In late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century England, a popular culture of writing was created by children through weekly provincial newspaper columns. Working-class and lower-middle-class boys and girls from across northern industrial England penned letters, stories, poems, drawings and puzzles for publication. These texts offer unique insights into non-elite children’s lives as they interacted in print with adult editors and local reading publics. This enables a reassessment of historiographical accounts of the advent of modern journalism, the rise of mass literacy and young subjectivities. Not only were the editors of ‘family newspapers’ responsive to the enthusiasms of the more literate younger generation, but children exerted a significant influence on household consumption. Although basic signature literacy was learnt at school, it was through practising collaborative writing at home that writing became both a marker of growing up and a mundane enjoyable activity that children shared. The columns were founded on visions of idealized childhood and many young writers narrated their lives through conceptions of childish powerlessness. However, these young writers also positioned themselves as part of a world shared with adults and riddled with inequalities; it was these inequalities that the columns sought to disguise through their celebration of the moral, associational, democratic and everyday.