Harriet Martineau

English writer and social commentator

• Born: June 12, 1802
• Birthplace: Norwich, Norfolk, England
• Died: June 27, 1876
• Place of death: Ambleside, Westmorland, England

Sometimes called the first woman sociologist, Martineau wrote numerous books, pamphlets, and articles on social and economic issues that helped shape political life in both England and North America. Her writings on slavery, laissez-faire economics, and women’s education were particularly influential.

Early Life

Harriet Martineau (mahr-tih-noh) was the sixth of eight children of Thomas Martineau, an English cloth manufacturer whose family was of French Huguenot descent. The family’s active involvement in the freethinking Norwich Unitarian community helped form attitudes of skepticism, rationalism, and reliance on systematic inquiry. Harriet owed a better education to Unitarianism than was standard among middle-class English girls of her day. She first attended a boys’ day-school that admitted a few girls and later went to a boarding school run by an aunt in Bristol. At the latter, she studied with the Reverend Lant Carpenter, a distinguished scholar. Harriet was sickly as a child, and when she was around the age of twelve was increasingly plagued by deafness. That disability helped steer her to focus her attention on writing by preventing her from becoming a governess or teacher.

In later life Harriet remembered her mother as having been harsh and distant—a woman who belittled her appearance, reinforcing intellectual pursuits at the expense of feminine social development. Harriet’s impression of a nonnurturing mother is corroborated by her younger brother, James, to whom she was particularly close. He later became a Unitarian minister, scholar, and church administrator of some distinction. When he entered the university in 1822, he encouraged Harriet to begin writing as a way of correcting the disparity in opportunities available to men and women.

Harriet began her writing career by publishing two articles in the Monthly Repository, a Unitarian journal. She continued to live at home, contributing occasional anonymous articles to the periodical press and augmenting the household economy with fancy needlework. In 1826, she became engaged to Hugh Worthington, a friend of James, but he died before a marriage could take place.

Meanwhile, the Martineau family manufacturing business, which had been declining for some time, failed in 1829. Faced with the necessity of supporting herself, Harriet attempted, unsuccessfully, to set up a correspondence school, and approached William Fox, the editor of the Monthly Repository, about payment for her contributions. He offered her fifteen pounds per year. From 1829 through 1832, Harriet was the journal’s chief and only paid contributor. She also accepted other writing assignments, and by 1832 was beginning to establish a reputation as a perceptive social commentator.

Life’s Work

In her autobiography, Martineau expressed gratitude for the financial difficulties that forced her to become a full-time writer. “I had henceforth liberty to do my own work in my own way,” she wrote, “for we had lost our gentility.” Following a suggestion of James, she planned a series of stories that would illustrate social and economic themes and persuaded Charles Fox, William Fox’s brother, to underwrite the series. The resulting Illustrations of Political Economy , which appeared in twenty-five monthly installments during 1832-1834, was a solid success. The principles that Martineau illustrated covered much of the same territory as John Stuart Mill’s later Principles of Political Economy (1848) and reached a much wider readership. Each of Harriet Martineau’s stories contained an appendix explaining its important points. Martineau continued the series with Illustrations of Taxation (1834), decrying, among other things, the national debt, and Poor Laws and Paupers (1834), which was instrumental in passage of Great Britain’s 1834 Poor Law Act.

In September of 1834 Martineau embarked on a journey to the United States, intending to write a book on American society and to test her methods of sociological observation. She spent nearly two years in this arduous venture, the most notable episode of which was a meeting of the Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society on Boston in August, 1835. Convinced of the evil of slavery on philosophical and economic grounds, and now having witnessed the ugly practice at firsthand in the United States, she publicly announced her support for abolition at the Boston meeting.

Upon Martineau’s return to England in 1836, she produced three books: Society in America (1837), which is among the most thorough sociological studies of a society in the nineteenth century, Retrospect of Western Travel (1838), an engaging picture of America, and How to Observe Morals and Manners (1838), a handbook for sociological investigation. Society in America decries slavery and also dwells on how the subordinate position of women was incompatible with the democratic ideals of the nation. During this period of her life, Martineau also wrote Deerbrook (1843), her only full-length novel, which is noteworthy for the sympathetic portrayal of an unmarried, marginalized governess.

In 1839, Martineau was stricken with a prolapsed uterus and ovarian tumor that left her debilitated and in constant pain. Over the next five years, she lived in seclusion in Tynemouth, near Newcastle, under the care of her physician brother-in-law, Thomas Greenhow, who diagnosed her problem as “excessive anxiety of the mind.” From her sickbed Martineau wrote a novel about Haiti, a series of popular children’s stories, and Life in the Sickroom (1848), a handbook offering advice for invalids.

After five years, Martineau decided to consult the mesmerist Spencer Hall. Several hypnosis sessions with Hall made her felt well enough to leave her house. Within four months, she was pronounced cured. Now a firm convert to mesmerism, she quarreled with Greenhow, who published a pamphlet detailing her case, claiming that he had nearly effected a cure before Hall appeared. Exactly what happened is uncertain, except that Hall got Martineau off the opiate addiction to which she had succumbed under Greenhow’s care.

After Martineau was restored to health, her first action was to purchase property in Ambleside in the Lake District, and have a modest house built on it. There she lived for the remainder of her life, conducting a healthy rural lifestyle and enjoying the company of literary neighbors, who included the aging poet William Wordsworth and poet Matthew Arnold.

Among the works that Martineau produced over the next ten years were Household Education (1849), History of England During the Thirty Years Peace (1849-1850), and a translation of Auguste Comte’s Course in Positive Philosophy. In 1846, she toured Egypt and the Middle East; her observations on that tour formed the basis for Eastern Life: Past and Present (1848). Eastern Life is more than a travelogue or a collection of sociological observations, as it attempts to trace the development of religious thought from its polytheistic origins in ancient Egypt through increasing abstraction to what Martineau saw as its logical endpoint: rationalism, positivism, the perfectibility of humans through intellect and industry, and a deity that, if it existed at all, had become irrelevant. Martineau herself had similarly evolved from a freethinking Unitarian to a decided agnostic.

In 1854, after enjoying a decade of robust good health, Martineau fell ill again. Convinced that her heart was about to fail, she returned to Tynemouth and began writing her autobiography, a frank, analytical assessment that leaves unanswered few questions about her private life, philosophy, and motivations. Martineau was actually undergoing a recurrence of the old ovarian tumor. Although she never completely regained her health, she lived for another twenty-two years and spent most of them in Ambleside. During this period, she became a regular correspondent for the Daily News, to which she contributed commentaries on the Crimean War of 1853-1856, the Indian Mutiny of 1857, and the U.S. Civil War of 1861-1865. By addressing the concerns of the textile manufacturing interests while maintaining an uncompromising proabolition stance, she was able to help sway British public opinion against intervening on the side of the Confederacy in the American Civil War.

Martineau’s last cause involved women’s rights. She used her pen to campaign vigorously against the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864 and 1869 because they provided for detaining and examining suspected prostitutes without permitting them due process of law. By 1866, she had become too ill to write. After suffering from severe bronchitis, she died at Ambleside on June 27, 1876.

Significance

Harriet Martineau would have scorned the label of “feminist.” In contrast to some of her contemporaries, she valued objectivity above all else and sought to distance her sex from her principles. Among those principles was equality of opportunity, which led naturally to advocacy of woman suffrage and access to higher education for women. As an abolitionist, Martineau helped shape British foreign policy. In the area of economic justice, her acceptance of Thomas Malthus’s views on population and Adam Smith’s views on free trade led her to oppose factory safety legislation and laws regulating wages and hours and to support the draconian New Poor Law of 1834.

Martineau was popular in her own day because she had a gift for transforming abstract social thought to concrete narratives that caught the popular imagination and was able to reduced masses of observations and anecdotes to coherent moral tales. A generation after she died, she was all but forgotten, as the problems she had helped solve faded into obscurity. However, the late twentieth century revival of interest in women’s issues has helped rescue her from obscurity, placing her in perspective as a perceptive, influential mid-Victorian thinker who brought a distinctive woman’s voice into the male-dominated field of sociology.

Bibliography

Easley, Alexis. First Person Anonymous: Women Writers and Victorian Print Media. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2004. Provides both a specific and a general picture of the publishing climate in which Harriet Martineau worked.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Gendered Observations: Harriet Martineau and the Woman Question.” In Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question, edited by Nicola Diane Thompson. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Contrasts Martineau’s objectivity and distancing herself from gender identity with contemporary feminists.

Hoecker-Drysdale, Susan. Harriet Martineau: The First Woman Sociologist. Providence, R.I.: Berg Publications, 1992. Showcases the American trip and provides contemporary context for mid-nineteenth century sociology.

Pichanik, Valerie Kossev. Harriet Martineau: The Woman and Her Work, 1802-1876. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1980. A comprehensive biography that emphasizes the development of Martineau’s outlook in the context of contemporary rationalist philosophy.

Thomas, Gillian. Harriet Martineau. Boston: Twayne, 1985. Part of a series of books on individual authors, this volume focuses on Martineau’s major works and provides summaries of them.