Last section of The Moonstone!

So overall I really enjoyed The Moonstone.  At first it was just a kind of fun, entertaining mystery/adventure, but after I finished it I started thinking about some of the things Collins did within the story.  All the different narratives give so many different perspectives and reveal things about the mystery, the main characters, the narrator and society in general, but its a very different way of telling a mystery than nowadays, where there's either a third person narrator or the story is told by the detective or an assistant/friend of the detective.

The "trance" plot device seemed kind of hokey when I first read it (up there with Edgar Allan Poe's "the monkey did it" ending to Murders in the Rue Morgue).  But when I was thinking about all the hipocrisy and hidden levels within people in The Moonstone, I read it on a whole different level.  Collins has so many characters who are outwardly one thing, but inwardly something else.  A lot of the story is about how people hide things from society and even from themselves (i.e. Miss Clack pretending her motives are really pure, Godfrey pretending to be a pillar of society, Jennings trying to hide his illness with opium)- and that made Franklin not knowing of his own actions a lot more significant than just a silly gimmick.

I thought the multi-narrators was a great way to tell this story. Does anyone know if it was a "first" or if multi-narrators had been used previously?