The Moonstone

Alexandra Lloyd

What role did 19th Century popular serial novels such as Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone play in British understandings of India?

When Wilkie Collins first wrote The Moonstone in 1868, it was not published in the form available today, but was published in instalments in a popular Victorian magazine, All the Year Round. Upon its first publication it was eagerly read by the general British public, for its readership not only included the ruling and upper classes, but the cost and availability meant that a copy would have a wide circulation amongst all members of a household. The tale’s images and ideas of India thus reached many social groups in British culture.

To Wilkie Collins, the gem, part of whose history we follow in The Moonstone, the novel of the same name, is the signifier of all things that humanity strives for, material and spiritual. He begins the novel by demonstrating that the history of the Moonstone gem is a history of thefts. In having his initial narrator state "that crime brings its own fatality with it" (p.6 Ch. IV of the prologue), Collins underscores the fact that nemesis attends every worldly expropriator of the Moonstone, which to its temporary European possessors is a bauble and a commodity but which to its faithful guardians, the Brahmins, is a sacred artefact beyond price.

The Moonstone is never really English or England's, for the novel begins with an account of its various thefts. It opens in India with Rachel Verinder’s Uncle Herncastle's purloining the gem in battle (the opening lines are specifically "written in India"(p.1)) and closes with Murthwaite, the famed fictional explorer's, account (dated 1850) of the restoration of the gleaming "yellow Diamond"(p.466) to the forehead of the Hindu deity of the Moon "after the lapse of eight centuries"(p.466, "The Statement of Mr. Murthwaite"). The date of Murthwaite's account of the restoration of the diamond may be ironic, for in 1850 a Sikh maharajah, exiled from Indian after the Anglo-Sikh War of 1848-9, presented a gem, which is thought to be the ...

... middle of paper ...

...l conciliation and transcendent faith if India were to arise from bloody, mutually destructive, strife and take her rightful place in the society of nations. Today, Collins's The Moonstone may be viewed not as a response to a national insurgency and/or European determination to keep the native in his place, but rather as a love story between two people who only come to see each other for what they are after misjudgements, misunderstandings, accidental and intended deceptions, and considerable self-sacrifice.

Bibliography

Page references to passages from The Moonstone come from the Oxford University Press, 1999 edition of the novel.

Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999.

Sutherland, John. “Introduction and A Note on the Composition” Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999.

Stewart, J. I. M. “A Note on Sources.” Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone. Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1966, rpt. 1973. Pp. 527-8.

Fraser, Antonia, ed. The Lives of the Kings and Queens of England. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1975.

Peters, Catherine. The King of the Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins. London, Minerva, 1991.