"Nothing Like Example"
In Dickens’ All The Year Round, the May 30th serialization is followed by an opinion piece titled “Nothing Like Example”. This piece criticizes the “morbidly disposed part of the British public” (583), a public which has taken to depicting deviance and differance in images (woodcuts) within the newspapers. The author of this piece is avidly opposed to this display of difference, and is instead calling for a stoic ignorance of such deviance and difference as opposed to an exhibition of it. This article discusses the public fascination with deviance and difference (in this case crime) on spectacle, but demands that these indulgences be quelled, suppressed, or tamed.
This call for a suppression of public interest in spectacle is oppositional to the inherently exploitative spectacle that is celebrated in the American publication of Harper’s Weekly. This article demands that a reader “instinctively [leave] unread – an account of some miserable creature” (583), which can change how a reader would perceive the preceding serialized section of Collins’ novel, where Lucy Yolland, a “strange creature” (Collins 301), defined by physical difference is depicted. Thus, the placement of this article directly following the serialized installment of Collins’ novel, actually heightens the ability for Collins' narrative to be read with a more sympathetic, and de-emphasized treatment of difference; and combats Leighton and Surridge's claim that Harper's is more sympathetic in it's treatment of differance and disability.
Works Cited
Collins, Wilkie. “Third Narrative” The Moonstone. Ed. John Sutherland. New York: OUP, 2008. 292-307. Print.
Leighton, Mary Elizabeth, -, and Lisa A. -- , - Surridge. “The Transatlantic Moonstone: A Study of the Illustrated Serial in Harper's Weekly.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 42, no. 3, 2009, pp. 207–243