ABSTRACT
By the 1860s, at the zenith of Victorian prosperity, the discourses of servitude found new meaning as an appropriate metaphor for the lower-class citizen’s functions in maintaining civic, national, and imperial order. The Moonstone features no less than three dubiously humble and obedient servants: a steward, his daughter, and a maidservant, demonstrating Collins’s profound awareness of the ironies that enshrouded domestic culture’s preoccupations with an increasingly enlarged public sphere, where the swelling ranks of subalterns, consisting of Britain’s working classes, ethnic minorities like the Irish, and her colonized subjects, were envisioned as servants of a now de facto British empire. In this context, the stately country house acquired a new signifi cance, since its large servant retinues could transform a home into a microcosmic version of society, with disorder below stairs suggestive of social and political anarchy.
