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Multiple Narratives & Relative Truths: a Study of The Ring and the Book, The Woman in White, and The Moonstone

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 September 2010

Sue Lonoff
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Extract

Across the span of a single decade, Robert Browning and Wilkie Collins published, respectively, a poem and two novels with similarly innovative structures. All three works are multiple narratives; that is, they are narrated by several of their characters who function both as actors and witnesses. All three were immediately popular, and all three continue to be regarded as major achievements of their audiors. The Woman in White, serialized in All the Year Round from 1859 to 1860, quickly became the talk of London and remained so preeminent among Collins's novels that in his will he requested as his epitaph, “author of The Woman in White and other works of fiction.” The Ring and the Book, begun in 1864 and inspired by a source that Browning found in 1860, was issued in four volumes, two in 1868 and two in 1869. Like The Woman in White, it was widely discussed and admired, exalting Browning's reputation even among readers who had earlier been critical. The Moonstone, begun in 1867 and published serially in All the Year Round during 1868, was not initially as popular as the other two, although its publisher reported that “crowds of anxious readers” waited for the latest serial installments; but today it is Collins's most celebrated novel, often (though inaccurately) cited as the first detective novel in English.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 10 , Spring 1982 , pp. 143 - 161
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1982

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References

Notes

1. Robinson, Kenneth, Wilkie Collins, A Biography (London: Bodley Head, 1951), p. 154.Google Scholar

2. Tinsley, William, Random Recollections of an Old Publisher (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1900), p. 114.Google Scholar

3. Browning and Collins were acquaintances. Collins is listed in the Brownings’ address book (I thank Philip Kelley for this information), and the two men were brought together in London by John Forster and by Frederick and Nina Chambers Lehmann. As yet, however, I have found no allusion to Collins's novels in anything by Browning, or to Browning's poem in anything by Collins; nor could I find evidence that either one influenced the other's work with multiple narration. On the other hand, they might both have been influenced by Emily Brontë's experiments with narrative merfiod, or by Dickens's in Bleak House.

4. The Ring and the Book, ed. Altick, Richard (Harmondsworth: Penquin, 1971), 1.1391.Google Scholar Future citations will appear in the text.

5. This count is based on Broughton, Leslie N. and Stelter, Benjamin F., A Concordance to the Poems of Robert Browning (New York: Haskell House, 1970), 111, 1073–75, 1079–80, and 1082.Google Scholar

6. Collins wrote Bajil in 1852 and revised it in 1862. While the changes between editions are minor, I quote here from the revised “Letter of Dedication” (as reprinted in the earliest authorized edition of his works. New York: Harper, 1874) because it dates from the period under study here. Future citations will appear in the text.

7. Robert Browning and Julia Wedgwood, A Broken Friendship…, ed. Curle, Richard (New York: Stokes, 1937), pp. 150, 152, and 153.Google Scholar

8. The Letters of John Ruskin, 1827–1869, vol. 36 of The Works of John Ruskin, ed. Cook, E. T. and Wedderburn, Alexander (London: George Allen, 1909), pp. xxxiv–xxxv (10 Dec. 1855).Google Scholar The Brownings had sent Ruskin a copy of Men and Women.

9. See DeVane, William C., A Browning Handbook, 2nd ed. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1955), pp. 320–23.Google Scholar The accounts by W. M. Rossetti and Rudolf Lehmann of Browning's decision to lay the book out in twelve cantos are both presented here (p. 322); neidier one, however, suggests Browning's motives for using multiple narrators.

10. See Hyder, Clyde K., “Wilkie Collins and The Woman in White,” PMLA, 54 (March 1939), 299–300.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. “Preface to the First Edition (1868),” The Moonstone, ed. Stewart, J. I. M. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 27.Google Scholar Future citations will appear in the text Further proofs of Collins's research are in the Morris L. Parrish Collection, Princeton University.

12. See Dépret, Louis, Chez les Anglais (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1879), pp. 250–51Google Scholar, also cited by Davis, Nuel Pharr in The Life of Wilkie Collins (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956), p. 211.Google Scholar

13. “Preamble” to The Woman in White, ed. Symons, Julian (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 33.Google Scholar Future citations will appear in the text.

14. Compare this passage on poets by Browning, Elizabeth Barrett (1857):Google Scholar

I write so

Of the only truth-tellers, now left to God, –

The only speakers of essential truth.

Opposed to relative, comparative,

And temporal truths.…

Aurora Leigh, A Poem, with an Introd. by Taplin, Gardner B. (Chicago: Academy Chicago Limited, 1979Google Scholar; rpt. of 1864 ed. published by J. Miller, New York), p. 28. See also the opening paragraph of Langbaum's, Robert chapter, “‘The Ring and the Book’: a Relativist Poem,” in The Poetry of Experience (New York: Norton, 1963), p. 109.Google Scholar (Throughout this important chapter, Langbaum defines and debates the poem's relativity, arriving at conclusions that significantly differ from mine.)

15. The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), p. 14.Google Scholar To do justice to Victorian theories of truth and the representation of truth in literature would require a lengthy detour from the major issues of this paper. But see, in addition to Houghton, passim: Welsh, Alexander, “The Allegory of Truth in English Fiction,” Victorian Studies, 9 (September 1965), 17Google Scholar, which discusses the “secularization of truth” in the western world; Stang's, Richard chapter on “Mid-Victorian Realism” in The Theory of the Novel in England, 1830–1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959)Google Scholar, which treats several of these issues under different labels; and Ashton, Rosemary, The German Idea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980)Google Scholar, passim, for indications of German influences on nineteenth-century English concepts of the Ideal and the Actual. On Browning's ideas, see also Altick, Richard D. and Loucks, James F., Browning's Roman Murder Story: A Reading of “The Ring and the Book” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 58–59, 68–69, 329–30, et al.Google Scholar

16. Robert Browning and Julia Wedgwood, p. 144.

17. DeVane, p. 294.

18. Hodell, Charles W., The Old Yellow Book: Source of Robert Browning's “The Ring and the Book” (Washington: Carnegie, 1908), p. 74.Google Scholar

19. Cook, , A Commentary Upon Browning's “The Ring and the Book” (London: Oxford University Press, 1920), pp. 288–89.Google Scholar

20. Hodell, p. 75.

21. See Allingham, William, A Diary, ed. Allingham, H. and Radford, D. (London: Macmillan, 1907), p. 207.Google Scholar

22. See Corrigan, Beatrice, ed., Curious Annals: New Documents Relating to Browning's Roman Murder Story (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1956), pp. xlvi–xlvii.Google Scholar As Corrigan points out, Browning's source gives less detailed information about the Pope's motives than the sources to which she has had access; nonetheless, the pattern of idealization is consistent.

23. The Old Yellow Book, Source of Browning's “The Ring and the Book” (Boston: Chipman, 1925), p. 623.Google Scholar

24. Dowden, , The Ring and the Book (Oxford University Press, 1912), p. ix.Google Scholar For more extensive analysis of the ring metaphor, see Cundiff, Paul A., Browning's Ring Metaphor and Truth (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1972), especially pp. 24–32 and 67–92, and Langbaum, pp. 132–34.Google Scholar

25. Rossetti Papers, 1862 to 1870 (London: Sands & Co., 1903), p. 401.Google Scholar

26. Robinson, p. 148.

27. “The Sensationalism of The Woman in White,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 32 (June 1977), 26.Google Scholar Kendrick's comments on Collins's revisions in narrative structure (p. 25) are also relevant to my discussion.

28. The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Dexter, Walter (London: Constable, 1938), 111, 145.Google Scholar

29. Reprinted in Wilkie Collins, The Critical Heritage, ed. Page, Norman (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), pp. 172–73, from a review of 25 July 1868.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30. Browning's shift away from self-conscious, confessional poetry is connected with John Stuart Mill's reaction to Pauline and with the adverse comments of various reviewers; see Phelps, W. L., “Notes on Browning's Pauline,” Modern Language Notes, 47 (May 1932), 292–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Irvine, William and Honan, Park, The Book, the Ring, and the Poet (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), pp. 26–27.Google Scholar Collins's assertiveness and his ongoing quarrels with Victorian reviewers are dealt with in the third chapter of my book, Wilkie Collins and His Victorian Readers (New York: Ams Press, 1982)Google Scholar; see also the reviews in Page on pp. 39, 47, and passim.

31. See “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach,” in The Implied Reader: Patterns in Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), pp. 274–94.Google Scholar

32. Reprinted in Browning: The Critical Heritage, ed. Litzinger, Boyd and Smalley, Donald (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970), p. 301Google Scholar, from a review in Tinsley's Magazine of January 1869.

33. See DeVane, William C., “The Virgin and the Dragon,” Yale Review, 37 (Autumn, 1947), 33–46Google Scholar, and Shaw, J. E., “The ‘Donna Angelicata’ in The Ring and the Book,” PMLA, 41 (March 1926), 55–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34. On the political and social implications of the novel, see Reed, John R., “English Imperialism and the Unacknowledged Crime of the Moonstone,” Clio, 2 (June 1973), 281–90.Google Scholar

35. On the interaction between speakers and their audiences in the poem, see Sullivan, Mary Rose, Browning's Voices in “The Ring and the Book” (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), especially p. 87 on Pompilia.Google Scholar