Harriet Martineau
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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.
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