[2] Their work was generally well regarded: in 1839 Queen Victoria gave George Byng a copy of Mary's Hymns and Fireside Verses.

[2] While William was in Australia, Mary was responsible for getting his collection Stories from English and Foreign Life, a translation Ennemoser's History of Magic, and the Australian Boy's Book, through the press.

[4] In 1853 they moved to West Hill in Highgate[5] close to Hillside, the home of their friends, the physician and sanitary reformer Thomas Southwood Smith and his partner, the artist Margaret and her sister Mary Gillies.

Mary Howitt had some years earlier arranged that the children's writer Hans Christian Andersen would visit Hillside to see the haymaking during his trip to England in 1847.

[6] After 1856 Mary, besides anonymous contributions to periodical literature of the day, edited with the assistance of her daughter A Treasuryof Stories for the Young, in three volumes.

[7] In the early 1840s Mary Howitt was residing in Heidelberg, where her literary friends included Shelley's biographer Thomas Medwin and the poet Caroline de Crespigny, and her attention was drawn to Scandinavian literature.

She edited for three years the Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap Book, writing, among other articles, "Biographical Sketches of the Queens of England".

She edited the Pictorial Calendar of the Seasons, added an original appendix to her husband's translation of Joseph Ennemoser's History of Magic, and took the chief share in The Literature and Romance of Northern Europe (1852).

In her declining years she joined the Roman Catholic Church, and was one of an English deputation received by Pope Leo XIII on 10 January 1888.

Nothing that either of them wrote will live, but they were so industrious, so disinterested, so amiable, so devoted to the work of spreading good and innocent literature, that their names ought not to disappear unmourned.Mary Howitt was away from her residence in Meran in Tirol, spending the winter in Rome, when she died of bronchitis on 30 January 1888.