Anyone acquainted with the number plans for Drood, but only with those, would be startled to discover that Dickens mentions on the very first page of the notes for Bleak House that Esther Summerson is Lady Dedlock's daughter--the reader of the published work is not allowed to suspect this until chapter 18 and the suspicion is not confirmed until chapter 36. Likewise, he refers to Estella as Magwitch's daughter on the first of his two sheets of "General Mems." for Great Expectations, although the reader does not learn this until the last line of chapter 11 in the third volume. Such anticipations, as Dickens would call them, are completely absent from the notes for his last book. A striking instance of this is provided by his contrasting treatment of two rather similar figures in the notes for, respectively, Hard Times and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. In the earlier book an old woman haunts the streets of Coketown, where she is a stranger and where she is obviously spying on one of its citizens, a Mr. Bounderby. Notes for the second number, both left and right, identify her as Bounderby's mother (Stone 25455), a fact not revealed to the reader until chapter 33, very near the end of the book. In Drood, there is a figure somewhat like her--the haggard woman of the first chapter--who haunts the streets of Cloisterham, where she is a stranger and where she is first seeking and then spying on one of its citizens, a Mr. Jasper. He obviously has, though unknown to himself, a relationship with her other than that of patron of her opium den in London, but the notes do not supply the slightest hint as to what that might be.
