SOURCE: “Family Secrets and the Mysteries of The Moonstone,” in Victorian Literature and Culture, Vol. 21, 1993, pp. 127-45.

In the following essay, Gruner evaluates The Moonstone's “scathing commentary” on the secrets and hidden sins of the Victorian family.

What brought good Wilkie's genius nigh perdition?           Some demon whispered—“Wilkie! have a mission.” 

Swinburne, “Wilkie Collins”

Swinburne's famous judgment on Wilkie Collins is not generally applied to The Moonstone, the work which T. S. Eliot called “the first and greatest of English detective novels” (377). While few readers today would go so far as to concur with William Marshall's opinion that the novel reveals a “general absence of social criticism, overt or implied,” still it is rarely considered one of Collins's “message” novels—and probably for this reason it has received far more critical attention than those later works (77-78).¹ But The Moonstone, like those later novels with purpose which...