The Moonstone: looking at dates

I thought it might be useful to include some key events that take place in 1848 when The Moonstone is set and 1868 when The Moonstone was written. All information is taken from The Annuls of London and The Timetables of History

1848

London reforms sewer systems since sewage had been directly emptied into the Thames creating health problems such as cholera outbreaks as well as a terrible smell. (For those who followed the Neverwhere blog this is before the Great Stink of 1858 so sewer reform was slow but there had been several cholera outbreaks in the 1840s which started the slow wheels of reform.)

First railway bridge across the Thames carrying the London and South Western line from Richmond to Windsor.

Waterloo station opened in Belgravia. It included a special daily “funeral express to take mourners to Brookwood Cemetery near Woking. (Station pictured at left.)

Chopin gave his first public performance in England in Belgravia which sold out and was considered a great success.

The Communist Manifesto is issued by Marx and Engels.

The Principles of Political Economy by J.S. Mill is published.

Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell is published

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood begins when William Holman Hunt wrote a letter to Dante Gabriel Rossetti to see if they might share studio space.

Queen’s College was established in Harley street for the higher education of women. Male tutors from Kings college were first used so women took courses with chaperones.

As mentioned in an earlier post revolutions are breaking out across Europe.

1868

The last public execution at Newgate prison was held.

The London Underground was expanding rapidly in all directions to accommodate the transportation needs of the city.

The Victoria Embankment along the Thames opened to foot traffic. (Illustration at left.)

The first traffic light with red and green gas lights was installed between Bridge Street and Great George street. The Express reported on December 8^th , “ which will serve to foot passengers by way of caution, and at the same time remind drivers of vehicles and equestrians that they ought at this point to slacken their speed.”

Horse racing started at a leisure park in Hornsey.

Charles Darwin publishes The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication. (On the Origin of Species was published in 1859 for additional context.)

Judging a Book by its Cover

I just wanted to add a second quick post today. The longevity and success of The Moonstone means that it has been issued and reissued and I find the cover art of these books fascinating as they are wildly different. Does the cover show the shivering sands, the diamond, India or the god from whom the stone was taken? Each cover choice seems to highlight a different aspect of what is important to the mystery of the moonstone. Some of the covers are shown below. They tend to fall into four categories: focus on a woman or women (either in fancy dress or at the shivering sands), an exterior of a home or street(generally Gothic looking), the diamond, the Indians or an exoticized image of the god. In the case of older covers these foreign representations seem offensive and on one the quote from Dorothy L. Sayers is larger than Collins name.

Women's Roles in Collins

I saw a lovely run through of The Moonstone right before the holiday break and I have been thinking about the women's roles.

I have always found women in Collins novels to be more assertive than one would expect from a Victorian novelist, which might speak to our misconceptions about Victorian women, but in particular Collins shows women acting forcefully on their own behalf which makes them feel very modern.

Lady Julia Verinder is clearly a force to be reckoned with. She is a long time widow she runs her esta

te. She has shunned a brother because of his questionable morals. She has taken pains to make sure that her estate is protected for her daughter. This is no small feat given the complexity of inheritance laws during the era and the favoring of male family members or husbands in how property was dispersed and controlled.

Additionally, Lady Verinder has been hiding a serious illness. Most critics feel the strange turn the novel takes about Lady Verinder's health issues is tied his own mother, who became sick and died while Collins was writing The Moonstone. His grief over his mother influenced the strength with which she is depicted and described. (Rachel with her mother as Godfrey Ablewhite and Miss Clack look on in the Arthur Fraser Illustration above.)

Rachel Verinder is much like her mother. She bears the brunt of public accusation and scorn both for the moonstone and a broken engagement. She conceals information to protect those she loves even at great personal expense. What interests me particularly about Rachel is the loss of identity she experiences when she discovers someone to have been untrue. In a complex intellectual move she experiences a diminution in herself because she failed to have the good judgement to make good decisions about others. (Rachel Verinder confronting Franklin Blake in another Arthur Fraser illustration at left.)

She also reminds me of another heroine in the Collins novel The Law and The Lady. Published in 1875 it follows the adventures of Valeria Brinton who discovers that her new husband married her under a false name. She further learns that her husband had a Scottish verdict of "not proven" in a trial on the murder of his first wife. When her husband flees in disgrace Valeria turns detective to prove her husband innocent and save their marriage. Similarly, Rachel is willing to shun convention to protect those she loves.

Collins is also interested in the plight of working class characters and that ambiguous class of genteel poverty in which Miss Clack resides.

Rosanna Spearman we are told from the outset has had a difficult life and been a thief and in an institution for reform. Many Victorian reform institutions for women were for prostitutes. While Rosanna is specifically identified as a thief she expresses a very un-Victorian trait, an open expression of her love and desire for a man who is her social superior. Spearman also works to conceal information for one whom she cares about. She is plain and has dealt with both the difficult unmentioned childhood and almost complete isolation from her fellow servants in the household in Yorkshire. The combination of both the lack of resources available to her and the tragic bravery she shows in the story are meant to give us both a critique the circumstances that led to her situation and evoke sympathy from the reader or audience.

Miss Clack is a delightful narrative voice in that she provides a complete contrast to Betteridge and her language, peppered with religious platitudes and moral aphorisms and her entirely different view of certain members of the family lets us clearly know we are in the world of first person testimony and that while the various narrators will stick to what they know their opinions will be colored by their prejudices. Clack is also a figure that was problematic to the Victorians and later eras. She is an extra woman, raised to be in the upper classes but not married off because of either lack of funds or lack of interest. Now beyond the age of marriage the question remains of what these women are to do, particularly women with diminishing incomes and a class based desire not to engage in work. Clack, like so many other single women turns to charitable work as she herself relies on charity from her wealthier family members.

It is important to consider that although Clack is a figure of fun in the novel. Women's groups were responsible for campaigning for many noble causes including stricter labor laws, particularly child labor, women's suffrage, and the anti-slavery movement. It was the growth of schools (championed by many of these women) that led to wider literacy that gave Collins a broad reading audience for his serialized works. So while Clack with her tracts is certainly humorous it is important to think of her in context in a world that would have had deep limitations for her because of her upbringing, her modest circumstances and the roles available to her as a woman.

Colonialism and Revolution in The Moonstone

One of the interesting things in thinking about The Moontstone and watching the development of the script as Rob has gone through drafts is how we think about the characters of the Indians as they appear in Victorian England and the history of the moonstone.

What surprised me about The Moonstone when I first read it is that Collins seems to show sympathy for the Indians about original theft of the stone from the statue of the moon god. It may be of interest to know that while Collins does not name the god the description fits with that of Chandra also sometimes known or combined with the god Soma. He pulls the moon across the sky in his chariot and is sometimes depicted riding on an Antelope. He is also a fertility god and associated with vegetation.

While Collins seems to rely on the exoticized east to use the three Indian travelers to create a sense of mystery and fear surrounding their presence in relation to the moonstone.


The status of the stone is already fraught. It has been stolen from the statue city of Somnauth and by a string of thefts and murders has ended up in a cache of stolen gems of Tipu Sahib. The story we are given about how Colonel Hearncastle killed (dishonorably) to possess the stone depicts the ugliness of colonialism and the looting that occurred throughout the British control of India. The stone inherited by Rachel Verinder is stolen goods and taken through violence.

A sense of sympathy is created for the three Indians, whom, we are told by the traveler Murthwaite, have forsaken home and caste to retrieve the stone. Collins also doesn't discount or minimize the mysticism of the Indians or any potential mystical associations with the stone. The Indians practicing scrying, looking into the future in a pool of ink is taken seriously by all but Betteredge. The fears many characters voice over the curse associated with the stone are again taken seriously so the Indians are not belittled as superstitious in comparison to the English.

At the same time it is difficult not to grapple with the fact that to a modern audience any depiction of three Indians in England at this time can seem racially charged, something I think Rob's adaptation goes to great pains to minimize. Ultimately the story is not about the fears of the other, the foreign. The fears and mystery lie in the actions and motivations of the family. One feels the stone might be best with the Indians as a form of restitution.

However, I don't want to minimize what Collin's audience would have known about British History in India. "The Storming of Serringpatam" in 1799 in which the stone is taken was a major British victory that ushered in the time of British rule in Southern India (and extended the reaches of the East India Company) in ways that were brutal to the local population. The novel is set in 1848 which is a year of revolutions in Europe (which colors and adds danger to Franklin Blake's European travels). It is also the year of Chartist demonstrations in London where many in the working classes rallied for reforms. Readers would have been aware of the cultural shifts and unrest in both England and abroad. Property, ownership, class and entitlement were not as solidly entrenched as they might have seemed.

Collins reading audience would have known of the earlier battle but also of the recent 1857 Sepoy Rebellion in which Indian troops near Delhi rebelled brought about the dissolution of the East India company in striking contrast to the time at which the gem was taken. Many of Collins' contemporaries referred to horrors inflicted on the English during this time period to portray Indians in a brutal and negative light which Collins seems to avoid but at the same time his readers would have read newspaper accounts about the violence of the Indian uprising and might have been prepared to view the three Indians as figures of fear.

Murthwaite is an interesting comparison to this. His presence in the story is because he is a noted traveler and valued for the conversation he will bring to the various dinner parties he attends when he is not traveling the world. He also acts as an interpreter for the actions and the language of the Indians for the other characters in the story. One source for the character of Murthwaite is John William Shaw Wyllie an Anglo-Indian traveller whom Collins would have met at his club. He also likely referred to the books Talboys Wheeler's The History of India and the Life of Sir David Baird by Theodore Hook.

A Meta-Treat: Layers of Story-Telling

Last night we blocked a particularly challenging set of pages where we join Franklin and Rachel as they travel from Yorkshire to London, meet Sergeant Cuff  and Mister Bruff there, rush off to the bank to trace the Moonstone to a sailor, who we follow through various alleyways and into the inn known as The Wheel of Fortune. We continue with Cuff telling us the backstory of Mister Godfrey Ablewhite, including for us information learned by Septimus Lucker and related to Cuff by way of interrogation.

It's parts like these that tend to blow my mind. Character A relates to the audience the private experience of character B, as learned from character C in a private interview. B and C had an interaction where B told C about this event. C told A about it. And now A is talking to us. A is therefore relating some of character C's point of view as well as his own and the speculation over the actions of B is tainted by B's telling, C's motives and A's opinion of the whole thing. Ka-POW!*

 

 *the sound of my brain exploding

Detective Fever

"Do you feel an uncomfortable heat at the pit of your stomach...and a nasty thumping at the top of your head?...I call it the detective-fever."

- Gabriel Betteridge, The Moonstone

The Moonstone is certainly one of the first detective novels. As such, it both sets many of the standards that will be followed in the genre but at the same time it is a bit more fluid than the standard detective novel.

In The Moonstone many characters play detective in addition to Sergeant Cuff of the Detective Police.

Gabriel Betteridge, Lady’ Julia’s house steward, describes detective fever. He can’t resist asking the servants his own questions.

Mr. Bruff, the family lawyer turns detective both to discover who looked at Lady Verinder’s will, and setting a watch on the bank.

Ezra Jennings pieces together Doctor Candy’s fevered ravings and makes a sensible narrative of them.

Franklin Blake turns amateur detective assembling the evidence of all the other characters to piece together the story.

Sergeant Cuff however represents many of the traits that would become standard to the professional detective. The unassuming appearance, the eccentric behavior, the use of misdirection to elicit answers, would all become part of the trope of the detective.

In this stage adaptation of The Moonstone, we lose the local police Superintendent Seagrave of Frizinghall, who acts as the bumbling, pompous foil to the deductions of Sergeant Cuff, who comes from London. Cuff is a member of the detective-police, a newly established in London where a detective, who specialized in solving crimes would be in charge of cases as opposed to the usual police officers.

Betteridge describes Cuff, "He was dressed all in decent black, with a white cravat round his neck. His face was as sharp as a hatchet, and the skin of it was as yellow and dry and withered as an autumn leaf. His eyes, of a steely light grey, had a very disconcerting trick, when they encountered your eyes, of looking as if they expected something more from you than you were aware of yourself. His walk was soft; his voice was melancholy; his long lanky fingers were hooked like claws. He might have been a parson, or an undertaker--or anything else you like, except what he really was."

In fact, Sergeant Cuff is likely based on a real London police detective, Inspector Jonathan Whicher. The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher traces Whicher's rise, fall and and investigation of the shocking murder of a three-year-old child, Saville Kent. Whicher is pictured at left. Whicher came to suspect a half-sister, Constance Kent and was ridiculed in Punch and his career ruined. Later, Constance Kent confessed but it was too late to resuscitate his career or the shambles of his life.

The new role of the clever detective and the emerging science of deduction was of interest to Collins and his friend Charles Dickens, who wrote several short pieces in his weekly paper Household Words, "The Detective Police," "On Duty with Inspector Field" and and "Three Detective Anecdotes" in which he met, profiled and praised the new order of detectives.

Collins also establishes the Detective with an eccentricity. Cuff loves roses and wants to cultivate them when he retires. He is described whistling "The Last Rose of Summer" an Irish Air by Thomas Moore, that was further popularized as Mendelssohn used it as the source for a fantasia. The lyrics are below.

'Tis the last rose of summer, left blooming all alone
All her lovely companions are faded and gone.
No flower of he kindred, no rose bud is nigh
To reflect back her blushes and give sigh for sigh.

I'll not leave thee, thou lone one! to pine on the stem
Since the lovely are sleeping, go sleep thou with them
Thus kindly I scatter thy leaves o'er the bed
Where thy mates of the garden lie scentless and dead.

So soon may I follow, when friendships decay
And from love's shining circle the gems drop away
When true hearts lie wither'd and fond ones are flown
Oh! who would inhabit this bleak world alone!

The lyrics seems to have additional significance given the role the roses picked for Franklin Blake's button hole play for both Rosanna Spearman mental state and what Rachel Verinder will go through after the theft of the diamond. The decay in the song is not unlike the decay inherited with the moonstone that seems to be destroying and scattering the family unit.

It is also interesting to note that the reader, or, in our case, the audience is asked to participate in this detective-fever. We are given the various accounts related to the missing moonstone and asked to piece them together. In doing so, we are asked to peer into the lives and motivations of the characters and lift the veil of Victorian domestic life.

The Vast Victorian: Tracts, Serving and Juggling

I am sorry to be so slow to get some new information up. While you are waiting for a variety of other dramaturgical tidbits I wanted to pass on some interesting reading material that will be of use to a number of you.

The Victorian Web (a project out of Brown University) has a wide variety of interesting materials on how, religion, science and social roles were viewed during the era. The section on tracts and the sorts of evangelical groups that would use tracts and would agitate for literacy (across classes) as a means to exposing children to religion will be of particular interest to Miss Clack. (Above: American tracts of the same era targeting children.)

Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management is a great book about the variety of things a lady would need to know to run a household. The entire book is online and the sections on the mistress of the house, servants, the doctor and legal memoranda will be of interest for this production not only for those playing servants, doctors and the lawyer but just to get a sense of the time period. Victorian recipes for the common hog are just a bonus.

Victorian writer, William Hazlitt, wrote many things, but his article, The Indian Jugglers, originally published in Table Talk in 1828 may be of interest. It quickly ceases to be about juggling, but the initial description of the jugglers may be of use to those thinking about how the Indian jugglers would be perceived by Victorians.

Opium Eating and The Moonstone

The use of opium is featured in several of novels by Wilkie Collins including The Moonstone. Collins was also a user of opium both in laudanum and injections. It is important however to understand that opium was widely used in England at this time as a medicinal remedy. Although Doctors and chemists widely disagreed about both its uses and it the physiological response to the drug it was accepted for use in the home and was not considered a source of shame or moral failing or addiction as an illness in the same way as modern drug use.

Opium is used in a variety of forms all of which are derived from the sticky white juice taken from the opium poppy. It can be prepared in a variety of forms. During the time period it was smoked in pipes, and injected as morphine but most often it was prepared in a brownish/red liquid tincture in alcohol known as laudanum.

Laudanum was widely available and inexpensive in chemist shops in even the smallest English villages. It was commonly given to sooth fussy children and infants. It was sold under a wide variety of names including: Batley's Sedative Solution, Dalby's Carminative, Godfrey's Cordial, McMunn's Elixir, and Mother Bailey's Quieting Syrup for which an advertisement is pictured at left. It was given as a tonic or cure a wide range of illnesses including colds, cholera, hay fever, insomnia, tuberculosis, nervousness, headaches, gout and rheumatism.

In Opium and the Romantic Imagination, Alethea Hayter says that,"Laudanum was cheaper than beer or gin, cheap enough for even the lowest-paid worker." Further in the same work, a chemist in a small Lancashire parish is cited as selling 200 pound of opium per year and a chemist in Thorpe is described as telling Coleride he sold two to three pounds of opium and a gallon of laudanum every market day.

Wilkie Collins saw his father taking "Bately's Drops" to ease the pain of heart disease before his death. When Collins began to suffer symptoms of rheumatism and gout as well as eye pain he began taking laudanum to ease the pain. He would be a lifelong user of laudanum. As his tolerance for the opiate increased so did his dosages. Late in life Collins was taking doses that would have killed a normal person. At a dinner party, he apparently asked the surgeon Sir William Fergusson to verify his claim and Fergusson told the dinner party that the amount of laudanum Collins took nightly was sufficient to kill every man at the dinner table. Collins also received occasional injections of morphine for pain.

Collins seems to have both resented and romanticized his need for laudanum. He claimed he took laudanum "To stimulate the brain and steady the nerves," but he advised his friend Hall Caine against taking it himself. He felt he needed it to bear the pain he suffered but he was also aware of the associations laudanum had with numerous writers. Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater was published in 1821. The use of opium by authors such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Charles Baudelaire was also well-known.

Walter Scott claimed to have written part of The Bride of Lammermoor (a novel particularly admired by Collins) while he was under the influence so that when he read it he did not recognize the story as his own. Collins may have remembered this story when he told a similar story about writing The Moonstone. Collins claimed that his pain was so great that he had to dictate the story and that he went through several secretaries before he found one who would ignore his cries of pain. It is clear from the manuscript that some of the pages are written in a different hand. Collins also claimed that he was "pleased and astonished" by the end of The Moonstone but did not recognize it as his own work.

"If I had only myself to think of, I should prefer the sharp pain to the frightful dreams." - Ezra Jennings, The Moonstone

The character of the Doctor Candy's assistant, Ezra Jennings, in The Moonstone is also an opium user many critics have seen him as the voice of Collins speaking when he describes the effects of the opium that keeps him from pain but gives him terrible nightmares. Collins did not describe nightmares as part of the effects of his laudanum use but he did describe waking hallucinations including the feeling that someone was standing behind him, ghosts on the staircase who wanted to push him down and a green woman with tusks who said goodnight by biting his shoulder.

Collins personal experience with laudanum is also represented in his descriptions of the experience of being under its influence which is key in both The Moonstone and his other novels including No Name and Armadale.

Sources: Opium and the Romantic Imagination, Alethea Hayter and Wilkie Collins, An Illustrated Guide, Andrew Gasson

Wilkie Collins: Beyond the Veil of Domesticity

In thinking about the complex web of interpersonal relationships in The Moonstone it is inevitable that one should look at the complicated in writing about Collins to look at the mysteries of his personal life.

William Wilkie Collins was the son of Harriet and William Collins. His father was a successful landscape painter and member of the Royal Academy. Initially, making a living as an artist was difficult and the Collinses financial circumstances were precarious for a time before successful commissions and patronage assured the Collins family of a respectable living. Collins was named after his godfather His father was conservative and very religious, traits Collins would seem to rebel against in his own more Bohemian adulthood. (A young Collins in a portrait by Millais at right.)

Collins was had a bulge on one side of his forehead and was nearsighted from childhood, wearing glasses most of his life.

His education was patchy with time at Maida Hill Academy and travels in France and Italy with his family when he was twelve and thirteen years old. He considered his time in Europe the best part of his education. He finished his education at a London boarding school where he began telling stories to please a school bully.

He worked at Antrobus & Co., a tea merchant. Collins hated the work and used much of his time to write stories. Much of his experiences here would reappear fictionalized in his novel, Hide and Seek. He read law at Lincoln's Inn in May 1846.

Collins maintained two households with women to whom he was not married, Caroline Graves and Martha Rudd. In 1858, Collins was living with widow Caroline Graves and her seven year old daughter from her first marriage Harriet bu

t called Carrie. Collins paid for Carrie’s education and when she was older she would often serve as his secretary. She made Collins life comfortable, though Dickens apparently referred to her as “the female skeleton” in the house. Some accounts describe his meeting with Caroline Graves as the inspiration for the opening of his novel, The Woman in White, but the stories are not confirmed. Collins and Graves would live together unmarried except for a brief two years when Graves married Joseph Clow. The marriage was likely in response to Collins new relationship with Martha Rudd or because he still did not want to marry Graves after his mother's death removed the excuse of her potential objection to the marriage. After two years Caroline abandoned her marriage to Clow and she and Collins lived as before. (Caroline Graves at right)

Collins was forty when he likely met nineteen year old Martha Rudd who was working as a servant in an inn where Collins vacationed. He brought her to London where she lived as Mrs. William Dawson and bore Collins two daughters Marian and Harriet and a son, William. (Martha Rudd at left)

The Martha Rudd and her children lived as Mrs. Dawson and the children used the name Dawson. They always lived within walking distance of Collins and Graves and the women knew of each other and the Dawson children were welcome in both homes.

Collins provided for both his families in his will. However, Carrie had married Henry Powell Bartley who served as Collins solicitor for the estate. His extravagant lifestyle decimated the inheritance that Collins had intended to secure his two families. It is notable that Collins, whose novels focus on revealing the uncomfortable realities underneath the familial structures should refrain from any traditional family structure himself.

Sources: Wilkie Collins An Illustrated Guide, Andrew Gasson; Wilkie Collins: Women Property and Propriety, Philip O'Neill; Introduction Oxford World's Classics Edition of The Moonstone and Introduction Penguin Classics Edition of The Moonstone

The Moonstone and Genre

I confess I have been delaying my first post for The Moonstone. Like a detective novel, there are so many irresistible avenues in which one can pursue when researching Wilkie Collins and the novel. I will try to set us down a number of those paths in the next few weeks without spoiling the mystery.

T.S. Eliot called The Moonstone, “the first and greatest of English detective novels,” but he did so in the context of an essay which praises Collins’ skill with atmosphere, but says that his novels will not have the permanence of Dickens.

G.K. Chesterton called it, “probably the best detective tale in the world.”

Dorothy L. Sayers in a 1944 introduction to The Moonstone said that Collins is “genuinely feminist in his treatment of women.”

It is useful to consider the question of genre.

While critics have categorized The Moonstone the first detective novel, and it certainly is a detective novel. (First detective novel is somewhat contested as a The Notting Hill Mystery by Charles Felix was serialized in 1862 but it did not have the success or longevity of The Moonstone) Collins subtitled The Moonstone "a romance" which has different connotations than our modern notions of romance novels. It is also part of a group of fiction popular in the 1860s known as sensation fiction. The unlike the Gothic novel, with which the sensation novel shares many features, in the Sensation novel the ordinary middle or upper middle class home becomes the scene of a terrible mystery or secret and the fear and pleasure derived in reading the story comes from revelation of some previously undisclosed familial secret. The underpinnings of the family home are made unstable by disclosure of secrets, possibly dark secrets, lying beneath the veneer of public respectability. Generally, the whole notion of genres was more fluid in the Victorian era than in the present.

For the purposes of the stage, this is particularly useful in that layers of knowledge that are revealed slowly overtime are enjoyable for an actor to play and for an audience to watch. It also fits well with Rob’s approach to the adaptation and Paul’s approach to the direction, which is to avoid the potential for vaudeville in favor of focusing real relationships.

It is also worth noting that Collins wrote a version of The Moonstone for the stage which was performed in 4 acts at the Royal Olympic Theatre in 1877. Collins simplified the plot, cut major characters and restricted the action to 24 hours. It was not well received and though it ran for three months the principal actors left the production before the run had finished.

In The Moonstone, Collins both pioneers and, in some cases, subverts the standard devices readers have come to know as the mainstays of detective fiction. An item is stolen from a locked house, there are a limited number of guests and servants who are the suspects, and an eccentric detective (who appears distracted) elicits key information from unsuspecting members of the household. The detective reveals a solution to the mystery based on analysis of the facts. The detective also at one point predicts the name of the guilty party by writing it on a piece of paper and sealing it in an envelope.

For the audience, I think it will be delightful to see these devices revealed on stage. At the same time it is important to realize that for all his popularity with reading public the categories applied to Collins have diminished his status compared to fellow author and friend Charles Dickens, who grappled with similar issues of class and the problems with the laws in England at that time particularly as they pertained to property, women and inheritance.

The novel was published starting January 4, 1868, in 32 weekly installments in All The Year Round, the weekly journal founded by Charles Dickens and simultaneously in the United States in Harper's Weekly. Later in was published in book form in three relatively inexpensive volumes. The structure of the weeklies meant that revelations varied from week to week to keep the readers waiting to see what the next installment would bring which fit well with the emerging literary form that focused on a detective.

The structure of The Moonstone follows the narratives of multiple different characters each giving their information in turn in the hope that the layers of evidence will emerge that will reveal what happened to ill-fated moonstone. This presents unique difficulties and opportunities for the stage and I think Rob has kept the strength and individuality of Collins' competing narrators.

In the days to come I will give more information on the context and the characters but will try to avoid spoilers.

Sources: Wilkie Collins An Illustrated Guide, Andrew Gasson; Wilkie Collins: Women Property and Propriety, Philip O'Neill; Introduction Oxford World's Classics Edition of The Moonstone and Introduction Penguin Classics Edition of The Moonstone

The Adaptation

a great post from Rob...

The Moonstone has been on the Lifeline ensemble’s list of must-do titles for years and years. It’s such a great read, such an important piece of the history of the genre, and such a well-written, well-crafted tale, that we all knew it had appear on our stage before long.  We all loved the book, and we felt strongly that it would appeal to many of our loyal audience members, the mystery fans and period drama enthusiasts alike. After years of trying to figure out who specifically was going to tackle the mammoth project, back in 2007 (before The Island of Dr. Moreau had even completed its run) Paul and I stepped up and committed ourselves to being the team that would take it on. It wasn’t able to fall in our 2008-2009 season, because Frances was already at work on Busman’s Honeymoon, the final chapter in the Lord Peter Wimsey series, for that year. The ensemble slated the production to be the final show of our 2009-2010 season, but rights to produce Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere came our way unexpectedly in the eleventh hour, and Paul and I decided we needed to jump on that opportunity before it passed. The ensemble supported us and allowed us to push back The Moonstone to February of 2011.

So here we are, almost three years after Paul and I began our Moonstone conversations, two full in-house readings of various drafts behind us, the pre-production process trundling along, and only a matter of weeks before our full team gathers for the start of the rehearsal process.  We’ve come a long way in the intervening time: our discussions have morphed from pie-in-the-sky, highly theoretical riffing and ramblings to super specific, nuts-‘n-bolts-y fussing over tiny details (where do we land for Cuff’s dialect?) and physical realities (where and how do we stage the trapdoor incursion of the Indians?) and challenging decisions (can we afford to lose the Yollands entirely?). I’m hard at work on what I’m calling my “third draft” (though, it’s really my sixth pass through the text), which is 16 characters, 77 pages, and 42,507 words shorter than where I started back in my very first draft, as I keep refining my vision, as I continue to focus on both clarity AND brevity (well, er, as close to “brevity” as an adaptation this sprawling could be said to be), and as Paul and I narrow further and further in on what the world of this production is going to be. And we’ve learned a lot as we’ve progressed.

The first major task was to identify the narrative framework we would use. I’ve done away with several of the less-essential narrators (the random Herncastle cousin, the steamboat captain, Cuff’s agent, etc), but have labored to keep as many of Collins’ wonderful crowd of voices present as possible. Direct address and the contrasting worldviews of the army of narrators are such important aspects of the novel, and I wanted them to remain intact in our stage production. And, actually, to give them a chance to come to LIFE in the hands of our wonderful cast.

Next, I had to wrestle with the broad structure of the piece. I’m not a big fan of intermissions in general, but the deeper I got into the work, the more a three-act structure for The Moonstone made the most sense to me. And now that we’re into our meetings with the design team, that structure is beginning to find conceptual support on the production end, and my worries about doing a two-intermission show are beginning to wane. A bit. =) We’ll see where we land by the time we get to opening.

The next round of editing was all about narrowing in on the character and plot elements that felt “essential” to me. I’ve kept as many of the  characters and subplots as I feel the script can support, but fans of the novel will definitely miss some wonderful Collins creations like Superintendent Seegrave , Caroline Ablewhite, Gooseberry, and many more , as I’ve worked to wrangle a veritable army of fictional characters into fighting shape. Darlings had to be slain left and right. But many lovelies have survived to see the light of day.

Tone and style have been challenging issues to land on. There are as many different ideas about how this novel could be brought to the stage as there are members of Lifeline’s ensemble. Some see a highly presentational vaudeville of quick-cuts and zippy pace. Some imagine a broadly-drawn comedy of manners. One particular adaptor even envisioned it being set in a modern museum, with history-obsessed tour guides recreating the story for the benefit of the audience. These are all fascinating ideas and could each be fleshed out into interesting productions of their own, but they aren’t the direction Paul and I have grown excited to explore.

What fundamentally interests ME in the novel is a) the depth and breadth of all the many characters’ backstories (whether it be a “main” character like Franklin or Rachel, or a “secondary” character like, say, Jennings – who we don’t even meet until hundreds and hundreds of pages into the book), b) the depth and drama inherent in the many wonderfully complicated relationships (the masks that people wear, the lies and half-truths we tell, the confusion the truth can bring, the pain we can cause when we try to “protect” the ones we love), and c) the struggles of ALL of the characters to bring order and sense to an inherently chaotic and uncontrollable world (whether it be Clack with her religious tracts, Cuff with his theories, Murthwaite with his cultural analysis, Rachel with her silence, Franklin with his persistence, and on and on). Rather than just being a “mystery,” to me this story is a Drama (about relationships and the lies and misunderstandings that can threaten to tear them apart), which also happens to have a wonderful, weird, unusual Mystery wrapped up in it. It’s got all that refreshing depth of character that makes the Sayers mysteries so satisfying -- sure, the plot twists and turns are there, but they’re hanging on something deeper than stock characters and genre tropes.

So, Paul and I are eschewing a Moonstone of vaudeville or broad comedy and hoping to bring to life the truth behind all of these unusual, humorous, tragic, HUMAN characters. We’re going to explore the fears that drive them and the pasts that won’t release them.  We’re going to tear the Verinder family apart and help them put the pieces of their lives back together -- those that survive, that is. Don’t worry: the fun of Miss Clack, Betteredge’s obsession with Robinson Crusoe, and all that great stuff will still be there, but so will the torments of Ezra Jennings, the trials of Rachel and Franklin, and the tragedy of Rosanna Spearman.

It’s all still very much in progress, still finding its feet, still moving slowly from the darkness to the light. And it’s been a challenging journey thusfar, though incredibly rewarding. And I look forward to sharing it with you in February.

Status Update!

We’ve been a little behind on the updating around here but the excitement of pre-production on The Moonstone has reached full tilt!  I completed casting a few weeks ago and am really thrilled with the team we’ve assemble there. Some of these actors are regular collaborators and friends and some are brand new to us. We had almost everyone present for a read through of the latest draft and I’m really energized by what they are bringing to the table.   AND production meetings are well under way. We’ve got a variety of surprises in store - what may at first read as a period mystery genre is going to be turned on it’s head a little as we explore the relationships in Collins’s work. 

Stay tuned for more discussion and research coming up shortly! In the meantime, enjoy some images of the Hindu moon god Chandra below. Arguably, Chandra is the subject of the statue holding our namesake gem, and this imagery is of particular interest to our design team.

Welcome

And so, dramaturgist Maren Robinson and writer Robert Kauzlaric join me again in a spate of research and discussion in bringing THE MOONSTONE to life on the small stage in Rogers Park, Chicago that Rob and I call home, Lifeline Theatre.  Maren, Rob and I created an exhaustive resource for a production of a new adaptation of Neil Gaiman's NEVERHWERE that resulted in the author himself coming to see our show. We do not expect Wilkie to return from the dead to offer his support, I'm not sure if he tweets, and besides, that would be just plain creepy.