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| Contrary to what many may think, Fashion Plates date to the
18th and 17th Centuries and were not just a 19th Century commodity.
Ladies have always been Ladies...and knowing this, Mr. Louis A. Godey made his
fortune and that of his lady editor, Mrs. Sarah J. Hale, based on this
fact. Beginning in 1830, Mr. Godey offered his "Lady's
Book" as a monthly staple for the education and entertainment of
his fair readers, promising each month, at least one hand-coloured fashion
plate, as well as other fashion information, helpful hints to the
homemaker, receipts and enough stories, poetry, sheetmusic and even dwelling floorplans
(for those husbanded with gentlemen of an architectural bent) to satisfy any 19th Century
woman. In 1836, Mr. Godey hired Mrs. Sarah Josephia Hale as his main
"Editoress", combining his "Ladies Book" with her own highly
successful "Ladies Magazine". The rest is history. So prized were the monthly issues that the majority of ladies at year's end would take the magazines to her local book seller or stationers to have them bound in book form. Most surviving volumes are of the bound variety.
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One of the First Frontispiece of Godey's Lady's Book - circa 1834 |
Godey and it's Rivals T.S. Authur's Magazine, circa 1863, Graham's Magazine, circa 1847, and Godey's Ladys Book, circa 1863
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| Godey's Lady's
Book was born in Philadelphia in July of 1830 and would reign as the supreme women's
magazine for approximately sixty-eight years. According to Robert Kunciov's
wonderful book, Mr. Godey's Ladies - a Mosaic of Fashion and Fancies, (Bonanza Books, New York, 1971), "it [was] a source of the last word in fashion, a compendium of practical advice, an anthology of stories, and poems, a gallery of fashion plates and art engravings, a platform of causes celebre and pas de celebre for the unliberated woman, a mirror of grace and a minor social history." This is what made many a 19th Century housewife's life exciting in her idle hours - dreaming of the fashions and far away places that the 19th Century women's subscription magazine would bring to her doorstep each month.
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| The intrepid Mr. Louis
Antoine Godey as he appeared in 1853
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| Born in New York City on June 6, 1804 to respectable parents of
small means, he was more or less self educated. With a penchant for books, and the
first money he was able to scrape together, he opened a combined newsstand and bookshop.(1)
Upon leaving New York for Philadelphia, then Publishing Capitol of the
United States, he worked for several years for a newspaper, both in the composing room and
business departments; such that he became well acquainted with the business of publishing
as well as marketing. In July of 1830 he struck out on his own and published his
very first issue of the "Lady's Book".(2) With Barnum-like bombast in which he always referred to his magazine in biblical intonations as "The Book", he proclaimed that "Our Book is the mirror of woman's mind!"(3) It would remain foremost so for
the next sixty-eight |
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| The Lady behind the
"Lady's Book" Sarah Josepha Hale
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| Always strong willed, Sarah Josepha Buell Hale was an early forerunner of education for women. Born October 24, 1788 and raised in Newport, New Hampshire, she was of course, like most gentlewomen of her day, educated at home and owed most of her "learning" to her older brother, Horiatio, who taught her the rudiments of Latin - a heady subject for a young woman in the 19th Century. After teaching school for a while, she married David Hale, a lawyer. Five children and nine years later, she was a widow. After her young husband's untimely death from pneumonia, Sarah took up sewing, the usual "career-path" acceptable to women in the 19th Century. This did not suit her and she began to write poetry - and with the publication of a novel, Northwood, in 1827, success was eminent. Moving her family to Boston, she began publication of her Lady's Magazine, "the first literary work exclusively devoted to women ever published in America."(4) |
| Source: (1) Finley, Ruth E. The Lady of Godeys - Sarah Josepha Hale Philadelphia, PA, Lippencott Company, 1931 page 42 (2) Ibid., page 42 (3) Ibid., page 62 (4) Ibid., pp. 24-40
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