The Moonstone by
Wilkie CollinsWilliam Wilkie Collins was an English novelist, playwright, and author of short stories. He was very popular during the Victorian era and wrote 30 novels, more than 60 short stories, 14 plays, and over 100 non-fiction pieces...
is a 19th-century British
epistolary novelAn epistolary novel is a novel written as a series of documents. The usual form is letters, although diary entries, newspaper clippings and other documents are sometimes used. Recently, electronic "documents" such as recordings and radio, blogs, and e-mails have also come into use...
, generally considered the first detective novel in the English language. The story was originally serialized in
Charles DickensCharles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity and fame than had any previous author during his lifetime, and he remains popular, having been responsible for some of English literature's most iconic...
' magazine
All the Year RoundAll the Year Round was a Victorian periodical, being a British weekly literary magazine founded and owned by Charles Dickens, published between 1859 and 1895 throughout the United Kingdom. Edited by Dickens, it was the direct successor to his previous publication Household Words, abandoned due to...
.
The Moonstone and
The Woman in WhiteThe Woman in White is an epistolary novel written by Wilkie Collins in 1859, serialized in 1859–1860, and first published in book form in 1860...
are considered Wilkie Collins' best novels. Besides creating many of the ground rules of the detective novel,
The Moonstone also reflected Collins' enlightened social attitudes in his treatment of the Indians and the servants in the novel. Collins adapted
The Moonstone for the stage in 1877, but the production was performed for only two months.
The novel's title
The Moonstone of the title is a diamond (not to be confused with the semi-precious
moonstoneMoonstone is a sodium potassium aluminium silicate, with the chemical formula AlSi3O8.-Etymology:Its name is derived from a visual effect, or sheen, caused by light reflecting internally in the moonstone from layer inclusion of different feldspars....
gem). It gained its name from its association with the
Hindu god of the moonHindu religious literature is the large body of traditional narratives related to Hinduism, notably as contained in Sanskrit literature, such as the Sanskrit epics and the Puranas. As such, it is a subset of Nepali and Indian culture...
. Originally set in the forehead of a sacred statue of the god at Somnath, and later at Benares, it was said to be protected by hereditary guardians on the orders of
VishnuVishnu is the Supreme god in the Vaishnavite tradition of Hinduism. Smarta followers of Adi Shankara, among others, venerate Vishnu as one of the five primary forms of God....
, and to wax and wane in brilliance along with the light of the moon.
Plot outline
Rachel Verinder, a young Englishwoman, inherits a large Indian diamond on her eighteenth birthday. It is a legacy from her uncle, a corrupt English army officer who
served in IndiaCompany rule in India refers to the rule or dominion of the British East India Company on the Indian subcontinent...
. The diamond is of great religious significance as well as being extremely valuable, and three
HinduHindu refers to an identity associated with the philosophical, religious and cultural systems that are indigenous to the Indian subcontinent. As used in the Constitution of India, the word "Hindu" is also attributed to all persons professing any Indian religion...
priests have dedicated their lives to recovering it. The story incorporates elements of the legendary origins of the
Hope DiamondThe Hope Diamond, also known as "Le bleu de France" or "Le Bijou du Roi", is a large, , deep-blue diamond, now housed in the Smithsonian Natural History Museum in Washington, D.C. It is blue to the naked eye because of trace amounts of boron within its crystal structure, but exhibits red...
(or perhaps the Orloff Diamond). Rachel's eighteenth birthday is celebrated with a large party, whose guests include her cousin Franklin Blake. She wears the Moonstone on her dress that evening for all to see, including some Indian jugglers who have called at the house. Later that night, the diamond is stolen from Rachel's bedroom, and a period of turmoil, unhappiness, misunderstandings and ill-luck ensues. Told by a series of narratives from some of the main characters, the complex plot traces the subsequent efforts to explain the theft, identify the thief, trace the stone and recover it.
Plot summary
Colonel Herncastle, an unpleasant former soldier, brings the Moonstone back with him from India where he acquired it by theft and murder during the
Siege of SeringapatamSiege of Seringapatam can refer to:* Siege of Seringapatam during the Third Anglo-Mysore War* Siege of Seringapatam during the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War...
. Angry at his family, who shun him, he leaves it in his will as a birthday gift to his niece Rachel, thus exposing her to attack by the stone's hereditary guardians, who, legend says, will stop at nothing to retrieve it.
Rachel wears the stone to her birthday party, but that night it disappears from her room. Suspicion falls on three Indian jugglers who have been near the house; on Rosanna Spearman, a maidservant who begins to act oddly and who then drowns herself in a local
quicksandQuicksand is a colloid hydrogel consisting of fine granular matter , clay, and water.Water circulation underground can focus in an area with the optimal mixture of fine sands and other materials such as clay. The water moves up and then down slowly in a convection-like manner throughout a column...
; and on Rachel herself, who also behaves suspiciously and is suddenly furious with Franklin Blake, with whom she has previously appeared to be enamored, when he directs attempts to find it. Despite the efforts of Sergeant Cuff, a renowned detective, the house party ends with the mystery unsolved, and the protagonists disperse.
During the ensuing year there are hints that the diamond was removed from the house and may be in a London bank vault, having been pledged as surety to a moneylender. The Indian jugglers are still nearby, watching and waiting. Rachel's mother dies, increasing her grief and isolation, and she first accepts and then rejects a marriage proposal from her cousin Godfrey Ablewhite, a philanthropist who was also present at the birthday dinner and whose father owns the bank near Rachel's old family home. Finally Franklin Blake returns from travelling abroad and determines to solve the mystery. He first discovers that Rosanna Spearman's behaviour was due to her having fallen in love with him.
She found evidence (a paint smear on his nightclothes) that convinced her that he was the thief and concealed it in order to save him, confusing the trail of evidence and throwing suspicion on herself. In despair at her inability to make him acknowledge her despite all she had done for him, she committed suicide, leaving behind the smeared gown and a letter he did not receive at the time because of his hasty departure abroad.
Now believing that Rachel suspects him of the theft on Rosanna's evidence, Franklin engineers a meeting and asks her. To his astonishment she tells him she actually saw him steal the diamond and has been protecting his reputation at the cost of her own even though she believes him to be a thief and a hypocrite. With hope of redeeming himself he returns to Yorkshire to the scene of crime and is befriended by Mr. Candy's assistant, Mr. Ezra Jennings. They join together to continue the investigations and learn that Franklin was secretly given
laudanumLaudanum , also known as Tincture of Opium, is an alcoholic herbal preparation containing approximately 10% powdered opium by weight ....
during the night of the party (it was given to him by the doctor, Mr. Candy, who wanted revenge on Franklin for criticizing medicine); it appears that this, in addition to his anxiety about Rachel and the diamond and other nervous irritations, caused him to take the diamond in a narcotic trance, in order to move it in a safe place. A re-enactment of the evening's events confirms this, but how the stone ended up in a London bank remains a mystery only solved a year after the birthday party when the stone is redeemed. Franklin and his allies trace the claimant to a seedy waterside inn, only to discover that the Indians have got there first: he is dead and the stone is gone. Under the dead man's disguise is none other than Godfrey Ablewhite, who is found to have
embezzledEmbezzlement is the act of dishonestly appropriating or secreting assets by one or more individuals to whom such assets have been entrusted....
the contents of a trust fund in his care and to have been facing exposure soon after the birthday party. The mystery of what Blake did while in his drugged state is solved: he encountered Ablewhite in the passageway outside Rachel's room and gave the Moonstone to him to be put back in his father's bank, from which it had been withdrawn on the morning of the party to be given to Rachel. Seeing his salvation, Ablewhite pocketed the stone instead, and pledged it as
suretyA surety or guarantee, in finance, is a promise by one party to assume responsibility for the debt obligation of a borrower if that borrower defaults...
for a loan to save himself temporarily from insolvency. When he was murdered, he was on his way to
AmsterdamAmsterdam is the largest city and the capital of the Netherlands. The current position of Amsterdam as capital city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands is governed by the constitution of August 24, 1815 and its successors. Amsterdam has a population of 783,364 within city limits, an urban population...
to have the stone cut; it would then have been sold to replenish the plundered trust fund before the beneficiary inherited. Cuff realized all of this independently after being dismissed from the case, but was reluctant to accuse Ablewhite without evidence or an official mandate.
The mystery is solved,
Rachel and Franklin marryCousin marriage is marriage between two cousins. In various jurisdictions and cultures, such marriages range from being considered ideal and actively encouraged, to being uncommon but still legal, to being seen as incest and legally prohibited....
, and in an epilogue from Mr. Murthwaite, a noted adventurer, the reader learns of the restoration of the Moonstone to the place where it should be, in the forehead of the idol.
Characters
- Rachel Verinder – young heiress at the centre of the story; on her 18th birthday she inherits the gem of the title.
- Lady Verinder – her mother, a wealthy widow devoted to her only child.
- Colonel Herncastle – Lady Verinder's brother, suspected of foul deeds in India, including the theft of the Moonstone.
- Gabriel Betteredge – the Verinders' head servant, first narrator.
- Penelope Betteredge – his daughter, also a servant in the household.
- Rosanna Spearman – second housemaid, ex-thief, suspicious and tragic character.
- Drusilla Clack – a poor cousin of Rachel Verinder, an unlikeable Christian evangelist and meddler, second narrator.
- Franklin Blake – adventurer, another cousin and suitor.
- Godfrey Ablewhite – philanthropist, another cousin and suitor.
- Mr. Bruff – family solicitor, third narrator.
- Sergeant Cuff – famous detective with a penchant for roses.
- Dr. Candy – the family physician, loses his sanity to a fever.
- Ezra Jennings – Dr. Candy's unpopular and odd looking assistant, suffers from an incurable illness and uses opium to control the pain.
- Mr. Murthwaite – a noted adventurer who has traveled frequently in India; he provides the epilogue to the story.
- The Indian jugglers – disguised Hindu Brahmins who are determined to recover the diamond.
Literary significance
The book is widely regarded as the precursor of the modern mystery and suspense novels.
T. S. EliotThomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
called it "the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels.. in a genre invented by Collins and not by Poe", and by
Dorothy L. SayersDorothy Leigh Sayers was a renowned English crime writer, poet, playwright, essayist, translator and Christian humanist. She was also a student of classical and modern languages...
as "probably the very finest detective story ever written". In "The Victorian Age in Literature" G. K. Chesterton calls it "Probably the best detective tale in the world." The plot shows some parallels with an earlier murder, mystery story by the English novelist
Sarah BurneySarah Harriet Burney was an English novelist, the daughter of musicologist and composer Charles Burney, and half-sister of the novelist and diarist Frances Burney .- Life :Sarah Burney's mother, Elizabeth Allen, was the second wife of...
The Hermitage (1839): the return of a childhood companion, the sexual symbolism of defloration implied in the crime, and almost catatonic reactions of the heroine to it, for instance but
The Moonstone introduces a number of elements that were to become classic attributes of the twentieth-century detective story:
- English country house robbery
- An "inside job"
- red herrings
Red herring is an idiomatic expression referring to the rhetorical or literary tactic of diverting attention away from an item of significance...
- A celebrated, skilled, professional investigator
- Bungling local constabulary
- Detective enquiries
- Large number of false suspects
- The "least likely suspect"
- A rudimentary "locked room
The locked room mystery is a sub-genre of detective fiction in which a crime—almost always murder—is committed under apparently impossible circumstances. The crime in question typically involves a crime scene that no intruder could have entered or left, e.g., a locked room...
" murder
- A reconstruction of the crime
- A final twist in the plot
Franklin Blake, the gifted amateur who eventually solves the mystery, is an early example of the
gentleman detectiveThe gentleman detective is a type of fictional character. He has long been a staple of crime fiction, particularly in detective novels and short stories set in Britain in the Golden Age...
. The highly competent Sergeant Cuff, the London policeman called in from
Scotland YardScotland Yard is a metonym for the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police Service of London, UK. It derives from the location of the original Metropolitan Police headquarters at 4 Whitehall Place, which had a rear entrance on a street called Great Scotland Yard. The Scotland Yard entrance became...
(whom Collins based on the real-life Inspector Jonathan Whicher who solved the Constance Kent murder), is not a member of the gentry, and is unable to break Rachel Verinder's reticence about what Cuff knows to be an inside job. The social difference between Collins' two detectives is nicely shown by their relationships with the Verinder family: Sergeant Cuff befriends Gabriel Betteredge, Lady Verinder's steward (chief servant), whereas Franklin Blake eventually marries Rachel, her daughter.
The Moonstone represents Collins's only complete reprisal of the popular "multi-narration" method that he had previously utilised to great effect in
The Woman in WhiteThe Woman in White is an epistolary novel written by Wilkie Collins in 1859, serialized in 1859–1860, and first published in book form in 1860...
. The technique again works to Collins's credit: the sections by Gabriel Betteredge (steward to the Verinder household) and Miss Clack (a poor relative and religious crank) offer both humour and pathos through their contrast with the testimony of other narrators, at the same time as constructing and advancing the novel's plot.
One of the features that made
The Moonstone such a success was the sensationalist depiction of
opiumOpium is the dried latex obtained from the opium poppy . Opium contains up to 12% morphine, an alkaloid, which is frequently processed chemically to produce heroin for the illegal drug trade. The latex also includes codeine and non-narcotic alkaloids such as papaverine, thebaine and noscapine...
addiction. Unbeknownst to his readership, Collins was writing from personal experience. In his later years, Collins grew severely addicted to
laudanumLaudanum , also known as Tincture of Opium, is an alcoholic herbal preparation containing approximately 10% powdered opium by weight ....
and as a result suffered from paranoid delusions, the most notable being his conviction that he was constantly accompanied by a
doppelgangerThe syndrome of subjective doubles is a rare delusional misidentification syndrome in which a person experiences the delusion that he or she has a double or Doppelgänger with the same appearance, but usually with different character traits and leading a life of its own. Sometimes the patient has...
he dubbed "Ghost Wilkie".
It was Collins's last great success, coming at the end of an extraordinarily productive period which saw four successive novels become best-sellers. After
The Moonstone he wrote novels containing more overt social commentary, which did not achieve the same audience. A heavily fictionalized account of Collins' life while writing
The Moonstone forms much of the plot of
Dan SimmonsDan Simmons is an American author most widely known for his Hugo Award-winning science fiction series, known as the Hyperion Cantos, and for his Locus-winning Ilium/Olympos cycle....
' 2009 novel,
DroodDrood is a 2009 novel written by Dan Simmons. It is a fictionalized account of the last five years of Charles Dickens' life told from the view point of Dickens' friend and fellow author Wilkie Collins. The title comes from Dickens' unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood...
.
Although
Moonstone is usually seen as the first detective novel, a number of critics suggest that Charles Felix's (pseudonym for Charles Warren Adams) lesser known
Notting Hill MysteryThe Notting Hill Mystery is an English-language detective novel written by an anonymous author using the pseudonym "Charles Felix", with illustrations by George du Maurier...
(1862–63) preceded
The Moonstone by a number of years and first used techniques that would come to define the genre.
Film, radio, and television adaptations
In 1934, the book was made into a critically acclaimed American film,
The Moonstone- Cast :*David Manners as Franklyn Blake*Phyllis Barry as Ann Verinder *Gustav von Seyffertitz as Carl Von Lucker*Jameson Thomas as Godfrey Ablewhite*Herbert Bunston as Sir John Verinder*Charles Irwin as Inspector Cuff...
by Monogram Pictures Corporation. Adapted to the screen by Adele S. Buffington, the film was directed by
Reginald Barker and starred
David MannersDavid Manners was a Canadian - American film actor.Born Rauff de Ryther Daun Acklom in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Manners came to Hollywood at the beginning of the talking films revolution after studying acting with Eva Le Gallienne, and acting on stage with Helen Hayes...
,
Charles IrwinCharles Irwin VC was born in Manorhamilton, County Leitrim and was an Irish recipient of the Victoria Cross, the highest and most prestigious award for gallantry in the face of the enemy that can be awarded to British and Commonwealth forces.-Details:Irwin was approximately 33 years old, and a...
, and
Phyllis BarryPhyllis Barry was an English film actress. Born in Leeds, England, Barry appeared in over 40 films between 1932 and 1947.-Career:...
.
The New York TimesThe New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
said of it: "
The Moonstone is a prime example of what can be accomplished on a small budget with a little extra time and care."
On 11 March 1945, "The Moonstone" was episode number 67 of the radio series,
The Weird Circle.
In 1959, the
BBCThe British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
adapted the novel into
a television serialThe Moonstone is a 1959 British television serial adapted from the Wilkie Collins novel The Moonstone. The series was made by the BBC and ran in 1959 over seven episodes.-Cast and characters:...
starring James Hayter.
In 1972The year 1972 in television involved some significant events.Below is a list of television-related events in 1972.For the American TV schedule, see: 1972-73 American network television schedule.-Events:...
it was remade again in the United Kingdom, featuring
Robin EllisRobin Ellis is an English actor best known for his role as Captain Ross Poldark in 29 episodes of the BBC classic series Poldark, adapted from a series of books by the late British author, Winston Graham...
, and aired in the United States on PBS's
Masterpiece TheatreMasterpiece is a drama anthology television series produced by WGBH Boston. It premiered on Public Broadcasting Service on January 10, 1971, making it America's longest-running weekly prime time drama series. The series has presented numerous acclaimed British productions...
. In 1996 it was remade a third time, also in the United Kingdom, for television by the BBC and
Carlton TelevisionCarlton Television was the ITV franchise holder for London and the surrounding counties including the cities of Solihull and Coventry of the West Midlands, south Suffolk, middle and east Hampshire, Oxfordshire, south Bedfordshire, south Northamptonshire, parts of Herefordshire & Worcestershire,...
in partnership with U.S. station
WGBHWGBH-TV, channel 2, is a non-commercial educational public television station located in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. WGBH-TV is a member station of the Public Broadcasting Service , and produces more than two-thirds of PBS's national prime time television programming...
of Boston, Massachusetts, airing again on
Masterpiece Theatre. It starred
Greg WiseGreg Wise is an English actor and producer. He has appeared in many British television works, as well as several feature films .- Early life :...
as Franklin Blake and
Keeley HawesKeeley Hawes is an English actress and model, known for many television roles. She is best known for her roles as Zoe Reynolds in Spooks and Alex Drake in Ashes to Ashes and Lady Agnes in the remake of Upstairs, Downstairs...
as Rachel Verinder.
In 2011
BBC Radio 4BBC Radio 4 is a British domestic radio station, operated and owned by the BBC, that broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programmes, including news, drama, comedy, science and history. It replaced the BBC Home Service in 1967. The station controller is currently Gwyneth Williams, and the...
serialised the story in four hour-long episodes in the
Classic SerialThe Classic Serial is a strand on BBC Radio 4 in which classics of English literature are adapted into series of one-hour dramas. It is broadcast twice weekly on BBC Radio 4, first from 3:00-4:00pm on Sunday, then repeated on 9:00-10:00pm the next Saturday....
slot.