ABSTRACT
Historical inquiry into the magazine-form in the Western world typically harnesses magazines to manifestations of capitalist economy and social mobility, the rise of consumer culture and transformations in lifestyle choices and socio-cultural taste in literate cultures with established literacy practices. In the Anglo-American world especially, from the 18th century on, the magazine-form is understood to have been central to the growth of a civil society, whose members aspired towards participation in a shared public arena in which social mobility, respectability, the cultivation of letters and the material improvement of everyday life through regulated patterns of consumption were held in high esteem (see, for instance, Anderson, 1991; Garvey, 1996; Nord, 1989; Shevelow, 1989; Williams, 1965, pp. 177–236 and passim; Loeb, 1994; Ohmann, 1996). As a bourgeois product par excellence, the magazine appears to have been directed at a modernising, middle-class reading public actively engaged in promoting a culture of consumption. How, then, can we account for the emergence and sustained production of magazines in circumstances which do not readily lend themselves to analysis in terms of received political economy frameworks known to be conducive to the rise of the middling-classes, or of professional-managerial classes with identifiable middle-class dispositions and aspirations?
