ABSTRACT
Collins’s first signed article for Baby: The Mother’s Magazine was his interview, “Chinese Children”, with Sun Yatsen in the April issue for 1897. One of his mother’s poems had already appeared in this same magazine eighteen months earlier.8 The very dedicated editor of this publication, a certain Mrs Ada S. Ballin, had sixteen years earlier co-published with her brother, Francis Ballin, a grammar of the Hebrew language, and was almost certainly Jewish herself.9 It is possible that the Ballin and the Collins families mixed in the same elite Anglo-Jewish social circles in London; they may even have been related.10 The subject of Collins’s next article for Baby, two issues later, was “The Childhood of the Queen”, in June 1897, in the midst of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee.11 Collins’s signed writings for Baby from then onwards came thick and fast for over a decade. He published a well-received article elsewhere in 1899, on “The Teeth of the Schoolboy”,12 but Baby appears to have been Collins’s chief vehicle for disseminating his educational ideas in print.
