Introduction

Indian Diamonds 175
ever, its addictive nature, colonial origin and degenerative effects led to its association
with opium (Keep and Randall 209). The conflation of the two went even
further as cocaine was classified as “a sub-category of opium” which obscured its
chemical and geographical origins (210). Both Tonga’s poison and Holmes’ cocaine
are actually derivatives of alkaline. 22 In the description of the rebels mad
with opium, Sherlock Holmes’ sobriety when under the influence of the drug is
juxtaposed with their irrationality. He methodically uses it to bridge the ennui
between his intellectual engagements.
The treatment of opium and opiate derivatives in The Moonstone and The Sign of
Four is ambiguous. Yet, the association of opium and the Mutiny provides a much
more threatening image in the later text. Remarkably, although the effect of opium
turns the Indian mutineers into an irrational mob, the English users of the drug
can turn it into a tool for detection and apparently even control it. In The Moonstone,
the unreliability of Herncastle’s story is based on his having been “a notorious
opium-eater for the years past” (Collins, Moonstone 45), while the detection of
the diamond demands “accepting a matter of opium as a matter of fact” (45).
Opium, in the ending of The Moonstone is not the substance to cloud but to lighten.
While Louise Foxcroft and Kathleen McCormack assert that generally in Victorian
fiction the negative and immoral aspects of the drug are emphasised (McCormack
138; Foxcroft 58), The Moonstone reflects the early Victorian stance towards opium
as a medicine. In addition, Collins’ own attitude certainly also led to a more favourable
depiction.
Contrarily, The Sign of Four explicitly aligns opium with the violence of the Mutiny
and assigns it to the periphery of the story and the empire. In The Moonstone,
on the other hand, opium takes centre-stage in the crime and its solution.
Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes represents the fin-de-siècle aesthete for whom
opium alone is “too quotidian a drug” (Foxcroft 57). In the use of cocaine, the
drug does not have the same uncontrollable effect on Holmes as opium has on
the Indians. Unlike The Moonstone, The Sign of Four shows the different effects the
drugs have on the white and contained character of Sherlock Holmes, and the
uncontrolled Indians in Small’s narrative of the Mutiny.
Going Native
One of the fears surrounding empire which found expression in imperial Gothic
was the anxiety about an atavistic backslide into “barbarism” through contact with
the Other (Brantlinger, Rule 229). The idea is based on an earlier turn in imperial
attitudes towards race: From about the middle of the century onwards, supremacy
over subject peoples was not imagined to be grounded in a superior culture and
22 Morphine, Holmes’ alternative to cocaine, is a derivative of opium and subject to the same
process of Orientalisation.