Transatlantic Moonstone Project: XXI

Wilkie Collins's novel The Moonstone was published in 1868 in serializations in both the United Kingdom's All the Year Round and the United States's Harper's Weekly concurrently alongside one another. Though both published the bestseller detective novel, each respectively had their differing contexts in terms of publication. This is due to the differences in their formatting of publication, as Harper’s Weekly was a magazine publication with illustrations, advertisements, gossips, and entertaining stories whereas All the Year Round was a literary journal. These differences in context of publication and of what is being published along with The Moonstone serializations indicate that they were aimed at different audiences, as they affect how the serials are read differently due to the influence of certain views found within other material around The Moonstone regarding issues encountered across the transatlantic. 

Andrew Radford argues in his essay “Victorian Detective Fiction”, where he compares several examples of Victorian detective fiction novels alongside Collins’s The Moonstone, that “British society attempted to consolidate its authority at home and abroad at the end of the eighteenth century under the stresses of war, colonial expansion and aggressive urbanisation” (1188). Due to this colonialist British attempt to secure their authority beyond England, the “representations of British authority established an essential criminality in the Indian character in order to justify the consolidation of British notions of law and order” (Radford 1188). That is, in order for British authority to succeed depended on the depiction and belief of an inherent criminality within the foreign Other to justify their colonialist fascination, yet fear and oppression, of the Other. 

This racism through the criminalization of the Other “in the Indian character” being made “in order to justify the consolidation of British notions of law and order” (Radford 1188) will be explored in Harper’s Weekly as it endorses this contempt, yet fascination, of the foreign Other alongside its publication of the serial part XXI of The Moonstone and the representation of the criminal Indian character in the novel. However, this contemptuous perception is not upheld in the serial publication in All the Year Round, and rather has a greater focus upon the English’s fascination of the foreign Other and their cultural etiquettes that would yield a different reading of The Moonstone and its approach to the foreign Other.

Works Cited

All the Year Round. 23 May 1868. 560-561. Print.

Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization. 23 May 1868. 331-335. Print.

Radford, Andrew. “Victorian Detective Fiction.” Literature Compass, vol. 5, no. 6, 2008, pp. 1179–1196.