St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3

VariousProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.5

Word count: 265K words
Chapters: 27

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 by VariousAuthor: Various,Language: English, Class: PZ: Language and Literatures: Juvenile belles lettres, Release Date: Sep 28, 2006

Editor's review

This is the single issue of St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3—one slice of a celebrated nineteenth-century American children's magazine. Aimed at young readers, the magazine typically gathered stories, poems, informational articles, and illustration captions across a variety of sections, reflecting the editorial tastes of children's literature at the time and offering primary material for observing late nineteenth-century American ideas about education, family life, and popular science. As a public-domain electronic text from Project Gutenberg, it is best read as a historical periodical: readers can sense the rhythm of its columns and the style of its language, or select individual pieces for English reading or for research in the history of children's literature. Note that the original carries a pronounced period context, and some expressions stand at a distance from present-day sensibilities; it should be read with historical understanding.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Readers studying nineteenth-century children's magazines and publishing history
English learners who want to encounter old periodicals in their original form
Readers interested in historical popular science and old-time children's reading matter
Teachers who need public-domain texts for classroom materials

Not a good fit for

Readers expecting a complete annual volume or a systematically edited collection
Young readers who prefer the pacing of modern children's literature
Readers who find old periodical formatting and period attitudes hard to adjust to

Reading tips

Skim the table of contents and sections first, then choose pieces of interest for close reading.
Treat it as a sample historical periodical, noting section types and language features.
Choose one or two short stories to read aloud, to feel the cadence of nineteenth-century children's writing.
If using it for teaching, excerpt a single piece and add notes on the period context.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

FAQ

Is this the whole magazine or a single issue?

According to the information, this is St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3—a single issue, not a complete volume or annual bound collection. It is best read as one historical slice rather than a full history of the magazine.

Can children read this old magazine directly?

Younger readers may need guidance. The original is nineteenth-century English, and some vocabulary, sentence patterns, and attitudes differ from contemporary usage. It is better for a teacher or parent to select pieces and provide background notes before giving them to a child.

Is it suitable for English reading practice?

It can serve as supplementary material. The pieces vary in length and are suited to reading by interest; but the language bears period features, so it is best used once readers have some grounding in English, with a dictionary and notes to avoid frustration over old-fashioned expressions.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Various Author

Various is not a real person but a collective attribution used in book cataloging and databases for works with multiple authors, commonly applied to anthologies, compilations, or publications with too many contributors to list individually. On this Chinese book site, this attribution covers as many as 3,387 titles, spanning encyclopedic entries, historical documents, and trial records. Representative works include several volumes of the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the record of the trial of the major war criminals before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Available public information is limited: nationality, birth and death dates, and common categories are not clearly recorded, making it difficult to summarize a unified writing style or personal biography. Readers should understand it as a cataloging convention rather than a single author.