The title-page for The Mystery of Edwin Drood is much more interesting than that for any other Dickens novel--although it has to be added that comparison is difficult, because so few of the others have title-pages. None survive for the first five novels (if in fact any were made) and there are none in existence for the last five, other than the one for Drood. This leaves only the title-pages of the five middle novels, Martin Chuzzlewit through Hard Times, and three of those differ widely from that for Drood in that they consist of determined, one might almost suppose desperate, attempts to fix the wanted titles, doing so over a good many sheets of paper, usually with one title per sheet. Chuzzlewit has nine such title-pages, Copperfield has sixteen and Bleak House ten. Dombey and Son is an exception: a single sheet displays one title, "Some / Dealings with the Firm / of / Dombey and Son / By Charles Dickens / Wholesale, Retail, and for Exportation."/ and is such an elegant specimen of penmanship and is so beautifully centered and spaced over the whole page that we are involuntarily reminded of Mr. Sapsea's epitaph for his wife's tomb. We cannot know for certain whether it is the perfected product of several attempts or a leisurely (because he had his title from the beginning) exercise in lapidary inscription; but it is probably the latter, as he did not suppress the failed attempts at a title for his two subsequent novels. As noted, there are no extant title-pages for the four novels immediately preceding Drood. That is, there are none for Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations or Our Mutual Friend. The closest precursor is the one for Hard Times, fifteen years before, which, as it happens, is the only other title-page in existence that at all resembles his last one. Like it, it is dated at the top--none of the others are--and, like it, it has all the considered titles on a single page, as well as some names of characters. However, when the two sheets are placed, as it were, side by side, marked differences appear. The prospective titles for Hard Times are mostly crowded into a narrow column on the right-hand side of the right-hand half of two conjoined sheets of paper (reproduced in Stone 250-1), with a few more listed just to the left of the column. They are written in a small hand, with many blottings, including some untidy clots of multiple obliterations. The title-page for The Mystery of Edwin Drood provides a striking contrast. It is immaculate. The handwriting is somewhat larger, the layout of the page is coherent and easily graspable, and, even more significantly, there is not a single blotting or erasure. Dickens tried out 38 possible names for the book we know as Hard Times, with several repetitions ("Hard Times" itself putting in three appearances, one of which is scribbled over (1)), but no prospective title for his last book is repeated exactly. There are many variations, but each change, however slight, has a decided point.
