Time of Beauty, Time of Fear: The Romantic Legacy in the Literature of Childhood

The Perils of Reading: Children’s Missionary Magazines and the Making of Victorian Imperialist Subjectivity

mary ellis gibson • The Perils of Reading Children’s Missionary Magazines and the Making of Victorian Imperialist Subjectivity In December 1849 the Ragged School Union Magazine reprinted a poem from the Ladies Needlework Penny Magazine written by one Mrs. E.S. Craven Green. Mrs. Green’s poem, “The Claims of the Needy,” will have a familiar ring in the context of middle-class “condition of England” poems of the decade. Mrs. Green exhorted Christian mothers to acts of charity in language that conflated home, country, queen, and empire. She began with the biblical epigraph, “suffer the little children to come unto me” and exclaimed: Yes, suffer them—the dust upon thy purple, Oh Island Queen of the far-surging sea, Imperial Albion!—by the wayside scattered Though vile and noisome weeds they seem to be; There is in each a germ of mighty power, A soul to answer at the judgment hour. [ . . . ] Oh, Christian mothers! England’s honour’d matrons, Whose hands free aid to the far heathen pour, How long shall little children be forbidden To tread with naked feet, the sacred floor 106 Mary Ellis Gibson Of those high temples where the Spirit moves, Of Him who ever pleads and ever loves? (30) For Mrs. Green, Britain, the “Island Queen” of the “far-surging sea,” has a “world-saving mission” both at home and abroad, a mission conceived as integral to motherhood. Metaphorically, the mother country and the queen herself guarantee the goodness of Britain’s children. Middle-class philanthropy ritually cleanses the imperial mantle by saving children everywhere. The same issue of the Ragged School Union Magazine defended Lord Ashley ’s emigration scheme for “ragged boys” who were sent to something like indentured servitude in Australia. The magazine printed testimonials from boys sent to Australia attesting to their happiness, but the writer acknowledged the “strong suspicion” in the minds of poor children and their parents that “something more than philanthropy” had to do with the emigration scheme. Some parents and children, the writer admitted, considered the emigration scheme “a secret system of transportation, without the benefit of council or jury. . . . Among the parents the report was current , that it was a new system of British slavery, and that Lord Ashley was to have [10 pounds] for every young ‘Arab of the city’ he could capture” [“The Emigrants. No. III,” Ragged School Union Magazine 1 (December 1849): 2]. As I shall argue, the Ragged School Union Magazine was only one of many in nineteenth-century Britain that worked—as these examples suggest—to constitute a gendered, classed, and defensively British subjectivity in its readers. Children’s missionary magazines, formed in evangelical Christian understandings of the world, worked within the parameters Mrs. Green well understood. For Mrs. Green and the editors of the Ragged School Union Magazine the bourgeois family was the family. The destitute family in Britain and the heathen child abroad measured the limits of domesticity. Mrs. Green’s language was, if anything, even more common in magazines for children than in magazines for adults. In such magazines, doing good and converting the heathen were central impluses that defined the family itself. The editorial practices, dominant tropes, and organizational principles of children’s magazines (whether overtly religious or secular) over The Perils of Reading 107 the course of the nineteenth century were rooted in the practices of missionary magazines. Here I trace the publishing history of missionary magazines for children . I argue 1) that they were crucial to the formation of enduring journalistic practices in children’s publishing and 2) that they crucially formed children as imperial subjects. Assuming my reader is likely to have little familiarity with missionary periodicals, I quote from them at length, analyzing at once the development of their print formulas and their implications for imperial subjectivity. Missionary magazines for children proliferated in the first half of the nineteenth century. Mrs. Green had a wide array of magazines from which to choose if she desired uplifting reading for her own middle-class children , or indeed for the destitute children in the ragged schools themselves. By 1849 she could have chosen from among the Children’s Friend, the Church Missionary Juvenile Instructor, the Juvenile Missionary Magazine, the Juvenile Missionary Herald, the Wesleyan Juvenile Offering, to name a few among the most prominent. And she would have just missed Mrs. Sherwood’s Youth’s Magazine , which had commenced in 1822 but ceased publication...