NEWSBOYS: SPANISH AMERICAN PATRIOT CHILDREN AND ‘THE HAZELWOOD MAGAZINE’ IN BIRMINGHAM, ENGLAND, 1820s

There was a close connection between the expansion of the press and experiments with new pedagogical strategies in the early industrial age. An expanding public school system required textbooks thus creating a whole new category of demand which appealed to printers who always on the lookout for reliable markets. At the same time, literacy was increasingly understood to be a desirable characteristic for a productive, patriotic citizenry. For a period of five years or so in the 1820s, several sons of important Spanish American patriot leaders were sent abroad to study in a progressive school called Hazelwood, near Birmingham in the heart of industrializing England. While there, the boys and their friends wrote and published a monthly periodical called the Hazelwood Magazine that clearly imitated the contents of professional newspapers andshared the underlying values of the medium.