The Penny Magazine

The Penny Magazine was an illustrated British magazine aimed at the working class, published every Saturday from 31 March 1832 to 31 October 1845. Charles Knight created it for the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in response to Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, which started two months earlier. Sold for only a penny and illustrated with wood-engravings, it was an expensive enterprise that could only be supported by very large circulation. Though initially very successful—with a circulation of 200,000 in the first year—it proved too dry and too Whiggish to appeal to the working-class audience it needed to be financially viable. Its competitor—which included a weekly short story—grew more slowly, but lasted much longer.

During the first few years of publication The Penny Magazine was highly successful in building an audience selling over 200,000 copies in 1832 with an estimation of nearly one million readers that year and easily outselling other periodicals such as the Edinburgh Journal and The Saturday Magazine.

There were several contributing factors behind this early success for The Penny Magazine. Firstly the price, as being sold for 1d. made it a financially viable option for the working class audience it was intended for. Thus based on price alone there were few direct competitors for the periodical to be challenged by. The only direct competitor in this price range in 1832 was the Edinburgh Journal.

Another aspect of its success as suggested by historians Rosemary Mitchell and A.L. Austin was the role of ‘non-radical information’. Austin states that the timing of the publication of the periodical in the same year as the Reform Act of 1832 was significant as this meant that “the working classes expected parliamentary authority to consider the laboring community’s complaints” and that such questioning of authority led to a “public shift toward rational inquiry” which could be found within the pages of The Penny Magazine. This outlook has been supported by Mitchell who also feels that the lack of controversial material was significant “in the Penny Magazine’s appeal to a mass audience.”

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