Wilkie Collins and the Ladies of Baghdad, or the Sleeper Awakened

Abstract

On a first reading of The Moonstone, the subtler references to the Nights may be scarcely glimpsed amid the flow of explicit allusions to Robinson Crusoe. The frequency with which Gabriel Betteredge invokes the name of Defoe’s masterpiece emphasises the significance of the role the earlier novel plays in The Moonstone. Apart from characterising the kindly, talkative, self-educated steward, and forwarding the religious satire by the mock sortes biblicae, the Defoe allusions increasingly evoke a sense of England as Crusoe’s isle invested by hostile Indians. Such an impression is an apt reminder of the nature of British overseas settlement, since, wherever the colony, on a Caribbean island or in the Indian subcontinent, the expatriate endeavoured to make a home from home, however precarious.¹ The scores of allusions to Defoe have also the important function of helping to structure Collins’ novel, linking Prologue and Epilogue to the main body of the novel which they frame.