Protestant Children, Missions and Education in the British World by Hugh Morrison

Abstract

Reviewed by: Protestant Children, Missions and Education in the British World by Hugh Morrison Hayley Keon Protestant Children, Missions and Education in the British World. By Hugh Morrison. Leiden: Brill, 2021. vii + 122 pp. Paper $84.00, e-book $84.00. Sunday schools, periodicals, public demonstrations, fundraisers, and Christian Endeavor Societies—these were only some of the ways that young people across the British Empire engaged with Protestant missions. They are also only some of the examples that Hugh Morrison interrogates in his concise but significant volume, Protestant Children, Missions and Education in the British World. Setting out to prove that the Protestant children's mission movement in Britain and its settler colonies was first and foremost pedagogical in its aims, Morrison weaves accounts of these child-centered activities throughout his text, knitting them into an analytical framework that foregrounds the holistic education of young participants in home-based mission organizations. In the process, he takes readers on a tour of imperial spaces, tracking both the trends and the specificities that shaped children's experiences of evangelism in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In its structure, this book "roves … widely" (in Morrison's own estimation), tracing what he terms the "educational imperative" at work in children's missions across a variety of contexts and thematic landscapes (14, 15). In the first of four content sections, he defines this concept through analysis, examining it from the angle of youthful philanthropy. While not denying that young people carried fundraising potential for missions, his approach to this topic contrasts with those of other scholars, who, while investigating the economic power of women and children in mission movements, have been quick to imply that financial incentives motivated evangelists to mobilize large numbers of youths [End Page 170] for their fundraising initiatives. In his account, Morrison overlays the facts of children's giving—namely, that it was pervasive, widespread, and relatively lucrative both in the metropole and settler colonies—with close readings of texts produced by adult missionaries. In so doing, he convincingly argues that philanthropy was envisioned as one avenue through which children could exhibit generosity, pick up new skills, and make use of their leisure time for productive ends. In the next section, the idea that leisure could be productive resurfaces in an examination of missionary periodicals aimed at child audiences. Situating these texts alongside a wider category of nineteenth-century children's reading materials, Morrison starts by outlining a brief history of this type of source before settling into a case study of one publication. Drawing out examples from the New Zealand-based periodical The Break of Day, he demonstrates that these works sought to entertain readers with engaging content that also carried educational value, such as descriptions of children in distant mission fields. Like Divya Kannan illustrates in her recent article for this journal ("'Children's Work for Children,'" spring 2021), Morrison similarly contends that these texts strived to teach young people about the world but also encouraged their readers to view themselves as moral agents whose racial, religious, and national identities located them at the top of an imperial hierarchy. In sections three and four, the focus of the book moves away from specific activities and reaches for wider conceptual eaves. Starting with questions of citizenship, Morrison explores how the children's mission movement stoked nationalist sentiments in young colonials while binding them to more expansive understandings of imperial belonging. Rather than presenting this as a rigid process, his writing effectively captures the fluid oscillation of power between these two modes of identity and also touches upon the experiential dimensions of race and gender. And in section four, issues of community, difference, and belonging remain in view as Morrison closes his book with a study of emotions. Following children into venues where they participated in large mission events, he tracks the ways that youthful expressions of enthusiasm cohered or jarred with adult expectations. Simultaneously, he engages with recent theories, highlighting the utility of concepts like Stephanie Olsen's emotional formations and frontiers to this aspect of childhood history. As in the rest of this text, his consideration of these concepts stretches...