In 1820, The Lady’s Magazine; or Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex (1770–1832) marked its fiftieth anniversary with the launch of a new series. The move was unavoidable. As Samuel Hamilton (1778–c. 1850), the periodical’s sometime printer, proprietor and editor, elaborated in a prospectus, times and ‘the taste of the day’ had changed since the publication of the magazine’s first issue in August 1770. In response to these shifts, the periodical vowed to ‘discard a few of the subjects which have hitherto entered into the regular list of our resources’; to ‘extend’ its range of contents; and to raise its production standards via the use of ‘finer paper, a more elegant type, and engravings of exquisite beauty’. These final two objectives would be met by the magazine’s headline reviews section – introduced a few years earlier – which featured extended, serialised extracts of ‘the best poems, novels, or historical narratives’ by the likes of Lord Byron, Thomas Moore and Sir Walter Scott, illustrated with original designs by ‘smirke, westall, stothard, and h. corbould’ and engraved by ‘james and charles heath, w. finden, engleheart and robinson’.

Other ‘improvements’ included an intensified commitment to ‘natural history’, ‘botany’, ‘mineralogy’ and ‘social philosophy’, which had become increasingly popular in the magazine since 1800, and to ‘OEconomics’ and ‘religion and morality’, which had always been prominent subjects. To avoid alarming loyal sub scribers, the prospectus was coy about what was to be discarded. The dedicated news section and items on current affairs that the magazine had carried would be dropped – owing to the ‘increased circulation of news papers’.