By Kelly Plante
DRAFT (ANNOTATIONS FORTHCOMING)
The Lady’s Museum is the first non-children’s book periodical for an adult audience to contain illustrations accompanying its articles. In the mid-eighteenth century, printing high-quality (non-woodcut) images was very expensive. Lennox’s publisher, John Newberry (1713-1767), is widely considered the first publisher to make children’s literature sustainable and profitable within the literary marketplace in England, and has been called the “father of children’s literature” to the extent that the Newbery Medal honoring children’s books was named after him in 1922. We think Newberry’s role as publisher drove the image budget for The Lady’s Museum.
The below gallery presents some of the images that appeared throughout both volumes of The Lady’s Museum when it was initially published, as they are available to us. Currently, these are the images that we have permission to display, and that are thus on display throughout the periodical on this website within the article within which they initially appeared.
Volume 1 contains more images than does volume 2. Volume 1, but not volume 2, of the magazine is available on Google Books (Oxford University’s copy). We have provided some of those images here for readers’ convenience until we receive permission to post high-resolution scans of the images. While we do not have permission to place them here, volume 1 images are available to view on Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO) for those who subscribe.
For some high-quality scans, see the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee’s digital exhibition cited below.
