Commercializing Childhood: Children’s Magazines, Urban Gentility, and the Ideal of the Child Consumer in the United States, 1823–1918 by Paul B. Ringel (review)

Like many books, the subtitle of this book tells the reader much more about it than the main title. This is a skillful history of a series of Boston- and New York–based magazines designed for children of middle-class and affluent families. Their editors followed the division between orthodox and liberal wings of genteel, largely Protestant-inspired cultures and their differing responses to commercialization in the nineteenth century. Paul Ringel explores these different wings of northeastern American gentility by contrasting the editorial policies of a succession of these children’s magazines. While the pioneering Nathaniel Willis’s Youth’s Companion adhered to conservative evangelical values, stressing childhood sin, Lydia Maria Child’s Juvenile Miscellany served up a more liberal array of stories, fostering self-improvement. Ringel sees signs of adaptation to the commercial in Willis’s increasing sentimentality (especially regarding women) and Child’s appeal to exoticism and child empowerment (even though her support of abolition was unacceptable to the conservative parents of her readers). Next he contrasts Daniel Ford’s midcentury editorship of Youth’s Companion with the more liberal children’s magazine, St. Nicholas, led by Mary Mapes Dodge. Ford shifted from the allegoric stories of Willis to more realistic but still cautionary fiction (“genteel sensational tales”) that avoided the excesses of the dime novels. Dodge went further in breaking from the conservative effort to protect children from popular commercial literature without abandoning genteel standards. In the final phase of his story, the Youth’s Companion and St. Nicholas were obliged to address a range of popular appeals (masculine virility and technological optimism, for example) but also new problems (like the rise of city temptations and peer groups). Ringel argues that these magazines declined by 1918, in part because of their success in “legitimizing children’s integration in the nation’s cultures of consumption and leisure” (14), but primarily, and more persuasively, because of the decline of genteel culture in the face of the appeals of the commercial and the popular.

This work is skillful at identifying exemplary illustrations of differences and trends in these magazines, and draws on a wide range of archival sources to inform us about the background and motives of the succession of editors. This is a fine account of the complex history of literary gentility as expressed in an effort to reach out to children readers and especially their parents. The book illuminates changing attitudes toward children and definitions of childhood—for example, by recognizing popular acceptance of an extended childhood in stories directed to older youth.

Yet this book only tangentially addresses its title, the commercialization of childhood. It’s true that these magazines were commercial efforts requiring some accommodation to popular and presumably commercial taste, but the commercial, for-profit character of these publications does not say much about introducing children to consumer culture beyond a restrained form of sensational literature. The “commercial” is treated very abstractly with no real discussion of the advent of a wide range of commercial influences—mass-produced games, toys, and dolls; dime “museums”; circuses; amusement parks; magic lantern shows; movies; and child-focused commercialized Christmas (though Dodge’s interest in the “domestic consumerism” of the holiday is mentioned briefly [137]). The stories that he reviews reflect changing attitudes toward children’s moral capacities, agency, and relationships with adult authority. All this is germane to the issue of how these magazines reflected or impacted child-rearing trends, but this doesn’t say much about the changing relationship between children and commerce. Did the magazines shift from the expectation that children save and be charitable toward an embrace of children’s delight in pursuing consumer goods? Did the stories show a trend toward themes involving consumer choice and deferred gratification? What about advertising trends...