Despite extensive engagement, children were invisible in the programs of the nineteenth-century Protestant missionary conferences. By the early 1900s this had noticeably changed as denominations and missionary organizations sought to maximize and enhance juvenile missionary interest. Childhood was the key stage in which to establish habits; the future depended upon “the education of the childhood of the race, in missionary matters as in all others.” Literature was pivotal and periodicals were deemed to be the most effective literary form. They provided the young with “impressions which will never be lost . . . nothing will appeal to the young more strongly than stories from beyond the seas, of strange people who know not of Christ, but who need His gospel.” Juvenile missionary periodicals were ubiquitous in Britain, Europe, and America, but they are still only partially understood. Adult and juvenile literature was qualitatively different so that “any adequate analysis . . . requires to be grounded in an understanding of the construction of childhood in the Victorian and Edwardian eras.” This task remains very much a work in progress. Most recent scholarship tends to discursively situate children's periodicals with respect to religion, culture, and politics. All agree on at least a broad two-fold function: the spiritual and the philanthropic. Periodicals per se were an integral part of a large and pervasive Victorian corpus of juvenile religious and moral literature. At the same time missionary periodicals were different. They emphasized child agency by encouraging a “participatory relationship” between readers and their subject. Children became active agents “in a diaologic relationship with [their] world.”
Empowerment and Collaborative Agency in Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry