Children's Selfishness [Text]

This is the article that immediately follows The Moonstone in Harper's Weekly, entitled “Children's Selfishness”. Katie Lanning, like Leverenz, recognizes that “Victorian editors were ‘sensitive’ to the connections readers made between texts in an issue, and editors often carefully selected and arranged materials with those possible connections in mind (Lanning 15). Harper’s Weekly exploits the idea that “readers could collapse borders [between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ of a text] as they explored ways to connect various texts into some meaningful pattern” (Lanning 17), and so not only asks the reader to make their own conclusions about the end of the story, but also looks to influence those conclusions, to shape readers’ interpretations of the story. “Children’s Selfishness” is a moralistic prose piece; the author starts with the idea that “a love of property is generally considered so harmless in a child that it is encouraged rather than controlled”, but goes on to advise that children should invest less in materialistic concerns, and learn generosity. This is a “useful lesson” than which “there are few lessons more desirable to be learned in early life”. Harper’s Weekly subtly connects the anonymous, selfish child with Rachel Verinder in The Moonstone, who even as a young woman of eighteen is consistently referred to as a child by the narrators, especially by Betteredge. Rachel initially seems too materialistic, but we as readers learn over the course of the novel that Rachel’s odd behavior after the theft of the moonstone is attributable to love for Franklin Blake, not selfish self-indulgence. Harper’s Weekly strategically uses “Children’s Selfishness” to convince readers that the change in Rachel’s character is one of the most important lessons of the novel, and simultaneously indoctrinates readers into a typically-American conservative reading of The Moonstone.