Despite extensive engagement, childrenFootnote 77 were invisible in the programs of the nineteenth-century Protestant missionary conferences. By the early 1900s this had noticeably changed as denominations and missionary organizations sought to maximize and enhance juvenile missionary interest. Childhood was the key stage in which to establish habits; the future depended upon “the education of the childhood of the race, in missionary matters as in all others.”Footnote 78 Literature was pivotal and periodicals were deemed to be the most effective literary form.Footnote 79 They provided the young with “impressions which will never be lost . . . nothing will appeal to the young more strongly than stories from beyond the seas, of strange people who know not of Christ, but who need His gospel.”Footnote 80 Juvenile missionary periodicals were ubiquitous in Britain, Europe, and America, but they are still only partially understood. Adult and juvenile literature was qualitatively different so that “any adequate analysis . . . requires to be grounded in an understanding of the construction of childhood in the Victorian and Edwardian eras.”Footnote 81 This task remains very much a work in progress.Footnote 82 Most recent scholarship tends to discursively situate children's periodicals with respect to religion, culture, and politics.Footnote 83 All agree on at least a broad two-fold function: the spiritual and the philanthropic. Periodicals per se were an integral part of a large and pervasive Victorian corpus of juvenile religious and moral literature. At the same time missionary periodicals were different. They emphasized child agency by encouraging a “participatory relationship” between readers and their subject. Children became active agents “in a diaologic relationship with [their] world.”Footnote 84
British settler children were also avid consumers of missionary literature. Similar observations can be made as to the overall function, yet other dynamics also applied. This essay broadly introduces the nature and role of settler Protestant children's periodical literature, by way of representative Canadian and New Zealand material. Settler children in both societies were influenced by similar religious institutions and were thus socialized transnationally within the British world. The essay indicates obvious similarities between what was produced locally and internationally, and strong continuities in the intended functions of such literature. However, it also argues that function can be thought of as both “intentional” and “unintentional,” whereby periodicals' functions also reflected local context and imperatives.
I. Fostering Juvenile Interest
New Zealand and Canada were sites of missionary activity among indigenous Māori and First Nations communities from earliest European contact. Against this backdrop colonial settler children read the literature of British “parent” organizations throughout the nineteenth century, particularly literature that had an English and Scottish provenance. These were mostly distributed through denominational and Sunday school channels. Anglican children, for instance, had ample access to all Church Missionary Society publications: the Church Missionary Gleaner, the Juvenile Instructor and its later manifestation The Children's World were widely read in New Zealand.Footnote 85 Foreign missions occupied the settler churches and their children more definitively from the 1870s, at which point the demand grew for locally produced juvenile material. At first local literature existed as inserts or as specialist pages in existing denominational periodicals. New Zealand Presbyterian and Baptist children were quickly linked with their denominations' first missionaries in the New Hebrides (from 1869) and East Bengal (from 1886) respectively.Footnote 86 In the early 1900s Canadian Congregational and Presbyterian children had dedicated pages in The Message and in the Monthly Leaflet.Footnote 87 These latter two were women's missionary periodicals. By the late-nineteenth century there were also examples of dedicated juvenile periodicals. From 1883–1885 New Zealand Presbyterian children had their own missionary magazine, the New Zealand Missionary Record [NZMR] and Canadian Anglicans had The Canadian Church Juvenile from 1893. Both of these were precursors for a whole array of denominational periodicals to be consumed by colonial children from the early 1900s. Up to 1914 these were represented by such periodicals as The Sunbeam (1892, Canada Methodist), Jewels: For the Little Ones (1900, Canada Methodist and Presbyterian), Young Folk's Missionary Messenger (1904, New Zealand Baptist), and The Break of Day (1909, New Zealand Presbyterian). Others emerged in the years following World War I.
What did children encounter in these periodicals? In the January 1895 issue of The Canadian Church Juvenile children read about Japanese street vendors, a boys' story about the virtues of honesty, a missionary account of Burma, brief character profiles of Jesus and disciples, poems, and a description of New Year in China. The first issue of the NZMR offered accounts of mission work in New Zealand, the New Hebrides, and Australia; factual essays on the New Hebrides and Cook Islands; and letter extracts from both LMS missionary James Chalmers and from Piri, a Christian convert and teacher in New Guinea.Footnote 88 Despite geographical differences the content of each followed very similar trajectories. For example, over the entire thirty-one issues of the NZMR fifty percent of the content was specifically missionary-related material: news, stories (often serialized and told from children's or converts' perspectives), and letters. Eighteen percent of material recounted the history and geography of places where missionaries were active. A quarter of the material was of a more general but explicitly didactic nature. There were also games and activities, editorial comment, notes for parents or Sunday-school teachers, and many etchings. As print technologies developed page numbers increased and periodicals carried increasingly more and higher-quality images.
II. [Providing] “A Sediment in the Mind”
While statistics are patchy we do know that a large proportion of settler children were engaged by churches,Footnote 89 and that denominations distributed such material widely through their networks. Juvenile institutions were broadly educative but religious objectives were always paramount. Missionary periodical literature certainly focused on fostering juvenile Christian faith. Yet while these pages acted as a more general moral compass, the missionary intent was always explicit. Typically it was to foster a lifetime of interest in “the Kingdom of Christ in the world”; to learn about missionary work and heroic missionary figures; and to channel practical interest.Footnote 90 These priorities were equally conceived in the minds of editors. Financial support was just one aspect of the wider “practical sympathies” to be fostered; children should also be “early trained, out of the fullness of their own spiritual privileges, to look abroad with a heart full of love and pity to the wide heathen wastes of the world.”Footnote 91 Colonial children should be interested in the whole world and not just in the circumstances that defined their immediate daily or national life. In the opening pages of The Break of Day in 1909 children were asked: “will you think about our missionaries and the boys and girls at home and abroad who know nothing of the love of Jesus? Above all, will you choose Christ to be your Master, and resolve by His grace to work and pray for the extension of His kingdom in New Zealand and in the far lands across the sea?”Footnote 92
Were British settler juvenile periodicals and readers simply a mirror of the British metropole? Partly yes, in that the sentiments and rhetoric associated with colonial missionary literature echoed or overlapped with those emanating from British homelands. They clearly tapped into both the content and the intent of wider global Protestant networks that linked Western societies by the late nineteenth century.Footnote 93 An explicitly intended function common across this entire Western literary corpus was to inculcate children's long-term missionary interest and involvement. However a second reading indicates other unintended yet significant functions that were linked more with local factors. Jeffrey Richards borrows an image from the physical sciences when he suggests that popular nineteenth-century fiction provided “a sediment in the mind” that was “peculiarly potent” because it served to feed the “imaginative life.”Footnote 94 In New Zealand and Canada this “sediment” related primarily to the issue of identity. Missionary periodicals helped settler children to define themselves in a range of new and evolving settings. While these identities were spiritual in nature, they were nuanced by geographical placement and cultural superiority. Identity was expressed in two unique settings in ways that shaped a sense of place. The focus was often on “those schemes to which our Church has already committed herself.”Footnote 95 Denominational identity and missionary involvement became tightly connected in this era of nascent colonial nationalism. Canadian and New Zealand Presbyterian identity, for example, was intrinsically linked to missionary projects in the New Hebrides, China, and India. Children should commit to this.
There were also other imperatives. For New Zealand children their own country and the southwest Pacific were both important. Periodicals regularly focused on people in these regions who were still missionary subjects: Māori, pioneering settlers still living in remote rural communities beyond church contact, and the Melanesians of New Guinea, the New Hebrides, and the Solomon Islands. For Canadian children political imperatives predominated. Congregational children in 1908 read that “we not only have the heathen abroad, but we have this great country. It is said that last year a million of emigrants have come in. What a work there is to do!”Footnote 96 The focus emphasized both First Nations and the large numbers of non-British immigrants arriving in Canada, with a clear emphasis on “Christianizing” and “Canadianizing” both.Footnote 97 Periodicals commonly carried headings like “To Make Canada God's Country” or articles suggesting that “unless we can make these people into good Canadian citizens and good Christians, they will make Canada a worse place to live in.”Footnote 98
Settler juvenile identity was therefore constructed through the rhetoric of British Protestant superiority, often predicated on the idea that the colonies were British societies par excellence. Francis Prochaska suggests that one “enduring legacy” of the British missionary movement amongst the young was its abiding “power . . . to form racial and cultural attitudes.”Footnote 99 Potentially orientalizing or pejorative images were as pervasive in colonial juvenile periodicals as they were in the wider Anglo-American literature. Progressive Christianity was constantly contrasted with non-progressive “heathenism.” Young Canadians were reminded that Burmese people were different because they “are only half civilized, and need many missionaries to tell them about Christ, and to make them more civilized”; and New Zealand settler children read constantly about Māori being both different and disadvantaged.Footnote 100 Yet this was not always focused on non-European peoples. French-Catholics or non-British immigrants in Canada and poor urban settlers in New Zealand were also depicted as benighted.Footnote 101 In theory “Christian” status meant that both settler Canadian or New Zealand children and their non-European brothers and sisters were equal. At the same time the literature reinforced a duality of “them” and “us.” Settler children continued to inhabit demonstrably different worlds from those people they encountered through the literature.
New Zealand and Canadian juvenile periodical literature simultaneously reflected local, national, and international content and priorities. Their functions reflected their unique settings: colonial nationhood; general education in an era of nascent compulsory schooling; spiritual and moral guidance; and missionary philanthropy among others. Settler children were being socialized into a culturally confident Western Protestantism that was both transnationally and locally configured. The grand cause of foreign missions was the responsibility of all ages. Periodicals affirmed the clear message that to be Christian carried great obligations. For settler children this was amplified through the discourse of privilege; it was a privilege to be Christian, to be British, and especially to inhabit lands of new opportunity. Such great privilege carried even greater responsibility to know about, care for, and be involved in the world. That the literature conveyed this in culturally prescribed ways is a given. What it reinforces is the need to “read” the modern missionary movement through a variety of lenses that equally account for age and location, and to develop comparative historiographies that continually blur and render problematic periphery and metropole.
