Jfiary Howitt

Jfiary Howitt (1799-1888) Mary Howitt, remembered today for writing some of the most popular bal lads of her time, for introducing humor into children's poetry, and for being the first English translator of Hans Christian Anderson and Fredrika Bremer, was born in Coleford, Gloucestershire, on 12 March 1799. Called "Polly" as a child, she was the second daughter of Ann Wood and Samuel Botham, an iron worker turned land surveyor. Her parents were both devout members of the Society of Friends, and the household was a constricted world of isolation and quiet, so much so that the children had unusual difficulty learning to speak. Her father forbade secular hterature on religious grounds, but he read frequently from the Bible, and in his absence Mary's mother, who possessed a strong narrative gift, told stories and recited a large repertoire of poetry from memory. A nurse sang ballads that shaped Mary's sensibilities. Although fiction, music, dancing, and theater all were off-limits, Mary compensated by creating battle scenes out of the damp spots on the wall of the Friends' meeting house and imagining heads of animals and people in the grain of the wood seats. After attending a school for girls at Uttoxeter, in 1809 Mary enrolled at a Friends' school in Croydon, where a copy ofBarbauld's Hymns in Prose was confiscated from her. In 1812 she began attending Hannah Kilham's Friends' school in Sheffield, where her interest in writers and authorship was awakened. Here she and her older sister, Anna, who would remain best friends throughout life, together wrote several prose tales and an epic. Mary became an insatiable reader, clandestinely devouring the Spectator, the Gentle man's Magazine, old English poetry and drama, Shakespeare, and the latest books of poetry, including Moore and Byron, which she copied into her album and learned by heart. When she was seventeen she stood under an apple tree by her house and prayed that one day she would become a famous writer. In 1817 Mary met William Howitt, seven years her senior. They studied botany together, and he introduced her to the Edinburgh Review, the novels 326 Mary Howitt of Scott, the engravings of Thomas Bewick, and the poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Crabbe, and Shelley. They became engaged early in 1819 and were married in a Quaker ceremony at Uttoxeter on 16 April l82r. Their mar riage would endure for over half a century and would be cited by Margaret Fuller in Woman in the Nineteenth Century as a prime example of the union of intellectual companionship. William had been apprenticed to a builder but vowed he would one day write books. He bought a chemist's shop in Hanley, which he operated for seven months. In April 1822, only a few months after Mary had given birth to a stillborn child, the couple sailed to Dunbarton and embarked on a five-hundred-mile walking tour of Scotland, visiting Abbots ford, the home of Sir Walter Scott, along the way. They published an account of this trip, "A Scottish Ramble in the Spring of 1822 by Wilfred and Wil freda Wender," the first of many collaborative writing projects, two years later in the Staffordshire Mercury. At trip's end, they joined William's brothers Godfrey and Richard in Nottingham, a center of religious dissent and radi cal politics and the prosperous core of the weaving trade; there William and Richard opened another chemist's shop. Mary and William published their first joint book, The Forest Minstrel, and Other Poems, with Baldwin, Cra dock and Joy in April 1823. It received good reviews, but its sales were not significant. In January 1824, having already lost three infants, Mary gave birth to a frail baby girl, Anna Mary, but almost died herself from puerperal fever. Only four of her ten children would survive to adulthood, and Mary was to outlive all but Alfred William (b. 1830) and Margaret Anastasia (b. 1839). Throughout her childbearing years Mary was a productive writer. She and William began contributing to the literary gift books and annuals as well as to periodi cals such as Time's Telescope and Hone's Table Book. In 1827 they brought out another collaborative effort, The Desolation of Eyam, and Other Poems, inspired by the heroic story of the vicar of Eyam during the plague years. The book got a mixed response. The Eclectic Review denounced it as "anti-Quakerish, athe istical, and licentious in style and sentiment," but the Noctes Ambrosianae was full of praise, calling Mary's language "chaste and simple-her feelings tender and pure-and her observation of nature accurate and intense." 1 Gradually, the couple began to gather around them an intellectual and artistic circle, getting to know William Wordsworth, William Hone, James Montgomery, and their neighbor Ann Taylor Gilbert. In December 1829 the Howitts traveled to London, where they visited I. Eclectic Review 34 (November 1828): 675 ; Noctes Ambrosianae, published serially, reprinted in 5 vols. (New York, 1863), quotation on 3: 17i. Mary Howitt Zillah Watts, editor of the New Year's Gifi, and her husband, Alaric A. Watts, editor of the Literary Souvenir, as well as Anna Maria and Samuel Carter Hall, editors of the Amulet and the Juvenile Forget-Me-Not. They met, too, the painter John Martin, Bryan Waller Procter, Allan Cunningham, Barbara Hofland, and Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L.E.L.). Friendship with the Halls, the Wattses, and other editors helped the Howitts make the transition from pharmacy to authorship as their principal source of family income. During the i83os, 1840s, and 1850s, Mary and William produced an astonishing num ber of works, as they struggled to support themselves as writers-publishing each year from one to four books, writing not only poetry but also reviews, fictional tales, and periodical articles. They also worked for humanitarian and political causes, kept up an active social calendar, took long walking tours, and conducted a heavy correspondence. Mary came to correspond with some of the leading women authors of her time, including Maria Jane Jews bury, Joanna Baillie, Mary Russell Mitford, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Anna Jameson, Caroline Bowles, Anna Maria Hall, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Felicia Hemans. Hemans had initiated the correspondence after reading the passage in "The Record of Poetry," from The Desolation ef Byam, praising her work. The two poets met in Liverpool in 1828 at the home of William Chorley, editor of the Winter's Wreath, a literary annual to which both women con tributed. Mary's Sketches ef Natural History (1834) contained what is today her best known poem, "The Spider and the Fly. An Apologue. A New Version of an Old Story." This book provided, according to Alexander H. Japp, "one of the first effective popularizations of science" in English 2 and helped to cul tivate the fanciful in literature for children. Her book of dramatic sketches, The Seven Temptations, influenced by Joanna Baillie, was published the same year; although it was damned by the critics, she always considered it her most original and best work. In i836 the Howitts visited Edinburgh, where they began a long friendship with David Macbeth Moir (Delta). He later said of Mary's ballads, "She has few contemporary rivals, whether we regard her pictures of stern wild solitary nature, or of all that is placid, gentle, and benignant in the supernatural." 3 They also met Robert Chambers, to whose mass-circulation weekly, Chambers' Edinburgh journal, Mary would contribute regularly and anonymously, and William Tait, for whose Tait's Edinburgh Maga zine both Howitts would write. In a typical year, Mary contributed poems 2. Quoted in Alfred H. Miles, The Poets and the Poetry of the Century, vol. 7,joanna Baillie to Mathilde Blind (London, [1894]), 83. 3. Sketches of the Poetical Literature of the Past Half-Century (Edinburgh, 1851), 273. Mary Howitt and tales to annuals and wrote ballads for the Monthly Repository and the Edin burgh journals. She planned her writing so that her periodical publications could be gathered together into books to bring in additional income. She was resourceful, too, in developing writing projects. When her sister Emma sent a journal of her children's life in Cincinnati, Mary published it under the title Our Cousins in Ohio and wrote a companion volume, Children's Year, about two of her own children. Not infrequently she would first contribute a poem to a magazine, then sell it to a literary annual, and later include it in a book of poems most of which had been previously published. She also recycled her work from one book to the next, in some instances publishing a poem many times, often revising it with each new appearance. This system enabled her to make a substantial contribution to her family's income. In 1836, for example, Richard Bentley paid her £150 for a three-volume novel entitled Wood Leighton; combined with the £so she earned for other writings that year, that added up to a respectable living. Allan Cunningham wrote that "Mary Howitt has shown herself mistress of every string of the minstrel's lyre, save that which sounds of broil and bloodshed. There is more of the old ballad simplicity than can be found in the strains of any living poet besides." 4 Letitia Elizabeth Landon described her in her novel Romance and Reality as one who "gave me more the idea of a poet than most of our modern votaries of the lute .... She is as creative in her imaginary poems, as she is touching and true in her simple ones." Birds and Flowers and Other Country Things (1838) contained some of Mary Hewitt's most successful lyrics; it was followed the next year by Hymns and Fireside Verses (1839), dedicated to Caroline Bowles.

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