William Howitt

Inspired by stories of the cheapness of life in Germany, MH , her husband and five children moved to the Rhineland (an unfortunate, because expensive, choice); they lived two years at Heidelberg.

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. Bearing the expenses of a...

MH 's nearly sixty-year-old husband and their two sons sailed for Australia to look for new opportunities.

In Leicester she met William Howitt ; she later visited his family at Heanor in Derbyshire. His mother was a compounder of herbal medicines. William loved Walter Scott , the Romantic poets, and the...

A couple of years after William Howitt 's return from Australia, he and MH moved the short distance from The Hermitage to West Hill Lodge, still in Highgate, where they remained until 1866.

During the 1850s, following the death of their schoolboy son Claude, MH and her husband experimented with spiritualism. MH received on one occasion a spirit message from Claude.

MH and her husband moved from West Hill Lodge in Highgate to The Orchard in Claremont near Esher: that is, from the north to the south of London and further away from the city.

Early in her marriage, living in Nottingham, MH wrote both poetry and prose. Her early poem Wild Crocus in Nottingham Meadows treats a sight which she also, in February 1835, described lyrically in a letter...

MH , her husband , and their daughter Margaret left England with the intention of visiting Brussels, then Switzerland, then Italy.

Readers were often unable to distinguish between the two Howitts. Mary Russell Mitford , however, reading The Book of the Seasons (published under William 's name alone, in 1831, at both London and Philadelphia), rightly...

Having been held up in Zurich by war, MH , her husband , and their daughter Margaret finally reached Rome.

The reviewers for the Gentleman's Magazine later turned on MH when they discovered that she was the wife (not sister) of William Howitt , of whom they disapproved.

Writer and editor William Howitt , husband of MH , died in Rome.

This work exemplifies the way that Mary and William Howitt functioned like a single, combined author: she here recycles some passages which had appeared under his pseudonym, Wilfred, fourteen years earlier in the journal Kaleidoscope.

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.