The Last Dickens by Matthew Pearl

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The author of The Dante Club and The Poe Shadow has fashioned another sleight-of-hand historical mystery that keeps us guessing from almost the first page. Again, master prestidigitator Matthew Pearl sets up with a simple double conundrum: In the jungles of India, a policeman shouts out the name of Charles Dickens while chasing a felon, while halfway around the world, a Boston publishing house clerk loses his life and the advance installment of Dickens's never-finished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The Last Dickens casts its spells between these polar events, conspiring to make us both careful textual detectives and fearless street sleuths. A challenging intellectual entertainment.

From the Publisher

In his most enthralling novel yet, the critically acclaimed author Matthew Pearl reopens one of literary history’s greatest mysteries. The Last Dickens is a tale filled with the dazzling twists and turns, the unerring period details, and the meticulous research that thrilled readers of the bestsellers The Dante Club and The Poe Shadow.

Boston, 1870. When news of Charles Dickens’s untimely death reaches the office of his struggling American publisher, Fields & Osgood, partner James Osgood sends his trusted clerk Daniel Sand to await the arrival of Dickens’s unfinished novel. But when Daniel’s body is discovered by the docks and the manuscript is nowhere to be found, Osgood must embark on a transatlantic quest to unearth the novel that he hopes will save his venerable business and reveal Daniel’s killer.

Danger and intrigue abound on the journey to England, for which Osgood has chosen Rebecca Sand, Daniel’s older sister, to assist him. As they attempt to uncover Dickens’s final mystery, Osgood and Rebecca find themselves racing the clock through a dangerous web of literary lions and drug dealers, sadistic thugs and blue bloods, and competing members of Dickens’s inner circle. They soon realize that understanding Dickens’s lost ending is a matter of life and death, and the hidden key to stopping a murderous mastermind.


From the Hardcover edition.

Publishers Weekly

Bestseller Pearl (The Poe Shadow) delivers a period thriller that has the misfortune to fall short of the high standard set by Dan Simmons's Drood(Reviews, Nov. 24), which also centers on Charles Dickens's final, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. After the author dies in 1870, a series of suspicious deaths leads Dickens's U.S. publisher, James Osgood, to suspect they may be connected with the solution to the novel's puzzle. Accompanied by attractive bookkeeper Rebecca Sand, the sister of one of the victims, Osgood travels from Boston to England to seek clues to Drood's missing conclusion. The action shifts to India, where Charles's son Francis is a superintendent of the Bengal Mounted Police, and back in time, to the novelist's last American tour in 1867. Some awkward prose distracts ("There were several other grim faces at dinner that, like some imperceptible force, spread a dark cloud over the levity"), while the ending may strike some readers as a cop-out. (Mar.)

Laurel Bliss - Library Journal

Pearl's third historical novel (after The Dante Club and The Poe Shadow) explores the circumstances surrounding Charles Dickens's unfinished last work, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Boston publisher James Osgood eagerly awaits the final installments of Drood after hearing of Dickens's sudden death. Unfortunately, Osgood's trusted messenger, Daniel, is killed before he can deliver the manuscript to the publishing house, and the manuscript disappears. Could Osgood's publishing rivals have stolen it, or is there an even deeper mystery going on? Accompanied by Daniel's sister, Osgood travels to England to search for clues about how Dickens planned on finishing Drood, unaware his enemies are close at hand. Pearl enriches his story through extended flashbacks, the inclusion of actual historical figures, including Osgood himself, and an in-depth knowledge of Dickens's career and literary works. Strongly recommended for all public libraries. [For some very different literary takes on Charles Dickens, see Richard Flanagan's Wanting, reviewed on p. 94, and Dan Simmons's Drood, reviewed in LJ1/09.-Ed.]

Kirkus Reviews

A rousing yarn of opium, book pirating, murder most foul, man-on-man biting and other shenanigans-and that's just for starters. Charles Dickens is dead, and, inexplicably, people are beginning to die because of that fact-not because they've got no reason to live absent new tales from a beloved author, but because said author's last work-in-progress contains evidence of real-life mayhem that its perpetrators, it would seem, do not wish to see publicized. So runs the premise that Pearl (The Poe Shadow, 2006, etc.), who specializes in literary mysteries, offers. The story unfolds on the docks of Boston, to which an office boy has run to retrieve the next installment of Dickens's Mystery of Edwin Drood, fresh off the boat from London. Said boy expires, unpleasantly, while a stranger of most peculiar manner is seen skulking in the vicinity, conspicuous by his "decidedly English accent" and "brown-parchment complexion," suggestive of India and imperial milieus beyond. Dickens's American publisher-better put, the only publisher in America who is paying the author royalties rather than stealing his work-sets out to solve the crime and retrieve the manuscript, with the clerk's resourceful sister on hand to help on a journey across oceans and continents. Meanwhile, our stranger is up to more nasty business, slashing throats, sawing bones and giving people the willies. It's clear that Pearl is having a fine time of it all, firing off a few inside jokes at the publishing business along the way: No matter that Dickens is dead with only six chapters done, says his London editor a trifle ungrammatically, for "Every reader who picks up the book, finding it unfinished, can spend their time guessing whatthe ending should be. And they'll tell their friends to buy a copy and do the same, so it can be argued."A pleasing whodunit that resolves nicely, bookending Dan Simmons's novel Drood (2009) as an imaginative exercise in what might be called alternative literary history. Author tour to Boston, New York, Pittsburgh, Iowa City, Madison, Wis., Scottsdale, Ariz., San Francisco, Seattle

Product Details

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Reading Group Guide

1. James Osgood must find more information about The Mystery of Edwin Drood to try to save his struggling publishing firm. Do you believe Osgood has additional motivations, whether personal or professional, for his quest?

 2. The character of Rebecca Sand is a young working woman in Boston during the latter half of the nineteenth century. What are some of the interesting and surprising challenges facing her in that time and place that struck you? Do you think she is properly appreciated by Osgood and the firm? 

3. Dickens’s death in 1870 and the incomplete status of his final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, is at the heart of this book’s story. For those who have read The Mystery of Edwin Drood, how did your knowledge of that novel influence your reading of The Last Dickens? For those who haven’t read it, what did you learn about that final Dickens novel, and would you now go out and read The Mystery of Edwin Drood? 

4. The Last Dickens refers to the last novel Charles Dickens wrote. Does the title have any other meaning or significance for you? If Fields, Osgood & Co. were publishing Matthew Pearl’s novel and called you into their offices at 124 Tremont Street demanding a title change, what might you suggest? 

5. The novel’s depiction of Charles Dickens is based closely on history. What are some of the facts of Dickens’s life that most interested you that you may not have known before? 

6. There is much consternation andexcitement over The Mystery of Edwin Drood’s incomplete status among the characters in this novel, propelling various actions. Other books by famous authors that were never finished include The Aeneid by Virgil, The Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Buccaneers by Edith Wharton, A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway, Septimius Felton by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Lesley Castle by Jane Austen. Some of these have undergone attempts to be “completed” by other writers or family members, as some of the characters in The Last Dickens wish to do with The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Should unfinished books like these have new endings written, or should they be left as fragments? 

7. The novel depicts a dramatically different period in the publishing world. What were some of the things that surprised you about book publishing in the nineteenth century? 

8. In our age of increasingly digital media, how relevant are books today? Discuss whether you think there will be a time when physical books no longer exist. What would be the implications of this? 

9. In the novel, there is a stalker who shadows Charles Dickens’s reading tour in America, which was based on actual incidents. Think of some modern examples of celebrity stalking and discuss the unique characteristics of this type of obsession in and out of this novel. 

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