The Brahmin Priests as an Active Policing Body

The Brahmin priests, who Franklin rightly fears are following him when he first arrives at the Verinder estate with the diamond, are responsible for Ablewhite's final punishment and are, I maintain, responsible for the real policing in the novel. As Patrick Brantlinger interprets it, Ablewhite is “murdered by the convenient Indians, the rightful owners of the gem” (49, emphasis added). The dismissive use of the word “convenient” implies a coincidence which does not exist. The fact that the Indians punish Ablewhite before the English manage to do it is not convenient; rather, it is the deliberate result of unceasing surveillance. These priests are the descendants of Brahmin priests who have followed the diamond since the eleventh century, those who have been bid to “[watch the Moonstone] night and day, to the end of the generations of men” (2; Prologue, section II). This particular trio gave up their caste status as Brahmins to follow the diamond to England after Herncastle stole it, and they have kept close watch ever since, waiting for the chance to recover their sacred talisman. The community's detection is thus a far second to the foreigners’ detection. Once the diamond is stolen from the Verinder estate, the priests engage in a “real, active, and time-bound intervention” and make certain they know where the diamond is placed in safekeeping, namely, in Septimus Luker's strongbox, and when it will be released (Roy 668). The English community, however – including the outside detective, Sergeant Cuff – ceases in vigilance as soon as Lady Verinder decides to leave her estate for London. Cuff actually retires shortly after the Moonstone case falls by the wayside, purchasing a cottage in Dorking and giving all his attention to cultivating his rose garden. Rachel Verinder begins attending society events, and Franklin Blake leaves for the Continent. Unlike the priests’ “active” exertion to police the theft, these characters actively attempt to forget the presence of the diamond in their lives.

The Hindu priests linger in the vicinity of the diamond for decades. Fear of their retribution kept the original thief, John Herncastle, terrorized for fifty years. Herncastle passes on this legacy of terror to the Verinder family. The priests’ new pursuit begins the afternoon Franklin arrives at the estate in Yorkshire with the Moonstone, which he puts in safekeeping at the bank. The priests continue to wait, as the Anglo-Indian Mr. Murthwaite phrases it, “with the patience of cats” (72; 1^st per., ch. X). On the night of the birthday party, the family steward Gabriel Betteredge writes that the priests, in the guise of jugglers, “[return] to us with the return of the Moonstone to the house” (70; 1^st per., ch. X). The obvious implication here is that the priests are the necessary attachment to the Moonstone – where the gem goes, they follow. Their only object is to regain their possession. The priests take action where the community remains deliberately passive. They are responsible for the attacks on Godfrey Ablewhite and Septimus Luker, presumably because they know something the English community does not: that these two men have banded together to steal the diamond. If the community had exercised appropriate oversight, the truth would be obvious at this point, and it would be pursued – there is no other reason these two particular men would be attacked in the same way, at the same time. Ablewhite himself enlightens Rachel, while feigning embarrassment, of the gossip circulating about him: “scandal says that the Moonstone is in pledge to Mr. Luker, and that I am the man who has pawned it” (208; 2^nd per. 1^st narrative, ch. II). Thus, Miller's claim that “the community knew all along, but simply didn't know that it knew” (46), may very well be true – the community certainly suspects that something is amiss, but because the community assumes its members are knowable, Ablewhite's guise as a “Christian Hero” is apparently successful in deceiving them. Even if they do have their suspicions, the English fail to actively pursue the criminal with this knowledge. Because the community fails to act, all the reader knows for sure and all the reader thinks the community knows, through the Verinder family lawyer, Bruff's, disclosure, and later Sergeant Cuff's discoveries, is that Ablewhite is an odious hypocrite with a secret life. His debts seem irrelevant, despite the amount of 20,000 pounds, which is the estimated value of the Moonstone, because Franklin Blake also has debts (for which he is harshly reprimanded at various points in the story), and the reader does not have any reason to believe that Blake stole the diamond (though he did). The priests, however, have an objective understanding of this knowledge and no vested interest in disbelieving it: since they are outsiders whose only goal is to regain the diamond, they do not allow Ablewhite's glamour to blind them to the truth.

Contrary to Miller's explanation, the English community thus fails on multiple counts. Franklin Blake, the actual thief who steals the diamond under the influence of opium, attempts to take control of the situation by demanding the police be called for an investigation the morning after the theft. Despite his enthusiasm, he fails to notice major clues that might lead him to the truth. For example, when Rosanna Spearman attempts to speak to him, he believes that since she is a former thief who has been hired from a reformatory, she has stolen the diamond and is on the verge of confessing to him. Rosanna is, of course, in love with Franklin, and she is aware that he is guilty of the theft. Her attempt to speak to him in the billiard room is for his own good, which Franklin does not learn until a year later, when he receives her letter after she has committed suicide. Franklin does not follow up with her after she flees the room, only telling Betteredge to “send her to me” if she wants to speak to him again, despite the fact that he suspects that she is about to confess (139; 1^st per., ch. XVI). Rather than risking the impropriety of seeking out a girl far beneath his social class, Franklin chooses the passive option, contrary to the “active” intervention of the priests, and waits for Rosanna to return to him. She only returns, in one sense, after her suicide, since Rosanna also fails in her many attempts to broach the topic with him. After Lady Verinder abandons the search for the diamond in an effort to keep Rachel safe from suspicion, Franklin ceases, also, and promptly leaves the country so that he might forget his love for Rachel. It is only upon his return to England nearly a year later that he decides that finding the diamond might help him fulfill his personal desire to regain Rachel's affections.

The women in the household – Lady Verinder, Rachel, and Rosanna – fail especially in policing the theft. Nancy Armstrong asserts in Desire and Domestic Fiction that women provide “domestic surveillance” (19) which helps to regulate the morality of families and communities. As Elisabeth Rose Gruner writes, however, because both Rachel and Rosanna have feelings for Franklin, and Lady Verinder refuses to expose her daughter to the scrutiny of the police, “the women. . . conceal a crime and set off a chain of circumstances which includes theft, suicide, and murder” (228). It is impossible to actively investigate a crime and at the same time cover it up. Rachel knows what has happened, and yet she refuses to confess. Lady Verinder is aware that Rachel knows (or suspects) something about the crime, which she admits when she writes to Franklin that Rachel avoids him because he “threaten[s] her secret with discovery.” Even so, she wishes to shield Rachel, so she insists that the police be done with the entire matter and pays Sergeant Cuff a generous fee in order to be rid of him. She authorizes Rachel's silence and acquiesces to it, despite calling it “incomprehensible” (180; 1^st per. ch. XXIII). Gruner further writes that “[t]he family's reliance on secrecy for its normal maintenance quickly translates, in The Moonstone, into an almost pathological – and certainly criminal – secrecy” (228). Franklin Blake is merely passive in his attempts to unravel the mystery, until his desire overwhelms him and he becomes determined to get the gem back. By concealing their knowledge of the crime through secrecy, however, the female members of the household, far from finding a way to solve the crime, are actually complicit in it.

The only member of the community who remains vigilant does not do so upon his own volition. Mr. Bruff, the family lawyer, is visited in his office by one of the Indian priests in disguise, who asks for a loan. When Bruff refuses, the priest inquires how long he might have had to repay a loan, had he received it. Mr. Bruff gives him the standard answer of one year's time. At first unsure of the meaning of this visit, Bruff then discusses it with Mr. Murthwaite at a dinner party, whose assistance leads Mr. Bruff to the conclusion that the diamond has been pledged for a loan and that “[the Indians] want to be certainly informed of the earliest period at which the pledge can be redeemed – because that will be the earliest period at which the Diamond can be removed from the safe keeping of the bank!” (287; 2^nd per., 2^nd narrative, ch. III). It is not until that moment that Bruff realizes the Indians’ vigilance continues uninterrupted, contrary to that of the English community. Further, Bruff, the one member of the community who picks up the search before Franklin's return to England, keeps a secret that may help police the crime. At the end of the conversation with Mr. Murthwaite, that gentleman suggests outright that Godfrey Ablewhite helped transport the stolen diamond from the estate in Yorkshire to London. Mr. Bruff has had his suspicions regarding Ablewhite, as he tells Miss Clack: “[Ablewhite] was in the house when the Diamond was lost. And he was the first person in the house to go to London afterwards. Those are ugly circumstances, ma'am” (216; 2^nd per., 1^st narrative, ch. III). But at the dinner party, Mr. Bruff calmly tells Murthwaite that Ablewhite is innocent, because Rachel Verinder said so, and to Bruff, Rachel's honesty must remain beyond reproach. Hence, Mr. Bruff ignores his own instinct and does not attempt to open the formal police record of the case again, despite the fact that he knows why Godfrey Ablewhite examined Lady Verinder's will. He is well aware that Ablewhite's “[need for] a large sum of money. . . by a given time” (273; 2^nd per., 2^nd narrative, ch. 1) is an obvious motive for the theft of the diamond. And yet, he dismisses Murthwaite's accusation and does not attempt to use his knowledge to take action. He only tells Rachel the secret about the will so that she might break her engagement with Godfrey – and she, for the sake of her own character, keeps the entire matter to herself.

Franklin returns to England in the spring of 1849 – his sudden return is due to his father's death, which puts him in possession of great wealth. Thus, his original reason for coming home is not because he actively decides to seek out the thief of the diamond. In fact, aside from Betteredge, none of the people directly involved with solving the case have actively decided to do so. As Miller writes, “detective figures such as Blake, Bruff, and Jennings have no intrinsic interest in detection at all” (48). This is strange: a crime has been committed, an injustice done to a respectable family, but nobody wants to right this wrong. Nevertheless, Franklin says to Betteredge upon his return to Yorkshire, “I have come here to take up the inquiry which was dropped when I left England. I have come here to do what nobody has done yet – to find out who took the Diamond” (296; 2^nd per., 3^rd narrative, ch. II). Franklin specifically says that nobody has taken up the search since he left, thus condemning the community as passive in its detection. Miller himself confirms this passivity but seems to view it as more evidence for the implicit policing power of the community:

Miller is attempting to position the community as unconsciously policing the theft – to say that the community happens to behave in a way that leads to the resolution of the crime, thus containing an implicit regulatory mechanism. But Miller admits that the community ends up solving the case “in the course of time, which is also invested with the detective function” (42). In time, the English community slowly begins to care about the theft again, and various details come to light to bring about the resolution. If time does some of the detective work, this does nothing to confirm the community's supposed position as a supervising body meant to control the morality of its members. If the crime is solved by default, there is no purpose to the community as a policing agent. The same cannot be said of the Brahmin priests. They knew all along that they were part of a “time-bound intervention,” as they spent a year deliberately waiting for the release of the diamond. The priests, whose devotion to the Moonstone is viewed, in a rather Saidian, Orientalist way, as “the foreignness of passionate excess” (Carens 247), have only one ambition: to regain the stone that has been lost to them for so long and take it home to their shrine. Thus, they are an alternative to the police force, and an active one. In fact, Tamar Heller writes that “the Indians are motivated by. . . justice” (247), a moral motivation an honorable policeman would presumably share. The priests’ cohesive desire renders them unstoppable. As Patricia Miller Frick writes, “For [the Brahmin priests], the gem is a symbol of unity, and it emphasizes their positive qualities of loyalty, persistence, and faith, which contrast with the doubt and disorder of the English narrators. . .. [B]y sacrificing their caste to regain the Diamond, they show themselves to be morally superior to the English characters who seek the gem for vain and self-serving reasons” (318).

Miller does attempt to belie the passivity of the community when he argues that it takes an active stance: “In the most active sense of the term, the community is concerned to ‘justify’ itself – to make its own justice. If this community can afford to dispense with the legal systems of surveillance, trial, and punishment, this is because its own organization anticipates and contains them” (47-48). However, the community's abrupt abandonment of the case makes “justifying” itself impossible. The act of justification does not occur until Ezra Jennings begins to work with Franklin after Franklin's return from the Continent. It is only then that Franklin realizes he must “justify” himself and the crime he has committed, lest he end up like Jennings, whose “past seems to fit into a pattern similar to Franklin's possible future. . . forced to leave his family and the woman he loved. . . he now exists as an outcast” (Roberts 178). Thus, the community does not “dispense” with surveillance, trial, or punishment. To “dispense” with something implies that it was once present, but the community never allows these things to surface. The surveillance may exist, such as in the preventative measures discussed above through the linen inventory and so on, but the trial and punishment cannot take place if the community refuses to pursue the criminal. The Indians, as the quote above from Heller attests, are the ones who are interested in “justice.” The English community, by ending the investigation, proves that it is interested in either shielding itself from suspicion or in forgetting the matter altogether. Seeking justice requires a sort of proactive behavior that transcends any implicit mechanism.

The community's resolute silence and refusal to police is also self-serving, although it seems, in the context of the novel, to be charitable – about someone else. Lady Verinder, Rosanna, Rachel, and Bruff all keep silent to either protect or vindicate someone outside of themselves, but in their attempts to protect the community, they forsake morality and become complicit in the crime. Through the lack of policing inherent in the novel, Collins seems to be questioning the dominance of the Victorian family, in particular, as a place of ultimate moral maintenance.Footnote ⁹ Gruner questions the family's reputation as a place of security from public scrutiny – Lady Verinder seems to confirm Rachel's guilt by abandoning the search, for example – when she writes that The Moonstone “asks us not to trust in [the domestic sphere's] appearance” (222) and calls the novel “a story about the necessary concealments families [practice]” (236). But it can also be argued that, if we subscribe to these concealments as “necessary,” then we must also question the ability of the family to regulate itself. This is not because families should never keep secrets, but rather, the kind of concealments the Verinder family practices, while resulting in protection of the family, are not commensurate to what Collins would call the “Christian morality. . . of all time,” which the Victorian family is implicitly supposed to embody (Armadale 4). If the family performed properly and inculcated a type of selfless morality, such concealments would be rendered unnecessary. In many of Collins's novels, the family fails in the regulatory function it is supposed to execute due to fragmentation and disharmony, thus betraying an obvious need for cohesiveness in order to function properly. In The Moonstone, however, despite the disharmony that the alleged curse of the diamond brings, many conventional bonds and affections between family members remain, and still they fail to carry a moral influence. Thus, the investigation of the crime is left to foreigners, and the family as a supervising mechanism breaks down, having failed to instill integrity and moral values in its members.

The Impact of Character

Due to this absence of integrity and values, we, as readers of The Moonstone, are left thinking all the more deeply about these central facets of what constitutes good moral character. In Collins's preface to the novel, he writes that he attempted to deviate from his regular approach of “[tracing] the influence of circumstances upon character.” Instead, he writes, he has “reversed the process. The attempt made here is to trace the influence of character on circumstances” (liii). The first question we must ask is what Collins means by “character.” Does he refer to the ordinary binary of character and plot, wherein character merely refers to a fictional person, detailed and written about in a realistic way? Or does he mean “character” in the deeper sense of “the sum of moral and mental qualities which distinguish an individual”? (OED, s.v. “character”). The common assumption appears to be in line with the former definition of character as a binary with plot, and some scholars argue that Collins has failed in his attempts to achieve his stated goal. Brantlinger, for example, writes that “Collins's point is hardly persuasive. Rachel's failure to confront Franklin with what she has seen prolongs the mystery, but the mystery itself is largely independent of character. If character were really central, her rejection of Franklin should serve as a tip-off to a clever detective like Cuff, who instead suspects Rachel” (40). This implies that Cuff would be paying attention to character development within the novel and searching for clues that might help him (and readers) understand more about Franklin and why Rachel has rejected him. Of course, he does not do this. Brantlinger seems to miss Collins's point here: it is because Cuff suspects Rachel's “character” – in the second sense of the word – that he suspects her. Brantlinger further writes that all of the characters, Rachel included, are victims of the “initial ‘circumstance’. . . the bequest of the diamond to Rachel by her uncle, from which everything else follows. The lives of all the characters are dramatically. . . altered by this circumstance” (40). Herncastle's bequest is merely an inciting incident, the initial plot point that sets the entire story into motion. If this were reflective of a novel's failure to centralize character, then every single novel that starts with an exciting plot point – and this would include much of Victorian fiction – could be viewed as privileging circumstance over character. While The Moonstone is a sensation novel, the bequest cannot be entirely perceived as a sensational circumstance to which all the characters react in the absence of character.

Melissa Free writes that the privileging of character over circumstance “signals a move in authorial concern away from subjectivity toward accountability, from personal susceptibility to personal responsibility” (344). This may well be what the novel is attempting to achieve: a narrative driven by the decisions made by “character” – not just the “characters” who make up the story, but the “moral and mental qualities” of those people which dictate what happens next. Accountability and personal responsibility are, in large part, what is missing from the collective morality of the English community. Like justice, the execution of accountability and responsibility requires action which is not carried out in The Moonstone. It makes sense to ask, then, what Collins may be attempting to say about the character of the Victorian family and its policing power.

Rachel Verinder is not, as Brantlinger argues, merely reacting to the bequest and so “[prolonging] the mystery” (40). Gruner writes that Rachel's behavior is characteristic of her, a fact that “all of [her] observers note. Rather than claiming that she has been changed by the theft of the diamond into a secretive person, Gabriel, Clack, Lady Verinder, and Bruff agree that she has always been ‘secret and self-willed’” (231-32). This is not a new trait and, thus, not a mere reaction against circumstance. Further, Bruff refers to her “absolute self-dependence [which] is a great virtue in a man. In a woman it has the serious drawback of morally separating her from the mass of her sex, and so exposing her to misconstruction by the general opinion” (270; 2^nd per., 2^nd narrative, ch. I). This is precisely what happens to Rachel and the reason why Cuff suspects her. Her “self-dependence” is “misconstrued,” and he believes that her silence is an attempt to conceal her guilt. Lady Verinder, however, is responsible for this supposed “flaw” in Rachel's character. If, arguably, Lady Verinder had been a more conventional Victorian mother, if she had made certain that Rachel's conduct was commensurate with what is generally expected of the traditional Victorian woman, then Rachel perhaps would have grown up very differently. Sensation fiction in general and Collins in particular “makes brilliant use of the conventions of the best Victorian novels while undercutting their most serious implications” (Brantlinger 49). The sanctity of the family and its regulatory function is one of these implications. Another is the traditional ideal of the Victorian “Angel in the House,” which Collins largely eschews or criticizes in much of his fiction. Lady Verinder and Rachel are not quite the role models a strict Victorian mother would choose for her daughter to emulate. Rather, Lady Verinder is a shrewd, practical woman able to manage her and her daughter's life without assistance from a man. As Bruff writes in his narrative, in response to Sir John Verinder's decision to leave his whole estate to his wife:

This is the kind of mother who has raised Rachel Verinder. It is well-known that Victorian “mothers were responsible for the social education of daughters, whose virtue and marriageability would be judged by their conformity to [social] rules” (Stoneman 141). Lady Verinder, however, clearly has other ideas about Rachel's conformity. She does not force Rachel to speak, despite her own suspicions, and despite the “domestic surveillance” she is supposed to provide for her daughter. Lady Verinder, then, has self-dependence of her own, both in the way she manages her household and in the ideas she has about how to raise a daughter. Taken together, Rachel's self-dependence and Lady Verinder's competence to handle family matters without her husband or lawyer's advice are obvious examples of an emergent proto-feminist mindset.Footnote ¹⁰ Character, then, is an important byword here, and not just Rachel's character, which makes such a strong impression on both readers and her own family and friends in the novel. What is of interest here is that Lady Verinder is not a woman of the sort of character who would punish her daughter for following her own personal convictions and living by her own perception of what is morally appropriate. Rachel's self-dependence has been little policed by her mother, and the moral regulation the family failed to provide is perhaps not so much a failing, at all, but rather, a subtle maternal nudge toward something greater.

For his part, Godfrey Ablewhite is not merely a stereotypical caricature of a villain. According to Catherine Peters, Collins meant for his antagonist to be a clergyman (305), perhaps derivative of his views on evangelical Christianity.Footnote ¹¹ He later changed his mind and made Ablewhite a religious philanthropist. Godfrey Ablewhite, like Rachel, is a character formed by the influences of his family. His father, Mr. Ablewhite, is discussed in Miss Clack's narrative when he arrives to question Rachel about her decision not to wed his son. Clack admits that she “knew the importance which his worldly greed attached to his son's marriage with Miss Verinder.” For all of Miss Clack's absurdity in her narrative, her mention of his “worldly greed” is a direct indication that Godfrey's father is not a morally regulative force in his son's life. Miss Clack continues: “[he] has the reputation generally (especially among his inferiors) of being a remarkably good-natured man. According to my observation of him, he deserves his reputation as long as he has his own way, and not a moment longer” (253; 2^nd per., 1^st narrative, ch. VIII). Rachel's prudent mother may choose not to correct her daughter, but Godfrey, having had Mr. Ablewhite as his example, is molded in the likeness of his father: kind and good when he wants to be, and forgoing that reputation when his desire overpowers him. The paternal impact is redoubled because of the utter ineptitude of Godfrey's mother: “From the hour of her birth she has never been known to do anything for herself. She has gone through life, accepting everybody's help, and adopting everybody's opinions” (241; 2^nd per., 1^st narrative, ch. VII). Mrs. Ablewhite not only fails to be a moral force (or any force) in her son's life, but also, if Miss Clack's estimation can be believed (and in this, perhaps it can be, since she reluctantly admits that Mrs. Ablewhite is so changeable that she cannot be converted), Godfrey's mother's lack of capability may contribute to Godfrey's failure to become self-sufficient. Like his mother, Godfrey “accepts everybody's help.” Even his philanthropy turns out to be a method of “getting help” from old ladies who love him enough to leave him money in their wills rather than helping others.

It might appear that Ablewhite steals the diamond in response to his father's refusal to lend him the three hundred pounds he needs to pay his young charge the income due to him a few days after Rachel's birthday party. It turns out, however, that “the twenty thousand pounds (from which the income was supposed to be derived) had every farthing of it been sold out of the Funds, at different periods, ending with the end of the year eighteen hundred and forty-seven” (449; 2^nd per., 6^th narrative, ch. III). Further, Godfrey forges the signature of the other Trustee in order to execute the sales. The fact that these crimes took place before Godfrey asked his father for a loan means that his character is responsible for his immorality, not a reaction to something external. His entrenched self-absorption prevails even in the face of, and perhaps because of, community obligation to his many charities. In fact, for both Rachel and Godfrey, it is within their respective characters to veer toward self-centered behavior that is not beneficial to the community as a whole. This individualism appears to have been instilled by their families, through the failure to regulate their moral conduct.

Indeed, the one place in the novel where moral behavior has been regulated is deliberately portrayed by Collins as a dismal failure. Miss Clack, the hypocritical fanatic madly in love with Godfrey, continually boasts of her regulated mind and her firm principles, but nobody is able to take her moral firmness seriously. Taylor quotes from Miss Clack's narrative to illustrate this point: “[Miss Clack] presents herself as a paragon of early training. . . ‘I am indebted to my parents. . . for having had habits of order and regularity instilled into me at a very early age’” (199). This “order and regularity” do not serve Miss Clack well, as her brand of hypocritical morality is largely ignored or dismissed by other characters. Collins thus not only brings forward the idea of “character” as one that drives the story, but also uses the individuality of character, rather than its conformity to regulation, to show that the family-as-police model has little value in the Victorian world.

The “Knowability” of the English Community

This essay has argued that the characters in the novel along with their moral “characters” fail to be regulated by the family. One implication of this failure is that the characters fail to conform to the traditional expectations of the overall community, which means that the community becomes less predictable, and thus, less “knowable.” In his landmark work The Country and the City, Raymond Williams writes that “[i]t is part of a traditional method – an underlying stance and approach – that the novelist offers to show people and their relationships in essentially knowable and communicable ways” (165). Novelists attempt to make readers feel as if they are looking into a confined space where they can get to know the people, their beliefs, and the norms they try to live out in their everyday lives.

Miller attempts to make the case for the knowable community in The Moonstone when he writes that the characters in the novel have “knowledge” of each other and that “[a]s early as the First Period, one could make an accurate guess at the thief simply by ranking the main suspects (Rachel, Rosanna, Blake, and Ablewhite) in the distance to which each stands outside the collective cognition whose spokesman is Betteredge” (45). But the “knowledge” the characters have of one another, and what Betteredge knows of them, does not extend very far. We cannot fairly call this novel's community a “knowable” one. Of Rachel, indeed, the characters have knowledge, because she has been there among them all along. Betteredge believes he knows Franklin Blake, writing that “[t]he years that had passed had left nothing of his old self, except the bright, straightforward look in his eyes. There I found our nice boy again, and there I concluded to stop in my investigation” (27; 1^st per., ch. V). Franklin, however, was the beneficiary of his father's decision “not to let his country have the honour of educating his son” (14; 1^st per., ch. III) and was educated in Germany, but has a French, German, and Italian side, as well as his native English one. He was on the Continent for years and “lived here, there, and everywhere; his address. . . being ‘Post Office, Europe’” (15; 1^st per., ch. III). Thus, Franklin, unlike Rachel, was not actually there at the estate in Yorkshire to pass on knowledge of himself. Betteredge informs the reader that Mr. Franklin liked to spend money and was kept from returning home by “some unmentionable woman” twice in a row, and then he writes that the reader “[knows] as much of Mr. Franklin Blake as I did – before Mr. Franklin Blake came down to our house” (16; 1^st per., ch. III). The members of the community, through Betteredge, assume they have knowledge of each other, and that they can use that knowledge to figure out where to place suspicion. The narrative itself, however, disproves that this knowledge exists. As Caroline Levine asks: “why, if we are all so easily persuaded of Blake's innocence, does the text go to so much trouble – and cover so many pages – to perform the experiment that puts the hypothesis to the test? Far from being a mechanical exercise, the experiment is fraught with anxiety – since it invites both characters and readers to consider that the truth it reveals will not be the solution we desire” (49). Thus, both the community and the novel's readers entertain the possibility that Blake is not innocent. Nobody actually knows anything for certain, and Blake himself is not entirely “knowable.” Rachel excuses Blake's actions in her own mind and admits the possibility of his needing the diamond to pay his debts, as proven by her never-sent letter. Her presumption about his motive for stealing the diamond is entirely wrong. Even she, the woman who becomes his wife, does not fully know Franklin, and she has her doubts regarding his character, even though she is willing to hide her doubts from the rest of the world by not speaking.

Collins spends this novel (and many others) critiquing what he calls, in Armadale, “clap-trap morality” (4).Footnote ¹² In a way, this is his attempt at reforming conventional attitudes and pushing the morality of the masses toward a more modern viewpoint. Collins had no patience for hypocrisy, and the way his characters are written makes clear reference to this belief. He objected to the Victorian treatment of women, as seen through his depiction of Rachel and Lady Verinder, to the hypocrisy of organized religion, as he makes plain through Godfrey and Miss Clack, and also to the way in which “outsiders,” including both colonial and unconventional people, were treated by society. The suspicion and dislike to which the novel's most conspicuous outsider, Ezra Jennings,Footnote ¹³ is subjected in the novel is portrayed as normal, but his inclusion into a major part of the storyline shows Collins's distaste for this convention. Peters writes that “[t]he message of the Gospels, the emphasis on forgiveness, tolerance and the reintegration of outcasts into society, was one [Collins] repeatedly referred to in his fiction” (108).

As perhaps the least knowable of all the novel's English characters, Jennings makes a very deliberate decision to assist a community that has no tolerance for him. Jennings is the one who comes up with the idea to do the experiment, and it is because of his copious notes that the English community is even able to ascertain that the experiment is necessary. In this, his actions are generous, and of course unexpected. Because he is isolated from society, he has no obligation to follow the moral and social guidelines set by the community. As Miller writes, he, along with the others, has “no intrinsic interest in detection,” but Jennings, because he “feels sorry for Blake, whom he sees as a double of himself” (48), agrees to help him.Footnote ¹⁴ Jennings's motivation, like those of the other English characters, is a self-interested one, as Miller later writes: “The intention to detect is visible only at a microscopic level, casually implied in self-evident moral imperatives (to love, to take care of, to feel sorry for)” (49, emphasis added). Jennings, like Rachel and Godfrey, makes a self-interested decision while pointedly ignoring the dictates of the community (in his case, to keep away). Through this decision to stand up to public opinion, however, he shows a strength of character that flies in the face of critical disbelief regarding Collins's use of character over circumstance. Jennings's use of individual agency to benefit others (and Collins's depiction of that agency on the part of an outcast) makes a powerful statement about the regulatory control of the community, namely that it is waning in the face of the (modern) individual. Carens writes that Jennings “‘enter[s] to us,’ as Blake phrases it, ‘quietly.’ The peaceful intervention of the racial hybrid counteracts the conventional polarization of racial identities” (256). Jennings “enters” the community for a moment and walks among its members. He “counteracts” not just tensions concerning race, but also those concerning people who are “inside” and “outside” of the accepted moral lines. Bruff and Betteredge may not accept him outright, but they do soften when they see that the suspicious outsider is, in this instance, correct. He is buried in a nondescript grave after his death, but this is in accordance with his own wish to “rest, unknown” (457; 2^nd per., 7^th narrative), not an indication of the community's feelings toward him. His individual behavior during the investigation earns him some regard and shows the English community that the weakening of its control (by allowing him into the house and, for a moment, into the community) might not be such a negative change. While Jennings is an unknowable outsider who is only half-English, the (full-blooded) English community could not have solved the crime without him. He is, unlike the Brahmin priests, self-interested, but he is still a testament to the fact that the societally-accepted English community is incapable of regulating itself. Thus, the community's failure is two-tiered: the Brahmin priests, as the true policing body, are diligently investigating the whereabouts of the Moonstone throughout the tale, and the outsider Jennings is the stimulus the English need to finally figure out the events of the night the crime occurred.Footnote ¹⁵