Part II - The Impeachment Trial of Andrew Johnson

With the narrative of "The Moonstone" taking strides, one turns the page of Harper's Weekly and is met with a strikingly grand print of the Impeachment Trial of American President Andrew Johnson. The image is busy, filled with a sea of white man's heads and bleached-white papers. Why would the publishers choose to include such a stunning image in the wake of the civil, intimate chapter of "The Moonstone" that was just showcased? I believe that it was an intentional decision revolving around an aim to wake up the reader and remind them of the immense scale of their country's struggle and solidarity, contrasting greatly with the genteel British scene which was freshly painting in the reader's memory. The opulence of the court-room represented differs from the picture that was just analyzed of the Verinders, Miss Clack, and Mr. Ablewhite a few pages earlier. Bearing in mind that American independence was much newer than it is today, coupled with the Civil War being just off the horizon of American sight-lines, these two images would have certainly been distinguished from one another by an American reader. The calm, quiet spaces on the British Isles were far away from and alien to the turbulent American stage, shaking in the shadows of assasinations and wars that were anything but civil. 

The usage of this two-page image to 'wake-up' the reader once again remarks on the nature of the reader as a consumer of a commodity, and Harper's Weekly plays to patriotism as a commodity. The image itself becomes an advertisement for the readership to collectively fight for the individual America. As Hedley argues, similar publications employed "strategies that target[ed] consumers in order to influence their understanding of what constitutes proper social behaviour within a capitalist framework." (143) Part of this framework, for this publication, was distinguishing between fiction and non-fiction, past (America being a British-led entity) and present (America becoming its own), and space (the foreign English sitting room) with place (the roaring populous court-room). 

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. 143