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This chapter considers the transnational collaboration between Samuel Beeton’s Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine and the French magazine Le Moniteur de la mode, run by Beeton’s French counterpart Adolphe Goubaud. Using a range of historical source material, Van Remoortel explores the behind-the-scenes contributions made by women to the success of this venture and to each magazine. In particular, she argues that Louise Goubaud’s contribution to the emergence of the cheap fashion press ‘has been consistently misunderstood’ and that Beeton’s trailblazing status was in fact indebted to her work in a range of ways (47). In democratising women’s access to fashion and design, the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine ‘promoted a new kind of femininity’ (46). Indeed, the pattern postal service made fashion more accessible in literal terms as well, bringing international fashion into the lives of women who were unlikely to find themselves in the boutiques of Paris. Van Remoortel’s essay brings to the fore the significance of transnational exchange, a topic highlighted in a number of other essays in this volume.

This chapter focuses attention on the domestic-feminine ideal promoted in the 1860s by the Young Englishwoman (1864–77), a successful fashion and domestic magazine that has received scant scholarly attention on account of its ostensibly overt didacticism. While the magazine’s concentration on fashion, needlework, and household management may have contributed to its being overlooked by previous scholars, Phegley significantly recasts the magazine’s domestic preoccupations in more progressive terms. The Young Englishwoman emerges in this account as an important cultural space for the championing of female agency in the domestic sphere through the promotion of what Phegley calls a ‘do-it-yourself spirit’ among nascent domestic managers (104). By stressing female agency, education, and independent consumerism on the home front, the magazine trained young women to be, in the words of Isabella Beeton (1836–65), ‘the commander of an army’ (108).

This chapter traces the growth of magazine publishing in Britain from its origins in London’s Grub Street, ranging from Edward Cave’s pioneering Gentleman’s Magazine of 1731 and John Limbird’s Mirror of Literature of 1822, through to the mid-nineteenth-century publishing houses of Samuel Beeton and John Cassell & Co. A landmark development was the publication in 1832 by Charles Knight of the generously illustrated Penny Magazine whose early issues sold in excess of 200,000 copies. The Penny Magazine had been produced under the auspices of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, but by the mid-nineteenth century Edward Lloyd’s Penny Dreadful genre was appealing to a more populist thirst for diversion and entertainment. Meanwhile the launch of the monthly Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine by Samuel and Isabella Beeton in 1852 is seen as the progenitor of the modern women’s title, which has since become the British magazine industry’s staple product.

In this chapter, Beetham offers a valuable overview of the emergence of the domestic magazine across the second half of the nineteenth century. Though acknowledging the ‘complex meanings of “home” and the “domestic” and how they relate to femininity,’ Beetham argues that ‘it is in the pages of the magazines read by the “ordinary” woman at home where those debates were and are worked through in that complex interweaving of materiality, emotion, and ideology in which we all struggle to give meaning to our lives’ (18). Beetham’s historical sweep of the domestic magazine as a publishing genre includes Samuel Beeton’s trailblazing Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine (1852–90), evangelical mothers’ magazines, and the cheap penny weeklies of the 1890s. She considers the ways in which we define such publications, account for their contradictions, and understand their relationship to earlier ladies’ magazines, together with new elements of their own invention and later of the New Journalism. In this way, she provides an important foundation for the essays in this section and the volume as a whole.