‘Clopton Hall’

EG sent this description of a schoolgirl visit to Clopton Hall in Warwickshire to the Quaker writer William Howitt in 1838, after the announcement of his forthcoming Visits to Remarkable Places: Old Halls, Battle Fields, and Scenes Illustrative of Striking Passages in English History and Poetry (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1840). Howitt incorporated it into his third chapter, ‘Visit to Stratford-on-Avon, and the Haunts of Shakespeare’, pp. 135–9. Earlier, in May 1838, EG had initiated a correspondence with William and Mary Howitt, writing to thank them for the pleasure two of their works had given her (Letters, p. 14). Carol Martin speculates that the piece may have been a school exercise written some years earlier. ¹ As was his custom in the preparation of his topographical surveys, Howitt subsequently visited the house himself, weaving his own impressions and background material around EG’s text. (see Visits to Remarkable Places, pp. 139–46). In her autobiography Mary Howitt records that her husband was so impressed with EG’s ‘powerful and graphic’ piece that he urged her ‘to use her pen for the public benefit’. ² As well as leading to this early publication, the association with the Howitts proved a fruitful one professionally and a lasting one in personal terms. (See Introduction, pp. xxiii, xxxi). The piece was reprinted with an Introduction by A. W. Ward, as ‘Clopton House’ in the 1906 Knutsford edition (Knutsford, vol. i) and by Clement Shorter in his 1911 World’s Classics edition (Shorter, vol. vii).