In June 1862, readers of the Canadian Post encountered an advertisement for a publication from New York.
Its title promised almost everything a household might want:
Information, Amusement and Domestic Economy.
Published by J. Dimon Smith & Brother at 20 North William Street in New York, The Household Journal was not a newspaper devoted to daily events, nor was it simply a manual of household instruction. It was a weekly collection of stories, poems, curious facts, practical advice, humour, puzzles, commentary and advertisements.
It was not the internet. But for a family gathered around a kitchen table in 1862, it performed some surprisingly familiar work.
Advertisement for The Household Journal in the Canadian Post, June 1862.
A weekly feed on paper
Today, we reach for a phone when we want to learn how to repair something, find a recipe, read a story, follow the news, solve a puzzle or simply be entertained for a few minutes. Each item may come from a different website, app or social-media account, but it arrives through the same small screen.
The Household Journal gathered a similarly varied stream of material between its covers.
A surviving issue dated October 19, 1861 opens with fiction, including “The Darkest Hour” and a collection called “Four Strange Stories.” Elsewhere, readers encountered poetry, a piece entitled “A Presidential Poet,” a temperance lecture by the celebrated showman P. T. Barnum, humorous selections under headings such as “Gravities and Gayeties” and “Pickings from Punch,” correspondence, household material and an entire assortment of puzzles.
Then came the advertisements.
Readers were offered sewing machines, Paris flowers, sheet music, millinery, roofing material, household equipment, railway and steamship travel—and even Scotch whisky in the same issue that printed a temperance lecture.
The subjects follow one another with very little concern for what we might now consider logical organization. A serious story could sit beside a joke, a moral lecture beside an advertisement, and a poem beside a word game.
Anyone accustomed to scrolling through a modern feed would recognize the sensation.
The most important difference was that this feed arrived at intervals and eventually ended. Its contents were selected by an editor rather than an algorithm. Readers could not comment beneath a story or follow a link to another source. They could, however, read passages aloud, lend the paper to a neighbour, copy a poem, attempt its puzzles and discuss what they had read.
One copy might travel through an entire family or between several households. Information was shared person to person rather than screen to screen.
The women of the household
The Household Journal was not explicitly called a women’s publication. Its fiction, humour, general information and puzzles were intended to make it suitable for the entire family.
But its promise of “domestic economy” spoke directly to women.
In the nineteenth century, women were generally expected to manage the daily workings of the household. Depending upon their family’s circumstances, that could encompass food preparation, clothing production and repair, household purchasing, home remedies, cleanliness, children’s education and the care of family possessions.
Women were also central to the circulation of information.
They exchanged recipes, patterns and remedies. They recommended books and articles. They read to children and sometimes to other adults. They copied poems and useful instructions into personal books. They carried news and ideas between households through letters, visits, church gatherings and conversations over kitchen tables.
Calling a publication a “household journal” presented it as reading for everyone. Yet women were often the people deciding which parts of it were useful, what should be saved, what could be tried and what was worth sharing.
They were not simply passive recipients of domestic advice. They were the household’s information managers.
A journal combining usefulness with entertainment acknowledged that women’s reading did not begin and end with recipes. Its audience could be interested in fiction, poetry, humour, public personalities, scientific curiosities, moral debates and puzzles as well as the practical work of running a home.
An American journal for Canadian readers
The copy advertised in the Canadian Post was not published in Canada. It came from New York.
That was not unusual. Long before Canadians streamed American television or scrolled through American-owned social-media platforms, American books, magazines and newspapers crossed the border in significant numbers.
By 1862, British North America had an active newspaper trade. Communities supported newspapers carrying local announcements, political commentary, international news, serialized stories and advertising. Canada also had religious, agricultural, political, scientific and professional periodicals.
What was more difficult to sustain was a broadly appealing, affordable magazine that could regularly provide a mixture of original creative work, domestic information and family entertainment.
Montreal’s Literary Garland, published from 1838 to 1851, had been the most successful Canadian literary magazine of its era. Its pages included fiction, poetry, essays, book reviews, jokes, anecdotes, household hints, recipes and music. It published many Canadian writers, including Susanna Moodie, and provided an important outlet for women’s writing.
It also struggled against the economics of Canadian publishing.
A relatively small and widely dispersed population made it difficult to build a large subscription base. Printing, paying contributors and distributing issues required considerable investment. American publishers could spread those costs across a much larger domestic market and then offer their publications to Canadian readers at competitive prices.
Foreign competition was among the pressures that contributed to the end of The Literary Garland in 1851.
Toronto’s Anglo-American Magazine, published from 1852 until 1855, attempted another mixture of literature, biography, poetry and Canadian history, but it too was short-lived.
Specialized Canadian publications proved more sustainable. The Canadian Agriculturist and Journal of the Board of Agriculture of Upper Canada, for example, served farm families from 1849 until 1863. Its practical information was valuable, but it was not trying to provide the same broad combination of domestic instruction, fiction and amusement.
In 1863—only a year after the Canadian Post advertisement—the Canadian Quarterly Review and Family Magazine began publication in Hamilton. Its appearance suggests that Canadian publishers also recognized an audience waiting for this kind of material.
The American advertisement may therefore have appeared during a particular opening in the market: after earlier Canadian literary magazines had disappeared and just before another Canadian publisher attempted to establish a family magazine.
We cannot know from the advertisement alone whether J. Dimon Smith and his brother deliberately identified a gap in Canadian publishing. We can say that their journal arrived at a moment when Canadian households had relatively few homegrown equivalents from which to choose.
A publication in transition
The Household Journal appears to have begun in New York in 1860 under the publication of A. Harthill & Co. Surviving issues from 1861 give its fuller title as The Household Journal of Popular Information, Amusement and Domestic Economy.
By June 1862, the Canadian Post advertisement identified J. Dimon Smith and Stephen Smith Jr., trading as J. Dimon Smith & Brother, as its publishers. They operated from the same address previously used by A. Harthill & Co.: 20 North William Street.
That shared address suggests that the brothers took over the existing journal rather than creating an unrelated publication with the same name.
The exact circumstances of the transfer remain unclear. The journal may have been sold, reorganized or continued under new proprietors. Its short and changing publication history was not unusual. Many nineteenth-century periodicals appeared with great optimism, changed ownership and then disappeared when subscriptions or advertising could no longer cover their expenses.
Would you have kept scrolling?
Among the poetry, stories and household information in the October 19, 1861 issue appeared a word puzzle entitled “Decapitations.”
The premise was simple: remove the first letter—the “head”—from one word to form another.
“Decapitations,” published in The Household Journal, October 19, 1861. Public domain.
The journal challenged its readers to solve eleven:
- Behead an article of clothing and leave a kind of grain.
- Behead a part of a ship and leave a tree.
- Behead a part of the body and leave a conjunction.
- Behead a very useful article of furniture and leave a prevention against burglars.
- Behead a boat and leave a very useful animal.
- Behead a part of a rail-car and leave a farming utensil.
- Behead a small animal and leave a liquid.
- Behead a vessel and leave a bird.
- Behead a bird and leave what we often see upon entering a drinking shop.
- Behead a tree and leave a kind of fruit.
- Behead an article worn by ladies and leave an animal.
The answers appear at the end of this article—but no scrolling ahead.
The puzzle was signed “F. E. H., Cattaraugus,” suggesting that it was contributed by a reader from Cattaraugus County in New York State. That small credit reminds us that the journal was not merely sending information outward from New York City. It was gathering creative contributions from readers and communities and redistributing them through its pages.
In that respect, it came even closer to something we recognize today.
People created material. Editors selected it. Readers consumed it, solved it, repeated it and shared it. A contribution from one community could reach households far beyond it—including readers across the border in Canada.
The internet did not invent the feed
The technologies we use to distribute information have changed dramatically. The desire behind them has not.
People in 1862 wanted instruction and diversion. They wanted stories, advice, novelty, humour and things to discuss with other people. Publishers learned to gather those interests into one package and to place advertisements beside them. They competed for attention and tried to persuade readers to return for the next issue.
Today, we worry about the amount of American content entering Canadian homes through enormous digital platforms. In 1862, Canadian publishers were already trying to compete with comparatively large American firms capable of producing inexpensive material for a mass audience.
The difference was that the information arrived through the post and was unfolded on a table.
For the women who read it, The Household Journal offered more than instructions for managing a home. It opened a small window onto a much wider world of stories, opinions, products, personalities and ideas. Women then carried those things into their conversations, their letters, their creative work and the knowledge they shared with the next generation.
They did not call it content.
They did not call it a feed.
And they certainly did not call it scrolling.
But when they opened The Household Journal, they knew the pleasure of wondering what they might find next.
Puzzle Answers
- COAT becomes OAT.
- HELM becomes ELM.
- HAND becomes AND.
- CLOCK becomes LOCK.
- SCOW becomes COW.
- BRAKE becomes RAKE.
- MINK becomes INK.
- BOWL becomes OWL.
- CROW becomes ROW—a quarrel that the puzzle’s author evidently associated with drinking shops.
- SPEAR becomes PEAR.
- CAPE becomes APE.
Read It Yourself
A digitized copy of the October 19, 1861 issue of The Household Journal of Popular Information, Amusement and Domestic Economy can be read free through Open Library
Image Credits
Masthead and “Decapitations” puzzle from The Household Journal of Popular Information, Amusement and Domestic Economy, October 19, 1861. A. Harthill & Co., New York. Public domain. Digitized by the Internet Archive.