Looking into The Lady’s Magazine

Prof. Jennie Batchelor and her colleagues at the University of Kent created the website The Lady’s Magazine: Understanding the Emergence of a Genre to explore an influential publication that debuted in 1770.

The Lady’s Magazine; or Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex, Appropriated Solely to Their Use and Amusement followed The Gentleman’s Magazine by nearly forty years. It offered a similar mix of news, essays, fiction, poetry, and more, though slanted to what the London publishers (male) considered women’s interests.

Thus, The Lady’s Magazine contained less about formal politics—but it still hit political topics. As the website notes, “an article purporting to be about women’s dress might make an impassioned plea for reforms in female education.” The magazine offered an admiring illustrated profile of the radical John Horne Tooke in 1794 when he was locked in the Tower of London on charges of treason.

The central project of Batchelor’s team is a free and annotated index of more than 15,000 items from the first series of The Lady’s Magazine, 1770 to 1819. (Further series carried the magazine until 1847.) This work involved sifting original content from the reprinted material every magazine depended on, listing all the subjects of every article, and trying to identify writers' pseudonyms.

The blog reporting progress on that work shared some specific stories, such as how clues from various sources let Batchelor name a prolific contributor labeled “R—” as the overlooked author and translator Radagunda Roberts. Another posting discussed how much of the magazine’s poetry was copied or closely adapted from others, but also asked whether people of the eighteenth century would have considered that plagiarism.

While touching on many topics, The Lady's Magazine devoted a lot of pages to clothing. At first the articles focused on what was appropriate, economical, or characteristic of other countries. After 1800, there were regular reports on the latest changing fashions. Many more items covered the womanly arts of sewing.

Batchelor was particularly interested in the embroidery patterns printed in the magazine, counting about 650 listed in the contents tables. However, those pages were designed to be removed and used, so most surviving copies offered no more than tantalizing descriptions of missing patterns.

After hunting intact issues for years, Batchelor pieced together enough pages to coauthor Jane Austen’s Embroidery with Alison Larkin. She just unveiled another spin-off project—Patterns of Perfection, a growing web archive of embroidery patterns as they appeared in The Lady’s Magazine, such as “A new Pattern for a Winter Shawl” and “Pattern for a Gown,” both from 1796.