All the Year Round Title Page [text]

The ascetic differences between the two journals can be easily spotted. While the inclusion of illustrations in Harper’s appears to further accommodate a middle-lower class readership and a taste for the sensational, All the Year Round’s exclusion of those elements perhaps forces readers to gather the sensational genre and class struggle from the text alone. 

Another major theme in the novel is the idea of “book as religion.” This is exhibited through one of the many narrators, Gabriel Betteredge, who narrates this section of the periodical. As Lanning states in her essay “Tessellating Texts: Reading The Moonstone in All the Year Round”: “Betteredge immediately establishes a connection with his reading audience by presenting himself as a reader.” (2). Through the text alone, All the Year Round attempts to engage the new, common reader in a similar way Harper’s illustrations attempt to do the same. By naming Betteredge, a working class man, an individual worthy of both readership (of Robinson Crusoe) and narrator-ship, Collins reaches out to the middle-lower classes to say they too are worthy. Both Betteredge and Miss Clack demonstrate the importance of  material, physical books in the Victorian’s life. To both characters, their materials are considered religious, and the act of reading them like worship. In many ways, by relying on text alone (no sensational illustrations or news) in All the Year Round, Dickens send a similar message to those reading the periodical: literature can be as important as religion in raising the spirit. As mentioned by Altick, the enjoyments of lower-class Victorians were far and few between, and so, both Collins and Dickens appear to suggest reading as an appropriate antidote to the mundanity of common life. 

Lanning, Katie. “Tessellating Texts: Reading The Moonstone in All the Year Round.” Victorian Periodicals Review 45.1 (2012): 1-22.

 Alitck, Richard. The English Common Reader : A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1957. Print.