About The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine

The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine

The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine was a monthly magazine published in London by Samuel Orchart Beeton from 1852 to 1879. Subtitled an illustrated journal combining practical information, instruction and amusement, it was one of the first cheap magazines aimed at middle-class women, and it became the platform from which the Beetons built their publishing reputation. Its supplements of 1859 to 1861, written by Samuel's wife Isabella Beeton, were later collected as her celebrated Book of Household Management, the most famous household book of the Victorian age.

Samuel Beeton's stated intention was that the magazine should tend to the improvement of the intellect. Its editors sought to inform as well as entertain their readers, offering the advice of an encouraging friend and the cultivation of the mind alongside serialised fiction, short stories and poetry.

Samuel Beeton and the launch of 1852

Samuel Orchart Beeton was a successful and innovative publishing entrepreneur. He had been the first British publisher of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852, the same year he launched The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine. The new magazine was priced at twopence, which made it a relatively cheap option for young, middle-class women at a time when much of the press was occupied with the upper classes, and it was an immediate success. According to one scholarly account, its circulation jumped from 25,000 at the end of 1852 to 60,000 in 1860.

The magazine was the foundation of a growing slate of Beeton periodicals. Samuel went on to found the Boy's Own Magazine in 1855 and the Young Englishwoman in 1864, among the earliest magazines aimed at audiences defined not only by age but also by sex, an early adoption of niche marketing whose success supported his expanding periodical network.

Isabella Beeton's contribution

Initially, the periodical was jointly edited by Isabella Mary Beeton and her husband Samuel, with Isabella contributing sections on domestic management, fashion and embroidery, and translations of French novels. Samuel was described as a discreet but firm believer in the equality of women, and the couple's relationship, both personal and professional, was an equal partnership.

Isabella Mayson had grown up accomplished in French and German and had trained herself in pastry-making, including lessons from a baker at Epsom. She and Samuel, whose families had lived in the same London street and whose sisters had attended the same school at Heidelberg, married at St Martin's Church, Epsom, in July 1856, and her contributions to the magazine belonged to the working partnership that followed the marriage. Between 1859 and 1861 Isabella wrote the supplements published with the magazine, on household management. These supplements were later collected and published in book form in 1861 as Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management, the work for which she remains famous. The magazine thus served as the original serial home of the most influential domestic manual of the nineteenth century, tested on its readers in monthly parts before it became a book.

Contents of the magazine

The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine published articles on middle-class domestic issues, fashion and fiction. A typical volume combined articles on domestic management, embroidery patterns, cooking, dressmaking, translations of French novels, serial fiction, biographical sketches and notes on gardening and medicine. More unusually for a women's magazine of its time, it also featured patterns for dressmaking, encouraging a do-it-yourself spirit among its readers, who could make the garments its fashion coverage described.

Fashion was a central element: the magazine's subject headings in library catalogues are costume, needlework and dressmaking. Its fiction offering, serialised novels and short stories alongside poetry, sat beside the practical material, so that instruction and amusement, as the subtitle promised, were delivered in the same monthly package.

The relaunch of 1860

In 1860 a new series began. Following the abolition of the paper tax, the Beetons decided to take the publication in a slightly different direction, relaunching it in a larger format and including high-quality coloured plates. Subsequently the price of the magazine rose from twopence to sixpence, and the magazine became directed to a wealthier readership, with more emphasis on fiction and fashion.

The pricing history was not entirely simple. HathiTrust's catalogue record notes that from June 1862 to December 1864 a shilling edition and a sixpenny edition were issued simultaneously, the shilling edition comprising, in addition to the sixpenny edition, a supplement containing fashion plates, patterns and fiction; from January 1865 the magazine and the supplement were issued together. A third series began in 1866. The magazine was published throughout in London by S. O. Beeton.

After Isabella's death

Isabella Beeton died in 1865. Following her death, the magazine was co-edited by her friend Matilda Brown alongside Samuel. Samuel himself remained its publisher until the end of the run, and the magazine continued for well over a decade after the death of the contributor who had made its name.

The Conversazione controversy

In 1867 Samuel Beeton expanded the existing correspondence section of the magazine. The contents of this Conversazione, which now included contributions by men, came to include material extolling the attractions of corsetry and tight-lacing, cross-dressing and flagellation. Extracts on the latter subject were later republished in pornographic compilations such as The Birchen Bouquet.

This strand of the magazine's later history sits oddly beside its reputation for respectable domestic instruction, and it is one reason the magazine attracts scholarly attention: the same pages that taught middle-class household management also hosted one of the most notorious correspondence columns of the Victorian periodical press.

Place among Victorian women's magazines

The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine is regarded as the first cheap magazine for middle-class women. Its significance lies in the combination it pioneered: practical household instruction, fashion plates and dressmaking patterns, fiction and self-improvement, sold monthly at first for twopence to readers whom more expensive periodicals did not serve. Its success demonstrated that a periodical built for a precisely imagined audience of young middle-class women could sustain large circulations, a lesson Samuel Beeton applied across his list of magazines for women, boys and girls.

Final years and archive

The magazine ceased publication in 1879, after a run of twenty-seven years. Complete and partial runs survive widely in research libraries: HathiTrust holds volumes of all three series, drawn from the collections of the University of California, the University of Minnesota, Harvard University and the New York Public Library, among others, and the Online Books Page maintains an archive listing for the title. Its catalogue subjects, costume, needlework and dressmaking periodicals, only hint at the range that made it a fixture of the Victorian middle-class home.

Legacy

The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine is remembered on two levels. For general readers it is the magazine that launched Mrs Beeton: without its monthly supplements of 1859 to 1861 there would have been no Book of Household Management in its famous form. For historians of the press it is a landmark in the creation of the modern women's magazine, the point at which practical domestic content, fashion and fiction were combined at a price middle-class women could afford, and at a circulation that proved the market existed. Published in London from 1852 to 1879, it remains one of the defining periodicals of the Victorian domestic world it both served and helped to shape.