Lady's Monthly Museum

Fashion plate entitled Morning Dress for Febr. 1799

The Lady's Monthly Museum; Or, Polite Repository of Amusement and Instruction^{[note 1]} was an English monthly women's magazine published between 1798 and 1832.

History

The Lady's Magazine, a women's magazine founded in 1770 with a "pseudo-genteel and sentimental emphasis", encouraged successors. The Lady's Monthly Museum; Or, Polite Repository of Amusement and Instruction was started in 1798 as one of the more successful of the group.^[1] The magazine was published by Vernor and Hood,^[2] and was one of the era's more popular publications.^[3]

It merged with the Lady's Magazine in 1832, becoming known as the Lady's Magazine and Museum of the Belles Lettres, Fine Arts, Music, Drama, Fashions, etc., and finally ceased publication in 1847.^[4][5]

Content

The magazine positioned itself to appeal directly towards women. It featured articles on fashion, biographies and portraits of aristocratic persons of interest, essays, and poems. Serialised stories also appeared in the Lady's Monthly Museum, making the publication one of the first to publish novels before they became available as books.^[6]

The Lady's Monthly Museum claimed in 1798 that its contributors were "Ladies of established Reputation in the literary Circles".^[7] However, contributing writers were poorly paid for their efforts. One of its regular writers, Mary Pilkington, often asked for increased compensation and eventually left the magazine in favour of the Lady's Magazine.^[7] Pilkington, mainly contributing anonymously, wrote poetry, stories, biographies, and social gossip for the magazine. She also contributed by conducting editorial work.^[2] From 1830 Charles Robert Forrester was also a contributor.

Notes

1. From 1814 the title of the magazine was The Ladies' Monthly Museum; this was later shortened to The Ladies' Museum.

References

1. Ballaster 1992, p. 66.
2. Skedd 2004.
3. Garofalo 2012, p. 34.
4. Beetham 2008, p. 342.
5. Ballaster 1992, p. 87.
6. Kloester 2005.
7. Hughes 2015, p. 463.

Works cited

• Ballaster, Ros (1992). Women's Worlds: Ideology, Femininity, and the Woman's Magazine. New York University Press. ISBN 978-0333492369.
• Beetham, Margaret (2008). "Lady's Magazine [1770–1847]". In Brake, Laurel; Demoor, Marysa; Beetham, Margaret. Dictionary of Nineteenth-century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland. Academia Scientific. p. 342. ISBN 9038213409.
• Garofalo, Daniela (2012). Women, Love, and Commodity Culture in British Romanticism. Ashgate Publishing. ISBN 978-1409441014.
• Hughes, Gillian (2015). "Fiction in the Magazines". In Garside, Peter; O'Brien, Karen. The Oxford History of the Novel in English: English and British fiction 1750-1820. Oxford University Press. pp. 461–528. ISBN 978-0199574803.
• Kloester, Jennifer (2005). Georgette Heyer's Regency World. Heinemann. ISBN 0-434-01329-3.
• Skedd, S.J. (2004). "Pilkington, Mary Susanna (1761–1839)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/22273. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)

External links

• The Ladies' Monthly Museum at Cathy Decker's Regency Publications Featuring Fashion Plates
• Lady's Monthly Museum at Google Books