This chapter explores how The Moonstone and A Study in Scarlet are interested in finance capital even though they do not appear to concern themselves with such questions. They are both interested in the collapse of character as value form and in the appearance of professional class characters. As the earlier novel, The Moonstone remains committed to the ethical universe of class society and shores up the value form of character. As such, it serves as a point of contrast to A Study in Scarlet, the first Sherlock Holmes novel. Traditionally marginalized in literary studies as an example of popular detective fiction, A Study in Scarlet can be read as a proto-modernist novel that participates in the historical process of finance capital in two ways: It orients its ethical universe around the emerging professional society, and its structure refuses to resolve contradictions in the legibility of character.

The conclusion applies the semiotics of affect imagined by Imagism and The Waste Land to several of the novels from the earlier parts of the book, including The Moonstone, A Study in Scarlet, The Waves, and Voyage in the Dark. The conclusion argues that in late Victorian novels affective expressions are incorporated into a novelistic poetics of character, while in the proto-modernist and modernist novels affective expression becomes an object of literary conjecture, a vector of critique, and a source of literary and economic value.

This chapter places race and disability in dialogue to highlight the complex, often contradictory, negotiations of exclusionary discourse within sensation narratives of the 1860s. The first half of the chapter discusses Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The ital Octoroon (1861–62), as a sensational text which places issues of race center stage and demonstrates how racial rhetoric is encoded through melodrama. Through exploiting the heightened topicality of racial questions in the midst of public discussions about the American Civil War, the novel exposes contradictory constructions of racial difference in the decade and implicitly displaces and elides British imperial violence. Issues of miscegenation and hybridity are analyzed in relation to the “octoroon fever” of the 1860s, before moving to a consideration of the ways in which contemporary discourses of race and mental disability converge in the slave figure, Tristan. The final part of the chapter extends this analysis of the constitutive relationship of race and disability in two of Wilkie Collins’s major novels of this no quote marks. Ital. all titles decade, Armadale (1866) and The Moonstone (1868).

Although The Moonstone is the novel most critics turn to when discussing Collins, race and empire, other of his fictions, such as Armadale, Miss or Mrs?, and Poor Miss Finch are also concerned with racial identity. His presentation of this issue is not always consistent, revealing the unstable cultural constructions of this Victorian concern

“On Time: How Fiction Writes History in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone,” shows how the novel subtly reinforces the principles put forth in the judicial opinion. Written just five years after Ramaswamy Aiyan v. Venkata Achari was decided by the Privy Council, The Moonstone reflects many similar concerns with centering English modernity, especially by way of comparison with colonies such as India. I show how the novel invokes oppositional teleologies for India and Britain, often playing up sectarian tensions and Brahminism in the Indian context. As the narrative of the mystery moves steadily forward, reflecting the teleology of British progress, the temporality of India remains stubbornly stagnant. Finally, folding the present into the past, the gem, the deity, and the devotees end up exactly where they began, oblivious to the linear narrative of history and impervious to the forward movement of time. More specifically, the novel’s mystery genre works to naturalize a teleological narrative of history that solidifies the relationship between the restorative British present and the stalled Indian past. As the mystery unfolds, it becomes increasingly clear that the temporality of the novel is intimately related to the teleology of a colonialist vision of history.