It was for Dickens to explain in the remaining part of the novel how the murder was achieved, and no one has a right to say that he would have failed in doing so. His object is to leave upon us the impression of a murder which was in a singular degree premeditated, ferocious, and complete. If Dr. Jackson is right in supposing that Drood was thrown from the tower, in addition to his being drugged, strangled, and laid in quicklime, Dickens gives us a fresh thrill of horror. CHAPTER VI—WHO WAS DATCHERY? In discussing this problem we have no aid from external evidence. It seems that the question was not raised by the critics of the time. We are thrown upon internal evidence, and not only the internal evidence of the book, but the evidence given by a study of Dickens’s methods. We have also, as I hope to show, some help given indirectly from Dickens’s own biography, and in particular from a book by Wilkie Collins. It will be convenient at this stage that we should discuss the exact position of affairs after Edwin vanished from the scene. To us who read the book, Jasper’s guilt is so plain and his character so atrocious that we wonder why those who knew him did not at once suspect his guilt. To us Jasper is a self-confessed criminal with his doom already written, but to his neighbours at Cloisterham he presented himself in a wholly different aspect. The Dean himself is not more obviously a pattern of virtuous living. Jasper occupies a conspicuous set of rooms. His fire burns, his red light glimmers, his curtains are drawn, in sight of all the town. He is young, good-looking, socially attractive, and occupied in an almost sacred profession. His duties as choirmaster raise him far above the position of a provincial teacher of music. On Sundays and weekdays the people hear his voice in Psalms and Canticles and Anthems. Edwin expresses the truth about his uncle’s standing when he says: ‘I should have put in the foreground your being so much respected as Lay Precentor, or Lay Clerk, or whatever you call it, of this Cathedral; your enjoying the reputation of having done such wonders with the choir; your choosing your society, and holding such an independent position in this queer old place.’ Mrs. Crisparkle remarks on his ‘well-bred consideration,’ and his pallor as of ‘gentlemanly ashes.’ When the story opens there is not a soul in Cloisterham who breathes a word of scandal against him, and his real nature is suspected by only two living persons known to us. One is Rosa Bud, whom he has terrified by his secret love-making; the other the opium woman in London, who has heard strange mutterings in his drugged sleep which to her were not wholly ‘unintelligible.’ The Dean’s fear is that ‘Mr. Jasper’s heart may be too much set on his nephew.’ Nocturnal ramblings with the disreputable Durdles suggest nothing more surprising to the Dean than that Jasper means to write a book about the place. His visits to London