‘DR MARIGOLD's PRESCRIPTIONS’, THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD

In 1858 Dickens commenced a series of public readings for his own benefit. This commercializing of an activity he had previously carried on for charitable purposes sharpened his perception of himself as an artist exposed more conspicuously than most to the gaze of the public. An enhanced sense of being at work in the ‘shop window’ is testified to with considerable bravado in the short text ‘Dr Marigold's Prescriptions’. This monologue was written in 1865 specifically for public performance. Its first-person protagonist is a ‘cheap jack’, an auctioneer of trashy, second-hand goods who operates out of the back of a cart; like Dickens himself, especially when onstage, he is entirely dependent on the success of his ‘patter’ to earn a living. The subject matter consists of accounts of the pathetic death of his daughter and of the derangement and death of his wife, which is followed by his adoption of another daughter, whom he brings up and eventually marries off. It is a sequence of events that follows a pattern fundamental to many of Dickens's narratives: the catastrophic demise of a ‘natural’ family is succeeded by the reparative, restorative experience of creating an adoptive one. What is unusual about this version of the predicament is the way in which the language of personal affection, of emotional values, is actually filtered through the economic opportunism of a monologist who depends on his verbal abilities to earn a living: