{"id":545,"date":"2015-06-16T14:26:30","date_gmt":"2015-06-16T13:26:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/ladys-magazine\/?p=545"},"modified":"2015-06-16T14:26:30","modified_gmt":"2015-06-16T13:26:30","slug":"meaning-and-magazines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/ladys-magazine\/2015\/06\/16\/meaning-and-magazines\/","title":{"rendered":"Meaning and Magazines"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The<\/a>

Frontispiece to the bound 1780 Lady’s Magazine.<\/p><\/div>\n

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?<\/p>\n

The answer, it seems to me, is never a clear cut one. The inherentally dialogic and dynamic format of the magazine means that it cannot ever be so.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Lady’s Magazine\u00a0<\/em>is no exception. Individual contributors to the magazine often had very strident views on the topics about which they wrote, whether that topic was whether men were women’s intellectual superiors, the need to abolish the slave trade, or the best cure for unwanted female hair growth. But as we have indicated many times on the blog<\/a> before – usually with a mixture of frustration and admiration – it is hard to identify any coherent editorial line running through the magazine at all. Nothing in the magazine is so consistent as its inconsistency.<\/p>\n

It would be easy to offer ready answers to the question of why this is the case. These range from the uncharitable and surely untrue – the magazine was so shambolic that it didn’t know what it was doing – to the downright cynical and misleading – the\u00a0Lady’s<\/em>\u00a0was so keen to secure as sizeable a readership as possible that it tried to be all things to all people. The more accurate answer still lies partly out of reach of my outstretched fingertips and would certainly take more words than I have here to try to work through. But any response to the question surely has to take into account one of the most important generators of meaning in the (indeed, any) magazine: the placement of contributions.<\/p>\n

The implications of how articles speak to and against one another were something I spent a lot of time thinking about (again) in a recent talk I gave at the wonderful Disseminating Dress<\/a> conference I attended at the University of York last month. This three-day conference organised by Serena Dyer<\/a> (University of Warwick), Jade Halbert<\/a> (University of Glasgow) and Sophie Littlewood<\/a> (University of York) brought together academics, curators and practitioners to examine how sartorial ideas and knowledge were transmitted between individuals and communities from the medieval period to the present. I was delighted to be asked to speak about what the\u00a0Lady’s Magazine<\/em>\u00a0had to say about dress and fashion.<\/p>\n

Of course, the magazine has rather a lot to say and in lots of different genres, from antiquarian and anthropological accounts, to moral essays and advice columns on dress, to embroidery patterns and fashion plates. But perhaps inevitably, my talk ended up being less about what individual contributions or even distinct sartorial genres disseminated about dress than about how these different contributions and genres buffetted against one another to create meanings that were much more than the sum of the magazine’s individual parts.<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/a>

LM XXIV (May 1783): 267. Image \u00a9 Adam Matthew Digital \/ Birmingham Central Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.<\/p><\/div>\n

Take, for instance, this\u00a0<\/strong>juxtaposition in the May 1783\u00a0issue. A month before, the magazine’s agony aunt, the Matron, had received a letter from\u00a0a\u00a0correspondent who went by the initials W. G., and who had complained bitterly about the\u00a0unbecomingly\u00a0masculine\u00a0appearance of women who sported riding habits. The animosity behind\u00a0W. G.\u2019s attack is quickly diffused by the eminently sensible Matron who urges that \u2018single ladies<\/em>, if they find the\u00a0riding habit\u00a0<\/em>more compact and convenient\u2019 should be allowed to wear it \u2018uncensured and unmolested\u2019 even if she ultimately had to concede that married women, \u2018if they are truly wise\u2019,\u00a0will \u2018wear only those dresses which are most becoming in the eyes of their husbands\u2019 (267).\u00a0After a brief diversion\u00a0on the ridiculous revival of the fashion for feathered garments, the Matron signs off\u00a0by noting that\u00a0\u2018Moderation [\u2026] in dress as well as in diversions, is not only most convenient, it is also most becoming.\u2019\u00a0With this, the Matron steers her usual, pragmatic course: misogyny is checked while propriety is observed.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"LM<\/a>

LM XXIV (May 1783): 268. Image \u00a9 Adam Matthew Digital \/ Birmingham Central Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.<\/p><\/div>\n

But just when the magazine\u2019s sartorial conservatism seems at its most surefooted, it is immediately undermined by the fashion report that follows it. Authored by an anonymous \u2018Lady of Fashion\u2019, one of a succession of\u00a0early fashion journalists who graced the magazine\u2019s pages, the report describes\u00a0the latest fashions\u00a0as\u00a0popularized by the\u00a0poet, actress (later novelist) and renowned celebrity\u00a0Mary (Perdita) Robinson. The moderation called for by the Matron is flagrantly thrown off in the report in\u00a0favour\u00a0of sumptuous descriptions of the Rutland gown with its petticoats \u2018tied back at the sides in the form of a Sultana\u2019s robe\u2019, the\u00a0\u2019 made of silver or gold muslin and lined with\u00a0coloured\u00a0Persian\u2019,\u00a0as well as the \u2018, trimmed with a wreath of white roses, and a panache of [the] white feathers\u2019 the Matron despised, before closing with a reference to \u2018Riding habits\u2019, which are \u2018much worn in the morning; the most fashionable are the Perdita\u2019s\u00a0pearl\u00a0colour\u2019 (268).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Whether the juxtaposition of the Matron\u2019s column and the fashion report was a coincidence or manufactured is a puzzle that I suspect we will never solve. In a sense, though, it matters little. For this is no isolated incident and what\u00a0is important about it is the range of effects the placement of such material had on readers\u2019 experience of navigating the magazine\u2019s content. And what is true for fashion is also true for the magazine’s conversations about marriage, class, domestic and global politics, the literary marketplace or any of the myriad subjects to which it returns. Few of these debates are ever definitively won or done with.<\/p>\n

It would, I think, be all too easy\u00a0to read these tensions as symptomatic of the mixed messages\u00a0and impossibly contradictory feminine ideal that we have come to associate with the modern women\u2019s magazine. But such views do not do justice\u00a0to the complexity of the\u00a0Lady’s.\u00a0<\/em>More to the point, they fail to acknowledge the form of the publication itself and the kinds of active reading practices\u00a0it\u00a0encouraged\u00a0and which our blog and project as a whole seek to illuminate.<\/p>\n

Readers of the\u00a0Lady\u2019s\u00a0Magazine\u00a0<\/em>were far from passive. So many of the magazine\u2019s most conservative pronouncements were actively challenged by editorial placement against articles\u00a0or artifacts\u00a0presenting contradictory points of view or by reader responses published in\u00a0subsequent\u00a0issues.\u00a0The very form of the magazine \u2013 one in which every reader was a potential contributor and no one, not even respected authorities such as the Matron, could be\u00a0guaranteed the final word on any subject\u00a0\u2013 meant that every pronouncement it made in its pages was provisional and open to\u00a0challenge.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Lady\u2019s\u00a0Magazine’s\u00a0<\/em>driving principle, as we have alluded to before, was\u00a0\u2018conversation\u2019, that \u2018sieve that strains our thoughts of all their dross,\u2019 as it put it in its March 1773 issue, \u2018and like fire to gold, [\u2026]\u00a0purifies the grosser and more unpolished ideas of our minds; it burnishes our mental magazine, and makes it fit for use\u2019 (127). This is not to say that the magazine was entirely democratic or that some voices weren\u2019t louder than others, but within the magazine\u2019s community, dissent was encouraged and debate\u00a0flourished.<\/p>\n

Whether editorial placement was dictated by design or simply a happy accident matters little. Except to say, that the space that such placements opened up for readers to navigate the magazine’s content, to reflect on its import, to craft their own response, and perhaps to choose to share that response within the magazine’s pages, was surely one of the magazine’s greatest achievements and sources of its success.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Dr Jennie Batchelor<\/strong><\/p>\n

School of English<\/strong><\/p>\n

University of Kent<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39796,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/ladys-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/ladys-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/ladys-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/ladys-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39796"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/ladys-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=545"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/ladys-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":555,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/ladys-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545\/revisions\/555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/ladys-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/ladys-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/ladys-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}