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The Discovery of the Truth 3: 8
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Moonstone, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Detective Methods and Genre Standards
Intention, Identity, and Personality
Science and Religion
Gender and Victorian Morality
Class, Wealth, and Nobility
British Imperialism
Summary
Analysis
Franklin Blake looks at the notably ugly Ezra Jennings, whose strong but inconsistent features make him “look old and young both together” and make him rather unpopular around town. Jennings admits that Mr. Candy’s memory “is hopelessly enfeebled” but thinks “it may be possible to trace Mr Candy’s lost recollection.” Jennings also explains that he is from a British colony and his mother is not English, which helps Franklin understand his apparent suffering. Jennings recalls the days after Candy fell ill after riding home and visiting a patient in the heavy rain on Rachel’s birthday. Jennings saved him by administering stimulants (while other doctors insisted on the opposite treatment), and Jennings owes so much to Candy that he has cared for him nonstop since.
The apparent connection between Jennings’s foreignness, his ugliness, and his misfortune shows the dangers of both British xenophobia and first impressions based on attractiveness. From the beginning, Jennings is a tragic figure, his ostracism and mistreatment contrasting profoundly with his apparent brilliance as a doctor and endless care for Mr. Candy. In many ways, his identity is also ambiguous, impossible to be placed: his age, ethnic origins, and history are completely unclear.
Themes
Literary Devices
During Candy’s acute illness, Jennings noted down his “wanderings” to test for research purposes whether “the loss of the faculty of speaking connectedly, implies of necessity the loss of the faculty of thinking connectedly as well.” By filling in the gaps between Candy’s disconnected utterances, Jennings began to arrive at coherent narratives—and one of these stories is very relevant to Franklin Blake’s inquiry, although Jennings is uncertain about the ethics of sharing this information. Franklin explains that he is hoping to learn about the Moonstone’s disappearance, something that Jennings laments he cannot help elucidate. At this moment, they realize they must take different paths to their destinations, and Jennings apologizes for being “of no use” in Franklin’s investigation. As Jennings begins to head his own way, Franklin realizes he “must tell him the truth” about his own apparent role in the Diamond’s theft and calls Jennings back.
Jennings’s strategy for reconstructing the meaning behind Candy’s words is directly analogous to the investigative process that both Collins’s detective characters and his readers undertake: Candy must use certain clues as the key to an invisible but coherent story, filling in the blanks among the evidence Candy gives him to solve a puzzle. Here, this investigative process is presented explicitly within the context of a scientific method, and Jennings’s graciousness and ethical concerns show, again, that he is far from the monster many consider him.
Themes
Literary Devices
Franklin begins to explain that he is accused of stealing the Diamond, but first Jennings interrupts him to explain that “a horrible accusation” has ruined his own life and reputation, but he cannot bring himself to admit what it is, and “the wrong is beyond all remedy.” He has lost his family and “the woman [he] loved” because of “the vile slander,” and even lost another job in rural England before going to work for Mr. Candy. Despite his appearance, he admits, he is only 40. But Jennings believes he “shall be dead” before the news reaches Frizinghall, for he is terminally ill and has grown addicted to opium in his attempt to extend his final years and make “the little sum” he needs to provide for an unnamed love one. Because he is “a dying man,” Jennings suggests, he has no time for insincerity and hopes to make some peace with the world.
Jennings’s mysterious “accusation” is a clear foil for Franklin’s role in the Moonstone’s theft; their parallel admissions of vulnerability solidify their bond and their chance to help one another (Jennings can help exonerate Franklin and fulfill his desire to be a force for good in the world by doing so). Like Julia Verinder, Jennings is terminally ill and making his final preparations for death. His opium addiction is directly based on the author’s, which was so severe while Collins was writing The Moonstone that he reportedly forgot his own novel’s ending.
Themes
Literary Devices
After Jennings’s speech, Franklin admits that Rachel saw him steal the Diamond. Jennings jumps up excitedly and asks Franklin if he has “ever been accustomed to the use of opium.” Franklin denies it but admits that he was “unusually restless and irritable” last year, and unable to sleep most nights—except the night of Rachel’s birthday. Jennings declares that he is “absolutely certain […] that [he] can prove [Franklin] to have been unconscious of” stealing the Diamond. Suddenly, a man calls Jennings for an appointment, and Jennings tells Franklin to meet him two hours later at Mr. Candy’s house.
Jennings’s astonishing revelation leaves the reader unsatisfied, prolonging Collins’s signature suspense but heavily insinuating that the theft might have had something to do with opium. Jennings’s apparently prophetic knowledge of what Franklin must have undergone recalls Sergeant Cuff’s remarkable predictions and raises the perennial question of whether Jennings is merely a brilliant scientist or has some mystical ability like the Indians purport (as always in The Moonstone, the answer is the former).
Themes
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