Harriet Martineau
Harriet Martineau, (June 12, 1802 - June 27, 1876) was an esteemed writer, publisher and traveled philosopher. A woman of progressive education, Martineau is often remembered for her early contributions to the present state of sociological study.
Early Life
Martineau was born in Norwich, England to a family of Huguenot extraction that professed Unitarian views. The atmosphere of her home was industrious, intellectual and austere. Martineau herself was very clever, but battled a lifetime of physical ailments leaving her without a sense of taste or smell. In her youth Martineau would also grow deaf, having to rely on an ear trumpet. At the age of fifteen, Harriett’s declining health led to a prolonged visit with her father's sister who kept a school at Bristol. Here, in the companionship of amiable and talented people, Martineau’s life would become much happier, falling under the influence of the Unitarian minister, Doctor Lant Carpenter, from whose instructions she claimed to derive "an abominable spiritual rigidity and a truly respectable force of conscience strangely mingled together." Martineau would return to Norwich between 1819 and 1830, her deafness finally confirmed by age twenty. In 1821, Harriett began to write anonymously for the Monthly Repository, a Unitarian periodical, and in 1823 would publish her first work entitled Devotional Exercises and Addresses, Prayers and Hymns.
In 1826, Martineau’s father would die, his death preceded by that of his eldest son and soon followed by the death of a man to whom Harriet was engaged. The situation left a bare maintenance to Harriett’s mother and sisters, and the family would soon after lose all their financial means. Harriet, precluded by deafness from teaching, began reviewing articles for the Monthly Repository while contributing short stories to the establishment. In 1830 she would gain three essay prizes from the Unitarian Association, and supplement her growing income by needlework. In 1831, Martineau sought a publisher for a collection of economic works entitled Illustrations of Political Economy, finally selecting Charles Fox. The sale of the first of Martineau’s series was immediate and enormous. Demand would increase with each publication to follow, securing Martineau’s literary success from that point forward.
London and the United States
In 1832, Martineau moved to London where she numbered among her acquaintances; Henry Hallam, Henry Hart Milman, Thomas Malthus, Monckton Milnes, Sydney Smith, Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, and later Thomas Carlyle. There Martineau continued with her series on political economy and began a supplemental collection entitled ‘’’Illustrations of Taxation’’’, a series supporting the British Whig Party’s Poor Law reforms. This collection, direct, lucid, written without any appearance of effort, and yet practically effective, displayed the characteristics of Martineau’s controversial style. Tory paternalists reacted by calling her a Malthusian "who deprecates charity and provision for the poor", while Radicals were equally opposed. In 1834 Charles Darwin received a letter from his sisters likening Martineau to "a great Lion in London" and recommending that Poor Laws and Paupers Illustrated be published in pamphlet sized parts.
In 1834, with the series complete, Martineau traveled to the United States. There her open adhesion to the Abolitionist party, then small and very unpopular, gave great offence, which was later deepened by the 1837 publication of Theory and Practice of Society in America and the 1838 Retrospect of Western Travel. Her later article, "The Martyr Age of the United States," published in the Westminster Review, introduced English readers to the struggles of the Abolitionists.
In October of 1836, Charles Darwin visited with his brother Erasmus Alvey Darwin, and found Eras spending his days with the eloquent Martineau. The Darwins shared her Unitarian background and Whig politics, though their father Robert remained concerned that as a potential daughter-in-law, Martineau’s politics were too extreme. Robert was upset by a piece he read in the Westminster Review calling for the radicals to break with the Whigs and give working men the vote "before he knew it was not hers, and wasted a good deal of indignation."
Charles would later call on Martineau, remarking that "She was very agreeable, and managed to talk on a most wonderful number of subjects". In his private papers, Darwin also commented; "I was astonished to find how ugly she is" and added how "she is overwhelmed with her own projects, her own thoughts and abilities", though brother "Erasmus palliated all this, by maintaining one ought not to look at her as a woman." For her part, Martineau described Charles as "simple, childlike, painstaking, effective". After a later meeting during which Darwin began to struggle with his own writing, he expressed sincere astonishment at the ease with which Martineau wrote such fluent prose, and remarked that he "never has occasion to correct a single word she writes", though she was "not a complete Amazonian, & knows the feeling of exhaustion from thinking too much."
In 1839 Martineau published a three volume novel entitled Deerbrook, a story of middle class country life with a surgeon hero. To the same period belong a number of handbooks, forming Martineau’s Guide to Service. The veracity of her later Maid of All Work led to a widespread belief, which she regarded with some complacency, that she had once been a maid of all work herself.
In 1839, during a visit to Continental Europe, Martineau's health would break down. Fearing the worst, she retired to solitary lodgings in Tynemouth near her sister and brother-in-law, a celebrated Newcastle surgeon Thomas Michael Greenhow. Publishing the novels The Hour and the Man (1840), Life in the Sickroom (1844), and the Playfellow (1841), Martineau also embarked on a series of tales for children including Settlers at Home, The Peasant and the Prince, and Feats on the Fiord. During this illness Martineau for a second time declined a pension on the civil list, fearing it would compromise her political independence.
Ambleside
In 1844 Miss Martineau underwent a course of mesmerism, and in a few months was restored to health. She eventually published an account of her case, which had caused much discussion, in sixteen Letters on Mesmerism. This led to friction with 'the natural prejudices of a surgeon and a surgeon's wife' and in 1845 she left Tynemouth for Ambleside in the Lake District, where she built herself "The Knoll", the house in which the greater part of her later life was spent.
In 1845 she published three volumes of Forest and Game Law Tales. In 1846 she made a tour with some friends in Egypt, Palestine and Syria, and on her return published Eastern Life, Present and Past (1848). This travelogue showed that as humanity passed through one after another of the world's historic religions, the conception of the Deity and of Divine government became at each step more and more abstract and indefinite. The ultimate goal Miss Martineau believed to be philosophic atheism, but this belief she did not expressly declare. It described ancient tombs, "the black pall of oblivion" set against the paschal "puppet show" in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, with the message that Christian beliefs in reward and punishment were based on heathen superstitions. Describing an ancient Egyptian tomb, she wrote "How like ours were his life and death!.. Compare him with a retired naval officer made country gentleman in our day, and in how much less do they differ than agree!" The book's "infidel tendency" was too much for the publisher John Murray, who rejected it.
She published at about this time Household Education, expounding the theory that freedom and rationality, rather than command and obedience, are the most effectual instruments of education. Her interest in schemes of instruction led her to start a series of lectures, addressed at first to the school children of Ambleside, but afterwards extended, at their own desire, to their elders. The subjects were sanitary principles and practice, the histories of England and North America, and the scenes of her Eastern travels. At the request of Charles Knight she wrote, in 1849, The History of the Thirty Years' Peace, 1816–1846 – an excellent popular history written from the point of view of a "philosophical Radical," completed in twelve months.
Mesmerism
Miss Martineau edited a volume of Letters on the Laws of Man's Nature and Development, published in March 1851. Its form is that of a correspondence between herself and the garrulous self-styled scientist Henry G. Atkinson, and it expounds that doctrine of philosophical atheism to which Miss Martineau in Eastern Life had depicted the course of human belief as tending. The existence of a first cause is not denied, but is declared unknowable, and the authors, while regarded by others as denying it, certainly considered themselves to be affirming the doctrine of man's moral obligation. Atkinson was a zealous exponent of mesmerism. The prominence given to the topics of mesmerism and clairvoyance heightened the general disapprobation of the book, which outraged literary London with its mesmeric evolutionary atheism, causing a lasting division between Miss Martineau and some of her friends.
She published a condensed English language version of the Philosophie Positive (1853). To the Daily News she contributed regularly from 1852 to 1866. Her Letters from Ireland, written during a visit to that country in the summer of 1852, appeared in that paper. She was for many years a contributor to the Westminster Review, and was one of the little band of supporters whose pecuniary assistance in 1854 prevented its extinction or forced sale. In the early part of 1855 Miss Martineau found herself suffering from heart disease. She now began to write her autobiography, but her life, which she supposed to be so near its close, was prolonged for twenty years.
She cultivated a tiny farm at Ambleside with success, and her poorer neighbours owed much to her. Her busy life bore the consistent impress of two leading characteristics – industry and sincerity.
When Charles Darwin's book The Origin of Species was published in 1859 Erasmus Darwin sent a copy to his old flame Miss Martineau who at 58 was still reviewing from her home in the Lake District. From her "snow landscape" Martineau sent her thanks, adding that she had previously praised "the quality & conduct of your brother's mind, but it is an unspeakable satisfaction to see here the full manifestation of its earnestness & simplicity, its sagacity, its industry, & the patient power by which it has collected such a mass of facts, to transmute them by such sagacious treatment into such portentious knowledge. I should much like to know how large a proportion of our scientific men believe he has found a sound road." She wrote to her fellow Malthusian (and atheist) George Holyoake enthusing "What a book it is! – overthrowing (if true) revealed Religion on the one hand, & Natural (as far as Final Causes & Design are concerned) on the other. The range & mass of knowledge take away one's breath." To Fanny Wedgwood she wrote "I rather regret that C.D. went out of his way two or three times to speak of "TheCreator" in the popular sense of the First Cause.... His subject is the "Origin of Species" & not the origin of Organisation; & it seems a needless mischief to have opened the latter speculation at all – There now! I have delivered my mind."
Auguste Comte and Sociology
The French philosopher Auguste Comte had laid the foundations for what became the field of sociology with his rambling six volume Cours de Philosophie Positive. Martineau undertook a translation that was published in two volumes in 1853 as "The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte (freely translated and condensed by Harriet Martineau)." It was a remarkable and difficult achievement, but a successful one. Comte himself recommended these volumes to his students instead of his own. Some writers regard Martineau herself as "the first woman sociologist." Her introduction of Comte to the English-speaking world and the elements of sociological perspective that may be found in her original writings argue for her recognition as a kindred spirit if not a significant contributor.
The End
She died at "The Knoll" on 27 June 1876. The verdict which she recorded on herself in the autobiographical sketch left to be published by the Daily News has been endorsed by posterity. She wrote "Her original power was nothing more than was due to earnestness and intellectual clearness within a certain range. With small imaginative and suggestive powers, and therefore nothing approaching to genius, she could see clearly what she did see, and give a dear expression to what she had to say. In short, she could popularize while the could neither discover nor invent."
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
- This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
- Maria Weston Chapman, Autobiography, with Memorials (1877)
- Mrs. Fenwick Miller, Harriet Martineau (1884, "Eminent Women Series").
- Paul L. Riedesel, "Who Was Harriet Martineau?". Journal of the History of Sociology, vol. 3, 1981. Pp.63-80.
Papers relating to Harriet Martineau are held in the University of Birmingham's Special Collections.
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