The Transatlantic Moonstone: A Study of the Illustrated Serial in Harper's Weekly

This article examines Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), a novel that has attracted varied ideological critique yet whose different transatlantic forms remain understudied. In an international market ungoverned by copyright law, Collins sold his story on both sides of the Atlantic, but the serial of The Moonstone that reached American readers differed markedly from the British text. Whereas the British All the Year Round serial was unillustrated, Harper’s Weekly advertised the American serial as “richly illustrated.” Harper’s illustrations formed an intrinsic part of the American Moonstone, heightening the text’s sensationalism, complicating its intricate narrative structure, and shifting its treatment of gender, disability, class, and race.