The Lady's Magazine (1770–1832) and the Making of Literary History by Jennie Batchelor (review)

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:

• The Lady's Magazine (1770–1832) and the Making of Literary History by Jennie Batchelor
• Astrid Dröse (bio)

Jennie Batchelor, The Lady's Magazine (1770–1832) and the Making of Literary History ( Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), pp. 320, $120/£85 cloth, open-access e-book.

Jennie Batchelor's monograph concerns a principal periodical of the late eighteen and early nineteenth century: the Lady's Magazine. "The first recognisable modern women's magazine" was published monthly from 1770 until 1847, ran to over 750 monthly issues, and circulated about 15,000 copies at its peak (3). Women's periodicals have long been considered aesthetically inferior, unintellectual, ephemeral testimonies of an amateur culture. Batchelor argues that "the Lady's Magazine can, indeed, persuasively write back to a literary history that has traditionally marginalised it on the grounds of its unapologetic popularity and its association with women's reading pleasure" (3). Batchelor presents a magisterial book that, for the first time, addresses a hitherto neglected field of literary history around 1800 and challenges established narratives. She alternates detective work with large historical arcs to describe the eventful history of the Lady's Magazine from the exciting founding phase in 1770 to 1832, the year in which the Robinson publishing house ceased publication.

The book's six main chapters treat the Lady's Magazine's origins, beginnings, content, authors and readers, rivalries and changes, and literary historical significance. Batchelor begins with a letter from Charlotte Brontë to Hartley Coleridge from 1840, in which Brontë reports on her reading of the Lady's Magazine in her youth. The letter illustrates the ambivalence that characterised the view of this journal in the mid-nineteenth century. On the one hand, the Lady's Magazine seemed old fashioned, as if it had [End Page 508] fallen out of time in the modern Victorian literary system; on the other hand, for Brontë it virtually symbolised the emancipation of female reading and writing.

The first chapter places the Lady's Magazine in the history of women's journals in the Age of Enlightenment, such as the Ladies' Mercury, the Lady's Museum, or the Female Specator. The aim of all these projects was "to promote women's reading, women's writing and women's literary history" (41). The Lady's Magazine followed on from these projects but also found its own paths from the beginning. The second chapter tells the magazine's turbulent founding story: it was essentially shaped by the competition of important players in the London book market, which took place in Paternoster Row, in the centre of the London publishing trade. As early as 1771, John Coote sold the new journal, which addressed the fair sex after the successful model of the Gentlemen's Magazine (founded in 1731), to the booksellers George Robinson (the so-called "king of the Row") and John Roberts. Coote's cofounder, John Wheble, did not accept the deal and continued to print a journal under the name of the sold project. This competition led to innovation pressure and accelerated brand consolidation. Robert and Robertson emerged victorious from a court case at the end of 1772, the sources of which (trial transcripts) Batchelor evaluates for the first time. This publisher team determined the great success of the magazine for decades.

Crucial to this success was the miscellany format, which offered readers (who certainly included men) the optimal combination of education and entertainment with a heterogeneous mix of popular topics, such as education, Gothic storytelling, oriental tales, and travel writing. Translations also played a major role, especially moral tales from French but also from German and Italian. The "unfixing of genre" and other effects of presentation such as seriality and juxtapositions of different texts created new possibilities for reception (82). Thus, the editors succeeded in what Batchelor, drawing on Jon P. Klancher's work, describes as audience-building. Batchelor presents the volume and variety of texts through cleverly chosen case studies that shed light on topics of the magazine. For example, the theme of slavery and abolition plays a major role around 1800. The brutal drama The Negro Slaves (1796) by the German author August von Kotzebue appears (in translation...