2011 VanArsdel Prize Essay Tessellating Texts: Reading The Moonstone in All the Year Round

Abstract

This essay explores the tessellated reading experiences associated with Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, a serialized novel published in All the Year Round. A tessellated reading is one that engages with multiple texts at once, connecting and shaping elements of each text into one unified reading experience. Because Victorian serial installments were often published among a variety of contents in a single periodical, readers could tessellate meaning by drawing connections between the various texts of the issue. The primary tessellation this paper studies is the relationship between narrator Gabriel Betteredge’s favorite book, Robinson Crusoe, and advertisements in All the Year Round. Betteredge’s edition of Robinson Crusoe matches the 1866 Macmillan edition advertised in All the Year Round during The Moonstone ’s run. This, and other connections between the novel and its surrounding texts, reveals porous boundaries between contents in the periodical indicative of tessellated reading.