Forster does not tell us that Dickens communicated the secret in a
letter. He quotes none: he says "I was told," orally, that is.
When he writes, five years later (1874), "Landless was, _I_ THINK,
to have perished in assisting Tartar finally to unmask and seize
the murderer," he is clearly trusting, not to a letter of
Dickens's, but to a defective memory; and he knows it. He says
that a nephew was to be murdered by an uncle. The criminal was to
confess in the condemned cell. He was to find out that his crime
had been needless, and to be convicted by means of the ring (Rosa's
mother's ring) remaining in the quicklime that had destroyed the
body of Edwin.

Nothing "new" in all this, as Forster must have seen. "The
originality," he explains, "was to consist in the 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."

But all this is not "hard to work," and is not "original." As Mr.
Proctor remarks, Dickens had used that trick twice already.
("Madman's Manuscript," Pickwick; "Clock Case Confession," in
Master Humphrey's Clock.) The quicklime trick is also very old
indeed. The disguise of a woman as a man is as ancient as the art
of fiction: yet Helena MAY be Datchery, though nobody guessed it
before Mr. Cuming Walters. She ought not to be Datchery; she is
quite out of keeping in her speech and manner as Datchery, and is
much more like Drood.


"A NEW IDEA"