What? How? Why?: Broadening the Mind with the Treasury of Literature (1868–1875), Supplement to the Ladies’ Treasury (1857–1895)

A study of the Treasury of Literature (1868-1875), literary supplement to the Ladies’ Treasury (1857-1895), perfectly illustrates how form and content of this periodical are inextricably linked. In this article, I demonstrate how the supplement, provided separately from the parent periodical and containing only fiction and informative articles, both in an ideological and in a commercial way assists to distinguish a conventional middle-class women’s magazine from its mainstream rivals. Simultaneously, I argue that the Treasury of Literature renders the Ladies’ Treasury more closely related to the late eighteenth-century ‘enlightened’ women’s magazines, a type of publication that vanished at the beginning of the Victorian era.