The question of ‘who read what?’ remains foundational to studies of reading (Rose 2010: 244). When scholars of children’s literature answer this question, they seldom conceptualise children as readers of newspapers. Instead, to learn about children’s reading, researchers turn to publications with titles and formats that make their young ‘implied reader’ explicit. Indeed, the principal historical surveys of children’s periodical reading make no mention of newspapers (Dixon 1986; Drotner 1988; Moruzi 2016). This chapter responds to this omission by directing a spotlight on what children’s writing in newspapers tells us about children’s engagement with periodicals between 1878 and 1918.
