Class, Wealth, and Nobility Theme Analysis

When they lose the Moonstone forever, Rachel and Julia Verinder are distraught not because they have lost something worth 20,000 pounds—they scarcely need the money—but rather because the Diamond’s loss signifies a violation of their family honor and dignity. The tension between these different modes of valuation—money and status—reveals the class differences that divide the wealthy, powerful Verinder family (who simply live off income from their land and do not work) from everyone else: their somewhat less wealthy and powerful relatives (who are constantly fighting debt to maintain their leisurely lifestyle), the professionals who serve them (like Mr. Bruff, Sergeant Cuff, and the doctors Mr. Candy and Ezra Jennings), and the working-class servants who keep their house. By portraying lower-class characters’ struggle sympathetically and showing how upper-class characters’ private lives do not at all measure up to their public personas, Collins challenges his era’s popular theory that class has anything at all to do with a person’s moral value.

Although most of them live in the same house, the novel’s characters have radically different experiences of the world, a set of differences that is unjustly determined by social class. Rosanna Spearman and the other servants work their whole lives but never earn enough to marry, take on better work, or move up socioeconomically. After giving up a life of petty theft, Rosanna is mortally bored and hopeless working at the Verinder estate; when she falls in love with Franklin Blake, who never even pays attention to her interest because she is only a servant, she can no longer stand her despair and drowns herself at the Shivering Sand. Rosanna’s friend Limping Lucy puts it plainly: the poor are forced to live “miserably” so that lazy rich aristocrats like Franklin Blake and Godfrey Ablewhite can avoid working, but fortunately “the day is not far off when the poor will rise against the rich.”

The novel’s middle-class characters fare better: Sergeant Cuff gets to comfortably retire after a long career, and Betteredge is an interesting, transitional character in terms of class: while he is technically one of the Verinders’ servants, he also takes on the dress, habits, and mannerisms of the upper class and is highly respected in the Verinder household, in part because he managed the family’s lands for a long time. For instance, even though Franklin Blake is technically of a higher social class than Betteredge, he takes loans from him and looks to him for advice. Betteredge is the only figure who mediates between the family and their servants and the only one with access to both the upper and working classes, because he can speak the languages of both classes. He practically worships the rich, however, whom he considers better than himself in every respect. Because he shows characters across the socioeconomic spectrum, Collins is able to show the severe inequality among them in a system that not only disproportionately benefits the wealthy, but also treats wealth as synonymous with honor and moral character.

However, Collins’s treatment of the upper class shows that their status is more about public appearances than private realities; they tend not to deserve their wealth at all, and often squander it. While Franklin Blake and Godfrey Ablewhite never have to work, it is because of their status and not their bank accounts: they are constantly getting further in debt to fund their lifestyles. Julia and Rachel worry about the Diamond’s loss because it signifies a violation of their family’s honor, and then fire Sergeant Cuff for the same reason: he questions whether Rachel herself might be guilty, crossing a line by questioning the family's honor. Collins thus shows that the public conflation of class, honor, and morality has nothing to do with people’s actual character. Ezra Jennings and Godfrey Ablewhite’s contrasting personalities demonstrate this: Jennings is physically hideous, disrespected and disdained by his community, and addicted to opium, but secretly yearns for love and acceptance and spends his last days doing everything possible to prove Franklin innocent of the Moonstone’s theft; meanwhile, Godfrey is outwardly chivalrous, pious, and charitable, but secretly steals everything of value he can get his hands on—including the Diamond itself, and the inheritance of a young man for whom he serves as trustee—so that he can pay for his mistress and villa outside London. Through these characters, Collins shows how people wrongly prioritize the public appearance of class over the private reality of action and personality.

However, Collins does not merely think some rich people do not deserve their wealth; he also shows how the very means of gaining wealth—inheritance and credit—end up undermining upper-class people’s lives and moral character. In other words, many of the novel’s characters are destroyed by their own wealth. Most obviously, the family immediately recognizes John Herncastle’s decision to leave the Moonstone to Rachel Verinder as a double-edged sword: it is at once a gesture of reconciliation and a way of getting revenge by passing on the Moonstone’s curse to his niece. Unlike her reckless husband John, Julia organizes her will so that her daughter Rachel will be protected from greedy suitors like her nephew Godfrey Ablewhite—who backs out of his engagement with Rachel once he learns that he will not grow rich by marrying her. He needs the money because he has leveraged his public-facing trustworthiness to get the credit and influence to access enormous sums of money he privately squanders, and will never pay back. While Collins does not demonize the wealthy aristocrats at his novel’s center, like Julia Verinder, her daughter Rachel, and Franklin Blake (who, like Godfrey Ablewhite, has debts of his own), he does make a case against the position, generally accepted but decreasingly viable in Victorian England, that wealth, nobility, and moral character are one and the same.