Monthly Archives: June 2018

Identifying Mrs. T-SS: Ann Thicknesse and the Lady’s Magazine

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As many of you know, the Lady’s Magazine project began as an effort to provide an annotated index of all of the text content of the Lady’s Magazine from 1770 to 1818. In addition to cataloguing every one of the around 15000 anecdotes, essays, serials and so on that the periodical printed during these years, we classified each of these items generically and provided keywords for every separate item in it to make its thousands of pages more easily navigable for modern readers and researchers.

Additionally, we worked to identify source texts for the magazine’s reprinted and excerpted material (no mean feat since periodical editors in this era were usually coy, shall we say, about such matters) and we also tried to identify as many as we could of the magazine’s anonymous and pseudonymous contributors.

We posted a number of our findings along the way on this blog, identifying the likes of the truly fascinating translator R. while also illuminating the careers of poets such as John Webb and fiction writers such as the Yeames sisters.

The indexing part of the project officially ended in 2016 with the end of our Leverhulme funded research project. But for me, this work is far from over. In recent months, I have given a paper on Radagunda Roberts and have written a journal article on Mary Pilkington and Catherine Day Haynes/Golland’s unacknowledged work for the Lady’s Magazine. I still haven’t given up on finding out more about gothic novelist Mrs Kendall either.

But I really wasn’t intending to think about attribution earlier this week when doing further research for a small section of the book on the magazine I am writing on the many, often beautiful, illustrations the periodical published in its more than six decade run. I was simply refreshing my memory about the key figures – G. M. Brighty, James Heath, Charles Heath, H. Mutley and Thomas Stothard etc. – with whom the magazine’s publishers collaborated and whose engravings, frontispieces and fashion plates ‘elegantly embellished’ successive issues of the Lady’s Magazine.

 

Private collection.

While doing this, I remembered a few occasions in the publication’s history where it didn’t have to commission engravings because contributors provided them with their copy. Once such case was in February 1784 when ‘P. T.’ submitted a description of a monument raised in Bath to honour the poet Thomas Chatterton. It didn’t take much ingenuity to work out that P. T. lightly conceals the identity of Philip Thicknesse, the travel writer and compellingly eccentric (some might say dubious or downright obnoxious) figure in the grounds of whose home the ‘Mausoleum’ was built and under which he would intriguingly bury his sixteen-year-old daughter Ann Frances in late 1785. But even if ingenuity (and Google) had failed me, the magazine’s ‘Correspondents’ column left me in no doubt about the identity ‘P. T.’ Indeed, the editor went out of his way to ‘acknowledge’ his ‘obligation to Capt. Thicknesse, for the honour of the Embellishment for this month’s collection’.

What I had forgotten about before I revisited this ‘Correspondents’ column (one of well over 600 the magazine printed) was the sentence that followed: ‘and we must likewise add, that his lady had previously favoured us with several singular marks of her patronage, and obligation; our Readers are obliged to her for one of the best pieces of Advice to her Daughter, that has appeared in any periodical work whatever; as well as several Lives from her Sketches of Learned Ladies in France.’

I suspect I originally read this late in the day, because the notes I had taken on it back in 2015 read: ‘CHECK: WAS ANN THICKNESSE REALLY AN ORIGINAL CONTRIBUTOR TO THE LADY’S MAGAZINE???’ (Yes: sometimes my research notes look like this initially, but I usually go back and answer any questions I pose myself and delete them.) In this case, I had clearly forgotten to follow up the lead! Fast forward three years…

Thomas Gainsborough, ‘Ann Ford’ (later Mrs. Philip Thicknesse). Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Ann Thicknesse (née Ford, 1737–1824) has interested me for some time. A talented musician and writer, she was known primarily to me as the author of the three-volume biographical dictionary, Sketches of the Lives and Writings of the Ladies of France (1778-81), from which the magazine reprinted a number of extracts in the early 1780s, and upon which Matilda Betham and Mary Hays drew in their own biographical works a few decades later. [1] Thicknesse was much later the author of a now relatively obscure (and not desperately good ) novel entitled The School of Fashion (1800).

I didn’t know a great deal about Thicknesse’s life, beyond the fact that it was long and that she had had to rebuff in print the taint of scandal as a young woman when Lord Jersey, a considerably older and married admirer, tried and failed to make her his mistress. In 1762, Ann became Philip Thicknesse’s third wife, months after the death of his second wife (and Ann’s close friend), Elizabeth. They would have several children together (quite how many is disputed) and were married for thirty years until Philip’s death in France in 1792 on the last of their many European travels together.

Ann’s life and career are documented in various places including the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and the indeispensible Orlando database of women writers in Britain. Both acknowledge that her writing career began in the 1760s with the publication of a staunch defence of her reputation in the face of Jersey’s allegations as well as two musical primers. A hiatus followed until the publication of Sketches in 1778, one that seems entirely natural given the amount of time Ann spent being pregnant, giving birth to and raising children in the next decade and a half.

But the note in the Lady’s Magazine’s ‘Correspondents’ column about the work entitled ‘Advice to her Daughter’ indicated clearly that this hiatus might not have been as long as we had suspected, and that Thicknesse’s literary career might have pre-dated the publication of Sketches. But what was the ‘Advice’?

‘Mrs. T-ss’s Advice to her daughter’ was an original conduct-book serial published in thirteen parts in the Lady’s Magazine between 1775 and 1776. The opening installment of serial, which takes the form of letters on different themes, was accompanied by an editorial note stating that ‘these letters are the real sentiments of the lady who wrote them, and who meant to leave them in manuscript as a legacy to her daughters’, before she was persuaded to send them to the Lady’s Magazine’s publisher, George Robinson, by ‘a friend’ (6 [June 1775]: 294). The daughter addressed in the letters is named Charlotte, likely Ann and Philip’s daughter, Sophia Charlotte Thicknesse, born in June 1763. (The Thicknesse family name usually appears without the final ‘e’ in the historical record, just as Ann’s blanked out name also omitted the ‘e’ in the title of her series for the magazine.)

I’ve long been intrigued by ‘Mrs. T-ss’s Advice to her daughter’, not least because of its worldly but conservative views on three of my favourite preoccupations: dress, masquerades and dancing, all of which, Mrs. T. pointed out, had the potential to make women ‘disgustful’ in the eyes of others. But Thicknesse’s more reactionary views sat alongside her deep-seated conviction in the potential of the female mind.

Through-lines between her magazine conduct book and later Sketches become more apparent as the series unfolds and are plain to see in its penultimate installment from February 1776: ‘Women inferior to Men, owing to their wrong Education’. Of a mind with the magazine that published her manuscript, Thicknesse argued passionately here for female education. If women seemed ‘fantastical’ or ‘trifling’ then it was only because they were denied the same pedaogogical and life advantages that men had and not because of any innate frivolousness or intellectual inferiority. Women, she argued, were just ‘as capable of reason and deep reflection as men’ in a paragraph that lauded the examples of historian Catharine Macaulay and scholar Elizabeth Carter, to whom the first volume of Thicknesse’s Sketches would later be dedicated (89).

‘Mrs. T-ss’s Advice to her daughter’ was not Thicknesse’s first published work but it was, arguably, her first recognizably literary work and now it has been identified as her work should be seen as an important precursor (literally and thematically) to her famous Sketches. Whether she wrote other original pieces for the Lady’s Magazine or other periodicals is not yet known.

As I wonder how many other notable women writers published works we have yet to discover in the Lady’s Magazine and rival periodicals I realize that while the book I am writing will get written some time in the not too distant future, the Lady’s Magazine project will always feel open-ended for me. There is still, I feel, so much to find out and so much I want to know.

Notes

[1] Sketches is in fact an an unacknowledged translation of Joseph La Porte’s Histoire littéraire des femmes françoises (1769). I am grateful to Gillian Dow for pointing me in the direction Séverine Genieys-Kirk’s ‘The Turbulent Seas of Cultural Sisterhood: French Connections in Mary Hays’s Female Biography’ (1803), Women’s Writing, 25:2 (2018): 167-85, for more information on this. (DOI: 10.1080/09699082.2017.1387337)

Prof Jennie Batchelor

School of English

University of Kent

Fashioning the Reader: Dress and Early Women’s Magazines (Part 1)

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Many of the Lady’s Magazine project’s followers do so because they are interested in fashion. That’s hardly surprising, really. The periodical’s fashion plates, reports, embroidery patterns and the many hundreds of essays it published on the allure and perils of sartorial consumption are the very things that first brought me to the Lady’s Magazine as a PhD student writing on eighteenth-century dress back in the late 1990s.

From its very first issue in August 1770 the periodical signalled that regular ‘fashion intelligence’ in the form of engravings and written descriptions of ‘the covering of the head, or the clothing of the body’ would be an indispensible part of its format (1). It was, though, a promise the magazine struggled to made good on. Although those essays on dress, as well as attention to the costumes of other nations in travel writing and an antiquarian interest in dress in works of history, are recurrent features in the periodical from its inception, fashion journalism, as we would call it now, is conspicuously absent in the magazine in its first thirty years.

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

The first fashion report, of sorts, the magazine published was in November 1770 and was accompanied by an engraving showing the actress Ann Catley in a scene from Love in a Village. In it, the magazine’s editors remarked that they had not lost sight of their promise to provide readers with the latest trends, but they struggled to live up to their stated objective of purveying metropolitan fashions to those in the provinces in subsequent issues (170). The first recognisably modern fashion report was not published until February 1773 and is typical of the economical to the point of obscurity, staccato prose style that would characterise the genre at this time: ‘The hair in front, with small puff curls; a close cap, made with wings; narrow ribbon, in small puffs; double row of lace; ditto lapelled …’ (72). Next month the magazine followed with an account of full dress and undress for March, allowing the unknown author to make comparisons that suggested fashion’s progress, even month by month, would be bewilderingly relentless – ‘Hair front lower, puff curls or none …’ – without the guiding hand of the magazine to steer readers through its labyrinthine course (152).

The magazine’s fashion reporters were as impermanent as the quickly outmoded styles they described, however, and readers wanting to know if hair fronts would plunge lower still (gasp!) would have to wait until September for the next update, and thereafter for another four issues until the Supplement to learn more. The problem got a good deal worse before it got better. A contributor known as Charlotte Stanley was by far the most reliable of these figures, although that’s not saying much. Her career of fashion reporting for the magazine began in March 1774; she produced another three reports across the rest of the year but did not resume her column until March 1776 (after the magazine apparently received a barrage of complaints from readers). She would produce only one more report that year. In 1777 and 1778 no fashion reports appeared in the magazine at all, but readers would not let the matter lie. As late as June 1782, a regular contributor to the magazine, Henrietta C-p-r, was begging Miss Stanley to once again bestow her ‘elegant favours’ upon her readers. The request fell on deaf ears.

In fact, it was not until the 1790s that fashion reports (usually glancing over the channel to observe the shifting styles, as well as politics, in France), became a much more regular feature. In 1800 would they become a permanent monthly fixture with the introduction of an elegant coloured fashion plate of Paris fashions usually taken (unacknowledged) from Le Journal des Dames et des Modes (1797–1839). (I’ve had a lot of fun playing ‘find the fashion plate’ in the past few weeks.) London reports and plates, commissioned directly by the magazine, did not follow until 1805. Before the first decade of the nineteenth century, fashion plates were an at best an irregular feature, largely it seems, because of the expence they involved. But it was an expence that could not be avoided after the founding on Vernor and Hood’s pocket-sized and elegant rival, the Lady’s Monthly Museum (1798–1828), with which the Lady’s would later merge and which contained monthly coloured plates. In a bid to keep up with its new and unwelcome competitor the Lady’s Magazine raised its price from the sixpence it had charged for thirty years to a shilling an issue in part to cover the costs of fashion plates.

Both publications faced further fashion competition from the launch of John Bell’s sumptuous, royal octavo La Belle Assemblée, or Belle’s Court and Fashionable Magazine, which launched in February 1806 and also later merged with the Lady’s. Bell’s magazine carried rich and varied contents, but remains best known for its dedicated and substantial, multi-page monthly fashion section originally entitled the ‘Second Division’. In the first issue alone this section included: reports on  ‘London Fashions for the Present Month’; ‘Parisian Fashions, for February’; ‘General Observations on Fashions and the Fashionables’; ‘Three whole length Portraits, and four Head Dresses of the London Fashions’; ‘Five whole length Portraits of Parisian Fashions’; and four embroidery patterns. None of the fashion plates was coloured, but this would change just ten months later when, in response to competition from his son John Browne Bell’s Le Beau Mode, and Monthly Register (1806–9), Bell Senior offered La Belle Assemblée in two formats: 2s 6d for issues containing uncoloured engravings, and 3s and 6d for those with coloured fashion plates.

LM 58 (Nov 1827). Image © Adam Matthew Digital / Cambridge University Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

The Lady’s Magazine could never compete fully with the high production values of Bell’s periodical, which even at its lowest price point cost twice as much as George Robsinson’s monthly magazine. But La Belle Assemblée’s influence can nevertheless be felt in the Lady’s Magazine’s and Lady’s Monthly Museum’s fashion coverage. One of its most important developments was its emphasis upon named fashion authorities, a trend that Rudolf Ackermann’s Repository of Arts (1809–29) also followed. Professional dressmakers and milliners such as Madame (Margaret) Lanchester and then Mrs M. A. (Mary Ann) Bell featured prominently as the ‘inventresses’ of the fashions La Belle Assemblée and the Repository visualised and described, while advertisements for these women’s fashionable London establishments featured in their back pages. By the 1810s, the Lady’s Monthly Museum and Lady’s Magazine had followed suit by looking to their own fashionistas – Miss Macdonald of 50 South Molton Street, Mrs W. Smith of 15 Old Burlington Street and Miss (Mary Maria) Pierpoint of Portman Square – to provide direction on the latest styles with instructions.

The reliance upon the expertise of these women changed the magazine’s fashion content in various ways that I have been trying to think through and write about in a book I am working on about the Lady’s Magazine. I’ve now worked out what I want to say about that, but as I was mulling it over and pondering the way the magazine’s fashion content changed over time, I couldn’t stop thinking about Madame Lanchester, Mrs Bell – interchangeably referred to in various sources as John Bell’s wife or daughter-in-law – and Miss Pierpoint. Who were these women? Why do we know so little about them now when in their own day their name commanded such widespread respect from the fashion conscious readers of the Lady’s Magazine and its competitors? I don’t yet have all the answers and there is much more I hope to be able to find out about these women, but after many hours (confession: it might actually be days) diving into the newspapers and digging around on Ancestry, I know a good deal more than I did and I plan to share some of these insights in part 2 of this blog post next week. Hope you’ll join me then!

 

 

Prof. Jennie Batchelor

School of English

University of Kent