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Crafting through Covid

CLICK HERE FOR THE LINK TO THE CRAFTING THROUGH COVID 1798 LADY’S MAGAZINE PATTERN AND STEP-BY-STEPS BY ALISON LARKIN

******* Now that we are post-event, I just wanted to add here the links so you can watch the conversation at your leisure.

If you’d like to watch on Youtube, the link is here.

Alternatively, you can watch on Facebook here. *******

Welcome back and I hope you’ve been keeping safe and well! It’s been a very strange and difficult time for us all, hasn’t it? In all the chaos and worry of the last few months, the Lady’s Magazine has been one of the things keeping me sane. I’ve been busy writing a piece on illustrations in the periodical and most busy finishing up (well: nearly finishing up) my book, The Lady’s Magazine (1770-1832) and the Making of Literary History (all 115000 words of it!). I’ve also been doing lots of talks and lovely online events about Jane Austen Embroidery, a history and craft book by me and professional embroiderer, Alison Larkin, that adapts 15 patterns from the Lady’s Magazine for modern readers and situates the magazine, the patterns and the projects in terms of the lives of Georgian women, the world they lived in and, of course, the life and works of Jane Austen. (We know she read the magazine, of course.)

I have to say that when the book came out with Pavilion in March, Alison and I were a little disappointed. We had quite a few events and workshops lined up and were so looking forward to talking to people interested in the things the book is about and those who were trying out the patterns. But of course, these things couldn’t go ahead and we all had more important things to be worrying about.

Except that embroidery and crafting are things that are so important to so many of us and now more than ever in this locked down, quarantined and isolated new reality.

 

Craft is about creativity. It distracts, absorbs and connects us. It forges a sense of community as we make things for other people or show and discuss our work in progress on social media, and get tips and advice from others. (I do this latter a lot…) Craft is about turning some things into something different and something more. And when things feel like they are falling apart at the seams, making something brings an enormous sense of consolation. It feels like we are making a difference.

I’ve been bowled over by all the lovely images people have been posting on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook of the lockdown stitching they have been doing using Jane Austen Embroidery. It’s been a wonderful reminder of the Stitch Off I launched in 2016, where all this started.

This got me thinking. I really wanted to get everyone together. One of the best things to come out the pandemic – other than all the #covidcrafting – has been how creative we have got online by finding ways of connecting us despite the travel restrictions we are living under.

And this was how the idea of the virtual chat and Sew Along ‘Crafting through Covid: A Virtual Sew Along and Conversation’ was born. The event, which live streams via YouTube on 16 September 19:00 GMT, will feature some conversation and images and videos of the wonderful work you have been doing. The event is free and you can watch the talks and join in the conversation through YouTube’s chat function. You can register via Eventbrite.

Don’t worry if you haven’t used one of the patterns before or even embroidered before. All are very welcome. But if you do want to try one of the patterns before or even during the event, I am delighted to say that Alison has a gorgeous beginner sprig project for you. It uses a November 1798 motif from the Lady’s Magazine – one that isn’t in the book or available on my Stitch Off pattern pages – and it is free to download here.

I so hope you can join us at the event, but if life gets in the way, don’t worry as we will be recording it so you can watch it on YouTube whenever you like.

Take care everyone!

Jennie

Prof Jennie Batchelor, School of English, University of Kent

 

Jane Austen Embroidery (or the Stitch Off is back on)

 

It’s World Book Day, which means I am frantically trying to wrestle my youngest child into a costume that he is not entirely sure he wants to wear to school while I am desperately wishing I had time to sit down and read Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light instead. But there is a light at the end of this particular parental tunnel. For today also sees the publication (by Pavilion) of my new book,  Jane Austen Embroidery, which I have been working on for the past few years with historic embroidery expert, Alison Larkin. And I couldn’t be happier.

 

Seasoned followers of the Lady’s Magazine project on Twitter or Facebook will know that the book has been a labour or love and many years in the making. It all started in 2015 when I came to own a copy of a half-year of the Lady’s Magazine for 1796 which had 6 original embroidery patterns in it. I couldn’t believe my good fortune. I had been working on and off on the magazine for a decade and a half before that phone call, and in that time I had only ever seen a handful of the 650 patterns for embellishing clothes, accessories and household objects that the magazine published between 1770 and 1819. You see, the patterns were never meant to be preserved. They were designed for use and designed to be used in ways that wouldn’t necessarily survive the usage. The patterns I now owned were an accident of history.

When I posted pictures of the patterns on Twitter, I had absolutely no idea that they would have the impact that they did. People loved them and I loved telling them what I could about them from my research over the years. But I also knew I had a lot to learn, too, and boy did I learn a lot when I released the patterns online so people could start making and adapting them for themselves.

The result was the #StitchOff. I have said it before, but I’ll say it again: The #StitchOff was the most lovely thing that I have done in my career to date. Being part of a community of people – first time stitchers to textile artists, Embroiderer’s Guild members and RSN graduates – across 3 continents united by their shared love of needlework, craft and women’s history was energising. And how fitting it was that all this was because of a magazine that owed so much of its success to its creation of a community of subscribers who chatted and debated with each other in the pages of the magazine itself.

Getting to display and share some 60 or so of the many gorgeous #StitchOff items at Chawton House, in a room dedicated to women’s accomplishments at the Emma at 200 exhibition, was a terrific experience. Seeing these rare patterns brought back to life some 200 and more years since their first publication was, frankly, moving.

The exhibition ran for 6 months and I felt both proud and sad when I went to Chawton to pack up the work to send back to its makers. I wanted to do something more. I just couldn’t think what.

And then, I got an invitation from one of the first people to get involved in the #StitchOff, Alison Larkin, to speak at the Yorkshire and Humberside Embroiderer’s Guild. I did a talk on the needlework from Jane Austen’s day – after all, we know she read the Lady’s Magazine – to the #StitchOff, proudly showing off the work of the Stitch-Offers along the way. Alison bought several pieces that she worked up for the Stitch Off for display, one created while working at the Captain Cook Memorial Museum in Whitby.

At the end of the talk, I had lots of fabulous questions from the audience, but one struck a particular chord. A very experienced embroiderer – someone who had been stitching for decades – pointed to one of the slides I had shown of a Lady’s Magazine pattern and said: ‘I couldn’t do that’. I couldn’t understand why. She replied, that looking at the pattern was like looking at a photo of a completed dish in a cookbook without an ingredients list and method. You see, the Lady’s Magazine never printed instructed with its patterns as later Victorian magazines did. It just knew its readers (girls and women) would have the skills to interpret the patterns and to determine colours and stitches themselves.

The question started ringing in my ears. I was taught to sew as a child by my grandmother and dabbled with embroidery until my teenage years, when study got in the way of everything. But years of working on eighteenth-century dress, needlework and craft meant that I knew – in theory – what to do with the patterns and how they were imagined to look. I could tell people what to do with the patterns even if my needlework skills were not up to showing them properly. Similar thoughts were clearly occurring to the infinitely more skilled Alison. As we sat drinking coffee after the talk she said that we should do a book you know to teach other people how to do this work and to contextualise the work for them historically. I left thinking it was a nice idea, but I had no idea how to make it happen…

Fast forward a few years, and Jane Austen Embroidery is now a reality. The book gives an introduction to embroidery in Jane Austen’s Britain and has separate features by me on embroidered dress, accessories and household objects, full of references to novels by Jane Austen and her contemporaries. The practical section of the book has 15 projects based on Lady’s Magazine patterns graded for all ability levels and with full instructions devised by Alison.  Some of the patterns will be familiar to those who joined in with the original #StitchOff, albeit in new interpretations. Many you won’t have seen before! And the book is just gorgeous, with beautiful illustrations by Polly Fern, and photography by Penny Wincer.

In the acknowledgements at the back fo the book, we thank various people without whom it wouldn’t have become a reality, most especially the Stitch-Offers. You know who you are. I hope the publication of the book will mean there are many more of us soon!

Thank you, Jennie.

Jane Austen Embroidery by Jennie Batchelor and Alison Larkin is published in the UK by Pavilion on 5 March 2020 at £16.99. It will be published by Dover in the US on 17 May 2020.

Professor Jennie Batchelor

School of English

University of Kent

Canterbury

Call for Papers: ‘The Lady’s Magazine at 250’ a two-day event at the University of Kent (24-25 April 2020)

Date: 24-25 April 2020

Location: University of Kent (Canterbury, UK)

Keynote Speakers: Prof Manushag N. Powell (Purdue University) and Dr Chloe Wigston Smith (University of York)

This two-day event will commemorate the 250th anniversary of the founding of the Lady’s Magazine (1770-1832). Part symposium, part study day and part public celebration of the first recognisably modern women’s magazine, this event will reflect and explore the diverse content, broad readership and multiple legacies of this influential periodical.

The first day will have a full programme of talks on and celebrations of the magazine. The second day will include a study day on fashion, embroidery, material culture and the Lady’s Magazine including optional embroidery workshops, which will allow participants to get hands on with history by learning to embroider a motif from a Lady’s Magazine pattern under the expert tutelage of historical embroidery expert, Alison E. Larkin. Further celebrations and specialist panels will be announced in due course.

Proposals are invited for talks on all aspects of the Lady’s Magazine, its origins, legacies and place in eighteenth-century and Romantic print and periodical culture. Please send abstracts of 250-300 words to Jennie Batchelor (j.e.batchelor@kent.ac.uk) on or before 1 June 2019.

 

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

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)

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

 

            

What the Lady’s Magazine Project Did Next

It’s been quite a while since our last blog post. Team Lady’s Magazine spent most of the summer working really hard trying to complete the data compilation and analysis for our index to meet our project deadline in September. I’m delighted to say that we did it! The Lady’s Magazine project index to the more than 15000 text items in the first series of the Lady’s Magazine is now live and free to view and download on our project website. Soon it will also be available in web format (and again in open access) on Adam Matthew Digital’s Eighteenth-Century Journals website.

 

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I am very proud of all that we achieved and incredibly grateful for hard work and collegiality of Koenraad and Jenny, who both have now gone on to bigger and better things. Koenraad left the UK just days after the project ended to take up a postdoctoral research fellowship at Ghent University (Belgium) and Jenny has taken up a Lectureship in Eighteenth-Century Studies and Romanticism at the University of Kent.

For all of us, the Lady’s Magazine project lives on. Koenraad’s work on the political content of the Lady’s Magazine feeds into his new research project on political fiction in the long nineteenth century. Jenny continues to work on the fascinating fiction in the magazine. As for me, well my work on the Lady’s Magazine is still very much unfinished business. Having completed the project, I am now moving on to the next phase of my research on the magazine, which is preparations for the book I am researching and soon (I hope) to be writing on the Lady’s Magazine in Romantic print culture. The Lady’s Magazine project isn’t dead. It’s just in phase 2.

And for me, phase 2 began beautifully. Last month I went to the University of York to give a talk about the Lady’s Magazine and run a workshop in the Borthwick Institute for Archives in the University Library organised by the Research School for Eighteenth Century and Romantics.

It was the best possible way to move forward. I went back. I was an undergraduate at York a few  more years ago than I like to admit and left – in a spectacular piece of bad timing on my part – the year the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies was founded. I never need much encouragement to return to York. But this time I had a more compelling reason than ever before: the University’s recent acquisition of the Heath Collection, which contains a number of fine volumes of the Lady’s Magazine.

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LM LV (1824): 179. Image © Adam Matthew Digital / Cambridge University Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

As the University catalogue explains, the Heath Collection was the work of Sir John Heath, ambassador to Chile during the Falkland’s conflict, and descendent of the Heath family of engravers who, in turn, had close connections with the Robinsons who published the Lady’s Magazine. The Heaths produced some of the periodical’s finest illustrations. The Heath collection comprises an interrupted run of early nineteenth-century bound volumes of the magazine, all of which contain images by Charles Heath and some of them from Heath’s time as editor of the magazine (from May 1823).

Before arriving 30 minutes prior to the start of the workshop I hadn’t set eyes on the volumes in the Heath Collection, although I had read other copies of all of the volumes it comprises elsewhere. I had no idea of the condition of the run and didn’t have time to look at them in detail before the workshop started. Even just laying them out on book cushions with Sarah Griffin, Special Collections and York Minster Librarian, however, I could see the quality of the bindings and had high hopes. These were more than borne out. The volumes in the collection, some of which bear the striking book plate of royal dressmaker Hardy Amies, are some of the finest and most in tact, I have ever seen.

The workshop was fully booked out with seventeen undergraduate and postgraduate students in attendance. And we had the highest volume to person ratio of any workshop I have been involved in since the project began.

image

 

As always, I learned so much from the students. Despite the fact that many started the workshop by saying they had never worked with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century periodicals and still fewer saying that they had worked with original copies rather than digital surrogates, the workshop participants proved highly skilled in reading the magazine to gain insights into its readership, appeal, contents, politics and influence. First impressions – or more accurately, the assumptions we bring subconsciously to the table before even opening copies of periodicals like the Lady’s Magazine – started to fragment in the face of the complexity of the miscellany format and happy to say that everyone found items pertinent to their research topics. Everyone in the room seemed to find material in the magazine that spoke directly to their research interests, and we had a spirited conversation about the pleasures and pitfalls of the digital revolution and the hazards of overlooking the material archive.

I also had an opportunity of giving a demonstration of our index and was delighted to hear students telling me how they could use it in their research and, in one case, how it was already being used.

If you’ve used the index, do let us know what you think about it. We’d love to know. Oh and if you ever find yourself in the North East, do head to the Borthwick. You will not be disappointed. I promise.

Jennie Batchelor

School of English

University of Kent

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reader, he burned them: Charlotte Bronte, Shipwreck and the Lady’s Magazine

Sadly, good news stories are rare these days. So when they come along, I tend to cling to them like precious cargo that can keep me afloat amidst the torrents of awfulness threatening to pull us all under in this unsettling and violent world.

BronteOne of the best news stories of the past ten days or so is surely the restoration of a book belonging to, and filled with annotations and sketches by, the Bronte family to their Haworth home. The purchase and repatriation of the salt-water stained copy of Robert Southey’s The Remains of Henry Kirke White was made possible by a £170,000 from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, in addition to a further £30,000 raised by a V&A Purchase Grant Fund and Friends of the National Libraries. As the BBC news website noted, this particular copy of Southey’s work was especially remarkable because of the story surrounding it. A treasured artefact of a life prematurely cut short, the book was ‘one of a few possessions saved from a shipwreck shortly before Maria married Patrick Bronte in 1812’, and bore an inscription from Patrick that read: ‘the book of my dearest wife and it was saved from the waves. So then it will always be preserved’. Preserved though it was, the book was nonetheless sold after Patrick’s death in the early 1860s and spent nearly a century in the US before its recent and happy return to Haworth. [1] 

After initially reading this story on the BBC news website, I spent a good 40 minutes trawling through as many different versions of the same story as I could find. Each told more or less the same version of the same series of events in more or less the same language, as news outlets tend to do today just as they did in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. What I was fruitlessly looking for, I soon realised in my obsessive re-reading, was an answer to an unposed question: What else survived the shipwreck? [2]

Based on the news coverage, you would be forgiven for thinking that only Southey’s Remains of Henry Kirke White was saved from the briny deep in 1812. But this was not the case. Especially prized by Charlotte Bronte was a set of volumes that kept the young woman away from her lessons and hungering after a literary career of her own: a collection of the Lady’s Magazine, the full run of which periodical extended well beyond the date of the shipwreck (from 1770 to 1832).

We don’t know exactly how many copies of the magazine Charlotte and her siblings inherited in the years after their preservation from the shipwreck, although we have some sense of which volumes survived because of the detail with which she later recalled them. Our evidence comes in the form of a letter dated 10 December 1840 to Hartley Coleridge in which Charlotte expressed regret that

I did not exist forty of fifty years ago when the Lady’s magazine was flourishing like a green bay tree—In that case I make no doubt my aspirations after literary fame would have met with due encouragement— […] and I would have contested the palm with the Authors of Derwent Priory—of the Abbey and Ethelinda. You see Sir I have read the Lady’s Magazine and know something of its contents—though I am not quite certain of the correctness of the titles I have quoted … 

DP Jan 1797

LM XXVII (Jan 1797): 12-13. © Jennie Batchelor. Not to be reproduced without permission.

In fact, Bronte’s recall is accurate. Like her, I have spent many happy hours reading the anonymous gothic novel Derwent Priory (serialised 1796-97 and later attributed to Mrs A Kendall), George Moore’s Grasville Abbey (1793-97) and the unsigned ‘Athewold and Ethelinda’ (1797). The fact that Bronte remembered this fiction was remarkable because she did not have the copies before her. Although she vividly remembered the brine ‘discoloured’ pages of the magazine over which she pored ‘on holiday afternoons or by stealth when I should have been minding my lessons’, the volumes had long since left her possession by the time she wrote to Coleridge in 1840:

One black day my father burnt them because they contained foolish love-stories. With all my heart I wish I had been born in time to contribute to the Lady’s magazine. [3]

The sense of horror and betrayal of her father’s act was evidently very much alive to Bronte years after it had been committed and clearly ran as deep as her affection for a magazine and an associated writing culture – ‘when the Lady’s magazine was flourishing like a green bay tree’ – that she sorely lamented the loss of as an aspiring professional writer.

I refer to Bronte’s letter frequently when I talk to people about the Lady’s Magazine and I use it for lots of different reasons. For one thing, as an example of a near contemporary reader’s response to the magazine it is rare. The fact that this is an example of so well known a writer as Bronte only makes it more valuable, not least because it means that I don’t have to rely solely upon my own powers of persuasion to get people to take the magazine seriously. Don’t take my word for it that the Lady’s Magazine is interesting and was influential, here’s what Charlotte Bronte thought about it …

But of course what is most interesting about this story is the tale of survival and destruction around which it turns and the complex psychodrama it plays out. For every fact the letter seems to give us – that Bronte read the Lady’s Magazine, that she associated it with the successful promotion of women’s writing, for instance – at least one question is begged – did she really think that unpaid journalism was preferable to a life of professional authorship and did she share any of her father’s views of its foolishness, for example. Most insistently, however, the question that nags at the reader of the letter is this: How could Patrick Bronte destroy volumes that evidently meant so much to his daughter and which had been saved, along with the Southey, from the waves?

In many ways, I feel that the broader piece of research to which our current Leverhulme project is related – a book I am writing about the Lady’s Magazine‘s place in Romantic literature and culture – is an attempt to answer this question. The rage, which is at once unique to the Bronte family and yet also eerily emblematic of the fate of the Lady’s Magazine, one of the most successful women’s magazines of all times and yet all but silenced in literary history, would certainly take many more words to explain than I have in this blog post.

For now though, I am struck by something I had lost sight of until the news stories of the past week or so. The Bronte Parsonage Museum’s acquisition of Maria Bronte’s copy of what has been repeatedly described as the treasured and invaluable Remains of Henry Kirke White reminds me that what is most important and too often forgotten is that the Lady’s Magazine was valued enough to be saved. Not only that but it was valued enough by at least one of Maria Bronte’s daughters enough to be read, re-read and remembered. The story of the destruction of copies of The Lady’s Magazine by a man who likely never read it (it was far more cynical about love than foolish) should not mute the more triumphant and arguably more telling one about its survival against the odds. These volumes will never be returned to Haworth, but given the personal and, I would argue, textual legacies that the magazine undoubtedly bestowed Charlotte Bronte, they never really left there.

Notes

 

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-36844945 <accessed 28 July 2016>

[2] Prior to her marriage to Patrick Bronte, Maria sent for her possessions to be shipped from Penzance, but the vessel ran aground of the Devonshire coast en route.

[3] The Letters of Charlotte Bronte: Vol. 1, 1829-1847, ed Margaret Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 240.

 

Dr Jennie Batchelor

School of English

University of Kent

Pedagogy and cosmopolitanism: Reader translations in the Lady’s Magazine

espirit-logo220x150This conference season has been busy for Team Lady’s Magazine. In the past two weeks alone, we attended two events that we were looking forward to very much, because we were to soft-launch our index there in anticipation of its official publication in September: the annual conference of the European Society for Periodical Research (ESPRit) at Liverpool John Moores University, and ‘Victorian Periodicals Through Glass’, held at the Athenaeum Club in London. Writing papers and presenting them, and giving the hard work of your colleagues the attention it deserves, can be exhausting work, although I would be less tired if I had the discipline to go straight to bed after conference dinners. Furthermore, when the conferences in question are as good as these two were, they are also very inspiring. We went home with ideas for last-minute tweaks to the index, with a better understanding of how the index will likely be used, and with a renewed sense of how the diverse contents of the Lady’s Magazine remain topical. One subject discussed at both events was the importance of transnational contacts to cultural production, throughout history, even for phenomena that may at first sight seem of a strictly national interest. I am thinking in particular of the panel of our friends of Agents of Change (Ghent University) at the ESPRit conference on their comparatist study of female-fronted socio-cultural transformation across the European periodical press between 1710 and 1920, and the keynote paper by Prof. Regenia Gagnier in London (doubling as this year’s Sally Ledger Memorial Lecture) on the afterlife of Wilde’s Soul Of Man Under Socialism (1891) in publications of Asian political movements. These made me reconsider a fascinating aspect of the Lady’s Magazine that has as yet received little attention: the many translations furnished by its vibrant community of reader-contributors.

staircase Athenaeum

Dickens and Thackeray famously set their differences aside on this staircase (© Athenaeum Club)

In standard accounts of long-eighteenth-century print culture, most notably in the otherwise admirable history by Prof. Kathryn Shevelow, there is a strong emphasis on the domestic ideology allegedly advocated by the Lady’s Magazine.[1] Scholars sweepingly reducing the complex ideological debates within the magazine to this particular message may not have read far beyond the subtitle of the magazine, in which it styles itself ‘Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex, Appropriated Solely to their Use and Amusement’. This does suggest a form of self-censorship calculated to reinforce strict gender norms so as to instil in its ‘fair’ readers their prescribed role in the household, and, of course, a secondary sense of ‘domestic’ is ‘of or pertaining to one’s own country or nation; not foreign, internal, inland, “home”’.[2] Nevertheless, as Jennie Batchelor has shown, the content of the magazine was much broader than this suggests, and for instance catered to the interest in other cultures and nations of a wide array of readers, most of whom will never have left the British Isles. There are hundreds of ‘anecdotes’ and ‘accounts’ of foreign cities and cultures, and many translations, often submitted by reader-contributors. In every volume of the magazine at least a number of items of foreign origins even appear in their original language.

Jenny DiPlacidi, who has categorized all contributions for our index, has made it very easy for us to find out how many items in French appeared in the magazine. Between 1770 and 1790 there were no less than 91 items in another language than English. Three of those are Italian, and all others are in French. While these relative proportions may be surprising, the choices of these two particular languages is soon explained. Italian was seen as a language of culture, amongst other reasons because it was the language of opera seria, and was additionally popularized through the parmesan-dusted verse of the Della Cruscans (also featured—need it still be said?— in the Lady’s Magazine), and shelves have been written on the enduring love/hate relationship between Britain and France. These items come in a variety of genres, but tales and conduct pieces predominate; two genres that are of course very common in the magazine in general. The items in foreign languages seem to have been nearly exclusively appropriations.

The foreign-language items did not only function as reading material on par with the English content, but evidently had a particular pedagogical use. Nearly all are translated by readers who submit their efforts for publication in subsequent issues. An editorial footnote stating that ‘a translation is requested’ often appears to encourage this practice. Over a period of a staggering ten years, between 1774 to 1784, loyal reader-contributor ‘Henrietta R-’ submitted instalments from Abbé Séran de la Tour’s Histoire d’Épaminondas (1739), and these were diligently translated by a cohort of other readers who kept up quite well with the pace of publication of the serialized original. It finished several years before the first one-volume translation of this work (a different text) is published, in 1787.

The fact that often more than one submitted translation of the same foreign-language original is published indicates that the quality of the translation was at least as important as the content of the original piece. It is clear that these pieces were perceived as a challenge by the readers, much in the same way as the many puzzles, and like these served to consolidate the magazine’s readership and gave readers an opportunity to exercise and demonstrate their ingenuity. In April 1782, a regular reader-contributor signed ‘Maria’ submitted an unattributed poem in French, which I have identified as an extract from Beaumarchais’s Le Barbier de Séville (1775). The prefatory headnote included by this reader reveals a lot about the purpose of this submission:

LM XIII April 1782 p. 216

LM XIII (1782): 216. Image © Adam Matthew Digital / Birmingham Central Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

LM VI (1775): 179. Image © Adam Matthew Digital / Birmingham Central Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Let’s dwell on the ‘shewing’ for a moment here, and not just for its cool archaic spelling. In the earliest volumes the magazine had followed the custom of magazines to organize a monthly poetry competition on a set theme, and it seems that getting your translation into print was perceived as a similar, though less official form of distinction. In fact, this sense of achievement must have been the primary motivation for many unremunerated amateurs to contribute in the first place. For the significant number of schoolchildren who contributed, there may have been a secondary incentive, as I have suggested before. The magazine’s translation assignments will have been similar to their homework for language classes at school, and it is certainly plausible that tutors made use of the material in the magazine in their teaching, and proudly urged star pupils to submit their work as an advertisement for their schools. We usually get the most information about juvenile contributors when they furnish translations, such as in this signature appearing in April 1775 with a translation of a French item that had appeared the month before, tacitly appropriated from Pierre Bayle’s ground-breaking Dictionare Historique et Critique (1697-1702).

Although, as said above, the foreign-language originals were extracted from a variety of sources, pedagogical works (themselves usually largely consisting of extracts) come up especially often. At the time, language pedagogy consisted mainly of translation exercises, and most textbooks were mainly compilations of short French or Italian texts for translation, written in a desirable style and register that students could emulate in their own compositions. They were explicitly marketed as aids for tuition in schools, such as Peter (occasionally ‘Pierre’) Hudson’s The French scholar’s guide: or, an easy help for translating French into English, that according to Worldcat goes through 13 editions between 1755 and 1805, and holds a long list of tutors, masters and teachers of French based in Britain who endorsed the work. Extracts from it, typical light reading such as anecdotes comparing the ways of different European nations, were republished in the Lady’s Magazine. In 1785, to give another example, two fables by Aesop in Italian were published, that before had appeared in several pedagogical books dedicated to that language. Fables were a popular genre for such works, probably because they are as a rule short and are inherently didactic.

This is a good year for studying the links between translation and pedagogy in the magazine, as in 1785 one ‘J. A. Ourry’ also has a short spell of busy activity, contributing eleven items in French. Ourry was to write a book of language instruction himself, The French scholar put to trial, or, Question on the French language (1795), and, as his signature in the magazine informs us, he too was a French teacher, based at ‘Mr. Birkett’s Academy’ in Greenwich. Most of Ourry’s contributions appear to be extracts from recent numbers of the popular Parisian monthly Mercure de France, but he also undertakes an odd and seemingly original correspondence in French with a reader-contributor signed ‘Juvenis’ on a minor religious controversy, while another reader-contributor signed ‘Philomathes’ provides English translations for each letter. Assuming an affable but gently condescending tone, the teacher Ourry used the magazine to publicize his didactic skills, learning and mastery of the French language. This was a good plan, given the magazine’s inferable extensive readership among middle-class mothers.

All of this demonstrates that language instruction was considered compatible with the mission of the magazine to provide content that was suitable for a wide readership of both sexes and all ages. Of course, the fact that only modern languages were included in this scheme is telling. Latin and Greek were avoided in the magazine, even to the point of removing quotes from the Classics from extracts or translating them without copying in the original, as Classical languages were usually not included in curricula for female education. When the opinionated ‘J. Hodson’ contributed a series entitled ‘The Critic’ with musings on Greek and Latin philology, an editorial note complained: ‘How often must we tell this young writer, that his critiques are not suitable to most female readers[…]?’ [LM XIV (December 1783), p. 658]. None of the French and Italian material will have given offence to even the most morally and politically orthodox readers, but they are unmistakably a means of intellectual stimulation that encouraged male and female readers to broaden their horizons. The mind of the magazine’s implied ‘lady’ reader may have been domesticized, yet she could still be a citizen of the world. In May 1789, ‘M. L. B.’ from Hillington in Norfolk replied to a letter signed ‘J. H.’ (likely the same ‘J. Hodson’) of the month before, which had denigrated a recent French translation of Milton:

LM XX May 1789

LM XX (1789): 263. Image © Adam Matthew Digital / Birmingham Central Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

This vehemence is all the more striking as there was, generally speaking, no love lost between Britain and France in this period. I wonder what the tenor of conversation was, over tea in Hillington by King’s Lynn, only two short months later.

Dr Koenraad Claes

School of English, University of Kent

[1] Shevelow, Kathryn. Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical. London: Routledge, 1990.

[2] ‘domestic, adj. and n.’. OED Online. June 2016. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com.chain.kent.ac.uk/view/Entry/56663?redirectedFrom=domestic& (accessed July 17, 2016).

1815: Modish Dresses, Modest Women and Bonaparte’s Brother

The frantic barking of the dog at the sound of the doorbell today didn’t result in the usual volley of curses but saw me leaping out of bed shouting “It’s the mailman! It’s the mailman!”IMG_0251

“Postman!” corrected my partner, grumbling irritably and pulling the duvet over his head.

grecianurncrop

Fashions for October, LM XLVI (October 1815), p. 427

My unusual excitement at being woken by man and beast was because of the anticipated delivery: a volume of the 1815 Lady’s Magazine. Ever since I bought a 1775 edition of the magazine I’ve been looking for another good deal (which for me means damaged but with as many engravings/plates/patterns as possible) and when 1815 appeared for sale with four fashion plates the opportunity was too good to miss.

For today’s post I leave off my ‘researcher’ hat and simply share my excitement at my new (old) edition of 1815 and some pictures of the engravings and plates that I’ve edited a bit to show off the really extraordinary skill of the artists. Although the engravings are one of the aspects of the magazine that we know little about (for most of the first series of the periodical they have no artist signatures or printer’s details) they have clearly been carefully chosen by the editors to accompany the tales and, at times, they are commissioned specifically for the stories.

One of the reasons the physical copies of the magazine are of such interest to researchers (and especially those who most frequently read the magazine in its digitized form) is of course the possibility of coming across something that is missing from the digitized edition. For example, the digitized edition of 1818 lacks several pages, so if you have only been able to access that edition the presence of those missing pages is welcome. Another reason to love the physical magazine is the possibility (that faint hope of treasure that keeps people like myself metal-detecting for hours in the rain) of finding something missing not only from the digitized edition, but likewise missing from most other volumes – such as a pattern unseen for over a hundred years, or an advertisement removed by the binders. And searching for such a possibility, I discovered something rather odd.

Screen Shot 2016-07-14 at 05.08.58

LM XVLI. Image © Adam Matthew Digital. Not to be reproduced without permission.

IMG_0257

LM XVLI, Fashions for July

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My volume of 1815 does indeed appear to have a fashion plate missing from the digital edition — it is opposite page 285 in my edition and is an engraving of a walking dress described in ‘Fashions for July’. The digitised edition also has an engraving for July depicting a walking dress, but it’s a different engraving. My engraving is numbered 6 in the upper left corner, while the digitised copy’s engraving is numbered 7. Curious indeed! Apparently my binder inserted the June engraving into July while the digitised edition is missing June’s entirely.

modestycontrast

‘The Charm of Modesty’, LM XVLI

But even when these exciting possibilities fail to materialise, the material of the magazine is fascinating enough in its own right. I’ve written before about the differences between working with physical and digital editions: I love the ease of the digitized magazine for work, for speed, for accessibility, for being able to drink a cup of coffee without fear of destroying something priceless, and so on. Yet the beauty of the fashion plates and engravings is undeniably enhanced by seeing them close up in person when the detail of the engravings, the strokes of the etchings, the brightness of the colours appear as if they were printed yesterday, not 200 years ago.

IMG_0246

Amelia Opie, 1769-1853, author.

1815 was an especially rich year for engravings; it includes several portraits of famous eighteenth- and nineteenth-century personages, including Byron, Lucien Bonaparte, Lord Castlereagh, Amelia Opie and others. The illustrations to the fictional content are likewise particularly intriguing; ‘Parental Horror’ depicts a father witness a snake coil around his infant’s neck while ‘The Charm of Modesty’ shows the youth Lycophron discern his lover Aglaia from a group of women enchanted to appear identical to her only by virtue of her downcast, modest eye.

dogengraving

Melia’s Dog, LM XLVI (March 1815), p. 103

The engravings present an opportunity to learn more about the printing process and editorial decisions behind the scenes of the finished product, yet at the moment they remain frustratingly silent. Where did they appear first, who selected them for use in the magazine, who printed them and who wrote the stories for which they were commissioned? Hopefully as we proceed with our work on the project and uncover more about the mysterious editors and publishers behind the magazine we will learn more about the illustrations and plates that were a constant feature and important selling point throughout the over 62 year print run of the Lady’s Magazine.

But for now, enjoy the pictures.

IMG_0226

Lucien Bonaparte

1815bluedress

Opera Dress, Fashions for February, LM XVLI

Parental horror

Engraving to serial tale ‘Mher-ul-Nissa’, LM XVLI (Supplement 1815), p. 581

Dr Jenny DiPlacidi

University of Kent

Becoming Jane: The Case of a Lady’s Magazine Emigrant

Working on The Lady’s Magazine project this May and June has led me down all manner of bizarre eighteenth-century rabbit holes, and no two days are ever the same. I have, over the month, chased one of Mary Robinson’s stray Sylphids across numerous newspapers. I found myself reading about sheep rot in an agricultural magazine just yesterday. I encountered a very serious vicar (J. H. Prince) who, as well as reflections on suicide, also wrote odes on dead cats (there are a surprising number of these, from a surprising number of contributors, in the magazine). I caught a brief glimpse of Emma Hamilton, or someone posing as her, in the pages of 1800, waxing lyrical about reading Dimond’s petrarchal sonnets. I smiled as the same hopeless swain, writing hopeless lines of poetry, tried with his lays first to ensnare one Susan Yates, and then just two months later, a Sophia. I laughed at Dr Hawes’ recommended methods for restoring to life the apparently dead (‘what thou doest – do quickly’), and laughed even more as ‘Tommy Softchin’ bemoaned his lack of whiskers. Sometimes I got very carried away on Ancestry; I tracked down the son of one of the magazine’s long-term contributors, John Webb. Webb often wrote poetry about his sons, and this particular one, Conrade, had a ‘providential escape’ from death by cart in 1800.[1] This escape proved fortunate for him, obviously, but unfortunate for 18 year-old William Riddle, who, 33 years later, was sentenced to two month’s confinement for drunkenly stealing a ham from his master, a cheesemonger: Conrade Manger Webb. Reading the Old Bailey Records, I thought about the ‘playful Conrade’ that a charmed father wrote about, the suing cheesemonger of 1833, and the 77-year-old man who lived and died on Edgware Road, weaving together these three seemingly disparate images, these three traces of a real, lived life.

The paucity of biographical records from this period often sees lives squashed into stubborn, unyielding signifiers. The thrill of finding the right person is quickly overwritten by frustration as that person is reduced to a date of birth, marriage, death, or a street number. Sometimes the records give a bit more: a court appearance, a list of household residents, a photo of a document. But I found over the last few months, that the magazine contributions themselves could sometimes provide rich insights into the lives of the contributors. In other words, they can make the records speak to us.

My work on the project was on attribution and authorship. I donned my best detective hat and ploughed my way through the years, cross-referencing each entry to find out whether it was original; if not, where it came from; and in any case, who might have written it. Tracking down an unacknowledged appropriation has its own pleasures, particularly when the search is a long, piecemeal one, but the most rewarding (and the most potentially frustrating) work lies, I think, in attribution. The magazine is a wonderful, dense, and unruly site in which to perform recovery project archaeology. Although there are so many contributors who will probably never be traced (the Eleanor H**** who translated 6 plays from French and German between 1799 and 1805 proved just one source of frustration for me this month), some are just waiting to be discovered. Likewise, although many contributors had short-lived careers in the Lady’s Magazine, some went on to publish novels or poetry collections after. Others can tell us something about their particular historical moment, about their situated and personal experiences. As Jennie noted in a recent blogpost, recovering the lives of contributors ‘might not seem all that important beyond fleshing out a footnote in literary history. But for [each writer] 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.’[2] Indeed, the aim is to uncover a messy eighteenth-century that is sometimes overlooked in favour of clean, linear narratives. The magazine is the perfect forum for this sort of work: inclusive, democratic, dialogic. And it affords fascinating glimpses into lost lives, which speak to modern concerns as much as they did to the concerns of their many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers.

In the spirit of recovery, then, and as a way of making the figures and names ‘speak’, I want to share the story of one of the Lady’s Magazine’s contributors, which takes us all the way from Lincolnshire to Washington. This story resides in the poetry sections of the magazine for 1805, which play host, as they often did, to a transient poetic community. When I first opened up the index, I optimistically scanned the names, looking for partial ones that I might be able to flesh out. One jumped out right away: Jane C—k—g. I searched Ancestry a few times that day with variations, but with no definitive results, and quickly gave up and moved on with the more fruitful business of searching out appropriations. But Jane kept asking for attention. By the time I arrived in 1805, I’d given up on finding her, when one afternoon, I arrived at this acrostic:

 

image

LM 31 (Aug 1800): 439. mage © Adam Matthew Digital / British Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

 

And there she was. Jane Cocking, Holbeach Marsh. Right after an acrostic to her sister Anne Cocking. I had a lead, and Ancestry was forthcoming.

Jane was born in Lincolnshire on 14th June 1789 to William (1760-1820) and Ann (nee Worseley, 1750-1834) Cocking. Her sister, Ann(e) (spelling varies in the records), was four years older than her (b. 7th March 1785). They lived at Holbeach Marsh, a fenland area in the South Holland district of Lincolnshire, which is where Jane signed most of her poetry from.

Jane started her 7-month writing career in the Lady’s Magazine, just shy of 16 years old, with six contributions to April’s poetry section.[3] Two of these were acrostics; one for an unknown woman called Jane Herbbass(?), and the other for her sister’s fiancé, William Blanchard (‘May you e’er live in peace and ease, / Belov’d by her you wish to please’). She also contributed an elegy on the death of her friend, Mary Cooling, who had died in December 1804, aged 15 (‘how transient were her charms’), and she wrote a poem to a Miss. Harrison, (probably Nancy Harrison, b. 31 May, 1783). These four contributions are full of assertions of her subjects’ virtues, and hopes for their future happiness, mostly in terms of marriage, and the successful avoidance of ‘false-hearted swains’ and ‘fickle shepherds’. In one of the other poems, ‘Some verses on leaving H—–N’, Jane laments having to leave friends after a long stay spent reading and writing poetry. She writes, wistfully, ‘ah when I think how our time we were spending – / In composing of poetry, or reading a book – / We were ever obliging, and never offending, / And the smile of good nature appear’d in each look’. The final poem, ‘Verses on a pleasant walk near Lincoln’, bids farewell to the landscape she knows, although at this point, readers are unsure what this means or where she is going:

 

Farewell, lovely scene! I must go,

And leave thee, ah! leave thee behind!

But I this, as some solace, shall know

Thou wilt e’er have a place in my mind.

Ah! how peaceful I oft have sat down,

Enjoying thy beauties serene!

Undisturb’d by the noise of the town,

I’ve hail’d thee the charmingest scene.

But now I must bid thee adieu,

Tho’ ‘t will certainly give me much pain;

Much more, as I certainly know

I shall ne’er see thy beauties again.

These are clumsy and perhaps derivative poems, but they also tell us the story of a contributor that is wholly relatable to anyone who was once a teenage girl, who tried to imitate what she read, who had heartfelt hopes for her loved ones, or who had to move home as a child.

In ‘on leaving H—–N’, she writes, despite obviously being preoccupied with the upcoming move in her other poems:

 

My heart is a gay one, a stranger to sorrow: –

That word in my ear has a very harsh sound; –

Present time I employ, and ne’er think of tomorrow –

‘Tis a period, we’re told, ‘that’s no-where to be found.

In July, Jane heeds her own advice, and leaves off thinking about leaving, in order to respond to a poem written by James Murray Lacey. His ‘Lover’s List’[4] establishes him as the Lady’s Magazine’s very own, eighteenth-century version of Lou Bega (see the questionable 1990 hit single Mambo No. 5), cataloguing his adoration of Evelina, then Mary, then Selina, then Betsy, then Nancy, and so on: 32 named women and ‘fifty more’ that he cannot name. Jane’s witty response in July reworks the original poem from a female respective, listing a slightly more modest 10 lovers, and ending with a flirtatious address to the original author: ‘I never will desert this swain [Francis is the one she’s settled on], / I do him love so well; /No, no, I’ll never change again – / Except for J. M. L.[5]

The following month, James Murray Lacey raises young Jane a tongue-in-cheek declaration:

You wrote, – and now she charms no more;

Jane fills each love-devoted thought:

I only fancy’d love before,

But now I’m certain I am caught.

[…]

From Portsmouth lately when I came,

‘Where have you been?’ ask’d all I knew;

My answer ever was the same, –

‘To Holbeach Marsh,’ – a jaunt quite new!’[6]

His request that she ‘turn Francis off’ and write back to him sadly went answered.

Meanwhile, we find out where Jane is actually going from another contributor, Belinda, who, in June 1805 writes two poems: ‘Lines to Miss Jane C—k—g’ and ‘Lines to the Misses C—k—g, on their going to America.’[7] From Belinda’s other poetry, alongside poems written to her, I was able to establish that her real name was Mary, and she had a sister who was probably called Ann. The final stanza of ‘on their going to America’ is intriguing. Belinda writes: ‘‘Tis a prayer that proceeds from the heart, / Although by a stranger ‘tis penned: / With regret she will hear you depart; / Then what pangs ‘twill inflict on each friend!’ Whilst these lines suggest that was wasn’t known to Jane personally, Jane’s response suggests that they were actually close friends. This is perhaps then demonstrative of the ways in which, like modern internet forums, the Lady’s Magazine provided a space in which to make ‘virtual’ friends. More likely, I think, given that Belinda writes from Fleet, near where Jane lived, it demonstrates the writer’s dogged adherence to the pseudonymity of the poem. Whilst Mary knows Jane, Belinda does not.

Jane’s poetry dominated the section in April, and then in October, although the poems included in October’s issue were written between May and August. From Holbeach Marsh, she writes praising Belinda (Mary). She also writes a short poem on contentment; one on modesty, addressed to a Mr. W—ley; one entitled ‘The Forsaken Swain’; and an acrostic to Clement Coote, who had written acrostics to Jane and Anne in the magazine two months before.[8]

Coote, if he is the Clement Tubbs Coote that I tracked down, was christened in November 1784 in Cambridge, and so would have been close in age to Anne Cocking. In 1799, aged around 15, he was apprenticed to Charles Burnett, a grocer, in Fleet, Lincoln.

 

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Clement T. Coote is apprenticed to Charles Burnett, grocer. Aug 1799.

He signs his 1805 poems from Fleet, as Belinda does, suggesting that this is how he knew Anne and Jane (Fleet is about 8 miles from Holbeach). In 1807, Coote returned to Cambridge, apparently giving up poetry, to take up another apprenticeship.

 

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Clement Coote is apprenticed to William Cockett, draper. Dec 1807.

 

In 1809, he married Mary Cole, who I spent an inordinately long amount of time trying to prove was Belinda in the hopes of a nice tidy circle, but alas, no such luck. He went on to run a business as a draper, grocer and tallow-chaundler, but unfortunately went bankrupt in 1817.

 

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Clement Tubbs Coote goes bankrupt. Literary Panorama and National Register 6 (Aug 1817)

At some point shortly after this, the Coote family moved to America too, arriving in Philadelphia. Clement Coote died in Baltimore in 1849.[9]

But back to Jane. By August 22nd 1805, Jane was in London, where she penned a farewell poem to Clement Coote, wishing her ‘dear Mr C—’ health, wealth and contentment.[10] Did she see him when he arrived on American shores 12 years later? Jane also wrote a final goodbye poem to Belinda (Mary), and to ‘Albion’s happy isle’ before she ‘brave[d] th’Atlantic deep’.[11] In this latter poem, she writes touchingly of storing memories of the English countryside – singing blackbirds and linnets – anticipating that in her new home, ‘Remembrance then will force the tear to flow, / When in my fancy I behold each spot, / Each fav’rite spot, I formerly admir’d.’ But she goes on:

‘But what are these? mean trifles, when compar’d

With leaving friends, friends much esteem’d, behind:

Whene’er I think on that, it casts a damp –

A cheerless damp throughout my frame I feel.

‘Cheerless damp’ is the same phrase that Belinda uses in her 1806 poem ‘To a friend leaving the country.’[12] On September 12th 1805, Jane’s sister Anne married William Blanchard at St George in the East, in London. Then sometime over the next few weeks, Jane’s parents, Jane, and the newly married Anne and William all emigrated to America, where they settled in Washington, in the District of Columbia.

The Cockings emigrated at a time which saw a lull in the numbers of arrivals to America, mostly due to the Napoleonic wars.[13] Maldwyn Allen Jones suggests that the total number of immigrants from Europe to America 1783-1815 was about 250,000, but with only about 3,000 a year during the Napoleonic wars.[14] So what made them leave, enduring at best, an uncomfortable, and at worst, a deadly journey across the Atlantic? Belinda’s fears for her friend undergoing a dangerous journey are apparent in the lines:

Atlantic, be proud of thy charge!

Neptune, curb ev’ry boist’rous storm!

With honour thy duties discharge;

Let nought thy smooth bosom deform![15]

And indeed, shipwrecks were a real threat. A list of all the shipwrecks in 1806, which is in the hundreds, can be found here. Unless I can track down Jane writing in America, it is unlikely that we will ever know what her journey was like or why her family travelled 3,000 miles to start again in Washington. However, they arrived safely. Life went on.

On August 19th 1813, aged 24, Jane married an American called Charles Carroll Glover. They remained in Washington, appearing on the 1820 federal census with three children and – something that shocked me, and that might tell us a bit more about the Cockings’ economic status – two young female slaves. Suddenly the weaving of strands that I already thought I knew became harder; the coherent, imagined, and celebratory picture I’d created was fragmented. Jane’s sister Anne (now Blanchard) also remained in Washington, had a large family of six(?) children, and owned at least one slave in 1830. Around this time, the number of slaves in Washington had reached its peak, representing twelve percent of the city’s population.[16] Anne shows up in 1862 claiming compensation for two recently freed slaves, Rachel Jackson and William Henry Taylor.[17] You can view her petition here.

Jane was widowed in 1827, and outlived all of her children too: her daughter Adeline died at 9 months; and sons William at 21, and Richard at 29. Jane herself lived to the grand age of 87, dying on September 14th, 1876.

 

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Gravestones at Oak Hill Cemetery, Washington, District of Columbia. From left to right: Charles and Jane Glover; Charles and Jane Glover’s children; Anne Cocking (Blanchard).

 

Back in 1805, Clement Coote wrote a poem for Jane, ‘on her Arrival in London, just before her Departure for America’, but this wasn’t published until April 1806.[18] In it, he hopes: ‘May you upon Columbia’s plain / Find some who love the tuneful train’, and wishes that she will continue to be inspired by other poets to write. Whether she did or not remains to be seen, and checking some American periodicals for Jane Cockings or Jane Glovers is on the to do list.

Tracing Jane C—k—g did several things for me. It demonstrated the way in which the Lady’s Magazine functioned as a forum for communication between momentary, geographically-located, networks of friends. It gave me an insight into the materials available for a teenage girl to express her joys and her anxieties, her love of the countryside she grew up in, and her fears about leaving it for America. It suggested, in linking a village in Lincolnshire to the changing legal status of slaves in mid nineteenth-century America, that the magazine’s webs and networks can be extended to cover a huge variety of geographical spaces and historical issues, of which migration and globalisation formed an integral part. This month has been a profoundly odd one, but also a profoundly human one, in which the connections between the past and the present have at once been fractured – sheep rot seems inescapably alien to me, writing in 21st century London – but also maintained. We continue, as people, to be fragmented across our daily lives, our writing, the records we leave, even the thoughts we have. Reading Jane – at once anxious, sorrowful, optimistic, virtuous, flirtatious; a child writing juvenilia and a slave owner; an intrepid teenage voyager and a widowed mother – was a palpable reminder of this.

Dr Kim Simpson

School of English

University of Kent

 

Notes

[1] LM 31 (Dec 1800): 672

[2] Jennie Batchelor, ‘Our ‘ingenious correspondent’: Finding Joanna Squire’, https://blogs.kent.ac.uk/ladys-magazine/2016/06/06/our-ingenious-correspondent-finding-joanna-squire/

[3] LM 36 (Apr 1805): 214-16

[4] LM 36 (Feb 1805): 103

[5] LM 36 (Jul 1805): 381

[6] LM 36 (Aug 1805): 437

[7] LM 36 (Jun 1805): 327

[8] LM 36 (Oct 1805): 549-51

[9] There is more information about Clement Coote, including a photograph of his portrait, here: http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&amp;GRid=113760171&amp;ref=acom

[10] LM 36 (Oct 1805): 551

[11] LM 36 (Oct 1805): 550

[12] LM 37 (May 1806): 275

[13] John Powell, Encyclopedia of North American Immigration (New York: Facts on File Inc., 2005), 37

[14] Maldwyn Allen Jones, American Immigration, 2nd edn. (London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 54

[15] ‘Lines to the Misses C––k––g, on their going to America’. LM 36 (Jun 1805): 327

[16] http://civilwardc.org/texts/petitions/about

[17] ‘In December 1861, Senator Wilson submitted a bill proposing the immediate and compulsory emancipation of the District of Columbia’s 3,300 slaves through a program of federal compensation. The District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act, which President Lincoln signed on April 16, 1862, allotted an average of $300 per slave to all slaveowners who were loyal to the Union, for a total payment of $900,000. Under the Compensated Emancipation Act, all slaves in the District of Columbia were free immediately. Slaveowners had ninety days to submit a petition, which consisted of a preprinted form, requesting compensation for their slaves. The petitions, which were written by the slaveowners, identified each slave, provided a personal description, including the slave’s “age, size, complexion, health and qualifications,” and presented an estimated value of the slave for purposes of compensation. […] During the three-month process, 966 slaveowners filed petitions and testified before the commission.’ http://civilwardc.org/texts/petitions/about

[18] LM 37 (Apr 1806): 217