Merry's Museum

"How Maggie Paid the Rent," Merry's Museum, April 1871.

Merry's Museum (1841-ca.1872) was an illustrated children's magazine established by Samuel Griswold Goodrich in Boston, Massachusetts in 1841. Louisa May Alcott served as editor for a year or so, and also contributed stories, as did Lucretia Peabody Hale, Caroline M. Hewins, Rebecca Sophia Clarke, Helen W. Pierson, and others.

Goodrich continued to oversee the magazine until 1854.^[1] For some time it was published in New York. Then in 1868 Boston's Horace B. Fuller bought the enterprise, and remained as publisher until ca.1872, when the magazine ceased.

Illustration from Emer Birdsey's "Wiry Will or the Snow-Man," 1869

Editors included Goodrich (1841–1850); Rev. S.T. Allen (ca.1850);^[2] and Alcott (ca.1868–1870).^[3] Among the many contributors were Mary Bedford; Katherine Bertha; Emer Birdsey; Kitty Carroll; Margaret Field; Lilian Louise Gilbert; E.B. Greene; Mary B. Harris; Annie Moore; Anna North; Annie Phillips; Mary N. Prescott; Rose Scott; M.G. Sleeper; Olive Thorne; and Elisabeth A. Thurston.

References

"Improve Your Talents" by D.W. Lothrop, 1869

1. ^ Samuel Griswold Goodrich. Recollections of a lifetime: or men and things I have seen, v.2. 1857; p.543.
2. ^ Goodrich. 1857; p.543.
3. ^ Frank Luther Mott. A history of American magazines: 1741–1850, Volume 3. Harvard University Press, 1938; p.714+

Further reading

• Merry's Museum. v.1–2 (Boston: Bradbury & Soden, School Street, 1841); v.11 (1849); v.13 (1847); v.15–16 (1848); v.20 (1850); v.27–28 (1854); v.33–34 (1857).
• Merry's Museum, new series. v.1 (Boston: Horace B. Fuller, Bromfield Street, 1868); (1869); (1871).
• Madeleine B. Stern. Louisa's Wonder Book: A Newly Discovered Alcott Juvenile. American Literature, Vol. 26, No. 3 (Nov., 1954), pp. 384–390.
• Pat Pflieger. A Visit to Merry's Museum; or, Social Values in a Nineteenth-Century American Periodical for Children (diss.). 1987–2006.
• "Merry's Museum." Louisa May Alcott encyclopedia. Greenwood Pr., 2001; p. 207+.