Harriet Martineau

The material for this biographical and critical sketch of Harriet Martineau and her works has been drawn from a variety of sources. Some of it is quite new. Her own Autobiography was completed in 1855; and there has not hitherto been anything at all worth calling a record of the twenty-one years during which she lived and worked after that date. Even as regards the earlier period, although, of course I have drawn largely for facts upon the Autobiography, yet I have found much that is new to relate. For some information and hints about this period I am indebted to her relatives of her own generation, Dr. James Martineau, and Mrs. Henry Turner, of Nottingham, as well as to one or two others. With reference to the latest twenty-one years of her life, my record is entirely fresh, though necessarily brief. Mrs. Chapman, of Boston, U.S.A., has written a volume in completion of the Autobiography, which should have covered this later period; but her account is little more than a repetition, in a peculiar style, of the story that Miss Martineau herself had told, and leaves the later work of the life without systematic record.

As a well-known critic remarked in Macmillan--"This volume is one more illustration of the folly of intrusting the composition of biography to persons who have only the wholly irrelevant claim of intimate friendship." But it should be remembered that when Miss Martineau committed to Mrs. Chapman the task of writing a memorial sketch, and when the latter accepted the undertaking, both of them believed that the life and work of the subject of it were practically over. I have reason to know that if Harriet Martineau had supposed it to be even remotely possible that so much of her life remained to be spent and recorded, she would have chosen some one more skilled in literature, and more closely acquainted with English literary and political affairs, to complete her "Life." Having once asked Mrs. Chapman to fulfill the task, however, Harriet Martineau was too loyal and generous a friend to remove it from her charge; and Mrs. Chapman, on her side, while continually begging instructions from her subject as to what she was to say, and while doubtless aware that she would not be adequate to the undertaking which had grown so since she accepted it, yet would not throw it off her hands.

But her volume is in no degree a record of those last years, which constitute nearly a third of Harriet Martineau's whole life. I have had to seek facts and impressions about that period almost entirely from other sources.

My deepest obligations are due, and must be first expressed, to Mr. Henry G. Atkinson, the dearest friend of Harriet Martineau's maturity. It is commonly known that she forbade, by her will, the publication of her private letters; but she showed her supreme faith in and value for her friend, Mr. Atkinson, by specially exempting him from such prohibition. Her objection to the publication of letters was made on general grounds. Her own letters are singularly beautiful specimens of their class; and she declared that she would not mind if every word that ever she wrote were published; but she looked upon it as a duty to uphold the principle that letters should be held sacred confidences, just as all honorable people hold private conversations, not to be published without leave. But in authorizing Mr. Atkinson to print her letters, if he pleased, she maintained that she was not departing from this principle; for it was only the same as it would be if two friends agreed to make their conversation known. I feel deeply grateful to Mr. Atkinson for allowing me the privilege of presenting some of her letters to the public in this volume, and of perusing very many more.

I have been permitted, also, to read a vast number of Harriet Martineau's letters addressed to other friends besides Mr. Atkinson, and how much they have aided me in the following work and in appreciating her personality, may easily be guessed; but, of course, I may not publish these letters. Amongst many persons to whom I am indebted for helping me to "get touch" with my subject in this way, I must specially thank two. Mr. Henry Reeve, the editor of the Edinburgh Review, was a relative and intimate friend of Harriet Martineau; and her correspondence with so distinguished a man of letters was, naturally, peculiarly interesting—not the less so because they differed altogether on many matters of opinion. Her letters, which Mr. Reeve has kindly allowed me to see, have been of very great service to me. Miss F. Arnold, of Fox How, (the youngest daughter of Dr. Arnold, of Rugby,) is the second to whom like particular acknowledgments is due. She was young enough to have been Harriet Martineau's daughter; but she was also a beloved friend, and was almost a daily visitor at "The Knoll" during the later years of Miss Martineau's life. The letters which Miss Arnold, during occasional absences from home, received from her old friend, are very domestic, lively, and characteristic of the writer. It has been of great value to me to have seen all the letters that have been lent me, but especially these two sets, so different and yet so similar as I have found them to be.

I have visited Norwich, and seen the house where Harriet Martineau was born; Tynemouth, where she lay ill; Ambleside, where she lived so long and died at last; and Birmingham, to see my valued friends, her nieces and nephew. If I should thank by name all with whom I have talked of her, and from whom I have learned something about her, the list would grow over-long; and so I must content myself with thus comprehensively expressing my sense of individual obligations to all who have laid even a small stone to this little memorial cairn.

F. F. M. CHAPTER I.

THE CHILD AT HOME AND AT SCHOOL 1

CHAPTER II.

EARLY WOMANHOOD; DEVELOPING INFLUENCES 29

CHAPTER III.

EARLIEST WRITINGS 49

CHAPTER IV.

GRIEF STRUGGLE, AND PROGRESS 67

CHAPTER V.

THE GREAT SUCCESS 100

CHAPTER VI.

FIVE ACTIVE YEARS 130

CHAPTER VII.

FIVE YEARS OF ILLNESS, AND THE MESMERIC RECOVERY 155

CHAPTER VIII.

THE HOME LIFE 178

CHAPTER IX.

IN THE MATURITY OF HER POWERS 200

CHAPTER X.

IN RETREAT; JOURNALISM 231

CHAPTER XI.

THE LAST YEARS 264

HARRIET MARTINEAU.

CHAPTER I.

THE CHILD AT HOME AND AT SCHOOL.

When Louis XIV. of France revoked the Edict of Nantes, in 1688, a large number of the Protestants who were driven out of France by the impending persecutions came to seek refuge in this favored land of liberty of ours. Many who thus settled in our midst were amongst the most skillful and industrious workers, of various grades, that could have been found in the dominions of the persecuting king who drove them forth. They must have been, too, in the nature of the case, strong-hearted, clear in the comprehension of their principles, and truthful and conscientious about matters of opinion; for the cowardly, the weak, and the false could stay in their own land. From the good stock of these exiles for conscience-sake sprang Harriet Martineau.

Her paternal Huguenot ancestor was a surgeon, who was married to a fellow-countrywoman and co-religionist of the name of Pierre. This couple of exiles for freedom of opinion settled in Norwich, where the husband pursued his profession. Their descendants supplied a constant succession of highly-respected surgeons to the same town, without intermission, until the early part of this century, when the line of medical practitioners was closed by the death of Harriet Martineau's elder brother at less than thirty years old. The Martineau family thus long occupied a good professional position in the town of Norwich.

Harriet's father, however, was not a surgeon, but a manufacturer of stuffs, the very names of which are now strange in our ears—bombazines and camlets. His wife was Elizabeth Rankin, the daughter of a sugar-refiner of Newcastle-on-Tyne. A true Northumbrian woman was Mrs. Martineau; with a strong sense of duty, but little warmth of temperament; with the faults of an imperious disposition, and its correlative virtues of self-reliance and strength of will. These qualities become abundantly apparent in her in the story of her relationship with her famous daughter. On both sides, therefore, Harriet Martineau was endowed by hereditary descent with the strong qualities—the power, the clear-headedness, and the keen conscience—which she interfused into all the work of her life.

Thomas and Elizabeth Martineau, her father and mother, were the parents of eight children, two of whom became widely known and influential as thinkers and writers. Harriet was the sixth of the family, and was born at Norwich, in Magdalen street, on the 12th of June, 1802, the mother being at that time thirty years old. The next child, born in 1805, was the boy who grew up to become known as Dr. James Martineau; so that the two who were to make the family name famous were next to each other in age. Another child followed in this family group, but not until 1811, when Harriet was nine years old, so that she could experience with reference to this baby some of that tender, protective affection which is such an education for elder children, and so delightful to girls with strong maternal instincts such as she possessed.