The Economic Underpinnings of Nineteenth-Century American It-Narratives: The Case of Merry's Museum, 1845

Recent work on American childhood, such as Karen Sánchez-Eppler’s Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (2005), has caused a reconsideration of children’s roles in American society. Childhood and its products, once overlooked as unimportant or of little value, are now receiving serious scholarly attention within American Studies. Sánchez-Eppler’s study explores the ways that nineteenth-century American children were “significant and varied participants in the making of social meaning.”¹ Whether as agents or as reform objects, children participate in many broader social movements. That children have these roles should be no surprise, but the fascinating intersection between childhood and adult culture has still received relatively little attention. This essay explores that juncture, foregrounding the unexpected manner in which some antebellum child readers of the periodical Merry’s Museum (1841–1872), a popular American children’s magazine edited and published by Samuel Goodrich, commented on American capitalism and the labor system through a series of publisher- and child-produced short stories.

As the name implies, the it-narrative (sometimes called an object narrative) genre uses an object or animal as the first-person protagonist; during the eighteenth century, such texts frequently provided biting social satire. In these stories the narrator typically connects disparate social agents and settings, and this panorama of society allows early incarnations to critique British culture at all levels—whether private, public, or religious—as their narrators transgress class and social boundaries. Works such as Frances Coventry’s The History of Pompey the Little (1751) and Charles Johnstone’s Chrysal; or the Adventures of a Guinea (1760–65) popularized the genre in 1750s–1760s British adult fiction, but by the end of the eighteenth century it-narratives were marketed mainly to children.² These stories characteristically feature two kinds of cultural opposition. The British examples favor supporting an acknowledged social hierarchy, whereas American versions stress a more individualistic social structure. Secondly, and more crucially for this study, the British examples’ top-down perspective emphasizes Christian charity and stewardship, whereas the American models ask their readers to forego charity and instead become interchangeable members of an ostensibly classless American workforce.

Produced by the editor, other adults, and child authors, the Merry’s Museum stories meld evangelical religion with workplace concerns in a distinctively American way, and they explore how valuing individualism simultaneously permits blending into a group. The characters these it-narratives illuminate, particularly marginalized figures of children, animals, factory laborers, and slaves, allow those who, Elaine Freedgood claims, were “required to objectify and commodify parts of themselves, their labour, their ideas, [and] their land” a chance to better understand their place in their respective communities.³ The nineteenth-century it-narrative functions as “a parable for subjects who need to think of themselves objectively.”⁴ That is, such stories teach marginalized readers to recognize themselves as a meaningful part of a larger system. As children themselves, at least half the authors of the it-narratives I discuss are outsiders, but speaking from this position permits the greatest cultural critique. My six examples all uncover the interconnected social relationships that their writers and readers expect to experience in their everyday lives but, as I show, the child authors provide the clearest understanding of those relationships’ nuances.

Examining these short stories through the Marxian concept of commodity fetishism would likely prove valuable; indeed, their regular emphasis on labor and the economy, and the ease with which the authors raise literal objects into subjecthood, invites such a critical lens. However, what I find more interesting, and what I argue the authors of these stories viewed as more useful, is studying the moral agency these objects and animals possess. Utilizing what Pierre Bourdieu calls the “social relations objectified in familiar objects,” the genre’s authors use their narrators to provide commentary that extends beyond an economically focused emphasis and looks additionally at social interconnections.⁵ A better way to apprehend it-narratives is to examine them broadly, including narrators such as animals, natural phenomena, and...