Some of the kids who collected cards in the 1880s later wrote down firsthand accounts. Here is a post of mine about the best known of them, Arthur Folwell, who wrote an article for the New Yorker in 1929 about his memories of collecting cards 40 years earlier:
https://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=202129
And here is a post with a couple of articles from Card Collector's Bulletin in the 1940s, with people's memories of collecting tobacco cards back in the 1880s:
https://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=239836