The New Lady’s Magazine

As regular visitors will know, this site is devoted to needlework patterns from the Lady’s Magazine (1770-1832). The Lady’s Magazine was the first women’s periodical to issue monthly needlework patterns for subscribers. This innovation, which launched in the magazine’s first issue for August 1770, was immensely popular with readers, although less so with professional pattern-drawers who complained about being undercut by the mass circulation of designs at a lower price.

Over the coming years, publishers tracked the growth and popularity of the Lady’s Magazine with great interest and, from the 1780s in particular, a number of rival publications sprang up as aggressively marketed direct rivals to it. Many of these peroidicals tried to emulate the Lady’s Magazine’s eclectic blend of content and styling. A number also emulated its successful strategy of enticing readers with the free gift of a needlework pattern.

One of these rivals was published just a few doors down from the shop of the Lady’s Magazine publisher, George Robinson, who worked out of 25 Paternoster Row. Alexander Hogg, who in the 1780s worked out of no. 16, launched the disingenuosly named New Lady’s Magazine in February 1782 much to the anger of Robinson who waged a war of words with the scurrilous Hogg in the newspapers, at publisher gatherings and on the pavement of the Row itself. Robinson had good reason to be angry given that the New Lady’s Magazine (1782-96?) filled many (though not all) of its pages with content originally written and published in the  Lady’s Magazine.

The needlework patterns that the New Lady’s Magazine issued were a mixture of old and new. Some of the designs, especially later in the magazine’s run, replicated those issued in the Lady’s Magazine just a few months earlier. But many of the patterns seem to have been original and I have reproduced some of these designs here from my private collection. I hope you enjoy them and enjoy making some of them, as I have recently.

For more on the New Lady’s Magazine and its rivalry with the original Lady’s Magazine, please see Chapter 5 of my book, The Lady’s Magazine (1770-1832) and the Making of Literary History.

(Special thanks goes to Leah Motton for digitising and compiling the data on this collection.)