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"He opened the bedroom door, and went out."
John Sloan
Half-tone lithograph
13.2 x 8.8 cm
Final illustration for Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone in the Charles Scribner's Sons Edition (1908), Facing p. 592. See page 592.
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
We waited — seeing and hearing nothing. We waited, hidden from him by the curtains.
The light which he was holding on the other side of us moved suddenly. The next moment he passed us, swift and noiseless, with the candle in his hand.
He opened the bedroom door, and went out.
We followed him along the corridor. We followed him down the stairs. We followed him along the second corridor. He never looked back; he never hesitated.,/p>
He opened the sitting-room door, and went in, leaving it open behind him.
The door was hung (like all the other doors in the house) on large old-fashioned hinges. When it was opened, a crevice was opened between the door and the post. I signed to my two companions to look through this, so as to keep them from showing themselves. I placed myself — outside the door also — on the opposite side. A recess in the wall was at my left hand, in which I could instantly hide myself, if he showed any signs of looking back into the corridor.
He advanced to the middle of the room, with the candle still in his hand: he looked about him— but he never looked back.
I saw the door of Miss Verinder's bedroom, standing ajar. She had put out her light. She controlled herself nobly. The dim white outline of her summer dress was all that I could see. Nobody who had not known it beforehand would have suspected that there was a living creature in the room. She kept back, in the dark: not a word, not a movement escaped her.
It was now ten minutes past one. —"Second Period, Fourth Narrative, Extracted from the Journal of Ezra Jennings,"p. 592.
Sloan has juxtaposed this illustration against the very passage realised, in which the sleep-walking Franklin Blake finally leaves his bedroom, and, much to the relief of the "watchers" in the experiment (Betteredge, back towards us, wearing stockings, breeches, and a butler's tailcoat; Jennings, readily identified by his streaked hair, and obviously in charge; and white-haired Bruff with his glasses off, right), begins to make his way to Rachel Verinder's sitting-room. Although the trio are in close proximity to him, Blake seems unaware of their presence — leading the reader to suppose that the experiment will be successful insofar as it will exonerate Blake. But will it result in the recovery of the Diamond? The reader, offered the same perspective as the observers inside the frame, awaits the outcome with apprehension, for the experiment may yet fail even to get Blake to the Indian cabinet, let alone where the Diamond has gone. The foregrounded figures — agitated, dynamic, and deliberating — mirror the apprehensions of the reader.
Whereas Alfred Pearse allows the reader to see the curious face of a man of advanced middle age (either Bruff or Betteredge) in the background, and another male head behind that, so that the focus of the composition, as in the equivalent F. A. Fraser illustration, is the sleepwalker, Sloan continues to keep the reader inb suspense as he shows Blake finally leaving his own room. As in the other artists' illustrations of this point in the story, the candlelight illuminates the front of the nightgown, casting a shadow immediately behind Blke, and casting another from his raised arm on the nightgown. Sloan thus shows the chief figure in action and in the background, and foregrounds The watchers in a shadowed chiaroscuro. The composition, then, is markedly different in its organisation compared to the 1910 half-tone lithograph of Alfred Pearse and the 1890 wood-engraving by F. A. Fraser: the postures of the clearly visible observers, the stance of the sleepwalker (merely holding a candle here, and not in front of the Indian cabinet), and juxtaposition of Franklin Blake and the observers do not align at all. Sloan is facilitating a simultaneous reading of text and image, as opposed to the proleptic reading of the illustration in the Collins Cleartype Edition, but compels the reader to address the text to learn the outcome of the experiment.
The Harper's Weekly serial instalment for 25 July 1868 uses an uncaptioned headnote vignette to describe Franklin Blake's sleepwalking under the influence of the slightly enlarged dose of laudanum administered by Ezra Jennings, but does not show his opening the cabinet to move the Moonstone as Fraser and Pearse do. It is not likely, given copyright restrictions, that the British illustrators Pearse and Fraser saw and were influenced by the American illustrations; however, their very different approach is probably the result of the different packaging of the novel and the limited number of illustrations available to them. In essence, the British editions let the reader know about the experiment's success long before he or she encounters it in the text, but do not assist the reader in determining what Blake actually did with the Diamond on the morning of 22 June 1848.
Left: The American serial's Headnote vignette (25 July 1868). Centre: The artful configuration of the scene in which Franklin Blake leaves his bedroom to begin the "experiment" in earnest, with Bruff, Jennings, and Betteredge clearly visible as they observe the laudanum's effect, "He opened the bedroom door, and went out." (1908). Right: F. A. Fraser's original conception of the sleepwalking scene, "He took the mock Diamond out with his right hand" (1890). [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.
________. The Moonstone: A Romance. All the Year Round. 1 January-8 August 1868.
_________. The Moonstone: A Novel. With 19 illustrations. New York & London: Harper and Brothers, 1868, rpt. 1874.
_________. 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. 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. With forty-nine illustrations by William Sharp. New York: Doubleday, 1946.
_________. The Moonstone: A Romance. With nine illustrations by Edwin La Dell. London: Folio Society, 1951.
Farmer, Steve. "Introduction" to Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 1999. Pp. 8-34.
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 27 August 2016