The Informal Education of British Children as Citizens: the Chinese Elements of the NSPCC’s Propaganda (1884-1914)

Abstract

This article assesses the representation of Chinese elements in the British children’s world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It focuses on the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, which explicitly stated that children were citizens with the same rights as adults. In its early years the NSPCC sought to develop children’s sympathy for China, however, this was increasingly supplanted by reports of entertainments including Chinese items. This paper argues that the Chinese elements were not only part of the informal education that shaped children’s identity as citizens, but demonstrated the inherent tension between the needs of the child and the needs of the state, and that the empire did not weaken, but rather strengthened the identity of children as national citizens.