English Malady: The Opiate Use in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone

Abstract

This article argues that Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone deploys opium as both narrative engine and cultural signifier to diagnose mid-Victorian imperial and domestic anxieties. Using close reading within a historicist and socio-cultural framework, it situates the novel’s multi-voiced structure against contexts of imperial commerce, East End drug cultures, medical practice, and emergent regulation, with selective intertextual comparisons to contemporaneous narratives. The analysis shows that opium and the diamond operate as twinned Oriental emblems that oscillate between thrill and threat, linking colonial extraction to metropolitan contamination through scenes of disguise, mixed descent, and domestic incursion. The study posits that opium in The Moonstone both symbolizes and enacts a cultural hypnosis that surfaces the empire’s external entanglements and internal fractures, anticipating Victorian recalibrations of imperial power and domestic governance while offering a critique of conquest, medicine, and class ideology.