The Moonstone

by Wilkie Collins

THE LITERARY WORK

A novel set primarily in Yorkshire and London in 1848-50; first published in London in 1868.

SYNOPSIS

After a fabled Indian diamond disappears under mysterious circumstances from an English country house, attempts to recover it lead to intrigue and murder.

Events in History at the Time of the Novel

The Novel in Focus

For More Information

A prolific writer, Wilkie Collins (1824-89) authored some 25 novels, along with numerous articles, short stories, and plays. He was a close friend and collaborator of his elder contemporary, the novelist Charles Dickens (1812-70), who also served as editor of periodicals. Beginning in the 1850s, Dickens serialized Collins’s novels in his periodicals Household Words (1850-59) and its successor All the Year Round (1859-88). The two friends also worked together on a number of short stories for the periodicals, and jointly wrote, produced, and acted in plays for Dickens’s stage company as well. Best known among Collins’s novels are, The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868); both were serialized in All the Year Round and later adapted by Collins for production on the stage. Collins’s tales are memorably dramatic, featuring strong villains and victimized heroines. In The Moonstone these plot elements are combined with crime and detection in a way that would distinguish the book, in the eyes of many modern critics, as the first true detective novel in English. Present-day critics have also seen deeper concerns at work in Collins’s novels, which question many of the assumptions on which Victorian society rested. At the heart of his social critiques lies Collins’s contempt for abuses of power, whether at home in Britain or abroad in the British Empire. It is with one such abuse that The Moonstone begins, when a British army officer plunders a famous diamond from the palace of a defeated local ruler in India.

Events in History at the Time of the Novel

The British Raj

Britain’s presence in India began in the seventeenth century, when the English East India Company established a handful of coastal trading posts (called “factories”) at sites from Surat in the west (1619) to Calcutta in the east (1690). Only in the middle of the eighteenth century, however, with the breakup of India’s Mughal Empire into warring states, did British influence begin to extend inland from the coast. In attempting to improve the East India Company’s commercial and strategic position within India, the British faced stiff competition from the French, who wished to further their own commercial and colonial interests. The colonial rivalry continued until Britain’s victory in the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, though the British had gained the upper hand in India by the 1760s. French influence in the final decades of the eighteenth century was limited to backing Indian rulers hostile to the East India Company, whose large armies now controlled the region of Bengal (today’s Bangladesh) and were poised to expand British power further.

After the 1760s, France’s best chance at upsetting British momentum in India came in 1798, when one of those anti-British rulers, Tipu Sultan of Mysore, took up negotiations with the French intending to arm himself against the raj, as British rule in India was known. At the same time, Napoleon Bonaparte occupied Egypt, posing a threat to the English since the brilliant French commander could use Egypt as a springboard from which to launch the overthrow of British rule in India. This so-called “scare of 1798” ended when the British Navy under Admiral Nelson shattered the French Mediterranean fleet in August of that year, and British forces under General David Baird captured Tipu Sultan’s capital of Seringapatam in May 1799. The victorious British troops pillaged Tipu’s opulent palace; in fact, Baird himself was reported to have participated in the widespread looting. This well-known historical event, the storming of Seringapatam, provided Collins with an exotic origin for his tale, which begins when a fictional British officer, Colonel John Herncastle, loots a sacred diamond known as the Moonstone from Tipu’s palace.

While the events of 1799 open the story, the main action is set half a century later, in 1848-50, when the diamond is bequeathed to Herncastle’s niece, Rachel Verinder. By that time, Britain had expanded its control throughout India, so that virtually the entire subcontinent was ruled either by the British directly or by states dependent on Britain. In 1849, the East India Company annexed the Punjab in the northwest, the last major region in India to remain independent. Yet less than a decade later, the British would be shocked by a stark demonstration of Indian resentment at foreign domination. In 1857, Indian troops, called sepoys, revolted against their British commanders. When the troops’ discontent was picked up and amplified by Indian society at large, the revolt grew into more than simply a military problem for the British. The British have referred to the unrest as the Great Mutiny; today, Indians call it their First War for Independence. Fighting was bloody, and atrocities were committed by both sides, including the well-publicized murders of hundreds of British women and children. Only after a protracted military campaign were the British able to restore control in 1859, but the now enfeebled East India Company was dissolved and henceforth India was ruled directly by the British government.

The rebellion had been caused, of course, by Britain’s assuming the role of superior power and, less obviously, by its insensitivity to Hindu customs. For example, orthodox Hindus were considered to be polluted if they crossed the sea, yet British commanders insisted on posting Indian troops overseas. In The Moonstone three determined Brahmins (Hindu priests) journey overseas to England to recover the diamond, which Collins describes as holding religious significance for them. By incurring this pollution, they thus willingly sacrifice their high status as Brahmins. Collins, writing a decade after the unrest of 1857-59, could have counted on many of his readers to recall its background, and understand the implications tied to the Brahmins’ actions. He used this and other details to increase the novel’s verisimilitude.

Victorian Britain and the outside world

Queen Victoria (ruled 1837-1901) gave her name to an era that saw dramatic advances for Britain both at home and abroad. While rapid changes brought prosperity at home, increasing power abroad, and the pride of an imperial nation to Britain, they also created social tensions, bleak social problems, and, for many, a reflexive fear of anything foreign. Like the British raj, considered the “jewel in the crown” of Britain’s worldwide empire, British society itself by the middle of the nineteenth century possessed a veneer of assurance and arrogance that overlaid deeper insecurities.

Historians commonly divide the Victorian era into three periods roughly spanning the length of Queen Victoria’s reign: early Victorian (about 1830 to 1850); middle Victorian (about 1850 to 1875); and late Victorian (about 1850 to 1900). Rapid industrialization, overcrowded cities, and economic dislocation made the early period one of social and political turbulence. This turmoil was expressed by two movements in particular: that of the Chartists, who agitated for political reform (such as abolishing the property qualification for Parliament); and the campaign to repeal the Corn Laws, which kept grain prices artificially high. The Chartists, whose petition to Parliament in 1839 was rejected despite having garnered over 1.2 million signatures, held huge demonstrations in London in 1842 and 1848. The demonstration in 1848 led many to fear a revolution in Britain similar to those occurring throughout Europe in that tumultuous year. For readers of The Moonstone, the character of the poor but fiery girl called Limping Lucy would have recalled this fear: “the day is not far off,” she declares, “when the poor will rise against the rich” (Collins, The Moonstone, p. 248). But the Corn Laws, which (like the laws to which Chartists objected) favored wealthy, aristocratic landowners at the expense of the poor, were repealed in 1849. Their repeal, along with growing economic prosperity in the 1850s, eased much of the unrest that dominated the 1840s.

Perhaps the biggest boost to the economy in the 1850s was the completion of a national rail system. By 1850 about 5,000 miles of track had been laid, reaching most parts of the country and allowing for rapid travel and vastly expanded commerce. The effects of rail transportation revolutionized life for everyone. For example, London newspapers could now be delivered overnight to Scotland; fresh foods could bring variety to diets in areas that had not changed eating habits for centuries. At the Verinder country home in Yorkshire, the remote setting of much of the novel, railway timetables are posted in the front hall for the convenience of guests returning to London. Steamships, too, likewise sped up sea travel, and were coordinated with trains for the convenience of international travelers. When Franklin Blake, the hero of The Moonstone, goes abroad, he takes a “tidal train,” a class of train flexibly scheduled to connect with a steamship leaving on the outgoing tide (The Moonstone, p. 250).

Further technological advances came rapidly in the two decades between the novel’s setting and its composition. Most significantly, improvements in the telegraph (invented earlier in the century) meant that by 1854, when lines across Europe were finished, messages that had taken weeks or even months could now be sent in seconds. By 1866 a transatlantic cable had linked Europe with North America. The Victorian world was shrinking rapidly—but the results were not always comforting. For example, the 1850s also brought the Crimean War, which was the first war to be covered by foreign correspondents. These innovative reporters took advantage of the improvements in communication to send firsthand reports from the front lines. In this war, which lasted for two years (1854-56)

INDIAN MYTHOLOGY AND THE MOONSTONE

In Indian mythology Chandra, or Soma, is the name of the Moon god. The moon gem, or the Chandrakanta, serves a purpose. It absorbs the rays of the moon, then transforms and emits them as cool, unadulterated moisture.

and pitted Britain and France against Russia, military disasters and gruesome casualties could thus be described with an immediacy that many found shocking. Rapid communication similarly allowed the Great Mutiny of 1857 to be widely publicized in Britain, leading to a growing public awareness not only of Britain’s imperial role, but also of the dangers inherent in it.

Crime and literature: “detective-fever.”

While crime rates in the Victorian era are thought to have been generally lower than in earlier times, they were higher in the 1840s than at any other time in the century. Urban growth (by 1850 half the nation’s population would live in cities) and economic dislocation had created a new concern for public safety. In 1842, the London Metropolitan Police, which had been established in 1829, set up a detective department called Scotland Yard after its original location. Staffing it were two inspectors and six sergeants. By the 1850s, other cities had begun forming their own police forces and crime rates dropped steadily for the rest the century.

As police constables became a familiar sight on city streets, improved communications and the growth of mass media such as newspapers, magazines, and books helped both to create and to satisfy a growing public interest in crime and law enforcement. Just as with so many other Victorian literary trends, Collins’s influential friend Charles Dickens led the way in 1850, writing two articles based on the exploits of a real-life police detective for his magazine Household Words. Dickens’s subject was one of Scotland Yard’s two original inspectors, Jonathan Whicher, whom he called Witchem in the articles. In 1860, amid great publicity, Whicher was called on to help solve the sensational Constance Kent murder case, in which the victim, a four-year-old boy named Francis Kent, had been found with his throat brutally slashed at his home in the small

SCOTLAND YAKD

The famed British police detective force was originally located at Great Scotland Yard, the sight where Scottish royalty were housed when visiting London. Scotland Yard was reorganized and expanded in 1878, when it established its Criminal Investigation Division [C.I.D.). Shortly thereafter, it was relocated, but the name “Scotland Yard” stuck despite the detective force’s moves to new quarters in 1890 and 1967.

village of Road in southwestern England. Whicher suspected the boy’s sister, Constance, but was unable to locate a nightgown belonging to her that he believed must have been stained with Francis’s blood. Without this key piece of evidence, Constance was acquitted, though in 1865 she confessed to the crime and to destroying the nightgown. Whicher’s reputation suffered further when he arrested an innocent man in a separate case the following year, and public opinion forced Whicher to retire in disgrace.

In the 1850s and 1860s, such widely followed cases created what one character in The Moonstone calls “detective-fever” (The Moonstone, p. 182). Collins himself followed the Constance Kent case carefully, and critics have noted several details that he incorporated into The Moonstone: a stained and missing nightgown is one of the novel’s central clues, for example, though it is stained with paint, not blood; and the novel’s professional detective, Sergeant Cuff, who like Whicher is wily and experienced, also proves to be fallible.

The Novel in Focus

Plot summary

The plot unfolds in a series of narratives, journal entries, and letters recorded by those characters in the tale who witnessed certain key events. A prologue purports to be taken from Herncastle family papers relating to the storming of Seringapatam in 1799, and to the subsequent theft of the Moonstone by Colonel John Herncastle. A large yellow diamond, the Moonstone was originally set in the forehead of a statue of the Hindu moon god before being stolen from its temple by a Mughal emperor and, much later, acquired by Tipu Sultan. Herncastle steals it from Tipu’s palace, though he knows that a curse supposedly hangs over anyone who lays hands on the famous diamond. He has also heard that the three Brahmin priests of the temple from which the Moonstone was originally taken, priests who are the descendants of the three original guardians, have dedicated their lives to recovering it.

The first and longest narrative begins in 1848 and is told by Gabriel Betteredge, the head servant at the Verinder house near Frizingham, on the Yorkshire coast. Lady Verinder, whose husband is deceased, is the younger sister of John Herncastle. As Betteredge relates, the household is expecting the arrival that evening of Franklin Blake, a young nephew of Lady Verinder’s, who has been studying abroad. That afternoon, the house is visited by three Indians dressed as traveling jugglers, whom Betteredge sends on their way. He also has to discipline one of the maids, Rosanna Spearman, a plain girl with a deformed shoulder who is unpopular with the other servants. She has left her work to go for a walk, claiming to need fresh air. Betteredge follows Rosanna to the Shivering Sand, a desolate patch of quicksand on the coast near the house that he knows is her favorite spot. While Betteredge and Rosanna sit talking at the Shivering Sand, they are surprised by the appearance of Franklin Blake, who has arrived at the house early and immediately sought out Betteredge. When Rosanna sees Blake, she blushes and awkwardly excuses herself.

Blake explains his early arrival. He has been followed in London for several days by “a certain dark-looking stranger” and thinks his watcher might be connected with the three jugglers Betteredge saw earlier that afternoon (The Moonstone, p. 82). Indeed, he suspects that the Indians are after the Moonstone, which he then shocks Betteredge by producing from his pocket. Herncastle, ostracized both by English society and by his own family because of his actions at Seringapatam, has left the diamond to his niece, Rachel Verinder, Lady Verinder’s young daughter. She is to take possession of it on her eighteenth birthday. Blake’s father, as Herncastle’s executor, has given Blake the task of delivering it to his cousin Rachel, whose birthday is approaching. Knowing the diamond’s past, Blake wonders if the spiteful Herncastle has deliberately left “a legacy of trouble and danger” to Rachel in revenge for his rejection by Lady Verinder and the rest of the family (The Moonstone, p. 88).

In the days leading up to Rachel’s birthday party, she and Blake spend time together painting a floral design on Rachel’s bedroom door. They finish the task on the afternoon of the party. Blake has a rival for Rachel’s attentions, however, in a third cousin, Godfrey Able white, who has also arrived several days before the party. The party itself is subdued, although Rachel is pleased with the diamond. The atmosphere worsens when Blake, who suffers from sleeplessness after quitting smoking, argues with Mr. Candy, a surgeon, over the effectiveness of modem medicine in dealing with such ailments. (A surgeon is addressed in Britain as Mister, while a physician is addressed as Doctor.) Another guest, Mr. Murthwaite, who has traveled extensively in India, identifies the three Indians (again seen nearby) as Brahmins, members of the highest priestly caste. Despite warnings, Rachel insists on wearing the valuable diamond and on keeping it that night in an unlocked drawer in her bedroom. The next morning, the Moonstone is gone.

When the local police superintendent proves unable to trace the missing diamond, Blake arranges for Lady Verinder to hire the celebrated Sergeant Richard Cuff of Scotland Yard. Cuff quickly rules out the Indians, whom the local superintendent had suspected, and directs his attention to a small smear on Rachel’s newly painted door. Questioning the members of the household, he establishes that the smear had to have been made between the time Rachel went to bed and 3 a.m., when the paint would have been completely dry. Therefore, it was likely made during the theft. Find the garment with a smear of paint, Sergeant Cuff declares, and it will lead to the thief. But a search of the house fails to turn up either a stained garment or the missing diamond.

While both Blake and Betteredge (who catches what he calls “detective-fever”) take an active interest in assisting the investigation, Rachel surprisingly appears uninterested, even obstructive. Furthermore, she seems inexplicably hostile to Blake for his efforts to uncover the thief. Cuff concludes that she has stolen the diamond herself to pay a secret debt of some sort. He suggests

KEY CHARACTERS IN THE MOONSTONE

she was assisted by Rosanna Spearman, who had been given her job despite a record as a thief, and who has acted suspiciously since the diamond’s disappearance. Rosanna, who has fallen hopelessly in love with Blake, drowns herself in the Shivering Sand. To protect her daughter, Lady Verinder dismisses Sergeant Cuff from the case. Closing her house in Frizingham, she takes Rachel to London, and the broken-hearted Franklin Blake embarks on a long voyage abroad. Thus ends Gabriel Betteredge’s narrative.

The story is then taken up by Drusilla Clack, another relative of the Verinders’ who was also present at the birthday party. Humorously portrayed as a hypocritical and interfering “Evangelical,” the pious Miss Clack lives in London, where she and Godfrey Ablewhite, whom she reveres, are active in a number of charitable causes. As Miss Clack relates, Ablewhite has been mysteriously attacked by an unknown assailant, who lures him into an empty apartment, ties him up, searches him, and then leaves. Also attacked in the same way is Mr. Septimus Luker, a London moneylender whom Rosanna Spearman had known, and from whom the attackers steal a receipt for “a valuable of great price” (The Moonstone, p. 264). When rumors spread in London society linking Ablewhite with Luker (to whom Ablewhite is thought to have pawned the diamond), Rachel is distressed. She declares that she positively knows her cousin Ablewhite to be innocent of the theft. Soon afterward, Lady Verinder dies from a heart condition, and Rachel agrees to marry Godfrey Ablewhite, whose father (Rachel’s uncle) has become her guardian. The Verinder family lawyer, Mr. Bruff, then contributes a brief narrative. He tells how he has accidentally learned that Ablewhite is deeply in debt and is only marrying Rachel for her money. Bruff informs Rachel, and she breaks the engagement. Consulting with Murthwaite, the guest who traveled to India, Bruff also concludes that the Indians, who seem to have been responsible for the attacks on Ablewhite and Luker, are planning to intercept the diamond when Luker takes it out of the bank where he has deposited it.

At this point Franklin Blake, returned from his travels, picks up the story. He calls on Rachel after arriving in England, but, suspecting him of stealing the diamond, she refuses to see him or to answer his letters. Deciding that the only way to overcome her enmity is to recover the diamond, Blake goes to the Verinder house at Frizington, in hopes that he and Betteredge can take up the investigation where they left off. Betteredge takes him to Rosanna’s friend, Limping Lucy, who gives him a letter that Rosanna had left with her. In the letter, Rosanna instructs Blake to go to the Shivering Sand, where she has secreted something that will explain her strange behavior before her suicide. Following her instructions, Blake and Betteredge go to the Sand and retrieve a watertight box in which Rosanna has secreted another letter and the missing stained nightgown. Blake is shocked to find that the nightgown is his own. The accompanying letter discloses Rosanna’s love for him and tells him that she had found the nightgown when straightening his room the morning after the theft. Realizing its significance, she had then hidden it to protect him from being discovered as the thief.

Confused and disturbed, Blake then returns to London where, with the connivance of Mr. Bruff, he contrives a meeting with Rachel. She tells him that she saw him take the Moonstone with her own eyes, and that she too has kept the secret to protect him. Now desperate for an explanation, Blake interviews the enigmatic Ezra Jennings, the surgeon Mr. Candy’s assistant, a terminally ill outcast who is shunned by the townspeople for his strange appearance. Jennings had saved Candy’s life the night of the party, when Candy returned from the Verinders’ with a high fever. The illness, which lasted days and almost killed the surgeon, impaired Candy’s memory, and Jennings took over Candy’s medical practice. While delirious with fever, Candy revealed that, smarting from the dinner argument with Blake, Candy had secretly slipped Blake a dose of opium as a joking rebuttal to Blake’s attack on the effectiveness of modern medicine. The opium, thought Candy, would prove his point by relieving Blake of the insomnia about which Blake complained.

Jennings, who had recorded Candy’s ravings and now reveals this intended joke to Blake, suggests that Blake, concerned for the Moonstone’s safety, might have unknowingly taken the diamond himself under the drug’s influence. Jennings also proposes that they reconstruct the conditions of that night as closely as possible to test his theory. The experiment is recorded in Jennings’s journal. Blake again quits smoking; and after Jennings gives him opium, Blake gets up in the night and takes a stand-in gem from Rachel’s unlocked drawer. He collapses before revealing what he did next, however, and remembers nothing of the incident the next morning. Rachel, who has agreed to be present for the experiment, loved him all along but had been heartbroken to believe him a thief.

Returning to London, Blake resumes the narrative, relating that in the meantime Mr. Bruff, the lawyer, has had Luker watched. The moneylender is seen to leave his house one morning accompanied by two guards. Blake and Bruff then hurry to Luker’s bank, from which they see him exit and pass something to a tall bearded man who looks like a sailor, and whom Bruffs assistant follows to a dockside inn. Sergeant Cuff, whom Blake has recalled to the case, accompanies Blake and Bruff to the inn the next morning, where they discover the sailor’s body in one of the rooms. When Cuff pulls off the fake beard, the body is revealed as Godfrey Ablewhite’s.

Cuff, having interrogated Luker, contributes a brief narrative that reconstructs the sequence of events. As Luker has revealed, Blake in his opium-induced stupor had entrusted Ablewhite with the Moonstone after taking it from Rachel’s room. Deeply in debt and leading a licentious double life, Ablewhite had kept the diamond to save himself from exposure and disgrace. He had pawned it to Luker, explaining how he had obtained it; despite his disguise, when he redeemed it from the moneylender, the Indians followed him to the inn, where they killed him and took back the Moonstone. Finally, in a letter from Murthwaite to Bruff, we learn that Murthwaite (traveling again in India) has witnessed the ceremony in which the Moonstone was restored to the forehead of the Hindu moon-god.

COLLINS AND OPIUM

Collins suffered from a painful condition called gout, for which he began taking opium before beginning The Moon stone. Opium was commonly prescribed for pain, as well as for a wide range of psychological ailments that the Victorians called “nervousness” or “hysteria.” Like Ezra Jennings, Collins soon became accustomed to doses that would kill another person; he would continue taking the drug until his death in 1889). Just as Jennings’s use of opium helped him deduce part of the mystery’s solution, Collins’s use contributed to his creation o& the puzzle, by offering personal experience of the drug’s effects.

Uneasy legacies. Critics have observed that the Indian elements in the story—the three Brahmins, and what Betteredge calls the “devilish Indian Diamond” itself—collectively constitute an alien threat that at first looms darkly over the cozy tranquility of the story’s English setting (The Moon stone, p. 88). The Indians’ menacing presence in the novel’s early pages would have struck a responsive chord with a readership in which deep fears and racial hatred remained fresh after the bloody events of 1857. Popular attitudes after the uprising of 1857 were expressed bluntly by Collins’s friend Charles Dickens, who wrote that if given the chance he would wipe the entire Indian race off the face of the earth.

But Collins’s reaction to India and what it represented was more measured and sympathetic than his friend’s. Indeed, it has been argued that the novel (particularly in its portrayal of the rapacious Herncastle) amounts to a biting and subversive indictment of British imperialism. British greed incites the Indians’ behavior, and the foreign threat turns out to be less dire than the domestic one. The Moonstone, John Herncastle’s uneasy legacy, is stolen by a second greedy and opportunistic Englishman, while the three ominously lurking Indians of the novel’s early pages end up representing such honorable ideals as duty and religious devotion.

Just as critics have suggested that The Moonstone challenged Britain’s imperial values, they have also seen the novel as questioning the values of British society at home. Most obviously, in the ludicrously self-righteous Miss Clack, Collins lampoons the hypocrisy of the do-gooder whose pious professions cloak less noble motives

THE DETECTIVE NOVEL

The Moonstone established many of the criteria for the classic English detective novel:

• A single mysterious crime in a remote country house
• Suspicion thrown on a number of characters in tum, after which an unlikely (or the least likely) suspect is shown to be guilty
• A bungled initial investigation, after which a famous detective is called in
• A mystery that follows the “rules of fair play” i.e. the reader encounters the same clues as the detectivels)

(Miss Clack, for example, affects disregard for Lady Verinder’s will, but secretly has her hopes set on a bequest). The novel’s villain, Godfrey Ablewhite, at first seems more genuinely to epitomize Victorian piety and respectability, though his hypocrisy too is progressively exposed to the reader. In contrast, Collins’s deepest sympathy seems reserved for the novel’s outcasts from respectable society, whose physical grotesqueness accompanies an essential sincerity: the deformed and unpopular Rosanna Spearman, tormented by her socially inappropriate love for Franklin Blake; and the sharp-minded but equally tormented Ezra Jennings, who ultimately performs the novel’s most impressive feat of deduction. Both reveal key parts of the story but die before it ends. The truth is their uneasy legacy in The Moonstone, just as greed is the uneasy legacy of a “civilized” empire.

Sources and literary context

In addition to the Constance Kent murder case, another real life crime also inspired parts of The Moonstone. In July 1861, a man named William Murray was lured to an address in London, attacked from behind, and shot in the head. Despite his wound, Murray resisted and mortally injured his assailant, whose name was William Roberts. While Murray at first claimed that Roberts was a complete stranger to him, it later appeared the two had quarreled over Murray’s wife. The case never attracted the wide attention of the Kent mystery, but it did receive ample coverage. Collins used its basic ingredients for the episode in which Ablewhite and Luker are lured to two London addresses and attacked by mysterious assailants about whom they claim to know nothing, but with whom they are in fact involved.

Collins took pains to be accurate in his details. His research sources included C. W. King’s Natural History, Ancient and Modern, of Precious Stones (1865) for diamonds and diamond lore; Theodore Hook’s Life of Sir David Baird (1832) for the storming of Seringapatam and the looting of Tipu Sultan’s palace by English officers; and the eighth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica for facts about diamonds and India. Collins also consulted John William Shaw Wyllie, who (like Murthwaite in the novel) was an experienced Indian traveler. Wyllie verified the authenticity of Collins’s portrayal of Hinduism, particularly the plausibility of suggesting that the three Brahmins would willingly pollute themselves by journeying overseas to recover a sacred object.

Along with Gothic and popular “sensation” novels, The Moonstone’s literary predecessors include the colorful Memoirs (1828-29) of Eugene François Vidocq (1775-1857), a French policeman who founded the first detective department in France, then audaciously organized a robbery and investigated it himself. Vidocq’s life inspired the first fictional detective, the French sleuth C. Auguste Dupin, who appears in several of Edgar Allen Poe’s short stories, including The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841), considered the earliest detective story. Vidocq is also thought to have been the inspiration for other short stories written in the 1860s by Emile Gaboriau and featuring a detective named Inspector Lecoq, who first appeared in 1866, two years before The Moonstone was published.

Reception

Victorian reviewers tended to dismiss The Moonstone as a mere puzzle story. For instance, the earliest review (by novelist Geraldine Jewsbury, writing in July 1868, just before the last installment of the serial) praised Collins’s “carefully elaborate workmanship” but decried the “somewhat sordid detective element” (Jewsbury in The Moonstone, p. 543). Another reviewer that same month compared The Moonstone contemptuously to crossword puzzles and anagrams, allowing that if readers liked that sort of thing they might find the novel rewarding. Apparently readers did like that sort of thing, for the circulation of All the Year Round surged during The Moonstone’s serialization from January to August 1868, and the three-volume edition of the novel (published in July 1868) sold well both in Britain and in the United States. The novel has never been out of print, testimony to its continued popularity.

Later critics proved more generous, particularly those who have written detective stories themselves. For instance, detective novelists Dorothy L. Sayers and J. I. M. Stewart both helped to boost Collins’s literary reputation in the first half of the twentieth century. No words of praise, however, are as often quoted as those of English poet T. S. Eliot, who, in his introduction to a 1928 edition of The Moonstone, called it “the first, the longest, and the best of modem English detective novels” (Eliot in The Moonstone, pp. 10-11).

—Colin Wells

For More Information

Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone. Ed. Steve Farmer. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 1999.

Hellar, Tamar. Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.

James, Lawrence. Raj. London: Little, Brown, 1997.

Lonoff, Sue. Wilkie Collins and His Victorian Readers: A Study in the Rhetoric of Authorship. New York: AMS, 1982.

Mitchell, Sally. Daily life in Victorian England. West-port, Conn.: Greenwood, 1996.

Newsome, David. The Victorian World Picture. London: John Murray, 1997.

Peters, Catherine. The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.

Reed, John R. “English Imperialism and the Unacknowledged Crime of Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone.” Clio 2 (1973): 281-90.