The Moonstone: Instalment VII

Wilkie Collins’ sensational novel The Moonstone was simultaneously serialized in All the Year Round in the United Kingdom and in the United States of America through Harper’s Weekly. The two publications presented the text in different ways as they followed their own formatting. Charles Dickens’ periodical All the Year Round followed a simplistic layout which directed attention to the text, whereas Harper’s Weekly placed the literature in the midst of a myriad of current events, advertisements, and other media.

Elizabeth Anderman discusses the way in which the original publishing of The Moonstone in Harper’s Weekly sensationalized the novel in part due to what she calls the participatory process that came with its serialized form (28). She expands on this by talking about how the periodical allowed for meaningful readings of serial instalments due to the influx of media surrounding them. Anderman highlights the importance of illustrations in readings of texts and also how they can provide more insight as they “connect to political articles, biographical profiles, and the images accompanying other fiction serials” (27). She claims that the illustrations, as well as the surrounding media prompt lateral readings of a text, which allow for an enriched understanding of it because “Depending on how the reader looks at the journal, different narrative meanings will be revealed” (Anderman 52).

Though I agree with Anderman’s points about how the layout of Harper’s Weekly allowed readers to gain a meaningful understanding of texts, I think that she fails to discuss other possible effects of it. She also underplays how a differently constructed publication like All the Year Round can prompt meaningful readings in its own way. My exhibit will demonstrate the ways in which Victorian readers of Harper’s Weekly in America may have been distracted by the surrounding images and texts around The Moonstone, as they led them to ponder upon other things or directed their reading of the text. I will also discuss how the simplistic layout of All the Year Round allowed readers of the United Kingdom to achieve a meaningful reading of The Moonstone.

Works Cited

All the Year Round: A Weekly Journal 15 Feb. 1868. 217-240. Print. 

Anderman, Elizabeth. “Serialization, Illustration, and the Art of Sensation.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 52, no. 1, 2019, pp. 27-56. ProjectMUSE, doi:10.1353/vpr.2019.0001. Accessed 3 December 2019.

Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone. Edited by John Sutherland. Oxford University Press, 2008.

Harper’s Weekly: A Journal of Civilization 15 Feb. 1868. 97-112. Print.