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
Miss Clack, John Verinder’s loquacious and outwardly deferential niece, thanks her late parents for teaching her “habits of order and regularity,” like how to care for her hair and fold her clothes before keeping her diary and repeating the “Evening Hymn” at night. Although she has grown more troubled in adulthood, folding her clothes reminds her of a time when her father was still alive, and her diary allows her to “discipline the fallen nature which we all inherit from Adam” and serve Mr. Franklin Blake.
Clack, like Betteredge, opens with a personal digression that reveals much about her character, although in her case it is truly irrelevant to the story and merely a kind of comic relief. Indeed, the tone of her account makes her religious fanaticism clear from the start and sets her up as an unreliable narrator—in contrast to the deliberately humble and sober Betteredge. Nevertheless, both are firmly pinned to particular values: Betteredge sees Robinson Crusoe and loyalty to his employer as paramount, the same way Clack sees (her interpretation of) the Bible.
Themes
Miss Clack has grown poor and distant from Julia’s side of the family. Living retired in Brittany, she mostly keeps to herself—but then, all of the sudden, she receives a letter from Franklin Blake, asking her to write a record of her visit to London in exchange for both a check and a sense of importance. Because she kept a detailed record of her visit in her diary and because her “sacred regard for truth is (thank God) far above [her] respect for persons,” she promises she will be an objective witness, although she also writes that Franklin Blake might modify her testimony. (Franklin Blake writes in a note explaining that he will not make any alterations to the “manuscripts which pass through my hands,” and that he can withstand “the smartest exercise of Miss Clack’s pen,” which is revealing about its own author’s character.)
Clack’s allusion to her new home in France and Franklin Blake’s scathing footnote suggest that, unlike Betteredge, she is far from beloved by the family; rather, Franklin simply needs her narrative for his records, and while she claims to be providing it out of a sense of service, it is clear that her real motivation is money (but also that she does not want to admit it). Clack’s declaration that she prefers “truth” above “persons” contrasts directly with Betteredge’s expression of delight that he puts loyalty to Julia above mere reason. It is also clear that Clack puts little actual weight in the “truth”—at least, “truth” conceived as scientifically verifiable fact, the kind relevant to the Diamond’s theft and necessary for the witness statements Franklin Blake is compiling. Indeed, her frequent conflation of “truth” with religious dogma ultimately obscures rather than reveals the facts of the case.
Themes
Literary Devices
Clack’s involvement with the Moonstone mystery begins on July 3rd, 1848, when she passes Julia Verinder’s house in London, notices it is occupied, and decides to knock. She learns that Julia and Rachel have recently come to London and sends a message “begging to know whether I could be of any use.” This message goes to “the daughter of a heathen old man named Betteredge—long, too long, tolerated in my aunt’s family.” While Penelope goes upstairs to pass the message, Miss Clack reads a religious pamphlet “addressed to young women on the sinfulness of dress.” Penelope returns and transmits Julia’s invitation to lunch the next day. Miss Clack offers Penelope the pamphlet, which she rejects—but Miss Clack puts it in the mailbox on her way out (making her feel “relieved, in some small degree, of a heavy responsibility towards others”).
Although Clack presents stumbling upon Julia’s house as a casual coincidence and offering her help as an act of service, Penelope’s note to her father Betteredge at the end of the last chapter suggests that Clack is ordinarily keen to impose herself on the family uninvited. And Clack’s attitude toward Penelope and Betteredge—who also considers himself a good Christian—again forces the reader to confront the question of how much of Betteredge’s narrative to take at face value (not to mention the perhaps easier associated question: how much of Clack’s). Clack’s pamphlet is a classic symbol of Victorian evangelical Christian morality, a largely conservative, reactionary trend that aimed to stop the changes in social and especially gender mores brought about by industrialization.
Themes
The same evening, Miss Clack meets with her charity committee, which is in the business of buying “unredeemed fathers’ trousers from the pawnbroker” and tailoring them for their “innocent son[s].” She is surprised that her “precious and admirable friend” Godfrey Ablewhite does not come to the meeting. The others on the Committee explain that Godfrey and Mr. Septimus Luker were “victims of an outrage which had startled all London” the previous week. While she neither saw the story in the newspapers nor heard it firsthand from Ablewhite, she will now “state the facts as they were stated” and hopes that the reader will accept “these lines […] written by a poor weak woman.”
Clack’s charity, also a caricature of the fundamentally useless religious social interventionism that often passed as reform, essentially uses the pants to denounce fathers for their poverty, which is labeled immoral without any consideration of how or why families end up poor (not to mention any attempts at genuinely changing the next generation’s socioeconomic situation). Clack’s mention of Godfrey should recall her brief presence at Rachel’s birthday dinner (when they spoke to no one else, and the reader can now likely see this might have had something to do with Clack’s propensity for endless, empty talk).
Themes
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On the previous Friday, June 30th, Godfrey ran into a stranger at a bank. While this may seem minor and unrelated, Miss Clack warns the reader against “presuming to exercise your poor carnal reason” (and then apologizes for “fall[ing] insensibly into my Sunday-school style”). The stranger was Mr. Luker, by the way. At home, Miss Clack continues, Godfrey found a boy waiting for him with a letter inviting him to go immediately to answer questions for a prospective donor to the charity for which he and Clack work. “The Christian Hero” Mr. Godfrey went immediately to the house in question, where he noticed “a faint odour of musk and camphor,” as well as “an ancient Oriental manuscript” on a table. Suddenly, a “tawny-brown colour[ed]” arm grabbed him from behind and he was blindfolded, gagged, thrown to the ground, and searched.
While Clack realizes that her “Sunday-school style” can be off-putting, it is so contradictory, exaggerated, and comedic, especially to Collins’s working- and middle-class newspaper audience, that it made her narrative the most popular section of the novel. Her name for Godfrey, “the Christian Hero,” recalls Betteredge’s comparable reverence for the man, although both contrast with his surliness on Rachel’s birthday, which is the reader’s only glimpse of him so far. Clack narrates the Indians’ robbery of Godfrey with a characteristic outrage tied to her descriptions of stereotypes about Asia and the men’s racial characteristics. Although, by distracting Godfrey with the “ancient Oriental manuscript,” the Indians seem to understand and use to their advantage the power of such prejudices and stereotypes.
Themes
Literary Devices
Clack considers the next events “hardly within the proper limits of female discussion,” but continues by explaining that Godfrey heard yelling in an unfamiliar language and then silence for some time, until the apartment’s landlord and his wife came to free him. They explained that an English gentleman and his “three Oriental noblemen” friends had rented their flat for a week, and that nothing out of the ordinary happened until this moment when they saw their lodgers walking away and encountered Mr. Godfrey bound upstairs. Although Godfrey’s possessions were strewn around the room, nothing was missing—except the book he had seen on the table before. Clack determines that “Godfrey had been the victim of some incomprehensible error.”
Clack ties her regressive picture of gender roles (“proper […] female discussion”) to her xenophobic disdain for the Indians, and of course recounts Godfrey being saved by the selfless English property owner. Again, the Indians play on this same stereotype to rent the apartment in the first place (by presenting themselves as aristocracy and enlisting an English gentleman). Unable to imagine that the Indians could have had a reason to search Godfrey—presumably, for the Diamond—Clack declares they must have been “incomprehensibl[y]” irrational to do so.
Themes
Literary Devices
Mr. Luker, similarly, received a mysterious letter that day from a man who professed to be “an enthusiastic collector of oriental antiquities.” The same exact thing happened to him: he saw the beautiful book, was choked and blindfolded and gagged and searched, then saved by a landlord who gave the same story. The only difference was that one of Mr. Luker’s papers was missing: it was a receipt for “a valuable of great price” that he had left in the bank. He ran to the bank in question, but they had seen no sign of the receipt nor the Indians. The police investigated, and it became clear that the men were planning to rob whatever Mr. Luker left in the bank (and searched Mr. Godfrey because they saw the two men meet there). Accordingly, Godfrey’s reason for being away from Miss Clack’s charity meeting was an appointment with the police.
Unlike with Godfrey, the Indians certainly had a reasonable basis for assuming Mr. Luker had something to do with the Diamond. This is the same story about which Cuff mailed a newspaper item to Betteredge, which means that Clack’s narrative has reached the point at which Betteredge’s ends. But given Clack’s reverence for Godfrey, the reader must decide how faithfully to believe her insistence that he was only at the bank by coincidence. Luckily, his meeting with the police confirms for Clack that Godfrey remains truly invested in her charity.
Themes
At lunch with Julia and Rachel Verinder the day after her visit to their house, Miss Clack is astonished by Julia’s concern for Rachel and Rachel’s “absence of all ladylike restraint.” Rachel goes to the library after lunch (as the doctor had ordered) and Julia tells Miss Clack “the whole horrible story of the Indian Diamond.” Given her lack of faith in Rachel’s character, Miss Clack was not astonished by any part of the story besides Julia’s failure to call in a clergyman and the doctor’s “heathen advice.” Julia explains that Godfrey and Luker’s “strange adventure[s]” further aroused Rachel’s spirits, and Miss Clack responds by suggesting that Rachel must be “keeping a sinful secret” that the investigation into the Diamond’s disappearance “threatens.” At that moment, Godfrey Ablewhite comes into the room.
Much like Betteredge does (although more forcefully), Clack considers Rachel the wrong kind of woman because of her independent-mindedness and refusal to accommodate the gendered expectations of polite society—even though Clack does not take into consideration the profound trauma Rachel has just suffered and also certainly lacks “restraint” when she openly accuses Rachel of hiding something. Clack’s disdain for doctors evokes the emerging tension between science and religion in Victorian England—a conflict in which Collins seems to side firmly with science.
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Literary Devices
