Children’s Magazines, Urban Gentility, and the Ideal of the Child Consumer in the United States, 1823-1918

As print culture grew in the 19th century, publishers raced to meet the demand for magazines aimed at middle- and upper-class children — especially those whose families had leisure time and cultural aspirations to gentility. Paul B. Ringel ’90 analyzes the content of these American children’s magazines and provides the stories of their authors and publishers to explain how the industry trained generations of children to become consumers.