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Franklin Blake. (uncaptioned)
William Sharp
Wood-block engraving from pen-and-ink sketch
8.8 x 4.9 cm
Illustration in Part 1, Ch. 4 in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, p. 22 in the 1946 Doubleday edition. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
Hearing what I now tell you, you will naturally ask how it was that Mr. Franklin should have passed all the years, from the time when he was a boy to the time when he was a man, out of his own country. I answer, because his father had the misfortune to be next heir to a Dukedom, and not to be able to prove it.
In two words, this was how the thing happened:
My lady's eldest sister married the celebrated Mr. Blake — equally famous for his great riches, and his great suit at law. How many years he went on worrying the tribunals of his country to turn out the Duke in possession, and to put himself in the Duke’s place— how many lawyer's purses he filled to bursting, and how many otherwise harmless people he set by the ears together disputing whether he was right or wrong— is more by a great deal than I can reckon up. His wife died, and two of his three children died, before the tribunals could make up their minds to show him the door and take no more of his money. When it was all over, and the Duke in possession was left in possession, Mr. Blake discovered that the only way of being even with his country for the manner in which it had treated him, was not to let his country have the honour of educating his son."How can I trust my native institutions,"was the form in which he put it,"after the way in which my native institutions have behaved to me?"Add to this, that Mr. Blake disliked all boys, his own included, and you will admit that it could only end in one way. Master Franklin was taken from us in England, and was sent to institutions which his father could trust, in that superior country, Germany; Mr. Blake himself, you will observe, remaining snug in England, to improve his fellow-countrymen in the Parliament House, and to publish a statement on the subject of the Duke in possession, which has remained an unfinished statement from that day to this.
There! thank God, that’s told! Neither you nor I need trouble our heads any more about Mr. Blake, senior. Leave him to the Dukedom; and let you and I stick to the Diamond. — "First Period. The Loss of the Diamond (1848). The events related by Gabriel Betteredge, house-steward in the service of Julia, Lady Verinder," Chapter 3, p. 15-16.
By the time that the reader encounters the image of Franklin Blake on page 22 (in the fourth chapter), he or she will already have encountered the above textual description of him, as opposed to the situation in the Harper's Weekly illustrations of 1868, in which Blake is introduced in the text and the narrative-pictorial sequence almost simultaneously. From Collins one has the impression that Franklin Blake is handsome, charming, but rather feckless young upper-middle-class youth with great expectations, a young man with education but no profession who has travelled widely. The British illustrators tend to agree that he is a well-dressed and bearded youth of medium height, but the original American illustrators depicted him with a moustache rather than a beard. The lack of a beard, in fact, created a repeated dissonance between the original serial illustrations and the letterpress in Harper's Weekly, suggesting that, having formed a mental image of the protagonist, William Jewett and "C. E." (the magazine's house illustrators) could not reverse themselves when they discovered a reference to a bearded Franklin Blake. Perhaps having read the entire novel in advance of illustrating, William Sharp did not make a similar error, and uses his bearded image to distinguish him from the other young man in the extended Verinder family, the clean-shaven Godfrey Ablewhite.
Left: The original serial wood-engraving of William Jewett's "He gave me the extract from the Colonel's will." (18 January 1868). Centre: F. A. Fraser's realisation of the scene in Rachel Verinder's sitting-room when Blake and Jenning's re-enact the theft, T"He took the mock Diamond out with his right hand." (1890). Right: John Sloan's depiction of a bearded Franklin Blake in the background of the group in the frontispiece, "Lord bless us! it was a Diamond!" (1908). [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 many illustrations. First edition. New York: Harper and Brothers, [July] 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. Illustrated by William Sharp. New York: Doubleday, 1946.
_________. The Moonstone: A Romance. With nine illustrations by Edwin La Dell. London: Folio Society, 1951.
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
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.
Last updated 25 September 2016