The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins was a book that I had hesitated about reading.
I’m not really sure why – perhaps because of the hype used on the cover – first and greatest? Really?
Reading it, though, was enjoyable, and one can see the prototype of Sherlock Holmes, of Agatha Christie novels, and perhaps even of Dorothy Sayers’ Whimsey novels.
The “Agatha Christie”-ness of it struck me, which really should be the other way around. If anyone was imitating, it was Christie imitating Collins. The stereotypical butler, the young couple who are fumbling their way around a love affair, the detective who knows more than he says – in the end, he is surprised not by the culprit, but by the method of how the culprit achieved his theft.
As a matter of fact, as much as I love Agatha Christie, I get tired of the same old characters – the same old house maids who are poorly trained and gossipy; the same old curmudgeonly old ladies with a soft spot for a rogue nephew; the same old nurses who hold the key to the mystery without really knowing it; the same old spunky young woman who is down-to-earth and beats the glamourpuss every time. My enjoyment of Christie may be at least partly due to the very same stereotypes and the beloved characters (Poirot, Marple, Tommy and Tuppence, Ariadne Oliver, etc.) that I’ve read about since I was a young child – having read most, if not all of her books, there’s very little that surprises me in one of the ones I haven’t yet read, and that’s OK. I don’t go to Christie for novel plots and characterizations.
The same is true of Dick Francis – in many ways, every single male protagonist is the same person with a slightly different situation, but much the same personality and characteristics – stoic, quiet, hidden depths, daring, etc. Again, I find these books to be reliably enjoyable – I don’t think I’ve come across a Francis that I didn’t like (not that they’re all equal, of course, some are definitely better than others; but I have yet to throw a Francis book across the room in frustration at poor writing).
So to read the same things from a sort of reverse point of view – i.e., the precursor to the Christie and Francis reliability and enjoyability – made the read feel comfortable right from the start. The same way you might have a mild annoyance with an arrogant character but still enjoy reading their narrative, I found Collins’ characters to be somewhat stereotypical, but saved by injections of true humanity.
The butler, Gabriel Betteredge, tells the first and largest part of the narrative of The Moonstone. He’s confident in his abilities, confident in his knowledge of his staff and how to handle them, and even confident that he knows how to handle his employers – the Lady Verinder and her daughter. He’s always got a smart (alec) reply, helpful advice, and an attitude. He has a soft spot for the black-sheep cousin; and he has a very strong sense of class and place, that he’s most interested in keeping others in, more so than himself. He’s sexist, at least once pulling some girl onto his lap as a means of “handling” her (not fondling, so much as trying to “solve her problem”, when she is emotionally upset). He himself propagates stereotypes about other characters, and characters’ reactions may not always be completely understandable to a modern reader, but probably were to a current reader of Collins’ time.
Betteredge is saved from being a complete cliché particularly by a scene after he and the detective, Sergeant Cuff, have discovered that a young member of his staff who was implicated as knowing something about the theft of the Moonstone had committed suicide. His daughter is distraught, in tears at the news; Sergeant Cuff tells her to come to her father’s study. When she arrived, Betteredge “took her and sat her on my knee — and I prayed God bless her. She hid her head on my bosom and put her arms around my neck — and we waited a little while in silence.” The death of the girl was hard on both of them, but as Betteredge explains:
People in high life have all the luxuries to themselves — among others, the luxury of indulging their feelings. People in low life have no such privilege. Necessity, which spares our betters, has no pity on us. We learn to put our feelings back into ourselves, and to jog on with our duties as patiently as may be. I don’t complain of this — I only notice it.
Collins, who was neither of high life or low life, being firmly upper middle class, yet understood a lot about how both of those lives were led. He shows respect for both, but also shows how it is to be not of the aristocracy. I wonder how accurate his view of the inner lives of the aristocracy was – he certainly believed that lower classes felt constrained, and that the same lower classes believed that the upper classes were not so constrained. But stereotypes abound, and at least to outsiders, upper class Englishmen are traditionally “stiff upper lip” kind of people who don’t show their feelings – a direct contradiction to what Betteredge claims about high lifers.
Another injection of humanity saves Franklin Blake from being the stereotypical rogue-nephew-with-a-heart-of-gold. When Blake meets the physician’s assistant, Ezra Jennings, he was unable to quit staring at him due to his remarkable appearance:
The door opened, and there entered to us, quietly, the most remarkable-looking man that I had ever seen. Judging him by his figure and his movements, he was still young. Judging him by his face, and comparing him with Betteredge, he looked the elder of the two. His complexion was of a gipsy darkness; his fleshless cheeks had fallen into deep hollows, over which the bone projected like a pent-house. His nose presented the fine shape and modelling so often found among the ancient people of the East, so seldom visible among the newer races of the West. His forehead rose high and straight from the brow. His marks and wrinkles were innumerable. From this strange face, eyes, stranger still, of the softest brown — eyes dreamy and mournful, and deeply sunk in their orbits — looked out at you, and (in my case, at least) took your attention captive at their will. Add to this a quantity of thick closely-curling hair, which by some freak of Nature, had lost its colour in the most startlingly partial and capricious manner. Over the top of his head it was still of the deep black which was its natural colour. Round the sides of his head — without the slightest gradation of grey to break the force of the extraordinary contrast — it had turned completely white. The line between the two colours preserved no sort of regularity. At one place, the white hair ran up into the black; at another, the black hair ran down into the white.
Even in this detailed description of the physical “oddness” of Ezra Jennings, Blake shows respect and sympathy as well as his self-ascribed rudeness of staring. The acknowledgment of “ancient people of the East” versus the “newer races of the West” implies that there is weight behind the ancient people that the newer races don’t have, and the description of the eyes is of beauty and sadness, not a sort of Svengali stare that one might expect in a description of a man of an ancient race. Betteredge specifically states that Jennings’ appearance is against him, and that the physician supposedly took him on in spite of a dubious character.
We never learn what this dubious character was, although Jennings confirms that he was accused of something that set the world against him. Only the physician, Mr. Candy, looked beyond his past and his appearance to see the human inside, and realize that here was an intelligent, gentle soul who needed a break. Blake manages to see past these also, and writes very emotionally of Jennings as a beautiful, caring person.
Finally, we have Rachel Verinder, the heroine. In some ways, she is the prototype stereotypical “marches to a different drummer” heroine that you see in Christie especially – remarked upon as being outspoken, believing what it suits her temperament to believe, and acting as she wishes. She does not subscribe to the notions of the day that women are decorative “angels of the house”, and she feels she’s just as good as any man. She could also just be a spoiled brat. I admit, I swayed that way a couple times during the story; and really, although she redeems herself, she got herself into a perfect tizzy by being so sure of what she believed to be the truth about Franklin Blake. Definitely, here is one person who is of the high life who indulges in their emotions. Admittedly, appearances were against Franklin, but she never even tried to find out if appearances were deceiving or accurate.
In the end, I felt that Collins really was a good judge of what made people who they were, and although everyone showed elements of stereotype, that he always came through with believable motives and actions. His humor was balanced by serious reflections on people and their stations in life. And who couldn’t love an author who named a stolen-goods fence/moneylender “Mr. Luker”?
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*According to T.S. Eliot
