The short story “Lyddy!”, by Thomas Egerton Wilks, was published in a London journal, The Young Lady’s Magazine, in 1837, its first year of publication, the works from which were collected in a single volume published in 1838.
Though its title is similar to that of other ladies’ magazines of the era, The Young Lady’s Magazine actually had much loftier ambitions:
…to concentrate every energy in the production, not only of such matter as may amuse the fancy, but at the same time tend to expand the mind, elevate the morals, refine the intellect, and awaken, — not the morbid sensibilities, too often produced by ill-selected fictions — but those pure, unhacknied feelings of the youthful heart, which are in themselves a mine of inexhaustible treasures, and which, by their development, shed a halo of enchantment around.
— Preface, p. iii
