About Monthly Packet

Monthly Packet

The Monthly Packet was an English monthly magazine published between 1851 and 1899. Its full original title was The Monthly Packet of Evening Readings for Younger Members of the English Church, and it was founded by members of the Oxford Movement to counter Anglo-Catholic extremism. It was strongly influenced by its first editor, the novelist Charlotte Mary Yonge, whose aims for it were to provide instruction, entertainment and improvement; its unstated aims were to encourage an interest in education, missionary work and charity.

The magazine was targeted, as its introductory letter in the first volume made clear, at middle- and upper-class Anglican girls, though the evidence suggests its readership actually included males, adults and members of the lower classes. It survived for forty-eight years, published the first appearance of Lewis Carroll's stories later collected as A Tangled Tale, and has been described as a pioneering popular magazine for teenage readers. By July 1880 the word "Younger" had been dropped from its title.

Origins: the Oxford Movement and a proposal in 1850

The magazine's foundation belonged to the world of the Oxford Movement, the High Church revival within the Church of England. It was founded by members of the movement to counter Anglo-Catholic extremism — that is, to give younger Anglican readers a magazine of the movement's own temper that would hold them against more extreme influences — and its first editor, Charlotte Yonge, was a churchwoman formed by John Keble, one of the movement's leaders, who had prepared her for confirmation and advised her writing.

The immediate proposal came in August 1850. Marianne Dyson, a writer and friend and mentor of Yonge, proposed — eagerly supported by Yonge's mother — that they should found a new magazine to be edited by Yonge, intended not for children but for adolescent girls and young women. Their first idea was to fund it themselves and have it printed locally, since they believed the Mozley brothers, Yonge's publishers, would not want to encroach on ground occupied by The Churchman's Companion, a High Church family magazine in which Yonge had been serialising fiction. The Mozleys, however, had no doubts about supporting the venture, and the first number of The Monthly Packet appeared in January 1851, published in London by John and Charles Mozley.

Charlotte Yonge as editor

Charlotte Mary Yonge edited The Monthly Packet for forty years — a tenure that made the magazine, to a large extent, an expression of her personality and beliefs. She combined the editorship with an enormous output of her own: novels, biography, history, school textbooks and pieces for the magazine itself, about 160 works in all across her career. Her first commercial success, The Heir of Redclyffe (1853), was published two years after the magazine began, and many of her novels were first serialised in its pages.

Yonge's handling of money set the magazine's moral tone. From her first publication at fifteen, the profits of her writing were donated to church causes such as schools and missions; the proceeds of The Heir of Redclyffe helped to fund the schooner Southern Cross for Bishop George Selwyn's Melanesian Mission. A magazine edited on those principles could present its aims — instruction, entertainment and improvement, with education, missionary work and charity behind them — as practice rather than slogan.

Evening readings for younger members of the English Church

The full title announced both the magazine's audience and its intended use. These were "evening readings": material suitable to be read aloud or privately in an Anglican household at the end of the day, addressed to the "younger members of the English Church". The introductory letter in the first volume targeted the magazine at middle- and upper-class Anglican girls — the daughters of the clergy and of churchgoing families, in the years between childhood and adult life for which little periodical reading then existed.

In practice the readership was wider than the title page admitted. Evidence suggests that it actually included males, adults and members of the lower classes as well as the girls it addressed. That breadth helps to explain the magazine's longevity: a monthly that a whole household could read, and that Sunday schools, parish libraries and mothers as well as daughters found usable, had more ways to reach subscribers than its stated audience alone would have allowed. Scholars of girls' periodicals have accordingly called it the first popular teen magazine — a periodical for adolescent readers before that category had a name.

Contents: instruction, entertainment and improvement

The magazine's contents mixed serial fiction — much of it Yonge's own — with stories, articles and educational material designed to inform as well as amuse. Yonge had already served an apprenticeship in magazine serialisation: her tales Henrietta's Wish and The Two Guardians had run in The Churchman's Companion in 1849–1852, and her Langley School stories, drawn from her teaching at the Otterbourne school, appeared in the same circle of High Church periodicals. The Monthly Packet became the principal home for that kind of writing under her own control.

Serialisation was the magazine's backbone. Rosa Nouchette Carey's novel Heriot's Choice appeared in it in 1879, and Yonge's own novels reached their first readers in its monthly instalments. Around the fiction stood the improving apparatus the prospectus promised: material encouraging education, missionary enterprise and charitable work, presented as part of a young Anglican reader's ordinary interests rather than as separate instruction.

Lewis Carroll and A Tangled Tale

The magazine's most famous literary connection is with Lewis Carroll. The Monthly Packet was the first periodical to publish Carroll's short stories — a series of humorous mathematical puzzles in story form — which were later compiled into the book A Tangled Tale. That a devout Anglican editor, whose magazine was founded to steady young churchwomen, made room for Carroll's playful logic is a reminder that Yonge's editorship, however firm its principles, was not narrow: unusual work such as Carroll's was included alongside the magazine's characteristic fiction and instruction.

The Carroll connection also illustrates the magazine's reach beyond its intended circle. A story-puzzle printed for Anglican girls in a Mozley monthly could be gathered into a book that has stayed in print as a minor classic of recreational mathematics — a afterlife its first readers, solving the problems as evening readings, could hardly have predicted.

Change over time: toleration and social concern

The magazine's approach was modified over its long run. In its early character it encouraged the prevailing religious and social standards of its churchmanship, with emphasis on submission and obedience. Over time, Anglo-Catholic contributions were accepted — a notable softening for a magazine founded to counter Anglo-Catholic extremism — and it became more tolerant of Roman Catholicism and Nonconformism. It came to recognise that certain ills in society, such as poverty and ignorance, needed to be addressed, and there was less emphasis on submission and obedience.

The title itself registered the change of audience: by July 1880 the word "Younger" had been dropped, so that the magazine addressed itself simply to members of the English Church. A periodical founded for girls in 1851 had, by its fourth decade, become a general Anglican monthly whose original readers had grown up with it — and whose daughters formed its next generation.

The Coleridge succession and the end in 1899

Yonge's forty-year editorship ended in the early 1890s. In 1891 Christabel Coleridge became assistant editor, and she was sole editor from 1894. Coleridge, a novelist from a family closely connected with Yonge's circle, maintained the magazine through its final years.

The Monthly Packet ceased in 1899, after forty-eight years of publication. It had outlived the Oxford Movement controversies that produced it, the Mozley publishing world in which it began, and most of the religious periodicals of its generation. Its closure at the century's end closed one of the longest continuous editorships — and, under Coleridge, one of the longest runs — in Victorian magazine history.

Reputation and study

The magazine is studied today from several directions. For historians of girls' reading, it is a founding text: a commercially successful monthly addressed to adolescent girls from 1851, decades before the girls' magazine became a standard publishing category. For historians of the Oxford Movement, it shows the movement's pastoral strategy in print — meeting younger readers with fiction and instruction rather than controversy. Scholars have also traced how its publishers began to promote Yonge herself as a literary asset, her name and her earlier works becoming part of the magazine's identity even while contributors remained formally discreet.

Bound runs of the magazine, in the half-leather sets in which Victorian families preserved their monthly parts, survive in libraries and the antiquarian trade. Read now, The Monthly Packet preserves a whole culture of Anglican girlhood — its fiction, its charitable and missionary enthusiasms, its puzzles and its improving articles — assembled month by month, for nearly half a century, under one of the most durable editors of the Victorian press.