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"Venerable, Architectural, and Inconvenient": Rented Spaces in The Mystery of Edwin Drood

When the enigmatic Dick Datchery arrives in Cloisterham in the fifth part of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, he asks the waiter at the Crozier Hotel where he might find a “‘fair lodging for a single buffer.’” “‘Something old is what I should prefer,’” he says, “‘something odd and out of the way; something venerable, architectural, and inconvenient [...] anything Cathedraly, now’” (202–3; ch. 18). In his whimsy, Datchery lights upon a cluster of adjectives that could easily describe the novel he inhabits. As the Inimitable’s final work, Edwin Drood is “venerable:” we seek, or indeed demand, evidence of Dickens’s creative maturity among its pages. But it is also an “odd” and exhilaratingly “inconvenient” novel, unfinished at Dickens’s death, pushed “out of the way” in frustration by those seeking categorical answers to the questions it raises. Finally, it is conspicuously “architectural,” with a profusion of strange spaces and insights into the complexities of the nineteenth-century property market. This essay puts forward three perspectives on space in the novel.1 I begin by exploring Dickens’s use of rented spaces to push Edwin Drood’s mystery plot forward; lodgings and hotels perform a narrative function in his embryonic detective story. In the second section, I move away from literary form to suggest that he sets up an intrinsic relationship between space and feeling. His scenes in London’s Staple Inn, in particular, are a profound meditation on living alone and loneliness and show him to be a subtler student of the emotions than he might get credit for. The final section considers the ways in which the novel’s politics are articulated through space. Throughout, I draw upon the ideas of a range of theorists, because Dickens’s own observations