From Smithsonian:
In the early evening dark of March 30, 1889, a thick crowd of eager children – estimates say as many as 2,000 – converged on the Palace Rink in Brooklyn for the inaugural Convention of the Golden Hours Club.
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Golden Hours, a popular “story paper” full of adventure stories for young readers, had prepared a jam-packed evening of entertainment for its fans: peppy, patriotic songs descended from an orchestra couched in the music loft. The children were treated to hours of performance from musicians, Civil War veterans, ventriloquists and caricaturists, with the itinerary running until nearly midnight. There were celebrities, too: the author Edward Ellis talked at length to a rapt crowd about “the Indians, of whom the boys have read so much.” The kids, noted the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, “were noisy and hearty and were afforded full rein.”
The keynote speaker was no less than circus mogul P.T. Barnum, who at 79 years old could still leave a crowd hanging on his every word. “When the rotund form and curly gray locks of the venerable showman appeared inside of the door,” wrote the Eagle’s correspondent, “the youngsters arose to their feet and cheered and stamped and whistled.” The New York Times corroborated, claiming that the roaring and cheers of the assembled children were louder than any circus calliope, and that “Barnum never got a more honest ovation.”
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The late 19th century was a fertile period in America for popular literature, in large measure due to the rise of pocket-sized dime novels and weekly illustrated “story papers” of serialized popcorn fodder that plainly and spryly catered to the public taste, asserting the newly prominent role of the audience as a driver of mainstream American culture. This phenomenon, of course, was nothing new to Barnum, who had for decades built a thriving career on his ability to shape and evolve with popular taste.
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Hundreds of titles appeared from the Civil War period onward, among them Frank Leslie’s Boys of America, Pleasant Hours for Boys and Girls, and Beadle’s Dime Novels. Golden Hours was one of the most popular story papers, printed weekly from 1888 to 1904 in more than 800 issues. The paper generally featured, as most story papers did, episodic action stories that nurtured nostalgia for the glow of pre-industrial frontier America: one issue from April 27, 1889, contains a very typical tale titled The Adventures of Two Boys Among the Utes: A Stirring Story of Hunting and Indian Adventure.
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Name-dropping Edward S. Ellis was a big deal: Ellis was a titan of Gilded Age youth literature, and his 1868 robot novel The Steam Man of the Prairies is often considered to be the first American work of “edisonade,” a modern term that refers to stories about clever, young, steampunk-y inventors. In Ellis’ story, characters described only as an “Irishman” and a “Yankee” stumble upon a teenager who has ingeniously built a steam-powered robot to pull a carriage for him. (Adventure!) The robot, cutting-edge and thoroughly alien, is ten feet tall, stout, and vaguely menacing with a tin stovepipe hat and a glowing coal furnace in its stomach.
Link to the rest at Smithsonian
