"Ten dollars' worth of fun": The obscured history of the toy magic lantern and early children's media spectatorship

Abstract

This essay excavates the toy magic lantern's largely overlooked significance in the late nineteenth century and explores the toy's role in cultivating children as media spectators. Domestic shows with toy lanterns allowed children to perform as curators, showmen, and audience members. This play naturalized such home entertainment as a commodifiable experience. Promotion of toy lanterns in the periodical The Youth's Companion from the 1880s to 1900s demonstrates the toy's function as an early children's home entertainment medium that has historically been overlooked in favor of analyses of the lantern as a mass medium in institutional contexts.