The Moonstone: Collins Classics

William Wilkie Collins (8 January 1824 - 23 September 1889) was an English novelist, playwright and short story writer best known for The Woman in White (1859) and The Moonstone (1868). Born to the family of a painter, William Collins, in London, he grew up in Italy and France, learning French and Italian. He began work as a clerk for a tea merchant. After his first novel, Antonina, appeared in 1850, he met Charles Dickens, who became a close friend and mentor. Some of Collins's works appeared first in Dickens's journals All the Year Round and Household Words and they collaborated on drama and fiction. In May of 1851 Collins acted with Dickens in Edward Bulwer-Lytton's play Not So Bad As We Seem. Among the audience were Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Collins's story "A Terribly Strange Bed," his first contribution to Household Words, appeared in April, 1852. In May 1852 he went on tour with Dickens's company of amateur actors, again performing Not So Bad As We Seem, but with a more substantial role. Collins achieved financial stability and an international following with his best known works in the 1860s, but began suffering from gout. Taking opium for the pain grew into an addiction. In the 1870s and 1880s his writing quality declined with his health. Collins was critical of the institution of marriage: he split his time between Caroline Graves and his common-law wife Martha Rudd, with whom he had three children.

Intrigue, investigations, thievery, drugs and murder all make an appearance in Collins’s classic who-done-it, The Moonstone. Published in serial form in 1868, it was inspired in part by a spectacular murder case widely reported in the early 1860s.
Collins’s story revolves around a diamond stolen from a Hindu holy place. On her eighteenth birthday, Rachel Verinder receives the diamond, but by the following morning the stone has been stolen again. As the story unravels through multiple eyewitness accounts, the elderly Sergeant Cuff—with a face “sharp as a hatchet”—looks for the culprit.
One of Collins’s best-loved novels, with an exciting plot moved along by deftly-drawn characters and elegant pacing, The Moonstone was also turned into a play by Collins; the play appears as an appendix to this edition.

“This superbly edited and richly documented edition of what T.S. Eliot described as ‘the first and greatest of English detective novels’ is the definitive and indispensible edition of The Moonstone.” — William Baker, Northern Illinois University
“The Moonstone, one of Wilkie Collins’s most popular and successful novels, has never been out of print since its first publication in 1868. Is another edition needed? The answer, in the case of Professor Farmer’s scholarly and impeccably edited text, must be a resounding yes. Invaluable for his survey of past and present reactions to the story, and for his own insights, the edition also includes historical and background material and a well-chosen collection of relevant contemporary documents—always an important feature of Broadview Literary Texts. This Moonstone will surely prove another winner for Broadview’s list.” — Catherine Peters, author of The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins
“Steve Farmer’s Broadview edition will undoubtedly become the definitive edition of The Moonstone. [It] deserves a five star rating.” — The Wilkie Collins Society Journal
“Here is a book which anyone with an interest in either Collins or Victorian literature in general will want to buy. The chief reason for this is Broadview’s exceptionally generous editorial policy in its series of Literary Texts, and the very good use that Steve Farmer has made of this generosity. In this edition, for a reasonable price, we are given not only a beautifully printed and error-free annotated text of the novel, but also a full introduction and over 150 pages of appendices. … This is the first time that Collins’ dramatic adaptation of the novel has been reprinted and this text alone is well worth the price of the book.” — Adrian J. Pinnington, Waseda University, Wilkie Collins Society Journal

Acknowledgements
Introduction
William Wilkie Collins: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Text
The Moonstone
Appendix A: Early Reviews of The Moonstone

1. Geraldine Jewsbury, The Athenaeum (July 25, 1868)
2. The Spectator (July 25, 1868)
3. Nation (September 17, 1868)
4. The Times (October 3, 1868)
5. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (October 1868)
6. Lippincott’s Magazine (December 1868)

Appendix B: Excerpts from Newspaper Accounts of the Constance Kent/Road-house Murder Case of 1860

1. The Times (July 3, 1860 to October 2, 1865)
2. The Sommerset and Wilts Journal (July 21, 1860)

Appendix C: Excerpts from The Times Accounts of the Major Murray/Northumberland Street Case of 1861

1. The Times (July 13, 1861 to July 26, 1861)

Appendix D: Collins on Indians

1. “A Sermon for Sepoys.” From Charles Dickens’s Household Words: A Weekly Journal (February 27, 1858)

Appendix E: Letters by Collins Concerning The Moonstone (the Novel and the Play)
Appendix F: The Moonstone (the Play)
Appendix G: Reviews of the Olympic Theatre Performance of Collins’s The Moonstone

1. The Times (September 21, 1877)
2. The Illustrated London News (September 22, 1877)
3. The Athenaeum (September 22, 1877)
4. The Spirit of the Times, New York (October 6, 1877)

Select Bibliography

At a party celebrating her eighteenth birthday, Rachel Verinder wears the stunning yellow diamond she unexpectedly inherited from her uncle, Colonel John Herncastle. She is not aware that the precious gem, known as the Moonstone, was plundered from a sacred Hindu shrine in southern India where her uncle had served with the British army fifty years earlier.
But someone knows the secret of the Moonstone and will go to desperate measures to retrieve it. When it goes missing later that night, suspicions are raised and accusations fly. Could it be a trio of mysterious Indian jugglers seen near the house? Or a love-struck housemaid suddely behaving strangely? And there is Rachel herself, who becomes furious when her paramour, Franklin Blake, directs attempts to find it.
As divergent accounts reveal more details, the diamond's recovery is complicated by unexpected twists and turns. Sifting through a compelling list of suspects, the indomitable Sergeant Cuff must find the truth about the Moonstone and its mysterious disappearance.