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Full-page chromolithograph: Godfrey Ablewhite, taking the Moonstone from Franklin Blake (uncaptioned)
William Sharp
ink-and-chalk chromolithograph.
18.2 by 12.9 cm (framed)
Illustration of flashback from the "Second Period, Fifth Narrative" in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, facing p. 420, in the 1946 Doubleday edition. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
After privately slipping the laudanum into your brandy and water, he wished you good night, and went into his own room. It was the next room to yours; and the two had a door of communication between them. On entering his own room Mr. Godfrey (as he supposed) closed his door. His money troubles kept him awake. He sat, in his dressing-gown and slippers, for nearly an hour, thinking over his position. Just as he was preparing to get into bed, he heard you, talking to yourself, in your own room, and going to the door of communication, found that he had not shut it as he supposed.
He looked into your room to see what was the matter. He discovered you with the candle in your hand, just leaving your bed-chamber. He heard you say to yourself, in a voice quite unlike your own voice, "How do I know? The Indians may be hidden in the house."
Up to that time, he had simply supposed himself (in giving you the laudanum) to be helping to make you the victim of a harmless practical joke. It now occurred to him, that the laudanum had taken some effect on you, which had not been foreseen by the doctor, any more than by himself. In the fear of an accident happening he followed you softly to see what you would do.
He followed you to Miss Verinder's sitting-room, and saw you go in. You left the door open. He looked through the crevice thus produced, between the door and the post, before he ventured into the room himself.
In that position, he not only detected you in taking the Diamond out of the drawer — he also detected Miss Verinder, silently watching you from her bedroom, through her open door. His own eyes satisfied him that she saw you take the Diamond, too.
Before you left the sitting-room again, you hesitated a little. Mr. Godfrey took advantage of this hesitation to get back again to his bedroom before you came out, and discovered him. He had barely got back, before you got back too. You saw him (as he supposes) just as he was passing through the door of communication. At any rate, you called to him in a strange, drowsy voice.
He came back to you. You looked at him in a dull sleepy way. You put the Diamond into his hand. You said to him, "Take it back, Godfrey, to your father’s bank. I t's safe there — it’s not safe here." You turned away unsteadily, and put on your dressing-gown. You sat down in the large arm-chair in your room. You said, "I can't take it back to the bank. My head's like lead — and I can't feel my feet under me." Your head sank on the back of the chair — you heaved a heavy sigh — and you fell asleep.
Mr. Godfrey Ablewhite went back, with the Diamond, into his own room. His statement is, that he came to no conclusion, at that time — except that he would wait, and see what happened in the morning. — "Second Period. The Discovery of the Truth (1848-1849. Sixth Narrative. Contributed by Sergeant Cuff," page 429-430.
Since this uncaptioned illustration occurs some nine pages ahead of the text, Sharp may have intended the reader to consider how the sleepwalker was justified in removing the Moonstone from the Indian cabinet in order to protect it, ironically giving it to a man most in need of ready money, and unscrupulous enough to take advantage of the situation. The illustration is essentially a flashback, constructed by Sergeant Cuff from a narrative provided the Lambeth money-lender Luker by Godfrey Ablewhite himself. However, the astute reader has probably been visualising this scenario for several hundred pages, but even the less than perceptive crime-and-dection reader has pondered the essentials of the illustration (sleep-walking Franklin Blake unintentionally transfers custody of the Moonstone to Godfrey Ablewhite, who is expecting some sort of disruption in Blake's behaviour as a result of the laudanum that he has unwittingly consumed with his brandy) after Matthew Bruff and Ezra Jennings lay out the only two logical alternatives after Blake falls asleep after taking the mock-Moonstone:
"One word about the Diamond," he said. "Your theory is that Franklin Blake hid the Moonstone in his room. My theory is, that the Moonstone is in the possession of Mr. Luker's bankers in London. We won't dispute which of us is right. We will only ask, which of us is in a position to put his theory to the test?"
"The test, in my case," I answered, "has been tried to-night, and has failed."
"The test, in my case," rejoined Mr. Bruff, "is still in process of trial. For the last two days I have had a watch set for Mr. Luker at the bank; and I shall cause that watch to be continued until the last day of the month. I know that he must take the Diamond himself out of his bankers’ hands — and I am acting on the chance that the person who has pledged the Diamond may force him to do this by redeeming the pledge. In that case I may be able to lay my hand on the person. If I succeed, I clear up the mystery, exactly at the point where the mystery baffles us now! Do you admit that, so far?" — "Second Period. The Discovery of the Truth (1848-1849. Fourth Narrative. Extracted from the Journal of Ezra Jennings," Chapter 6, p. 402.
Sharp has already established Franklin Blake's demeanour during a drug-induced trance in Franklin Blake sleep-walking (p. 388), but this picture subtracts the presence of Mathew Bruff, Ezra Jennings, and Gabriel Betteredge, and adds Godfrey Ablewhite, although the setting of both is much the same — although the angle at which we perceive the action has been subtly altered, as if the reader is now on the floor, looking up at Blake (now facing left, rather than right). Thgus, the illustrator shifts the focus from the sleepwalker to the slightly larger figure in the foreground, left, looking right: Godfrey Ablewhite, above whom we see the chandelier that previously was immediately above Franklin Blake's head. Indeed, reader's vantage point would now appear to be that occupied by Mathew Bruff in previously illustration, so that the reader sees not the window and bed, but the fireplace and the Elizabethan painting above it. The peculiar angle of the wall and painting imparts a surreal, almost nightmarish quality to the second sleepwalking illustration.
This full-page, colour illustration becomes the climax as it offers the full solution to the mysterious disappearance of the diamond and the exoneration of Franklin Blake; explains the theft fully ten pages before the text does so, and more than thirty pages before the text and its illustration simultaneously reveal that the thief was Godfrey Ablewhite, so that the scene in the upper room of the public house is relegated in Sharp's narrative-pictorial sequence to an unravelling of the strands of the plot.
Above: The highly effective climactic wood-engraving in the original serial in Harper's of the moment just before "The Discovery of the Truth," "Look at the man's face. It is a face disguised — and here's proof of it!" (1 August 1868). [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
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.
Richardson, Betty. "Prisons and Prison Reform." Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia, ed. Sally Mitchell. London and New York: Garland, 1988. Pp. 638-640.
Stewart, J. I. M. "Introduction." Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966, rpt. 1973. Pp. 7-24.
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 28 October 2016