Hidden Literacies

Periodicals in the 1890s

The issue of Chit Chat included in The Hidden Literacies Project also dates from 1893 and includes among the items advertised on its back pages a souvenir album for the World Fair held in the imaginary city of Allentown on Forest Continent. Chit Chat is the only periodical the Nelson boys produced that presents itself as a family paper intended for a juvenile audience. The Nelson family were clearly vested in the sort of literary domesticity nineteenth century children’s 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 marketing scheme proved highly successful, making it 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.”

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