Harriet Martineau

Harriet Martineau
Born	12 June 1802(1802-06-12) Norwich, England
Died	27 June 1876(1876-06-27) (aged 74) Ambleside, England
Notable work(s)	Deerbrook (1839) The Hour and the Man (1839)

Harriet Martineau (12 June 1802 – 27 June 1876) was an English social theorist and Whig writer, often cited as the first female sociologist.

Martineau wrote 35 books and a multitude of essays from a sociological, holistic, religious, domestic, and, perhaps most controversial, a feminine perspective; she also translated various works from Auguste Comte. She earned enough to be supported entirely by her writing, a challenging feat for a woman in the Victorian era. Martineau has said of her approach: "when one studies a society, one must focus on all its aspects, including key political, religious, and social institutions". She believed a thorough societal analysis was necessary to understand woman's status. Novelist Margaret Oliphant said "as a born lecturer and politician she(Martineau) was less distinctively affected by her sex than perhaps any other, male or female, of her generation." Martineau's writing introduced feminist sociological perspectives on otherwise overlooked issues such as marriage, children, domestic and religious life, and race relations.

Early life

The sixth of eight children, Harriet Martineau was born in Norwich, England, where her father worked as a manufacturer. Her mother was the daughter of a sugar refiner and a grocer. The family was of French Huguenot ancestry and professed Unitarian views. She was closest to her brother, James Martineau, who was a clergyman in the tradition of the English Dissenters. Her mother was a driving influence in her later writing as their relationship was strained and lacking affection. Martineau claimed her mother abandoned her to a wet nurse. Her ideals on domesticity and the "natural faculty for housewifery" as described in her piece, Household Education written in 1848, stemmed from her lack of nurture growing up. Martineau's mother was the antithesis to the warm and nurturing qualities Harriet believed to be necessary for girls at an early age. Martineau's mother urged all her children to be well-read but at the same time, opposed female pedantics "with a sharp eye for feminine propriety and good manners. Her daughters could never be seen in public with a pen in their hand." Her mother was a strict enforcer of proper feminine behavior, pushing her daughter to hold a sewing needle as well as the pen when each was considered appropriate.

Martineau began losing her sense of taste and smell, becoming increasingly deaf at a young age and having to use an ear trumpet. It was the start to a long road of heath problems she would encounter later in life. In 1821 she began to write anonymously for the Monthly Repository, a Unitarian periodical, and in 1823 she published Devotional Exercises and Addresses, Prayers and Hymns. Her father's business failed in 1829. At 27 years old, Martineau was able to step out of feminine propriety in order to earn a living for her family. Along with her needlework, she began selling her articles to the Monthly Repository. Her first commissioned volume, Illustrations of Political Economy, was published in February 1832 and quickly grew successful. Martineau agreed to compose monthly volumes for 24 months critiquing various political and economic affairs. A multi-volume work, it presented itself as a fictional tutorial on different political economists such as Malthus, Ricardo, and Bentham for the general public. It was her first piece to receive widespread acclaim. She continued in this way earning accolades for her writing, three essay prizes from the Unitarian Association. Her work with the Repository solidified her position as a successful writer.

London and the United States

Writing was considerably gendered in the Victorian era. Non-fiction and prose about social, economic and political writing was masculine, while lighter writing about romance and domesticity were considered to be for women authors. Despite these gendered expectations in the literary world, Martineau expressed her opinions on a variety of topics brazenly despite objections. In 1832 Martineau moved to London. Among her acquaintances were: Henry Hallam, Harriet Taylor, Alexander Maconochie, Henry Hart Milman, Thomas Malthus, Monckton Milnes, Sydney Smith, John Stuart Mill, George Eliot, Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Charles Lyell, as well as Thomas Carlyle. Florence Nightingale and Charlotte Brontë later on in her literary career.

Until 1834 she continued to be occupied with her political economy series and with a supplemental series of Illustrations of Taxation. Four stories supporting the Whig Poor Law reforms came out about the same time. These tales (direct, lucid, written without any appearance of effort, and yet practically effective) display the characteristics of their author's style. Tory paternalists reacted by calling her a Malthusian "who deprecates charity and provision for the poor", while Radicals opposed her to the same degree. Whig high society fêted her. In May 1834 Charles Darwin got a letter from his sisters telling him that Martineau was "now a great Lion in London, much patronized by Ld. Brougham who has set her to write stories on the poor Laws" and recommending Poor Laws and Paupers Illustrated in pamphlet-sized parts. They added that their brother Erasmus "knows her & is a very great admirer & every body reads her little books & if you have a dull hour you can, and then throw them overboard, that they may not take up your precious room".

Harriet Martineau

In 1834, after completing the series, Harriet Martineau paid a long visit to the United States. Her support of abolitionism, then unpopular, caused controversy. This was increased by the publication, soon after her return, of Society in America (1837) and How to Observe Morals and Manners (1838), two books that led to the founding of modern sociology. Society in America was Martineau's angered response to the state of women's education. She wrote, "The intellect of women is confined by an unjustifiable restriction of... education... As women have none of the objects in life for which an enlarged education is considered requisite, the education is not given... The choice is to either be 'ill-educated, passive, and subservient, or well-educated, vigorous, and free only upon sufferance." Her article in the Westminster Review, "The Martyr Age of the United States", introduced English readers to the struggles of the abolitionists in America.

Soon after the voyage of the Beagle, Charles Darwin went in October 1836 to stay with his brother Erasmus in London, and found him spending his days "driving out Miss Martineau". Charles wrote to his sister that "Our only protection from so admirable a sister-in-law is in her working him too hard." He commented that "She already takes him to task about his idleness— She is going some day to explain to him her notions about marriage— Perfect equality of rights is part of her doctrine. I much doubt whether it will be equality in practice." The Darwins shared her Unitarian background and Whig politics, but their father Robert was concerned that as a potential daughter-in-law, her politics were too extreme. He 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, and even now can hardly believe it is not hers." In early December 1836 Charles Darwin called on Martineau and may have discussed the social and natural worlds she was then writing about in her book Society in America, including the "grandeur and beauty" of the "process of world making" she had seen at Niagara Falls. He remarked that "She was very agreeable and managed to talk on a most wonderful number of subjects, considering the limited time. I was astonished to find how little ugly she is, but as it appears to me, she is overwhelmed with her own projects, her own thoughts and own abilities. Erasmus palliated all this, by maintaining one ought not to look at her as a woman." In April 1838 Charles told his older sister Susan that "Erasmus has been with her noon, morning, and night:—if her character was not as secure, as a mountain in the polar regions she certainly would loose it.— Lyell called there the other day & there was a beautiful rose on the table, & she coolly showed it to him & said 'Erasmus Darwin' gave me that.— How fortunate it is, she is so very plain; otherwise I should be frightened: She is a wonderful woman".

Deerbrook, Martineau's first three volume novel that followed her series of American books in 1838, described a failed love between a physician and his sister-in-law.

Newcastle and Tynemouth

In 1839, during a visit to Continental Europe, Martineau was diagnosed with a uterine tumor. She visited her brother-in-law, the celebrated Newcastle upon Tyne doctor Thomas Michael Greenhow, on several occasions to try to alleviate her symptoms; on the last occasion staying for six months in the family house at 28 Eldon Square. She was immobile and confined to a couch, cared for by her mother until finally purchasing a house and hiring a nurse to aid her. She moved down-river to Tynemouth, where she stayed at Mrs Halliday's boarding-house, 57 Front Street for nearly five years from 16 March 1840. "Being homebound is a major part of the process of becoming feminine. In this interior setting she(Martineau) is taught the home arts of working, serving, and cleaning, as well as the rehearsals for the role of mothering. She sees her mother... doing these things. They define femininity for her." Her sickness caused her to quite literally enact the constraints of her gender during the time.

Martineau authored a few books during her illness. Crofton Boys, the children's novel and Life in the Sickroom: Essays by an Invalid, and autobiographical reflection on invalidism, were written in 1844. In 1848 she wrote Household Education, the handbook on the 'proper' way to raise and educate children. She also composed The Hour and the Man, about the Haitian slave leader Toussaint L'Ouverture and began working on her Autobiography.

A plaque marks the house where she produced at least three books, including , and Life in the Sick-Room, describing her life in Tynemouth. She also devotes some hundred pages of her autobiography to this period. Notable visitors included Richard Cobden and Thomas Carlyle and his wife. Life in the Sickroom is considered to be one of Martineau's most underrated works. It upset evangelical readers as they "thought it dangerous in 'its supposition of self-reliance.' It is a series of essays embracing womanhood. Martineau dedicated it to Elizabeth Barrett as it was "an outpouring of feeling to an idealized female alter ego, both professional writer and professional invalid- and utterly unlike the women in her own family." It was written during a kind of public break from her mother. This book was a proclamation of her independence. Martineau turned the traditional patient/doctor relationship on it's head by asserting control over her space even in sickness. The sickroom was her space. Being a women in this power dynamic especially added to the negative reactions. Life in the Sickroom explained how to regain control even in illness and her work was undermined because of it. Critics undermined it choosing to believe if she was an invalid her mind as well must be sick and not taken seriously. British and Foreign Medical Review dismissed Martineau's piece for the same beliefs as the critics: an ill person cannot write a healthy work. For a woman to be in a position of control, especially in sickness was unheard of. The British and Foreign Medical Review pushed for treatments such as 'unconditional submission' where one follows blindly the advice of their doctor. They had a huge issue to Martineau holding any sort of 'authority to Britain's invalids.'

Expecting to remain an invalid for the rest of her life, she delighted in the freedom her telescope allowed. Across the Tyne was the sandy beach ″where there are frequent wrecks – too interesting to an invalid... and above the rocks, a spreading heath, where I watch troops of boys flying their kites; lovers and friends taking their breezy walks on Sundays..." She also gives a lyrical picture of Tynemouth:

"When I look forth in the morning, the whole land may be sheeted with glistening snow, while the myrtle-green sea tumbles... there is none of the deadness of winter in the landscape; no leafless trees, no locking up with ice; and the air comes in through my open upper sash, but sun-warmed. The robins twitter and hop in my flower-boxes... and at night, what a heaven! What an expanse of stars above, appearing more steadfast, the more the Northern Lights dart and quiver!"^{[citation needed]}

During her illness, she for a second time declined a pension on the civil list, fearing to compromise her political independence. Her letter on the subject was published, and some of her friends raised a small annuity for her soon after.

Ambleside & Mesmerism

In 1844 Martineau underwent a course of mesmerism, returning to health after a few months. There was national interest in mesmerism around the 1840s. Also known as 'animal magnetism', it can be defined as a "loosely grouped set of practices in which one person influenced another through a variety of personal actions, or through the direct influence of one mind on another mind. Mesmerism was designed to make invisible forces augment the mental powers of the mesmeric object." 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". In 1845 she left Tynemouth for Ambleside in the Lake District, where she built herself "The Knoll", the house in which she spent the greater part of her later life.

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 Harriet Martineau believed to be philosophic atheism, but this belief she did not expressly declare. Her book 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.

Martineau wrote Household Education in 1848 lamenting the state of women's education. She believed women had a natural inclination to motherhood and believed domestic work went hand in hand with academia for a proper, well-rounded education. She stated, "I go further than most persons... in desiring thorough practice in domestic occupations, from an early age, for young girls" It expounded 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 afterward extended, at their request, to their parents. 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 the publisher Charles Knight, in 1849 she wrote The History of the Thirty Years' Peace, 1816–1846 – an excellent popular history from the point of view of a "philosophical Radical". Incredibly productive, Martineau spanned a variety of subjects in her writing and did so with more assertiveness than was expected of women at the time. She has been described as having an 'essentially masculine nature'. It was common perception that a progressive woman, in order to be progressive, was emulating the qualities of a man.

Martineau in her later years.

Martineau edited a volume of Letters on the Laws of Man's Nature and Development, published in March 1851. Its epistolary form is of a correspondence between her and the self-styled scientist Henry G. Atkinson. It expounds the doctrine of philosophical atheism to which she 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 disapproval of the book, which outraged literary London with its mesmeric evolutionary atheism, causing a lasting division between Harriet Martineau and some of her friends.

She contributed regularly to the Daily News from 1852 to 1866, writing sometimes six leaders a week. 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 band of supporters whose assistance in 1854 prevented its end.

Martineau considered herself psychosomatic which was the medical belief of the times relating the uterus with emotions and hysteria. She had symptoms of hysteria: loss of taste, smell. partial deafness throughout life may have contributed. She had mesmerism performed on her by various people, the maid, her brother, Spencer T. Hall (famous mesmerist of the time.) However, some attribute the true reason to her recovery to a shift in the positioning of her tumor no longer obstructing her organs. But these physical improvements were the first signs of healing she had experienced in five years and happened at the same time of her first mesmeric treatment, so she confidentially attributed her cure to mesmerism.

In the early part of 1855, Martineau was suffering from heart disease. She began to write her autobiography expecting her life to be cut short due to illness. However, her health lasted her another two decades and her two-volume autobiography was published posthumously in 1877. It was rare for a woman to publish an autobiography let alone one secular in nature. It was regarded as dispassionate, 'philosophic to the core' in its perceived masculinity, and a work of necessitarianism. It went in depth into her childhood experiences and memories where she expressed feelings of deprived affection from her mother and devotion to her brother, James.

When Darwin's book The Origin of Species was published in 1859, his brother Erasmus sent a copy to his old flame Harriet Martineau. At age 58, she 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 portentous knowledge. I should much like to know how large a proportion of our scientific men believe he has found a sound road."

Martineau supported Darwin's theory because it was not based in theology. Martineau strove for secularism stating, "In the present state of the religious world, Secularism ought to flourish. What an amount of sin and woe might and would then be extinguished." 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 "The Creator" 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."

Economics and social sciences

As early as 1831, Martineau wrote on the subject "Political Economy" (as the field of economics was then known). Her goal was to popularise and illustrate the principles of laissez faire capitalism, though she made no claim to original theorising.

Martineau's reflections on Society in America, published in 1837, are prime examples of her approach to the area later known as sociological methods. Her ideas in this field were set out in her 1838 book How to Observe Morals and Manners. She believed that some very general social laws influence the life of any society, including the principle of progress, the emergence of science as the most advanced product of human intellectual endeavour, and the significance of population dynamics and the natural physical environment.

Auguste Comte coined the name sociology and published a rambling exposition under the title of Cours de Philosophie Positive in 1839. 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 achievement, but a successful one. Comte recommended her volumes to his students instead of his own. Some writers regard Martineau as "the first woman sociologist". Her introduction of Comte to the English-speaking world and the elements of sociological perspective in her original writings support her credit as a sociologist.^{[citation needed]}

Death

Harriet Martineau died at "The Knoll" on 27 June 1876. She left an autobiographical sketch to be published by the Daily News, in which she wrote:^{[citation needed]}

"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 clear expression to what she had to say. In short, she could popularize while she could neither discover nor invent."

See also

• History of feminism
• List of suffragists and suffragettes
• List of sociologists

Bibliography

• A large number of letters of Harriet Martineau are held in the University of Birmingham's Special Collections.

Books by Harriet Martineau

• Illustrations of taxation; 5 volumes; Charles Fox, 1834
• Illustrations of Political Economy; 9 volumes; Charles Fox, 1834
• Miscellanies; 2 volumes; Hilliard, Gray and Co., 1836
• Society in America; 3 volumes; Saunders and Otley, 1837; (reissued by Cambridge University Press, 2009; ISBN 9781108003735); Google Books
• Retrospect of Western Travel; Saunders and Otley, 1838
• How to Observe Morals and Manners; Charles Knight and Co, 1838; Google Books
• Deerbrook; London, 1839; Project Gutenberg
• The Crofton Boys. A Tale; Charles Knight, 1841; Project Gutenberg
• Eastern Life. Present and Past; 3 volumes; Edward Moxon, 1848
• Feats on the Fiord. A Tale of Norway; Routledge, Warne, & Routledge, 1865
• Harriet Martineau's Autobiography. With Memorials by Maria Weston Chapman; 2 volumes; Smith, Elder & Co, 1877; Liberty Fund.

• Atkinson, H.G. & Martineau, H.; Letters on the Laws of Man's Nature and Development; Chapman, 1851 (reissued by Cambridge University Press, 2009; ISBN 9781108004152)
• Comte, A; Martineatu, H. (tr.); The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte; 2 volumes; Chapman, 1853 (reissued by Cambridge University Press, 2009; ISBN 9781108001182)

Books about Harriet Martineau

• Maria Weston Chapman, Autobiography, with Memorials (1877). Virago, London 1983
• Logan, Deborah Anna (2002). The Hour and the Woman: Harriet Martineau's "Somewhat Remarkable" Life. Northern Illinois University Press. ISBN 0875802974. 
• David, Deeirdre (1989). Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy: Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot. Cornell Univ Pr. ISBN 0801494141. 
• Rees, Joan. Women on the Nile: Writings of Harriet Martineau, Florence Nightingale, and Amelia Edwards. Rubicon Press: 1995, 2008.
• Sanders, Valerie (1986). Reason Over Passion: Harriet Martineau and the Victorian Novel. New York: St. Martin's Pr. ISBN 0710810180. 

References

•  Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Martineau, Harriet". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 
• Miller, Fenwick. Harriet Martineau (1884, "Eminent Women Series").
• Riedesel, Paul L. "Who Was Harriet Martineau?", Journal of the History of Sociology, vol. 3, 1981. pp. 63–80.
• Webb RK. Harriet Martineau, a radical Victorian, Heinemann, London 1960
• Weiner, Gaby. "Harriet Martineau: A reassessment (1802–1876)", in Spender, Dale (ed.) Feminist theorists: Three centuries of key women thinkers, Pantheon 1983, pp. 60–74 ISBN 0-394-53438-7

Further reading

• Ella Dzelzainis and Cora Kaplan, eds. Harriet Martineau: Authorship, Society, and Empire (Manchester University Press, 2011); 263 pages; essays on her views of race, empire, and history, including the 1857 Indian Mutiny and the Atlantic slave trade.

Primary sources

• Logan (Ed.), D. A. (2007). The Collected Letters Of Harriet Martineau. London: Pickering and Chatto. ISBN 9781 85196 804 6. 

External links

• Works by Harriet Martineau at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Harriet Martineau at Internet Archive (scanned books original editions color illustrated)
• Martineau Society (.co.uk)
• Essays by Harriet Martineau at Quotidiana.org
• The positive philosophy of Auguste Comte / freely translated and condensed by Harriet Martineau Cornell University Library Historical Monographs Collection.
• Archival material relating to Harriet Martineau listed at the UK National Register of Archives
• Guide to the Harriet Martineau Papers at The Bancroft Library
• Papers of Harriet Martineau are held at The Women's Library at London Metropolitan University, ref 7HRM
• Retrospect of Western Travel by Harriet Martineau, 1838
• Harriet Martineau (at spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk)
•  "Martineau, Harriet". Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography. 1900.