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"The Moonstone." — from Harper's 1874 volume edition."
type-set
8.5 cm long by 5.4 cm wide (3 ⅜ by 2 ⅛ inches).
The Moonstone from Harper's 1874 volume edition" — "First Period. Loss of the Diamond (1848)." Chapter 11, page 90. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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The illustrations appearing here are courtesy of the E. J. Pratt Fine Arts Library, University of Toronto, and the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, UBC.
Lord bless us! it was a Diamond! As large, or nearly, as a plover's egg! The light that streamed from it was like the light of the harvest moon. When you looked down into the stone, you looked into a yellow deep that drew your eyes into it so that they saw nothing else. It seemed unfathomable; this jewel, that you could hold between your finger and thumb, seemed unfathomable as the heavens themselves. We set it in the sun, and then shut the light out of the room, and it shone awfully out of the depths of its own brightness, with a moony gleam, in the dark. — "First Period: The Loss of the Diamond (1848), The Events related by Gabriel Betteredge, house-steward in the service of Julia, Lady Verinder," Harper's Weekly, 25 January 1868, Chapter 9, p. 76.
As the first narrator of The Moonstone explains, it is to keep the God of the Moon out of the hands of the Sultan and his followers that three Brahmins remove it from the temple just before the attack. They take it Benares, where Vishnu the Preserver appears to them in a dream, commanding that the Moonstone be watched night and day, and prophesying ruin for anyone who steals it. The idol now has a temple of its own. But it falls victim to a second Mohammedan raid at the beginning of the eighteenth century, when the followers of Aurungzebe destroy the shrines at Benares. The idol is "broken in pieces," and in due course the stone from its forehead becomes an ornament in the handle of Sultan Tippoo's dagger. Bearing out Vishnu's prophecy, Tippoo is killed in 1799, during the British assault on his fortress at Seringapatam. — Burgan, 260-261.
The enigmatic image of the oversized diamond, the crescent moon, and a building with an onion-dome on the banks of what might be the sacred Ganges may be analeptic, taking the reader back to the history of The Moonstone when it adorned the forehead of the Moon God in the temple of Siva at Somnauth. However, the illustration may well be proleptic, pointing the reader to the verey close of the novel, when the three Brahmins have restored the Moonstone to the statue of the deity on his antelope throne in a new temple, at Somnauth, as reported by Mr. Murthwaite, the Indian traveller, in 1850:
The curtain between the trees was drawn aside, and the shrine was disclosed to view.
There, raised high on a throne — seated on his typical antelope, with his four arms stretching towards the four corners of the earth — there, soared above us, dark and awful in the mystic light of heaven, the god of the Moon. And there, in the forehead of the deity, gleamed the yellow Diamond, whose splendour had last shone on me in England, from the bosom of a woman's dress!
Yes! after the lapse of eight centuries, the Moonstone looks forth once more, over the walls of the sacred city in which its story first began. How it has found its way back to its wild native land — by what accident, or by what crime, the Indians regained possession of their sacred gem, may be in your knowledge, but is not in mine. You have lost sight of it in England, and (if I know anything of this people) you have lost sight of it for ever.
So the years pass, and repeat each other; so the same events revolve in the cycles of time. What will be the next adventures of the Moonstone? Who can tell? — "Epilogue III. The Statement of Mr. Murthwaite (1850)," p. 491.
The sequence of illustrations between Part 1 and Part 5 shows the diamond first in the forehead of the god, then in the pommel of a dagger wielded against an Indian by a white man (both figure 1), then in the breast of an Englishwoman’s dress (fig. 5), each time highlighted by white space but never as markedly as in the first illustration, this glow symbolically marking its right place in Indian religious and cultural life. Perhaps the most memorable visual image of the novel confirms this reading: the chapter head to Part 6 depicts a wholly extradiegetic scene, a huge diamond in a night landscape (fig. 7). Here, the stone is aligned with the religious order of the Moon God (represented by the symbol of the crescent moon) and with Indian culture (represented by the Taj Mahal-like dome in the right corner of the otherwise deserted landscape). This extradiegetic visual scene strongly naturalizes the rightness of the Indians' quest to return the diamond to its cultural and religious home. — Leighton and Surridge, p. 230.
Burgan, William M. "Masonic Imagery in The Moonstone and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Wilkie Collins to the Forefront: Some Reassessments. Ed. Nelson C. Smith and Reginald C. Terry. New York: AMS Press, 1995. Pp. 101-148.
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. 5-529.
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 66 illustrations. Vol. 12 (1 January-8 August 1868), pp. 5-503.
_________. The Moonstone: A Romance. Illustrated by George Du Maurier and F. A. Fraser. London: Chatto and Windus, 1890.
_________. The Moonstone, Parts One and Two. The Works of Wilkie Collins, vols. 5 and 6. New York: Peter Fenelon Collier, 1900.
_________. The Moonstone: A Romance. Illustrated by A. S. Pearse. London & Glasgow: Collins, 1910, rpt. 1930.
_________. The Moonstone. Illustrated by William Sharp. New York: Doubleday, 1946.
Gregory, E. R. "Murder in Fact." The New Republic. 22 July 1878, pp. 33-34.
Karl, Frederick R. "Introduction." Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone. Scarborough, Ontario: Signet, 1984. Pp. 1-21.
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
Lonoff, Sue. Chapter 7, "The Moonstone and Its Audience." Wilkie Collins and His Readers: A Study of the Rhetoric of Authorship. New York: AMS Press, 1982. Pp. 170-230.
Nayder, Lillian. Unequal Partners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, & Victorian Authorship. London and Ithaca, NY: Cornll U. P., 2001.
Peters, Catherine. The King of the Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins. London: Minerva, 1991.
Reed, John R. "English Imperialism and the Unacknowledged crime of The Moonstone. Clio 2, 3 (June, 1973): 281-290.
Stewart, J. I. M. "A Note on Sources." Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966, rpt. 1973. Pp. 527-8.
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.
Winter, William. "Wilkie Collins." Old Friends: Being Literary Recollections of Other Days. New York: Moffat, Yard, & Co., 1909. Pp. 203-219.
Created 26 August 2016
Last updated 1 November 2025