The Moonstone is set in the 1850s, or the Victorian period in Britain. Huge scientific and technological booms were underway. One such development that's particularly important to the book's plot is the rapid development of the British railway system. Instead of taking a long time to reach characters who are far from each other, people (and news!) can get from the North of England to the South in a day due to this new infrastructure.
Advancements in the field of medicine are also important to the novel as they are embodied in characters like Ezra Jennings. Relatedly, the novel's setting also engages with the emerging conversation in Collins's time around the use of narcotics. In particular, The Moonstone reflects on the social unease around the widespread use of opium. Britain was trading and profiting enormously in the sale of this drug from farms and plantations in its colonies. Collins links the close relationship between England and India to both its depiction of colonial violence and to its narration of the dangers and benefits of opium use.
Although parts of the novel are set in a stereotypically described and opulent British India, the majority of its events happen in two traditionally opposed British settings. The large northern county of Yorkshire, where the Verinder estate and the Shivering Sand are located, is wild countryside, associated in English literature with emotional excess, the Gothic, and the extreme. London is the Southern metropolis of England and is depicted as a place of modernity, order, and progress. As previously mentioned, however, the two places are geographically connected in The Moonstone by the fast railway systems now in place to travel between them. Characters move between these places quickly and easily, displaying the newly mobile and rapid pace of life in 1850s Britain.
Where Collins does specifically address India, there is a tension between stereotypical and broad-strokes depictions of the country as a British colony, and extremely specific allusions to real historical events that happened in the 1800s. When the novel was published the public interest in British India was unusually high, as the British government had recently completely revamped its system of governance after the First Indian War of Independence. The novel's "Indian" sections contain many colorful depictions of religious events and imaginary cultural traditions, which are contrasted with the more staid and somber narration of British life "at home."
