It was founded by Henry Oscar Houghton, who named the periodical after his former business, Riverside Press, of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

[1] The magazine was published by Hurd & Houghton in New York City[2] and it printed stories written by Mary Mapes Dodge, Sarah Orne Jewett, Rose Terry Cooke, Hans Christian Andersen and other authors who were well known at the time.

The editor was Horace Scudder, who stressed literary value over the moral-of-the-story style emphasized in some children’s magazines of the nineteenth century.

[1] Scudder believed that reading material offered to children should not be limited to stories written especially for them, and he regularly included Shakespeare, plus translations of Greek and Roman authors in the magazine.

Scudder taught himself to read and write the Danish language in order to correspond with the writer, and to check the translations of Andersen’s stories.