The Leedberg Athenæum

Godey’s Lady Book (1854)

  • Title: Godey’s Lady Book – 1854 – Volume 1
  • Published by Louis A. Godey, Philadelphia
  • Year of printing: 1854

Notes:

 Godey’s Lady Book was a monthly magazine published from 1830 to 1896, and was the most popular magazine in its day by far, reaching 150,000 subscribers at its peak.  It was primarily aimed at women, but included content that could be enjoyed by men as well, and as a result was widely read and highly influential.  A large amount of the content was literary, such as informative articles about new inventions like sewing machines, serialized novels, and poems. 

Godey’s is probably best known for its full-page, hand-colored, plates showing the latest in women’s fashion, which capture a fascinating progression of women’s clothing in the 19th century.  It also included a monthly section that presented a house floor plan — often with servant’s quarters, incorporating farming, but never including indoor plumbing facilities, which did not yet exist. A monthly column of medical advice included questionable tips on things like how to remove freckles or stop squinting. It also included bits of social commentary — often revolving around the theme of not challenging young children mentally, or else they would have low intelligence for life.  Collectively, Godey’s serves as a fascinating time capsule of life in the mid-1800s. 

The publisher, Louis A. Godey, had a monthly column, “Godey’s Arm Chair”, where he could pontificate freely, but more than anything he demonstrated his flair for showmanship.  Most of this column was devoted to praising the quality of his magazine, pointing out how the circulation continued to grow, and often responding directly to letters from subscribers.

The editor, Sarah Josepha Hale, was a hugely impactful woman in the 1800s.  Besides editing Godey’s, she authored the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb”, campaigned successfully for the creation of Thanksgiving as a national holiday, and organized fundraising to complete the Bunker Hill Monument.  Hale also had her own column each issue, called the “Editor’s Table”, which she would often use to advocate for women’s rights and education.  

While it was issued monthly, it was common for subscribers to have six months’ worth of issues bound together into one volume, as is the case with this collection of issues from January through June, 1854.  The magazine was printed with this in mind — page numbers incremented continuously between issues and only reset every six months, at which point a table of contents for the prior period was included that could be bound at the beginning.  These were not magazines that people read and then threw away — they would be kept for years, or centuries in this case.

Historical context:

When this book was published in 1854, Franklin Pierce was President of the United States.  This year, Pierce enacted the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed a general ban on slavery in northern states and instead allowed each state to vote on slavery.  This led to a series of events known as “Bleeding Kansas”, where pro-slavery Missourians crossed the border to illegal vote in Kansas, resulting in competing governments and armed conflict.  Outrage over this Act led to the birth of the modern-day Republican Party in the same year, which broke off from the Whig party.  These events inflamed tensions and moved the country closer to civil war.

Further Reading:

Acquired August, 2026