Introduction
<1>Historians have long regarded women’s family and friendship networks as a significant part of Victorian social life (Smith-Rosenberg; Baron 4-7), and researchers have further noted the important part these networks played in women’s entry into the public sphere–in philanthropy, in early feminism, and, as in the case discussed here, in popular journalism (Summers 33-63; Levine 10, 115; Onslow, 175-7). This essay shows how the entry into the religious periodical market of a small group of women, linked by shared religious beliefs and a common interest in the education of the poor, had a long-lasting impact on the field of literature for children. In 1842 members of this network founded a small children's magazine, The Magazine for the Young, which not only held its own for thirty-three years against its male-dominated competitors in the field of small sectarian publications, but became the model for the new “high class” children's magazines that emerged in the 1860s, and whose influence extended into the twentieth century.
<2>The Magazine for the Young was the creation of a network of like-minded women interested in writing for a religious market. These were Marianne Dyson, her friend Anne Sturges Bourne, and her sister-in-law, Elizabeth Dyson, who founded the magazine in 1842, Anne Mozley, who took over the editorship in 1843 and held that post until 1875, and the aspiring writers whose careers Mozley advanced by publishing their early work, most notably Charlotte M. Yonge, who became the magazine’s most substantial and best-known contributor.
<3>These women were initially linked by connections to John Keble, Vicar of the parish of Hursley in Hampshire, one of the leading figures in the revival of the High Church wing of the Anglican Church known as the Tractarian or Oxford Movement. Elizabeth Dyson was the wife and Marianne Dyson (who lived with them) the half-sister of a long-time friend of Keble’s, two of Anne Mozley’s brothers had been students at Oriel College, Oxford, when he was a tutor there, and Charlotte Yonge had grown to adulthood under his influence, her home in the village of Otterbourne being in his parish. They were all in consequence deeply committed to the Oxford Movement, and were further united by a shared commitment to the education of the poor. They not only taught in Sunday Schools, but played a major part in the unpaid supervision of the daily activities of the (paid) teachers and scholars in their local parish schools, and they saw themselves as inculcating what their party called “sound Church principles,” that is seeking religious guidance not just from the scriptures, but from the Anglican prayer book and the broader history of the Christian church (Dennis 11, 54).
A Niche in the Market
<4>These women were by no means the earliest to look to the periodical press as the field for their activities. Margaret Beetham (17-44) has shown that women were omnipresent from the beginning of the century as founders, editors and contributors in the emergence of magazines directed to women, while Alexis Easley has described how, as the century progressed, they penetrated areas of journalism not seen as specifically feminine, even, from the 1830s on, establishing themselves within the precincts of the “high class” quarterlies and monthlies. Barbara Onslow has noted that women interested in writing for the periodical press could often enter it by finding “a niche in the market,” a potential readership that was not being served by anyone else. The niche these High Church women found was in a corner of the vast area of minor religious publications.(1)
<5>During the early years of the nineteenth century religious publishing had moved beyond the instructive tract and the polemical pamphlet to include the regularly appearing periodical publication (Altholz 2). The aim was to offer an alternative literature of an “improving” kind, much of it in the form of tiny monthly magazines–usually costing a penny–committed to making their readers lead better and more Christian lives by sugaring the pill of religious instruction and exhortation with entertainment in the form of pictures, stories and poems. This group included a large number of magazines directed at children.(2) A feature common to this multitude of small publications was that each was advocating a particular sectarian path to salvation. There was however one gap. There was no children’s periodical which conformed to what the women who founded The Magazine for the Young believed was the appropriate High Church form of teaching.
<6>Almost all the sectarian publishing ventures to this date had been male initiatives, dominated by male clergy and publishers. Two of the most successful of the existing periodicals intended for children, and typical of many others, were the non-denominational The Child’s Companion; or Sunday Scholar’s Reward (1824-1922), and The Children’s Friend (1824-1929)(3) which was owned and edited by the Rev. Carus Wilson (the model for Mr Brocklehurst in Jane Eyre) and promoted the views of the evangelical faction within the Anglican church (Drotner 49-60). Both were founded in 1825 and were very tiny penny publications, roughly 3 by 5 inches in size, containing, besides the text, at least three line illustrations per issue relating to that text, usually of children engaged in some activity. There was little actual narrative in the stories. They usually began with a lively vignette of child life– work on a farm, a picnic in the fields–followed by a long homily delivered by a parent, Sunday School teacher or clergyman. There were also numerous accounts by parents and Sunday School teachers of the death-beds of children who had responded to religious teaching, and of the expectation of heavenly happiness they had shown. They also contained articles on history, geography and natural history, many giving graphic details of violent events, strange customs and exotic animals (Drotner 51-53), perhaps an attempt by the editors to lure children away from the “penny dreadfuls,” stories of violence and crime which had, since their first appearance, quickly captured a juvenile readership. (E.S. Turner; Haining; Springhall).
<7>High Anglican readers, imbued with their faction’s concern for religious reserve and respect for “holy names,” must have found a good deal of the rhetoric in these little papers very different from that they used in their own teaching. Such passages as “It is also true that the blood of Jesus Christ can wash your wicked heart clean from all its pride” (Children’s Friend, May 1842), and “Do you seek for pardon and mercy from God, through the blood of Jesus, your Redeemer?” (Child’s Companion, January 1842) would have seemed embarrassing or even semi-blasphemous (Coleridge 185, Dennis 55) to them. These papers also contained antagonistic references to “Popery”: “Prince Albert’s country ought to be dear to us as Protestants. It was in Germany that the glorious Reformation from Popery began” (Child’s Companion, January, 1842) and “. . . living and dying in the darkness and error of Popery” (Children’s Friend, February, 1842). Such comments did not conform to the Tractarian respect for, and interest in, Roman Catholic ritual and dogma (Dennis 1). Furthermore no attempt was being made to inculcate the “sound Church principles” which they felt were so important, no explanation of the Anglican prayer book or the church’s various festivals. There was, consequently, no magazine addressed to children whose religious tone was sympathetic to High Church clergy and Sunday School teachers. It was this niche in the market that The Magazine for the Young was intended by its founders to fill.
Founding the Magazine
<8>No records survive from the publishers of The Magazine for the Young, but the motives that drove its founders and the history of its first year can be deduced from the unpublished correspondence between one of the first editors and her lifelong friend. Marianne Dyson and Anne Sturges Bourne were both born in 1809 and had been childhood friends. Marianne Dyson’s father held the position of Clerk of the House of Commons, responsible for recording the House’s proceedings, keeping its accounts and seeing to the upkeep of the building. Anne Sturges Bourne’s father was a landowner in Hampshire (the family home was Testwood) and a prominent member of parliament, being at various times a member of Canning’s Cabinet and Secretary of State for the Home Department. The two became friends when they were still little girls, and letters that they wrote to one another from 1822 (when they were both 13) on are now in the Hampshire Record Office.
<9>As young women they had spent a lot of time in London and moved in high-ranking parliamentary social circles.(4) In 1836, however, Dyson’s father died, and, by now a semi-invalid, she began living with her much older half-brother and his wife (the third in this founder group) at his parsonage in Dogmersfield, Hampshire. Sturges Bourne’s family were still frequently in London or paying political visits, but her country home was close enough to Dogmersfield to allow frequent contact.
<10>Most of their correspondence had always been about religious questions and their views on the books they had been reading, their greatest enthusiasms being for The Fairy Bower by J.H. Newman’s sister, Harriett Mozley, and for Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s Sintram and Undine. By the 1840s, when they were just over 30, they were, their correspondence reveals, becoming seriously concerned with what to do with the rest of their lives and had began to discuss how what they called “spinsterism” could be made a vocation.(5) They were already involved with the founding and running of National Schools(6) for working-class children in their parishes, and had began to consider that providing reading material for this group might be a possible vocation.(7)
<11>Moral and instructive tales promoting various shades of religious opinion were increasingly being written for working-class children, with the major High Church publisher of them being James Burns, 17 Portman Street, London (Alderson). Burns was born about 1808, exchanged his family’s Presbyterianism for Anglicanism, and in 1837 set up a bookshop in London from which he began issuing a range of materials aimed at the High Church market, for example, “sheets” setting out the service for a church stone-laying (Bourne to Dyson F27/16). He made a particular feature of what were known as “reward books,”(8) little twopenny or sixpenny tales intended both to entertain and point a moral, which could be lent or given to the village children who attended local parish schools. This “school-child literature,” as Charlotte Yonge (“Lifelong Friends” 182) later called it, consisted of short stories featuring working-class characters in rural settings, dealing with familiar problems, temptations, and character faults and, according to the High Church Christian Remembrancer, making “habitual reference to Christian principles” (400). In fact, Burns built up quite a stable of writers producing this sort of literature, one reference to them giving the following list of titles: Biddy Kavanagh, Michael the Chorister, Amy’s Earnings, The Sights in Town and Country, The Conceited Pig, The White Kitten (Yonge Langley School).(9)
<12>Both Sturges Bourne and Dyson aspired to join Burns’s reward book team, with Dyson’s Conversations with Cousin Rachel(10) the first of their efforts to be published. Sturges Bourne, writing from London in June 1840, said that she had been into Burns’ shop and that “he praised ‘R’ and said it was liked but I did not dare to ask too eagerly about its sale” (Bourne to Dyson F17/11/1-2). Dyson’s biggest success, Ivo and Verena, was published by Burns in 1842, and was still being reprinted twenty years later.(11)
<13>Sturges Bourne, too, was trying to write little tales, and what she wrote about them gives some idea of the aims and enthusiasms of this pair–and also their amateurism. For example in July 1841 she sent the Dysons an outline of the story which was eventually published in The Magazine for the Young as “Lydia Morrison”:
I want her [Elizabeth Dyson, Marianne’s sister-in-law] to make a sea side story - the imagery would be so beautiful - & no children look so happy as fishermen’s playing under the waves, building sand houses, or paddling after shrimps on wet sand. Then father going out in storms, & the boy’s first adventures might be very fine. I cannot make it, because I can’t do children’s ways or talks, but Owl [Elizabeth Dyson] certainly was a poor child in some former state of being. (Bourne to Dyson F18/8/1)
I send the first part of “The fisherman’s daughter” to Owl to do up as she likes, & will send a storm scene next time. She must put in some useful instructions (look in Cottage Comforts if she can’t invent them) that it may answer the two purposes of helping motherless girls, & suggesting new imagery & scenes to those who live among hedgerows. You will laugh at my always doing a desolate girl. A child story wd have been much better but I cannot do them. (Bourne to Dyson F18/9/1)
It would seem that what they hoped to achieve by their stories was not just moral guidance but both practical advice to their readers on how to live their daily lives and a widening of their horizons beyond that sphere.
<14>Their next step was to persuade Burns to publish a monthly children’s magazine, andThe Magazine for the Young, edited by Marianne Dyson and her sister-in-law, and published by Burns, began in 1842 (Yonge “Lifelong Friends” 183; Blakeway). The Magazine for the Young was of much the same size and appearance as the two major evangelical productions described above, but, even apart from the difference in religious tone, it differed from them in a number of ways. In the first place it cost twopence rather than a penny, had almost no illustrations,(12) and was addressed more specifically to a working-class readership. Furthermore its stories, no doubt following the example of Burns’ Reward Books, differed in possessing a narrative structure that moved from the original setting of the scene through a number of events to a satisfactory outcome. A number of serialized tales set among the village poor, including Sturges Bourne’s “Olive Lester” and “Lydia Morrison,” provided the main fiction throughout its first year. Each issue also contained a number of short non-fiction articles, and a selection of poems. The sectarian leaning of the editors can be seen in the listing of each month’s festivals, mostly saints’ days, and in the two major series of articles, “Church History in England” and “Dialogues on the Church-Service,” that appeared throughout the year. The poetry was almost entirely religious in content, some original but most reprinted from elsewhere, often, as in the case of Thomas Vaughan’s “They are all gone into the world of Light,” without any acknowledgment of the author.
<15>There were also a number of secular articles which were almost entirely about animals. Some, like a gruesome tale of sailors killing a polar bear and her cubs, and the story of the Welsh nobleman who mistakenly killed the hound that had saved his child from a wolf,(13) were sensational tales set in distant times or places, while others like “The Repentant Dog” and “The Three Owls” were stories of domestic life from which a moral could be drawn. These were probably intended to provide interesting anecdotes that could be used by Sunday School teachers to stimulate and broaden the interests of their scholars and to feed their desire for violent and sensational material with “wholesome” rather than the “dangerous” tales by which the “penny dreadfuls” enticed young readers.(14)
<16>It seems, however, that the Dysons found the editorship too great a burden, and in October of that first year Marian Dyson wrote to Anne Sturges Bourne: “We resign the Mag at the end of the year to some editor found for it by Mrs Mozley, but we have promised still to contribute ...” (Dyson to Bourne).
An Editor with a Professional Approach
<17>“Mrs Mozley” was Harriett Mozley, the author they so much admired, whose husband had a parish in Wiltshire, and the editor she found was her sister-in-law, Anne (1809-1891). This placed the magazine in the hands of someone who had grown up in the heart of a publishing family and was herself fast becoming an accomplished journalist. Anne Mozley’s father, Henry Mozley of Derby, had run one of the publishing businesses that catered to the High Church clientele. He seems to have done a certain amount of collaborating with Burns,(15) and when Burns joined the Roman Catholic Church in 1847 most of his list, includingThe Magazine for the Young and his reward books, passed to two of Henry Mozley’s sons whohad taken over the family firm on their father’s death in 1845 (Alderson 122). At the time Anne Mozley took over the editorship she was one of four “daughters at home,” (her six brothers all had careers), but was on the verge of a prestigious, though strictly anonymous, career of her own in serious journalism. In the 1840s and 1850s she wrote a number of papers for The Christian Remembrancer (published by the family firm), and between 1861 and 1880 published twenty-nine articles in Bentley’s Quarterly Review and Blackwood’s and probably well over one hundred “middles” inThe Saturday Review (Antonia and Jordan; Jordan “Sister as Journalist”). Nevertheless, as well as writing for this market, and earning quite substantial sums doing so, she edited the Magazine for the Young for the next thirty-two years (1843-1875), and built up for it a loyal following who gave it the affectionate title of the “Pink Mag” because of its pink paper covers (Coleridge 149).
<18>This change gave the magazine an editor with abilities very much greater than those of its well-meaning but amateurish founders. Mozley’s sophisticated judgment enabled her to avoid to a considerable extent the sentimentality and weak piety so often characteristic of religious journals addressed to children and the working-class, and took it up a path of literary excellence not found in other children’s magazines until the mid-1860s. The novelist Charlotte Yonge, who became a major contributor, noted the journal’s strengths in an obituary of Mozley in 1891:
No one can turn over one of its many volumes without being impressed by the tone, perfectly simple but always of a refined order and never puerile, which pervades it. This was due to her wonderful instinct for adaptation and selection, and choice of contributors. There were hardly any articles of her own in it–I only know of two little essays, one on cleanliness, one on spending money–but in each there were memorable thoughts that I remember to this day. Nothing weak, twaddling, ultra or ill-judged could find a home there, and, as my own earliest ventures were made there, I can speak most gratefully of her deft touches of criticism, and of the kind appreciation that I always so much valued. (“In Memoriam” 341)
<19>For the first few years of her editorship Anne Mozley held very much to the pattern established by the magazine’s founders: “school-child” fiction with a village setting, articles on church rituals and practice, anecdotes about animals wild and domestic. Her “wonderful instinct for adaptation and selection” revealed itself in her choice of non-fiction secular pieces. She also began on occasion to give their sources, noting for example in March 1843 that “Story of a Jaguar” came from Humboldt’s Travels in South America.She also broadened them beyond the focus on animals. In February 1844 “The Cromer storm of 1843” appeared, an account of the loss–and recovery–of fishing boats out at sea during a tempest, followed in April by “The fixed stars” taken “From the German of Hebel” and in June by “The Iroquois Indians. ” Her sources were diverse. Among those appearing in 1845 were “The Chamois–Hunter From Kohl’s Austria” (March), “The Collier-Boys Abridged from the Brit. Mag. Dec. 1843” (an account of a group of boys trapped in a mine with bad air and fast-rising waters who prayed to be delivered and were saved by another fall) (April) and “The lost children Restored” taken “From Mrs Grant’s ‘Memoirs of an American lady.’” (November). Eventually original contributions out-numbered republished content, but as late in the magazine’s history as May 1870 the following appeared: “The Robber and the Dervish [M. Vámbéry’s Sketches of Central Asia].”
<20>Fiction, under Mozley’s editorship, achieved a significance and a quality which set it even further apart from its evangelical rivals. Mozley, one may assume, had access to Burns’ stable of reward book writers, and, through her family, to the aspirant authors sending their manuscripts to the Mozley brothers, while her own taste in selection and her “deft touches of criticism” helped create a readable text. 1843 began with a two-part “school-child literature” tale about a little crippled girl who manages to win a prize for sewing at her National School and so raises her own sense of self-worth. This was followed by an eight-part serial story, “The Bird-Keeping Boy” written by the Rev. Samuel Rickards (1796–1865), an Oxford connection of the Mozley brothers, about a boy taken out of school at nine years old to help support the family by driving birds away from the corn. There is not much drama in the narrative, but it is full of detail about village life, and its appeal was long-lived. It had been reprinted as a reward book by 1848 with the author’s name acknowledged on the title-page and it was still on the list of the Mozleys’ successor, Walter Smith, forty years later. The next major serial, “A Village Story,” which ran from February to June 1844, was another “desolate girl” story, though rather more lively and varied than Anne Sturges Bourne’s conscientious but laboured tales. It too had been reprinted as a reward book by 1848.(16)
<21>Furthermore, though all stories and articles not reprinted from elsewhere were, in accordance with the usual practice of the time, anonymous (Liddle), they are obviously from a number of different authors with different backgrounds and talents. It would seem that Mozley had quickly established a pool of what Charlotte Yonge was later to call “novices and ladies” (Yonge to Macmillan 65-68)(17) anxious to see their work in print. The three founders were apparently not the only women of their class with literary tastes and experience with Sunday School teaching and National School visiting. A substantial number, if one can judge from the variety of styles, found in The Magazine for the Young a place where these interests could be brought together. Their stories, though not very polished, show a real concern with exploring and understanding their experiences and the experiences of their scholars through fiction. In this passage from “Jane and Betsy; or, the Holyday” (May 1844) the author tries to enter into the pressures facing the girls they taught:
“Well,” said Betsy Shoreman, “ít’s no wonder you’re tired, Jane; you’ve worked like a horse all this day. Why, you’ve gleaned twice as much as I have. I wonder you went on gleaning after you had got one large bundle; your mother said she would not expect you to bring home more than that.”
“I know she did,” replied Jane Morris; “but as I was able to get more, of course I went on leasing. Mother has hard work to get on with all us children, and we ought to help her as much as we can.” (113)
<22>The author of “The Testament of St John” (July 1844), on the other hand, seemed more interested in representing the children’s often contentious relations with one another:
. . . and from this group [picking gooseberries] more than one harsh noisy scream was heard and more than one recriminating tone answered the sobs with which Fanny Fletcher held up her scratched hand, and cried out, “Harriet Baines did this because I have got finer gooseberries than she has!”
“I did not,” said Harriet; “you did it when you pushed through the bush to get at my side.”
“Hannah Jackson never keeps her own side,” said another.
“Nor you either,” said Hannah Jackson in reply. “You’ve torn your sleeve, Judith Thompson; and I am glad of it, for it was all your fault which made Nancy Wheeler spill all this water upon me.” (152)
It would seem that the type of story pioneered by Sturges Bourne had found a number of imitators anxious to explore and expand the genre.
<23>Nevertheless, though these authors had moved farther towards the construction of a narrative than the authors contributing to the Magazine’s evangelical rivals, they still took it for granted that their stories must make a moral point, and often concluded with a laboured passage pointing it out. A rather charming little story called “The Parrot” (January 1844) about an orphan boy, brought up by his grandmother, who sells his parrot to help pay the rent ends like this:
Do you not think Charlie was much happier than he would have been if he had kept polly? He missed her sadly at first of course; but he had the pleasure of thinking that he had done what was right, and had been able to shew his gratitude to his grandmother, for her care and tenderness. He remembered, too, her lessons in self-denial, and, although so young, could feel the happiness of believing that the sacrifice he made was well pleasing to his heavenly father.
In this, at any rate, The Magazine for the Young stayed comfortably within the conventions that would characterise most respectable children’s fiction until the end of the century.(18)
<24>Under Mozley’s editorship, however, the magazine began to envisage a broader target audience. It seems likely that Mozley and her publisher brothers had become aware that their market was expanding, that it was not just the teachers of village children who were buying the magazine. The stories of desolate girls and naughty village children, the tales of tigers and shipwrecks, appealed to a wider audience, and the magazine was being bought for reading in middle-class nurseries and schoolrooms. Like its evangelical rivals it began to look to a middle class readership rather than the village children favoured by the founders, but whereas these rivals set their tales in the families of merchants, manufacturers and tradesmen, the “Pink Mag” authors usually assumed a readership of children of the country gentry and the professional classes.
<25>Under this new policy, the stories ceased to be specifically designed to appeal to village school children,(19) and began to assume that their child readers were familiar with upper middle class life. As early as January 1845 “Louisa’s Garden” appeared, a three-part story about a clergyman’s daughter living in an industrial town who longs to work in a garden, and in March 1846 “Opposite Neighbours” about a middle-class mother and little daughter who watch with interest the children in the house opposite. In 1848 the three-part story, “Passages in the Life of a Child” consisted of the childhood recollections of a girl brought up in an Elizabethan manor house that had been absorbed into an industrial town, while in another three-part story, “Letters of Two Sisters,” the difficulties faced by one of the sisters who has been sent to boarding school “that she may acquire a grace and propriety of deportment, which girls brought up entirely at home are apt to miss” are described.
<26>A further indication of a broadening audience is the change in the tone of the stories with working-class settings. The founders had assumed an audience of village children living in parishes where there were National and Sunday Schools offering strong religious instruction, and their stories dealt with the kind of naughtiness these children might indulge in and with the problems and temptations they were likely to meet. Now some of the stories about working-class children began to take on characteristics of the “waif” literature that was to be made widely popular in the 1860s and 1870s by Hesba Stretton (Jessica’s First Prayer) and “Brenda” (Froggy’s Little Brother), stories of neglected and abused children and their encounters with the promises and comforts of religion, stories designed to engage the sympathies of the middle class for the poor (Bratton 84-88; Davin 67-98). The two-part story “The Bristol Children” (November 1852, January 1853), for example, gives graphic descriptions of the slums of Bristol and the sufferings of two motherless children with a drunken father, (“Whether he came by day or night, his heavy footstep on the creaking staircase was a terror to his children.”) and recounts how the piety of his frightened little daughter leads him to correct his ways.
<27>The changes seem to have had a positive effect. No records of the Mozley business survive so it is impossible even to begin to estimate the circulation of The Magazine for the Young, but in 1849 the number of pages rose from 25 to 35 per issue (and stayed at that size until the magazine ceased publication) which suggests that it must have been making at least a modest profit for the publishers. Nevertheless, in spite of the changed target audience it is obvious that in no other way was it modelling itself on the evangelical children’s magazines. Whereas the chief lures they held out to the purchaser were the illustrations,(20) The Magazine for the Young expected that, in spite of its dour appearance, readers, having once enjoyed the superior letterpress would take out subscriptions and recommend it to their friends. And here the Dyson-Burns connection dropped a real plum into the editor’s hands: the novelist Charlotte M. Yonge whose more or less continuous contributions began in the 1840s by providing a superior model for the writers of “school child literature” and concluded in 1866 with a tale of missionary life in South Africa.
Charlotte Yonge and The Magazine for the Young
<28>Charlotte Yonge (1823-1901) was fourteen years younger than Marianne Dyson. She lived in Hampshire with her parents and brother in the family house at Otterbourne (about thirty-five miles from Dogmersfield), and the two moved in the High Church circles whose centre was the Oxford Movement leader, the Reverend John Keble, in whose parish Otterbourne lay. When Dyson died Yonge wrote that she was “one of the great influences of my life. . . That first time I saw her in the garden at the Nest [the Dogmersfield parsonage] has been one of the landmarks of my life; and next to my father and Mr Keble, she turned the course of my mind” (Coleridge 309).
<29>The two seem to have met in about 1843 when Yonge was publishing her first novel, Abbeycurch, which appeared under the imprint of both Burns and Mozley.(21) Dyson quickly became her mentor, encouraging her to write reward books and offer manuscripts to The Magazine for the Young.. Female friendships of that date often involved the invention of nicknames, and Yonge frequently addressed Dyson as “driver, ” and referred to herself, and on one occasion to Anne Mozley, as Dyson’s “slaves” (Coleridge 177).
<30>Because of the policy of anonymity, common in most periodicals at that date, it is impossible to know how much written by Yonge appeared in the Magazine for the Young in the early days. Her first identifiable contribution,(22) “A History of Two Magpies,” was published in July 1846, but there could have been earlier ones. Three of the reward books in the Mozley’s 1848 catalogue, Midsummer Day, or the Two Churches, Harriet and her Sister, and London Pride, were definitely by Yonge,(23) but again, there could have been others.
<31>In the later 1840s Yonge began to emerge from the pack of “novices and ladies” as one of the Mozley brothers’ significant authors. In 1847 they published her second novel, “Scenes and Characters, or, Eighteen Months at Beechcroft. By the author of ‘Abbey Church, or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit’,” and in 1848 a History textbook, Kings of England: A History for Young Children, initially written for usein a boarding school for “superior village girls” run by Marianne Dyson (Coleridge 147-48). Yonge’s contributions to The Magazine for the Young were also attracting attention. Between September 1846 and December 1848 she published a series of twenty-seven moral tales, “Langley School,” which dealt with village children and their relations with one another, with their parents, with the National School and with the squire’s family. These stories seem to have enthused a host of the teenage girls searching for “something to do” (Sturrock). Yonge’s biographer wrote of the Langley stories fifty-five years later: “Whatever this record of the doings and sayings of a set of village school-children may have done for the school-child readers themselves, it is certain that it set a whole generation of girls to work at [voluntary] school-teaching” (Coleridge 149). In 1850 the first fifteen of these stories were collected and published in book form by the Mozley brothers as “Langley School. By the author of ‘The Kings of England’,” a focus on an individual author’s body of work which suggests that although Anne Mozley was maintaining the customary anonymity of contributors in the Magazine, her publisher brothers were beginning to “promote” Yonge as one of their literary assets.
<32>The Mozleys, it soon appeared, were not to have sole possession of Yonge’s output. Her next two novels did not go directly to book form, but were serialised in another of the small High Church periodicals of the day, The Churchman’s Companion, a “family magazine” published by Joseph Masters, of 78 New Bond Street, London. Henrietta's Wish, or, Domineering: A Tale ran from January 1849 to May 1850, and The Two Guardians; or, Home in this World from July 1850 to Feb 1852. When Henrietta's Wish was issued in book form by Masters there was no mention on the title page of the two novels Yonge had previously published with the Mozleys, while in 1852 The Two Guardians appeared labelled as “By the author of ‘Henrietta’s Wish,’ ‘Kenneth,’(24) etc ., etc..” Fear of such divided custody may have been what induced the Mozleys to back a new scheme being touted by Marianne Dyson.
<33>In August 1850 Dyson, eagerly supported by Yonge’s mother, proposed that they should found a new magazine to be edited by Yonge, intended not this time for children but for adolescent girls and young women. Their first idea was that they should fund it themselves and have it locally printed because they believed the Mozleys would not want to encroach on ground occupied by The Churchman’s Companion (Coleridge 158). The Mozleys, however, seem to have had no doubts about supporting the venture, and the first number of The Monthly Packet appeared in January 1851. It survived into the 1890s.
<34>Yet in spite of this new distraction Yonge continued to support the “pink mag.” Langley School was followed by two further serialstories which served as the backbone of the magazine from April 1849 through to January 1852.(25) The nine-part The Railroad Children (April to December 1849) was a precursor of the classic “waif” story though with a rural setting. The neglected children of an irreligious railroad navvy are orphaned and brought back to their father’s native village. Here they are placed in the care of their grandfather and uncle, both respectable, religious-minded carpenters who are guided by the teachings of their High Church clergyman. The story consists of the children’s initial resistance to their new environment and final acceptance of its values–though the youngest and weakest child dies. The ten-part Mrs Elderney's School, which ran from January 1850 to January 1852,reverted to the standard moral tale format, though dealing with middle-class rather than village children. Mrs Elderney, a widow returned from India, runs a school for her daughter and six other girls, three being daughters of an owner of “a large firm,” of “a grocer in the town,” and of a “steward to a gentleman with a large estate.” The stories deal mostly with the various temptations and failings of the little girls, vanity, greed, untruthfulness, boasting, in much the same manner as the Langley School stories. During 1850 and 1851 Yonge also contributed a series of botanical essays, “Chapters on flowers,” that were collected and republished by the Mozleys as The Herb of the Field in 1853, and there may have been other non-fiction pieces that have not been identified.
<35>The Mozleys had been well-advised to bid for Yonge’s loyalty, for in 1853 she published The Heir of Redclyffe,(26) which became a massive bestseller, and moved her from being a writer for a limited niche market to a highly valuable literary property who would have been welcomed into the list of any of the leading publishers of the day. For its publication she had deserted the small religious publishers like Masters and the Mozleys for the more prestigious John W. Parker and Son of London, and after this big success published eight more major works with Parker. When that firm closed in 1863, she moved all these titles to Macmillan and Co. who remained her major publishers for the rest of her life.
<36>Nevertheless, in spite of her commitment to mainstream publishing, Yonge remained loyal to the Mozleys. Most of her major novels for the rest of her life were first serialised in The Monthly Packet before passing to Macmillan’s, which guaranteed the Packet’scontinued purchase by many of her loyal followers, and as well as this she continued to write for The Magazine for the Young. Although after the publication of The Heir of Redclyffe there followed a gap in recognisable Yonge fiction, nothing that can be identified as by her appearing in the Magazine between February 1852 and March 1856, she may have continued to support the magazine with non-fiction series. Letters written to her Macmillan publishers in the 1880s reveal that two series by her were appearing in 1855 and 1856. Her “Thoughts on Pictures” were expositions of the religious significance of major works of art, mostly paintings by Raphael, whom she called “that most glorious of all painters” (1855, 47), and, starting in January 1856, “Householders” gave accounts of various crustaceans–building a collection of shells being a life-long hobby of Yonge’s (Yonge to Craik).
<37>The next identifiable run of Yonge serial stories began in March 1856 and lasted until November 1866. Her first two new serials were a return to the “school child” story with a village setting aimed at a village audience. Leonard the Lion-Heart which ran from March to June 1856, is the story of a boastful little boy whose courage fails him in a crisis, while The Christmas Mummers (May 1857 to March 1858), shows the salutary influence on younger boys of a youth who organises a village production of a traditional mummers’ play. Both were republished as reward books, and identified, as were all her reprinted works from then on, as “By the author of ‘The Heir of Redclyffe’.” Her next serial, Friarswood Post Office (August 1858 to August 1859), on the other hand, was longer and addressed to a rather more mature audience. It is the story of three young men, two the sons of a village Post Mistress, one an invalid and the other healthy, and a boy just released from a workhouse to adult life who is rebelling against its restrictions by rejecting both cleanliness and religion. The invalid at first resists and then accepts a religious interpretation of his suffering, the workhouse boy is tamed by his contact with the mother and sister of the family, while the rebellious healthy son through his admiration of the workhouse boy’s independent spirit is brought back to acceptance of his mother’s principles.
<38>With the next two serials, however, Yonge moved across to the genre that The Magazine for the Young had been developing since Mozley took over. These stories, though more accomplished than anything that had yet appeared in the Magazine for the Young, like them assumed in the reader an understanding of the lives of children of the country gentry. The Stokesley Secret (serialized January 1860 to April 1861) recounts events involving the large family of a retired sea captain turned country squire being cared for by a young governess while their mother is being treated for a serious illness in London. Countess Kate (serialized October 1861 to December 1862), one of the most frequently reprinted of all Yonge’s books, tells the story of a girl brought up by relatives in a country parsonage, who suddenly becomes a peeress in her own right, and the troubles she has when she moves to the home of two spinster aunts who try to train her for her new position. (These motifs were later borrowed with outstanding success by the authors of Little Lord Fauntleroy and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.)(27)
<39>The last of Yonge’s serials, New Ground, which ran from January 1863 to November 1866, reverted to the format of the simple moral tale, contrasting the responses of different characters to a variety of moral challenges confronting them as daughters, sisters and members of a missionary party. The tale was given colour and interest by details of the life of a missionary family in Africa, details gathered by Yonge, who left the British Isles only once in her life, from the letters of missionary friends and the reports in missionary magazines.(28)
Mercenary Considerations
<40>It seems likely that it was loyalty like Yonge’s to the High Church cause, together with the field it offered to the “novices and ladies” that made The Magazine for the Young economically viable. The Mozleys, both the father who established the business and the sons who continued it, were dedicated High Anglicans but also successful businessmen. Henry Mozley (1773-1845) had eleven children but was able to employ a good governess and masters for his daughters and send three of his sons to Oxford. The family was able to live in a large house on what was then the outskirts of Derby,(29) and he left enough money for his widow and his four unmarried daughters to live in comfort for the rest of their lives. The publisher sons also seem to have made a fair living from the business. One of them, John, married J.H. Newman’s other sister, Jemima, and was able to give his five sons university educations. The other, Charles, remained unmarried, but seems to have been able to afford a good deal of foreign travel (Jordan “Sister as Journalist” 318-19).
<41>Nevertheless the Mozleys’ approach to publishing was cautious, and their list, in so far as can be judged from known works, was not a particularly distinguished one. In spite of their editors’ success in creating and maintaining a faithful readership for their various periodicals, they seem to have been unwilling to spend money to increase their circulation, but chose rather to keep the costs down to what the subscriptions of a loyal following would cover. With the Magazine for the Young this was done in part by using cheap paper and eschewing all illustrations even for botanical works like Yonge’s “Chapters on Flowers,” but it is difficult also not to suspect that their greatest saving came through allowing it to be subsidised by the good will of the authors and the editor.
<42>I have no information on what the Mozleys paid contributors to the Magazine for the Young, but the rates for the Monthly Packet were very low. In 1852 Yonge received a lump sum of £30 for the year from which to pay herself and the contributors, which worked out at 7½d. per page. By 1854 it had risen to 1s.6d., but was still only 2s.6d. in the 1860s when monthlies with wider circulations were paying as much as £1 per page (Yonge to Roberts; Maxwell 133).
<43>For authors at the beginning of a career, it was probably sufficient to see their work in print, but this was scarcely the case with authors who had established themselves. The explanation would seem to lie in Yonge’s statement: “My object always was to make the packet [that is The Monthly Packet] a handmaid to the Church.”(Yonge to Innes) Although she could have got something like £25 a month if she had serialised her novels in a major journal like Macmillan’s Magazine,(30) she was prepared to allow them to appear first in a context that might entice readers to look also at the articles on the catechism and church history. She made no such concessions when her contributions to the Magazine for the Young appeared as single novels, expecting and getting a good price from the Mozleys.(31) Nevertheless she was prepared to sell them cheaply to periodicals like the Magazine for the Young that never violated “sound Church principles.”
<44>It seems likely that Mozley, too, gave her services as editor for very little return,(32) though her motive may have been somewhat different from Yonge’s. It is noteworthy that when the Mozley firm passed to other hands in 1875 (one brother had died, the other wanted to retire) The Magazine for the Young ceased publication, though The Monthly Packet continued into the 1890s. This suggests that for Mozley editing The Magazine for the Young was work done for the family, and that, by now in her sixties and living in the country, she was not prepared to subsidize the profits of another publisher.
<45>The magazine was probably also a boon to the general list of its publishers. As was the case with most monthly periodicals and their publishers, the Mozleys seem to have undertaken the republication of many of the pieces that had first appeared in The Magazine for the Young, and the fact that they had appeared there provided some guide to future popularity from the response (the editors frequently received letters of comment from subscribers) there. This brought them books like Rickard’s The Bird-Keeping Boy and Yonge’s The Stokesley Secret that remained in print for decades and made the Mozley business quite a valuable property when negotiations for its sale began with Walter Smith in 1875.(33)
A Magazine Transformed
<46>Throughout the 1850s and 1860s Anne Mozley continued to transformThe Magazine for the Young from just another sectarian publication into a magazine with a broader appeal. During the 1850s she began to tone down the sectarian nature of the moral and religious content. While containing nothing that could offend the “sound Church principles” of its original audience, the sectarian emphasis of the journal became much more low-key. Articles on such topics as church history and ritual no longer appeared, and there was little emphasis even on the bible. By the 1860s, though the fiction and non-fiction articles were permeated with directives on how to lead a Christian life, there was almost nothing that could mark it out as specifically High Church. It was, it seems, being adapted to suit the tastes of a wider and thus more profitable market. This change does not seem to have resulted from any more general policy shift within the Mozley firm. The Monthly Packet continuedto proclaim its High Church allegiances long after those of The Magazine for the Young had become muted. For example, the Packet’s July to December 1866 volume contained two series focusing on the Anglican prayer book, “Sonnets from the Collects” and “Practical Readings on the Apostles’ Creed,” and also an account of the activities of the Anglican order of nuns established at Clewer. Yet Yonge does not seem to have regarded Mozley’s policy as necessarily a betrayal of the evangelizing aims of the paper’s founders. As she wrote to one of the “novices and ladies” when offering to forward her work to The Magazine for the Young, “I think there is much more use in insinuating sound doctrine into periodicals read by all the world than in writing in those that belong to a small section of a party.” (Yonge to Wilford)
<47>Another indication that an educated audience was being considered was the introduction during 1856 of a “double acrostic” into a number of issues, a first hint of the “brain-teasers” that were to be a feature of children’s magazines in the next century. These acrostics appeared seven or eight times a year for the rest of the periodical’s life, mostly signed with the initials A.N.E, but supplemented in the 1870s with ones signed F.A.N.
<48>This use of initials, too, was significant, showing that Anne Mozley like the rest of the periodical publishing world was abandoning the commitment to anonymity. Actual names seldom appeared as authors of the various contributions, but articles and stories, headed “by the author of ….” or signed at the end with initials, allowed readers to identify favourite authors and look out for their work.
<49>The Magazine for the Young continued to be published along the lines established by the 1860s until its demise in December 1875. In spite of the appearance of the “high class” children’s magazine in the 1860s, there are no indications that the editorwas making adjustments to meet these changes. Well-written, enjoyable fiction continued to be the mainstay. Whereas even in evangelical papers like The Children’s Friend that were attempting to increase their appeal(34) fiction occupied less than a quarter of their pages, and the serials were usually quite short (frequently built on a simple “ministering children” plot where children from comfortable homes help “waifs” of various sorts), at least half and usually more of The Magazine for the Young consisted of varied fictional material, while many of its serials were republished as books of 200 or more pages.
<50>Mozley continued to pay for it in her long-established manner: by encouraging neophytes with talent who were prepared to accept the Mozley brothers’ rates of pay for a chance to establish their reputations. From January to September 1870, for example, “My Own Story” by F.M.P. [Frances Mary Peard] was the major serial. At this date Peard was at the beginning of her career, but she went on to become quite a prolific novelist, many of her works being popular enough to be published in continental editions by Tauchnitz (Harris). Opportunities of other sorts were also seized. Peard’s serial was followed by “The Little Messmates” by the Rev. Frederick W. Mant, a clergyman who usually published on philanthropic subjects, but who had fifteen years earlier produced a highly successful tale called The Midshipman, or Twelve Years at Sea(35) and now returned to the same subject. It can also be seen from the juxtaposition of these serials that Mozley still saw the Magazine for the Young as addressed to both boys and girls.
<51>And then, in 1875, the sale of the Mozley business began, and The Magazine for the Young, and Anne Mozley’s editorship of it, ended.
A Long-Lasting Lecacy?
<52>But though The Magazine for the Young ceased publication, its legacy remained. Mozley’s long years of experimentation and modification had resulted in a children’s magazine whose tone and practices had become the model for the new sort of children’s monthly that emerged in the 1860s and whose influence stretched into the twentieth century.
<53>During the 1860s, as Marjory Lang has pointed out, “publishers finally began to recognize in the juvenile market an enormous potential for profit and to crowd the bookstalls with colorful and commercial fiction for children” (21). Furthermore there were some who felt there was now a place for a rather different sort of periodical to serve this market. Major commercial publishers were now prepared to risk considerable sums, both on presentation and payments to contributors. The first of these was George Bell who founded Aunt Judy’s Magazine in 1866, soon followed by Alexander Strahan with the similar Good Words for the Young in 1868 (Lang 22-24; Sumpter Ch.2). Yet Bell did not, I would suggest, set out on this new venture without an image of the kind of magazine on which he was to lavish his money. A cheap model that could be adapted already existed: The Magazine for the Young.
<54>At first sight the difference between Aunt Judy’s Magazine and The Magazine for the Young is striking. Aunt Judy’s was larger, (5½ by 7½ inches compared with 3½ by 5½), had more pages (65 compared to 35), and contained three or more full-page illustrations in each number as well as smaller vignettes. It was also much more expensive: 6d an issue as against 2d for The Magazine for the Young. And yet there were similarities that made Aunt Judy’s closer to The Magazine for the Young than to anything else that had preceded it. In the first place both papers were children’s magazines, as distinct from papers focusing on either girls or boys and differing also from the family magazines which included stories and articles addressed to both adults and children. Secondly both were broadly Anglican, though non-sectarian within that definition, and, though moral and religious concerns pervaded most of the contributions, there were almost no articles on specifically religious topics. Most important of all, fiction dominated, each issue containing both single stories and serials of a quality that ensured they were usually republished and often remained in print for many years. Both too had a non-fiction component: articles and poems which dealt in an entertaining fashion with topics that if not strictly “educational,” could be seen as broadening the children’s horizons and stimulating their sympathies and their intelligence.(36) The main differences between them(37) in content were largely due to the differences in the sums the publishers were prepared to pay the contributors.(38) The editor of Aunt Judy’s could attract contributions from Lewis Carroll and Hans Christian Andersen while Mozley was still fostering the development of novice after novice.
<55>There is good reason to believe that the similarity was hardly a coincidence, that the first editor of Aunt Judy’s, Margaret Gatty (1809-1873), must have been long familiar with the various Mozley brothers’ magazines. Gatty was the wife of a Yorkshire country clergyman, and during the 1840s, 50s and 60s was bringing up eight lively, intelligent children, all of them voracious readers (Jones 38-39). It is inconceivable that the “pink mag,” whether borrowed or bought, did not form part of the family’s childhood reading. Furthermore, though George Bell had been publishing her children’s stories since 1851, in 1857 Gatty began offering some of them to The Monthly Packet before passing them to Bell, and when her daughter, who was to become the noted Juliana Horatia Ewing, first began writing in 1861, her stories were also sent to the Packet. By 1866 twenty-five contributions by Gatty had appeared there, and five by the future Mrs Ewing.(39)
<56>Though Aunt Judy’s Magazine ceased publication in 1885, its handsomely bound annual volumes remained in school and private libraries and, much like the bound volumes of Punch, reached generations not yet born when it was founded. Two of the major writers of children’s fiction in the early twentieth century, Rudyard Kipling and A.A. Milne, wrote in their autobiographies that, of all their childhood’s reading, Aunt Judy’s Magazine was the most significant influence on their work (Kipling 11; Milne 28). Kipling’s accolade focused mainly on the impact on him of J.H. Ewing’s stories, but for Milne it was the whole Aunt Judy’s experience:
I have mentioned Aunt Judy’s Magazine. I hope that she means something to some of my contemporaries, for she meant Heaven to us [Milne and his two brothers]. We had all the bound volumes; but I never knew, or know now, whether the components were still in circulation. Was Mrs Ewing Aunt Judy? Who were the other contributors? Any poor laurels which I have won as writer for children I strip from my head and distribute apologetically, leaf by leaf, to those of them who have remained unknown. To us the volumes of Aunt Judy’s Magazine were friends as familiar and as well-loved as were (in this more practical age) the volumes of the Children's Encyclopaedia to my own child. Aunt Judy was not practical. She entranced us, but never told us how to make a tricycle.
<57>For a researcher fascinated by this High Church network of women writers and what they accomplished it is tempting to believe that when two early-Victorian spinster ladies decided that it was their “woman’s mission” to found a magazine for “poor children,” they set off a train of events that played a part in the creation of Mowgli and Winnie-the-Pooh.