I've heard that Victoria Magazine was responsible in 90s America for the revival of interest in what James Norwood Pratt called, "the tea topics little old ladies of both sexes debate", a somewhat dismissive way of saying that it focused on the aesthetics of tea-service, something that Pratt and the California gourmand crowd seemed to reject in their tea-drinking of the 80s, partially (if I am reading his friend Helen Gustafson's book correctly) due to the suffocating class issues that tended to ride on the coattails of a formal tea, where any mistake in etiquette was so socially stressful that nobody wanted to participate. I'm not sure what the trick was exactly, but Victoria Magazine seemed to be able to side-step this, I think by taking the host out of the picture, beautiful teas laid out in empty rooms and gardens waiting to be discovered like Alice wandering through Wonderland.
I guess there must have been some internal trouble? The internet suggests that the sort of person who appreciated the aesthetics of Victoria back then was not necessarily the sort of person who could buy antique furniture, Wedgwood teapots, or French table linens, leading to an audience-advertiser mismatch. The original editor stepped down and the magazine got a redesign which included abandoning the curly script, and just as suddenly Southern Lady appeared. Then Victoria went out of business, TeaTime appeared somewhere in there(?), and Victoria was resurrected under new management with the old curly script.
I'm fascinated by this subculture because it seems like a lot of the older brick-and-mortar teashops I've visited in the U.S. depend on the sort of customer who became interested in tea through these type of magazines.
