Marianne Van Remoortel

Women Editors and the Rise of the Illustrated Fashion Press in the Nineteenth Century

In the second half of the nineteenth century, a new type of magazine emerged in Europe and the United States. Fashion—a staple of up-market women’s periodicals since the late eighteenth century—was...In the second half of the nineteenth century, a new type of magazine emerged in Europe and the United States. Fashion—a staple of up-market women’s periodicals since the late eighteenth century—was no longer the prerogative of the elite press. Thanks to technological advances in printing, communication, and transportation, it became a core ingredient of a growing number of affordable, lavishly illustrated women’s and family magazines. These publications not only offered increasingly sophisticated visualizations and descriptions of the latest fashions, they also contained more detailed and user-friendly patterns with instructions enabling readers to dress themselves and their families fashionably on a modest budget. This shift away from leisure-class luxury towards a more practical, hands-on approach was a key moment in the history of fashion and in women’s history. The new magazines actively targeted women as consumers and practitioners of style, granting them an unprecedented sense of control over their public identities. Femininity became, quite literally, “makeable.” Credit for this shift tends to go to a few big-name publishers, such as Adolphe Goubaud and the Didot brothers in Paris, Louis Schäfer in Berlin, and Samuel Beeton in London. These men have gone down in history as the trailblazers of the illustrated fashion press. They are generally seen as clever entrepreneurs who capitalized on the latest technological developments and joined forces on an international scale as they negotiated deals to exchange textual and visual materials among their respective magazines. Kate Nelson Best counts Goubaud among the “most powerful new press magnates” (106) of the Second French Empire, pointing out that Le Moniteur de la mode (1843–1913) had ten foreign editions by 1869, in English, Russian, Spanish, and other languages. Beeton is described in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as a “pioneer of popular print,” an epithet due in no small measure to his 1860 deal with Goubaud to import fashion plates from Le Moniteur into the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine (1852–79). Schäfer, for his part, gained fame for establishing Der Bazar (1855–1936) as a “Weltblatt” (global journal) with a “Weltruf” (“ZumBeginn” 1) (global reputation). Already in 1863, it boasted a circulation of more than 200,000 copies: 105,000 in German, 50,000 in English, 32,000 in French, and 15,000 in Spanish (“Der Bazar” 1863 n.p.). When more versions in Dutch, English (US), Russian, Italian, Hungarian, and Czech pushed figures to “mehr als eine halbe Million” (over half a million), it proudly claimed to be “die verbreitetste Zeitung der Welt” (“Der Bazar” 1873 241) (the most widespread journal in the world).

Towards a sustainable and collaborative data model for periodical studies

This article advocates the development of a sustainable, structured, and open data model for periodical research. Considering the recent digital turn in periodical studies, it argues that a data model embracing Linked Open Data practices will not only facilitate collaboration among periodical scholars across language boundaries but also contribute to a better understanding of what periodicals are and how the relationships among periodicals may evolve over time. By way of illustration, the article presents the data model developed in the context of an ongoing five-year research project on women editors and their periodicals in early-eighteenth- to early-twentieth-century Europe.

The Roots of RSVP: An Interview with Founding RSVP President Michael Wolff

This interview retraces the origins of RSVP so as to be able to reconstruct the growth and expansion of a new and exciting research area.

Back-Room Workers Stepping Forward: Emily Faithfull and the Compositors of the Victoria Press

The London West End in more than one way served as a hub for the professionalization of women’s work and the burgeoning women’s movement in general. In March 1860, the young women’s rights activist, lecturer and publisher Emily Faithfull set up a women-staffed printing firm there as part of the broader efforts of the recently founded Society for Promoting the Employment of Women (SPEW). In a paper read at the Glasgow meeting of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science (NAPSS) in August and published shortly afterwards in the English Woman’s Journal, she announced that the Victoria Press, as the establishment was styled in honour of the Queen, employed as compositors sixteen girls and women of varying ages and levels of experience. They had all ‘devoted themselves to their new occupation with great industry and perseverance’ and ‘accomplished an amount of work which I did not expect untrained hands could perform in the time’,1 she enthused, ensuring her audience that the girls received excellent treatment in terms of wages, working conditions and hours of work. Large wood engravings in the Illustrated London News and the Lady’s Newspaper showed the spacious printing office at 9 Great Coram Street, described by Matilda Hays as ‘two light airy rooms thrown into one with triple rows of compositors’ cases’ and ‘young women and girls sitting or standing before them, busy working’.2

Women, Work and the Victorian Press

Research into women’s work for the press raises tantalizing questions of attribution and identity. The vast majority of periodical texts were published anonymously or under pseudonyms. On the basis of preliminary findings for twenty-one of the forty-five journals covered by the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, Walter E. Houghton estimated the number of unsigned or pseudonymous contributions for the period 1824–1900 at roughly 70 per cent.1 As several critics have pointed out since, women were even more likely to disappear into anonymity than men. Alexis Easley gives the example of Fraser’s Magazine, which famously portrayed its contributors as an exclusively male coterie of ‘Fraserians’, thus ‘mask[ing] the contributions of several women to the magazine’.2 The Irish-born fiction writer Selina Bunsbury was one of Fraser’s most prolific authors, contributing some fifty stories in the 1830s and 1840s, yet in contemporary accounts and histories of the magazine, including the recent entry in the Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism, she is rarely acknowledged as such.3 Similarly, Marysa Demoor has revealed among the anonymous reviewers of the Athenaeum a surprising number of women, including Mathilde Blind, Augusta Webster and Geraldine Jewsbury. Basing her conclusions on careful examination of the ‘marked file’, the annotated editor’s copy kept in the City University Library in London, Demoor demonstrates that women played a far more active and important role in late-nineteenth-century literary criticism than the masculine or ungendered voice commonly adopted by reviewers of both sexes would suggest.4

Christina Rossetti and the Economics of Periodical Poetry

It is an intriguing thought that Matilda Pullan must have crossed paths with Christina Rossetti at some point in the 1850s, when their respective positions in the literary market were quite the reverse of what they are now. By that time, Pullan had already made a name for herself as a needlework author; Rossetti was virtually unknown, having published little else besides a few scattered poems in the magazines. In 1854, the Rossetti family moved to 45 Upper Albany Street, London, later renumbered 166 Albany Street, about half a mile up the street from Pullan’s residence. In between the two houses lay Christ Church, a leading Tractarian church in the city. Along with her mother and sister, Rossetti had been attending services there for over a decade. Coincidentally, this was also the church where Pullan had her son baptized in 1853 by the Rev. Henry W. Burrows, one of the Rossetti women’s principal spiritual advisers. Given Burrows’s sympathy for the plight of fallen women, a concern also shared by Rossetti, it is no surprise that he agreed to baptize the illegitimate child of a gentlewoman.

Selling Domesticity: Eliza Warren Francis and the Ladies’ Treasury

From the 1860s through to the 1890s, ‘Mrs Warren’ was a familiar name in household management. Her manuals — How I Managed My House on Two Hundred Pounds a Year (1864), How I Managed My Children from Infancy to Marriage (1865) and Comfort For Small Incomes (1866) — went through several editions, selling thousands of copies in Britain and across the Atlantic. Warren also acquired considerable reputation as the editor of the Ladies’ Treasury (1857–1895), one of the longest-running and most successful Victorian periodicals for middle-class women.1 Yet, while the lives of her primary competitors, Samuel and Isabella Beeton of the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine (1852–1879) and Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1859), have been amply documented in several biographies, Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) entries and a BBC television drama, Mrs Warren is only known through her publications and rivalry with the Beetons. In The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton, Kathryn Hughes calls the Ladies’ Treasury a ‘plodding copycat’ of the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, suggesting that ‘one book that Mrs. Warren never wrote, but perhaps should have, was “How I Turned to Authorship in Order to Pay Someone Else to Do My Domestic Work for Me”’.2

The Fine Art of Satire: Florence and Adelaide Claxton and the Magazines

As the young Christina Rossetti sent her first poems to the magazines from the Rossetti family home in Upper Albany Street, Florence and Adelaide Claxton, two aspiring visual artists in their late teens, returned with their parents from a long stay abroad to their house in North Kensington. From 1850 to 1858, they had been travelling in Australia, India and Ceylon, where their father, historical painter Marshall Claxton, had hoped to find a market for his paintings. The experience left an indelible mark on his daughters. Not only did they both take up orientalist themes in their work but, more importantly, they grew up to be astute observers of their own society and culture. And they were made aware at an early age of the difficulties of finding profitable artistic employment.

Threads of Life: Matilda Marian Pullan and Needlework Instruction

Although Matilda Marian Pullan would not live to suffer the post-career difficulties that Eliza Warren Francis faced in old age, their lives and careers paralleled each other in many ways. After being widowed twice, Warren Francis eked out a living by contributing needlework patterns to the magazines before going on to edit her own journal, running a fancy repository, giving lessons in needlework, selling the copyrights to her household manuals and taking in boarders. Pullan, too, was forced by events in her private life to provide for herself. Like Warren Francis, she built a successful career in the press while running a lodging house and fancywork business and giving lessons to supplement her income. The two women alternately superintended the needlework section of the Family Friend, and although they appear as co-authors on Treasures in Needlework (1855), there is no evidence that the collection, which contains material harvested from the Family Friend, was a real joint effort. For all their similarities, they were competing colleagues belonging to different strata of society rather than collaborating friends. Warren Francis had been brought up in a lower-middle-class family of traders.

A Catalogue of Coleridge's 'Great Circulating Library'

In a notebook entry for March 1832, Coleridge recalls that his childhood appetite for reading was gratified when a stranger gave him a ticket for ‘a great Circulating Library in King’s Street, Cheapside’ and he ‘read thro’ the whole Catalogue, folios and all─whether I understood them or did not understand them─running all risks, in skulking out, to get the two Volumes which I was entitled to have daily─Conceive what I must have been at 14 [...]’. 1 J. B. Beer identified this library in 1956 as John Boosey’s City Library at 39, King Street. More recently, Duncan Wu has pointed to an advertisement in two 1793 issues of the Morning Post, in which Boosey, who had apparently thought of closing down his business, proudly announces its continuation under somewhat different terms. 2