Creating a New Abolitionist Literature for Children. Lydia Maria Child’s The Juvenile Miscellany (1826–1834) between Domesticity and Racial Hierarchies

This chapter aims to analyze American abolitionist Lydia Maria Child’s first antislavery stories in The Juvenile Miscellany, the periodical for children she edited from 1826 to 1834 that, through short stories, poems and puzzles, provided amusement and imparted moral lessons to young girls and boys. The chapter therefore explores Child’s early use of children’s literature as a political instrument to create a multiracial egalitarian America by educating young minds in a republic that had declared that all men were born equal but had kept in slavery “that class of Americans called Africans.” Furthermore, it will show how, although she struggled to fight slavery and racial prejudice, in her abolitionist stories Child often reaffirmed racial hierarchies and forms of white superiority.