ABSTRACT
This Christmas story was the last of three stories that EG contributed to Howitt’s Journal, 3 (1 January 1848), pp. 4–7, under her now familiar pseudonym ‘Cotton Mather Mills’ (see headnote to ‘Libbie Marsh’s Three Eras’, p. 47). It was reprinted, with ‘The Sexton’s Hero’ as a six-penny pamphlet for the benefit of the Macclesfield Public Baths and Washhouses (Manchester: Johnson, Rawson and Co., 1850), and republished in three parts as ‘by the authoress of “Mary Barton”, “The Moorland Cottage”’ in the penny weekly the Christian Socialist on 29 March, 5 and 12 April 1851 (1, pp. 175–6, 183–4, 191–2). The story was reprinted with ‘The Sexton’s Hero’ by Chapman and Hall in 1855, as a three-penny pamphlet, in a format similar to editions of ‘Libbie Marsh’s Three Eras’, ‘Hand and Heart’ and ‘Bessy’s Troubles at Home’, which were also issued in pamphlet form in 1855. It was collected in Lizzie Leigh and Other Tales (1855) and again in The Grey Woman and Other Tales (1865). Rubenius suggests that in its seasonal message of goodwill, and in the conversion of the hard-hearted Mrs. Jenkins into a generous and benevolent neighbour the story is ‘wholly Dickensian’ (Rubenius, p. 278). Uglow points out that beneath the story’s gentle comedy is a more sombre thread (Uglow, p. 96). Mary’s anxiety for her child, and her fears about her competence as a mother link the story to the Diary and to novels and other stories in which motherhood and mothering are explored. The story was included in the 1906 Knutsford edition (Knutsford, vol. ii), and in Clement Shorter’s 1913 World’s Classics edition (Shorter, vol. viii). It was translated into French as ‘La Pluie et le beau temps: Conte de Noël’, in La Revue britannique, 6, pp. 426ff.
