Andrew Lang

The Puzzle Of Dickens's Last Plot Andrew Lang

Grewgious was apparently legal agent for Edwin, while Edwin's maternal uncle, John Jasper aged about sixteen when the male parents died, was Edwin's "trustee," as well as his uncle and devoted friend. Rosa's little fortune was an annuity producing £250 a-year: Edwin succeeded to his father's share in an engineering firm. When the story opens, Edwin is nearly twenty-one, and is about to proceed to Egypt, as an engineer. Rosa, at school in Cloisterham, is about seventeen; John Jasper is twenty-six. He is conductor of the Choir of the Cathedral, a "lay precentor;" he is very dark, with thick black whiskers, and, for a number of years, has been a victim to the habit of opium smoking. He began very early. He takes this drug both in his lodgings, over the gate of the Cathedral, and in a den in East London, kept by a woman nicknamed "The Princess Puffer." This hag, we learn, has been a determined drunkard, "I drank heaven's-hard," for sixteen years before she took to opium. If she has been dealing in opium for ten years the exact period is not stated, she has been very disreputable for twenty-six years, that is ever since John Jasper's birth. Mr. Cuming Walters suggests that she is the mother of John Jasper, and, therefore, maternal grandmother of Edwin Drood. She detests her client, Jasper, and plays the spy on his movements, for reasons unexplained.