"The Moonstone" — "Second period. The Discovery of the Truth. (1848-1849.) Third Narrative. Contributed by Franklin Blake," Ch. I: Uncaptioned headnote vignette

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Franklin Blake at a desert encampment: uncaptioned headnote vignette for Chapter I in "Second period. The Discovery of the Truth. (1848-1849.) Third Narrative."

Harper & Bros. house illustrators

Wood engraving

6.1 x 5.6 cm

Twentieth headnote vignette for Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone: A Romance in the Harper's Weekly (23 May 1868), page 325. [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 Suggested by the Headnote Vignette for the Twenty-first Instalment

In the spring of the year eighteen hundred and forty-nine I was wandering in the East, and had then recently altered the travelling plans which I had laid out some months before, and which I had communicated to my lawyer and my banker in London.

This change made it necessary for me to send one of my servants to obtain my letters and remittances from the English consul in a certain city, which was no longer included as one of my resting-places in my new travelling scheme. The man was to join me again at an appointed place and time. An accident, for which he was not responsible, delayed him on his errand. For a week I and my people waited, encamped on the borders of a desert. At the end of that time the missing man made his appearance, with the money and the letters, at the entrance of my tent.

"I am afraid I bring you bad news, sir," he said, and pointed to one of the letters, which had a mourning border round it, and the address on which was in the handwriting of Mr. Bruff.

I know nothing, in a case of this kind, so unendurable as suspense. The letter with the mourning border was the letter that I opened first.

It informed me that my father was dead, and that I was heir to his great fortune. The wealth which had thus fallen into my hands brought its responsibilities with it, and Mr. Bruff entreated me to lose no time in returning to England. — "Second period. The Discovery of the Truth. (1848-1849.) Third Narrative. Contributed by Franklin Blake. Chapter I." 23 May 1868: p. 326.

Commentary

Having just read the news of his father's death and his having come into a sizeable inheritance, on returning to England Blake then learns "of all that had happened in [his] absence" (325), including the making and breaking of the engagement between Rachel Verinder and Godfrey Ablewhite, but Bruff does not reveal either Rachel's motives for breaking off the engagement or Godfrey's motives for acquiescing in the rupture.

However, the position of the vignette immediately above the third and last chapter contributed by Mathew Bruff leads to more than a little ambiguity as to which European is smoking a pipe of tobacco (Franklin Blake's addiction of choice) with the desert Arabs. That Bruff's narrative is still continuing and that his third chapter involves his after-dinner conversation with the "celebrated Eastern traveller" Mr. Murthwaite may imply that the figure in the vignette is that interesting, minor personage introduced at Rachel Verinder's eighteenth birthday-party and depicted in the February 1st instalment's major illustration, "And whispered to the company, confidentially, 'Please to change your mind, and try it; for I know it will do you good'" (fifth weekly instalment). That the text does not point specifically to the desert locale in describing Murthwaite's recent travels suggests that the figure (smoking and youthful) in the headnote vignette is Franklin Blake, however:

The prominent personage among the guests at the dinner party I found to be Mr. Murthwaite.

On his appearance in England, after his wanderings, society had been greatly interested in the traveller, as a man who had passed through many dangerous adventures, and who had escaped to tell the tale. He had now announced his intention of returning to the scene of his exploits, and of penetrating into regions left still unexplored. This magnificent indifference to placing his safety in peril for the second time, revived the flagging interest of the worshippers in the hero. The law of chances was clearly against his escaping on this occasion. It is not every day that we can meet an eminent person at dinner, and feel that there is a reasonable prospect of the news of his murder being the news that we hear of him next. — "Second period. The Discovery of the Truth. (1848-1849.) Second Narrative. Contributed by Mathew Bruff, Solicitor, of Gray's Inn Square," Ch. III, p. 325.

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).

References

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.

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 in the Rhetoric of Authorship. New York: AMS Studies in the Nineteenth Century, 1982. Pp. 170-227.

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.

Robinson, Kenneth. "Chapter 12: 'The Moonstone'." Wilkie Collins: A Biography London: The Bodley Head, 1951. Pp. 200-224.

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.

Last updated 14 September 2016