Part XXI - Moonstone Titles

Many other details in the May 23 1868 editions of Harper’s Weekly and All the Year Round reveal the pretensions to literariness and courting of a highbrow audience. The title page of Year Round includes this quotation from Shakespeare: “The Story of Our Lives from Year to Year” (All the Year Round). Victorian authors frequently quoted Shakespeare, and their literature was often inspired by his works. This signifies the journal’s entry into literary discourse. Unlike Harper’s, Year Round includes all the narrative background information before the text, making The Moonstone into a serious and scholarly entry, that one traces as if studying history. 

Both publications associate themselves with Collins’ earlier work, The Woman in White. This is another way of associating The Moonstone with literature, and specifically mystery literature rather than sensation fiction. The Woman in White is often read as one of the first mystery novels, or another proto-detective novel. These texts flatter educated audiences by “suggesting that the real mysteries of life can yield to human reason and that ordinary mortals can provide answers and achieve justice” (Trecker emphasis added). The novels appeal to reason and intellect, readers focussed on the rational mind rather than sensation only. 

Although the illustrations in Harper’s are often read as “heightening the text's sensationalism” (Leighton & Surridge 207), transatlantic moonstone scholars Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge complicate this understanding in their article “The Transatlantic Moonstone: A Study of the Illustrated Serial in Harper’s Weekly”. Leighton and Surridge suggest that “the illustrated version of The Moonstone that Harper's readers encountered in 1868 added an intricate visual layer to this already complex narrative structure” (Leighton & Surridge 210). Rather than sensationalizing, the illustrations are playing a key role in the complexity of the narrative, in their view.

In analysing the effect of the Harper's illustrations, we proceed on the premise that Victorian serial illustrations do not merely reflect or supplement the verbal text but constitute plot elements per se, thus profoundly affecting the narrative's unfolding and meanings. (Leighton & Surridge 210)

In their article Leighton and Surridge continue to explore “the interplay of visual and verbal text” (Leighton & Surridge 210) considering "verbal and visual units . . . [as] equal partners in the discourse” (Sillar qtd by Leighton & Surridge 210). Conservative scholarship often equates canonical literature’s literary value with its difficulty and complexity. Following Leighton and Surridge’s argument would suggest that the illustrations are an important part of making the U.S. version more intellectually challenging for the reader, rather than less. This understanding makes Harper’s, the self-titled Journal of Civilization, just as highbrow as All the Year Round in its own way.The two journals use similar and different methods in their effort to codify themselves as intellectual publications for the discerning reader.