Gabriel Betteredge, the amenable House-Steward of The Moonstone, treats Robinson Crusoe as his secular Bible. Claiming that “such a book as Robinson Crusoe never was written, and never will be written again” (MS 22)—the alpha and omega of his narrative faith—Betteredge turns to the novel as his moral and spiritual antidote, as a Protestant hails decontextualized passages from the good book as his daily guidance. Were I to follow Betteredge’s example, Robinson Crusoe would show me thus:

I drew up the State of my Affairs in Writing, not so much to leave them to any that were to come after me, for I was likely to have but few Heirs, as to deliver my Thoughts from daily poring upon them, and afflicting my Mind; …[I] set the good against the Evil, that I might have something to distinguish my Case from worse; and I stated very impartially, like Debtor and Creditor, the Comforts I enjoy’d, against the Miseries I suffer’d, Thus:

Upon the whole, here was an undoubted Testimony, that there was scarce any Condition in the World so miserable, but there was something Negative or something Positive to be thankful for in it; and let this stand … that we may always find in it something to comfort ourselves from, and to set in the Description of Good and Evil, on the Credit Side of the Account. (Defoe 57-58)

Rather than writing down his name, or wishing for a reproductive posterity of his story by imagining his children reading his writing, Crusoe opts to write, severely, “like Debtor and Creditor.” While the table itself labels the two sides “Evil” and “Good,” the last sentence of the passage reaffirms that by “good” he really means “Credit”—which, as logic follows, would mean that by “evil” he really means “Debt.” Indeed, to be in debt, as Robinson Crusoe suggests, was truly to be evil in Victorian England.

Self-help books from the period, such as Self-Help; with Illustrations of Character and Conduct (1859) by Samuel Smiles, cautioned their readers not to incur any debt, for debt “renders him a slave in many respects, for he can no longer call himself his own master, nor boldly look the world in the face” (Self-Help 1866, 287). The stain of debt, unlike a simple financial expense, is permanent; and it relates to the idea of a man’s credit in Victorian society, which not only took account of a man’s wealth but his upbringing, connections, and social standing. According to Leeann Hunter, “ruin can be permanent, even after debts are paid” (149). When a man was ruined by debt—rendering himself a negative worth—he was a failure in his finances, private family life, and public stature. March 19, 1876 issue of The New York Times cites, in an article titled “A New Way to Collect Debt,” a case that took place “not many years ago” in which “funeral was interrupted in England by the appearance of a Sheriff’s officer who levied upon the corpse and coffin” (“A New Way”). In this, debt had the power to turn the very body of the debtor into a commodity that could (and would) be used to fill the lack that debt signified. In Victorian literature, the topic of debt was also frequently tied to the topic of morality and the wealth of the soul; for example, Mr. Dombey, in going bankrupt, also loses his family, and indeed Dickens’s language focuses more on his loss of his daughter Florence Dombey, rather than the loss of his material things. To be bankrupt, and in debt, was to be bereft of what makes a man a man.

Critically, debt has been understood as the underbelly of the Victorian credit economy, which has been discussed mostly in terms of the Victorian realist novel’s imagination of nation- and self-making. Patrick Brantlinger notes a parallel between national debt and the representational anxiety of realism, writing “The Victorian novel simultaneously registers both the substantiality of British power and prosperity and its insubstantiality, its basis only in ‘credit’ and ‘debt,’ in part by metaphorizing its own lack of reality (its fictionality) as no different from that of money (always a form of debt)” (Fictions 7). Citing John Vernon, Brantlinger claims that “both money and the realist novel share the failure of mimesis” (“Cashing” 11); in Brantlinger’s psychoanalytic purview, debt in realist fiction speaks to the anxiety of its ultimate “lack”—its lack of reality. This mimetic lack in Victorian novels becomes the site at which British national debt, fetishism, and empire are registered and transmuted. Since Brantlinger’s study, critical attention has shifted more to the idea of personal debt and credit, as other critics have reflected on the connection between anxiety of representation and credit-debt economy in terms of fictional character and individual self-formation. Margot C. Finn brings a corrective to Brantlinger, categorizing public and private debt separately. She demonstrates that as personal credit played a key role in growth of industry and trade in Victorian England, the idea of credit was not only confined to the national financial realm but also extended to the social and cultural. In fact, sometimes the flow of influence seems reversed: Finn asserts that “where early modern debt relations had been predicated on conceptions of mutual trust, modern consumer credit was shaped most decisively by notions of personal character” (18-19). Character not only was a result of one’s conduct and economic stability but also what underwrote faith in one’s honest labor relationship to the market, as servants or governesses would be asked to provide reference of character before a successful hire.¹ As Finn writes, “Credit thus reflected character, but also constituted it” (19).² Deidre Lynch also suggests that character, with the development of novel-writing in late 18^th and early 19^th century, provided commercialized imaginations of self-definition and individuation for the bourgeoisie. Anna Kornbluh has recently echoed this: defining “fictious capital”—the “feigned capital that alchemically precipitated real wealth” (5)—as the basis of Victorian credit economy, she argues that the realist novel sublimates the Victorian cultural struggle with fictious capital into its characters’ interiority. All in all, the realist novel becomes the site in which the metaphorical relationship between the credit economy and the self is represented and realized. The self was largely defined and measured through the credit-debt standing of one’s character. As Samuel Smiles puts it, “Character is property…the noblest of possessions” (Character 180, 187). Thus, literary imagination would also utilize this binary of credit (as a fundamental social capital) and debt (as the lack, or the utter loss, of it) through the idea of self-making. Robinson Crusoe’s table of “good” and “evil” in the proto- Bildungsroman demonstrates this in a nutshell: one’s character can be self-recognized, built, and even curated. In writing, one can form the self, through the formation of one’s character. Credit and debt, thus, have an intimate relationship to the Victorian value of the self and its development through the genre of the novel.

Thus, to build character was to build credit. Self is inseparable from the metaphor of money in the Victorian novel: composing one’s self-history, a narrative form most well-represented by the genre of the Bildungsroman, is tightly wound with the notion of accruing private credit. In these reflections and reifications of the credit economy in the Victorian realist building of the self, debt is often characterized as the shadow of such credit in characterological terms. Debt is relegated to that “type” of character whose growth is stunted, providing foils to the protagonist, but ultimately pushed aside for the plots of the protagonists’ progress, or made into minor allegories of the novels’ critique of the failures of the larger social institution. The first category would include Bleak House’s Harold Skimpole, who only comes to abuse the trust and wealth of those around him through his perpetual state of debt (and shamelessness). Others under the second category would include the tragic figures of William Dorrit in Dickens’s Little Dorrit, Charley Tudor in Trollope’s The Three Clerks, or Rawdon Crawley in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, who all demonstrate the taint that debt had on one’s social status, virtue, body, and even soul through their allegorical narratives of descent. Their plots tend to end much before the main story, and are subservient to a larger secret or a revelation about the main character. In a way, the fatal touch of debt is reserved for the minor characters in the Victorian Bildungsroman, demonstrating Alex Woloch’s claim that “minor characters are the proletariat of the novel” (27). In the Bildungsroman, in particular, “the hero’s progress is facilitated through a series of interactions with delimited minor characters” (Woloch 29), who in Lukács’ words, whether “guilty or not, are tragically ruined…whose life dissolves into nothingness” (Lukács 55). Debt becomes one of the techniques that the Bildungsroman uses to inflict such tragic destiny upon these minor characters, who by counterexample signal to the English Bildungsroman hero’s correct progress. The form of the novel’s plot, in this frame, becomes a temporal space in which the Bildungsroman hero eliminates alternative possibilities of lives unled, particularly those possibilities that are stained by debt, to choose his correct path of accruing private credit, and thus character.

The form of the sensation novel, I argue, is in a tense relationship with the form of the Bildungsroman. The sensation novel genre is known for its multiple voices and unrealistic plots that center around suspenseful sequences ending with revelations of mystery, as opposed to the first-person narrative that strives for cohesive selfhood and the tight bond with realism of the Bildungsroman. However, suspense plots in sensation novels also work structurally in the same manner as coming-of-age plots in the Bildungsroman. Both are narrative space-times during which alternative possibilities, or forking paths, of the plot are successively eliminated, until the only ‘correct’ path is revealed to the characters and the reader, whether it be the ‘correct’ path of maturation for the Bildungsroman, or the ‘correct’ culprit of the sensational crime. But seen through the frame of debt, these two similar structures are working towards opposite effects. Taking Wilkie Collins’s two novels—The Woman in White and The Moonstone—as case studies, I locate the transaction and collection of debt, which mark the ‘wrong’ forking path in the plots of Bildungsroman, as a central drive in the suspenseful plots of the sensation fiction genre.³ Like Robinson Crusoe, Collins’s two most famous novels keep an account of the evils and goods structuring the suspense plot through the thematics of debt and credit. They show a world in which the contractual relationship of debtor and creditor, and most of all the always-already condition of debt marking a character as ontologically lacking, is a necessary element in the governing system of a narrative. Unlike the Bildungsroman’s allergic separation of debt and sense of self in order to preserve the characterological self-worth, debt simply takes precedence over the self in Collins. By examining how Collins’s sensation novels rely on a system of balancing debt and credit in the narrative form, I hope to marry the form and genre of suspense with the readers’ expectation for, and contractual relationship with, the text.⁴

Specifically, some of the most suspenseful sequences in each novel end with a recognition scene gone awry: rather than a recognition of one’s place in society or one’s true identity, Collins’s sensation novels entail “comparing of receipts” scenes that reveal the debt of the character deemed evil, and vouch for the collection of that debt by the character deemed good. By making such account-keeping a central structure that governs the plots of suspense, Collins configures novelistic closure as a balancing of checks. In doing so, he not only reshapes the way in which the Bildungsroman of the previous decades formulated the closure of the novel from a successful socio-economic integration to a payment of debt, but also directs an experience of reading that modern readers of mystery genre are familiar with: reading for payoff.⁵

At first glance, Collins’ two novels, which were his most popular and prime examples of the sensation genre, involve a progress of sorts in their protagonists that is achieved specifically through the telling of their suspense plots. The individual who was dramatized as the narrative hero in the Bildungsroman, is now sensationalized. The Woman in White (1860) stars Walter Hartright, who begins as a lowly art instructor, but by the end of the novel marries the aristocratic Laura Fairlie and has a son who will inherit the estate. Franklin Blake in The Moonstone (1868) begins as a man of many debts and a low reputation: Betteredge describes that as a child, Franklin “had a transaction” with Betteredge, in which he borrowed “a ball of string, a four bladed knife, and seven-and sixpence in money—the colour of which last [Betteredge has] not seen, and never expect to see again” (TM 28). He also testifies that “the more money [Franklin] had, the more he wanted: there was a hole in Mr Franklin’s pocket that nothing would sew up.” Franklin, in other words, is marked from childhood as a debtor. He is also a “universal genius” who dabbles in everything, yet cannot settle on anything (TM 29). However, in the end, he is married to the affluent Rachel Verinder, and brings together many voices into a coherent story of recovering the secret of the diamond’s theft.⁶ In these short summaries, these novels seem to deliver a satisfying ending of the protagonists having reached personal, social, and economic development, as a Bildungsroman would.⁷ However, these changes are not brought upon by the steady elimination of unsavory life-paths that the hero of Bildungsroman goes through. In fact, the sensational hero’s progress only comes about as a byproduct of collecting the injurious debt of another character.

In The Woman in White , the central sleight-of-hand that confirms the Secret of Sir Percival Glyde involves a textual magic trick; Sir Glyde had forged the marriage of his parents for his inheritance of Blackwater Park on the church’s wedding registry, but there existed a copy of the original before those alterations were made. Like The Moonstone, at the heart of the plot is not only the villain’s debt, but also his Secret (capitalized in the book constantly), that he accepted Blackwater Park as his legacy, when he was in fact a bastard child. This Secret is dramatically revealed when Walter compares the two wedding registries as if comparing two receipts: one could say that wedding registries are receipts of marriages. What is revealed in the comparison of receipts is what Ian Duncan calls, in reference to The Moonstone, an “ontological lack” (“The Moonstone” 307).

Fittingly, Sir Percival Glyde’s real status as a bastard who took the estate that he did not deserve, his ontological lack, is signified by a literal lack on the bottom of the page of the unadulterated wedding registry—the “blank space,” indeed, “tells the whole story,” as Walter cries. He then goes on to imagine a sadistic tear-down of Sir Percival’s whole personage:

The idea that he was not Sir Percival Glyde at all, that he had no more claim to the baronetcy and to Blackwater Park than the poorest labourer who worked on the estate, had never once occurred to my mind…The disclosure of that secret, even if the sufferers by his deception spared him the penalties of the law, would deprive him, at one blow, of the name, the rank, the estate, the whole social existence that he had usurped. This was the Secret, and it was mine! A word from me; and house, lands, baronetcy, were gone from him for ever—a word from me, and he was driven out into the world, and nameless, penniless, friendless outcast! (WW 521)

The crime of forgery that Sir Glyde had committed is the utmost robbery and concealment of debt in Walter’s eyes, as it is what has provided him of his “name, the rank, the estate, the whole social existence.” The magic trick of turning someone no different from “the poorest labourer” to “Sir Percival Glyde” was his borrowing a social existence and identity he did not possess to begin with. This act of magical thinking—the thought that filling in the gap on the page would fill the void of his illegitimacy—is parallel to the basic logic of taking a loan: of owing, of being in debt, of spending what you don’t have. Compare this to the last moment of the novel, in which Walter, after having delivered the entire narrative as a part of his legal evidence of Laura Fairlie’s legitimacy, is presented with not only her legacy (Limmeridge House) but also his reproductive, upper-class futurity. Marian Halcombe presents Walter’s son who shares his father’s name to Walter himself in a dramatic gesture of their reclamation of inheritance from Sir Glyde’s magic trick:

“Do you talk in that familiar manner of one of the landed gentry of England? Are you aware, when I present this illustrious baby to your notice, in whose presence you stand? Evidently not! Let me make two eminent personages known to one another: Mr. Walter Hartright—the Heir of Limmeridge.” (WW 643)

Unlike the receipt comparison scene above that revealed the discrepancy—the ‘lack’—in one of the wedding registries, this scene is the direct opposite, where there are two Mr. Walter Hartrights, who are both “the Heir of Limmeridge.” The bodies of Walter, and his son, are made interchangeable and same under the frame of debt and credit, which validates their wealth, unlike Sir Glyde’s incongruent wedding registries that unveiled his illegitimacy. In proving Laura’s legitimacy, Walter in fact proves the illegitimacy of her first husband, Sir Percival Glyde, revealing his magic trick of forgery, and airing his debt.⁸ While Walter is not, strictly speaking, a creditor to Sir Glyde’s debt, Sir Glyde’s ontological lack is what allowed him to usurp Laura’s estate through his marriage to her; by uncovering Sir Glyde’s debt, Walter collects the benefit, as it allows him to nullify the marriage between Laura and Sir Glyde, for Walter to step into the husband’s position. Walter also does this through the legal vocabulary of his framing narrative, thereby gaining legitimacy as the self-making narrator who accumulates various voices and converts them into a coherent story of Sir Glyde’s illegitimacy. As Mario Ortiz-Robles points out, “each of the individual narratives functions as a kind of deposition or affidavit” (848), forming a quasi-legal document that ‘proves’ Sir Glyde’s debt and guilt (which are indistinguishable) and Walter’s credit and trustworthiness (again, same difference). Taken as a whole, the novel at first glance seems to revolve around the spectacle of switching the two women, but it actually centers around the real changelings of collection and debt:⁹ Walter Hartright and Sir Percival Glyde.

The form of the recognition scene, which Ben Parker describes in his reading of Dickens’s novels as “the series of revelations that illuminates all of these [past] questions, retroactively aligning all pertinent information and producing a coherent image of the past” (140), maps neatly onto the function of the scene of receipt in Collins’s The Woman in White. By revealing Sir Percival Glyde’s ontological lack and answering all the questions of Sir Glyde’s suspicious mysteries, Walter Hartright improves his own image by counterexample, as the bringer of light to this sordid plot of Sir Glyde’s debt. In other words, Collins’s sensation novel distorts a conventional feature of the Bildungsroman, the scene of recognition, into a scene of receipt, following its logic of debt and credit. What this shift does in the form of the recognition scene is that it makes it strictly relational—no longer an event of the individual’s “own historical dissolution” (Parker 138), in which the hero of the Bildungsroman recognizes his or her own secret, the sensational scene of receipt comparison shows one individual rupturing the other’s history into pieces, revealing their secret that lets one gain narrative authority and credit. Put differently, the self-development that we see in Bildungsroman mutates in the sensation novel into a development that can only come at the cost of another’s descent.

Arguably Collins’s most successful novel, The Moonstone, has been theorized most frequently (out of Collins’s novels) in terms of colonial guilt and exchange. Ilana Blumberg reads a system of gift-giving in The Moonstone, claiming that “The Moonstone’s representation of ethically flawed exchange unfolds against the unattainable measure of the free gift, the gift that exacts no recompense from its recipient and thus affirms its giver’s generosity rather than his or her rapacity” (166). Ian Duncan also reads a fundamental narrative flow of colonial debt in the novel, pointing out that “debt is the foreign agent (“a strange gentleman, speaking English with a foreign accent” [91]) that invades the house alongside the Moonstone to undermine Blake’s character, and debt drives Ablewhite to pocket the jewel” (“The Moonstone” 307). The Moonstone, a darker, colonial reflection of The Woman in White, indeed revolves around the same structure of borrowing and returning, debt and credit. The opening and the closing of the novel signify the whole plot as the British domestic space being lent the red herring of the Indian Diamond, until it is finally returned to its original place, as if the narrative debt—signified by the colonial guilt of the British empire raiding India—was paid by its return.¹⁰

Although in her introduction, Sandra Kemp claims that “The Moonstone is then as much about a quest for a self as it is about finding the lost gem through salvaging the past” (TM xxvii), one could argue that Franklin’s real individual progress is that he has better credit by the end of the novel; he begins with debts, “a hole in [his] pocket that nothing would sew up” (TM 29), and yet as he aids in exposing the true debtor of the plot, Godfrey Ablewhite, his credit is cleansed—the dissolution of the suspense, as with The Woman in White, delivers and erases the debt of Franklin as it did the low-class origins of Walter Hartright. The novel reveals the true identity of Godfrey Ablewhite in the most transparent case of the literary magic trick yet: Sergeant Cuff’s way of revealing the true criminal behind the plot of The Moonstone. Cuff writes down the name of the thief of the diamond in a sealed envelope, and asks Franklin to “wait to open the envelope...till you have got at the truth, and then compare the name of the guilty person, with the name that I have written in that sealed letter” (TM 438). After a suspenseful chapter of tracking down disguised Godfrey, losing him once, finding him again, waiting until the morning to knock on the door of his lodging, discovering his dead body still in disguise, and even taking the time to stretch out the suspense by describing in detail how Cuff is pulling off Godfrey’s wig, beard, and washing off his complexion, Cuff finally completes his textual magic trick:

‘Open the sealed letter first—the letter I gave you this morning.’

I opened the letter.

‘Read the name, Mr. Blake, that I have written inside.’

I read the name that he had written, it was—Godfrey Ablewhite.

‘Now,’ said the Sergeant, ‘come with me, and look at the man on the bed.’

I went with him, and looked at the man on the bed.

GODFREY ABLEWHITE! (TM 447-48)

The (perhaps overly) transparent device of suspense—planting and payoff—bears a resemblance to comparing receipts. The italicization and the capitalization of Godfrey’s full name literally set that name apart from the rest of the text on the page, allowing the readers themselves to compare the exact sameness of the letters, as Franklin is doing with the name written on Sergeant’s note and the name signified by Godfrey’s dead body. As in The Woman in White, the binary relationship is clear; Godfrey’s debt, the source of the whole plot, is collected by Franklin, who reaps the benefits of that same plot.

But what The Moonstone’s ending really signals to us is the cyclical nature of the balancing of checks, and how the narrative of personal progress matters little in the question of debt. The above mentioned comparing of receipts scene with Sergeant Cuff is in fact the very last time that we hear from Franklin—his last words are specifically “GODFREY ABLEWHITE!” (MS 448). His last words are the literal acknowledgment of receipt of debt in the form of comparing Godfrey’s name on Cuff’s note and the dead man’s identity; moreover, the narrative itself seems to dismiss Franklin’s character from then on. As if the settlement of debt was all that was required of the character, Franklin is only half-heartedly mentioned once more, by Gabriel Betteredge:

My purpose, in this place, is to state a fact in the history of the family, which has been passed over by everybody, and which I won’t allow to be disrespectfully smothered up in that way. The fact to which I allude is—the marriage of Miss Rachel and Mr. Franklin Blake. This interesting event took place at our house in Yorkshire, on Tuesday, October ninth, eighteen hundred and forty-nine. I had a new suit of clothes on the occasion. And the married couple went to spend the honeymoon in Scotland. (TM 462)

Franklin’s marriage is reduced to a mere “interesting event,” overshadowed by Gabriel Betteredge’s “new suit of clothes” for the occasion. Even more damning is the way in which the news of Rachel’s pregnancy is announced. Betteredge knows in advance of even Franklin that Rachel might be pregnant, because he reads the phrase “one Child born” in “a domestic bit concerning Robinson Crusoe’s marriage” in his endlessly consulted proto- Bildungsroman . Betteredge interrupts Franklin before he announces the news, in fact, and announces that he “needn’t say a word more”—and thus goes Franklin’s chance to even articulate the conception of his own child, displaced by the words of one Robinson Crusoe (TM 462, 463). Franklin’s progress is interchangeable with Robinson Crusoe’s, as is textually demonstrated. In comparison to the soaring buildup, and the grand emphasis lent to Walter Hartright’s recognition of his son as “Mr. Walter Hartright—the Heir of Limmeridge,” Franklin’s payoff to his Bildung is constantly made feeble, brushed off like a mere narrative necessity (WW 643, original emphasis).

Franklin’s personal triumph is given up, I argue, for two reasons, one: that as Franklin has collected the debt of Godfrey Ablewhite, thereby settling the “lack” that the narrative began with, he is of no use to a narrative that is not concerned with individuals, but rather transactions between them; two: The Moonstone will need to make use of the last of its narrative space not to honor individual Bildung , but rather forging and ending of a contractual relationship between the reader and the novel. The ending atomizes the course of Franklin’s development, and with it the idea of individual development— Bildung —itself. As we get closer to the end the novel, the story that Franklin so painstakingly compiled (as his own character consolidated into the role of the good English husband and father), starts to unravel once more. The various testimonials from different characters breathlessly diverge, and in the final eyewitness account that Mr. Murthwaite provides of the Hindu ritual in which the Moonstone is restored to its temple once more, the three Indians that shadowed the narrative thus far as one unit separate, “in three separate directions…never more were they to look on each other’s faces” (MS 471). Then of course, the last page of the novel triumphantly, and yet also ominously, signals the inconsequence of all that the readers have read so far:

Yes! after the lapse of eight centuries, the Moonstone looks forth once more, over the walls of the sacred city in which its story first began…So the years pass, and repeat each other; so the same events revolve in the cycles of time. What will be the next adventures of the Moonstone? Who can tell? (TM 472)

The allusion to repetition is significant: it calls attention to the uselessness of being so held in suspense throughout the novel. The same, complicated events of The Moonstone are to be repeated all over again after years pass—Franklin’s puny plot of self-cohesion was to no avail, after all. Even the form of the text emphasizes this ‘outside’ of the narrative progression that Franklin’s take part in. The prologue and the epilogue take place outside the British national boundary, and are written by people who are not involved in the suspense plot at all. By sandwiching the main suspense plot of Franklin’s Bildung, the prologue and the epilogue formally atomize the plot as an episode contained within a seemingly larger universe, an unfathomable narrative time. This signals a shift in Collins’s formulation of the national, masculine Bildung—the individual narrative of progress does not matter, in the larger context of debt and credit that we see in the colonial history of the diamond. The form of the novel prioritizes the exchange of debt and credit over the narrative of individual’s progress.

In this, Collins’s fiction might beckon the eventual arrival of Hardy’s bleak Naturalism epitomized in Jude the Obscure , where each organism’s (Jude’s, in this case) potential for development does not matter in the grand scale of the narrative, and will most likely be thwarted if observed long enough. As Emily Steinlight had argued in her muscular reading of the novel, “individuality and statistical aggregation cease to be opposed; the very traits that define the protagonists’ identities render them both generalizable and redundant” (200-01). Here, the Victorian Bildung comes to die: Steinlight’s reading positions the novel’s protagonist as a feeble singular organism “at the limit of nonbeing” precisely because it is an individual, and the individual’s life “comes to signify a peculiar error in the singular organism’s growth process: a failure to die” (202, 203). In a broad scale, one could contend that the genre of sensation fiction, which boomed in the 1860s and 70s, functions as a bridge in cultural formulation of literary Bildung : between the mid-19^th century autobiographical novels of individual development and the Naturalist novels of individual descent at the end of the 19^th century. But unlike Jude the Obscure, where the individual life is subsumed under the aggregate as an interchangeable, redundant, and insignificant germ, The Moonstone emphasizes that the individual life is subsumed by the debt-credit relationship that is episodically created and resolved, in an infinite cycle of credit economy.

The comparison of receipts in Woman in White and The Moonstone is tied to a system of debt and credit in which each resolution of suspense has been for someone’s credit, and someone else’s debt: what these novels show is a zero-sum game of not only financial debt but narrative debt. Thematics of debt seep into not only the domestic and corporate spheres of the plot, but also the singular and aggregate notions of identity; in doing so, the suspense plot of debt renders all aspects of the novel only in their relation to the concept of credit and debt. It points to a cultish, all-encompassing rhetoric of capitalism that Walter Benjamin describes in “Capitalism as Religion”: indeed, within the narrative system of debt and credit, “everything only has meaning in direct relation to the cult: it knows no special dogma, no theology. From this standpoint, utilitarianism gains its religious coloring” (Benjamin 259). Suspense, I have been claiming thus far, becomes the narrative space in which this cultish credit economy can overtake not only the values of the Bildungsroman but also of narrative itself. This way, the novels give rise to not only a model of narrative in which debt and credit are at play on the thematic level, but also at the level of form: the novels themselves act as a contracted debtor to the readers waiting to collect their payoff of suspense.

Unlike the true mystery of the self and self-history in the Bildungsroman, the true mystery of the sensation novel becomes the mystery of money—where it comes from, where it goes, and who can trace its movement. While even in Great Expectations and Little Dorrit, the question of money was still tangled with the sense of self and the emergence of a coherent selfhood, Collins’s novels seem to directly disregard the latter for the former: with this, the ultimate virtue that these novels advocate for becomes the virtue of honesty, of money that comes of legitimate origin, though it never can. The vision of the sensation novel is a vision of utopia. As a form of spending beyond the real existing value, credit comes to form an idealized vision that can never be achieved, limited by the very fact of its ontological lack (that what you spent, you did not own). Therefore, I repeat: the true mystery of the sensation novel is the mystery of money. The veneer of wealth or credibility is always already implicated in gaping debt in the past. Only in correctly evaluating and interpreting personal credibility does the sensational hero grasp the secret of character, and thus the secret of the story. Once the debt is aired, the secret of the money is resolved, severing the debt relationship among the characters—this ends the narrative too, thus severing the reader’s connection with the text. And the end of a sensation novel has been thought as an especially amnesiac experience: “in reading sensational novels our memory has a trick of deserting us, and our attention of playing truant,” writes a critique of the genre in 1870 (“Our Novels” 417-18).

The feeling of a complete severance when one reaches the end of a sensation novel is not a novel experience. Walter Kendrick notes that “the reason for the novel’s existence, which it provides with great care on page one, had been used up by its end…Everything, indeed, which the ‘Preamble’ guarantees evaporates during the course of the novel” (32-33). Nicholas Dames theorizes that Collins’s sensation novels utilize the selective forgetting apparent in Bildungsroman such as Pendennis or David Copperfield to a pathological extent: Collins suppresses his plots’ aberrations by utterly forgetting and effacing colorful, morally ambiguous characters like Count Fosco. As Dames sums up, “Collins’s plots of the 1860s, that is, run throughout on the principle of a problematized, constant forgetting, then turn near the novel’s close to forgetfulness as a means of ending the narrative—of ‘forgetting’ those individuals whose status, interest, or danger might make them ‘memorable’” (189). While I agree with Dames that selective, even pathological, forgetting is crucial in Collins’ novels, his argument assumes that the Bildungsroman and the sensation novel pursue the same project of effacing parts of the plot that departs from the Victorian domestic norm by the end of the novel. I would rather pivot that the sensation novel’s investment in the debt-credit relationship makes the pathological forgetting on the readers’ part inevitable, regardless of whether or not those effaced elements adhere to the Victorian domestic norm or not, as we see with poor Franklin Blake’s perfect picture of Victorian bourgeois domesticity that is also round up and forgotten by the end of The Moonstone.

This system of narrative encourages a way of reading in terms of seeking balance: when a character dies, the readers are meant to look for a rebirth; when a character rises in esteem, we are encouraged to look for a downfall. Collins’s system of debt and credit reaches beyond the simple artistic decision for character doubles or dramatic irony, as the dissolution of the suspense plot specifically hinges upon the planting and payoff of debt and credit. This reading practice applies to our reading consciousness as well. When we are put in a lull of suspense, we hold on—partly because, as many scholars have suggested, of uncertainty or entertained uncertainty of future narrative events (Carroll, Gerrig) or frustration of desire waiting to be snuffed out (Smuts)—but mostly because, we know that our wait will be offset by the revelation that compensates our commitment to the plot. Beyond the simple experience of feeling rewarded when we reach the end of a novel, we feel as if the text owes us a proper, correct dissolution of suspense. I suspect that Collins’s model of narrative debt explains why repeat readers of suspense can still feel the agitation and frustration during the duration of suspense: the text and the reader enter a contractual relationship, where the reader comes to expect a payoff of their loan to the text. This loan is that of time and attention, and the utilitarian balancing of checks within the system of these sensation novels has effectively formed the readers’ taste for cathartic payoff.