LM, V (1774). Image \u00a9 Adam Matthew Digital \/ Birmingham Central Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.<\/p><\/div>\n The story provides a first-person account by the narrator, Harriot West, an orphan whom we first encounter in the boarding school outside of London where she was raised by the kindly Mrs. S\u2014. When Harriot visits a schoolmate during the holidays she is sharply reminded of her forlorn position in the world by her hostess who, in an effort to curtail her husband\u2019s teasing, tells him that Harriet is \u2018only a poor child, whom nobody owned, and for whom, of course, nobody cared\u2019 (V, 577). Harriot realizes that her lack of family means that she can \u2018expect mortifying treatment\u2019 and she reflects \u2018I felt myself detached, as it were, from every human creature, I felt myself a solitary being, in the wide world, without a parent, without a friend, without a protector\u2019 (V, 578). Following a familiar pattern in eighteenth-century literature, Harriot\u2019s orphaned state is compounded by having no knowledge of her birth parents, and though her adventures eventually lead her on a journey of discovery: of family, fortune and love, she must first endure hardship and dangers.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/ladys-magazine\/files\/2014\/12\/humble-beginning-e1418212129928.png\")
<\/a>Examining the fictional content of the Lady’s Magazine<\/em> in its own right reveals fascinating lines of potential influence from earlier texts and opens up new intertextual possibilities for our readings of later and better known works. Stories such as the anonymously authored The History of an Humble Friend<\/em>, a serial fiction that appears monthly in the Lady’s Magazine<\/em> for over two years, beginning in September 1774 and concluding in the yearly supplement to 1776, shares marked similarities to works like Frances Burney\u2019s Evelina<\/em> (1778) and Ann Radcliffe\u2019s The Italian<\/em> (1797) \u2013 both of which are published years after this humble tale makes its first appearance. This novel length serial fiction deploys standard eighteenth-century Gothic tropes such as the reclamation of the missing mother figure, but does so relatively early on in traditional chronologies of the genre. Likewise, its presentation of the sentimental orphan prefigures later representations popularized in novels by Burney and Charlotte Smith.<\/p>\n<\/a>