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- This well-known historical event, the storming of Seringapatam, provided Collins with an exotic origin for his tale, which begins when a fictional British officer, Colonel John Herncastle, loots a sacred diamond known as the Moonstone from Tipu’s palace.
www.encyclopedia.com/arts/culture-magazines/moonstone
The Moonstone: A Romance by Wilkie Collins is an 1868 British epistolary novel. It is an early example of the modern detective novel, and established many of the ground rules of the modern genre. Its publication was started on 4 January 1868 and was completed on 8 August 1868.
Oct 6, 2016 · Not ‘just’ a crime story but, in parallel, a powerful romance, The Moonstone is also an astonishingly modern commentary on Colonialism, the English class system, religion and the position of...
- Events in History at The Time of The Novel
- The Novel in Focus
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The British Raj
Britain’s presence in India began in the seventeenth century, when the English East India Company established a handful of coastal trading posts (called “factories”) at sites from Surat in the west (1619) to Calcutta in the east (1690). Only in the middle of the eighteenth century, however, with the breakup of India’s Mughal Empire into warring states, did British influence begin to extend inland from the coast. In attempting to improve the East India Company’s commercial and strategic positi...
Victorian Britain and the outside world
Queen Victoria (ruled 1837-1901) gave her name to an era that saw dramatic advances for Britain both at home and abroad. While rapid changes brought prosperity at home, increasing power abroad, and the pride of an imperial nation to Britain, they also created social tensions, bleak social problems, and, for many, a reflexive fear of anything foreign. Like the British raj, considered the “jewel in the crown” of Britain’s worldwide empire, British society itself by the middle of the nineteenth...
INDIAN MYTHOLOGY AND THE MOONSTONE
In Indian mythology Chandra, or Soma, is the name of the Moon god. The moon gem, or the Chandrakanta, serves a purpose. It absorbs the rays of the moon, then transforms and emits them as cool, unadulterated moisture. and pitted Britain and France against Russia, military disasters and gruesome casualties could thus be described with an immediacy that many found shocking. Rapid communication similarly allowed the Great Mutiny of 1857 to be widely publicized in Britain, leading to a growing pub...
Plot summary
The plot unfolds in a series of narratives, journal entries, and letters recorded by those characters in the tale who witnessed certain key events. A prologue purports to be taken from Herncastle family papers relating to the storming of Seringapatam in 1799, and to the subsequent theft of the Moonstone by Colonel John Herncastle. A large yellow diamond, the Moonstone was originally set in the forehead of a statue of the Hindu moon god before being stolen from its temple by a Mughal emperor a...
KEY CHARACTERS IN THE MOONSTONE
she was assisted by Rosanna Spearman, who had been given her job despite a record as a thief, and who has acted suspiciously since the diamond’s disappearance. Rosanna, who has fallen hopelessly in love with Blake, drowns herself in the Shivering Sand. To protect her daughter, Lady Verinder dismisses Sergeant Cuff from the case. Closing her house in Frizingham, she takes Rachel to London, and the broken-hearted Franklin Blake embarks on a long voyage abroad. Thus ends Gabriel Betteredge’s nar...
COLLINS AND OPIUM
Collins suffered from a painful condition called gout, for which he began taking opium before beginning The Moon stone. Opium was commonly prescribed for pain, as well as for a wide range of psychological ailments that the Victorians called “nervousness” or “hysteria.” Like Ezra Jennings, Collins soon became accustomed to doses that would kill another person; he would continue taking the drug until his death in 1889). Just as Jennings’s use of opium helped him deduce part of the mystery’s sol...
Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone. Ed. Steve Farmer. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 1999. Hellar, Tamar. Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic. New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 1992. James, Lawrence. Raj. London: Little, Brown, 1997. Lonoff, Sue. Wilkie Collins and His Victorian Readers: A Study in the Rhetoric of Authorship. New York:...
Aug 4, 2013 · The Moonstone was all I could have hoped for. A mysterious, cursed jewel, wrested from India, only to be stolen later from a great British mansion.
Oct 22, 2020 · The British colonizers clearly hear the tale in this way, as to them, the Moonstone is nothing but a “fanciful story” (Collins 13). Only John is taken in by the tale, and even he has no respect for the diamond’s cultural significance.
Wilkie Collins based his character Sergeant Cuff on a real celebrated Victorian Detective Inspector Jack Whicher.
Oct 7, 2016 · Published: 7 October 2016. The charismatic Franklin Blake realises he can only win the heart of his true love, the beautiful and independent Rachel Verinder, if he finds the thief.
