Hidden Literacies

Marketing Family Magazines

The Nelsons were clearly vested in the sort of literary domesticity nineteenth century family magazines hoped to foster. The family portrait the brothers stage in their parlor [fig.6] includes a map on the wall, a shelf piled with books, Papa and Walter reading, and a newspaper spread on the table. Note the string running from Elmer’s hand that he used to trigger the camera. As Elmer explains, the Nelsons’ interest in photography is the direct result of the boys’ love of periodicals—and of guns:
During the spring and early summer of 1896, Arthur was getting subscribers for The Youth’s Companion in order to get himself a rifle, and among the premiums which he got was a Harvard camera using a 2-1/2 X 4 plate and a Phoenix camera using a 2-1/2 X 2 plate. We received them the 3rd of July, we like the looks of them very much and they seemed very simple. The larger one Arthur gave to me and the smaller to Walter. We were soon trying them.
The Youth Companion’s innovative “premiums” marketing scheme proved highly successful; rewarding young readers for signing up new subscribers it became the juvenile magazine with the largest circulation throughout most of the nineteenth century.  As Paul Ringel notes, subscribers to Youth’s Companion “came from not only the elite but also the middle and working classes…. What the families shared with children’s magazine editors was neither economic nor social status but an ambition for advancement and a belief that carefully managed engagement with the market economy could help…fulfill these aspirations”(7). In subscribing to children’s magazines, Ringel argues, families hoped to acquire “gentility."

Premiums were among the most engaging features of The Youth’s Companion, and the boys clearly take great pleasure in creating the elaborate “Premiums” pages of Chit Chat.  The Nelsons’ premiums offer items that support literary pursuits and Nelson seeds alongside world-making and warfare: a writer's box, a tablet of paper, the game of "Authors," a “Geography Game,” its box decorated with an unmistakable map of Big Continent, flags, and
 
THE NEW STEAMER MARY
This is the boys delight a regular model of a war ship that now sails in Big Continent navy this is a real little war boat it has the little holes for the canon to come out a boy will play with this for hours at a time
This “real little war boat” modeled on “a war ship that now sails in Big Continent navy” portrays the brothers’ imaginary World as actual and present. In presuming the market appeal of such toys, the Nelsons clearly do not think of their games as uniquely their own, but are confident that the war play they have enjoyed on their island/continents would “delight” any boy.  The Nelsons’ own hand-hewn forts and manuscript publications may epitomize the “autonomous, unstructured, or self-structured play” Howard Chudacoff contrasts with the rising prominence of manufactured toys and adult supervision during this period(7), but commodified playthings are among the pleasures of the Nelsons' imaginary World.

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