In his prime Charles Dickens was a man who churned out novel after novel that instantly became classics. At times he would release these in chapters and the avid reader would have to wait for each subsequent chapter to come out. His last book The Mystery of Edwin Drood was released in installments to readers from around the world but June 9, 1870 would spell certain disaster to them when Charles Dickens passed away. They would never learn the true fate of Edwin Drood.
It was not until 1872 when Thomas James began to channel the spirit of the dead author. No one knows the details but it was said that James knew nothing of spiritualism and only had a rudimentary education. To pull off the writing of the remaining chapters of Edwin Drood was fantastic. The collaboration began on Christmas Eve and continued for a little over a year. James was said to have no recollection of the sessions and claimed that what he did remember was the author by his side dictating the novel to him. To say that Edwin Drood upon completion was a Dickens novel would be false. Most think it was an excellent copy of the great author’s prose style nothing more. No one will ever know for sure if the great author actually chose an uneducated man from Vermont to pen his final novel for the world. However, the posthumous completion of Edwin Drood is a story worthy of Dickens himself.
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