Boys Write Back: Self-Education and Periodical Authorship in Late-Nineteenth-Century Story Papers

The advent of boys' popular culture is signaled by 1870s entertainment periodicals. Following in the current of Oliver Optic's more expensive series books, boys' cheap periodicals were bought, traded, collected, and even, at times, authored by the youth that read them. Mythologized by Tom Sawyer who follows their every rule in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and easily replicated and later repented of by amateur author Jo March in Little Women, the sensational stories of boys' periodicals became the touchstone for boy's culture. Lorinda Cohoon, in Serialized Citizenships: Periodicals, Books, and American Boys, 1840-1911, connects the proliferation of boys' periodical literature during the second half of the nineteenth century with a shift in the construction of American boyhood identities (and their corresponding boyhood citizenships)—namely, the emergence and proliferation of the popular good-hearted, fun-loving "bad boy" who rebukes civilization along with his rival, the upstanding, almost seductive good boy who reforms civilization. ¹ While Cohoon focuses the majority of her study on representations of boys, I examine how boys represent themselves. I extend her arguments about boyhood citizenships into a broader public sphere: the marketplace. I build on Cohoon's analysis of boys' civic identities toward their vocational identities, which revolve around both consuming and producing. While fictional children of the nineteenth century were largely portrayed as innocent and good, as Anne Scott MacLeod points out, real children of the era were courted as an increasingly autonomous class of child consumers, as Viviana Zelizer argues. ² As youth make their own consumer choices, they play a large part in sanctioning and even constructing their own culture.

Late-nineteenth-century story papers provided unique spaces and special opportunities for young writers to enter the marketplace by voicing their desires and queries and improving their writing abilities and professional literacies. Story papers, newspaper-sized weekly publications containing fiction and miscellany, while certainly not devoid of adult interference, literally created space for boys to interact with editors and each other, allowing youth to help direct and produce the print entertainment they consumed. The economics of mass (re)production and the sensational culture that surrounded boys' contagious narratives inspired readers to write, mimicking their favorite stories and querying the editors. The community of reader/writers and the mechanics of boy self-education that this community dramatizes made space for young readers to develop their writing skills and professional identities. This essay will examine how a handful of boys at the cusp of adulthood used story paper spaces to understand their own emerging subjectivity and write themselves into adulthood. These young readers saw themselves as capable of entering the public marketplace by writing themselves into the story paper itself, yet they struggled with their own preparedness, asking story paper editors to evaluate and help them improve their professional literacy. Obscuring the boundaries between leisure and work, the marketplace of boys' stories helped produce a community of young readers turned writers who play at (re) creating themselves and work at self-education.

To locate these young readers, aged about ten to eighteen, I examine a small sample of story papers and the community of youth present in its papers, namely, the periodicals Boys of New York and its scion Happy Days, published for nearly fifty years, from 1875 to 1924, in New York. Boys of New York was started on August 23, 1875, in imitation of the Boys of England serial by Normand L. Munro, and was the first story paper devoted solely to American boys. Munro sold the publication three years later to Tousey and Small, who ran the publication together for about six months before Frank Tousey took over on January 27, 1879. ³

Like most boys' story papers, publisher Frank Tousey's Boys of New York and Happy Days contained five or more serialized stories, advice columns, contests, and other various miscellany (see Figure 1). In digesting readers' engagement with the periodicals, including letters, submissions, and various contests, the tension between reading and writing helps elucidate who these nineteenth-century readers were and how they imagined themselves as writers...