Educating the Proper Woman Reader: Victorian Family Literary Magazines and the Cultural Health of the Nation (review)

In the 1860s a new kind of middle-class magazine was launched. These made serialised fiction and often lavish illustration their selling points. Jennifer Phegley's book takes a close look at five years' publication of three of these magazines: The Cornhill, Belgravia, and The Victoria Magazine.

Historians of the periodical press describe these as "shilling monthlies," a new kind of journalism presaging the mass press at the end of the century. Literary historians compare the quality of the writing in The Cornhill under W. M. Thackeray's editorship with the sensationalism of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Belgravia. Feminist scholars treat The Victoria Magazine as a politically radical and proto-feminist product of Emily Faithfull's Victoria Press. Phegley draws intelligently on scholarly work in all these areas. She understands that the magazine is a mixed or hybrid form and deals with illustration as well as text, with articles as well as fiction. She makes central to her argument the debates about realism and sensationalism that have engaged literary critics, both Victorian and contemporary. She understands the challenges posed to the radical project of the Victoria Press by the launch of a magazine that was not overtly political. Phegley draws on these debates, but gives them a new significance. She does this in three ways: by relating these rather different journals to each other, by inventing the term "family literary magazine" to describe them all, and by arguing that they are all concerned with empowering the woman reader.

Even more radical than this grouping of British periodicals of the 1860s, is her decision to begin her account by looking across the Atlantic to Harper's New Monthly Magazine, an American journal launched in the 1850s. Phegley's argument is that Harper's blazed a trail through the thickets of nineteenth-century publishing and gender politics, which the British magazines followed a decade later. Harper's, she argues, was a pioneer in that it defined its readers as women and insisted that "women were crucial to the development of a superior literary culture" (54). Her case is that Harper's undertook to educate its women readers in good taste, which they would in turn instil in their families, thus ensuring a culturally healthy society. Phegley acknowledges that Harper's was very differently situated from, say, The Cornhill, not least because establishing a healthy national culture in America involved, as Harper's discovered, distinguishing itself from English literary culture and not simply imitating it. I find this the weakest bit of Phegley's argument. Fascinating in itself though the discussion of Harper's is, the relationship between this middle-class literary magazine and the rush of such journals in Britain in the 1860s needs to be made more clearly. Once her focus turns to Britain, however, Phegley's account is convincing and well argued.

Concerns about "healthy reading" centered on reading by women and the working class in the second half of the Victorian period. Though Phegley acknowledges the class-based nature of these debates, she does not address working-class reading at all. Instead she focuses on middle-class women's reading, as represented in the chosen journals—and she has, as I have suggested, a sophisticated understanding of the complexity and hybridity of the magazine genre and of the nature of its representations. She uses the term "family literary magazine" as a descriptor because this conveys the two central elements of these journals for her argument. First, each of these titles was intended for domestic reading and the reader constructed in the text is therefore the woman who managed the middle-class home. Her task was ensuring the physical and cultural health of the nation's families—and therefore, by extension, of the nation itself. Phegley argues that, contrary to a prevailing anxiety about women's reading as endemically unhealthy, these journals gave the female reader...