The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To WILLIAM HOWITT,1 [1852]

Text from facsimile in Bonham's online catalogue, May 2020.
Address: William Howitt Esquire | 28 Upper Avenue Road2
Date: Signature confirms 1852.

• 1. William Howitt (1792-1876; Dictionary of National Biography), author; married Mary Botham 1821; both were prolific writers, separately and in collaboration, and William had established a reputation with Rural Life of England, 1836, and Visits to Remarkable Places, 1840. CD reviewed his Boy's Country Book in the Examiner, 7 Apr 1839 (see Pilgrim Letters 1, p. 536, headnote) but did not meet the Howitts until later — probably through William Johnson Fox, R.H. Horne, or Thomas Southwood Smith, and certainly before their residence in Germany 1840-3. Their home at Clapton was the resort of many radical writers, and in 1846 both were contributing largely to the People's Journal, of which in April they became co-editors and part-proprietors, with W.J. Linton and the publisher John Saunders. For the opening Number, Howitt contributed a "People's Portrait" of CD, which acclaimed him especially for his "championship of the weak and oppressed" (People's Journal [3 Jan 1846]: 12).
  
• 2. Howitt lived in Avenue Road from 1848 until his emigration to Australia in 1852.