The period between 1780 and 1830 might be characterized by an often unselfconscious and unresolved, even haphazard, dialogue between seriality, periodicity and the volume format, a dialogue that can, historically, be given shape through the wider growth and democratization of print culture in the period. Both Jon Klancher and Marilyn Butler, two of the most important cultural historians to have considered late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century periodicals, have developed sophisticated models for their history that suggest a complex dialogue between the construction of a precise implied readership for each magazine and a broader address to the 'general' or 'national' reader. This chapter emphasizes the central role both scholars give periodicals as agents of cultural change at this time. In short, women's magazines, like many other periodicals, abandoned the late eighteenth-century attempt to construct an egalitarian community of writers and readers and instead began to construct a role devoted to the ideological project of a newly proselytizing middle class.