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Chatterbox was founded in December 1866 by British clergyman John Erskine Clark. It's amazingly difficult to find any information about this magazine, despite the fact that for decades (and well into the 20th century) it was one of the most popular magazines for children in Britain and America!
The magazine was issued weekly, and cost a halfpenny. Today, it's available in the form of bound annuals (the first having been issued in 1867). The magazine was aimed at "older" children - children with a good level of reading ability.
Chatterbox offered its readers an interesting collection of short articles, short fiction, and serialized tales that would run for most or all of a given year. The magazine was aimed at boys and girls, so stories included heroic boys' adventure tales and stories whose theme can only be described as "the importance of being good little girls" for the fairer sex. (One assumes that editors perhaps supposed that girls would never read the adventure stories; one also assumes that they quite certainly did!)
Chatterbox was also renowned for its wonderful illustrations. Animal artist Harrison Weir was a frequent contributor to its pages, illustrating all sorts of animal anecdotes and fables. Generally every third page in the magazine offered a full-page engraving, making Chatterbox an amazing art source for the Victorian era.
The magazine was published in both Britain and America. If you're collecting print editions, it can be helpful to know the country of publication, as a magazine issued for a particular year in Britain might be published the following year in America. Several unauthorized knockoffs were also published in America under the name of "Chatterbox," including Frank Leslie's Chatterbox and Belfort's Chatterbox. Generally these had completely different content, and such knockoffs led to more than one copyright lawsuit.
The magazine survived until 1948, and many of us may remember having an old volume or two lying around the house. Bound volumes are still readily available on eBay. Today, we may find the reading a bit less "politically correct" than we might like - Chatterbox did not hesitate to perpetuate Victorian stereotypes of minorities and ideas of traditional women's roles!
Due to the relatively juvenile nature of the nonfiction content, we have not archived individual articles from Chatterbox on VictorianVoices.net. However, we are happy to announce that we have now posted our entire collection of Chatterbox on Archive.org, making this, as far as we know, the only readily available electronic archive of this publication. Use the links below to download individual volumes.
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