Charles Jacobs Peterson was the founder of Ladies' National Magazine, better known as Peterson's National Magazine, the most popular women's periodical in America during the midnineteenth century. As the owner, publisher, manager, editor, and major contributor for this magazine's first forty-five years, he helped create a new market in American publishing. Peterson also helped foster the growth of an immensely popular middlebrow American literature largely forgotten today, much of it written by his fellow Philadelphians. He was the author of many popular works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry; a member of the most prestigious literary and social clubs in the city; and a close friend of such literary figures as Charles Kingsley, George Rex Graham, Louis A. Godey, Edgar Allan Poe, James Russell Lowell, and Frances Hodgson Burnett.

Peterson was born in Philadelphia on 20 July 1819, the eldest son of Thomas and Elizabeth Jacobs Peterson. Peterson's Swedish ancestors had...