Jennie Batchelor. The Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832) and the Making of Literary History

Abstract

This book is the culmination of a series of projects designed to rectify the neglect of The Lady’s Magazine, a monthly periodical that survived for more than six decades following its launch in 1770 but was largely forgotten soon after its publication ceased. The magazine fell out of literary history, Jennie Batchelor maintains, as Romanticist ideas of authorship and genre came to hold sway over the histories of the period in which it flourished. As an inclusive, community-building publication that supported amateur authorship and popular literary forms, The Lady’s Magazine was systematically marginalized, Batchelor argues, by mainstream historiography, which, with masculine leanings, favoured literary exclusivity and more professional models of authorship. Like many periodical publications, it was also literally thrown away, resulting in a situation where, despite huge print runs, there are now few extant copies of individual issues and no full runs of the magazine in any public library. Batchelor’s earlier work with the digital publisher Adam Matthew has enabled readers (with a subscription) to access The Lady’s Magazine more readily than ever before, while her Leverhulme Trust project ‘The Lady’s Magazine (1770–1818): Understanding the Emergence of a Genre’ has resulted in a freely available annotated index to the vast body of content that accrued over the long run of the periodical—more than 15,000 items. Following this access-focused work, Batchelor’s book now offers an insightful and detailed history of the magazine, of its impact in its time and of its subsequent sidelining. It is an outstanding work that makes a major contribution to periodical studies and persuasively uncovers, as Batchelor terms it, an ‘unRomantic’ strand of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British literary culture.