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Passage Illustrated: Betteredge's infallible guide

He unlocked a cupboard in a corner, and produced a dirty and dog's-eared book, which exhaled a strong odour of stale tobacco as he turned over the leaves. Having found a passage of which he was apparently in search, he requested me to join him in the corner; still mysteriously confidential, and still speaking under his breath.

"In respect to this hocus-pocus of yours, sir, with the laudanum and Mr. Franklin Blake," he began. “While the workpeople are in the house, my duty as a servant gets the better of my feelings as a man. When the workpeople are gone, my feelings as a man get the better of my duty as a servant. Very good. Last night, Mr. Jennings, it was borne in powerfully on my mind that this new medical enterprise of yours would end badly. If I had yielded to that secret Dictate, I should have put all the furniture away again with my own hand, and have warned the workmen off the premises when they came the next morning."

"I am glad to find, from what I have seen up-stairs," I said, "that you resisted the secret Dictate."

"Resisted isn't the word," answered Betteredge. "Wrostled is the word. I wrostled, sir, between the silent orders in my bosom pulling me one way, and the written orders in my pocket-book pushing me the other, until (saving your presence) I was in a cold sweat. In that dreadful perturbation of mind and laxity of body, to what remedy did I apply? To the remedy, sir, which has never failed me yet for the last thirty years and more — to This Book!"

He hit the book a sounding blow with his open hand, and struck out of it a stronger smell of stale tobacco than ever.

"What did I find here," pursued Betteredge, "at the first page I opened? This awful bit, sir, page one hundred and seventy-eight, as follows. — 'Upon these, and many like Reflections, I afterwards made it a certain rule with me, That whenever I found those secret Hints or Pressings of my Mind, to doing, or not doing any Thing that presented; or to going this Way, or that Way, I never failed to obey the secret Dictate.' As I live by bread, Mr. Jennings, those were the first words that met my eye, exactly at the time when I myself was setting the secret Dictate at defiance! You don’t see anything at all out of the common in that, do you, sir?"

"I see a coincidence — nothing more."

"You don't feel at all shaken, Mr. Jennings, in respect to this medical enterprise of yours?"

"Not the least in the world." — "Second period. The Discovery of the Truth. (1848-1849.) "Fourth Narrative, extracted from the Journal of Ezra Jennings,"​ instalment twenty-nine, p. 454.

Commentary

If in The Moonstone Ezra Jennings represents the advances of modern science, including Dr. John Elliotson's Human Physiology (1840) and George Combe's "Essay on the Constitution of Man" (1828, 1835), both of which he names as authorities in discussing the effects of opium with Franklin Blake, Betteredge represents conventional, superstitious thinking as he continually consults Daniel Defoe's early eighteenth century novel Robinson Crusoe to address any issue that life throws at him. After all this medical talk in deadly earnest, Collins must have felt that the antidote for the rarefied language of psychology, physiology, and pharmacology was the comic relief of Betteredge's unswerving reliance on Defoe's pseudo-biography. In this illustration the professional man of science, Ezra Jennings (left, in thoroughly modern clothing), squares off against the eighteenth-century throwback, Gabriel Betteredge, dressed in the clothing of the bygone era — consulting a large volume, undoubtedly the 1719-20 novel The Life and Strange Adventure of of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner — also a childhood favourite of Charles Dickens. Betteredge at last is depicted not in full livery, but in workaday clothing appropriate to the managing of the Yorkshire estate while the owner is away in London. As is suitable for their "John Bullish" and "exotic" origins respectively, Betteredge is addicted to tobacco, Jennings to laudanum.

Heightening this motif of interpretation [of printed text], the Harper's illustrations also call attention to acts of reading. This visual pattern underlines the letterpress's focus on the interpretation of narrative, the "battle over whose perspective and voice" prevail in the novel. In a series of repetitive images, the illustrations show Cuff, then both Blake and Jennings, all reading (Part 12; Part 28, fig. 8). These scenes of characters immersed in books create self-reflexivity around the reading process itself, reminding us forcefully that The Moonstone requires its characters as well as its readers to become active analysers of narratives, their biases, and visual as well as verbal points of view. — Leighton and Surridge, p. 224.

Franklin Blake, with a humanistic and philosophical education in France, Italy, and Germany, cites the classics of English literature; for Betteredge, all literature and learning is collapsed into a single book, which he treats as if it were the Bible; but for Jennings, the important thinkers are the authors of such recent medical texts as forensic specialist William Carpenter's The Principles of General and Comparative Physiology (1839) and Carpenter, Elliotson, and Combe, all of which permit "Collins to concretize some of his claims about somnambulism and mesmerism" (Farmer, n. 1, p. 459). In Jennings' own words, "Science sanctions my proposal, fanciful as it may seem" to re-enact the crime and re-creating the circumstances of that fateful evening. Thus, Collins has his characters at this stage of the story engage in a battle of books. Ironically, the writer of fiction is investing scientific and practical works with greater value than biographies such as William Roberson's Charles the Fifth (1769) and novels such as Samuel Richardson's Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, one of the few models of first-person narrative that would have provided Collins with a useful model for his multi-voiced perspective. Despite the value that Collins's more conservative readers would have placed on the works at Franklin Blake's bedside on the night of the experiment, Ezra Jennings pronounces their "one great merit of enchaining nobody's interest, and exciting nobody's brain." In buttressing the judgment of his present narrator, the rank outsider Ezra Jennings, Collins satirizes the old-fashioned, traditional judgment of his first principal narrator, Gabriel Betteredge, because only such progressive, rational thinking will lead to a solution of the crime. Thus, literature plays a minor role and science (as it was at that time) a major role in Jennings' radical proposal: that Franklin Blake arrange to have the crime re-enacted at the Verinder estate, recreating as much as possible the circumstances of 21 June 1848.

The relevant illustrations in other editions depicting the role of Ezra Jennings in this late stage in the story are few indeed until the 1946 edition, with illustrations that William Sharp composed two years earlier, giving the experimental physician some prominence.

Images of Ezra Jennings from Other Editions, 1908-1946

Left: William Sharp's realisation of the scene in which Blake consults Jennings in his medical dispensary, Franklin Blake and Ezra Jennings (uncaptioned: 1946). Centre: Alfred Pearse's depiction of the sleepwalking scene, with Betteredge and probably (behind him) Jennings observing, "He took the mock Diamond out with his right hand." (1910). Right: John Sloan's depiction of the re-enactment of Franklin Blake's taking the Moonstone, with Jennings (distinguished by his hair), Betteredge, and Bruff observing, "He opened the bedroom door, and went out." (1908) [Click on the images to enlarge them.]

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).

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Last updated 18 September 2016