The Moonstone (installments from Feb. 1868)--chaps. 10-15 (Betteredge's narrative, continued)

Dear Serial Readers,

Thanks for all these terrific posts!

In this past set of chapters we're introduced to the "celebrated character" of Sergeant Cuff. Although original readers would not have made this comparison, I thought of the Watson/Holmes pairing in Conan Doyle's Sherlock stories. Like Watson, Betteredge is the earnest narrator who, despite his attentiveness, simply cannot *see* in the ways that Cuff does. I was struck too by Cuff as a reading master, by his repeated lessons about how to be a good reader of clues, of everyday, ordinary things and events and characters. These lessons, within the narrative, are directed at Betteredge, but do we too profit from the scenes of Cuff's instruction? I read somewhere that detective novels, sensation fiction, and more generally the enterprise of reading, can stimulate a kind of paranoia, where details overwhelm us to suspect everywhere the possibilities of clues, of hidden meanings. Betteredge seems an average, close reader, attentive and able to draw obvious conclusions. But Cuff is a different kind of reader, a master reader who makes startling connections. What makes him so?

My other observation, perhaps proof that I'm reading in a different way here, is that there are evident "curtain scenes" with the end of each installment, much more so than I'd noticed in Dickens' serials. Even if you're reading an edition of THE MOONSTONE that does not show the serial breaks, you can probably tell where they fall because of the dramatic suspense with which Betteredge ends that chapter or section. Chap. 10 ends with Betteredge's "The next thing to tell is the story of the night." This would be the night when the Diamond disappears. And this is also the break between the Feb. 1 & Feb. 8, 1868 installments. Then chap. 11, which includes two different installments, notes that division with, "..and out walked Rosanna Spearman!" And the very last of these five Feb. 1868 installments ends with Betteredge hearing Lady V's voice calling to them, on the heels of Cuff's assertion that some scandal is about to "burst up in the house." Perhaps these marked divisions are part and parcel of sensation fiction that stimulate the reader on for more episodes. Did such provocative endings to installments actually stimulate sales, get readers to buy the next edition of the magazine, in this case?

So I'm curious how Julia's "DailyLit" option for today's serial reader would affect these deliberate "curtain scenes" from the original serialization? Am I finding these suspenseful accents because I know that's where the installment ended when Collins first wrote it and Dickens published it? Surely I'd read the novel's new divisions in the DailyLit mode differently! I wish I had the patience to try out the experiment!

Next time: the remainder of Betteredge's narrative, chaps 16-23.

Serially struck,
Susan