A cry inside hurried me into a room which appeared to serve as an armoury. . .
F. A. Fraser
Wood engraving
13.9 x 8.6 cm
Second illustration for Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone: A Romance in the Chatto and Windus Edition (1890), facing p. 4.
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
While I was still vainly trying to establish order, I heard a frightful yelling on the other side of the courtyard, and at once ran towards the cries, in dread of finding some new outbreak of the pillage in that direction.
I got to an open door, and saw the bodies of two Indians (by their dress, as I guessed, officers of the palace) lying across the entrance, dead.
A cry inside hurried me into a room, which appeared to serve as an armoury. A third Indian, mortally wounded, was sinking at the feet of a man whose back was towards me. The man turned at the instant when I came in, and I saw John Herncastle, with a torch in one hand, and a dagger dripping with blood in the other. A stone, set like a pommel, in the end of the dagger's handle, flashed in the torchlight, as he turned on me, like a gleam of fire. — "The Prologue," III, p. 4.
As the story opens at the conclusion of the siege of Seringapatam, India, in 1799, Collins's arrogant English aristocrat Colonel John Herncastle, obsessed with the possibility of acquiring the legendary gemstone in battle, approaches the sultan's treasury to steal the fabled yellow diamond. Finding his way blocked by the three Brahmins charged with attempting to regain the scared gem from the court of the Moslem potentate, Mahmoud of Ghizni, who stole it from the Hindu temple, Herncastle slays the guardians, and thus brings upon himself and his family a terrible curse:
The dying Indian sank to his knees, pointed to the dagger in Herncastle's hand, and said, in his native language — "The Moonstone will have its vengeance yet on you and yours!" He spoke those words, and fell dead on the floor. — "The Storming of Seringapatam (1799) Extracted from a Family Paper," p. 4.
Although the great social illustrator George Du Maurier provided a frontispiece for the edition, this is the first of F. A. Fraser's eight wood engravings for the 1890 edition of the novel. Even more lurid and Sensational is the initial realisation of this moment in Harper's Weekly for 4 January 1868 by an anonymous American artist working in the style of Harper and Brothers' house artist John Maclenan, who had illustrated both Dickens's A Tale of Two and Great Expectations "lavishly" for that large-format American weekly magazine. Although Harper's house illustrator (or perhaps, as M. E. Leighton and Lisa Surridge contend, a pair of house illustrators) provides an even more dramatic realisation of the same scene, "The Moonstone will have its vengeance yet on you and yours." (Harper's, 4 January 1868, p. 5), the later British edition (1910, rpt. 1930) merely depicts in its frontispiece the seizure of Godfrey Abelwhite by the mid-nineteenth-century trio of Brahamins: muted violence without bloodshed for Edwardian readers.
In F. A. Fraser's rendering of the scene, the third Brahmin is still pleading for his life as Colonel Herncastle's cousin, the narrator of "The Prologue," with a uncertain expression enters the room by parting the curtain, his sabre advanced. Herncastle himself, bareheaded (perhaps to suggest his departure from military discipline) stares downward at Brahamin, whose raised finger (centre) may betoken a warning. The officer grips the dagger with the gemstone in its hilt in his right hand, menacing the unarmed supplicant, as he holds aloft torch in his left, his sword still by his side. A curious effect is achieved by the circle of arms on the wall, immediately behind the colonel's head, suggesting a sort of demonic or bellicose halo. Dressed in a uniform consistent with the period of the Napoleonic wars, Herncastle possesses a fine figure and intellectual physiognomy, intended perhaps to balance the threatening gesture he makes with the dagger. The Eastern setting is implied both by the Persian carpet, lower right, and the unsheathed scimitar, lower left, which the Brahmin might at any moment grab from the floor to defend himself against the European assailant whose uniform implies that he is acting in the interests of his nation, rather than out of personal greed.
Left: The original serial illustration in which Colonel Herncastle is about to murder the last Brahmin in the Moghul armoury as he curses the Englishman's line, "The Moonstone will have its vengeance yet on you and yours!" (4 January 1868). Centre: A. Pearse's frontispiece which foreshadows the three priests' restraining Godfrey Ablewhite in order to recover the diamond, He felt himself suddenly seized round the neck (1910). Right: William Sharp's study of the obsessed young officer, Colonel Herncastle in the armoury (uncaptioned, 1946). [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone: A Romance. with sixty-six illustrations. Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization. Vol. 12 (1868), 4 January through 8 August, pp. 5-503.
Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone: A Romance. All the Year Round. 1 January-8 August 1868.
_________. The Moonstone: A Novel. With 19 illustrations. Second edition. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1874.
_________. The Moonstone: A Romance. Illustrated by George Du Maurier and F. A. Fraser. London: Chatto and Windus, 1890.
_________. The Moonstone. With 19 illustrations. The Works of Wilkie Collins. New York: Peter Fenelon Collier, 1900. Volumes 6 and 7.
_________. The Moonstone: A Romance. With four illustrations by John Sloan. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1908.
_________. The Moonstone: A Romance. Illustrated by A. S. Pearse. London & Glasgow: Collins, 1910, rpt. 1930.
_________. The Moonstone/span>. Illustrated by William Sharp. New York:Doubleday, 1946.
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
Vann, J. Don. "The Moonstone in All the Year Round, 4 January-8 1868." Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: Modern Language Association, 1985. Pp. 48-50.
Last updated 20 September 2016
