The Lady's Monthly Museum
by M.M. Bennetts During the last years of the 18th century and well into the early 19th century, as female literacy and affluence increased, there was a growing body of publications designed to meet this burgeoning demand for feminine entertainment. This is an age of when great poetry not only sells, it sells well--Byron's Childe Harold doesn't just sell well, it's a runaway best-seller along the lines of the Da Vinci Code . Austen's Sense & Sensibility causes such a sensation, Lady Caroline Lamb's mother is writing about it, saying that everyone in the Spencer household is wholly taken up with it and talks of nothing else. It is--make no doubt--a literate society and whilst the salons of English ladies may not reach the intellectual and political heights achieved by Frenchwomen of the period, that doesn't make them literary slouches. The Lady's Monthly Museum or Polite Repository of Amusement and Instruction: Being an Assemblage of whatever can tend ...