The Gothic Lineage
Illustration (AI-generated): A Yorkshire country house at night; through a window a cabinet in a girl's sitting room glows where a great yellow diamond once lay; on the moonlit sands below, a quicksand cove (the Shivering Sand) and three small figures in Indian dress at the lodge gate.

Works · Novel · 1868

The Moonstone

by Wilkie Collins

First appeared 4 Jan 1868 – 8 Aug 1868 in All the Year Round

Nocturne plate · illustration (AI-generated, 2026)

Full title: The Moonstone: A Romance

A yellow diamond looted from an Indian shrine at Seringapatam in 1799 passes through an English family and arrives at a Yorkshire country house in 1848 as a birthday present for Rachel Verinder. That night it vanishes from her room. The case is told by many hands: the old house steward, a pious spinster, a lawyer, a doctor’s assistant and the young gentleman Franklin Blake, each recording only what he or she saw. Sergeant Cuff of Scotland Yard investigates while three Indian visitors watch the house.

Between the two, shifting backwards and forwards at certain seasons of the year, lies the most horrible quicksand on the shores of Yorkshire.

First Period, Chapter 4 (Gabriel Betteredge's narrative). Checked against Project Gutenberg ebook #155 (Gutenberg #155 text)

Facts

  1. The novel ran in All the Year Round and, simultaneously, in Harper’s Weekly from 4 January to 8 August 1868 in 32 parts. Collins received 850 pounds for the English serial rights and 750 pounds from Harper for early proofs, 1,600 pounds for serial use alone.[1][2]
  2. Tinsley Brothers signed the book contract on 10 June 1868 and paid 600 pounds for a first edition of 1,500 copies at 10s 6d a volume; it was announced as ‘just ready’ in the Publishers’ Circular on 1 July 1868 and, in Tinsley’s own recollection, the 1,500 copies sold out. A second edition of 500 copies was advertised in the Publishers’ Circular on 10 December 1868.[2][3]
  3. T. S. Eliot praised it as the first, and by his judgement the best, of English detective novels. The Wilkie Collins pages note that priority is usually given to The Notting Hill Mystery, issued in book form in 1865.[5][6][3]
  4. Andrew Gasson records that several incidents in the novel are taken from the real-life Constance Kent ‘Road Case’.[3]

Setting

1848-1849, with a prologue at the storming of Seringapatam in 1799[4]

  • a country house on the Yorkshire coast
  • the Shivering Sand
  • London
  • Seringapatam

Themes

Notes on dates 3 notes on disputed dates and attribution
  1. Day of three-volume publication: Lewis shows Tinsley’s contract on 10 June 1868, a Publishers’ Circular notice on 1 July and a listing on 15 July; other pages give 1 July or 16 July. July 1868 is shown.
  2. ‘First detective novel’: the Wilkie Collins pages say priority ‘is usually given to’ The Notting Hill Mystery (1865), while Allingham, Eliot and Sayers treat The Moonstone as the first in English. This timeline makes no claim of priority for either.
  3. T. S. Eliot’s wording is quoted two ways on the Wilkie Collins pages; the fact paraphrases and does not quote.

Threads

Threads in

  • In the tradition of Murders in the Rue Morgue 1841

    Martha Hailey DuBose writes that Poe, with ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841) and his later tales, ‘carved out the fundamentals of the genre’ and that Collins ‘made the next real breakthrough in detective fiction after Poe’ with The Moonstone in 1868; a genre-level succession, not a claim that Collins borrowed from the story.[7]

Threads out

No sourced relation from a later work on this timeline is recorded.

Contemporaries

Works on the timeline that first appeared within three years of 1868, and the other writers alive when The Moonstone appeared (ages computed from sourced dates).

Thumbnails: Nocturne plates · illustration (AI-generated, 2026).

Alive at first appearance (4 Jan 1868)

Where a date is known only to the month or year, an age is given as the two values it could be.

Sources

  1. Philip V. Allingham, 'The Moonstone in Serial and Triple-Decker Publication'. The Victorian Web. Accessed 2026-10-09.
  2. Paul Lewis, 'Milking the Moonstone: What Wilkie Collins earned from his great detective novel' (August 2022); also notes The Woman in White trebled the profits of All the Year Round. The Wilkie Collins Society. Accessed 2026-10-09.
  3. Andrew Gasson, The Moonstone (Wilkie Collins Information Pages). wilkie-collins.info. Accessed 2026-10-09.
  4. The Moonstone (Project Gutenberg ebook 155). Project Gutenberg. Accessed 2026-10-09.
  5. Wilkie Collins Society Newsletter, Spring 2009 (T. S. Eliot on The Moonstone). The Wilkie Collins Society. Accessed 2026-10-09.
  6. Andrew Gasson, Detective fiction (Wilkie Collins Information Pages). wilkie-collins.info. Accessed 2026-10-09.
  7. Martha Hailey DuBose, Women of Mystery (St. Martin's Press, 2000), sample text (Poe's 1841 blueprint; Collins 'the next real breakthrough'). Library of Congress (catalog enhancement). Accessed 2026-10-09.