How did we come to imagine what "ideal childhood" requires? Beginning in the late eighteenth century, German child-rearing radically transformed, and as these innovations in ideology and educational practice spread from middle-class families across European society, childhood came to be seen as a life stage critical to self-formation. This new approach was in part a process that adults imposed on youth, one that hinged on motivating children's behavior through affection and cultivating internal discipline. But this is not just a story about parents' and pedagogues' efforts to shape childhood. Offering rare glimpses of young students' diaries, letters, and marginalia, Emily C. Bruce reveals how children themselves negotiated these changes. Revolutions at Home analyzes a rich set of documents created for and by young Germans to show that children were central to reinventing their own education between 1770 and 1850. Through their reading and writing, they helped construct the modern child subject. The active child who emerged at this time was not simply a consequence of expanding literacy but, in fact, a key participant in defining modern life.
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The New Enlightenment Youth Periodical for the New Youth Subject
Opening the first issue in April 1776 of a popular weekly magazine by Christian Felix WeiĂe, young readers found a dialogue in seven scenes. The story went like this: While playing with his fatherâs gun, Karl accidentally shot his little sister, Julie. Seeing her covered in blood, their brother Wilhelm cried out that he would give his own life for her, and Karl fell in a swoon. Their father demanded to know who was responsible. His rage was so terrifying, the brothers covered for one another to prevent a second murder! ThenâJulie miraculously revived, claiming responsibility for shooting herself and refusing to let Karl be punished. Moved by the childrenâs loving defense of one another, their father relented, grateful to his mendacious children for preventing him from shooting the culprit.
One could be distracted by this storyâs shocking content, or read it as an Age of Revolutions anti-authoritarian allegory. But the uses of this little soap opera as a pedagogic tool are particularly intriguing. Imagine the German children who subscribed to Der Kinderfreund: Ein Wochenblatt fĂŒr Kinder (The Childrenâs Friend: A Weekly for Children) in the 1770s and 1780s. What can we surmise about how they responded to âSibling Loveâ? Did they recognize characters from previous serials? Who laughed through the silly opening scene of Wilhelmâs arithmetic mistakes? Who skipped ahead for the fun of rehearsing the dramatic gunshot itself? What pleasure did child readers find in the vivid, over-the-top stage directions? If a set of siblings performed this dialogue, did someone want to play the terrifying father? What happened when girls read parts written for boys, and vice versa? Who claimed the position of director?
Various sources furnish evidence of reading practices around dialogues such as this one. Family archives document that elite German children often copied, wrote, and performed plays with siblings, parents, and tutors. Folklorists, child development researchers, and our own experiences as children tell us that performance and storytelling of some kind are ubiquitous in growing up. The genre of sentimental drama would have been familiar to eighteenth-century child readers, given its frequent appearance in youth periodicals. We can suppose that siblings receiving Der Kinderfreund read this play together even if they did not act it out, since the magazineâs subscription list included girls and boys in a wide range of ages. But perhaps most suggestive for considering child readersâ practices is what follows after the play: a moral lesson placed in a more realistic setting. The coda suggests that children should apply similar principles to the scenario of a brother lying for his sister after she breaks two porcelain cups.
The play and its framing story point toward the same moral guidance: prioritizing compassion for the feelings of others, even if that suffering is caused by a parentâs discipline. Beyond that, the lesson also models a way to read, with fictional children from the frame narrative discussing the story they have just heard with their father, identifying personally with its characters, and investing it with meaning for their quotidian life. This new genre of youth periodicals invited children to play an active, imaginative role in their reading, for an education that was more sentimental and concerned with childrenâs amusement than ever before.
In this chapter, I explore how Enlightenment youth periodicals supported the development of the modern child subject. The commercial expansion of a new genre during the years around 1800 provided a literary laboratory for pedagogic ideas about childrenâs innocence and the cultivation of self-control; at the same time, the growing success of these publications indicated the reimagination of child readers as a distinct audience. Forms such as dialogues for childrenâs performance and serialized tales both scripted and responded to changing reading practices. While the texts provide direct evidence of adult values about childhood, childrenâs tastes and changing uses of periodicals influenced the development of a modern childrenâs literature. The stories themselves depicted ideal readers and sentimental family life in line with the new ideology of childhood, but were also subject to a range of possible readings and misreadings. Enlightenment periodicals especially contributed to the emergence of a new kind of reader through the fashioning of gendered subjectivities in texts directed both at girls and at a cross-gender audience. Not only did adultsâ desire âto amuse and instructâ signal greater attention to child readersâ desires and agency, but the spread of such texts offered more opportunities for children themselves to negotiate their reading education.
More than sixty titles published between 1756 and 1855 are surveyed in this chapter, as the publication of youth periodicals exploded at the end of the eighteenth century. After taking a look at the forms and stories found in these textsâthat is, how they were written and what they were written aboutâI examine the construction of gendered subjectivities in periodicals as a crucial dimension of young peopleâs changing reading practices. Throughout, I indicate ways of thinking about child readersâ reception and practices around the developing genre of youth periodicals.
Genre Development
In their style and format, youth periodicals of the European Enlightenment owed a debt to the moral weeklies that, building on an English tradition, had been published for adults since the early eighteenth century.1 The 1770s and 1780s witnessed an explosion of magazines, weeklies, yearbooks, almanacs, and other serialized readers especially redesigned for children and youth.2 I suggest that the swift adoption of periodicals by pedagogues demonstrates a growing preoccupation with childrenâs literacy practices as a cornerstone of constructing the modern child subject.3 Pedagogic use of serial publications also underscored this eraâs reimagination of childhood as a separate stage of life that required its own books. Periodicals quickly generated new texts that could guide child readers to moral action and emotional expression. These publications also carried the pedagogic aims of the Enlightenment into the home.
Beyond these variations, what did a typical Enlightenment youth periodical look like? (See Appendix A for the tables of contents from two exemplary publications.) Some form of serialization was key, though I have included titles that were published as frequently as twice weekly and as infrequently as annual yearbooks. Some only survived about a year, but longevity increased moving into the nineteenth century.4 A few titles introduced at the end of the period under examination here lasted in some form into the early twentieth century. Most Enlightenment-era magazines and weeklies had short runs, but surprisingly wide distribution. Some were short-lived because their creators moved on to other projects but did become more popular from year to year.5 The volumes were usually smallâoften pocket-sizedâand ranged in the quality of their paper, printing, and presentation. As with fairy tales and schoolbooks, technological innovations throughout this period increased the number and interest level of accompanying illustrations. Some included fold-out copies of sheet music for folk and art songs, supporting their cultivation of bourgeois arts. Many of the earlier periodicals still followed the old practice of an opening letter of dedication to a royal patron.
While some of the periodicals I have examined were explicitly aimed at young children below the age of ten, in many cases the imagined audience of these periodicals was older. However, age is one of several boundaries of publishersâ intended audience that was permeable in practice. This can be seen in the subscribersâ list published in the NiedersĂ€chsisches Wochenblatt fĂŒr Kinder (Lower Saxony Weekly for Children, orig. 1774) in its 1781 and 1783 volumes. Families of four or five children each were listed by name, spanning enough years to suggest that youth were reading before or beyond the intended age.
Subscriptions
Young readers acquired periodicals in a number of ways, including at shops and book fairs. One early magazine explained in each issue the ideal methods of finding the Leipziger Wochenblatt fĂŒr Kinder (Leipzig Weekly for Children, 1772â74):
In the coming new year, this weekly paper will still be issued on the usual days, namely Mondays and Thursdays, both at the local newspaper stall as well as in the Crusius bookshop in Paulino. Elsewhere it is to be had both at any post office and in the principal bookstores.
The frequent publication of this title is worth noting, as is the range of distribution sites beyond the publisherâs main shop. A later volume noted that supplementary materials (a collection of letters by the fictional child protagonists of the weekly stories) were being sold to benefit educational institutions in the Ore Mountains of Saxony.9
Eighteenth-century European publishing was often financed by reader subscriptions. In a quintessentially modern turn to middle-class consumers versus a single aristocratic patron, subscriptions were collected by publishers from across wide regions. Serial publications were especially suited to the subscription process, since readers could invest in a title and continue to receive new volumes over time.10 The first edition of Leprince de Beaumontâs Magasin des enfans warned readers âwho wish the continuation of this Magasin that it cannot be printed, unless we are sure of one hundred subscriptions; they are therefore urged to subscribe early.â11 In that case, they exceeded their initial modest hopes, and continued to issue new volumes. To encourage subscriptions, publishers offered special deals, as when the first volume of FĂŒr deutsche MĂ€dchen (For German Girls, 1781â82) noted that subscribers would receive the next volume at their known address for the special rate of four issues at three guilders.12 The editor Paul Nitsch wrote âwith prophetic spiritâ that he would like to begin with at least a couple hundred âadmirable girlsâ as readers.13 Aimed at younger girls, this publication was very regularly printed, missing only one week during Christmas. Even though it was short-lived in its original run, it was popular enough to be collected and reprinted some years later. In fact, many of these periodicals, especially in the eighteenth century, were gathered and reissued in bound volumes.
Even where a list of subscribers seems small to us today, it could be of great value in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century book trade. When publisher Johann Friedrich Cotta and author Marianne Ehrmann had a famous falling out over the popular girlsâ periodical Flora, Ehrmann created a new journal but Cotta had possession of the original subscription list and was able to continue sending out magazines under the cover of the old title.14 Subscription proved a useful tool for the cultivation of a community of youth readers. The explosion of the genre was not possible without the financial and cultural investment of German families.
Foundational Titles
Several titles from the late Enlightenment stood out as especially successful or influential for the development of youth periodicals and childrenâs literature extending into the nineteenth century. They also furthered the construction of a modern child subject through their establishment of normative practices for childrenâs reading and propagation of ideas about childrenâs interiority. These landmarks include some publications already mentioned: Madame Leprince de Beaumontâs Magasin des enfans (first published 1756) and its German translation (first published 1761), Johann Christian Adelungâs Leipziger...