Explore "Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens" by G.K. Chesterton on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
_Pickwick_ was a work partly designed by others, but ultimately filled up by Dickens. _Edwin Drood_, the last book, was a book designed by Dickens, but ultimately filled up by others. The _Pickwick Papers_ showed how much Dickens could make out of other people's suggestions; _The Mystery of Edwin Drood_ shows how very little other people can make out of Dickens's suggestions.
Dickens was meant by Heaven to be the great melodramatist; so that even his literary end was melodramatic. Something more seems hinted at in the cutting short of _Edwin Drood_ by Dickens than the mere cutting short of a good novel by a great man. It seems rather like the last taunt of some elf, leaving the world, that it should be this story which is not ended, this story which is only a story. The only one of Dickens's novels which he did not finish was the only one that really needed finishing. He never had but one thoroughly good plot to tell; and that he has only told in heaven. This is what separates the case in question from any parallel cases of novelists cut off in the act of creation. That great novelist, for instance, with whom Dickens is constantly compared, died also in the middle of _Denis Duval_.