PJT 1747

I didn't want to spend yet another week on Edwin Drood, but I wanted to explain the meaning of these initials that Mr. Grewgious wondered about (so frequently throughout the novel). For those of you who have not read Edwin Drood yet, Mr. Grewgious is a character who lives in a house where the initials PJT 1747 are inscribed in the wall. Throughout the book, he wonders about what the initials might stand for, and thinks about it when he is bored or distracted.
Here are a few of my initial answers:
- Perhaps John Tyler
- Poor Jammed Toes (injured in 1747)
- Peanut butter and Jam Toast (as old as 1747?)
- Pete Jasper's Teeth
- Possibly Junky Tweasers
etc...

Later, I discovered what it actually meant. Here is an except from my story notebook:

"PJT stands for the initials of the president of that particular inn where Mr. Grewgious chose to take his lodgings.
President John Thompson 1747
President of the Staple Inn, London, 1747

The question remaining is: Who is Mr. Datchery?

The story that I love most out of all of Dickens’ novels is The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Dickens wrote this, and many of his other novels, in serial form where one or two chapters would be published monthly or weekly in a magazine and later printed as more expensive, hardcover books. Serializing his novels made it cheaper for poorer people to buy his books. Edwin Drood is Dickens’ last story, the one he was writing just prior to his death. It is the story of a young man, Edwin Drood, who mysteriously disappears one night after a storm. Bit by bit, the reader finds out that Edwin’s uncle, an opium addict, wanted him dead. Unfortunately, Dickens died before he was able to finish the last few chapters—the final installment in the serial. Because of this, it is missing the part where the murderer is revealed and the mystery remains unsolved. Although it is darker than most of his other novels, Edwin Drood remains my favorite because it leaves the last segment to the imagination of the reader.

At the end of the novel, it is fairly obvious who killed Drood and why he did it. But in the last couple of chapters that Dickens wrote, a new character who takes up lodging in Cloisterham for a couple of months. Dickens makes it fairly clear that Mr. Datchery could be a person (perhaps another familiar character) in disquise (i.e. Mr. Datchery has unusually bushy hair, suggesting that he could be wearing a wig).
So my question is, who is Mr. Datchery? There are many possible answers to this question, but no one will ever know what the original author intended.

"Please sir, I want some more."

Oliver Twist was the first novel that made me cry. I sat curled up in a soft chair thinking about what I had just read. Tears streamed down my burning cheeks and splashed onto the yellowed pages of the book I held in my hands. My eyes skimmed over the last part of the chapter and I knew then that Dickens was the greatest master of the English language. Bill Sikes had just murdered the prostitute Nancy as she cried out piteously for mercy. In a few sparse sentences, Dickens conveyed passion, mercilessness, tender-heartedness, and forgiveness unlike any writer I had ever read. The day that Charles Dickens died was the day that the world lost its greatest English writer. No one has equaled him since.
Not only did Dickens write good novels, he wrote them for a purpose. He saw the appalling conditions of the workhouses, prisons, and streets of Victorian London and made those scenes the stage for his novels. He showed the rich people of London the squalor and filth that the poor were living in at the time in the hopes that workhouses might be closed. A Christmas Carol, Bleak House, Oliver Twist, and many others of his novels are built around Dickens’ desire to create social awareness of what was really going on in the gutters and side streets of London. Having worked as child in a boot blacking factory, Dickens felt that child labor was unethical. In his book Oliver Twist, he writes against using children labor to further wealth—such as Fagin uses the street boys to gain money as pickpockets. Children were given very little to eat in workhouses and street life was not much better. Dickens knew how to get a public reaction to these appalling facts when he wrote Oliver Twist’s plaintive cry, “please sir, I want some more.”
Charles Dickens is a great English author, not only because he could write well or develop interesting characters, but because he knew how to arouse the public’s awareness onto horrible conditions in London’s workhouses and streets, and child labor in the Industrial Revolution. True greatness lies not in how many books an author can write, but on how many reader’s hearts he or she can change.

Miss Ester Summerson

The heroine of Bleak House. Ester is a very uncomplicated young lady who suddenly finds herself in the middle of an ongoing court case, Jarndyce and Jarndyce. Of all of Dicken's characters, she is perhaps the most normal. The only unusual thing about her is her family history (which Mr. Guppy is determined to learn about).

Dickens created real, life-like characters based on real people. Dickens’ strong character development is what makes his writing so powerful. Each character has a distinct personality from another. Even the names of the characters reflect part of their individuality. Names like Bumble, Landless, Dedlock, and Datchery reveal something about their character. Dickens uses names like Dodson and Fog—two lawyers from The Pickwick Papers—to make fun of professions and personalities. Even someone who is not familiar with Dickens’ novels would recognize certain names as being Dickensian. Dickens modeled his characters—such as the parochial Mr. Bumble in Oliver Twist and the moneywise Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield—after people he knew and saw in his day to day life. His characters are lifelike and real. Dickens made his characters real, not by just describing them, but by letting his characters describe themselves. Each character has a distinct way of speaking and can be identified by the reader without his or her name being mentioned. In some of Dickens’ novels, like Bleak House, there is more than one narrative voice that switches back and forth every two or three chapters. Bleak House is partially written in the first person and narrated by Ester Summerson, the main character. In other chapters, it changes to a third person voice and discusses events that Ester is not able to see. The use of these different techniques not only makes the story interesting, but engaging as well. Dickens’ uses lively characterizations to create a powerful image in the minds of his readers.

A Young Man Named Guppy

Mr. William Guppy - a clerk at the office of Kenge and Carboys.

Mr. Guppy is perhaps one of the best of all the characters that Dickens created for his serial novel, Bleak House. He is awkward, but punctual, intellectual, opinionated---and desperately in love with one of the main characters. Throughout the entire novel, he devotes himself to whatever he thinks will make her happy, until he finds out that her face is terribly scarred after a bout of smallpox. Then, he declares himself to be completely cured of his love sickness.

"Mr. Guppy suspects everybody who enters on the occupation of a stool in Kenge and Carboy's office of entertaining, as a matter of course, sinister designs upon him. He is clear that every such person wants to depose him. If he be ever asked how, why, when, or wherefore, he shuts up one eye and shakes his head. On the strength of these profound views, he in the most ingenious manner takes infinite pains to counterplot when there is no plot, and plays the deepest games of chess without any adversary." --Bleak House

Mr. Guppy is one of my favorite characters as well. Even though his personality is superficial and shallow, he is clever enough to get himself out of awkward situations and solve mysteries and secrets that were carefully hidden for years.

Here is a link to the complete text of Bleak House online.