Front Page of All the Year Round No.463

When looking at the title page of All the Year Round No.463 it is clear that it is marketed to a well-read upper-class readership. At the top of each issue is a quote from William Shakespeare’s Othello which reinforces the idea of a high-brow audience as it positions itself alongside a famous English author. From the front page alone it is clear that Englishness and the ideology surrounding what it means to be English; well-read.

            The lack of outside advertisement in the beginning and the fact that it jumps immediately into that week’s instalment of The Moonstone. Readers are therefore left to their own imagination and interpretation because the other short stories and poems in this edition of All the Year Round are not present until after. As this edition was published in the United Kingdom the idea of British domination and ideology would already be present in society and they would not need to be influenced to see it. Leighton and Surridge say that “The Moonstone, of course, scrutinizes not only ‘whodunit’ but which power structures and ideological assumptions underlie acts of investigation” (224). While readers are asked to question British domination and ideology throughout The Moonstone, All the Year Round is clearly marketed to a more upper-class audience who is expected to have read major works from the English canon at the time such as Othello and already subscribe to the British ideology. Despite Charles Dickens's criticism of the English class structure throughout his works, All the Year Round is meant to be read by the more privileged of society who understand the British way of life.

Works Cited

Leighton, Mary Elizabeth and Lisa Surridge. “The Transatlantic Moonstone: A Study of the

Illustrated Serial in Harper’s Weekly.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 42, no.3, 2009,

pp.207-243.