This essay examines five children’s homemade manuscript magazines and advances an argument that creative collaboration was an important feature of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century childhood, especially for middle-class young people associated with artistic circles. Focusing on children connected to the Pre-Raphaelite and Bloomsbury circles, the essay shows how select children formed their own artistic circles, modeled on those of the adults in their lives. The magazines are The Scribbler (1878–80) by the children of William Morris with assistance from the children of Philip Burne-Jones; Our Paper (1870–87) by the children and cousins of the Strachey family; The Gem (1898) by Margaret Keynes with her brothers Geoffrey and John Maynard; the Hyde Park Gate News (1891–95) by the Stephen children, later Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell; and the Charleston Bulletin (1921–27) by Vanessa Bell’s sons, Julian and Quentin Bell. Through serialized stories, correspondence, competitions, and abundant editorial commentary, child-authors and editors asserted a textual agency as they documented and created collaborative artistic communities.

This article places the nearly forgotten local tour guides at the forefront of the studies of Victorian travel and travel writing on semicolonial China, showing how mediating agents shaped and disrupted cross-cultural writing and history with their relational identities. It contextualizes British and American travel writing on the Five Hundred Genii Temple (in Chinese, the Hualin Temple) from 1849 to 1912 within the intertwined relations between travel writers and guides, in the local socio-spatial condition of Guangzhou (then Canton) and under the travel-to-tourism transition in China. The role played by earlier foreign expatriate guides shifted from introducers to coordinators, leading to travelers’ nuanced local understandings that challenged the temple’s presumed otherness. Later authoritative Cantonese guides manipulated local interactions, reviving stereotypical images among the tourists. The guides appropriated metropolitan baggage of the guided in different ways, cowriting the travel writing and the cross-cultural history it implied. Being mediating agents in the travel as a process of encounter with otherness, the guides significantly altered the encounter while sometimes becoming themselves the focal Other in the writing.

This paper argues that recategorizing Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1872) as humane children’s literature exposes a nineteenth-century humane education that was based in human exceptionalism, while the narratives also push for a conception of subjectivity that would include the child and nonhuman-animal. The Alice books overturn the popular nineteenth-century views that children were inferior British subjects and that nonhumans lacked subjectivity altogether (even as this era saw an upsurge in legal protections for children and animals alike). I argue that Carroll’s work satirizes, not just children’s literature, but humane children’s literature, imagining a revised form of humane education that resisted a speciesist indoctrination of the Victorian child. In the Alice books, humane education leads to positive interspecies relationships and provides children and animals with opportunities to model a robust humane framework for Victorian adult society, ultimately pushing for a view of children and animals not as subordinate to their adult (human) counterparts but as autonomous beings not lacking in subjectivity.