Merry's Museum was an illustrated children's magazine established by Samuel Griswold Goodrich

Samuel Griswold Goodrich

Samuel Griswold Goodrich was an American author, better known under the pseudonym Peter Parley.-Biography:Goodrich was born at Ridgefield, Connecticut as the son of a Congregational minister...

 in Boston

Boston

Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...

, Massachusetts

Massachusetts

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. As of the 2010...

 in 1841. Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott was an American novelist. She is best known for the novel Little Women and its sequels Little Men and Jo's Boys. Little Women was set in the Alcott family home, Orchard House in Concord, Massachusetts, and published in 1868...

 served as editor for a year or so, and also contributed stories, as did Lucretia Peabody Hale

Lucretia Peabody Hale

Lucretia Peabody Hale was a United States journalist and author.-Biography:Hale was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and educated at George B. Emerson's school there...

, Caroline M. Hewins, Rebecca Sophia Clarke

Rebecca Sophia Clarke

Rebecca Sophia Clarke , also known as Sophie May, was an American author of children's fiction. Using her nieces and nephews as inspiration, she wrote realistic stories about children. She wrote 45 books between 1860 and 1903. The most popular being the Little Prudy books...

, Helen W. Pierson, and others.

Goodrich continued to oversee the magazine until 1854. 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.
Editors included Goodrich (1841–1850); Rev. S.T. Allen (ca.1850); and Alcott (ca.1868–1870). 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.

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
  Madeleine B. Stern
  Madeleine Bettina Stern , born in New York, New York, was an American historian and rare books dealer and noted Louisa May Alcott scholar....
  
  . 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+.