Commercializing Childhood
272 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
5 b&w illus.
Paperback
Release Date:23 Sep 2015
ISBN:9781625341914
Commercializing Childhood
Children's Magazines, Urban Gentility, and the Ideal of the Child Consumer in the United States, 1823-1918
University of Massachusetts Press
Long before activists raised concerns about the dangers of commercials airing during Saturday morning cartoons, America's young people emerged as a group that businesses should target with goods for sale. As print culture grew rapidly in the nineteenth century, enterprising publishers raced to meet the widespread demand for magazines aimed at middle- and upper-class children, especially those whose families had leisure time and cultural aspirations to gentility. Advertisers realized that these children represented a growing market for more than magazines, and the editors chose stories to help model good consumer behavior for this important new demographic.
In this deeply researched and engaging book, Paul B. Ringel combines an analysis of the stories in nineteenth-century American children's magazines with the backstories of their authors, editors, and publishers to explain how this hugely successful industry trained generations of American children to become genteel consumers. Ringel demonstrates how these publications, which were read in hundreds of thousands of homes, played to two conflicting impulses within American families: to shield children from commercial influences by offering earnest and moral entertainment and to help children learn how to prosper in an increasingly market-driven society.
In this deeply researched and engaging book, Paul B. Ringel combines an analysis of the stories in nineteenth-century American children's magazines with the backstories of their authors, editors, and publishers to explain how this hugely successful industry trained generations of American children to become genteel consumers. Ringel demonstrates how these publications, which were read in hundreds of thousands of homes, played to two conflicting impulses within American families: to shield children from commercial influences by offering earnest and moral entertainment and to help children learn how to prosper in an increasingly market-driven society.
This book is thoroughly researched, demonstrates an excellent understanding of magazine literature and culture, and provides biographical background and social history as contexts for the literature under examination.'—Carol J. Singley, author of Adopting America: Childhood, Kinship, and Narrative Identity in Literature
'Ringel's nuanced interpretations are alive to the contradictions inherent to the precarious cultural balancing acts of juvenile publishing, and this book presents these findings in a clear and engaging style. This is the sort of solid scholarship that truly adds to our knowledge, and I predict that this book will last as a standard resource for many years.'—Karen J. Sanchez-Eppler, author of Dependent States: The Child's Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture
'Paul Ringel's book plays a small but important role in helping readers understand the evolution [of editorial decision-making].'—The Atlantic
'This is a fine account of the complex history of literary gentility as expressed in an effort to reach out to children readers and especially their parents. The book illuminates changing attitudes toward children and definitions of childhood--for example, by recognizing popular acceptance of n extended childhood in stories directed to older youth.'—Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth
'Paul Ringel's impeccably researched and compellingly written Commercializing Childhood offers an important corrective to the assumption that children of previous centuries were 'innocent' of the marketplace, or that they were unable to make choices among competing media. Interweaving analysis of the content of children's periodicals with a savvy recovery of the editorial struggles over which content to include, Ringel traces the tension between profit and pedagogy as it emerged in some of the earliest days of children's periodical culture in the U.S.'—American Periodicals
'Scholars of children's literature, nineteenth-century periodicals, and the American print market more broadly will find Commercializing Childhood a momentous resource. Ringel deftly weaves together extensive research and keen analysis in a work that should prove approachable and absorbing for readers with any level of familiarity with children's periodicals and nineteenth-century print culture . . . It is sure to become a scholarly standard for many.'—Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada
'Ringel's nuanced and well-argued text offers ways to read children's periodicals as significant records of ideas about children's education and socialization.'—History of Education Quarterly
Paul B. Ringel is associate professor of history at High Point University.
