Matthew Pearl - The Last Dickens

“Tell me-for a lark-before we finally know the truth, what do you think, Osgood?” asked Chapman as he prepared to depart from the office, his assistant handing him his overcoat and brown felt hat with its jaunty blue ribbon. “Tell us, do you think Drood lives or dies in the end?”

“I don't know whether he lives or dies,” answered Osgood. “But I know he is not dead.”

Chapman, shouldering his rifle, nodded but moved his mouth in a rehearsal of confusion at the enigmatic response.

Some minutes later, after their guest's departure, some impulse or feeling gripped Osgood. It made him get up from his desk. He stood looking down at the palms of his own hands and the scars from their adventures.

He could not have said why, but he was soon walking down the hall; hurrying down the stairs, dancing around the slower climbers; bursting through the reception hall, past the shining glass cases of Ticknor & Fields and Fields & Osgood books, out the front doors; pushing past the line at the peanut vendor and the Italian organ grinder, looking out, looking at the tourists to Boston in bright bonnets and light hats loitering under the shady elms of the Great Mall along the Common, looking over at squirrels scrambling for lost crumbs and pleading pitifully for donations of other scraps, looking for Fred Chapman in the dappled light of the summer scene. Osgood got as far as the tents pitched by the traveling circus, which were sheltering exhibitions of overheated animals and myriad humanity.

It is impossible to claim to know what James Osgood thought to have said had he caught up with him. It wouldn't have mattered, though, because the strapping visitor from London and the pages in his case were already gone.

Boston, December 1870, five months later

CROSSING THE ORNATE LOBBY, THE MAN WITH THE FLOWING white beard made a graceful stop at the front desk.

“Is Mr. Clark in?”

He addressed this question to a definitively New England shop boy, whose dream was one day to turn thirteen years old and another day to write a book of his own like the ones in the shining glass cases. For now he was content to be sitting and reading one. “Guess he ain't,” was his reply, too absorbed to break his concentration.

“Can you say when he'll return?”

“Guess I can't.”

“Mr. Osgood or Mr. Fields, then?”

“Mr. Osgood's out on business, and Mr. Fields, he's not to be disturbed today, guess I don't know why.”

“Well,” the caller chuckled to himself. “I entrust these important papers with you, then, sir.”

The lad looked up at the documents and took the card that sat on top with a surprised and astonished expression.

“Mr. Longfellow,” he said, jumping to his feet from his stool. He stared at the visitor with the same intensity he had reserved for his book. “Say, old man! Do you mean to say you are really Long fellow?”

“I am, young man.”

“Wall! I wouldn't have thought it! Now, how old was you when you wrote Hiawatha? That's what I want to know.”

After satisfying this and the shop boy's other burning questions, the poet turned toward the front doors as he secured his heavy coat, lowered his hat, and braced himself for the wintry air.

“My dear Mr. Longfellow!”

Longfellow looked up and saw it was James Osgood coming in. He greeted the young publisher.

“Come upstairs and warm awhile by the fire in the Authors’ Room, Mr. Longfellow?” suggested Osgood.

“The Authors’ Room,” Longfellow repeated, smiling dreamily. “How long since I idled there with our friends! The world was a holiday planet then, and things were precisely what they seemed. I've just left some papers for Mr. Clark that needed my signature. But I ought to return to Cambridge to my girls.”

“I shall walk with you part of the way, if you'd allow it. I have my gloves on already.”

Osgood put his arm through the author's as they walked up Tremont Street through the blustery afternoon. Their talk, interrupted at intervals by the freezing gusts, soon turned to The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The Fields, Osgood & Co. edition had just been published a few months earlier.

“I believe I interrupted your shop boy's enjoyment of Drood's tale,” Longfellow said.

“Oh, yes. That's little Rich-he hadn't seen a schoolroom before two years ago, and now reads a book a week. Drood is his favorite so far.”

“It is certainly one of Mr. Dickens's most beautiful works, if not the most beautiful of all. It is too sad to think the pen had fallen out of his hand to leave it incomplete,” Longfellow said.

“Some months ago I had in my possession the final pages,” said Osgood, without exactly intending to. What would Osgood tell him about it? That Fred Chapman had taken the manuscript back to England? That an accident had occurred on board the ship and destroyed several pieces of baggage including the trunk carrying. Drood ? “Cruel misfortune intervened,” Osgood commented vaguely.

Longfellow paused before replying, pulling Osgood's arm closer as if to tell him a secret. “It is for the best.”

“What do you mean?”

“I sometimes think, dear Mr. Osgood, that all proper books are unfinished. They simply have to feign completion for the convenience of the public. If not for publishers, no authors would ever reach the end. We would have all writers and no readers. So you mustn't shed a tear for Drood. No, there is much to envy about it- I mean that each reader will imagine his or her ideal ending for it, and every reader will be happy with their own private finale in their mind. It is in a truer state, perhaps, than any other work of its kind, however large we print those words, The End. And you have made the best of it!”

Indeed, their edition of Drood had been a resounding success by any measure and beyond every expectation, sending the publishing firm scrambling to print enough editions to keep up with demand. It had seemed that stories had trickled out into the trade-apparently beginning with a Bookaneer who called himself Molasses-of Os-good's remarkable search for the book's ending. Pieces of the narrative of this quest, some entirely true and some wild rumor, were put together in a lengthy series of articles by Mr. Leypoldt in his newly titled magazine, the Publishers Weekly , as the first of his stories of the soul of publishing, which brought thousands of new eyes on Leypoldt's magazine and led to the narrative being retold by the major newspapers and journals in all the cities. This attracted enormous attention and interest in their edition of Drood , turning the name Osgood on the title page into a selling point-while the pirated editions by Harper hawked by the peddlers and bagmen gathered dust. The Fields & Osgood editions filled the front windows of bookstores, banishing the Indian prints and cigar boxes to the back.