SOURCE: Fryckstedt, Monica Correa. “Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna & The Christian Lady's Magazine.” Victorian Periodicals Review 14, no. 2 (summer 1981): 43-51.

In the following essay, Fryckstedt examines Tonna's editorship of The Christian Lady's Magazine.

With the exception of Wanda Fraiken Neff's stray remarks, The Christian Lady's Magazine (1834-49) has received no attention from literary scholars.¹ The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature merely notes that Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna was its editor from 1834 to 1846, and Alison Adburgham, E. M. Palmegiano and Ivanka Kovačević also content themselves with only a brief mention.² Behind this dry fact lies a gold mine of information yet to be explored. An examination of some articles and above all the editorials by Charlotte Elizabeth (her pseudonym) would shed new light on the opinions the editor of an ultra-Protestant magazine tried to impress on the minds of middle-class female readers in religious, political and social questions.

The Christian Lady's...