Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century

by George Paston

The Howitts seem to have kept up their spirits bravely under this reverse, and never for a moment relaxed in their untiring industry. They moved into a small house in Avenue Road, St. John's Wood, and looked around them for new subjects upon which to exercise their well-worn pens. Mary hoped to get employment from the Religious Tract Society, which had invited her to send in a specimen story, but she feared that her work would hardly be considered sufficiently orthodox, though she had introduced one of the 'death-bed scenes,' which were then in so much request. As she anticipated, the story was returned as quite unsuitable, and thereupon she writes to her sister in some depression: 'Times are so bad that publishers will not speculate in books; and when I have finished the work I am now engaged on, I have nothing else certain to go on with.' However, writers so popular with the public as the Howitts were not likely to be left long without employment. Mary seems to have been the greater favourite of the two, and the vogue of her volume of collected Poems and Ballads, which appeared in 1847, strikes the modern reader with amazement. Some idea of the estimation in which she was then held is proved by Allan Cunningham's dictum 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 in her composition than can be found in the strains of any living poet besides.' Another critic compared Mrs. Hewitt's ballads to those of Lord Macaulay, while Mrs. Alaric Watts, in her capacity of Annual editor, wrote to assure her old friend and contributor that, 'In thy simplest poetry there are sometimes turns so exquisite as to bring the tears to my eyes. Thou hast as much poetry in thee as would set up half-a-dozen writers.' The one dissentient voice among admiring contemporaries is that of Miss Mitford, who writes in 1852: 'I am for my sins so fidgety respecting style that I have the bad habit of expecting a book that pretends to be written in our language to be English; therefore I cannot read Miss Strickland, or the Howitts, or Carlyle, or Emerson, or the serious parts of Dickens.' It must be owned that the Howitts are condemned in fairly good company.

The work of both husband and wife suffered from the inevitable defects of self-education, and also from the narrowness and seclusion of their early lives. Mary possessed more imagination and a lighter touch than her husband, but her attempts at adult fiction were hampered by her ignorance of the world, while her technique, both in prose and verse, left something to be desired. It is evident that the publishers and editors of the period were less critical than Miss Mitford, for, in 1848, we find that Mrs. Howitt was invited to write the opening volume of Bradshaw's series of Railway novels, while in February 1850, came a request from Charles Dickens for contributions to Household Words. 'You may have seen,' he writes, 'the first dim announcements of the new, cheap literary journal I am about to start. Frankly, I want to say to you that if you would write for it, you would delight me, and I should consider myself very fortunate indeed in enlisting your services.... I hope any connection with the enterprise would be satisfactory and agreeable to you in all respects, as I should most earnestly endeavour to make it. If I wrote a book I could say no more than I mean to suggest to you in these few lines. All that I leave unsaid, I leave to your generous understanding.'

The Howitts were keenly interested in the gradual awakening of the long-dormant, artistic instincts of the nation, the first signs of which became faintly visible about the end of the forties. 'Down to that time,' observes Mary, 'the taste of the English people had been for what appealed to the mind rather than to the eye, and the general public were almost wholly uneducated in art. By 1849 the improvement due to the exertions of the Prince Consort, the Society of Arts, and other powers began to be felt; while a wonderful impulse to human taste and ingenuity was being given in the preparation of exhibits for the World's Fair.' The gentle Quakeress who, in her youth, had modelled Wedgwood figures in paper pulp, and clapped her clear-starching to the rhythm of Lalla Rookh, was, in middle life, one of the staunchest supporters of the Pre-Raphaelite Brethren, and that at a time when the President of the Royal Academy had announced his intention of hanging no more of their 'outrageous productions.' Through their friend, Edward La Trobe Bateman, the Howitts had been introduced into the Pre-Raphaelite circle, and familiarised with the then new and startling idea that artistic principles might be carried out in furniture and house-decoration. Less than three-quarters of a century before, Mary's father had been sternly rebuked by her grandfather for painting a series of lines in black and grey above the parlour fireplace to represent a cornice. This primitive attempt at decoration was regarded as a sinful indulgence of the lust of the eye! With the simple charity that was characteristic of them, William and Mary saw only the best side of their new friends, the shadows of Bohemian life being entirely hidden from them. 'Earnest and severe in their principles of art,' observes Mrs. Howitt naively, 'the young reformers indulged in much jocundity when the day's work was done. They were wont to meet at ten, cut jokes, talk slang, smoke, read poetry, and discuss art till three A.M.'

The couple had by this time renounced their membership of the Society of Friends, but they had not joined any other religious sect, though they seem to have been attracted by Unitarian doctrines. 'Mere creeds,' wrote Mary to her sister, 'matter nothing to me. I could go one Sunday to the Church of England, another to a Catholic chapel, a third to the Unitarian, and so on; and in each of them find my heart warmed with Christian love to my fellow-creatures, and lifted up with gratitude and praise to God.' For many years the house in Avenue Road was, we are told, a meeting-place for all that was best and brightest in the world of modern thought and art. William Howitt was always ready to lend an attentive and unbiassed ear to the newest theory, or even the newest fad, while Mary possessed in the fullest degree the gift of companionableness, and her inexhaustible sympathy drew from others an instant confidence. Her arduous literary labours never impaired her vigorous powers of mind or body, and she often wrote till late into the night without appearing to suffer in either health or spirits. She is described as a careful and energetic housewife; indeed, her husband was accustomed to say that he would challenge any woman who never wrote a line, to match his own good woman in the management of a large household.

In 1851 came the first tidings of the discovery of gold in Australia, and nothing was talked of but this new Eldorado and the wonderful inducements held out to emigrants. William Howitt, who felt that he needed a change from brain-work, suddenly resolved on a trip with his two sons to this new world, where he would see his youngest brother, Dr. Godfrey Howitt, who had settled at Melbourne. He was also anxious to ascertain what openings in the country there might be for his boys, both of whom had active, outdoor tastes, which there seemed little chance of their being able to gratify in England. In June, 1852, the three male members of the family, accompanied by La Trobe Bateman, sailed for Australia, while Mary and her two daughters, the elder of whom had just returned from a year in Kaulbach's studio at Munich, moved into a cottage called the Hermitage, at Highgate, which belonged to Mr. Bateman, and had formerly been occupied by Rossetti. Here they lived quietly for upwards of two years, working at their literary or artistic occupations, and seeing a few intimate friends. Mary kept her husband posted up in the events that were taking place in England, and we learn from her letters what were the chief topics of town talk in the early fifties.

'Now, I must think over what news there is,' she writes in April, 1853. 'In the political world, the proposed new scheme of Property and Income Tax, which would make everybody pay something; and the proposal for paying off a portion of the National Debt with Australian gold. In the literary world, the International Copyright, which some expect will be in force in three months. In society in general, the strange circumstantial rumour of the Queen's death, which, being set afloat on Easter Monday, when no business was doing, was not the offspring of the money market. Mr. and Mrs. Charles Kean, who were here the other day, spoke of it, saying truly that for the moment it seemed to paralyse the very heart of England.... [May 4th.] The great talk now is Mrs. Beecher Stowe and spirit-rapping, both of which have arrived in England. The universality of the latter phenomena renders it a curious study. A feeling seems pervading all classes and all sects that the world stands on the brink of some great spiritual revelation. It meets one in books, in newspapers, on the lips of members of the Church of England, Unitarians, and even Freethinkers. Poor old Robert Owen, the philanthropist, has been converted, and made a confession of faith in public. One cannot but respect a man who, in his old age, has the boldness to declare himself as having been blinded and mistaken through life.'

In December, 1854, William Howitt returned from his travels without any gold in his pockets, but with the materials for his History of Discovery in Australia and New Zealand. Thanks to what he used to call his four great doctors, Temperance, Exercise, Good Air, and Good Hours, he had displayed wonderful powers of activity and endurance during his exploration of some almost untracked regions of the new world. At sixty years of age he had marched twenty miles a day under a blazing sun for weeks at a time, worked at digging gold for twelve hours a day, waded through rivers, slept under trees, baked his own bread, washed his own clothes, and now returned in the pink of condition, with his passion for wandering only intensified by his three years of an adventurous life. The family experiences were diversified thenceforward by frequent change of scene, for William was always ready and willing to start off at a moment's notice to the mountains, the seaside, or the Continent. But whether the Howitts were at home or abroad, they continued their making of many books, so that it becomes difficult for the biographer to keep pace with their literary output. Together or separately they produced a History of Scandinavian Literature, The Homes and Haunts of the Poets, a Popular History of England, which was published in weekly parts, a Year-Book of the Country, a Popular History of the United States, a History of the Supernatural, the Northern Heights of London, and an abridged edition of Sir Charles Grandison, besides several tales for young people, and contributions to magazines and newspapers.

Even increasing age had no power to narrow their point of view, or to blunt their sympathy with every movement that seemed to make for the relief of the oppressed, the welfare of the nation, or the advancement of the human race. Just as in youth they had championed the cause of Catholic Emancipation and of political Reform, so in later years we find them advocating the Repeal of the Corn Laws, taking part in the Anti-Slavery agitation, working for improvement in the laws that affected women and children, and supporting the Bill for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. A more debatable subject--that of spiritualism--was investigated by them in a friendly but impartial spirit. 'In the spring of 1856, 'writes Mrs. Howitt, 'we had become acquainted with several most ardent and honest spirit mediums. It seemed right to my husband and myself to try and understand the nature of these phenomena in which our new acquaintance so firmly believed. In the month of April I was invited to attend a séance at Professor de Morgan's, and was much astonished and affected by communications purporting to come to me from my dear son Claude. With constant prayer for enlightenment and guidance, we experimented at home. The teachings that seemed given us from the spirit-world were often akin to those of the gospel; at other times they were more obviously emanations of evil. I felt thankful for the assurance thus gained of an invisible world, but resolved to neglect none of my common duties for spiritualism.' Among the Hewitts' fellow-converts were Robert Chambers, Robert Owen, the Carter Halls and the Alaric Watts's; while Sir David Brewster and Lord Brougham were earnest inquirers into these forms of psychical phenomena.

In 1865 William Howitt was granted a pension by Government, and a year later the couple moved from Highgate to a cottage called the Orchard, near their former residence at Esher. Of their four surviving children, only Margaret, the youngest, was left at home. Anna, already the author of a very interesting book, An Art Student at Munich, had, as her mother observes, taken her place among the successful artists and writers of her day, 'when, in the spring of 1856, a severe private censure of one of her oil-paintings by a king among critics so crushed her sensitive nature, as to make her yield to her bias for the supernatural, and withdraw from the arena of the fine arts.' In 1857 Anna became the wife of Alfred Watts, the son of her parents' old friends, Alaric and Zillah Watts. The two boys, Alfred and Charlton, born explorers and naturalists, both settled in Australia. Alfred, early in the sixties, had explored the district of Lake Torrens, a land of parched deserts, dry-water-courses, and soda-springs, whose waters effervesced tartaric acid; and had opened up for the Victorian Government the mountainous district of Gippsland, with the famous gold-field of the Crooked River. In 1861 he had been employed to head the relief-party that went in search of the discoverer, Robert O'Hara Burke, and his companions, and a year later he brought back the remains of the ill-fated explorers to Melbourne for public burial. Later in life he was successfully employed in various Government enterprises, and published, in collaboration with a friend, a learned work on the aborigines of Australia.

Charlton Howitt, the younger son, after five years' uncongenial work in a London office, emigrated to Australia in 1860. His quality was quickly recognised by the Provincial Government, which, in 1862, appointed him to command an expedition to examine the rivers in the province of Canterbury, with a view to ascertaining whether they contained gold. So admirably was the work accomplished that, on his return to Christchurch, he was intrusted with the task of opening up communications between the Canterbury plains and the newly-discovered gold and coal district on the west coast. 'This duty was faithfully performed, under constant hardships and discouragement,' relates his mother. 'But a few miles of road remained to be cut, when, at the end of June, 1863, after personally rescuing other pioneers and wanderers from drowning and starvation in that watery, inhospitable forest region, Charlton, with two of his men, went down in the deep waters of Lake Brunner; a fatal accident which deprived the Government of a valued servant, and saddened the hearts of all who knew him.'