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
Sergeant Cuff turns to Godfrey Ablewhite’s actions at the Verinder house. Godfrey lived a double life: publicly, he was a noble man of charity, while privately, he had a villa and mistress near London that nobody knew about. The villa was full of fine, rare flowers, and the lady had an immense collection of valuable jewels, in addition to impressive horses and carriages. More astonishing than the existence of this villa was that everything in it was paid, without any outstanding debt.
Godfrey’s public and private lives were polar opposites: in fact, his charitable behavior and performances of politeness and grace were precisely what allowed him to get away with being a scoundrel. He breaks conventional codes of marriage by keeping a mistress, but this is something the author Wilkie Collins also did openly, and it is unclear why Godfrey would not just marry this woman (most likely, his family would have approved). Nevertheless, his reckless spending on things that are completely useless except as signifiers of class ironically threatened his place in the upper class altogether.
Themes
This much is known: Godfrey had control of a 20,000 pound trust for an underage man who was set to receive his inheritance in February, 1850. And yet Ablewhite had long since spent this 20,000 pounds by forging the other Trustee’s signature on every document.
In fact, the only reason Godfrey had no formal debt was because he stole the money outright—ultimately, of course, this worked out worse for him than simply borrowing money (like Franklin Blake) would have been.
Themes
The day before Rachel’s birthday and the Diamond’s theft, Godfrey Ablewhite had asked for a 300 pound loan from his father—the same amount he needed to pay the underage man twice a year. Godfrey’s father refused to lend him the money, and it is no longer surprising that Godfrey proposed marriage to Rachel Verinder shortly thereafter. He thus needed 300 pounds within the week and 20,000 pounds within two years, as of the date of the Diamond’s theft. Godfrey helped Mr. Candy slip Franklin the laudanum on the night of the theft.
Although Mr. Bruff already showed in his narrative that Godfrey only ever wanted to marry Rachel for her money, Cuff now reveals that he never had pure motives to begin with—indeed, he was notably surly on the day of Rachel’s birthday despite proposing to her, and his desperate need for money at the time clearly accounts for this.
Themes
