"I went to the cabinet. The drawer was empty."

Harper & Bros. house illustrators; signed "CB."

Wood engraving

14.5 cm high by 11.4 cm wide

Second illustration for Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone: A Romance in Harper's Weekly (8 February 1868), lower left, page 85. [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

"Gone!" says Penelope. "Gone, nobody knows how! Come up and see."

She dragged me after her into our young lady's sitting-room, which opened into her bedroom. There, on the threshold of her bedroom door, stood Miss Rachel, almost as white in the face as the white dressing-gown that clothed her. There also stood the two doors of the Indian cabinet, wide open. One, of the drawers inside was pulled out as far as it would go.

"Look!" says Penelope. "I myself saw Miss Rachel put the Diamond into that drawer last night." I went to the cabinet. The drawer was empty.

"Is this true, miss?" I asked.

With a look that was not like herself, with a voice that was not like her own, Miss Rachel answered as my daughter had answered: "The Diamond is gone!" Having said those words, she withdrew into her bedroom, and shut and locked the door. — "First Period: The Loss of the Diamond (1848), The Events related by Gabriel Betteredge, house-steward in the service of Julia, Lady Verinder,"Chapter 11, p. 85.

Commentary

Gabriel Betteredge, the aging house-steward to Lady Verinder, the man whose narratives follow the Prologue and precede the Epilogue, is one of the most striking of the characters through whom the relation of several sensibilities is explored. Apparently a patiuent and long-suffering husband of a shrewish wife — in whose departure from life he finds reason to infer the reality of "an all-wise Providence" — and a devoted father. Betteredge has passed through life entirely unable, except in matters related to survival, to distinguish between appearance and reality. . . . — Marshall, p. 82.

Or, rather, for Betteredge what he sees, the appearance of things, is reality, as when, for example, the morning after the theft, Godfrey Ablewhite's throwing his hands into the air denotes for Betteredge want of character and presence of mind, when it is a fine, highly convincing performance of dismay: "All he did when he heard what had happened was to hold up his hands in a state of bewilderment which didn't say much for his natural strength strength of mind" (85).

In the first of the two larger illustrations for this instalment, the reader sees Betteredge and Penelope inspecting the empty Indian cabinet as Rachel Verinder looks on, wrapped in a gown rather than wearing a dress. The cabinet does not seem to be as exotic and foreign as the text suggests, but it certainly has no locks, and does possess multiple drawers and compartments, although none of the drawers seem to have the depth necessary to contain the diamond. Despite the absence of locks, Betteredge (still dressed in livery, despite Collins's objections to Harper's at the end of January) is holding a ring with two large keys, which do not appear to have anything to do with the cabinet. What the reader surmizes at a glance, before even reading the accompanying text, is that the Diamond is no longer where Rachel Verinder placed it the previous evening (in the lower drawer, to which Penelope Betteredge is pointing), against her mother's advice. Although the illustration hardly inspired, it introduces Penelope, and uses a uniformed Betteredge to provide visual continuity.

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 17 August 2016