ABSTRACT
The Swedish author Fredrika Bremer travelled to England and then on to the United States and Cuba in the years 1849 to 1851. Between 1842 and 1850 Mary Howitt translated various novels and novellas by Fredrika Bremer. Mary Howitt too was politically a long-time opponent of slavery and an advocate of women's rights. The emancipatory drive accorded with Howitt's own politics. However, Howitt herself, as translator, came in for some rebuke from most reviewers of Homes of the New World with regard to her failure to edit Bremer's text. In determining on a politics of the domestic informed by fairly recent and popularized ideas on political economy as the basis for her critique, Johnstone also has in mind the condition or state of the nation, writing: it is of the essence of real life among a people whom we, in past times more closely resembled, and by whose example people might, perhaps, in some things profit still.
