All the Year Round, The Moonstone Title Page, 1 August 1868. [text]

                The All the Year Round title page for Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone serves as the main point of comparison and contrast to Harper’s Weekly. This journal is concerned entirely with its own reputation, harnessing not only the fame of Dickens’ to propel it into further success and increased readership, but also exploiting an unrelated Shakespeare quote to elevate All the Year Round above any other journal.

                Catherine Waters, in her book mainly discussing Dickens’ other weekly journal Household Words (which took its name from a Shakespearean quote), asserts that       “the material form is certainly not attractive [...] boldface capitals linking the title to the concluding announcement that the 'weekly journal' is 'CONDUCTED BY CHARLES DICKEN.'S [...] a form of branding that capitalized on Dickens's reputation and resembles the rhetoric of authenticity established through stamps and seals used to verify patent-protected products in advertisement" (21).

While Waters is not specifically discussing this page in her comment, the argument holds its validity. The journal’s title as well as Dickens’ name are capitalized and much larger than that of The Moonstone. Furthermore, Collins’ name is not even mentioned, only identifying him as “the author of “The Woman in White,” &c &c”, perfectly illustrating the unimportance of the individual author and his or her story in Dickens’ journal. 

Waters, Catherine. Commodity Culture in Dickens's Household Words: The Social Life of Goods. Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Co. 2008. Print.