Children’s Periodicals and the Common Good: The Charitable Child

Kristine Moruzi

This paper explores how children’s magazines encouraged children to help other children, defining a philanthropic role for young people that is reinforced through the press. It uses children’s print culture to examine the relationship between children and charitable institutions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and foreground children’s active roles. Not only does this approach demonstrate children’s agency and responsiveness to the needs of others during this period, but it also shows how ideas of charity were articulated in printed materials for children. Charitable ideals for children were mobilised in periodicals and traversed boundaries based on class, gender, and race. The ubiquity and frequency of children’s periodicals meant that young people were regularly exposed to charitable ideas in both fictional and non-fictional materials in ways that reinforced the expectation that they should help others in need.

Kristine Moruziis an associate professor in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University, Australia and author of The Charitable Child: Philanthropy in Children’s Periodicals, 1840-1940 (Edinburgh UP 2024). She is also author of Constructing Girlhood through the Periodical Press, 1850-1915 (2012) and From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Children’s Literature (1840-1940) (2018). She researches on historical and contemporary children’s literature and has edited a number of collections including Edinburgh History of Children’s Periodicals (Edinburgh UP 2024), Literary Cultures and Nineteenth-Century Childhoods (Palgrave 2023), and Sexuality and Sexual Identities in Literature for Young People (Routledge 2021).