A Study Guide for Wilkie Collins's "The Moonstone"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Wilkie Collins's "The Moonstone," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jun 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535838498

Book preview

The Moonstone

Wilkie Collins

1868

Introduction

The Moonstone, by British author Wilkie Collins, was first published serially in thirty-two weekly parts in 1868. The magazine in which it ran, All the Year Round, was created and run by Collins's famous contemporary, Charles Dickens. In the United States, it was published simultaneously in Harper's Weekly. The first book edition of the novel was published that same year, and for nearly a century and a half, The Moonstone has remained popular as one of the most gripping novels to come out of the Victorian period in England.

The Moonstone has often been cited as the first true detective story, although some literary historians point to earlier fiction that could make that claim. The Moonstone, however, is the most popular of such early detective stories, and it entrenched many of the conventions of the detective genre. These conventions are used in the service of a story about the mysterious disappearance of a magnificent Indian jewel, the Moonstone, and efforts made to recover it. The Moonstone is also noteworthy for its narrative technique. Rather than simply narrating the story in a conventional third-person mode, Collins constructed his story as a series of narratives written by several of the characters, each of whom provides his or her perspective on the events surrounding the Moonstone and clues that lead to the final resolution of the case.

The Moonstone is widely available, including an edition published by Simon and Brown in 2011.

A free online version can be found at the Project Gutenberg Web site at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/155.

Author Biography

Collins was born on January 8, 1824, in London, England, where he lived most of his life. His father, William Collins, was a popular landscape painter and member of the Royal Academy. Collins endured a miserable childhood at boarding school, where he was bullied by the other students, though he later said that he developed his narrative skills by telling stories to one of his tormentors, thus keeping him at bay. His father tried to set him up in the tea trade, but Collins had no interest in commerce. When he was twenty-two years old, he took up the study of law at London's Lincoln's Inn, and he was called to the bar (that is, became a lawyer) in 1851. That year, though, his career took a new direction when he met novelist Charles Dickens. Rather than practicing law, he devoted himself to literature; he had begun writing as early as 1848.

In the years that followed, Collins wrote twenty-five novels. Two are still widely read: The Woman in White, published in 1859–1860, and The Moonstone, published in 1868. Two other of Collins's novels have also remained relatively popular: No Name, published in 1862, and the revenge thriller Armadale, published in 1866. Additionally, Collins published dozens of short stories and nonfiction pieces. He also wrote more than a dozen plays, some of them in collaboration with Dickens, who wrote plays for amateur theatrical performances. During the mid-Victorian period, Collins was among the