The Delicate art of turn-of-the century literary networking

The publication of Susan R. Gannon and Ruth Anne Thompson’s Mary Mapes Dodge marks a new chapter in the recognition of Dodge as one of the most significant figures in middle-class American culture around the turn of the century. The authors use the familiar format of the Twayne United States Authors Series to present a prospectus of Dodge research, providing not only the first full-length critical study of Dodge, but suggesting a variety of scholarly and critical approaches to her as an influential writer, editor, and cultural icon. While Dodge is remembered today primarily for her novel Hans Brinker; or, The Silver Skates (1865), much of her contemporary, cultural authority was exerted through her role as the founding editor and “conductor” of the celebrated St. Nicholas Magazine for children, from 1873 to her death in 1905. Due largely to the personal presence and vision of Dodge herself, St. Nicholas combined editorial innovation, the deep pockets of Scribners and Company, and access to the literary circles of New York to become what many still regard as the best children’s magazine ever published. Because so much of Dodge’s importance lies in her editorial work and cultural ethos, Gannon and Thompson’s task in Mary Mapes Dodge is twofold: to demonstrate a significance and style that eludes conventional literary analysis, and to frame that significance for a number of audiences and critical perspectives.

Because Dodge never elaborated her ideals of writing and publishing for children in a book of her own, Gannon and Thompson’s synthesis of her correspondence, editing, fiction writing, and other activities will resonate especially among readers interested in the “golden age” of children’s literature around the end of the last century. Indeed, the authors show that the gild on the writing for children of this period was derived, in the case of St. Nicholas, from the magazine’s close financial, editorial, and cultural relationships with its powerful parent company, the publishing firm of Scribners, and its sister magazine, Century. With her background in editing, writing for children—and, not least, her personal connections among the literati of New York and Philadelphia, among whom she had grown up—Dodge was uniquely qualified to practice what Gannon and Thompson call the “delicate art of literary networking” necessary not only to attract the best children’s writers and editors of the era, but to recruit some of the most prestigious nineteenth-century authors for adults to St. Nicholas and to coach them in the new challenge of writing for the young (2). “You shudderingly say our special public is particular to distraction,” Dodge wrote to Rudyard Kipling, after he had sent his first submission to what he termed Dodge’s “most stern inspection,” “but you cannot conceive what a terror the . . . children become if an author who once pleases them . . . dares stop. In short, why go back to the old folks at all? Any dry bones will do for them” (137).

As this sample of her persuasiveness suggests, Dodge’s networking was part of her more general crusade on behalf of the independence and importance of children’s tastes in reading. Gannon and Thompson’s book is particularly useful in tracing this philosophy through their chapters on Dodge’s early journalism, The Irvington Stories, Hans Brinker, Donald and Dorothy, as well as on her assorted verse and articles on games and celebrations. Together with two chapters on her role at St. Nicholas, what emerges in the course of this survey is a portrait of an editor and writer grounded in the genteel, Victorian tradition of the nineteenth century who is, nonetheless, remarkable for her “readiness to listen to her young readers, her respect for their views, her orientation toward the future and her openness to experiment” (156). Given the subtlety of this balance, it is hardly surprising that Dodge claimed that a “magazine for children can have no policy. . . . Influence springs from something deeper than opinion” (113). Rather than arriving...