8. — I am glad to say that '' Rural Life ' 
is doing very well, and Longmans are anxious for another book 
from the same author. I am working hard at ' Colonisation and 
Christianity,' and mean it to be out in May. If thou canst give 
me any hints, or furnish me with a good motto or two, I shall 
be glad. I take a rapid review of the behaviour of the Christian 
nations of Europe to all the natives of the countries they have 
seized in all quarters of the world. After May I shall begin 
the ' Visits to Remarkable Places,' which I hope to make an 
interesting volume. 

" Do you know that the wife of our surgeon here, Mrs. Neville, 
is an old friend of John Keats ? I believe I might say an old 
flame. Many of his verses were addressed to her; and a very 
lovely young woman she was, I doubt not. She sent us the 
other day three sketches of him to look at — one of them in 
youth and health ; one lying in his berth reading while passing 
through the Bay of Biscay on his way to Italy ; and one as he 
lay with his head on the pillow just before death. They were 
done by Mr. Severn, the young artist who went to Italy with 
him, and are very interesting." 



" Colonisation and Christianity," by "William Howitt, is an 
able and good book, that has now long been out of print. Its 
publication led to the formation of the British India Society, 
which issued in a separate form the part of the work relating 
to India. My husband, amongst other important facts, pointed 
out that, were the native tanks kept in repair and the grand 
native system of irrigation only properly sustained, the awful 
famines in India would not occur. John Bright, made ac- 



146 MARY HOWITT. 

quaiuted with the abuses of our Indian system, took up the 
question in the Chamber of Commerce in Manchester, and then 
in Parliament, which dissolved the East India Company and 
introduced measures of reform. He and Professor Fawcett 
both powerfully protested against the reforms in India being 
inadequate, and especially against the neglect of the obvious 
means to prevent famine. 

Mary Howitt to Miss Bowles. 

" Jan. 3, 1839. — A very happy New Year it must needs be 
to you, and you must allow William and myself to congratulate 
you most cordially on the era which it is to accomplish in your 
life. Now, I wonder whether you thought we should be sur- 
prised. I can tell you no. Mrs. Bain called one day and told 
me to guess who was going to be married. As she glanced to 
the books on the table, I asked, ' Is the lady literary ?' ' Yes.' 
AVell, as it was not likely to be Joanna Baillie, I said, * Miss 
Bowles.' ' Oh ! you are a conjurer,' replied my friend — * but 
the gentleman ? ' Admiral Bain, my friend's husband, intend- 
ing to give me a hiut, said, ' I have been at his house.' That, 
however, was no clue ; still, I did not hesitate, and said, * Dr. 
Southey.' 

" Now, will not this convince you what a natural, joyful 
thing it seemed to be ? I had the pleasure of making William 
guess, when he came in from his walk ; and then we paid a 
delicious mental visit to your cottage, and gave you our entire 
heart-sjTnpathy. May the Almighty bless you, and crown 
your life with such happiness as you so well deserve. 

" I am quite cheered to know that you did not disapprove of 
' Colonisation and Christianity.' William felt the least in the 
world sorry afterwards that a copy had gone to you. Not that 
he feared you could disapprove of its general spirit, but that there 
might be reasons why such a volume should not be quite to your 
taste. I thought it was horrible and dismal reading for a 
lone lady. Dear Miss Bowles, this again reminds me of your 
future. You will have more cheery company than the cat and 
tlie canary-bird, and the portraits of the dead ancestors. I 
^hall never pity you of a winter's evening now, let you be 
reading ever so melancholy a book. 



POPULAR EDUCATIOX. 147 

" On the very day your lust letter came I was going to write 
to you to request the permission to inscribe my little volume of 
' Jlymns and Fireside Verses' to you. William is going to 
send you a book, which you can present to some young boyisli 
cousin, if you please. It is 'The lioy's Country-Book,' being 
the real life of a country boy. The engraver, Mr. Williams, 
has embellished it, I think, very beautifully. 

" You would be shocked, as we were, to hear of poor L. E. L.'s 
death. We feared, when she went with her husband to Africa, 
that her days might be looked upon as numbered, but we never 
thought they were so few. It is indeed a melancholy fate, and 
reminds us of poor Miss Jewsbury. It was dreadful to think of 
her dying attended only by such a strange being as her husband, 
Mr. Fletcher. Iler relations have not received one syllable 
from him to this day. 

" Poor Miss Jewsbury ! It was she who gave us most of the 
carols which are quoted and alluded to in the * Rural Life.' 
She knew how I doted on carols and ballads, and, half in joke 
and half in earnest, she colkcted at Manchester and its neigh- 
bourhood all the halfpenny carols and songs that she could, 
and had them bound for me." 

I make mention, in the above letter, of Admiral Bain. This 
excellent and enlightened man, deploring the crass ignorance 
of the labouring class in Esher, succeeded, with much diificulty 
and opposition on the part of the gentry, in setting on foot a 
village school at his own cost. The affluent feared making 
their servants and labourers intellectual by teaching them to 
read and write. On our arrival at Esher, the only school-build- 
ing in the neighbourhood * was in the distant and obscure hamlet 
of Oxshott, due to the beneticence of the Royal Family. It 
bore the inscription, "The Royal Kent School, founded in 
1820 ;" but it was no longer used. The windows were broken, 
and the whole premises in a state of dilapidation. The farmers 
were glad that so it shoxild be, as the peasants, if educated, 
would no longer be beasts of burden. In Esher the benevolent 
Admiral would not be thwarted, and the poor children began, 
about the year 1836, to receive a useful English education. 

* A dame-school had been commenced by the Princess Charlotte in one of the 
lodges of Claremont Park, but wajs discontinued after her death. 

L <{}^ Noel Byron introduced us to her son-in-law and 
daughter, the Earl and Countess of Lovelace, who, like herself, 
were extremely interested in the formation of industrial schools. 
She had organised a school in 1834 in Ealing Grove, under the 
charge of Mr. E. T. Craig, in which boj's were successfully 
educated for agricultural pursuits ; and, when we became 
acquainted with her, was anxious to meet with a suitable 
schoolmaster to form and manage for her a similar institution 
at Kirkby-Mallory, in Leicestershire. Such an individual was 
procured for her by my husband. 

Durins: our life at Nottino'ham, AVilliam had discovered and 
encouraged the intellectual ability of a poor man named 
Ephraim Brown. He put into his hands works that were 
calculated to soften down a natural ruggedness of character 
and to cultivate his mind, which was of no mean order. Brown 
evinced genuine gratitude to his benefactor, and a most anxious 
desire to help others of the labouring class to think, reason, and 
reflect. Village education was at that time confined to reading, 
writing, and arithmetic, without any attempt at the culture of 
the understanding, the intellectual powers of the child being 
totally neglected. His great ambition, therefore, became to 
help to draw public attention to the subject of popular educa- 
tion, so that, suitable measures being enacted, he might still 
live to see his beloved native land enjoying, like her favoured 
sister, Scotland, a wise, flourishing, and enlightened rural popu- 
lation. He embraced most thankfully Lady Byron's offer, learnt 
tlie system in licr model school at Ealing, and then commenced 
a fellow-establishment at Kirkby. 

I well remember, when staying at Lord Lovelace's seat, East 
Horsley Park, during a long drive through a southernmost 
remote portion of Surrey, how here and there a solitary peasant 



COTTAGE SCHOOLS. 140 

in white slop stared at the hidios dashing by in carriage and 
four; and how 3Ir.s. Ilippersley Tucktield, another guest of 
Lord Lovelace's, explained to his two sisters, the lion. Misses 
King, and myself, as we bowled along, the system of education 
which she was carrying out on her estates near Bristol. Slie 
had the most needful instruction imparted to poor children by 
voluntary or paid teachers in cottages. She was opposed to the 
erection of expensive school-premises and great gatlierings 
toe-ether of children, believing that the formation of their moral 
and religious characters could only be individually effected in 
small centres of tuition. She maintained that by her method 
the entire juvenile population could in a very few weeks be put 
to school almost without effort or sensible cost. 

In Lord Lovelace's schools we saw, during our first visit, a 
hundred and thirty bright, happy, busy children ; the boys 
acquiring the most common handicraft trades, and the girls 
learning dairy, laundry, and other household work. 

To this period belongs a " First Book for Reading " that 
I wrote, and which was published, I believe, at the cost of 
sixpence. 

Returning now to my correspondence with my sister Anna, I 
thus address her, February 1, 1839 : — 

" It is impossible that anything so kindly meant as thy 
remonstrances could offend us. But I really cannot tell to 
what it alludes. I have never contributed to any periodical 
for these three years at least, except C/uonbers's Journal; and to 
that five articles. To none of these can thy remarks apply. 
' The Friend's Family ' is the only one that describes Friends, 
and I had no desire in it of ' ministering to a depraved public 
taste.' I myself should feel great interest in a faithful sketch 
of a Moravian family. 

"Then, as to William's contributions to periodicals, it can 
only be to JW//'.v Magazine, for he has not written in any other 
for years. His articles on Friends there contain not one word 
w^hich is not true, and had any object but that of pandering to 
bad passions. Their aim has been to make known to the public 
what is really noble and peculiarly Christian in the profession 
and practice of the Society ; and he has done so more than any 



150 MARY HOWITT, 

other writer that has written on the subject. I grant that he 
has spoken freely of many of their ouUmrd peculiarities ; and 
that he has done with design, because he saw clearly th;it 
ihese were sapping the foundation of the Society's simplicity 
and usefulness, and that they had come to be regarded by the 
Society itself as the essentials of the faith, or at least of its 
practice. He firmly believes this, and he did, in my opinion, 
quite right to speak of them as they deserved. 

"I think thou art wrong in saying they have injured his 
reputation in the literary world, for we have continual evidence 
with how much interest they are read — and that not by gossip- 
ing, idle readers — and how much they have tended to the better 
features of Quakerism being understood. Owing to these very 
papers William has been emplo3'ed to write the article, ' Quaker,' 
for the new edition of the ' Encyclopaedia Britannica ' ; that is 
anything but a proof of his good name having suffered. On 
the contrary, we looked upon it as one of the most flattering 
and gratifying testimonials to his fair reputation ; for none but 
acknowledged and first-rate writers have ever been employed on 
that work. That part of the ' Encyclopaedia' is just about being 
published, and the article, therefore, will soon be before the 
public. William has gone carefully through upwards of a 
hundred Friends' books, old and new, in order to make it 
perfect. The former article was very imfavourable to Friends, 
and especially to the character of George Fox. 

" My dearest sister, if thou knew how earnestly desirous we 
are, how it is the frequent cause of our humble supplications, 
that, in our day and generation, we may be enabled to do good 
by making virtue lovely, and teaching how simple and glorious 
is Christianity, thou wouldst not suspect us of any such false 
designs as thou speakst of. With such desires it is impossible 
that we can ever willingly or knowingly have perverted our 
talents." 

My husband revisited the north of England this spring for 
his work on " Remarkable Place