Kornelia's Exhibit

Wilkie Collins’ intriguing novel The Moonstone was incrementally released to the masses in the U.S. and U.K., through a process called serialization. Every week, a new chapter of the novel would be released within the different countries, like the new episode of a television show. The April 11th publications in both of these texts harbor stark visual differences, namely the inclusion and exclusion of illustrations and advertisements which either aid in expanding upon the text, or distracting from the text. In Harper’s Weekly, the American publication, the words on the page are broken up by a patchwork of various images. In the U.K.’s All the Year Round, the pages are nearly naked, and the text itself is mostly uninterrupted by ads and illustrations. The reason for this is because The Moonstone itself was enough of an advertisement of British culture and idealism– there was no need to distract from getting lost in the pages of the chapter. 

I will be exploring how the front pages of these two texts differ, and how they engage with space, hospitality towards the reader, and making an impression aimed at the consumer. I will also remark on how Harper’s Weekly breaks up the text with an enormous two-page engraving of Andrew Johnson’s impeachment trial, and how this blatant reminder of the dizzying grandeur and awe-inspiring scale of American society sits within the text. Finally, I will turn my focus towards the patchwork-quilt of advertisements at the end of the April 11th edition of Harper’s Weekly and engage with them as a metaphor for a spacial society as a whole. This is an exploration of space, hospitality, and spatial narrative within the confines of the cut-up serialized novel.

Works Cited

All the Year Round: A Weekly Journal. Edited by Charles Dickens, vol. 19, Chapman & Hall, 11 April 1868, London, p. 468.

Anderman, Elizabeth. “Serialization, Illustration, and the Art of Sensation.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 52, no. 1, 2019, pp. 27–56.

Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization. Harper & Brothers, 11 April 1868, New York, pp. 229-240.

Hedley, Alison. “Advertisements, Hyper-Reading, and Fin De Siècle Consumer Culture in the Illustrated London News and the Graphic.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 51, no. 1, 2018, pp. 138–167.