Philanthropy in Children's Periodicals, 1840-1930

Drawing on a wealth of material from children’s periodicals from the Victorian era to the 1920s, this book examines how the concept of the charitable child is defined through the press. Charitable ideals became increasingly prevalent at a time of burgeoning social inequities and cultural change, shaping expectations that children were capable of and responsible for charitable giving. While the child as the object of charity has received considerable attention, less focus has been paid to how and why children have been encouraged to help others. This book aims to begin to fill this gap by exploring how children’s magazines and children’s columns in adult newspapers encouraged children to help other children, defining a philanthropic role for young people that is reinforced through the press. It uses children’s print culture to examine the relationship between children and charitable institutions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and foreground children’s active roles. Not only does this approach demonstrate children’s agency and responsiveness to the needs of others during this period, but it also shows how ideas of charity were articulated in printed materials for children. Charitable ideals for children were mobilised in periodicals and traversed boundaries based on class, gender, and race. The ubiquity and frequency of children’s periodicals and children’s columns in adult newspapers meant that young people were regularly exposed to charitable ideas in both fictional and non-fictional materials in ways that reinforced the expectation that they should help others in need.