These full-page wood-engravings face the page of text illustrated, so that the reader encounters word and image simultaneously, "reading" one against the other throughout the complementary pages. For a volume containing 434 pages, the novel is hardly as abundantly illustrated as the American first edition, but introduces the reader to visualisations of all the principal characters, including the cousins on military service in India in Fraser's initial plate, the three Brahmins and their clairvoyant child (Fraser's third plate), Sergeant Cuff and the gardeners (Fraser's fourth plate), the Sergeant with his alterego, Betteredge, the butler (Fraser's fifth plate), Rachel Verinder, her mother, Godfrey Abelwhite, and the censorious Miss Clack (Fraser's seventh plate), and the male protagonist, Franklin Blake (Fraser's final two illustrations), and, indistinctly, the attorney, Mr. Bruff, watching from the shadows (Fraser's eighth plate). Significant by their absences are the anguished servant, Rosanna Spearman, Betteredge's daughter, Mr. Candy, and Ezra Jennings.
Related Materials
- "The Moonstone" and British India (1857, 1868, and 1876)
- Detection and Disruption inside and outside the 'quiet English home' in "The Moonstone"
- "Do you think a young lady's advice worth having?" — p. 94.
- The "Harper's Weekly" Illustrations for Wilkie Collins's "The Moonstone" (1868)
- Frontispiece: "He felt himself suddenly seized round the neck." Page 279.
Bibliography
Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone: A Romance. All the Year Round. 1 January-8 August 1868.
_________. The Moonstone: A Romance. Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization. With 63 illustrations. 1 January-8 August 1868.
_________. The Moonstone: A Romance. Illustrated by George Du Maurier and F. A. Fraser. London: Chatto and Windus, 1890.
_________. The Moonstone: A Romance. Illustrated by A. S. Pearse. London & Glasgow: Collins, 1910, rpt. 1930.
Leighton, Mary Elizabeth, and Lisa Surridge. "The Transatlantic Moonstone: A Study of the Illustrated Serial in Harper's Weekly." Victorian Periodicals Review Volume 42, Number 3 (Fall 2009): pp. 207-243. Accessed 1 July 2016. http://englishnovel2.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/files/2014/01/42.3.leighton-moonstone-serializatation.pdf
Last updated 25 July 2016