Intoxication, Provocation, and Derangement: Interrogating the Nature of Criminal Responsibility in The Mystery of Edwin Drood

This article argues that Dickens's unfinished final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), contains phantom trajectories of an unborn commentary on the triangulation of the Victorians' developing understanding of the unconscious mind, the law, and the medical/legal turf war then being fought over criminal responsibility. Contrary to legal critics' claims that Dickens's novels are backward glances at near-extinct issues of law, I argue that studying the Drood case alongside real-life court cases reveals Dickens's engagement with a current, emerging medico-legal discourse that he foresaw would change the structure of future criminal defenses. This article moots the cases a prosecutor might bring against the two most likely suspects, Neville Landless and John Jasper, and centers both their defenses on the exculpatory potential of both characters' having episodes of altered consciousness. Ultimately, I argue that Dickens is exploring the way in which a legal acknowledgement of altered states and dual personalities might produce the moral vacuum of crimes without a criminally responsible perpetrator.