Edwin Drood: Solutions and Resolutions

On Saturday 20 September the University co-hosted this innovative one-day conference in the splendid Senate Room of the even splendider Senate House, home to the central University of London Library and administrative offices. The wood-panelled room with its formal pews and microphones, as various of the 40-plus attendees noted, was the perfect setting for a courtroom-style inquiry into the mystery posed by the unfinished state of Dickens’s last major novel, left only half completed at the time of the novelist’s death in June 1870.

The conference was devised and organised, with aplomb, by Dr Pete Orford, honorary Research Fellow in Humanities and Visiting Lecturer in English Literature in the University’s Department of English and Digital Media. Academic speakers from five European countries and the USA were present to discuss the various forms of solution proposed to date, as were writers, screenwriters and artists who have been involved in various culturally-fascinating attempts to write or create something over the blank page left by Britain’s most famous novelist. Panels were chaired by Professor John Drew, Dr Hazel Mackenzie and Professor David Paroissien, and postgraduate students from The Department of English and Digital Media attended, so in addition to Dr Orford’s masterful compèring there was a real Buckingham air to the proceedings.

The conference comes at the end of a six-month project blogging the public’s responses to re-reading the novel in its original monthly parts, made available through a collaboration with the Special Collections service of the University of Aberdeen’s Sir Duncan Rice Library. The blog can be accessed here.

Now a final, but equally significant, phase of public engagement ensues as Dr Orford takes The Drood Inquiry out to the world at large to help answer a detailed questionnaire concerning responses to the novel’s various unsolved mysteries, and to solicit preferred solutions from which some quantitative as well as qualitative conclusions may be drawn.

Full accounts of the day’s proceedings can be be encountered on the Victorian is the New Black and Cloisterham Tales  blogs.

Delegate feedback

• “A thoroughly enjoyable and informative conference”
• “Altogether an excellent experience”
• “The venue was perfect and everything ran very smoothly. …a really varied and interesting programme”
• “The breadth and depth of the panels was impressive and thought-provoking, and it was a true privilege to be part of such a successful, convivial, and enriching day”