At a Club Dinner

Compared to the American version, the texts surrounding The Moonstone in All the Year Round create a different critique of class-based inequality. As demonstrated in the poem “At a Club Dinner”, the European version of section twenty-eight seeks less to Other individuals from lower classes, and instead critiques the inequality associated with excessive displays of wealth. As this poem states, “We eat more dinner than hunger craves, / We drink our passage to early graves, / And fill, and swill, till our foreheads burst, / For sake of the wine and not of the thirst” (All the Year Round 109). This stanza criticizes the excess that those of the wealthy class indulge in from a critical standpoint, rather than presenting upper class behavior as the social norm and excluding all who do not conform as “Other”.

This poem goes on to state that “We toil and moil from morn to night / Slaves and drudges in health's despite, / Gathering and scraping painful gold / To hoard and garner till we're old; / And die, mayhap, in middle prime, / Loveless, joyless, all our time” (109). This stanza presents the opposite side of the problem, speaking to the labours that the lower classes are subjected to, and highlighting the suffering they bear. Rather than ostracising these lower-class individuals as Others and examining them from a distance, this poem presents these struggles on equal footing to the reader. This reading, in a direct contrast to the American version, would work to increase the sympathy and compassion directed to Ezra Jennings, a lower class man who arguably lived a “loveless, joyless” life for the purpose of helping others (109).

Works Cited

"At a Club Dinner". All The Year Round, vol 12, Harper & Brothers, July 11 1868, New York City.

Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone. Oxford University Press, 2008, New York.