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 […]
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 […]
Titles are an important element of a publication’s marketing strategy, and will usually be chosen to draw the attention of a target readership. In the case of the Lady’s Magazine (1770-1837), it is quite likely that the title was meant to position this periodical as an alternative to the long-established Gentleman’s Magazine (1731-1922), suggesting that […]
Periodical publications, and especially the subgenre of the magazine, are seldom a one-way street. The content they provide readers with may stimulate response in the form of letters to the editor and other unsolicited copy, and many periodicals turn this reciprocity to good use. As previous blog posts have shown, the Lady’s Magazine was particularly […]
This is the blog for our major new research project on The Lady’s Magazine (1770-1818), run out of the University of Kent. The research is funded by a two-year Leverhulme Research Project grant and will result in a host of publications about the contents of and contributors to this early, long-running and groundbreaking women’s magazine, as well as a […]
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 […]
This week the Lady’s Magazine team travelled to the first annual CRECS conference at Cardiff University, where we were invited by Anthony Mandal, Sophie Coulombeau and James Castell to deliver a workshop on researching the periodical. Cardiff University’s Special Collections and Archives (SCOLAR) was particularly suited to our delivery of a hands-on workshop as the […]
Already several of our blog posts have discussed the many instances of appropriated content in the Lady’s Magazine. In my last post, I discussed the methodology by means of which I try to find the sources of these non-original items, and a few kind readers have since humoured me by asking about my findings. Of […]
Drama appears in the Lady’s Magazine throughout its over sixty year print run in numerous forms. The most frequent genre is the review, but the theatrical world is also presented to the magazine’s readers through, for example, biographical essays on actors and actresses, excerpts from plays, songs from new productions, engravings of theatres and performers […]
Who or what makes meaning in magazines? Publishers? Editors? Advertisers (usually, in fact, these were the publishers or editors in the era I spend my working life in)? The authors of individual contributions? Or maybe even readers? The answer, it seems to me, is never a clear cut one. The inherentally dialogic and dynamic format […]