"We Are All Getting Liberal Now": The Cosmopolitan Critique of British Liberalism in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone

abstract:This analysis examines the critique of the British narrative of liberal progress by "situational cosmopolitans" in Collins's The Moonstone. The novel offers two intertwined versions of this narrative: a historical one influenced by the eighteenth-century Scottish conjectural history of stadial development; and a sociocultural one shaped by the evolutionism that emerged after the publication of On the Origin of Species. In both versions, the story of liberal progress—extending, in a conservative estimate, from 1688 to the nineteenth century—served, in its moral, cultural, intellectual, economic, and political aspects, to justify the assertion of British national power and the promotion of British imperial expansion over several centuries. Establishing the salience of this narrative reveals the novel's implicit interrogation of it in two forms: first, as an indigenized improvement upon that model and, second, as an Indian supersession of that paradigm in the Hindu concept of the four yugas. While The Moonstone offers powerful counter-narratives to the liberal account, the novel nonetheless grants it some validity in a reduced, denationalized form that suggests its broader relevance.