Wilkie Collins is best known for his works The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone, both of which reflected aspects of Collins’s own experience.
By the time The Moonstone appeared serially between January and August 1868 in the periodical All the Year Round, Collins had become a regular user of laudanum and had begun experimenting with opium. The use of drugs by one character in The Moonstone was one of several components that captured readers’ imagination, along with murder, theft of an incredibly expensive jewel, suicide, a love affair, the exoticism of East Indian priests, superstition, an admirable detective, and even humor. Collins made an enormous contribution to detective fiction with the novel.
One of the first English fiction writers to use a detective as a main character, Collins focused his novel on the moonstone, an incredible diamond stolen from a Hindu holy place by British colonel John Herncastle, with a murder involved. Narrated by a number of witnesses, the story follows the fate of the gem and those who would possess it.
The numerous references to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in the first chapters prepare readers for an adventure tale, but what follows is nothing like the stranded Crusoe’s tale of survival. The good-natured narrator Mr. Betteredge constantly seeks wisdom from the novel, feeling a kinship with another man treading a threatening and strange path, totally unfamiliar to him.
Mr. Betteredge, a servant in the Verinder family, highlights the challenges of telling a good story straight through, without diversion, as if Collins himself were remarking on the challenges to writing.
According to the account, when the colonel bequeaths the moonstone to Rachel Verinder, his niece, Franklin Blake, his nephew, travels with it to Yorkshire, planning a presentation for Rachel’s 18th birthday. Blake tells Betteredge that he believes the colonel had sent the diamond on purpose to curse the Verinder household, where his sister had refused to see him in the past.
As might be predicted, the stone disappears before it can reach its destination. The first investigator on the scene is dull-witted enough to provide sharp contrast to the clever but sad Sergeant Cuff, brought into the case from London.
Investigators suspect three Hindus sighted in the locale, their presence allowing Collins to emphasize the exotic and to play on reader prejudices regarding the mysterious Orient and its inhabitants. Those prejudices had been earlier revealed, hidden in Betteredge’s claim that “Now I am not a sour old man. I am generally all for amusement, and the last person in the world to distrust another person because he happens to be a few shades darker than myself.”
Betteredge continues the humor foreshadowed by his name when he asks the reader, regarding the possibility that the family might be the focus of a vendetta by East Indians, “Who ever heard the like of it—in the nineteenth century, mind; in an age of progress, and in a country which rejoices in the blessings of the British constitution?”
Also suspected are Rachel and her servant, Rosanna Spearman, a former thief who eventually commits suicide. During Blake’s visit, he meets another houseguest named Godfrey Ablewhite, a verse-writing philanthropist to whom Rachel becomes engaged. Betteredge describes him as, “a barrister by profession; a ladies’ man by temperament; and a Good Samaritan by choice. Female benevolence and female destitution could do nothing without him. Maternal societies for confining poor women; Magdalen societies for rescuing poor women; strong-minded societies for putting poor women into poor men’s places, and leaving the men to shift for themselves—he was vice-president, manager, referee to them all.”
Although Cuff has done his best, Franklin Blake must assume the investigation in order to make progress on the case. In a twist suggesting Collins’s self-consciousness regarding his drug usage, Blake, an opium user, discovers through a local doctor assistant, Ezra Jennings, that he himself had absconded with the jewel while under the influence of opium.
That lead proves a red herring, and Cuff returns to the scene, establishing that Ablewhite is the actual thief. However, he never makes an arrest, as Ablewhite receives his just dessert, killed by a group of Hindus who reclaim the moonstone.
Collins’s book enjoyed a wild popularity and established a trend in detective stories, influencing works to follow. His good friend Charles Dickens wrote The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), left uncompleted at his death, adopting Collins’s method and including gruesome opium dreams and an investigator of murder. The Moonstone remains available in print and electronic form.
Bibliography
Grinstein, Alexander. Wilkie Collins: Man of Mystery and Imagination. Madison, Conn.: International Universities Press, 2003.
Phillips, Walter Clark. Dickens, Reade, and Collins: Sensation Novelists; a Study in the Conditions and Theories of Novel Writing in Victorian England. 1919. Reprint, New York: Russell & Russell, 1967.
Categories: British Literature, Crime Fiction, Detective Novels, Literature, Mystery Fiction, Novel Analysis
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