SOURCE: “The Moonstone, the Victorian Novel, and Imperialist Panic,” in Modern Language Quarterly, Vol. 55, No. 3, September, 1994, pp. 297-319.

In the following essay, Duncan explores Collins's representation of romantic imperialist discourse in The Moonstone.

Novel and Empire

Wilkie Collins's Moonstone (1868) is the sole mid-Victorian novel of the first rank that makes England's relation with India the center of its business. In the conquest of Seringapatam an English officer steals a sacred Indian diamond and bequeaths it to his niece back home. When the jewel disappears from the niece's bedroom, her family and friends—a cast of representative English gentry—fall under suspicion. Eventually the thief is revealed and punished, but agents of the cult carry the Moonstone back to India.

Despite its concern with an imperial dispossession of national character, Collins's best-known novel fails to appear in any of the powerful studies of Victorian representations of empire of the...