by Kristine Moruzi
1. Tell us a bit about your book on charity and children’s periodicals
My book is about how children’s periodicals in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries encouraged young people to do charitable work. I examined a number of different children’s magazines, including religious, commercial, and charitable ones, to show how these periodicals encouraged their young readers to contribute time and money to their charitable causes.
These causes included foreign and home missionary work, beds in children’s hospitals, child emigration, temperance, the Junior Red Cross, and much more. Between 1840 and 1930, children were consistently and actively engaged in raising money and doing charitable work. And children’s periodicals were instrumental in helping to identify these charitable causes and directing children towards activities that would help support these charities.
2. What inspired you to research the area of children and charity?
One of the main ways that charitable contributions were acknowledged in the periodical press is through subscription lists.
These lists typically identified the charitable donor’s name, address, and contribution. However, when I first came across a list in a nineteenth-century children’s magazine, Aunt Judy’s Magazine,I had no idea what it was or why it was there. And thus began a lengthy research project aimed at uncovering the extent of children’s charitable work and how children’s periodicals – and their editors and writers – encouraged young readers to participate in charitable giving.
3. What was the most exciting thing about this project for you?
The project spans a period of 90 years from 1840 to 1930. During this period, children’s periodicals, and the periodical press more broadly, changed as paper prices decreased and new technologies were introduced. By the turn of the twentieth century, children’s magazines contained more illustrations, and photography was much more common. Some of these magazines included photographs of individual children or groups who had raised money for a particular charitable cause.
Meanwhile, child readers were engaging with their magazines by writing letters that were published in the correspondence columns of the magazine. So we see much more evidence of the individual children who are involved in this charitable work.
At the same time, children’s magazines are always keen to attract new readers to replace the children who were growing up and no longer interested in their content. This impacts the charitable causes as well. If you want to continue to support a charitable cause through a magazine, you must attract new readers, inform them about the cause, and encourage them to support it. These children’s periodicals developed a range of strategies to keep their young readers informed about, and invested in, their charitable work.
4. Did you discover anything particularly strange or surprising?
I expected that the charitable work being performed by young people was encouraged by adults, and it definitely was. But I also found vibrant communities of young people who were writing to ‘their’ magazine and suggesting that readers raise money for a particular charitable cause. The enthusiasm of the young people themselves for this charitable work was incredible.
This support for charitable work was also evident throughout the British empire. Like their British counterparts, young people in New Zealand and Australia wrote in to children’s columns of adult weekly newspapers and asked the editors of these columns to allow them to raise funds for various charitable causes.
5. Did you get exclusive access to any new or hard-to-find sources?
I was fortunate to be able to visit a number of extraordinary archives run by some of the charitable organisations I discuss in the book, including the Red Cross, the Waifs and Strays Society, Barnardos, and the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children in London.
6. Has your research in this area changed the way you see the world today?
This research demonstrates the extent to which young people in the past were capable of engaging with and contributing to the world around them. Young people’s charitable work in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was ubiquitous because it was understood that they should think about how they could help others. In the twenty-first century, our ideas about children and childhood have changed significantly, and it makes me wonder about the extent to which we still encourage young people to consider how they can help others.
7. What’s next for your research on children and charity?
The heyday of children’s periodicals is the period I’ve covered in my book. So in my next project I want to turn my attention to the twentieth century and see what happens to children’s charity in children’s literature. How much of the decline in children’s charitable behaviours is a result of secularism? Or is it a consequence of our changing ideas of childhood? I think looking at children’s literature published in the twentieth century is part of the answer to these questions.
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About the book
Uncovers the role of children’s periodicals in the development of charitable ideals for children between 1840–1930
- The first book-length study highlighting the role of children’s periodicals in the development of charitable ideals for children between 1840-1930
- Considers the role of middle- and working-class children as charitable donors and the extent to which children could occupy dual roles as both donors and recipients
- Demonstrates how children’s magazines and children’s columns encouraged children to undertake charitable work by considering their agency, motivations, subjectivity and habits
- Highlights the transnational circulation of charitable ideals for young people
About the author
Kristine Moruzi is Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. Her research focuses on contemporary and historical children’s literature, with a particular interest in children’s magazine culture in the nineteenth century.
