Magazines are everywhere. It is easy to forget their origins amidst the sordid covers of the latest soap-opera cliff-hanger or celebrity scandal. I want to suggest that a reflection on the humble origins of the magazine can reveal its importance not only to teenage girls’ gossip life, but to society as a whole.
As is to be expected, all modern history seems to return to the printing press. With its modernisation in Germany, the press revolutionised the literary landscape. No longer were books the reserve of learned scholars and monks. Pamphlets littered the streets, fitted with easily understood woodcuts for the less literate. These then evolved into professional and academic journals, such as the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, begun in 1665. It is easy even at this stage to see where magazines like the New Yorker evolved from. Magazines designed to entertain emerged in the latter end of the seventeenth century, boosted by an increased literacy rate in the late-eighteenth century. Magazines grew closer to newspapers but continued to be lighter in content. The nineteenth-century brought even cheaper printing and ushered the magazine into the space that it still occupies: popular entertainment.
Another important development of the nineteenth century was the expectation of women to participate more in social and political spaces. This necessitated a knowledge of the basics of current affairs, from gossip to world events. Magazines provided this intelligence without being overburdened with severity and conflict in the way that newspapers often can be even today. ‘Social politics’ became the realm of the magazine.
Naturally, not all publications were the same. As already mentioned, some magazines retained their pretentious tone and straddled that liminal space between academic journal and easy gossip. In the seventeenth century, many magazines featured short verse and well-written anecdotes alongside political discourse. This persists today in some magazines, particularly in the more niche literary publications. Online newspapers such as the one that you are currently reading straddle the line between newspaper and magazine. Most notably in this current era seems to be Substack, designed specifically as a platform for cultivating a readership for this sort of venture. In this way, magazines form a sort of digital third space, not quite academia but not quite uneducated either. They complicate the binary between a private and public realm, allowing entry into intellectual and alien worlds from the comfort of one’s own bedroom.
This transient property of magazines also facilitates their most important function. By providing access to worlds beyond our own experiences, magazines provide an easily accessible peak into new realms. They can be platforms for photojournalism, for niche academic work, for individual testimonies ranging from religious conversion to a bad job interview, and platform writing from anyone and everyone. Historian Rajat Neogy said that ‘academia is like fashion’ and I argue that magazines are the same. Every publication is an interesting patchwork of fabric woven from varied opinions, perspectives, interests, and aesthetics.
If nothing else, I wish for you to take away from this exploration of the magazine one thing: that ‘magazines are like culture.’ They have evolved from the humble (and boring) religious and political pamphlets that they once were, becoming instead one of the most diverse forms of entertainment that we have at our disposal. In an age of subscriptions and the ‘vintage’ label pricing up physical media, magazines remain cheap sources of fun and information. Yet, despite all this, they have maintained their original function as a democratic source of knowledge, perhaps more nuanced, niche, and numerous than they once were, but no less valuable. Even your mother’s old copy of Woman’s Weekly with a doctored Robbie Williams on the cover.
Image: Diana Aguilar on Flickr