“Being Editors”: Childhood Over Time

The popularity of periodical literature in the nineteenth century made textual duration over time a frequent and familiar element of the reading experience. On a practical, material level, the text is broken into installments that appear at intervals, and the reader must wait a week or a month for the next issue. During the interval, at the more abstract level of imagination, the text is suspended in the reader’s mind where it blends with events in his or her life. The temporal element of reading periodical literature is of special significance when the texts are for children for whom the several months over which a text appears may amount to a great portion of their young lives. Indeed, this chapter argues that children were themselves aware of the complicated temporality inherent in serialisation. To support this claim, I examine several periodicals made at home by child authors and editors, participating in what was a common domestic pastime: The Rectory Magazine (c. 1846) and The Rectory Umbrella (1850) produced by a young Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll); the fictional Lewisham Recorder assembled by the five Bastable children in E. Nesbit’s The Story of the Treasure-Seekers (1899); and the semi-fictional The Pickwick Portfolio included in Little Women (1868) and based on Louisa May Alcott’s series of homemade juvenile magazines (1849–1850). In some ways, the fictional magazines are proxies for real ones—this is certainly the case for Alcott. However, what is most compelling about these texts is the ways in which all the child editors, whether they are actual children like Dodgson or made-up children like the Bastables, fictionalise the editorial process. They simulate serial publishing and, in so doing, demonstrate insight into the way time enters into textual practice.