Why – and how – does one tackle an archive the size of The Lady’s Magazine? How does one approach so much material on so many topics? I came to the journal in a series of stages, first dipping into it, then finding myself intrigued by the variety of what seemed at times like unrelated items, and then becoming increasingly intent on uncovering the interactions between items, issues, and years of connected material. My particular focus stems from a background in the Gothic and an interest in questions of gender, sexuality, violence, transgressions, family, and marriage, and how these concerns are negotiated within eighteenth-century writings. Understandings and constructions of authorship, reading and writing, public and private, and the political, legal and social implications of gendering such identities, activities, and spaces find fertile ground for exploration in the archive.
I wrote my first monograph (currently under consideration for publication) on representations of incest in eighteenth-century Gothic texts, and subsequently began research on my second monograph on seemingly Gothic representations of violence and imprisonments across a range of genres and print forms. This book (now in progress) includes a chapter on the appearance of these themes in 18th-century periodicals, and this research is what led me to The Lady’s Magazine. But the archive is simply too big for one chapter, and so I am simultaneously working on a standalone chapter on the changes in the Gothic stories that appear in the magazine over time. So, essentially I’m writing two chapters that deal with the magazine in very different ways, but the standalone chapter has the potential to become (in the distant future!) part of a third monograph.
In tracing Gothic themes, stories, conventions, plotlines and images in The Lady’s Magazine it became immediately apparent that the massive scale of the archive affords an embarrassment of riches. The Lady’s Magazine ran from 1770-1832 and produced issues monthly so there are (I approximate here, not having counted precisely) over 732 issues which, at around 50 pages each, make up an archive of some 36,000 pages. Because the entire print run of the journal has been digitized and is now available online as downloadable pdfs (through the amazing database ‘Eighteenth Century Journals: A Portal to Newspapers and Periodicals c. 1685 – 1835’), I am able to easily access the issues via my desktop computer, laptop, iphone or ipad.
I created this blog, as I created my Twitter account @gothic_desires, in part to help me with my own research on The Lady’s Magazine. Because the amount of material to read and research is tremendous, I wanted to be able to create a personal archive that I could access at any time from my phone or a computer and scan through quickly to remind myself of items that I want to follow up on in more detail. I thought that Twitter would be an ideal tool for research because I could take snapshots of items of interest on my iphone, tweet them with a few key tags, and easily go back later without having to wade through files, folders, and text. The intent was to do this as a research methodology, a means of creating a simple and accessible archive for myself that would allow me to rapidly make a visual note or flag data without disrupting my reading flow as much as I tend to when I pause to take notes and inevitably find myself quoting pages of material and writing lengthy tangents.
The method worked as I planned and created the easily searchable series of images and text that I desired, but it had an unanticipated consequence. In only three months of tweeting about my research on The Lady’s Magazine I have acquired almost 900 followers. While many are researchers and academics who work within the field of eighteenth-century studies, many others are romance writers (particularly writers of historical romance), students, lawyers, artists, feminists, to name a few. In short, although many are eighteenth-century scholars, many more represent what I imagine the magazine’s original readership to be: a heterogenous blend interested in the broad range of material published. I think this speaks to the exciting and diverse nature of the journal and the scope of its appeal.
It is my hope that in continuing to use Twitter daily, and by using this blog to explore those brief items of interest from The Lady’s Magazine in greater detail, I can create an ongoing and interactive research methodology which, just like the magazine’s 18th-century format, will allow a diverse readership to engage with, read, comment, and interact with the work and each other.
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