Give, give; be always giving’: Children, Charity and China, 1890-1939

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, the first paragraph is included here:
 Before he reveals the answer to the riddle, nine-year-old Matty Bryan asks his father for a penny and his mother and grandmother for a halfpenny each. He then takes out his new missionary-box, explaining that the money is for ‘black people, to buy them Bibles, and to send them preachers to tell them about God, and how they’re to get to heaven; and Mr. Graham [his teacher] said that it was the same as giving them the Bread of life’ ( Elliott 1872, p. 17). This scene from Emily Elliott’s novella Matty’s Hungry Missionary-Box and the Message It Brought (1872) is an example of the creative ways children in nineteenth-century Britain were depicted as engaging in charity. Although not everyone agreed with the value of foreign missions, by the mid-nineteenth century, missionary societies such as the London Missionary Society (LMS, established 1795) and the Church Missionary Society (CMS, established 1799) had placed missionary boxes like Matty’s in many homes, and children were taught to donate regularly (Cox 2008, p. 97). According to historian Frank Prochaska ‘[n]owhere in the charitable world did the young play a more important part than in the evangelical missionary movement’ (1978, p. 103). While it is impossible to provide exact figures for the amount of money Victorian children raised for missionary societies, it was a significant amount . The funds raised supported missionary ships, paid for specific cots in hospitals, and sponsored ‘native teacher[s]’ (Prochaska 1978, p. 107; Thorne 1999, p. 126; Elleray 2011, pp. 229-230). In the early twentieth century, children were told that for one penny a week, they could help support the LMS’s eighty-three missionaries in China who were involved in the work of ‘leper asylums, training homes, orphanages and schools for both boys and girls’ (J.M.B. [c 1900], p. 15).