Harriet Martineau
by Florence Fenwick Miller · English · Gutenberg #36965 · 437,949 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Harriet Martineau
Author: Florence Fenwick Miller
Release date: August 3, 2011 [eBook #36965]
Language: English
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_Famous Women._
HARRIET MARTINEAU.
_Already published_:
GEORGE ELIOT. By Miss Blind.
EMILY BRONTE. By Miss Robinson.
GEORGE SAND. By Miss Thomas.
MARY LAMB. By Mrs. Gilchrist.
MARGARET FULLER. By Julia Ward Howe.
MARIA EDGEWORTH. By Miss Zimmern.
ELIZABETH FRY. By Mrs. E. R. Pitman.
THE COUNTESS OF ALBANY. By Vernon Lee.
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT. By Mrs. E. R. Pennell.
HARRIET MARTINEAU. By Mrs. F. Fenwick Miller.
RACHEL. By Mrs. Nina H. Kennard.
MADAME ROLAND. By Mathilde Blind.
SUSANNA WESLEY. By Eliza Clarke.
MARGARET OF ANGOULEME. By Miss Robinson.
MRS. SIDDONS. By Mrs. Nina H. Kennard.
MADAME DE STAEL. By Bella Duffy.
[Illustration: FAMOUS WOMEN]
HARRIET MARTINEAU.
BY
MRS. F. FENWICK MILLER.
BOSTON:
ROBERTS BROTHERS.
1887.
_Copyright, 1884_,
BY ROBERTS BROTHERS.
UNIVERSITY PRESS:
JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE.
PREFACE.
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.
CONTENTS.
PAGE.
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.
The sixth child in a family of eight is likely to be a personage of but
small consequence. The parents' pride has been somewhat satiated by
previous experiences of the wonders of the dawning faculties of their
children; and the indulgence which seems naturally given to "the baby"
gets comparatively soon transferred from poor number six to that
interloper number seven. Mrs. Martineau, too, was one of that sort of
women who, as they would say, do not "spoil" their children. Ready to
work for them, to endure for them, to struggle to provide them with all
necessary comforts, and even with pleasures, at the cost, if need be,
of personal sacrifice of comfort and pleasure, such mothers yet do not
give to their children that bountiful outpouring of tender, caressing,
maternal love, which the young as much require for their due and free
growth as plants do the floods of the summer sunshine. To starve the
emotions in a child is not less cruel than to stint its body of food.
To repress and chain up the feelings is to impose as great a hardship
as it would be to fetter the freedom of the limbs. Mothers who have
labored and suffered through long years for the welfare of their
children, are often grieved and pained in after days to find themselves
regarded with respect rather than with fondness; but it was they
themselves who put the seal upon the fountains of affection at the time
when they might have been opened freely--and whose fault is it if,
later, the outflow is found to be checked for evermore?
The pity of it is that such mischief is often wrought by parents who
love their children intensely, but who err in the management of them
for want of the wisdom of the heart, the power of sympathetic feeling,
which is seen so much stronger sometimes in comparatively shallow
natures than in the deeper ones that have really more of love and of
self-sacrifice in their souls. Those who lack tenderness either of
manner or feeling, those to whom the full and free expression of
affection is difficult or seems a folly, may perhaps be led to reflect,
by the story of Harriet Martineau's childhood, on the suffering and
error that may result from a neglect of the moral command: "Parents,
provoke not your children to wrath."
"My life has had no spring," wrote Harriet Martineau, sadly; yet there
was nothing in the outer circumstances of her childhood and youth to
justify this feeling. Her mother's temper and character were largely
responsible for what Harriet calls her "habit of misery" during
childhood. It is right to explain, however, that this unhappiness was
doubtless partly due to physical causes. She was a weakly child, her
health having been undermined by the dishonesty of the wet nurse
employed for her during the first three months of her life. The woman
lost her milk, and managed to conceal the fact until the baby was found
to be in an almost dying condition from the consequences of want of
nourishment. How far her frequent ill-health, during many succeeding
years, was to be ascribed to this cannot be known; but her mother
naturally attributed all Harriet's delicacy of health to this cause,
even the deafness from which she suffered, although this did not become
pronounced till she was over twelve years of age.
Her deafness, which was the most commonly known of her deficiencies of
sensation, was not her earliest deprivation of a sense. She was never
able to smell, that she could remember; and as smell and taste are
intimately joined together, and a large part of what we believe to be
flavor is really odor, it naturally followed that she was also nearly
destitute of the sense of taste. Thus two of the avenues by which the
mind receives impressions from the outer world were closed to her all
her life, and a third was also stopped before she reached womanhood.
The senses are the gates by which pleasure as well as pain enter into
the citadel where consciousness resides. Of all the senses, those which
most frequently give entrance to pleasure and seldomest to pain, were
those which she had lost. "When three senses out of five are
deficient," as she said, "the difficulty of cheerful living is great,
and the terms of life are truly hard."
She suffered greatly, even as a little child, from indigestion. Milk
in particular disagreed with her; but it was held essential by Mrs.
Martineau that children should eat bread and milk, and for years poor
Harriet endured daily a lump at her chest and an oppression of the
spirits, induced by her inability to digest her breakfast and supper.
Nightmares and causeless apprehensions in the day also afflicted the
nervous and sensitive girl, and she had "hardly any respite from
terror."
A child so delicate in health could not have been very happy under any
home conditions. Only a truly wise and tender maternal guardianship
could have made the life of such an one at all tolerable; but Harriet
Martineau was one of the large family of a sharp-tempered, masterful,
stern, though devoted mother, whose cleverness found vent in incessant
sarcasm, and in whom the love of power natural to a capable, determined
person degenerated, as it so often does in domestic life, into a severe
despotism.
Mrs. Martineau's circumstances were such as to increase her natural
tendency to stern and decided rule. Dr. Martineau tells me that all
who knew his mother feel that Harriet does not do justice in her
"Autobiography" to that mother's nobler qualities, both moral and
intellectual, and especially the latter. Harriet and James Martineau,
like so many other men and women of mark, were the children of a mother
of uncommon mental capacity. Her business faculties were so good, and
her judgment so clear, that her husband (a man of a sweet and gentle
disposition) invariably took counsel with her about all his affairs,
and acted by her advice. There are still inhabitants of Norwich who
remember Mrs. Martineau, and their testimony of her is identical with
her son's. "She was the ruling spirit in that house," says one of them.
"Whatever was done there, you understood that it was she who did it."
The way in which this gentleman came to know so much of her
corroborates Dr. Martineau's declaration that "she was really devoted
to her children, and would do anything for them; if we were miserable
in our childhood (a fact which he does not dispute) it could not be
said to be consciously her fault." Mr. ---- was the husband of a lady
who had been reared from early childhood by Mrs. Martineau, having been
adopted by her simply in order to provide her little daughter, Ellen,
who was nine years younger than Harriet, with a child companion
somewhat about her own age. This lady, her widowed husband tells me,
retained a most warm admiration and affection for Mrs. Martineau.
Mothers who have brought up eight children of their own can appreciate
the self-devotedness of this mother in receiving a ninth child by
adoption in order to increase the well-being of her own little
daughter.
Several other instances were told to me of Mrs. Martineau's benevolence
and kindness of disposition. Young men belonging to her religious body,
and living in lodgings in Norwich, were uniformly made welcome to her
house, as a home, every Sunday evening. One of the Norwich residents,
with whom I have talked about her, received a presentation from her to
the Unitarian Free School, and afterwards, in his school life, met with
constant encouragement and patronage at her hands. He tells me that he
has never forgotten the stately and impressive address with which she
gave him the presentation ticket, concluding with a reminder that if he
made good use of this opportunity he might even hope one day to become
a member of the Town Council of that city,--and at that giddy eminence
her _protege_ now stands.
For the sake of the lesson, it should be understood that she was thus
truly benevolent and kindly, and no vulgar termagant or scold. It is
for us to see how such a nature can be spoiled for daily life by too
unchecked a course of arbitrary rule, and by repression of outward
signs of tenderness.
Not the least evil which a stern parent, who maintains a reserve of
demeanor, and who requires strictness of discipline within the home,
may do to himself and his children, is that by denying expression to
the children's feelings he closes to himself the possibility of knowing
what goes on in their young minds. Thus, a child so restrained may for
years suffer under a sense of injustice, and of undue favoritism shown
to another, or under a belief that the parent's love is lacking, when a
few words might have cleared away the misapprehension, and given the
child the natural happiness of its age.
Speaking of her childhood, Harriet says: "I had a devouring passion
for justice; justice, first, to my own precious self, and then to
other oppressed people. Justice was precisely what was least understood
in our house, in regard to servants and children. Now and then I
desperately poured out my complaints; but in general I brooded over
my injuries and those of others who dared not speak, and then the
temptation to suicide was very strong."
The most vivid picture that she has drawn of the discipline under which
such emotions were induced in her is found in a story, _The Crofton
Boys_, which she wrote during a severe illness, and under the
impression that it would contain her last words uttered through the
press. Mrs. Proctor, in _The Crofton Boys_, is depicted with remarkable
vividness by a series of little touches, and in a succession of trivial
details, with an avoidance of direct description, that reminds us of
the method of Jane Austen. Harriet never achieved any other portrait of
a character such as this one; for this is treated with such minute
fidelity, and such evident unconsciousness, that we feel sure, as we
sometimes do with a picture, that the likeness must be an exact one. So
distinct an individuality is shown to us, and at the same time, the
evidences of the artist's close and careful observation of his model
are so obvious, that, without having seen the subject, we _feel_ the
accuracy of the likeness. So does the "portrait of a mother" in that
tale which Harriet wrote for her last words through the press, show us
the nature of Mrs. Martineau in her maternal relation.
"Mrs. Proctor so seldom praised anybody that her words of esteem went a
great way.... Everyone in the house was in the habit of hiding tears
from Mrs. Proctor, who rarely shed them herself, and was known to think
that they might generally be suppressed, and should be so."
If any person were weak enough to express emotion in this way in
her presence, Mrs. Proctor would promptly and sternly intimate her
disapproval of such indulgence of the feelings. When the little lad was
leaving home for the first time, all the rest of the household became a
little unhappy over the parting.
"Susan came in about the cord for his box, and her eyes were red,--and
at the sight of her Agnes began to cry again; and Jane bent down over
the glove she was mending for him, and her needle stopped.
"'Jane,' said her mother, gravely, 'if you are not mending that glove,
give it to me. It is getting late.'
"Jane brushed her hand across her eyes, and stitched away again. Then
she threw the gloves to Hugh without looking at him, and ran to get
ready to go to the coach."
So little allowance was ordinarily made in that house for signs of
affection, or manifestations of personal attachment, that the child who
was going away for six months was "amazed to find that his sisters were
giving up an hour of their lessons that they might go with him to the
coach." Even when Hugh got his foot so crushed it had to be amputated,
though his mother came to him and gave him every proper attention, yet
"Hugh saw no tears from her"; nothing more than that "her face was very
pale and grave." His anticipations of her coming had not been warm; his
one anxiety had been that he might bear his pain resolutely before her.
"As Hugh cried, he said he bore it so very badly he did not know what
his mother would say if she saw him." And it was well that he had not
anticipated any outburst of pity or expression of sympathy from her,
for, when she did come, "she kissed him with a long, long kiss; but she
did not speak." Her first words in the hearing of her agonized child
were spoken to give him an intimation that the surgeons were waiting to
take off his foot. The boy's reply was--not to cling to her for
support, and to nestle in her bosom for comfort in the most terrible
moment of his young life, but--"Do not stay now; this pain is so bad! I
can't bear it well at all. Do go, now, and bid them make haste, will
you?"
Later, when the leg was better, the poor boy's mental misery once
overpowered him, even in his mother's presence. Sitting with her and
his sister--"... He said, 'He did not know how he should bear his
misfortune. When he thought of the long, long days, and months, and
years, to the end of his life, and that he should never run and play,
and never be like other people, and never able to do the commonest
things without labor and trouble, he wished he was dead. He would
rather have died!' Agnes thought he must be miserable indeed if he
would venture to say this to his mother." Such was the idea that these
children had of maternal sympathy and love! So little did they look
upon their mother as the one person above all others to whom their
secret troubles should be opened!
It is proper to observe that the mother came out of this test well.
There is no record that Mrs. Martineau was ever found wanting in due
care for her children when the pent-up agony of their bodies or spirits
became so violent as to burst the bonds of reserve that her general
demeanor and method of management imposed upon them. Her children's
misery (for Harriet was not the only one of the family whose childhood
was wretched) came not from any intentional neglect, or even from any
indifference on her part to their comfort and happiness, but solely,
let it be repeated, from her arbitrary manner and her quickness of
temper. It is worth repeating (if biography be of value for the lessons
which may be drawn from it for the conduct of other lives) that the
mother whose children were so spirit-tossed and desolate was,
nevertheless, one who gave herself up to their interests, and labored
incessantly and unselfishly for their welfare. It was not love that
really was wanting; far less was it faithfulness in the performance of
a mother's material duties to her children; all that was lacking was
the free play of the emotions on the surface, the kisses, the loving
phrases, the fond tones, which are assuredly neither weaknesses nor
works of supererogation in family life. By means of candid expression
alone can the emotions of one mind touch those of another; and from the
lack of such contact between a child and its mother there must come, in
so close a life relationship, misery to the younger and disappointment
to the elder of the two.
"I really think," says Harriet, "if I had once conceived that anybody
cared for me, nearly all the sins and sorrows of my anxious childhood
would have been spared me." Yet, not only was she well fed, well
clothed, well educated, and sent to amusements to give her pleasure
(magic lanterns, parties and seaside trips are all mentioned); but
besides all this, when she did burst forth, like Hugh Proctor in the
book, with the expression of her suffering, she was soothed and cared
for. But this last happened so rarely--of course entirely because it
was made so difficult for her to express herself--that the occasions
lived in her memory all her life.
The moral consequences of all this were naturally bad. Even with all
motherly sympathy and encouragement, so sickly a child would have been
likely to suffer from timidity, and to fall into occasional fits of
despondency and irritability; but, with fear continually excited in
her mind, and with an eternal storm of passionate opposition to
arbitrary authority raging in her soul, it is no wonder that the poor
child made for herself a character for willfulness and obstinacy,
while internally she suffered dreadfully from her conscience. "In my
childhood," she says, "I would assert or deny anything to my mother
that would bring me through most easily.... This was so exclusively
to one person that, though there was remonstrance and punishment, I
was never regarded as a liar in the family." Her strength of will
was very great; and when she had been placed in a false position by
her dread of rebuke, the powerful will came into play to maintain
a dogged, stubborn, indifferent appearance. Yet all the while her
conscientiousness--the strong convictions as to what was right, and
the ardent desire to do it, which marked her whole career--was at work
within her, causing a mental shame and distress which might have been
easily aided by gentle treatment to overcome the fear and the firmness
which were acting together to make her miserable and a sinner.
It is altogether a sad story, but I have not told it at length without
reason. The fact that other children are suffering similarly every day
makes the record worth repeating. But, besides this, her vivid
remembrance of her childish pangs tends to show how warm and strong
were her natural affections. If Harriet Martineau's mind had not been
sensitive and emotional, and if her love for those united to her by
family ties had not been ardent, she would not have felt as she did in
her childhood, and she would not have remembered, all through her life,
how she had suffered in her early years from unsatisfied affection.
Now, this soft, loving, emotional side of her character must be
recognized before her life and her work can be properly appreciated.
The intellectual influences of her home life were not more happy than
the moral ones. She was thought by her family anything but a clever
child. Indeed, Dr. James Martineau (whose recollections are peculiarly
valuable, both from his nearness to Harriet in age and from their great
attachment in early life) still thinks that she really was a dull
child. Her intelligence, he believes, awoke only in her later youth,
coincidentally with some improvement in health. It is hard to guess
what the impression of her childish intellectual powers might have been
under different conditions. She suggestively remarks[1]: "It should
never be forgotten that the happier a child is the cleverer he will be.
This is not only because in a state of happiness the mind is free, and
at liberty for the exercise of its faculties instead of spending its
thoughts and energy in brooding over troubles, but also because the
action of the brain is stronger when the frame is in a state of
hilarity; the ideas are more clear, impressions of outward objects are
more vivid, and the memory will not let them slip." Moreover, it is a
fact worthy of note that the recognition by her family of her mental
development followed upon her return home after she had been away for a
time, and had been learning at a boarding-school under "the first
person of whom she never felt afraid." Still, the fact remains that
Harriet was the ugly duckling of her family, and supposed to be the
most stupid of the group of Martineau children.
[1] _Household Education_, p. 202.
She was active-minded enough, however, to begin early that spontaneous
self-education which only intellects of real power undertake, either
in childhood or in later years.
Milton was her master. When she was seven years old she came by
accident upon a copy of _Paradise Lost_ lying open upon a table. Taking
it up, she saw the heading "Argument," and in the text her eye caught
the word "Satan." Instantly the mind which her relations thought so
sluggish was fired by the desire to know how Satan could be argued
about. She sought the passage which tells how the arch-fiend was--
Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky,
With hideous ruin and combustion, down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire.
For the ensuing seven years her thoughts dwelt daily in the midst of
the solemn scenes, and moved to the sound of the sonorous music of
Milton's poetry. "I wonder how much of it I knew by heart--enough to
be always repeating it to myself with every change of light and
darkness, and sound, and silence, the moods of the day and the seasons
of the year." The dull child, who neglected her multiplication table,
did so because her mind was pre-occupied with thoughts of this grander
order.
Her love of books increased, and her range of reading became wide.
Milton, although the favorite, was by no means her only beloved
author. She read rapidly, and, as clever children often do,
voraciously. Whole pages or scenes from Shakespeare, Goldsmith,
Thompson, and Milton she learned by heart, until she knew enough
poetry to have fitted her for the occupation of a wandering reciter.
In this way her self-education in the English classics, and in
literary style, went on at the same time with her daily education by
living teachers.
Harriet's formal education was somewhat desultory; but it is a
noteworthy fact that it was, so far as it went, what would have been
called a "boy's education." In this respect the history of her mental
development is the same as that of many other illustrious women of
the past. Girls' High Schools, and University examinations for
young women, are products of the present day, and are rapidly
rendering obsolete the old ideas about the necessary differences and
distinctions between the education of boys and girls. But up to the
first quarter of this century, the minds of boys and of girls were
commonly submitted to entirely different courses of training. While
the boys learned precision in reasoning from mathematics, the girls
were considered sufficiently equipped for their lot in life by a
knowledge of the first three rules of arithmetic. While any faculty of
language that a lad possessed was trained and exercised by the study
of the classics, his sister was thought to require no more teaching in
composition and grammar than would enable her to write a letter.
Elaborate samplers, specimens of fine stitching, of hemming done by a
thread on the most delicate cambric, of marking in tiny stitches and
wonderful designs, and of lace more noticeable for difficulty in the
doing than for beauty, have come down to us from our grandmothers'
days, to show us how the school-time of the girls was being disposed
of, while the boys were studying Euclid, Virgil, and Homer. If we have
changed all that, and are now beginning to give a considerable
proportion of our girls the same mental diet for the growth and
sustenance of their minds with that which is supplied to boys, it is
largely owing to the direct efforts in favor of such a course put
forth by women such as Harriet Martineau, who had themselves been, at
least partially, educated "like boys," and were conscious that to such
education they owed much of their mental superiority over average
women.
In her earlier years Harriet was taught at home by her elder brothers
and sisters, with the addition of lessons in some subjects from
masters. She was well grounded in this manner in Latin, French and the
ordinary elementary subjects. But her systematic education did not
begin until she was eleven, when she and her sister Rachel were sent
to a school kept by a good master, at which boys also were receiving
their education.
The school-life was delectable to Harriet. Mr. Perry, the master, was
gentle in his manner, and methodical in his style of teaching; and
under his tuition the shy, nervous child felt for the first time
encouraged to do her best, and aided not merely to learn her lessons,
but also to expand her mental faculties. The two years that she
remained at Mr. Perry's school gave her a fair insight into Latin and
French, and enabled her to discover that arithmetic was to her mind a
delightful pastime rather than a difficult study. English composition
was formally and carefully taught. This was Harriet's favorite lesson;
but she would spend her playtime in covering a slate with sums for the
mere pleasure of the exercise.
When Harriet had been at this school for about two years, Mr. Perry
left Norwich. The home system of education was then resumed. She had
visiting masters in Latin, French, and music. For the rest, Mrs.
Martineau selected a course of reading on history, biography, and
literature. One of the girls read aloud daily while the others did
needle-work.
"The amount of time we spent in sewing now appears frightful; but it
was the way in those days among people like ourselves." Harriet became
a thoroughly accomplished needle-woman. She had, indeed, a liking for
the occupation, and continued to do much of it all through her life.
Many of her friends can show handsome pieces of fancy-work done by her
hands. Again and again she contributed to public objects by sending a
piece of her own beautiful needle-work to be sold for the benefit of a
society's funds. Not even in the busiest time of her literary life did
she ever entirely cease to exercise her skill in this feminine
occupation. In fact, she made wool-work her artistic recreation.
But with all her liking for needle-work, and with all the use that she
made of her skill in the art, she did feel very keenly how much her
time and strength had been wasted in childhood upon the practice of
this mechanical occupation that should have been employed in the
cultivation of her mental powers. A girl then was required to become a
proficient in the making of every kind of garment. It was considered a
good test of her capacity to know at an early age how to cut out and
put together a shirt for her father; drawing threads to cut it by, and
drawing threads to do the rows of fine stitching by, and stitching
evenly and regularly, only two threads of the finest material being
taken for each stitch! The expenditure of time out of a girl's life,
involved in making her capable of doing all this, was something
shocking. In these days, when the development of the means of
communication has made division of labor more generally practicable
than of old, and when nearly all men and women, from the richest to
the artizan classes, wear garments made chiefly by machinery, I doubt
if many readers can be got to realize how much a girl's intellectual
training was diminished when Harriet Martineau was a child by the vast
amount of time consumed in training her as a seamstress. Harriet was
taught how to make all her own clothes, even to covering shoes with
silk for dancing, and to plaiting straw bonnets. It is as though every
boy were taught in his school-life to be a thorough carpenter, so as
to be able, in youth, to turn out, unaided, any article of furniture.
It is obvious how much time such technical training must swallow up.
To conceive how a girl was held back by it, we must ask ourselves:
What was her brother doing while she was learning needle-work?
The matter did not end with the waste of time alone. Health, strength
and nerve-force--in a word, _power_--was squandered upon it to a
degree truly lamentable. Harriet Martineau's testimony[2] upon this
point may be taken, because of her real fondness for the employment
and the skill which she displayed in it:
[2] _Household Education_, p. 286.
"I believe it is now generally agreed among those who know best
that the practice of sewing has been carried much too far for
health, even in houses where there is no poverty or pressure of
any kind. No one can well be more fond of sewing than I am, and
few, except professional seamstresses, have done more of it, and
my testimony is that it is a most hurtful occupation, except where
great moderation is observed. I think it is not so much the
sitting and stooping posture as the incessant monotonous action
and position of the arms that causes such wear and tear. Whatever
it may be, there is something in prolonged sewing which is
remarkably exhausting to the strength, and irritating beyond
endurance to the nerves. The censorious gossip, during sewing,
which was the bane of our youth," she adds, "wasted more of our
precious youthful powers and dispositions than any repentance and
amendment in after life could repair."
Harriet's reading for pleasure in childhood had mostly to be done by
snatches. She learned much poetry by keeping the book under her work,
on her lap, and glancing at a line now and another then. Shakespeare
she first enjoyed, while a child, by stealing away from table in the
evenings of one winter, and reading by the light of the drawing-room
fire, while the rest lingered over dessert in the dining-room. In this
way, too, she had to read the newspaper.
The older she grew, the less time was afforded her from domestic
duties for study. She was sent, at the age of fourteen, to a
boarding-school near Bristol, kept by an aunt of her own, where she
stayed fifteen months, and on her return home her education was
considered finished. Thenceforth it was a struggle to obtain
permission to spend any time in reading or writing, and such
opportunities as she got, or could make, had to be taken advantage of
in secrecy.
It is melancholy to read of her "spending a frightful amount of time
in sewing," and being "expected always to sit down in the parlor to
sew," instead of studying; of her being "at the work-table regularly
after breakfast, making my own clothes or the shirts of the household,
or about some fancy work, or if ever I shut myself into my own room
for an hour of solitude, I knew it was at the risk of being sent for
to join the sewing-circle;" and of the necessity that she lay under to
find time for study by stealing secret hours from sleep. But it is
needful to lay stress upon these hindrances through which the growing
girl fought her way to mental development. Wide though her knowledge
was, great though her mental powers became, who can tell how much was
taken from her possibilities (as from those of all other great women
of the past) by such waste of her powers in childhood and youth?
It is distressing to think about. The only comfort is that it was
inevitable. Of all the causes that unite to make the women of the
present more favorably circumstanced than those of the past, none is
more potent than the progress of mechanical discovery having relieved
them from the necessity of making all the clothing of mankind with
their own hands. From the era when Errina, the Greek poetess,
mournfully lamented that her mother tied her to her distaff, down to
the days in which Harriet Martineau studied by snatches, and spent her
days in making shirts in the parlor, an enormous amount of feminine
power has been squandered wastefully in this direction. If women
hereafter draw out a Comtist calendar of days upon which to reverence
the memory of those who have helped them on in the scale of beings,
assuredly they must find places for the inventors of the
spinning-mule, the stocking-loom and the sewing-machine.
Religion formed the chief source of happiness to Harriet Martineau in
childhood and early youth. Her parents were Unitarians, and their
child's theology was, therefore, of a mild type, lacking a hell, a
personal devil, a theory of original sin, and the like. She did not
fear God, while she feared almost all human beings, and her devotion
was thus a source of great joy and little misery.
When she was at the Bristol boarding-school, she came under the
ministerial influence of the great Unitarian preacher, the Rev. Dr.
Carpenter. The power of his teaching increased the ardor of her
religious sentiments. She was just at an intense age--between
fourteen and sixteen. Dr. Carpenter's religious instructions made
the theism in which she had been educated become a firm personal
conviction, and caused the natural action of a sensitive conscience,
the self-devotion and humility of a deep power of veneration, and
the truthfulness and sincerity of a rare courage, to be blended
indistinguishably in their exercise with emotional outpourings of the
spirit in worship, and with attachment to certain theological tenets.
Her younger sister well remembers that Harriet's fervent and
somewhat gloomy piety was the cause of a good deal of quizzing
amongst her elders, when she returned home from Bristol; their
amusement being mixed, however, with much respect for her sincerity
and conscientiousness. But, as her mind expanded, she thought as
well as felt about her theology, and her religious development did
not end with childhood.
CHAPTER II.
EARLY WOMANHOOD: DEVELOPING INFLUENCES.
Old Norwich, in the early years of this century, was a somewhat
exceptional place. It so chanced that besides the exclusiveness
natural even now to the society of a cathedral town--besides the
insular tone of thought and manners which most towns possessed in
those pre-railway days, and while our continental wars were holding
our country-people isolated from foreign nations--besides all this,
Norwich then prided herself upon having produced a good deal of
literary ability. Her William Taylor was considered to be almost the
only German scholar in England, and other men, whose names are now
nearly forgotten, but who in their day were looked up to as lights of
learning and literature--Sayers, Smith, Enfield, Alderson, and
others,--gave a tone to the society of Norwich, which, if somewhat
pedantic, was, nevertheless, favorable to the intellectual life. It is
no small testimony to the healthy and stimulating mental atmosphere of
old Norwich that there successively came out from her, in an age when
individuality and intellect in woman were steadily repressed, three
women of such mark as Amelia Opie, Elizabeth Fry and Harriet
Martineau.
But even in Norwich the repression just alluded to was felt by women.
Even there it was held, to say the least, peculiar and undesirable for
a girl to wish to study deep subjects. "When I was young," Miss
Martineau writes, "it was not thought proper for young ladies to study
very conspicuously; and especially with pen in hand." They were
required to be always ready "to receive callers, without any sign of
blue-stockingism which could be reported abroad. My first studies in
philosophy were carried on with great care and reserve.... I won time
for what my heart was set upon either in the early morning or late at
night."
It was thus at unseasonable hours, and without the encouraging support
of that public feeling of the value and desirability of knowledge, and
the honorableness of its acquisition, by which a young man's studies
are unconsciously aided, that Harriet in her young womanhood continued
to learn. She read Latin with her brother James, and translated from
the classics by herself. Her cousin, Mr. Lee, read Italian with her
and her sister; and in course of time they undertook the translation
of Petrarch's sonnets into English verse. She read Blair's Rhetoric
repeatedly. Her Biblical studies were continued until she was in that
position which, according to Macaulay, is necessary "for a critic of
the niceties of the English language;" she had "the Bible at her
fingers' ends."
But her solitary studies went also into heavier and less frequented
paths. Dr. Carpenter had taught her to interest herself in mental and
moral philosophy. She read about these subjects at first because he
had written upon them, and afterwards because she found them really
congenial to her mind. Locke and Hartley were the authors whom she
studied most closely. Then the works of Priestley, and the study of
his life and opinions--which she naturally undertook, because Dr.
Priestley was the great apostle and martyr of Unitarianism--led her to
make a very full acquaintance with the metaphysicians of the Scotch
school.
To how much purpose she thus read the best books then available, upon
some of the highest topics that can engage the attention, soon became
apparent when she began to write; but of this I must speak in due
course later on. Two other of the most important events, or rather
trains of events, in the history of her young womanhood, must be
mentioned first.
The earlier of these was the gradual oncoming and increase of her
deafness. She began to be slightly deaf while she was at Mr. Perry's
school, and the fact was there recognized so far as to cause her to be
placed next to her teacher in the class. How keenly she even then felt
this loss, she has in part revealed in the story of Hugh Procter; and
a few lines from an essay of hers on Scott may here be added:
"Few have any idea of the all-powerful influence which the sense of
personal infirmity exerts over the mind of a child. If it were known,
its apparent disproportionateness to other influences would, to the
careless observer, appear absurd; to the thoughtful it would afford
new lights respecting the conduct of educational discipline; it would
also pierce the heart of many a parent who now believes that he knows
all, and who feels so tender a regret for what he knows that even the
sufferer wonders at its extent. But this is a species of suffering
which can never obtain sufficient sympathy, because the sufferer
himself is not aware, till he has made comparison of this with other
pains, how light all others are in comparison."
As pathetically, but more briefly, she says about herself:--"My
deafness, when new, was the uppermost thing in my mind day and night."
Her inability to hear continued to increase by slow degrees during the
next six years; and when she was eighteen "a sort of accident"
suddenly increased it. Music had, until then, been one of her great
delights, and it shows how gradual was the progress of her deafness,
that she found herself able to hear at an orchestral concert, provided
she could get a seat with a back against which she could press her
shoulder-blades, for a long time after the music had become inaudible
without this assistance. Such a gradual deprivation of a most
important sense is surely far more trying than a quick, unexpected,
and obviously irremediable loss would be. The alternations of hope and
despair, the difficulty of inducing the sufferer's friends to
recognize how serious the case is, the perhaps yet greater difficulty
to the patient to resolutely step out of the ranks of ordinary people
and take up the position of one deficient in a sense, the
mortifications which have to be endured again and again both from the
ignorance of strangers and the mistaken sympathy of friends--all these
make up the special trial of one who becomes by degrees the subject of
a chronic affliction. No sensitive person can possibly pass through
this fiery trial unchanged. Such an experience must either refine or
harden; must either strengthen the powers of endurance or break down
the mind to querulous ill-temper; must either make self the centre of
creation or greatly add to the power of putting personal interests
aside for the sake of wider and more unselfish thoughts and feelings.
Which class of influences Harriet Martineau accepted from her trial
the history of her courageous, resolute life-work, and her devotion to
truth and duty as she saw them, will sufficiently show.
How much she suffered in mind was quite unknown to her family at the
time. She was always reserved in speaking about her own feelings and
emotions to her mother, and in this particular case Mrs. Martineau,
with the kindest intentions, discouraged, as far as possible, all
recognition of the growing infirmity. The society of Norwich had never
been very attractive to the young girl, who was above the average in
natural abilities, and still further removed from the petty and
frivolous gossip of the commonplace evening party, by the extensive
and elevating course of study through which her mind had passed. Had
she been well able to hear, she could have quietly accepted what such
intercourse could give her. This would have been much. Kindliness and
good feeling, common sense, and ideas about man and his circumstances,
are to be enjoyed and gained quite as much in ordinary as in what is
commonly called intellectual society. But in the freshness of her
sensitive suffering Harriet shrank from the Norwich evening parties.
Her mother, however, insisted upon her taking her full share of
visiting.
The case was made worse by the customary errors in the treatment of
deaf persons; namely, the endeavoring to keep up the illusion that she
was not deaf, the occasional assurances that she could hear as well as
ever if it were not for her habits of abstraction, and so forth, and
the imploring her to always ask when she did not hear what was said,
followed by scoldings (kindly meant, but none the less irritating to
the object) when it was found that she had been silently losing the
larger part of a conversation. False pride, pretence, and selfish
exactions were thus sought to be nourished in her; while the blessings
of an open recognition of her trouble, and a full and free sympathy
with her pain and her difficulty in learning to bear it, were at the
same time withheld.
I have spoken of this method of treatment of such a case as erroneous.
But in such a matter only those who have gone through the experience
and have come out of it at last, as she did, with the moral nature
strengthened, and the power of self-management increased, can be really
competent to express an opinion upon the proper method of behavior to
similar sufferers. I hasten to add, therefore, that in substance the
view that I have given is that expressed in Harriet Martineau's _Letter
to the Deaf_, published in 1834. In that remarkable fragment of
autobiography she appealed to the large number of people who suffered
like herself, to insist upon the frank recognition of their infirmity,
and to themselves acquiesce with patience in all the deprivations and
mortifications which the loss of a sense must bring. The revelation in
this essay of her own sufferings is most touching; and very noble and
beautiful is the way in which she urges that the misery must be met,
and the humiliation must be turned aside, by no other means than
courage, candor, patience, and an unselfish determination to consider
first the convenience and happiness of others instead of the sufferer's
own.
"Instead of putting the singularity out of sight we should
acknowledge it in words, prepare for it in habits, and act upon it
in social intercourse. Thus only can we save others from being
uneasy in our presence, and sad when they think of us. That we can
thus alone make ourselves sought and beloved is an inferior
consideration, though an important one to us, to whom warmth and
kindness are as peculiarly animating as sunshine to the caged
bird. This frankness, simplicity, and cheerfulness can only grow
out of a perfect acquiescence in our circumstances. Submission is
not enough. Pride fails at the most critical moment. But hearty
acquiescence cannot fail to bring forth cheerfulness. The thrill
of delight which arises during the ready agreement to profit by
pain (emphatically the joy with which no stranger intermeddleth)
must subside like all other emotions; but it does not depart
without leaving the spirit lightened and cheered; and every
visitation leaves it in a more genial state than the last.... I
had infinitely rather bear the perpetual sense of privation than
become unaware of anything which is true--of my intellectual
deficiences, of my disqualifications for society, of my errors in
matter of fact, and of the burdens that I necessarily impose on
those who surround me. We can never get beyond the necessity of
keeping in full view the worst and the best that can be made of
our lot. The worst is either to sink under the trial or to be made
callous by it. The best is to be as wise as possible under a great
disability, and as happy as possible under a great privation."
It is essential, for a correct understanding of her character, that
this great trial of her youth should be presented amidst the moulding
influences of that time with as much strength as it was experienced.
But it is difficult, within the necessary limits of quotation, to
convey an idea to the reader of either the intensity and bitterness of
the suffering revealed, or of the firmness and beauty of the spirit
with which the trial was met. Nor was the advice that she gave to
others mere talk, which she herself never put in practice. If her
family did not realize at the time how deeply she suffered, still less
could her friends in later life discover by anything in her manners
that her soul had been so searched and her spirits so tried. So
frankly and candidly, and with such an utter absence of affectation,
did she accept this condition of her life, that those around her
hardly realized that she felt it as a deprivation; and a few lines in
her autobiography, in which she mentions how conscious she was of
intellectual fatigue from the lack of those distractions to the mind
which enter continually through the normal ear, came like a painful
shock to her friends, making them feel that they had been unconscious
of a need ever present with her throughout life.
For some time after the deafness began, she did not use an
ear-trumpet. Like many in a similar position, she persuaded herself
that her deafness was not sufficiently great to cause any considerable
inconvenience to others in conversation. At length, however, she was
enlightened upon this point. An account appeared in a Unitarian paper
of two remarkable cures of deafness by galvanism, and Harriet's
friends persuaded her to try this new remedy. For a brief while, hope
was revived in her; the treatment threw her into a state of nervous
fever, during which she regained considerable sensibility in the organ
of hearing. The improvement was very temporary, but it lasted
sufficiently long to let her know how much her friends had been
straining their throats for her sake. From that time she invariably
carried and used an ear-trumpet, commencing with an india-rubber tube,
with a cup at the end for the speaker to take into his hand, but
afterwards employing an ordinary stiff trumpet.
Into this existence, which had hitherto been so full of sadness, there
came at length the bright-tinted and vivid shower of light, which
means so much to a woman. Love came to brighten the life so dark
hitherto for lack of that sunshine. Much as it is to any woman to know
herself beloved by the man whom she loves, to Harriet Martineau it was
even more than to most. It was not only that her character was a
strong one, and that to such a nature all influences that are accepted
become powerful forces, but besides this she had always loved more
than she had been loved; and her self-esteem had been systematically
suppressed by her mother's stern discipline, and afterwards injured by
the mortifications to which the on-coming of her deafness gave rise.
How much, in such a case, it must have been, when the hour at last
came for the history of the heart to be written! How delightful the
time when she could cherish in her thoughts a love which was at once
an equal friendship and a vivid passion! How great the revolution in
her mind when she found that the man whom she could love would choose
her from all the world of women to be his dearest, the partner of his
life!
It would be a proof, if proof were needed at this time of day, that it
is well-nigh impossible for any person to give a candid, full and
unerring record of his own past, and the circumstances in it which
have most influenced his development, to turn from the brief and
cursory record which Harriet Martineau's autobiography gives of this
attachment, to the complete story as I have it to tell, here and in a
future chapter.
The strongest of all the family affections of her childhood and youth
was that which she felt for her brother James. He was two years
younger than herself. They had been playmates in childhood, and
companions in study later on. Harriet's first attraction to Mr.
Worthington was that he was her brother's friend. The two young men
were fellow-students at college, preparing for the Unitarian ministry.
Worthington was already well known to Harriet from her brother's
letters before she saw him. He then went on a visit to Norwich, to
spend a part of the vacation with James, and the interest which the
friend and the sister already felt in each other, from their mutual
affection for the brother, soon ripened into love. This was, I
believe, in 1822, when she was twenty years old.
Her father and mother looked not unkindly upon the dawning of this
affection. The brother, however, who knew the two so well, felt quite
certain that they were not suited for each other. Harriet was of a
strong, decided temper, even somewhat arbitrary and hasty, quick in
her judgments, and firm in her opinions. The temperament of
Worthington, on the other hand, was, I am told, gentle, impressionable
and sensitive in the extreme. He was highly conscientious, and
ultra-tender in his treatment of the characters and opinions of
others. The two seemed in many respects the antipodes of each other.
He who knew them both best was convinced that they would not be happy
together, and that opinion he has never changed.
It is above all things difficult to predict beforehand whether two
apparently antagonistic characters will really clash and jar in the
close union of married life, or whether, on the contrary, the
deficiencies of the one will be supplemented by those opposite
tendencies which are rather in excess in the other. It is notorious
that marriages are seldom perfect matches in the view of outsiders;
the incongruities in the temperaments and the habits of life and
thought, are more easily discerned than the fusing influence of ardent
love can be measured. Nor, indeed, can the changes which will be
worked in the disposition by a surrender to the free play of emotion
be accurately foreseen. Considerations such as these, however, do not
have much weight in the mind of a young man whose experience of the
mysteries of the human heart is yet to come; and James Martineau was
strongly averse to the engagement of his sister and his friend. Their
attachment was not then permitted to become an engagement. Worthington
was poor--was still only a student--Harriet was supposed, at that
time, to be well portioned; the sensitive temperament of the young
lover felt the variety of discouragements placed in the path of his
affection, and so that affection which should have brought only joy
became, in fact, to Harriet the cause of sorrow, suspense and anxiety.
Yet its vivifying influence was felt, and the true happiness which is
inseparable from mutual love, however the emotion be checked and
denied its full expression, was not lacking. For some insight into
what Harriet Martineau knew and felt of love, we must look elsewhere
than in the formal record of the Autobiography.[3] But this, like all
the other chief events of her life, has found a place in her works
under a thin veiling of her personality. Let us see from one of her
early essays how Harriet Martineau learned to regard love. The essay
is called "In a Hermit's Cave."
[3] Mr. H. G. Atkinson writes to me: "She had written much
more at length (than is published) in her Autobiography about
her courtship; but she consulted me about publishing it, and
I advised her not to do so--the matter counted for so little
in such a life as hers." The quotation which I give here
shows for what it did really count in the history of her
mental development. But so difficult must it needs be for the
writer of an autobiography to speak frankly of the more
sacred experiences of the life, that it is not surprising
that Harriet Martineau "destroyed what she had written," when
so advised by the friend whom she consulted. I need only add
that the many new details about the facts of this matter,
which I am able to give, I have received from two of her own
generation, both of whom were very intimate friends of hers
at the time when all this occurred.
"The place was not ill-chosen by the holy man, if the
circumstances could but have been adapted to that highest
worship--the service of the life.... But there is yet wanting the
altar of the human heart, on which alone a fire is kindled from
above to shine in the faces of all true worshippers for ever.
Where this flame, the glow of human love, is burning, there is the
temple of worship, be it only beside the humblest village hearth:
where it has not been kindled there is no sanctuary; and the
loftiest amphitheatre of mountains, lighted up by the ever-burning
stars, is no more the dwelling-place of Jehovah than the Temple of
Solomon before it was filled with the glory of the Presence....
"Yes, Love is worship, authorized and approved.... Many are the
gradations through which this service rises until it has reached
that on which God has bestowed His most manifest benediction, on
which Jesus smiled at Cana, but which the devotee presumed to
decline. Not more express were the ordinances of Sinai than the
Divine provisions for wedded love; never was it more certain that
Jehovah benignantly regarded the festivals of His people than it
is daily that He has appointed those mutual rejoicings of the
affections, which need but to be referred to Him to become a holy
homage. Yet there have been many who pronounce common that which
God has purified, and reject or disdain that which He has
proffered and blest. How ignorant must such be of the growth of
that within! How unobservant of what passes without! Would that
all could know how from the first flow of the affections, until
they are shed abroad in their plentitude, the purposes of creation
become fulfilled. Would that all could know how, by this mighty
impulse, new strength is given to every power; how the intellect
is vivified and enlarged; how the spirit becomes bold to explore
the path of life, and clear-sighted to discern its issues.... For
that piety which has humanity for its object--must not that heart
feel most of which tenderness has become the element? Must not the
spirit which is most exercised in hope and fear be most familiar
with hope and fear wherever found?
"How distinctly I saw all this in those who are now sanctifying
their first Sabbath of wedded love.... The one was at peace with
all that world which had appeared so long at war with him. He
feared nothing, he possessed all; and of the overflowings of his
love he could spare to every living thing. The other thought of no
world but the bright one above, and the quiet one before her, in
each of which dwelt one in whom she had perfect trust.... In her
the progression has been so regular, and the work so perfect, that
any return to the former perturbations of her spirit seems
impossible. She entered upon a new life when her love began; and
it is as easy to conceive that there is one Life Giver to the
body, and another to the spirit, as that this progression is not
the highest work of God on earth, and its results abounding to His
praise.... To those who know them as I know them, they appear
already possessed of an experience in comparison with which it
would appear little to have looked abroad from the Andes, or
explored the treasure-caves of the deep, or to have conversed with
every nation under the sun. If they could see all that the eyes of
the firmament look upon, and hear all the whispered secrets that
the roving winds bear in their bosoms, they could learn but little
new; for the deepest mysteries are those of human love, and the
vastest knowledge is that of the human heart."
Even more vividly, at a later period, she told something of her
experiences in one of her fictions, under the guise of a conversation
between a young husband and wife:--
"Do you really think there are any people that have passed through
life without knowing what that moment was, that stir in one's
heart on being first sure that one is beloved? It is most like the
soul getting free of the body and rushing into Paradise, I should
think. Do you suppose anybody ever lived a life without having
felt this?"
Walter feared it might be so; but, if so, a man missed the moment
that made a man of one that was but an unthinking creature before;
and a woman the moment best worth living for....
"It seems to me," said Effie, "that though God has kindly given
this token of blessedness to all--or to so many that we may nearly
say all--without distinction of great or humble, rich or poor, the
great and the lowly use themselves to the opposite faults. The
great do not seem to think it the most natural thing to marry
where they first love; and the lowly are too ready to love."
"That is because the great have too many things to look to besides
love; and the lowly have too few. The rich have their lighted
palaces to bask in, as well as the sunshine; and they must have a
host of admirers, as well as one bosom friend. And when the poor
man finds that there is one bliss that no power on earth can shut
him out from, and one that drives out all evils for the time--one
that makes him forget the noon-day heats, and one that tempers the
keen north wind, and makes him walk at his full height when his
superiors lounge past him in the street--no wonder he is eager to
meet it, and jogs the time-glass to make it come at the soonest.
If such a man is imprudent, I had rather be he than one that first
lets it slip through cowardice, and would then bring it back to
gratify his low ambition!"
"And for those who let it go by for conscience sake, and do not
ask for it again?"
"Why, they are happy in having learned what _the one feeling is
that life is worth living for_. They may make themselves happy upon
it for ever, after that. Oh! Effie, you would not believe, nothing
could make you believe, what I was the day before and the day after
I saw that sudden change of look of yours that told me all. The one
day, I was shrinking inwardly from everything I had to do, and
every word of my father's, and everybody I met; and was always
trying to make myself happy in myself alone, with the sense of God
being near me and with me. The other day, I looked down upon
everybody, in a kindly way; and yet I looked up to them, too, for I
felt a respect that I never knew before for all that were suffering
and enjoying; and I felt as if I could have brought the whole world
nearer to God, if they would have listened to me. I shall never
forget the best moment of all--when my mind had suddenly ceased
being in a great tumult, which had as much pain as pleasure in it.
When I said distinctly to myself, 'She loves me,' Heaven came down
round about me that minute."[4]
[4] _Illustrations of Political Economy_: "A Tale of the
Tyne," pp. 54, _et seq._ This passage is doubly interesting
from the fact that Mr. Malthus, the discoverer of the
Population Law, sent specially to thank her for having
written it.
This tells how Harriet Martineau could love in her youth. Perhaps the
stream ran all the more powerfully for its course being checked; for
it was over three years after she met and became attached to Mr.
Worthington before their love was allowed to be declared, and their
engagement was permitted--a long period for hope and fear to do their
painful office in the soul, a long test of the reality of the love on
both sides.
Her extensive and deep studies, her sufferings and inward strivings
from her deafness, and the joys and anxieties of her love, were the
chief moulding influences of her early womanhood. We shall soon see
how she came to seek expression for the results of all these in
literature.
CHAPTER III.
EARLIEST WRITINGS.
Harriet Martineau's first attempt to write for publication was made in
the same year that her acquaintance with Mr. Worthington was formed; in
1822, when she was twenty years old. It was, apparently, at the close
of the vacation in which Worthington had visited his friend Martineau
at Norwich, that she commenced a paper with the design of offering it
to the Unitarian magazine, _The Monthly Repository_. She had told James
that when he had returned to college she should be miserable, and he
had, with equal kindness and sense, advised her to try to forget her
feelings about the parting by an attempt at authorship. On a bright
September morning, therefore, when she had seen him start by the early
coach, soon after six, she sat down in her own room with a supply of
foolscap paper before her to write her first article.
The account which she--writing from memory--gives in her autobiography,
of this little transaction, is curiously inaccurate, as far as the
trifling details are concerned. Her own statement is that she took
the letter "V" for her signature, and that she found her paper
printed in the next number of the magazine, "and in the 'Notices to
Correspondents' a request to hear more from 'V' of Norwich." Her little
errors about these facts must be corrected, because the truth of the
matter is at once suggestive and amusing.
The article may be found in the _Monthly Repository_ for October, 1822.
It is signed, not "V," but "Discipulus." This, it need hardly be
pointed out, is the _masculine_ form of the Latin for learner, or
apprentice. The note in the correspondents' column is not in that same
month's magazine; but in the number for the succeeding month, the
editor says in his answers to correspondents: "The continuation of
'Discipulus' has come to hand. _His_ other proposed communications will
probably be acceptable." If more proofs than these were required that
the youthful authoress had presented herself to her editor in a manly
disguise, it would be furnished by a passage in one of these
"Discipulus" articles, in which she definitely figures herself as a
masculine writer, speaking of "our sex" (_i.e._ the male sex) as a man
would do. The interesting fact is thus disclosed that Harriet Martineau
adds another to the group of the most eminent women writers of this
century who thought it necessary to assume the masculine sex in order
to obtain a fair hearing and an impartial judgment for their earliest
work. Surely, as our "Discipulus" takes her place in this list with
George Eliot, George Sand, and Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, a great
deal is disclosed to us about how women in the past have had to make
their way to recognition _against the tide_ of public opinion.
That first printed essay is interesting because it was the precursor
of so long a course of literary work, rather than for itself. Yet it
is not without its own interest, and is very far indeed from being the
crude, imperfect performance of the ordinary amateur. The subject is
"Female Writers of Practical Divinity." Here are the first words that
Harriet Martineau uttered through the press:
"I do not know whether it has been remarked by others as well as
myself, that some of the finest and most useful English works on the
subject of practical Divinity are by female authors. I suppose it is
owing to the peculiar susceptibility of the female mind, and its
consequent warmth of feeling, that its productions, when they are
really valuable, find a more ready way to the heart than those of the
other sex; and it gives me great pleasure to see women gifted with
superior talents applying those talents to promote the cause of
religion and virtue."
There is nothing remarkable in the literary form of this first
article. How soon she came to have a style of her own, vivid,
stirring, and instinct with a powerful individuality, may have been
gathered already from the quotations given in our last chapter. But in
her first paper the style is coldly correct; imitative of good but
severe models, and displaying none of the writer's individuality. Two
points as regards the matter of the essay are of special interest, and
thoroughly characteristic. It is interesting, in the first place, to
know that she who was destined to do probably more than any other one
woman of her century for the enlargement of the sphere of her sex in
the field of letters, should have written her first article on the
subject of the capacity of women to teach through their writings. The
second point worth noticing is that her idea of "practical Divinity"
is simply, good conduct. Theological disputation and dogma do not
disturb her pages. Her view of practical Divinity is that it teaches
morals; and it is largely because the women to whose writings she
draws attention have occupied themselves with the attempt to trace out
rules of conduct, that she is interested in their writings, and
rejoices in their labors. Indeed, she only alludes once to the
opinions on dogmatic theology of the writers whom she quotes, and then
she does it only to put aside with scorn the idea that morality and
teaching should be rejected because of differences upon points of
theology.
Encouraged by the few stately words with which the editor of the
_Repository_ had received the offer of more contributions, "Discipulus"
continued his literary labors, and the result appeared in a paper on
"Female Education," published in the _Monthly Repository_ of February,
1823. This is a noble and powerful appeal for the higher education of
girls and the full development of all the powers of our sex. It is
written with gentleness and tact, but it courageously asserts and
demands much that was strange indeed to the tone of that day, though it
has become quite commonplace in ours.
The author (supposed to be a man, be it remembered,) disclaimed any
intention of proving that the minds of women were equal to those of
men, but only desired to show that what little powers the female
intellect might possess should be fully cultivated. Nevertheless, the
fact was pointed out that women had seldom had a chance of showing how
near they might be able to equal men intellectually, for while the lad
was at the higher school and college, preparing his mind for a future,
"the girl is probably confined to low pursuits, her aspirings after
knowledge are subdued, she is taught to believe that solid information
is unbecoming her sex; almost her whole time is expended on low
accomplishments, and thus, before she is sensible of her powers, they
are checked in their growth and chained down to mean objects, to rise
no more; and when the natural consequences of this mode of treatment
are seen, all mankind agree that the abilities of women are far
inferior to those of men." Having shown reasons to believe that women
would take advantage of higher opportunities if such were allowed
them, "Discipulus" maintained in detail that the cultivation of their
minds would improve them for all the accepted feminine duties of life,
charitable, domestic and social, and that the consequent elevation of
the female character would react beneficially on the male; cited the
works of a cluster of eminent authoresses, as showing that women could
think upon "the noblest subjects that can exercise the human mind;"
and closed with the following paragraph, wherein occurred the phrases
by which it is shown that our "Discipulus" of twenty is masquerading
as a man, more decisively even than by the termination of the Latin
_nom de guerre_:
"I cannot better conclude than with the hope that these examples of
what may be done may excite a noble emulation in _their own_ sex, and
in _ours_ such a conviction of the value of the female mind, as shall
overcome _our_ long-cherished prejudices, and induce _us_ to give _our_
earnest endeavors to the promotion of _women's_ best interests."
It is most interesting to thus discover that Harriet Martineau's first
writings were upon that "woman question" which she lived to see make
such wonderful advances, and which she so much forwarded, both by her
direct advocacy, and by the indirect influence of the proof which she
afforded, that a woman may be a thinker upon high topics and a teacher
and leader of men in practical politics, and yet not only be
irreproachable in her private life, but even show herself throughout
it, in the best sense, truly feminine.
Harriet contributed nothing more to the _Monthly Repository_ after this
(so far as can now be ascertained), for a considerable time. Encouraged
by the success of her first attempts with periodicals, she commenced a
book of a distinctly religious character, which was issued in the
autumn of the same year, 1823, by Hunter, of St. Paul's Churchyard.
The little volume was published anonymously. Its title-page runs thus:
"_Devotional Exercises_; consisting of Reflections and Prayers for the
use of Young Persons. To which is added an Address on Baptism. By a
lady."
The character of the work is perhaps sufficiently indicated by the
title. But it would be a mistake to suppose that the book is a
commonplace one. It contains a good deal of dogmatism and many
platitudes. It contains, likewise, however, many a noble thought and
many a high aspiration, expressed in words equally flowing and fervent.
A "Reflection" (something like a short sermon) and a prayer are
supplied for each morning and each evening of the seven days of the
week. She had already attained to such an insight into the human mind
as to recognize that religious devotion is an exercise of the emotions.
Proof, too, is given in this little work of the fullness with which she
realized that true religion must be expressed by service to mankind; to
those nearest to one first, and afterwards to others; and indeed, that
a high sense of social duty, with a fervent and unselfish devotion to
it, _is_ religion, rather than either the spiritual dram-drinking, or
the dogmatic irrationality to which that name of high import is
frequently applied.
The prayers in this little volume differ much from the supplications
for personal benefits which are commonly called prayers.
These are rather aspirations, or meditations. The highest moral
attributes, personified in God, are held up for the worship of the
imperfect human creature, with fervent aspiration to approach as
nearly as possible towards that light of unsullied goodness.
The lack of petitions for material benefits which appears in these
"Devotions" was by no means unconscious, instinctive, or accidental.
She had deliberately given up the practice of praying for personal
benefits, partly because she held that, since it is impossible for us
to foresee how far our highest interests may be served or hindered by
changes in our external circumstances, it is not for us to attempt to
indicate, or even to form a desire, as to what those circumstances
shall be. As regarded the emotional side of her religion, she had come
to prefer to leave herself and her fate to the unquestioned direction
of a higher power.
But there was more than this in it. In her philosophical studies, she
had, of course, met with the eternal debates of metaphysicians and
theologians on Foreknowledge, Fate, and Freedom of the Will. The
difficult question had, indeed, presented itself to her active and
acute young mind long before those studies began. She remembered that
when she was but eleven years old she found courage to offer her
questionings upon this point to her elder brother Thomas. She asked:
If God foreknew from eternity all the evil deeds that every one of us
should do in our lives, how can He justly punish us for those actions,
when the time comes that we are born, and in due course commit them?
Her brother replied merely that she was not yet old enough to
understand the point. The answer did not satisfy the child. She knew
that if she were old enough to feel the difficulty, she must also be
mentally fit to receive some kind of explanation. But under the
pastoral influence of Dr. Carpenter, the emotional side of her
religion was cultivated, and such doubts and difficulties of the
reason were put away for the time.
Not for all time, however, could the problem be shirked by so active,
logical, and earnest a mind. It recurred to her when she was left to
her own spiritual guidance. Long before the date of these "Devotions"
she had fought out the battle in her own mind, and had reached the
standpoint from which her Prayers are written. She had convinced
herself of the truth of the Necessitarian doctrine, that we are what
we are, we do what we do, because of the impulses given by our
previous training and circumstances; and that the way to amend any
human beings or all mankind is to improve their education, and to give
them good surroundings and influences, and mental associations; in
short, that physical and psychological phenomena alike depend upon
antecedent phenomena, called causes.
As soon as she had thus settled her mind in the doctrine of Necessity,
she perceived that prayer, in the ordinary sense of the term, had
become impossible. If it be believed that all that happens in the
world is the consequence of the course of the events which have
happened before, it is clear that no petitions can alter the state of
things at any given moment. A belief in the efficacy of "besieging
Heaven with prayers" implies a supposition that a Supreme Ruler of the
Universe interferes arbitrarily with the sequence of events. Those
whose minds are clear that no such arbitrary interference ever does
take place, but that, on the contrary, like events always and
invariably follow from like causes, cannot rationally ask for this
fundamental rule of the government of the universe to be set aside for
their behoof; even although they may believe in an all-powerful Divine
Ruler, who has appointed this sequence of events for the law under
which His creatures shall live and develop.
Still, however, Harriet Martineau supplicated for spiritual benefits,
as we have seen in the little volume of _Devotional Exercises_. These
aspirations not only gave her an emotional satisfaction, but were, she
then thought, justifiable on necessitarian principles; for each time
that we place our minds in a certain attitude we increase their "set"
in the same direction; and she believed at that time that a holy life
was in this way aided by frequent reflections on and aspirations
towards the highest ideal of holiness personified in the name of God.
Her religious belief was, then, pure Theism. To her, it was still very
good to be a worshipper of Jehovah, the Eternal Presence, the
Ever-living Supreme; and Jesus was His Messenger, the highest type
that He had ever permitted to be revealed to man of the excellencies
of the divine nature. But there was no Atonement, no personal Evil
One, no hell, no verbally-inspired revelation in her creed.
It will be unnecessary to say more about her theological beliefs till
the next twenty years have been recorded, for in that period there was
substantially no change in her views. There did come, indeed, a change
in her method of self-management and in her opinions as to the way in
which religious feelings should affect daily life. She soon concluded
that we are best when least self-conscious about our own goodness, and
that, therefore, we should rely upon receiving inspiration to right
and elevated feelings from passing influences, and should refrain from
putting our minds, by a regular exercise of volition, into affected
postures in anticipation of those high emotions which we cannot
command. Under these beliefs she soon ceased all formal prayer.
Meantime she was still, at twenty-one years old, in the condition of
mind to write _Devotional Exercises_.
The little book met with a favorable acceptance among the Unitarians,
and speedily went into the second edition. Thus encouraged, Harriet
began another volume of the same character. Such work could not
proceed very fast, however, for her domestic duties were not light,
and her writing was still looked upon in her family as a mere
recreation. She labored under all the disadvantages of the amateur.
But events soon began to crowd into her life to alter this view of the
case, and to prepare the way for her beginning to do the work of her
life in the only fashion in which such labor can be effectively
carried on--as a serious occupation, the principal feature of every
day's duties.
After a long period of poverty and distress, caused by the Napoleonic
wars, England, in 1824, experienced the special dangers of a time of
rapidly increasing wealth. There was more real wealth in the country,
owing to the expansion of trade, which followed on the re-opening of
the continent to our commerce, but speculation made this development
appear far greater than it was in reality.
There was, at that time, no sort of check upon the issue of paper
money. Not only did the Bank of England send out notes without limit;
not only could every established bank multiply its drafts recklessly;
but any small tradesman who pleased might embark in the same business,
and put forth paper money without check or control. Thus there was
money in abundance, the rate of interest was low, and prices rose.
The natural and inevitable consequence of this state of things, at a
moment when trade was suddenly revived, was a rage for speculation.
Not only merchants and manufacturers were seized with this epidemic;
the desire for higher profits than could be obtained by quiet and
perfectly safe investments spread amongst every class. "As for what
the speculation was like, it can hardly be recorded on the open page
of history without a blush. Besides the joint-stock companies who
undertook baking, washing, baths, life insurance, brewing,
coal-portage, wool-growing, and the like, there was such a rage for
steam navigation, canals and railroads, that in the session of 1825,
438 petitions for private Bills were presented, and 286 private Acts
were passed.... It is on record that a single share of a mine on which
L70 had been paid, yielded 200 per cent, having risen speedily to a
premium of L1400 per share."[5]
[5] Harriet Martineau's _History of the Peace_, book ii,
p. 8.
Periods of such inflation invariably and necessarily close in scenes
of disaster. Gold becomes scarce; engagements that have been
recklessly entered into cannot be met; goods have been produced in
response to a speculative instead of a legitimate demand, and
therefore will not sell; the locked-up capital cannot be released, nor
can it be temporarily supplied, except upon ruinous terms. Panic
commences; it spreads over the business world like fire over the dry
prairies. The badly-managed banks and the most speculative business
houses begin to totter; the weakest of them fall, and the crash brings
down others like a house of cards; and in the depreciation of goods
and the disappearance of capital, the prudent, sagacious and honorable
merchant suffers for the folly, the recklessness, the avarice and the
dishonesty of others.
Such a crash came, from such causes, in the early winter of 1825.
Harriet Martineau's father was one of those injured by the panic,
without having been a party to the errors which produced it. He had
resisted the speculative mania, and allowed it to sweep by him to its
flood. It was, therefore, by no fault of his own that he was caught by
the ebbing wave, and carried backwards, to be stranded in the
shallows. His house did not fail; but the struggle was a cruel one for
many months. How severe the crisis was may be judged from the fact
that between sixty and seventy banks stopped payment within six weeks.
The strain of this business anxiety told heavily upon the already
delicate health of Mr. Thomas Martineau. In the early spring of 1826
it became clear that his days were numbered. Up to the commencement of
that troubled winter it had been supposed that his daughters would be
amply provided for in the event of his death. But so much had been
lost in the crisis, that he found himself, in his last weeks,
compelled to alter his will, and was only able to leave to his wife
and daughters a bare maintenance. He lingered on till June, and in
that month he died.
It was while Mr. Martineau lay ill, that Harriet's second book,
_Addresses, Prayers, and Hymns_, passed through the press, and the
dying father took great interest and found great comfort in his child's
work. Much of it he must have read with feelings rendered solemn by his
situation.
This little volume so closely resembles the _Devotional Exercises_,
that it is unnecessary to refer to it at greater length. The hymns,
which are the special feature of this volume, do not call for much
notice. They are not quite commonplace; but verse was not Harriet's
natural medium of expression: she wrote a considerable quantity of it
in her early days, as most young authors do; but she soon came to see
for herself that her gift of expression in its most elevated form was
rather that which makes the orator than the poet.
The comparative poverty to which the family were reduced on Mr.
Martineau's death at once freed Harriet, to a considerable extent,
from the obstacles which had previously been interposed to her
spending time in writing. It was still far from being recognized that
literature was to be her profession; but it was obvious that if her
pen could bring any small additions to her income they would be very
serviceable. A friend gave her an introduction to Mr. Houlston, then
publishing at Wellington, Shropshire; and a few little tales, which
she had lying by, were offered to him. He accepted them, issued them
in tiny volumes, and paid her five guineas for the copyright of each
story. This, then, was the beginning of Harriet Martineau's
professional authorship.
CHAPTER IV.
GRIEF STRUGGLE AND PROGRESS.
The loss of pecuniary position did something more for Harriet
Martineau besides opening the way to work in literature. The knowledge
that she was now poor gave her lover courage to declare himself, and
to seek her for his wife. Poverty, therefore, brought her that
experience which is so much in a woman's mental history, however
little it, perhaps, goes for in a man's. A love in youth, fervent,
powerful, and pure; a love, happy and successful in the essential
point that it is reciprocated by its object, however fate may deny it
outward fruition; such a love once filling a woman's soul, sweetens it
and preserves it for her whole life through. Pity the shriveled and
decayed old hearts which were not thus embalmed in youth! Harriet
Martineau did have this precious experience; and her womanliness of
nature remained fresh and true and sweet to the end of her days
because of it.
There may be many married women old maids in heart--to be so is the
punishment of those who marry without love; and there are many, like
Harriet Martineau, who are single in life, but whose hearts have been
mated, and so made alive. I do not know that she would have gained by
marriage, in any way, except in the chance of motherhood, a yet
greater fact than love itself to a woman. On the other hand, her work
must have been hindered by the duties of married life, even if her
marriage had been thoroughly happy, and her lot free from exceptional
material cares. Matronage is a profession in itself. The duties of a
wife and mother, as domestic life is at present arranged, absorb much
time and strength, and so diminish the possibilities of intellectual
labor. Moreover, the laws regulating marriage are still, and fifty
years ago were far more, in a very bad state; and, leaving a woman
wholly dependent for fair treatment, whether as a wife or mother, upon
the mercy and goodness of the man she marries, justify Harriet
Martineau's observation: "The older I have grown, the more serious
have seemed to me the evils and disadvantages of married life, as it
exists among us at this time." The wife who is beloved and treated as
an equal partner in life, the mother whose natural rights in the
guardianship of her family are respected, the mistress of a home in
which she is the sunshine of husband and children, must ever be the
happiest of women. But far better is it to be as Harriet Martineau
was--a widow of the heart by death--than to have the affections torn
through long years by neglect and cruelty, springing less from natural
badness than from the evil teaching of vile laws and customs. Fifty
years ago marriage was a dangerous step for a woman; and Harriet
Martineau had reason for saying at last: "Thus, I am not only entirely
satisfied with my lot, but think it the very best for me."
For a while, however, the happy prospect of a beloved wifehood cheered
her struggling and anxious life. But it was not for long. Her actual
and acknowledged engagement lasted, I believe, only a few months. Mr.
Worthington had, at this time, but lately completed his course as a
Divinity student; and he had been appointed to the joint charge of a
very large Unitarian Church at Manchester. Conscientiousness was one
of the most marked features of his character, according to his college
friend; and Harriet herself declares that she "venerated his moral
nature." He had thrown himself into the very heavy pastoral work
committed to him with all the devotion of this high characteristic.
Moreover, the long doubt and suspense of his love for her before their
engagement, had, doubtless, worked unfavorably upon his nervous
system. The end of it was, that he was suddenly seized with a brain
fever, in which he became delirious. He was removed to his father's
home in Leicestershire, to be nursed; and in process of time, the
fever was subdued. But the mind did not regain its balance. He was
still, as she says, "insane"; but from one of her dear and early
friends, I hear that "his family did not call it insanity,"--only a
feeble and unhinged state, from which recovery might have been
expected hopefully.
In this state of things it was thought desirable that the woman he
loved should be brought to see him. The beloved presence, his
physician believed, might revive old impressions and happy
anticipations, and might be the one thing needful to induce a
favorable change in his condition. His mother wrote to beg Harriet
Martineau to come to him; Harriet eagerly sought her mother's
permission to hasten to his side; and Mrs. Martineau forbade her
daughter to go. The old habit of obedience to her mother, and the
early implanted ideas of filial duty, were too strong for Harriet at
once to break through them; she did not defy her mother and go; and in
a few more weeks--terrible weeks of doubt and mental storm they must
have been, between her love and her obedience dragging her different
ways--Worthington died, and left her to her life of heart-widowhood,
darkened by this shadow of arbitrary separation to the last. "The
calamity was aggravated to me," she says, "by the unaccountable
insults I received from his family, whom I had never seen. Years
after, the mystery was explained. They had been given to understand,
by cautious insinuation, that I was actually engaged to another while
receiving my friend's addresses." They had not appreciated how
submissive she was as a daughter; and their belief that her love was
insincere was not an unnatural one in the circumstances.
Had those relatives of the dead lover lived to read Harriet Martineau's
Autobiography, they would not have been made to think differently of
her feelings towards him; for there she goes calmly on, after the
passage above quoted, to say only: "Considering what I was in those
days, it was happiest for us both that our union was prevented." As we
have had to look outside the Autobiography for a record of what love
was to her, and what it did for her, so we must seek elsewhere for the
cry of agony which tells how she felt her loss. But the record exists;
it is found in an essay entitled _In a Death Chamber_, one of that
autobiographical series published in _The Monthly Repository_, from
which I have previously quoted.
This beautiful piece of writing--far more of a poem in essence than
anything which she ever published in verse--is spoiled as a
composition by mutilation in quoting. But its length leaves me no
option but to select from it only a few of the more confessional
passages, to aid us in our psychological study:
This weary watch! In watching by the couch of another there is no
weariness; but this lonely tending of one's own sick heart is more
than the worn-out spirit can bear. What an age of woe since the
midnight clock gave warning that my first day of loneliness was
beginning--to others a Sabbath, to me a day of expiation.
All is dull, cold and dreary before me, until I also can escape to
the region where there is no bereavement, no blasting root and
branch, no rending of the heart-strings. What is aught to me, in
the midst of this all-pervading, thrilling torture, when all I
want is to be dead? The future is loathsome, and I will not look
upon it; the past, too, which it breaks my heart to think
about--what has it been? It might have been happy, if there is
such a thing as happiness; but I myself embittered it at the time,
and for ever. What a folly has mine been! Multitudes of sins now
rise up in the shape of besetting griefs. Looks of rebuke from
those now in the grave; thoughts which they would have rebuked if
they had known them; moments of anger, of coldness; sympathy
withheld when looked for; repression of its signs through selfish
pride; and worse, far worse even than this ... all comes over me
now. O! if there be pity, if there be pardon, let it come in the
form of insensibility; for these long echoes of condemnation will
make me desperate.
But was there ever human love unwithered by crime--by crime of
which no human law takes cognizance, but the unwritten everlasting
laws of the affections? Many will call me thus innocent. The
departed breathed out thanks and blessing, and I felt them not
then as reproaches. If, indeed, I am only as others, shame, shame
on the impurity of human affections; or, rather, alas! for the
infirmity of the human heart! For I know not that I could love
more than I have loved.
Since the love itself is wrecked, let me gather up its relics, and
guard them more tenderly, more steadily, more gratefully. This
seems to open up glimpses of peace. O grant me power to retain
them--the light and music of emotion, the flow of domestic wisdom
and chastened mirth, the life-long watchfulness of benevolence,
the thousand thoughts--are these gone in their reality? Must I
forget them as others forget?
If I were to see _my_ departed one--that insensible, wasted
form--standing before me as it was wont to stand, with whom would
I exchange my joy?... But it is not possible to lose all. The
shadows of the past may have as great power as their substance
ever had, and the spirit of human love may ever be nigh, invested
with a majesty worthy to succeed the lustre of its mortal days.
This is the poem of Harriet Martineau's love. This is what remains to
show that the girl whose intellect was so powerful, and who had
habitually and of choice exercised her mind upon the most abstruse
studies and the most difficult thoughts which can engage the
attention, could nevertheless feel at least as fervently, and deliver
herself up to her emotions at least as fully, as any feeble, ignorant,
or narrow-minded creature that ever lived. Surely, with the truth
emphasized by such an example, the common but stupid delusion that the
development of the intellect diminishes the capacity for passion and
tenderness, must fade away! This girl's mental power and her mental
culture were both unusually large; but here is the core of her heart,
and is it not verily womanly?
This experience did more than give her hours of happiness; it did more
than bring to her that enlargement of the spirit which she so well
described; for it taught her to appreciate, and to properly value, the
influence of the emotions in life. Never in one of her works, never in
a single phrase, is she found guilty of that blasphemy against the
individual affections, into which some who have yet sought to pose as
high priests of the religion of humanity have fallen and lost
themselves. In all her writings one finds the continual recognition of
the great truth which was in the mind of him who said: "If a man love
not his brother whom he hath seen, how shall he love God whom he hath
not seen?"--a truth of the very first consequence to those who aim at
expressing their religion by service to the progress of mankind.
The year 1826, to Harriet crowded so full of trouble, came to an end
soon after Mr. Worthington's death. In the following year, though she
was in very bad health, she wrote a vast quantity of manuscript. Some
of it was published at once. Other portions waited in her desk for a
couple of years, when her contributions to _The Monthly Repository_
recommenced, after a change in its editorship.
She wrote in the year 1827 various short stories, which were published
by Houlston, of Shrewsbury, without her name on their title-pages.
Their character may be guessed by the fact that they were circulated
as Mrs. Sherwood's writings! In tone, they resemble the ordinary
Sunday-school story-book; but there is a fire, an earnestness, and an
originality often discoverable in them which are enough to mark them
out from common hack-writing. Two of them, _The Rioters_ and _The Turn
Out_, deal with topics of political economy; but the questions were
thought out (very accurately) in her own mind, for at that time she
had never read a book upon the subject.
These little stories were so successful that the publisher invited her
to write a longer one, which should have her name attached to it. She
went to work, accordingly, and produced a good little tale, of one
hundred and fifty pages of print, which she called _Principle and
Practice_. It recounts the struggles of an orphan family in their
efforts after independence. As in all her writings of this kind, her
own experience is interfused into the fiction. No part of this story
is so interesting as that where a young man who has met with an
accident has to reconcile his mind to the anticipation of life-long
lameness--as she to deafness. The sisters of this orphan family, too,
make money by a kind of fancy-work by which she herself was earning a
few guineas from the wealthier members of her family, namely, by
cutting bags and baskets out of pasteboard, fitting them together with
silk and gold braid, and painting plaques upon their sides. _Principle
and Practice_ was so warmly received in the circle to which it was
suited that the publisher called for a sequel, which was accordingly
written early in the following year.
There was a vast quantity of writing in all these publications; and,
besides this, she was continually at work with her needle. Such
unremitting sedentary occupation, together with her sorrow, caused a
serious illness, from which she suffered during 1828. It was an
affection of the liver and stomach, for which she went to be treated
by her brother-in-law, Mr. Greenhow, a surgeon at Newcastle-on-Tyne.
Her remarkable powers of steady application, and her untiring industry,
were always[6] amongst her most noteworthy characteristics--as,
indeed, is proved by the vast quantity of work she achieved. In each
of her various illnesses, friends who had watched with wonder and
alarm how much she wrote, and how unceasingly she worked, either with
pen, or book, or needle in hand, told her that her suffering was
caused by her merciless industry. Her "staying power" was great; she
rarely felt utterly exhausted, and therefore she was impatient of
being told that she had, in fact, over-exerted her strength.
Sometimes, indeed, she admitted that she worked too much, and pleaded
only that she could not help it--that the work needed doing, or that
the thoughts pressed for utterance, and she could not refuse the call
of duty. But more often she said, as in a letter to Mr. Atkinson,
which lies before me, "My best aid and support in the miseries of my
life has been in _work_--in the intellectual labor which I believe has
done me nothing but good." So her immense industry in 1827 may have
seemed to her a relief from her heart-sorrows at the moment; but none
the less it probably was the chief cause of her partial breakdown in
the next year. A blister relieves internal inflammation; but a
succession of such stimuli too long continued will exhaust the
strength, and render the condition more critical than it would have
been without such treatment.
[6] "I should think there never was such an industrious
lady," said the maid who was with her for the last eleven
years of her life; "when I caught sight of her, just once,
leaning back in her chair, with her arms hanging down, and
looking as though she wasn't even thinking about anything,
it gave me quite a turn. I felt she _must_ be ill to sit
like that!"
At Newcastle there was a brief cessation from work, under the doctor's
orders. But in the middle of 1828 Harriet began to write again for the
_Repository_, in response to an appeal put forth by the editor for
gratuitous literary aid. That editor was the well-known Unitarian
preacher, William Johnston Fox, of South Place Chapel. Mr. Fox became
Harriet Martineau's first literary friend. He had no money with which
to reward her work for his magazine; but he paid her amply in a course
of frank, full, and generous private criticism and encouragement. "His
correspondence with me," she says, "was unquestionably the occasion,
and, in great measure, the cause, of the greatest intellectual
progress I ever made before the age of thirty." Mr. Fox was so acute a
critic that he ere long predicted that "she would be one of the first
authors of the age if she continued to write;" while, at the same
time, he offered suggestions for improvement, and made corrections in
her work upon occasion. Her advance in literary capacity was now very
rapid. Her style went on improving, as it should do, till her latest
years; but it now first became an _individual_ one, easy, flowing,
forcible, and often most moving and eloquent.
During the latter half of 1828 and the early part of the succeeding
year, she contributed, more or less, to nearly every monthly number of
the _Repository_, without receiving any payment. She wrote essays,
poems, and so-called reviews, which last, however, were really
thoughtful and original papers, suggested by the subject of a new
book. Some of these contributions were signed "V"; but others,
including all the reviews, were anonymous.
Most of these articles are on philosophical subjects, and are written
with the calmness of style suitable to logical and argumentative
essays. In the _Repository_ for February, 1829, and the succeeding
month, for instance, there appeared two papers, headed, "On the Agency
of Feelings in the Formation of Habits," which are simply an accurate,
clear, and forcibly-reasoned statement of the philosophical doctrine
of Association, with which that of Necessity is inseparably connected.
These were, it has been already observed, the theories by which she
was learning both to guide her own action and to see that society is
moulded, however unconsciously, as regards most of the individuals
composing it. A clearer statement of the doctrines, or a more forcible
indication of how they can be made to serve as a moral impulse, cannot
be imagined. Here is very different work from _Devotional Exercises_,
or _Principle and Practice_. But it brought its author neither fame
nor money.
Another piece of work done in 1828, or early in the following year,
was a _Life of Howard_, which was written on a positive commission
from a member of the Committee of Lord Brougham's "Society for the
Diffusion of Useful Knowledge," who promised her thirty pounds for it.
The MS. was at first said to be lost at the office; eventually she
found that its contents were liberally cribbed by the writer of the
_Life_ which was published; but she never received a penny of the
promised payment. These were her times of stress, and struggle, and
suffering, and disappointment, in literature as in ordinary life. Her
great success, when at last it did come, was so sudden that her
previous work was obscured and pushed out of sight in the blaze of
triumph. But these years of labor, unrecognized and almost unrewarded,
must not be left out of our view, if we would judge fairly of her
character. Courage, resolution, self-reliance, determination to
conquer in a field once entered upon, are displayed by her quiet
industrious perseverance through those laborious years. Harriet
Martineau did not make a sudden and easy rush far up the ladder of
fame all at once; her climb, like that of most great men and women,
was arduous and slow, and her final success proved not only that she
had literary ability, but also the strength of character which could
work on while waiting for recognition.
Fresh trouble was yet impending. After Mr. Martineau's death, his son
Henry remained a partner in the weaving business which the father had
carried on so long; and the incomes (small, but sufficient for a
maintenance) of the widow and unmarried daughters had to be paid out
of the profits of the factory. Just three years after Mr. Martineau's
death, however, in June, 1829, the old house became bankrupt, with but
small assets. Mrs. Martineau and her daughters were thus deprived
suddenly of all means of support.
The whole family met this final blow to their fortunes with calm
courage. It was soon settled that the two girls who possessed all
their senses should go out to teach; but Harriet could not be set to
work in the same way--for pupils could not easily be found who would
say their lessons into an ear-trumpet. The husband of the lady brought
up by Mrs. Martineau with her youngest daughter tells me that upon
this occasion Harriet's mother said to her adopted child, "I have no
fear for any of my daughters, except poor Harriet; the others can
work, but, with her deafness, I do not know how _she_ can ever earn
her own bread!"
The first resource for Harriet was fancy work of different kinds. "I
could make shirts and puddings," she declares, "and iron, and mend,
and get my bread by my needle, if necessary--as it was necessary, for
a few months, before I won a better place and occupation with my pen."
During the winter which followed the failure of the old Norwich house,
she spent the entire daylight hours poring over fancy-work, by which
alone she could with certainty earn money. But she did not lay aside
the sterner implement of labor for that bright little bread-winner,
the needle. After dark she began a long day's literary labor in her
own room.
Every night, I believe, I was writing till two, or even three, in
the morning, obeying always the rule of the house of being present
at the breakfast-table as the clock struck eight. Many a time I
was in such a state of nervous exhaustion and distress that I was
obliged to walk to and fro in the room before I could put on paper
the last line of a page, or the last half-sentence of an essay or
review. Yet was I very happy. The deep-felt sense of progress and
expansion was delightful; and so was the exertion of all my
faculties; and not least, that of Will to overcome my
obstructions, and force my way to that power of public speech of
which I believed myself more or less worthy.
She offered the results of this nightly literary toil to a great
number of magazine editors and publishers, but without the slightest
success. Totally unknown in London society, having no literary friends
or connections beyond the editor of the obscure magazine of her sect,
her manuscripts were scarcely looked at. Everything that she wrote was
returned upon her hands, until she offered it in despair to the
_Monthly Repository_, where she was as invariably successful. Her
work, when published there, however, brought her not an atom of fame,
and only the most trifling pecuniary return. She wrote to Mr. Fox,
when she found herself penniless, to tell him that it would be
impossible for her to continue to render as much gratuitous service as
she had been doing to the _Repository_; but he could only reply that
the means at his disposal were very limited, and that the utmost he
could offer her was L15 a year, for which she was to write "as much as
she thought proper." With this letter he forwarded her a parcel of
nine books to review, as a commencement. A considerable portion of the
space in his magazine was filled by Miss Martineau for the next two
years on these terms.
The essay previously referred to, on the "Agency of Feelings in the
Formation of Habits," which appeared in the _Repository_ for February
and March, 1829, was Harriet Martineau's first marked work. It was
followed up by a series, commencing in the August of the same year, of
"Essays on the Art of Thinking," which were continued in the magazine
until December, when two chapters were given in the one number, in
order, as the editor remarked, that his readers "might possess entire
in one volume this valuable manual of the Art of Thought."
"V," the writer of these articles, was supposed to be of the superior
sex. In those days, Mr. Fox would have shown rare courage if he had
informed his readers that they were "receiving valuable instruction"
in how to exercise their ratiocinative faculties from the pen of a
woman. In the Index, I find the references run--"V.'s" "Ode to
Religious Liberty"; _his_ "Last Tree of the Forest"; _his_ "Essays
on the Art of Thinking," etc., etc.
The "Essays on the Art of Thinking" are nothing less than an outline
of Logic. In substance, they present no great originality; but they
display full internal evidence that the thoughts presented were the
writer's own, and not merely copied from authority. It is really no
light test of clearness and depth of thought to write on an abstruse
science in lucid, perspicuous fashion, giving a brief but complete
view of all its parts in their true relations. Only an accurate
thinker, with a mind both capacious and orderly, can perform such a
task. The highest function of the human mind is, doubtless, that of
the discoverer. The original thinker, he who observes his facts from
nature at first hand, who compares them, and reasons about them, and
combines them, and generalizes a principle from them, is the one whom
posterity to all time must honor and reverence for his additions to
the store of human knowledge. But not far inferior in power, and equal
in immediate usefulness, is the disciple who can judge the
originator's work, and, finding it perfectly in accordance with facts
as known to him, can receive it into his mind, arrange it in order,
deck it with illustration, illuminate it with power of language, and
represent it in a form suitable for general comprehension. There is
originality of mind needed for such work; that which is done, the
adaptation of the truths to be received to the receptive powers of the
multitude, is an original work performed upon the truths, hardly
inferior in difficulty and utility to that of him who first discerns
them. This was the class of work which Harriet Martineau was beginning
to do, and to do well. But there was more than this in her purposes.
As these articles, though vastly inferior in execution to what she
afterwards did, nevertheless show the essential characteristics of her
work, this seems to be the most favorable opportunity to pause to
inquire what was the special feature of her writings. For, various
though her subjects appear to be, ranging from the humblest topics,
such as the duties of maids-of-all-work, up to the highest themes of
mental and political philosophy, yet I find one informing idea, one
and the same moving impulse to the pen of the writer, throughout the
whole series. Let us see what it was that she really, though half
unconsciously perhaps, kept before her as her aim.
It is obvious at once that her writings are all designed to _teach_.
A little closer consideration shows that what they seek to teach is
always _what is right conduct_. Abstract truth merely as such does not
content her. She seeks its practical concrete application to daily
life. Further, not merely has she the aim of teaching morals, but she
invariably makes _facts_ and _reasonings from facts the basis_ of her
moral teachings. In other words, she approaches morals from the
scientific instead of the intuitional side; and to thus influence
conduct is the invariable final object of her writings.
It would sound simpler to say that she wrote on the science of morals.
But the term "moral science" has already been appropriated to a class
of writing than which nothing could, very often, less deserve the name
of science. The work which Harriet Martineau spent her whole life in
doing, was, however, true work in moral science. What she was ever
seeking to do was to find out how men should live from what men and
their surroundings are. She must be recognized as one of the first
thinkers to uniformly consider practical morals as derived from
reasoned science.
Many of the articles contributed to the _Repository_ were naturally,
from the character of the publication, upon theology. Much that is
noticeable might be culled from amongst them; as, indeed, could be
inferred from the fact that an able leader of her religious body
allowed her to fill so very large a portion of the pages by which,
under his guidance, the Unitarian public were instructed. In all the
essays, a distinguishing feature is the earnestness of the effort put
forth to judge the questions at issue by reason, and not by prejudice.
It is true that the effort often fails. There comes the moment at
which faith in dogma intervenes, and submerges the pure argument; but
none the less do the spirit of justice and fairness, and the love of
truth, irradiate the whole of these compositions.
Mr. Fox soon asked her if she thought that any of her ideas could be
expressed through the medium of fiction. It so happened that the
suggestion precisely fell in with a thought that had already occurred
to her that "of all delightful tasks, the most delightful would be to
describe, with all possible fidelity, the aspect of the life and land
of the Hebrews, at the critical period of the full expectation of
the Messiah." She wrote a story which she called _The Hope of the
Hebrews_, in which a company of young people, relatives and friends,
were shown as undergoing the alternations of doubt and hope about
whether this teacher was indeed Messiah, on the first appearance
of Jesus in Palestine. The day after this story appeared in the
_Repository_ Mr. Fox was at an anniversary dinner of the sect, where
so many persons spoke to him about the tale, that he wrote and
generously advised Harriet not to publish any more such stories in his
magazine, but to make a book of them. She adopted the suggestion; the
little volume was issued with her name, and proved her first decisive
success. Not only was it well circulated and highly appreciated in
England, but it was translated into French, under high ecclesiastical
sanction, and was also immediately reproduced in the United States.
While this book was in the press, she went to stay for a short time in
London. Mr. Fox, hearing from her how anxious she was to earn her
livelihood by literature, succeeded in obtaining from a printer friend
of his an offer for her to do "proof correcting and other drudgery,"
if she liked to remain in London for the work. This would have given
her a small but certain income, and there could be little doubt that,
if she stayed in London, she would gradually get into some
journalistic employment which would enable her to support herself
tolerably well. There were no great hopes in the matter. Mr. Fox told
her that "one hundred or one hundred and fifty pounds a year is as
much as our most successful writers usually make"--success here
meaning, of course, full employment in hackwork. It had not yet
occurred, even to Mr. Fox, that she was to be really a successful
author. But to do even this drudgery, and to take the poor chance now
offered to her, implied that she must make her home in London; and she
wrote to inform her mother of this fact.
The same post which carried Harriet's letter to this effect, bore to
Mrs. Martineau a second missive, from the relative with whom her
daughter was staying, which strongly advised that Harriet should be
recalled home, there to pursue the needle-work by which she had proved
she could earn money. The good lady had been wont to ask Harriet day
by day "how much she would get" for the literary labor upon which she
had expended some hours; and the poor young author's reply not being
satisfactory or precise, her hostess looked upon the time spent at the
desk as so much wasted. She gave Harriet some pieces of silk, "lilac,
blue, and pink," and advised her to keep to making little bags and
baskets, which the kind friend generously promised to assist in
disposing of for good coin of the realm.
The mother who had stood between her full-grown daughter and the bed
of a dying betrothed, now thought herself justified in interposing
between the woman of twenty-seven and the work which she desired to
undertake for her independence. Mrs. Martineau sent Harriet a stern
letter, peremptorily ordering her to return home forthwith. Bitterly
disappointed at seeing this chance of independence in the vocation she
loved thus snatched away, Harriet's sense of filial duty led her to
obey her mother's commands. She went home with a heavy heart; and with
equal sadness, her little sister of eighteen turned out of home, at
the same despotic bidding, to go a-governessing. "My mother received
me very tenderly. She had no other idea at the moment than that she
had been doing her best for my good."
Harriet did not return to Norwich entirely discouraged. Resolution
such as hers was not easily broken down. The British and Foreign
Unitarian Association had advertised three prizes for the best essays
designed to convert Roman Catholics, Jews and Mohammedans respectively
to Unitarianism. The sum offered for each was but small: ten guineas
for the Catholic, fifteen for the Jewish, and twenty for the
Mohammedan essays. But it was less the money than interest in the
cause, and desire to see if she could succeed in competition with
others, that led Harriet to form the intention of trying for _all
three_ prizes.
She went to work immediately upon the Catholic essay, which was to be
adjudicated upon six months earlier than the other two. When it was
finished, she paid a schoolboy, who wrote a good hand, a sovereign
that she could ill spare, for copying the essay, which was about
two-thirds the length of this volume. The essays were to be
superscribed, as usual in such competitions, with a motto, and the
writer's name and address had to be forwarded in a sealed envelope,
with the same motto outside. In September, 1830, she received the
gratifying news that the committee of adjudication had unanimously
awarded this prize to her.
The other two essays were commenced with the spirit induced by this
success. One of them was copied out by a poor woman, the other by a
schoolmaster. Harriet was careful even to have the two essays written
upon different sorts of paper, to do them up in differently shaped
packages, and to use separate kinds of wax and seals.
The sequel may be told, with all the freshness of the moment, in a
quotation from the _Monthly Repository_ for May, 1831: "We were about
to review it [_i.e._ the Catholic essay] when the somewhat startling
fact transpired of her having carried off the other premiums offered
by the Association's committee for tracts addressed to the Mohammedans
and the Jews. We shall not now stop to inquire how it has happened
that our ministers would not or could not prevent the honor of
championing the cause of pure Christianity against the whole
theological world from developing upon a young lady. However that
may be, she has won the honor and well deserves to wear it."
The essays were published by the Unitarian Association. There can be
little doubt that, however many ministers may have competed, the
Committee did select the best papers offered to their choice. The
learning in all is remarkable; the freedom from sectarian bitterness,
from bigotry, and from the insolent assumption of moral and religious
superiority, is even more striking, in such proselytising
compositions.
While waiting the result of the prize competition, Harriet wrote a
long story for young people, which she called _Five Years of Youth_.
It is one of the prettiest and most attractive of all her writings of
this class. It has a moral object, of course--a somewhat similar one
to that of Jane Austen's _Sense and Sensibility_; but the warning
against allowing sensitiveness to pass into sentimentality is here
directed to girls just budding into womanhood; and the punishment for
the error is not a love disappointment, but the diminution of the
power of domestic and social helpfulness.
Harriet's work of this year, 1830, comprised the doing of much
fancy-work for sale, making and mending everything that she herself
wore, knitting stockings even while reading, studying a course of
German literature, and writing for the press the following quantity of
literary matter:--_Traditions of Palestine_, a duodecimo volume of 170
printed pages; _Five Years of Youth_, 264 small octavo pages; three
theological essays, making a closely printed crown octavo volume of
300 pages; and fifty-two articles of various lengths in the twelve
numbers of the _Monthly Repository_.
And now she had touched the highest point of sectarian fame. The
chosen expositor to the outer world of her form of religion, and the
writer of its favorite Sunday School story-book of the hour, she must
already have felt that her industrious, resolute labor through many
years had at last borne some fruit.
But the moment for wider fame and a greater usefulness was now at
hand. In the autumn of 1827 she had read Mrs. Marcet's _Conversations
on Political Economy_, and had become aware that the subject which she
had thought out for herself, and treated in her little stories of _The
Rioters_, and _The Turn-Out_, was a recognized science. She followed
this up by a study of Adam Smith, and other economists, and the idea
then occurred to her that it might be possible to illustrate the whole
system of political economy by tales similar in style to those she had
already written. The thought had lain working in her mind for long,
and, in this autumn of 1831, the idea began to press upon her as a
duty.
There were many reasons why it was especially necessary just then that
the people should be brought to think about Social Science. The times
were bitter with the evils arising from unwise laws. None knew better
than she did how largely the well-being of mankind depends upon causes
which cannot be affected by laws. It is individual conduct which must
make or mar the prosperity of the nation. But, on the other hand, laws
are potent, both as direct causes of evil conditions (and in a less
degree of good conditions), and from their educational influence upon
the people. Harriet Martineau felt that she had come to see more
clearly than the masses of her fellow-countrymen exactly how far the
miseries under which English society groaned were caused directly or
indirectly by mischievous legislative acts. Moreover, the
circumstances of the moment made the imparting of such knowledge not
only possible, but specially opportune. The Bishops had just thrown
out the Reform Bill; but no person who watched the temper of the time
could doubt that their feeble opposition would be speedily swept
aside, and that self-government was about to be extended to a new
class of the people. Most suitable was the occasion, then, for
offering information to these upon the science and art of society.
Harriet was right in her judgment when she started her project of a
series of tales illustrative of Political Economy, under a "thorough,
well-considered, steady conviction that the work was wanted, was even
craved for by the popular mind."
She began to write the first of her stories. The next business was to
find a publisher to share her belief that the undertaking would be
acceptable to the public. She wrote to one after another of the great
London publishers, receiving instant refusal to undertake the series
from all but two; and even these two, after giving her a little of
that delusive hope which ends by plunging the mind into deeper
despair, joined with their brethren in declining to have anything to
do with the scheme.
Finally, she went to London to try if personal interviews would bring
her any better success. She stayed in a house attached to a brewery
(Whitbread's), belonging to a cousin of hers, and situated near the
City Road. Thence, she tramped about through the mud and sleet of
December to the publishers' offices day after day for nearly three
weeks. The result was always failure. But though she returned to the
house worn-out and dispirited, her determination that the work should
be done never wavered, and night after night she sat up till long
after the brewery clock struck twelve, the pen pushing on in her
trembling hand, preparing the first two numbers of the series, to be
ready for publication when the means should be found.
It was the kind friend who had helped her before who came to the
rescue at last at this crisis. Mr. W. J. Fox induced his brother
Charles to make her proposals for publishing her series.
Mr. Charles Fox took care to offer only such arrangement as should
indemnify him from all risk in the undertaking. He required, first,
that five hundred subscribers should be obtained for the work; and
second, that he, the publisher, should receive about seventy-five per
cent of the possible profits. Hopeless of anything better, she
accepted these hard terms, and it was arranged that the first number
should appear with February, 1832.
The original stipulation as to the time that this agreement should run
was that the engagement should be terminable by either party at the
end of every five numbers. But a few days afterwards, when Harriet
called upon Mr. W. J. Fox to show him her circular inviting
subscribers for the series, she found that Mr. Charles Fox had decided
to say that he would not publish more than two numbers, unless a
thousand copies of No. I were sold in the first fortnight! This
decision had been arrived at chiefly in consequence of a conversation
which W. J. Fox had held with James Mill, in which the distinguished
political economist had pronounced against the essential point of the
scheme--the narrative form--and had advised that, if the young lady
must try her hand at Political Economy, she should write it in the
orthodox didactic style.
Mr. Fox lived at Dalston. When Harriet left his house, after receiving
this unreasonable and discouraging ultimatum, she "set out to walk the
four miles and a half to the Brewery. I could not afford to ride more
or less; but, weary already, I now felt almost too ill to walk at all.
On the road, not far from Shoreditch, I became too giddy to stand
without some support; and I leaned over some dirty palings, pretending
to look at a cabbage-bed, but saying to myself as I stood with closed
eyes, 'My book will do yet.'"
That very night she wrote the long, thoughtful, and collected preface
to her work. After she had finished it she sat over the fire in her
bedroom, in the deepest depression; she cried, with her feet on the
fender, till four o'clock, and then she went to bed, and cried there
till six, when she fell asleep. But if any persons suppose that
because the feminine temperament finds a relief in tears, the fact
argues weakness, they will be instructed by hearing that she was up by
half-past eight, continuing her work as firmly resolved as ever that
it should be published.
CHAPTER V.
THE GREAT SUCCESS.
The work which had struggled into printed existence with such extreme
difficulty raised its author at a bound to fame. Ten days after the
publication of the first number, Charles Fox sent Harriet word that
not only were the fifteen hundred copies which formed the first
edition all sold off, but he had such orders in hand that he proposed
to print another five thousand at once. The people had taken up the
work instantly. The press followed, instead of leading the public in
this instance; but it, too, was enthusiastic in praise, both of the
scheme and the execution of the stories.
More than one publisher who had previously rejected the series made
overtures for it now. Its refusal, as they saw, had been one of those
striking blunders of which literary history has not a few to tell. But
there is no occasion to cry out about the stupidity of publishers.
They can judge well how far a work written on lines already popular
will meet the demand of the market; but an entirely original idea, or
the work of an original writer, is a mere lottery. There is no telling
how the public will take it until it has been tried. Publishers put
into a good many such lotteries, and often lose by them; then nothing
more is heard of the matter. But the cases where they decline a
speculation which afterwards turns out to have been a good one are
never forgotten. Still, the fact remains that it was Harriet Martineau
alone who saw that the people needed her work, and whose wonderful
courage and resolution brought it out for the public to accept.
Her success grew, as an avalanche gains in volume, by its own
momentum. Besides the publishers' communications she had letters, and
pamphlets, and blue-books, and magazines forwarded to her in piles, in
order that she might include the advocacy of the senders' hobbies in
her series. One day the postmaster sent her a message that she must
let a barrow be fetched for her share of the mail, as it was too bulky
to come in any other way. Lord Brougham declared, that it made him
tear his hair to think that the Society for the Diffusion of
Knowledge, which he had instituted for the very purpose of doing such
work as she was undertaking, seemed not to have a man in it with as
much sense of what was wanted as this little deaf girl at Norwich. The
public interest in the work was, perhaps, heightened by the fact that
so ignorant was everybody of her personality, that this description of
Brougham's passed muster. But she was not little, and she was now
twenty-nine years of age.
She stayed in Norwich, going on writing hard, until the November of
1832, by which time eight numbers of her series had appeared. Then she
went to London, taking lodgings with an old servant of Mrs.
Martineau's, who lived in Conduit street. In the course of a few
months, however, Mrs. Martineau settled herself in London, and her
daughter again resided with her, in a house in Fludyer street,
Westminster.
The purely literary success which she had hitherto enjoyed was now
turned into a social triumph. However she might strive against being
lionized she could not avoid the attentions and honors that were
poured upon her. It is little to say that all the distinguished people
in town hastened to know her; it was even considered to give
distinction to a party if she could be secured to attend it. Literary
celebrities, titled people, and members of Parliament, competed for
the small space of time that she could spare for society.
This was not very much, for the work she had undertaken was heavy
enough to absorb all her energies. She had engaged to produce one of
her stories every month. They were issued in small paper-covered
volumes of from one hundred and twenty to one hundred and fifty pages
of print. She began publication with only two or three numbers ready
written. Thus, to keep on with her series, she had to write one whole
number every month. It would have been hard work had it been simple
story-telling, had she been merely imaginatively reproducing scenes
and characters from her past experience, or writing according to her
fancy. But it was, in fact, a much more difficult labor upon which she
was engaged. Her scheme required that she should embody every shade of
variety of the human character; that her scenes should be laid in
different parts of the world, with topography and surroundings
appropriate to the story; and that the governments and social state of
all these various places should be accurately represented. In addition
to all this she had to lay down for each tale the propositions which
had to be illustrated in it; to assure herself that she clearly saw
the truth and the bearings of every doctrine of political economy; and
then to work into a connected fiction in a concrete form the abstract
truths of the science--representing them as exemplified in the lives
of individuals.
Political economy treats of the production, distribution and
consumption, or use, of all the material objects of human desire,
which are called by the general name of wealth. Thus, it is a subject
which concerns every one of us in our daily lives, and not merely a
matter belonging (as its name unfortunately leads many to suppose)
entirely to the province of the legislator. The great mass of mankind
are producers of wealth. All are necessarily consumers--for the bare
maintenance of existence demands the consumption of wealth. The
well-being of the community depends upon the industry and skill with
which wealth is produced; upon the distribution of it in such a manner
as to encourage future production; and upon the consumption of it with
due regard to the claims of the future. It is individuals who, as the
business of common life, produce, exchange, divide and consume wealth;
it is, therefore, each individual's business to comprehend the science
which treats of his daily life. A science is nothing but a collection
of facts, considered in their relationship to each other. Miss
Martineau's plan, in her series, was strictly what I have indicated as
being always her aim; namely, to deduce from an abstract science rules
for daily life--the secondary, practical or concrete science. It was
the union of a scientific basis with practical morals that made this
subject attractive to her mind, and led her (in the words of her
preface,) to "propose to convey the leading truths of political
economy, as soundly, as systematically, as clearly and faithfully, as
the utmost painstaking and the strongest attachment to the subject
will enable us to do."
She did her work very methodically. Having first noted down her own
ideas on the branch of the subject before her, she read over the
chapters relating to it in the various standard works that she had at
hand, making references as she read. The next thing to do was to draw
out as clearly and concisely as possible the truths that she had to
illustrate; this "summary of principles," as she called it, was
affixed to each tale. By this time she would see in what part of the
world, and amongst what class of people, the principles in question
were operating most manifestly; and if this consideration dictated the
choice of a foreign background, the next thing to be done was to get
from a library works of travel and topography, and to glean hints from
them for local coloring.
The material thus all before her in sheets of notes, she reduced it to
chapters; sketching out the characters of her _dramatis personae_,
their action, and the features of the scenes, and also the political
economy which they had to convey either by exemplification or by
conversation. Finally, she paged her paper. Then "the story went off
like a letter. I did it," she says, "as I write letters; never
altering the expression as it came fresh from my brain."
I have seen the original manuscript of one of the Political Economy
Tales. It shows the statement just quoted to be entirely accurate. The
writing has evidently been done as rapidly as the hand could move;
every word that will admit of it is contracted, to save time. "Socy.,"
"opporty.," "agst.," "abt.," "independce.," these were amongst the
abbreviations submitted to the printer's intelligence; not to mention
commoner and more simple words, such as wh., wd., and the like. The
calligraphy, though very readable, has a somewhat slipshod look.
Thus, there is every token of extremely rapid composition. Yet the
corrections on the MS. are few and trifling; the structure of a
sentence is never altered, and there are but seldom emendations even
of principal words. The manuscript is written (in defiance of law and
order) on both sides of the paper; the latter being quarto, of the
size now commonly called _sermon_ paper, but, in those pre-envelope
ages, it was letter paper.
Her course of life in London was as follows: she wrote in the morning,
rising, and making her own coffee at seven, and going to work
immediately after breakfast until two. From two till four she saw
visitors. Having an immense acquaintance, she declined undertaking to
make morning calls; but people might call upon her any afternoon. She
was charged with vanity about this arrangement; but, with the work on
her hands and the competition for her company, she really could not do
differently. Still, Sydney Smith suggested a better plan; he told her
she should "hire a carriage, and engage an inferior authoress to go
round in it to drop the cards!" After any visitors left, she went out
for her daily "duty walk," and returned to glance over the newspapers,
and to dress for dinner. Almost invariably she dined out, her host's
or some other friend's carriage being commonly sent to fetch her. One
or two evening parties would conclude the day, unless the literary
pressure was extreme, in which case she would sometimes write letters
after returning home. During the whole time of writing her series, she
was satisfied with from five to six hours' sleep out of the
twenty-four; and though she was not a teetotaller, but drank wine at
dinner, still she took no sort of stimulant to help her in her work.
This was the course of life that a woman, of no extraordinary physical
strength, was able to maintain with but little cessation or interval
for two years. When I look at the thirty-four little volumes which she
produced in less than as many months, and when I consider the
character of their contents, I am bound to say that I consider the
feat of mere industry unparalleled, within my knowledge.
The _Illustrations of Political Economy_ are plainly and inevitably
damaged, as works of art, by the fact that they are written to convey
definite lessons. The fetters in which the story moves are necessarily
far closer than in the ordinary "novel with a purpose;" for here the
object is not merely to show the results, upon particular characters
or upon individual careers, of a certain course of conduct, and thence
to argue that in similar special circumstances all persons would
experience similar consequences: but the task here is to show in
operation those springs of the social machinery by which we are _all_,
generally quite unconsciously, guided in our _every-day_ actions, the
natural laws by which _all_ our lives are _inevitably_ governed. To do
this, the author was compelled to select scenes from common life, and
to eschew the striking and the unusual. Again, it was absolutely
necessary that much of the doctrine which had to be taught must be
conveyed by dialogue; not because it would not be possible to
exemplify in action every theory of political economy--for all those
theories have originally been derived from observation of the facts of
human history--but because no such a small group of persons and such a
limited space of time as must be taken to _tell a story about_, can
possibly display the whole consequences of many of the laws of social
science. The results of our daily actions as members of society are
not so easily visible as they would be if we could wholly trace them
out amongst our own acquaintances or in our own careers. The
consequences of our own conduct, good or bad, must _come round_ to us,
it is true, but often only as members of the body politic. Thus, they
are very often in a form as little distinguishable to the uninstructed
mind as we may suppose it would be comprehensible to the brain, if the
organs of the body had a separate consciousness, that it was
responsible for its own aches arising from the disturbance of the
liver consequent upon intemperance. But in a tale it is obviously
impossible to show _in action_ any more of the working of events than
can be exemplified in one or two groups of persons, all of whom must
be, however slightly, personally associated. The larger questions and
principles at issue must be expounded and argued out in conversations,
or else by means of an entire lapse from the illustrative to the
didactic method. Now, as ordinary people do not go about the world
holding long conversations or delivering themselves of dissertations
on political economy, it is clear that the introduction of such talks
and preachments detracts from the excellence of the story as a work of
art. Still less artistically admirable does the fiction become when a
lesson is introduced as a separate argument intruded into the course
of the tale.
Political economy as a science was then but fifty years old. Adam
Smith had first promulgated its fundamental truths in his immortal
_Wealth of Nations_, in 1776. Malthus, Ricardo, and one or two others
had since added to the exposition of the facts and the relationship
between the facts (that is to say, the science) of social
arrangements. But it was not then--nor is it, indeed, yet, in an age
when the great rewards of physical research have attracted into that
field nearly all the best intellects for science of the time--a
complete body of reasoned truths. Some of the positions laid down by
all the earlier writers are now discredited; others are questioned. In
a few passages, accordingly, these tales teach theories which would
now require revision. It must be added at once that these instances
are few and far between. The reasoning, the grasp of the facts of
social life and the logical acumen with which they are dissected and
explained in these tales are, generally speaking, nearly perfect, and
therefore such as all competent students of the subject would at this
day indorse. The slips in exposition of the science as it was then
understood are _exceedingly_ rare. Greater clearness, and more
precision, and better arrangement could hardly have been attained had
years been spent upon the work, in revising, correcting, and
re-copying, instead of each "Illustration" being written in a month,
and sent to press with hardly a phrase amended.
The accuracy and excellence in the presentation of the science were
admitted at once by the highest authorities. Mr. James Mill early made
honorable amends for his previous doubts as to the possibility of Miss
Martineau's success. Whately and Malthus expressed their admiration of
the work. Lord Brougham called upon her, and engaged her pen to
illustrate the necessity for reform in the treatment of the social
canker of pauperism. The Gurneys, and the rest of the Quaker members
of Parliament got Mrs. Fry to make an appointment to ask Miss
Martineau's advice as to their action in the House on the same
subject, when it was ripe for legislation. The Chancellor of the
Exchequer (Lord Althorp) even sent his private secretary (Mr.
Drummond, the author of the world-famous phrase "Property has its
duties as well as its rights") to supply Miss Martineau with
information to enable her to prepare the public for the forthcoming
Budget. The chairman of the Royal Commission on Excise Taxes gave her
the manuscript of the evidence taken, and the draft of the report of
the Commission, before they were formally presented to the Ministers
of the Crown (a thing without precedent!), in order that she might use
the facts to pave the way for the reception of the report in the House
and by the people. The whole public of male students of her science
paid her work what men consider in their unconscious insolence to be
the highest compliment that they _can_ pay a woman's work: the
milder-mannered ones said she had "a masculine intelligence"; the
stronger characters went further, and declared that the books were so
good that it was impossible to believe them to be written by a woman.
Newspaper critics not infrequently attributed them to Lord Brougham,
then Lord Chancellor; that versatile and (at the moment) most popular
politician was supposed either to write them all himself, or to supply
their main features for the inferior mind to throw into shape.
While statesmen, politicians, thinkers, and students were thus
praising the clearness and appreciating the power of the work as
political economy, the general public eagerly bought and read the
books, both for their bearing on the legislative questions of the day
and for their vividness and interest as stories. And indeed, they
richly deserved to be read as works of fiction. Remembering the
limitations to their artistic excellence previously adverted to, they
may be with justice praised for most of the essential features of good
novel-writing.
The characters are the strongest point. Clearly individualized,
consistently carried out, thinking, speaking, and acting in accordance
with their nature, the characters are always personages; and some of
them must live long in the memories of those who have made their
acquaintance. The sterner virtues in Cousin Marshall, in Lady F----,
in Ella of Garveloch, and in Mary Kay, are no less clearly and
attractively depicted than the milder and more passive ones in the
patience of Christian Vanderput, in the unconscious devotion to duty
of Nicholas, in the industry and hopefulness of Frank and Ellen
Castle, in the wifely love and agony of Hester Morrison, in the quiet
public spirit of Charles Guyon, in the proved patriotism of the Polish
exiles, and in a dozen other instances. Her feelings and her spirit
are at home in depicting these virtues of the character; but none the
less does she well succeed in realizing both vice and folly. Her real
insight into character was quite remarkable; as Dr. Martineau observed
to me, when he said, "My sister's powers of observation were
extraordinary." If, on the one hand, her deafness often prevented her
from appreciating the delicacies and the chances of verbal expression
(which really reveal so much of the nature) in those around her, so
that she was apt to draw sharper lines than most people do between the
sheep and the goats in her estimation; on the other hand, she saw more
than those whose minds are distracted by sounds, the light and play of
the countenance, and the indications of character in trivial actions.
The excellence of her character-drawing in these novels gives abundant
evidence that the disqualification was more than counterbalanced by
the cultivation of the other faculty.
The unconsciousness of her mental analysis is at once its greatest
charm and the best token of its truthfulness. Florence Nightingale
realized how fully this was so with reference to the finer qualities
of morals. In her tribute to Harriet Martineau's memory Miss
Nightingale justly observes:--
In many parts of her _Illustrations of Political Economy_--for
example, the death of a poor drinking-woman, "Mrs. Kay,"--what
higher religious feeling (or _one should rather say instinct_)
could there be? To the last she had religious feeling--in the
sense of good working out of evil into a supreme wisdom
penetrating and moulding the whole universe; into the natural
subordination of intellect and intellectual purposes and of
intellectual self to purposes of good, even were these merely the
small purposes of social or domestic life.
On the other side of the human character in her delineation of the bad
qualities, she as instinctively seeks and finds causes for the errors
and evils of the minds she displays. Foolishness, and ignorance, and
poverty are traced, entirely without affectation and "cant," in their
action as misleading influences in the lives of the poor sinners and
sufferers.
The stories told in the _Illustrations_ are frequently very
interesting. In this respect, there is a notable advance in the course
of the series. The earlier tales, such as _Life in the Wilds_ and
_Brooke Farm_, are not to be compared, as mere stories, with even
those written later on by only eight or nine stirring eventful months,
such as _Ireland_ and _The Loom and the Lugger_. Still better are the
latest tales. The _Illustrations of Taxation_ and _Illustrations of
Poor-Laws and Paupers_ are, despite the unattractiveness of their
topics, of the highest interest. _The Parish_, _The Town_, _The
Jerseymen Meeting_, _The Jerseymen Parting_; and _The Scholars of
Arnside_, would assuredly be eagerly read by any lover of fiction
almost without consciousness that there was anything in the pages
except a deeply interesting story.
Archbishop Whately pronounced _The Parish_ the best thing she had
done. _Vanderput and Snook_, the story dealing with bills of exchange,
was the favorite with Mr. Hallam. Lord Brougham, on whose engagement
she did the five "Poor-Law" stories, wrote most enthusiastically that
they surpassed all the expectations that her previous works had led
him to form. Coleridge told her that he "looked eagerly every month"
for the new number; and Lord Durham recounted to her how one evening
he was at Kensington Palace (where the widowed Duchess of Kent was
then residing, and devoting herself to that education which has made
her daughter the best sovereign of her dynasty), when the little
Princess Victoria came running from an inner room to show her mother,
with delight, the advertisement of the "Taxation" tales; for the young
Princess was being allowed to read the _Illustrations_, and found them
her most fascinating story-books.
Harriet's experiences, however, were not all quite so agreeable. Mrs.
Marcet, who "had a great opinion of great people--of people great by
any distinction, ability, office, birth, and what not--and innocently
supposed her own taste to be universal," formed a warm and generous
friendship for Miss Martineau, and used to delight in carrying to her
the "homages" of the savants and the aristocratic readers of the
_Illustrations_ in France, where Mrs. Marcet's acquaintance was
extensive. She one day told Miss Martineau, with much delight, that
Louis Philippe, the then King of the French, had ordered a copy of the
series for each member of his family, and had also requested M. Guizot
to have the stories translated, and introduced into the French
national schools. This was presently confirmed by a large order from
France for copies, and by a note from the officially-appointed
translator requesting Harriet Martineau to favor him with some
particulars of her personal history, for introduction into a
periodical which was being issued by the Government for the promotion
of education amongst the French people. The writer added that M.
Guizot wished to have Miss Martineau's series specially noticed in
connection with her own personality, since she afforded the first
instance on record of a woman who was not born to sovereign station
affecting practical legislation otherwise than through a man.
At the very time that she received this flattering note, Harriet was
engaged in writing her twelfth number, _French Wines and Politics_.
The topic treated in this story is that of value, with the subsidiary
questions relating to prices and their fluctuations. The tale takes up
the period of the great French Revolution, and shows how the fortunes
of certain wine-merchants near Bordeaux, and of the head of the Paris
house in connection, were affected by the course of that great social
convulsion. The scene was unquestionably happily chosen. The
circumstances were abnormal, it is true; but the causes which created
such vast fluctuations in prices, and such changes in the value of
goods, were, in fact, only the same fundamental causes as are always
at the basis of such alterations in price and value; it was merely the
rapidity and violence of the movement which were peculiar. The story
was well put together; and the "Illustration" was in every way
admirable for every possible desirable object, except only for the one
of being pleasant to the ruling powers in the France of 1833.
Harriet Martineau's constant sympathy with democracy, her hatred of
oppression and tyranny, and her aversion to class government, all
became conspicuous in this story. "The greatest happiness of the
greatest number" of mankind was her ideal of the aim of legislation;
and she well knew, as Bentham saw, that only the democratic form of
government can produce a body of laws approximating to this ideal. Her
efforts were constant, therefore, to prepare the people to demand, and
to afterwards wisely use, the power of governing themselves. Now,
though Louis Philippe was the citizen-king, though he was the head of
a republican monarchy, though his legislative chamber rejected in that
same year a ministerial document because it spoke of the people as
"subjects," yet it may be easily understood that this king and his
ministers did not care to stimulate the democratic feeling of the
nation any more than they found inevitable. The whole tone of this
work would be objectionable to them; and a dozen passages might be
readily quoted to show why royal and aristocratic rulers were little
likely to aid its circulation amongst the people whom they governed.
Here, for instance, is a portion of the passage on the storming of the
Bastile:--
The spectacles of a life-time were indeed to be beheld within the
compass of this one scene.... Here were the terrors which sooner
or later chill the marrow of despotism, and the stern joy with
which its retribution fires the heart of the patriot. Here were
the servants of tyranny quailing before the glance of the
people.... The towers of palaces might be seen afar, where princes
were quaking at this final assurance of the downfall of their
despotic sway, knowing that the assumed sanctity of royalty was
being wafted away with every puff of smoke which spread itself
over the sky, and their irresponsibility melting in fires lighted
by the hands which they had vainly attempted to fetter, and blown
by the breath which they had imagined they could stifle. They had
denied the birth of that liberty whose baptism in fire and in
blood was now being celebrated in a many-voiced chant with which
the earth should ring for centuries. Some from other lands were
already present to hear and join in it; some free Britons to aid,
some wondering slaves of other despots to slink homewards with
whispered tidings of its import; for from that day to this, the
history of the fall of the Bastile has been told as a secret in
the vineyards of Portugal, and among the groves of Spain, and in
the patriotic conclaves of the youth of Italy, while it has been
loudly and joyfully proclaimed from one end to the other of Great
Britain, till her lisping children are familiar with the tale.
Besides such passages as this, scarcely likely to please the French
king, there was the special ground for his objection that his
immediate ancestor, Egalite, was introduced into the story, and
depicted in no favorable light his efforts to inflame the popular
violence for his selfish ends, his hypocrisy, his cowardice, and so
on, being held up to contempt. Mrs. Marcet, when she read all this,
came breathless to Harriet Martineau to ask her how she could have
made such a blunder as to write a story that plainly would (and, of
course, in fact, did) put an end to the official patronage of her
series in France, and would destroy for ever any hopes that she might
have entertained of being received at the Court of Louis Philippe?
Greatly surprised was the good lady at finding Harriet's reverence for
that monarch so limited in extent. She replied to her kind friend that
she "wrote with a view to the people, and especially the most
suffering of them; and the crowned heads must for once take their
chance for their feelings."
At the very moment that Mrs. Marcet's remonstrance was made, Miss
Martineau was writing a story of a character likely to be even more
distasteful to the Emperor of Russia than this one to the King of the
French. She had found it difficult to illustrate the theory of the
currency in a story treating of the existence of civilized people. The
only situation in which she could find persons, above the rank of
savages, transacting their exchanges by aid of a kind of money which
made the business only one remove from bartering, was amongst the
Polish exiles in Siberia. She therefore wrote _The Charmed Sea_, a
story founded upon the terrible facts of the lives of the exiled Poles
"in the depths of Eastern Siberia," working in "a silver-mine near the
western extremity of the Daourian Range, and within hearing of the
waters of the Baikal when its storms were fiercest." Had the
melancholy tale been written in the service of the Poles, it could not
have been more moving. So powerful, and interesting was it, indeed,
that the criticism of the _Edinburgh Review_ was that the fiction too
entirely overpowered the political economy. The arrival of _The
Charmed Sea_ in Russia changed the favorable opinion which the Czar
had previously been so kind as to express about the _Illustrations_.
He had been purchasing largely of the French translation of the series
for distribution amongst his people. But now he issued a proclamation
ordering every copy in Russia of every number to be immediately burnt,
and forbidding the author ever to set foot upon his soil. Austria,
equally concerned in the Polish business, followed this example, and a
description of Harriet Martineau's person was hung in the appointed
places, amidst the lists of the proscribed, all over Russia, Austria,
and Austrian-Italy. Despots, at least, had no admiration for her
politics.
The only important adverse criticism in the press appeared in the
_Quarterly Review_.[7] The reviewer objected impartially to every
one of the twelve stories which had then appeared. Every circumstance
which could arouse prejudice against the series was taken advantage
of, from party political feeling and religious bigotry, down to the
weakness of fluid philanthropy, and "the prudery and timidity of the
middle-classes of England." The principal ground of attack was the
story which dealt with Malthusianism, _Weal and Woe in Garveloch_.
[7] In the same number, by the way, appeared the notorious
biting and sarcastic notice of Tennyson's second volume. It
is a distinction, indeed, for a critical review, that one
number should have devoted half its space to violently
unfavorable criticisms of Alfred Tennyson's poetry and
Harriet Martineau's political economy.
When the course of my exposition brought me to the population
subject, I, with my youthful and provincial mode of thought and
feeling--brought up, too, amidst the prudery which is found in its
great force in our middle class--could not but be sensible that I
risked much in writing and publishing on a subject which was not
universally treated in the pure, benevolent, and scientific spirit
of Malthus himself.... I said nothing to anybody; and, when the
number was finished, I read it aloud to my mother and aunt. If
there had been any opening whatever for doubt or dread, I was sure
that these two ladies would have given me abundant warning and
exhortation--both from their very keen sense of propriety and
their anxious affection for me. But they were as complacent and
easy as they had been interested and attentive. I saw that all
ought to be safe.
The _Quarterly Review_ seized the opportunity of the appearance
of this number to make a vile attack upon the series and its writer.
Harriet suffered under it to a degree which seems almost excessive.
The review is so obviously full of fallacies, as regards its Political
Economy, that any person whose opinion was worth having could hardly
hesitate in deciding that she, and not her critic, was talking
common-sense and arguing logically. As to the personal part of the
article, it is, though scurrilous, and even indecent, so very funny
that the attacked might almost have forgotten the insult in the
amusement. Nevertheless, the writers, Croker and Lockhart, did their
worst. Croker openly said that he expected to lose his pension very
shortly, and, being wishful to make himself a literary position before
that event happened, he had begun by "tomahawking Miss Martineau." All
that could be painful to her as a woman, and injurious to her as a
writer, was said, or attempted to be conveyed, in this article.
Let us see what it was all about. Garveloch, one of the Hebridean
islands, is seen in the "Illustration" rapidly multiplying its
population, both by early marriages and by immigration, under the
stimulus of a passing prosperity in the fishing industry. The influx
of capital and the increase of the demand for food, have led to such
an improvement in the cultivation of the land, that the food produce
of the island has been doubled in ten years. Ella, the heroine (a
fine, strong, self-contained, helpful woman--one of the noblest female
characters in these works), foresees that if the reckless increase of
population continues, the supply of food will by-and-by run short. Her
interlocutor asks how this will be the case, since the population will
surely not double again, as it has done already, in ten years? Then
the _Quarterly_ quotes Ella's reply, and comments on it:--
"Certainly not; but say twenty, thirty, fifty or any number of
years you choose; still, as the number of the people doubles
itself for ever, while the produce of the land does not, the
people must increase faster than the produce."
This is rare logic and arithmetic, and not a little curious as
natural history. A plain person now would have supposed that if
the produce doubled itself in ten, and the people only in a
hundred years, the people would not increase _quite_ so fast
as the produce, seeing that at the end of the first century the
population would be multiplied but by two, the produce by one
thousand and twenty-four. But these are the discoveries of genius!
Why does Miss Martineau write, except to correct our mistaken
notions and to expound to us the mysteries of "the principle of
population."
The reviewer goes on to suggest, in the broadest language, that she
has confounded the rate of the multiplication of the herring-fisher-women
with that of the herrings themselves; reproves her for writing on
"these ticklish topics" with so little physiological information; and
tells her that she, "poor innocent, has been puzzling over Mr.
Malthus's arithmetical and geometrical ratios for knowledge which she
should have obtained by a simple question or two of her mamma." In
one and the same paragraph, he tells her that he is "loth to bring a
blush unnecessarily upon the cheek of any woman," and asks her if she
picked up her information on the subject "in her conferences with the
Lord Chancellor?"
This is enough to show to what a sensitive young lady was exposed in
illustrating "a principle as undeniable as the multiplication table,"
and in stating the facts upon which hangs the explanation of the
poverty, and therefore of a large part of the vice and misery, of
mankind. Miss Martineau's exposition was, of course, entirely right,
and the fallacy in the review is obvious, one would suppose on the
surface. The reviewer's error consists in his assumption--the falsity
of which is at once apparent on the face of the statement--that land
can go on doubling its produce _every_ ten years, for an indefinite
period. So far from this being true, the fact is that the limit of
improving the cultivation of land is soon reached.
Better agricultural treatment may easily make half-cultivated land
bring forth double its previous produce; but the highest pitch of
farming once reached--as it comparatively soon is--the produce cannot
be further increased; and even before this limit is reached, the
return for each additional application of capital and labor becomes
less and less proportionately bountiful. This is the truth known to
political economists as "the Law of the Diminishing Return of Land."
Taken in conjunction with the fact that the human race _can_ double
for ever, theoretically, and in reality _does_ multiply its numbers
with each generation, checked only by the forethought of the more
prudent and the operations of famine, war, crime, and the diseases
caused by poverty, this law explains why mankind does not more rapidly
improve its condition--why the poor have been always with us--and why
teaching such as Harriet Martineau here gave must be received into the
popular mind before the condition of society can be expected to be
improved in the only way possible, by the wisdom and prudence of its
members.
Painful as was the attack she had undergone, intensely as she had
suffered from its character and nature, Miss Martineau did not allow
what she had felt of personal distress to have any influence on her
future writings. Her moral courage had been well trained and
exercised, first by the efforts that her mind had had to make in
following her conscience as a guide to the formation of opinions, in
opposition to the tendency implanted by her mother's treatment to bow
supinely before authority; secondly, by the lesson of endurance which
her deafness had brought to her. She had now to show, for the first,
but by no means the last time, that hers was one of those temperaments
which belong to all leaders of men, whether in physical or moral
warfare; that danger was to her a stimulus, and that her courage rose
the higher the greater the demand for its exercise.
Praise and blame, appreciation and defamation, strengthened and
enlarged her mind during this period. But at the end of it, Sydney
Smith could say: "She has gone through such a season as no girl before
ever knew, and she has kept her own mind, her own manners, and her own
voice. She's safe."
CHAPTER VI.
FIVE ACTIVE YEARS.
On the conclusion of the publication of the _Illustrations of
Political Economy_, Harriet went to the United States, and travelled
there for more than two years. Her fame had preceded her; and she
received the warm and gracious greeting from the generous people of
America that they are ever ready to give to distinguished guests from
their "little Mother-isle." She travelled not only in the Northern
States, but in the South and the West too, going in the one direction
from New York to New Orleans, and in the other to Chicago and
Michigan. Everywhere she was received with eager hospitality. Public
institutions were freely thrown open to her, and eminent citizens vied
with each other in showing her attention, publicly and privately.
The most noteworthy incident in the course of the whole two years was
her public declaration of her anti-slavery principles. The
Anti-Slavery movement was in its beginning. The abolitionists were the
subjects of abuse and social persecution, and Miss Martineau was
quickly made aware that by a declaration in their favor she would risk
incurring odium, and might change her popularity in society into
disrepute and avoidance. It would have been perfectly easy for a less
active conscience and a less true moral sense to have evaded the
question, in such a manner that neither party could have upbraided her
for her action. She might simply have said that she was there as a
learner, not as a teacher; that her business was to survey American
society, and not to take any share in its party disputes, or to give
any opinion on the political questions of a strange land. Such
paltering with principle was impossible to Harriet Martineau. She did
not obtrude her utterances on the subject, but when asked in private
society what she thought, she frankly spoke out her utter abhorrence,
not merely of slavery in the abstract, but also of the state of the
Southern slave-holders and their human property. She could not help
seeing that this candor often gave offense; but that was not her
business when her opinion was sought on a moral question.
The really searching test of her personal character did not come,
however, with regard to this matter, till she went to stay for a while
in Boston, the head-quarters of the abolitionists, fifteen months
after her arrival in America. It happened that she reached Boston the
very day a ladies' anti-slavery meeting was broken up by the violence
of a mob, and that Garrison, falling into the hands of the enraged
multitude, was half-murdered in the street. Harriet had given a
promise, long previously, to attend an abolitionists' meeting; and
though these occurrences showed her that there was actual personal
danger in keeping her word, she was not to be intimidated. She went to
the very next meeting of the ladies' society, which was held a month
after the one so violently disturbed, and there, being unexpectedly
begged to "give them the comfort" of a few words from her, she rose,
and as the official report says, "with great dignity and simplicity of
manner," declared her full sympathy with the principles of the
association.
She knew well how grave would be the social consequences to her of
thus throwing in her lot with the despised and insulted abolitionists;
but she felt that "she never could be happy again" if she shrunk from
the duty of expression thrust upon her. The results to her were as
serious as she had apprehended. She received innumerable personal
insults and slights, public and private, where before all had been
homage; the Southern newspapers threatened her personal safety,
calling her a foreign "incendiary;" and, to crown all, she had to give
up an intended Ohio tour, on the information of an eminent Cincinnati
merchant that he had heard with his own ears the details of a plot to
hang her on the wharf at Louisville, before the respectable
inhabitants could intervene, in order to "warn all other meddlesome
foreigners."
All this abuse and insult and threatening from the lower kind of
persons, interested for their purses, had, of course, no influence
upon the hundred private friendships that she had formed. Ardent and
deep was the affection with which many Americans came to regard her,
and with some of them her intimate friendship lasted through all the
succeeding forty years of her life. Emerson was one of these friends,
and Garrison another. It was her frequent correspondence with these
and many others that kept her interest in the affairs of the United
States so active, and made her so well-informed about them as to give
her the great authority that she had, both in England and America,
during the life and death struggle of the Union, so that at that time,
when she was writing leaders for the London _Daily News_, Mr. W.
E. Forster said that "it was Harriet Martineau alone who was keeping
English public opinion about America on the right side through the
press."
Loath to leave such friendships behind, and yet longing for home, she
sailed from New York at the end of July, 1836, and reached Liverpool
on the 26th August. A parting act of American chivalry was that her
ship-passage was paid for her by some unknown friend.
It was while she was in the United States that the first portrait of
her which I have seen was painted. She herself did not like it,
calling the attitude melodramatic; but her sister Rachel, I am told,
always declared that it was the only true portrait of Harriet that was
ever taken. At this point, then, some idea of her person may be given.
She was somewhat above the middle height, and at this time had a
slender figure. The face in the portrait is oval; the forehead rather
broad, as well as high, but not either to a remarkable degree. The
most noticeable peculiarity of the face is found in a slight
projection of the under lip. The nose is straight, not at all turned
up at the end, but yet with a definite tip to it. The eyes are a clear
gray, with a calm, steadfast, yet sweet gaze; indeed there is an
almost appealing look in them. The hair is of so dark a brown as to
appear nearly black. A tress of it (cut off twenty years later than
this American visit, when it had turned snow-white) has been given
to me; and I find the treasured relic to be of exceptionally fine
texture--a sure sign of a delicate and sensitive nervous organization.
Her hands and feet were small.
She was certainly not beautiful; besides the slight projection of the
lower lip the face has the defect of the cheeks sloping in too much
towards the chin. But she was not strikingly plain either. The
countenance in this picture has a look both of appealing sweetness
and of strength in reserve; and one feels that with such beauty of
expression it could not fail to be attractive to those who looked upon
it with sympathy.
The competition amongst the publishers for Miss Martineau's book on
America was an amusing contrast to the scorn with which her proposals
for her _Political Economy_ had been received. Murray sent a message
through a friend, offering to undertake the American work; and letters
from two other publishers were awaiting her arrival in England. On the
day that the newspapers announced that she had reached town no fewer
than three of the chief London publishers called upon her with
proposals. She declined those of Bentley and Colburn, and accepted the
offer of Messrs. Saunders and Otley to pay her L300 per volume for the
first edition of three thousand copies. The book appeared in three
volumes, so that she received L900 for it. She completed the three
goodly volumes in six months.
She had wished to call the book _Theory and Practice of Society in
America_, a title which would have exactly expressed the position that
she took up in it, viz., that the Americans should be judged by the
degree in which they approached, in their daily lives, to the standard
of the principles laid down in their Constitution. Her publishers so
strongly objected to this title, that she consented to call the work
simply _Society in America_. She held to her scheme none the less, and
the book proceeds upon it. She quotes the Declaration of Independence
that all men are created equal, with an inalienable right to life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that Governments derive
their just powers from the consent of the governed. "Every true
citizen," she claims, "must necessarily be content to have his
self-government tried by the test of the principles to which, by his
citizenship, he has become a subscriber." She brings social life in
the United States of 1834-6 to this test accordingly.
That method of approaching her subject had some advantages. It enabled
her to treat with peculiar force the topics of slavery, of the
exclusion of women from political affairs, and of the subservience to
the despotism of public opinion which she found to exist at that time
in America.
But she herself came to see, in after times, that her _plan_ (leaving
the details aside) was radically faulty. She was, as she says, "at the
most metaphysical period" of her mental history. Thus, she failed at
the moment to perceive that she commenced her subject _at the wrong
end_ in taking a theory and judging the facts of American society by
their agreement or disagreement with that _a priori_ philosophy. It
was the theory that had to be judged by the way in which the people
lived under a government framed upon it, and not the people by the
degree in which they live up to the theory. The English public wanted
a book that would help them to know the American public and its ways;
the Americans required to see through the eyes of an observant,
cultivated foreigner, what they were being and doing. It is this which
a traveller has to do--to observe _facts_: to draw lessons from them,
if he will, but not to consider the facts in their relationship to a
pre-conceived theory. Human experience is perennially important and
eternally interesting; and this is what a traveller has to note and
record. Political philosophies must be gathered from experience
instead of (what she attempted) the real life being viewed only as
related to the philosophy. In fine, her error was in treating
abstractedly what was necessarily a concrete theme.
With this objection to the scheme of the book, all criticism may end.
All criticism did not end (any more than it began) in this way in
1837. Speaking out so boldly as she did on a variety of the most
important social topics, she naturally aroused opposition, which the
power and eloquence of the style did not mitigate.
The anti-slavery tone of the book alone would have ensured violent
attacks upon it and its author, as, after her ostracism because of her
anti-slavery declaration, she well knew would be the case. "This
subject haunts us on every page," distressfully wrote Margaret Fuller;
and greatly exaggerated though this statement was, it certainly is
true that there is hardly a chapter in which the reader is allowed to
forget that the curse of humanity made merchandise, shadowed life,
directly or indirectly, throughout the whole United States. Neither by
the holders of slaves in the South, nor by their accessories in the
North, was it possible that she could be regarded otherwise than as an
enemy, the more powerful, and therefore the more to be hated and
abused, because of her standing and her ability. In estimating the
courage and disinterestedness which she displayed in so decisively
bearing her witness against the state of American society under the
slave system, it must be remembered not only that she had many valued
personal friends in the South, and amongst the anti-abolitionists of
the North, but also that she knew that she was closing against herself
a wide avenue for the dissemination of her opinions upon any subject
whatsoever. No book written by an abolitionist would be admitted into
any one of thousands of American homes. The abolitionists reprinted
portions of _Society of America_, as a pamphlet, and distributed
it broadcast. The result was that, up to the time when slavery was
abolished Harriet Martineau was continually held up to scorn and
reprobation in Southern newspapers, "in the good company of Mrs.
Chapman and Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe."
Even greater courage was displayed by Harriet Martineau in her
boldness of utterance upon some other points, about which freedom of
thought was as obnoxious in England as in America. When she maintained
that divorce should be permissible by mutual consent, provided only
that the interests of children and the distribution of property were
equitably arranged for; when she pleaded for the emancipation of
women; or when she devoted a chapter to showing the evils which spring
from the accumulation of enormous fortunes, and incidentally attacked
the laws and customs of primogeniture, of the transfer of land, and
the like, which are devised specially to facilitate and encourage such
accumulations: in these and other passages of an equally radical
nature, she braved a large body of opinion in English society, as
well as in the other country for which she wrote. She mentions
subsequently, that for many years she was occasionally startled by
finding herself regarded in various quarters as a free-thinker upon
dangerous subjects, and as something of a demagogue. I have little
doubt that the "advanced" political philosophy of _Society in America_
did originate such suspicions in minds of the Conservative order, "the
timid party," as she described them in this same book. Yet she adds:
I have never regretted its boldness of speech. I felt a relief in
having opened my mind which I would at no time have exchanged for
any gain of reputation or fortune. The time had come when, having
experienced what might be called the extremes of obscurity and
difficulty first, and influence and success afterwards, I could
pronounce that there was nothing for which it was worth
sacrificing freedom of thought and speech.
There was but little in _Society in America_ of the ordinary book of
travels. As an account of the political condition and the social
arrangements of the American people it was of singular value. But
the personal incidents of travel, the descriptions of scenery, the
reminiscences of eminent persons, of all which Harriet Martineau
had gathered a store, were entirely omitted from this work. Messrs.
Saunders and Otley suggested to her that she should make a second
book out of this kind of material. She consented; and wrote her
_Retrospect of Western Travel_. She completed the manuscript of this
in December, 1837, and it was published soon afterwards in three
volumes. The publishers gave her six hundred pounds for it.
The fifteen hundred pounds which she thus earned exceeded in amount
the whole of what she had then received for her _Illustrations of
Political Economy_. The last-named great work was nearly all published
upon the absurdly unequal terms which Charles Fox had secured from her
in the beginning. It was characteristic of her generosity in pecuniary
matters and her loyalty to her friends, that although her agreement
with Fox was dissoluble at the end of every five numbers, she
nevertheless allowed it to hold good, and permitted him to pocket a
very leonine share of her earnings throughout the whole publication of
the original series, only claiming a revision of the terms when she
commenced afresh, as it were, with the "Poor-Law," and "Taxation"
tales. Thus the immense popularity of the _Illustrations_ had not
greatly enriched her. A portion of her earnings by them was invested
in her American tour; and now that she received this return from her
books of travels she felt it her duty to make a provision for the
future. She purchased a deferred annuity of one hundred pounds to
begin in April, 1850. It displayed a characteristic calm confidence in
herself that she should thus have entirely locked up her earnings for
twelve years. She clearly felt a quiet assurance that her brain and
her hand would serve to maintain her, at least as long as she was in
the flower of her age.
The six volumes about America were not the whole of her work during
the first eighteen months after her return to England. She wrote an
article on Miss Sedgwick's works for the _Westminster Review_, and
several other short papers for various magazines. The extraordinary
industry with which she returned to labor after her long rest requires
no comment.
Early in 1838 she wrote a work called _How to Observe in Morals
and Manners_. It forms a crown octavo volume of two hundred and
thirty-eight pages, and was published by Mr. Charles Knight. The book
is an interesting one, both for the reflections which it contains upon
the subject of its title, and as indicating the method which she had
herself pursued in her study of the morals and manners of the country
in which she had been travelling. There is certainly no failure in the
courage with which she expresses her convictions. She admits elsewhere
that the abuse which she received from America had so acted upon her
mind that she had come to quail at the sight of letters addressed in a
strange handwriting, or of newspapers sent from the United States. But
there is no trace in this her next considerable work of any tendency
to follow rather than to lead the public opinion of her time. One
paragraph only may be quoted to indicate this fact:
Persecution for opinion is always going on. It can be inflicted
out of the province of Law as well as through it.... Whatever a
nation may tell him of its love of liberty should go for little if
he sees a virtuous man's children taken from him on the ground of
his holding an unusual religious belief; or citizens mobbed for
asserting the rights of negroes; or moralists treated with public
scorn for carrying out allowed principles to their ultimate
issues; or scholars oppressed for throwing new light on the sacred
text; or philosophers denounced for bringing fresh facts to the
surface of human knowledge, whether they seem to agree or not with
long established suppositions.[8]
[8] _How to Observe_, p. 204.
The next piece of work that Harriet did in this spring of 1838 was of
a very different order. The Poor-Law Commissioners were desirous of
issuing a series of "Guides to Service," and application was made to
Miss Martineau to write some of these little books. She undertook
_The Maid of All Work_, _The Housemaid_, _The Lady's Maid_ and _The
Dress-maker_. These were issued without her name on the title-page,
but the authorship was an open secret.
She was a thoroughly good housekeeper herself. Her conscience went
into this, as into all her other business. "Housewifery is supposed to
transact itself," she wrote; "but in reality it requires all the
faculties which can be brought to bear upon it, and all the good moral
habits which conscience can originate." It was in this spirit that
she wrote instructions for servants. The fine moral tone invariably
discoverable in her works, is as delightful here as elsewhere. But
the little "Guides to Service," contain also the most precise and
practical directions for the doing of the household duties and the
needlework which fall to the hands of the classes of servants for whom
she wrote. Practical hints are given from which the majority of these
classes of women-workers might learn much, for _brains tell_ in the
mean and dirty scrubbery of life as well as in pleasanter things, and
science is to be applied to common domestic duties as to bigger
undertakings. The heart and mind of Harriet Martineau were equal to
teaching upon matters such as these, as well as to studying the deeper
relations of mankind in political economy, or the state of society in
a foreign land. Her great power of sympathy enabled her to enter fully
into every human position. So well was the maid-of-all-work's station
described, and her duties indicated, and her trials pointed out, and
how she might solace herself under those troubles discovered, and the
way in which her work should be set about detailed, that the rumor
spread pretty widely that Harriet had once occupied such a situation
herself. She regarded this mistake with complacency, as a tribute to
the practical character of her little work.
As a fact, she was herself a capable housewife. Her housekeeping was
always well done. Her own hands, indeed, as well as her head, were
employed in it on occasion. When in her home, she daily filled her
lamp herself. She dusted her own books, too, invariably. Sometimes she
did more. Soon after her establishment at the Lakes (an event which we
have not yet reached, but the anecdote is in place here), a lady who
greatly reverenced her for her writings called upon her in her new
home, accompanied by a gentleman friend. As the visitors approached
the house by the carriage-drive, they saw someone perched on a set of
kitchen steps, cleaning the drawing-room windows. It was the famous
authoress herself! She calmly went for her trumpet, to listen to their
business; and when they had introduced themselves, she asked them in,
and entered into an interesting conversation on various literary
topics. Before they left, she explained, with evident amusement at
having been caught at her housemaid's duties, that the workmen had
been long about the house; that this morning, when the dirty windows
might for the first time be cleaned, one of her servants had gone off
to marry a carpenter, and the other to see the ceremony; and so the
mistress, tired of the dirt, had set to work to wash and polish her
window for herself.
An article on "Domestic Service," for the _Westminster Review_, was
written easily, while her mind was so full of the subject, in the
beginning of June, 1838. But a great enterprise was before her--a
novel; and at length she settled down to this, beginning it on her
thirty-sixth birthday, June 12th, 1838. The writing of this new book
was interrupted by a tour in Scotland during August and September, and
by writing a remarkable and eloquent article on slavery, "The Martyr
Age of the United States," which occupies' fifty-five pages of the
_Westminster Review_ in the January, 1839, number of that publication.
The novel got finished, however, in February of this latter year; and
it was published by Easter under the title of _Deerbrook_.
Great expectations had been entertained by the literary public of
Harriet Martineau's first novel. The excellences of her _Illustrations_
as works of fiction had been so marked and so many, that it was
anticipated that she might write a novel of the highest order when
released from the trammels under which she wrote those tales. To most
of those who had expected so much _Deerbrook_ was a complete
disappointment. I believe I may justly say that it is the weakest of
all Harriet Martineau's writings. It is, indeed, far superior in all
respects to nine hundred out of every thousand novels published. But
she is not judged by averages. A far higher standard of literary art
is that to which we expect Harriet Martineau's writings to conform.
The book is deficient in story. Deerbrook is a country village, where
two sisters from Birmingham, Hester and Margaret Ibbotson, take up
their temporary abode. Mr. Hope, the village surgeon, falls in love
with Margaret; but being told that Hester loves him, while Margaret is
attached to Philip Enderby, Hope decides to propose to Hester; is
accepted, married to the sister he does not love, and sets up
housekeeping with the sister with whom he is in love as an inmate of
his home. The wife, moreover, is of a jealous, exacting disposition,
ever on the watch for some token of neglect of her feelings by her
friends, anxious, irritable, and hyper-sensitive.
Here is a situation which, the characters being what they are
described to be, could in real life eventuate only in either violent
tragedy or long, slow heart-break. A woman of ultra-sensitive and
refined feelings could not live with a husband and a sister under such
circumstances without discovering the truth. A man of active
temperament and warm emotions, who declares to himself on the night of
his return from his wedding tour that his marriage "has been a
mistake, that he has desecrated his own home, and doomed to withering
the best affections of his nature,"--such a man, with the woman he
really loves living in his home, beside the unloved wife, could not
completely conceal his state of mind from everybody, and presently
find that after all he likes the one he has married best. Yet in the
impossible manner just indicated do all things end in _Deerbrook_. The
interest of the book is then suddenly shifted to Margaret and Enderby.
Hope and Hester become mere accessories. But the plot does not
improve. The Deerbrook people, hitherto adorers of their doctor,
suddenly
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