ABSTRACT
The history of the magazine stretches back to the late seventeenth century. In 1693 the periodical The Ladies’ Mercury was launched with the aim of providing entertainment and education in a morally uplifting way for literate, leisured women. Other journals which followed in the eighteenth century (The Ladies’ Magazine, The Lady’s Magazine, The Lady’s Monthly Museum) were similarly aimed at upper-class women. By the nineteenth century, economic prosperity and higher standards of literacy (due to the Education Act of 1870) ensured that the target audience changed – middle-class women, who were expected to show little interest in world affairs and were instead grounded in issues of domesticity, personal appearance and family life were the new readers of titles like The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, 48 such magazines were launched, being generally less expensive than previous journals and making profit from advertising revenues (Ferguson 1983: 16).
