THE MOONSTONE ALL THE YEAR ROUND NO. 472 FRONT PAGE

This image is from the title page of the nineteenth installment of The Moonstone in All the Year Round. The layout emphasizes the publication’s name which appears in the largest font and there are no pictures or other texts on the same page. In comparison to Harper’s Weekly, it is clear that there is more of an interest in textual components rather than visual by the lack of illustration. This may be an indication that Dickens’ journal diverges from the norm as readers of serialized sensation fiction came to expect the interplay of text and image by 1863 (Anderman 28), and that Dickens and was “well aware of the importance of all textual and visual aspects of the magazine working together as a whole to create meaning and generate interest” (Garrison et al. qtd. in Anderman 28). I would suggest then that Dickens does not include illustrations in this publication to separate All the Year Round from the visual attraction commonly associated with sensation fiction. This has the effect of leaving my initial impression of Miss Clack in this installment unchanged. In Harper’s Weekly, the illustration and layout of the first page encourage the notion that Miss Clack’s inner nature is contradictory to her outer values. This image, however, leaves characterization mainly up to the text.

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.