Periodical Time in Nineteenth Century Children's Magazines

Abrupt changes in how time was calculated and understood in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, including the creation of time zones and the new national regulation of mail and train schedules, suggests that the nation in... [ view full abstract ]

Abrupt changes in how time was calculated and understood in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, including the creation of time zones and the new national regulation of mail and train schedules, suggests that the nation in this era had to adapt to new ways of understanding time. Children’s literature kept up with these changes with the genre of the children’s magazine, which used these new technologies to deliver monthly issues of these magazines to child readers with a regularity and swiftness previously impossible.  This new regularity required both adult and child readers to re-conceptualize national time and their own relationship to it.  In contrast to novels which could (and did) fetishize children who were figuratively “frozen” in time and never grew up, the periodic nature of children’s magazines had to confront the fact that each issue addressed an audience that was a month older than the last.

 This paper argues that the periodic and serial nature of children’s periodicals during the nineteenth century created a genre in which the clock was constantly ticking.  It negotiated between the cultural desire to keep the child “a child” as long as possible and the perception that the increasingly technological and urban world was causing time to speed up. Reading the children’s periodical thus allows us to question the relationship between time and childhood in the nineteenth century and to consider how periodical genres of children’s literature forcibly disrupt conceptions of time, childhood, and reading that had long been treasured in times past.