Victorian Family Magazines and Popular Culture

This course will explore the expanding literary marketplace for both working- and middle-class family magazines in England between the 1850s and the 1870s. These inexpensive publications aimed at a wide readership offered serialized fiction, poetry, essays, advice columns, personal advertisements, needlework patterns, and fashion plates among their varied and interesting contents. The family magazine was part of the mass-market periodical press that emerged alongside the repeal of taxes on newspapers, the introduction of faster printing presses, rapidly falling paper prices, and an increasingly national distribution system that utilized the railroads. As a result, for the first time working- and lower-middle-class families could afford their own magazines and many more periodicals for the upper-middle-classes were available. Our task will be to define this multi-faceted and complex periodical genre by studying the ways in which it targeted its varied audiences by emphasizing serial fiction as a key selling point.