The Lady's Magazine, or Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex, Appropriated Solely to Their Use and Amusement, 1770-1837

Bennett, Shelley M. "Changing Images of Women in Late-Eighteenth-Century England: The "Lady's Magazine," 1770-1810." Arts Magazine 55.9 (May 1981): 138-141. [has ten small black and white photographs of plates]

Copeland, Edward. Women Writing About Money: Women's Fiction in England, 1790- 1820. Cambridge Studies in Romanticism. Eds. Marilyn Butler and James Chandler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. [includes black and white versions of various plates]

Laudermilk, Sharon, and Teresa L. Hamlin. The Regency Companion. New York: Garland, 1989.

"Curiously enough the first true fashion plates were not French but English. The Lady's Magazine was publishing them from 1770 onwards. And suddenly similar plates were being published all over Europe" (Laver 146-7)

The Lady's Magazine "was the first of the true fashion-plate magazines that was issued regularly. The plates were not decorated with color until 1790. Before 1790, dressmakers would color the plates themselves to enhance the dress designs and entice their lady customers to order garments" (Laudermilk and Hamlin 33).

The Lady's Magazine was published in London, monthly, printed for Robinson and Roberts, starting in August of 1770. In 1820, they began a new series, starting again with volume 1 for that year. The University of California system has some copies of this journal in their various special collections (UCLA has some 1802 copies, while UCR has 1775, 1778, 1784, 1789, and 1792-4 copies. UCSB has the mother lode, however, the complete set from 1773 to 1818; some of their copies, they state are "very worn."

"The Lady's Magazine with its emphasis on the doings of the haut ton marked "fashion" as a structure around which middling rank women could mount their conversation about consumption. The Lady's Magazine tapped a grass-roots response to the subject, too, since it drew on its eager reader for the contributions that filled its pages. The magazine offered women the opportunity to speak to other women, to argue with one antoher, and often to provide one another with specialized information otherwise hard to come by. The Lady's, together with other women's magazines at the end of the century, nurtured a culture for women centered on material culture" (Copeland 3).

"The genteel reader might take home La Belle Assemblee; the tradesman's daughter might be more likely to choose the Lady's Magazine, but again, both magazines could appeal, like the novels, across the entire span of the middling ranks" (Copeland 6).