Empire of Diamonds: Victorian Gems in Imperial Settings by Adrienne Munich (review)

In October 2018, three weeks after the gruesome murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi under the direction of Mohammed bin Salman, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex wore a pair of diamond earrings to a state dinner, ones that had been given to her as a wedding gift by the Saudi Crown Prince. The Duchess, biracial and American, was castigated by the British press for her act. It is an episode that Adrienne Munich might have made much of, crystallizing as it does so many traces of what she describes as the "imperial consciousness" attached to the gemstones in question (9).

Adrienne Munich's Empire of Diamonds: Victorian Gems in Imperial Settings tells a tale, alternately sparkling and bloody, of how such gems traversed Victoria's realm, helping to shape its many facets and give form to an Englishness constituted by these fundamentally foreign objects. Vibrantly interdisciplinary, Munich's archive stretches from a Mughalstyle miniature watercolor of a Sikh prince to illustrations in a J. Peterman Catalogue of a reproduction of the "Heart of the Ocean" necklace from the film Titanic (1997), and from Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud to memoirs of mining the South African diamond fields. Along the way, she offers a wide survey of Victorian diamond literature, primarily focused on novels but also considering poems such as Alfred Tennyson's Idylls of the King (1859–85) and stories such as Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Blue Carbuncle" (1892). As Munich shows, it is a rich vein to explore, in which named stones both historical and imaginary assert their presence as forcefully as fictional characters—or as their respective owners and authors.

When faced with so many brilliant diamonds, how best string them together? How construct a setting that lets them shine? Munich's great stroke here was to realize that the shifting geographical associations of the gemstone across the century could help her tell her tale. Beginning in part I with India, the source of many older diamonds, she traces the history of British engagements with the stones as they travel from the East, considering especially how and whether these gems (and their owners) can be "converted" by changing their settings (29): the Koh-i-noor or "Mountain of Light," as it underwent various recuttings and resettings; Duleep Singh, whose family had owned this most famous diamond; and Rudyard Kipling's Kim O'Hara, whom Munich reads as reflecting India's facets. She also explores the various ways Indian stones like Wilkie Collins's Moonstone resist imperial shaping by proving their ability to "strike back at the Empire" (69).

Part II moves away from the sacred powers of Indian gems into the heart of the British metropole, to questions of national, racial, and familial hierarchies. Munich describes how the diamonds of Tennyson's Idylls and Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit (1855–57) serve as "talismanic signs of masculinity" (113) or fetishized "trophies," like the women who wear them—proof of status in a culture of new mobility, icons of authenticity and (racial) purity that are nevertheless dangerously transferable and subject to imitation and taint (14). The pleasures of Munich's readings of the more familiar texts lie less in their novelty than in their careful arrangement within her own narrative setting. John Plotz has also shown, for example, how diamonds crystalize the distinction between affective and commercial value, and others have considered links between imperialist crimes and literary gems. But one shining strand in this section (and the next) follows the long association between Jews and this particular jewel. Here, Walter Scott's Ivanhoe (1819) serves as Jamesian germ and original gem, and Munich argues convincingly for the legacy bequeathed by Rebecca of York on British literature, from Anthony Trollope's novels to Daniel Deronda's (1876) Jewish plot and beyond.

Beyond takes us to South Africa, which became in the 1870s the locus of a mad "scramble" after the stones, as unprecedented quantities of diamonds...