11 Heavenly Citizens of the World: Child Readers and the Missionary Cause

The first magazines aimed at child readers in Europe were published during the latter half of the eighteenth century. Briton John Newbery’s The Lilliputian Magazine, published in 1751, is considered the very first, but both the Swedish Wecko-Blad til Barns Nytta och Nöje, published by Samuel Hasselberg in 1766, and the Dano-Norwegian Ungdommens Ven, published in 1770, are early examples of European children’s magazines.2 S. Svensson, Barnavänner och skolkamrater. Svenska barn- och ungdomstidningar 1766–1900 sedda mot en internationell bakgrund (Stockholm, 2018), p. 93; N. Shine, ‘Børneblade i Danmark fra 1770–1900’, Børn og Bøger, 4 (1971), 91–8, at p. 91. It should be noted that many of these early periodicals also catered to adults, and Nina Christensen argues that Ungdommens Ven was aimed at young girls as well as their mothers and aunts (N. Christensen, Videbegær – Oplysning, børnelitteratur, dannelse (Aarhus, 2012), p. 178). Although relatively short-lived, and without a large readership, these early children’s magazines illustrate the important changes in European eighteenth-century print culture, of which periodicals were a driving force.3 E. Krefting et al., En pokkers skrivesyge. 1700-tallets dansk-norske tidsskrifter mellom sensur og ytringsfrihet (Oslo, 2014), pp. 25–6. See also E. Krefting et al., ‘Introduction’, in E. Krefting et al. (eds), Eighteenth-Century Periodicals as Agents of Change: Perspectives on Northern Enlightenment (Leiden, Boston, 2015), pp. 1–13. These developments in the production and spread of children’s periodical literature continued into the next century, and by the time the Norwegian missionary children’s magazine Børnevennen was established in 1868, there had been a slow but steady increase in the number of magazines of general interest aimed at Norwegian children, leading up to a significant growth of new periodicals in the 1870s.4 E. Økland, ‘Norske barneblad’, in T. Ørjasæter et al., Den norske barnelitteraturen gjennom 200 år: Lesebøker, barneblad, bøker og tegneserier (Oslo, 1981), p. 103.

The first attempts to establish specialised missionary magazines for children in Norway, however, appeared some thirty years earlier, in the late 1840s, and thus correspond with the growth in religious children’s magazines elsewhere in Europe. These periodicals came about in a larger flora of religious literature aimed specifically at children, such as books with religious content, Bible editions, catechisms and psalm books (see Haarberg’s chapter in this book).5 S. Hagemann, Barnelitteratur i Norge inntil 1850 (Oslo, 1965), p. 248; E. Økland, ‘Norske barneblad’, p. 100. In the 1840s and 1850s, when the children’s magazine became an increasingly important genre in Norway, there were also attempts to establish general-interest children’s magazines, such as Niels Andreas Biørn’s successful weekly Børnevennen (1843–50) in addition to more ephemeral endeavours like Huusvennen (1847) and Illustreret Børneven (1856).6 E. Økland, ‘Norske barneblad’, p. 99. Evidently, like their predecessors, these publications also featured religious materials, and their editors were often, like Biørn, priests. Both the general-interest magazines and those that were more specifically dedicated to religious content, including missionary magazines, contributed to widening the scope of religious reading materials for children as well as the contexts for this reading beyond school and beyond the catechism.7 E. Krefting et al., En pokkers skrivesyge, p. 185. Certainly, these developments are not unique to Norway. Yet the missionary magazines aimed at Norwegian children offer a useful vantage point for considering the staging of eighteenth-century child readers as well as the transnational contexts for the periodical literature that was made available to them.

Like so many of these early periodicals, the first missionary magazines were neither numerous, widely read nor long lived and could be considered marginal and of minor importance. Nonetheless, they possibly paved the way for later and more prolific publications, and they testify to the range of reading materials that were available in the early stages of Norwegian printed children’s literature. They also offer valuable insight into the various roles the child readers were ascribed in children’s magazines generally and in the missionary magazines specifically: as citizens of the world and of the heavens, and as potential future missionaries.

In the following I examine the staging of the child reader in the early Norwegian children’s magazines that were issued by or affiliated with missionary movements, with particular emphasis on the very first children’s missionary magazine in Norway, Missionsblad for Børn (Missionary Magazine for Children, 1847–8). The chapter argues that the Norwegian missionary magazines are important to be able to understand the ways in which the Norwegian child was staged as an active participant in religious life and, as such, in print culture. Furthermore, by tracing the foreign models from which these publications drew both inspiration and actual material, the chapter investigates some of the transnational networks of and contexts for these magazines.