Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Moonstone, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Detective Methods and Genre Standards
Intention, Identity, and Personality
Science and Religion
Gender and Victorian Morality
Class, Wealth, and Nobility
British Imperialism
Summary
Analysis
In “Statement of Mr. Murthwaite (1850), In a Letter to Mr. Bruff,” Murthwaite reminds Bruff about their acquaintance and conversation about the Moonstone in 1848. He explains that he has “been wandering in Central Asia [… and] the north and north-west of India” ever since. He has since come to a “little known” area named Kattiawar, which is devoutly Hindu and home to the holy city of Somnauth—which was destroyed in the 11th century by Muslim invaders. On his way to Somnauth, Murthwaite encounters a few others going the same way, and manages to convince them he is a pilgrim. But the group of other travelers grows and grows, until thousands descend upon Somnauth for what Murthwaite soon learns will be a nighttime ceremony honoring the Moon god.
Although his return to the story may be unanticipated, it makes perfect sense that the traveler Murthwaite, the only man capable of appreciating, navigating, and communicating in both England and India besides the three Brahmins who steal the Diamond, narrates the Epilogue’s closing section. Indeed, his ability to blend in with the pilgrims attests to his cultural duality or ambiguity. To the astute reader who remembers Somnauth from the Prologue, it is clear that Murthwaite will stumble upon the Moonstone’s temple.
Themes
When he arrives in Somnauth, Murthwaite’s friends bring him to the Moon god’s shrine, which is hidden behind trees and a curtain at the top of a hill. Looking down, Murthwaite sees “the grandest spectacle of Nature and Man, in combination, that I have ever seen.” “Tens of thousands of human creatures” wearing white filled the area, in which three rivers met and flowed into the ocean. At the shrine, music begins and three men stand before the Moon god’s statue—Murthwaite immediately recognizes them as the three Indians from the Verinder estate. A companion explains to Murthwaite that these men were Brahmins but gave up their caste in order to recover the Moonstone, and would spend the rest of their lives as pilgrims, never to meet one another again. The three men embrace before the shrine, and then descend into the crowd, into which they blend seamlessly.
Murthwaite’s descriptions build a profound sense of suspense as the Brahmins prepare to reveal the Moon god. The sheer volume and coordination of pilgrims makes the ceremony feel earth-shattering and reveals how powerfully the Moonstone truly does unify Hindus—this certainly looks like a far more suitable place for the Diamond than on Rachel’s dress as an adornment. The Brahmins’ ultimate sacrifice of their existing bond, their honorable positions, and ultimately the rest of their lives similarly allows Collins to suggest that the British were fundamentally unable to appreciate the Moonstone’s true value.
Themes
The crowd falls silent and the curtain is drawn away from the trees, revealing the statue of the Moon god on his antelope, with the Moonstone in its forehead. His friends in England likely know how the Moonstone returned to India, Murthwaite writes, but he does not. But “the years pass, and repeat each other,” and so nobody knows “what will be the next adventures of the Moonstone.”
At last, in the book’s closing lines, the Moonstone’s theft is undone, and it is returned to its original, rightful resting place. While the whole book focused on the Diamond’s disappearance from Rachel’s bedroom, this ending forces the reader to remember that the Verinders were stealing the stone all along. Murthwaite’s final line evokes not only the cyclicality that is central to Hindu religious belief (e.g. reincarnation), but also the cycles of the Diamond’s theft, as well as the serialized format of Collins’s novel (and the inevitable next one that would soon come out in Dickens’s magazine).
Themes
