St. Nicholas is acknowledged to be the best children’s magazine published, particularly during the reign of its founding editor, Mary Mapes Dodge. From 1873 to 1905, Dodge worked to create what she called a
pleasure ground
for children - a magazine that would have great impact on several generations of children. The list of authors who wrote for her includes Louisa May Alcott, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Rudyard Kipling, Theodore Roosevelt, and Mark Twain. The quality of the magazine’s illustration was equally high. The magazine was also the launching pad for a new generation of authors and artists, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, E. B. White, Jack London, and Eudora Welty. This anthology of critical writing on St. Nicholas includes the most influential articles already published and newly commissioned essays on a variety of subjects, including the impact of the St. Nicholas league, the utopian thrust of the magazine’s fiction, and how Dodge persuaded Kipling to become a children’s writer. Essays also analyze Dodge’s relationship with her readers, her editorial practice, the illustrations, American family life as seen by young British readers, war and military life, advertising, and the middle class preoccupation with
change of fortune
tales. The work places St. Nicholas in American cultural history, and analyzes how it both influenced and was influenced over thirty years. Essential documentary material presently unpublished or inaccessible and illustrations from the magazine are also included.