Toward a History of Children as Readers, 1890–1930

Abstract

In 1930 Journal of Social Hygiene published results of a survey of recreational interests of 1,600 girls in Brooklyn. Their favorite recreational activity was reading, which was then followed by swimming, then making dresses, going to movies, playing tennis, dancing, and riding in automobiles.1 A presentation at 19 14 New York Child Welfare exhibit on hobbies of boys found that majority of 933 boys surveyed gave reading as their favorite hobby as well.2 Reading thus topped lists of both boys and girls as their favorite pastime, and yet we know very little about historical reading experience of children. This is an especially glaring omission when we consider that time period from 1890 to 1930 saw establishment of children's publishing, children's librarianship, and dawn of the century of child.3 There are very few histories of reading that include evidence of child readers. Historical readers of all ages are notoriously difficult to study because evidence of their interactions with texts is ephemeral and often absent from historical record. There has been some scholarship that scrutinizes individual children's diaries, focusing on their reading or including evidence of their reading as one aspect of their path from childhood to adulthood.4 Only a handful of studies have attempted to analyze children's reading activities as connected to but also distinct from those of adults.5 There are studies of readers organized by class that include young people, defined as children both legally and culturally, but intertwine children's reading experiences with those of adults.6 This intertwining is appropriate when analyz-