Interesting link for those interested in Victoriana/Edwardiana: St. Nicholas Magazine online. St. Nicholas was a magazine for children, designed to carry good quality literary stories, to be generally "improving" and of high quality. Although the stories carried moral lessons, and the idea of "behaving well" (particularly being honest and polite), they were not the heavy-handed moralizing common in some Victorian (and pre-Victorian) children's books, where "ungodly" children got eaten by wild animals or particularly godly children died beatific deaths and were carried off by angels...(I would have found that second sort of story particularly scary as a child).

(I wonder if there is some link between the mindset of making a "children's literary magazine" with good-quality stories and basic information on science and current events and the idea of Everyman's Library,, which I've written about before? They are of roughly the same era...I wonder if there was a general trend for autodidacticism in early 20th century America, if it was "cool" to be studious then?)

I haven't time at the moment to check out the full site (I found it in the course of researching something else) but it looks interesting. (There is, as there often has to be from things of that era, a disclaimer: people of African American heritage were NOT treated well in many of the stories. So much so that apparently the NAACP at the time put out a competing magazine designed to be free of that sort of prejudice. Ah well. That mars St. Nicholas a bit, just another link in the long chain of people being unable to love their neighbors as themselves)

And I wonder if perhaps pockets of that kind of attitude persist, or have been revived today - St. Nicholas, from what I've read on the website, sounds almost a bit in the same vein as "The Dangerous Book for Boys" and its companion "The Daring Book for Girls" (which I have a copy of; looking at it makes me wish fervently it had been around when I was 10 or so).