Part I - Harper's Weekly's Moonstone

Harper's Weekly's front page on April 11th was formatted with the text framing an image of Miss Clack, Rachel Verinder, Lady Verinder, and Godfrey Ablewhite. This placement is symmetrical, but the eye is not immediately drawn to the text which provides a backstory to the image. What "steals the show" is an artist's portrayal of a blip in the narrative, because it is heavily contrasted with the monotonous text surrounding it– vibrant with chiaroscuro (a play beyween light and dark in an image). Contrasting with All the Year Round's bare front page of The Moonstone, I argue that Harper's Weekly is using this illustration to serve two functions: to advertise for the text, and providing eye-catching treats for those who skim through the pages without a care to read monotonous words. From the first page, Harper's displays a partiality for catering to the reader not as a solemn gentleperson whose dreariness matches the blandness of a page covered in dizzying words, but as a host who values space that plays more than one part.

In her article which contains hyper-readings of Victorian illustrated weekly's, Alison Hedley states "...[a] typical advertising page in an illustrated weekly evolved from a block of dense, minimally illustrated letterpress columns to a visual bazaar of images and slogans." (Hedley, 138) This visual bazaar is very apparent in Harper's Weekly, as will become more evident in parts two and three of this exhibit. It is an assault on the senses which very much coincides with a heightening of pace within consumer culture: "We want things now." The inclusion of such a large image on the front page of this weekly edition speaks volumes about what was important to the publishers of Harper's Weekly, and it is not necessarily the text. What is important is that everyone who opens the magazine is captivated by something which causes them to plunge themselves deeper into the publication, especially bearing in mind that The Moonstone was one of many textual 'features' within the bazaar of the magazine itself. The inclusion of an image taking up around fifty percent of the page, resting in the centre, is a nod towards a shift in consumer culture in America. It is a decision that was made reflecting on the spacial narrative of the publication, not just The Moonstone itself.

Works Cited

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, p. 138