"III. The Angry Pessimist" & "Plain English"

It must first be established that the American and English publics are in fact infantilized and the basis of their infantilization.  

In this last instalment of The Moonstone, Part XXXII, Godfrey Ablewhite is revealed as the thief of the Moonstone. "III. The Angry Pessimist" scathingly describes the English public as strikingly similar to Godfrey Ablewhite - a man to whom "honour, virtue, and courage/ are all very well in their places,/but that money's a thousand times better" (205). 

The article "Plain English" is published conspicuously beside "III. The Angry Pessimist", suggesting that this depravity and propensity for crime is caused by childlike ignorance - ignorance to those oppressed when their wealth is stolen from them, the racial other. The unnamed author claims that “every pictorial fact is cut out” (205) and geography is taught based on “vague ’boundaries’” (205). Englishness, as in the English public, plainly is operating without an understanding of “battles”("Plain English" 205)and “kings”("Plain English" 205), instead having a mere “list”  ("Plain English" 205) of these imperial conquests. Similarly, Godfrey does not concern himself with the Indians who's lives and religion are at stake every moment the Moonstone is abroad. In the English education, no humanity, no "dramatic incident" is taught that informs of the racial other. The "utterly false logic of imperialism" (Free 340) that the colonizer is humanizing and educating the colony, the racial other is exposed, since the English public if hardly educating themselves. 

Thus infantilized in their ignorance, crimes of theft, of colonialism, are made easy for the English public, and, like children, they must be taught. But "we (the English) go on seeing evils, and lamenting them, but never attempt to remedy them" ("Plain English" 205). 

Works Cited: 

Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone. Edited by John Sutherland, Oxford University Press, 1999.

“III.The Angry Pessimist.” All the Year Round: A Weekly Journal, 8 August 1868. pp. 205. Print.

“Plain English.” All the Year Round: A Weekly Journal, 8 August 1868. pp. 205. Print.

Free, Melissa. “‘Dirty Linen’: Legacies of Empire in Wilkie Collins's the Moonstone.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 48, no. 4, 2006, pp. 340–371.