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This article argues for the importance of restoring girls' aspirations and self-education to narratives of Victorian educational reform. Studies typically focus upon the efforts of professionals, politicians and campaigners in plotting the pioneering changes to girls' education in the second half of the nineteenth century. Here it is contended that the success of these developments depended upon a new generation of girls with the confidence and ambition to take advantage of the new opportunities to sit examinations and attend university. To do this, the article excavates the neglected phenomenon of the manuscript magazine. It examines how young females used well-established periodicals to advertise their own amateur magazines. Inviting readers to contribute to their ventures, they constructed independent networks of collaborative cultural endeavour. Manuscript magazines, it will be suggested, need to be understood as part of a 'magazine culture' widely embraced by Victorian girls. To tease out the small but subtle ways in which magazine culture could enhance the aspirations of young women, the article focuses upon the extraordinary diary archives of Eva Knatchbull-Hugessen (1861–95). The educational career of Knatchbull-Hugessen, who was an early student at Newnham College in the 1880s, exemplifies the impact which engagement in girlhood culture could engender and the significant role played by magazines, both professional and amateur, in this process. Understanding teenage responses to educational reforms requires a recalibration of our analytical lens to focus not upon grand narratives of feminist awakening but rather upon the small subjective shifts which typically underlay young females' decisions.

This article explores the enthusiastic reception with which many young Britons greeted the French Revolution. In some cases this sparked intense debate about the politics of family life, as children and youths sought to apply revolutionary principles of equality and democracy to their own lives. This was not an isolated phenomenon which sprang up simply in response to the revolution itself, however. Rather, it was the sharpest demonstration of what the article coins the 'juvenile enlightenment'. The enlightenment has rarely been considered from the perspective of the child. This article argues that key features of the enlightenment had the potential to empower children and to encourage the articulation of distinct subjectivities. In places where this occurred in conjunction with other enlightenment practices, such as a vibrant urban culture with associated sociable activities, it could result in striking youthful engagement in a variety of civic and political affairs. The growing crystallisation of the category of 'child' was intrinsic to this process in some respects, but also significantly complicated it in others. Politicised young subjects might rebel against the constraints the subject position of 'the child' entailed, finding older more inclusive notions of 'youth' better conducive to political engagement. Examining these issues through the lens of a child's manuscript diary enables close scrutiny of the shifting and complicated identities this context produced. More radically however, such an analysis reveals the extent to which juvenile subjects could themselves be significant political actors and actively contribute to the constitution of contemporary enlightenment culture.

The 1867 Reform Act created a polity in which, for 50 years, age and householding status were frequently more important than class in determining British men's right to vote. In the debates leading up to the act, both age and householder status were deployed to manage fears of greater democratisation. This essay traces some of the associative connections parliamentarians made between the sexual and family status of potential voters; their relationship to their fathers or sons; the kinds of houses in which they dwelt; and their personal decisions to delay or undertake marriage. The claim that the new male voter was distinguished for his 'independence' has been much discussed. However, it is suggested here that it was equally the figure of the settled citizen which emerged as significant during parliamentary debate. This was a category which could be interlaced with a stream of connected ideas concerning attachment to the 'hearth', the community, and to Anglo‐Saxon heritage itself. During the age of reform, calls to raise the age of suffrage frequently surfaced. This contributed to a climate of opinion which legitimised arguments denigrating the political abilities of the young and which helped to make possible age‐related political structures. Analysed alongside debates over the merits of an education clause in 1866 and the amendment to enfranchise lodgers the following year, the essay considers how class‐specific distinctions of age and life cycle helped to uphold an enduring model of hegemonic masculinity, centring on the mature, householding male.