A Brief Discussion on the Representation of Disability in Context of Periodicals across the Transatlantic Moonstone; Ezra Jennings' Fourth Narrative

The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins, is a serialized novel published across several months in 1868 across the Atlantic in the United State's magazine, Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization, and the British literary journal, All The Year Round: A Weekly Journal. The transAtlantic novel demonstrates two very different portrayals of the same story due to the variants of contextual material in each serialization. Harper's Weekly represents the American interpretation, bookending the chapter from The Moonstone with civil war commentary, short stories and advertisements. In contrast to the British literary journal, All The Year Round, which opens with a chapter from The Moonstone and concludes with various classifications of literature.

 The chapter analyzed in this exhibit is the first half of the Fourth Narrative, Ezra Jennings' personal journal, featuring self-reflections and his combat with an unseen disability.  Harper's Weekly provides multiple examples surrounding the topic of disability, death and misery in context with the narrative of Ezra Jennings, who repeatedly discusses the very same topics in the context of his disability and opium addiction. However, All The Year Round fails to acknowledge the topic of disability in the literature that follows the chapter; resistance to the topic speaks volumes for the journal's opinion on disability. Reflecting the two periodicals contextualization of the story allows the reader to develop different opinions in association with the novel.  

Mark Mossman begins outlining the definition of disability in his Article, Representations of the Abnormal Body in The Moonstone, as "The category of disability begins to emerge within these conflicting modernized discourses on the function and significance of the normal and the abnormal body." (485). Following the application of this idea, the depiction of death and disability in Harper's Weekly creates an atmosphere of normalization in context. Whereas All The Year Round lacks a display of disability, treating the disabled as the abnormal, the peripheral members of society, fitting outside the stereotype of "normal". A possible reason why disability is not discussed within the British journal is due to the fact that the editor in chief, Charles Dickens, a friend to Wilkie collins, "Occasionally took steps to censor Collins work" (Prindle, pp 56), due to the fact his audience was upper to middle-class individuals. 

The individual elements in this exhibit acknowledge the normalization of disability in Harper's Weekly, and the frequency it is used between literary elements and advertisements. 

Works Cited: 

Prindle, Joshua. Morality and Medicine: Opium and Addiction in Wilkie Collins's and Armadale and The Moonstone. Iowa State University, Ann Arbor, 2017. PhD Dissertation. 

Mossman, Mark. “REPRESENTATIONS OF THE ABNORMAL BODY IN THE MOONSTONE.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 37, no. 2, 2009, pp. 483–500.

Levy, Eric. “Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone and the Problem of Pain in Life.” Victorian Review, vol. 28, no. 1, 2002, pp. 66–79. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/27793483.

Harper’s Weekly: A Journal of Civilization. July 18th 1868. Pp 430-464

All the year Round: A Weekly Journal. Edited by Charles Dickens. July 25th 1868. Edited by Charles Dickens  

Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone, edited by John Sutherland, Oxford University Press, 2008.