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.
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.
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
Wealth and Poverty Eliza Meteyard
EM found the financial pressure to write intense; she complained in 1857 of a spider's web of work, which necessity of ways and means compels me to do.
Lightbown, Ronald W., and Eliza Meteyard. “Introduction”. The Life of Josiah Wedgwood, Cornmarket Press.
In addition to maintaining herself, she assisted...
Travel Margaret Fuller
In order to pay for this trip, MF wrote a column titled Things and Thoughts in Europe. In this capacity she travelled through England, Scotland, France and Italy at a time when...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Naomi Royde-Smith
NRS begins with Sherwood's work as a children's writer, and the sway held by her Evangelical texts from about 1812 to 1850. She credits Lewis Carroll in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland with outdating the didactic...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Bessie Rayner Parkes
A second edition appeared a year later, and a paperback edition in 2008.
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
This collection contains Parkes's reminiscences of George Eliot , Anna Jameson , Mary Howitt , Georgiana Fullerton , and Catherine Booth ...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text George Paston
The subjects of the first collection include Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan) , Mary Howitt and her husband , and Lady Hester Stanhope .
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Camilla Crosland
Since she was well-connected in London literary circles, she was able to include in her memoir recollections of time spent working with the annuals and of literary figures such as Grace Aguilar , Lady Blessington
Textual Production Elizabeth Ham
EH anonymously contributed Mabel (a ghost story about a deaf girl) to an anthology, The Remembrance, edited by Thomas Roscoe and dedicated to Queen Adelaide .
This volume also contained work by Felicia Hemans
Textual Production Charles Dickens
Other contributions were appeared from Mrs Alexander , Elizabeth Barrett Browning , Edward Bulwer-Lytton , Caroline Chisholm (later parodied by CD ), Wilkie Collins , Dinah Mulock and Georgiana Craik , Amelia B. Edwards ,...
Textual Production Christian Isobel Johnstone
She included her own work, along with that of Gore , Mitford , Howitt , Mrs Fraser , and Catherine Crowe . Several editions appeared, up to an eleventh in 1862.
Feminist Companion Archive.
Textual Production Matilda Hays
In 1847, while still in her twenties, MH was led by her desire to improve the lot of women to found a periodical. In the words of her later application for a Civil List pension:...
Textual Production L. E. L.
She handed on the latter post to Mary Howitt at her marriage. She had been contributing to such lavish annual publications since she wrote for the Forget-Me-Not in 1823, and her name became closely associated...
Textual Production Mary Russell Mitford
Mitford sought to secure a review from either Mary or William Howitt , but Mary replied that reviews had already appeared in the journals they had links with. Another friend, Barbara Hofland , reviewed it...
Textual Production Georgina Munro
GM published in The People's Journal (later The People's and Howitt's Journal) over the whole of its run; her sixteen contributions are mainly short stories.
The People's Journal began in 1846 and Howitt 's...
Textual Production Harriet Martineau
It was dated 1851. Her biographer R. K. Webb claims that the bulk of the book is Atkinson 's, with promptings from Harriet Martineau , although it certainly also includes substantial letters from her.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
HM
Textual Production Anna Mary Howitt
She chose epigraphs to chapter one from Keats and James Shirley , to chapters three and fourteen from Mary Howitt , and elsewhere from Elizabeth Barrett Browning , Percy Bysshe Shelley , and writers in French, German, and Italian.

Timeline

8 May 1835: Hans Christian Andersen began publishing...

Writing climate item

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...

Writing climate item

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...

Building item

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...

Building item

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...

National or international item

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 novel Hertha stressed...

Writing climate item

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 petition for Reform of the Married Women's...

National or international item

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...

Building item

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...

National or international item

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.

Texts

Howitt, Mary. A Popular History of the United States of America. Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1859.
Howitt, Mary. Ballads and Other Poems. Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1847.
Howitt, Mary, editor. Biographical Sketches of the Queens of Great Britain. Henry G. Bohn, 1851.
Howitt, Mary. Birds and Flowers, and other Country Things. Darton and Clark, 1838.
Howitt, William, and Mary Howitt, editors. Howitt’s Journal of Literature and Popular Progress. W. Lovett.
Howitt, Mary. “Howitt, Mary: Ballads (1847)”. University of Alberta: Individual Literature Collections (Chadwyck-Healey): English Poetry, Second Edition.
Howitt, Mary. “Howitt, Mary: Tales in Verse (1865)”. University of Alberta: Individual Literature Collections (Chadwyck-Healey): English Poetry, Second Edition, New Edition.
Howitt, Mary. Hymns and Fireside Verses. Darton and Clark, 1839.
Goldschmidt, Meïr Aron. Jacob Bendixen. Translator Howitt, Mary, Colburn, 1852.
Howitt, Mary. Marion’s Pilgrimage, A Fire-side Story, and Other Poems. Darton, 1859.
Howitt, Mary. Mary Howitt’s Illustrated Library for the Young. W. Kent, 1856.
Howitt, Mary. Mary Howitt: An Autobiography. Editor Howitt, Margaret, W. Isbister, 1889.
Howitt, Mary. My Own Story; or, The Autobiography of a Child. Thomas Tegg, 1845.
Andersen, Hans Christian. Only a Fiddler!. Translator Howitt, Mary, R. Bentley, 1845.
Howitt, Mary. Our Cousins in Ohio. Barton, 1849.
Howitt, Mary. Sketches of Natural History. E. Smith, 1834.
Howitt, Anna Mary et al. “Some Passages from the Child-life of Lucy Meridyth”. The Golden Casket, edited by Mary Howitt, James Hogg and Sons, 1861.
Howitt, Mary. Tales in Verse. William Darton and Son, 1836.
Howitt, Mary, and John Absolon. The Children’s Year. Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1847.
Howitt, Mary. The Cost of Caergwyn. 1864.
Howitt, William, and Mary Howitt. The Desolation of Eyam. Wightman and Cramp, 1827.
Howitt, Mary. The Dial of Love. Darton, 1853.
Howitt, William, and Mary Howitt. The Forest Minstrel, and Other Poems. Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, 1823.
Howitt, Mary. The Heir of Wast-Wayland. T. Hodgson, 1847.
Andersen, Hans Christian. The Improvisatore. Translator Howitt, Mary, R. Bentley, Moyes and Barclay, 1845.