John Habberton

He was born at Brooklyn, New York, and educated in the public schools of Illinois,[2] where he went to live with an uncle after his father died when he was six years old.

[1] The novel is subtitled With some account of their ways, innocent, crafty, angelic, impish, witching and impulsive; also a partial record of their actions during ten days of their existence.

Habberton is acknowledged as the author of the book in an advertisement within the 1903 edition of Andersen's Fairy Tales published by Routledge.

Helen's Babies was intended as just a piece of humour and aimed at an adult audience, but it almost instantly became a major juvenile literature success, highly estimated by youngsters, as well as Rudyard Kipling.

[citation needed] Its popularity dwindled somewhat after World War II (although George Orwell mentions it favorably in his 1946 essay on early American literature, "Riding Down from Bangor").