THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD 📚: with Pete Orford

Charles Dickens: A Brain on Fire! 🔥

Welcome to a new series of Charles Dickens: A Brain on Fire!🔥
Today we take a deep dive into Dickens’ final, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood …
Joining us to talk about this extraordinary book, is the inimitable Dr Pete Orford who is a Lecturer in English Literature, and Course Director for the MA research in Charles Dickens, at the University of Buckingham.

Pete has written extensively on Shakespeare, Dickens but also Terry Pratchet, Philip Pulman and JK Rowling. With contributions to The Oxford Handbook and Blackwell Companion to Charles Dickens and he is currently editing Pictures From Italy for Oxford University Press.

Pete is also the author of Edwin Drood: Charles Dickens’ unfinished novel and our endless attempts to end it - which means following swiftly on the back of this episode he will be joining us again to talk about all the ‘what if’s’ and conspiracy theories that have sprung up in trying to solve the unanswered questions of what was Dickens going to write next at the point where his novel stops!

But right now, in this first part, our focus is on the text that exists …

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Host: Dominic Gerrard
Series Artwork: Léna Gibert
Original Music: Dominic Gerrard
Thank you for listening!

Chapters

1. Exploring the Setting of Cloisterham (00:00:00)

2. Dickens' Edwin Drood and Mortality (00:06:20)

3. Jasper's Torment and Macbeth References (00:14:34)

4. Themes of Character and Openness (00:26:31)

5. Dickens' Last Novel (00:32:18)

6. Charles Dickens in Edwin Drood (00:38:59)

7. Manipulation in "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" (00:47:33)

8. Themes of Desire and Racism (01:01:19)

9. Analyzing Macbeth's Modern Adaptation (01:13:00)