This
week, the distinguished contemporary writer Ali Smith gave the inaugural
Harriet Martineau lecture for Norwich Writers’ Centre, bringing alive a woman
who in her time was ubiquitous, but who now is hardly known. Martineau was a political journalist, an
early sociologist, a radical campaigner, a traveller and an author who inspired
Charlotte Bronte, Charles Darwin, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf and many others.
Ali
Smith began by pointing out the extraordinary coincidence that first Harriet
Martineau and twenty years later Elizabeth Fry (neé Gurney) were born in the
same house, Gurney Court, off Magdalen Street, Norwich, ten minutes walk from
where I am writing this blog. Martineau
was shaped by the Nonconformist Unitarian milieu in which she grew up. As a child, Martineau was a prodigious
learner, for example she committed Paradise
Lost to memory. Perhaps as a result,
she was always a redoubtable free-thinker.
She was arguing with the Bible from the age of 8, and later decided that
gods, whether in Eastern or Western versions, were no more than human
creations. This conclusion rather
dismayed her Unitarian family.
Growing
up, with a mother who promoted feminine graces, she seems to have used sewing as a cover for learning:
"When I was young, it was not thought proper for
young ladies to study very conspicuously; and especially with pen in
hand. Young ladies...were expected to sit down in the parlour to sew, -
during which reading aloud was permitted". Not only did she sew all
her own clothes, she also used needlework as a way of supporting herself as a
young writer, after the collapse of the family textile business in 1828. "I
sewed indefatigably all those years...I made literally all my clothes, as I
grew up...The amount of time spent in sewing now appears frightful: but it was
the way in those days, among people like ourselves".
Martineau
began to go deaf at the age of 12. She
also lost her sense of smell and taste. But
she did not let this undermine her, saying later “this same deafness is about the best thing that ever happened to me”. Ali Smith talked about how Martineau had to
work out how to hold her ear trumpet so it did not disturb her hat. Her 1834 essay “Letter to the Deaf” advises
people with hearing loss to be independent and sociable. Hearing
people, she suggested, should be matter-of-fact about deafness. The essay was reprinted by welfare societies
for the benefit of deaf people.
In
the late 1830s, Martineau came to fame as a writer with a series of monthly
parables about economics which were read around the world and underpinned her
financial security, as well as earning her a lifetime ban from Russia. In 1835, she toured America and spoke at
anti-slavery meetings which led to mob protests and death-threats. On her return, she wrote Society in America, with the abolitionist theme again leading to
outrage across the pond. It was at this
time, through a friendship with his brother Erasmus that came close to marriage,
that Martineau influenced Charles Darwin.
Her work against slavery later earned her a commemorative statue in
Wellesley College, near Boston.
For
feminist Martineau, the personal was political.
Every experience turned into an essay.
For example, in the 1840s, she spent five years as an invalid, possibly suffering
from a uterine tumour (I was glad to discover she stayed for a time with her brother
in Newcastle, and in Tynemouth, using her telescope to watch the beach). Eventually, her symptoms were miraculously
cured by the fashionable new technique of Mesmerism, or hypnosis. Immediately she wrote about her illness and
cure, in another collection of essays, Life
in the Sick-Room.
In
1845, Martineau went to the Lake District to convalesce after illness, and fell
in love with the scenery. She bought a
field near Ambleside, and designed and had built “The Knoll”, which still
exists and can be rented as a holiday cottage.
She would hold tea and dinner parties, where guests like Wordsworth and
Coleridge would be encouraged to plant trees in her grounds.
In
1846, travelling in Egypt, Palestine and Syria, she was very interested in the
life of the Harem, which she considered must be extremely boring. According to Ali Smith, Marteau asked her host to buy skipping ropes for the women she had met there, so they
would have something to do and a means to keep healthy. For herself, after a rather disastrous
early romance, she seems to have decided that she was better off single.
In
1851, Martineau wrote Laws of Man’s
Nature and Development, a proto-evolutionary text (eight years before
Darwin published). Written in epistolary
form and promoting atheism, it was widely condemned for its secularism. When Darwin finally published Origin of Species in 1859, she lamented
his obfuscation on the matter of God.
In 1853, she translated the work of Auguste Comte, the pioneering French
sociologist, into English. Two years
later, fearing imminent death from heart disease, she wrote her autobiography
in three months. She was to live for
another twenty years and her auobiography would be published posthumously.
Harriet
Martineau wrote 1642 newspaper editorials and 100 books, and had opinions, and
influence, on every topic of the day. Many
of her articles were unashamedly feminist, for example when she wrote about the problem of wife-beating. She campaigned for women’s
suffrage and against the notorious Contagious Disease Act, favouring instead
regulated prostitution. She also
collaborated with another great Victorian thinker and disabled person, Florence
Nightingale, to improve the situation in hospitals. With her first-hand
knowledge and personal contacts, Martineau covered the American Civil War
extensively, naturally taking a pro-North, pro-Lincoln campaigning stand.
But
Martineau was by no means a straightforwardly progressive figure. Coming from a manufacturing background,
Martineau supported a laissez-faire approach in economics, in contrast to
Dickens and others who favoured regulation of factories to achieve better
health and safety – what she described as “meddling legislation”. Her
outspokenness naturally
caused friction, but she was also widely admired.
George Eliot wrote "she is a trump -- the only English
woman that possesses thoroughly the art of writing."
Harriet
Martineau’s novels include The Hour and
the Man, a historical novel about the Haiti slave rebellion of Toussaint
l’Ouverture, and Deerbrook, about a
failed romance. She also wrote four novels for children. To modern readers, her style appears
long-winded and ponderous, which is perhaps why she is not often read today. Ali Smith quoted the obituary that typically
Martineau wrote for herself:
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.
This modesty obscures the reality that Harriet
Martineau was an inspiring, pioneering, passionate, original woman: would that any of us could leave a legacy
half as significant as hers.
In closing, Ali Smith
suggested that now that Elizabeth Fry is to be replaced on banknotes by Winston
Churchill, we might all ink in Martineau’s image by way of protest at the lack
of women on our currency. For a
neglected Englishwoman whose fame began with her writings on political economy,
it would be an appropriate memorial.
