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Eighteenth-Century Periodicals for Women

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Peter John Miller*
Affiliation:
The University of Alberta

Extract

“There have been three silent revolutions in England,” asserted Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1832, “first when the professions fell off from the church; secondly, when literature fell off from the professions; and, thirdly, when the press fell off from literature.” A striking illustration of what Coleridge had in mind by his second and third “silent revolutions” is afforded by an examination of the development of periodicals for women in the late eighteenth century. Moreover, a study of the origin and nature of these magazines raises the question of the actual and potential uses of literacy, an educational problem that has acquired a special significance in the twentieth century.

Type
Notes and Documents I
Copyright
Copyright © 1971 History of Education Quarterly 

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References

Notes

1. Taylor Coleridge, Samuel, Table Talk. Works (New York: Harper Bros., 1884), 6:391.Google Scholar

2. John Bennet, Reverend, Strictures on Female Education: Chiefly As It Relates to the Culture of the Heart (London: T. Cadell, c. 1780), pp. 40,44.Google Scholar

3. Prefatory Address,” The New Lady's Magazine (January 1792).Google Scholar

4. Gisborne, Thomas, An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1797), p. 59.Google Scholar

5. The Quarterly Review 10, no. 19 (October 1813–January 1814): 32.Google Scholar

6. Quoted in Tompkins, J. M. S., The Popular Novel in England, 1770–1800 (London: Constable and Co., 1932), p. 2.Google Scholar

7. It is significant in this connection that by 1770 the initial prestigious episode in the history of the novel, for which Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, and Smollett deserve most credit, was at an end. With the exception of the works of Jane Austen, the novels published between Humphrey Clinker (1771) and Waverley (1814) have deservedly suffered the neglect of posterity.Google Scholar

8. Table of Contents,” The Lady's Magazine (April 1766).Google Scholar

9. The New Lady's Magazine (December 1792); and Supplement (1792).Google Scholar

10. Ibid. (September 1789), p. 499 ff.Google Scholar

11. Monthly Compendium of Advertisements,” La Belle Assemblée (April 1806).Google Scholar

12. Ibid., p. 38.Google Scholar

13. Quoted in Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (London: Pelican Books, 1963), pp. 5253.Google Scholar

14. Taylor Coleridge, Samuel, The Friend. Works (New York: Harper Bros., 1884), 2:407.Google Scholar

15. Ibid., p. 544.Google Scholar

16. Coleridge, Table Talk, p. 331.Google Scholar

17. Coleridge, The Friend, p. 34.Google Scholar

18. Ibid.Google Scholar

19. Williams, Culture and Society, pp. 295–96.Google Scholar

20. Walsh, William, The Use of Imagination (London: Peregrine Books, 1959), p. 23.Google Scholar

21. Hoggart, Richard, The Uses of Literacy (London: Pelican Books, 1957).Google Scholar