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The Moonstone (1868) by Wilkie Collins is a 19th-century British epistolary novel, generally considered the first detective novel in the English language. The story was originally serialized in Charles Dickens' magazine All the Year Round. The Moonstone and The Woman in White are considered Wilkie Collins' best novels. Besides creating many of the characteristics of detective novels, The Moonstone also represented Collins' social opinions by his treatment of the Indians and the servants in the novel. Collins adapted The Moonstone for the stage during 1877, but the production was performed for only two months | THE MOONSTONE A Romance by Wilkie Collins Ebd E-BooksDirectory.com PROLOGUE THE STORMING OF SERINGAPATAM 1799 Extracted from a Family Paper I address these lines written in India to my relatives in England. My object is to explain the motive which has induced me to refuse the right hand of friendship to my cousin John Herncastle. The reserve which I have hitherto maintained in this matter has been misinterpreted by members of my family whose good opinion I cannot consent to forfeit. I request them to suspend their decision until they have read my narrative. And I declare on my word of honour that what I am now about to write is strictly and literally the truth. The private difference between my cousin and me took its rise in a great public event in which we were both concerned the storming of Seringapatam under General Baird on the 4th of May 1799. In order that the circumstances may be clearly understood I must revert for a moment to the period before the assault and to the stories current in our camp of the treasure in jewels and gold stored up in the Palace of Seringapatam. II One of the wildest of these stories related to a Yellow Diamond a famous gem in the native annals of India. The earliest known traditions describe the stone as having been set in the forehead of the four-handed Indian god who typifies the Moon. Partly from its peculiar colour partly from a superstition which represented it as feeling the influence of the deity whom it adorned and growing and lessening in lustre with the waxing and waning of the moon it first gained the name by which it continues to be known in India to this day the name of THE MOONSTONE. A similar superstition was once prevalent as I have heard in ancient Greece and Rome not applying however as in India to a diamond devoted to the service of a god but to a semi-transparent stone of the inferior order of gems supposed to be affected by the lunar influences the moon in this latter case also giving the name by which the stone
