Reading Langham Place periodicals at Number 19
Beth Palmer
19 Langham Place in central London was the headquarters for a group of female
reformers interested in increasing opportunities for female work and education and in
reforming the unequal laws regarding property and electoral rights. The friendship
between Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and Bessie Rayner Parkes was core to the
group. It was their early activities in petitioning parliament and writing reformist
articles that attracted other like-minded women to their cause. Key members included
those with established literary interests such as the novelist Matilda Hays and the poet
Adelaide Procter. There were also a significant number who found themselves
plunging into roles for which they had no training but much enthusiasm such as Emily
Faithfull and Emily Davies who became publishers and editors. Their membership
was primarily middle-class, and well-off Langhamites such as Bodichon provided
funding where necessary. Initially located in Princes Street1, the expanding group
soon moved to Langham Place, a location found by the wealthy Lady Theodosia
Monson. This would provide the offices for their journals, meeting space for the
associations and committees that the Langham Place Group formed, rooms for
refreshments and, importantly, for reading.
The production and dissemination of feminist reading material which recorded
and promoted their growing activities and interests was central to the group’s ethos.
The periodicals they produced provided regular updates on their work as well as
spreading the message outwards from the London base. In writing of the English
1
According to Pam Hirsch, a small reading room was established at the premises in Princes Street
before the group moved (Hirsch 1998: 185).
Woman’s Journal in particular Herstein argues that women ‘from all parts of Britain
used the Journal to create the country’s first effective feminist network’ (Herstein
1993: 24) and DiCenzo sees the larger body of feminist and suffrage periodicals
functioning as vehicles ‘mobilizing collective action’ (DiCenzo 2011: 73).
The group was connected to other reformist collectives such as the National
Association for the Promotion of Social Sciences (NAPSS), the Society for the
Promotion of the Employment of Women (SPEW), and the Female Middle-Class
Emigration Society. As Phillipa Levine puts it ‘The Langham Place women offered a
central metropolitan conduit through which a variety of radical and feminist
experiments flowed.’ (Levine 1987: 87) Many of the members were active across
several liberal and reformist networks and 19 Langham Place provided offices for the
operations of SPEW whose founders were the Langhamites Adelaide Procter and
Jessie Boucherett. Expanding opportunities for female employment was a crucial
concern put into practice by projects such as a register for recording the details of
women in want of work. Maria Rye organised an Engrossing Office where women
copied legal documents, and Rye and Isa Craig directed women into the new
profession of telegraph clerks. Emily Faithfull demonstrated women’s capability in
the printing industry by setting up her own printing house, the Victoria Press. The
press worked very successfully, printing several Langhamite publications and
becoming ‘Printer and Publisher in ordinary to Her Majesty’. These projects
promoting female employment intersected with agitation for better educational
opportunities for women and girls. The campaign for women to be allowed to take
university entrance exams, for example, was a lengthy one in which many Langham
Place women were involved. Emily Davies would later become one of the key
campaigners in the setting up of Girton College first at Hitchin and then in
Cambridge.
The Langham Place Group has provided a rich source of material and debate
for scholars of nineteenth-century feminism (Levine, Hirsh, Lacey). This chapter,
though, seeks to uncover the reading practices encouraged by the Langham Place
Group and by the first feminist periodicals that they produced: the English Woman’s
Journal (1858-1864), the Englishwoman’s Review (1866-1910), and the Victoria
Magazine (1863-1880). The editors of these magazines, Bessie Rayner Parkes, Jessie
Boucherett, Emily Davies and Emily Faithfull, along with fellow Langhamites cared
deeply and thought carefully about readership. They asked themselves how they
would engage and maintain readers and how the seemingly passive act of reading
might be converted into, or re-imagined as, a dynamic feminist activity.
The English Woman’s Journal
Several critics have emphasised the importance of the English Woman’s Journal
(hereafter EWJ) in creating a community of female readers. In its first years it was
unique in seeking to connect readers through a mutual interest in addressing and
debating their shared social disenfranchisement. The EWJ did not only publish essays
by members of the Langham Place Group and other early feminists but also ‘invited
their readers to participate in the construction of the Journal not only by reading it but
also by submitting letters of suggestion and inquiry’ (King 1993: 309). The ‘Open
Council’ section of the magazine certainly provided a vigorous forum in which
readers could participate. Their letters were often published in full and responded with
knowledge and insight to previous articles. As well as printing and promoting
insightful readerly interaction in ‘Open Council’ the EWJ’s other features and articles
encouraged its subscribers towards a particular mode of reading that was rigorous,
hard-working and analytical rather than emotional and leisure-oriented. The first
article of the first issue of the EWJ sets out this mode of reading it expects its readers
to undertake and refuses to sympathise if this is a difficult or strange model for the
middle-class woman. ‘Profession of the Teacher’, probably written by Parkes,
provides an almost unadorned list of the schemes and charities that have attempted to
help the unfortunate governesses and a blunt appraisal of their successes and failures.
She follows this information with ‘Our readers will perhaps be tired of all these dates
and figures, but only by their aid can we present even the slightest outline of what has
been done by this long series of labours.’ ([Parkes] 1858: 4) Acknowledging that this
article may require an effort to read and might even be tiresome, Parkes’s tone
remains unerringly self-confident that readers will understand and adapt to her
purpose. There is no sense that she will encourage passive acts of reading, or that her
work will attempt to amuse readers.
To reinforce her point, Parkes goes on to criticise an article on female
employment from Blackwood’s Magazine. The article claimed that women’s
difficulties with employment were exaggerated and gave the very dubious example of
the gainful employment of the Brontë sisters as evidence. Instead of mounting a fullscale attack on the Blackwood’s article, Parkes outlines the means by which the reader
could unpick its argument for themselves. She outlines how women readers can refute
the claims of articles like this which ignore facts.
The exact number of women who are unmarried or widowed, and such
proportion of them as have to work for their bread, are to be found stated in
the census. Female pauperism (in the workhouses) can be estimated, and
female emigration told, to a head: nobody need dispute about “exaggeration”
till they have checked it by figures. ([Parkes] 1858: 13).
She is encouraging women to be discerning readers and to verify the facts of an
argument rather than be taken in by empty rhetoric. Such encouragement would be
reiterated later in response to articles such as the Saturday Review’s ‘The Intellect of
Women’ which argued, ‘[Women] do not proceed by arriving at argumentative
conclusions from clearly defined premisses [sic], but they throw out observations
which they cannot tell how they came by’ (cited in Schroeder 2002: 249). The
reading room at 19 Langham Place would soon become an ideal place to check the
facts and figures of an argument and in doing so, to refute accusations of the illogical
nature of female debate. For now, though, Parkes is content to point her readers in the
direction of sources useful to them in making informed assessments of their reading.
This active and interrogative mode of reading was encouraged throughout the
EWJ and especially in the regular book review section. Books reviewed by the
magazine included novels, biographies, volumes of poetry, and journals. The
emphasis in many of these reviews is the text’s links to the central concerns of the
Langham Place Group. The January 1859 review of Gladstone’s weighty Homer and
the Homeric Age concentrates only on the chapter entitled ‘Women in the Homeric
Age’ and suggests that the rest of the book would not be of interest. Wasting valuable
hours of reading time on ancient history irrelevant to most women is not
recommended. The reviews of magazines also consistently point the EWJ’s readers to
articles relevant to questions of women’s education, employment or legal status. For
example, in May 1858, Fraser’s magazine for the previous month is commended for
printing in full Thomas Henry Buckle’s lecture on ‘The Influence of Women on the
Progress of Knowledge’. The reviewer suggests that Buckle should follow this up
with another lecture on female education. The following month she herself becomes
the ideal active reader when we see her taking up her own suggestion and writing
‘Female Education in the Middle-Classes’. By demonstrating active responses to
reading through its own contributors, the EWJ also inspires similar reactions in its
readers, both in ‘Open Council’ and elsewhere.
Another strategy used in the book review section is for the reviewer to offer
opinions but finally to refer the book to the judgement of the individual. For example,
an 1858 review of The National Magazine claims ‘we must cease to turn over pages,
where, among articles good, bad, and indifferent, there are so many of the former, that
it will be shorter to say at once that the moderate sum of tenpence may be very
profitably invested, and a judgement formed by the reader for himself’ (Anon 1858a:
130-1). And again in July of the same year the reviewer recommends ‘our readers to
get the book [Intellectual Education, and its Influence on the Character and
Happiness of Women], and judge of it from its own merits’ (Anon 1858c: 347).
Similarly, when critiquing A Lady’s Diary of the Siege of Lucknow, the reviewer
informs us that ‘After reading this book we went to see the Panorama of Lucknow,
the better to realize the vivid descriptions it contains’ (Anon 1858b: 270). Following
reading with action of some kind: checking facts, joining a committee, writing a
response, or even reading another perspective on the topic, demonstrates how reading
was conceptualised as an impetus or catalyst in the EWJ. In her work on women’s
magazines Margaret Beetham demonstrates that, while the female reader was usually
constructed as leisured, the issue of work recurred ‘as a disruptive presence across the
range of women’s journals, disappearing completely only in the cheapest serials – the
fantasy ‘lady-land’, of mill-girl fiction, whose readers most needed some escape from
the work which dominated their lives’ (Beetham 1996: 135). Work was certainly one
of the areas of dispute amongst the Langham Place women, even the most radical
members deemed some areas of industry unsuitable for women. Despite these internal
differences, the EWJ did present a unified perspective that conceptualised reading as
an important form of work.
Analysing the English Woman’s Journal through its content presents a
coherent sense of the modes of reading its editors sought to encourage. However,
when examining the correspondence of its editors – Bessie Parkes and Emily Davies –
significant differences become apparent in the ways these women felt their magazine
was actually being read. Parkes, who initially edited the journal with the help of
Matilda Hays before Davies was brought in, held a modest but unwaveringly positive
outlook on the effects her magazine would have on its readers. At the end of the first
year of publication Parkes writes to Bodichon that she will continue to ‘trust to the
gradual working of public opinion towards further extensions of principle’ (GCPP
Parkes 5/87, 5 January 1859). Parkes connected increasing circulation with an
increasing take up of the magazine’s reformist thinking. She seems to have
homogenised her imagined readers by assuming that they would all comprehend the
magazine’s purpose in the same way and to the same degree. Even in 1862, when
Parkes was starting to worry about falling circulation she remained convinced that
‘the little EWJ will still ride on steadily doing its month’s portion of practical work’
(GCPP Parkes 5/14, Parkes to Bodichon, 1 April 1862). By conceptualising the
magazine itself as undertaking the work, Parkes, in this letter, writes against the
message conveyed through its content, that women readers should be ‘working’ to
interrogate, critique and question existing assumptions about female capability.
To some degree, Davies shared Parkes’s idealism. She wrote enthusiastically
to Barbara Bodichon:
I cannot think of any other better way in which I could spend time + money +
thought than this [being editor of EWJ] …+ I cannot help thinking that to
work upon the public mind is a very important thing. An inspiring thought,
once printed, may kindle somewhere, + produce greater results than twenty
printing presses. (GCPP Bodichon 2/3, undated)
While this letter is undated it was probably written in late 1862. This enthusiasm was
soon tempered, however, by pressing financial concerns and clashes of opinion with
Parkes. In a letter to Barbara Bodichon’s sister, Nannie, in January 1863 Parkes
proposes that if the magazine is to continue it needs to aim at a ‘higher class of
reader’. She suggests the fiction oriented shilling monthlies Macmillan’s and Fraser’s
magazines as useful models (GCPP Bodichon, 2/4). Less than two weeks later, Davies
was presenting these concerns even more explicitly to Bodichon herself.
To create an atmosphere, we must be read, + the EWJ is not. I think it is of
very little use as a rallying point... The Journal has been of no use in the
Medical movement. It was of no use in the London University matter, + is of
none now, that I can see, in the Local Exams question. (GCPP Bodichon, 2/10,
14 January 1863)
The idea of kindling and inspiring readers, no matter how few, into action has ebbed
away in this bleak appraisal. The letter goes on to show how Davies has moved
significantly away from Parkes’s views on the effects of reading the EWJ.
One of Bessie’s notions is, that people read the Journal with so much more
attention than other magazines, that an article read by 1000 people in the EWJ
tells more than one read by 60,000 people in Good Words. This seems to me
pure delusion. (GCPP Bodichon, 2/10, 14 January 1863)
Davies’s practical-minded deflation of the notion that a small number of attentive
readers is better than a large number of any readers separates her from Parkes’s ethos
with regards to readership.2 The Victoria Magazine, the next Langham Place
production with which Davies was associated, swings towards this focus on reader
number rather than the perceived ‘quality’ of reading but carries over the EWJ’s
interest in reading as active not passive.
Victoria Magazine
Davies, dissatisfied with the EWJ, combined forces with Emily Faithfull to ensure
their new publication targeted a wider readership. Writing to Barbara Bodichon in
1863 Davies sought approval for the venture which will ‘afford an outlet for the
expression of moderate + well-considered opinions on those questions, which while
more directly bearing on the condition of women, are in their wider aspects, of the
2
Barbara Bodichon, though she was less involved in the day-to-day work of the journal, often
functioned as the sounding board against whom both Parkes and Davies could air their grievances.
Bodichon conceptualises reading in her own way in Women and Work (1857). Alongside the training
of teachers, nurses and accountants, she also recommends that ‘1,000 readers’ should be educated to
‘read the best books to the working people’. Here reading is again understood as work not leisure, but it
is also a classed activity. Notably, she does not recommend educating the working people themselves
(Bodichon: 44).
highest importance to society generally’ (GCPP Bodichon, 2/13, 12 March 1863).
This new approach was successful in garnering between five and ten times the
number of readers buying the Englishwoman’s Review (Ellegård 1971: 18). Its
availability at Mudie’s circulating library attested to the fact that it was a wellrecognised periodical amongst middle-class subscribers. Faithfull’s Victoria Press
printed the monthly editions and also the six-number volumes of the magazine
designed to last longer than individual issues. Her confidence in its longevity was not
misplaced with the magazine lasting seventeen years.
In order to help create the Victoria Magazine’s appeal to a broader range of
readers Davies and Faithfull included male writers in their contributor list, including
Davies’s brother the Rev. J. Llewellyn Davies, the journalist R.H. Hutton, the
theologian F. D. Maurice and the poet Thomas Hood. The first serial novel was
provided by Thomas Adolphus Trollope.3 In arranging contributions by men, Davies
was hoping that her new audience might move towards a wider, family readership.
This was not just an economically-motivated strategy. Davies had already stated in
January 1863 that ‘I should like to represent good men as well as women’ (GCPP,
Bodichon, 2/10). She felt their cause would be better served by working with existing
reformist groups, rather than separating themselves with the concomitant risk of
accusations of ‘Bloomerism’ (GCPP Bodichon 2/2, 3 December 1862). There is no
specific evidence to suggest that male readers were attracted to the magazine in
numbers, but the Victoria Magazine’s approximation to what Jennifer Phegley calls
the ‘family literary magazine’ would have encouraged households to share the
publication as they would with a monthly such as Cornhill (Phegley 2004: 2).
3
Davies had sought George Eliot and Anthony Trollope as serial contributors, but both were
unavailable. (GCPP Bodichon, 2/13, Davies to Bodichon, 12 March 1863).
Using male contributors with recognisable names provided reassurance for
new readers of the quality of the publication. Reformist ideas could be introduced
alongside the trusted and uncontroversial pieces. Indeed, the interpolation of reformist
opinions into general articles can be seen in Edward Dicey’s ‘Social Life in the
United States’. It echoes the general interest of those by Hutton and Senior but also
discusses the coming emancipation of women in America and their greater access to
cultural and political discussion than women in Britain. He states emphatically and
encouragingly ‘Every American woman is a politician and reads the papers regularly’
(Dicey 1863: 9). The tone may roll over into hyperbole, but it enthusiastically
encourages British women to take on politically-minded reading strategies.
When putting ourselves in the reader’s position and reading the Victoria
Magazine through the years of its publication we can trace a gradual falling off of the
prestigious, and expensive, contributors; and an increase in the prevalence of
women’s issues. Mary Taylor’s articles exemplify the Victoria Magazine’s
developing expectations as to the feminist perspectives of its readers. They appeared
intermittently between 1865 and 1870 and placed earning money as the first duty of
women, above motherhood, philanthropy and domesticity. Taylor notices that ‘Since
the earliest of these papers were written, the doctrine that women should, or at least
may earn a living, has become less unpopular than it was.’ Taylor’s was a radical
position and she admits the possibility that her articles may ‘startle and offend the
reader’ (Taylor 1870: i-ii). Her confident tone, however, invites readerly agreement
rather than offence. When in 1876 Faithfull added the column ‘Women and Work - A
Guide to Employment for Women’, she was no longer arguing for the right of women
to work, but pushing the limits of what they could do. Like Taylor she assumed that
her loyal readers had by this point been persuaded by the earlier numbers of the
magazine (as well as the numerous reformist articles, books and seminars it
recommended). For example, in the ‘Women and Work’ column in April 1876 she
dealt with the unfair examination of women who wanted to get into medicine and
unequal salaries in the civil service. Her emphasis on the practicalities of employment
demonstrates that Faithfull, unlike Parkes, did not want to suggest that reading alone
was a powerful form of female work. Reading, for Faithfull, was to be combined with
training and employment in professional fields.
The ‘Correspondence’ section reveals many of the Victoria Magazine’s
readers to have been workers, whether voluntary or paid. These readers were very
willing to share their expertise on subjects such as perfume making, women’s work in
nurseries, boarding schools, emigration and employment overseas, and women’s pay.
Such correspondents demonstrated women’s professional capacities, just as the
magazine did in its very existence – having been printed by female compositors at the
Victoria Press. They echoed Faithfull’s belief that it is ‘impossible to estimate the
good sometimes achieved by the simple narrative of another person’s persistent
courage and ultimate success in some new business or profession’ ([Faithfull] 1877:
126).
The readers were not just writing in to rehearse their professional difficulties and
triumphs though. They were also engaging with the wider debate on the woman
question in the periodical press (like readers of the EWJ and the Englishwoman’s
Review).4 Notably, Faithfull gave her readers further opportunities to get directly
involved in such debates by initiating the ‘Victoria Debating Society’. Starting in late
1869 the monthly events featured a lecture from an invited speaker followed by lively
debate. Speakers’ papers were printed in the following month’s edition of Victoria
For example, E.M. King takes issue with a letter printed in the Examiner on the women’s suffrage bill
(King 1874: 167-70).
4
Magazine and included a transcript of the ensuing debate. Giving readers access to
‘live’ debates through these write-ups stimulated ongoing discussion in the
‘Correspondence’ pages of the magazine. Early in the history of the society, Mr J. F.
Stanford’s concluding remarks following Mrs Horace St John’s paper on ‘the Position
of Women’ (Victoria Debating Society, Jan 1870, 193-214) proved particularly
controversial. Opposing the speaker’s opinions he argued that the ‘sheet anchor of
social arrangements was that the man should earn the money to maintain the wife and
family’ (St John et al 1870: 214). At the time several members of the society disputed
Mr Stanford’s position and Faithfull put him down effectively. In the following
month’s ‘Correspondence’ section Mr Stanford’s opinions were exposed to further
critique. One reader in particular was astounded by his inflexibility and felt compelled
to present her understanding of Faithfull’s mission, that the aim of the society was to
‘keep DISCUSSION alive on every question appertaining to an amelioration in the
condition of women’ not to rehearse the same tired arguments concerning women’s
perceived reliance on men (Anon 1870: 257). Debates that began in a hall in London
could reverberate throughout the country because of readers’ interventions in the
‘Correspondence’ section. Indeed, after Faithfull’s trip to the United States in 1872
the readership became international.5
The Englishwoman’s Review
The Englishwoman’s Review followed Parkes’s conception of the politicised and
active reader from its very beginning. Unlike the Victoria Magazine, it did not seek to
broaden its readership by competing in the shilling monthly market for the middleArticles demonstrated an interest in women’s position in America from the earliest issues of the
Victoria Magazine. From the early 1870s onwards American readers made their presence felt. Lucinda
B. Chandler, for example, writes from Washington D. C. and talks of the ‘bond of sympathy’ formed
when she met Faithfull (Chandler 1873)
5
class reader. Edited by Jessie Boucherett initially (and later by Caroline Ashurst Biggs
and Helen Blackburn) the magazine fulfilled Parkes’s idea of a magazine that would
‘ride steadily on’ achieving its work un-harried by concerns of profit or competition.
The circulation achieved by the Englishwoman’s Review always remained modest, but
it continued to publish until 1910.6 It far outlasted the other two Langham Place
periodicals and competed with the range of reformist and suffrage journals appearing
towards the end of the century.
In the opening address to her readers, Boucherett writes
We cordially invite the co-operation of all practical workers in the cause of
charity, and hope that ladies who are engaged in visiting workhouses,
establishing orphanages, or arranging plans for the boarding-out of orphans in
cottages, will supply us with the facts, and let us know the results of their
experience. We should also receive with pleasure, communications regarding
hospitals, village hospitals, convalescent and sea-side homes. Suggestions for
the improvement of female education will be gladly received, for the purpose
of discussion in these pages ([Boucherett] 1866: 4).
From its first pages, the Englishwoman’s Review sought an interactive relationship
with its readers. It differed from its predecessor the EWJ, however, in imagining its
readers as already committed to its cause. It did not seek to persuade women that
work, education and reform were important but assumed a common understanding of
these principles. As Faithfull did in the later issues of Victoria Magazine, Boucherett
constructed her readers as already hard at work in a range of philanthropic activities
6
Beetham places its circulation at 2,000 when it was closed down in 1910 (Beetham 1996: 175). Its
endurance may, at least initially, have been due to the quarterly rather than monthly publication pace of
the ER. Biggs took it to a monthly format in 1875.
and willing to share their knowledge on these areas of expertise. On suffrage, an issue
on which the EWJ wavered, the Review again assumed its readers to be active
supporters. Indeed, in October 1868 Boucherett writes, ‘To Our Readers’ asking them
to ‘send us information with regards to all towns and villages in their respective
neighbourhoods where women have sent in claims for votes’ ([Boucherett] 1868: 75).
Boucherett saw her readers as a resource to be utilised and her magazine as a channel
for bringing together their knowledge and experience.
Regular features of the magazine such as the reports of speeches by NAPSS
members, ‘Reviews of Books’, ‘Events of the Quarter’, ‘Public Opinion’ and
‘Correspondence’ sections all also aimed to make involvement in reformist projects a
norm, and indeed an expectation, within their readership. ‘Events of the Quarter’
records the wide-ranging activities of reformist groups from details of the latest
sailings organised by Maria Rye’s emigration society to the most recent numbers of
women achieving success in nursing training or public examinations. ‘Public
Opinion’ distils and reprints articles concerning female work, or related issues, from
other reviews and journals. These are generally excerpted without editorial comment
implying a trust in the readers’ capabilities to compare and evaluate. This attitude
seems amply fulfilled when readers write into the correspondence section to air their
views on numerous pamphlets, articles and publications. For example, the July 1868
‘Correspondence’ section prints a letter from ‘AN INDIGNANT OUTRAGED GIRL
OF THE PERIOD’. The correspondent is responding to Eliza Lynn Linton’s
anonymous ‘The Girl of the Period’ article previously published in the Saturday
Review which excoriated young women of the day and likened them to members of
the demi-monde. Taking on the influential review, the correspondent confidently
asserts: ‘There are yet plenty of English girls who honour their God, their parents, but
not the principles of the Saturday Review. The thousands of English girls whom this
writer has unfairly stigmatised, demand an apology, and they ought to have it’
(Indignant 1868: 525). In the following quarter’s issue the ‘Correspondence’ section
again is used to display even more forcefully the power of the Review’s readers. The
editorial adjudicator of the section relates:
We have also received a letter from a Correspondent, enclosing an Article
from the Family Herald, in which “Women’s Suffrage” is opposed in very
violent language. Our Correspondent recommends that when newspapers and
magazines contain similar articles, ladies should give up taking them (Anon
1868: 57).
While the Review itself does not go as far as to explicitly endorse this proposed
boycott, it does list a number of journals friendly to its cause and in doing so
implicitly criticises those its does not name. The EWJ sought to imagine its ideal
reader as an active respondent; their ‘Correspondence’ reveals that the Review’s
readers fulfilled its predecessor’s model for readership. Their reading is politically
minded, discriminating and leads to action.
The review section, sometimes signed by Boucherett as J.B., also imagines
and inculcates independence of mind in the reader. For example in a review of Sowing
the Wind, by Eliza Lynn Linton, the reviewer questions the protagonist’s extreme
adherence to her ‘semi-lunatic’ husband’s wishes: ‘In questions of taste every loving
wife must feel it a pleasure to yield her own desires to her husband’s, but in questions
of duty, is it safe to take it for granted that the like course should be pursued?’ (Anon
1867: 240). A large number of the books and pamphlets reviewed related to the
development of women’s status in the law, the professions and in society more
widely. Works by those prominent in reformist circles such as Harriet Martineau, J.S.
Mill, Mary Taylor, and Caroline Dall were featured and praised. As in the EWJ, the
magazine pushes the reader into active dialogue rather than passive acquiescence with
these works. Words of Weight on the Woman Question is recommended ‘to the
attention of any one who wants information on these questions; not only as a short
manual for reference and quotations, but as [the author] says, “for inducing the reader
to supply its omissions by searching for himself into the questions discussed”’ (Anon
1871: 93-4). The masculine pronoun might be used here, but there is no doubt that the
call is aimed at women readers. As with the EWJ and the Victoria Magazine the type
of reading called for within the pages of the Review challenges the reader to think and
act in new ways.
Reading room at Langham Place
All three of the magazines discussed above may have been read in domestic settings,
work places, meeting halls and anywhere else that their busy (primarily) female
audience could find space to read. One location in which these magazines must have
been circulated with particular enthusiasm is the reading room at 19 Langham Place
which opened in the early days of the group’s work on 1 September 1859 (see ‘The
English Woman’s Journal Advertiser’ (Anon 1859: no page). The reading room was
part of the ‘Ladies Institute’ at Langham Place which included the register of
employment held at the offices and the availability of a Committee Room ‘for the use
of philanthropic societies at stated periods, and on specified terms.’ However, the
feature most highlighted on the institute’s prospectus is:
A LADIES’ READING ROOM. – The Ladies Reading Room is open from 11
a.m. to 10 p.m.
Leading Daily and Weekly Papers, Magazines and Reviews.
Terms, one guinea per annum. A two guinea subscription enables the
subscriber to bring with her any lady not a subscriber.
N.B. – Professional ladies half price.
Ladies visiting the West End on shopping or other business will find this a
great convenience, as attached to the Reading Room is a Luncheon Room, and
a room also for the reception of parcels, for the use of subscribers only (cited
in Blackburn 1902: appendix C)
The one guinea subscription fee was not an unusual rate for a metropolitan library and
equalled the fee charged by Charles Edward Mudie. Setting such a fee meant that the
Reading Room was aimed primarily at middle-class women. Despite the fifty per cent
reduction for ‘professional women’ subscription would still been a significant
investment for Faithfull’s Victoria Press compositors who, when fully trained, earned
£1 per week.7 It must be significant in class terms that these potential subscribers are
denominated as ‘professional’ rather than ‘working’ women. Reading rooms set up by
the working classes for themselves tended to charge far less. The Lord Street Working
Men’s Reading Room in Carlisle, for example, only cost its subscribers 1d per week
when it opened in 1851 (Rose 2001: 66-7).8 The mention of ‘ladies’ shopping in the
West End and the invitation to use Langham Place to receive purchases makes the
The half guinea subscription fee was equal to roughly half a week’s wages for these women.
Rose also demonstrates how subscription fees could be used as a tool for controlling membership.
When working men in Croydon asked that the ban on political and religious works in their library be
lifted, its middle-class committee members feared radicalism and raised the subscription fee so that
fewer men could afford to attend (2001: 65).
7
8
reading room a space of wealth, leisure and consumption, as well as one of earnest
reformist endeavour.
Even with these class inflections to the prospectus, the clientele attracted to
the reading room did not match Parkes’s expectations. Writing to Bodichon about the
decoration of the reading room, she says she ‘shall send a couple of smaller telling
pictures, something bright + not too good for the gaudy company; delicate pictures
are utterly lost there’ (GCPP, 5/88 30 Jan 1859). The use of the word ‘gaudy’ implies
Parkes’s disapproval of the readers’ lack of discrimination and perhaps even their
gaiety. It may have proved that well-to-do women shopping in the West End did not
shift easily from their habits as leisured consumers into a studious or workmanlike
mode of reading on entering 19 Langham Place. Indeed, the range of activities on
offer at the Ladies Institute implies a bustling space rather than a quiet sanctuary for
serious study. 80 women were registered as members in 1860, but the distribution of
wealth and class status amongst them remains hypothetical without full records.
(GCPP Parkes 5 95/1, Parkes to Bodichon).
If the subscribers themselves did not live up to expectations, the reading room
certainly filled a significant symbolic role.9 It was of central importance to the
Langhamites from the beginning of their work and was an important enough topic to
cause quarrels between Matilda Hays and Lady Mondon (GCPP Bodichon, 2/13
Davies to Bodichon, 12 March 1863). Its wider significance is also evidenced in the
reaction of critics to the ‘Ladies Institute’. To some male commentators the reading
room seemed to infringe on what had been exclusively masculine territory. It had,
until now, been deemed a fundamental part of gentlemen’s clubs, such as the
Athenaeum or Boodle’s, in which men could keep engagements, relax, and read and
9
Parkes may have been disappointed with the number of subscriptions aswell. When she made the
author Anna Mary Howitt and her mother honorary members, Howitt replied hoping that they may be
able to send her some paying subscribers (GCPP Parkes 7/9, undated).
which kept women firmly outside their doors. The Saturday Review, always an
adversary of the English Woman’s Journal, ran a condescending article on the reading
room on 7 January 1860. It stated,
… we should not like to refer the committee-women of the ladies reading
room to the study of Ecclesiazusae and the Lysistrata, for it is very naughty
reading, though it does describe what became of the ladies imitating a
masculine institution, and combining against the other sex’ (cited in Hirsch
1998: 197).
Drawing on classical learning – another realm almost exclusive to men at this point in
the period – with its references to Aristophanes’ plays, the writer belittles the project.
It reinforces (classical) reading as an activity prohibited to women for their own good.
The underlying anxiety is, of course, that women would be reading, not Greek plays,
but the kind of reformist materials published by members of the Langham Place
Group. Women accessing both these types of reading material represent a danger to
the reviewer’s segregated and hierarchical understanding of the gender divide. When
John Ruskin wrote to Barbara Bodichon giving an appraisal of one of her paintings he
found cause to criticise both the painting and the reading room at Langham Place. ‘Do
you really think that a drawing of an American swamp is a precious thing to bequeath
to the world. I don’t like your ladies’ reading room either, at all…’ (cited in Hirsch
1998: 164) Unable to muster rational cause for his dislike, Ruskin’s tone sounds
threatened and irritable. Again, access to a reading room is aligned with women
breaking into other spheres conventionally associated with male excellence – in this
case fine art.
To both Ruskin and the Saturday Review, the concept of the reading room was
gendered masculine. But in order for the Ladies Institute to receive such vigorous
condemnation, the reading room must also have been perceived as a space for
collaborative, politicised thinking and a focal point for turning reading into action.10
This was precisely what many of the Langham Place circle wanted. The reading room
may have been partially diverted from that purpose by its ‘gaudy’ subscribers, and it,
like the Victoria Magazine, did attempt to acknowledge that reading could be a form
of leisure as well as of work; however the activities of the Langham Place group
examined here cumulatively represent a significant and early effort to shift the
conceptions of why and how women read. Kate Flint has posited two positions for the
Victorian woman reader: in the first, reading allowed the ‘Victorian woman to
abnegate the self, to withdraw into the passivity induced by the opiate of fiction’
while in the second it ‘allowed her to assert her sense of selfhood, and to know that
she was not alone in doing so’ (Flint 1993: 330). While the Langham Place group did
not seek to deny women the escapist pleasures of the novel, they were attempting to
construct reading as a dynamic, collaborative and catalytic activity. Reading Langham
Place periodicals, attending meetings, debates, and using the reading room gave
Victorian women an early opportunity to assert a feminist sense of selfhood amongst
an active community of like-minded individuals.
Whilst ‘the “clubbability” of women remained under question in articles in the main stream journals
up to the turn of the century’ (Liggins 2007: 228), the ‘Ladies Institute’ at 19 Langham Place can be
identified as a forerunner of the many women’s clubs that sprang up during the 1880s and 1890s. Many
of these clubs, like Langham Place, balanced progressive principles with an appeal to the metropolitan
female consumer. The Somerville, for example, founded in 1878, laid on lectures by socialists and
suffragists amongst others, while the more radical Pioneer Club was perceived as the ‘cradle of the
New Woman’ (Rappaport 2000: 92).
10
Works Cited:
Nineteenth-Century Sources:
Anon. 1858a. Notices of Books. English Woman’s Journal, 1, 130-131.
Anon. 1858b. Notices of Books. English Woman’s Journal, 1, 267-270.
Anon. 1858c. Notices of Books. English Woman’s Journal, 1, 341-347.
Anon. 1859. The English Woman’s Journal Advertiser [end papers]. English
Woman’s Journal, 2, no page
Anon. 1867. Reviews of Books. Englishwoman’s Review, 1, 231-245.
Anon. 1868. Correspondence. Englishwoman’s Review, 2, 55-57.
Anon. 1870. Correspondence. Victoria Magazine, 14, 257.
Anon. 1871. Reviews of Books. Englishwoman’s Review, 5, 93-101.
Bodichon, B. 1857 [2001]. Women and Work, in Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and
the Langham Place Group, edited by C. A. Lacey. Women’s Source Library, Vol 3.
London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 36-73.
- Bodichon Papers. Girton College Archival Collections.
[Boucherett, J]. 1866. The Work We Have to Do. Englishwoman’s Review, 1, 1-5.
-
1868. To Our Readers. Englishwoman’s Review, 9, 77.
Chandler, L. B. 1873. Correspondence. Victoria Magazine, 22, 266-268.
Dicey, E. 1863. Social Life in the United States. Victoria Magazine, 1, 2-14.
[Faithfull. E.] 1877 [Headnote] to A Woman’s Struggles: the True Account of an
American Shorthand Writer. Victoria Magazine, 30,126.
Indignant Outraged Girl of the Period, An. 1868. Correspondence. Englishwoman’s
Review, 8, 525.
King, E.M. 1874. Correspondence. Victoria Magazine, 23, 167-170.
[Parkes, B R]. 1858. Profession of a Teacher. English Woman’s Journal, 1, 1-13.
- Parkes Papers. Girton College Archival Collections.
St John, Mrs H. et al. 1870. ‘Victoria Debating Society: The Position of Women’.
Victoria Magazine, 14, 193-214.
Taylor, M. 1870. The First Duty of Women, a series of articles reprinted from the
Victoria Magazine. London: Victoria Press. Originally published in the Victoria
Magazine.
Modern Criticism:
Beetham, M. 1996. A Magazine of Her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s
Magazine, 1800-1914. London: Routledge.
Blackburn, H. 1902. Women’s Suffrage: A Record of the Women’s Suffrage
Movement in the British Isles. London: Williams and Norgate.
DiCenzo, M. With L. Delap and L. Ryan. 2011. Feminist Media History: Suffrage,
Periodicals and the Public Sphere. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ellegård, A. 1971. The Readership of the Periodical Press in Mid-Victorian Britain.
Victorian Periodicals Newsletter, 13, 3-22.
Flint, K. 1993. The Woman Reader, 1837-1914. Clarendon Press: Oxford.
Herstein, S. 1993. The Langham Place Circle and Feminist Periodicals of the 1860s.
Victorian Periodicals Review 26(1), 24-27.
Hirsh, P. 1998. Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, 1827-1891: Feminist, Artist and
Rebel. London: Chatto & Windus.
King, M. 1993. ‘Certain Learned Ladies’: Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her? And the
Langham Place Circle. Victorian Literature and Culture, 21, 307-326
Lacey, C. A. 2001. Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and the Langham Place Group,
Women’s Source Library, Vol 3. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Levine, P. 1987. Victorian Feminism, 1850-1900. London: Hutchinson.
Liggins, E. 2007. “The Life of a Bachelor Girl in the Big City”: Selling the Single
Lifestyle to Readers of Woman and the Young Woman in the 1890s. Victorian
Periodicals Review, 40(3), 216-238.
Phegley, J. 2004. Educating the Proper Woman Reader: Victorian Family Literary
Magazines and the Cultural Health of the Nation. Columbus: The Ohio State
University Press.
Rappaport, E. 2000. Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West
End. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Rose, Jonathan. 2001. The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. New
Haven and London. Yale University Press.
Schroeder, Janice. 2002. “Better Arguments”: The English Woman’s Journal and the
Game of Public Opinion. Victorian Periodicals Review, 35(3), 243-271.