Dinah Maria Craik (born Dinah Maria Mulock, often credited as Miss Mulock or Mrs. Craik; 20 April 1826 – 12 October 1887) was an English novelist and poet. She wrote the novel, John Halifax, Gentleman, which presents the mid-Victorian ideals of English middle-class life.
Life
Mulock was born on 20 April 1826, at Stoke-upon-Trent to Dinah and Thomas Mulock and raised in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire, where her father was minister of a small independent nonconformist congregation. Her childhood and early youth were affected by her father's mental health and his unsettled fortunes, but she gained a good education from various quarters and felt called to be a writer. In 1839 she was in London assisting her mother and studying design and languages. Her mother died in 1845 and her father lost interest in his children.
She was still in London in 1846, at the same time as two friends, Alexander Macmillan and Charles Edward Mudie. Introduced by Camilla Toulmin to Westland Marston, she rapidly made friends in London and found great encouragement for her stories for the young. In 1849 her emotional first novel, The Ogilvies, was published.
In 1865, she married George Lillie Craik, who soon became a partner with Alexander Macmillan in the publishers Macmillan & Company, and nephew of George Lillie Craik. They adopted a local foundling baby girl, Dorothy, in 1869.
At Shortlands, near Bromley, Kent, while preparing for Dorothy's wedding, Craik died of heart failure on 12 October 1887, aged 61. Her last words were said to have been: "Oh, if I could live four weeks longer! but no matter, no matter!" Her final book, An Unknown Country, appeared with Macmillan in 1887, the year of her death. Dorothy married Alexander Pilkington in 1887, but they divorced in 1911 and she later married Captain Richards of Macmine Castle. She and Alexander had a son, John Mulock Pilkington. He married Freda Roskelly and had a son and daughter with her.
