In 1884 when fifteen-year-old Arthur Conan Doyle went out after dark with his skates slung over his shoulders to celebrate Father Rector’s Day with his fellow students, he was met by a world of silent, blue ice aglow under colorful Chinese lanterns.

At the edges of the frozen pond, fiery orange torches lit up the snow-covered banks with marmalade softness. A handful of students, already on the ice, streaked by on silver-bladed skates. Later, they ate turkey and goose, and sipped hot punch by the open hearth.

It was a memorable day for the young man, who would some day be the creator of Sherlock Holmes, for he wrote to his mother afterwards, describing in detail the skates and the snow and the sound of firecrackers as they were tossed into the happy mêlée by the school’s masters.

If skating was a popular pastime in Doyle’s day, it might at least in part have been due to the appearance nineteen years earlier of children’s writer and editor Mary Mapes Dodge’s book, Hans Brinker, Or the Silver Skates. In 1865, James O’Kane of 126 Nassau Street, New York City, had published Mrs. Dodge’s book to lukewarm reviews but instant reader acclaim.

Hans Brinker is the story of a young boy’s courage and the healing power of love. It’s the story of young Hans and Gretel Brinker, good Hollanders, who stand ready to sacrifice their most prized possessions—their hard-earned new skates—to restore their father to health, and their mother to happiness. One of the most beloved books in the pantheon of children’s literature, over a hundred editions of “The Silver Skates” were released in the first thirty years of its publication, in no less than five languages. Even today, a quick scan of the juvenile section of any local library will probably produce a copy of the book.

Mrs. Dodge derived the inspiration for her classic work from the Scharff family of Newark, New Jersey, and from her interest in Dutch culture, in general. Having devoured Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic in 1856, she also gobbled up that author’s History of the United Netherlands when it appeared in 1864. Only a few years earlier, she’d come across an article in The Working Farmer entitled “Skating Hints for Beginners” and read it with gusto. From it she learned that “skates with runners” similar to those then in fashion on rivers and lakes through the U.S., “probably originated in the Low Countries since they were introduced into England from Holland….”

Her imagination began to smolder; all it took was a request from Oliver Johnson, managing editor of the Independent, to write a children’s series for his publication, to ignite the bonfire which would become Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates. Still, she needed her neighbors, the Scharff family, who had originally come from the Netherlands, to add fuel to her already burning literary imagination.

Adriaan Scharff and his large extended family—wife, children, and grandchildren—came from Amsterdam in 1845 to settle in Dodge’s hometown of Newark, New Jersey. A dignified Dutch family with a direct line, on Mrs. Scharff's side, to Christiaan Brunings, one of Holland’s great engineers, the Scharffs soon rose to prominence in Newark, then a small country town. There they lived, on a twenty-one acre farm, with a clear view of the nearby Passaic River. Safe and secure in their new home, the young Scharffs whiled away their time trying to catch turtles and frogs in summer, and skating on the silvery frozen river in winter. It was here that they gained a local reputation as “real fancy skaters”.

Skating had long been popular among the Dutch patroons and their families. Witness a letter from Mrs. Anne Grant of Albany, NY describing a sleighing party in New York in the mid-eighteenth century, in which she writes: “In winter the river, frozen to a great depth, formed the principal road through the country, and was the scene of all those amusements of skating and sledge races, common to the north of Europe.” Such a scene was a common sight on the rivers and lakes of New York State and New England.

Something seems to have clicked in Dodge’s mind as soon as Johnson asked her for a series of children’s stories, for she began mixing Motley’s history with the Scharff family and the article she’d read on skating. Her imagination aflame, she visited the elder Scharffs and asked them to recall for her every detail of their life in Holland. Grandfather and Grandmother Scharff, as they were now called, did one better; they provided her with a true story that would become the plot for her most memorable book.

After all that work, however, Johnson turned Dodge’s story down.

It was too long, he said; anyway, it wasn’t what he wanted.

So Dodge turned to her old friend and publisher, James O’Kane. But O’Kane didn’t want it either. No one was likely to read a travelogue about Holland, he argued.

In the end, O’Kane did publish it—even if he did so reluctantly—and he was delightfully surprised when the book, bound in modest brown cloth stamped with a gold circle surrounding the publisher’s initials, “J.K.”, became an even greater success than Dodge’s first book, Irving Stories, had been the year before, despite the lukewarm reviews it had received.

Dodge never forgot the “kind Holland friends” who had provided her with one of her most enduring children’s stories for, according to her biographer, Catherine Morris Wright, she thanks them in the preface to the first edition with the following words: “While acknowledging my obligations to many well-known writers on Dutch history, literature, and art, I turn with especial gratitude to those kind Holland friends, who, with generous zeal, have taken many a backward glance at their country for me sake, seeing it as it looked twenty years ago, when the Brinker home stood unnoticed in sunlight and shadow…”

Hans Brinker was only the beginning of what was to become an auspicious literary career for Dodge; it was the rock upon which she was to build her literary house.

As early as 1867, Dodge had visited the Catskills to seek rest for nervous exhaustion in the wild mountain scenery. She brought back with her a memento from her trip—a bit of untamed forest moss entwined about a cross—and gave it to her friend and supporter, Robert Dale Owen. She also brought back with her the idea for a third book.

It was at this time that Horace E. Scudder, editor of Boston’s Hurd and Hutton (which would later become Houghton Mifflin) urged her to write an children’s article for his magazine, Riverside, “a story such as [Dodge’s son] Harry would be glad to read and would be better for reading.
The result was an article entitled Holiday Whispers Concerning Games and Toys, a brief guide of children’s amusements that included puzzles, games and the Zeotrope, precursor of the modern-day movie that appeared in the magazine’s May-June 1867 issue.

This article, along with her two published books, launched Dodge’s career as one of the world’s premier editors of children’s literature. In 1868 she was offered a position as Associate Editor of Heart and Home. Here, she would work with such as-yet-undiscovered talents as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Donald G. Mitchell, author of Reveries of a Bachelor, a book which had become an instant popular success upon its publication.

The magazine’s first issue, published on December 26, 1868 sported an illustration by Nast of Santa stealing down a chimney stack. Inside its pages was a poem, “Old-World Sparrow”, by William Cullen Bryant, an article by Harriet Beecher Stowe, and a review of Dodge’s new book, A Few Friends and How They Amused Themselves; the book was described as “a tale in ten chapters containing descriptions of twenty pastimes and games, and a fancy-dress party…”

Not a bad literary beginning.

Recognizing her unique qualities as writer and editor, Scribner’s eventually approached her to edit a magazine for them which “would be her own.”

Believing that it should belong to all children, everywhere, she lovingly named it St. Nicholas, as universal a name as they come. The first issue appeared on November, 1873; fan letters poured in immediately.

More literary cross-pollination; Dodge’s literary acumen would eventually allow her to reap the early literary harvest of the likes of Rebecca Harding Davis, Frank R. Stockton, Bayard Taylor, and Louisa May Alcott.

From there it would only get better.

In her lifetime, Dodge would meet, befriend, edit and publish the likes of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Rudyard Kipling, and Mark Twain. There was also the work of Kate Douglas Wiggin and Helen Hunter Jackson.

It was a bookish life, lived to the fullest.

But sometimes it was too much for even this nineteenth-century dynamo.

Perhaps it was the Dutch influence that prompted her to choose as her home-away-from-home a modest wooden house with no plumbing, on land thick with evergreens, deep in the heart of the Catskills. In 1889, tired of the fast-paced New York City literary scene, Mrs. Dodge moved herself, at least for the summers, to a private community known as Onteora Park, in the tranquil Greene County, NY village of Tannersville, a hamlet set high in the mountains like a precious stone, a place long associated with another Dutch legend, that of Rip Van Winkle.

Dodge named her home after one of the wildflowers that flourished just outside her front door: “Yarrow”, she called it. And through the doors of her rustic mountain home, flung wide open in welcome to one and all, would walk the likes of Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain, John Burroughs, Helen Hunter Jackson, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

But that’s not why Dodge is still remembered and loved by children the world over. Dubbed “Lady of the Silver Skates” by one of her biographers, her fame—as if borne by the wind—has withered and grown, withered and grown, like the yarrow that still graces her wild, untamed Catskills’ garden, as each new generation of children, coaxed by an earlier generation of Dodge’s now-grow-up readers, decides one day to experience for themselves the story of two very good children and a pair of gleaming silver skates.