When the enigmatic Dick Datchery arrives in Cloisterham in the fifth part of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, he asks the waiter at the Crozier Hotel where he might find a “‘fair lodging for a single buffer.’” “‘Something old is what I should prefer,’” he says, “‘something odd and out of the way; something venerable, architectural, and inconvenient [...] anything Cathedraly, now’” (202–3; ch. 18). In his whimsy, Datchery lights upon a cluster of adjectives that could easily describe the novel he inhabits. As the Inimitable’s final work, Edwin Drood is “venerable:” we seek, or indeed demand, evidence of Dickens’s creative maturity among its pages. But it is also an “odd” and exhilaratingly “inconvenient” novel, unfinished at Dickens’s death, pushed “out of the way” in frustration by those seeking categorical answers to the questions it raises. Finally, it is conspicuously “architectural,” with a profusion of strange spaces and insights into the complexities of the nineteenth-century property market. This essay puts forward three perspectives on space in the novel.1 I begin by exploring Dickens’s use of rented spaces to push Edwin Drood’s mystery plot forward; lodgings and hotels perform a narrative function in his embryonic detective story. In the second section, I move away from literary form to suggest that he sets up an intrinsic relationship between space and feeling. His scenes in London’s Staple Inn, in particular, are a profound meditation on living alone and loneliness and show him to be a subtler student of the emotions than he might get credit for. The final section considers the ways in which the novel’s politics are articulated through space. Throughout, I draw upon the ideas of a range of theorists, because Dickens’s own observations

中文翻译：

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“尊贵、建筑和不便”：埃德温·德鲁德之谜中的租用空间

当神秘的 Dick Datchery 在《埃德温·德鲁德之谜》的第五部分到达克洛斯特汉姆时，他问克罗泽酒店的服务员他可能会在那里找到“'一个缓冲的'公平住宿'”。应该更喜欢，'”他说，“'一些奇怪的东西；一些古老的、建筑的和不方便的 [...] 任何大教堂式的东西，现在'”（202-3；第 18 章）。在他的奇思妙想中，达奇里指出了一组形容词，这些形容词可以很容易地描述他所居住的小说。作为《不可模仿》的最后一部作品，埃德温·德鲁德是“令人尊敬的”：我们在其书页中寻找或确实要求狄更斯创造性成熟的证据。但它也是一部“古怪”且令人振奋的“不方便”的小说，在狄更斯去世时未完成，被那些寻求对它提出的问题的明确答案的人沮丧地“排除在外”。最后，它具有明显的“建筑风格”，充满了奇怪的空间和对 19 世纪房地产市场复杂性的洞察力。本文提出了小说中关于空间的三个视角。1 我首先探讨了狄更斯利用租用空间来推动埃德温·德鲁德的神秘情节；住宿和旅馆在他的侦探故事雏形中起到了叙事的作用。在第二部分，我从文学形式转向暗示他在空间和感觉之间建立了一种内在的关系。特别是他在伦敦 Staple Inn 的场景是对独居和孤独的深刻思考，并表明他是一个比他可能获得的荣誉更微妙的情绪学生。最后一部分考虑了小说政治通过空间表达的方式。始终，