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Paul B. Ringel , Commercializing Childhood: Children's Magazines, Urban Gentility, and the Ideal of the Child Consumer in the United States, 1823-1918 (Amherst and Boston : University of Massachusetts Press , 2015, $28.95). Pp. 275. isbn 978 1 6253 4191 4 .
Reviews
In this excellent contribution to the histories of childhood, of children's literature, and of consumer culture, Paul Ringel explores the "tensions between commerce and ideology, gentility and entertainment, belief and action," as well as the perennial issue of how to guide children safely into a useful and respectable adulthood (71). Ringel offers a close reading of several important children's magazinesￂ -ￂ often called "juveniles" by contemporariesￂ -ￂ including the Youth's Companion, the Juvenile Miscellany, Our Young Folks, St. Nicholas Magazine, and others. Any one who has slogged through children's magazines from the nineteenth century knows that they can be oppressively didactic and aggressively overwritten; most modern readers would find it impossible to believe that children and youth would ever be attracted to them.
But Ringel persevered, and his book focusses on changes over timeￂ -ￂ changes that to most readers would seem quite subtleￂ -ￂ that show how editors and authors...