"Weigh it in your hand, sir," she said to the Sergeant. [image]

In the ninth serial part of The Moonstone, Mr. Betteredge and Sergeant Cuff travel to the nearby town of Cobb’s Hole to pay a visit to friends of Rosanna Spearman. While the journey is not far in distance, it is worlds away from the genteel setting of the Verinder estate. The Yollands are a lower-class family, but Betteredge maintains that they are “respectable, worthy people” (124) and “a credit to the neighbourhood” (124). His verbal approval of the Yollands is undercut almost immediately when he calls explicit attention to his need to translate Mrs. Yolland’s lower-class Yorkshire dialect into “the English language” (125)—distinguishing between the proper English and the social “Other” in the scene. 

Harper’s Weekly picks up on Betteredge’s hypocritical stance towards the impoverished lower classes. In this serial part, a large illustration of Mrs. Yolland and Sergeant Cuff is positioned in the bottom-right portion of the first page. The scene is claustrophobic and darkly shaded, with Mrs. Yolland crouched in a submissive position in front of and below Sergeant Cuff. Sergeant Cuff stands erect and holds his hat behind his back like a proper English gentleman. In his other hand, Cuff appears to be extending his hand to aid Mrs. Yolland, but a closer look shows that he holds a chain between his fingers. The presence of the chain is explained in the story’s discourse (128) but because of the image’s size and shading relative to the verbal text, it takes a prominent position on the page of Harper's Weekly. This image functions proleptically to direct the reading of the verbal text. Before the reader learns the identity of the woman in the scene, he/she perceives that she is impoverished, lives in bleak and cramped quarters, and is subservient to the middle-upper class English gentleman. 

Works Cited

Collins, Wilkie. “Chapter XV.” The Moonstone. Ed. John Sutherland. New York: OUP, 2008. 199-132. Print.