Author Archives: ladys-magazine

The Lady’s Magazine, boarding schools and other problems

One of the great pleasures involved in working on the Lady’s Magazine is talking to people about it. I love surprising people with its diverse contents and am yet to find a subject (from the reception of Dryden to recipes for the cure of various skin disorders) about which it does not say something interesting across the course of its long run. (Keep testing me, people!)

Frontispiece to LM IV (1773).

Frontispiece to LM IV (1773). Image © Adam Matthew Digital / Birmingham Central Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

But while it is very easy to say what is in the Lady’s Magazine, characterising what it is really about is much harder. In part, this is because every time you think you have hit upon the thing that holds the periodical together (fashion, class, morals or women’s issues – whatever they might be) you read something that throws you completely. This is, in part, because the multi-authored, multi-vocal format means that the only consistent thing about the magazine is its inconsistency. Even when a contribution is not in active dialogue with another it buffets up against the articles it appears alongside, creating a range of possible meanings only some of which could have been in the control of the magazine’s editors.

I plan to say more about the production of meaning and ways of reading the magazine in future posts. Here, though, I just want to focus briefly on one of the many consistent inconsistencies of the magazine: its attitude to boarding schools. It’s a subject I have become increasingly fascinated by, not least because it speaks to one of the key things that I now am coming to think holds the magazine together: the question of women’s education.

Koenraad has already noted on the blog that a small but significant number of Lady’s Magazine contributors (particularly of enigmas, rebuses and translations in response to the monthly translation competitions that ran in the magazine’s early years) were boys and girls. We know this because their age sometimes appears alongside their contributions or because they are accompanied by the name of the school they attended.

LM, IV (May1773): 23.

LM, IV (May 1773): 23. Image © Adam Matthew Digital / Birmingham Central Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Pupils wore the name of their school alongside their signatures like a badge of honour. Meanwhile, the ubiquity with which the names of establishments such as Mrs Pasham’s boarding school, Northampton, Pimlico boarding school, or Brown and Reynolds’s school in Stepney, appear seems to suggest that headmasters and governesses saw their pupils sending in contributions to the magazine as an effective (and cheap) form of advertising.

It was a game that the magazine was not only willing to play but of which its editors recognised the necessity. As they acknowledged on many occasions, boarding schools were a potentially large market for their periodical, and being put on school library shelves was important for the magazine’s continued success. This was not just a matter of securing subscriptions, as the editors made clear in the ‘To our Correspondents’ column in the September 1775 issue. After boasting of the ‘infinite pleasure’ they had in acknowledging ‘the receipt of hints from the most celebrated boarding schools in six counties, during the course of th[e] month’, the editors went on to ricochet flattery back and forth between its boarding school patrons and itself. If ‘the governesses of these seminaries are the best judges of what will contribute to the amusement, polishing, and refinement of their pupils’ then their approval of the magazine could not better convince the magazine’s editors of ‘our own importance, at the same time as we shall receive an incontrovertible proof of their sincere attachment to the good of the younger part of the sex, who have the benefit of their instructions’ (LM VI [Sept. 1776]: n. p.).

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LM II (Sept 1771). Image owned by the author.

But the esteem was not always mutual. In September 1785, for instance, a correspondent who went by Modestia wrote to the magazine’s agony aunt, Martha Gray (aka The Matron), to complain about the periodical’s publication of one of its resident physician, Dr Turnbull’s, columns on male midwifery. The issue at stake was not exactly the content of the column, but its availability to young readers ‘of both sexes’. If the magazine were ‘only to be locked up in our closets with our family medicines the discussion of such subjects might be allowable’, Modestia admitted. Given, however, that it was ‘extensively perused by young ladies at their boarding schools’, it could be ‘productive of awkward situations’. The ’embarrass[ment]’ of ‘the governess’ when posed with difficult questions arising from such content is offered up as the principal source of Modestia’s unease, but she closes, somewhat elliptically, by noting that young boarding school misses are at precisely ‘that time of life when novelty strikes us in the most forcible manner, and puts our ideas into motion’. The Matron politely brushed aside Modestia’s complaint (and completely ignores her implicit suggestion that such material might make young girls sexually inquisitive or even sexually active) by noting that precisely the same impressionability her correspondent fears ensures that young girls ‘may be easily diverted from such subjects, which they cannot understand, and turned to others more suitable to their age, and more adapted to their comprehension’ (XVI: 472).  If the compliments of boarding school mistresses were gladly accepted and publicised, their complaints were hardly taken seriously.

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LM, I (1770). Image © Adam Matthew Digital / Birmingham Central Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

For its part, however, the magazine would regularly caution against fashionable boarding school education and the vices of socially ambitious governesses. One such example will already be familiar to readers of this blog. In December Jenny wrote about the anonymous serial fiction, ‘The History of an Humble Friend’, which ran from September 1774 to the Supplement (or thirteenth issue) of 1776. The titular heroine, Harriot West, is sent to a boarding school at the age of five, and although her governess is kind and good (unlike many others who appear in the magazine’s pages), Harriot’s fellow pupils are no advertisement for boarding school education. Sent to such establishments by mothers who are unfit for the name so that ‘they may not provoke their jealousy at home’, these girls are given an opportunity to ‘acquire more knowledge than they would have done at home’. However, this is an opportunity that is squandered owing to the girls’ interaction with other young girls whose fashionable vices they invariably contract and in the face of which governesses are powerless: ‘At home, they [these pupils] have, perhaps, only their own failings to subdue, at school, they are, by associating with young folks of different follies, too apt, from the force of imitation, to copy the very imperfections against which they they ought to be the most strongly guarded’. Knowing how reliant the magazine was on the very approval of the establishments their contributor had slighted, the editors published this instalment of the fiction with a note at the bottom of the page which stated that ‘these remarks on Boarding-Schools’ were inserted ‘ to shew our impartiality, but [we] differ from the author in opinion’ (LM V [Oct. 1774]: 521). There is plenty of evidence elsewhere to suggest that the editors are protesting a little too much here.

But where does this leave us? What does the magazine’s inconsistent account of boarding school education tell us except that the magazine contradicts itself on this as on so many other matters? Well, for one thing, it makes clear, I think, how the magazine’s ideological fault lines and the complexity of its relationship with its readers were informed by economic imperatives (nothing new under the sun, as they say…). More than that, though, I think, it points to the one thing that I feel totally comfortable saying the magazine is actually about: not fashion, class, morals, education or women’s issues, although it it is surely about all of these things, but conversation. As Modestia unwittingly noted, the Lady’s Magazine’s business was putting ‘ideas into motion’. Sometimes these ideas gained momentum and a life of their own and sometimes they collided messily. One thing is for sure, the magazine always provoked more questions than it answered. And while that presents certain challenges to those of us who want to talk or write about the magazine, it’s surely what makes the experience of reading it so very seductive.

 

Dr Jennie Batchelor

School of English

University of Kent

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Projecting outwards

We are now, somewhat unbelievably, heading towards the six-month mark of our two-year project. The index is progressing very well, the methodological quandaries its composition has posed are being worked through, and we are getting ever closer to a sense of what this magazine was really all about and why it was so popular and enduring.

But up until this point, we have have mainly been talking about the magazine amongst ourselves. Enjoyable though this has been, we felt the time was right to start taking the project to people to gain feedback and to see what questions about the magazine people  most wanted answered. In the past couple of weeks we have been doing just that and it has been truly illuminating and a good deal of fun.

Screen Shot 2015-03-16 at 10.47.40Our first big public presentation of the research project took place on the 4 March at the University of Kent as part of the School of English’s ongoing research seminar series. Trying to whittle down our respective roles in the project to just 12 minutes each was quite a challenge, but it certainly focused the mind. I began by talking about my 15-year fascination with the magazine and my sense of why it had not yet received the scholarly attention or been accorded the critical literary-historical importance I felt it deserved. I then handed over to Jenny who talked about and demonstrated a part of the index in action and elucidated her herculean efforts to catalogue each and every one of the many thousands of items in the magazine over its first 50 years by genre, subgenre and keyword. Finally, Koenraad delivered fascinating insights into the methods he is using to profile individual contributors (the vast majority of whom go by pseudonyms) and to make attributions where they might be possible. We were delighted with the feedback we got and the genuine interest the magazine and project seemed to generate from colleagues working in all periods and across different genres. Its a talk that we will be giving in a slightly different form at Chawton House Library in May if you would like to come and hear it then.

Then just two days later we got an opportunity to revisit the project from a different point of view by participating in a wonderful Material Witness workshop series for CHASE (Consortium of the Humanities and the Arts in South-East England) doctoral training initiative at Kent. Our topic was ‘Text as Object’ and our focus was working on and between digital copies of eighteenth and nineteenth century periodicals and the originals. The event was co-run by our colleague Professor Cathy Waters and we were very fortunate to have been joined by Professor John Drew from the University of Buckingham and founder of the groundbreaking Dickens Journals Online. A dedicated post on the day as a whole will follow soon on the Material Witness blog, but I couldn’t resist sharing some of our experiences from the day here.

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Kent has very few copies of the Lady’s Magazine in its Special Collections, but it does have one fine bound volume and, incredibly, one unbound monthly copy. In fact, it is the only unbound monthly copy, with its original covers, I have seen in 15 years of working with this material. The workshop participants – all doctoral students from across the CHASE consortium – could handle this material, alongside copies of La Belle Assemblee (with which handsome title the Lady’s Magazine would eventually merge) and all had complete access to the Adam Matthews digitisation of the magazine’s complete run.

We had one dedicated slot in the day to get students working with the magazine in its digital form (after an earlier session handling the originals). The question was what to do with it. We have lots to say about the magazine, of course, and could easily have filled 30 minutes telling everyone how important we think the magazine is. Instead, we opted for a different approach. Much to the bemusement of many of the participants we set them up with a laptop each and gave them a simple instruction. They had 10 minutes to read the Lady’s Magazine and tell us what they thought about it.

Of course we were interested in their thoughts and observations (most of which were about the magazine’s readers and writers) but the exercise was a sleight of hand on our part designed to find out how individuals (chose to) read the magazine in digital form. Where do you start? Which year? And once you have a year, do you read from front to back or do you go to the index at the back of the bound volumes or the contents pages at the start of each month? Or do you search for particular keywords? Is this anything like we imagine the reading experience would have been for eighteenth-century readers or even our own if we had the original material copies in our hands? Do the differences matter and why? It was a fascinating conversation and we could have continued for much longer than we had time for.

IMG_5942We’ll take up some of these questions and lines of conversation in a future post. But the thing that I will most happily take from the day is something I hadn’t really thought about in advance of it. As we sat there at the front of the room watching nearly 20 people sat reading the Lady’s Magazine, some furiously making notes, some smiling, some talking to colleagues about particularly interesting content, it struck me: we had a group of nearly 20 people reading and engaging with the content of the Lady’s Magazine! I whipped out my iPhone and started taking lots of photos to commemorate the occasion.

Because ultimately this is what this project is about. Yes we have articles we want and need to write and I have a book I want and need to write, but our main goal is to get people reading the magazine again and to help them navigate it. It was a great moment and one I hope we will get to replicate again in the near future.

Dr Jennie Batchelor

School of English

University of Kent

Confessions of a Periodicalist

Working on The Lady’s Magazine can be a pretty heady experience. Take one magazine that ran for 13 issues a year for over six decades. Add a generous dose of content representing pretty much every single prose, poetic and dramatic genre you have ever heard of (and some you don’t like to admit you haven’t). Finish with the zest of a sprightly community of readers, almost none of whom used their own names within the magazine’s pages. The result: one dizzying cocktail that brightens up your day right up until the moment when the room starts spinning before your very eyes.

Today, after my latest binge on the magazine in preparation for two still not-yet finished papers I’m giving in quick succession next month, I feel it’s time to confess my sins.

My name is Jennie Batchelor. And I am a periodicalist. I sometimes say one thing and think another. I am beyond help. In fairness, though, it’s not really my fault. I mean, I know that old saying about workmen and their tools, but have you seen what I have to work with? I mean, come on!

LM, XV (Oct 1784): 547. Image © Adam Matthew Digital / Birmingham Central Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

LM, XV (Oct 1784): 547. Image © Adam Matthew Digital / Birmingham Central Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

But I digress… This is how it happened. A couple of weeks ago I was sat at my desk having read through a big stack of interesting journal articles, chapters and monographs on anonymity and pseudonymity from the Early Modern period to the present. The goal was to contextualise and theorise my reading of the practice of pseudonymity in the Lady’s Magazine for a paper I am giving at an eighteenth-century studies conference in the US on a panel on the study of women’s writing now that we are in a ‘post-recovery’ moment. The abstract, which I sent off last year, promised to develop an argument that I had begun to sketch elsewhere: that anonymity and pseudonymity pose huge challenges not just to literary scholars but to feminist or women’s writing academics, in particular, and that we need to embrace these challenges enthusiastically. I maintained that the many hundreds of unknown women – the Constantia Marias and Lucindas – who wrote for the Lady’s Magazine and possibly had no more lofty career aspirations than publication within the periodical’s pages demand to be understood as an important part of women’s literary history, even if all we know about them are the presumably mostly false names they adopted.

As Virginia Wolf pointed out ‘Anon’ was all too often a woman. Of course, sometimes she was a man, too. And as the Lady’s Magazine suggests with dizzying frequency, sometimes she was a woman pretending to be a man, or man pretending to be a woman. Its readers commonly wrote in when articles by ‘A SPINSTER’ seemed more likely to have emerged from the pen of the most curmudgeonly of bachelors, or when the spirited defences of the fair sex by male wits seemed to speak more of insider knowledge than of chivalry. Nonetheless, as I contended in my abstract for the conference, I wanted to argue for the importance of the magazine in the history of women’s writing, even if some of its women were pretending to be or actually were men. The identities of individual authors interested me much less than their collective endeavours in the creation of a mixed-sex, but female dominated, dynamic writerly community which was not in the least hung up on the Romantic conception of the author as solitary genius and which set the agenda for the public discussion of women’s lives across the decades in which it thrived. (That’s the short and slightly simplified version, anyway.)

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LM, XXXIV (May 1803): 252. © Adam Matthew Digital / British Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Yet for all my anti-Romanticist impulses (I told you this was confessional, didn’t I?), I still managed to spend about 6 hours on the day I had marked down in my diary as ‘anon research day’ trying to track down the identity of two women who I have become completely absorbed by in the past few months: Catherine Bremen Yeames and Elizabeth Yeames  (although every single one of their Christian and surnames is spelled or abbreviated in multiple ways in the magazine’s pages). They started writing for the Lady’s in the 1800s and as I was re-reading the issues from those years, I became intrigued by their many, varied and distinctive contributions, just as I was tantalised by the fact that they shared a name and both resided in Norfolk, which seemed to indicate that they were related to one another.

Who am I kidding? I also was gripped by the thought that they had to be traceable given that they had such an unusual surname, untypically given in full in the magazine, and that they were tied to a specific locale. If I couldn’t find these women then I may as well give up the attribution ghost entirely.

LM, XXXIV (May 1803): 253. © Adam Matthew Digital / British Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

LM, XXXIV (May 1803): 253. © Adam Matthew Digital / British Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Needless to say, I found them. A typo I made in the last Google search I was going to allow myself of the day set me on a chain of web searching that led me to the baptismal records of the sisters (because they were sisters after all), details of their parents’ names and wedding date (not in Norfolk, but rather pleasingly for this project, just a few miles from my University in Dover) and the birth and christening dates of their many other siblings.

I became lost in the websites complied by resourceful and generous family genealogists, who with little interest in the sisters nonetheless gave off hints of important information that led me to understand that Catherine’s contributions to the magazine stopped because of her premature death as a young woman (the family trees I had seen her mentioned in wrongly assumed she died at birth), while her younger sister Elizabeth continued to write for the periodical for many years afterwards and looked expressly to it for help to support her family after the death of her oldest sister and her naval father overseas. Three months after this appeal, Elizabeth married, I discovered, and regardless of whether this helped her financial situation, she continued to write for the Lady’s under her married name (the connection to her unmarried self is not openly acknowledged in the magazine’s pages and would have been known to me had I not made the connection this way). It was a fascinating journey that took me to the will of the sister’s mother (unbelievably available online) and to Elizabeth’s own resting place, in a grave with her mother and another of her sisters. I even managed to get a photograph of her tombstone emailed to me later that day through another website for genealogists.

There is a lot more to tell about the Yeames sisters and a good deal more to say about their writing. I’m not done with them, that’s for sure. So watch this space, as they say. Yet I confess, that on my ‘anon research day’ I felt bad rather than amused by the irony that I spent so much time obsessively trying to find out exactly who two women periodical contributors were that I forgot to eat lunch and only remembered to pick up my kids with five minutes to spare.

 

But this is what working with periodicals like the Lady’s Magazine is all about, isn’t it? You see, here’s my big confession. I like working with periodicals because they are so infuriating. I like them because every time I think I may be starting to understand what they are about they wrong-foot me and suggestion other, equally plausible, possibilities.

I really don’t believe that our research project needs to attribute huge swathes of articles to known or important writers to put the Lady’s Magazine on the academic map. Even to attempt to do so would, as I’ve already hinted, be rather at odds with what I think the magazine was about and trying to do. Nor do I believe any less in the importance of pseudonymity to the magazine or to the history of women’s writing for all my determination to seek out the identities of some magazine contributors.

I like historic periodicals and I believe that many of them are deeply important because they keep me people like me on toes by forcing me to question my and ‘the disipline’s’ logic and familiar crutches – of genre, gender, politics, period, and ‘the author’ – at every turn. Ephemera indeed!

Dr Jennie Batchelor

University of Kent

 

 

 

 

Addressing the Public or Dressing the Facts?

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LM XII (Jan 1781): iii. Image © Adam Matthew Digital / British Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

We couldn’t let the first month of the year come and go without reflecting on one of the constants throughout Lady’s Magazine‘s long print run. Every January from the early 1770s right through 1818, where our project ends, the magazine opened with an Address to the Public. The column’s title sounds rather grander than the editorial leader familiar from today’s monthlies, although its function was largely identical: to thank readers for their patronage in buying the magazine; to divert them to content of which the editors were especially proud; and to persuade subscribers that their money had been well spent.

The sheer quantity of puffing that takes place in the Addresses to the Public is more than enough to power any one of the many ‘aerostatic voyages’ (balloon flights to you and I) about which the Lady’s Magazine routinely raged. Indeed, to read the editors’ annual announcements you would be forgiven for thinking that the Lady’s Magazine was the first magazine ever to have catered for a female audience, or to have celebrated female writers, or that it was the only, and certainly the most popular, periodical to have solicited reader contributions.

 

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LM, XXXIV (Dec 1803). Image © Adam Matthew Digital / British Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Yet for all its hyperbole, the Addresses contain vital information about this most enduring, yet elusive, of publications. They chart, for instance, the important shifts in style, composition and politics that characterise the magazine across its long print run and ensured its longevity. They document how a magazine, one of the main attractions of which in its first decades was its encouragement to reader-contributors to provide ‘original pieces of merit’, gradually gave way to a miscellany format in which the bulk was formed of ‘selections from the most valuable publications of the day’ for ‘those who have neither leisure not inclination to peruse voluminous and expensive works’ themselves, (LM, XXXIII [Jan, 1802]: 3). They signal the magazine proprietors’ and editors’  developing sense of who their audience was or could be. The mistresses and pupils of boarding schools, so important in the first two decades of the title’s history become marginalised post-1790, for example, while the need to produce elegant coloured fashion plates to keep up with reader expectations is taken as a given by 1800 . And they mark the shifting sands of the periodical’s aspirations as its call for a ‘revolution in female manners’, some 14 years before Wollstonecraft used the term only somewhat differently (LM XXVIII [Jan 1778]: iii), gave way to more modest hopes to satisfy ‘the delicacy and refined taste of the Fair Sex’ (LM, XXXIV [Jan 1803]: iii)

They also, in the absence of any known surviving publisher archive, offer up clues to such important and complexly related matters as: how many people read the magazine (in fact the only statistics we have to go on are those cited in the magazine itself); how the magazine was run; who wrote for it and why. Take just one of these questions by way of illustration. The identities of most of the magazine’s editors over the course of its nearly 70-year run remain obscure to this day. Editorial practice, however, becomes much clearer when the Annual Addresses are read, especially when they are read in conjunction with the monthly Correspondents columns. From these we see anecdotal evidence that what we might strongly suspect must, in fact, be the case: that a work so eclectic and yet, peculiarly, so coherent, had to be the work of multiple hands. We get glimpses of a succession of editorial boards, whose members were not always in agreement with one another, but the majority of whom believed in the magazine and had its best interests at heart.

LM, XXXIII (Jan. 1802). mage © Adam Matthew Digital / British Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

LM, XXXIII (Jan. 1802). mage © Adam Matthew Digital / British Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Mostly, they testify to the powerful sense of community that the magazine held to be synonymous with its name. The Lady’s Magazine was, its editor or editors declared in 1781: ‘a Collection which is supplied entirely by Female Pens, and has no other end in view, than to cherish Female ingenuity and to conduce to Female improvement’ (LM, XII [Jan. 1781]: iv). Any reader of the Lady’s Magazine in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries or now would struggle to dispute the centrality of and importance given to women’s lives, writing or wit to the periodical and these factors were surely two of the title’s principal attractions to its readers and contributors.

And yet almost every point made in this extract from the 1781 Address to the Public requires qualification. ‘Female improvement’ was undoubtedly a mainstay of the magazine, but the question of what constituted an improved woman and the best means to cultivate her talents were two of the most hotly debated topics throughout the magazine’s history. And if ‘Female ingenuity’ was cherished, as it certainly was by the magazine, then so too was that of men and boys, whose ‘Pens‘ provided a good deal of the content of the magazine’s pages, in fact rather more than we might feel comfortable with given its name.

Our project, amongst many other things, is working away in the interstices between the magazine’s rhetoric and what is recoverable about its reality. In this fascinating, if sometimes frustrating ongoing work, our best and most misleading resource is the magazine itself.

Dr Jennie Batchelor

School of English, University of Kent

 

 

 

 

The Scale of Female Literary Merit

Magazines have not, as a rule, fared well in literary history. Condemned by the very topicality that once made them so popular, periodicals are often cast as the mere ephemera in the face of which works of true literary merit have endured.

The bad press that magazines have received is not unwarranted. The eighteenth-century periodical marketplace could be as cut-throat and unprofessional as it was lively, with some titles barely lasting for a handful of issues. Even those serial publications that enjoyed much longer print runs bear material witness to their contingent status. Few survive intact. Readers routinely removed plates and engravings. They frequently ripped out embroidery patterns or song sheets and wrote copiously in the margins or scribbled all over their pages.

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LM, XXXII (1801). Image © Adam Matthew Digital / Britishl Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Yet, the blanket association of the genre with ephemera is profoundly misleading. Titles such as The Lady’s Magazine didn’t only survive by being lucky. Monthly issues were printed with an expectation that subscribers would bind them according to the publisher’s printed instructions and preserve them in bound volume form for posterity. References were made to articles in earlier volumes in expectation that readers would still have them to hand. And there is anecdotal evidence that some magazine readers went to great lengths to preserve their libraries against the ravages of the elements and time, such as the brine soaked, shipwrecked and salvaged copies of The Lady’s Magazine that Charlotte Bronte recalled reading as a child when she should have been paying attention to her lessons and which had once belonged to her mother or aunt (Letter to Hartley Coleridge 10 December 1840).

But the Lady’s Magazine was about preservation in other ways, too. From its opening issue in August 1770, the editors proclaimed that ‘Every branch of literature’ would ‘be ransacked to please and instruct’ (LM 1 (August 1770): 1). No generic stone would be left unturned in their pursuit to cultivate the female mind; nor would the work of any living or dead writer (man or woman) whose literary efforts conduced to female improvement.

Although a good deal of the content of the magazine was apparently original, much besides was repurposed from extant sources. Indeed, one of the many strands of our research project is divining the shifting ratio of old to new content over the course of the magazine’s run. I must confess, however, that when I first began reading the Lady’s Magazine more than fifteen years ago, I tended to skip those poems and extracts from those books on travel, history, religion and conduct I could read elsewhere. I noted with little more than passing interest that the magazine was fairly even handed in its inclusion of nuggets of wisdom from uncomfortable bedfellows such as James Fordyce, Dr Gregory and Mary Wollstonecraft.

The more I read the magazine, however, the more I became interested in what works and which authors the magazine chose to acknowledge and how. Why reprint that particular letter of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s (on hair dye) in August 1771 (II: 68) and not another? Why those particular extracts (‘On Modesty’ and ‘The Character of the Notable Woman and Fine Lady Contrasted’) from A Vindication of Woman in the June 1792 issue of the magazine?

These are not always easy questions to answer. Neither are the effects of these selections – whether made by editors or by enthusiastic readers who transcribed passages of their own choosing – always easy to fathom. But two things are clear: such choices matter; and sometimes they surprise.

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LM, XII (1781): 135. Image © Adam Matthew Digital / Birmingham Central Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

No one would be shocked to find Montagu or Wollstonecraft occupying page space in the 1770s  and 1790s of the magazine, or by the numerous laudatory references to the Bluestockings throughout the first decades of the title’s run. Some might be slightly taken off guard, however, by the extracts from The New Atalantis (1709) that appeared in the March 1781 issue under the title ‘Observations by the celebrated Mrs. Manley’ just four years before another (albeit reluctant) Lady’s Magazine contributor, Clara Reeve, remarked that Manley’s works were best forgotten in The Progress of Romance. Few readers could similarly have expected that the poet Elizabeth Thomas, known popularly in literary history as ‘Curl’s Corinna’ thanks to Alexander Pope, would form the second subject of the magazine’s ‘Lady’s Biography. Modern’ series in May 1771.

One of the many important aspects of the Lady’s Magazine that our project index will help to shed light on is who the magazine was keen to preserve for literary posterity and who it was not in the form of its long-running biographical series of illustrious literary women  and selections from the works of noted writers. Such data has the potential both to underscore and (perhaps more importantly) to disrupt some of our entrenched assumptions about the making of literary history in the second half of the long eighteenth century.

This was a project that, as we know, had serious repercussions for the status of women writers and women’s writing, even if the magazine itself could sometimes be rather less than serious about the important work of preservation and the rather specious criteria upon which such acts of literary judgement were made.

scale of literary merit

LM, XIII (June 1792). Image © Adam Matthew Digital / Birmingham Central Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Dr Jennie Batchelor

School of English, University of Kent

 

 

 

Robinson and Roberts vs Wheble: Periodicals and Piracy

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LM, I (1771). Image © Adam Matthew Digital / Birmingham Central Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

One of the many problems involved in working with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century periodicals is not knowing for sure what you are reading. Distinguishing between original and repurposed content is easier in a digital age, but is still a very inexact science because of the sheer scope of the archives from which serial publications can be drawn. Faced with a bewildering array of multi-genre content, the doggedly determined periodical scholar (is there any other kind?) is left heavily reliant on gut instinct and old-fashioned detective skills. 

Characteristically, the Lady’s Magazine does its best to keep readers off the scent. True: many articles drawn from previously published, longer works, are credited as being ‘By’ their original author or are acknowledged as extracts in their titles. But there are many other articles that appear in the magazine with no signature attached to them and no form of acknowledgement of prior appearance even though they are not originals. And there are others again that have a signature and read as though submitted by a reader for the first time when, in fact, these turn out to be, shall we say, borrowed. Whether the magazine sought deliberately to dupe its readers about such contributions or was itself simply deceived by contributors trying to pass of the work of others as their own (the editors certainly discovered authors doing this on many occasions and proudly declared so when they did) is unclear to say the least.

Trying to pursue the bigger question of how copyright law was understood to apply to eighteenth-century periodicals takes you into still murkier territory. Evidence from the magazines themselves suggests that editors and booksellers saw serial publications as working at the very margins, or even completely outside, of contemporary copyright law. Indeed, they seemed often to have operated in a culture of broad (if not unshakeable) understanding that their contents could and would be widely repurposed.

But there were limits to this understanding, and the Lady’s found itself on both sides of the copyright infringement fence. For nine years of its print run, The Lady’s  was forced to fend off the unapologetically unscrupulous efforts of publisher and rival Alexander Hogg, who, working out of 24 Paternoster Row, was the next door neighbour to George Robinson and his partners. Hogg’s New Lady’s Magazine waged an unrelentingly aggressive campaign against the Lady’s from 1786 to 1795 in a publication that Hogg claimed was more polite, better produced and better value than its predecessor and contemporary. In fact, huge swathes of the New Lady’s Magazine was plagiarised verbatim, without acknowledgement, from the Lady’s itself. Quite what Hogg and Robinson said to each other as they inevitably walked past each other in Paternoster Row intrigues me. But Robinson couldn’t claim the moral high ground all of the time. In 1819, for example, his magazine was forced to respond (not exactly apologetically) to the proprietor of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, who had complained that the Lady’s had committed an ‘invasion of [literary] property’ by printing ‘without alteration, abridgement, or acknowledgement’ a piece entitled  ‘Some Remarks on the Use of the Preternatural in Fiction’ by John Wilson, which they had printed the year before (L: Oct 1819: ‘To Our Correspondents’).

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LM, 1 (1770). Image © Adam Matthew Digital / Birmingham Central Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

In many ways, however, the most interesting insights the Lady’s Magazine offers us into contemporary understandings of the periodical’s place in debates about piracy and plagiarism comes early in its history. When the first issue of the Lady’s Magazine appeared in August 1770 it was as a joint venture between the bookseller John Coote and publisher John Wheble. During April 1771 Coote sold his interest in the publication to the publishers George Robinson and John Roberts for 500l. Sensing that he was onto a good thing, Wheble, who had himself previously and unsuccessfully sought to buy the interest off Coote, would not give up on the Lady’s, however, and continued to publish it alongside Robinson and Roberts’ official version. The resulting dispute between Robinson and Roberts and Wheble over which Lady’s Magazine was legitimate led them to the courtroom in July 1771 in a trial that found in favour of Robinson and Roberts, who were awarded nominal damages of 5s.

A transcript of the courtroom proceedings, which was presided over by Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, appeared in full in the July 1771 issue of the magazine. It is an extraordinary document, worth every twinge of eye strain occasioned by scrutinising its densely printed text and densely argued perspectives on the thorny question of who ‘owns’ a publication that is the work of multiple hands: a proprietor, a printer, a publisher, an editor as well as engravers and numerous (and often unknown) writers.

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LM, IV (1773). Image © Adam Matthew Digital / Birmingham Central Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Wheble’s defence lay in the quantity of labour he claimed he had put into getting the publication off the ground. He contended that the ‘time, application and invention’ he had invested in the magazine should have been enough to prove his title to it (I, July 1771: 44). Coote unsurprisingly disagreed, arguing that he had been proprietor and legal owner of the magazine and that Wheble’s small part in proceedings had been simply to get the publication onto readers’ bookshelves: ‘After the author has wrote, the compositor has done his part, and the printer has set the press, the last hand it comes to is the publisher [… .] All he has to do with it is, upon the one hand to publish it, upon the other hand, to transmit the profits to Mr Coote’ (I: July 1771: 42).

Coote’s case was hard to dispute, but the serial form of the The Lady’s complicated matters rather. As Wheble pointed out, some significant elements of the content of the Lady’s Magazine, such as the long-running travel narrative, A Sentimental Journey (1770-77), had yet to be concluded when Robinson and Roberts took over publishing the title. This begged an important question that the trial dodged rather than resolved: What rights has a publisher over a work that is published in part form? Wheble insisted, as he would, that as publisher of the previous eight installments, he had the right to publish future parts. Coote responded by asserting that serial literature (and its authors) belonged not to a publisher but to the publication in which it appeared. Since he had sold the Lady’s Magazine to Robinson and Roberts, the unknown author of A Sentimental Journey (known only as ‘a Lady’) was duty bound to write for its new publishers.

Lord Mansfield would not be drawn on these matters of ownership. After all, Mansfield declared, ‘there is not a colour of property’ in such ‘title[s]’ (I: July 1771: 50). In arguably the most interesting sections of the transcript, Mansfield, rather than focus on the rights of publishers, proprietors or even lowly authors, looks out for the magazine’s readers.

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LM, IV (1773). Image © Adam Matthew Digital / Birmingham Central Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

No law could prevent Wheble from continuing to publish the periodical after Coote sold his interest in it to his rivals, Mansfield declared, and indeed, Wheble ploughed on with publishing his own Lady’s Magazine alongside Robinson and Roberts version until December 1772, when it died a sudden death. But for Wheble not to acknowledge his break with Coote, for Wheble to present his Lady’s Magazine as a continuation of Coote’s original, was to dupe readers, Mansfield concluded: ‘If he had said Mr Coote has left off his work, and I will continue it, he had a right to do it; but he has gone on in a manner that has imposed upon the public, in saying No. 9. was a continuation of the original work, of which eight numbers had been sold which was a fraud’ (1: July 1771: 52)

By July 1771, it is clear that The Lady’s Magazine was an established brand that readers and subscribers bought into with every purchase. As Mr Wallace, Wheble’s solicitor, declared with undisguised irony, the case of Robinson and Roberts vs Wheble ‘got a great victory [for the booksellers], in being told they have got no property in such works’ (I: July 1771: 52). In the process, the court failed to resolve a set of questions about the periodical’s place in contemporary copyright law that would resurface throughout the long history of the Lady’s Magazine’s run. But it also worked to emphasise the rights of readers whose title to serial publications seemed in some ways more secure than those of their publishers and authors.

Dr Jennie Batchelor

School of English, University of Kent

 

 

 

 

Welcome to the Lady’s Magazine: Understanding the Emergence of a Genre

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Frontispiece, LM, I (Aug 1770). Image © Adam Matthew Digital / Birmingham Central Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

This is the blog for our major new research project on The Lady’s Magazine (1770-1818), run out of the University of Kent. The research is funded by a two-year Leverhulme Research Project grant and will result in a host of publications about the contents of and contributors to this early, long-running and groundbreaking women’s magazine, as well as a fully annotated index available online. You can read more about the project, its researchers (Dr Jennie Batchelor, Dr Jenny DiPlacidi and Dr Koenraad Claes), its objectives and its rationale here.

Over the next two years we will be using the blog to document some of our discoveries and the many challenges involved in working on so vast and miscellaneous an archive. But for our first post, we wanted to provide some essential background on a magazine that Charlotte Bronte, writing to Hartley Coleridge on 10 December 1840, declared ‘with all her heart’ she wished she had ‘been born in time to contribute to’.

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LM, XV (Aug 1784). Image © Adam Matthew Digital / Birmingham Central Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

From its inauspicious first appearance in August 1770 to the beginning of its new series in 1818, the magazine presented its readers with a uniquely panoramic view on to the world of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century life, literature and the arts and sciences. For a modest price (just sixpence for the first few decades of the magazine’s history) readers were provided with a monthly feast of short stories and serialised fiction, poetry, essays on history, science, politics and travel, advice for wives and mothers, fashion reports, recipes, medicinal ‘receipts’ offering cures for maladies from cramp to ‘hectic fevers’, accounts of trials and biographies of famous historical and contemporary figures, enigmas, rebuses and domestic and foreign news reports, as well as elegant engravings, fashion plates, embroidery patterns and song sheets.

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LM, XXVI (Jan, 1805). Image © Adam Matthew Digital / British Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

The concept of a periodical aimed primarily at a female readership was by no means new when the first issue appeared in 1770. John Dunton’s The Ladies’ Mercury was first published in February 1693 and in the following decades many more periodicals took up where Dunton left off, including Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectator (1744-46) and Charlotte Lennox’s Lady’s Museum (1760-61). In fact, George Robinson’s Lady’s Magazine was only the third periodical to bear the name in the eighteenth century. Jasper Goodwill’s publication of the same name had run from 1749 to 1753, while Goldsmith’s better known Lady’s enjoyed a four-year run from 1759 to 1763. Like all of these earlier works, Robinson’s Lady’s Magazine was built upon the dual premise of edification and amusement. But its generic scope and, crucially, its construction of a community of mixed-sex but largely female reader-contributors upon whom the magazine appeared to be largely dependent for the bulk of its content guaranteed its unusual success and longevity.

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Frontispiece, LM, XVIII (Jan, 1787). Image © Adam Matthew Digital / [Birmingham Central Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Literary careers were launched in the pages of the Lady’s Magazine. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village first appeared in serial form in the magazine in the 1820s as did the novels of other,  more obscure, authors such as George Moore, author of Grasville Abbey (serialised in the magazine in 1793 and later published in 1796 in volume form). Most major and many minor published figures in the period had extracts from their work published in the magazine. What made the magazine so very popular in its own time and so fascinating today, however, is the quite literal positioning of these works next to the amateur contributions of legions of anonymous or pseudonymous contributors. Extracts from the works of Wollstonecraft and Rousseau can be found next to those of a W., an Oxoniensis, a ‘Friend to the Fair Sex’ or an Eleonora keen to participate in current debates on the rights of man or female education. Predictably, the magazine’s dependence upon this unpaid, amateur labour force often led it into difficulty. The ‘To our Correspondents’ pages, in which a succession of largely unknown editors addressed readers, give some sense of the scale of contributions received and their range in quality. Many contributions were rejected on the grounds that they were poorly written or in poor taste while even accomplished serials could be a source of complaint when contributors failed to conclude them. But for all its pitfalls, the magazine’s reliance upon the goodwill of reader-contributors also created a powerful form of what we would now think of as brand loyalty and a clear sense of collective (if also sometimes highly competitive) endeavour.

In the coming weeks and months some of the fruits of our own collective (and not in the least competitive) endeavour will be posted on this blog. Please do send us any comments or questions you have about the magazine or the project.