‘I Would Keep It Forever’: Child Agency and Kinship in a Personal Archive of Letters

ABSTRACT This article revisits a childhood archive of letters exchanged between an 11‐year‐old reader and Canadian children's authors to examine how childhood is relationally produced across time through encounters amongst children, adults and texts. Working with a personal archive, I return to letters written by my child self and preserved across three decades, reading them alongside the responses of adult authors and my own present‐day annotations. Drawing on Marah Gubar's relational model of childhood, Spyrou's attention to children's participation in the production of childhood, Beauvais's conception of childhood as culturally and relationally constituted and Bourdieu's account of cultural capital and literary legitimacy, I consider how a child reader comes to occupy and negotiate a position within literary culture. I read my child self as an ‘artful dodger’: not simply a recipient of adult literary culture, but an active participant who learned to navigate and sometimes circumvent the structures through which children's reading is authorized and valued. Through a methodological oscillation between child and adult selves, the archive becomes more than a repository of childhood memory. It is a relational record in which childhood is continually remade through writing, responding, preserving, rereading and return. I argue that such material archives can illuminate not only how children participate in literary culture but also how relationships amongst children, adults, texts and memory persist and transform across generations.