All this social attention paid to the child may explain the great interest during the
period (even among adults) in children’s literature. Among the most flourishing
periodicals of the time were magazines meant for the young: The Youth’s Companion
(1827–1929), Our Young Folks (1865–1873), The Riverside Magazine for Young People
(1867–1870), and Harper’s Young People (1879–1899). Foremost among these was St
Nicholas (1873–1943), ably edited by Mary Mapes Dodge and whose contributors
included virtually every literary notable of the time.
Besides her editorial skills, Dodge is best known for Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates
(1865), her story about a hardluck and impoverished but hardworking and loving Dutch
family. Change the setting from The Netherlands to New England and this description
might easily fit another classic domestic novel, the one Louisa May Alcott once thought
of titling ‘The Pathetic Family’—that is, Little Women (1868). Pathos was, in fact, all the
rage whether one turned to Martha Finley’s aggrieved Elsie Dinsmore (1867) or Horatio
Alger’s pitiable Ragged Dick (1867).
Some found this interest in pathos pathetic and, tired of the good boys of Sunday
School books and the pitiable children of popular fiction, Thomas Bailey Aldrich
published his own antidote: The Story of a Bad Boy (1870). Six years later Samuel
Clemens would publish his own bad boy story, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. But that
same year (1876), Tom Sawyer’s nemesis would be engendered with the birth of Vivian
Burnett to author Frances Hodgson Burnett; Vivian would later become the model for the
Exemplary Boy in Little Lord Fauntleroy.
In fact, just a few years later, Frances Hodgson Burnett would spend the summer at
Nook Farm (a neighbourhood in Hartford, Connecticut) and her next-door neighbour
was Clemens; Burnett was a guest of Harriet Beecher Stowe and stayed in a bungalow
financed by the sales of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The following summer, Clemens published
The Prince and the Pauper and sent Burnett a copy. Several years later, upon publication
of Little Lord Fauntleroy (1885), Clemens would consider a lawsuit against Burnett,
believing she had plagiarised from his novel to create her own.
But Clemens was too busy to begin legal proceedings. Following the success of James
Otis Kaler’s story about a runaway boy in Toby Tyler (1881), Mark Twain wrote about
another conscience-stricken escapee in that milestone book of American literature the
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. At the end of that book, Huck advises that he’s about to
‘light out’ to the wilderness but, in truth, the wilderness was fast disappearing; about
the time the book was published (1884– 1885), the last buffalo herd was slaughtered.
Then, too, wilderness of another kind disappeared in 1899 when Freud’s The
Interpretation of Dreams was published.
In the very first year of the new century, Frank L.Baum published another milestone
book: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (in subsequent printings, ‘wonderful’ was dropped
from the title). The success of Baum’s book (cleverly illustrated by W.W.Denslow) as well
as the success of its sequels suddenly made visible America’s fledgling fantasy industry.
Until the Oz books, authors of fantasy laboured in near obscurity since America’s rough-
and-ready taste seemed to require the gravitas of facticity. There were, however,
exceptions—among them: Joel Chandler Harris’s animal fabliaux in his Uncle Remus
stories (1878 et seq.), Howard Pyle’s illustrated ‘fairy stories’ (1886 et seq.), and Palmer
Cox’s Brownies (1887 et seq.).
866 THE WORLD OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE