The Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832)

Abstract

When the Lady’s Magazine; or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex was launched in August 1770, it was not the first periodical to target women readers, nor even the first to adopt this title. This Lady’s Magazine, however, was the longest-surviving and most influential female-oriented periodical of its day. From 1770, the year in which Lord North’s ministry was established, to the passing of the 1832 Reform Act, it edified and entertained readers with a diverse range of contents. Its readers were legion – circulation figures were around 10,000–15,000 monthly copies at its height – and it boasted a veritable army of contributors. While much of the magazine’s letterpress, as was customary, was extracted from published sources, a significant percentage was original and authored by the magazine’s thousands of largely anonymous contributors, many of whom were or became widely celebrated outside its pages. The community the magazine forged between writers, editors, and subscribers was robust and enabled it to weather successive bankruptcies and the aggressive attempts of competitors to poach its readership. Eventually, the Lady’s Magazine merged with its two most successful rivals – The Lady’s Monthly Museum (1798–1828) and La Belle Assemblée (1806–1832) – which gave it an altered afterlife that lasted until 1847.