Three years after Dickens’ death, Thomas Power James (henceforth James) added a continuation to The Mystery of Edwin Drood, claiming that it was written by the ‘spirit-pen of Charles Dickens, through a medium’. This study attempts to clarify whether the continuation can be considered a posthumous work of Dickens as James suggested. Word preferences in the continuation are analyzed for similarity with those in The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Methods used are multivariate analyses of the frequencies of frequent words in three corpora －The Mystery of Edwin Drood, the continuation, and Our Mutual Friend, with the third corpus added as a reference. The analyses display distinct clustering of sections included in the continuation, on one hand, and those in the two Dickens’ works, on the other, highlighting differences in terms of word preferences. The results suggest that James’ claim regarding the continuation seems dubious.