About Ladies' Cabinet

Ladies' Cabinet

Ladies' Cabinet — in full, The Ladies' Cabinet of Fashion, Music and Romance — was a British monthly women's magazine published in London by George Henderson from January 1832. The New York Public Library's catalogue records the full title as running from January 1832 until June 1870, while other library and booksellers' records describe the Fashion, Music and Romance series proper as continuing to 1852, when it was succeeded by a shortened title, Ladies' Cabinet of Fashion. Under its successive series it was one of the longer-lived women's monthlies of the early Victorian period.

The magazine was a small-format illustrated monthly aimed at a middle-class market. Its contents mixed romantic serialised stories, poems and fashion reporting, together with extracts from novels, short stories, reviews, aphorisms, songs, philosophical discussions and detailed descriptions of the latest clothing fashions from London and Paris. Its most visible feature was its hand-coloured engraved fashion plates.

The full title and what it promised

The title The Ladies' Cabinet of Fashion, Music and Romance was a programme in itself. "Fashion" promised the plates and the descriptions of London and Paris dress; "Music" reflected the songs included among its contents; and "Romance" covered the serialised stories and tales that filled much of each number. Women's magazines of the 1830s sold themselves as cabinets — collections of varied, pleasing material gathered for a reader's leisure — and Henderson's title told the purchaser exactly what the collection contained.

The New York Public Library's summary of the magazine describes it as an illustrated women's magazine including extracts from novels, short stories, reviews, aphorisms, songs, philosophical discussions and detailed descriptions of the latest clothing fashions from London and Paris. That variety was deliberate: a monthly that offered a serial story, a song, a review, a page of improving reflection and an authoritative account of what was being worn could claim a place in the household month after month.

George Henderson and the London publication

The magazine was published in London by George Henderson — cited as G. Henderson or Geo. Henderson on its volumes, with Elizabeth Henderson also appearing as publisher on plates of the 1840s. Its volumes were small: library records give the format as 18 cm, and a surviving volume of 1843 measures about six and a half by four inches, running to 442 pages for a half-year's numbers with an engraved title page. Printers associated with the magazine in catalogue records include Thomas Goode, William Guthrie and Bradbury and Evans.

Henderson's first series ran to fourteen volumes between 1832 and the end of 1838. A second series followed from 1839 to 1843, in ten volumes, and a further new series from 1844 onwards. That rhythm of half-year volumes — each January-to-June and July-to-December run of monthly numbers bound as a book — was how the magazine lived its second life on middle-class shelves after the monthly parts had been read.

Editors: Margaret and Beatrice De Courcy

Catalogue records name Margaret De Courcy and Beatrice De Courcy as the magazine's editors. The 1843 volume is catalogued as edited by them, and their names are attached to the magazine in the bibliographical record of its contents, including Henry Gardiner Adams's poem "Among the Rhododendrons", published in The Ladies' Cabinet of Fashion, Music and Romance on 1 July 1857 — evidence that named contributors were still placing occasional verse in its pages in the later 1850s.

Women editing a women's magazine was a selling point as well as a fact. The Ladies' Cabinet addressed a predominantly female, middle-class readership, and editorial control by women fitted the intimate, advisory tone — on dress, on reading, on accomplishments — that such a magazine was expected to keep with its subscribers.

Fashion plates

The magazine's fashion plates are the part of it most fully documented today. The National Portrait Gallery in London holds a large group of them — the periodical is associated with seventy portraits and plates in its collection — including hand-coloured etchings and engravings for specific months: "Evening Dress" and "Social Party Dress" in the autumn of 1834, "Morning Dress" in the summer of 1835, "Evening Dress" and "Social Party Dress" in January 1835, and a run of 1838 plates — "Dinner Dress" and "Opera Dress" for March, "Ball Dress" for April and "Morning Visiting Dress" for June — drawn by W. Bosell, with further plates into the 1840s, such as "Walking Dresses" for June 1844 and "Evening Dresses" for September 1846.

The Gallery's assessment of the magazine is candid: its plates were copies of French ones, badly drawn and crudely coloured. That judgement captures the economics of the cheaper fashion press. Original Paris plates were expensive; a small London monthly competing for middle-class subscribers copied the French designs that set the season's styles, and its readers accepted provincial execution in exchange for an affordable monthly guide to what Paris was wearing.

Describing the dresses

Each plate was accompanied by a detailed verbal description, and those descriptions show what the magazine's fashion service actually consisted of. The "Walking Dresses" plate of June 1844, for example, was described in terms of a green plaided foulard robe with a high corsage and long tight sleeves, a shawl mantelet of shaded gros de Naples bordered with rich fringe, and a rice-straw chapeau trimmed with lilac ribbon and a white and lilac plume. The "Evening Dresses" of September 1846 were described down to the lace: a taffeta robe with a low corsage and a berthe of point d'Angleterre, and an India muslin robe with a berthe of Mechlin lace flounces and a breast knot of ruby velvet ribbon.

Such detail was practical, not decorative. A reader — or her dressmaker — was meant to be able to reproduce the dress from plate and description together: the fabrics, the trimmings, the construction and the accessories are all specified. The Ladies' Cabinet, like other fashion monthlies, functioned as a pattern service for women who could not shop in Paris or London, delivered in monthly instalments.

Stories, songs and miscellaneous reading

Fashion occupied only part of each number. The National Portrait Gallery's description of the magazine notes that it predominantly contained romantic serialised stories, poems and fashions, and the library summary adds extracts from novels, short stories, reviews, aphorisms and philosophical discussions to the mixture. Serial fiction gave readers a reason to buy the next number; extracts and reviews connected the small monthly to the wider world of new books; aphorisms and short reflective pieces supplied the improving element expected of respectable women's reading.

The "Music" of the title was represented by songs printed in the magazine — the drawing-room ballad being a standard accomplishment of the middle-class household the magazine served. Taken together, the contents modelled a complete feminine leisure culture of the 1830s and 1840s: dress fashionably, read improving and romantic literature, sing and play at home, and follow the novels of the season through extracts and reviews.

Series, succession and the question of dates

The magazine's bibliographic history is unusually tangled, and its dates are stated differently by different authorities. One library finding aid summarises the run of The Ladies' Cabinet of Fashion, Music, and Romance as: volume 1 (January–June 1832) to volume 14 (July–December 1838); a new series, volume 1 (January–June 1839) to volume 10 (July–December 1843); and a third series, volume 1 (January–June 1844) to volume 17 (January–June 1852) — with publication of that title ceasing in June 1852 and the magazine continued by Ladies' Cabinet of Fashion.

Booksellers describing the 1843 volume likewise state that the magazine ran from 1832 to 1852 and was succeeded by Ladies' Cabinet of Fashion in 1852. The New York Public Library, by contrast, catalogues The Ladies' Cabinet of Fashion, Music, and Romance itself as beginning in January 1832 and ceasing in June 1870. The likeliest reading of the two records together is that the title family continued, under the shortened successor title, until 1870; readers should be aware that sources differ on whether the post-1852 years are counted as the same magazine or as its continuation.

The magazine and its market

The Ladies' Cabinet belonged to the crowded field of women's monthlies that multiplied in the 1830s, when falling production costs and a growing middle-class female readership made such magazines viable. Its competitors ranged from long-established titles such as The Lady's Magazine to the Paris fashion press, whose plates set the standard the London monthlies copied. Against that competition Henderson's magazine held a modest but durable position: small in format, monthly in rhythm, miscellaneous in content and centred on the coloured fashion plate.

Its longevity is its chief distinction. A magazine launched in January 1832 that was still issuing monthly parts in the 1840s, still placing verse in 1857, and — on the New York Public Library's dating — still running in some form until 1870, outlasted most of the women's periodicals founded alongside it. Survival across four decades of changing fashion, in both dress and publishing, required exactly the mixture it offered: stories to follow, songs to sing, and, above all, the new dresses described and pictured every month.

Survival and study

The magazine survives in bound volumes and in the evidence of its plates. Bonhams sold a set of the first series, volumes 1 to 14, with the second series, volumes 1 to 10, together with original monthly parts from 1839 to 1842 — a reminder that the half-year volumes, in their contemporary half-calf bindings, are the form in which the magazine usually reaches the modern reader. Birmingham's libraries hold individual fashion plates from it in the R. Crompton Rhodes collection, catalogued as specimens of Victorian fashion printing.

For historians of dress, the Ladies' Cabinet is a dated, month-by-month record of early Victorian fashion as it was presented to middle-class women: the plate names — morning dress, walking dress, dinner dress, opera dress, ball dress, evening dress — map the occasions of a fashionable day, and the descriptions preserve the fabrics, laces and trimmings specified for each. For historians of publishing, it stands as a case study in the small-format women's monthly: French-derived plates, serial romance, songs and reviews, gathered under a title that promised its readers a cabinet of everything a lady was expected to enjoy.