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The 1860s British sensation novel became a best-selling literary genre at both sides of the Atlantic. One of the reasons was its treatment of the social issues that dominated imperialistic Britain and United States. Wilkie Collins’s novel The Moonstone, which was published simultaneously in Britain and the United States through All the Year Round and Harper’s Weekly, is a clear example of this. The propriety of the English high-class Verinder house is disrupted by a diamond robbery occurred inside the house, which places its main characters at stake. Nonetheless, the household is re-established with the irruption of Ezra Jennings. His construction as a character is fully made clear at the twenty-seventh part of the novel, when Collins portrays him as an ambiguous, mixed-race outcast. Being described as “the bastard child of the British Empire” (Thomas, qtd. in Mondal, 24), his character can comment about the novel’s theme of colonial objects in England. Nevertheless, critics have studied this issue mainly considering the Indian background of the diamond and the Brahmin priests. Critic Sharleen Mondal offers an innovative analysis by putting Ezra Jennings as a key element in the novel’s reorientation, in terms of sexuality and desire. Moreover, Ezra Jennings also questions nineteenth-century politics of race, which resonate with the political debates occurring in mid-Victorian England.

Works cited

Mondal, Sharleen. “Racing Desire and the New Man of the House in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone”. Nineteenth Century Gender Studies, vol. 5, no. 1 (2009), pp. 23-43. Web. Accessed 25 October 2019. ncgsjournal.com/issue51/mondal.htm