The Moonstone (installments from Jan. 1868): prologue through chaps 1-9

Dear Serial Readers,

Here we are in a new serial reading country--the metaphor works too since, like Little Dorrit, this one opens out of England, this time in India. This is the first serial novel we've explored on these bloggy pages that is regarded as "sensation fiction"--a genre of Victorian popular reading that was always serialized first in magazines, either monthly ones, or weekly ones, like this one--Dickens' ALL THE YEAR ROUND. You can see the top of the first page from that weekly, the early Jan. 1868 issue that launched this novel, and sold for 2d, two pence (the monthly magazines were usually a shilling, or 12d, so this was quite a good deal!) Like Dickens, Collins wrote as the serial was being issued, usually a month or two ahead of schedule. Sensation fiction (like many of Dickens' novels) traded in suspense and secrecy, disguises and masquerades, and were designed to keep readers coming back for the next segment, like (as this one is regarded) a good mystery. Critics sometimes complained that sensation novels favor plotting over character, rather than the other way round. I see the emphasis on the plotting here, and marvel at how the timeline of the plot echoes serial time, the very dates that head each installment. What do you think? Too much emphasis on plotting? Do you get a sense of these distinct characters too?

Collins uses multiple narrators here (and in some of his other novels), and the first four segments, from Jan. 1868, are largely from Betteredge (nice Dickensian pun name!), the Verinder house-steward. What do you make of him as a narrator and whom is he addressing? All the attention to his *telling* of the story of the Moonstone certainly highlights the way this story is delivered to us.

The romance plotting, the servants taking bets about which cousin Rachel will marry, is humorous, and also interesting for this attention to the below-the-stairs (class) view of the "gentlefolk" (as Betteredge puts it). Yet when an engagement or marriage is previewed in the opening sections, there's bound to be complications. Cousin marriage, while 'normal' in nineteenth-century novels, even from Austen's EMMA, becomes more complicated as the century advances.

I'm also struck by the attention to alternative forms of knowledge--occultism (even if through Betteredge's Orientalism), clairvoyance, dreams and visions, drugs. Since some of us read Dickens's DROOD in this format, I want to mention that Dickens was writing DROOD just after MOONSTONE was issued in his magazine. I had not previously thought of DROOD as a companion text, but perhaps it is!

Finally, I'm fascinated by a thing (the upper-case Diamond--also "mere carbon") as something like a mute character, or the Moonstone as a fetish attached to multiple kinds of values and powers and debts: familial revenge, colonial theft, monetary worth, spiritual or occult powers, or the meaning of a jewel as gift to a young woman. The sheer attention to the displaying of the Diamond to Rachel and her family on her birthday compares with Betteredge's detailed description of her own body and face!

Looking forward to your thoughts as we embark on this *Moonstone* expedition!
Thanks Julia for the link to online versions of this novel. As I've redesigned this site, I've also done some housekeeping, including the righthand column where I've noted the serials we've read and when we read them, as well as two links to downloadable versions (including THE MOONSTONE--try Project Gutenberg).

For next week: Betteredge's narrative continued, chaps 10-15 (Feb. 1868)

Serially shimmering,
Susan