Deception

Anderman suggests that "[t]he weekly serial produces its “single art” by combining text and picture, layout and image, current events and action, reader and page" (Anderman 52). In The Moonstone, however, the parts of this "single art," at times, contradict eachother, suggesting that the original appearance is not as it seems. 

Within this section of the novel, the Verinder’s lay eyes on the Moonstone for the first time. Betteredge, the narrator of this section, describes it as “unfathomable as the heavens themselves” (Collins 61). The poem pictured here describes a jewel in very similar terms. Like the Moonstone, which “shone awfully out of the depths of its own brightness with a moony gleam in the darkness” (62), the poem’s jewel is “gleaming in the light/ of the young moon” (Wideswarth 1-2). He then goes describes the reactions of those in the room: Rachel is fascinated and the Bouncers scream. In this critical moment, Betteredge compares Rachel’s two suitors, Godfrey Ablewhite’s indifferent comment that the diamond is “mere carbon” makes Franklin Blake look like a “perfect savage” in comparison (Collins 62). By the end of the novel, readers learn that the opposite is true and that, as the poem’s title suggests, “Appearances are Deceitful.” Halfway through the poem, it is revealed that the jewel is merely a “chip of bottle glass” (Wideswarth 8). 

Although the Moonstone proves to be a genuine diamond, Godfrey Ablewhite does not. Like Godfrey, the poet is not who they claim to be. The only information I have been able to find about the poet Wideswarth is that he was an alias of the 1950s American comedian, Benjamin Shillaber. According to the Encyclopedia of American Humorists, Wideswarth’s name is a testament to his “devotion to English Romantic poets” (Gale). Therefore, does the story’s proximity to a poem about deceiving appearances, written by a man who is not who he claims to be, suggest that readers should not trust appearances in detective novels?