We’ve been very busy in the last few weeks. And as the Lady’s Magazine project races towards completion in September 2016, I have been feeling more than a pang of guilt about not being as present on our social media as I would like to be. In part, that’s because we have all been quite busy outside the world of the Twittersphere, with conferences, workshops and, also, other forms of writing beyond the blog.

We’ve been finding it hard to keep up with all the different things that we’ve been doing, and it occurred to me earlier this week that it likely means you have, too. So, just in case you have missed anything that may be of interest to you, we thought we would list some of this activity in one place to make it easier to find. So here’s just some of the things we’ve been up to.

New Statesman Hidden Histories podcast series

A couple of months ago, I was invited by Dr Sophie Coulombeau (Cardiff University) and Dr Liz Edwards (University of Wales) to take part in 3 of a series of 6 podcasts on eighteenth-century women writers and and how both got written out of literary history for the New Statesman. The Lady’s Magazine features prominently in two of the six podcasts: episode 4, ‘Sociable Spaces’ is about the magazine and the debating societies it tracked and mirrored for some of its history; and my ‘Fight Club’ pitch in episode 5 for the best woman writer of the eighteenth century was heavily influenced by her work on the magazine. The series as a whole is simply excellent and I had a ball being involved. The podcasts are free to listen to and download here.

A Fate Worse than Death: Marital Cynicism in the Lady’s Magazine

When Catherine Curzon, aka the fabulous Madame Gilflurt asked me if I would like to write something about the magazine for her wonderful blog, I jumped at the chance. I offered Catherine a few possible topics but was delighted when she picked the one I was hoping she would because it is a bit of a favourite of mine: the rotten state of marriage as it is portrayed in the magazine. You can read the blog post, which is much more fun than it sounds, I promise, here.

The Quilter

The Stitch Off continues apace, with new items arriving each week and comments from visitors pouring in to tell us how much they admire and are inspired by the wonderful exhibition of our followers’ work on display at Chawton House Library, as part of their ‘Emma at 200′ exhibition. I have said it before, but honestly, the Stitch Off is one of the most enjoyable projects I have ever been, and likely ever will be, involved in in my working life. So you can imagine how I felt when I was asked by the Editor of The Quilter if I would write something about how it all came about for their summer 2016 issue (number 147). I received my hard copy of the magazine last week, and it now takes pride of place on my coffee table at work. If you would like to read the article, you can find it here.

I’d love to hear your thoughts about the article, blog post or podcast!

Dr Jennie Batchelor

School of English

University of Kent

As we enter the last few months (gulp!) of our project, new discoveries are throwing themselves at us at a pretty alarming rate. A number of these insights relate to the identities and biographies of some of our authors. The emphasis here, as always, is on the some. We have noted this many times on this blog before, but it bears repeating: the vast majority of reader-contributors who provided original content for the magazine are, and will likely always remain, unknown to us, hidden as they are behind obscure pseudonyms or legal names so common that a week lost in Ancestry trying to find them will never be gotten back.

The figures we have been able to piece biographical details about generally present themselves to us with a little bit of extra detail extra to help us on our attribution way. Often, as in the case of John and Elizabeth Legg or John Webb, this detail takes the form of  a place of residence that, along with other clues, has taken us to the relevant archives. Some, like Elizabeth Yeames or C. D. Haynes, are betrayed by brief biographical nuggets offered up in the magazine itself or by easily overlooked asides in that most fabulous resource for the doggedly persistent academic, Notes and Queries.

Others are located by pure serendipity. One such happy accident occurred a few months ago when I was too tired to do ‘proper work’ but unable to sleep. I was messing about on Ancestry and thinking about those magazine contributors I most wanted to know about but didn’t.

LM, 60 (Dec 1809): 549. Image © Adam Matthew Digital / British Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

The name of Joanna Squire, or Miss Joanna Squire, as the magazine demurely referred to her, kept resurfacing in my mind. Joanna Squire enjoyed (although as you’ll see, that might not be quite the right word) quite a stint in the Lady’s Magazine. Although her nearly 6 years of publishing with the magazine (between late 1809 and 1815) is not remarkable by the periodical’s standards, the column inches she occupied were significant. In addition to a sole piece of prose – a fragment on hope that appeared in the December 1809 issue – Squire produced a considerable number of poetic works in the first half of the 1810s. Indeed, many single monthly issues of the magazine from these years usually contains 4 or more of her poems.

LM 61 (Oct 1810): 470-71.

It was not Squire’s productivity that most impressed me, however; it was her range and spirit. Squire’s poems include completions of ’bouts-rimés’ (poems prompted by rhyming end lines offered up by the magazine to inspire readers), charades and meditations on the fickleness of fortune (a favourite topic). She often wrote poems to and received poetic epistles from other magazine contributors (including Charlotte Caroline Richardson and James Murray Lacey). She was also a patriotic and political poet who wrote a series of works condemning Bonaparte’s public and private life.  Her ‘Address to Fortune’, an extempore poem on ‘reading that Bonaparte had deprived his repudiated Josephine of the title of Empress’ from the October 1810 issue, merits a blog post of its own.

Yet this is just one of many poems Squire submitted to the Lady’s Magazine for publication and she remained their ‘respected’ and ‘ingenious’ correspondent, as they were apt to call her, for a significant period of time. At least, that is, until she spectacularly fell out with the magazine’s editors.

In February 1815, the ‘Correspondents’ column of the magazine acknowledged receipt of ‘the very angry epistle of Miss Joanna Squire’ but refused to extend to her the expression of gratitude normally extended to contributors. The circumstances of Squire’s spat with the magazine are unclear, but the magazine’s perturbation is not:

It would be
 quite easy to refute all her remarks; but after the petulant language, which
 she has used, she deserves no explanation, and none shall she have.—We
 recommend to her perusal the speech of Mrs. Caveat, at page 73 of our
 present Number. (no page)

For the curious, Mrs Caveat – a figure in a regular serial in the magazine in the 1810s – admonishes a companion for want of ‘good breeding’ and ‘petulant’ comments on page 73. I bet you could have guessed that.

From then on, Squire disappears from the Lady’s Magazine and although I had found other works by her in contemporary periodicals, I was drawing a blank in finding her or anything by her after 1815. What happened to her and her talent, I wondered? Had she died not long after the spat with the magazine?

I had looked for her in birth, marriages and deaths records before, but had never found a convincing lead. But that evening my tired and inaccurately typing fingers happened upon a one I hadn’t found before: a Joanna Squires christened on 10 November 1776 in Staines Middlesex. As with my previous efforts to locate Catherine Cuthbertson, I hoped that Squire(s) had lived long enough to see the 1841 census so I could find out more about her and I also hoped that she was considerate and sensible enough not to have married. My initial and disappointed searches drew a blank.

Then, just as I was about to give up, I thought I would try a marriage search again using the information in my new lead: a Joanna born around 1776 in Middlesex. When I found a marriage record for September 1816 to a John Carey in the parish of St George the Martyr, Southwark, I instantly woke up. I knew the name Carey. I knew that a John Carey (could it be this one?), was a literary figure and I knew I had read excepts from his work and odd original pieces in the Lady’s Magazine. Before logging off from Ancestry I did a search for Joanna Carey in the 1841 and 1851 census returns hoping I might be on to something. I was. I found her: as Johanna Carey, a woman of independent means living in the same parish in which she married in 1841; and as Joanna Carey, now living with her servant Elizabeth Jones in Newington High Street, in 1851.

From then it was a few internet searches to assemble a lot of biographical information very quickly. Dr John Carey was easy to pin down. A Dublin born classical scholar, teacher and editor, Carey has his own ODNB page [1], although no mention is made in it of either of his two wives (Joanna was the second). What the ODNB lacked, the Gentleman’s Magazine for 1830 more than made up for. Reporting Carey’s death on 8 December 1829 (the ODNB has Carey’s death date as 1826) in a substantial obituary, the Gentleman’s Magazine gives a generous account of Carey’s career, in part because he was a ‘frequent contributor’ to it himself.

Gentleman’s Magazine, new series, 29 (April 1830): 371.

In the penultimate paragraph of the death notice, the obituarist notes that ‘Dr Carey was twice married; and, by his second wife (who, was the author of the novel, entitled “Lasting Impressions,” and of numerous pieces of fugitive poetry, many of which have been published in this Miscellany, is not unknown to the public), he has left a very promising boy, now in his eleventh year.’ John Squire Carey was born on the 29 August 1819 when his mother was in her early forties. He died in 1836 and his mother would outlive him for a further 15 years. When she died in November 1851, she left a will, witnessed by Elizabeth Jones, leaving her estate to her husband’s grandson from his previous marriage, John Carey Garnder.

Uncovering the details of Joanna Squire’s life might not seem all that important beyond fleshing out a footnote in literary history. But for every Joanna Squire, C. D. Haynes, Radagunda Roberts or John Legg we find, we are able to bring into slightly sharper focus what it might have meant to be an author in the period covered by the Lady’s Magazine. And the answer is a messy one. Authors for the Lady’s Magazine didn’t, usually, write in single genres or modes and their careers often spanned decades, marriages, childbirths and deaths. Known Lady’s Magazine authors often did not just write for this title. They fall into and out of love with the magazine as often as twenty-first-century scholars working on it. But thank goodness for serendipity for keeping even the most tired and cynical of researchers energised and keen to find out more.

Notes

[1] W. Sutton, ‘Carey, John (1756–1826)’, rev. Philip Carter, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/4654, accessed 9 Feb 2016]

John Carey (1756–1826): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/465

Dr Jennie Batchelor

School of English

University of Kent

This week the Lady’s Magazine team travelled to the first annual CRECS conference at Cardiff University, where we were invited by Anthony Mandal, Sophie Coulombeau and James Castell to deliver a workshop on researching the periodical. Cardiff University’s Special Collections and Archives (SCOLAR) was particularly suited to our delivery of a hands-on workshop as the library has an impressive run of the Lady’s Magazine. Attendees, including undergraduates, postgraduates and academics focusing on eighteenth-century studies were able to examine copies of the magazine to explore questions we posed regarding the periodical’s audience, content and form.

Koenraad, Jennie and I asked the audience to look at the volumes in groups of six to ten – each table was able to have two copies of the magazine so everyone was able to look at, touch and search through two different years in the magazine’s history. They then reported back to us with their assumptions about who the magazine was marketed to and designed for, using evidence from the physical copies to support their responses.

As researchers on the Lady’s Magazine, hearing the audience responses about the publication’s intended audience was particularly interesting in that it allows us to consider how we might modify the ways in which we present our work on the magazine. Overcoming assumptions about exactly what the periodical was, and who read and wrote for it, must be an essential part of our discussion of the periodical. It is too easy to take for granted the evidence the magazine itself offers in its full title Lady’s Magazine; or Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex, Appropriated Solely to Their Use and Amusement and to thus overlook the diversity of not only its readership and authors, but also the scope of its content.

Our audience was then given different topics; we asked them to consider how the magazine presents fashion, celebrity, masculinity and the news. One of the best parts of the workshop was going between the different tables and seeing how excited the attendees were when engaging with the material artifact. They noted the size of the volumes and print, the quality of the engravings, and often went directly to the magazine’s index at the end of each yearly bound volume to try and get an idea of the contents. But as attendees soon discovered for themselves, the magazine’s own index is of limited usefulness in determining exactly the content, genre or even subject of a particular item. They questioned whether or not the presentation of a topic in a specific item could be used to make assumptions about the magazine’s politics, discussed the appearance of a topic in different genres, debated the changes in the division of the news section and did a brilliant job grasping quickly the subtleties and scope of the periodical.

The day after the conference we returned to SCOLAR to take advantage of the library’s holdings – Jennie and Koenraad were interested in the copies of the Lady’s Magazine that included advertisements – very rare indeed – and patterns and engravings that have been removed from most other available volumes. (Koenraad’s blog post next week will be focusing on his work on these advertisements and the insights they offer into the magazine). I was keen to look at the volumes of one of the Lady’s Magazine’s imitators and competitors, the Lady’s Monthly Museum; Or, Polite Repository of Amusement and Instruction (1798 – 1832). The copies I examined were incredibly useful to my research on the fictional content of the Lady’s Magazine, but what I also appreciated about the volumes of the Lady’s Monthly Museum were its many beautiful fashion plates.

This was our second visit to Cardiff as a project team after presenting a panel last summer at BARS, and again we had a wonderful time at the University, discussing our work to a receptive and engaged audience and learning much from their responses to the magazine and our project.

Back in February of this year, Steve Hewlett’s interview of Stephen Hull, Editor-in-Chief of the Huffington Post UK, for the BBC’s Media Show created quite an online storm. It was hard to avoid the social media fallout, but in case you did, it revolved primarily around Mr Hull’s comments about the non-payment of the many bloggers who provide content for Huffington Post UK. Defending the media outlet’s position, Mr Hull controversially linked the refusal to pay non-staff writers in these terms: ‘If I was paying someone to write something because I want it to get advertising, that’s not a real authentic way of presenting copy. When somebody writes something for us, we know it’s real, we know they want to write it. It’s not been forced or paid for. I think that’s something to be proud of’.

Mr Hull’s equation of unpaid, voluntary contributions with an authenticity that he implies would be tainted by payment and its associated obligations to a media outlet’s advertisers caused quite a stir. Why on earth should objectivity be the province of the unpaid, we wondered? What will the long-term consequences of this reliance on unpaid writers for media content be for the future of journalism? Is the new media strangling the old? Is there really, as Mr Hull implies, any writing that is truly disinterested (whether you get paid for it or not)? And what do we do with the inconvenient truth that bloggers and journalists alike need to eat and pay rent?

At best, Mr Hull’s comments have been seen by his critics as naive. At worst, they have been cast as utterly parasitic: a devaluing of authorial labour under the guise of praise. But then again, is it any wonder that media outlets will rely on free copy in an ever expanding and cut-throat marketplace? Why should journalism be any more immune to austerity than any other profession, industry or service? And it’s surely the case, isn’t it, that a number of the bloggers who write for Huffington Post UK and other outlets aren’t doing so because they are being ‘forced’? Many, surely, choose such unpaid work in the hopes of future, paid career opportunities. But other writers might not care (much) about this. The reach and influence of the Huffington Post UK is such that it presents a formidable platform from which to articulate views and realities that the world needs to hear about. Sometimes getting such messages out matters more to the people who want to convey those messages than getting paid. Although I wonder how many would turn down offer of payment for their research and time if it were offered….?

As we move from an age of authors to the age of bloggers and social media enthusiasts, the questions about the value of authorial labour posed by Mr Hull’s comments are only ever going to become more pressing. And I, for one, am not optimistic about where the story is going to end. But in saying as much, I realise that I am adopting a position that is laden with irony.

LM XX (1789). Image © Adam Matthew Digital / Birmingham Central Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

I am sat here writing this blog for free, just as I have written a magazine article and at least two other guest blog posts this month for no payment. Am I bitter about this? Not in the least. I do these things because I value the fact that these media opportunities open up our research to wider audiences than an academic book with its hefty price tag could garner. I do it because I love what I do and because I want to share that enthusiasm, to get feedback on work in progress, and (hopefully) to get better at it as a consequence. I do it, as Mr Hull suggests the Huffington Post UK‘s bloggers do, because I want to. But I firmly believe that I am no more objective in my blog posts than I have been in the odd bits of paid writing I have done over the years. And of course, I can do this voluntary writing because I have a full-time job that pays the bills and enables me to write for free. I thought the days of authorship being the preserve of only those who had leisure and means to do it had ended in the eighteenth century…

And herein lies the second irony. What makes me uneasy about Mr Hull’s comments is something that I have frequently and openly celebrated about the Lady’s Magazine: its creation of a community of volunteer reader-contributors who provided the magazine’s original content apparently free of charge. As I have argued at length elsewhere, one of the key reasons why the Lady’s Magazine has been so long neglected by historians and literary scholars is that its reliance on enthusiastic amateurs like John Webb, Elizabeth Yeames, and the hundreds of A.Z.’s, Anons and Nobodies whose copy fills its pages, means that it has been seen as insufficiently professional to be taken seriously [1].

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

Why should this be the case? Why should we assume that just because the likes of Elizabeth Yeames might not have been paid for her work for the magazine that she didn’t take that work seriously? After all, as I pointed out in this blog post, the fact that she published in the Lady’s Magazine meant that she had a reach and influence that stretched over decades and continents. In the 1810s, she would likely have been read in greater numbers and been much more readily identifiable to readers than the anonymous author of Sense and Sensibility (1811). What does it matter if she was not paid for that work? Authorial success and literary value can’t be reduced to pounds, shillings and pence, can they? What if being read mattered more to her than being paid?

It’s a complex web of a problem if ever there was one, and it is one that the Lady’s Magazine itself was increasingly aware of as it moved into the nineteenth century. For the first decades of the magazine’s history, there is little sense that the non-payment of authors was anything other than a selling point for the publication. Write for us and you too can be read by thousands, is the implicit promise the editors made to their readers. Indeed, the magazine went to great lengths to ensure that potential contributors felt that publication in it was a prize, even if that prize involved no remuneration whatsoever or the kind of career beyond its pages secured by the likes of Mary Russell Mitford.

The magazine’s monthly columns acknowledging items submitted for publication are full of lavish praise for the best and most highly valued contributions, such as those of Henrietta R-, whom the editors acknowledged with the ‘greatest esteem, as well as gratitude’ in the August 1774 issue (no page). Equally, the magazine was rarely backwards in coming forwards with criticisms of what it conceived to be poorly conceived, written or inappropriately focused content. The magazine named and shamed many whose work it would not deign to publish, such as poor Anna Maria, whose poetic effusion on the death of a beloved pet was greeted in the September 1817 correspondents column with one of the editors’ most scathing  rejections in its history: ‘We sincerely regret Anna Maria’s loss; but advise her when she raises the funeral pile to her Canary bird, to light it with her elegy‘ (no page). In the face of such public rejection, it is little wonder that ‘gaining a footing’ in the ‘inclosure’ of the magazine, in the form of being accepted for publication, felt like something worth attaining for many of the magazine’s authors, even if generated no income (LM 33 [May 1782]: 258).

LM XLVIII (Sept 1817). Image © Adam Matthew Digital / Birmingham Central Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

But a good number of the magazine’s contributors could ill afford to be cavalier about whether they got paid or not for their writing. Many, we know, most certainly did not write from a position of financial disinterest.

Mary Pilkington

Mary Pilkington, for instance, who undertook paid editorial work for Vernor and Hood’s Lady’s Magazine rival, The Lady’s Monthly Museum (1798-1828), also wrote various original articles and serials for the Robinson publication from 1809 onwards. As her polite but at times aggrieved correspondence with Vernor and Hood reveals, she absolutely relied on income from her journalism and other writing [2]. Between 1810 and 1825 an embarrassed Pilkington repeatedly called on the charity of the Royal Literary Fund for financially distressed authors with modest success, but insufficient to guarantee her long-term security [3]. Knowing what we do about Pilkington’s circumstances, it is quite clear that altruism can have played little part in this determinedly professional and financially straitened writer’s publication choices.

Such evidence about Lady’s Magazine contributors’ financial circumstances is hard to piece together. It relies first on us having an identifiable author to begin with and second on external evidence (journals, letters and, in the case of Pilkington, institutional archives) which is often very hard to track down or, in many cases, non-existent. In the absence of such documentation, authors’ dealings with and attitudes towards editors are hard to discern. Odd letters about contributors’ experience of publishing in the Lady’s Magazine exist but, at the moment, I can count the ones I have found and read so far on a couple of hands. Those parts of the relatively small archive around the magazine’s publishers, the various members of the Robinson family, that we have been able to consult so far offer little by way of illumination either. As Koenraad blogged here, the ledger of George Robinson’s copyright purchases has no information on material intended for publication in the magazine, a fact that seems to corroborate the longstanding  assumption that no authors were paid for contributions to the Lady’s Magazine.

For the most part, then, we are left to glean the financial circumstances and motives of authors from their heavily mediated presence within the magazine’s columns. This is a hazardous enterprise, but nonetheless, offers glimmers of insight into how authors conceived of their work. Exhibit A in the author’s defence is the editors’ repeated refusal to pay postage for author contributions.  For decades the editors implored readers that it could not ‘be deemed either humanity or generosity to involve us in such enormous expence’ as attended payment for unpaid postage (LM 33 [Oct 1782]: no page). And yet month after month contributors continued to send in articles in this manner, presumably hoping that the strength of their work would persuade the magazine to pay the postage costs even if no further remuneration was expected. But ultimately, without payment, without contracts, the magazine’s contributors had little bargaining power. In fact the only power they had over the magazine was to threaten to leave it if they felt its editors’ dealings with them were unfair. The frequent tailspins the magazine plunged into when successive instalments of popular fictions or essay series failed to arrive (post paid) are hardly surprising when authors were only under a moral, rather than financial, obligation to continue and complete them.

At the moment, however, I am amassing a body of evidence that strongly suggests that the magazine’s working relationship with its contributors was not static across its six decade long run. Indeed, from the 1810s, precisely at the point at which Pikington started writing from the periodical, there is evidence within the Lady’s Magazine that the tide of opinion was turning; that writers were expecting more from the magazine; and that the magazine itself recognised that its future was entirely dependent upon authors whom it could little afford to take from granted. Take, for instance, a notice published in the correspondents column of August 1811, in which the editor notes: ‘On the subject of “Payment,” in answer to A.B.’s inquiry, we have to observe, that, although the contributions to Magazines are usually gratuitous, we shall feel no objection to allow him a moderate remuneration for his productions, provided that we approve them’ (no page). That word ‘usually’ was surely a beacon a hope for many a writer looking not only to be published but hoping to be paid for their periodical essays.

LM XXXIV (Oct 1783): p. 320. Image © Adam Matthew Digital / Birmingham Central Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Other hints surface in this decade that some of the Lady’s Magazine‘s contributors, at least, could expect payment for their efforts. The strange, but compelling serial, ‘The Author’s Portfolio’, which began publication in June 1814, is a wonderfully metafictional piece of writing about the hazards of life as a periodical author at the beginning of the new century. It is, in fact, one of several serial variations on this theme that appear in a very short space of time. The conceit of the ‘Author’s Portfolio’ is that its contents are the unpublished efforts of an unknown writer whose death is reported in its first instalment. The titular author takes lodgings in the house of a Mrs Stubbs, who takes the gentleman’s repeated assertions of the significant sums of money he carries around in his portfolio as a sign that he is a man of means, only to find out upon his death that he was insolvent and these papers were not banknotes, but manuscripts from which he hoped to secure future income. Succeeding where the author failed, on his death Mrs Stubbs takes the advice of a curate to send these unpublished papers to ‘”Messsrs Robinson, for publication in the “Lady’s Magazine”–not doubting that they would consent to pay a reasonable sum for the copyright’. The Robinsons acquiesce and the author’s funeral expenses are covered as consequence (LM 35 [June 1814]: 251).

The circumstances of the publication of ‘The Author’s Portfolio’ are likely an elaborate fiction. Nonetheless, it would seem odd to signal the magazine’s generosity in paying the copyright for works if this was something the magazine was not, at least on occasion, willing and able to do. This mention in the ‘Author’s Portfolio’, even with other evidence that I am piecing together from the magazine, is, sad to say, insufficient to suggest a sea change in attitudes to the payment of authors as the Lady’s Magazine moved into the nineteenth century. But coupled with what we know of the dire financial circumstances of some of its authors, it seems clear that at least some of the magazine’s non-staff writers were being paid in the 1810s, if not before.

More interesting still, perhaps, is the magazine’s increasing awareness in this decade that it had a moral and financial obligation to the men and women who provided its original content. In July 1814, for example, the magazine devoted its correspondents column to the plight of Elizabeth Yeames ‘to whose pen the Lady’s Magazine has, in time past, been indebted for various contributions’. At this time, Yeames who wrote for the magazine from the early 1800s through the 1810s (latterly under her married name of Mrs Robert Clabon) found herself ‘reduced to the painful necessity of soliciting a public subscription for her own relief, and that of her widowed mother and numerous family’, which included her widowed mother, her sister Catherine (another of the magazine’s contributors), a disabled brother and three other siblings. The magazine explained that Yeames’s father, Peter, master of ‘his Majesty’s packet, Earl of Leicester’ had, in 1803, the year she had first started writing for the magazine, fallen victim to ‘the tyrannous injustice of Bonaparte’ and been taken prisoner of war and died while being transported (no page.). The Robinson’s publishing house in Paternoster Row was one of three locations where subscriptions for Yeames were received.

LM XLV (July 1814): p. 320. Image © Adam Matthew Digital / British Library. Not to be reproduced without permission

Now of course, had writing proved a more viable means of support, perhaps Yeames, like Pilkington (and numerous other writers of this period) might not have had recourse to charity. And I have no concrete evidence that the magazine paid Yeames for any of her contributions to it, although I suspect they at least latterly did. But what I find interesting in this transitional decade in the magazine’s history (the 1810s) is the editors increasing readiness to acknowledge the injustice and untenability of not financially supporting its writers.

Recognising such obligations undoubtedly presented problems for The Lady’s Magazine. It saw itself as mass media; it sought to keep its purchase price low to reach as many readers as possible; and given that it had a seemingly endless supply of people willing to write for nothing why should it pay anyone at all? But the magazine had to move with the times. And as part of its constant efforts to position itself strongly within an increasingly professionalised periodical marketplace, it had to reassess the way that it valued the authorial labours of its contributors.

That nearly two hundred years after the Lady’s Magazine started to talk more openly with its readers about payment for copy and to reflect publicly on its pecuniary and moral obligations to its writers similar debates about the value of authorial labour have resurfaced so loudly should give us pause for thought. New media might have a lot to learn from the new media of old.

Notes

[1] Jennie Batchelor, ‘”Connections which are of service . . . in a more advanced age”: The Lady’s Magazine, Community, and Women’s Literary Histories’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature  30 (2011): 245-267.

[2]  Some of Mary Pilkington’s letters to Vernor and Hood have been preserved in volume 3 of ‘Original Letters, Collected by William Upcott of the London Institution. Distinguished Women’, 4 vols. British Library. Add, Ms 78688.

[3] Archives of the Royal Literary Fund: 1790-1918, 145 reels (London: World Microfilms Publications, 1981-4), reel 7, case 256.

Dr Jennie Batchelor

School of English

University of Kent.

In the past few weeks, the social media pages of academics have been buzzing with commentary on the ‘CV of Failures’ that was published online by Princeton professor Johannes Haushofer. Prof. Haushofer decided to be open about his failed applications for jobs and scholarships and his rejected journal submissions to show the world that even tenured staff at Ivy League institutions have to deal with disappointments, and to encourage junior colleagues who might wrongly think that they are somehow deficient as academics because of their own. Some commentators have dismissed this as a ‘humblebrag’, but I am too appreciative of Prof. Haushofer’s candour, and too impatient with internet neologisms, to be of their opinion. In fact, I have decided to follow suit, and to write a blog post about a recent failure of my own: the wrong tree I have been barking up in the mistaken assumption that it held the identity of Lady’s Magazine contributor ‘J. Hodson’.

    Jennie, Jenny and I have in past posts told you enthusiastically about our discoveries on the largely anonymous and pseudonymous contents of the magazine. In the last two months alone, for instance, we have blogged about Catherine Cuthbertson and Radagunda Roberts (about the latter even twice). Most of you probably had not heard of these brilliant women before, and that is precisely why we were so interested in them. It is very satisfying to find out more about these long-forgotten authors whose periodical contributions had more contemporaneous readers than any canonized novel. Finding out the smallest detail often takes a lot of work. Despite of the rarity of resources on eighteenth-century authors in general, and the especially scanty paper trails left by periodical writers, it can take a while to rule out all possible leads that you need to verify in order to close in on the true, or at least the most probable story. Often we do not manage to do so at all. Only last week I lost a few days because I thought that I was on the brink of an exciting discovery concerning a reader-contributor who has been puzzling us for some time.

    We can gather a few basic facts about ‘J. Hodson’ from the magazine. This contributor is identified as male in an editorial footnote and genders himself male as well, he is active (at least under this signature) in the magazine from September 1781 to February 1784, and the by-lines to a few of his items tell us that he would have been ‘14 years old’ in September 1781. As I have discussed before, juvenile authors regularly contributed to the Lady’s Magazine, and their age is then often specifically stated to draw attention to the precocity of their writing. Hodson’s contributions are certainly impressive for a teenager. He starts off quite blandly with two appropriated items, being a poem allegedly ‘translated from Ossian’ (September 1781) which in fact appears to be only a slight paraphrase of the ‘original’ by Macpherson, and a series of ‘Sayings and sentiments of wise men’ of Greek and Roman Antiquity (September to January 1782) which did not come straight from these fonts of wisdom themselves but were all gleaned from The Spectator (continuously in print in collected editions) without acknowledgement. Young master Hodson however finds his own voice the year after, submitting a generic but prosodically competent pastoral poem in March 1782, and in May 1782 a gallant poetic defence of the fair sex against a misogynistic letter writer.

LM XIV (Dec 1783): p. 658. Image © Adam Matthew Digital / Birmingham Central Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

    From June 1783 to February 1784 he delivers his most impressive feat, an essay series entitled ‘The Critic’ which consists of quibbling but erudite discussions of contentious passages in translations of classical literature. This is one of several cases wherein reader-contributors in the late eighteenth century continue the older tradition of essay periodicals (such as the aforementioned Spectator) as serial features in magazines like the Lady’s. Hodson’s ‘Critic’ may have been inspired by earlier reviews of the translations in question, or may have otherwise followed on views first suggested by others, but they do appear to be largely original. An exasperated note with the December 1783 instalment shows that the editors, for one, either found them too ambitious for the Lady’s Magazine, or wished to say in a polite way that they considered Hodson’s essays too much like the homework of a schoolboy conning his Latin vocab.

LM XIII (June 1782): p. 320. Image © Adam Matthew Digital / Birmingham Central Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

    Nevertheless, in the June 1782 number Hodson is honoured with ‘A Card’ from overbearing regular contributor ‘J. L-g’ (John Legg), a strange polymath who often gave himself airs about his importance in the magazine. Legg predicts a bright future for Hodson, and indeed it is not hard to understand why he would have thought so. Other young hopefuls like Thomas Chatterton and George Crabbe had contributed before, and probably many other authors of later renown who we have since again forgotten about. So who knew what bright career Hodson went on to have after his promising start in the welcoming, democratic forum that was the Lady’s Magazine?

    Unfortunately, the trail went cold instantly. ‘J. Hodson’ stops contributing to the Lady’s Magazine, or at least under that signature, in 1874, and at no point before or after seems to have contributed to other periodicals with recognizable signatures (which includes the variants “Hodgson” and ‘Hudson’ that appear in the Lady’s Magazine as well). Our usual searches through records of births and deaths did not yield much because there were so many young men named Hodson/Hudson/Hodgson around with the initial “J”, and it is always best not to rule out the possibility that the signature referred to a so-called “hypocorism” (calling name or pet name) or a middle name that the author could have preferred to go by. His stipulated age allowed us to narrow it down somewhat, so that we could query all men named Hodson/Hudson/Hodgson born in 1781 minus 14, or 1767 (allowing a year of variability on the date).

   This was when it happened: information on a certain Rev. Septimus Hodson in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography implied that this person was born around the same time as our Hodson, in 1768. With some rounding off, both would have been 14 in September 1781, and “J.” could well have been an initial standing for the Rev.’s middle name. Could they be one and the same person? Further research made me eager that they would be. The Rev. Hodson turned out to have been a minor public figure in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. He was an author as well, publishing amongst others a few books of sermons and some favourably noticed socio-economic pamphlets. In the early nineteenth century he married the Romantic poet Margaret Holden, who was friendly with Joanna Baillie and Robert Southey, and there is no reason why the Rev. as a boy would not himself have tested his pen by writing for the Lady’s Magazine on matters literary. Interestingly, he was also a controversial figure, as is demonstrated by William West’s memoir of early-nineteenth-century literary London ‘Annals of authors, artists, books and booksellers’[1], which states that his reputation had suffered from an accusation of plagiarism levelled at his first books of sermons.

from: Septimus Hodson (Ed.), Psalms & Hymns selected for Congregational Use (1801), p. viii

   If only that were all. The fantastic blog All Things Georgian by the historians Joanne Major and Sarah Murden recently featured a post on him, that revealed that the Rev. Hodson during the had been involved in a scandal after allegations that he had “seduced” a thirteen-year-old ward of the Lambeth orphanage, where he then officiated as chaplain. This is a big discovery as the ODNB does not mention these events, merely stating that

[t]he claim […] that he was forced to give up his preferments and flee to America ‘in consequence of a discovery particularly disgraceful’, seems to be unsubstantiated, although in 1789 he did publish A Refutation of the Charges of Plagiarism Brought Against the Rev. Septimus Hodson.[2]

   Although I was able to track down a few documents relevant to Septimus, none revealed any helpful middle names starting with ‘J’. Confusingly, the year of birth that the ODNB has for him, 1768, is probably wrong to begin with, as I only discovered a couple of days into my research. Major and Murden hold instead that he was born in 1763, which I believe is right, as this year is indicated in a record of his birth that is difficult to track down because its entry in online databases transcribes Septimus’s name wrongly as ‘Sephinus’ (which – wonderfully – is also a name). I suspect that the ODNB biographer based her findings on the Cambridge alumni register where Caius College alumnus Rev. Hodson is entered as being born in 1768; likely too a wrong transcription, based on the understandable error of mistaking a foxed ‘3’ for an ‘8’. It is a scary thought, but you cannot always rely on historical documents, and errors tend to perpetuate themselves.

    So, neither the names, nor the ages of these men were in agreement. How I wish that they had been, as identifying ‘J. Hodson’ with the Rev. Septimus would have allowed me to tell a sensational story. But hey-ho: though disappointing, this is not the end. There are other J. Hodsons publishing in the late eighteenth century. One possible candidate is Dr James Hodson M.D., author of theological tracts and the men’s medical guide Nature’s Assistant to the Restoration of Health (1789) which contains valuable hints on ‘a destructive habit of a private nature’. This is an amusing possibility, and this Dr Hodson would surely be a less grim connection for the magazine than the Rev. Still, I have found no substantial evidence to confirm or refute the possibility that this author and the Lady’s Magazine’s ‘Critic’ would be one and the same person either.

    As Prof. Haushofer wanted to demonstrate with his inverted CV: the important thing is not to lose heart. If you have any suggestions on where I might look next, I would be very grateful for them, and productive leads will of course be cited in our annotated index!

Dr Koenraad Claes

School of English, University of Kent

[1] William West, ‘Annals of authors, artists, books and booksellers. Letter XIV: Thomas Cadell, the Rev. Septimus Hodson, &c.’, The Aldine Magazine of Biography, Bibliography, Criticism, and the Arts Vol. 1, 1839.

[2] Kathryn Sutherland, ‘Holford , Margaret (bap. 1778, d. 1852)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004. [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/13450, accessed 4 May 2016]

We often discuss the variety of items, subjects, themes and genres that appear in the Lady’s Magazine. Each seemingly transparent topic can be found within an array of genres; for example, the topic of ‘fashion’ appears in items ranging from the moral essay and advice column to the opinion piece, historical essay and fashion report. Deciding which genre an item belongs to in the magazine is a task at times difficult to negotiate. This is in part because genres overlap and are by nature flexible; designating a particular item either a sentimental tale or a moral tale is thus not always simple or clear. Assigning works a genre requires that one privilege a particular genre over another, making decisions at once about authorial intent, editorial preference and reader perceptions.

Yet once the difficult decisions are made, how can we disseminate a database with tens of thousands of items, belonging to dozens of distinct genres, into readily comprehensible information? The pie chart is a simple yet effective research tool that allows the different genres in the Lady’s Magazine to be visualized. In 1770-71, for example, the magazine was largely made up of anecdotes, essays and translations, followed by enigmas and conduct items.

In comparison, in this sample chart for 1771, it is easy to see that the majority of the magazine’s items are now essays or moral essays, followed by enigmas, translations and reviews. And of course, because enigmas are short in comparison to the lengthier essays, translations and reviews, it is these latter three genres that made up the bulk of the magazine’s content in its second year of publication. Anecdotes in 1771 make up only 5% of the magazine, in comparison to 17% the previous year. 

One of the key aspects of my research on the project is not only to analyse the items in order to assign them genres, but also to examine how the magazine’s generic composition evolves over the five decades of shifting literary tastes and political, social and cultural revolutions of its first series. Although this is a difficult task to negotiate, by breaking down the magazine’s generic makeup for each year in a pie chart, one can readily see what types of items could be found in the magazine. From here, it is easier to extrapolate the larger shifts in genres over the magazine’s print run. The dramatic decrease in the number of anecdotes from the first to second year, for example, could be explained by the magazine’s increasing readership and correspondingly larger number of contributors of original essays and fiction that meant the editors could rely less on extracted and popular anecdotes as material.

The most striking aspect of the pie chart created for 1790 is, I believe, the greater number of distinct genres in the magazine. Twenty years into its publication, the periodical was clearly comfortable with its position in the literary marketplace and the editors and publishers felt secure enough to  print an even greater variety of genres and items. Also interesting is that, in the key historical moment, the number of translations (usually from the French) has dwindled to only 1% of the magazine.

This is only a snapshot of one aspect of our research on the magazine’s composition and genres, but it allows the scope and quantity of data on genres to be readily perceived and is useful in analyzing the evolutions and in disseminating the results to other researchers and the public.

Jenny DiPlacidi

University of Kent

In the 1830s, in India, an anonymously published book entitled Santa Sebastiano was sold at auction. It had two eager bidders who did not want to give up the purchase. One was Emily Eden, poet, novelist, bibliophile and sister of Lord Auckland. The other was historian, politician and equally avid reader Thomas Babington Macaulay. The episode is described with predictable bemusement by Macaulay’s nephew Sir George Trevelyan in his Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay (1875-76), who notes that the auction winner, Macaulay, later annotated the last page of his copy of Santa Sebastiano (1806) with ‘an elaborate computation of the number of fainting-fits that occur’ in it. (Julia de Clifford alone faints 11 times, but who, except Macaulay, is counting?) [1]

While Trevelyan expressed admiration that Macaulay thought he could probably ‘rewrite “Sir Charles Grandison” from memory,’ his uncle’s passion for ‘silly, though readable’ books, like those of Mrs Meeke or Mrs Kitty Cuthbertson, who authored Santa Sebastiano, as well as The Romance of the Pyrenees (1803), The Forest of Montalbano (1810), Adelaide; or, the Countercharm (1813), and (although Trevelyan did not know this) Rosabella;  or, A Mother’s Marriage (1817), seemed inexplicable. Yet Trevelyan’s view is unrepresentative. Kitty or Catherine Cuthbertson was a widely read and highly popular Gothic novelist in the Radcliffean tradition. The Romance of the Pyrenees was translated into French and German (the anonymous French translation was widely presumed to be of a Radcliffe novel on the continent). American editions of her novels followed and extracts from them appeared in US periodicals well into the nineteenth century [2].

A perhaps still more telling indication of Cuthbertson’s enduring popular appeal can be found in a review of Lord Brabourne’s edition of Jane Austen’s letters that appeared in The Times on 6 February 1885. The review broadly welcomes Brabourne’s edition, but laments the lack of annotation, especially in correspondence in which Austen alludes to other writers. It was ‘absurd to assume’, the reviewer declared, ‘that one reader in a thousand knows any particulars about “Alphonsine” and the “Female Quixote”, and is aware that Madame de Genlis is the author of the former and Mrs. Charlotte Lennox of the latter’. The refrain is repeated a few lines later when the reviewer turns to a now well-known letter in which Austen expresses incredulity that Mrs. (i.e. Jane) West was so very prolific when so domestically encumbered. West, the reviewer proclaims, is ‘but a name to the reader of this work’. Brabourne should have recognised this fact and provided relevant editorial information that the reviewer is, instead, forced to disclose. West, he interestingly continues, was ‘a voluminous writer in the last century who resembled in many things the Mrs. Meeke and Mrs. Kitty Cuthbertson’ [3].

LM, 35 (Feb 1804): 87. Image © Adam Matthew Digital / British Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

What does this tell us? Well, for thing it suggests that if West and her works were obscure in 1885, Cuthbertson and her Gothics evidently were not. This is despite the fact that Cuthbertson never signed her name to any of her novels. And there is considerable evidence that knowledge of her fiction, although increasingly clouded in a biographical fog, persisted for at least several decades afterwards the Times review. Cuthbertson’s novels generated sufficient interest, for example, to spark conversations in Notes and Queries the 1910s and 1920s (some prompted by speculations that her work was by Radcliffe or Clara Reeve). More recent scholarship on the Gothic by Rictor Norton and others has sought to establish Cuthbertson’s place as one of the key figures of the genre in the early nineteenth century, as she surely was [4].
It was a career that began in earnest in the pages of the Lady’s Magazine. (Some sources suggest that she wrote an earlier 1793 unpublished play staged on 25 February at Drury Lane entitled Anna but the attribution is not secure.) Her first novel, The Romance of the Pyrenees was serialised in the magazine from February 1804, having been recently published in volume form by Robinson (the magazine’s publisher) in 1803. However, just weeks after the title first went on sale, and after only a few copies of it had been sold, the bulk of the print run of the Romance was devastated by a warehouse fire at the establishment of the magazine’s then printer, Samuel Hamilton.

LM, 35 (Feb 1804): 87. Image © Adam Matthew Digital / British Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Attempting to cut their losses on the damaged run, Robinson decided to serialise Cuthbertson’s novel along with their recently printed edition of Royall Tyler’s American 1797 The Algerine Captive in the Lady’s Magazine with occasional engravings. As a consequence, The Romance of the Pyrenees reached a new and possibly much wider readership than it would have done had it been published in volume form alone. It became the longest running serial magazine fiction in the long eighteenth century apart from a serialisation of Pamela [6]. In subsequent years, the magazine would publish extracts of other of her novels (Santa Sebastino in 1807; Adelaide in 1814), all of which Robinson published, and the snippets from which seemed to serve as puffs to promote wider circulation of her work.

Cuthbertson’s fiction, with its complex plots and naturalised supernatural endings (my favourite involves a parrot), extends over many volumes and merits a blog post in its own right. Since reading it, however, one of my major preoccupations has been trying to find out more about its author. Although Cuthbertson was evidently popular and, at some point in the nineteenth century, revealed to be the author of her anonymous novels, her biography remains a series of speculations and lacunae.

Biographical accounts suggest that Cuthbertson was born before 1780 and that she may have been Scottish or, as a likely army daughter, been born overseas. Some sources also make reference to a possible connection to a Captain Bennet Cuthbertson, who published an important work on military tactics. Armed with this scant information I was determined to find out more and with a little effort, and a few hours lost in the archives, I did.

The first and most signifiant clue I found was a Notes and Queries article by a relative of the Cuthbertsons, William Ball Wright, of Osbaldwick Vicarage, York, who posted in June 1911 a response to a query about the authorship of the Romance of the Pyrenees. The article notes that Kitty Cuthbertson was the author of the work and that Kitty’s father was a Captain Bennet Cuthbertson, of Northamptonshire, of the 5th Regiment, who retired to Dublin in 1772. The first two dots were, therefore, joined. A third came when I looked into Bennet Cuthbertson a little more. Cuthbertson‘s System for the Complete Interior Management and Oeconomy of Battalion of Infantry was published in 1768 in Dublin. Likely before the publication of this work, Cutherbertson married a Catherine Bell (daughter of a Dr Thomas Bell of Dublin). Ball Wright, a descendant of Catherine Bell’s sister, Elinor, goes on to explain that the couple had several children, including  Kitty (or Catherine), Olivia, Julia and Anne. (It is possible that they also had a son, Robert, although this is not mentioned in the article.) While Anne stayed in Ireland,  the other Cuthbertson sisters moved to London at some unknown point before 1803 to ‘wr[i]te romances’. [5]

The Dublin connection, then, is what has thwarted efforts to find Catherine Cuthbertson before now. The Irish records for this period are patchy to say the least. After many hours of searching, I can find no birth or baptism notice for Catherine in the extant Irish records. But I can now prove that she was born in Ireland.

Hoping that a life of penning Gothic fiction promoted good health, long-livedness and a disinclination to marry, I went in search of the Cuthbertson sisters in the 1841 and 1851 census returns. An Olivia Cuthbertson (born in Dublin) showed in the 1851 census as living, aged 85, in Ealing, Middlesex. I was disappointed that I couldn’t find a Catherine or Julia. But the Ealing connection seemed worth pursuing. What if this Olivia was Catherine’s sister? And what if the sisters had lived together or very near one another?

And then I found them.

In the 1841 census, Catherine Cuthbertson, born in Ireland, was living with a Juliana Cuthbertson. Both are listed (perhaps improbably) as 70 years old at the time (although it is theoretically possible, if unlikely, that the sisters were twins). Their source of income was the Irish Civil List, details of which subsequently confirmed for me that the sisters, along with Olivia, were living off their deceased father’s pension. I then went in search of Catherine’s death notice (occurring some time between 1841 and 1851, since she was not in the later census) and soon found a burial record indicating that she was buried in Ealing on the 2 June 1842 aged a more likely 67, dating her birth to around 1775.

As attribution finds go (and we have had lots so far in the Lady’s Magazine project), this may not seem like headline news. Cuthbertson was a magazine contributor by accident not design. And although her work in the magazine and outside it was published anonymously, her authorship has long since been known and the attributions of her novels secured. Putting a (rough) birth and (more secure) death date on Cuthbertson’s life as I have been able to do might seem more like housekeeping than significant research.

But I can’t help but feel that this is signficant. The Dublin connection – the fact of which made Cuthbertson’s biography so remote to us for so long – is surely of particular interest. Cuthbertson deserves the place in the history of the Gothic she is beginning to secure, but she also, I think, warrants a place in the history of Irish (women’s) writing. I hope some of my colleagues in Irish Studies will pick up this gauntlet and run with it, because Cuthbertson, quite frankly, deserves our attention.

Like so many of the writers published in the Lady’s Magazine Cuthbertson’s work was influential. She was more than a Radcliffe imitator. Her work, as I hope to show in a later blog post, had formal and thematic influence and, as I have indicated, had extraordinary geographical as well as temporal reach. Her books sat alongside Austen’s in Queen Charlotte’s library, and as we have seen, it was taken for granted that readers in the 1880s would have heard of her, as they would have heard of Jane Austen, in contrast to the by then considered obscure Jane West, Charlotte Lennox and Madame de Genlis. Into the early twentieth century, people cared enough about her novels to enquire into her author’s life and work.

Cuthbertson, like so many Lady’s Magazine authors, is an important figure in literary history, not just because of what she wrote, how many people fainted in her novels’ pages, or because people like Macaulay read her. She is important because her persistent popularity and claim on readers’ imaginations makes clear that so many of the things we once thought we knew about literary history – about who was read and remembered – don’t always chime with reality.

Dr Jennie Batchelor

School of English

University of Kent

Notes

[1] Sir George Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1877), vol 1, pp. 129-130.

[2] A notice for an 1812 American edition of The Forest of Montalbano appeared in the National Intelligencer for 24 March 1812, for instance. The Arkansas Gazette published a long extract of Romance of the Pyrenees on March 17 1878.

[3] ‘Jane Austen’, The Times (6 Feb 1885): 3.

[4] See, for instance, Rictor Norton ‘Gothic Readings’ <accessed 14.4.16>.

[5] William Ball Wright, ‘Note’, Notes and Queries, 77 (17 June 1911): 475.

[6] Robert D. Mayo, The English Novel in the Magazines, 1740–1815 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 232–33

It is a truth universally acknowledged – by epidemiologists, at least – that the ‘first case’ is never the first case. For example, the Duke of Richmond’s illness and death in 1819 is often said to be the first recorded case of rabies in Canada [1]. However, not only is the nature of the Duke’s illness contested, but three much more probable cases of human rabies have come to light: Charles Gigueres (dog bite, 1814), Jean Maheu (dog bite, 1816) and Madame Bruneau (cat bite, 1817) [2]. All of these reports predate the Duke of Richmond’s death.

LM, 46 (April 1815): 194. Image © Adam Matthew Digital / Birmingham Central Library. Not to be reproduced without permission

The scientific veterinary literature infers from data like these that rabies was present in Canada in pets and perhaps in wild life from at least the late eighteenth century, but the reference in the Lady’s Magazine (LM, 44 [April 1813]: 194) to the dogs running mad in Newfoundland is the first direct reference to rabies in animals in Canada of which I am aware.

The commentator reports that, ‘This is said to be the first case of hydrophobia among the canine race in that cold climate. The consequences are very serious, as dogs are the beasts of burden in that country’. It is tangentially interesting to note that the poet, Byron, owned a Newfoundland breed dog, which contracted rabies and died in 1808 at Newstead Abbey in England. The dog, ‘Boatswain’ was commemorated in a famous epitaph, the last lines of which are

BOATSWAIN, a DOG,
who was born in Newfoundland May 1803,
and died at Newstead Nov.r 18th, 1808.

Assuming that Boatswain was not a recent acquisition, he contracted rabies in Britain not Canada (the incubation period of canine rabies is usually less than 6 months; range, 10 days to about 1 year). Rabies was endemic in Britain around that time. Byron is said to have nursed Boatswain without any fear of contracting the disease himself. This may not be as fantastical as it sounds; canine rabies exists in two forms: furious and dumb. In dumb rabies the dog becomes docile and may be paralyzed. An almost contemporary (1815 case date) account of dumb rabies in a Newfoundland breed dog can be found in The Veterinarian [3]. Byron aside, by reporting the outbreak of rabies in Newfoundland in 1815, the Lady’s Magazine scored an important scientific first.

Rabies is caused by a bullet shaped Lyssavirus. Viral ecotypes emerge which become adapted to and persist in particular mammalian hosts. Nevertheless, the virus can spill over into other susceptible species. For example, canine rabies causes approximately 59,000 human deaths annually [4]. A stomach-churningly accurate description of human rabies can be found in an 1807 issue of the Lady’s Magazine (LM, 38 [March 1807]: 152–56). The average incubation period of rabies in humans is typically between one to three months (range 10 days to a year, rarely longer). Once symptoms appear, the disease in people is almost always fatal. Only 11 survivors of clinical rabies are known [5] and more than two thirds of these have lasting neurological damage.

LM, 38 (Mar 1807): 152. Image © Adam Matthew Digital / British Library. Not to be reproduced without permission

The author (Dr Motherby) of the article on ‘Hydrophobia’ extracted by the Lady’s Magazine recommended several prophylactic measures: these included immediate cautery of the bite wound, the application of a caustic substance to the wound or, preferably, excision (or amputation) of the wound site (LM, 38 [March 1807]: 156). Although Motherby offers no evidentiary basis for his recommendations they might well have worked. We must be careful here because not everyone bitten by an infectious animals contracts rabies (even in the absence of immediate action) and the risk of infection varies with the location of the bite, but well-regarded randomized controlled clinical trials from the 1960s demonstrated that immediate and thorough cleansing of the bite with soap (and some other substances) markedly reduces the risk of infection compared with controls [6], and thorough cleaning the wound is still the first of several steps in rabies prophylaxis. Dr Motherby goes on to state, that once symptoms appear, 2 grains (about 130 mg) of opium administered every 3 hours can relieve the symptoms but do ‘no more’. Other authors writing in the Lady’s Magazine were much more optimistic.

In 1816, Dr Vogelsang (of Goerlitz, in Saxony) claimed to have cured Ms Joanna Rosina of Hydrophobia by bloodletting (LM, 17 [Jan 1816]: 29). Ms Rozina ‘aged 19, had been bitten by a yard dog in the foot … Four days afterwards she found herself unwell’. Dr Vogelsang, ‘opened a vein’ and took, in all, about 38 ounces (over a litre) of blood. Ms Rozina, not surprisingly, ‘fainted away’ but subsequently was ‘quite recovered’. There are at two things that tell us this was not rabies: first, the patient recovered, and, second, the incubation period of 4 days was less than half the accepted minimum incubation period for rabies in humans (Ms Rozina was also bitten in the foot which tends to result in longer incubation periods for human rabies). According to the US Centers for Disease Control, 15 to 20% of dog bite wounds become infected and at least 40 different pathogens have isolated from dog bite wounds. If the cause of Ms Rozina’s illness was an infected bite wound (plausible, but by no means certain) there are plenty of pathogens other than the rabies virus that are better candidates.

Almost 25 years earlier than the article describing Dr Vogelsang’s apparent success, an anonymous contributor to the Lady’s Magazine (LM, 33 [June 1792]: 300) extolled the virtues of ‘Aurum palpabile’. He or she writes, ‘There are few political disorders in which it is not happily administered, as it generally performs a cure. The rabies patriotica (or patriotic fury) has often yielded to this remedy’. The contributor goes on to claim that it works even in very advanced cases of human rabies. Aurum potabile (sic) was a centuries old universal remedy: there is a laboured, jokey reference to it in Ben Johnson’s Volpone (‘Tis aurum palpabile, if it is not potabile’) and earlier mentions abound. For those interested in such things here is an eighteenth century recipe for drinkable gold (all metric measure are approximate).

Dissolve in a moderate heat half a dram (0.88 g) of fine gold, in two ounces (57 ml) of aqua regia (a mixture of nitric acid and hydrochloric acid), and add to the solution an ounce (28 ml) of the essential oil of rosemary (an infusion of rosemary in in olive oil), shake them together, and set them to rest; after which separate the oil by decantation, and add to it four ounces or five (156ml) of rectified spirit of wine (repeatedly distilled wine), digest them for a month and it will become purplish. [7]

An online search revealed that there are no randomized controlled clinical trials that demonstrate the efficacy (and more importantly, the safety) of this concoction for rabies.

LM, 44 (Dec 1813: 586. Image © Adam Matthew Digital / BritishLibrary. Not to be reproduced without permission

Rabies was endemic in Britain throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries [8]. It was present in both dogs and cats. The Lady’s Magazine (LM, 14 [December 1813]: 586) reports that a servant girl in Camberwell died ‘in consequence of having been bitten by a cat, which she was chastising for some act of misconduct’. The servant died with symptoms ‘exactly similar to that perceptible in cases of the hydrophobia’.

The elimination of rabies from Britain began with various legislative acts in the second half of the nineteenth century that promoted and enforced the shooting and muzzling of stray dogs and instituted draconian quarantine laws. These laws were vigorously opposed by humane societies, but rabies disappeared (temporarily) from Britain in the first few years of the twentieth century. We do not know why. Such strategies have never worked as effectively anywhere else. It is speculated that the legislation succeeded in its aim because rabies in Britain never became endemic in foxes in Britain – fox densities were just too small to maintain the virus. It is certainly true that fox hunting in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries resulted in such a large turnover of indigenous populations that foxes had to be imported from France to bolster the ‘thinned’ populations [9]. It would be interesting to know if contributors to the Lady’s Magazine had anything to say about foxes.

Gary Smith

Professor of Population Biology and Epidemiology

University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine

Notes

[1] H. Tabel, A. H. Corner, W. A. Webste, C. A. Casey, ‘History and epizootiology of rabies in Canada’, Canadian Veterinary Journal 15 (1974): 271-281

[2] J. D. Blaisdell, ‘Rabies and the Governor-General of Canada’, Veterinary History 7 (1992): 19-26.

[3] Mr Youatt, (1837) ‘Animal Pathology. Rabies in the dog – symptoms continued’, The Veterinarian 10 (1837): 446-47.

[4] K. Hampson, L. Coudeville, T. Lembo, M. Sambo, A. Kieffer, M. Attlan, et al. (2015) Estimating the Global Burden of Endemic Canine Rabies. PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases 9: 4 (2015) <e0003709. doi:10.1371/journal.pntd.0003709>

[5] M. Netravathia, V. Udanib, R. S. Manic, V. Gadada et al. ‘Unique clinical and imaging findings in a first ever documented PCR positive rabies survival patient: A case report’, Journal of Clinical Virology 70 (2015): 83–88.

[6] D. J. Dean, G. M. Baer, and W. R. Thompson, ‘Studies on the Local Treatment of Rabies-infected Wounds’, Bulletin of the World Health Organization 28 (1963): 477–486.

[7] G. Motherby, A New Medical Dictionary (London: J. Johnson, 1775).

[8] P. Muir and A. Roome, ‘Indigenous rabies in the UK’, The Lancet 365 (2005): 2175

[9] A. N. May, The Fox-Hunting Controversy, 1781-2004: Class and Cruelty (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016).

Beautiful Dundee, by B4bees on Flickr (click pic for link)

We are approaching that time of the year again. Every year from spring to late summer, Conference Season brings opportunities to learn about the research of colleagues working all over the world, to see old friends, and to meet new ones. This festive period lasts longer than Christmas time, and in many ways, it’s better. You get to talk freely about your obsessions without relatives and friends diverting the conversation to less esoteric subjects, and who doesn’t like a good wine reception? At the bottom of this post you will find a calendar of conferences and workshops which will be attended by Team Lady’s Mag in the near future, but in this blog post I will zoom in on an early event that I have been particularly looking forward to: this week’s Authorship & Appropriation conference at the University of Dundee (8 – 9 April 2016).

   As we have been telling you from our first post, gaining insight into the authorship of the Lady’s Magazine is a major goal of our research project. We soon found that the myriads of reader-contributors who supplied the bulk of the magazine’s contents did not just submit original productions, but also acted as intermediates who disseminated the work of others. Often, their submissions elaborated on or were downright identical to previously published texts by other authors; in other words, they engaged in appropriation. We were therefore very excited when we read in the CFP for this event that papers were invited on the “theory and practice of the adaptation and appropriation of literary texts”. Jenny DiPlacidi and I proposed a panel on ‘Appropriation as Cultural Transmission in the Eighteenth-Century Periodical Press’, which was lucky enough to be accepted. Ours is session 3C on Friday afternoon, in case you’re around and would like to join us! Jenny and I will of course be talking about the Lady’s Magazine (when are we not?), but this isn’t strictly a Lady’s Mag panel. Jennie Batchelor will unfortunately not be able to join us, but we were very happy to find a third speaker in our Kent colleague Dr Kim Simpson (@AmatoryAnon). Kim works on anonymity and appropriation in early eighteenth-century prose fiction, and has recently been exploring the afterlives of these narratives in mid-century periodicals. We expect that the three of us together will be able to do justice to the central role in literary history of appropriations from and in eighteenth-century periodicals.

   Most readers of this blog will know that periodicals were the primary site of literary publication throughout the eighteenth century. The number of authors who made it to the stage of getting their own books published was dwarfed by the myriads of those contributing essays, verse and short or serial fiction to the essay papers, newspapers and magazines of their day. Encouraged by a more lenient attitude towards intellectual property, and a smaller risk of prosecution due to less stringent copyright laws, magazines in particular liberally repurposed material from other sources such as books and competing periodical titles. This practice was often justified at the time as a form of cultural transmission: in the spirit of the Statute of Anne that limited the ownership of copyright to a limited period so that texts could later circulate freely, periodicals would have disseminated meritorious literary productions so a wider readership could benefit. In this period the distinction between repurposed content and original copy is problematic, because appropriated texts were often subtly adapted and subsequently with no qualms claimed by the author-appropriators as their own. The three papers in this panel discuss instances of how this practice of appropriation in British eighteenth-century periodicals contributed to the development and popularization of certain literary modes, themes and genres, either reading long-forgotten original publications from periodicals as possible models for now canonized texts, or, conversely, demonstrating how the legacy of famous texts was kept alive in periodicals through unacknowledged adaptations written by minor authors.

Jenny DiPlacidi: ‘“Full of pretty stories”: Literary Afterlives in the First Series of the Lady’s Magazine’

LM, V (Aug 1774): 182. Image © Adam Matthew Digital / Birmingham Central Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

This paper examines appearance and reuse of Gothic conventions in the fiction of the Lady’s Magazine: or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex (1770-1832), analysing the fiction’s engagement with earlier texts and assessing its influences on later and better-known works. It argues against the critical tradition that has long disparaged the periodical’s tales as derivative works produced by amateurs to suggest that its fiction was a significant cultural form that reworked classical and contemporary tales to establish and shape eighteenth-century popular literature. For example, the short tale ‘Alphonso; or, The Cruel Husband’ (1774) reframes Boccaccio’s story of Ghismonda and Guiscardo, popularized by Hogarth’s 1759 painting, and, arguably, participates in a cultural practice in which classical works were marketed and consumed via translations later reformulated within the magazine. The History of an Humble Friend (1774-76), an anonymous serial novella, shares marked similarities to Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778) and Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797). The serial deploys standard eighteenth-century Gothic tropes such as the reclamation of the missing mother early on in traditional chronologies of the genre. Likewise, its presentation of the sentimental orphan prefigures later representations in novels by Burney and Charlotte Smith. Stories like this, The Governess (1778-80) and The History of Lady Bradley (1776-78) are preoccupied with issues such as women’s education, laws, marriage and inheritance and the conflict between duty to family and self-autonomy; concerns central to eighteenth-century society that featured prominently – and similarly – in later canonical texts.

Kim Simpson: “Anomalous & Anonymous: Locating Links and Chasing Tales in Amatory Fiction and Beyond”

Aphra Behn, by unknown artist

In 1723, Jane Barker, writing as Galesia in A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies, spoke indignantly and scornfully of Aphra Behn, despite, in the 1726 sequel, The Lining of the Patch Work Screen, borrowing from her short fiction plots for inset narratives. One of these borrowings was from Behn’s ‘The Wand’ring Beauty’ (1698). Although Carol Shiner Wilson, amongst others, have noted this particular reworking, in 1723 the text had undergone another adaptation by the little-known Arthur Blackamore, which was crucial to Barker’s version. Reading these three versions together, this paper traces and analyses the transformations of the original plot. It contends that Blackamore’s rendering develops the disguised amatory heroine, foreshadowing later works that address proto-feminist strategies of dissimulation. Meanwhile, Barker’s self-conscious positioning of Behn’s romance tale alongside the inset narrative ‘The History of Dorinda,’ a reactionary warning about the dangers of quixotic reading practices, prefigures Charlotte Lennox’s  The Female Quixote (1752), as well as some of the concerns articulated by Eliza Haywood in her periodical the Female Spectator (1744-46). This case study explores the complex and contradictory ways in which the generative potential of the original was exploited by subsequent writers. It maps out influence between amatory writers, between early and mid-century writers, and between short fiction and the periodical. But it also makes a claim for the importance of lesser known and anonymous writers in this time period, demonstrating that despite our tendency to place known authors at the centre of study, a fuller picture of the array of understudied texts might demonstrate that they shaped and informed attributed ones as much as the other way around.

Koenraad Claes: “Poetics of appropriation: re-occasioned occasional verse in the Lady’s Magazine”

The Lady’s Magazine (1770-1832) stands out among periodicals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century because of the exceptionally large extent to which it relied on readers’ submissions for its copy. According to the scholarly consensus, the early years of this periodical coincided with the breakthrough of sentimental verse, and much of the poetry submitted by readers does adhere to what Jerome McGann has identified as ‘the poetics of Sensibility’: featuring a strong emphasis on the recording and communication of an individual’s ‘affects’, i.e. emotional responses to specific situations. Most of the poetry submitted by the readers to the magazine belongs to the subgenre of ‘occasional verse’, usually short lyrical poems that were meant to mark a specific event that had impressed the poet. However, research by the Lady’s Magazine Project has shown that most of these poems were not merely influenced by the leading poets of Sensibility of the period, but are undeniably appropriations. These appropriations often are near-verbatim copies of famous or more obscure originals in which only references to the absolute specifics of settings or addressees were altered. This paper will discuss how such loose notions of intellectual property could coexist with the valuation of emotional authenticity that is apparent from the poems themselves and from the reception of other work in this genre, and will identify which specific aspects of appropriated texts were adapted to detach the source text from its original author and publication context.

We would love to meet our readers attending the conference in Dundee, so if you are around, please do come say hello. Alternatively, this spring and early summer you will be able to hear us at the following events.

13 May – University of East Anglia (Norwich) – CHASE workshop “Periodical Studies”

17 May – Cardiff University – Cardiff Romanticism and Eighteenth-Century Seminar: CRECS Annual Conference

7-8 July – Liverpool John Moores University – European Society for Periodical Research (ESPRit): Conf. Periodical Counter Cultures

15 July – Athenaeum Club (London) – Conf. Victorian Periodicals Through Glass

Dr Koenraad Claes

School of English, University of Kent