[Letter to] My dear Friend
Contributors: Chapman, Maria Weston, 1806-1885, recipient
Series: Maria Weston Chapman Correspondence (1835-1885)
Published: 1847
Place of publication: Clapton, [London, England]
Language: eng
Format: [manuscript]
Subjects: Correspondence; Women abolitionists; National anti-slavery standard; Antislavery movements; History
Notes: Holograph, signed.

Mary Botham Howitt thanks Maria Weston Chapman for her kind letters. Mary B. Howitt refers to a "bitterly unkind" article in the National Anti-Slavery Standard. Howitt said: "That article brought with it sleepless nights & cost me tears." Although the article was written by Mr. Briggs, the author of Harry Franco, Mary B. Howitt imagines that "the animus of that article proceeds from this country---from the malicious, bad people in the People's Journal, who are doing all they can to ruin us entirely." [Charles Frederick Briggs was the author of The Adventures of Harry Franco, 1939.] Howitt especially mentions John Dix, known in America by the name of John Dix Ross, "an unfortunate drunkard & thief but who is allied with Mr. [John] Saunders against us & who has attempted to cast a stigma on my character respecting an article on Lowell which I sent to the People's Journal ...He it is, I suspect, who has been the prime mover in this." Mary B. Howitt is glad to receive the memoir from Abby Kelley Foster. The short account, which Mary B. Howitt was allowed to draw up from Henry C. Wright's memoir, is read here with pleasure. Mary B. Howitt reflects on the difference between the English and the better Americans, who are "incredibly attractive to me."

Includes an envelope with the delivery address: Maria Weston Chapman, Boston, United States. And a notation: "Paid. By Steamer Britannia."