By Issy Packer
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins was first published in 1868 and was serialized in All the Year Round, the British literary magazine founded by Charles Dickens. T. S. Eliot described the novel as “the first and greatest of English detective novels.” Despite such plaudits from a literary giant, The Moonstone seems to have faded from modern memory with the emergence of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot.
The Moonstone follows the story of Rachel Verinder, a young woman who inherits a large Indian diamond called the Moonstone from her uncle, a corrupt British officer who served in India. On her 18th birthday, the diamond is stolen from Rachel’s room and a detective called Sergeant Cuff is assigned to the case. In The Moonstone, Sergeant Cuff was based on a real detective, Jack Whicher who was one of the first Scotland Yard detectives. The novel subsequently follows the character’s at times misguided but ultimately successful efforts to recover the lost jewel.
When writing the novel, Collins drew on the real-life emergence of the modern police force and other contemporaneous fiction. During the 18th and 19th century, newspapers reported openly on crime and court cases. But innovations in policing contributed to an upsurge in public interest. Prior to the 19th century, policing was mainly associated with private guards and the military. Modern police forces–ostensibly run in service to the public rather than to individual monarchs or noblemen–utilizing new forensic methods to solve crimes stoked imaginations across Europe, Britain, and eventually the United States.
There have been some disputes on the assertion that The Moonstone was the first English detective novel and that Collins was the father of the detective genre. Before Collins published his novel, authors such as Edgar Allen Poe and Charles Dickens influenced the popular genre of detective fiction.
Poe wrote detective fiction before Collins published The Moonstone. The Purloined Letter was the last of his three detective stories which first appeared in The Gift: A Christmas and New Year’s Present for 1845, published in December, 1844 in Philadelphia. It was later included in the 1845 collection Tales by Edgar A. Poe. It was one of the many stories written by Poe which included the famous French detective, C. Auguste Dupin. Poe used the emergence of the police force in France to help his inspiration in detective fiction, Collins did the same but in England.
Dickens wrote short stories that often included elements of detective fiction. One of these stories was Bleak House, a serialized novel published between March 1852 and September 1853. Dickens created Inspector Bucket in Bleak House. Inspector Bucket is one of the earliest known fictional detectives, and Dickens even modeled him after the mannerisms and appearance of real-life Scotland Yard detective Charles Field.
Dickens describes Bucket as “mildly studious in his observation of human nature”. The suggestion that a detective should be educated in reading people is widely accepted in detective fiction, however Collins subverts this in The Moonstone as his character Sergeant Cuff borders on aloof. While Sergeant Cuff is described within the novel as confident and intelligent, he makes several mistakes, coming to the wrong conclusion by accusing Rachel Verinder of being the thief. However, unlike many detectives in later fiction, like Hercule Poirot, Cuff does not solve the mystery alone, he has help along the way, including from another detective and aspiring doctor and researcher, Ezra Jennings.
Ezra Jennings can be seen as a detective of sorts. An aspiring doctor and researcher, the character has a real desire to figure out what is going; “[h]ere again there is a motive under the surface; and here again I fancy I can find it out”. In his essay The ‘Shivering Sands’ of Reality: Narration and Knowledge in Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone, Lewis Roberts states that Jennings “represents the larger tendency of The Moonstone to use scientific and realistic discourses and paradigms to confute objectivity, resulting in a sense of the […] incomprehensible, the realms of knowledge outside of conventional understanding”. It is in this way that Jennings can be seen as the detective of the novel as he is able to comprehend what is going on outside the conventional understanding of the supposed detective, Cuff. The element of the unhelpful police force was a quality that Collins introduced and inspired in later detective novels.
The Moonstone can be seen as not just a detective novel but as being influenced by a mix of many genres, one of them being the sensationalist novel. The Woman in White, Collins’ first published novel in 1860, initiated this subgenre of fiction. Sensation fiction was popular during the 1860s and 1870s, however it was often looked down upon by many readers for “preaching to the nerves instead of the judgment [sic]” H.L. Manse said in the essay ‘Sensation Novels’ in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 18: Victorian Novelists After 1885.
The sensation novel was largely written by women and written for women, such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret. The sensation novel differed from the other genres, such as the gothic genre, as it was supposedly domestic. Lyn Pykett states something similar in her collection of work The Sensation Novel: From the Woman in White to the Moonstone in that sensation fiction “was seen by many as a form of creeping contagion, the means by which the world of the common streets, and the violent or subversive deeds of criminals were carried across the domestic threshold to violate the sanctity of the home”. The shocking and sensational events intrude on bourgeois life, which is seen in The Moonstone by introducing the foreign elements of the Indian diamond in the idyllic, English home. From the sensation to the crime narrative, Collins is bringing the reality of the Empire home.
Imperialism was one of the main focuses of The Moonstone and the context of imperialism plays an important part in the novel. The use of imperialism emphasizes the Englishness of the novel as it draws on the contexts of the time. William Hughes states in his novel Historical Dictionary of Gothic Literature that in The Moonstone, “the presence of a diamond plundered from India upsets the routine of an English country house, and the Indian guardians of the stone become a constant and fearful presence in the imaginations of domestic servants, educated householders, police alike.” The characters are fearful and unwelcoming of the presence of a foreign country. The use of imperialism invading the typical English setting creates foreignness, this is seen when Matthew Bruff believes that “[i]f the Moonstone had been in my possession, this Oriental gentleman would have murdered me”. This offensive assumption expresses ethnocentric English fears endemic to the time period.
The intrusion of India further mirrors the invasion of Britain in India, disrupting the natural order in the novel as well as in reality. This sense of foreignness for the reader and for the characters creates, as William Hughes states, a “colonized Other” that is invading the “colonizing nation”. This sense of binary opposition of the self vs. the other – with the Other being the foreign Indian natives – creates a distinct separation between the English and the Indians. The position of otherness then becomes the position of subjugation and oppression. The inclusion of imperialism enforces the view that this novel is a typical “English” novel as it is dealing with issues and the contexts that England dealt with during this period.
Imperialism in English crime fiction has been utilized in other novels following The Moonstone, including Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four. Like much contemporaneous literature in the 19th century, Collins’ successors in crime fiction utilized the foreignness of imperialism and the Empire in contrast with the pastoral scenes of England. However, Collins was the first to bring this sense of “otherness” to detective fiction.
Collins’ influence of the detective genre is seen through other elements alongside the admittedly outdated imperialist attitudes. Many of these elements seen in The Moonstone were utilized in later detective fictions by many authors, one example of this is the bungling of local constabulary. In The Moonstone Sergeant Cuff makes an appearance after the local police mishandle the case, similarly Sherlock Holmes is not even a proper detective, preferring to refer to himself as a “consulting detective” who is employed by Scotland Yard to aid with resolving cases.
Another trope that Collins introduced and has since been utilized by countless crime writers is his technique of having multiple, and at times, unreliable narrators. Modern day crime writers like Ann Cleeves and Lucy Foley have both used this element in their writing as well as the most renowned unreliable narrator of detective fiction, Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Collins first used this trope in his sensation novel The Woman in White and he uses it again in The Moonstone to cast doubt on his characters, keeping the audience guessing until the last minute.
A reconstruction of the crime and a final twist in the plot is now a certainty in many detective novels. Hercule Poirot is famous for using intuition and imagination to put himself in the murderer’s shoes and reconstruct the crime scene thus allowing all of the facts to be laid out and the solution to make sense to the reader. Collins first employed this technique in The Moonstone by having Franklin Blake and Ezra Jennings attempt to recreate the events that led to the jewel being stolen. This reconstruction of the crime scene leads the other characters, as well as the reader, to the final twist in the plot which ultimately reveals who is behind the crime.
While Egar Allen Poe may have pioneered detective fiction with early short stories like The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Collins was the first author to put the serialized extracts of The Moonstone into a printed book, forming the first true detective novel.
Collins created many of the stereotypes we see today in detective fiction, weaving together elements from other genres and using current events and attitudes to create a detective novel like no other. With 27 novels, more than 50 short stories and 15 plays, it’s time that Collins started to get the credit he deserved.
