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
The narrator writes to his English family from India in an attempt to explain how he and his cousin John Herncastle grew apart during their involvement in the attack on the Palace of Seringapatam in 1799. He explains that he will begin before the attack, with the stories his group heard about the palace’s “treasure in jewels and gold.”
With an anonymous narrator reporting about broken family ties and a “treasure” halfway across the world from Britain (indeed, in Asia, which at the time was popularly associated with mysticism and exotic intrigue), the novel jumps straight into the register of mystery, invoking many motifs that became tropes in the genre over the 100 years after this novel’s publication.
Themes
