Nineteeth-Century Racial Mindsets

Franklin Blake starts his depiction of Ezra Jennings in Part XXVII with “… Betteredge’s assertion that the appearance of Ezra Jennings, speaking from a popular point of view, was against him.” (Collins 351). Taking into account the mindset of nineteenth-century readers, it definitely is. This text is a joke from the “Humors [sic] of the Day” section of Harper’s Weekly where this part of the novel is published. The joke mocks stereotypes of bad appearance in the United States, and how to ‘correct’ them. The third indication is strikingly significant. In post-Civil War United States, race was a major issue, as liberated African-American slaves still faced harsh discrimination by white Americans. The fact that an American magazine makes fun of this by suggesting that non-white people can become “fair” (“Valuable Recipes”), shows how racist are nineteenth-century race politics. Having a “gipsy complexion” (Collins 351), Ezra can be misinterpreted by both the novel’s characters and American readers, as their social ideals predispose them to criticise and laugh at his body. Franklin makes this clear by saying that “he had suffered as few men suffer” (Collins 353). Mondal further argues that his status as a mixed-race character “acts as a visible reminder of the illicit and unsavory colonial desires of which he is the product” (25). In fact, the connotations of personality linked to these racialised standards are even more unsavoury.

Mondal comments that “the significance of “mixed” blood can be mapped across a set of racial debates that took place in the 1860s, … linked … to latent criminality” (30). This is noticeable in the publication of The Moonstone in Britain. Alongside the novel, All the Year Round presents this class-clash love story in Elizabethan London. However, this story is different, as it has an orientalised woman as protagonist. She has “… long black hair, and dark eyes, that could flash either with holy or unholy fire” (“London Myth” 88); features matching Ezra’s deep black hair and “dreamy brown eyes” (Collins 353). Similarly, this woman sells oranges, which were “newly introduced into Europe from China” (“London Myth” 88), the same place Ezra’s medicinal opium comes from. Hence, as both characters are oriental, their nineteenth-century readers quickly associate their origin with evilness. The only way this woman can gain the love of an English gentleman is by signing a contract with the Devil. This makes more evident that Ezra might also be hardly judged by British readership, as they believed that mixed-race people are criminal and dangerous. Ezra even acknowledges this by warning Franklin that he is in “bad company”, as “the cloud of a horrible accusation has rested on [Ezra] for years” (Collins 360). Like the unnamed woman of the story, “obscurity was the only hope left for [him]” (360). Consequently, Ezra Jennings is subject to the greatly racist ideals from which he is born.

Works cited

Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone. E-book, Standard Ebooks, 2019.

“Growth of a London Myth”. All the Year Round, 4 July 1868, pp. 88-89.

“Humors of the Day: Valuable Recipes”. Harper’s Weekly: A Journal of Civilization, 4 July 1868, p. 427.

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