Victorian England, perhaps, is unduly regarded as a domain of male domination, certainly in its public life: even Gladstone did not support “votes for women”, although he approved their entry into the professional worlds of both medicine and education. Women, too, became exceedingly prominent and important in Victorian literature: as with Elizabeth Gaskell, the Brontes, “George Eliot”, and, Mrs Humphrey Ward. That must have been largely because by the rules of those times they were excluded from the masculine realms of politics, the Church, and the law, so their innate abilities inevitably turned into the alternative avenues of fiction, and creative literature.
At any rate, amidst the rich profusion of periodical literature for the menfolk – ranging from Quarterly Review to Contemporary Review and the Cornhill Magazine – we need also to acknowledge an equally significant Victorian procession of magazines for women. Perhaps, nowadays, we tend to overlook these, or at least to underestimate their social and domestic significance; perhaps being influenced unduly by the continuing presence of the male‐dominated Victorian literature in such kindly preserves as St Deiniol’s Library at Hawarden, in North Wales (the Gladstone Memorial Library).
There is surely ample room, even on the crowded shelves of books about the Victorian Age in Literature, for a specialised volume, studying the huge diversity of Victorian women’s magazines. This present volume amply identifies the wide range: tales of romance and passion co‐existing with moralistic fiction, political journalism, fashion, cookery, advice columns, and readers’ letters. The low intellectual content of women’s reading in the eighteenth century was effectively parodied by R.B. Sheridan in his play, The Rivals (1775). Much of the extreme sentimentality of this was carried on into the ensuing nineteenth century: with the result that, during the early part of the Victorian period, women’s magazines were dominated by “escapism”, “Sweethearts”, and sheer romance. This was the “Mills and Boon” era in the Victorian literature. Gradually, however, after 1850, Victorian women’s magazines did improve, in challenge and mental content, so that by the end of that crucial period, the best of them could also compete with those for men, alike in social challenge and in mental capacity.
This comely and delightful volume treats a largely unexplored Victorian theme with a very commendable thoroughness, intensity and insight. It well balances what may have hitherto been treated as exclusively a man’s world: that of literature and even of journalism. Women’s interests, inevitably, began as largely domestic and circumscribed by the home. Hence the early fashion magazines, the illustrated magazines, and the religious magazines. These were followed by magazines specifically intended for young people, with later on magazines containing fairly big sections, devoted to serious fiction and even poetry. Political journalism, including the theme of “Women and Politics”, began to be published, as early as the year 1863. Even by 1860, it could be assumed that women at home could or should be interested in books: nor were they wholly leisured women of the middle classes, because the British Workwoman, in 1863, published an instructive review of London Labour and the London Poor.
Competitions began spasmodically in 1862; more regularly, after 1890: and personal interviews with female writers came in between 1889 and 1894. Evidently, therefore, the scope of Victorian women’s magazines gradually enlarged, reaching its influential heyday in the last decade of the nineteenth century, when indeed the whole of the delicately poised balance of that Victorian society was challenged, rather creatively, from so many different quarters: feminist, artistic and economic.
There is a full bibliography and suggested reading list. So, we should find here a very original, important and instructive book: certainly, well deserving a wide readership, among students of our cultural and literary history, as well as what are today perhaps disagreeably called “Women’s Studies”. At any rate, even men can learn a lot about facets of the Victorian literature as a whole, from careful reading of this wholly admirable book. Perhaps one may add further credence to this too brief appraisal by stating that, of its two Editors, Margaret Beetham is Reader in English at the Manchester Metropolitan University, and Kay Boardman is Senior Lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire, based in Preston.
