Charles Dickens died on June 9, 1870, at the age of 58. The immediate cause of death was a stroke that Dickens had the previous day. He spent the hours immediately before this stroke working on the manuscript of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, his final and unfinished novel. Dickens’s health was in decline for a number of years; he had never fully regained his strength after a serious railroad accident in 1865, during which Dickens assisted a number of injured and dying passengers while also salvaging the manuscript for his penultimate novel, Our Mutual Friend (published in installments between 1864 and 1865). Despite failing health, in the period between 1865 and 1870, Dickens continued to work with his hallmark intensity. He travelled to America in 1867 and spent several months on tour, presenting public readings; after he returned, he continued to tour and give readings throughout England, Scotland, and Ireland in 1868 and 1869. However, the tour was cut short when Dickens had a stroke in April 1869.

After his ill health brought an end to travelling to give public readings, Dickens turned to writing a final novel: The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Like all of Dickens’s previous novels, it would be published in serial form (in which short installments of a novel were published at regular intervals, often in a magazine or literary journal).