British Ceylon and Colonial Hybridity in The Mystery of Edwin Drood

Abstract: This article argues that Dickens's unfinished final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood , challenges the British Empire's fantasy of homogeneous Englishness through its portrayal of the racially hybrid twins from Ceylon, Neville and Helena Landless. Brought to England in the name of supplementary "education," the twins' colonial hybridity is strategically tamed and instrumentalized by the English residents of Cloisterham, reflecting the status of the mixed-race population in British Ceylon ("the Burghers"). When the male twin poses an epistemological threat to English society's idealized rhetoric of imperialism through his "border thinking," the twins' hybridity becomes criminalized, confined, and ultimately erased, leaving them perpetually "land-less." The novel's peculiarities in plot development and projected ending can be more effectively explained if readers take the Landlesses' mixed-race identity – and Dickens's potential awareness of such colonial hybridity – into consideration.