During the four years spent at Esher, Mary seems to have been too much occupied with the cares of a young family to use her pen to much purpose. She produced little, except a volume of Hymns and Fireside Verses, but she frequently assisted her husband in his work. William, industrious as ever, published, besides a large number of newspaper articles, his Boys' Country Book, the best work of the kind ever written, according to the Quarterly Review; and his History of Colonisation and Christianity, in which he took a rapid survey of the behaviour of the Christian nations of Europe to the inhabitants of the countries they conquered in all parts of the world. It was the reading of this book that led Mr. Joseph Pease to establish the British India Society, which issued, in a separate form, the portion of the work that related to India. Mr. Howitt next set to work upon another topographical volume, his Visits to Remarkable Places, in which he turned to good account the materials collected in his pedestrian rambles about the country.
In 1840 the question of education for the elder children became urgent, and the Howitts, who had heard much of the advantages of a residence in Germany from their friends, Mrs. Hemans, Mrs. Jameson, and Henry Chorley, decided to give up their cottage at Esher, and spend two or three years at Heidelberg. Letters of introduction from Mrs. Jameson gave them the entrée into German society, which they found more to their taste than that of their native land. 'For the sake of our children,' writes Mary, 'we sought German acquaintances, we read German, we followed German customs. The life seemed to me easier, the customs simpler and less expensive than in England. There was not the same feverish thirst after wealth as with us; there was more calm appreciation of nature, of music, of social enjoyment.' In their home on the Neckar, the Howitts, most adaptable of couples, found new pleasures and new amusements with each season of the year. In the spring and summer they explored the surrounding country, wandered through the deep valleys and woods, where the grass was purple with bilberries, visited quaint, half-timbered homesteads, standing in the midst of ancient orchards, or followed the swift-flowing streams, on whose banks the peasant girls in their picturesque costumes were washing and drying linen. In the autumn the whole family turned out on the first day of the vintage, and worked like their neighbours. 'It was like something Arcadian,' wrote Mary when recalling the scene. 'The tubs and baskets piled up with enormous clusters, the men and women carrying them away on their heads to the place where they were being crushed; the laughter, the merriment, the feasting, the firing--for they make as much noise as they can--all was delightful, to say nothing of the masquerading and dancing in the evening, which we saw, though we did not take part in it.' In the winter the strangers were introduced to the Christmas Tree, which had not yet become a British institution: while with the first snow came the joys of sleighing, when wheel-barrows, tubs, baskets, everything that could be put on runners, were turned into sledges, and the boys were in their glory.
During the three years that were spent at Heidelberg, William Howitt wrote his Student Life in Germany, German Experiences, and Rural and Domestic Life in Germany, works which contain a great deal of more or less valuable information about the country and the people, presented in a homely, unpretentious style. Mary was no less industrious, having struck a new literary vein, the success of which was far to surpass her modest anticipations. 'I have been very busy,' she writes in 1842, 'translating the first volume of a charming work by Frederica Bremer, a Swedish writer; and if any publisher will give me encouragement to go on with it, I will soon complete the work. It is one of a series of stories of everyday life in Sweden--a beautiful book, full of the noblest moral lessons for every man and woman.' In the summer of 1841 the Howitts, accompanied by their elder daughter, Anna, made a long tour through Germany and Austria, in the course of which they collected materials for fresh works, and visited the celebrities, literary and artistic, of the various cities that lay in their route. At Stuttgart they called on Gustav Schwab, the poet, and visited Dannecker's studio; at Tübingen they made the acquaintance of Uhland, and at Munich that of Kaulbach, then at the height of his fame. By way of Vienna and Prague they travelled to Dresden, where, through the good offices of Mrs. Jameson, they were received by Moritz Retzsch, whose Outlines they had long admired. At Berlin they made friends with Tieck, on whom the king had bestowed a pension and a house at Potsdam; while at Weimar they were entertained by Frau von Goethe, whose son, Wolfgang, had been one of their earliest acquaintances at Heidelberg. This interesting tour is described at length in the Rural and Domestic Life of Germany.
Another year was spent at Heidelberg, but the difficulties of arranging the business details of their work at such a distance from publishers and editors, brought the industrious couple back to London in the spring of 1843. 'On our return to England,' writes Mary, 'I was full of energy and hope. Glowing with aspiration, and in enjoyment of great domestic happiness, I was anticipating a busy, perhaps overburdened, but, nevertheless, congenial life. It was to be one of darkness, perplexity, discouragement.' The Howitts had scarcely entered into possession of a new house that they had taken at Clapton, when news came from Heidelberg, where the elder children had been left at school, that their second son, Claude, had developed alarming symptoms of disease in the knee-joint. It was known that he had been slightly injured in play a few weeks before, but no danger had been anticipated. Mr. Howitt at once set out for Heidelberg, and returned with the invalid, on whose case Liston was consulted. The great surgeon counselled amputation, but to this the parents refused their consent, except as a last resource. Various less heroic modes of treatment were tried, but poor Claude faded away, and died in March, 1844, aged only ten years and a half. This was the heaviest trial that the husband and wife had yet experienced, for Claude had been a boy of brilliant promise, whom they regarded as the flower of their flock. Only a few months before his accident his mother had written in the pride of her heart: 'Claude is the naughtiest of all the children, and yet the most gifted. He learns anything at a glance. Claude is born to be fortunate; he is one that will make the family distinguished in the next generation. He has an extraordinary faculty for telling stories, either of his own invention or of what he reads.'
A lesser cause of trouble and anxiety arose out of the translation of Miss Bremer's novels. 'When we first translated The Neighbours,' writes Mary, 'there was not a house in London that would undertake its publication. We published it and the other Bremer novels at our own risk, but such became the rage for them that our translations were seized by a publisher, altered, and reissued as new ones.' The success of these books was said to be greater than that of any series since the first appearance of the Waverley novels. Cheap editions were multiplied in the United States, and even the boys who hawked the books about the streets were to be seen deep in The Home or The H. Family. In a letter to her sister written about this time, Mary expatiates on the annoyance and loss caused by these piracies. 'It is very mortifying,' she observes, 'because no one knew of these Swedish novels till we introduced them. It obliges us to hurry in all we do, and we must work almost day and night to get ours out in order that we may have some little chance.... We have embarked a great deal of money in the publication, and the interference of the upstart London publisher is most annoying. Mlle. Bremer, however, has written a new novel, and sends it to us before publication. We began its translation this week, and hope to be able to publish it about the time it will appear in Sweden and Germany.'
In addition to her translating work, Mrs. Howitt was engaged at this time upon a series of little books, called Tales for the People and their Children, which had been commissioned by a cheap publisher. These stories, each of which illustrated a domestic virtue, were punctually paid for: and though they were never advertised, they passed swiftly through innumerable editions, and have been popular with a certain public down to quite recent times. Perhaps the most attractive is the Autobiography of a Child, in which Mary told the story of her own early days in her pretty, simple style, with the many little quaint touches that gave all her juvenile stories an atmosphere of truth and reality. Her quick sympathy with young people, and her knowledge of what most appealed to the childish mind, was probably due to her vivid remembrance of her own youthful days, and to her affectionate study of the 'little ways' of her own children. Many are the original traits and sayings that she reports to her sister, more especially those of her youngest boy, Charlton, who had inherited his parents' naturalistic tastes in a pronounced form, and preferred the Quakers' meeting-house to any other church or chapel, because there was a dog-kennel on the premises!
About a year after her return to England, Mrs. Howitt turned her attention to Danish literature, finding that, with her knowledge of Swedish and German, the language presented few difficulties. In 1845 she translated Hans Andersen's Impromsatore, greatly to the satisfaction of the author, who begged that she would continue to translate his works, till he was as well known and loved in England as he was on the Continent. Appreciation, fame, and joy, declared the complacent poet, followed his footsteps wherever he went, and his whole life was full of sunshine, like a beautiful fairy-tale. Mary translated his Only a Fiddler; O. T., or Life in Denmark; The True Story of My Life; and several of the Wonderful Stories for Children. The Improvisatore was the only one that went into a second edition, the other works scarcely paying the cost of publication. Hans Andersen, however, being assured that Mrs. Howitt was making a fortune of the translations, came to England in 1847 to arrange for a share of the profits. Though disappointed in his hope of gain, he begged Mrs. Howitt to translate the whole of his fairy-tales, which had just been brought out in a beautifully-illustrated German edition. Much to her after regret, she was then too much engrossed by other work to be able to accede to his proposal. The relations between Hans Andersen and his translator were marred, we are told, by the extreme sensitiveness and egoism of the Dane. Mrs. Howitt narrates, as an example of his childish vanity, the following little incident which occurred during his visit to England in the summer of 1847:--
'We had taken him, as a pleasant rural experience, to the annual hay-making at Hillside, Highgate, thus introducing him to an English home, full of poetry and art, sincerity, and affection. The ladies of Hillside--Miss Mary and Margaret Gillies, the one an embodiment of peace and an admirable writer, whose talent, like the violet, kept in the shade; the other, the warm-hearted painter--made him welcome.... Immediately after our arrival, the assembled children, loving his delightful fairy-tales, clustered round him in the hay-field, and watched him make them a pretty device of flowers; then, feeling somehow that the stiff, silent foreigner was not kindred to themselves, stole off to an American, Henry Clarke Wright, whose admirable little book, A Kiss for a Blow, some of them knew. He, without any suggestion of condescension or difference of age, entered heart and soul into their glee, laughed, shouted, and played with them, thus unconsciously evincing the gift which had made him earlier the exclusive pastor of six hundred children in Boston. Soon poor Andersen, perceiving himself neglected, complained of headache, and insisted on going indoors, whither Mary Gillies and I, both anxious to efface any disagreeable impression, accompanied him; but he remained irritable and out of sorts.'
It was in 1845 or 1846 that the Howitts made the acquaintance of Tennyson, whose poetry they had long admired. 'The retiring and meditative young poet, Alfred Tennyson, visited us,' relates Mary, 'and cheered our seclusion by the recitation of his exquisite poetry. He spent a Sunday night at our house, when we sat talking together till three in the morning. All the next day he remained with us in constant converse. We seemed to have known him for years. So in fact we had, for his poetry was himself. He hailed all attempts at heralding a grander, more liberal state of public opinion, and consequently sweeter, nobler modes of living. He wished that we Englanders could dress up our affections in more poetical costume; real warmth of heart would gain rather than lose by it. As it was, our manners were as cold as the walls of our churches.' Another new friend was gained through William Howitt's book, Visits to Remarkable Places. When the work was announced as 'in preparation,' the author received a letter, signed E. C. Gaskell, drawing his attention to a beautiful old house, Clopton Hall, near Stratford-on-Avon. The letter described in such admirable style the writer's visit to the house as a schoolgirl, that William wrote to suggest that she ought to use her pen for the public benefit. This timely encouragement led to the production of Mary Barton, the first volume of which was sent in manuscript for Mr. Howitt's verdict. A few months later Mrs. Gaskell came as a guest to the little house at Clopton, bringing with her the completed work.
In 1846 William Howitt took part in a new journalistic venture, his wife, as usual, sharing his labours and anxieties. He became first contributor, and afterwards editor and part-proprietor of the People's Journal, a cheap weekly, through the medium of which he hoped to improve the moral and intellectual condition of the working classes. 'The bearing of its contents,' wrote Mary, in answer to some adverse criticism of the new paper, 'is love to God and man. There is no attempt to set the poor against the rich, but, on the contrary, to induce them to be careful, prudent, sober and independent; above all, to be satisfied to be workers, and to regard labour as a privilege rather than as a penalty, which is quite our view of the matter.' The combination of business and philanthropy seldom answers, and the Howitts, despite the excellence of their intentions, were unlucky in their newspaper speculations. At the end of a few months it was discovered that the manager of the People's Journal kept no books, and that the affairs of the paper were in hopeless confusion. William Howitt, finding himself responsible for the losses on the venture, tried to cure the evil by a hair of the dog that had bitten him. He withdrew from the People's Journal, and, with Samuel Smiles as his assistant, started a rival paper on the same lines, called Howitts Journal. But, as Ebenezer Elliott, the shrewd old Quaker, remarked, apropos of the apathy of the working-class public: 'Men engaged in a death struggle for bread will pay for amusement when they will not for instruction. They woo laughter to unscare them, that they may forget their perils, their wrongs, and their oppressors. If you were able and willing to fill the journal with fun, it would pay.' The failure of his paper spelt ruin to its promoter; his copyrights, as well as those of his wife, were sacrificed, and he was obliged to begin the world anew.