Dinah Maria Craik, born Mulock, was a novelist who occasionally expressed herself in verse. Somewhat lacking in imaginative perception of experience and overburdened with presumed loftiness of sentiment, her poetry is mainly distinguished by careful and coherent structure.

One of three children, Craik was born on 20 April 1826 at Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire. Her father, Thomas Mulock, was a clergyman and a man of some learning with a strong taste for literature. Her mother, Dinah Mulock, kept a small school. From her earliest days Craik was exposed to a great respect for literature and religion. Not surprisingly, she grew up to be a literary personality as well as an earnest churchwoman with a warm admiration for the Baptist way of life as one that embodied a simple and ideal Christianity.

Craik was not only a precocious poet (she wrote her first poem, "The Party of Cats," when she was ten...