Harriet Martineau
"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