Harper's Weekly Full Page Text

Leighton and Surridge point out that the illustrations of the Harper’s installments “[heighten] the text’s sensationalism” (207), but the form itself also lends itself in the dramatization of the text. Whereas All the Year Round takes on a book or magazine form, Harper’s Weekly uses a newspaper format to further sensationalize its content. The front page of The Moonstone is organized like the front page of a newspaper, centred entirely on its illustration and the following pages are organized into four panels of text per page, read lengthwise in columns, also like a newspaper. This form may have contributed to a heightened sense of pleasure in the story, as the form sets the reader up for an entirely different reading experience than would be found in All the Year Round. Using this newspaper layout, Harper’s is drawing on ingrained connotations of the everyday habit of reading the news to enter into the reading experience, using a structural framework to guide the reader. If readers are accustomed to finding intrigue, shock, and scandal in a newspaper, this textual form for a mystery novel has now primed its audience to notice and savor all of those things.