"Who can tell?" in Harper's Weekly [Text]

This is the last paragraph of The Moonstone, as it appears in Harper's Weekly. Harper’s Weekly advertises the story as “printed from the author’s manuscript”, but that is not strictly true. There is one notable variant in the American version, as opposed to the British: the American edition changes the punctuation in Collins’ original manuscript to “Who can tell?” with a question mark, instead of “Who can tell!” with an exclamation point. This question mark is almost certainly a purposeful change made by the American editors. I corresponded with the Morgan Library, in New York, which owns Collins’ manuscript, and I confirmed that the original uses an exclamation point (“Who can tell!”), and not a question mark. Thus some change was made sometime after the submission of the manuscript to its London publishers. There is a slight chance that the change was the result of a typographical error, but considering the fact that the American punctuation also appears in other editions, it seems unlikely. This seemingly small change significantly affects the tone of the whole novel, as the last line is the last impression the novel leaves with readers. There is a sense of mystery, and uncertainty, inherent in the question mark. This question mark also intentionally leaves the conclusion of the story open to interpretation, and in a way asks readers to make their own conclusions, within a moralistic intratextual context.

Collins himself eventually edited the final line to read “Who can tell?”, as early as the 1871 edition. John Sutherland reproduces the question mark in the 1999 Oxford World’s Classics edition, based on the 1871 edition, and notes that “Wilkie Collins – writing twenty years later through his surrogate narrators” is the one who “can ‘tell’” (xv). Sutherland wonders whether Collins was “setting up a sequel with his teasing last question” (xv). I am not entirely sure why Collins would change the text to match the American version in 1871, but regardless, the text did witness a change in 1868, apparently not by Collins’ own hand.