Novel
The Moonstone
Wilkie Collins · 1868
Opening lines
In the first part of Robinson Crusoe, at page one hundred and twenty-nine, you will find it thus written:
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
In 1799, at the sack of Seringapatam, an English officer seizes an enormous yellow diamond that once adorned the idol of a moon god. By his will he leaves it to his niece Rachel for her eighteenth birthday, and a cousin brings it to her at the house in Yorkshire. Three Indian jugglers have appeared on the terrace shortly before and return on the evening of the party. By morning the stone has vanished from the cabinet in her small sitting room. The local police find nothing; Sergeant Cuff comes from London, notes a mark on the fresh paint of a door, and clashes with the young woman, who refuses to help him.
Context
The novel appeared in weekly instalments from 4 January to 8 August 1868 in All the Year Round, the magazine edited by Dickens, and in three volumes from Tinsley as early as July, before the end of the serial. While he was writing it, his mother died, in March 1868, and rheumatic gout struck him down: he had to dictate part of it, under laudanum, and later declared that he had not recognised some pages as his own. The sergeant in the book is modelled on a real Scotland Yard inspector, Jonathan Whicher.
Who it is for
A long novel, made up of the successive accounts of several witnesses, gathered together after the event by one of the characters.
Prizes and reception
T. S. Eliot regarded it as the first, the longest and the best of modern English detective novels.
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