March beginnings: "Midway on our path through life, I found myself in a dark wood, Where the way ahead was obscured"*

The Cathedral and Gundulf's Tower,  from "The Gentleman's Magazine"

"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 of 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.  It is so, for cymbals clash, and the Sultan goes by to his palace in long procession. Ten thousand scimitars flash in the sunlight, and thrice ten thousand dancing-girls strew flowers.  Then, follow white elephants caparisoned in countless gorgeous colours, and infinite in number and attendants.  Still, the Cathedral tower rises in the background, where it cannot be, and still no writhing figure is on the grim spike.  Stay! Is the spike so low a thing as the rusty spike on top of the post of an old bedstead that has tumbled all awry?  Some vague period of drowsy laughter must be devoted to the consideration of this possibility.
Shaking from head to foot, the man whose scattered consciousness has thus fantastically pieced itself together, at length rises, supports his trembling frame upon his arms, and looks around. "
Charles Dickens, 1870

Illustration by Charles Keeping, Folio Society edition 1982

 So begins The Mystery of Edwin Drood, with the Cathedral choir-master, John Jasper, awakening in a Limehouse opium den.  This was Dickens' last, unfinished novel, being written for publishing in monthly parts.  He died suddenly on June 9th, 1870, leaving the conclusion of this last work itself an unsolved mystery.

The May monthly part, with scenes from the novel, 1870.

A young Luke Fildes made his name when he was chosen to illustrate The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

*The opening lines of Dante's Inferno (various translations):

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, Che la diretta via era smarrita."