Abstract
There is a sentence in Harriet Martineau’s autobiography which furnishes us with a key to her life: ‘So to work I went, with needle and pen.’1 She is referring to the period after her father died, when the family business failed and she and her sisters were faced with making their own way. Few opportunities were open to women in the England of the 1820s and even fewer to one handicapped by severe deafness. But Harriet did possess pen, needle and an abundant share of the resolute work ethic inherited from her Huguenot ancestors. Throughout her seventy-four years (1802–76) these three resources were constants in the life of this intelligent and strong-willed woman as she made her mark on the society of her time.
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Notes
Martineau, Deerbrook (London: Smith, Elder, 1858);
R. K. Webb in Harriet Martineau, A Radical Victorian (London: William Heinemann, 1960) pp. 80–90, gives a lucid explanation of her necessarianism. He does not think Martineau was a true Benthamite. While the Benthamites were legal and administrative reformers, she was ‘doctrinaire, utopian, and woolly’. To me, ‘doctrinaire’ and ‘woolly’ seem contradictory. Despite her beginning with doctrinaire principles, she grew to be fairly flexible in practice, but not, I think, because she was ‘woolly’.
Theodora Bosanquet, Harriet Martineau, An Essay in Comprehension (London: Frederick Etchells & Hugh Macdonald, 1927) p. 133. The Carlyles were good friends of Harriet’s none the less, and, in a letter to Emerson, Carlyle described her as ‘a genuine little poetess, buck-rimmed, swathed like a mummy into Socinian and Political Economy formulas; and yet verily alive in spite of that’ (ibid., p. 1).
John Cranston Nevill, Harriet Martineau (London: Frederick Muller, 1943) p. 121.
Vera Wheatley, The Life and Works of Harriet Martineau (Fairtown, NJ: Essential Books, 1957) p. 337. The Martineau — Dickens relationship was at first amiable and Martineau supplied Dickens with material for Household Words She praised many of his works and loved Pickwick, especially, as an unsurpassably humorous character. But later she criticized his characters and situations as exaggerated and unrealistically sentimental. In 1873 she wrote to Maria Weston Chapman that ‘At all times, in all his writings, Dickens opposed and criticized all existing legal plans for the relief of the poor’ (Memorials, p. 521). While he was in the United States, Dickens praised Martineau’s travel book as the best that had been written on America, but, when Anne Weston expressed her gratitude for Martineau’s writing on slavery, Dickens ‘assented… with something of a stare’ (Anne W. Weston to Deborah Weston, 4 Feb 1842, Weston Papers, BPL).
Martineau, ‘Demerara’, Illustrations of Political Economy, vol. ii (London: C. Fox, 1834).
Martineau, ‘Briery Creek’, no. xxii in Illustrations of Political Economy, (London: C. Fox, 1833) p. 155.
Richard Hofstadter, in Social Darwinism in American Thought, rev. edn (Boston, Mass.: Beacon, 1955) p. 52, says that William Graham Sumner learned the wage-fund doctrine by reading Martineau. Hofstadter points out Martineau’s objections to government charity but leaves a distorted impression of her as a hard-hearted Social Darwinist by failing to explain her position fully: that, if government allowed more representation, tax reform and free trade, such charity would be unnecessary.
Martineau, ‘A Tale of the Tyne’, no. xxi in Illustrations of Political Economy (London: C. Fox, 1833) p. 61.
Yet in a later work Martineau defended the segregation of workhouse children as necessary to their moral safety and re-education. See Martineau, A History of the Thirty Years’ Peace, 4 vols (London: George Bell, 1877) vol. u, p. 504.
In addition to the Hofstadter citation above (n. 13), see Max E. Fletcher, ‘Harriet Martineau and Ayn Rand: Economics in the Guise of Fiction’, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, vol. 33, no. 4 (Oct 1974) pp. 367–79.
Percy Colson, who in a most unsympathetic study calls her ‘joke-proof’, must have read only her pedantic tales, but neither her travel accounts nor her letters — Victorian Portraits (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries, 1932). My reading of Martineau is that she had a lively and active sense of humour. How could anyone who lacked one have remained a friend of Sydney Smith? More recently, Jonathan A. Glickstein has written of her, ‘One would be hard pressed to find among leading American abolitionists a real equivalent to the antislavery Englishwoman Harriet Martineau, with her use of vulgarized laissez faire tenets to defend the interests of manufacturing proprietors and deny the right of laboring men to compulsory relief.’ Then he goes on to contrast ‘The ethic of Christian love and responsibility for the poor and downtrodden that animated American abolitionists…. ’
(Glickstein, ‘“Poverty Is Not Slavery”; American Abolitionists and the Competitive Labor Market’, in Antislavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Abolitionists, ed. Lewis Perry and Michael Fellman (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1979) p. 217). A major exception to the above stereotyping is R. K. Webb’s biography.
J. Bartlett Brebner in ‘Laissez Faire and State Intervention in Nineteenth Century Britain’, Journal of Economic History, Supplement VIII (1948) pp. 59–73, argues that in practice the laissez-faire of nineteenth-century Britain was as much a ‘Hands-on’ as a ‘Hands-off’ policy. He points out that, when it dawned on Bentham that all governments were out to get the ’greatest happiness’ for those by whom, rather than for whom, governments were run, he immediately set about to get ’the greatest number’ into the government.
Martineau, ‘Cousin Marshall’, no. viii, in Illustrations of Political Economy (London: C. Fox, 1832) pp. 49–52, 130–1. The same themes can be followed in ‘The Land’s End’, ‘The Parish’, ‘The Hamlets’ and ‘The Town’. See also Thirty Years’ Peace, vol. II, pp. 487–8, 507.
Martineau, ‘A Manchester Strike’, Illustrations of Political Economy, vol. iii (London: C. Fox, 1834) and ‘Thirty Years’ Peace’, vol. iii, p. 94; Wheatley, Martineau, pp. 103–5.
Martineau, Society in America, 3 vols (London: Saunders & Otley, 1837) vol. ii, pp. 247–8.
Martineau: ‘A Tale of the Tyne,’ no. xxi in Illustrations of Political Economy (1833) pp. 42, 45–6, 106; and Thirty Years’ Peace, vol. ii, p. 313 and following.
Chester Kirby, ‘The English Game Law System’, American Historical Review, vol. xxxviii (Jan 1933) pp. 240–62, and ‘The Attack on the English Game Laws in the Forties’, Journal of Modern History, vol. iv (Mar 1932) pp. 18–37; Martineau, Thirty Years’ Peace, vol. iv, pp. 303–7.
Martineau, Thirty Years’ Peace, vol. iv, p. 216; Betty Fladeland, Men and Brothers: Anglo-American Antislavery Co-operation (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1972) p. 305.
A. R. Schoyen, The Chartist Challenge: A Portrait of George Julian Harney (London: William Heinemann, 1958) p. 163; Wheatley, Martineau, p. 276; Bosanquet, Martineau, pp. 111–12, 208.
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© 1984 Betty Fladeland
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Fladeland, B. (1984). Harriet Martineau. In: Abolitionists and Working-Class Problems in the Age of Industrialization. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06997-2_4
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