Harriet Martineau (1802-1876)

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.

Eric Sykes (1923-2012)

Eric Sykes was a British comedian, actor and scriptwriter, who became deaf at an early stage of his career, and who continued acting into his eighties, by which time he was also nearly blind.  He was a pioneering British example of how disability need make no difference to success.

Sykes was born in Oldham, Lancashire in 1923, son of working class parents: his mother died during childbirth.  During the Second World War, he was a wireless operator in the Mobile Signals Unit, Royal Air Force, and it was during the war years that he discovered comedy.

After the war, Eric Sykes struggled to establish himself as a comic, with little success.  Then, through an old RAF friend who had become a stage performer, Sykes broke into scriptwriting.  He went on to write for BBC radio shows like Educating Archie and The Goon Show, co-writing 24 episodes with Spike Milligan from 1954 onwards.  He also wrote for Frankie Howerd, Tony Hancock and Peter Sellars, among others. 

From appearances on the Tony Hancock show in the late 1950s, Sykes developed his own performing career, with his enduring persona as an incompetent lazy bachelor.  At about the same time, he began to lose his hearing: he was forced to lip-read his fellow actors to get his cues.  Ultimately he was to go almost completely deaf.

In the 1960s, he had his own television show with his co-star Hattie Jacques (who I always liked, perhaps because she was as large as my Aunty Penny).  In the 1970s, the show was revived in colour as Sykes, resulting in the production of 68 episodes, the series brought to an end when Hattie Jacques died of a heart attack in 1980.  Eric would always get things wrong, and sister Hattie would always scold him (much like the relationship between my parents).  Eric Sykes was notable for never swearing and never doing lewd material in his performances, although he was involved in several rather politically incorrect 1970s TV shows.

Eric Sykes continued into old age as a character actor, contributing to TV adaptations of Alice in Wonderland, Gormenghast, and Agatha Christie among others.  His voice is also heard in the Teletubbies childrens show and he made an appearance in the film of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

Eric Sykes died on 4 July 2012, aged 89.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

"O you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause which makes me seem that way to you & I would have ended my life — it was only my art that held me back. Ah, it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me."

One of the acknowledged masterpieces of romantic music is Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which finishes with the great Ode to Joy, Schiller’s verses about international harmony set to a memorable and moving tune.  Even when poorly played, as when I saw it recently at Geneva’s Victoria Hall, it’s an amazing work of great power, requiring an enlarged orchestra and several choirs.  Yet when it was premiered on 7 May 1824 to a tumultuous reception, it is said that Beethoven, his back to the audience, had to be turned around to see the applause which he had been unable to hear, being totally deaf by this point in his life.

Born in Bonn, he was the son and grandson of musicians, and was soon recognized as having innate talent himself.  His upbringing was chaotic, his mother died, and his father's music teaching was brutal.  Because his father was also a feckless drunk, Beethoven looked after his two younger brothers and supplemented the family income by playing in the court orchestra.   By 13, he had published two sonatas and attracted support from the Elector of  Bonn.   Thanks to this assistance, in 1792 Beethoven went to Vienna to study with Haydn.  He quickly established a reputation as a piano virtuoso, and from 1795 began publishing his own compositions, soon earning enough from them to cover his living expenses.  After 1800 there followed the works of his middle period, known as his “Heroic” period, which comprised the great symphonies, piano sonatas, the violin concerto and the opera Fidelio.

But aged 26, at exactly the same time as his career began to took off, Beethoven began to lose his hearing.  As he explained to a friend: "I must confess that I lead a miserable life. For almost two years I have ceased to attend any social functions, just because I find it impossible to say to people: I am deaf. If I had any other profession, I might be able to cope with my infirmity; but in my profession it is a terrible handicap."  He was not just hard of hearing, he also suffered from tinnitus, a perpetual and distracting ringing in his ears.   No wonder that his first thoughts were of suicide, as he explained in letters to his brother.  In the Heiligenstadt testament, written on 6 October 1802, he talks about his loneliness: 

"O how harshly was I repulsed by the doubly sad 
experience of my bad hearing, and yet it was impossible for 
me to say to men speak louder, shout, for I am deaf." 

But he changed his mind, and decided instead to dedicate his life to music: he had seven more symphonies to come at this point in his career.  After 1811, he never played in public, and by 1814 he was totally deaf, unable to hear either music or speech.

A side effect of Beethoven’s deafness is that more is known of his everyday life than of those of his contemporaries.   If you wanted to talk to Beethoven, you wrote down your questions or comments in a bound volume – a Conversation Book – of which 400 were known to have been filled in, although 264 were later destroyed.   The surviving Conversation Books give a unique insight into his discussions with friends and colleagues.

Beethoven seems to have been a rather irascible character.  He refused to play if people were not paying attention.  He had no respect for rank.  The Archduke Rupert was forced to announce that the usual rules of court etiquette did not apply to Beethoven.  But nevertheless, Beethoven had a close circle of devoted friends who supported him.  He fell in love with aristocratic ladies on several occasions, but unfortunately as a commoner he had no hope of marrying one of them.

In the years after 1816, Beethoven was sick and produced little.  But he recovered, and another period of amazing creativity followed, partly influenced by renewed study of Baroque masters such as Bach and Handel.  In this last phase of his career, he composed the late string quartets, Missa Solemnis, Diabelli Variations, and the Ninth Symphony – all while completely unable to hear a note.

From 1825, when he was completing the string quartets, Beethoven was again seriously ill.  He died on 26 March 1827, following hepatitis.  His funeral was attended by 20,000 people, among then Franz Schubert, who was one of the torchbearers and who was himself to die the following year.  Ludwig van Beethoven's life may have been frustrating and troubled, but his work puts him into the first rank of composers, alongside Bach and Mozart.