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 take to throwing stones at him, and to mobbing his house,
because he votes for the Parliamentary candidate opposed by the great
man of the village, and because they take it into their heads (not a
particle of reason why they do so being shown,) that he anatomizes
bodies from the graveyard. We are invited to believe that though his
practice had been singularly successful, all his patients deserted
him; and notwithstanding that Hester and Margaret had each seventy
pounds a year of private income, the household was thus reduced to
such distress that they could not afford gloves, and had to part with
all their servants, and dined as a rule off potatoes and bread and
butter! Then Margaret's lover, Enderby, hears that she and Hope loved
each other before Hope married; and though he does not for a moment
suspect anything wrong in the present, and though he passionately
loves Margaret, this supposed discovery that he is not her first love
causes him to peremptorily and without explanation break off the
engagement. Presently, however, an epidemic comes and restores
confidence in Mr. Hope; and Enderby's sister, who had given him the
information on which he acted, confesses that she had exaggerated the