The text of The Moonstone is neither an especially difficult nor a roblematic one, and, on the whole, Steve Farmer’s annotation is correspondingly light. This is the first time that Collins’s dramatic adaptation of the novel has been reprinted and this text alone is well worth the price of the book. These appendices include excerpts from early reviews of the novel, newspaper accounts of two sensational crimes which almost certainly contributed to its plot, an article by Collins addressing (albeit in a very indirect fashion) the issue of the Indian Mutiny, letters by Collins concerning the composition and publication of the novel, and, last but by no means least, the complete text of the stage adaptation of the novel which Collins made in 1877, together with reviews of the original performances.

In this edition, for a very reasonable price, we are given not only a beautifully printed and error-free annotated text of the novel, but also a full introduction and over 150 pages of appendices. The chief reason for this is Broadview’s exceptionally generous editorial policy in its series of Literary Texts, and the very good use that Steve Farmer has made of this generosity. Here is a book which anyone with an interest in either Collins or Victorian literature in general will want to buy. In the case of this new edition by Steve Farmer, however, such a reaction would be completely misplaced. Thus, for Collins scholars and enthusiasts, who have put so much effort in recent years into editing and promoting his less well-known novels, the announcement of yet another edition of The Moonstone, when so many are already available, is likely to provoke a reaction of discouragement than pleasure. The Moonstone, in particular, ever since the poet Swinburne declared it to be the best of Collins’s novels, has received a great deal of critical attention, although it was perhaps the introduction to the novel written by another poet, T.S.Eliot, which first made it academically fashionable. The most popular of his novels in his lifetime, they have remained the works by Collins which anyone with any interest in the Victorian novel has read. Of the twenty-five novels which Collins produced, over an exceptionally long and creative literary career, only two can be said to have really made it into the canon (or at least, which amounts to much the same thing, into undergraduate reading lists.) These two are, of course, The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868).

The moonstone collins