Vindications and Reflections: The Lady’s Magazine during the Revolution Controversy (1789–1795)

Abstract

This essay examines how the French Revolution and the controversy it spawned figure in one of the most important British women’s magazines of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century: George Robinson’s Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832). Even though most scholars who have written on the magazine have dismissed it as an organ of female domestication, Koenraad Claes demonstrates that this pioneering publication is uniquely qualified as a document on this politically turbulent period. While the Lady’s Magazine, like most magazines, cannot be said to be a straightforward organ of any ideological position, it consistently made room for radical reformist views of the likes of Catharine Macaulay, Thomas Paine, Helen Maria Williams and Mary Wollstonecraft. Through a detailed analysis of how the successive phases of the Revolution Controversy, Claes reveals how readers of this period’s British women’s periodicals were better informed about ongoing political debates than we have long presumed.