What is a little magazine?

There are few terms pertaining to print culture that are used more absent-mindedly than ‘magazine’. In everyday situations, we use it as a self-evident alternative for ‘journal’, ‘review’ or any number of generic names we give to a periodical publication that is not a newspaper. Each of these terms, however, has its own historical connotations. The metaphor is lost in contemporary English, but ‘magazine’ (from Italian: magazzino) originally referred to ‘a storehouse’. A periodical that styles itself ‘a magazine’ thereby suggests that the publishers wish the text to be considered a storehouse of information. This is a popular conceptual metaphor in the nineteenth-century press, and several variants occurred. Some preferred the confidentialsounding ‘repository’, for example the Ladies’ Repository (1841–76) and the theological Monthly Repository (1806–37), while others favoured the more presumptuous ‘museum’, as in the Lady's Museum (1798–1832), and there even was a successful monthly Ladies’ Treasury (1857–95). These names are all linked by a shared metaphorical background, but the neutral and therefore perhaps most productive ‘magazine’ has proved the most enduring. Over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a ‘magazine’ came to be understood as a periodical publication that accommodated a variety of authorial voices, unlike the largely single-authored essay periodicals of the eighteenth century such as The Spectator (1711–12/15) by Addison and Steele or Dr Johnson's Rambler (1750–2). Magazines would also contain a variety of textual genres, unlike review periodicals such as the Edinburgh Review (1802–1929). Magazines would predominantly contain original material (unlike periodical miscellanies of which few clear-cut examples existed in the Victorian age), and did not specialise in coverage of current events (unlike newspapers). Some publications did not pigeonhole themselves neatly in the categories that we place them in now, and the deceptive appropriation of titles or formal features suggested with more prestigious periodical genres for marketing purposes was rife. For instance, as we shall see, some of the magazines under scrutiny in this book appropriated characteristics then associated with review periodicals to increase their prestige.

The qualified term ‘little magazine’ is if anything more problematic, as this was only applied in hindsight to publications which clearly share several important features, but which the proprietors may not have thought of as ‘little’.