Magazine Miniatures: Portraits of Actresses, Princesses, and Queens in Late Eighteenth-Century Periodicals

This essay explores images of actresses, queens and princesses in late-century periodicals. Comparing portraits of Sarah Siddons, Mary Robinson, and Elizabeth Inchbald to images of Queen Charlotte and Princess Charlotte Augusta, Laura Engel argues that periodical portraits function as celebrity pin-ups (versions of the same image) as well as markers of individual character (celebrating specificity and originality), thus participating in the creation of ideas about women’s claim to fame, legitimacy, and visibility. Readers could ‘own’ an image of their favourite player by purchasing a periodical, and could also feel connected to royal women, who resembled their most cherished theatrical stars. At the same time, the legitimacy bestowed on queens and princesses transferred visually to famous actresses who appeared in very similar costumes and poses. Looking closely at the ways in which artists employed similar iconography in these portraits, suggests ways of seeing that, Engel contends, connect to contemporary modes of visual display, particularly to the repetition and serial nature of pictures on Facebook, which promote a sense of intimacy and familiarity with the portrait’s subject that is ultimately a construction. Periodical portraits thus foreground the inherent tension between formality and intimacy highlighted in images of celebrated women.

Theatrical, Periodical, Authorial: Frances Brooke’s Old Maid (1755–1756)

Manushag Powell revisits Frances Brooke’s Old Maid (1755-6) to highlight its understudied interest in theatrical performance and criticism. Brooke’s interest in the drama was lifelong, encompassing not only personal ambitions that were partly thwarted by her famous quarrels with David Garrick over her Virginia and his King Lear, but also her friendship and eventual partnership with the powerful actress-manager Mary Ann Yates, who was also a close friend of fellow pioneering periodicalist Charlotte Lennox. Brooke’s interest in the theatre predated and reached far beyond Garrick’s involvement. Ultimately, the essay champions the radical ambitions of Brooke’s periodical writing and theatrical criticism, and both recognises and laments the fact that an alliance of female professional artistry could be enabled by the theatre, but not yet by periodical writing.

Advertising Women: Gender and the Vendor in the Print Culture of the Medical Marketplace, 1660–1830

This essay asks when and how did early periodical advertisements identify or solicit consumers by gender? In response to this question, Barbara Benedict analyses the representations and self-representation of women medical practitioners (physicians and apothecaries) and the female body in handbills and newspaper advertisements from 1650 to 1751. It argues that the rough-and-tumble world of advertisement provided women with opportunities to capitalise on their gendered physicality, despite the social and gender prejudices this move entailed. Benedict illuminates how medical ads by women physicians occupy an ambiguous position as simultaneously participants in the public world, the printed marketplace, and as privileged or limited by their special connection to domesticity, and particularly to the body. Print, the essay concludes, enabled early female medical practitioners to compete in the medical marketplace.

The Woman behind the Man behind the World: Mary Wells and the Feminisation of the Late Eighteenth-Century Newspaper

The rediscovery of the Della Cruscans, a late-eighteenth century poetic coterie, has helped to revive an interest in papers of “elegance” such as John Bell’s the World, which established a successful template for the late eighteenth-century newspaper, one that was exploited by many of the papers that followed in its wake. In this chapter, Claire Knowles examines the contribution made to this paper not only by women in general, but by one woman in particular, Mary Wells. Wells was a popular actress and the mistress of the paper’s proprietor, Edward Topham. She was implicated in the paper’s establishment and played an important role in its daily running. By examining Wells’ largely unacknowledged role at the World alongside the work of the female poets that the paper encouraged, Knowles suggests that the paper can be seen as an important example of the increasing feminisation of print media in the late-eighteenth century.

‘[T]o cherish Female ingenuity, and to conduce to Female improvement’: The Birth of the Woman’s Magazine

Despite the much-documented rise of periodical studies, no major study of the late eighteenth-century women’s magazine exists. Those who have devoted specific attention to the form, either as an epilogue to studies of the essay periodical or as a prelude to the Victorian women’s magazine, commonly misrepresent it. In this chapter, Jennie Batchelor interrogates these oversights and distortions and offers a reassessment the women’s magazine in relation to the periodical genres in whose company the magazine is often considered a poor relation. The chapter proceeds with an extended consideration of one of the women’s magazine’s earliest and most influential examples – the Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832) in relation to earlier ladies’ magazines and periodical forerunners such as Charlotte Lennox’s Lady’s Museum (1760–1). Revealing the multiple ways in which the magazine demonstrated its commitment to women’s education, Batchelor challenges accounts that have seen eighteenth-century women’s magazines as the beginning of the end for their female readers and that have erroneously associated the genre with a uniformly and oppressively conservative gender ideology.

Frances Brooke, Editor, and the Making of the Old Maid (1755–1756)

Kathryn King’s essay takes as its focus Frances Brooke’s Old Maid (1755–6), one of several crucial texts in a burst of female periodical editorial activity at mid-century. It offers a fresh reading of information about the Old Maid’s contributors, focusing especially on the marginal notes to the original issues inscribed by the paper’s chief contributor Lord Orrery. These annotations, King reveals, constitute a largely unquarried source of information about Brooke’s practices and her understanding of her role as editor. They moreover, cast light on her ambiguous relationship with the nobleman who supplied nearly a quarter of the paper’s contents. Brooke’s own contributions receive dedicated attention before King concludes by assessing why the female editor is often passed over in the stories we tell of female authorship in the eighteenth century.

Travel Writing and Mediation in the Lady’s Magazine: Charting ‘the meridian of female reading’

A regular feature of eighteenth-century periodicals, travel narratives allowed magazine readers to imagine their relationship to the world outside of Britain. Via detailed accounts of a range of serialised, excerpted and abridged travel writings in the Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832), JoEllen DeLucia’s essay reveals the role mediation and magazine culture played in producing readers’ sense of women as both self-interested members of the British Empire. Reading texts such as the magazine’s serialisation of Cook’s voyages and the Embassy of Lord Macartney alongside oriental tales and exotic fashion plates, the chapter argues that, on the one hand, travel writing made the world a smaller place, while on the other, its discussions of global politics and theories of good governance, extended the parameters of the feminine sphere. In examining the complex horizontal identifications that magazine travel narratives fostered, DeLucia concludes that women’s magazines present an alternative to the well-worn scripts we have developed about women readers that revolve around the domestic and often very English novel.

Women’s Poetry in the Magazines

Nearly every monthly magazine published in the eighteenth century had a poetry section, a regular slot given over in each issue to poetic expression of all kinds, written by a broad range of writers, both male and female, provincial and metropolitan, amateur and established. This chapter assesses the place that women poets, both familiar and unfamiliar, occupied in the rich poetic culture that made magazines possible. Jennifer Batt’s case studies are drawn from national periodicals such as the Gentleman’s Magazine (1731–1922), London Magazine (1732–85) and British Magazine (1746–51), as well as from regional magazines. Collectively, these examples shed light on the possibilities that periodicals made available to female poets (of giving them a voice, a readership, a public profile and place within a poetic community). At the same, Batt demonstrates that women could be exploited by the medium and its editorial practices (publishing without author consent, for instance, or intrusive framing of poems) in ways that have overdetermined women poets’ critical reception.

Introduction: Women and the Birth of Periodical Culture

The editors of this volume assert that periodical studies and feminist studies within the British eighteenth century are inseparable activities. While male authors dominated eighteenth-century periodicals, it does not follow that the form itself existed or could have existed independent of women: quite the opposite was true. From John Dunton’s Athenian Mercury (1690–7) to the Tatler (1709–11) and Spectator (1710-11), to Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectator (1744–6), to the magazines like the Lady’s Museum (1760–1) or Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832) that filled out the later portion of the period, women were avid readers of, contributors to, and consumers fostered through periodical culture: the form was thoroughly tied up in the ‘fair-sexing’ upon which it founded itself – but, the editors contend, ‘fair-sexing’ is only one part of the story. Tracing the conditions that affect periodical scholarship, such as limited publishers’ archives and the challenges of digital scholarship, the introduction also considers the question of readership, and, with it, nomenclature: what does it mean to call a periodical a Lady’s paper? Resisting the traditional separation between essay and magazine, this introduction seeks to alert the reader to a more flexible and capacious understanding of how periodicals interact with one another, and with the women who enable them.

Fast Fashion: Style, Text, and Image in Late Eighteenth-Century Women’s Periodicals

Chloe Wigston Smith’s essay examines the innovative changes in fashion journalism in the later eighteenth century initiated by The Lady’s Magazine’s (1770–1832). Through its fold-out embroidery patterns, fashion plates, coverage of royal birthday celebrations and early forms of fashion journalism, the Lady’s circulated knowledge about particular trends and styles, ranging from reticules and caps to colours, silhouettes, shoes. Smith contends that the Lady’s fashion coverage modelled an early form of ‘fast fashion’, in which detailed textual descriptions and fashion plates that showed full figures, and sometimes the front and back of costumes, provided minute guides to style. In a period in which most middling and elite clothes were bespoke, fashion journalism in publications including the Lady’s, the Gallery of Fashion (1794–1803) and La Belle Assemblée (1806-32), Smith concludes, placed the agency of style in the hands of readers and contributed to the democratization of style.