained in Jekyll's letter, the mystery would “roll away like a story that is told” (75). This is, of course, false assurance, for the story is never fully told to him. Within Lanyon's narrative is a prophetic account of his own disappointed reading of an enigmatic text—the confused notebook belonging to Dr. Jekyll, which he had instructed Lanyon to retrieve along with his powders. Lanyon recalls only two things in that book: the frequent recurrence of the word “double” and the emphatic exclamation “total failure!!!” (76). These words may have impressed him because they would eventually characterize his own double-minded and failed text. At the crucial point of his narrative, when he is about to reveal the connection between Jekyll and Hyde, Lanyon duplicates Jekyll's acts of censorship: “What he told me in the next hour I cannot bring my mind to set on paper. I saw what I saw, I heard what I heard” (80). In admitting that he cannot report what he witnessed, Lanyon acknowledges the power of his own self-repression, which not only manages to maintain the mystery but also costs him his life.

The second narrative, “Henry Jekyll's Full Statement of the Case,” is just as self-censoring and just as costly. Jekyll's account of things is no more satisfactory in setting down on paper the explanation that binds the pieces of this story together than Lanyon's. By the third page of this “full” confession, Jekyll admits that it will not be full because even his own knowledge of what he has done remains “incomplete” (83). Furthermore, he says he “will not enter deeply into this scientific branch of my confession” because others might be tempted to repeat his attempts to “cast off” the “doom and burthen of our life.” The result of such an effort, he claims, is that “it but returns upon us with more unfamiliar and more awful pressure” (83). These are obscure, puzzling claims for Jekyll to employ in excusing his censorship of information. Exactly what constitutes the “doom and burthen of our life” is intentionally obfuscated here. But Jekyll's words at least seem to indicate that the means by which he uncovered the censoring agency (the technique of “casting off” this burden) will remain censored in his account, for fear of what happens when that agency is evaded or repudiated. When cast off, he says, its “pressure” only returns with even more force. This admission, along with Lanyon's admitted failure to commit to paper the transformation he had witnessed, may cover another admission, which Stevenson is making in this tale—that he fears the laying down of the white man's “burden” and the transformation of British national identity entailed in it. Like Jekyll, he may prefer to repress this truth, however, and allow his dream self to become more and more “unfamiliar” until eventually he can declare with Jekyll, “I had lost my identity” (85).

So Jekyll vanishes from the text, virtually censoring his own identity from it. He is both murderer and victim in this mystery. In his place he leaves behind two objects: the text of the narrative itself, and the “body of a self-destroyer,” as Jekyll calls “Hyde” (70). The two are, in important ways, the same thing—instruments of the censorship that hides the criminal within the mind of the respected citizen. Jekyll suggests this disagreeable truth in the final fear about Hyde which he expresses in his statement—that Hyde will suppress his text. It is only through “great prudence” and “great good luck,” Jekyll claims, that “my narrative has hitherto escaped destruction,” for “should the throes of change take me in the act of writing it, Hyde will tear it in pieces” (96-97). Jekyll's anxiety over Hyde's destruction or distortion of his written text is ironic since Hyde is from the outset the product of Jekyll's writing and since Jekyll's writing has always been severely self-censored and self-repressed anyway. Not only does Hyde begin his existence as the chemical formula Jekyll writes out in his notebook; he is sustained by the banknotes and account books Jekyll writes for him to secure the secrecy of their connection. Hyde even has his future provided for by the will that names him heir—again, in Jekyll's own handwriting. Lanyon is first introduced to Hyde by way of a letter written (apparently) by Jekyll, and Utterson learns of Hyde's existence from the handwritten text of the controversial will. But although Hyde's existence depends on these texts, he also seems bent on altering, disfiguring, or destroying them.⁵⁴ Hyde has burned the account books in the fireplace of the rooms Jekyll rented for him, “scrawl[ed] blasphemies” on the pages of Jekyll's books, burned his letters, and destroyed his father's portrait (96). Hyde even writes in Jekyll's own hand, but he alters it once again to disguise his identity with Jekyll. As Jekyll's dream self, Hyde is both an expression of his identity, and a disguise for it—the object of Jekyll's self-censorship and its agent as well. Ultimately, Hyde is the sign of Jekyll's inability to make a coherent life story by binding the aspects of his psychological polity together. He is the text of Jekyll's own self-censorship.

As the principal detective in the story, Utterson eventually discovers an important clue: that Jekyll's writing is in the same hand as Hyde's. But Utterson comes even closer to the heart of the mystery when he observes a feature common to all the documents Jekyll writes about Hyde. In each of them, the author—Jekyll—alludes to his own “disappearance.” Utterson becomes concerned that “the idea of a disappearance and the name of Henry Jekyll” are always “bracketed” together in these texts (59). Inscribed in each of Jekyll's written expressions of Hyde, in other words, is the admission that he represses a criminal within him. This admission is most clearly evidenced when Jekyll strives to counteract Hyde's “usurpation” of his authority at the end by appealing to the authority of his original text of himself—by trying to replicate the formula of powders that he had used to “blot out” Hyde. When Jekyll fails to duplicate the compound, he speculates that the original batch of chemicals must have been “impure” (96). But the point that Jekyll misses here is that he fails because all the texts he has written have been “impure”; all have exercised some censorship, some denial, some refusal to acknowledge his dream as his own and to reveal it to his community. The result is that he becomes more rather than less unfamiliar to himself and to his community. In his efforts to “blot out” Hyde, he blots out himself and his social identity. His internalized agency of disguise is so effective that even he is unable to penetrate its tactics any more.

Jekyll and Hyde represents the fullest development of the psychological claims of the detective story. But it also establishes the limits of its therapeutic powers. As was true of the gothic and autobiographical novel, the treatment of dreams in the detective novel expresses a desire for a science of the self which can make sense of these shadowy and disagreeable truths. In developing models of the psyche that drew from the disciplines of pathology, economy, and politics, these novelistic forms of the nineteenth century helped both to develop and to challenge conventional notions of the bourgeois subject. These fictions of the unconscious helped the science of psychoanalysis to construct a model of the psyche which combined all of them, and they provided the vocabulary to suspect that model as well.

But Jekyll and Hyde also takes the process a step farther. In challenging the assumption of an essential, coherent, and unified subject, Stevenson's story repudiates the fundamental confidence in language that undergirds gothic, autobiographical, and detective fiction, and forms the basis of psychoanalytic interpretation as well. In so doing, Jekyll and Hyde anticipates the widespread resistance to the claims of psychoanalysis expressed by the high modernists and their skepticism about the coherence of the psyche and the dependability of any single interpretive strategy. We might also say that Jekyll and Hyde anticipates the Lacanian emphasis upon the problems of linguistics within the discipline of psychoanalysis. Other modernist fiction will also prefigure this development. When Marlow says to his audience in Heart of Darkness, “I am trying to tell you a dream,” he tries to explain that his intention is not to interpret the dream but merely to “convey the dream sensation”—which attempt he is certain will fail, because “no relation of the dream can convey the dream sensation” or “that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams.”⁵⁵ The power and truth of the dream, contained in its sensation, are fundamentally transformed by attempts to interpret or master them in language. Likewise, the mystery of the identity of Lord Jim is not to be solved through skilled detective work or psychological analysis, any more than the unspeakable truth of Kurtz is. Jim and Kurtz can be presented only as “one of us,” as part of who we are, as immersed with us in “the destructive element” of the “dream” into which we are all born.⁵⁶ When Stephen Dedalus realizes that his life is “not a dream from which he would awake,” he acknowledges that he too is continually immersed in a dream in which his language is not a means of mastery but was only another aspect of the dream sensation.⁵⁷

Lacan was to make an analogous claim in his reinterpretation of Freudian dream theory. Though he concedes that an unconscious discourse speaks through the conscious discourse of the dream account, he questions whether this factual description can ever be employed to provide an accurate metaphor about the nature of the unconscious itself. Indeed, in collaboration with the modern novelists I will consider in the final chapter, Lacan's return to Freud exposes the self-criticism already built into the psychoanalytic configuration of the psyche. Together, they level a critique of the radical individualism assumed by certain psychoanalytic and novelistic fictions of the unconscious, as they undermine the authority of the discourses in which those fictions were articulated.

Notes

1. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes, 2 vols. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1930), 1:160-61, hereafter cited in the text.

2. See, for example, Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot; John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (1976), pp. 94-96, 103-4; Albert D. Hutter, “Dreams, Transformations, and Literature: The Implications of Detective Fiction,” Victorian Studies 19 (December 1975): 181-209; Ernst Bloch, “A Philosophical View of the Detective Novel,” in Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (1987), pp. 244-64; and Donald P. Spence, “The Sherlock Holmes Tradition: The Narrative Metaphor,” in Spence, The Freudian Metaphor, pp. 113-60. See also Muriel Gardiner, ed., The Wolf-Man by the Wolf-Man (1971), p. 146.

3. On how Freud did just this, see Carl E. Schorske, “Politics and Parricide in Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams,” in Fin de Siècle Vienna, pp. 181-207.

4. Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, p. 178.

5. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (1965), p. 142.

6. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance, p. 96.

7. See Robert Champigny on the detective as cultural storyteller in What Will Have Happened: A Philosophical and Technical Essay on Mystery Stories (1977), pp. 46, 103. See also Edmund Wilson, “Why Do People Read Detective Stories?” New Yorker, October 14, 1944, for an analysis of the dialectic between innocence and guilt in the detective story and the “cathartic effect” of the confession scene in these narratives (p. 76).

8. See Philip Collins, “The Police,” in Collins, Dickens and Crime (1962), pp. 196-219; and Ernest Mandel, Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story (1984), pp. 12-14.

9. As Mandel indicates, the majority of the middle classes and intelligentsia were hostile to the police in the beginning of the nineteenth century, regarding them largely as “a necessary evil, intent on encroaching upon individual rights and freedoms. The weaker it was, the better” (Delightful Murder, p. 12).

10. Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone, ed. J. I. M. Stewart (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1966), p. 215, hereafter cited in the text.

11. See Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious.

12. James Sully, “The Dream as Revelation,” Fortnightly Review 59 (March 1893): 358.

13. Myers, Human Personality, 1:xvi; see also chaps. 2 and 4 for documented cases of these conditions.

14. See Nigel Walker and Sarah McCabe, Crime and Insanity in England (1967); Hearnshaw, Short History of British Psychology; and Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious.

15. For more on the connection between doubles and detectives, see Day, In the Circles of Fear and Desire, pp. 54-55.

16. There have been a number of attempts to “complete” The Mystery of Edwin Drood, some seeking to confirm Jasper as the murderer, others seeking to exonerate him. For representative “solutions” of the mystery, see Montagu Saunders, The Mystery in the Drood Family (1914), and Charles Forsyte, The Decoding of Edwin Drood (1980). Philip Collins's chapter “The Mysteries in Edwin Drood” convincingly argues that Dickens left little doubt that Jasper was the murderer (pp. 290-319).

17. Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, ed. Arthur J. Cox (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1974), p. 269, hereafter cited in the text. A. E. Dyson argues (perhaps for this reason) that the entire novel “feels” more like “a shifting dream” than the more characteristic Dickensian social observation or criticism (“Edwin Drood: A Horrible Wonder Apart,” Critical Quarterly 11 [Summer 1969]: 141).

18. Kate Perugini, “Edwin Drood and the last days of Charles Dickens,” Pall Mall Magazine 37 (1906): 643-44, quoted in Philip Collins, Dickens and Crime, p. 294.

19. Letter from Luke Fildes in the Times, 3 November 1905, quoted by Collins, p. 294.

20. Forster, Life of Dickens, p. 808.

21. Ibid.

22. Dianne Sadoff sees in the double narrative of Bleak House a specific repression: Dickens's “double attitude toward the project upon which all his novels embark: the attempt to come to terms with the father as his own metaphorically sinful diseased origin and the desire not to know what it all means” (Monsters of Affection, p. 17).

23. Ellis, The Criminal, p. 3.

24. Walker and McCabe, Crime and Insanity in England, p. 59.

25. Freud, “Wish-Fulfilment,” Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, [Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud; hereafter] SE 15: 218-19.

26. Theodor Reik, The Compulsion to Confess (1945), p. 49.

27. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Edwin Drood and the Homophobia of Empire,” in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), p. 182. For more on the relation between empire and gothic, see Brantlinger's chapter “Imperial Gothic,” in Rule of Darkness.

28. Mandel, Delightful Murder, p. 43.

29. See Morris, Heaven's Command, pp. 71-85, for a description of the cult and the elaborate British efforts to eliminate it. For a development of the theory of Jasper's connection to the cult see Howard Duffield, “John Jasper: Strangler,” Bookman 70 (February 1930): 581-88; and Felix Aylmer, The Drood Case (1964).

30. See The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Walter Dexter (Bloomsbury: Nonesuch Press, 1938), 2: 889.

31. Davis, Collins, p. 207.

32. Quoted ibid.

33. Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, pp. 203-4.

34. Charles Mitchell characterizes the novel as a conflict between the “inner” and “outer man,” which produces in most of the characters either a brooding introspection (Jasper) or an artificial public self (Sapsea). These distinctions break down, I think, since the agencies of the outside are so thoroughly internalized in these characters, and the “inner” drives are so palpably expressed in their public personas. See “The Mystery of Edwin Drood: The Interior and Exterior of Self,” ELH 33 (June 1966): 228-46.

35. Roy Roussel argues that Rosa's story culminates in her “escape” into literary fantasy, which “represents a search for an alternative ground for a completed story not available in the cyclic structure of nature.” See “The Completed Story in The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” Criticism 20 (Fall 1978): 383-402. To regard this as “escape” is to underestimate the importance of the literary for Dickens, I think, and it is Miss Twinkleton's censorship, rather than the reading itself, which is the problem. Drood, like other detective novels, explores the “nature” of the human mind in ways that science was not yet prepared to do, expressing a need for a science that would.

36. See Philip Collins's summary of these possibilities and his notation of their sources in Dickens and Crime, p. 295.

37. For more on the relationship between psychological theory and the development of criminal law at the end of the nineteenth century, see Foucault, Discipline and Punish, esp.19-22. See also Ellis, The Criminal. Of particular interest is Ellis's “Criminal Literature and Art” (pp. 176-92).

38. See Schorske, Fin de Siècle Vienna; Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1984).

39. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1979), p. 73, hereafter cited in the text.

40. See, for example, Jenni Calder's biography Robert Louis Stevenson: A Life Study (1980).

41. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Lantern Bearers and Other Essays, ed. Jeremy Treglown (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1988), p. 219, hereafter cited in the text.

42. It is the moral dimension of Jekyll and Hyde which is (I think mistakenly) most commonly emphasized in readings of the tale. Jenni Calder's Life is typical in its description of the novella as an argument against hypocrisy (pp. 220-23). Hanna Wirth Nesher compares Jekyll and Hyde unfavorably to The Turn of the Screw and Heart of Darkness because of its relative moral simplicity. But to emphasize the moral is to divide moral aspirations from psychological realities. See Nesher, “The Stranger Case of The Turn of the Screw and Heart of Darkness,” Studies in Short Fiction 16 (Fall 1979): 317-25.

43. Letter to H. B. Baildon, Spring 1891, quoted in Edwin M. Eigner, Robert Louis Stevenson and Romantic Tradition (1966), p. 37.

44. Eigner, Stevenson, p. 37. See also Myers's frequent references to his correspondence with Stevenson in Human Personality (1: 91, 126, 303).

45. See Ed Block, Jr., “James Sully, Evolutionist Psychology, and Late Victorian Gothic,” Victorian Studies 25 (Summer 1982): 443-67.

46. Quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Strange Case of Robert Louis Stevenson (1950), p. 178.

47. John A. Steuart, Robert Louis Stevenson: A Critical Biography (1924), 2: 410.

48. Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, 232; David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (1980), pp. 62, 241.

49. Elwin, The Strange Case, p. 177.

50. Letter to Symonds quoted ibid.

51. James Morris, Heaven's Command, pp. 381, 387.

52. Elwin, The Strange Case, p. 238.

53. Irving S. Saposnick has argued that “in contrast to other multiple narratives whose several perspectives often raise questions of subjective truth and moral ambiguity, the individual narratives in Jekyll and Hyde provide a linear regularity of information, an incremental catalogue of attitudes toward Hyde's repulsiveness and Jekyll's decline” (p. 722). While it is true that these several narratives do not challenge one another's credibility, they do not exactly form a “linear regularity of information.” Each seems, rather, to be independent, to stand on its own, and to censor itself at the critical moment. I read the first-person narratives in particular as raising a number of ambiguities about how to explain the mystery and how to bring the several “pieces” of the narrative together. See Saposnick, “The Anatomy of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 11 (Autumn 1971): 715-31.

54. I argue this point more fully and connect Jekyll and Hyde with the shift in modern literature toward seeing the act of writing as equivalent to the “death of the author” in “In the Company of Strangers: Absent Voices in Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Beckett's Company,” Modern Fiction Studies 32 (Summer 1986): 157-73.

55. Conrad, Heart of Darkness, p. 39.

56. Conrad, Lord Jim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), p. 153.

57. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Chester G. Anderson (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1981), p. 146.

Bibliography

Aylmer, Felix. The Drood Case. London: R. Hart-Davis, 1964.

Bloch, Ernst. “A Philosophical View of the Detective Novel.” In Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature. Translated by Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987: 244-64.

Block, Ed, Jr. “James Sully, Evolutionist Psychology, and Late Victorian Gothic.” Victorian Studies 25 (Summer 1982): 443-67.

Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.

Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Knopf, 1984.

Calder, Jenni. Robert Louis Stevenson: A Life Study. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.

Champigny, Robert. What Will Have Happened: A Philosophical and Technical Essay on Mystery Stories. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977.

Collins, Philip. Dickens and Crime. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1962.

Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone. Edited by J. I. M. Stewart. Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1966.

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1973.

———. Lord Jim. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958.

Day, William Patrick. In the Circles of Fear and Desire: A Study of Gothic Fantasy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.

Dexter, Walter, ed. The Letters of Charles Dickens. 3 vols. Bloomsbury: Nonesuch Press, 1938.

Dickens, Charles. The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Edited by Arthur J. Cox. Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1974.

Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Complete Sherlock Holmes. 2 vols. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1930.

Duffield, Howard. “John Jasper: Strangler.” Bookman 70 (February 1930):581-88.

Dyson, A. E. “Edwin Drood: A Horrible Wonder Apart.” Critical Quarterly 11 (Summer 1969): 138-57.

Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Eigner, Edwin M. Robert Louis Stevenson and Romantic Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966.

Ellenberger, Henri F. The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. New York: Basic Books, 1970.

Ellis, Havelock. The Criminal. London: Walter Scott, 1892.

Elwin, Malcolm. The Strange Case of Robert Louis Stevenson. London: MacDonald, 1950.

Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens. Edited by J. W. T. Ley. New York: Doubleday, 1928.

Forsyte, Charles. The Decoding of Edwin Drood. New York: Scribner's 1980.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1979.

Freud, Sigmund. Delusion and Dream in Jensen's “Gradiva.” Translated by New York: Beacon, 1956.

———. Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Edited and translated by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute for Psychoanalysis, 1953-72.

———. Three Case Histories. Edited by Phillip Rieff. New York: Collier Books, 1963.

Gardiner, Muriel, ed. The Wolf-Man by the Wolf-Man. New York: Basic Books, 1971.

Hutter, Albert. “Dreams, Transformations, and Literature: The Implications of Detective Fiction.” Victorian Studies 19 (December 1975): 181-209.

Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Edited by Chester G. Anderson. Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1981.

Mandel, Ernest. Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Mitchell, Charles. “The Mystery of Edwin Drood: The Interior and Exterior of Self.” ELH 33 (June 1966): 228-46.

Morris, James. Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973.

Myers, Frederick W. H. Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. 2 vols. New York: Longmans and Green, 1904.

Nesher, Hanna Wirth. “The Stranger Case of The Turn of the Screw and Heart of Darkness.” Studies in Short Fiction 16 (Fall 1979): 317-25.

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Modern Library, 1965.

Reik, Theodor. The Compulsion to Confess. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1945.

Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Translated by Denis Savage. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970.

Roussel, Roy. “The Completed Story in The Mystery of Edwin Drood.” Criticism 20 (Fall 1978): 383-402.

Sadoff, Dianne F. Monsters of Affection: Dickens, Eliot, and Brontë on Fatherhood. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.

Saposnick, Irving S. “The Anatomy of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 11 (Autumn 1971): 715-31.

Saunders, Montagu. The Mystery in the Drood Family. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914.

Schorske, Carl E. Fin de Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture. New York: Random House, 1981.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.

Spence, Donald P. The Freudian Metaphor: Toward Paradigm Change in Psychoanalysis. New York: Norton, 1987.

Steuart, John A. Robert Louis Stevenson: A Critical Biography. 2 vols. Boston: Little, Brown, 1924.

Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Lantern Bearers and Other Essays. Edited by Jeremy Treglown. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1988.

———. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1979.

Sully, James. “The Dream as Revelation.” Fortnightly Review 59 (March 1893): 354-65.

Thomas, Ronald R. “In the Company of Strangers: Absent Voices in Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Beckett's Company.” Modern Fiction Studies 32 (Summer 1986): 157-73.

Walker, Nigel, and Sarah McCabe. Crime and Insanity in England. 2 vols. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1978.

Wilson, Edmund. “Dickens: The Two Scrooges.” In Wilson, The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1978: 3-86.

———. “Why Do People Read Detective Stories?” New Yorker, October 14, 1944, 73-76.