The Educational Functions of the First Woman’s Almanac in Britain: Media Literacy and The Ladies’ Diary, 1704–1713
Abstract
While 18th-century almanacs transmitted usable information that was meant to be relevant to daily life, at the beginning of the century they also began to function as an educational tool that enabled readers to act as producers of media content, and, as a result, to develop media literacy via the practice of writing and responding to amateur poetry. In this article, I define media literacy as a cultural category shaped by specific media-related skills: the creation, interpretation, evaluation, and negotiation of media content. I examine John Tipper’s The Ladies’ Diary (1704–1713), one of the best-selling almanacs of the era, as an educational tool that, through the strategy of inviting and publishing amateur poetry, promoted and taught media competencies. Tipper’s almanac, I argue, should thus be acknowledged as an influential document in the history of media education.
References
Bannet, E. T. (2005). Empire of letters: Letter manuals and transatlantic correspondence, 1688–1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Batchelor, J., & Powell M. N. (Eds.). (2018). Women’s periodicals and print culture in Britain, 1690–1820s: The long eighteenth century. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Cohen, M. (2015). The pedagogy of conversation in the home: ‘Familiar conversation’ as a pedagogical tool in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. Oxford Review of Education, 41(4), 447-463. DOI: 10.1080/03054985.2015.1048114
Hunter, J. P. (2001). Couplets and conversation. In J. Sitter (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to eighteenth-century poetry (pp. 11–36). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hutton, C. (1775). The Diarian miscellany: Consisting of all the useful and entertaining parts, both mathematical and poetical, extracted from The Ladies’ Diary, from the beginning of that work in the year 1704, down to the end of the year 1773. With many additional solutions and improvements (Vol. 4). London.
James, K. (2011). Reading numbers in early modern England. BSHM Bulletin: Journal of the British Society for the History of Mathematics, 26(1), 1–16. DOI: 10.1080/17498430.2010.504529
The ladies’ diary; or, The woman’s almanack. (1704-1713). London.
Loveman, K. (2019). Epigram and spontaneous wit. In P. Bullard (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of eighteenth-century satire (pp. 492–508). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Miegon, A. (2008). “The Ladies’ Diary” and the emergence of the almanac for women, 1704–1753 [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. Burnaby, Canada: Simon Fraser University.
Olsen, K. (1999). Daily life in 18th-century England. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Tipper, J. (2011). [Letter to H. Wanley, November 8, 1703]. In Sir H. Ellis (Ed.), Original letters of eminent literary men of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. (Camden Society, Old series, XXIII) (pp. 306–309). Burlington: TannerRitchie Publishing.
Wardhaugh, B. (2012). Poor Robin’s prophecies: A curious almanac and the everyday mathematics of Georgian Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wernimont, J. D. (2017). Poetico-mathematical women and “The Ladies’ Diary”. In H. Marchitello & E. Tribble (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of early modern literature and science (pp. 337–350). London: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI: 10.1057/978-1-137-46361-6
Whyman, S. E. (2007). Letter writing and the rise of the novel: The epistolary literacy of Jane Johnson and Samuel Richardson. Huntington Library Quarterly, 70(4), 577–606. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/hlq.2007.70.4.577
Wood, J. R. (2018). Periodicals and the problem of women’s learning. In J. Batchelor & M. N. Powell (Eds.), Women’s periodicals and print culture in Britain, 1690-1820s: The long eighteenth century (pp. 25–39). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
- The Author/Authors agree(s) to publish the article free of charge in Multidisciplinary Journal of School Education in English or Spanish. The Editorial Board reserves the right to shorten the texts and change the titles.
- As part of free publication mentioned in § 1, the Author/Authors agrees to make the full electronic version of their article available in the Internet.
- The Author/Authors agrees to index their article in databases at home and abroad, including abstracts and keywords as well as Author's/Authors’ affiliation in English and in other languages. The Author/Authors agrees to pass on the information mentioned above to the owners of these databases.
- The Author/Authors declares that their publication is original and does not include borrowings from other works which might cause Publisher's responsibility, does not infringe the rights of the third party and that their copyright on this publication is not limited. The Author/Authors will incur all the costs and will pay compensations which might result from the mendacity of the following statement.
- The Author/Authors declares to bear complete responsibility for the scientific reliability of the article submitted. The detailed contribution of all co-authors is defined.
- The Author/Authors declares to publish the text in the Multidisciplinary Journal of School Education under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-ND 4.0).
- For more than one author, please complete the Authorship Contributions and send it to the editorial office. Please indicate the specific contributions made by each author (list the authors’ initials, e.g., JKH). Please download, complete, scan and attach the file in the system during the submission process.
Authors Statement - Authorship Contributions
