The House of Longman, founded in 1724, which survived for 270 years, through seven generations, might well have come to an early end in 1755 with the death of its founder, Thomas Longman (1699-1755). The word 'conger', describing the group participating in the sale, was familiar to both Thomas I and Thomas II, although its meaning changed over the course of the eighteenth century, as did the words 'publisher' and 'publishing'. The history of serial publications, particularly in the eighteenth century, could never be completely separated from the history of books. Thomas I and his nephew preferred building up a substantial home trade, wholesaling books as well as retailing them, and developing a foreign trade to making bold innovations and diversifying their business, as some other booksellers, notably the Newberys, chose to do. The expanding Longman home trade rested on a network of contacts, some of them expressed in imprints that were not always consistently framed.

The period between 1780 and 1830 might be characterized by an often unselfconscious and unresolved, even haphazard, dialogue between seriality, periodicity and the volume format, a dialogue that can, historically, be given shape through the wider growth and democratization of print culture in the period. Both Jon Klancher and Marilyn Butler, two of the most important cultural historians to have considered late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century periodicals, have developed sophisticated models for their history that suggest a complex dialogue between the construction of a precise implied readership for each magazine and a broader address to the 'general' or 'national' reader. This chapter emphasizes the central role both scholars give periodicals as agents of cultural change at this time. In short, women's magazines, like many other periodicals, abandoned the late eighteenth-century attempt to construct an egalitarian community of writers and readers and instead began to construct a role devoted to the ideological project of a newly proselytizing middle class.