Idols on Display: Pacific Object Lessons for the British Child

This chapter explores what evangelicals taught the British child through facilitating their engagement with the Pacific idol. Drawing on Parna Sengupta’s and Sarah Anne Carter’s work on the nineteenth-century object lesson, I explore the function of this Pacific object in buttressing the British child’s involvement in missionary culture, and thus the entanglement of the child in the intertwined dynamics of empire and evangelicalism. While the idol-object occasions the object lesson in children’s missionary meetings, its efficacy is leveraged and amplified by narrating these scenes within the children’s missionary periodical. The late 1830s and 1840s saw a proliferation of such periodicals, which focused on missionary work as a means to engage children in awareness of and fundraising for the missionary movement while providing evangelically approved reading for the growing number of child readers as literacy rates increased among the working and lower middle class, in part through the Sunday school movement. The Pacific idol, then, enables us to trace the entanglement of missions, empire, literacy, and the British child.