The Moon and Sixpence was published by Heinemann in London in 1919. It established Maugham — already successful as a playwright — as a major novelist, and introduced his characteristic method: the first-person narrator who is worldly, observant, slightly cynical, and always positioned at one remove from the extraordinary people he describes.
Charles Strickland is a middle-aged London stockbroker — comfortable, dull, married — who one day announces that he is leaving his family to become a painter. He offers no explanation, shows no remorse, and refuses to acknowledge that his wife and children have any claim on him. He moves to Paris, lives in squalor, paints obsessively, treats everyone who helps him with contempt or indifference, and eventually travels to Tahiti, where he produces the masterpieces that will, after his death from leprosy, make him famous.
The novel’s model is Gauguin — but Maugham makes Strickland harsher than Gauguin actually was, pushing the question of art versus morality to its extreme. Strickland is not merely selfish but actively cruel: he destroys a man who helps him (Dirk Stroeve, a mediocre painter whose wife Strickland seduces, uses as a model, and abandons, driving her to suicide). The narrator cannot forgive this. He also cannot deny that Strickland’s paintings are great — that the vision they embody justifies nothing but is genuine.
The title (from a review of Of Human Bondage that described Philip Carey as a man who, “like so many young men… was so busy yearning for the moon that he never saw the sixpence at his feet”) establishes the novel’s central opposition: the moon (art, vision, transcendence) versus the sixpence (domestic happiness, moral decency, ordinary life). Maugham’s genius is to refuse to choose: both the moon and the sixpence are real, and no human being can have both.
Collecting The Moon and Sixpence
First edition (Heinemann, London, 1919): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
First US edition (George H. Doran, New York, 1919): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- Heinemann first UK edition in dust jacket: $500–$1,500
- Doran first US edition in dust jacket: $200–$600
- Without jacket: $30–$60
- Signed first edition: $1,000–$3,000
One of the defining novels about the artist’s vocation and Maugham’s most famous work after Of Human Bondage. Fine copies in intact jackets command high prices.