Ezra Jennings is a character, and part-narrator, in
Wilkie Collins
William Wilkie Collins (8 January 1824 – 23 September 1889) was an English novelist and playwright known especially for '' The Woman in White'' (1859), a mystery novel and early "sensation novel", and for '' The Moonstone'' (1868), which has b ...
' 1868 novel ''
The Moonstone
''The Moonstone'' (1868) by Wilkie Collins is a 19th-century British epistolary novel. It is an early example of the modern detective novel, and established many of the ground rules of the modern genre. The story was serialised in Charles Di ...
''.
Ill-favoured, and of ill repute, he is ultimately responsible for solving the mystery of the Moonstone's theft, and so for reuniting the hero with the heroine,
Rachel Verinder.
Origins
Walking with
Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens (; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian er ...
in the
Lake District, Collins sprained his ankle, and was much struck by the appearance of the doctor's assistant treating him: "a startling object to look at, with his colourless face, his sunken cheeks, his wild black eyes, and his long black hair". He used him as the basis for a series of characters, culminating in Ezra Jennings.
Characteristics
Where the whiter-than-white
Godfrey Ablewhite conceals an evil core, the ugly Jennings hides by contrast a heart of gold. A
liminal figure, spanning East and West, male and female - "some men are born with female constitutions - and I am one of them" - Jennings is able to use his creative sensitivity to bring the unconscious theft of the stone back into social consciousness.
As an opium-user, and a cultural figure on the margins of Victorian respectability, Jennings is the figure in the novel who comes closest to the author himself. Jennings is very depressed, believing death will be an escape and that the complete oblivion of memory is the key to happiness; and the opium which used to be successful, along with the disease he has, are fast killing him.
See also
References
External links
Ezra Jennings
{{The Moonstone
Literary characters introduced in 1868
Fictional English people