THE MOONSTONE ALL THE YEAR ROUND NO. 472 LIGHTING BY OXYGEN

This article, entitled “Lighting by Oxygen,” follows the nineteenth installment of The Moonstone in All the Year Round. Similarly to “The Devil Outwitted” in Harper’s Weekly, this article appears on the same page as the last words in Miss Clack’s narrative and is therefore placed as a direct comparison. Unlike the story following the U.S. Moonstone, “Lighting by Oxygen” is a non-fiction piece that describes the scientific proceedings concerning the production of light. All the Year Round then seems to diverge from the excitement of sensation fiction to highlight Miss Clack’s religious zeal and irrationality by contrasting it with scientific fact and logic. This is supported by Anderman who comments that non-fiction “complement[s] the emotional intensity of fiction while fiction expands the effect of the factual” (Anderman 52). In not carrying on the themes of the sensation novel, All the Year Round emphasizes Miss Clack’s irrationality rather than her hypocrisy and successfully shifts the focus of this installment in comparison to Harper’s Weekly.

Works Cited

Anderman, Elizabeth. “Serialization, Illustration, and the Art of Sensation.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 52, no.1, 2019, pp. 27-56. Project Muse, doi: https://doi.org/10.1353/vpr.2019.0001. Accessed 01 December 2019.