St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, October 1878, No. 12

VariousProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.2

Word count: 241K words
Chapters: 25

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, October 1878, No. 12 by VariousAuthor: Various,Language: English, Class: PZ: Language and Literatures: Juvenile belles lettres, Release Date: Jan 5, 2006

Editor's review

This is the October 1878 issue of St. Nicholas Magazine, a monthly children's periodical and a primary-source document of nineteenth-century American children's publishing. Its value lies not in systematic knowledge but in the tastes of an era's children's literature: stories, poems, popular-science sketches, puzzles, and reader correspondence are interleaved, and the language carries late-Victorian rhetorical habits. For readers studying the history of children's literature, periodical publishing, or changes in English, this original form offers more information than a curated anthology. Reading it makes tangible how adults of the time imagined child readers and packaged moral instruction as entertainment. Because it is a public-domain electronic text released by Project Gutenberg, the formatting is plain text, illustrations are absent, and it suits browsing as historical material or a language sample rather than as leisure reading for immersive stories. Enter with a periodical-studies mindset; reading selectively by section is more effective than reading straight through.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Scholars and students of nineteenth-century Anglo-American children's literature and periodical publishing
English learners interested in Victorian English language and rhetoric
University instructors who need public-domain primary sources for course design or research materials
Document lovers who enjoy the look of old periodicals and are willing to browse selectively

Not a good fit for

General young readers looking for a fully illustrated or finely typeset edition
Leisure fiction readers expecting a continuous plot and modern narrative pacing
Beginners with limited English reading ability who need annotated support

Reading tips

Start with the table of contents and section divisions; pick one story, one popular-science piece, and one puzzle to sense the differences in format.
Note unfamiliar allusions or historical names as you go and look them up in one batch rather than stopping at every sentence.
Read alongside other children's periodicals of the same period to compare section layouts and moral discourse.

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

This issue has only text and no illustrations. Will that affect comprehension?

Partly. The original illustrations were part of the reading experience, and public-domain electronic texts usually omit images, but the main text of the stories and sections is complete. Focusing on language, section structure, and content orientation still yields historical value; for illustrations, consult microfilm or archival scans from a library.

Can someone with average English read this 1878 children's periodical?

You can try, but patience is needed. It was aimed at children of its time; sentences are longer than in modern children's books, and some vocabulary and allusions are uncommon today. Start with short stories and puzzles, use a dictionary, and don't insist on reading everything; treating it as a language sample rather than exam material makes it much less stressful.

Is this material suitable for introducing children to English reading?

Not very. The text is old, the formatting is plain text without illustration support, and its language habits differ considerably from contemporary children's books. Young readers may lose interest; for teaching, it suits students at secondary level or above who have some English foundation and need contact with historical texts.

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.