It is with one such abuse that The Moonstone begins, when a British army officer plunders a famous diamond from the palace of a defeated local ruler in India. At the heart of his social critiques lies Collins’s contempt for abuses of power, whether at home in Britain or abroad in the British Empire. Present-day critics have also seen deeper concerns at work in Collins’s novels, which question many of the assumptions on which Victorian society rested. In The Moonstone these plot elements are combined with crime and detection in a way that would distinguish the book, in the eyes of many modern critics, as the first true detective novel in English. Collins’s tales are memorably dramatic, featuring strong villains and victimized heroines. Best known among Collins’s novels are, The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868) both were serialized in All the Year Round and later adapted by Collins for production on the stage. The two friends also worked together on a number of short stories for the periodicals, and jointly wrote, produced, and acted in plays for Dickens’s stage company as well. Beginning in the 1850s, Dickens serialized Collins’s novels in his periodicals Household Words (1850-59) and its successor All the Year Round (1859-88).

He was a close friend and collaborator of his elder contemporary, the novelist Charles Dickens (1812-70), who also served as editor of periodicals. A novel set primarily in Yorkshire and London in 1848-50 first published in London in 1868.Īfter a fabled Indian diamond disappears under mysterious circumstances from an English country house, attempts to recover it lead to intrigue and murder.Įvents in History at the Time of the NovelĪ prolific writer, Wilkie Collins (1824-89) authored some 25 novels, along with numerous articles, short stories, and plays.

The moonstone novel