When children's magazine St. Nicholas was first published in 1873, kids devoured it. Perhaps that's because the publication was among the first to put more energy into appealing to children than to teaching them morals. Other serials and periodicals quickly joined in the game, including Harper's Young People and, later, the Youth's Companion. At the time, the relationship between magazine publishers and book publishers was quite incestuous. Often, the book publishers owned the magazines (as was the case for the publishing house Harper & Row, which produced Harper's Young People) and used them to test ideas that, if they caught on, could be turned into books.

According to children's book historian Leonard Marcus, author of a new history of the Golden Books, Golden Legacy, children's periodicals proliferated during this period with the rise of the middle class. It was a time of relative prosperity, when families could afford to indulge their precious creations. Parents wanted books that their children would welcome as gifts. And, for perhaps the first time in America's history, people were beginning to take into account that children did not like to be lectured to.

Illustrated stories that were designed to amuse began to flourish. In this story, published in Harper's Young People in 1885, a hungry, begging fox is rebuffed by a well-appointed castle guard who (hey, how 'bout that?) just so happens to be an anthropomorphized sausage. Casting food in a starring role would go on to have an illustrious future (see Mayor McCheese, the Pillsbury Doughboy, and the Aqua Teen Hunger Force).