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

My research on the Lady’s Magazine began in the autumn of 2013 when I started to examine the fiction within eighteenth-century periodicals as part of my new book project. It was a completely digital effort: making use of the University of Kent’s subscription to the Portal to Newspapers and Periodicals c1685-1835 that has a mass of titles digitized by Adam Matthew – including the complete 62-year run of the Lady’s Magazine – provided me with more than enough material for the chapter at the click of a mouse. Downloading and reading the yearly volumes of the magazines felt very much like reading ‘the real thing’. The scanned pages retain any creases or stains or marks of age, and where the print is faded or blurred in the original, it is too in the digital copies.

I had seen and handled the magazine before I began my work on it, but only monthly issues rather than the bound, annual volume. After many months of reading the periodical in pdf format, I decided to purchase a volume of my very own.

Finding a year that was both particularly interesting in terms of content and in poor enough condition to be affordable took a bit of time, but I finally found a very readable (though almost disbound and missing the front board) volume of the Lady’s Magazine for 1775.

Reading the material artifact after having spent so much time with the digital editions was slightly disorienting. Used to the large screen of the computer and zooming in until the font size was comfortable, the material text seemed at once smaller (the font) and bigger (there’s no overlooking in the physical copy the weighty heft of each year). There is, of course, that connection to the past that seems so much stronger when handling the same worn and yellowed pages once thumbed through by the eighteenth-century reader.
And then there was the surprise of finding a page that was not present in the digital volume of 1775.

Taking out the book one night to show a friend what it is that I actually do (‘yes, I need to read 48 of these by next September’), she looked through the engravings and asked about the pattern. Certain that there was no pattern in the digital copy, the pdf was immediately consulted and it confirmed that the pattern in that edition of September 1775, according to the directions to the binder, been removed. As Jennie Batchelor pointed out in her blog last week, binders at times ignored or overlooked these directions, and by luck, the ‘three new patterns for watch cases’ had ben retained in my edition.

That the pattern was set opposite a serial feature on Cleopatra seemed jarring, but it brought to mind a letter that had been written to one of the magazine’s regular columnists, Bob Short Jr., by a man who signed himself G. Rffy. In January 1779, G. Rffy’s writes that Bob Short’s column was printed opposite the sewing pattern which ‘rendered it rather more conspicuous than otherwise’ (LM X [Jan 1779]: 93). This is just as true today; periodicalists handling the material artifact now experience the same sense of surprise when turning the page in the middle of a discourse on religion to find a pattern for ruffles. Readers’ experiences of and engagement with the magazine’s various items could be altered by the location of text opposite an engraving or pattern. While the pattern for watch cases may seem relatively unimportant in the grand scheme of the Lady’s Magazine, it highlights the differences between working with digitized and material magazines, and also raises questions about the editorial practices regarding the positioning of text and engravings to, perhaps, render certain items ‘rather more conspicuous’.

Dr Jenny DiPlacidi

University of Kent

I’ve started to notice a bit of a theme in our recent posts for the blog, most of which have been about the difficulty of writing them. Many of these difficulties arise from the challenge of trying to make sense of what is before us when we read the magazine. How on earth can we even begin to work out who Camilla or J. L-g was, for instance? How can we make sense of the periodical’s editorial policy when articles  – sometimes articles placed right next to one another – directly contradict each other? Do such moments exhibit a lapse of editorial judgement? Or are they an accidental juxtaposition? A strategic spur to debate and controversy? Even as we start to find answers to some of these questions, more and more problems present themselves to us. It certainly keeps us on our toes, that’s for sure.

In the past few days I have been working with yet another interpretive conundrum that I have been very aware of it for some time: How can we write about parts of the magazine that are no longer there?

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

Call any magazine, especially the Lady’s, ephemera in my earshot and I’m afraid I won’t be able to let it go. The longstanding association of historical women’s magazine’s with the ephemeral, the frivolous and the disposable could not seem further from the truth behind such titles. The Lady’s was a magazine that always had an eye to futurity. Monthly issues, like those of many of its rivals, were intended to be preserved in bound annual volumes and the last issues of each year published binder’s instructions on how to organise the material for posterity, especially non-paginated items, such as the handsome illustrations the magazine provided each month. Whether you read the magazine today in digital or hard copy it will almost always be in this annual bound format for which we owe a debt of thanks to the collective efforts of binders who curated them and the readers who agreed with the magazine’s editors that the publication was worth preserving in the first place.

But not everything was preserved. Many surviving bound volumes are missing the Supplement or Index. Others are missing (whether by error or design is usually hard to tell) odd pages of text, engravings or fashion plates. (I always like to think the latter might be missing when they are because their owners had taken them to their dressmakers Barbara Johnson style, but of course, we cannot be sure.)

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

Then there are those parts of the magazine that were never designed to be preserved, not even by the editors who boasted of their inclusion. This is especially true of song sheets and embroidery patterns, both of which were regular features of the magazine in its first decades. Neither of these types of material are to be found in the annual ‘Directions to the Binder’ and in fact when they are mentioned at all, as in the note that appeared under the advertisement for the 1771 second volume, it was to confirm that they had no place in the bound versions of the magazine at all:  ‘Note. The Patterns to be taken out’ (LM II [July 1771]: n. p.). Such features of the magazine were clearly meant to be pulled out and used. And evidently they were.

Nonetheless, we are fortunate that some owners and binders ignored these dictates. Indeed, song sheets can be found fairly frequently in the bound volumes of the magazine for the first two decades digitised on the Adam Matthews Eighteenth-Century Journals V database that is our main source for our project, as they are in other, less systematically digitised runs of the periodical that can be found online as well as in variously located hard copies yet to be scanned.

Embroidery patterns, however, are much less common. This has been a recurrent source of disappointment to me in the years I have been reading and working on the magazine. As I set about writing a paper I am giving at the Disseminating Dress conference at York at the end of the month, it has begun to really vex me.

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

The inclusion of a monthly pattern was an important feature of the magazine from its first issue in August 1770. In its inaugural Address to readers, the editors placed dress and fashion at the heart of the magazine’s mission and identified the inclusion of patterns as an important part of its utility and appeal to readers. The ‘subjects’ the magazine would alight upon were designed to render readers’ ‘minds not less amiable than [their] persons’, the editors declared: ‘But as external appearances are the first inlet to the treasures of the heart; and the advantages of dress, though they cannot communicate beauty, may at least make it more conspicuous, it is intended in this collection to present the sex with the most elegant patterns for the Tambour, Embroidery, or every kind of Needlework.’ Taking advantage of ‘the progressive improvement made in the art of pattern-drawing’, the magazine could boast for just sixpence an issue for the first three decades of its run: ‘[e]very branch of literature’, ‘engravings designed to adorn the person’, as well as ‘a pattern’ that alone ‘would cost them double the money at the Haberdashers’ (LM I, [Aug. 1770]: 1).

In part this is a masterpiece of marketing, the eighteenth-century equivalent to a television shopping channel telling you that not only will the advertised purchase price get you X and the Y you never even knew you wanted, but a free (yes: absolutely free!) Z into the bargain. But my strong feeling is that the patterns represented much more than simply a commercial ploy.

Patterns served various ends within the magazine. Some were educational. I think I would feel as if all my birthdays and Christmases had come at once if I ever came across one of the patterns for embroidered maps of Britain and the Americas published in 1776 and 1777 and intended to supplement the fascinating series of essays on the history and geography of these nations published in these years. I haven’t seen any in copies of the magazine I have consulted.

LM XVII (Mar. 1786). Image © Adam Matthew Digital / Birmingham Central Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

The vast majority, though, were for decorating garments and other household objects, from watch cases and fire screens to sleeves, pockets and gentleman’s ruffs. These patterns can potentially tell us a great deal about the magazine and its understanding of its female readers. At the very least, their inclusion is a strong indication that for all its interest in the elaborate and extravagant fashions worn at court and by contemporary celebrities such as Mary Robinson or Sarah Siddons, the Lady’s expected its middling readers (lady does not mean aristocratic, here) to fashion themselves in a  modest and simple style. Ornamentation, in all things, merely for ornamentation’s sake was to be despised. In  both their intellectual and sartorial pursuits,  the magazine’s readers were instead supposed to be characterised by a considered elegance, marked by grace and cultivated through reflection and practice. I strongly suspect that the embroidery patterns the magazine published played an important part in shaping this ideal.

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

Every single one of the patterns that appeared in the magazine is briefly described in the table of contents for the month in which it appeared. Quite what the existence of more of the physical patterns would add to this picture is uncertain. What is clearer to me is that their absence is not a sign that the magazine was frivolous or disposable. In matters sartorial as in all things, the Lady’s saw itself as both attractive and useful to the lives of its readers. The fact that so few of these patterns have survived to this day – that many were presumably used – suggests that it may well have been right.

Dr Jennie Batchelor

School of English

University of Kent 

LM X (Oct. 1779). Image © Adam Matthew Digital / Birmingham Central Library. Not to be reproduced without permission

A frequent contributor to the Lady’s Magazine in the 1770s and 1780s bore the signature J. L-g from Market Lavington, a small town in Wiltshire. Some of the items provided by the writer, such as ‘A Caution to the Ladies’ in the 1778 supplement, are opinion pieces designed to advise women against the dangers of fortune tellers, female vanity, and indolence. But other works were meditations and reflections penned whilst walking through the town’s surrounding fields and forests. Describing the prospects, flora, and fauna, the works focus on the emotional and spiritual states the writer experiences in nature.

It was whilst reading the October 1779 contribution entitled ‘A Description of October’ that I began to develop that sympathy and liking for the subject that can so quickly send an archivist on a wild and time-consuming chase to identify the person behind the mysterious signature.  This reflective work revealed more of the author’s personality, demonstrating his love of animals and environment and an empathy with the hares and pheasants pursued by hound and hunters.

LM X (Oct. 1779). Image © Adam Matthew Digital / Birmingham Central Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

J. L-g describes the hare, ‘poor timid creature’, that ‘perplexed, and in the utmost distress […] pours all his soul in flight’ (Oct: 542) before he ‘falls a victim to his numerous enemies’. The writer then turns to the ‘murdering gun’ of the fowler and the pheasants who are killed for the ‘luxurious appetite of man’, lamenting: ‘poor creatures! How hard is your fate!’ (542).

In spite of his conservative advice (that, frankly, rankled me at times), J. L-g identified so deeply with the persecuted prey that I reluctantly began to like the author who hitherto seemed cantankerous and moralizing. Feeling a peculiar kinship to a long-deceased writer is not such a bad thing for archivists working with so much anonymous and pseudonymous literature. It is easy when reading so many items by the same person to develop an idea of who they were and what they were like, to create a name to fill the blanks in the signature, and to imagine the person behind the persona. Though my research role on the project is to focus on the magazine’s content, it was this sense of kinship, that sneaking fondness for the self-described shy and reclusive writer, that made me so interested in the man behind the contributions.

LM X (Oct. 1779). Image © Adam Matthew Digital / Birmingham Central Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

When other items from the same town began appearing signed ‘E. L-g’  or ‘Eliza L-g’ or ‘E-h L-g’ I began to feel I had at least a few possibilities to send on to the project’s attribution research associate, Koenraad Claes. But Koenraad’s research skills would have been wasted on this because in one quick google search for the keywords ‘18th century’, ‘Elizabeth L’ and ‘market lavington’ I was directed to the Market Lavington Museum blog that made it clear the signatures belong to John Legg and Elizabeth Legg, siblings, of Market Lavington. A quick email to the very helpful museum curator, Rog Frost, supplied me with a memoir of John Legg and photographs of the gravestones. These can be viewed on the museum’s blog.

Identifying John and Elizabeth Legg is only one small piece of a much larger puzzle of contributors and communities of writers. But it helps us to ask more questions about the correspondents and their relationships with each other and the editors of the Lady’s Magazine. It also demonstrates how essential modern day communities of researchers, curators, genealogists and bloggers are in uncovering the men and women who wrote for the periodical.

Dr Jenny DiPlacidi

School of English

University of Kent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr Jennie Batchelor

School of English

University of Kent

LM, IX (November 1778): 583. © Adam Matthew Digital / British Library. Not to be reproduced without permission

While writing my last blog post on the diverse genres of items mentioning or concerned with female fashions I initially included a November 1778 letter to the editor entitled ‘Proposal for Raising Female Regiments.’ The letter was, at first glance, a satirical epistle with multiple targets including French soldiers and domineering wives. However, something about the material didn’t feel quite right; it didn’t read like the average letter to the editor. I began searching for some of the unique terms in the text and it was the phrase advocating women ‘be cloathed in vests of pink sattin, and open drawers of the same’ (LM, IX [Nov 1778]: 584) that led me to the discovery that the letter was not, in fact, an anonymous epistle, but an essay attributed to Oliver Goldsmith.

While the attribution isn’t made until an edited collection of Goldsmith is published in the 1790s, the letter/essay had been appearing in periodicals and gazettes since January 1762. The satirical epistle is signed T.S. in the Lady’s Magazine as, I believe, a nod to Tobias Smollet, the editor of the British Magazine where it first appeared. The essay’s edited form in the Lady’s Magazine removes any details that would reveal the original date of publication, yet leaves the mention of attacking the French troops intact — at the time of its initial publication the reference was propaganda regarding the Seven Years’ War. There are also other explicit references in the original essay that clearly locates it as having been written within 1762 and which have all been removed to make its insertion in the 1778 volume of the Lady’s Magazine topical. Likely, the letter to the editor would have been read as satirizing the French soldiers participating in the American War of Independence.

LM, IX (November 1778): 584. © Adam Matthew Digital / British Library. Not to be reproduced without permission

The contributor has repurposed and repackaged the Goldsmith essay so that it becomes newly relevant, appearing as a just-penned letter to the editor. Yet signing the letter ‘T.S.’ indicates that the contributor doesn’t intend to use the text without giving credit to the earliest place of publication (at the time, this was the only information available regarding its source). As my previous blog post reveals, the nuances of the letter’s authorship left me unable to tackle the material within the brevity of the blog. The Goldsmith essay has a whole life outside of the Lady’s Magazine where it is eventually repurposed, but so too does its appearance within the periodical engage with the other items concerned with dress, gender, citizenship, and education.

What this example points to, I believe, is not only the way that the roles of authorship and content research on this project overlap, but also the challenges in writing about the items in the Lady’s Magazine. The complexity involved in uncovering authorship and contextualizing the content highlights the collaboration that is so necessary for the project and that speaks to the dialogic nature of the magazine itself. Part of what is so exciting and interesting about working on the Lady’s Magazine is how much we are constantly learning about eighteenth-century print culture, readers, and authorship.

Dr Jenny DiPlacidi

School of English, University of Kent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr Jennie Batchelor

School of English

University of Kent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr Jennie Batchelor

University of Kent

Examining the index of any year of the Lady’s Magazine for titles that mention fashion or dress inevitably produces a number of items, yet some of the most provocative discussions on the topic have seemingly unrelated titles. In 1778, for example, contributions on women’s dress are found in long-running serials such as ‘The Matron’ and ‘The Female Reformer’ as well as appearing in letters to the editors. Many of the articles that feature fashion are informed by the major philosophical concerns of the period and function as social commentary rather than solely as fashion reports. Such items, often bearing obscure titles or none at all when buried within the body of lengthier serials, can be easy for researchers to overlook.

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

Part of our research project’s database includes assigning specific keywords to each item that usefully signal the subject matter in ways the genre or title may not indicate. For instance, a letter to the editor published in January 1778 listed in the index merely as ‘Shapes, fine’ strongly condemns the fashion of stays or corsets. Using terms characteristic of eighteenth-century discourse generally and particularly prevalent in discussions of manners and fashion the letter writer references ‘nature’ and ‘artifice’. The letter, signed H—, then goes on to locate the practice of ‘women’s lacing themselves up’ as one that will ‘entail diseases and deformity upon their successors’ – language more commonly encountered in medical tracts on venereal disease.

LM, VII (1776). Image © Adam Matthew Digital / Birmingham Central Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

‘[. . .] women’s lacing themselves up, in order to make what has been heretofore called fine shapes, I cannot help asking why, in the name of nature and reason, they cannot appear with the shape which their Creator has been pleased to give them? Why, for the sake of a capricious whim, must they entail diseases and deformity upon their successors? It is a known fact, that the health and strength of many thousands have been utterly destroyed, even before they were born’ (LM, IX [Jan 1778]: 17). The letter writer’s concern is not only with the defiance of ‘nature and reason’ occasioned by wearing stays, but also with their destructive effects on women’s bodies and the health and strength of the children they bear. Anxieties about female bodies and their productivity are returned to in relation to dress in a variety of contexts.

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

A reader who signs his letter to the magazine’s long-running agony aunt column ‘A Single Man’ laments women’s unproductive activities. Stating that ‘the more domestic women can be made, the better companions they will be for us’ (LM, IX [Jan 1778]: 35) he locates this desired domesticity in necessary and useful work that does not waste time: ‘I generally find the girls about some trifling piece of work, such a knotting, netting, or twisting purses [. . .] the time taken up in the making of it is misspent; it might certainly be disposed of in a more advantageous manner, in the performance of some works of indisputable usefulness’ (LM, IX [Jan 1778]: 35). Such productive, rather than trifling work, stops women from being ‘drawn to the card table’ and allows them to keep the hearts of their husbands by demonstrating ‘a constant attention to every species of domestic oeconomy, which ought never to be neglected for the pursuit of trifles’ (LM, IX [Jan 1778]: 36). Domestic economy, then, correlates directly to women working in useful, necessary, and productive ways.

LM, VII (1776). Image © Adam Matthew Digital / Birmingham Central Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

The maintenance of ‘decency’ is the purported impetus behind the letter from a ‘Friend to Decency, Delicacy, and Decorum’ who requests that the Matron side with him regarding the female fashion of jackets. The letter writer, however, is clearly more concerned with appearance than morality. ‘A Friend’ argues about the trend: ‘If these jackets can be at all allowable, they must be so only in the young: an old shepherdess, a Pastorella beyond her prime is past endurance’ (LM, IX [Aug 1778]: 412). The dig at women’s age elicits a response from ‘Patient Grizzle’ who states ‘But what provokes me more than all is his postscript: Can there be anything more ridiculous than for a man to pretend to say at what age a woman shall leave off a jacket [. . .] but then I would not be prescribed by any one of the male sex – no, so far from it, that I would put on a jacket at three-score if I liked it’ (LM, IX [Oct 1778]: 527). This reader’s reply demonstrates that although ‘A Friend’ may have dressed his argument in the language of decency, she understands it as an attack on women’s freedom of choice.

The correspondents’ engagement with the magazine and each other reveals the range of discourses embedded within unexpected items, underscoring the complexity and breadth of the archive.

Dr Jenny DiPlacidi

University of Kent