Lady of the House
How lovely are these fin de siècle drawings? They are from the magazine The Lady of the House and Domestic Economist which was one of Ireland’s first women’s monthly magazines which catered to educated, upper middle class women. It ran from the 1890s until the 1920s when it reformed as Irish Tatler after Independence, a publication we all know and love today.
It was published by Wilson, Hartnell and Co., who were not magazine publishers but in fact one of Ireland’s first advertising agencies, it was really an extended advertisement for one of the agency’s largest clients, Findlater & Co. a wine merchant and grocer whose clientele were the aforementioned upper middle class ladies of Dublin.
Stephanie Rains , an Irish Media Historian has written about The Lady of the House and says: “The first issue of Lady of the House had a 20,000 print run (which was very large for an Irish magazine) and was free to Findlater’s account customers. In other words, the first 40 pages of articles, photographs, short stories and readers’ letters were merely the window-dressing for a grocer’s price-list. If it is a truism of commercial media that its object is not to deliver content to audiences, but to deliver audiences to advertisers, then Lady of the House was an early and extreme example of an entire publication being a thinly-disguised advertisement.”
While the grocer’s list does take up a lot of page count a flick through the pages of the magazine reveals features on everything from Distinguished Irish women in London, fashion illustrations and features on wedding gowns, promenade and driving costumes, new spring hats and bonnets, as well as what to wear to the Punchestown Races, reports from Spring Paris Fashions and competitions for Ireland’s Prettiest Child are written from a specifically Irish perspective.
The image above shows how the adverts were dotted through the magazine from: Bovril, Fry’s Cocoa, Jacobs & Co, Bushmills, Invigorator Corsets and also some of Ireland’s leading fashion establishments from Elvery’s & Co. Waterproofers, The Lahmann Agency, Merrion Sqaure and Martin & Mumford (Ladies Tailor on Suffolk Street) were spread throughout too.
I loved a specific feature in April 1891 which talks of new spring hats and the latest novelties in millinery, which disagrees with Dublin being late on adopting fashion trends…
Two Seasons Behind?
Our contemporary, The Queen, the most celebrated of the London fashion journals, has supplied a very handsome testimonial to the enterprise of The Lady of the House, it has long been said that London, in the matter of Dress and Fashion, is one season behind Paris and Dublin one season behind London. The charge thus made against Dublin modistes of being two seasons behind the Fashions of the Day is absurdly untrue, how authentic it is as regards to – THE LADY OF THE HOUSE – the only Irish fashion journal, we ask our readers to pronounce after they have examined the following designs which appeared on our pages on 15th February and 16th March respectively and were produced for The Queen on 28th March. No sign of being “two seasons behind” we modestly opine?
The Lady of the House, 15th April 1891
Read more about the history of Irish media and more information on The Lady of the House from Stephanie Rains whose excellent blog on Irish Media History is here.