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...