University of Mississippi

St. Nicholas 

and Mary Mapes Dodge

 

St. Nicholas

 represented a refreshing change of pace from the “dreary moralizers” and is 

still remembered as the paramount children’s journal of all time. Tebbel described it as “one of 

the freshest voices of all . . . beyond any doubt the best magazine for children ever published in 

America.”

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 Despite its beginning at the inauspicious time during the Panic of 1873, 

St. 

Nicholas’

 attractive design and content captured an audience immediately. Editor Mary Mapes 

Dodge described her intentions for the magazine:  

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14 

Its cheer must be the cheer of the bird-song; it must mean freshness and heartiness, life 

and joy…. Most children of the present day attend school. Their heads are strained and 

taxed with the day’s lesson. They do not want to be bothered nor amused nor petted. 

They just want to have their own way over their own magazine. They want to enter one 

place where/ they can come and go as they please…. Of course, they expect to pick up 

odd bits and treasures…. A child’s magazine is its playground.

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Among its contributors were Robert Louis Stevenson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Rudyard Kipling 

whose 

The Jungle Book

 was first published as a serial in 

St. Nicholas

. Tebbel blamed the radio 

for 

St. Nicholas’

 demise in 1943. It “altered children’s tastes in entertainment” and made 

magazines seem old fashioned.

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In addition to literary stars as writers, the early decades of children’s magazines were 

highlighted by the significant role played by outstanding editors and publishers. For 32 years 

children’s novelist Mary Mapes Dodge, author of 

Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates

, edited  

St. Nicholas: Scribner's Illustrated Magazine for Girls and Boys,

 a monthly literary publication 

from 1873 until 1940, considered by many to be the paramount children’s journal of all time that 

“seems to have inspired a loyalty bordering on fanaticism in its young readers,” Tobbel 

explained that “it is easy to see why children who grew up with this magazines found it an 

experience they treasured all their lives.”

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Like 

The Youth’s Companion

, Dodge published work by the country’s foremost writers, 

including Louisa May Alcott, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Robert Louis Stevenson, F. Scott 

Fitzgerald, Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling, and illustrations by the same artists and wood 

engravers used by Scribner & Company's other magazine, 

Scribner's Monthly

.

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 Young 

contributors who continued writing were William Faulkner, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ring 

Lardner, and Robert Benchley.

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 Through its writers and readers the influence of 

St. Nicholas

 

stretches to the present. Some educators credit 

Cricket

, a literary magazine launched in 1973, 

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15 

with assuming the mantle of 

St. Nicholas

, or at least shreds of it.

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