Relatively little is known about Harriet Martineau’s early years, particularly her intellectual influences prior to 1820 and her literary apprenticeship during the 1820s. Other than Martineau’s Autobiography (by definition selective and subjective), little information about this period survives, making the only extant pre-1820 letter, to Lant Carpenter, especially meaningful – for its rarity, for its content, for its relation to her intellectual development, and for the sibling connection it reveals. What precious little formal schooling Martineau had received officially ended with the writing of this 1819 letter, whereas her brother James was about to embark on nearly ten years’ schooling culminating in the Doctor of Divinity degree. The disparity in their fates provides a dramatic illustration of intellectual division of labour based solely on social custom. Martineau returned to Norwich and her needlework; to assuage her loneliness, she began writing and, gradually, publishing. Encouraged by immediate success, inspired by James’s letters to her about the intellectual stimulation of college, and spurred by the drastic shift in the family fortunes that required her to be self-supporting, Martineau alternated between needle and pen, hoping against hope that her path lay with the latter, rather than the former.