Mary (Elizabeth) Mapes Dodge Biography

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Dictionary of Literary Biography on Mary (Elizabeth) Mapes Dodge

The finest American children's magazine of the nineteenth century was St. Nicholas: Scribner's Illustrated Magazine for Girls and Boys, edited from its beginning in 1873 until 1905 by Mary Mapes Dodge. Dodge enlisted America's finest children's illustrators and writers to create original work maintaining throughout her tenure a high quality of production and a circulation of about seventy thousand.

Mary Elizabeth Mapes was born on 26 January 1830, 1831, or 1838 in New York City to James Jay Mapes and Sophia Furman Mapes. Called Lizzie by her family, she had three sisters and a brother. The Mapes home was frequented by many of the leading scientific and literary figures in New York City, such as Horace Greeley. William Cullen Bryant, and John Ericsson, and had a well-stocked library. The children were educated by their father and by tutors and governesses.

Mary Mapes married William Dodge, a New York lawyer, in 1851 and had two sons. She was widowed in 1858 and began writing to support her family. Her first published work, The Irvington Stories (1865), was designed to appeal to boys. Dodge's next book, Hans Brinker; or, The Silver Skates: A Story of Life in Holland (1866) had immediate success. In December 1868 she became an associate editor for Hearth and Home, a children's magazine edited by Harriet Beecher Stowe and Donald Grant Mitchell (who used the pseudonym Ik Marvel).

In 1870 Dodge's friend Roswell Smith, who had been one of the founders of Scribner's Monthly: An Illustrated Magazine for the People asked her to submit her ideas for a children's magazine to be sponsored by Scribners. Her response, published anonymously in Scribner's Monthly in July 1873, set forth the philosophy that was to undergird St. Nicholas. She proposed an entirely new format: a children's magazine, she said, should not "be a milk-and-water variety of the adults' periodical. But, in fact, the child's magazine needs to be stronger, truer, bolder, more uncompromising than the other...." It should not moralize: "Let there be no sermonizing either, no wearisome spinning out of facts, no rattling of the dry bones of history." She said that the main focus of a children's magazine was to entertain: "Its cheer must be the cheer of the bird-song, not of condescending editorial babble.... Most children of the present civilization attend school. Their little heads are strained and taxed with the day's lessons. They do not want to be bothered nor amused nor taught nor petted. A child's magazine is its pleasure-ground."

Frank Stockton, who had worked with Dodge at Hearth and Home, joined her as assistant editor, and the first issue of St. Nicholas was published in November 1873. St. Nicholas was such an immediate success that it absorbed Our Young Folks, one of the best of its rivals, in January 1874. With it came its editor, John T. Trowbridge, who became a leading contributor to St. Nicholas.St. Nicholas absorbed the Children's Hour in July 1874 and Schoolday Magazine and Little Corporal, a Chicago publication widely distributed in the Midwest, in May 1875.

Because Scribners owned St. Nicholas, the magazine was able to use the high quality printing equipment of De Vinne press and the writers, artists, and engravers employed by Scribner's Monthly. Dodge required originality in writing. Such well-known authors as Noah Brooks, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Lucretia Peabody Hale contributed to the first issue, and the first volume included the work of Louisa May Alcott, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, William Cullen Bryant, Helen Hunt, Bret Harte, John Hay, Sarah Orne Jewett, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Olive Thorne, and Charles Dudley Warner. Alcott wrote three novels for St. Nicholas: Eight Cousins (1875), Under the Lilacs (1878), and Jack and Jill (1902). Margaret Oliphant and Susan Coolidge also wrote for the magazine. Stockton left the magazine in 1878 to devote more time to his writing, much of which first was published in St. Nicholas. His duties were taken over by William Fayal Clarke, who was appointed assistant editor. In 1881 the Century Company took over ownership of the magazine and renamed it St. Nicholas: An Illustrated Magazine for Young Folks but allowed Dodge to continue in control.

In the 1880s Dodge used more serials and natural history features, and she selected poetry which de-emphasized duty and encouraged fun. First published in St. Nicholas in the 1880s were Frances Hodgson Burnett's Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), illustrated by R.B. Birch; Dodge's Donald and Dorothy (1883); Charles E. Carryl's Davy and the Goblin (1885); Edward Eggleston's The Hoosier School-Boy (1882); Mayne Reid's The Land of Fire (1884); Brander Matthews's Tom Paulding (1892); and Thomas Nelson Page's Two Little Confederates (1888). Poet and illustrator Palmer Cox contributed thirty pieces to St. Nicholas during the decade, including his first published work about the Brownies in February 1883. Novelist Julia Magruder's adapted selections from five of George Eliot's novels appeared in 1887 and 1888. In 1887 Tudor Jenks became an assistant editor and a major contributor. Ernest E. Thompson and John Burroughs were the most significant writers of natural history for St. Nicholas in the 1880s. The Agassiz Association, sponsored by the magazine, grew to ten thousand members by 1886.

During the last fifteen years of her editorship Dodge was able to increase the length of St. Nicholas and add more illustrations per issue. In September 1893 the magazine absorbed Wide Awake, the most popular New England periodical. Mark Twain contributed the serial Tom Sawyer Abroad, by Huck Finn (1894). Jack London's The Cruise of the Dazzler was published in the magazine in July 1902. Between November 1904 and October 1905 St. Nicholas published L. Frank Baum's Queen Zixi of Ix. Rudyard Kipling contributed three pieces in the 1890s, including "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi" (November 1893), later included in The Jungle Book (1894). Theodore Roosevelt's Hero Tales from American History (1895) was serialized in the 1890s, as was Howard Pyle's The Story of Jack Ballister's Fortunes (1895). Illustrations continued to be excellent, with Dodge adding color and photographs. The Quarterly Illustrator (December 1893) said that "nearly every illustrator of talent and note has got his handiwork between the covers of St. Nicholas." In 1893 Clarke was promoted to associate editor. He held this position until 1905, when he was promoted to editor on the death of Dodge.