Fashion plate, The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, c.1872. Wedding dress.

A bride in an elaborately bustled white wedding dress trimmed with pleated frills and sprays of white flowers has her bracelet fastened by a woman in a rich green silk day dress trimmed with matching silk fringe, frills and applied bands in the same colour. The bride is in a wedding veil, her attendant wears a flower-trimmed bonnet. A small girl to the far right is turned away from the viewer, looking at herself in a mirror and lifting the back of her skirt upwards to mimic the bustle silhouette of the adults' skirts.

In 1852, publishing entrepreneur Samuel Beeton launched The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine at the startlingly low price of 2d a copy. An instant success, it had achieved a circulation of 50,000 by 1860 and became the `blueprint for the modern magazine industry'. It appealed to the rapidly-expanding middle-class sector who relished the mix of fiction, fashion and food, the latter provided by Beeton's wife, the soon-to-be lionised Isabella. Isabella visited Paris regularly and acquired fashion plates from Adolphe Goubaud's Moniteur de la Mode. A feature of Beeton's magazine was the "Practical Dress Instructor," a forerunner of the paper dressmaking pattern. In 1861, Beeton followed up his success with The Queen, a weekly newspaper of more topical character.

E.2221-1888