When they lose the Moonstone forever, Rachel and Julia Verinder are distraught not because they have lost something worth 20,000 pounds—they scarcely need the money—but rather because the Diamond’s loss signifies a violation of their family honor and dignity. The tension between these different modes of valuation—money and status—reveals the class differences that divide the wealthy, powerful Verinder family (who simply live off income from their land and do not work) from everyone else: their somewhat less wealthy and powerful relatives (who are constantly fighting debt to maintain their leisurely lifestyle), the professionals who serve them (like Mr. Bruff, Sergeant Cuff, and the doctors Mr. Candy and Ezra Jennings), and the working-class servants who keep their house. By portraying lower-class characters’ struggle sympathetically and showing how upper-class characters’ private lives do not at all measure up to their public personas, Collins challenges his era’s popular theory that class has anything at all to do with a person’s moral value.
Although most of them live in the same house, the novel’s characters have radically different experiences of the world, a set of differences that is unjustly determined by social class. Rosanna Spearman and the other servants work their whole lives but never earn enough to marry, take on better work, or move up socioeconomically. After giving up a life of petty theft, Rosanna is mortally bored and hopeless working at the Verinder estate; when she falls in love with Franklin Blake, who never even pays attention to her interest because she is only a servant, she can no longer stand her despair and drowns herself at the Shivering Sand. Rosanna’s friend Limping Lucy puts it plainly: the poor are forced to live “miserably” so that lazy rich aristocrats like Franklin Blake and Godfrey Ablewhite can avoid working, but fortunately “the day is not far off when the poor will rise against the rich.”
The novel’s middle-class characters fare better: Sergeant Cuff gets to comfortably retire after a long career, and Betteredge is an interesting, transitional character in terms of class: while he is technically one of the Verinders’ servants, he also takes on the dress, habits, and mannerisms of the upper class and is highly respected in the Verinder household, in part because he managed the family’s lands for a long time. For instance, even though Franklin Blake is technically of a higher social class than Betteredge, he takes loans from him and looks to him for advice. Betteredge is the only figure who mediates between the family and their servants and the only one with access to both the upper and working classes, because he can speak the languages of both classes. He practically worships the rich, however, whom he considers better than himself in every respect. Because he shows characters across the socioeconomic spectrum, Collins is able to show the severe inequality among them in a system that not only disproportionately benefits the wealthy, but also treats wealth as synonymous with honor and moral character.
However, Collins’s treatment of the upper class shows that their status is more about public appearances than private realities; they tend not to deserve their wealth at all, and often squander it. While Franklin Blake and Godfrey Ablewhite never have to work, it is because of their status and not their bank accounts: they are constantly getting further in debt to fund their lifestyles. Julia and Rachel worry about the Diamond’s loss because it signifies a violation of their family’s honor, and then fire Sergeant Cuff for the same reason: he questions whether Rachel herself might be guilty, crossing a line by questioning the family's honor. Collins thus shows that the public conflation of class, honor, and morality has nothing to do with people’s actual character. Ezra Jennings and Godfrey Ablewhite’s contrasting personalities demonstrate this: Jennings is physically hideous, disrespected and disdained by his community, and addicted to opium, but secretly yearns for love and acceptance and spends his last days doing everything possible to prove Franklin innocent of the Moonstone’s theft; meanwhile, Godfrey is outwardly chivalrous, pious, and charitable, but secretly steals everything of value he can get his hands on—including the Diamond itself, and the inheritance of a young man for whom he serves as trustee—so that he can pay for his mistress and villa outside London. Through these characters, Collins shows how people wrongly prioritize the public appearance of class over the private reality of action and personality.
However, Collins does not merely think some rich people do not deserve their wealth; he also shows how the very means of gaining wealth—inheritance and credit—end up undermining upper-class people’s lives and moral character. In other words, many of the novel’s characters are destroyed by their own wealth. Most obviously, the family immediately recognizes John Herncastle’s decision to leave the Moonstone to Rachel Verinder as a double-edged sword: it is at once a gesture of reconciliation and a way of getting revenge by passing on the Moonstone’s curse to his niece. Unlike her reckless husband John, Julia organizes her will so that her daughter Rachel will be protected from greedy suitors like her nephew Godfrey Ablewhite—who backs out of his engagement with Rachel once he learns that he will not grow rich by marrying her. He needs the money because he has leveraged his public-facing trustworthiness to get the credit and influence to access enormous sums of money he privately squanders, and will never pay back. While Collins does not demonize the wealthy aristocrats at his novel’s center, like Julia Verinder, her daughter Rachel, and Franklin Blake (who, like Godfrey Ablewhite, has debts of his own), he does make a case against the position, generally accepted but decreasingly viable in Victorian England, that wealth, nobility, and moral character are one and the same.
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Class, Wealth, and Nobility Quotes in The Moonstone
“Do you know what it looks like to me?” says Rosanna, catching me by the shoulder again. “It looks as if it had hundreds of suffocating people under it - all struggling to get to the surface, and all sinking lower and lower in the dreadful deeps! Throw a stone in, Mr Betteredge! Throw a stone in, and let's see the sand suck it down!”
Here was unwholesome talk! Here was an empty stomach feeding on an unquiet mind!
“Do you mean to tell me, in plain English,” I said, “that Miss Rachel has stolen her own Diamond?”
“Yes,” says the Sergeant; “that is what I mean to tell you, in so many words. Miss Verinder has been in secret possession of the Moonstone from first to last; and she has taken Rosanna Spearman into her confidence, because she has calculated on our suspecting Rosanna Spearman of the theft. There is the whole case in a nutshell. Collar me again, Mr. Betteredge. If it's any vent to your feelings, collar me again.”
People in high life have all the luxuries to themselves—among others, the luxury of indulging their feelings. People in low life have no such privilege. Necessity, which spares our betters, has no pity on as. We learn to put our feelings back into ourselves, and to jog on with our duties as patiently as may be. I don't complain of this—I only notice it.
I am (thank God!) constitutionally superior to reason. This enabled me to hold firm to my lady's view, which was my view also. This roused my spirit, and made me put a bold face on it before Sergeant Cuff. Profit, good friends, I beseech you, by my example. It will save you from many troubles of the vexing sort. Cultivate a superiority to reason, and see how you pare the claws of all the sensible people when they try to scratch you for your own good!
“Her ladyship has smoothed matters over for the present very cleverly,” said the Sergeant. “But this family scandal is of the sort that bursts up again when you least expect it. We shall have more detective-business on our hands, sir, before the Moonstone is many months older.”
“Where’s this gentleman that I mustn’t speak of, except with respect? Ha, Mr. Betteredge, the day is not far off when the poor will rise against the rich. I pray Heaven they may begin with him. I pray Heaven they may begin with him.”
“If you had spoken when you ought to have spoken,” I began: “if you had done me the common justice to explain yourself—”
She broke in on me with a cry of fury. The few words I had said seemed to have lashed her on the instant in to a frenzy of rage.
“Explain myself!” she repeated. “Oh! is there another man like this in the world? I spare him, when my heart is breaking; I screen him when my own character is at stake; and he—of all human beings, he—turns on me now, and tells me that I ought to have explained myself ! After believing in him as I did, after loving him as I did, after thinking of him by day, and dreaming of him by night—he wonders I didn't charge him with his disgrace the first time we met: ‘My heart's darling, you are a Thief! My hero whom I love and honour, you have crept into my room under cover of the night, and stolen my Diamond!’ That is what I ought to have said. You villain, you mean, mean, mean villain, I would have lost fifty Diamonds, rather than see your face lying to me, as I see it lying now!”
“Speaking as a servant, I am deeply indebted to you. Speaking as a man, I consider you to be a person whose head is full of maggots, and I take up my testimony against your experiment as a delusion and a snare. Don’t be afraid, on that account, of my feelings as a man getting in the way of my duty as a servant! You shall be obeyed. The maggots notwithstanding, sir, you shall be obeyed. If it ends in your setting the house on fire, Damme if I send for the engines, unless you ring the bell and order them first!”
“I wish I had never taken it out of the bank,” he said to himself. “It was safe in the bank.”
The curtain between the trees was drawn aside, and the shrine was disclosed to view.
There, raised high on a throne—seated on his typical antelope, with his four arms stretching towards the four corners of the earth—there, soared above us, dark and awful in the mystic light of heaven, the god of the Moon. And there, in the forehead of the deity, gleamed the yellow Diamond, whose splendour had last shone on me in England, from the bosom of a woman's dress!
Yes! after the lapse of eight centuries, the Moonstone looks forth once more, over the walls of the sacred city in which its story first began. How it has found its way back to its wild native land—by what accident, or by what crime, the Indians regained possession of their sacred gem, may be in your knowledge, but is not in mine. You have lost sight of it in England, and (if I know anything of this people) you have lost sight of it for ever.
So the years pass, and repeat each other; so the same events revolve in the cycles of time. What will be the next adventures of the Moonstone? Who can tell!
