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Rachel wearing the Moonstone (uncaptioned)
William Sharp
Chromolithograph from chalk-and-ink.
18.1 x 12.7 cm
Illustration of scene from Chapter 10 but placed in Chapter 13 in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, p. 100 in the 1946 Doubleday edition. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
Before I could leave the room in my turn, Miss Rachel, always considerate to the old servant who had been in the house when she was born, stopped me. "Look, Gabriel!" she said, and flashed the jewel before my eyes in a ray of sunlight that poured through the window.
Lord bless us! it was a Diamond! As large, or nearly, as a plover's egg! The light that streamed from it was like the light of the harvest moon. When you looked down into the stone, you looked into a yellow deep that drew your eyes into it so that they saw nothing else. It seemed unfathomable; this jewel, that you could hold between your finger and thumb, seemed unfathomable as the heavens themselves. We set it in the sun, and then shut the light out of the room, and it shone awfully out of the depths of its own brightness, with a moony gleam, in the dark. No wonder Miss Rachel was fascinated: no wonder her cousins screamed. The Diamond laid such a hold on me that I burst out with as large an "O" as the Bouncers themselves. The only one of us who kept his senses was Mr. Godfrey. He put an arm round each of his sister’s waists, and, looking compassionately backwards and forwards between the Diamond and me, said, "Carbon, Betteredge; mere carbon, my good friend, after all!" — First Period: "The Loss of the Diamond (1848)," Chapter Nine, p. 60.
However, the absence from the illustration of Godfrey's sisters, the "Bouncers," may suggest that the passage illustrated occurs in the next chapter, when Rachel wears the Moonstone at her birthday dinner as the guests are assembling:
Those two sat on either side of Miss Rachel, who, as queen of the day, was naturally the great attraction of the party. On this occasion she was more particularly the centre-point towards which everybody's eyes were directed; for (to my lady’s secret annoyance) she wore her wonderful birthday present, which eclipsed all the rest — the Moonstone. It was without any setting when it had been placed in her hands; but that universal genius, Mr. Franklin, had contrived, with the help of his neat fingers and a little bit of silver wire, to fix it as a brooch in the bosom of her white dress. Everybody wondered at the prodigious size and beauty of the Diamond, as a matter of course. But the only two of the company who said anything out of the common way about it were those two guests I have mentioned, who sat by Miss Rachel on her right hand and her left. — First Period: "The Loss of the Diamond (1848)," Chapter Ten, p. 62-63
The reader must now turn back some thirty-seven pages to find the passage realised by the elegant chalk-and-ink full-page illustration facing page 100, long after the jewel has been stolen, Superintendent Seegrave has been called in (and dismissed), and Sergeant Cuff has arrived. Certainly, William Sharp would have had access to earlier illustrations that depict Rachel Verinder and the Moonstone, but none of the antecedents place Rachel in so neat a juxtaposition with her two suitors. To the right, apparently enraptured by the sight of his beautiful cousin, is beardless, square-jawed Godfrey Ablewhite, his hands clutched as if he trying to still his racing heart (which he well may be since this jewel may offer him the opportunity to escape being detected as an embezzler). To the left (which is to say, Rachel's right), Franklin Blake, with a goatee and definitely older and more self-controlled, does not even regard Rachel as he turns his head to chat with Betteredge (extreme left). His lack of interest in the Moonstone, then, contrasts Godfrey proprietary gaze. Curiously, Sharp shows the sparkling of the Moonstone, but not the gem itself, requiring each viewer to construct for him= or herself its size and appearance. Rachel seems to be unaware of anything and anyone else except the jewel, which she discretely covers with her hand.
Left: Alfred Pearse's description of Godfrey's being enthralled with the Moonstone, "Exquisite! exquisite!" in the Collins' Clear-Type Press Edition (1910). Centre: The dinner scene in the original serial in Harper's, "And whispered to the company, confidentially, 'Please to change your mind, and try it; for I know it will do you good.'" (1 February 1868). Right: John Sloan's version of the varying reactions to Rachel's wearing the gem on her birthday, 'Lord bless us! it was a Diamond!' (1908). [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.
Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone: A Romance. All the Year Round. 1 January-8 August 1868.
_________. The Moonstone: A Novel. With many illustrations. First edition. New York: Harper and Brothers, [July] 1868.
_________. The Moonstone: A Novel. With 19 illustrations. Second edition. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1874.
_________. The Moonstone: A Romance. Illustrated by George Du Maurier and F. A. Fraser. London: Chatto and Windus, 1890.
_________. The Moonstone. With 19 illustrations. The Works of Wilkie Collins. New York: Peter Fenelon Collier, 1900. Volumes 6 and 7.
_________. 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. Illustrated by William Sharp. New York: Doubleday, 1946.
_________. The Moonstone: A Romance. With nine illustrations by Edwin La Dell. London: Folio Society, 1951.
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
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.
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.
Winter, William. "Wilkie Collins." Old Friends: Being Literary Recollections of Other Days. New York: Moffat, Yard, & Co., 1909. Pp. 203-219.
Last updated 10 October 2016