Who Speaks for Welsh Children? Early Welsh Children’s Periodicals

When the first Welsh-language children’s periodical was launched in 1823, children in Wales had very few books that they could call their own. The Welsh popular press was still very much in its infancy, but a radical peripatetic schooling system and a wave of religious revival, inspired a new interest in childhood and a new concern for children. The Addysgydd (‘Educator’) aimed to create a reading culture and community that would sustain the young members of the church. It was a prescriptive literature, an attempt to imprint particular behaviours and habits. But it was also a creative literature, engaging the reader with visual, biblical, and contemporary manifestations of the child. Its marginal position as a Welsh-language children’s publication, on the fringes of an emerging British state ideology, opened a new space to claim for Welsh children their own distinct identity. This chapter explores the space created by the Addysgydd and subsequent Welsh periodicals for children not only to discuss childhood but to position the child both as linguistically distinct from England, and inextricably tied to the culture and politics of Britain and empire.