The moral tales in the Lady’s Magazine form a distinct genre that consists of short, often illustrated, didactic stories intended to convey a lesson or moral to the reader. One might imagine that such a genre communicates a consistent or coherent ideology, but the fictional content of the moral tale varies widely in both instructive message and writing style – even in works by the same author.

The prolific correspondent ‘R—.’ contributed moral tales for well over a decade, penning stories such as ‘Surgi, or the Stoic’ (LM IV [April 1773]: 193), ‘The Unexpected Meeting’ (LM IV [May 1773]: 233) – which takes place in Margate –, ‘Alphonso; or the Cruel Husband’ (LM V [April 1774]: 183), ‘Celadon and Florella; or the Perils of a Tete-a-tete’ (LM V [February 1773]: 65), ‘Penelope, or Matrimonial Constancy’ (LM V [September 1774]: 457) and ‘The Unwary Sleeper’ (LM V [May 1774]: 233). All of these tales have accompanying engravings and ‘R—.’ also contributed essays, opinion pieces, and serial fiction.

Because I would like to spend further time on this topic in future blog posts, I will only discuss two of the tales here. ‘The Unwary Sleeper’ and ‘The Fatal Wreath’ (LM XII [March 1781]: 117). In ‘The Unwary Sleeper’ the female character, Dulcetta, describes herself thusly: ‘My figure gave pleasure, but the readiness with which I imbibed the instructions of my teachers, recommended me more strongly than my personal accomplishments’ (233). In contrast, her friend Amelia’s : ‘mode of education was different from mine; she could sing, and play well on her guitar and spinet, but could neither stitch a wristband, or read an English author with propriety. An adept at quadrille, but totally ignorant of the first rudiments of religion’ (233), Amelia allows ‘liberties’ from men that shock her friend. After she elopes with Mr. D— it is revealed he is already married with ‘a family of half a score children’ (234).

Dulcetta’s religious and moral education has saved her from her friend’s fate, but the tale doesn’t conclude here, as it easily could. Instead, it transports Dulcetta one month forward to her father’s house three miles away. After this apparently insignificant alteration in time and location, Dulcetta feels removed from normality, a distance likewise experienced by the reader due to a shift from the earlier, matter-of-fact narration to a tone similar to a fairytale. The estate, ‘in the midst of a wood, and [. . . ] entirely by itself’ affords her no companion and so she wanders alone, picking wildflowers and reading. Laying down under a large tree, she is ‘immediately transported into the land of dreams. I thought that I was in a solitary place, and that a person was attempting to be rude with me. I shrieked—the shriek waked me—and who should stand before me but the treacherous Mr. D—,’ (234). Dulcetta is saved by one of her father’s servants and the incident causes her to conclude that ‘the fall of the sex is generally owing to their vigilance’s being asleep when it should be awake’ (234).

The pointed observation feels ill-suited to the preceding passage given that the moral female protagonist was sleeping when attacked and only fortuitously saved by an improbably located servant. If even a virtuous and properly educated female risks a ‘fall’ by falling asleep, R—. seems to suggest luck, more than vigilance, is needed to save one’s virtue.

R—.’s March 1781 tale ‘The Fatal Wreath’ features another slumbering character, but this time the sleeper is the (would-be) seducer of the luckless Almira. Celadon, ‘fond of dissipation’, persuades Almira into frequent meetings in a grove decorated with a statue of Diana, goddess of chastity, where Almira makes ‘concessions [. . .] which she wished that she had not made’ (118). When she finds him asleep in the grove one summer’s evening, she places chaplet of flowers on his head. Suddenly fearing the statue of Diana is animated, ‘that she even pointed her shaft against her’, Almira flees, but ‘a viper bit her heel – she sunk – she died – she might have met with a worse, had Celadon awoke, when she placed the flowery wreath on his temples.—Let the sex beware of innocent advances and liberties; advances and liberties are dangerous’ (118).

Again, the moral is intriguingly elusive. R—. states that ‘advances and liberties are dangerous’ but it is unclear just how far the liberties between Celadon and Almira have gone. By suggesting that had Celadon awoken Almira would have met with a fate worse than death, R—. implies that she has not already had sexual intercourse with Celadon in spite of allowing some ‘concessions’. The viper bite saves Almira from what might have been, rather than punishing her for what has already occurred. The ‘what might have been’ fate could also have befallen the virtuous Dulcetta in the ‘The Unwary Sleeper’ yet she was saved by luck. Regardless of the potential danger of liberties, advances, and slumber, what R—. depicts as the actual, physical dangers to unwary or unguarded women are vipers and, of course, treacherous men.

Dr Jenny DiPlacidi

University of Kent

Who or what makes meaning in magazines? Publishers? Editors? Advertisers (usually, in fact, these were the publishers or editors in the era I spend my working life in)? The authors of individual contributions? Or maybe even readers?

The answer, it seems to me, is never a clear cut one. The inherentally dialogic and dynamic format of the magazine means that it cannot ever be so.

The Lady’s Magazine is no exception. Individual contributors to the magazine often had very strident views on the topics about which they wrote, whether that topic was whether men were women’s intellectual superiors, the need to abolish the slave trade, or the best cure for unwanted female hair growth. But as we have indicated many times on the blog before – usually with a mixture of frustration and admiration – it is hard to identify any coherent editorial line running through the magazine at all. Nothing in the magazine is so consistent as its inconsistency.

It would be easy to offer ready answers to the question of why this is the case. These range from the uncharitable and surely untrue – the magazine was so shambolic that it didn’t know what it was doing – to the downright cynical and misleading – the Lady’s was so keen to secure as sizeable a readership as possible that it tried to be all things to all people. The more accurate answer still lies partly out of reach of my outstretched fingertips and would certainly take more words than I have here to try to work through. But any response to the question surely has to take into account one of the most important generators of meaning in the (indeed, any) magazine: the placement of contributions.

The implications of how articles speak to and against one another were something I spent a lot of time thinking about (again) in a recent talk I gave at the wonderful Disseminating Dress conference I attended at the University of York last month. This three-day conference organised by Serena Dyer (University of Warwick), Jade Halbert (University of Glasgow) and Sophie Littlewood (University of York) brought together academics, curators and practitioners to examine how sartorial ideas and knowledge were transmitted between individuals and communities from the medieval period to the present. I was delighted to be asked to speak about what the Lady’s Magazine had to say about dress and fashion.

Of course, the magazine has rather a lot to say and in lots of different genres, from antiquarian and anthropological accounts, to moral essays and advice columns on dress, to embroidery patterns and fashion plates. But perhaps inevitably, my talk ended up being less about what individual contributions or even distinct sartorial genres disseminated about dress than about how these different contributions and genres buffetted against one another to create meanings that were much more than the sum of the magazine’s individual parts.

Take, for instance, this juxtaposition in the May 1783 issue. A month before, the magazine’s agony aunt, the Matron, had received a letter from a correspondent who went by the initials W. G., and who had complained bitterly about the unbecomingly masculine appearance of women who sported riding habits. The animosity behind W. G.’s attack is quickly diffused by the eminently sensible Matron who urges that ‘single ladies, if they find the riding habit more compact and convenient’ should be allowed to wear it ‘uncensured and unmolested’ even if she ultimately had to concede that married women, ‘if they are truly wise’, will ‘wear only those dresses which are most becoming in the eyes of their husbands’ (267). After a brief diversion on the ridiculous revival of the fashion for feathered garments, the Matron signs off by noting that ‘Moderation […] in dress as well as in diversions, is not only most convenient, it is also most becoming.’ With this, the Matron steers her usual, pragmatic course: misogyny is checked while propriety is observed.

 

But just when the magazine’s sartorial conservatism seems at its most surefooted, it is immediately undermined by the fashion report that follows it. Authored by an anonymous ‘Lady of Fashion’, one of a succession of early fashion journalists who graced the magazine’s pages, the report describes the latest fashions as popularized by the poet, actress (later novelist) and renowned celebrity Mary (Perdita) Robinson. The moderation called for by the Matron is flagrantly thrown off in the report in favour of sumptuous descriptions of the Rutland gown with its petticoats ‘tied back at the sides in the form of a Sultana’s robe’, the ’ made of silver or gold muslin and lined with coloured Persian’, as well as the ‘, trimmed with a wreath of white roses, and a panache of [the] white feathers’ the Matron despised, before closing with a reference to ‘Riding habits’, which are ‘much worn in the morning; the most fashionable are the Perdita’s pearl colour’ (268).

 

Whether the juxtaposition of the Matron’s column and the fashion report was a coincidence or manufactured is a puzzle that I suspect we will never solve. In a sense, though, it matters little. For this is no isolated incident and what is important about it is the range of effects the placement of such material had on readers’ experience of navigating the magazine’s content. And what is true for fashion is also true for the magazine’s conversations about marriage, class, domestic and global politics, the literary marketplace or any of the myriad subjects to which it returns. Few of these debates are ever definitively won or done with.

It would, I think, be all too easy to read these tensions as symptomatic of the mixed messages and impossibly contradictory feminine ideal that we have come to associate with the modern women’s magazine. But such views do not do justice to the complexity of the Lady’s. More to the point, they fail to acknowledge the form of the publication itself and the kinds of active reading practices it encouraged and which our blog and project as a whole seek to illuminate.

Readers of the Lady’s Magazine were far from passive. So many of the magazine’s most conservative pronouncements were actively challenged by editorial placement against articles or artifacts presenting contradictory points of view or by reader responses published in subsequent issues. The very form of the magazine – one in which every reader was a potential contributor and no one, not even respected authorities such as the Matron, could be guaranteed the final word on any subject – meant that every pronouncement it made in its pages was provisional and open to challenge.

The Lady’s Magazine’s driving principle, as we have alluded to before, was ‘conversation’, that ‘sieve that strains our thoughts of all their dross,’ as it put it in its March 1773 issue, ‘and like fire to gold, […] purifies the grosser and more unpolished ideas of our minds; it burnishes our mental magazine, and makes it fit for use’ (127). This is not to say that the magazine was entirely democratic or that some voices weren’t louder than others, but within the magazine’s community, dissent was encouraged and debate flourished.

Whether editorial placement was dictated by design or simply a happy accident matters little. Except to say, that the space that such placements opened up for readers to navigate the magazine’s content, to reflect on its import, to craft their own response, and perhaps to choose to share that response within the magazine’s pages, was surely one of the magazine’s greatest achievements and sources of its success.

 

Dr Jennie Batchelor

School of English

University of Kent

One of the many interesting and pleasurable aspects of working on the Lady’s Magazine project is having the opportunity to present our work to the public, which we were able to do at Chawton House Library in Hampshire.

Chawton is an estate that was inherited by Jane Austen’s brother, Edward Austen Knight, after being adopted by the heirless Knight family and taking their surname. The estate is now open to visitors who can learn about the Austen family and the history of women’s writing in Britain. It is also home to a unique visiting fellows program that I had the privilege of participating in during the summer of 2012. The program allows scholars from around the world to use the library’s impressive collection of women’s writings that range from unpublished manuscripts to popular fiction, rare books, periodicals and first editions, among others. In addition, the library hosts a variety of events including evening talks that draw in a diverse audience and the Lady’s Magazine team was very excited to be asked by Dr Gillian Dow, Chawton’s director of research, to present our ongoing research at one of these talks last week.

Our talk was in three parts, opening with Dr Jennie Batchelor providing the historical context of eighteenth-century periodicals and the Lady’s Magazine, describing its unique features and diverse content. Dr Batchelor explored the lasting influence of the magazine as a medium in which women writers were encouraged to publish, citing the letters of Charlotte Bronte who ‘wished with all her heart’ she ‘had been born in time to contribute to’ the magazine and outlining the changes in print culture and periodicals throughout the long eighteenth century. Dr Koenraad Claes discussed his role on the project, which is to explore the anonymous and pseudonymous contributors to the magazine. Explaining the many difficulties involved in tracking down the thousands of signatures over the years, Dr. Claes provided examples of research techniques and successes in linking the elusive initials to individuals. My part of the talk discussed my role in reading the wide range of items in the magazine and assigning genres to the content in order to examine shifts and consistencies in the magazine’s composition over time.

I also discussed the probability that Jane Austen was familiar with the Lady’s Magazine and its fiction; although it is impossible to say definitively that Austen read the Lady’s Magazine and its tales and stories, it is more likely than not. As Edward Copeland points out, the immense popularity of the magazine meant that ‘everybody’ read the periodical. Making a case for Austen’s familiarity with the magazine, Copeland notes connections between her life and some of the items within the periodical, the most notorious of which being the April 1800 trial report of Austen’s aunt, Mrs. Leigh-Perrot, who was accused of stealing lace from a shop in Bath.[1] Even if Austen never read the Lady’s Magazine, we know that she read the local newspaper, the Hampshire Chronicle, which frequently reprinted fiction from the Lady’s Magazine within it.

After our talk we answered questions from a lovely audience who were interested in many different aspects of the magazine, including details of its physical size, its readership, the process of printing the many engravings as well as publication costs and profits. It was a wonderful experience and we thoroughly enjoyed our time at Chawton House Library talking about our work on the magazine.

Dr Jenny DiPlacidi

University of Kent

 

[1] Edward Copeland, Women Writing about Money: Women’s Fiction in England, 1790-1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 119-21.