"There she was, all alone, looking out on the quicksand and the sea."

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Harper & Bros. house illustrators "C. B." and William Jewett

Wood engraving

17.4 cm high by 11.5 cm wide

Third regular illustration for Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone: A Romance in Harper's Weekly (11 January 1868), page 21. Betteredge discovers one of the housemaids, Rosanna Spearman, contemplating the Shivering Sand, and persuades her to go into lunch. [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

I hardly know what the girl did to offend them. There was certainly no beauty about her to make the others envious; she was the plainest woman in the house, with the additional misfortune of having one shoulder bigger than the other. What the servants chiefly resented, I think, was her silent tongue and her solitary ways. She read or worked in leisure hours when the rest gossiped. And when it came to her turn to go out, nine times out of ten she quietly put on her bonnet, and had her turn by herself. She never quarrelled, she never took offence; she only kept a certain distance, obstinately and civilly, between the rest of them and herself. Add to this that, plain as she was, there was just a dash of something that wasn't like a housemaid, and that was like a lady, about her. It might have been in her voice, or it might have been in her face. All I can say is, that the other women pounced on it like lightning the first day she came into the house, and said (which was most unjust) that Rosanna Spearman gave herself airs.

Having now told the story of Rosanna, I have only to notice one of the many queer ways of this strange girl to get on next to the story of the sands.

Our house is high up on the Yorkshire coast, and close by the sea. We have got beautiful walks all round us, in every direction but one. That one I acknowledge to be a horrid walk. It leads, for a quarter of a mile, through a melancholy plantation of firs, and brings you out between low cliffs on the loneliest and ugliest little bay on all our coast.

The sand-hills here run down to the sea, and end in two spits of rock jutting out opposite each other, till you lose sight of them in the water. One is called the North Spit, and one the South. Between the two, shifting backwards and forwards at certain seasons of the year, lies the most horrible quicksand on the shores of Yorkshire. At the turn of the tide, something goes on in the unknown deeps below, which sets the whole face of the quicksand shivering and trembling in a manner most remarkable to see, and which has given to it, among the people in our parts, the name of the Shivering Sand. A great bank, half a mile out, nigh the mouth of the bay, breaks the force of the main ocean coming in from the offing. Winter and summer, when the tide flows over the quicksand, the sea seems to leave the waves behind it on the bank, and rolls its waters in smoothly with a heave, and covers the sand in silence. A lonesome and a horrid retreat, I can tell you! No boat ever ventures into this bay. No children from our fishing-village, called Cobb's Hole, ever come here to play. The very birds of the air, as it seems to me, give the Shivering Sand a wide berth. That a young woman, with dozens of nice walks to choose from, and company to go with her, if she only said "Come!" should prefer this place, and should sit and work or read in it, all alone, when it's her turn out, I grant you, passes belief. It's true, nevertheless, account for it as you may, that this was Rosanna Spearman's favourite walk, except when she went once or twice to Cobb's Hole, to see the only friend she had in our neighbourhood, of whom more anon. It's also true that I was now setting out for this same place, to fetch the girl in to dinner, which brings us round happily to our former point, and starts us fair again on our way to the sands. — Chapter 4, p. 21.

Commentary

Rachel Verinder's unfortunate double, Rosanna Spearman, a reformed thief and daughter of a prostitute, is a dangerous woman with a past, a brooding malcontent whose attraction to the Shivering Sand foreshadows her eventual suicide when Franklin Blake, with whom she becomes obsessed, remains indifferent to her. Although she lacks Martha Endell's respectable, working class background, she is apparently (although not in fact, at least in the sexual sense of Martha Endell and Em'ly Peggotty in the Dickens novel) a fallen woman, and like the ex-seamstress Martha in Dickens's David Copperfield is attracted to the notion of committing suicide by drowning, an impulse that Dickens's protagonist attempts to arrest as he intervenes on the banks of the Thames at the crucial moment. Rosanna has no such saviour, but in this scene she at least receives Betteredge's kindness. Rosanna, however, eventually succeeds in destroying herself, leaving a suicide note that Franklin Blake cannot bear to read. The woman whom Blake ignores is so infatuated with him that she attempts to hide what she believes is evidence that he stole the diamond, and bequeaths him his own paint-stained nightgown, which she had hidden in a japaned box in the Shivering Sand.

Introduced early and by herself in the original series of illustrations, Rosanna serves Collins admirably as a red herring in the Moonstone's mysterious disappearance, for as a former criminal and social misfit in the household, Rosanna easily distracts the reader's attention from other suspects. Indeed, Collins plays upon the average middle-class class reader's biases to direct suspicion away from the respectable Godfrey Ablewhite, whose many charity organizations have been attempting to aid just such fallen women as Rosanna Spearman. Her inky cloak, worn to disguise her misshapen shoulder, is the outward and visible sign of her difference in relation to the other housemaids, and implies both her apartness and depression, a reiteration of Hamlet's "inky cloak." In the Harper's illustrations, in both the serial and the July 1868 volume, the illustration flags Rosanna as a significant character, with her all-encompassing cloak suggesting that she has something to hide, although the guilty secret is ultimately revealed as her passion for a member of the gentlemanly class rather than as her anxiety over having stolen the gem and violated the Verinders' trust.

To the Victorians, it was of course immodest for a woman to show any passion at all — and ludicrous that a deformed under-housemaid should presume to love a gentleman. But Collins takes Rosanna's side and recruits the reader's sympathy by making her a helpless victim of her passion and keeping its symptoms within bounds. Rosanna is a former thief, but she is not a fallen woman. Her one explicit gesture, aside from her letter [to Franklin Blake], is the daily substitution of her own rose for Rachel's in Franklin water glass, an act whose sexual symbolism must have eluded readers of the period. — Lonoff 207-208

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Last updated 8 August 2016