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THE MOONSTONE

Wilkie Collins

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Introduction

Preface

Preface to a New Edition

Prologue: The Storming of Seringapatam (1799)

Part 1 First Period

Chapter 1 The Loss of the Diamond (1848)

Part 2 Second Period

Chapter 2 The Discovery of the Truth (1848–1849)

Epilogue

Chapter 3 The Finding of the Diamond

Classic Literature: Words and Phrases Adapted from the Collins English Dictionary

About the Author

History of Collins

Copyright

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

In the year 1928, when the boom in “serious” detective-novel writing which began round about the first world war was nearing its height, and the “art and science” of it was being very seriously discussed, an eminent detective novelist, in a forty-five page introduction to a vast collection of stories, let fall the opinion that “The Moonstone is probably the finest detective story ever written.” Until that date, Wilkie Collins had been slightly regarded by connoisseurs, unless they were specialists in lesser Victorian fiction—“In the British Museum catalogue,” discovered the shocked author of this encomium, “only two studies of this celebrated mystery-monger are listed: one is by an American, and the other by a German.” Thereafter, however, he became great; he was almost canonised as the direct ancestor of Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Thorndyke, Hercule Poirot, Lemmy Caution, and all the tribe.

It is interesting, therefore, to observe that Collins himself did not think of The Moonstone as a detective story at all. This was not because the genre had not yet come into existence. The solution of a crime by the exercise of pure ratiocination on the part of a single mind had been set out in classic form twenty years before by Edgar Allan Poe in The Murders in the Rue Morgue—in which, incidentally, the character-scheme of Dupin plus adoring chronicler set the convenient pattern which was repeated in Holmes plus Watson, Poirot plus Hastings, and many other subsequent combinations. In France, also, the roman policier was developing fast in the hands of Gaboriau and Du Boisgobey. Collins, if he had wanted to write, “the finest detective story,” had no lack of models; but he did not. What he himself thought of the intention of his own novel—and he presumably knew what he meant to do—he set out in the preface:

“The attempt made, here, is to trace the influence of character on circumstances. The conduct pursued, under a sudden emergency, by a young girl (Rachel Verinder) supplies the foundation on which I have built this book.”

He goes on to say that he has endeavoured to make his subsidiary characters behave as they would have behaved; and adds that his account of the “physiological experiment”—the dosing of Franklin Blake with laudanum in order to induce him to repeat his sleep-walking actions on the night of the disappearance of the Moonstone—is based on a careful study of books and of living authorities. Clearly what interested the author of The Moonstone was not the detail of the theft of the gem and the subsequent tracking down of those responsible, but the effect of the whole series of events on the behaviour of his characters. That is to say, he was writing a novel with a plot, not a cross-word puzzle.

There are, of course, elements in The Moonstone which have since become classic detective-story-components—so classic, indeed, that later writers seeking to avoid monotony have drawn especial attention to the fact that they are not using the established formula. There is the very stupid policeman, in this case Superintendent Seegrave, who is a worthy ancestor of Lestrade, Inspector Japp, and of all the police officers whom Dr. Thorndyke bewildered in his day. There is the crime brought home, after suspicion has been well distributed to the most unlikely persons; although, on the other hand, Collins is scrupulously fair and makes no attempt to confuse the reader by presenting the real criminal as a person too attractive to be mistrusted. There are some clues, notably the paint-stained nightgown, though the paint-stained nightgown does not solve the mystery; it is, in fact, not much more use to Sergeant Cuff than a blood-stained nightgown was to that unfortunate Detective Whicher whom some suppose to have been the real life model for the Sergeant. (The Constance Kent case, as a matter of fact, except for the incident of the nightgown, bears practically no resemblance to the plot of The Moonstone.) Finally, there is the clear attempt to build up Sergeant Cuff into a “character,” by stressing his peculiar physical appearance and his reiterated interest in the growing of roses. This might legitimately be regarded as a foreshadowing of the long array of detectives noted for personal idiosyncrasies—Sherlock Holmes above all, but including also Lord Peter Wimsey, with his collector’s mania, the blind Max Carrados of Ernest Bramah, Baroness Orczy’s Old Man in the Corner, who fiddled with string, and a dozen others, as well as some whose distinguishing characteristic is proudly stated to be that of possessing none whatever.

The creation of an idiosyncratic and therefore easily-memorised detective is one of the established tricks of the trade, enabling the detective to last out a course of thirty to fifty novels, and so to fix himself in the public’s mind that at the circulating library counter the inveterate asks for “the new Poirot” or whatever it may be. Sophisticated moderns may, however, observe that Sergeant Cuff’s roses are rather over-stressed, and have very little relevance to the matter in hand; and, more devastatingly, that Sergeant Cuff, though doing in the course of the book, some pretty detection, was quite wrong in his conclusions, and did not solve the mystery in this, his first recorded case. He does not appear, in The Moonstone, likely to earn his creator the modest competence which writers of detective stories expect by solving twenty or thirty problems in the future. He is no omniscient, no Great Brain—Poe’s Dupin is a far more plausible prototype for the twentieth-century paladins. Sergeant Cuff is what his creator intended him to be, a character in his own right, a policeman playing a part in a story of real people with a mystery at its heart.

This type of story was extremely common in the mid-Victorian era—a fact which the sudden glorification of The Moonstone tends to obscure. The Victorians loved a mystery, or a crime, or both, set in the ordinary development of plot. The greatest of them all has made his contribution in the unsolved Mystery of Edwin Drood; but few people appear to remember nowadays how many of the popular Victorian novels had a mystery (often involving a policeman) as their main or subsidiary plot. Leaving aside other books of Collins’ own, such as No Name or Armadale, we may turn to Trollope and note, among many possible candidates, Is He Popenjoy?, a mystery of inheritance, the murder of Mr. Bonteen, which takes up so much of the space of Phineas Redux, Orley Farm, and the theft story in the Last Chronicle of Barset.

Let us go a little further afield. Mrs. Henry Wood is chiefly known, to this generation, for the sensational sentimentalities of East Lynne—itself in some sort a mystery novel. But a very much better book of hers—The Channings—which deserves a revival, contains within its 450 pages no fewer than three mysteries. It begins with the problem of a chorister’s surplice found stained with ink, to the great disgrace of the cathedral school—it is only close to the end of the book that this ill-deed is finally brought home to the most disagreeable of a disagreeable family, Gerald Yorke. It continues with the theft of a twenty-pound note, for which the noble Arthur Channing long bears the blame—the situation being further confused by speculation as to how Hamish Channing, Arthur’s brother, was suddenly in a position to pay off his small scale creditors; and further chronicles the complete disappearance of Charley, the youngest Channing, after having been frightened by a bogus ghost in the cathedral cloisters. It must be admitted that the eminent authoress, having landed herself with a slight over-plus of plot, shows a lamentable lack of interest in Charley Channing, only restoring him to life, with a minimum of explanation, in time for the happy reunion at the end of the book; also that Mr. Butterby, the representative of the law, is exhibited as singularly incompetent. Nevertheless, The Channings is a novel which, like The Moonstone, traces “the influence of character on circumstances,” and particularly of characters in contact with crime. The long Johnny Ludlow series, by the same author, is also very much concerned with crime and its detection and (or) punishment; and to enter yet more respectable precincts, it should be remembered that Charlotte Yonge, whose saga-volumes of Victorian family life now fetch such high second-hand prices, devoted the whole of one book, The Trial, to a murder-mystery, and that a large part even of The Daisy Chain turns on the questions “who inked the school-master’s book?” and “will Norman May’s character be re-established?”