19 - Making Space for Women's Work in the Leisure Hour: From Variety to ‘Verity’

Summary

TOO TIGHT MAKES LOOSE

Fizz went the beer through the hole from which it had driven the peg!

The master hammered the peg in tight.

Fizz–fizz–fizz went the beer through a seam in the cask!

The master plastered the seam with pitch.

Bang went the beer through the bunghole all over the cellar!

‘It's a pity!’ said the old Barrel, standing nearly empty, ‘but, if he had but left it a little liberty and breathing room, it wouldn't have taken the law into its own hands.’

(‘Original Fables,’ Leisure Hour 6 July 1867: 431)

THE LEISURE HOUR was launched as a penny weekly family magazine by the Religious Tract Society in 1852 to compete with the flood of cheap and often sensational periodicals that were suddenly available to working-class readers. Because the society hoped to attract a wide working-class audience while also satisfying its middle-class, evangelical membership, early advertisements for the new magazine emphasised both the variety of its contents and its Christian tone: ‘Articles on the more prominent topics of the day will be mingled with interesting narratives, instructive sketches from history, visits to places of celebrity in distant parts of the world, popular dissertations on scientific questions, and the choicest effusions of poetry: the whole forming a miscellany aiming to be highly attractive in itself, and one which the Christian parent and employer may safely place in the hands of those who are under his influence’ (Publishers’ Circular 4 Dec 1851: 399). The notion that the Leisure Hour's contents could be trusted as safe was reiterated in the inaugural issue. In ‘A Word with Our Readers,’ the Leisure Hour claimed it would ‘introduce to the reader only such views as all may unite in approving…. It is no part of our design to sound the gong of controversy, and there are many secular questions which divide the opinions of good men, with which we shall not choose to intermeddle’ (1 Jan 1852: 8). Yet, despite its promise to avoid controversial secular debates, from 1860 onward the Leisure Hour published a surprising number of articles advocating for women's education, employment, and property rights.