About The Female Tatler

The Female Tatler

The Female Tatler was a British society periodical published in London from 8 July 1709 to 31 March 1710. It appeared three times a week, in imitation of Richard Steele's The Tatler, which had begun only three months earlier, and it was written in the voice of a woman: Mrs Crackenthorpe, described on its title as a lady that knows everything. In less than a year it produced more than a hundred numbers of lively, scathing society satire, and then vanished — leaving scholars arguing for nearly three centuries about who had actually written it.

The Female Tatler belongs to the first age of the British periodical essay. After the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695 had freed the press from pre-publication censorship, London filled with newspapers and essay papers, and gossip, as its editor quickly realised, sold. A female-voiced Tatler was a direct challenge to Steele's male coffee-house persona on his own ground.

Three months after The Tatler

Steele's The Tatler was first published in 1709 under the pen name Isaac Bickerstaff, Esquire, printing the news and gossip that filtered through London's coffee houses, three days a week. It was a successful venture that lasted two years and was widely imitated, in Edinburgh and elsewhere.

Three months after the original Tatler was first published, in July 1709, the Female Tatler appeared. Its opening addressed itself directly to Steele in his Bickerstaff persona, hoping he would not think she invaded his property by undertaking a paper of this kind, since tattling — as the paper archly put it — had always been judged peculiar to her sex. The joke announced the whole enterprise: the supposedly female art of tattle, turned into print, and aimed back at the society that practised it.

Mrs Crackenthorpe, a lady that knows everything

The paper's presiding persona was Mrs Crackenthorpe. The full title under which the Bodleian Library's copy is catalogued runs: The Female Tatler; by Mrs Crackenthorpe, a lady that knows everything. The persona claimed omniscience about London society — who was courting whom, who was in debt, who had been seen where — and used that claimed knowledge as a licence for satire and moral comment.

Later in the run, Mrs Crackenthorpe gave way to a Society of Ladies, who continued the paper. Whether that change marked a real change of authorship or merely a change of fictional front has never been established; no one knows who, or even what sex, the people involved in the publication were.

Who wrote it? The authorship question

The Female Tatler was published anonymously, and its authorship became a small scholarly mystery. From the 1960s to the 1990s, scholars generally thought the anonymous woman writer might have been Delarivier Manley, the novelist and playwright. Manley was subsequently ruled out as author, and the writer remains unknown.

Earlier reference works had pointed elsewhere, and some never settled the matter at all. The Dictionary of National Biography credited the playwright Thomas Baker with the authorship of the Female Tatler, describing it in its turn as a scurrilous periodical paper. An older survey of women's magazines, meanwhile, repeated the Manley attribution, naming her as editor under the Crackenthorpe pseudonym and adding Anne Baldwin as publisher, while cataloguing records at the Bodleian still list Manley and Baker together in the editor field. The honest modern position is the one given in current accounts of The Tatler: the author is unknown, Manley has been excluded, and the paper's woman's voice may or may not have been a woman's.

Contents: satire, society and letters

The Bodleian's cataloguing of the complete run describes its keywords plainly: journal, women, satire, society, letters, advertisements and poems, literature. The Female Tatler mixed society scandal and sharp personal satire with correspondence, verse and advertisements, presented — on its own declaration — as a reformative device as much as an entertainment: it proposed to expose folly and vice by laughing at them.

Contemporaries noticed it. Addison mentioned the Female Tatler among the periodicals started in imitation of Steele's methods, alongside titles such as Tit for Tat. To be named, even in a list of imitators, in The Spectator's predecessor's own circle was evidence that a thrice-weekly paper of less than a year's life had made itself impossible to ignore.

Scandal and reputation

The paper was known in its own time for lively wit and scathing satire. That reputation had a sharper edge: the 1994 survey of three hundred years of British women's magazines records that the Female Tatler circulated scandal and abuse to such an extent that both its editor and its publisher were indicted for libel. Whether or not every detail of that older account survives modern scrutiny of the authorship question, it captures how the paper was remembered — as a publication that named names and took risks with them.

In the London of 1709, a paper that claimed a lady who knows everything as its source, and printed what she knew three times a week, was playing a dangerous and commercially attractive game. Its short life may itself be part of the story: scandal sheets burned brightly and briefly.

The run: July 1709 to March 1710

The Female Tatler was published three times weekly and ran for less than a year, from 8 July 1709 to 31 March 1710. The Bodleian Library's set, from which the Eighteenth Century Journals collection is drawn, comprises numbers 1 to 111; a modern list of eighteenth-century British periodicals for women counts the thrice-weekly run at 115 issues. The discrepancy is small and typical of early periodical bibliography, where numbering irregularities were common.

Either way, the arithmetic of the run is impressive for a paper produced at that tempo: more than a hundred numbers in under nine months, each number an essay sheet of comment on the town. The original Tatler itself only survived until 1711, when Steele and Addison closed it to found The Spectator.

Among the first women's periodicals

The Female Tatler stands near the head of the list of British periodicals for women. The first British periodical published specifically for women, The Ladies' Mercury, had appeared in 1693 for just four issues. The Female Tatler, in 1709, was the first to sustain a frequent, essay-based society paper in a woman's voice over a substantial run.

The type it established — the female spectator of society, commenting on manners, courtship and reputation — runs forward through the century. Eliza Haywood's The Female Spectator of 1744–1746, Charlotte Lennox's The Lady's Museum of 1760–1761, and the long-lived Lady's Magazine from 1770 all worked the ground that the Female Tatler had opened: periodical writing addressed to women, in a woman's persona, about the social world women were expected to navigate.

A tune, a title and a popular afterlife

The paper's fame in its own moment is witnessed by an unlikely survival: a country dance tune named The Female Tatler. The melody first appears in John Young's Dancing Master, second volume, in its first edition of 1710 — while the paper was still appearing — and Young retained it in subsequent editions to 1728. It also appears in Walsh and Hare's country dancing collections of 1719 and in John Walsh's of 1754. A periodical title catchy enough to name a dance tune was a title the whole town knew.

The name was revived again in popular culture's long memory of the scandal sheet: modern commentary on television's Lady Whistledown, the fictional gossip writer of Bridgerton, reaches back to Mrs Crackenthorpe as her real-life precursor, a lady that knew everything about the society of 1709 and printed it.

Survival in libraries

The Female Tatler survives as a complete run in research libraries, pre-eminently the Bodleian Library at Oxford, whose copy (shelfmark Hope fol. 91) underlies the digital edition in the Eighteenth Century Journals collection published for subscribing institutions. Through that edition, every number from the first of 8 July 1709 to the last of 31 March 1710 can be read today in facsimile.

Legacy

The Female Tatler's legacy is out of proportion to its nine months of life. It was among the very first British periodicals to build an entire publication on a woman's editorial voice; it proved that society satire in that voice could rival the coffee-house papers on their own thrice-weekly schedule; and it left a mystery of authorship that still exercises scholars. Mrs Crackenthorpe, whoever she — or he — was, remains the founding figure of the British women's society paper.