First English detective novel:THE MOONSTONE

Introduction:Life of Wilkie Collins

               William Wilkie Collins was born in 1824,the son of William Collins,a painter and member of the Royal Academy.He was named after his father and his godfather,Sir David Wilkie,a distinguished Scottish painter.Collins’s upbringing was comfortably middle-class,but his education somewhat unconventional:his parents believed travel to be as important as schooling,and took him away from school in 1836 to tour the Continent for almost two years.Wilkie found the experience enjoyable but unsettling,and when he finally left school at the age of seventeen,he had little inclination toward a career.For a time he dabbled in commerce,and in 1846 began to study law.His main interest,however,was writing:his first book,a biography of his father,was published in 1848,and his first novel,Antonina,in 1850.

          

                 In the following year he met Charles Dickens(1812-70):it was to be the start of a long and fruitful friendship,extending to 1870,the year of dicken’s death.The year they met,Dickens was editor of Household Words,a magazine which,typically for the mid-nineteenth century,published novels in serial installments.It was through Collins’s association with Dickens that the publication of several of his novels,including The Moonstone,was arranged.In 1856 Collins joined the staff of Household Words,and in the same year travelled with Dickens to Paris.There,in a little bookstall,he discovered an account of certain famous French crimes,Recucil des causes celebres,on which he drew for the plots of some of his novels.Of these,the most famous is The Woman in White(1860),which was published serially in All the Year Round,the magazine Dickens founded after a quarrel with his publishers brought Household Words to an end.

                   

                   It was roughly at this time-in about 1859-that Collins formed a relationship with caroline Graves,a woman of whom little is now known.She and Collins lived together for some years,but never married.In 1868,she left him to marry a man named Joseph Clow,but returned to Collins in the early seventies and remained his mistress until his death in 1889.While estranged from Caroline,Collins entered into a liaison with another young woman,Martha Rudd,who bore him three illegitimate children.Little is known of her ,either,for Collins took pains to conceal his two irregular relationship from all but his most intimate friends.

                       

                      In 1862 Collins developed a condition known in the nineteenth century as rheumatic gout,which caused him great pain in his legs,feet and eyes.To alleviate the pain began to take opium,usually in the form of laudanum.As time passed,his dependence on the drug increased;it was particularly great as episodes of The Moonstone began to appear in All the Year round in 1868,for only two weeks after the first installment,with the discovery that his mother was dying,Collin’s illness became especially acute.He was so unwell for some months that he was unable to write and had to dictate portions of his novel to a secretary.At first he engaged a young man to take dictation,but he and a number of others hired subsequently found Collins’s cries of pain so distressing that they were obliged to leave.Finally he found a young woman able to disregard his suffering,who successfully recorded a number of The Moonstone’s  installment.In order to sleep at night,Collins took larger and larger doses of laudanum,and completed the last part of the novel largely under its influence.’When it was finished,’he told a friend  ,’I was not only pleased and astonished at the finale,but did not recognize it as my own.’Franklin Blake,a semi-autobiographical character in the novel,similarly acts under the influence of opium without remembering what he did.The horrors of addiction,as described by another character,Ezra Jennings,were no doubt known to Collins at first hand.

                       By 1870,the year of Dickens’s death,Collins’s dependence on opium was complete.By 1875,he was drinking a wine glass of laudanum every evening before retiring,an amount that would have been lethal to anyone who had not built up resistance to its effects.The Woman in White(1860) was written prior to his addiction and The Moonstone(1868) in its early stages.These are his greatest novels;the ones written afterwards show a marked decline in quality directly ascribable to opium.Collins died in 1889;though he is mentioned in various memoirs.His life has been most fully recorded by Kenneth Robinson In Wilkie Collins:biography(1951),and by Nuel Pharr Davis in The Life of Wilkie Collins(1956).

SUMMARIES OF THE NOVEL THE MOONSTONE

                       The novel opens in India in 1799 with an account of the Moonstone,a sacred Hindu diamond guarded by three Brahmin priests.During the British attack on Seringapatam,Colonel Herncastle murders the guardians and steals the diamond.

                      In his will Herncastle leaves the diamond to his niece,Rachel Verinder,with instructions that it is to be presented to her next birthday.Shortly after the Colonel’s death in 1848,Rachel’s cousin, Franklin blake,is given the task of delivering the diamod to her at the Verinders’ house in Yorkshire.Blake gives her the Moonstone as instructed,but is concerned that three Indians who have earlier visited the house will attempt to steal it.At the dinner held on the evening of Rachel’s birthday,there is a dispute between Blake and the local doctor,Mr.Candy,over the practice of medicine and Blake’s refusal to take drugs to help him sleep.Afterwards,the Indians appear and perform a juggling act for the guests;Mr.Murthwaite,a traveler who knows India well,tells blake that jugglers are Brahmins in disguise.The following morning the Moonstone is missing.

   

                     The local police are asked to investigate,but are so incompetent that Blake arranges for a London detective,Sergeant Cuff,to take over the case.Cuff establishes that the thief must have a mark of paint on the garment he or she was wearing when the crime was committed.Although he fails to discover the garment,Cuff concludes that Rachel has hidden the Moonstone and intends to sell it with the help of Rosanna Spearman,a servant formerly imprisoned for theft.But Rosanna kills herself for unrequited love of Blake,and Rachel denies having the diamond;Cuff is dismissed with the case still unsolved,having refused blake’s offer of marriage,Rachel goes to London;blake goes abroad.

       

                 Shortly afterwards,another of rachel’s cousins,Godfrey Ablewhite,is attacked and searched by three Indians.A money-lender named Luker is also attacked and a receipt stolen from him stating that Luker has deposited a valuable gem at his bank.Though it appears that the gem is the Moonstone and Godfrey the thief,Rachel declares that she knows Godfrey to be innocent.Later she agrees to marry him,but breaks the engagement after learning that he is chiefly interested in her money.

           

                   In the spring of 1849 Blake returns to England from the continent.Rachel refuses to see him,and he resolves to find out who stole the moonstone.He returns to Yorkshire to find a letter written by Rosanna before her death,directing him to a secret hiding-place.Here he discovers his own nightgown with a mark of paint on it,and another letter from Rosanna explaining that for love of him she has hidden the evidence of his guilt.Blake cannot believe that he stole the Moonstone.He confronts Rachel and learns that she saw him take it.Hoping to find an explanation for his unremembered actions,he decides to interview each of the birthday guests in turn.Mr.Candy,the doctor,has been ill and has lost his memory,but his assistant,Ezra Jennings,provides Blake with some valuable help.Jennings has kept a record of Mr.Candy’s delirium which reveals that the doctor secretly drugged Blake on the evening of the birthday dinner to prove to him that drugs would indeed help him to sleep.Now convinced that he took the Moonstone in an opium-induced trance,Blake still has no proof of his moral innocence.Jennings suggests an experiment:the conditions preceding the dinner will be duplicated,and Blake drugged again;witness will then observe his behaviour.

                    

                   The experiment is carried out,watched by Jennings,Rachel and a Lawyer,Mr.Bruff.Blake takes the mock diamond used in the experiment,but drops it on the floor and falls asleep shortly afterwards.He is seen to be innocent and is reconciled with Rachel,but the Moonstone is still missing;the only hope of finding it now lies in watching Luker.On returning to London,blake finds that Luker has gone to his bank,possibly to withdraw the Moonstone from the vault.Acting quickly,Blake and Mr.Bruff arrange for him to be followed when he emerges;in the event,Luker seems to pass something to several people,including a dark-skinned sailor who is seen to take lodgings in Lower Thames Street.The sailor is evidently intending to leave for Rotterdam on the following day.Blake and Sergeant Cuff(who has rejoined the case)hurry to the lodging-house,but find on arrival that the Moonstone is gone,and that the sailor has been murdered.The sailor turns out to be Godfrey Ablewhite in disguise.

                          

                    It is later discovered that Godfrey,in urgent need of a large sum of money,saw Blake pick up the Moonstone in Rachel’s room,and took it away from him.The Indians escape;Mr.Murthwaite later reports from India that he has seen the Moonstone restored to its sacred shrine.