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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Moonstone," Wilkie Collins masterfully weaves a tale of mystery and intrigue, employing a narrative style that blends first-person perspectives with a series of eyewitness accounts. As one of the earliest detective novels in English literature, this groundbreaking work explores the theft of a priceless gem from an English country estate, unraveling the complexities of human morality and the stratagems of crime. Collins's intricate plotting and vivid characterizations exemplify the Victorian fascination with sensationalism while providing keen insights into class dynamics and cultural prejudices of the time. William Wilkie Collins, a contemporary and close friend of Charles Dickens, was significantly influenced by the evolving social mores of the Victorian era, as well as his own experiences with crime and justice. Having collaborated with Dickens on several theatrical productions, Collins developed a flair for dramatic storytelling, which is evident in his fast-paced and suspenseful narrative style. His personal life, infused with themes of love, betrayal, and psychological depth, informs the various character struggles within the novel, enriching the reader's understanding of moral ambiguity. I wholeheartedly recommend "The Moonstone" to readers who seek to delve into the origins of detective fiction. Collins's innovative techniques and engaging storytelling not only entertain but also challenge readers to grapple with deeper themes of trust, deception, and the nature of truth. This essential read will undoubtedly resonate with both classic literature enthusiasts and modern mystery aficionados alike. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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The Moonstone
Table of Contents
Introduction
A jewel torn from its sacred origin passes through English hands and leaves a trail of doubt, desire, and divided testimony in its glittering wake.
The Moonstone is widely regarded as a cornerstone of the English detective novel, a work that crystallized methods of clueing, investigation, and narrative suspense for generations to come. Published in the Victorian era, it bridged the sensational domestic drama of its time with the emerging fascination for rational inquiry and forensic detail. Its endurance rests not only on craft but on curiosity: how truth can be constructed, contested, and finally confronted. By shaping a mystery through layered voices, the book influenced both the rules and the possibilities of detective fiction, establishing an idiom that later masters would refine.
Written by William Wilkie Collins and first published in 1868, The Moonstone appeared in serial form in Britain and the United States before book publication. It tells of an Indian diamond brought into an English household and of the perplexing disappearance that follows. Without revealing its twists, one can say Collins sets in motion an investigation that ranges from a country estate to the heart of Victorian urban life. His purpose, evident in the book’s architecture, was to test how conflicting perspectives reveal and obscure truth, and to marry sensation with reason in a narrative built for relentless momentum.
Collins’s most distinctive formal innovation is the mosaic of testimonies that composes the novel. Rather than a single, authoritative narrator, he assembles a sequence of voices, each with habits, biases, and blind spots. This structure not only intensifies suspense but also transforms the reader into an active assessor of evidence, weighing tone as carefully as fact. The legalistic framing of narratives, with documents and personal accounts stacked against one another, invites a modern skepticism about certainty itself. In doing so, the book anticipates later experiments in unreliable narration and the ethical stakes of storytelling as a form of power.
The novel’s investigative apparatus helped define the genre. A professional detective, cool in observation and method, steps into a landscape of rumor, reputation, and class propriety, testing alibis against the stubborn logic of physical clues. Collins refines the country house mystery template: a closed circle, a vanished object, and a calendar of events that must be reconstructed with care. Yet he balances rigor with humanity, showing how grief, pride, and secrecy complicate even the most rational pursuit. Many conventions cherished by Golden Age writers find early articulation here, from red herrings to the ideal of fair challenge to the reader.
As a leading figure of sensation fiction, Collins injects domestic interiors with danger and moral ambiguity, proving the home can be as charged as any battlefield. The Moonstone examines how social roles, especially those shaped by class and gender, determine who is believed and who is dismissed. Servants, gentlefolk, and professionals speak in turn, and their differential access to authority becomes part of the puzzle. The texture of daily life—habits, rituals, and codes of respectability—nourishes the mystery. This fertile tension between the ordinary and the sensational makes the novel feel both intimate and destabilizing, a mirror in which propriety flickers and falters.
The book also carries the imprint of empire, with the diamond’s Indian origin casting a long moral shadow over events in England. Collins uses the coveted gem to examine questions of possession, restitution, and cultural misunderstanding without reducing the story to allegory. The fascination with the exotic and the pressure of imperial history hover at the edge of the narrative, making each act of desire or concealment more charged. By embedding an object of colonial plunder at the narrative’s core, the novel invites readers to consider the costs of acquisition and the histories that glitter inside seemingly private dramas.
Atmosphere is one of Collins’s quiet masterstrokes. A country house thrums with expectancy; a coastline unsettles with shifting sands and treacherous ground; London’s streets and interiors suggest both anonymity and exposure. The novel’s pace alternates between quickened beats of revelation and contemplative stretches where character, memory, and suspicion accumulate. Humor, too, surfaces in unexpected places, ensuring that the investigation is not merely grim but richly human. The setting becomes a map of moral and psychological terrain, as weather, rooms, and distances echo the instability of knowledge and the difficulty of seeing plainly through desire, fear, and habit.
Truth and testimony anchor the novel’s thematic web. Collins asks how we know what we know, and how the need to be believed shapes the stories people tell. Time is an accomplice and an adversary: memories blur, loyalties shift, and small inconsistencies grow large under scrutiny. The law pursues certainty, but justice requires a broader reckoning that takes motive, vulnerability, and context into account. The book also considers privacy and exposure, the instincts to conceal or confess, and the ethical weight of watching others. In this intricate interplay, mystery becomes an instrument for probing conscience as much as solving a crime.
The Moonstone’s legacy is evident in its influence on detective fiction’s architecture and atmosphere. Later writers drew on its multiple-witness design, its carefully planted clues, and its balance of logic with emotional realism. Its professional investigator prefigured the cool, methodical detectives of subsequent decades, while its domestic setting foreshadowed the intricate house-bound puzzles of the Golden Age. Beyond the page, the story has inspired notable adaptations across stage, radio, and television, a testament to its resilient plot engine and strong characterization. Its techniques seeped into popular and literary traditions alike, proving the crime narrative’s capacity for depth.
For contemporary readers, the novel remains compelling because it entwines intellectual challenge with moral inquiry. The puzzle satisfies, but the book’s questions about ownership, truth, and responsibility resonate across eras. In a world preoccupied with evidence, testimony, and contested narratives, Collins’s structure feels strikingly modern. The social textures—work, kinship, reputation—are rendered with a clarity that makes the past feel proximate rather than remote. Moreover, the novel’s wit, pacing, and atmospheric detail keep the experience pleasurable even as it invites reflection. It offers both the delight of detection and the friction of ethical debate, an enduring combination.
To encounter The Moonstone is to enter a chamber of mirrors where a single dazzling object refracts desire, memory, and judgment. Its inventive storytelling, historical consciousness, and humane curiosity have secured its place as a classic of the detective tradition. Collins’s blend of sensation and reason creates a narrative that challenges as it entertains, asking readers to listen closely and weigh carefully. The result is a work that feels inexhaustible: a mystery about a theft that doubles as an inquiry into how people tell, hide, and discover the truth. For these qualities, it continues to reward and astonish new audiences.
Synopsis
The Moonstone opens with a historical account of a famed yellow diamond, once embedded as the eye of a Hindu deity and guarded by three dedicated priests. During a late-eighteenth-century British assault in India, the gem is taken amid violence, and a solemn vow is made by its guardians to retrieve it at any cost. The jewel, rumored to bring misfortune to possessors, passes into the hands of Colonel John Herncastle, an estranged member of an English family. His reputation for ruthlessness and the diamond’s contentious provenance establish a shadow over the inheritance that will later carry the Moonstone into a tranquil English household.
Years later, at the Yorkshire home of Lady Verinder, her daughter Rachel celebrates her eighteenth birthday. A surprising legacy arrives from the late Colonel Herncastle: the Moonstone itself, gifted to Rachel with ambiguous intent. Servants bustle, relations gather, and the household’s trusted steward, Gabriel Betteredge, observes the shifting moods. Among the guests is Franklin Blake, a cosmopolitan cousin assisting with arrangements; Godfrey Ablewhite, a popular philanthropist, is also in the circle. Rumors of three Indian entertainers seen near the estate foster unease. The jewel’s exotic splendor and troubled history provoke fascination and anxiety, setting expectations of both spectacle and danger within the genteel setting.
Protective measures are planned for the night, yet by morning the Moonstone has vanished from Rachel’s room. Confusion intensifies when Rachel refuses to cooperate with inquiries, acting with sudden, painful reserve toward Franklin. Local authorities falter, and the renowned Sergeant Cuff from London arrives to direct a systematic investigation. He studies household frictions, fixates on a smear on fresh paint, and traces a missing stained garment. Suspicion touches servants and family alike, including Rosanna Spearman, a reformed thief employed as a housemaid. The inquiry exposes hidden tensions, while the presence of mysterious Indians nearby sustains a sense of external threat.
Rosanna’s private troubles deepen the mystery. Drawn by her secret feelings and past, she conceals an item at the treacherous Shivering Sand along the coast, linking the case to a bleak landscape of lost things. Tragedy follows, leaving behind cryptic traces and unshared knowledge. Sergeant Cuff forms a theory that implicates a member of the household, but his conclusions cannot be fully tested, and the family’s distress grows. Lady Verinder, protective of her daughter, brings the formal investigation to a halt. The case, unresolved, dissolves into uneasy silence, with relationships strained and the Moonstone’s fate obscured behind personal grief and pride.
The narrative then shifts to new testimonies, including that of Miss Drusilla Clack, whose earnest religious zeal colors her view of London society. Through her and other witnesses, readers see domestic changes, social visits, and charitable meetings that still pulse with the earlier scandal. Godfrey’s public benevolence, Rachel’s constrained independence, and the lingering rumor of the stone create a web of appearances. Financial transactions begin to surface in the background, hinting that the diamond may have been pledged or moved covertly. Meanwhile, the three Indians persist with disciplined patience, suggesting a pursuit guided less by vengeance than by relentless duty.
Time passes before Franklin Blake returns, determined to understand the rift with Rachel and to clear the doubts that surround him. Working with Gabriel Betteredge and the family solicitor, Mr Bruff, he reopens lines of inquiry into banks, jewelers, and the paper trail that valuables often leave behind. Witnesses recall oddities from the night of the disappearance, including a physician’s visit and unusual symptoms afterward. Franklin’s path leads him to Ezra Jennings, the marginalized but insightful assistant to a local doctor, whose medical knowledge and outsider’s perspective shed new light on memory, suggestion, and the unintentional acts that can arise under certain influences.
Guided by Jennings, Franklin consents to a carefully controlled experiment meant to reproduce the conditions of the original night. The test involves the responsible use of a common Victorian medicine and the measured observation of its effects. What follows offers a striking explanation: the person who carried the Moonstone away did so without conscious criminal intent, acting under an altered state that suspends ordinary will. This revelation reframes earlier suspicions, vindicating some and complicating others. Crucially, it separates the removal of the gem from the later movements that spirited it into hidden channels, implying additional agents and motives beyond the household.
The investigation accelerates in London, tracing the stone through discreet transactions and a chain of intermediaries. Behind philanthropy and respectability lie private pressures that bring a different kind of desperation to light. Pursuits through offices, lodging houses, and night streets lead to decisive encounters and to the unveiling of a role played by a seemingly impeccable figure. The dedicated Indian seekers reappear at critical moments, their quiet persistence steadily closing distances. Personal misunderstandings among the English characters are addressed as facts accumulate, and the position of the Moonstone at last becomes knowable, setting the stage for a final, formal resolution.
Final statements from multiple narrators bring the strands together. The ultimate disposition of the Moonstone acknowledges its sacred origin and the vows that have shadowed it, while the consequences for those entangled in the theft and its aftermath unfold in measured terms. Public law, private conscience, and religious duty intersect to produce an ending that restores order without erasing loss. The polyphonic structure underscores how bias, class, and colonial assumptions shape testimony, even when truth emerges. The story closes with accounts settled and futures tentatively outlined, its central message balancing mystery’s pleasures with a sober meditation on possession and restitution.
Historical Context
The Moonstone unfolds across two principal settings and two time frames: British India at the close of the eighteenth century and England in the late 1840s. Its prologue is anchored in the storming of Seringapatam in 1799, when the East India Company defeated Tipu Sultan, establishing the imperial context for the jewel’s seizure. The principal narrative, set around 1848–1849, moves between a Yorkshire country house near the fictional Frizinghall, the nearby coast, and metropolitan locales in London, including Hampstead. This juxtaposition—India as the site of conquest and England as the arena of domestic order—allows the plot to expose the flow of empire into the Victorian household and the legal, social, and moral norms of mid-century Britain.
The English settings mirror the stratified social world of Victorian Britain: a landed widow’s estate, a refined urban milieu of solicitors and doctors, and the precarious quarters of reformed servants and working-class coastal communities. The period’s infrastructures—railways, the electric telegraph, and professionalized policing—shape movement, investigation, and communication. London’s expanding institutions (Scotland Yard, hospitals, charitable societies) provide a procedural backdrop to the central mystery. Simultaneously, the narrative’s Indian origins foreground imperial extraction, intercultural encounter, and religious offenses against sacred property. These entwined geographies and times situate the drama at the intersection of colonial war’s aftermath and the seemingly insulated, rule-bound universe of Victorian domestic life.
The East India Company’s rise from a chartered trading enterprise (chartered 1600) to a territorial power (1757–1858) frames the jewel’s violent provenance. After Plassey (1757) and the acquisition of Diwani rights in Bengal (1765), Company rule fused commerce, taxation, and private military force under governors-general such as Warren Hastings and Richard Wellesley. Company officers amassed fortunes through prize-taking and patronage, while practices of looting and the resale of “curiosities” and gems became commonplace. The Moonstone’s Colonel John Herncastle exemplifies the Company officer who treats sacred Indian property as spoils. The narrative’s moral disturbance—and ensuing pursuit—echo contemporary debates about Company corruption, conquest, and legitimacy.
The Anglo-Mysore Wars, fought between the Company and the Mysore state under Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan (1767–1769, 1780–1784, 1790–1792, 1798–1799), culminated in a decisive British victory. The 1792 Treaty of Seringapatam curtailed Mysore’s power, and the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War ended on 4 May 1799 with the storming of Seringapatam and Tipu’s death. British commanders, including General George Harris and Major General David Baird, broke Mysore’s resistance and opened the region to Company reorganization. Collins roots his fictional diamond’s seizure in this conflict, linking a private act of sacrilege to a public military conquest that contemporaries celebrated as an imperial triumph but critics read as rapacious.
The British campaign against “Thuggee” in the 1830s–1840s, led by William Henry Sleeman and the Thuggee and Dacoity Department (formally centralized from 1835), generated sensational claims about secret Indian criminal fraternities. Thousands of arrests and executions were reported, and government blue books and press accounts popularized images of ritual murder and covert pursuit. While scholarship later questioned aspects of this narrative, Victorian readers associated India with concealed, religiously coded vengeance. The Moonstone’s three Brahmin guardians, persistent and disciplined, channel these fears and fascinations: they traverse Britain with quiet intensity, transforming imperial stereotypes into a haunting counter-presence that unsettles complacent English spaces.
The storming of Seringapatam (4 May 1799) was a watershed. Commanded by General George Harris, with columns led by David Baird, British and allied forces breached the northwest ramparts of Tipu Sultan’s capital after a weeks-long siege. Tipu was killed near the Water Gate amid fierce street fighting. Casualties on both sides were heavy; Mysore’s defeat extinguished a major challenge to Company hegemony in southern India. Immediately after, a Prize Committee inventoried captured wealth, manuscripts, and jewels—later dispersed through auctions and official allocations. This bureaucratized looting forms the factual matrix for Collins’s fictional theft: an officer who appropriates a sacred gem outside sanctioned channels, inviting retribution beyond imperial law.
The Koh-i-Noor’s nineteenth-century trajectory intensified British fascination with Indian diamonds. Originating in the Golconda mines and long associated with the Mughals, the Koh-i-Noor passed to Ranjit Singh in Lahore before its forced cession under the Treaty of Lahore (1849) after the annexation of the Punjab. Presented to Queen Victoria in July 1850, the gem was displayed at the Great Exhibition (Crystal Palace, Hyde Park) in 1851, drawing millions. Recut by Garrard in 1852 to enhance brilliance, it became a dynastic emblem and an imperial trophy. The Moonstone mirrors this history: a powerful Indian jewel, removed by conquest, circulates as a coveted British possession yet carries a narrative of dispossession and curse.
The Indian Rebellion of 1857—centered in Meerut, Delhi, Kanpur, and Lucknow—combined military mutiny with civilian uprisings against Company rule. Triggers included greased cartridge rumors, annexations such as Awadh (1856), land and revenue grievances, and cultural-religious tensions. After brutal sieges and reprisals, the British suppressed the revolt by 1858. Parliament then passed the Government of India Act (1858), transferring authority from the Company to the Crown; Queen Victoria’s Proclamation promised religious toleration and legal equity. The uprising altered British perceptions of India, entrenching anxieties about insurrection and retribution. The Moonstone’s relentless reclamation plot echoes post-1857 fears: imperial crimes may return, in secret, to England’s doorstep.
Britain’s modern police emerged with the Metropolitan Police Act (1829), creating the “Peelers,” and the Detective Branch at Scotland Yard was established in 1842. The Bow Street Runners were dissolved in 1839 as centralized policing advanced. Early detectives, including figures like Charles Frederick Field, became public curiosities, discussed in the press and periodicals. Their methods—surveillance, informants, attention to material trace—prefigured forensic rationality. Sergeant Cuff, the novel’s celebrated investigator, reflects this institutional moment: a specialized officer operating within but also beyond routine constabulary work. The book stages the period’s faith in detection while also exposing its blind spots when confronted with colonial artifacts and private, domestic secrecy.
Railway expansion and the electric telegraph reconfigured mid-century British space and time. After the Liverpool–Manchester line (1830), the 1840s “railway mania” created dense networks linking Yorkshire, the Midlands, and London; the Great Northern Railway (chartered 1846) and trunk lines accelerated travel. Cooke and Wheatstone’s telegraph (1837) spread along railway corridors; by the 1850s, companies such as the Electric Telegraph Company offered rapid communication for commerce and policing. The Moonstone leverages these systems: swift journeys between Yorkshire and London, timed alibis, and messages that collapse distance. Its plot demonstrates how technological acceleration aids investigation and concealment alike, embedding crime and pursuit in a national infrastructure.
Opium permeated Victorian medicine and commerce. Laudanum—tincture of opium in alcohol—was widely purchased without prescription, used for pain, insomnia, and “nervous disorders.” Britain’s imperial entanglements magnified supply and controversy: the First (1839–1842) and Second (1856–1860) Opium Wars compelled Qing China to open ports and legalize aspects of the trade. Domestic regulation lagged until the Pharmacy Act (1868), which restricted the retail of poisons, including opiates, to qualified pharmacists and mandated labeling. The Moonstone’s plot hinges on laudanum: an unwitting dose induces somnambulistic theft, while Dr. Ezra Jennings’s experimental replication of the event dramatizes medicine’s ambiguous power—therapeutic, investigative, and ethically fraught.
Victorian penal and reformatory reforms shaped experiences of the poor and criminalized. Pentonville Prison (opened 1842) exemplified the separate system; the Penal Servitude Act (1853) reduced transportation in favor of imprisonment and licenses; the Reformatory Schools Act (1854) and Industrial Schools Act (1864) aimed to divert juveniles from prison into institutional discipline. Female “rescue” homes and Magdalen asylums sought to reform those labeled “fallen.” Rosanna Spearman’s backstory as a reformatory alumna draws on this policy landscape: her employment in service reflects philanthropic ambition and social suspicion. The novel traces how reform changes legal status but not stigma, making vulnerability to coercion and secrecy a structural condition.
The Poor Law Amendment Act (1834) centralized relief, created Union workhouses, and stigmatized outdoor aid, reshaping rural and coastal poverty. In northern counties such as Yorkshire, industrial fluctuations and seasonal trades intensified precarity among fisherfolk and artisans. Parish authorities and guardians enforced deterrent principles, pressuring the poor toward institutionalization or migration. The Moonstone’s working-class figures—servants, laborers, and coastal women like Limping Lucy—inhabit this austere welfare regime. Their bargaining power, mobility, and resentment toward gentry and officials reflect the period’s hardening attitudes. The plot’s entanglements show how poverty, reputation, and official inquiry intersect, making truth-finding a social struggle as much as a legal process.
Evangelical philanthropy expanded dramatically from the early nineteenth century through the 1860s, energizing organizations such as the Religious Tract Society (founded 1799), the London City Mission (1835), and a host of Bible and temperance societies. These groups promoted moral reform, domestic piety, and surveillance of everyday conduct through visiting, tract distribution, and charitable relief tied to behavioral norms. In The Moonstone, the indefatigable Miss Clack embodies this culture: zealous, intrusive, and convinced of spiritual causality. Her activities convey how religious voluntarism shaped social relations, creating networks of influence and pressure that intersected with policing and welfare, and, at times, obscured material causes behind moral rhetoric.
Victorian legal doctrines governing women’s property and marriage structured the novel’s stakes. Under coverture, a married woman’s personal property typically vested in her husband; meaningful reforms came later with the Married Women’s Property Acts (1870, 1882). The Matrimonial Causes Act (1857) moved divorce from ecclesiastical to civil courts but preserved gender asymmetries. As an unmarried heiress, Rachel Verinder lawfully possesses the gem, yet any marriage could reconfigure control. Trusteeship, settlements, and the counsel of family solicitors (like Mr. Bruff) reflect the era’s reliance on legal instruments to manage female wealth. The plot’s tensions over secrecy, trust, and engagement negotiations arise from this juridical environment.
As a social and political critique, the book indicts imperial plunder by linking sacrilege abroad to disorder at home. The jewel, seized during a colonial war and pursued by dispossessed guardians, turns an English country house into a theatre of reckoning. British institutions—law, police, medicine—can neither justify the original theft nor fully domesticate its consequences. The careful proceduralism of Sergeant Cuff cannot neutralize an act that violates another polity’s religious law. In representing restitution, the narrative imagines justice beyond imperial jurisprudence, suggesting that the empire’s moral debts persist despite parliamentary transfers of sovereignty and polite narratives of “civilizing” conquest.
The book also interrogates domestic hierarchies, gendered law, and philanthropic moralism. Servants possess knowledge that masters lack; reform does not erase stigma; poverty conditions choices. Evangelical zeal becomes a mechanism of surveillance rather than solace. Opium—legal, respectable, and sold over the counter—exposes contradictions between medical authority and bodily autonomy. Railways and telegraphs promise transparency yet abet concealment. Finally, the constraints of coverture and the brokerage of marriage in property matters reveal how personal liberty is negotiated within legal inequities. Through these interlocking critiques, the narrative portrays mid-Victorian Britain as orderly on the surface, but structurally compromised by empire, class discipline, and gendered law.
Author Biography
William Wilkie Collins was a British novelist, short-story writer, and dramatist active during the high Victorian period. Celebrated as a founding figure of the sensation novel and a key precursor of modern detective fiction, he brought courtroom logic, domestic realism, and Gothic atmosphere into popular serial storytelling. Writing for and about an expanding urban readership, he crafted plots that hinged on secrets, disputed identities, and the power of documents, while probing the social pressures of marriage, class, and property. His best-known works, especially The Woman in White and The Moonstone, brought him wide readership across Britain and beyond and helped redefine what mainstream fiction could do.
Collins grew up in London and spent part of his youth traveling in Italy and France, experiences that sharpened his eye for visual detail and setting. After schooling at private academies, he worked as a clerk in the tea trade before turning to the law, entering Lincoln's Inn in the mid-1840s. He was called to the bar in the early 1850s but chose letters over legal practice, a background that would inform his meticulous plotting and fascination with evidence. His first novel, Antonina, appeared around mid-century, followed by the early sensation experiment Basil. He also published the travel book Rambles Beyond Railways, drawn from walking in Cornwall.
In the early 1850s Collins met Charles Dickens, beginning a long professional association that shaped his career. He contributed fiction and journalism to Dickens's weeklies, Household Words and later All the Year Round, learning the rhythms of serial publication and the demands of a mass readership. The pair also collaborated theatrically: Collins wrote stage pieces such as The Lighthouse and The Frozen Deep, productions in which Dickens took a keen interest as an actor and manager. These ventures honed Collins's command of suspense, multiple viewpoints, and cliffhanger pacing, techniques that would become hallmarks of his most successful novels.
Collins's breakthrough came with The Woman in White, first issued in serial form at the end of the 1850s. Its blend of mystery, legal intrigue, and domestic menace captivated readers and helped crystallize the sensation label used by contemporary critics. He followed with No Name and Armadale, ambitious narratives that explored inheritance, social stigma, and the instability of identity. The novels' theatrical adaptations and widespread discussion attested to their cultural reach, even as commentators debated their moral implications. Through these works Collins refined the documentary texture of his fiction, using letters, wills, and testimony as engines of plot and windows into character.
In the late 1860s Collins produced The Moonstone, often regarded as a landmark in English-language detective fiction. Its rotating narrators, attention to procedure, and memorable investigator helped set patterns for later crime narratives. The book also weaves in themes of empire and addiction, including the medically supervised use of opiates - a subject Collins understood firsthand, as he endured chronic pain for much of his adult life. Other works from this productive stretch include The Dead Secret and shorter tales that experiment with first-person testimony and unreliable memory, deepening his interest in how truth emerges from conflicting accounts.
Collins sustained his popularity into the 1870s and 1880s with novels that tied sensation plotting to social questions. Man and Wife scrutinized ambiguities in marriage law and the cult of athleticism; Poor Miss Finch treated disability and perception; The New Magdalen addressed double standards around so-called fallen women; The Law and the Lady offered an early woman-led investigation; later works such as The Haunted Hotel and Heart and Science explored psychological disturbance and medical ethics, including a critique of vivisection. Critical opinion grew uneven as fashions shifted, yet his readership remained large, and his books continued to appear in serial and three-volume formats.
After the death of his great contemporary Dickens in 1870, Collins remained a prominent public author despite intermittent illness. He adapted his fiction for the stage, and kept publishing into the late 1880s. His final novel, Blind Love, was left incomplete at his death and was issued posthumously with completion by Walter Besant. Though late-Victorian critics sometimes dismissed sensation fiction as ephemeral, twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarship has restored Collins to centrality. Today he is read as a master of narrative design and atmosphere, a pioneer of the detective genre, and a probing analyst of Victorian law, gender, and the pressures of modern life.
The Moonstone
First Period
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Second Period
First Narrative
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Second Narrative
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Third Narrative
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Fourth Narrative
Fourth Narrative
Fifth Narrative
Fifth Narrative, Chapter I
Sixth Narrative
Sixth Narrative
Seventh Narrative
Seventh Narrative
Eighth Narrative
Eighth Narrative
Epilogue
Epilogue
Prologue.
THE STORMING OF SERINGAPATAM[1] (1799):
(Extracted from a Family Paper.)
I.
I address these lines—written in India—to my relatives in England.
My object is to explain the motive which has induced me to refuse the right hand of friendship to my cousin, John Herncastle. The reserve which I have hitherto maintained in this matter has been misinterpreted by members of my family whose good opinion I cannot consent to forfeit. I request them to suspend their decision until they have read my narrative. And I declare, on my word of honour, that what I am now about to write is, strictly and literally, the truth.
The private difference between my cousin and me took its rise in a great public event in which we were both concerned—the storming of Seringapatam, under General Baird, on the 4th of May, 1799.
In order that the circumstances may be clearly understood, I must revert for a moment to the period before the assault, and to the stories current in our camp of the treasure in jewels and gold stored up in the Palace of Seringapatam.
II.
One of the wildest of these stories related to a Yellow Diamond—a famous gem in the native annals of India.
The earliest known traditions describe the stone as having been set in the forehead of the four-handed Indian god who typifies the Moon. Partly from its peculiar colour, partly from a superstition which represented it as feeling the influence of the deity whom it adorned, and growing and lessening in lustre with the waxing and waning of the moon, it first gained the name by which it continues to be known in India to this day—the name of The Moonstone. A similar superstition was once prevalent, as I have heard, in ancient Greece and Rome; not applying, however (as in India), to a diamond devoted to the service of a god, but to a semi-transparent stone of the inferior order of gems, supposed to be affected by the lunar influences—the moon, in this latter case also, giving the name by which the stone is still known to collectors in our own time.
The adventures of the Yellow Diamond begin with the eleventh century of the Christian era. At that date, the Mohammedan conqueror, Mahmoud of Ghizni, crossed India; seized on the holy city of Somnauth; and stripped of its treasures the famous temple, which had stood for centuries—the shrine of Hindoo pilgrimage, and the wonder of the Eastern world.
Of all the deities worshipped in the temple, the moon-god alone escaped the rapacity of the conquering Mohammedans. Preserved by three Brahmans, the inviolate deity, bearing the Yellow Diamond in its forehead, was removed by night, and was transported to the second of the sacred cities of India—the city of Benares.
Here, in a new shrine—in a hall inlaid with precious stones, under a roof supported by pillars of gold—the moon-god was set up and worshipped. Here, on the night when the shrine was completed, Vishnu the Preserver appeared to the three Brahmans in a dream.
The deity breathed the breath of his divinity on the Diamond in the forehead of the god. And the Brahmans knelt and hid their faces in their robes. The deity commanded that the Moonstone should be watched, from that time forth, by three priests in turn, night and day, to the end of the generations of men. And the Brahmans heard, and bowed before his will. The deity predicted certain disaster to the presumptuous mortal who laid hands on the sacred gem, and to all of his house and name who received it after him. And the Brahmans caused the prophecy to be written over the gates of the shrine in letters of gold.
One age followed another—and still, generation after generation, the successors of the three Brahmans watched their priceless Moonstone, night and day. One age followed another until the first years of the eighteenth Christian century saw the reign of Aurungzebe, Emperor of the Moguls. At his command havoc and rapine were let loose once more among the temples of the worship of Brahmah. The shrine of the four-handed god was polluted by the slaughter of sacred animals; the images of the deities were broken in pieces; and the Moonstone was seized by an officer of rank in the army of Aurungzebe.
Powerless to recover their lost treasure by open force, the three guardian priests followed and watched it in disguise. The generations succeeded each other; the warrior who had committed the sacrilege perished miserably; the Moonstone passed (carrying its curse with it) from one lawless Mohammedan hand to another; and still, through all chances and changes, the successors of the three guardian priests kept their watch, waiting the day when the will of Vishnu the Preserver should restore to them their sacred gem. Time rolled on from the first to the last years of the eighteenth Christian century. The Diamond fell into the possession of Tippoo, Sultan of Seringapatam, who caused it to be placed as an ornament in the handle of a dagger, and who commanded it to be kept among the choicest treasures of his armory. Even then—in the palace of the Sultan himself—the three guardian priests still kept their watch in secret. There were three officers of Tippoo's household, strangers to the rest, who had won their master's confidence by conforming, or appearing to conform, to the Mussulman faith; and to those three men report pointed as the three priests in disguise.
III.
So, as told in our camp, ran the fanciful story of the Moonstone. It made no serious impression on any of us except my cousin—whose love of the marvelous induced him to believe it. On the night before the assault on Seringapatam, he was absurdly angry with me, and with others, for treating the whole thing as a fable. A foolish wrangle followed; and Herncastle's unlucky temper got the better of him. He declared, in his boastful way, that we should see the Diamond on his finger, if the English army took Seringapatam. The sally was saluted by a roar of laughter, and there, as we all thought that night, the thing ended.
Let me now take you on to the day of the assault.
My cousin and I were separated at the outset. I never saw him when we forded the river; when we planted the English flag in the first breach; when we crossed the ditch beyond; and, fighting every inch of our way, entered the town. It was only at dusk, when the place was ours, and after General Baird himself had found the dead body of Tippoo under a heap of the slain, that Herncastle and I met.
We were each attached to a party sent out by the general's orders to prevent the plunder and confusion which followed our conquest. The camp-followers committed deplorable excesses; and, worse still, the soldiers found their way, by a guarded door, into the treasury of the Palace, and loaded themselves with gold and jewels. It was in the court outside the treasury that my cousin and I met, to enforce the laws of discipline on our own soldiers. Herncastle's fiery temper had been, as I could plainly see, exasperated to a kind of frenzy by the terrible slaughter through which we had passed. He was very unfit, in my opinion, to perform the duty that had been intrusted to him.
There was riot and confusion enough in the treasury, but no violence that I saw. The men (if I may use such an expression) disgraced themselves good-humoredly. All sorts of rough jests and catch-words were bandied about among them; and the story of the Diamond turned up again unexpectedly, in the form of a mischievous joke. "Who's got the Moonstone?" was the rallying cry which perpetually caused the plundering, as soon as it was stopped in one place, to break out in another. While I was still vainly trying to establish order, I heard a frightful yelling on the other side of the court-yard, and at once ran towards the cries, in dread of finding some new outbreak of the pillage in that direction.
I got to an open door, and saw the bodies of two Indians (by their dress, as I guessed, officers of the palace) lying across the entrance, dead.
A cry inside hurried me into a room, which appeared to serve as an armory. A third Indian, mortally wounded, was sinking at the feet of a man whose back was towards me. The man turned at the instant when I came in, and I saw John Herncastle, with a torch in one hand, and a dagger dripping with blood in the other. A stone, set like a pommel, in the end of the dagger's handle, flashed in the torchlight, as he turned on me, like a gleam of fire. The dying Indian sank to his knees, pointed to the dagger in Herncastle's hand, and said, in his native language—"The Moonstone will have its vengeance yet on you and yours!" He spoke those words, and fell dead on the floor.
Before I could stir in the matter, the men who had followed me across the court-yard crowded in. My cousin rushed to meet them, like a madman. "Clear the room!" he shouted to me, "and set a guard on the door!" The men fell back as he threw himself on them with his torch and his dagger. I put two sentinels of my own company, on whom I could rely, to keep the door. Through the remainder of the night, I saw no more of my cousin.
Early in the morning, the plunder still going on, General Baird announced publicly by beat of drum, that any thief detected in the fact, be he whom he might, should be hung. The provost-marshal was in attendance, to prove that the General was in earnest; and in the throng that followed the proclamation, Herncastle and I met again.
He held out his hand, as usual, and said, "Good-morning."
I waited before I gave him my hand in return.
"Tell me first," I said, "how the Indian in the armory met his death, and what those last words meant, when he pointed to the dagger in your hand."
"The Indian met his death, as I suppose, by a mortal wound," said Herncastle. "What his last words meant I know no more than you do."
I looked at him narrowly. His frenzy of the previous day had all calmed down. I determined to give him another chance.
"Is that all you have to tell me?" I asked.
He answered, "That is all."
I turned my back on him; and we have not spoken since.
IV.
I beg it to be understood that what I write here about my cousin (unless some necessity should arise for making it public) is for the information of the family only. Herncastle has said nothing that can justify me in speaking to our commanding officer. He has been taunted more than once about the Diamond, by those who recollect his angry outbreak before the assault; but, as may easily be imagined, his own remembrance of the circumstances under which I surprised him in the armory has been enough to keep him silent. It is reported that he means to exchange into another regiment, avowedly for the purpose of separating himself and me.
Whether this be true or not, I cannot prevail upon myself to become his accuser—and I think with good reason. If I made the matter public, I have no evidence but moral evidence to bring forward. I have not only no proof that he killed the two men at the door; I can not even declare that he killed the third man inside—for I can not say that my own eyes saw the deed committed. It is true that I heard the dying Indian's words; but if those words were pronounced to be the ravings of delirium, how could I contradict the assertion from my own knowledge? Let our relatives, on either side, form their own opinion on what I have written, and decide for themselves whether the aversion I now feel towards this man is well or ill founded.
Although I attach no sort of credit to the fantastic Indian legend of the gem, I must acknowledge, before I conclude, that I am influenced by a certain superstition of my own in this matter. It is my conviction, or my delusion, no matter which, that crime brings its own fatality with it. I am not only persuaded of Herncastle's guilt; I am even fanciful enough to believe that he will live to regret it, if he keeps the Diamond; and that others will live to regret taking it from him, if he gives the Diamond away.
The Story
FIRST PERIOD. THE LOSS OF THE DIAMOND (1848).
The events related by Gabriel Betteredge, house-steward in the Service of Julia, Lady Verinder.
CHAPTER I.
In the first part of Robinson Crusoe[2], at page one hundred and twenty-nine, you will find it thus written:
"Now I saw, though too late, the Folly of beginning a Work before we count the Cost, and before we judge rightly of our own Strength to go through with it."
Only yesterday, I opened my Robinson Crusoe at that place. Only this morning (May twenty-first, eighteen hundred and fifty), came my lady's nephew, Mr. Franklin Blake, and held a short conversation with me, as follows:
"Betteredge," says Mr. Franklin, "I have been to the lawyer's about some family matters; and, among other things, we have been talking of the loss of the Indian Diamond, in my aunt's house in Yorkshire, two years since. The lawyer thinks, as I think, that the whole story ought, in the interests of truth, to be placed on record in writing—and the sooner the better."
Not perceiving his drift yet, and thinking it always desirable for the sake of peace and quietness to be on the lawyer's side, I said I thought so too. Mr. Franklin went on:
"In this matter of the Diamond," he said, "the characters of innocent people have suffered under suspicion already—as you know. The memories of innocent people may suffer, hereafter, for want of a record of the facts to which those who come after us can appeal. There can be no doubt that this strange family story of ours ought to be told. And I think, Betteredge, the lawyer and I together have hit on the right way of telling it."
Very satisfactory to both of them, no doubt. But I failed to see what I myself had to do with it, so far.
"We have certain events to relate," Mr. Franklin proceeded; "and we have certain persons concerned in those events who are capable of relating them. Starting from these plain facts, the lawyer's idea is that we should all write the story of the Moonstone in turn—as far as our own personal experience extends, and no further. We must begin by showing how the Diamond first fell into the hands of my uncle Herncastle, when he was serving in India fifty years since. This prefatory narrative I have already got by me in the form of an old family paper, which relates the necessary particulars on the authority of an eye-witness. The next thing to do is to tell how the Diamond found its way into my aunt's house in Yorkshire, two years ago, and how it came to be lost in little more than twelve hours afterwards. Nobody knows as much as you do, Betteredge, about what went on in the house at that time. So you must take the pen in hand, and start the story."
In those terms I was informed of what my personal concern was with the matter of the Diamond. If you are curious to know what course I took under the circumstances, I beg to inform you that I did what you would probably have done in my place. I modestly declared myself to be quite unequal to the task imposed upon me—and I privately felt, all the time, that I was quite clever enough to perform it, if I only gave my own abilities a fair chance. Mr. Franklin, I imagine, must have seen my private sentiments in my face. He declined to believe in my modesty; and he insisted on giving my abilities a fair chance.
Two hours have passed since Mr. Franklin left me. As soon as his back was turned, I went to my writing-desk to start the story. There I have sat helpless (in spite of my abilities) ever since; seeing what Robinson Crusoe saw, as quoted above—namely, the folly of beginning a work before we count the cost, and before we judge rightly of our own strength to go through with it. Please to remember, I opened the book by accident, at that bit, only the day before I rashly undertook the business now in hand; and, allow me to ask—if that isn't prophecy, what is?
I am not superstitious; I have read a heap of books in my time; I am a scholar in my own way. Though turned seventy, I possess an active memory, and legs to correspond. You are not to take it, if you please, as the saying of an ignorant man, when I express my opinion that such a book as Robinson Crusoe never was written, and never will be written again. I have tried that book for years—generally in combination with a pipe of tobacco—and I have found it my friend in need in all the necessities of this mortal life. When my spirits are bad—Robinson Crusoe. When I want advice—Robinson Crusoe. In past times when my wife plagued me; in present times when I have had a drop too much—Robinson Crusoe. I have worn out six stout Robinson Crusoes with hard work in my service. On my lady's last birthday she gave me a seventh. I took a drop too much on the strength of it; and Robinson Crusoe put me right again. Price four shillings and sixpence, bound in blue, with a picture into the bargain.
Still, this don't look much like starting the story of the Diamond—does it? I seem to be wandering off in search of Lord knows what, Lord knows where. We will take a new sheet of paper, if you please, and begin over again, with my best respects to you.
CHAPTER II.
I spoke of my lady[3] a line or two back. Now the Diamond could never have been in our house, where it was lost, if it had not been made a present of to my lady's daughter; and my lady's daughter would never have been in existence to have the present, if it had not been for my lady who (with pain and travail) produced her into the world. Consequently, if we begin with my lady, we are pretty sure of beginning far enough back. And that, let me tell you, when you have got such a job as mine in hand, is a real comfort at starting.
If you know any thing of the fashionable world, you have heard tell of the three beautiful Miss Herncastles. Miss Adelaide, Miss Caroline, and Miss Julia—this last being the youngest and the best of the three sisters, in my opinion; and I had opportunities of judging, as you shall presently see. I went into the service of the old lord, their father (thank God, we have got nothing to do with him, in this business of the Diamond; he had the longest tongue and the shortest temper of any man, high or low, I ever met with)—I say, I went into the service of the old lord, as page-boy in waiting on the three honourable young ladies, at the age of fifteen years. There I lived till Miss Julia married the late Sir John Verinder. An excellent man, who only wanted somebody to manage him; and, between ourselves, he found somebody to do it; and what is more, he throve on it, and grew fat on it, and lived happy and died easy on it, dating from the day when my lady took him to church to be married, to the day when she relieved him of his last breath, and closed his eyes forever.
I have omitted to state that I went with the bride to the bride's husband's house and lands down here. "Sir John," she says, "I can't do without Gabriel Betteredge." "My lady," says Sir John, "I can't do without him, either." That was his way with her—and that was how I went into his service. It was all one to me where I went, so long as my mistress and I were together.
Seeing that my lady took an interest in the out-of-door work, and the farms, and such like, I took an interest in them too—with all the more reason that I was a small farmer's seventh son myself. My lady got me put under the bailiff, and I did my best, and gave satisfaction, and got promotion accordingly. Some years later, on the Monday as it might be, my lady says, "Sir John, your bailiff is a stupid old man. Pension him liberally, and let Gabriel Betteredge have his place." On the Tuesday as it might be, Sir John says, "My lady, the bailiff is pensioned liberally; and Gabriel Betteredge has got his place." You hear more than enough of married people living together miserably. Here is an example to the contrary. Let it be a warning to some of you, and an encouragement to others. In the mean time, I will go on with my story.
Well, there I was in clover, you will say. Placed in a position of trust and honor, with a little cottage of my own to live in, with my rounds on the estate to occupy me in the morning, and my accounts in the afternoon, and my pipe and my Robinson Crusoe in the evening—what more could I possibly want to make me happy? Remember what Adam wanted when he was alone in the Garden of Eden; and if you don't blame it in Adam, don't blame it in me.
The woman I fixed my eye on was the woman who kept house for me at my cottage. Her name was Selina Goby. I agree with the late William Cobbett about picking a wife. See that she chews her food well and sets her foot down firmly on the ground when she walks, and you're all right. Selina Goby was all right in both these respects, which was one reason for marrying her. I had another reason, likewise, entirely of my own discovering. Selina, being a single woman, made me pay so much a week for her board and services. Selina, being my wife, couldn't charge for her board, and would have to give me her services for nothing. That was the point of view I looked at it from. Economy—with a dash of love. I put it to my mistress, as in duty bound, just as I had put it to myself.
"I have been turning Selina Goby over in my mind," I said, "and I think, my lady, it will be cheaper to marry her than to keep her."
My lady burst out laughing, and said she didn't know which to be most shocked at—my language or my principles. Some joke tickled her, I suppose, of the sort that you can't take unless you are a person of quality. Understanding nothing myself but that I was free to put it next to Selina, I went and put it accordingly. And what did Selina say? Lord! how little you must know of women, if you ask that. Of course she said Yes.
As my time drew nearer, and there got to be talk of my having a new coat for the ceremony, my mind began to misgive me. I have compared notes with other men as to what they felt while they were in my interesting situation; and they have all acknowledged that, about a week before it happened, they privately wished themselves out of it. I went a trifle further than that myself; I actually rose up, as it were, and tried to get out of it. Not for nothing! I was too just a man to expect she would let me off for nothing. Compensation to the woman when the man gets out of it, is one of the laws of England. In obedience to the laws, and after turning it over carefully in my mind, I offered Selina Goby a feather-bed and fifty shillings to be off the bargain. You will hardly believe it, but it is nevertheless true—she was fool enough to refuse.
After that it was all over with me, of course. I got the new coat as cheap as I could, and I went through all the rest of it as cheap as I could. We were not a happy couple, and not a miserable couple. We were six of one and half a dozen of the other. How it was I don't understand, but we always seemed to be getting, with the best of motives, in one another's way. When I wanted to go up stairs, there was my wife coming down; or when my wife wanted to go down, there was I coming up. That is married life, according to my experience of it.
After five years of misunderstandings on the stairs, it pleased an all-wise Providence to relieve us of each other by taking my wife. I was left with my little girl Penelope, and with no other child. Shortly afterwards Sir John died, and my lady was left with her little girl Miss Rachel, and no other child. I have written to very poor purpose of my lady, if you require to be told that my little Penelope was taken care of, under my good mistress's own eye, and was sent to school and taught, and made a sharp girl, and promoted, when old enough, to be Miss Rachel's own maid.
As for me, I went on with my business as bailiff year after year up to Christmas, 1847, when there came a change in my life. On that day, my lady invited herself to a cup of tea alone with me in my cottage. She remarked that, reckoning from the year when I started as page-boy in the time of the old lord, I had been more than fifty years in her service, and she put into my hands a beautiful waistcoat of wool that she had worked herself, to keep me warm in the bitter winter weather.
I received this magnificent present quite at a loss to find words to thank my mistress with for the honor she had done me. To my great astonishment, it turned out, however, that the waistcoat was not an honor, but a bribe. My lady had discovered that I was getting old before I had discovered it myself, and she had come to my cottage to wheedle me (if I may use such an expression) into giving up my hard, out-of-door work as bailiff, and taking my ease for the rest of my days as steward in the house. I made as good a fight of it against the indignity of taking my ease as I could. But my mistress knew the weak side of me; she put it as a favor to herself. The dispute between us ended, after that, in my wiping my eyes, like an old fool, with my new woolen waistcoat, and saying I would think about it.
The perturbation in my mind, in regard to thinking about it, being truly dreadful after my lady had gone away, I applied the remedy which I have never yet found to fail me in cases of doubt and emergency. I smoked a pipe and took a turn at Robinson Crusoe. Before I had occupied myself with that extraordinary book five minutes, I came on a comforting bit (page one hundred and fifty-eight), as follows: "To-day we love, what to-morrow we hate." I saw my way clear directly. To-day I was all for continuing to be farm-bailiff; to-morrow, on the authority of Robinson Crusoe, I should be all the other way. Take myself to-morrow while in to-morrow's humor, and the thing was done. My mind being relieved in this manner, I went to sleep that night in the character of Lady Verinder's farm bailiff, and I woke up the next morning in the character of Lady Verinder's house-steward. All quite comfortable, and all through Robinson Crusoe!
My daughter Penelope has just looked over my shoulder to see what I have done so far. She remarks that it is beautifully written, and every word of it true. But she points out one objection. She says what I have done so far isn't in the least what I was wanted to do. I am asked to tell the story of the Diamond and, instead of that, I have been telling the story of my own self. Curious, and quite beyond me to account for. I wonder whether the gentlemen who make a business and a living out of writing books, ever find their own selves getting in the way of their subjects, like me? If they do, I can feel for them. In the mean time, here is another false start, and more waste of good writing-paper. What's to be done now? Nothing that I know of, except for you to keep your temper, and for me to begin it all over again for the third time.
CHAPTER III.
The question of how I am to start the story properly I have tried to settle in two ways. First, by scratching my head, which led to nothing. Second, by consulting my daughter Penelope, which has resulted in an entirely new idea.
