The Juvenile Missionary Magazine

Focusing on the London Missionary Society’s children’s periodical, the Juvenile Missionary Magazine, Chapter 1 investigates the means by which missionary information was disseminated to young audiences, and the relations thereby established between Pacific organisms, objects, or peoples and the British child. The chapter introduces the growing significance of the apparently marginal in its investigation of the coral polyp, which develops into a cultural fable that enabled a new perspective on children’s agency in missionary efforts, particularly their fundraising for the missionary ship, the John Williams. The Juvenile Missionary Magazine tracked the John Williams’s movements, informed the children about missionary work in the South Pacific, and listed the children’s contributions toward the missionary effort in each issue. The chapter then shifts to the affective connections encouraged between the child reader and the Pacific Islander convert in the Juvenile Missionary Magazine, focusing on accounts of and by Kiro, a Cook Islander who lived in Britain from 1847 to 1850. Examples of the Pacific Islander as an exemplary Christian in turn functioned as a disciplinary mechanism requiring the British child to pay greater attention to their own spiritual state. Through the coral polyp and the Pacific Islander convert, this chapter elaborates ways in which the empire impacted metropolitan culture, demonstrates the means by which missionary texts called the South Pacific to the British child’s attention, and argues for the significance of what had previously been marginalized on the basis of size (the coral polyp), age (the child), or race (the Pacific Islander convert).