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

Reviewed by: The Lady's Magazine (1770–1832) and the Making of Literary History by Jennie Batchelor Hannah Doherty Hudson Jennie Batchelor, The Lady's Magazine (1770–1832) and the Making of Literary History (Edinburgh: Univ. of Edinburgh Press, 2022). Pp. 320; 38 b/w illus. 110. 00 cloth. Readers of an academic monograph on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women's periodical The Lady's Magazine may not expect to find dramatic accounts of business feuds, advertising wars, and legal battles. "How controversial could such a publication possibly be? " we may wonder (with old stereotypes of The Lady's Magazine as essentially domestic, feminine, and conservative lurking at the back of our minds). Fortunately for all of us, Jennie Batchelor's pathbreaking new book not only compellingly challenges those stereotypes but does so in part through outlining the numerous literary controversies in which the Lady's Magazine and its publishers, editors, and reader-contributors were embroiled over its remarkably long lifespan. These contretemps are fascinating, but they also paint a new picture of The Lady's Magazine as a dynamic publication, both idealistic and pragmatic in its aims. Far from holding itself decorously apart from the financial skirmishes and tiffs of the London publishing industry, Batchelor shows how The Lady's Magazine was as fully enmeshed in the business of publishing as any of its rival publications, constantly navigating changing markets, new competitors, and an evolving sense of what the magazine—both The Lady's Magazine specifically and the miscellaneous magazine form in general—could and should be. The Lady's Magazine, in other words, was a central player in the changing literary landscape of the later eighteenth century, and its explicit focus on women as subjects, contributors, and readers made it more, not less, relevant to the era's most important debates. End Page 402 An initial example may illustrate this point. In chapter 2, which follows a fascinating and useful first-chapter account of earlier periodicals written by or for women, Batchelor tells the story of The Lady's Magazine's earliest years, from its founding in 1770 by John Coote and John Wheble. The magazine was sold less than a year later to George Robinson and John Roberts but, as Batchelor reveals, the sale, engineered by Coote, was by no means a smooth one. Wheble, the magazine's publisher, insisted that he still had a right to the title, a difference in opinion that led, remarkably, to "two rival Lady's Magazines published between April 1771 and December 1772 as Wheble and Robinson. . . aggressively competed for readers and their respective publications' futures" (43). As the conflict proceeded to court, after Robinson and Roberts filed suit against Wheble for his continued publication of his own version of the magazine, it also made its way into the pages of the contested periodical in question: "Wheble had the trial proceedings taken down in shorthand and reprinted them in full along with copious, wounded annotations in the July 1771 issue of his Lady's Magazine" (63). Wheble's remarks (readable in part in one of the book's numerous helpful illustrations 64) are highly entertaining in themselves, as are the ongoing accusations of theft and fraud, duplicated materials, and copycat features that ensued as the twin Lady's Magazines battled for dominance. As Batchelor reveals, however, the dispute also has a much larger literary significance: in this early struggle to establish the magazine's identity, key aspects of the periodical—especially its focus on travel, fiction, women's experiences, and free exchange of sometimes contradictory ideas via a community of reader-contributors—were solidified. Others accounts of feuds, competitions, and petty grievances in the book function similarly: they provide enormously engaging glimpses into literary history, but they also help us to understand the form and function of the magazine. A deliberately sharp editorial response to a letter-writer (99) or a comical snippet of a serialized story (50) gives insight into the magazine's tone and changing relationship to its readers over time, while a spat with Blackwood's Magazine over copyright (198–200) provides a window into the larger argument of chapter 5, which traces The Lady's Magazine. . .