Custom essays on In What Way Does the City Figure In “Sweeney Todd” And “The Mystery of Edwin Drood”

What are the differences between the two stories? Both of the stories date from Middle Age and also both of the stories were written in gothic style. But “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” is the novel. Everything in its plot was imagined by Charles Dickens. But the story about Sweeney Todd was a well known legend before. The analysts don’t affirm that the legend is perfectly true but after all it has a part of truth in the plot. “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” never was a subject of such kind of assertions.
The story of Edwin Drood is set in Cloisterham, a lightly fictionalized Rochester and feelingly evokes the atmosphere of the town as much as its streets and buildings. The story of Sweeney Todd is happened in ancient London. Cloisterham is not real city. The “main character of the city is “an ancient English Cathedral Tower”. We meet it at the very beginning of the novel. I want to quote the extract from the chapter 1 of the novel (the quotes are given according to the cite www.dickens-literature.com, the electronic edition of the Charles Dickens’ novels)
“An ancient English Cathedral Tower? How can the ancient English Cathedral tower be here! The well-known massive gray square tower of its old Cathedral? How can that be here! There is no spike of rusty iron in the air, between the eye and it, from any point of the real prospect. What is the spike that intervenes, and who has set it up? Maybe it is set up by the Sultan’s orders for the impaling of a horde of Turkish robbers, one by one. It is so, for cymbals clash, and the Sultan goes by to his palace in long procession. Ten thousand scimitars flash in the sunlight, and thrice ten thousand dancing-girls strew flowers. Then, follow white elephants caparisoned in countless gorgeous colors, and infinite in number and attendants. Still the Cathedral Tower rises in the background, where it cannot be, and still no writhing figure is on the grim spike. Stay! Is the spike so low a thing as the rusty spike on the top of a post of an old bedstead that has tumbled all awry? Some vague period of drowsy laughter must be devoted to the consideration of this possibility…”
We can see that Dickens took some element from the different cultures and joined them together. From the first word he let readers understand that the city is not real and we could never find it on the map. He wrote the novel with the elements of gothic and I think that unreal city is the main element of this scary mystery.
We know already that some features of Cloisterham Dickens borrowed from the real Rochester. What do we know about Rochester? Nowadays it is a town; it is situated in Kent, England, about 30 miles from London. But at the Dickens’ days it was a city. What features of the real city Dickens used in his novel? According to the official cite www.cometorochester.co.uk, “A city steeped in history, dominated by a fine Norman Castle and Cathedral, bounded by the maritime traditions and spirit of past British naval dominance on the River Medway”.
Like many of ancient English cities, Rochester already had a long rich history at the Dickens’ times. The city had enough old ancient castles for being an ideal background for the mystic story. The only thing which Charles Dickens decided to do is to change the name of the city. He wanted to make the city a way of character. If you read “The Mystery Of Edwin Drood” you have noticed that the author successfully realized the original idea.
I want to give here one more description of the city from the author’s text:
“…Similarly, service being over in the old Cathedral with the square tower, and the choir scuffling out again, and divers venerable persons of rook-like aspect dispersing, two of these latter retrace their steps, and walk together in the echoing Close…
For sufficient reasons, which this narrative will itself unfold as it advances, a fictitious name must be bestowed upon the old Cathedral town. Let it stand in these pages as Cloisterham. It was once possibly known to the Druids by another name, and certainly to the Romans by another, and to the Saxons by another, and to the Normans by another; and a name more or less in the course of many centuries can be of little moment to its dusty chronicles…”
Here the author let us understand that in “The Mystery…” even the name of the city suppose to be a secrecy. The Old Cathedral is the main attraction and characteristic of the city.
The city in the Dickens’ novel is silent and provincial. The author gave an interesting description of its patriarchal character:
“…An ancient city, Cloisterham, and no meet dwelling-place for any one with hankerings after the noisy world. A monotonous, silent city, deriving an earthy flavor throughout from its Cathedral crypt, and so abounding in vestiges of monastic graves, that the Cloisterham children grow small salad in the dust of abbots and abbesses, and make dirt-pies of nuns and friars; while every ploughman in its outlying fields renders to once puissant Lord Treasurers, Archbishops, Bishops, and such-like, the attention which the Ogre in the story-book desired to render to his unbidden visitor, and grinds their bones to make his bread…”
I think that the main trait of the gothic style of “The Mystery…” we may find in the descriptions of the city. Dickens described the gloomy background of the story and so made reader feel intently. The city was playing the role or the suitable background. The reader was felt tension and the breath of the mystery before he even knew the names of the main characters and the common plot.
Also Dickens described the people’s life with help of the city. He never tried to describe just a city separately from mention about its inhabitants. Moreover, he described Cloisterham with help of the people who settled there. The author called the city “drowsy”. Many authors used such kind of methods; but in aggregate with the gothic style of “The Mystery Edwin Drood” such description gave readers the impression that the city Cloisterham is an animate being. I want to give the last quotation here:
“…A drowsy city, Cloisterham, whose inhabitants seem to suppose, with an inconsistency more strange than rare, that all its changes lie behind it, and that there are no more to come. A queer moral to derive from antiquity, yet older than any traceable antiquity. So silent are the streets of Cloisterham (though prone to echo on the smallest provocation), that of a summer-day the sun blinds of its shops scarce dare to flap in the south wind; while the sun-browned tramps, who pass along and stare, quicken their limp a little, that they may the sooner get beyond the confines of its oppressive respectability. This is a feat not difficult of achievement, seeing that the streets of Cloisterham city are little more than one narrow street by which you get into it and get out of it: the rest being mostly disappointing yards with pumps in them and no thoroughfare–exception made of the Cathedral-close, and a paved Quaker settlement, in color and general confirmation very like a Quakeress’s bonnet, up in a shady corner.
In a word, a city of another and a bygone time is Cloisterham, with its hoarse Cathedral-bell, its hoarse rooks hovering about the Cathedral tower, its hoarser and less distinct rooks in the stalls far beneath. Fragments of old wall, saint’s chapel, chapter-house, convent and monastery, have got incongruously or obstructively built into many of its houses and gardens, much as kindred jumbled notions have become incorporated into many of its citizens’ minds. All things in it are of the past. Even its single pawnbroker takes in no pledges, nor has he for a long time, but offers vainly an unredeemed stock for sale, of which the costlier articles are dim and pale old watches apparently in a slow perspiration, tarnished sugar-tongs with ineffectual legs, and odd volumes of dismal books. The most abundant and the most agreeable evidences of progressing life in Cloisterham are the evidences of vegetable life in many gardens; even its drooping and despondent little theatre has its poor strip of garden, receiving the foul fiend, when he ducks from its stage into the infernal regions, among scarlet-beans or oyster- shells, according to the season of the year…”