About Myra's Journal of Dress and Fashion

Myra's Journal of Dress and Fashion

Myra's Journal of Dress and Fashion was a monthly fashion magazine published in London from 1875 to 1912. The British Newspaper Archive, which digitised its run, describes it as the first and longest-running example of a cheap fashion magazine: it cost threepence, it was edited by Martha Browne, who wrote as Myra, and it lasted for nearly forty years. The Journal came out of the Beeton publishing world — Browne had worked with Samuel Beeton on The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine and The Young Englishwoman before launching a fashion paper under her own persona — and it made its reputation by a practical combination that later fashion journalism would take for granted: Paris fashion reports, dressmaking instructions with paper patterns, large fashion plates, illustrations set into the text itself, and a chatty editorial column, "Spinnings in Town," that recommended goods to readers in the manner now called the advertorial. Its surviving run, February 1875 onwards in the digitised archive, is treated by historians of dress as a treasure trove, and by historians of journalism as a landmark in the moment when women were first addressed directly as consumers.

Origins in the Beeton magazines

The Journal's roots lay in the Beeton firm's earlier women's magazines. Martha Browne was, in the British Newspaper Archive's phrase, a journalist of much experience who had worked with Samuel Beeton on The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine and The Young Englishwoman. The first number of Myra's Journal itself explained the break to its readers: the editorial voice, signing as The Silkworm, author of "Spinnings in Town" and late editress of The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, stated that Samuel Beeton was to be entirely dissociated from his publishers, Messrs Ward, Lock — Mr Tyler having left the firm in 1873, to the writer's regret — and that had control of the magazines rested entirely with Beeton, the old editorial duties would have continued. Instead, a new journal was launched, with Beeton's disinterested wishes for its durable success. That valedictory address, printed at the head of the new magazine, is the founding document of Myra's Journal: a fashion paper created when an experienced editress and the Beeton name parted company with the firm's publishers.

The editor behind "Myra"

The magazine's personality was its editor. Martha Browne wrote under the name Myra, and the thesis scholarship on the Journal refers to her as Myra Browne, author of the editorial column "Spinnings in Town." The persona was deliberate: in her opening address, Myra promised her old and new friends that she would make her knowledge of the economies and elegancies of dress useful to them, that she wrote daily answers to readers who favoured her with inquiries, and that she earnestly sought the criticisms, advice and opinions of her readers. She told them, further, that letters had shown her suggestions had been followed with good effect, both as to thrift and appearances. Two promises ran together throughout the Journal's life — economy and elegance — and both were addressed to women managing real household budgets, not to the carriage trade. The magazine's name put the editor's persona, not a proprietor's, on the masthead.

A cheap fashion magazine: price and format

The Journal's commercial idea was fashion at a popular price. It was founded in 1875 and cost 3d, and the British Newspaper Archive calls it the first and longest-running cheap fashion magazine, finding its success in presenting fashion in a cheap and practical format. By 1881 the publication was advertising itself as the "Best and Cheapest Fashion Journal," offering cut-out paper patterns, a coloured fashion plate and fifty-two pages of text. Those three selling points define the object: a monthly that a middle-class household could buy regularly, that showed fashion in colour, and that gave the reader the means to make the clothes it pictured. The digitised issues show the density of the result — page after page in which dress descriptions, pattern information and advertising sat side by side, with the Countess Mantle and its paper model priced in the same issue that carried the Paris report.

Patterns, plates and Paris reports

Content was the Journal's substance. Its regular ingredients, as catalogued by the British Newspaper Archive, were detailed illustrations in the main body of the text — rather than plates gathered separately — fashion advertisements, dress-making instructions with patterns provided within its supplements, fashion reports from Paris, and large fashion plates. The December 1875 issue's "Dress and Fashion in Paris" column shows the Paris report at work within months of launch: luxury and taste in the season's toilettes for visiting and evening wear, the fashion for white dresses at the theatre, braid trimming on dresses, paletots and bonnets, and practical devices such as the tape that drew up a skirt's front breadth. The pattern trade was integrated into the magazine's world: Madame Marie Goubaud of Paris advertised rooms in Bedford Street, Covent Garden, supplying the fashions presented in Myra's Journal, with models of the coming modes for wholesale houses, drapers and fashionable ladies. A reader could therefore move from report to pattern to finished garment through the magazine's own pages and advertisers.

"Spinnings in Town" and the invention of the advertorial

The Journal's most original feature was editorial. "Spinnings in Town," Martha Browne's regular column, mixed fashion intelligence with recommendations of specific goods and shops, in a chatty and informal way. The British Newspaper Archive identifies Browne as a pioneer of the advertorial — the combination of editorial and advertising — and calls the Journal representative of the so-called New Journalism. The October 1875 "Spinnings" shows the method: the columnist wanders through one of the largest London houses devoted to furs, Messrs Bevington & Morris of Cannon Street, describes squirrel-lock mantles, dolmans and seal-fur mantles with their prices, and converts a shopping expedition into reading matter. The watershed, in the Archive's judgement, was in the history of journalism and advertising alike: women were addressed themselves as consumers, spoken to directly as the people who decided what to buy.

Health, beauty and the soap advertisements

Fashion was never the whole contents. The Archive summarises the Journal as a successful combination of lively and informative advice on fashion, health and beauty with its illustrated material. A University of Saskatchewan master's thesis devoted to the magazine — Illustrated Soap Advertisements in Myra's Journal 1875–1912 — shows how that wider advice worked. Advice, the thesis finds, was provided in Myra's "Spinnings in Town" through clever advertorial plugs written into the monthly column, and social ideals were also communicated through the imagery of illustrated advertisements; advertisements for commercially manufactured soap were especially significant in recommending proper middle-class behaviours and responsibilities. Soap advertising, on this reading, did not merely sell a product: it sold an idea of what constituted middle-class behaviour to the willing female consumers who bought the magazine, and beauty became a main non-material commodity the Journal traded in, integral to the creation of the middle-class female identity. The thesis's dates, 1875–1912, are the Journal's own, and its evidence is a reminder that a fashion magazine is also a conduct manual in disguise.

Readers: middle-class women as consumers

The Journal's imagined reader can be reconstructed from its own contents and from the scholarship. She was a middle-class woman, newly part of a rapidly emerging class whose members, as the Saskatchewan thesis puts it, were insecure about what constituted appropriate behaviour and sought guidance from authority figures; magazines such as Samuel Beeton's Myra's Journal supplied that guidance. Myra's opening address promised attention to ladies' and children's apparel, to the dressing of children — in no country, she wrote, were there born such lovely boys and girls as in England, nor were they generally so prettily dressed — and to the furnishing and maintenance of the household and the arrangement of home life. Patterns and engravings of all garments necessary for the young of both sexes were to be given frequently. The magazine thus addressed the mother as dressmaker, household manager and consumer at once, and its nearly forty years of life suggest the address was a successful one.

Sister publications and the Beeton pattern world

The Journal did not stand alone. The British Newspaper Archive records that it spawned several sister publications, with one focusing on Children's Dress — a natural extension of the children's coverage promised at launch. Its pages also belonged to a wider Beeton-era economy of print for women: the same issues advertised the Silkworm series of shilling books on ornamental arts and useful knowledge for ladies, including works on Polonaise lace, macramé lace and elementary needlework, published from Wine Office Court, Fleet Street, and advertised the related Myra's Journal of Dress and Needlework. Advertisements for Parisian models, silk warehouses in Regent Street and mourning warehouses filled its advertiser pages, making each monthly number a small marketplace as well as a magazine. That density of commerce was not incidental to the Journal's survival; it was, on the advertorial model Browne pioneered, the point.

The run to 1912 and the surviving archive

Indicative of its success, the Journal lasted for nearly forty years, ceasing publication in 1912. A run of thirty-seven years made it, for most of its life, a fixture of the Victorian and Edwardian fashion press rather than an experiment. Its survival in digital form is unusually complete: the Internet Archive holds Myra's Journal of Dress and Fashion 1875–1912, and the British Newspaper Archive added the title to its collection in 2021, presenting issues from 1 November 1875 to 1 February 1900 and beyond as evidence for the history of fashion. For the directory reader, the honest summary is that Myra's Journal is documented less by a shelf of biographies than by its own pages and by the scholarship those pages have attracted — on dress, on advertising, and on the making of the middle-class woman reader. What those sources establish is enough: the first and longest-running cheap fashion magazine in Britain, edited for its whole life around one woman's persona, and a founding text of fashion journalism as a commercial art.