Not identified. The contributor is a well-educated woman; various literary and classical allusions appear in her two H.W. stories, and also a quotation in Latin and one in Greek. Payment for each of the contributions made by cheque.

Dickens wrote Miss King two letters (February 9, February 24 1855) concerning her "Mother and Step-Mother". He found "very great merit" in the story—"good touches of character, passion, and natural emotion", but stated that it was too long for H.W. and needed great compression if he were to accept it. He pointed out also the expository, rather than dramatic, treatment of the material, and objected to some of the dialogue. The talk of one of the boys was "a little too 'slangy'''; the conversation of the Italian maid with her mistress was unnatural. As the story appeared in H.W., it had evidently been revised in accordance with Dickens's criticism.

At the close of his first letter to Miss King, Dickens wrote concerning the story: "I repeat ... that I am much impressed by its merits, and that if I had read it as the production of an entire stranger, I think it would have made exactly this effect upon me". The comment may imply that Dickens was acquainted with Miss King, or it may refer merely to the fact that she had already appeared in H.W. In a letter to Wills, September 4 1855 (MS Huntington Library), Dickens stated that he found a later contribution by Miss King unsuited to H.W.

Harper's reprinted the first of Miss King's contributions without acknowledgment to H.W.

Author: Anne Lohrli; © University of Toronto Press, 1971.