His calico printing and warehousing partnership with a certain William Gregory Langdon in London, Cheapside, is known to have ended in February 1848.
[4] He was involved in litigation with the Western Bank of Scotland over the insolvent firm of John Monteith and Co., in which he claimed to have retired as a partner in 1855, having "moved to the country" in 1852.
[3] In a Who's Who entry in 1907, Mrs Needle stated she was "a student and writer up to the period of marriage; during a long married life of engrossing claims my literary production was suspended, to be resumed in 1881," i. e. after her husband's death.
They include Catherine Irving (anonymously, 1855), Stephen Ellicott's Daughter (c. 1880), Julian Karslake's Secret* (1881),[6] Lucia, Hugh, and Another* (1884), also published in the United States and telling of "an 'ideal marriage' which becomes a painful trap".
[7] The Story of Philip Methuen (1886), said to be her most popular work,[1] was followed by Noel Chetwynd's Fall (1888) and then Unequally Yoked (1891), about the marriage of a parson to a woman "beneath him" – called "a very inferior and somewhat unpleasing tale" by The Athenaeum,[1] but noted in recent times as featuring "a slum girl who grows in stature to match [her husband's] spirit.