Julia Goddard

She was born in Birmingham on 11 July 1825, the eldest daughter in a family of at least eight children of Samuel Aspinwall Goddard (1796–1886) and his wife, Jemima Goddard, née Bachope (1800–1875).[1] Samuel Aspinwall Goddard came from Brookline, Massachusetts (a town near Boston), in the United States, but moved to Birmingham, where he was a gun manufacturer and iron merchant, and wrote pamphlets on free trade and currency reform.[1][2] He was the United States' consul in Birmingham, and later became a naturalized British subject.[1][2]

In 1863 Goddard published her first children's book, Karl and the Six Little Dwarfs, and at least a further twenty-five were published over the rest of her career.[1]

Many of her books concentrated on animal welfare, itself mirroring her long-term commitment to helping animals receive more humane treatment, more "moderate humanitarianism", than the "more radical elements in the animal rights' movements or anti-vivisection".[1] According to a contemporary account in the Animals' Friend, Goddard was "one of the hardest and yet most unpretentious workers the movement has yet possessed".[1]

She never married.[1]

Goddard suffered from extremely poor health from 1894 onwards after a severe case of influenza, and together with her failing eyesight, she had to stop writing.[1]

She was unmarried and lived with her sister, Fanny Goddard, in a cottage in Little Aston, near Sutton Coldfield, Warwickshire.[1] She died at her cottage as a result of a cerebral haemorrhage on 30 September 1896.[1]

• Karl and the Six Little Dwarfs (1863)
• More Stories (1863)
• The Boy and the Constellations (1866)
• Wonderful Stories from Northern Lands (1871)
• The Golden Journey and Other Verses (1875)
• The Four Cats of the Tippertons and Other Stories About Animals (1881)