“While always financially troubled and relatively small in circulation - there were twelve hundred subscribers in 1840 - the journal remained prestigious and influential, so much so that contributors put up with tiny or even nonexistent fees in order that their work might appear in its pages” (Nelson, Invisible Men, p.215).   

The small circulation numbers and the money problems are fascinating, considering that the periodical featured such notables as Jeremy Bentham, George Eliot, and John Stuart Mill!

“George Eliot published an 1856 review titled ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’. Eliot, ‘like Charlotte Brontë, was well aware that male reviewers had a tendency to overpraise writing by women as a double-edged gesture of chivalry which flattered and demeaned at the same time’ (Shaw, p.207). Eliot ‘represented many women writers as ‘silly’ grouping them into the ‘mind-and-millinery species,’ novels supposedly about real life but actually hopelessly distorted imitation of upper-class worldliness’. In the review, she ‘concludes with an appeal for a truer representation’ of women writers. She argues that reviewers ‘clearly promote mediocre writing by women as a way of characterizing women's literacy in general. Her review is an attempt to put such representations out of play’” (Shaw, "Constructing the 'Literate Woman'" p.208).