Mary Howitt

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Standard Name: Howitt, Mary
Birth Name: Mary Botham
Married Name: Mary Howitt
Pseudonym: Wilfreda
Between them, Mary Howitt and her husband William wrote and published over 180 books. Hers alone, at her death, occupied forty pages of the British Museum printed catalogue.
Dunicliff, Joy. Mary Howitt: Another Lost Victorian Writer. Excalibur Press of London, 1992.
1, 261
Bearing the expenses of a large family, they needed to harness their literary productivity to earning potential.
Dunicliff, Joy. Mary Howitt: Another Lost Victorian Writer. Excalibur Press of London, 1992.
1, 134-5
As an opportunistic writer in several low-status, low-cost genres, accustomed to placing the same work in several successive venues, MH left a complex, even confusing bibliography, not yet reduced to order by scholars.
Black and white, head-and-shoulders photograph of the aged Mary Howitt. She is dressed in black: a dark hood covers her grey hair and white cap; her black, patterned cloak, tied with dark ribbons, covers a dark dress buttoned in front. Her eyes are cast down.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Anthologization Anna Mary Howitt
Anna Mary Howitt (now Watts) , as the author of An Art-Student in Munich, contributed Some Passages from the Child-life of Lucy Meridyth to an anthology compiled by her mother, Mary Howitt : The...
Anthologization Mary Cowden Clarke
In 1848 MCC may have contributed two pieces to A Book of Stories for Young People, along with Mary Howitt and Anna Maria Hall . But Richard D. Altick believes the stories The Princess...
Anthologization Barbara Hofland
BH seems to have remained saleable for a long time, since The Gift of Friendship . . . with contributions by . . . Mrs. Hofland appeared as late as 1877. Others included were Mary Howitt
Anthologization Elizabeth Gaskell
EG first reached print alone when her gothic sketch Clopton Hall was included in Mary and William Howitt 's Visits to Remarkable Places.
Uglow, Jennifer S. Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories. Faber and Faber, 1993.
37
The Athenaeum Index of Reviews and Reviewers: 1830-1870.
637 (11 January 1840): 34-6
Birth Anna Mary Howitt
AMH was born, the first child of writers Mary and William Howitt to be delivered alive, though Mary had been four times pregnant since her marriage in 1821.
Dunicliff, Joy. Mary Howitt: Another Lost Victorian Writer. Excalibur Press of London, 1992.
95
Cultural formation Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon
Barbara Leigh Smith , Christina Rossetti , Elizabeth Siddal , Bessie Rayner Parkes , Anna Mary Howitt , and Mary Howitt conducted a series of seances at the Hermitage, the Howitt family home.
Herstein, Sheila R. A Mid-Victorian Feminist: Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon. Yale University Press, 1985.
97
Dedications Anna Mary Howitt
She wrote a warmly affectionate dedication to her parents, William and Mary Howitt . A US edition appeared the following year; a second edition was dated 1880.
The work has appeared in German as Herrliche...
Education Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon
Mary Howitt , a friend of the Smith family, wrote approvingly of Benjamin Leigh Smith's unorthodox methods of childrearing: Objecting to schools he keeps his children at home, and their knowledge is gained by reading...
Family and Intimate relationships Anna Mary Howitt
AMH 's mother, Mary Howitt , became a well-known and much-loved writer in many genres, particularly for children.
Family and Intimate relationships Dinah Mulock Craik
DMC adopted her daughter, who had been abandoned, from a parish workhouse. Mary Howitt wrote a feeling account of the first discovery of the baby lying on a builders' sand-heap at 5 a.m. on the...
Family and Intimate relationships Charlotte Mew
Young Charlotte developed an adolescent crush on her headmistress, Lucy Harrison , who was a niece of writer Mary Howitt , a charismatic Quaker, and a scholar of English literature.
Warner, Val. “New Light on Charlotte Mew”. PN Review, No. 1, pp. 43 - 7.
44
According to CM 's...
Fictionalization Harriet Martineau
Mary Russell Mitford wrote disapprovingly of HM 's claims: I see no good in these experiments.
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. L’Estrange, Alfred Guy KinghamEditor , Harper and Brothers, 1870.
2: 281
Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna 's pamphlet Mesmerism: A Letter to Miss Martineau, argued that if the account...
Friends, Associates Mary Cowden Clarke
In addition to meeting Dickens as a result of her theatrical activities, MCC and her husband met William Hazlitt through a shared duty of theatre reviewing, and she became friends with Mary Howitt , and...
Friends, Associates Elizabeth Gaskell
EG met Mary Howitt in Heidelberg and attended many society balls with her. They shared much in common and became close friends.
Uglow, Jennifer S. Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories. Faber and Faber, 1993.
143-4
Friends, Associates Margaret Oliphant
MO and her husband sometimes attended parties with such writers as Samuel Carter Hall , Anna Maria Hall , Dinah Mulock (later Craik) , and Mary Howitt .
Williams, Merryn. Margaret Oliphant: A Critical Biography. St Martin’s Press, 1986.
19

Timeline

8 May 1835
Hans Christian Andersen began publishing fairy tales, some collected and some of his own devising, in his native Danish.
1839
Hemmet, one of Fredrika Bremer 's best-known domesticnovels, appeared; it was translated into English in 1843 by Mary Howitt as The Home, or Family Cares and Family Joys.
11 October 1845
A translated edition of Emanuel Swedenborg 's work The Principia was published in London; this form of spiritualism soon became popular in elite intellectual circles.
17 February 1847
The Whittington Club (named after the poor boy who became Lord Mayor of London) held its first meeting. Unlike traditional gentlemen's clubs, it welcomed women and lower-middle-class men.
December 1855
Barbara Leigh Smith , later Bodichon, founded the Married Women's Property Committee (sometimes called the Women's Committee) to draw up a petition for a married women's property bill.
1856
Fredrika Bremer 's feminist novelHertha stressed the need for women's independence; it appeared in an English translation by Mary Howitt the same year.
14 March 1856
A petitionfor Reform of the Married Women's Property Law, organized by the Married Women's Property Committee and signed by many prominent women, was presented to both Houses of Parliament.
April 1862
The Senate of the University of London voted against allowing women into their medical degree programme.
18 August 1882
The Married Women's Property Act gave women the right to all the property they earned or acquired before or during marriage.