Reading religious periodicals from the nineteenth century requires ‘careful and ongoing methodological reflection’, Mark Knight notes, pointing to the complexities of the term ‘religion’ and of interpreting theological material from earlier periods and of often little-known religious groups.
1 M. Knight, ‘Periodicals and Religion’, in A. King et al. (eds), The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers (London, 2016), p. 356. Similarly, Felicity Jensz and Hanna Acke remind us how missionary periodicals ‘can inform us of historical events, actors, and places, but must all be read cautiously, and with an awareness of missionary biases’, and how these biases were often political as much as religious.
2 F. Jensz and H. Acke, ‘Introduction’, in F. Jensz and H. Acke (eds), Missions and Media: The Politics of Missionary Periodicals in the Long Nineteenth Century (Stuttgart, 2013), p. 10. These remarks are also valid for the study of the early religious magazines that were aimed at Norwegian children, many of which were affiliated to
Brødrevennene,
3 Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine in German. the Norwegian branch of the evangelical Moravian Church with strong ties to Germany and Denmark.
4 L. Harberg, Hundre år for barnet: Norsk Søndagsskoleforbund 1889–1989 (Oslo, 1989), p. 13; I. Sagvaag, Søndagsskulebarnet i Søndagsskulebladet. Utgreiing om Børnebibliotheket/Barnas Søndagsblad (Bergen, 1999), p. 12. Indeed, several of the early Norwegian missionary magazines for children were published in the south-western town of Stavanger, where the Moravian Church played a significant role in Christian life from the 1820s until the turn of the century.
5 P. Øverland, Kortere avhandlinger om Brødremenigheten i Norge (Trondheim, 1987), pp. 10, 40. Also significant is that the School of Mission and Theology was founded in Stavanger in 1843 by the Norwegian Mission Society. In this chapter, however, I am less concerned with the theological contents of the magazines as such, and more interested in how the missionary cause had an impact on the staging of the child reader, and how we through these publications may gain a broader understanding of the ways in which the child reader was cast by writers, editors and publishers in mid-nineteenth-century print culture.
6 For child-centred approaches to children’s literature, see for example Ch. Appel and N. Christensen, ‘Follow the Child, Follow the Books – Cross-Disciplinary Approaches to a Child-Centred History of Danish Children’s Literature 1790–1850’, International Research in Children’s Literature, 10:2 (2017), 194–212; M. O. Grenby, The Child Reader, 1700–1840 (Cambridge, 2011).Missionary magazines have mainly been approached ‘as sources of information on religious, imperial, and cultural history. As historical documents, these often well-indexed and increasingly accessible publications have provided a treasure trove of information.’
7 A. King et al. (eds), The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers (London, 2016), p. 159. In the case of missionary magazines for children, academic interest in them as either sources or primary texts has been limited, and due to an apparent lack of literary value, missionary publications are often left out of general historical overviews of children’s literature.
8 Sagvaag, Søndagsskulebarnet i Søndagsskulebladet, p. 36. For instance, they are omitted from the major historical overviews of Norwegian (T. Birkeland et al. (eds), Norsk barnelitteraturhistorie (Oslo, 2018); Hagemann, Barnelitteratur i Norge inntil 1850; T. Ørjasæter et al., Den norske barnelitteraturen gjennom 200 år: Lesebøker, barneblad, bøker og tegneserier (Oslo, 1981)), Swedish (G. Klingberg, Svensk barn- och ungdomslitteratur 1591–1839 (Stockholm, 1964); Svensson, Barnavänner och skolkamrater) and Danish children’s literature (I. Simonsen, Den danske børnebog i det 19. aarhundrede (Copenhagen, 1966); T. Weinreich, Historien om børnelitteratur – dansk børnelitteratur gennem 400 år (Copenhagen, 2006)). Another aspect concerns the scarcity of materials: these first missionary magazines for children were often small and unassuming, printed on cheap paper and with inexpensive binding. Consequently, many copies have been lost. Nevertheless, the materials we
do have access to in the libraries and archives shed light on the early children’s missionary magazines and invite us to approach them not merely as historical or theological sources, but as texts worthy of study in their own right. As Anja Müller points out in her discussion of eighteenth-century English periodicals and prints, ‘it is high time that these texts were considered in their function as printed mass media for the construction of childhood’.
9 A. Müller, Framing Childhood in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals and Prints, 1689–1789 (London, New York, 2009), p. 6. No doubt, this applies to nineteenth-century missionary children’s magazines, too.
In his study of the religious periodical and newspaper press in England during the late eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century, Louis Billington identifies a growth of specialised religious magazines in the period between 1790 and 1840 in which journals promoting foreign missions played a pioneering role.
10 L. Billington, ‘The Religious Periodical and Newspaper Press, 1770–1870’, in M. Harris and A. Lee (eds), The Press in English Society from the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries (Rutherford, London, Toronto, 1986), p. 119. Between the 1820s and 1840s this growth became especially noticeable in the increase of religious children’s magazines, which were usually small, with brief texts and a few simple illustrations.
11 Ibid., p. 121. The Child’s Companion; or, Sunday Scholars Reward (1824–1932), issued by the Religious Tract Society,
The Children’s Friend (1824–1930) and the Wesleyan
Child’s Magazine (1824–45) are early examples of successful and long-lived publications, whereas later examples include the
Church Missionary Juvenile Instructor (1844–90), the London Missionary Society’s
Juvenile Missionary Magazine (1844–66) and the
Juvenile Missionary Herald (1845–1905).
12 Ibid., pp. 120–1; K. Drotner, English Children and their Magazines, 1751–1945 (New Haven and London, 1988), p. 25; Svensson, Barnavänner och skolkamrater, pp. 48–9. Even earlier examples include Katholischer Kinderfreund (Vienna, 1785) and The Youth’s Magazine or Evangelical Miscellany (London, 1805–67) (Svensson, Barnavänner och skolkamrater, pp. 48–50). In Germany important publications were
Jugendblättern (1836–1916) and the
Die Sonntagsschule (1863–c. 1925), and among the most popular examples of such magazines in the Scandinavian countries – influenced by the publications in England and Germany – were the Swedish
Dufwo-rösten and
Christlig Barntidning (1848–61), the Danish
Børnenes Blad (1877–98) and the Norwegian
Børnenes Søndagsblad (1874–99).
13 S. Svensson, Barnavänner och skolkamrater, pp. 49–50.As some of these magazine titles indicate, many of the publications were affiliated to the Sunday school movements, which were hugely influential in distributing religious texts to children.
14 C. S. Hannabuss, ‘Nineteenth-century Religious Periodicals for Children’, British Journal of Religious Education, 6:1 (1983), 20–40, at p. 21; S. Svensson, Barnavänner och skolkamrater, p. 49. In England, Robert Raikes’ Sunday schools in 1780 mark the beginning of the organised Sunday school, whereas the first Sunday school in Germany can be dated to 1824.
15 The first Sunday school in Sweden was organised in the 1850s, and in Finland in 1870 (I. Sagvaag, Søndagsskulebarnet i Søndagsskulebladet, p. 21). In Norway early variants of Sunday schools date back to 1734 and to Sunday gatherings for children organised by Brødrevennene. In the 1750s these became more organised, not least with the Haugean movement at the turn of the century, and gradually took the form of Sunday schools. There was a significant increase in the 1870s, concurrent with the development towards a civil public school,
16 A. Danbolt, ‘Den kristelige søndagsskolen – et middel i Lutherstiftelsens kamp for luthersk kristendom. Søndagsskolen og indremisjonen i 1870-årene’, Tidsskrift for Teologi og Kirke, 79:1 (2008), 48–65. but the very first official Sunday school in Norway was the Stavanger Søndagsskole started on 10 March 1844, inspired by and financially supported by the Religious Tract Society (1799) in England.
17 I. Hagen, Barnet i norsk kristenliv: søndagsskolen i Norge gjennom 100 år (Oslo, 1947), p. 36. In addition, tract societies had been established in Bergen, Christiania and Stavanger (1832) and had begun publishing texts, mostly translations from English, German and Swedish.
18 E. Molland, Norges kirkehistorie i det 19. århundre, vol. 1 (Oslo, 1979), p. 164. This, and the Sunday school movement, certainly played a major role in the development of religious magazines for children in Norway, including those focusing on the missionary cause.
Søndagsblad for Børn (Sunday Magazine for Children) appeared only as a trial issue on 7 July 1844 and is possibly the first Sunday school magazine for children in Norway. The issue is an eight-page leaflet, edited by Erik Nicolai Saxild and published in Christiania (today’s Oslo).
19 Saxild (1787–1846) was a former teacher, co-director and inspector at the Christiania Sunday school, and a key figure in the establishment of the city’s first child asylums in 1839. He published several texts for children, and his attempt to establish Søndagsblad for Børn rather late in his life must be seen in context with his longtime engagement in children’s welfare in the city. Clearly,
Søndagsblad for Børn was not a successful endeavour. In the postscript dated 29 June 1844 it becomes clear that Saxild, having invited subscribers in January earlier that year, has not yet gathered enough subscribers to cover the costs of the magazine. He once again encourages parents and teachers in and outside the city to subscribe but admits that the magazine’s future is uncertain.
20 In an announcement in the later Børnevennen, the magazine’s future seems to depend more on divine intervention than on financial circumstances: ‘“The Children’s Friend”, God willing, is to be published next year in the same way and on the same terms as this year’ (‘“Børnevennen” udkommer, om Gud vil, næste Aar paa same Maade og same Betingelser som iaar’): (Børnevennen, December 1868, p. 16). The magazine explicitly addresses children aged between five and twelve but was intended as a Sunday read for the whole family to facilitate an appropriate marking of the Sabbath. The materials that would provide such an appropriate marking, based on the first and only issue, were religious stories, questions on the scripture, hymns and poetry in the form of an excerpt from the prominent author Henrik Wergeland’s poem
Aftenbøn. The postscript also tells us something about the magazine’s overall purpose:
Søndagsblad for Børn, Saxild hopes, will enable children’s faith to bear fruit for a happy childhood and youth, for the fatherland, and finally for ‘the eternal Sabbath, the divine, eternal home!’
21 ‘den evige Sabbat, det himmelske, evige hjem!’ (Søndagsblad for Børn, 1844, p. 8). Thus, it shares with the missionary magazines the function of preparing the child for the divine afterlife and of promoting the idea of the child as what D. J. Konz refers to as ‘a pious, responsible Christian citizen in-training’.
22 D. J. Konz, ‘The Many and the One: Theology, Mission and Child in Historical Perspective’, in B. Prevette et al. (eds), Theology, Mission and Child: Global Perspectives (Oxford, 2014), pp. 23–46, at p. 32.