Wonder Book For Girls & Boys

Hawthorne made it his ambition to be a writer as a teenager, he graduated from Bowdoin College in Maine, where poet Longfellow was also a student, and spent several years traveling New England writing short stories before creating The Scarlet Letter. He wrote A Wonder-Book between April and July 1851, freely adapting six legends from Charles Anton's A Classical Dictionary. He set out deliberately to 'modernize' the stories, freeing them from 'cold moonshine' and using a romantic, readable style. This was criticized by adults but proved universally popular with children. 

The stories in A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys are all stories within a story. The frame being that a Williams College student, Eustace Bright, is telling these tales to a group of children at Tanglewood, an area in Lenox, Massachusetts, where Hawthorne lived for a time.

A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys covers the myths of:

The Gorgon's Head - the story of Perseus killing Medusa at the request of the king of the island, Polydectes.

The Golden Touch - the story of King Midas and his "Golden Touch".

The Paradise of Children - the story of Pandora opening the box filled with all of mankind's Troubles.

The Three Golden Apples - the story of Heracles procuring the Three Golden Apples from the Hesperides' orchard, with the help of Atlas.

The Miraculous Pitcher - the story of Baucis and Philemon providing food and shelter to two strangers who were Zeus and "Quicksilver" (Hermes) in disguise. Baucis and Philemon were rewarded by the gods for their kindness; they were promised never to live apart from one another.

The Chimæra - the story of Bellerophon taming Pegasus and killing the Chimæra.

Although dated 1852 on the title-page, A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys was actually published in November 1851 by Ticknor, Reed and Fields in Boston . This edition has the misprint “lifed” for lifted” on page 21, line 3. It features the original gray-green cloth, pale yellow wove endpapers, a frontispiece and six inserted engraved plates after designs by Hammat Billings.