So The Moonstone is put together from this unusually large number of separate narratives, which appear in nonoverlapping chronological order. This is the kind of thing that’s right up my alley, and somehow I didn’t even know about it until I’d opened the book to the table of contents. Shameful.
The narratives are all put together by Franklin Blake, though it’s not entirely clear why. At the beginning he seems like something of a family chronicler; later I thought he was collecting materials for his own exoneration; and later still it seemed he wouldn’t have needed them after all. But he collects a combination of preexisting documents and specifically commissioned accounts.
Blake is particular in his commission: each witness must only write about what they themselves knew at the time, and must not color their accounts with the knowledge that they later gained as the mystery of the Moonstone was solved. They are pretty good about this; we know they know what happens, but they don’t let us find anything out in advance for the most part.
So Blake wants us to have the best first-hand account possible of the entire affair from top to bottom. But normally this kind of testimony is far from unimpeachable, and we expect, with so very many narratives, to find conflicts or mysteries to clear up among them. I mean, this is a mystery, anyway, and Collins has given us a bunch of different accounts from a bunch of different people, some of whom must have something to hide. So we expect to be teasing out the differences, finding a detail here or there, that sort of thing, but it doesn’t really happen. In fact, because the stories are mostly recounted after the mystery is cleared up, the tellers don’t really have much to hide at all, even if they did during the investigation. And between the lack of overlap between accounts, the familiarity of each writer with some of the other stories, and the general ingenuousness, there is nary a discrepancy in the novel. The characters might have a few fun and interesting things to say about each other (ah, Miss Clack), but that’s about it.
It really does seem as if the people helping out Franklin Blake by contributing their stories to the whole actually want to help him document the truth. To that end, many of the accounts that are not themselves primary documents (e.g., en excerpt from Ezra Jennings’s journal, a letter from Mr. Candy, the statement of Sergeant Cuff’s man) explain that they can be counted on as accurate because they have been cross-checked against diaries kept at the time. Gabriel Betteredge relies on the diary of his daughter, Penelope, and Miss Clack explains that:
I am indebted to my dear parents (both now in heaven) for having had habits of order and regularity instilled into me at a very early age.
In that happy bygone time, I was taught to keep my hair tidy at all hours of the day and night, and to fold up every article of my clothing carefully, in the same order, on the same chair, in the same place at the foot of the bed, before retiring to rest. An entry of the day’s events in my little diary invariably preceded the folding up. …
…I have continued to fold my clothes, and to keep my little diary. The former habit links me to my happy childhood—before papa was ruined. The latter habit—hitherto mainly useful in helping me to discipline the fallen nature which we all inherit from Adam—has unexpectedly proved important to my humble interests in quite another way. It has enabled poor Me to serve the caprice of a wealthy member of the family into which my late uncle married. I am fortunate enough to be useful to Mr. Franklin Blake.
In spite of this “caprice,” Miss Clack does, like the others, do her best to make her account accurate, even going so far as to reprint a nasty little correspondence between herself and Blake, so that the “letters may speak for themselves.” And Mr. Blake does not scruple to note that:
Miss Clack may make her mind quite easy on this point. Nothing will be added, altered, or removed, in her manuscript, or in any of the other manuscripts which pass through my hands. Whatever opinions any of the writers may express, whatever peculiarities of treatment may mark, and perhaps in a literary sense, disfigure, the narratives which I am now collecting, not a line will be tampered with anywhere, from first to last. As genuine documents they are sent to me—and as genuine documents I shall preserve them; endorsed by the attestations of witnesses who can speak to the facts.
And again, it seems to be true. An actual pursuit of the truth, even so far that the ship’s captain seems to regret that he has “not got the ship’s journal to refer to, and [he] cannot now call to mind the latitude and longitude” specifically, is under way. And all because Mr. Bruff and Mr. Blake think “that the whole story ought, in the interests of truth, to be placed on record in writing—and the sooner the better”—what pure motives, and purely carried out. Almost unbelievable.
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