The Collected Letters of Harriet Martineau

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.

The period marked by Harriet Martineau’s shift from confinement on the ‘prone-couch’ of her second-storey Tynemouth sickroom to ranging across the peaks of Lake District mountains and climbing the Great Pyramid is consistent with the general pattern of her health and invalidism. As a young woman with a history of chronic ailments stretching back to infancy, Martineau covered over 500 miles on a Scottish walking tour with her brother James, returning home to a comparatively inert lifestyle further tempered by a series of family tragedies and minor health crises. A decade later, the vigour she exhibited during her American tour was that of a hardy pioneer, flying over ‘corduroy roads’ as exuberantly as any frontierwoman; but within three years, she was rendered virtually immobile for nearly six years with uterine tumour. When she got up from her prone-couch, she confidently ordered that it be given away, as she had no further use for it. The period from 1845 through 1855 is remarkable for Martineau’s unprecedented degree of health, energy and well-being (‘I am now certain that I never knew before what health was’), prompting several questions – first and foremost, how can such a transformation be accounted for? As the result of a compelling coincidence of factors, she was convinced – for a time, at least – that all credit for her miraculous recovery was due to mesmerism, which seemed to cure her when Victorian medical science could not. How could a woman of such formidable intellect – second to few, arguably, in the nineteenth-century, a woman whose belief in the superiority of science was in place long before her work on Comte’s Positive Philosophy – advocate the healing powers of a pseudo-science? To what degree was her ‘cure’ circumstantial or serendipitous, real or imaginary? Although she asserts that human will alone cannot overcome illness, Martineau’s transformation from a fainting invalid to a ‘stout, brown farmwife’ who hikes five miles before breakfast, while maintaining her role as an intellectual force in the Victorian press, compellingly attests to an irrepressible energy extending far beyond any literary ‘need of utterance’.

Harriet Martineau’s return from London in winter 1855, after her diagnosis with heart disease, marked the end of a decade of remarkable physical vigour: from this time, she never left her Ambleside home again. Convinced she would die at any moment, she resigned herself to the invalid life – for the next twenty-one years; but quite in character, Martineau’s spirited ‘need of utterance’ manifested itself in the form of books (about a dozen volumes) and a staggering array of periodical articles (well over 1,000). Indeed, her first act as an invalid was to write her over 900-page autobiography – within a few months. It may well be claimed that Martineau’s intellectual productivity increased, if anything, in proportion to her enforced physical inactivity – her abundant correspondence alone attesting to this point. The constant stream of visitors, particularly from America, honoured her with their pilgrimages to The Knoll and reinforced her status as a sage ‘From the Mountain’, her hermit persona providing a curious juxtaposition with her indefatigable intellectual vigour. She once quipped that London ‘is so kind as to come to me’, rather than her to it; now, her visitors hailed from all over the world.

The American Civil War was in full swing by 1863; and, with her niece Maria efficiently arranging every aspect of her life, Harriet Martineau devoted her energy to writing, needlework and a seemingly inexhaustible capacity for letter-writing. The correspondence in this final volume of Martineau’s collected letters exhibits an undiminished intellectual engagement with domestic, national and international events, despite her chronic ill-health. Personally, her intense interest in American affairs reflects a passion for the abolitionist cause of more than thirty years’ duration; professionally, her commentary on the war demonstrates both a formidable depth of knowledge about contemporary events and a facility for shrewd, insightful political analysis. Events in America alternately sent her into despair – resulting in ‘sinking fits’ – or to her writing table, where her knowledge, passion and political comprehension found expression in writing for periodicals. Only one factor engaged Martineau’s heart and mind more than the American Civil War, and that was Maria Martineau.