In this excellent contribution to the histories of childhood, of children's literature, and of consumer culture, Paul Ringel explores the “tensions between commerce and ideology, gentility and entertainment, belief and action,” as well as the perennial issue of how to guide children safely into a useful and respectable adulthood (71). Ringel offers a close reading of several important children's magazines – often called “juveniles” by contemporaries – including the Youth's Companion, the Juvenile Miscellany, Our Young Folks, St. Nicholas Magazine, and others. Any one who has slogged through children's magazines from the nineteenth century knows that they can be oppressively didactic and aggressively overwritten; most modern readers would find it impossible to believe that children and youth would ever be attracted to them.

But Ringel persevered, and his book focusses on changes over time – changes that to most readers would seem quite subtle – that show how editors and authors found ways to educate young readers while at the same time entertaining them. He places that shift in the contexts of changes in the publishing industry (as it evolved from denominational presses in Boston to commercial houses in New York); the struggle between orthodox and liberal religion as it played out in Protestant denominations, including the small but powerful New England-based Unitarian movement; and the personal motivations of the authors and editors themselves (who range from Nathanial Willis and Julia Maria Child to Lucy Larcom and Mary Mapes Dodge). By positioning children's literature in much larger cultural, religious, and economic frameworks, Ringel transcends the often dreary content of the magazines to show how magazines merged with the evolving consumer culture of the nineteenth century, both as objects to be consumed and as vehicles to bring children into that culture through content, advertising and “premiums” that rewarded readers who recruited subscribers.

Ringel joins several historiographical discussions of interest to historians of children and of child rearing, particularly the tension between skepticism and optimism about children's religious nature and the extent to which children and youth were truly “priceless” to middle-class Americans in the nineteenth century. Ringel understands and describes quite clearly the complexity of cultural and social changes; the evolution of magazines for children and youth was not linear, but a series of overlapping, often incremental, additions. Few genres or styles of story ever fully disappear; even the traditional child deathbed scenes, full of pathos and earnest faith, doggedly hang on in a few religious magazines.

Along the way, Ringel argues that values, like childhood, are constructs; the changeable content of children's magazines shows us the “fluidity of respectable thinking” (70). Indeed, consumerism came to be seen as a means of promoting respectable values. He features gender prominently, as editors Child and Dodge (coming from very different professional, social, and economic backgrounds) become, in effect, bookends to his argument, and as he introduces more than a few hints of the “boy problem” that would obsess reformers and writers in the early twentieth century.

In a concise and clear summary statement, Ringel suggests why all of this is important. The magazines published during the century after 1830, “like the genteel cultures that had spawned them … were part of the nation's transition from a set of predominantly rural, localized producer societies into a compilation of more urban, industrial, and centralized consumer cultures.” The magazines “had helped white Protestant families adapt their standards of children's behavior to the conditions of those cultures,” and provided the “basis from which twentieth- and twenty-first-century adults would continue to contest the commercial roles of young people in American society” (197).

One reason Ringel is so convincing is that he does not attempt to provide a survey of all juvenile magazines from this period. But it would have been useful to have seen a bigger role – at least as counterpoints to the more famous magazines featured in the book – for publications such as Oliver Optic's monthly Student and Schoolmate, which reflected less Protestant angst and a more direct approach to commercialization than the Youth's Companion and the others. Finally – and this is not a criticism, but a hopeful suggestion for future work by Ringel or other scholars in the field – an appropriate sequel to Commercializing Childhood would examine the ways in which children received the lessons they were supposed to learn, and the ways in which they actually incorporated their roles as consumers into their lives. That is, of course, a tall order, but such an exploration would be a perfect complement to Ringel's useful and well-written book.