He loves his nephew, and yet cannot avoid hating him as a rival for the young woman.
Jasper, who is the choirmaster in "an old cathedral town" (based on Canterbury), is a secret opiun user. Both are in love with Rosa Bud, the ward of the lawyer Hiram Grewgious. The novel's main figure would be Drood's young uncle (and rival) John Jasper.
So Dickens decided he would write one novel where the center would be the commission of a crime: to wit, the disappearance (and probable murder) of the title character Edwin ("Ned") Drood. Dickens, who could plot as well as Collins, could not quite see how differently the two approached novel writing. Collins did this too, but he centered his plots on the crimes in the stories. He was a social critic, and he had to notice crime as part of the social scene. But in all of his books Dickens used crime and criminal as an element, not the central element, of the story.
In his lesser fiction, he had used characters based on real life poisoners Thomas Griffith Wainewright and Dr. Murders played parts in MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT, BLEAK HOUSE, A TALE OF TWO CITIES, and OUR MUTUAL FRIEND. OLIVER TWIST was certainly a crime centered tale of gangs of youths trained to be thieves in London. He had been accused of writing sensational novels by his critics. It became the best selling series of issues for the magazine - outstripping issues that had contained Dickens' novel OUR MUTUAL FRIEND. He edited a magazine, ALL THE YEAR ROUND, and had been lucky enough to get his friend, William Wilkie Collins, to write a novel for it to be serialized. He already had David COPPERFIELD, GREAT EXPECTATIONS, PICKWICK PAPERS, BLEAK HOUSE, OLIVER TWIST, A Christmas CAROL, A TALE OF TWO CITIES, and seven or eight other titles to remind the world of his talents. Charles Dickens reputation did not need THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD to survive his death in 1870.
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