"The Moonstone" — "Second period. The Discovery of the Truth. (1848-1849.) Third Narrative. Contributed by Franklin Blake," Ch. VIII: "He started impulsively to his feet and looked at me."

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He started impulsively to his feet and looked at me

Harper & Bros. house illustrators; unsigned.

Wood engraving

17.6 cm high by 11.5 cm wide

Only illustration for Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone: A Romance in Harper's Weekly (27 June 1868), centre-page, page 405. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]

Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.

[You may use these images without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the photographer and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]

Illustrations courtesy of the E. J. Pratt Fine Arts Library, University of Toronto, and the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, University of British Columbia.

Passage Illustrated

The little doctor sat restlessly picking at the points of his fingers all the time I was speaking. His dim watery eyes were fixed on my face with an expression of vacant and wistful inquiry very painful to see. What he was thinking of, it was impossible to divine. The one thing clearly visible was that I had failed, after the first two or three words, in fixing his attention. The only chance of recalling him to himself appeared to lie in changing the subject. I tried a new topic immediately.

"So much," I said, gaily, “for what brings me to Frizinghall! Now, Mr. Candy, it’s your turn. You sent me a message by Gabriel Betteredge —"

He left off picking at his fingers, and suddenly brightened up.

"Yes! yes! yes!” he exclaimed eagerly. "That's it! I sent you a message!"

"And Betteredge duly communicated it by letter," I went on. "You had something to say to me, the next time I was in your neighbourhood. Well, Mr. Candy, here I am!"

"Here you are!” echoed the doctor. “And Betteredge was quite right. I had something to say to you. That was my message. Betteredge is a wonderful man. What a memory! At his age, what a memory!"

He dropped back into silence, and began picking at his fingers again. Recollecting what I had heard from Betteredge about the effect of the fever on his memory, I went on with the conversation, in the hope that I might help him at starting.

It's a long time since we met," I said. "We last saw each other at the last birthday dinner my poor aunt was ever to give."

"That’s it!" cried Mr. Candy. "The birthday dinner!" He started impulsively to his feet, and looked at me. A deep flush suddenly overspread his faded face, and he abruptly sat down again, as if conscious of having betrayed a weakness which he would fain have concealed. It was plain, pitiably plain, that he was aware of his own defect of memory, and that he was bent on hiding it from the observation of his friends. — "Second Period, Third Narrative, Contributed by Franklin Blake," Chapter 8, p. 405.

Commentary

Collins, it seems, simplifies nineteenth-century medical history to defend the attitudes of the offended Mr. Candy who is shown in contrast to the "new" ideas and approaches of the younger Ezra Jennings. Candy echoes the traditional and, by 1868, outmoded views of medical practice, maintaining the stereotyped image of the general practitioner as a mere dispenser of drugs with little diagnostic or clinical abilities. — Ira B. Nadel, 244.

Conveniently for withholding vital information from the reader and prolonging the story, Mr. Candy's fever has deprived him of his memory, so that he has very little memory of the night of Rachel Verinder's birthday dinner. Thus, although the old physician had told Betteredge that he had something significant to communicate to Franklin Blake, he cannot recall what that was. At the very curtain of the chapter, just as Franklin Blake is leaving the physician's practice, whom should he stumble upon (of course!) but the physician's assistant, who the reader guesses may be able to shed some light on what Dr. Candy had wanted to tell Blake:

"I am afraid, sir, you find Mr. Candy sadly changed?"

I turned round, and found myself face to face with Ezra Jennings. [406]

The circumstances of the interview at first glance seem mundane enough: a slightly over-furnished Victorian sitting-room with pictures and bric-a-brac, none of which Collins describes — and displyed prominently on the small table, in the very centre of the composition (distracting the reader from regarding the patient Franklin Blake, seated, and the slightly agitated, white-haired physician, supporting himself with one hand on the table) is a bell jar containing ornamental vegetation. Although there is apparently nothing else inside the jar, visual inspection is pointless because the scene is hermetically sealed — rather like Mr. Candy's specific memories of the birthday dinner. Perhaps the metaphorical stout door (like the real door behind the elderly doctor) that prevents him from accessing those memories is his guilt over what he did to the unsuspecting bachelor who had derided his medicine and physic generally.

Related Materials

The Moonstone and British India (1857, 1868, and 1876)
Detection and Disruption inside and outside the 'quiet English home' in The Moonstone
Illustrations by F. A. Fraser for Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone: A Romance (1890)
Illustrations by John Sloan for Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone: A Romance (1908)
Illustrations by Alfred Pearse for The Moonstone: A Romance (1910)
The 1944 illustrations by William Sharp for The Moonstone (1946).

Last updated 16 September 2016