Family and Friends
"The Pansy"
From 1874 to 1896 , Pansy and her husband were the editors of a weekly children's magazine called, appropriately, "The Pansy." It began as a weekly Sunday School paper of just a few pages, and later it grew to a much larger offering, sent in "numbers" to mail subscribers. It was full of stories, woodcut illustrations, news of new inventions, missionary endeavors, and many varied items of interest to the children who joined The Pansy Society.
This paper was truly an Alden/Livingston family event! As you delve into the pages of a volume of The Pansy, you find that Pansy only contributed a story or two, and perhaps a serial each week. The family contributed to several full-length serialized stories that were also published as books. There were so many letters about "A Sevenfold Trouble," that she had to put an explanation in the printed book's forward, telling readers that she was not pretending to be all seven viewpoints! The forward found in the Toronto: William Briggs edition says, "it is really and honestly written by seven people, and not by one person pretending to be seven different ones, as some of you have 
thought...it is an honest record of what we, who are all writers, and all very intimate friends, have seen and heard as we looked on at the lives of certain people in whom we are deeply interested." The book was written by the group, with each taking a chapter here and there to provide the seven viewpoints in the story.
This uniquely talented family was very closeknit and were an important part of each other's lives. Read more about each of them by following the links.
• Grace Livingston, Pansy's niece (later Grace Livingston Hill)
• Mrs. C. M. Livingston (sister Marcia and Grace's mother)
• C.M.L.. or Rev. Charles Montgomery Livingston (Grace's father)
• G.R.A., (Pansy's husband, Rev. Dr. Gustavus Rossenberg Alden)
• Paranete, penname of Pansy's son Dr. Raymond Macdonald Alden
• Julia Macdonald (another Macdonald sister)
• Faye Huntington (pen name of Pansy's best friend and co-author Theodosia (Docia) Toll Foster)