The following essay discusses Mary Howitt and her husband, William.

Mary and William Howitt, now almost wholly forgotten, deserve attention for the volume and range of their work and for the degree to which they mirror the concerns of their age. Part of nineteenth-century literary life throughout Romanticism and Victorianism, this married couple reflected the transition in literary taste during these crucial decades. Provincial in background, they nonetheless reached well beyond the borders of England to the writers of Germany and Scandinavia. William was one of the first English authors to travel in and write about the newly settled lands of Australia and New Zealand. Both Howitts knew well the ever-widening range of religious ideologies, from Quaker to spiritualist to Roman Catholic. Read and admired by old-style Tories, the Howitts nonetheless lived and wrote by a reformist, even Chartist, creed fueled by sensitivity to the abuses of the...