The Children's Realm: Journal to Teach the Higher Way of Living to the Young was a British monthly magazine for children and families that promoted vegetarianism. Published in London from 1906 to 1914 by the Vegetarian Federal Union and founded by Arnold Hills as a successor to the earlier children's periodical Children's Garden, it formed part of a wider network of juvenile vegetarian societies in the late Victorian and Edwardian period. The magazine was edited first by Florence I. Nicholson and later by A. M. Cole, and although aimed primarily at children it was also intended for family reading and welcomed contributions from non-vegetarian readers.
The magazine combined fiction, poetry, essays, correspondence and regular columns with recipes, practical advice and reports from children's branches. Its contents promoted vegetarian diets and ideas of kindness to animals, but also addressed broader questions of social reform and philanthropy through projects such as children's homes, dinner funds and countryside outings for poorer children. Regular contributors included the young artist and writer L. A. Hayter, his schoolfriend Gerald Bullett, and the freethinker and sex-reform campaigner George Bedborough, while the London fruiterer W. B. Shearn is recorded as an active benefactor and organiser of associated children's events.
Later commentary on the satirical weekly Punch has described its references to The Children's Realm as treating the magazine as earnest and priggish, and for much of the twentieth century it attracted limited scholarly attention. From the early twenty-first century, however, historians of vegetarianism, childhood and print culture have used The Children's Realm as a source for the social and cultural history of children's vegetarianism in Britain. Marzena Kubisz and other scholars have discussed it as part of a sequence of vegetarian children's magazines and, in Kubisz's work, as an early example of what she terms "vegan literature for children" and a site of identity formation for young vegetarians.
The Children's Realm emerged from the children's branches of the British vegetarian movement in the late Victorian and Edwardian period. Since the 1890s, activists such as Frances L. Boult and the Ivy Leaf Society had organised children's societies and launched the magazine Children's Garden (1900–1905), which has been interpreted as providing vegetarian children with a sense of community and mitigating their social isolation within a dominant meat-eating culture.[1][2] Historian James Gregory places these magazines in a sequence of juvenile vegetarian periodicals beginning with the Daisy Society's Daisy Basket (1893–94), edited by Joseph Knight, and Boult's later title Rainbow, running through Children's Garden and culminating in The Children's Realm.[3] An overview of historical children's vegetarian periodicals from the Ernest Bell Library also presents The Children's Garden and The Daisy Basket as precursors to The Children's Realm.[4]
Founding and editorial outlook
Boult's death in 1905 and the closure of Children's Garden in December that year prompted debate about how to continue the work with young readers. According to Marzena Kubisz, Arnold Hills of the London Vegetarian Society and the Vegetarian Federal Union[5] undertook to publish a new magazine that would honour Boult's legacy and continue her emphasis on mercy, kindness and "higher humanity". Responding to requests from child readers of Children's Garden, the new periodical appeared in January 1906 under the title The Children's Realm: Journal to Teach the Higher Way of Living to the Young.[1]
In his foreword to the first issue, Hills presented Boult's work with children as grounded in a belief that their innocence could become a source of "redemptive energy". He summarised her aims as to "gather in the children" and teach them the "wonders of Vegetarian truth", and he described children's branches as a nursery preparing "little soldiers for the battle of good against wrong".[6]
The first editor was Florence I. Nicholson, secretary of the Vegetarian Federal Union. In her New Year address to readers in the first issue, she invited young vegetarians to help make both the magazine and the "Children's Vegetarian Movement" a success, appealing to their "willing hands" to build up a large number of helpers for the cause. Nicholson was later succeeded as editor by A. M. Cole.[1]
Although aimed primarily at children, the magazine was intended for family reading and deliberately welcomed contributions and readers who were not yet vegetarians. Editors described non-vegetarian adults and children as "still labouring in the darkness of flesh-eating", but presented them as potential converts rather than excluding them from the imagined community of the "Realmers".[1]
Circulation and distribution
Kubisz notes that from the outset the editors saw wide distribution as important to the magazine's survival and to the growth of a children's vegetarian movement. They repeatedly invited readers to help secure new subscribers, sometimes offering prizes such as a copy of Eliza Brightwen's Wild Nature Won by Kindness for the child who sent in the largest number of subscriptions in the first month of publication. Similar appeals were issued again in 1908 when circulation was still considered unsatisfactory.[1]
Children were encouraged to ask local newsagents to stock the magazine and to promote it at school. One letter published in the "Our Correspondence Column" in March 1910 described a schoolboy who always pinned a copy of The Children's Realm on his classroom wall, which Kubisz cites as an example of the magazine's presence in educational spaces. Surviving sources do not provide firm circulation figures or precise print runs.[1]
Suspension and closure
According to Kubisz, the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 brought the rapid growth of children's vegetarian activities to a halt. Financial difficulties led the publishers to suspend the magazine, and in September 1914 A. M. Cole announced that The Children's Realm, described there as an "excellent little messenger of humanity and sane diet", would cease publication.[1]
Contents and themes
Columns and genres
The Children's Realm continued and expanded many of the features of its predecessor Children's Garden. Regular columns included "In the Kitchen" (with recipes and food advice), "For the Boys" (edited by a persona known as The Captain), "Uncle Joker's Page" and "Our Correspondence Column", alongside reports from children's branches and announcements of events.[1]
The magazine mixed non-fiction with fiction and poetry. Non-fiction pieces covered subjects such as health, nutrition, geography, gardening and the social and economic conditions facing the urban poor under rapidly developing capitalist systems. Essays were used to present vegetarian arguments and to link diet reform with broader questions of justice and "higher" forms of civilisation.[1]
Fiction in the magazine, often in the form of serialised tales, short stories and poems, focused on human–animal relations and the ethics of kindness, drawing on earlier traditions established in The Daisy Basket and Children's Garden. Animal protagonists, child reformers and moral questions around the killing of animals for food are described by Kubisz as common motifs.[1]
Interactive readership and contests
According to Kubisz, the editors treated child readers as active participants rather than passive consumers. The Children's Realm frequently organised essay competitions and other contests and printed letters, stories and drawings submitted by children. Competition topics often revolved around vegetarian themes, including reasons for adopting a meatless diet, reflections on the ethics of flesh-eating and, in one case, "Diseases, Drunkenness, Crimes and Cruelties, Connected with Flesh Eating".[1]
Letters pages show a diverse readership. Some children wrote as committed vegetarians and animal lovers, while others stated that they were "not very fond of animals" but loved plants, which Kubisz interprets as suggesting that sensitivity to nature more broadly could act as a starting point for later changes in lifestyle. Non-vegetarian readers were encouraged, rather than criticised, and invited to experiment with vegetarian practices and to join the magazine's community.[1]
Social reform and philanthropy
Alongside diet reform, the magazine promoted philanthropic activities directed at children in British cities. Articles and illustrations contrasted the circumstances of relatively affluent readers with those of poorer children and urged support for projects such as The Nest, a vegetarian children's home, the Children's Dinner Fund, which Kubisz reports as providing thousands of cheap or free meals each week, and the Fresh Air Fund, which offered day trips to the countryside for children who could not otherwise afford them.[1]
According to Kubisz, these campaigns The Children's Realm connected vegetarian ethics with wider concerns about poverty, exploitation and social inequality and presented its readers both as advocates for animals and as potential helpers of less privileged children.[1]
W. B. Shearn and vegetarian spaces
Kubisz identifies the fruiterer W. B. Shearn as one of the magazine's most active benefactors. His father, Benjamin Shearn, owned a vegetarian restaurant on Tottenham Court Road in London which included a Fruit Saloon and Palm Garden Luncheon Rooms, alongside a nearby shop described in contemporary publicity as a place that "must make all meat-eating children who see it wish they were Vegetarians". Shearn, who preferred to describe himself as a fruitarian, ran the family's fruit and vegetable business and the Fruitarian Luncheon Saloon, which became a meeting place for members of the London Vegetarian Society and a welcoming setting for young vegetarians.[1]
From 1907 advertisements for "B. Shearn & Son, the largest Health Food Stores in London" appeared regularly in The Children's Realm. Shearn sponsored essay competitions on topics such as "Why I Am a Vegetarian", offering baskets of fruit as prizes and inviting all entrants to a "fruit tea and conversazione", and provided trophy fruits for events such as Yuletide festivals and Christmas bazaars. He also organised parties for vegetarian children, including celebrations of the magazine's anniversary, which child correspondents described as generous and memorable occasions. Kubisz interprets these activities as part of the socio-material support structures that made children's vegetarian practice more sustainable and helped young readers consolidate individual and collective vegetarian identities.[1]
Gender, justice and proto-environmentalism
Kubisz suggests that over time the magazine addressed an increasingly broad range of reform concerns. Editorials and stories encouraged children to resist injustice "wherever we find it", not only on behalf of animals but also in relation to "other youngsters" and to perceived unfairness in human society. Features invited readers to think about gender roles, the position of girls and boys in the household and the relationship between humans and the natural environment.[1]
She reads this widening focus as an early intersection of vegetarian doctrine with gender politics and what she characterises as proto-environmentalist thought, framed for a juvenile audience.[1]
Contributors
L. A. Hayter and Gerald Bullett
Kubisz highlights the young artist and writer L. A. Hayter as one of the magazine's more prominent contributors. His stories and illustrations, sometimes co-authored with his schoolfriend Gerald Bullett, are described by Kubisz as having taken the magazine "by storm". Hayter's work, which included serials such as "The Weather Kingdom", "The Land of Undh-Aneethe" and "The Nimble Sixpence", blended fantasy, absurd humour and whimsical visual design. His tales featured figures such as goblins, fairies, talking coins and anthropomorphised natural forces, often accompanied by line drawings. Kubisz notes that the magazine provided an early venue for Bullett, who later became a published novelist, poet and critic; some of his first stories, such as "The Rescue" and "A Moonlight Shadow", appeared in its pages in the late 1900s.[1]
George Bedborough
George Bedborough, who sometimes wrote under the persona "Uncle George", is discussed by Kubisz as one of the magazine's regular contributors on questions of animals and social reform.[7] A freethinker and sex-reform campaigner, he was known as the editor of The Adult, a sexological journal, author of the poem The Atheist and an advocate for decriminalising homosexuality. Gregory characterises The Children's Realm as being "conducted" by Bedborough, and notes that he had already gained notoriety through his work on The Adult.[3] Kubisz states that he adopted vegetarianism after visiting slaughterhouses in Chicago with Moses Harman and thereafter used his writing to familiarise young readers with vegetarian diets and to draw attention to the suffering of animals and humans.[7]
From 1911 Bedborough contributed regularly to The Children's Realm, publishing travelogues, accounts of animals he had encountered and didactic essays that often combined autobiographical material with short stories, parables and dream-visions; these pieces were later collected in Stories from the Children's Realm: A Book for Those Who Love Children and Animals (Vegetarian Federal Union, 1914), advertised as promoting vegetarianism from a humanitarian point of view and treated by Kubisz as a principal source for how early vegetarian children's fiction familiarised young readers with the idea of a meat-free diet.[6][7]
Kubisz argues that Bedborough presented cruelty as arising more from thoughtlessness than from a deliberate wish to inflict pain and treated imagination as a tool for entering into the thoughts and feelings of others, maintaining that fantasy in children's literature was valuable when it deepened empathy for the suffering of animals and people; at the same time, she notes that his calls for respect towards people of colour remained framed by contemporary imperial assumptions, linking his opposition to racism with an appeal to recognise parallels in the disparagement of both racialised humans and "mere animals".[6][7]
Tone and style
Kubisz describes The Children's Realm as marked by surreal humour, self-mockery and a playful tone that sought to appeal to varied tastes while retaining a reformist message. Comic illustrations such as a caricature of a child suffering from "cabbage-itis" after an over-dose of cabbage, or a head taking on the form of a carrot, are given as examples of a mixture of dietary instruction and visual joke.[1]
Reception and legacy
Contemporary comment in the London satirical weekly Punch was less sympathetic. Writing in his survey of the paper's treatment of Edwardian England, Charles L. Graves notes that in 1907 Punch quoted what he describes as an apparently genuine letter from The Children's Realm, calling it "a paper which aimed at teaching 'the higher way of living to the young'". The letter described a small boy who was "a very earnest vegetarian" and, in Graves's account, was treated by Punch as a priggish child correspondent.[8]
Kubisz notes that, like many middle-class children's periodicals of the period, individual issues of The Children's Realm survive mainly as bound yearbooks held in the collections of the British Library, and argues that for much of the twentieth century the magazine received little scholarly attention, reflecting what she sees as a broader neglect of vegetarian periodical culture in historical research.[1][9] A later account from the Ernest Bell Library reports that it cares for 84 consecutive issues of The Children's Realm from volume 1, number 1 to volume 7, number 12, and states that the British Library also holds issues from 1913 and 1914.[4]
From the early twenty-first century, historians of vegetarianism, childhood and print culture have begun to use The Children's Realm as a source for studying the social and cultural history of children's vegetarianism in Britain.[1][3] Kubisz in particular uses the magazine, alongside The Daisy Basket and Children's Garden, to discuss the emergence of a self-consciously vegetarian child subject, the socio-material infrastructure of children's vegetarian lifestyles and the ways in which periodicals for young readers functioned as tools for identity formation.[1] In her interpretation, subscribing to and participating in The Children's Realm formed part of a series of "small-scale acts of identity formation" through which children could experience vegetarianism as a lived practice in what she terms an "antagonistic" meat-centric environment. She also draws parallels between the magazine's representations of animal advocacy and later vegan literature and online spaces for young activists.[1]
In an earlier overview of vegan literature for children, Kubisz places The Children's Realm and related vegetarian magazines for young readers within what she calls the early history of "vegan literature for children", arguing that late nineteenth and early twentieth century vegetarian stories for children form part of a longer tradition that continues in contemporary vegan books. She proposes 1914, when the last issue of The Children's Realm appeared, as a symbolic end to a period of "lively growth" in this early phase, after which she identifies a standstill in the development of vegan literature for children until the later twentieth century.[6]
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