高三英语049.doc

东北师范大学附属中学网校（版权所有 不得复制）
期数： 0512 YYG3 049
学科：英语 年级：高三 编稿老师：徐 卓
审稿老师：孔 军
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预 习 篇
[同步教学信息]

Unit 13 The mystery of the Moonstone

I. Background Information
English novelist, whose unconventional private life and determination to tackle social issues disconcerted his audience. Many of Wilkie Collins' novels contain sympathetic portraits of physically abnormal individuals. Critics often credit Collins with the invention of the English detective novel. While he was aware of the work of Poe and Gaboriau, he worked in the mainstream of Victorian domestic and social fiction. Sergeant Cuff from Collins' novel THE MOONSTONE (1868) became a prototype of the detective hero in English fiction. Dorothy L. Sayers has called it "probably the very finest detective story ever written."
--"Good night, Mr. Betteredge," he said. "And mind, if you ever take to growing roses, the white moss rose is all the better for not being budded on the dog rose, whatever the gardener may say to the contrary!"
--"What are you doing here?" I asked. "Why are you not in your proper bed?"
--"I am not in my proper bed," answered the Sergeant, "because I am one of the many people in this miserable world who can't earn their money honestly and easily at the same time."
(from The Moonstone)
Wilkie Collins was born in London. His father was William Collins, a well-known landscape painter and a full member of the Royal Academy. Harriet (Geddes) Collins, his mother, was the daughter of a painter. They were a devoted couple, and young Wilkie grew with his brother in a secure household. However, Collins never outgrew his childhood sickliness, he was small and had a slightly deformed skull. Collins was educated privately, he studied painting for several years. At the age of eleven he began attending school, but at the end of the year the family moved to Italy, where William Collins studied the old masters. After nearly two years abroad, the family returned to England. With the help of his father, Collins found work in the office of a tea importer (1841-46). During this period he started to write fiction. Collins' first story. 'The Last Stagecoachman' was published in 1843. He studied then law without much enthusiasm at Lincoln's Inn and worked industriously on his first novel, ANTONINA; OR, THE FALL OF ROME (1850), a historical story in the manner of Bulwer Lytton. At the age of 27 Collins became a lawyer. He never practiced law but put his legal knowledge to work in crime writing. His father died in 1847 and Collins set aside other literary aspirations to write his father's biography. It appeared in 1848.
In 1851 Collins started his long friendship with Charles Dickens, while they were pursuing a mutual interest in amateur theatricals. Inspired by the success of Dickens's Christmas books, Collins produced MR WRAY'S CASH-BOX in 1852. He joined in 1856 the staff of Dickens's Household Worlds, and collaborated with him on pieces for the magazine. Dickens helped Collins bring humour and believable characters into his books. In 1858 Collins met Caroline Graves, a widow, who was his life companion until his death. Collins saw her first at a mysterious midnight encounter of which he made use in THE WOMAN IN WHITE (1860). He also had relationship with Mrs Martha Rudd, whose three children Collins acknowledged as his own. By 1868 she lived in London as Collins' mistress, Caroline Graves lived with him as a "housekeeper." In 1868 Caroline married Joseph Clow, but returned to Collins within two years. In The Woman in White Collins had two opposite woman characters, one dark and one light, like in Ivanhoe and The Last of the Mohicans.
BASIL (1852) was Collins' first novel based on crime, mystery, and suspense. The enormously popular suspense thriller Woman in White appeared first in Dickens's periodical All the Year Round in 1859-60. Using a multivocal narrative, Collins imitated the presentation of testimony from a number of witnesses in a court case. The book tells the story of the evil Sir Percival Glyde's plot to steal his wife's inheritance with the help of a sinister Italian, Count Fosco. Walter Hartright goes to Limmeridge House in Cumberland as drawing master to Laura Fairlie and her half-sister Marian Halcombe. He sees Anne Catherick on the night she left an asylum to which she had been committed by Sir Percival. Anne knows a secret about his past - his illegitimacy. Sir Percival burns the parish registry and is killed in the resulting fire. Laura has been committed to an asylum as Anne, but Walter restores Laura to her true identity.
In the 1860s Collins published NO NAME (1862), in which a young woman learns that she and her sister are illegitimate and penniless after the death of their father, but starts her countermove to regain her inheritance. ARMADALE (1866) was a story of fate, criminal fraud, and an attempted murder. Its anti-heroine Lydia Gwilt has been called "the first femme fatale in the modern sense." In Moonstone, the first English detective novel, Collins created Sergeant Cuff, whose numerous traits would turn up in detective fiction for generations to come. '"I haven't much time to be fond of anything," says Sergeant Cuff." "But when I have a moment's fondness to bestow, most times... the roses get it."' (from The Moonstone, 1868) In Moonstone Cuff interviews people at a country house to discover who stole a huge diamond that has a violent history. The plot includes also somnambulism and experiments with opium, Oriental magic, and three mysterious Hindus. The story unfolds through the words of its various characters. By making the criminal a member of the same class as the victim, Collins challenged the idea, that criminal behavior of the lower classes threatened the peace of the middle class. The crime is committed by one of the investigators unknowingly under the influence of opium.
In the short story 'The Terribly Strange Bed' the narrator is nearly killed because of his own activities. The story opens in Paris. The narrator, shortly after finishing his college education, seeks excitement in one of the gambling houses but finds it too fashionable and enters an obscure gambling-room. He has incredible luck, he wins all the time, and drinks much champagne. Then he meets an old soldier, who advises him to sleep comfortably in the house, it is too late to go home. In his room upstairs he rests in a four-post bed, and remembers a picnic party in a Welsh valley, and a young lady who quoted 'Childe Harold'. "Of all the wonderful faculties that help to tell us we are immortal, which speaks the sublime truth more eloquently than memory?" In the middle of his recollections he sees that that the bed top is silently coming down. The canopy is a thick mattress and the whole bed a machine for secret murder by suffocation. He escapes, goes to the police, and in the end the villains are arrested. Collins fills the story with forebodings - the reader knows that the narrator's luck is not natural, that he should not trust the old soldier, and there is something wrong with the room.
During the 1860s Collins started to suffer severely from the rheumatic pains, and became addicted to laudanum, a form of opium, that was used perhaps more heavily by Thomas De Quincey or Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In 1873 Collins made a tour in the United States, where among others he met Mark Twain and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The death of Dickens in 1870 robbed Collins of a powerful mentor, and his popularity declined. Although suffering from spells of severe illness, Collins continued to write in his final years. In THE NEW MAGDALEN (1873) Collins attacked the attitudes to fallen women. THE EVIL GENIUS (1886) dealt with adultery and divorce. Collins died from a stroke on 23 September 1889. Never yielding to Victorian conventions, Collins had insisted upon a simple funeral in his will. His last novel, BLIND WILL, appeared posthumously in 1890 and was finished by Walter Besant.

II. Language Points in Warming-up, Listening and Speaking Sections
1. comfort 安慰（某人）
comfort a dying man
安慰垂死的人
The child ran to his mother to be comforted.
那个孩子跑到母亲身边以求得到安慰。
comfortable 适合的，令人安逸的，舒适的
a comfortable bed 舒适的床
The patient was comfortable after his operation. 病人手术后非常安逸。

2. curse
（1）诅咒
The witchdoctor cursed him, his son and his grandson.
巫师诅咒他、他儿子和他孙子。
She cursed him for ruining her life.
她诅咒他破坏了她的生活。
(2)be cursed with
因……向遭殃，因……而受苦
She was cursed with stammer all her life.
她一生受日吃之苦。

3. considerable
体贴的，关心的，替他人着想的，考虑周全的
Your children are always considerable towards old people.
你的孩子总是非常体贴老人。
It was very considerable of you to let us know you were going to be late.
你事先告诉我们你会来得晚些，真是考虑周全。

III. Exercises
A. 用动词的适当形式填空
1.____(use) your head, and you will have an idea.
2.He is an old man who is stubborn in ____(accept) new thought.
3.The murderer was brought in with his hands _____(tie) back.
4. We have missed the bus. I'm afraid that we have no choice but to ____(take) a taxi.
5.He wanted to do what he could ____(help) those are in trouble.
6. He is said ____(write) two books about his child in the past two years.
7.This is one of the problems ____ (discuss) a meeting next week.
8.The students are busy ____(prepare) for the final exanimation.
9.We must do everything we can to keep the river ____(pollute).
10. To improve our English, we must practice ____(read) every morning.
Keys:
1. Use 2. accepting 3. tired 4. take 5. to help 6. to have written 7. to be discussed 8. preparing 9. being polluted 10. reading

B. 句型转换
1. A. With the help of the classmates, he made great progress.
B. ____ ____ the classmates, he made great progress.
2. A. Mother is busy doing housework every day.
B. Mother is busy _____ housework every day.
3. A. He didn’t know what kind of place it was until he came to Macao.
B. It was ____ ____ he came to Macao ____ he knew what kind of place it was.
4. A. No matter who would like to devote his whole life to his own country, he should go where there are kinds of difficulties.
B. ____ would like to devote his whole life to his own country, he should go where there are kinds of difficulties.
5. A. He can’t do it well because he lacks courage to do it.
B. He can’t do it well because of ____ ____ courage to do it.
Keys:
1. Helped by 2. with 3. not until, that 4. Whoever 5. lack of

C. 单句改错
1. It was 10 o’clock that he received the letter from his girl friend.
2. The door is closed. There is nothing to do but to wait for Mother.
3. This is the best gift for her in her birthday party.
4. Suddenly there was a terrible voice from a girl later at night.
5. The former president said the relation between these two countries needed improve.
6. These flowers they planted last week died for lack water.
7. You’d better wear a pair of sunglasses in order to protect you in sunlight.
8. The theory they had stuck to for many years proved wrongly.
9. Look what you have done. You would have been more careful.

Keys:
1. that 改为when 或10 o’clock 前加at 2. 去掉第二个to 3. for 改为to
4. later 改为late 5. improve 改为improving 6. lack 改为lacking 或lack 后加of 7. in 改为from 8. wrongly 改为wrong 9 . would 改为should