ABSTRACT
As I discussed in Chapter 2, another type of musician recurs in late Victorian fiction besides angelic and demonic women: the diabolical, foreign male musician who practices animal magnetism. In Charles Dickens's last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), John Jasper is portrayed as especially insidious since, as an English clergyman, he is welcomed into respectable households and the girls' school where Rosa Budd resides. His nationality, class and occupation are represented as inspiring trust, making Jasper's criminality, mesmerism and Eastern orientation unsuspected by his community. This allows him to threaten Rosa and probably murder his nephew, Edwin Drood, without the label of "dubious foreigner," which might have attracted suspicion. 1 As in sensation fiction where appearances are deceptive, the sinister inclinations of a respectable choirmaster are revealed in The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
