Commercializing Childhood: Children's Magazines, Urban Gentility, and the Ideal of the Child Consumer in the United States, 1823–1918

Abstract

In Commercializing Childhood Paul B. Ringel skillfully differentiates and interprets the distinct ethos of nineteenth-century children's periodicals while teasing out their underlying ideologies and editorial strategies. Ringel examines how particular publications bridged familial and commercial spheres and gradually integrated young readers into an escalating consumer culture. Proceeding through three sections that cover establishing, commercializing, and sustaining children's magazines, Ringel vividly portrays the era's most influential juvenile periodicals through a savvy mix of content analysis and close reading. The eight chapters of Commercializing Childhood reveal how children's magazines balanced stable ideological approaches with the shifting demands of increasingly consumer-oriented readerships. Ringel locates in the major periodicals two dominant schools of thought that shaped children's periodicals for nearly a century: the orthodox Protestant stance, which “presented childhood as an inherently sinful and thus physically and spiritually dangerous stage of life,” and the liberal Protestant orientation, which “emphasized individuals’ capacity for self-improvement” (pp. 17, 20). Isolating recurring tropes, conventions, and genres that enabled these publications to negotiate between the editors’ values and the expectations and desires of their genteel audiences, his analysis exposes ongoing tensions between magazines and markets. Thus, the Youth's Companion publisher Nathaniel Willis enlisted sentimental ideals to reinforce conservative religious values, while his successor, Daniel Sharp Ford, embraced “genteel sensationalism,” a paradoxical blend of orthodox Protestant morality and dime-novel plot elements that transformed aggressively masculine adventure stories into cautionary tales (p. 74). In contrast, Lydia Maria Child's Juvenile Miscellany, the progressive competitor of the Youth's Companion, inaugurated an enduring editorial formula “that balanced confidence about children and their future against the audience's need to avoid destabilizing extensions of that optimistic faith” (p. 48).