So strong is the evidence for Helena Landless being Datchery that even the chief advocates of the Proctor theory have fully admitted its force. Dr. M. R. James says: ‘I will go as far as this: if Edwin is dead, then Datchery is Helena.’ {164b} Mr. Andrew Lang over and over again admitted that Datchery might be Helena. But he contended that, if so, the idea of Dickens is improbable with the worst sort of improbability, is terribly far-fetched, and fails to interest. ‘It is the idea of a bad sixpenny novel. We are asked to credit Dickens with the highest scientific skill, and this egregious invention is the result of his science. The idea would have been rejected by Mr. Guy Boothby. But it does not follow that Mr. Walters has not hit on Dickens’s idea. If he has, _Edwin Drood_ is far below _Count Robert of Paris_ in its first uncorrected state, as the public will never know it.’ There is something in this argument, and it has never yet been fairly met, but I believe that I can show that the idea was probably suggested to Dickens by one figure in real life, and another figure in fiction. So far as I am aware these suggestions are made for the first time. In the _Bancroft Recollections_, Lady Bancroft writes on page 31: My first part at the Strand Theatre was Pippo, in his burlesque _The Maid and the Magpie_, which proved an immense success, and I established myself as a leading favourite. It was not until the _Life of Charles Dickens_ was published that I knew his opinion of this performance. Dickens had written years before, in a letter to John Forster, these words: ‘I went to the Strand Theatre, having taken a stall beforehand, for it is always crammed. I really wish you would go to see _The Maid and the Magpie_ burlesque there. There is the strangest thing in it that ever I have seen on the stage—the boy Pippo, by Miss Wilton. While it is astonishingly impudent (must be, or it couldn’t be done at all), it is so stupendously like a boy, and unlike a woman, that it is perfectly free from offence. I never have seen such a thing. She does an imitation of the dancing of the Christy Minstrels—wonderfully clever—which, in the audacity of its thorough-going, is surprising. A thing that you _cannot_ imagine a woman’s doing at all; and yet the manner, the appearance, the levity, impulse, and spirits of it are so exactly like a boy, that you cannot think of anything like her sex in association with it. I never have seen such a curious thing, and the girl’s talent is unchallengeable. I call her the cleverest girl I have ever seen on the stage in my time, and the most singularly original.’