All Program Dates
April 28, 2025 | 7:00pm - 8:30pm ET
May 5, 2025 | 7:00pm - 8:30pm ET
May 12, 2025 | 7:00pm - 8:30pm ET
May 19, 2025 | 7:00pm - 8:30pm ET
May 26, 2025 | 7:00pm - 8:30pm ET
June 2, 2025 | 7:00pm - 8:30pm ET
June 9, 2025 | 7:00pm - 8:30pm ET
Registration
Tuition for this course is $250. Members receive exclusive discounts on our programs and courses. Not a member? Learn more.
Please check your spam folder for your email confirmation. If you have questions, please call (215) 732-1600 or email rsvp@rosenbach.org.
A welcome email from the instructor three weeks before the course begins. Zoom links will be sent for the course one week before the first meeting.
This program is for those 18 and older.
Registration opens for Delancey Society members on Friday, March 14, for Rosenbach members on Friday, March 21, and for the general public on Friday, March 28. Registration opens at 12:00 p.m. ET.
Description
The Mystery of Edwin Drood was the final serial novel by Charles Dickens, left unfinished at his death. It’s a mystery novel with no ending, leaving readers to piece together what they have read and how it might continue. There have been many continuations of the novel, including one from an author who claimed to have channeled the ghost of Dickens to finish it, a Tony Award-winning Broadway musical, and of course, a hit BBC television adaptation. What is often overlooked with these adaptations is the grim direction in which Dickens was taking his readers: a novel set at Christmas-time but beginning in a squalid opium den, turning Christmas carols into laments. The Rosenbach holds in its collection the original serial parts of The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Throughout this course, we’ll read the existing six serial parts as the first readers did, one part at a time for six sessions, then we’ll spend a final session discussing the many ways Dickens could have unspooled his final mystery, perhaps even solving the mystery of Edwin Drood itself.
Instructor
Edward G. Pettit is the Sunstein Senior Manager of Public Programs at the Rosenbach and has been presenter for the Biblioventures series since its inception, covering Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and for twenty months, a serial exploration of Dickens’s first book, The Pickwick Papers. Pettit has also taught many reading courses at the Rosenbach, including Nicholas Nickleby, Bleak House, and Dickens’s Christmas Books. He is a member of the Dickens Fellowship, the Philadelphia Pickwick Club, and in 2012, was the Charles Dickens Ambassador for the Free Library of Philadelphia’s year-long bicentenary celebration of Dickens’s birth. When not reading, he can be found working on his TARDIS so he can return to the 19th Century.