The Moonstone was published during the mid-nineteenth century, a momentous time in the history of British science, Christianity, and the relationship between the two. With the English economy’s transition to industrial capitalism, the controversy surrounding Darwinian theory, and the simultaneous acceleration of medical, transportation, and communication technologies alongside religious concern for society’s disadvantaged, science and religion began to grow antagonistic. It was no longer clear to most educated people that complex biology and technology were signs of God’s existence; rather, science had begun to challenge religion’s monopoly on explaining the history and development of the world and human species. With its exaggerated evangelical narrator Miss Clack, meditations on Hindu mysticism and “hocus-pocus,” and eventual dependence on a medical experiment for its plot, The Moonstone puts this emerging conflict front and center. The novel ultimately makes a case for putting scientific methodologies (including that of detective work) above blind faith—including the blind faith many technology-minded Victorians put in science itself.
The novel takes a satirical and critical stance toward religion—and especially Victorian Christianity. The most obvious example is the sanctimonious figure of Miss Clack, who considers spreading (her version of) the gospel as her primary purpose in life and increasingly alienates the entire Verinder family by doing so. Her narrative is replete with caricatures of nineteenth-century evangelism and ironic twists (like when she hides a pamphlet on “Satan among the Sofa Cushions” between Julia’s own sofa cushions—and inadvertently reveals her proselytizing as the devil’s work). She continually insists that she is looking out for people’s best interests before hounding them and violating their privacy in order to distribute such pamphlets. The emergent conflict between science and religion is clearly staged when Julia refuses to see a clergyman and insists on seeing a doctor for her terminal illness. This horrifies Miss Clack, who sees religion as an absolute authority and science as a “heathen profession” that only gets in the way. Of course, contemporary readers can see that Julia is sick and needs a doctor, not a blessing. Despite his and Clack’s mutual disdain for one another, Betteredge also sees Christianity as synonymous with all that is good and noble in the world; he declares Julia Verinder respectable because she is “a Christian woman, if ever there was one yet,” and later a “merciful and Christian mistress.” Ironically, of course, Julia turns down Miss Clack’s offer of spiritual advice and has no interest in religion during even her final days. And while both Betteredge and Miss Clack seem to think Christianity contains the truth, they are both deeply skeptical of Hinduism, the religion that gave the Moonstone its value in the first place; Betteredge calls it “hocus-pocus.”
In contrast to religious “hocus-pocus,” Collins positions scientific thinking as realistic and truly descriptive of reality; he clearly retains faith in the technological advancements of his day. The most obvious example of this is the scientific experiment on which the novel’s plot turns: Ezra Jennings is able to recreate Franklin Blake’s unwitting theft of the Moonstone by replicating the conditions under which he did it the first time. The unfulfilled plan that would have presumably banished the Diamond’s curse—breaking it up by cutting it into different stones in Amsterdam—also would have used technology to resolve the case once and for all. A more subtle example is the scientific Reformatory that turns Rosanna from a criminal into a law-abiding servant, which contrasts comically with the religious foundations run by Godfrey and Miss Clack—for instance, they find God’s work in a foundation that tailors delinquent fathers’ pants for their sons. Finally, the detective method is also a proxy for scientific investigation, a process of following concrete evidence to workable conclusions, which is on display from when Cuff traces the paint smear on Rachel’s door to when Franklin Blake traces and unearths Rosanna’s hidden letter.
But Collins also criticizes many characters’ misunderstandings of science, and excessive faith in it—he argues more for a scientific way of thinking than for science itself as the solution to every problem. During Ezra Jennings and Franklin Blake’s attempt to reconstruct the theft through a science experiment, the impressionable and histrionic Mrs. Merridew cannot sleep because she remembers that every science experiment in school was accompanied by an explosion—her comical misunderstanding of science only turns more ridiculous when she insists that the explosion was so quiet that technology must be progressing (of course, there simply is no explosion). This episode allows Collins to mock common misunderstandings of science, including the blind belief in progress. Further, the experiment is only necessary to account for the original theft of the Moonstone, which was also the product of science: Mr. Candy slipped Franklin Blake laudanum to prove that medicine worked after Franklin told Candy that his occupation was unnecessary and pointless. While this offers unquestionable proof that science works, here it is creating a problem rather than solving one. Ultimately, while Collins astutely recognizes the growing division between science and religion, his criticism of religion’s excesses does not prohibit him from also criticizing science’s.
Many prominent critics have argued that one of Collins’s great achievements was his ability to combine realism and romance, a scientific portrait of the world and an otherworldly fantasy that captures the reader’s attention. While his clear elevation of science over religion might suggest that he prefers this world over fantasy, in fact he shows how remarkable, romantic, and mysterious events are all accessible through the realist form—that a linear police investigation can inspire faith and wonder, and that a science experiment can reignite love.
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Science and Religion Quotes in The Moonstone
The Moonstone will have its vengeance yet on you and yours!
You are not to take it, if you please, as the saying of an ignorant man, when I express my opinion that such a book as Robinson Crusoe never was written, and never will be written again. I have tried that book for years—generally in combination with a pipe of tobacco—and I have found it my friend in need in all the necessities of this mortal life. When my spirits are bad—Robinson Crusoe. When I want advice Robinson Crusoe. In past times, when my wife plagued me; in present times, when I have had a drop too much—Robinson Crusoe. I have worn out six stout. Robinson Crusoe hard work in my service. On my lady's last birthday she gave me a seventh. I took a drop too much on the strength of it; and Robinson Crusoe put me right again. Price four shillings and sixpence, bound in blue, with a picture into the bargain.
Lord bless us! it roar a Diamond! As large, or nearly, as a plover's egg! The light that streamed from it was like the light of the harvest moon. When you looked down into the stone, you looked into a yellow deep that drew your eyes into it so that they saw nothing else. It seemed unfathomable; this jewel, that you could hold between your finger and thumb, seemed unfathomable as the heavens themselves. We set it in the sun, and then shut the light out of the room, and it shone awfully out of the depths of its own brightness, with a moony gleam, in the dark. No wonder Miss Rachel was fascinated: no wonder her cousins screamed. The Diamond laid such a hold on me that I burst out with as large an 'O' as the Bouncers themselves.
“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.”
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!
Pecuniary remuneration is offered to me—with the want of feeling peculiar to the rich. I am to re-open wounds that Time has barely closed; I am to recall the most intensely painful remembrances—and this done, I am to feel myself compensated by a new laceration, in the shape of Blake's cheque. My nature is weak. It cost me a hard struggle, before Christian humility conquered sinful pride, and self-denial accepted the cheque.
*NOTE. Added by Franklin Blake — Miss Clack may make her mind quite easy on this point. Nothing will be added, altered, or removed, in her manuscript, or in any of the other manuscripts which pass through my hands. Whatever opinions any of the writers may express, whatever peculiarities of treatment may mark, and perhaps in a literary sense, disfigure, the narratives which I am now collecting, not a line will be tampered with anywhere, from first to last. As genuine documents they are sent to me—and as genuine documents I shall preserve them; endorsed by the attestations of witnesses who can speak to the facts. It only remains to be added, that “the person chiefly concerned' in Miss Clack's narrative, is happy enough at the present moment, not only to brave the smartest exercise of Miss Clack's pen, but even to recognize its unquestionable value as an instrument for the exhibition of Miss Clack’s character.
When the Christian hero of a hundred charitable victories plunges into a pitfall that has been dug for him by mistake, oh, what a warning it is to the rest of us to be unceasingly on our guard! How soon may our own evil passions prove to be Oriental noblemen who pounce on us unawares!
“I'm afraid, Drusilla,” she said, “I must wait till I am a little better, before I can read that. The doctor—”
The moment she mentioned the doctor's name, I knew what was coming. Over and over again in my past experience among my perishing fellow-creatures, the members of the notoriously infidel profession of Medicine had stepped between me and my mission of mercy—on the miserable pretence that the patient wanted quiet, and that the disturbing influence of all others which they most dreaded, was the influence of Miss Clack and her Books. Precisely the same blinded materialism (working treacherously behind my back) now sought to rob me of the only right of property that my poverty could claim—my right of spiritual property in my perishing aunt.
“Oh, Rachel! Rachel!” I burst out. “Haven't you seen yet, that my heart yearns to make a Christian of you? Has no inner voice told you that I am trying to do for you, what I was trying to do for your dear mother when death snatched her out of my hands?”
“In the name of the Regent of the Night, whose seat is on the Antelope, whose arms embrace the four corners of the earth.
Brothers, turn your faces to the south, and come to me in the street of many noises, which leads down to the muddy river.
The reason is this.
My own eyes have seen it.”
The nightgown itself would reveal the truth; for, in all probability, the nightgown was marked with its owner's name.
I took it up from the sand, and looked for the mark.
I found the mark, and read —
MY OWN NAME.
“If Mr. Jennings will permit me,” pursued the old lady, “I should like to ask a favour. Mr. Jennings is about to try a scientific experiment to-night. I used to attend scientific experiments when I was a girl at school. They invariably ended in an explosion. If Mr. Jennings will be so very kind, I should like to be warned of the explosion this time. With a view to getting it over, if possible, before I go to bed.”
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!
