Пенни Магазин: Британский иллюстрированный журнал для рабочих.

British 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. Similarly, in 1841 over 30% of males and nearly 50% of females were still illiterate, therefore using illustrations Knight was able to appeal to an audience with limited reading skills, while also enabling self education. The illustrations became highly popular with Knight’s target audience as shown by the fact 1,887 illustrated articles were published in The Penny Magazine between the years of 1832 and 1845. These images would often vary between machinery and animals. The popularity of illustrations and Knight’s desire for sales resulted in certain covers becoming scientifically inaccurate, for example an illustration of "The Boa Constrictor" (October 27, 1832) showed the creature attacking its prey with fangs drawn even though the reptile suffocates its prey. Austin argues that the idea of the snake striking at its prey was more likely to stir the reader’s emotions and entice them into purchasing the magazine.