Wide Awake (magazine)

• 1. Introduction

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  Wide Awake promised its readers no stories in the "run-away-to-sea" style for boys, or the "elope-and-be-happy" incentive for girls. Those were complaints, the magazine said, that parents of the era voiced often. The magazine ran out of Boston. Its fiction came from writers such as Margaret Sidney, Edward Everett Hale, Sarah Orne Jewett, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, and Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman. Its illustrations came from artists including Howard Pyle, William Thomas Smedley, Sol Eytinge Jr., and Frank T. Merrill.

  Behind that roster of names stood a single publisher with a very particular idea of what children should read. Who set that agenda, and what became of the magazine built to carry it out?

• 2. A Publisher's Vision

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  Daniel Lothrop ran the Boston publishing firm D. Lothrop Company, and in 1875 he launched a magazine of his own, aimed at readers between ten and eighteen years old. Lothrop held an evangelical viewpoint, and he wanted the magazine to help make the boys and girls of America "broad-minded, pure-hearted, and thoroughly wide awake." The first issue was dated July, 1875. That mission needed someone to carry it out day to day, and Lothrop looked outside Boston to find her.

• 3. At The Editor's Desk

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  Ella Farman had already written several children's books for D. Lothrop Company when Lothrop picked her as Wide Awake's first editor. For several months she ran the magazine from her home in Battle Creek, Michigan, helped by her friend Emma L. Shaw. The two women eventually moved to Boston, where Charles Stuart Pratt worked as the magazine's art editor. Farman and Pratt married in 1877, and soon afterward Shaw returned to Michigan. Ella Farman Pratt kept editing Wide Awake until December, 1891.

  Her successor, and the magazine's last editor, was Elbridge Streeter Brooks, who had spent 1884 through 1887 as an associate editor at St. Nicholas Magazine. Brooks had also written more than thirty nonfiction books for children of his own. Brooks was the editor who would eventually have to tell readers the news no one wanted to hear.

• 4. What Filled The Pages

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  Early issues of Wide Awake filled 60 to 72 pages with illustrated short stories, articles, poems, and serialized fiction. A word puzzle page called Tangles challenged readers each month. A section titled Wide Awake Post Office printed letters from children describing their homes and families. Wide Awake Athletics taught readers about team sports and gymnasium exercise. By later years the magazine averaged 92 pages, not counting the advertising. Advertisements never appeared among the stories themselves. They ran only in dedicated ad sections at the start and end of each issue, plus the inside front cover and the back cover.

  Despite all this content, Wide Awake never built its subscriber circulation above 25,000, though its actual readership went well beyond its paying subscribers. Twice a year, six issues, minus their covers and ads, were bound into hardcover gift editions known for years as Wide Awake Pleasure Book. Serialized stories were timed to begin in the first issue of each bound volume and finish in the last. Some were later published as standalone novels by D. Lothrop Company. Between the 1880s and 1893, a single issue cost 20 cents, a year's subscription cost $2.40, and a bound Pleasure Book cost $1.50. One of those serials would outshine all the others, following a single family through story after story.

• 5. The Pepper Family Serial

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  Harriet Mulford Stone wrote under the pen name Margaret Sidney, and her stories about the Pepper family became Wide Awake's most popular serial. Her first published story, Polly Pepper's Chicken Pie, appeared in the magazine in 1877. Phronsie Pepper's New Shoes followed in 1878. Readers responded so well that editor Ella Farman Pratt asked Stone to turn the Peppers into an ongoing series. The new installments ran in the 1880 issues.

  Publisher Daniel Lothrop read the Pepper stories himself and grew curious about their author. Business took him to New York, and he chose to break his journey in New Haven to meet Miss Stone. He kept making biweekly visits to see her, and in 1881 the two wed. That same year, D. Lothrop Company published an expanded version of the serial as the novel Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. For as long as Wide Awake survived, every new Peppers novel appeared first as a magazine serial, then as a book from D. Lothrop Company. The Peppers were not the only project Lothrop built into the magazine. A second one, centered on self-improvement rather than fiction, was already running inside its pages.

• 6. The Chautauqua Supplement

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  Daniel Lothrop had a personal interest in the Chautauqua Institution. It had begun as a summer program training Sunday School teachers, before growing into public lectures and self-improvement courses. In 1882, Wide Awake started including a 16-page Chautauqua Young Folks' Reading Union supplement, known as CYFRU, in every issue. D. Lothrop Company published every book on that supplement's reading list. The CYFRU pages were left out of the hardcover Pleasure Book collections, and the supplement itself was discontinued in 1888. Not long after the supplement ended, the magazine would lose the man who had built it, in a way readers never saw coming.

• 7. The Final Issue

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  On the 18th of March 1892, Daniel Lothrop died unexpectedly. His widow set aside her own writing career and took charge of publishing both the books and the magazines herself. She ran into financial difficulties, and none of the Lothrop magazines lasted long after her husband's death. The final issue of Wide Awake was dated August, 1893. It ran 144 pages, long enough to carry every remaining chapter of the two stories still being serialized. An article on Daniel Lothrop's life explained that the company would take up new lines of book publishing. Thought and labor, it said, could no longer be spread across running magazines.

  The issue itself broke the news plainly. "So, to make a long story short, with this August number Wide Awake ceases to be a separate publication. From this time it is merged into St. Nicholas, and becomes St. Nicholas." Readers were urged to carry their loyalty forward, loving St. Nicholas just as strongly as they had loved Wide Awake. A separate two-page announcement from St. Nicholas confirmed that subscribers would receive that magazine for the remainder of their subscriptions. For its readers, that two-page notice was the only proof that the magazine they had followed for years was now gone.