The Ladies holds an uneasy position between the middle- and the upper-class, presenting itself as a guide for the upper-class woman to “court, fashion, and society,” but implicitly offering middle-class women a class-climbing guidebook. The Ladies, after all, provides excruciatingly detailed fashion advice as well as money-management tips. At sixpence ("sixpence half by post") per weekly issue, the journal places itself at the high end of the market. Pricing details. (Cynthia White mistakenly describes the journal as a "sixpence monthly," an error adopted by the few other critics who mention The Ladies, but the publication indeed comes out weekly.) By using the word "ladies" rather than "women," it also allied itself with the upper-class society that would within a decade become the province of a number of ladies' magazines. See White for more details.
Class negotiations go on in discussions of the "pretence" that is English society’s most troublesome trait and the care with which both the shopkeeper’s wife and the titled lady are defended. The Ladies’ feud with the Saturday Review also brings in this class dimension. In responding to the Review’s attack on charitable balls (“Fashionable Screws”), the ladies claim that the real problem is class climbing. Excerpts from The Ladies’ response to the Saturday Review, in which they deplore class climbing but offer their pity to the short-funded:
The humbler worshippers of le beau mode, whose scanty means are not adequate to living up to the mark of those they aspire to mingle with are much to be pitied. It is true that they mix with the elite of society, share all their enjoyments and amusements, grow radiant in the delight of speaking familiarly with and of lords, dukes and marquises, eat of the very best, drink of the most costly, and look and talk and write down at the commonalty, the mere rabble who are out of society. Yet they are not happy. The humiliating excuses they have to make, the mean shifts they have to adopt, the degradation of debts, which they are unable to pay, the horrible fear of being some day found out, and thrust from their paradise of snobs haunt the poor little shams and render them miserable. Those whom they ape smile at their ridiculous pretensions, and make them “pay handsomely for a front seat among the upper ten,” and others of their own class laugh openly at their paltry yet desperate expedients. These are the very people who are always most vengeful and bitter in their denunciations of the aristocracy, and it is to their querulous complaints that the Saturday Review of the 15th inst. opened its pages in an article on “Fashionable Screws.” Let us hear how pitiably Jeames complains at the gall and wormwood of living above his means to gratify a noble, honourable ambition--that of being intimate with the great:--” [Reprint of “Fashionable Screws”, complaining that men are forced to pay high- priced tickets to dull charitable events because “fine ladies not unfrequently play at philanthropy. The Ladies concludes:]
“Poor dear! Is he not hardly dealt with? What is the unhappy man to do? He can’t retire from society, you know. He can’t retire from society, you know. He can’t refuse to be bored by other people’s amusements and entertainments. What is to be done? Obviously the mountain must come to Mahomet. ... Suppose ... that one-half of the noblest charities in London would be compelled to close their doors to- morrow if it were not for the large sums raised at these harmless associations of kindly thoughts and generous actions with the enjoyments and pleasures of society. In that case what is to be done? Are the starving to go unfed, the sick to die uncared for, the ignorant to remain untaught, because Jeames finds the demands upon his scanty means made by those who have every right to believe he is what he pretends to be--a source of discomfort? and are ladies to relinquish their harmless pleasures and amusements because Jeames de la Plush finds that they bore him?
Thackeray asked, “Why should Jones and I, who are in the middle rank, alter the modes of our being to secure an eclat which does not belong to us? No one is deceived by such temporary splendour in ‘the poor silly jays, who trail a peacock’s feather behind them, and think to simulate the gorgeous bird whose nature it is to strut on palace-terraces, and to flaunt his magnificent fan-tail in the sunshine.’ Fate has comfortably appointed gold plate for some and has bidden others contentedly to wear willow pattern. And being perfectly contended (indeed, humbly thankful--for look around, O Jones, and see the myriads who are not so fortunate) to wear honest linen, while magnificos of the world are adorned with cambric and point lace; surely we ought to hold as miserable, envious fools, those wretched Beaux Tibbs’s of society who sport a lace dickey and nothing beside.”
