From the mid-nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth century, children commonly made magazines at home. Inspired by popular periodicals, these homemade magazines include a range of familiar features, such as serialized stories, correspondence, and advertisements as well as familiar topics, though with added attention to subjects appealing to children. Produced as part of an at-home education or merely for entertainment, these magazines were often made by groups of children, frequently siblings, with limited or no adult intervention.Footnote 1 This essay focuses on five homemade manuscript magazines that reveal how young people associated with the Pre-Raphaelite and Bloomsbury circles enjoyed and sustained creative circles during childhood.
The analysis here is part of a broader study involving firsthand examination of forty-two children’s magazines as well as secondhand accounts of twenty others. Collectively, these magazines were produced by children aged five to seventeen in Britain, the United States, and Australia, with initial publication dates ranging from 1828 to 1921. In some cases, only one issue was produced; in others, magazines ran more or less regularly over several years. In one extraordinary example, the Unique Manuscript Magazine by brothers Roger and Giles Dixey of Oxford ran almost seventy years from 1904 until 1972.Footnote 2 In her article on the periodicals produced by the children of the Croydon Friends’ School, Catherine Sloan showcases manuscript magazines made by working-class children.Footnote 3 However, the majority of homemade magazines available online and in archives were produced by young people from middle- and upper-class households that valued education and literacy and had considerable leisure. Many of these magazines were by children of artists, authors, or educators or by children who themselves achieved renown in adult life. The Young Men’s Magazine (1829–30) by Charlotte and Branwell Brontё is probably the best-known example, but magazines were also made at home by sibling groups that included Lewis Carroll, Louisa May Alcott, and the children of Robert Frost.Footnote 4 Of course, the number of extant magazines made by recognized individuals may be an accident of celebrity: it seems worthwhile to hold on to the papers of Alcott or Carroll, but the juvenilia of the unremembered are rarely retained. Indeed, it is surprising so many samples of magazines made at home by unfamous children do survive.Footnote 5
I focus here on two related clusters of children whose magazines showcase juvenile artistic collaborations, collaborations familiar to the young people through the creative networks of adults in their lives. Having observed the socio-artistic practice of participating in a generative community of artists, these children emulate that practice with their homemade magazines (and often other endeavors like clubs and dramatic performances). These young writers sometimes attempted to produce periodicals professional in content and quality; at other times, they appear to parody the content and features of periodicals made by adults. Both rhetorical approaches assert the authority of the child authors, either achieving success in an adult endeavor or presuming to judge and mock adults. I begin with a magazine associated with the Pre-Raphaelite circle: The Scribbler (1878–80) was produced by William Morris’s daughters, Jenny and May, along with the two children of Edward Burne-Jones. I then turn to a series of magazines produced by three generations of children, socially adjacent to the Pre-Raphaelites and later central to the Bloomsbury circle: Our Paper (1870–87) by the children of the large Strachey family; The Gem (1898) by Margaret Keynes with support from her brothers, Geoffrey and John Maynard; Hyde Park Gate News (1891–95) by Vanessa, Thoby, and Virginia Stephen; and the Charleston Bulletin (1921–27, 1930–40) initially by Vanessa’s sons Julian and Quentin Bell, with a reprise by their half-sister, Angelica Bell, and including contributions from Bloomsbury adults, among them Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and John Maynard Keynes, all familiar with the form from their own youthful experiences with magazine-making.Footnote 6
These five children’s homemade magazines feature the same elements as most other samples of the genre. Four of the five have advertisements, editorials, and serials, and all have letters, abundant editorial commentary, and frequent attention to topics of interest to children, such as excursions, animals, toys and gifts, illness, and school. While I hope to paint a picture of this understudied literary form, my primary focus is on how these five specimens reflect and even generate the literary and artistic circles with which they are associated. Certainly, these magazines have the added interest of being produced by children who grew up surrounded by artists and writers and who became artists and writers themselves. However, my emphasis is on the magazines as compelling in their own right, not merely as antecedents to the texts the authors and editors would go on to produce. These homemade magazines reveal how young people seized textual authority as they formed and sustained artistic communities in childhood.
While most of these magazines have received little attention, scholars have addressed the topic of collaboration in children’s homemade periodicals, especially those produced in school settings and by networks of young women in their late teens and early twenties. Lois Burke writes: “The periodical press inspired a reciprocal reading and writing culture that allowed girls to work through adolescent identity and authorial aspirations during the late-Victorian era. This collaborative culture can be found in manuscript magazines created and circulated within networks of girls,”Footnote 7 networks also analyzed by Kathryn Gleadle. Collaboration among siblings was especially common, as Olivia and Alan Bell assert: “It was almost inevitable that households with a strong adult literary tradition should produce some corporate effort in the nursery.”Footnote 8 The magazines considered in this essay are of this sort and in each case involve mixed gender groups of siblings. Discussing the strong bond between brothers and sisters, Valerie Sanders explains: “Siblings spent more time together in a protected environment … [and] brothers who went away to school and college could expect to find their sisters at home when they returned, ready to resume … companionship.”Footnote 9 It was precisely in the context Sanders describes—over the school holidays—that many homemade magazines were produced. I find in these magazines evidence not only of how the children passed the time but also of how they fostered their own creativity, performing and in some cases reimagining the sorts of generative alliances they observed in their parents.
To create and sustain periodicals, these children exhibited what I will call a textual agency.Footnote 10 Writing about literary collaborations between children and adults, Victoria Ford Smith argues that while children’s literature scholarship, following Jacqueline Rose, has generally read children as powerless and passive, this need not be the case: she finds that an adult collaborator can support children in developing their own voice and takes as one example the collaboration between Robert Louis Stevenson and his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, on a homemade magazine.Footnote 11 Children’s agency as writers and editors of periodicals is even more striking when adult support is limited or absent altogether and the collaboration occurs among young people on their own. In these creative circles, we find a version of agency Ville Vuolanto calls a “childist perspective,” a child’s view on power structures and on the chosen textual form.Footnote 12
One power structure child authors and editors resist is the authority of the education system. The rise of homemade magazines parallels the institutionalization of education, and with their magazines, the children assert their own agendas in the face of what Elizabeth Gargano describes as “the looming specter of educational standardization.”Footnote 13 Producing magazines at home and often over the holidays, children engaged in an intellectual and creative endeavor outside the bounds of formal education or other institutions that would curtail their creativity and their authority. Indeed, many child contributors used homemade magazines as a space to ridicule their formal educations.Footnote 14 They held firm to their textual agency, highlighting the topics that interested them, making the jokes that amused them, and offering editorial commentary that reveals insight into the periodical form and the publishing process while also celebrating the “childist perspective.”
Indeed, child-editors and authors achieved remarkable agency in the complex production of periodicals: they received and vetted submissions, responded to queries, and sustained features, serials, and the magazines themselves over long periods. In “Playing the Author: Children’s Creative Writing, Paracosms, and the Construction of Family Magazines,” Christine Alexander explains that as children have little agency in the adult world, manuscript magazines offer young people the opportunity to display “a precocious knowledge of the publishing world” as they “engage with the literary scene, reorganize and reimagine it as their own.”Footnote 15 In an earlier essay, Alexander focuses on the Brontë juvenilia and describes a paradox at the heart of homemade magazines: “The child’s utterance defines itself through difference—an empowering act—while at the same time further affirming its power through self-appropriation. Paradoxically, it defines itself both in opposition to and in alliance with the adult world, through a surprising sophisticated representation of self.”Footnote 16 Because they know their genre well, child-editors are able to craft magazines that are at once good copies of and savvy commentaries on published periodicals.
The Scribbler
Jenny (b. 1861) and May (b. 1862) Morris were the only children of William Morris, the founder of the Arts and Crafts movement, a socialist, and a central figure to the Pre-Raphaelites. His wife, née Jane Burden, was a model to the Pre-Raphaelite painters, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who frequently visited the Morris home and even suggested he and his wife, Elizabeth Siddal, might adopt May.Footnote 17 The Morrises were especially close with the family of Edward Burne-Jones, a Pre-Raphaelite painter who founded a decorative arts firm with Morris. The Burne-Jones children, Philip (b. 1861) and Margaret (b. 1866), were frequent playmates with Jenny and May (fig. 1). May recounts, “Our [1873] move brought us nearer the Burne-Jones’s in Fulham, and the two families were able to meet more frequently. It was now that the constant visits of [our fathers] developed into Sunday morning breakfast at the Grange.”Footnote 18 Later, she describes the four friends as a singular entity: “Father and Mother took us abroad at the end of July [1874]—the whole bunch, Phil-and-Margaret-and-Jenny-and-May.”Footnote 19 That same year the children formed a secret society,Footnote 20 and in 1878 Jenny and May spearheaded the more serious and longer-term endeavor of The Scribbler with regular contributions from Philip and Margaret, and three known submissions from Rudyard Kipling (b. 1865), the Burne-Jones’s cousin. When they began The Scribbler, Jenny and May were seventeen and sixteen, respectively, but as the magazine arose out of a creative circle that began in childhood—the girls were thirteen and twelve during the existence of the Secret Society—and as teenaged girls existed in a liminal space between childhood and adulthood, I offer this magazine as a product of a young people’s collaboration. At twelve and thirteen, Margaret and Rudyard were definitely still in childhood.
The Morris and Burne-Jones children in the year they formed their Secret Society. May Morris; Margaret Mackail (née Burne-Jones); Sir Philip Burne-Jones; 2nd Bt’ Jane Alice (“Jenny”) Morris. By Frederick Hollyer. Albumen cabinet card, 1874. National Portrait Gallery x19862. Image used with permission.
The Morris and Burne-Jones children were surrounded by creative adults who worked in concert through the formal and informal alliances of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and through the professional networks of their design firms. With their secret society and The Scribbler, the children formed a parallel network of their own, and three of the children remained in generative creative networks throughout their lives. Margaret did not pursue an artistic career herself, but her husband, John William Mackail, was an early biographer of William Morris. Philip became a painter, known for The Vampyre (1897), and moved in circles that included the Stephen family, discussed below. May studied embroidery at the South Kensington School of Design and in 1885 became director of the embroidery department of her father’s firm.Footnote 21 She also wrote biographical introductions to each of the twenty-four volumes of her father’s collected works. Jenny suffered from epilepsy and did not enjoy the same opportunities as the others. In fact, it was not long after her diagnosis that the children began The Scribbler, and biographer Jan Marsh theorizes the magazine was an effort to keep Jenny occupied as her world narrowed: during the winter of 1878–79, Jenny’s “intellectual energies, denied academic work, found expression in editing The Scribbler.”Footnote 22 Seventeen issues were produced once or twice each month between November 1878 and March 1880.
The Scribbler features serialized stories, including “Queen of the Adriatic,” which appears in every issue of the magazine. In fact, May blamed that story for the failure of the magazine: “I think it was the ‘serial’ that killed the Scribbler: no magazine, however pronounced its vitality could survive a serial extending over a year and a half, with every prospect of running into the next century.”Footnote 23 Indeed, “Queen of the Adriatic” was never concluded. The magazine does contain ten completed serials, though none that ran for so long. “The Castle on the Moors,” for example, is only two installments, and “The St. Bartholomew” is four.Footnote 24 Serials imply a reading public awaiting subsequent installments, and the editorial labor involved in sustaining serials is a clear example of creative collaboration. In the second installment of “St. Bartholomew,” when Little Buttercup describes how “a tremendous clap of thunder shook the house from basement to rafter, and instantaneously a brilliant flash of lightning* illumined the room,” the editor inserts a note to correct the author’s meteorological science: “*We should advise ‘Little Buttercup’ to study some work on atmospheric phenomena before she commits herself again on this subject. Pr. D.”Footnote 25 This remonstrance offers a glimpse of the interactions among the young people who produced the magazine and is consistent with a practice Gleadle describes in girls’ circulated manuscript magazines: “On receiving the latest issue, participating readers were expected to provide constructive criticism and usually to award marks, before passing that number promptly on to the next name on the register. In these ways, contributors were constructing tangible networks as they engaged in the common cause of intellectual endeavor.”Footnote 26 Sloan describes similar active engagement with magazines as children would pencil in comments before passing the magazine on to the next reader.Footnote 27
While there is no record of how The Scribbler was disseminated, we can deduce from the signs of reader input that it did circulate, likely according to one of a few documented models. Some homemade magazines were read collectively: the Charleston Bulletin, for instance, was often shared over breakfast.Footnote 28 Other magazines were passed around informally among members of a fairly closed network, such as a family or two nearby households.Footnote 29 The Hyde Park Gate News is in this category. There is no evidence the magazine left the house in which it was produced, though there were up to ten family members living in the house plus visitors and servants. Some magazines were actually circulated, moving from household to household by hand or sent through the post, sometimes over great distances.Footnote 30 Many of these include lists of subscribers with addresses and instructions about how long each reader may keep the magazine before sending it to the next name on the list.Footnote 31 Given the close-friend network at the core of The Scribbler, my guess is that this magazine was handed from household to household, moving easily between families that frequently socialized.
However The Scribbler circulated, the existence of a community of readers is showcased in the correspondence included in the magazine. In the first number, “A correspondent, eager upon gymnastic sports, writes to us, asking if we can inform him of the best soap to use for the preparation of that difficult achievement known as ‘catching the pig by the soaped tail.’ We refer the ardent gymnast to our readers, being unable to inform him ourselves.”Footnote 32 While this notice appears to be a straightforward, albeit humorous, response to a letter received from a reader, the fact that it appears in the first number raises questions: did a child submit a query in anticipation of the forthcoming periodical? Or did the editor fictionalize the letter in order to include an expected feature in the magazine? It is easy to see how the humor in the query and response would amuse readers. It is also an opportunity to parody the correspondence columns in published periodicals.Footnote 33 Whether the letter was real or invented, it achieves two aims at once: it highlights (or imagines) the presence of a community into which the magazine enters, and it uses humor to assert the textual agency of the young editors.
A second example of correspondence in The Scribbler provides explicit editorial commentary about the magazine’s creative team and certainly involves some embellishment:
In answer to “Parsimonia,” who writes complaining of the high price of the “Scribbler,” the Editor begs to offer an explanation. In the first place, the “Scribbler” is printed by a newly patented process, which is sure to act in the long run, though at present it is rather tedious and expensive, and involves a large staff of printers and mechanics, who being new to the work, are somewhat puzzled and muddle-headed, and likely to sour the Editor’s future life. New and extensive premises have lately been erected at Hammersmith, close to the Oil-mills, especially established for the preparation of printer’s ink to be used in the offices.Footnote 34
The editor suggests a much more substantial community of young people at work on the magazine—“a large staff of printers and mechanics”—than was truly the case. The Morris sisters were familiar with large staffs of laborers and artists through their father’s design firm, and it is not surprising they evoke a similar creative enterprise of their own. However, while some later installments were typed, the early installments were handwritten, so there was no staff of printers at all. The editor borrows language she knows from her parents’ artistic efforts and deploys it to comic effect. She makes similar rhetorical gestures on at least two other occasions: at the end of the second number when she states the magazine is published by “Messrs Morris & Co (Junior)” and in a mock notice appearing earlier in the same issue: “Morris & Co., Junior beg respectfully to announce that as they are selling off their Summer stock of three-legged stools, tables and chests, etc. after medieval patterns … N.B. No connection with a firm of the same name in Oxford St.”Footnote 35 Though Jenny and May Morris clearly modeled their creative community on their parents’, when they assert there is “no connection,” they insist their project is not merely a subsidiary of the adults’ enterprise. They further distance their own creative work from their parents’ through humor.
Yet even as they sought to preserve their authority as young creators, the editors and contributors to The Scribbler regularly mention the broader creative circle they lived within. Some of these references are clearly fictional, such as this note in the first number: “The celebration of the fifty-second anniversary of the founding of the Shakespeare Idiots’ Society took place last week at the Vestry Hall … in Erewhonshire.”Footnote 36 The mention of Erewhonshire, surely a reference to Samuel Butler’s 1872 novel,Footnote 37 intimates this event was invented for comedic purposes and perhaps also to create the impression of a robust community. Probably not fictional are several accounts of at-home dramatic performances. For instance, the March 1879 issue includes a review of “A Quiet Evening” at the residence of Mr. Bell of Kew and featuring assorted members of the Nicholson, Bell, and Morris families: “The performance was received with bursts of approbation, testified by much laughter from the distinguished audience.”Footnote 38 A year later, The Scribbler includes a description of another performance featuring the same players with the addition of W. Sickert.Footnote 39 These social outings featured multigenerational groups of writers and publishers performing together and reveal the presence of a broader creative community out of which The Scribbler emerged.Footnote 40
The Scribbler further calls attention to this network in January 1880 when the editor announces the Portfolio, a new magazine edited by Mr. E. H. Bell: many homemade magazines broadcast the advent of others, promoting the work of friends and relations and also reminding readers of a robust publishing scene created and curated by young people. The next issue of The Scribbler mentions the Portfolio again and describes methods of contribution and circulation: “… the contributors have but to send their articles to [the Editor], and the number, when completed is sent to one, with a list of names and addresses of the rest, and the dates when it is due at each place.”Footnote 41 That the Morris girls were familiar with this method of circulation yet chose not to deploy it offers further evidence that The Scribbler was likely shared within a smaller circle. Even so, correspondence, descriptions of social gatherings, and notices of other homemade magazines all mark The Scribbler as the product of a community of creative young people, a community also highlighted by serialization and editorial interjections. The Morris and Burne-Jones children were steeped in artistic collaboration, and it is not surprising that they emulated the practice. Indeed, their magazine showcases deep familiarity not only with the periodical form but also with the work of making art in community. Through humor as well as the successful creation of a fully developed periodical, they assert and sustain textual agency in The Scribbler, a lasting record of the busy and creative teenaged years of Phil-and-Margaret-and-Jenny-and-May.
Our Paper
Our Paper, a holiday project of the children and cousins of the large Strachey family, was produced weekly during the 1870–72 summer holidays and then very sporadically between 1872 and 1876 with a single issue in 1887. The project was initially spearheaded by the children’s mother, Jane Strachey, who is identified as the editor of the first installment. According to biographer Barbara Caine, Jane “spent a lot of time with her children, regarding them as companions and entering into their activity with great enthusiasm. She oversaw their early education at home and as soon as they were able to read and write encouraged them to produce their own newspapers.”Footnote 42 In “parliamentary reports,” accounts of the inner workings of the magazine, Jane Strachey looms large, referred to as Her Majesty; however, these reports also indicate the children had considerable authority over the enterprise, taking editorial control after the first issue. The main authors and editors in 1870 were elder siblings and cousins of the more famous Lytton (b. 1880). Key participants ranged in age from five to fourteen and included Elinor (b. 1859), Richard (b. 1864), and Dolly (b. 1865) as well as cousins Arthur (b. 1858) and Kitty (b. 1860) Strachey, Andrew Colvile (b. 1859), and Bartle Grant (b. 1856) (fig. 2). A list of seventeen contributors with pen names and ages was drawn up in 1872 and facilitates identification of the children involved at that point. Many of the contributors were later associated with the Bloomsbury circle, most famously Lytton, who was not yet born when the magazine began but contributed to the 1887 reprise when he was seven years old.Footnote 43
This 1870 photograph shows several of the children the year Our Paper began. “Arthur, Dolly, Elinor, Kitty, Charlie, Dick.” Photographer unknown. Albumen carte-de-visite, September 1870. NPG x129642. Image used with permission.
As the 1872 list of contributors makes plain, Our Paper involved quite a large group of children, and, as in The Scribbler, the editors set their magazine in a broader literary community when they include correspondence and mention other homemade magazines. For instance, a review of Our Paper from the Kilburn Times appears in the August 31, 1870, number and includes detailed commentary on the work of many contributors, such as five-year-old Dolly, writing under the pen name Loldy. The reviewer writes, “we … compliment Loldy on the length of her compositions, which are so full of thought & information that it would be impossible to weary oneself with reading them.”Footnote 44 Loldy’s contributions are quite short, so the review is tongue-in-cheek and may be invented, along with its supposed source, in which case the review only simulates a literary community. The reviewer is George Rowe (aka Regeo Wore) whose name appears in the 1872 list of contributors to Our Paper, which further suggests the piece may never have appeared in another magazine and thus fictionalizes a larger creative community than may have existed.
Correspondence first appears in the sixth installment of Our Paper in which “Emma” describes a visit to Margate, and Charlie Grant (aka R. Gnat, then aged seventeen) writes about school exams. In a different letter, Grant describes the discovery of a lost Shakespeare play, a parody transcribed into the installment.Footnote 45 Two years later, in September 1872, Grant again writes a humorous letter, this one poking fun at the contents of published periodicals: “I take up my pen partly because I find it difficult to write without one, & partly because I have to suggest that there is a want of padding very noticeable in Our Paper, a want of light literature and anecdote, a barrenness of statistical reports.”Footnote 46 In January 1873 a letter from Elinor (writing as Norile) describes a diverse readership: “There can be no doubt that the great object of ‘Our Paper’ is to get as many people as possible to read it, and of course no one will do so unless it is amusing. The little ones think the riddles amusing & the older ones the domestic leaders and reports.”Footnote 47 More earnest than her cousin’s letter of the year before, Elinor’s letter shows how the young editors made strategic editorial choices to meet the tastes of a range of readers.
The “parliamentary reports” that appear in several issues of Our Paper offer a rich repository of editorial commentary about making the magazine. Despite their mother’s early influence, these reports show the children managing the logistics of home-publishing largely on their own. The first report records two meetings during which the group discussed the acquisition of paper and the formulation of pen names:
Aug 15th. President asked the House for supplies for a new book … President moved a petition to Her Majesty for the backs of old letters etc … Agreed…. Aug 16th. President moved that a vote of thanks be offered to H. M. for gracious assent to the letter petition. G. P. seconded. Carried…. President moved that writers & correspondents of “Our Paper” subscribe to their contributions anagrams formed of the letters of their own names.Footnote 48
The parliamentary report next appears in August 1872 and includes a fascinating discussion of whether the girls should be recognized as females or should continue to publish using masculine titles: Elinor, for instance, had been known as Mr. Norile. The motion “in support of female suffrage and asserting that ‘female members of this House be recognized in all the forms of this House, as of the feminine gender’” was put to a vote and failed to pass.Footnote 49 This report also recounts debate over the frequency of publication; some felt it was too much work to produce the magazine weekly, while the opposition asserted that since the magazine was published only over the holidays, bringing it out weekly was manageable. As a compromise to avoid the false promise of publishing weekly year-round, the children voted to amend the title with the phrase “a holiday newspaper & magazine.” The parliamentary reports show the children asserting agency over a style of collective decision-making they observed in adults, and in having fun with the discourse of parliamentary procedure, they make it their own.
Despite the August 1872 resolution, the children failed to produce Our Paper weekly: the next number appeared one month later on September 8, 1872, and the next after several months on January 7, 1873. The subsequent issue did not appear until 1876, and there was then a gap of over ten years. When the magazine returned for one issue in 1887, all the original contributors were adults, and it seems Dolly, then aged twenty-two, was the editor. Perhaps motivated by fond remembrances of her own experiences, she corralled the younger siblings and cousins into a reprise of the family magazine. One of the contributors was “Selig,” the pen name for Giles, later known by his middle name Lytton. Seven-year-old Selig offered “A Frog’s Adventure. A Fable,” about a frog called Hoplegs who doesn’t listen to his mother, as well as ten short “Poems on Animals Fishes & Birds,” all more or less what you would expect from a young boy with some innate literary talent, not yet realized.Footnote 50 The reprise of Our Paper is noteworthy, not only because it includes the most famous of the Strachey children, but also because it involves passing the practice of making a magazine from an older generation to a younger one. A much longer-lasting example is the Charleston Bulletin, which features assorted Stracheys and Grants as well as John Maynard Keynes, and is a reprise of the Stephen family’s Hyde Park Gate News. The Charleston Bulletin itself was reprised in 1930 by the youngest Bell sibling, Angelica. The return to a family magazine in the next generation indicates how important these endeavors were to the young participants and how the creative communities at the heart of these home publications extended over time.
The Gem
Edited by Margaret Keynes (b. 1885) with regular contributions from neighbors Arthur and E. Glazebrook and brothers John Maynard (b. 1883) and Geoffrey (b. 1887),Footnote 51 The Gem appeared in eleven installments throughout 1898 when the Keynes children were thirteen, fifteen, and eleven, respectively.Footnote 52 John Maynard became an important economist and central Bloomsbury figure; Geoffrey became a writer and surgeon, also associated with the Bloomsbury group; and Margaret became a social reformer with an emphasis on the welfare of children and the elderly.Footnote 53 The children who produced The Gem differ from the others considered in this essay because, though adjacent to artists, their own adult lives were more academic and intellectual than artistic. They thus show that creative collaboration was not only practiced by young people destined to pursue artistic endeavors.Footnote 54
Like the magazines discussed above, The Gem includes serials and correspondence; it also features riddles, puzzles, and competitions. These provide direct engagement with readers who sent in responses and won prizes, thus collaborating in the production of the periodical even if they did not also contribute written work or illustrations. Margaret writes in the first number: “There will be a competition every week which the editor hopes all will go in for.”Footnote 55 The “all” here suggests a community, although the result of the first competition—the best drawing of a little man—never appears. The second competition is more successful: announced in the second number, a prize is offered for making the most words out of the letters in “competition.”Footnote 56 Readers learn the next week that eleven-year-old Geoffrey won for eighty-two words, and Miss E. Glazebrook received honorable mention for seventy-six.Footnote 57 Competitions, like correspondence, display the active participation of readers, though in this second instance both entries are from children in the magazine’s inner circle.
Additional content in The Gem sheds light on the community of children involved in its creation. In the first installment, the page labeled General News lists three items, all indicating participation of a specific group of young people:
A meeting will be held in the 6 Harvey Rd. schoolroom fortnightly, [at] which it is hoped all members of the H[arvey]. R[oad]. D[ramatic]. S[ociety]. will be present.Footnote 58
A letter box is going to be placed on the wall between No 6 and 7 Harvey Road it will be cleaned daily for contributions.
The Editor will be obliged if Miss E Glazebrook will make the first covers.Footnote 59
These items broadcast shared activity, shared space, and shared responsibility. In the next installment, an editorial further suggests the communal nature of this publishing project: “I think it would be a good plan if the contributors of this magazine took it in turns to be editor. This might prevent the editor from getting tired of it and the consequent death of the magazine. I should like to know the opinions of contributors about this.”Footnote 60 In the fourth installment, which appeared two months after the third, a poem apologizes for the delayed production of the magazine and describes another consequence of children in community—communicable disease:
For weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks,
The Gem has not been out.
The measles have made red its cheeks.
Its eyes did water spout.Footnote 61
This is one of several apologies issued by child editors for delays due to illness. One might argue that Margaret asserts authority over the situation by writing the poem, but in truth, disease was a factor that limited children’s agency.
In the same number as the measles poem, the editor implies interest in The Gem may be flagging: she requests “any serials must be sent complete to the editor,” a new rule likely imposed because some contributors failed to finish their serial stories. The editor also announces the “Gem will appear at indefinite intervals.”Footnote 62 The magazine depended on the participation of a small group of creative children, and when they were unable to contribute or chose not to, the magazine suffered. Indeed, the group central to The Gem’s production began to disperse in the spring of 1898. The fourth number reports the Glazebrook family moved to Liverpool, and Margaret comments on her elder brother’s departure for school with a lament:
It almost makes one cry to tell
What to the Gem one day befell
John Keynes did leave his native home
At Eton town he now doth roam.Footnote 63
Though physically removed, John Maynard sent letters from Eton, including one written in the humorous style typical of children’s homemade magazines. The “epistolary letter” claims the “respectful correspondent” is “honored … to address the revered editor” and goes on at length about how he “should fill more than [his] fair share” of the periodical if “he submitted anything more of the important point” he wishes to mention. He never mentions a point, and the letter is clearly a send-up of the long-winded, obsequious correspondence the children encountered in traditionally published periodicals.Footnote 64 Maynard also sent photographs to be pasted into the magazine, a feature that marks The Gem as somewhat unusual, though not unique (fig. 3). Several photographs are of Eton and thus document the participation of the elder sibling even while away at school. The Glazebrooks may also have participated from afar: Margaret wrote in November 1898, after the family had moved away, “Next term I am exceedingly sorry to say I shall have to give up my pleasant duty of Editor, but I hope Miss E Glazebrook will continue the Gem, and I hope to be still able to contribute.”Footnote 65 This plea, along with John Maynard’s letters from Eton, show how the community of children continued to collaborate even when dispersed. In so doing, they attempted to retain their textual agency despite the lack of agency over where they resided.
“Eton College” photographs by John Maynard Keynes. The Gem, No. 9. (November 1898): 3. © The estates of John Maynard Keynes, Sir Geoffrey Langdon Keynes, & Margaret Neville Keynes. Used with permission from Prof. Simon D. Keynes on behalf of the Keynes family and reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.
The physical removal of key participants was also managed by widening the circle: new initials begin appearing among the contributors midway through the year. One editorial in August 1898 insisted the magazine remained healthy, exaggerating the readership, “thousands – nay rather millions – are trembling with eagerness to read [The Gem’s] inspired pages.”Footnote 66 Still, being geographically scattered and busy with their respective educations proved ultimately to be insurmountable obstacles, and the magazine folded by the end of the year. The failure of The Gem is a reminder that children’s agency was limited. Maintaining a collaborative publishing project was exceptionally difficult for young people who had limited control over their time and no control over their health or where they lived. This evident difficulty makes homemade magazines that run for several years all the more impressive.
Hyde Park Gate News
Probably the best known of the magazines discussed in this essay, the Hyde Park Gate News was produced by the three eldest Stephen siblings. Sixty-nine issues appeared weekly in 1891–92 and 1895. Like The Scribbler, this magazine was made by a group of children, in this case only siblings, who were frequently included in their parents’ creative circle (fig. 4). Their mother, Julia Stephen, like Jane Morris, had been a Pre-Raphaelite model, and their father, Leslie Stephen, was a highly respected writer and scholar. The Stephen children became adults who pursued artistic endeavors: modernist writer Virginia Woolf, painter Vanessa Bell, and founder of the Bloomsbury group Thoby Stephen.Footnote 67
All four children with their mother in the period between the two extant runs of Hyde Park Gate News. Julia and the children at lessons, 1894: (left to right) Thoby, Vanessa, Virginia, Julia, and Adrian. Smith College Libraries, Mortimer Rare Book Collection. www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/rarebook/exhibitions/stephen/38a.htm.
Virginia (b. 1882), Vanessa (b. 1879), and Thoby (b. 1880) all contributed to the Hyde Park Gate News, though Virginia was the primary editor and writer. At age nine when the magazine began, she was younger than most of the children in leadership positions in the production of homemade magazines—the average age for child-editors of the magazines in my broader study is just over thirteen. Vanessa was twelve, and Thoby was eleven. The youngest Stephen sibling, Adrian (b. 1883), was excluded from work on the magazine, though he is mentioned often. In 1892 the Hyde Park Gate News reports on Adrian’s attempts to produce his own magazine, the Cork-Screw Gazette. The editor describes this “little squitty paper” and writes that Adrian “is not blessed with the spirit of punctuality which may be called the foundation stone of a paper.” In the same editorial, she recounts Leslie Stephen’s attempt to dissuade Adrian from making his own paper.Footnote 68 A few weeks later, the editor reports again on the failure of the magazine to appear, this time due to illness: “The Editor of the ‘Cork Screw Gazette’ is now suffering from over-work. We do not know whether his little weekly production will be able to appear. The first morning of his illness would have afforded good training for a steward as he was pretty liberal with his vomitations.”Footnote 69 With the references to this other family magazine, the editors of Hyde Park Gate News indicate a broader creative community, even as they distance themselves from an inferior juvenile effort. They thus echoed the creative circles of their parents and anticipated the celebrated circle of their adulthood.Footnote 70
In adult life, both Virginia and Vanessa supplied recollections of the magazine. Vanessa wrote in “Notes on Virginia’s Childhood”: “Naturally we produced a family newspaper – The Hyde Park Gate News. Virginia wrote most of it and it lasted four or five years.”Footnote 71 Quoting from this same source, Gill Lowe explains the excitement the girls felt as they awaited their mother’s reaction to an issue of the Hyde Park Gate News:
Once, while their parents were at dinner, the girls pointedly left an issue of Hyde Park Gate News on the table beside their mother’s sofa, crept into the adjoining room in anticipation, and hid to hear their parents’ reaction. Virginia was “trembling with excitement” as they waited, spying through the window into the drawing room…. Then [our mother] noticed the paper, picked it up, began to read. We looked and listened hard for some comment. “Rather clever, I think,” said my mother, putting the paper down without apparent excitement.Footnote 72
Woolf described this anticipation herself in “A Sketch of the Past”: “How excited I used to be when the ‘Hyde Park Gate News’ was laid on [mother’s] plate on Monday morning, and she liked something I had written!”Footnote 73 In her remarks on the children’s magazine, biographer Hermione Lee asserts Julia Stephen’s “personality is detectable everywhere in the Hyde Park Gate News, which is anxious to please her.”Footnote 74 Quentin Bell, Woolf’s nephew and biographer as well as the editor of the Charleston Bulletin, affirms that the young Virginia Stephen was mindful of her adult audience: “As might be expected [of the 1895 installments], the charm and fun of the earlier numbers has evaporated…. She is still writing for an adult audience; but now she has reached a self-conscious age and plays for safety.”Footnote 75 Despite these assertions that the Stephen children were conscious of their adult readers, especially their mother, there is no indication any adult assisted in the production of the magazine.
Moreover, while the Stephen children evidently had an adult audience in mind, they included content that indicates the magazine also sought to entertain young readers. Hyde Park Gate News frequently features two subjects common in children’s homemade magazines: pets and toy boats. For instance, in fall 1891 the loss of Virginia’s toy boat The Fairy is reported:
It is with very great sorrow that we state that the youngest female residing at 22 H. P. is plunged in the very deepest mourning by the loss of her beautiful boat the Fairy…. She made several short voyages each time returning to the shore. She then made fine progress and had next reached the other side of the pond when she was observed to get suddenly smaller and disappeared from view.Footnote 76
Our Paper also includes a report of a lost toy boat, the Royal George, which split in two.Footnote 77 The incident reported in the Hyde Park Gate News is particularly compelling because of the unexpected sequel several months later: “Oh astounding event! ‘The Fairy’ has been restored to terra firma to the joy of her youthful owners.”Footnote 78 The account of how the boat was discovered and returned follows. In some ways, this magazine functions as a sort of newsletter of family life, and thus the story of the lost-and-found boat would perhaps be expected by adult readers in the household, but it would have a special urgency and emotional resonance for young readers.
Especially intriguing is the inclusion of this story about play in a magazine that pretends to be adult in content and style. The editors achieve a successful facsimile of a published periodical but do not let their readers forget that they are children. We see another example of adult tone meeting child delight in a report on “a vulgar little song coming into fashion who’s chorus is ‘Ta ra ra bomteay.’ [sic] We are sure that the proper mind of Mrs. Jackson [the children’s maternal grandmother] would be properly shocked to know that this vulgar little ditty has actually been sung under the same house as the one in which she is.”Footnote 79 Repetition of the terms “vulgar” and “proper” evokes an adult sensibility, but the delight in the song itself and in singing it in proximity to their grandmother emphasizes the children’s point of view. Indeed, getting away with singing this ditty may be analogous to getting away with the child-focused elements of the parent-pleasing newspaper.
Hyde Park Gate News also offers the children’s perspectives on the family’s travels and social outings. Some outings were aimed at young audiences, such as attending a magic show: “The young juveniles who reside in 22 H. P. G. have lately been to an entertainment given by Maskelyne and Cook. The young juveniles were taken there by that most benignant of benignant ladies Miss Duckworth.”Footnote 80 As with the discussion of “Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay,” the diction in this piece combines adult phrasing—“young juveniles”—with content pleasing to children. Some social events described in Hyde Park Gate News were more adult: for instance, an October 1892 piece describes visits from “the newly wedded couple Mr and Mrs Davis,” Arthur and Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, the parents of the boys whose imaginative play would inspire J. M. Barrie to write Peter Pan, and Philip Burne-Jones who “acts a sort of moving spirit to everything.”Footnote 81 We cannot know if the Stephen children knew Burne-Jones had also made a magazine in his youth, but it is gratifying to think that the man retained some of the spirit that infused the secret society and The Scribbler.
In addition to frequent references to activities with adult friends and family members, the writers also mention other children, such as cousin Charles Fisher and friends Sybil Dilke and Hilary Hunt. Fisher was the son of Julia Stephen’s sister and spent his Sundays with the Stephens.Footnote 82 Because he was often in the family home, Charles was probably familiar with the Hyde Park Gate News. Sybil Dilke was also proximate—she lived next door and was near in age to the Stephen children—while Hilary Hunt was the nephew and stepson of William Holman Hunt, another Pre-Raphaelite. While no evidence suggests these children contributed to the magazine, they may well have been part of the community of readers. That said, the Hyde Park Gate News was a more insular project than the other magazines discussed here—it was produced by and for the Stephen family.
Even with restricted participation in the Hyde Park Gate News, the children still included familiar features that suggest a creative community. Along with serials and notices of other magazines, the magazine frequently features correspondence. For example, in March 1895 a correspondent who addresses the editor as “my dear cousin” describes a literary conversation between a young person and an adult:
After dinner we discussed Charlotte Brontё. “Charlotte Brontё was a very clever woman,” said my aunt. I did not like her to think that I did not know everything there was to be known about Charlotte Brontё, so I said, “Yes, and poetry too.” “She was a very good novelist,” repeated my aunt, “and I think she wrote one or two very pretty poems. The Spanish Gipsy and Aurora Leigh, but I haven’t read them for some time.”Footnote 83
The joke is that Brontё wrote neither The Spanish Gipsy nor Aurora Leigh; moreover, it is hardly accurate to describe these hefty verse-novels as “pretty poems.” Both the young person and the aunt reveal what thirteen-year-old Virginia likely considered comical ignorance, though they do spend an evening talking about literature. With this humorous depiction of the sort of literary conversation the Stephen children knew well, Virginia asserts textual agency, right under the nose of her judgmental adult readers.
An earlier example of correspondence in Hyde Park Gate News follows a pattern seen in The Scribbler: answers are provided to questions supposedly sent into the magazine, and the combination of the response and the correspondent’s name allows the reader to deduce the question.Footnote 84 For instance, the editor advises “Redskin” to “Use Pear’s soap daily,” and “Reader” is told, “If the child is a girl ‘A World of Girls’ or the Girls Own Paper would be suitable. If a boy, certainly the Boy’s Own Annual.” The response to “Generosity” reminds us that Virginia’s boat spent the winter of 1891–92 lost in the weeds: “The name you have given yourself seems to suit you very well. The youngest Editor wishes for a boat above all things.”Footnote 85 In this correspondence section, the children seem to address an adult readership—adults are likely to be purchasing books for children and certainly the plea for a toy boat is directed to an adult. Yet in taking control of a well-known feature of periodicals for their own purposes, especially in the last item about the boat, the child asserts a “childist perspective” and with it assumes agency within the periodical form. Additionally, the indication of a real or imagined network of active readers reminds us that this magazine emerged from an artistic community. The creativity central to the children’s lives would extend not only into their adult years but also into the family’s next generation.
Charleston Bulletin
Like the 1887 issue of Our Paper, the Charleston Bulletin is a second-generation magazine, an exceptionally robust example with significant input from Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell as well as cameo appearances by others whose juvenile efforts have been discussed here: John Maynard Keynes and several of the Strachey siblings as well as Bartle Grant’s son, Duncan. The magazine was produced between 1921 and 1927 by Julian (b. 1908) and Quentin Bell (b. 1910), the two sons of Vanessa Bell, with later contributions from their younger sister Angelica (b. 1918) (fig. 5).Footnote 86 Thirteen and twelve, respectively, Julian and Quentin captured life at Charleston, the house where the Bells lived along with Duncan Grant, David Garnett, and sometimes Keynes, and where many figures of the Bloomsbury circle came to visit. Like their parents, Quentin and Angelica both became artists, and Quentin was also an art historian and curator of his aunt’s life. Julian was a poet but died young, killed while driving an ambulance during the Spanish Civil War.
The children during the second year of publication of the Charleston Bulletin. Photograph of Quentin (left) and Julian Bell sitting on the ground with their half-sister, Angelica Bell, outside their home “Charleston,” East Sussex, 1922. Part of the Vanessa Bell Collection. Tate Archive. Presented by Angelica Garnett 1981 and 1988–92. © Tate. Used with permission.
In his biography of Julian, Peter Stansky writes, “The children found [Charleston,] its grounds, and the surrounding countryside a perfect place for endless activity.” He adds, “The children, along with the grown-ups, were at the center of life at Charleston: that is its immediately distinguishing quality. They were not put to one side, categorized, or patronized, taken up enthusiastically and unceremoniously let down.”Footnote 87 In “Charleston Garden: A Memory of Childhood,” Quentin recalls, “In the eyes of the grown-ups we had one virtue: we did not need to be amused…. I am still grateful for the policy of wise neglect which made [Charleston] for us so happy a place.”Footnote 88 It was in this happy place that the boys, both taking on editorial responsibility at different times, documented life with the Charleston Bulletin, later known as The New Bulletin. Like the Hyde Park Gate News, this was a family paper produced by the children and presented for approval to the older generation. An important difference lies in the attitude of the youth to their parents: whereas Virginia and Vanessa were anxious for their parents’ respect and wounded when they did not receive it, Quentin and Julian were almost peers with their parents and were quick to levy criticisms and to satirize the adults’ behavior.
The Charleston Bulletin differs from the other magazines considered here in being less an attempt to replicate a published periodical and more what we would now call a newsletter. There are weather forecasts and accounts of assorted events at Charleston. These include visits from friends and family, a wide range of outdoor adventures, and the building of a new studio on the back of the house as well as many apologies for delayed publication or other perceived deficiencies in the magazine.Footnote 89 The tone is often mocking, as in this July 1927 notice:
The local country is now menaced by a new peril, following Nessa’s sensational purchase of a Renault the Woolves have purchased a Singer And the denizens of Tilton are now the proud owners of a second hand Morris Cowley. Whatever we may think of the problem of pedestrian traffic and the misuse of motor-cars we must all agree that the car will be a great asset to the house and a prmanent [sic] source of instruction and amusement to the rats in the duck shed.Footnote 90
Much of the writing throughout the magazine is humorous and exaggerated, the children taking no pains to spare the adults, but the events described are based on real occurrences, as multiple biographies and memoirs affirm.
The New Bulletin did not publish serialized stories or puzzles. However, it included an abundance of correspondence and other features that describe or invite participation of the readers and signal the presence of a lively creative community. It also has many editorials that provide metacommentary on the production and readership of the magazine. Several of the Bloomsbury adults sent letters to the Bulletin, and Virginia Woolf contributed six stories, illustrated by Quentin.Footnote 91 These stories feature comical depictions of the adults who formed the Charleston community. “The Dunciad,” for instance, presents the life story of Duncan Grant, and “Eminent Charlestonians” has sections on Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, Duncan Grant, and others; it was obviously modeled on Eminent Victorians, the manuscript of which Lytton Strachey had read aloud at Charleston.Footnote 92 Among other adults who submitted writing to the Bulletin are artist and critic Roger Fry, who sent “a charming letter” to the August 21, 1924, number, and John Maynard Keynes who replied to “The Bulletin Questionnaire on Charlestonian Belief” in the issue of August 25, 1926. This questionnaire includes queries such as, “Do you believe Angelica to be a manifestation of a personal Devil?” and “Do you believe the basis of reality at Charleston to be mud?” Responses were no and yes, respectively.Footnote 93 This is the only documented submission to the magazine from Keynes, though the editor reports on August 29, 1924, that “several communications have been received from the Tiltonians.”Footnote 94
Despite the significant contributions from their aunt, already a celebrated author in the mid-1920s, and the occasional participation of other Charlestonians, the editor decries the lack of submissions from the adult artists and authors. In August 1924 Quentin writes:
The New Bulletin [has not] received any contributions yet from [illegible], so far only given 2 contributions during the complet [sic] history of the paper; not that they can’t work if they like considering that we have 2 artists and a journalist in the house which proves that it is shere [sic] laziness. A vote of protest was passed by the entire office which is reproduced below.
There follows a list of all those who work on the Bulletin—editor, writers, compositors, office boys, and illustrators—and who wish to register their “vote of protest against the deplorable idleness of our readers.” Next to each title are the initials QB.Footnote 95 In addition to calling out the adults for their “shere laziness,” Quentin invents and simultaneously undercuts the fiction of a full publishing staff.
Later that same month, Quentin again complains of the pressure to produce a lengthy magazine and the lack of assistance from the artistic adults. It is clear the adults had expectations of the Bulletin, which perhaps limited the children’s authority over the enterprise; however, the tone Quentin strikes asserts agency through exaggerated vitriol. He writes, “In the early days of history of the Bulletin when there was only one page, or two, at most we did not need contributions quite so much; but now adays [sic] the grown ups insist on 4, 5, or 6 pages, and yet they give nothing to the Journal itself and lie there like fat and sluggish parasites, while the gallant Tiltonians and the inspired Rodmelians send contributions for them to read.”Footnote 96 Though he praises the Keynes and the Woolfs, Quentin is cranky with the primary adult residents of Charleston. This editorial outburst elicited a long letter titled “Fat and Sluggish Parasites” that pretends to be an extract from the Nation and the Athenaeum. The entire letter is highly entertaining, but for the sake of brevity I include only selections:
“The New Bulletin” … is published in Charleston & its area of circulation appears to embrace the neighbouring townships of Tilton & Rodmell. We cannot locate these latter places in our map of South Carolina…. Before this fine example of journalistic fearlessness, we can only bow our diminished heads…. The example of our contemporary compels us to acknowledge how far short we have fallen of real catholicity in plain-speaking. Towards our readers we have been mealy-mouthed. We have pandered to their grotesque pretentions to be intelligent & discriminating human beings. All along we have known better. “Fat & sluggish parasites”—with what an uprush of warm emotion do we greet these noble words, crystal-clear & health-giving as the famous pond from whence they are wafted! We can only promise to make amends.Footnote 97
This letter may be in Virginia Woolf’s hand, though it would make more sense for it to have been written by one of the Charlestonians. In any case, the correspondence between the editor and an adult reader reveals the extent to which the community of creatives at Charleston involved the children and was captured in the Bulletin.
Indeed, the community evoked by this magazine does not really distinguish between child and adult circles. Instead, the children are more or less included in the adult circles, or that’s how it appeared to the children.Footnote 98 In this multigenerational collaborative space, the Bell children sustained a magazine that described the artistic community out of which it developed. The magazine also generated community as the young people worked together, often daily, to produce the magazine, and many adults also participated regularly. Thus, the Charleston Bulletin is not only an exemplary second-generation magazine but also one of the best at both capturing and creating community. Moreover, even with clear adult interest and involvement, the magazine captures the children’s perspective on the exceptionally robust collaborative community at Charleston.
Conclusion
The five magazines discussed in this essay span a period of seventy years and involve generations of creative Victorians and moderns that begin with the Pre-Raphaelites and end with the children of the Bloomsbury circle. These magazines present the familiar features of published periodicals and show that the child-editors and authors were knowledgeable about the form they emulated. They include some interesting juvenilia from writers who would become celebrated in adult life, and they offer insight into child life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their importance thus operates in two registers: as precursors to work produced by renowned adults and as juvenile work with merit of its own. In particular, these magazines have significant merit as records of collaborative communities of creative children. Some include adult input, some do not, but all center child-editors and authors. These children were familiar with creative circles because they observed—and documented—them in their parents’ lives. Some of these young people would grow up to live and work in such circles as adults, but all of them lived and worked in creative circles as children. As young people, with limited authority over many aspects of their lives, they used their homemade manuscript magazines as a place to assert textual agency.
