Part IV - All The Year Round's Moonstone

The striking thing about the April 11th front page of All the Year Round is its slogan: "With which is incorporated household words." (Dickens, 468) Household words means privacy, familiarity, history, and a shared language and way of being that is understood by many. This publication differs greatly from Harper's Weekly because it is much more bare, and much more reflective of the earlier dense letterblock style which Hedley referred to at the beginning of her article. Interestingly, contrary to the image of the Moonstone characters being framed by text in Harper's, the text itself is framed by a border here. 

The “household words” are familiar to, and accepted by the British people reading them. The material is by Brits, for Brits, which makes its pages an unglamorized display of hospitality. Advertisements, which inform people of their lacks and suppressed desires, are not needed, because what it means to be British is already established in the foundations of this weekly journal. Harper’s Weekly, however, needs to remind Americans who they are amidst being invited into a space of British life and culture. The pages need to be bedazzled and stamped with seals that act as reference-points for the readership. The novel itself is more of a space to put identifiable things (like images and advertisements) inside, and less of a place (something tangible, familiar, and close). The opposite is true for All the Year Round, which stands alone and unadorned with a dainty border surrounding it, like a frame encapsulating a painting. “The Moonstone” is a British story, which stood naked and undecorated for British people who needed no incentive to “buy-in” to the culture, because they were already a part of it. Where Harper’s Weekly uses “The Moonstone” as a space to hang posters on, "emphasiz[ing] the foreignness of the novel, (Anderman, 41) All the Year Round recognizes the importance of the British text as an ambassador for British betterment as a whole, and uses space as a wide open invitation to invite the reader in to experience it fully.

Works Cited

Anderman, Elizabeth. “Serialization, Illustration, and the Art of Sensation.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 52, no. 1, 2019, p. 41

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