St. Nicholas has been called the best children's magazine ever published, particularly during the tenure 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 some of 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 the story of the long and productive literary partnership between Dodgeand Alcott. 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 Essential documentary material presently unpublished or inaccessible and illustrations from the magazine are also included.

"Early to bed and early to rise: If that would make me wealthy and wise I'd rise at daybreak, cold or hot, And go back to bed at once. Why not?" -Mary Mapes Dodge, Rhymes and Jingles (1874) Rhymes and Jingles (1874) by Mary Mapes Dodge contains 200 poems written to delight children. Ten of these follow a traditional format, but the majority are quite short and were written as "garden songs," a genre of verses that are intended to be set to music. They are also accompanied by line drawings. When it appeared, the book was so popular that it was often compared favorably to the author's more famous work, Hans Brinker.