Fauna, Flora and Illustrated Verse in Mary Howitt’s Environmental Children’s Poetry

Mary Howitt an important new media innovator from the 1820s to the 1840s, both in her material forms and in her content, especially with respect to her ecopoetry in Sketches of Natural History, a multimodal volume for children published in 1834. Among her other achievements, Mary Howitt co-authored poems with her husband William Howitt that challenged definitions of the Romantic poet-creator and wrote an innovative autobiography of childhood (My Own Story, 1844). A decade earlier, Howitt published a ground-breaking children’s poetry volume entitled Sketches of Natural History (1834), an early example of environmental writing. Pairing animal and plant illustrations with poetry, Sketches of Natural History anticipated ecopoetics today in representing fauna, flora, and humans as co-equal earthly inhabitants, even in “The Water-Rat.” This volume’s illustrated verse, crucial to teaching natural history and inspiring interest, clearly built upon Howitt’s own experience as a prolific contributor to illustrated literary annuals in the 1820s and ’30s. The combination of poetry and wood-cut illustration in Sketches produced a new kind of children’s literature focused on cultivating joy rather than on inculcating religious dogma.