“Donations need not be large to be acceptable”: Children, Charity, and the Great Ormond Street Hospital in Aunt Judy’s Magazine, 1868–1885

When Aunt Judy’s Magazine first appealed to its child readers in 1868 to raise money for a cot at the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, it took advantage of the charitable impulses that had initially been developed by earlier missionary magazines. Yet it could not rely on the same organisational structures, such as Sunday schools and community involvement in the missionary society, to help promote child readers’ engagement with, and commitment to, the children’s hospital as a charitable cause. This article examines how the middle-class Aunt Judy’s Magazine used charitable content to attract and retain readers. It demonstrates how this content both contributed and responded to the philanthropic model of childhood depicted in the magazine as a whole.