Betteredge goes into enormous detail over inconsequential trivialities, and he offers long irrelevant digressions, meanwhile passing flattering comments on his own approach as a raconteur of events. Gabriel Betteredge’s narrative is styled as a combination of his favourite reading – Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe – and another eighteenth century monologuist, Laurence Sterne. The narrators include Gabriel Betteredge a longwinded house steward, Franklin Blake the apparent hero of the novel Drusilla Clack an interfering spinster Sergeant Cuff a Scotland Yard detective who guesses the identity of the villain and Ezra Jennings, a curious medical assistant who actually solves the mystery. This makes the reader’s task more difficult in assembling a ‘truth’ of what happens in the story, but it offers more entertainment as a compensation. They are multiple both in their literary style and their various points of view. Wilkie Collins adopted the same narrative strategy as he had for his previous big success The Woman in White – a multiplicity of voices. Before the serialization had reached its conclusion, it was published in what was then the conventional three volume format by William Tinsley, and in single volume format later the same year.Īlthough the book did not at first sell well in novel format, it eventually became Collins’ second most successful work, after The Woman in White.įor a full account of the composition, publication and reception of the novel, see the bibliographic essay by John Sutherland in the Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Moonstone. The Moonstone first appeared as weekly instalments in All the Year Round, the literary magazine owned and edited by Charles Dickens, the friend and sometimes collaborator of Wilkie Collins.

He was a friend and a collaborator of Charles Dickens, and one of the most commercially successful novelists of the mid nineteenth century. This was a genre of fiction in which Wilkie Collins excelled. The book is also a ‘sensation novel’ – one that sets out to deliberately shock the reader.

It is certainly a great novel of mystery that sustains both its central puzzle and the solution to it over a very long narrative. The Moonstone (1868) is often regarded as the first great detective novel.

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The moonstone 1868