In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

"Child's Pleasure-Garden": Nineteenth-Century American Children's Magazines and the Concept of Childhood Autonomy A. S. W. Rosenbach, a distinguished collector of children's books, has expressed a common consensus among scholars of juvenile literature on the historical significance of the genre: "more than any class of literature, children's books reflect the minds of the generation that produced them" (Early American Children's Books xxvi-xxvii). During the years 18701 890, social and economic factors altered the production of children's literature, so that juvenile periodicals soon constituted an important segment of the field, and began to exert a considerable influence on American youth. Many publishers of the era, like Horace Scudder, editor of The Riverside Magazine for Young People, were alarmed by the disturbing concepts of independence which the new "story papers" seemed to instill in children (Childhood 23940 ). Other editors like Mary Mapes Dodge, who established St. Nicholas, the most famous American children's magazine, emphasized the role of juvenile periodicals as a reflection of the child's curiosity and tastes: "A child's magazine is its pleasure-ground .... They do not want to be bothered nor amused nor taught nor petted .... They just want to enter the one place where they may come and go as they please . . ." (Scribner's Monthly 353). Several contemporary scholars of historical children's literature, like R. Gordon Kelly, Anne Scott MacLeod, Fred Erisman, and Mary Lystad, have used juvenile periodicals as the basis of analysis of American concepts of childhood, especially for those precepts of behavior that adults were attempting to encourage in their children. Histories of childhood present evidence in the form of observation by foreigners that the American child was given an extraordinary amount of freedom in decision-making and self-assertiveness. Social historians like Philippe Aries and Richard Rapson theorize that it was in the last quarter of the nineteenth century when the general push towards egalitarianism accelerated, that the concept of childhood autonomy emerged in the United States (Aries 404, Rapson 198). The Civil War period represents a dramatic break with an earlier era of repressive attitudes towards children when, as Mark Twain remarks, "children were always regarded as if, everyone being born with an equal amount of original sin, the pressure on the square inch must needs be greater in a baby" (White 15). As the economy and social structure of the country stabilized during the later affluent period of the Gilded Age, the American middle class was increasingly able to afford the leisure time and money needed to indulge its children. It is the contention of the historian Henry Steele Commager that this focus on children, in a futureoriented nation like the United States, went so far as to create a youth-dominated literature in the latter half of the nineteenth century, a period when "majors wrote for minors" (Saturday Review 10-1 1 and 44-46). The validity of Commager's argument can, in part, be supported by an analysis of the major juvenile magazines of the period, such as St. Nicholas, Wide Awake and The Youth's Companion, whose literary works interweave popular fictional themes and the social concerns of a growing democracy intensely preoccupied with the current status and future of its youth. By the 1 880's most of the large American publishing" houses produced at least one children's magazine, whose advantages were twofold: it acted as a second medium of circulation for the books of a popular writer, and, in its indirect form of promotion and publicity 107 through serialization, it generated a mass appetite for fiction. To be sure, much of the material used in even these American juvenile magazines was still pirated from British publications. Eventually, however, the huge financial success of giants like Youth's Companion and St. Nicholas stimulated the development of a group of talented American writers who could compete with the British. A distinctive aspect of American magazine publishing was the creation of juvenile periodicals devoted to specific social causes, such as abolition; such were The Slave's Friend (1836-1838) and The Juvenile Miscellany (1826-1834), edited by Lydia Maria Child, whose pro-abolitionist views were so unpopular that...

pdf

Share