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
Friends, Associates Ellen Wood
As she began to establish herself as a writer, EW became a friend of her fellow authors Anna Maria Hall , Julia Kavanagh , and Mary Howitt . The latter wrote her a complimentary letter...
Textual Features Dorothy Wellesley
DW 's selection, though, demonstrates a serious interest in women's literary and feminist history. Of the selections whose authors can be identified, almost half are women. Though Marguerite, Lady Blessington , doyenne of the albums...
Intertextuality and Influence Frances Eleanor Trollope
The Trollopes' collaborative work, whose title was influenced by William and Mary Howitt 's Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets, is a collection of previously written articles, all concerning Italian literary...
politics Agnes Strickland
AS was a romantic or imaginative supporter of the Cavaliers and Jacobites of the past, but in practical terms she was a conservative. When Mary Howitt asked her to support a petition to parliament about...
Friends, Associates Elizabeth Siddal
ES had met some female associates of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood : artists Anna Mary Howitt (daughter of Mary Howitt ) and Barbara Leigh Smith (later Bodichon), as well as Bessie Rayner Parkes .
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...
Literary responses Elizabeth Singer Rowe
When Reeve later retold the Charoba story in The Progress of Romance, 1785, it was as a specimen of the genre, with implicit reference to some of Rowe's critical points. William Howitt (born in...
Friends, Associates Christina Rossetti
Around this time she became aware of her brother Dante Gabriel 's involvement with Elizabeth Siddal , although she and Siddal met only in 1854 and were never intimate friends. Close family friends of Christina...
Publishing Christina Rossetti
In the four months following the end of her engagement to James Collinson no new poems were entered in her notebook, but the broken engagement was not necessarily the cause, since there are several other...
Textual Production Elizabeth Rigby
The second appeared in June 1844. This instalment (as Children's Books) considered works by Maria Edgeworth , Mary Martha Sherwood , and Mary Howitt .
Rigby, Elizabeth. “Children’s Books”. Quarterly Review, Vol.
74
, pp. 1-26.
1
Lochhead, Marion C. Elizabeth Rigby, Lady Eastlake. John Murray.
46
Houghton, Walter E., and Jean Harris Slingerland, editors. The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals 1824-1900. University of Toronto Press.
1: 726
.
Textual Production Adelaide Procter
Here AP 's wide literary connections paid off handsomely. Contributors to The Victoria Regia included some of the most prominent names in literature of the day, mingled with less prominent writers who were also feminists:...
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 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 ...
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.
19
Material Conditions of Writing Margaret Oliphant
MO kept writing through the difficult years of her married life, through poverty, her husband's illness and her children's deaths, although fellow-writer Mary Howitt tried to frighten her with the story that too much mental...

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.