VIIHARRIET MARTINEAU
Harriet Martineauis one of the most distinguished literary women this century has produced. She is among the few women who have succeeded in the craft of journalism, and one of the still smaller number who succeeded for a time in moulding and shaping the current politics of her day. There are many things in her career which make it a particularly instructive one. Her vivid remembrance of her own childhood gave her a very strong sympathy with the feelings and sufferings of children; all mothers, especially the mothers of uncommonly intellectual children, ought to read, in the early part of Harriet Martineau’s autobiography, her record of her own childhood, and its peculiar sufferings.
The Martineaus were descended from a French Huguenot surgeon, who left his native country in 1688, after the revocation of the edict of Nantes. He settled at Norwich, and became the progenitor of a long line of distinguished surgeons in that city. Harriet’s father was a manufacturer; she was born on the 12th June 1802, the sixth of eight children. There is nothing in the outward circumstances of her youth to distinguish it from that of the substantial but simple comfort of any middle class family of that period, save that her education was above the average. The independence of judgment in religious matters that had made their ancestor a Huguenot, made the latter Martineaus Unitarians; and it was to this fact that the excellence of the education of the family was in part due. For the Rev. Isaac Perry, the head of a large and flourishing boys’ school in Norwich, became converted to the principles of Unitarianism, with the consequence of losing nearly all his pupils. The Unitarian community felt it their duty to rally round him, and support him to the utmost of their power. Hence those who, like the Martineaus, had children to educate sent them, girls as well as boys, to him. Harriet therefore had the inestimable advantage of beginning her career with a mind well equipped with stores of knowledge that were at that time usually considered quite outside the range of what was necessary for a woman.
She speaks of herself as having, especially in her childhood, “a beggarly nervous system”; and her description of her utterly unreasonable terrors, which she bore in silence, because of the want of insight and sympathy around her, ought to be a lesson to every parent. “Sometimes,” she says, “I was panic-struck at the head of the stairs, and was sure I could never get down; and I could never cross the yard into the garden without flying and panting, and fearing to look behind, because a wild beast was after me. The starlight sky was the worst; it was always coming down to stifle and crush me, and rest upon my head.” “The extremest terror of all,” she says, was occasioned by the dull thud of beating feather beds with a stick, a process in which the housewives of Norwich were wont to indulge on the breezy area below the Castle Hill. A magic-lantern, or the prismatic lights cast by glass lustres upon the wall, threw her into the same unaccountable terror-stricken state. If she could have been coaxed into speaking of these panics, they might probably have ceased to assail her. But this she never dreamed of doing. There was too little tenderness in her family life to overcome her natural timidity. Once when her terror at a magic-lantern so far overcame her as to find vent in a shriek of dismay, “a pretty lady, who sat next us, took me on her lap, and let me hide my face in her bosom, and held me fast. How intensely I loved her, without at all knowing who she was.”
When Harriet Martineau was more than fifty, she wrote a detailed account of all she had suffered in childhood, not from any want of gratitude or affection to her parents, but because she felt that mothers ought to know what their children sometimes suffer, so that they might protect them by tender watchfulness from becoming victims of these imaginary terrors. It is not, it must be remembered, stupid children who are most subject to these “ghostly enemies,” but much more frequently it is the children of vivid imagination and bright intelligence who are most subject to them. A child who is frightened of the dark ought not to be unkindly ridiculed or forced to endure what terrifies it; it ought to be helped by all gentle means to overcome its fear, and all other unreasonable fears conjured up by its imagination.
That Harriet Martineau showed in early childhood that she was gifted with extraordinary mental powers cannot be doubted. At seven years old she “discovered”Paradise Lost. She had been left at home one Sunday evening, when all the rest of the family had gone to chapel, and she began looking at the books on the table. One of them was turned down open. She took it up, and began looking at it. It wasParadise Lost. The first thing she saw was the word “Argument” at the head of a chapter, which she thought must mean a dispute, and could make nothing of; but something about Satan cleaving Chaos made her turn to the poetry, and, in her own words, that evening’s reading fixed her mental destiny for the next seven years; the volume was henceforth never to be found, but by asking her for it. “In a few months, I believe there was hardly a line inParadise Lostthat I could not have instantly turned to. I sent myself to sleep by repeating it, and when my curtains were drawn back in the morning, descriptions of heavenly light rushed into my memory.” Her keen appreciation of Milton’s great poem was the compensation nature provided for the imaginative terrors which made her childhood such a sad one.
Another misfortune was in store for her, which might have embittered the whole of her future existence. When she was about twelve years old it was recognised that her hearing was not good; by sixteen her deafness had become very noticeable, and excessively painful to herself; and before she was twenty she had become extremely deaf, so that she could hear little or nothing without the help of a trumpet. Few people can realise how much the loss of this all-important sense must have cost her. At the outset of life, to be deprived of a faculty on which almost all free and pleasant social intercourse depends must be a bitter trial. One striking characteristic of Harriet Martineau’s mind was brought into relief by it. Throughout her life a misfortune never overtook her without calling out the strength necessary to bear it, not only with patience, but with cheerfulness. As soon as it was clear that her deafness was a trial that would last as long as her life, she made a resolution with regard to it. She determined never to inquire what was said, but to trust to her friends to repeat to her what was important and worth hearing. This she rightly regarded as the only way of preventing her deafness becoming as irksome and trying to her companions as it was to herself. It was not till she was nearly thirty that she began to use a trumpet, and she blamed herself seriously for the delay; for she felt it to be the duty of the deaf to spare other people as much fatigue as possible, and also to preserve their own natural capacity for sound, and the habit of receiving it, as long as possible.
Harriet’s first attempt at authorship was undertaken at the age of nineteen; she was tenderly devoted to her brother James, who was two years her junior. When he left home for college, the brightness of her life departed; he told her she must not permit herself to be so miserable, and advised her to take refuge, each time he left her, in some new pursuit; her first new pursuit was writing, and with a beating heart she posted her manuscript to the Editor of theMonthly Repository, a Unitarian magazine of that day. She adopted the signature of “V. of Norwich”; all authors will sympathise with what she felt when her manuscript was accepted, and she saw herself for the first time in print. She had not told any member of her family of her enterprise. Imagine therefore her delight when her eldest brother, whom she regarded with the utmost veneration, selected this article by V. of Norwich for special commendation, reading passages from it aloud, and calling upon Harriet to say whether she did not think it first-rate. After a brief attempt to keep her secret, she blurted out, “I never could baffle anybody. The truth is, that paper is mine.” The kind brother read on in silence, and as she was going he laid his hand on her shoulder and said gravely (calling her “dear” for the first time), “Now, dear, leave it to other women to make shirts and darn stockings; and do you devote yourself to this.” “I went home,” she adds, “in a sort of dream, so that the squares of the pavement seemed to float before my eyes. That evening made me an authoress.”
The trials of her life, however, shortly after this time began to thicken round her. Her beloved elder brother, whose advice had so greatly encouraged her, died of consumption. Her father’s business declined rapidly in prosperity; it was a period of great commercial depression, and for a time absolute ruin seemed to stare the family in the face. The cares and the mental strain of this time brought the father to his grave; he died in 1826, when Harriet was twenty-four years of age, leaving his family in comparatively straitened circumstances. Shortly after this Harriet became engaged to be married; but this, instead of bringing happiness, was a source of special trial; for shortly after the engagement had been entered into, her lover became suddenly insane, and after months of severe illness, bodily and mental, he died. The next misfortune was the loss, in 1829, by the mother and daughters of the Martineau family, of nearly all they had in the world. The old manufactory, in which their money had been placed, failed. The way in which she treated this event is very characteristic. “I call it,” she wrote, “a misfortune, because in common parlance it would be so treated; but I believe that my mother and all her other daughters would have joined heartily, if asked, in my conviction that it was one of the best things that ever happened to us.... We never recovered more than the merest pittance.... The effect upon me of this new ‘calamity,’ as people called it, was like that of a blister upon a dull, weary pain or series of pains.I rather enjoyed it, even at the time; for there was scope for action, whereas in the long, dreary series of preceding trials, there was nothing possible but endurance. In a very short time my two sisters at home and I began to feel the blessings of a wholly new freedom. I, who had been obliged to write before breakfast, or in some private way, had henceforth liberty to do my own work in my own way; for we had lost our gentility. Many and many a time have we said that, but for the loss of that money, we might have lived on in the ordinary provincial method of ladies with small means, sewing and economising, and growing narrower every year; whereas by being thrown, while it was yet time, on our own resources, we have worked hard and usefully, won friends, reputation, and independence, seen the world abundantly, abroad and at home, and, in short, have truly lived instead of vegetated” (Autobiography, pp. 141, 142).
For a time, notwithstanding the kind brother’s advice to Harriet, to leave sewing to other women and devote herself to literature, pressure was brought upon her to get her living by needlework instead of by her pen. She tried to follow both the advice of her friends and her own inclinations. By day she pored over fine needlework, by night she studied and wrote till two or three o’clock in the morning. Instead of being crushed by the double strain, her spirit rose victorious over it. “It was trulylifeI lived during those days,” she wrote, “of strong, intellectual, and moral effort.” And again: “Yet I was very happy; the deep-felt sense of progress and expansion was delightful; and so was the exertion of all my faculties, and, not least, that of will to overcome any obstructions, and force my way to that power of public speech of which I believed myself more or less worthy.” Her first marked literary success was the winning of each of three prizes which had been offered by the Unitarian body for essays presenting the arguments in favour of Unitarianism to the notice of Catholics, Jews, and Mohammedans.
She took every precaution to prevent the discovery that her three essays were by the same hand; and great was the sensation caused by the discovery that this was indeed the case. The most important result to herself of this achievement was that it finally silenced those who wished her to believe that she was fit to do nothing more difficult in the world than bead-work and embroidery. It also set her up in funds to the extent of £45, and she immediately began to plan the work which brought her fame—a series of tales illustrating the most important doctrines of political economy, such as the effect of machinery on wages, the relation of wages and population, free trade, protective duties, and so on. The difficulties she encountered, before she could induce any publisher to accept her series, were such as would have broken any spirit less heroic and determined than her own. “I knew the work wanted doing,” she said, “and that I could do it”; and this confidence prevented her from losing heart when one rebuff after another fell upon her. Almost every publisher to whom she applied repeated the cry that the public would attend to nothing at that time (1831) but the cholera and the Reform Bill. She says she became as sick of the Reform Bill as poor King William himself. At length, after a most exhausting and, to any one else, heart-breaking succession of disappointments, her series was accepted, but on terms that made her success in finding a publisher very little pleasure to her. The first stipulation was that 500 copies of the work must be subscribed for before publication, and the agreement was to cease if a thousand copies did not sell in the first fortnight. The dismal business of obtaining subscribers to an unknown work by an unknown author nearly broke her down. But in her darkest hour, alone in London, without money or friends, leaning over some dirty palings, really to recover from an attack of giddiness, but pretending to look at a cabbage bed, she said to herself, as she stood with closed eyes, “My book will do yet.”
The day of publication came at last, and Harriet, who had now rejoined her mother in Norwich, eagerly awaited the result. For about ten days she heard nothing, and she began to prepare herself to bear the disappointment of failure. Then at last a letter came, desiring her to make any corrections necessary for a second edition, as the publisher had hardly any copies left. He proposed, he said, to print an additional 2000. A postscript altered the number to 3000, a second postscript suggested 4000, and a third 5000! Her first feeling was that all her cares were now over. Whatever she had to say would now command a hearing, and her anxiety in future would be limited to making a good choice what to write about. Her series made a remarkable sensation; she was overwhelmed with praise from all quarters. Every one who had a hobby wanted her to write a tale to illustrate its importance. Advantageous offers from publishers poured in upon her. Lord Brougham, who was then the leading spirit of the Diffusion of Knowledge Society, declared that the whole Society had been “driven out of the field by a little deaf woman at Norwich.”
It soon became evident, from the amount of political and literary work which was pressed upon her, that it was necessary for her to live in London. She accordingly took a small house in Fludyer Street, Westminster, in 1832, where she lived for seven years with her mother and aunt. No change could be greater than that from the provincial society in which she had been brought up, to that into which she was now welcomed. The best of London literary and political society was freely offered her. Cabinet ministers consulted her about their measures, and she enjoyed the acquaintance or friendship of all the foremost men and women of the day. But her head was not turned, and she was not spoiled. Sydney Smith said he had watched her anxiously for one season, and he then declared her unspoilable. The well-founded self-confidence that had made her say to herself, when almost any one else would have despaired, “My book will do yet,” prevented her from being dazzled by flattery and social distinction. She knew perfectly well what she could do and what she could not do. It made her angry to hear herself spoken of as a woman of genius; and in correcting a series of errors that had been made in an account given of her personal history inMen of the Time, she drily remarks, “Nobody has witnessed ‘flashes of wit’ from me. The giving me credit for wit shows that the writer is wholly unacquainted with me.”
She was a woman of the utmost determination and endurance in carrying out anything she had made up her mind to be right. She once remarked that she had thought the worst that could befall her would be to die of starvation on a doorstep, and added gleefully, “I think I could bear it.” Her courage was put rather unexpectedly to the test in 1835, when she visited the United States. As every one is aware, negro slavery was lawful all over the United States until the civil war of 1862. But every one does not know that the heroic little band of men and women who first protested against the wickedness of slavery in America did so at the peril of their lives. The abolitionists, as they were called, were the objects, even in cities like Boston, usually considered the centres of culture and refinement, of most brutal outrage and cruelty. The abolitionists could not then even hold a meeting but at the peril of their lives. Miss Martineau found herself therefore in a society divided into two hostile factions—one rich, strong, and numerous; the other poor, small, and intensely hated. When she arrived she was disposed to be rather prejudiced against the abolitionists. She condemned slavery as a matter of course, but she thought those who had undertaken the battle against it in America had been fanatical, sentimental, and misguided. This disposition of her mind was diligently fostered by the defenders of slavery, who represented the abolitionists to her as bloodthirsty ruffians who were trying to incite the slaves to the murder of their masters.
It was not long before her clear intellect discerned the true bearings of the case. She soon acknowledged that, however distasteful to her might be the language used by the abolitionists, they were completely innocent of the charges made against them, and were, in fact, the blameless apostles of a most holy cause. From the time of forming this judgment, her course was clear. She boldly avowed abolitionist principles, and took an early opportunity of attending an anti-slavery meeting at which, in a short speech, she avowed her conviction that slavery was inconsistent with the law of God, and incompatible with the course of His providence. It is unnecessary at this distance of time to recount in detail the fury with which this declaration was regarded by the bulk of American society, and by almost the whole American press. Insult and contumely now met her at every turn, in quarters where she had before received nothing but adulation and flattery. But she was not of a nature to be induced by threats of personal violence to consent to that which her reason and conscience condemned. She remained then and always an ardent abolitionist, and when the great question of the existence of slavery in the United States was submitted to the arbitrament of war, she was one of the chief among the leaders of political opinion in England who kept our country as a nation free from the guilt and folly of supporting the secession of the Southern States from the American Union. The late Mr. W. E. Forster said at the time that it seemed to him as if Harriet Martineau alone were keeping this country straight in regard to America.
After her return from America she resumed for a time her usual life of work and social activity in London. In a few years, however, her health broke down, and she removed to Tynemouth, suffering, as was then thought, from an incurable disorder. For five years (1837-42) she lay on her couch a helpless, but by no means an idle, invalid. Some of her best books, including her delightful stories for children,Feats on the Fiord,The Crofton Boys, etc., were written during this period. She was under the care of a medical brother-in-law, who resided at Newcastle, and some of the most leading of London physicians visited her professionally. But her case was considered chronic, and she resigned herself to the belief that her health was gone for ever. After five years some one persuaded her to try the effects of mesmerism, and some members of her family and many of her former friends were very angry with her for getting well through its means. Her remarks on the subject are characteristic. “For my part,” she writes, “if any friend of mine had been lying in a suffering and hopeless state for nearly six years, and if she had fancied she might get well by standing on her head instead of her heels, or reciting charms, or bestriding a broomstick, I should have helped her to try; and thus was I aided by some of my family and by a further sympathy in others, but two or three of them were induced to regard my experiment and recovery as an unpardonable offence, and by them I never was pardoned.”
After her recovery she plunged again as heartily as ever into the enjoyment of travel and of work, and finally settled in a little home, which she built for herself, in the Lake country at Ambleside. Here she continued her literary activity, writing herHistory of the Peace, her version of Auguste Comte’s philosophy, and at one time contributing as many as six articles a week to theDaily News. But she was not content with merely literary labour; she exerted herself most effectually to set on foot, for the benefit of her poorer neighbours, all kinds of means for improving their social, moral, and intellectual position. She showed them, by example, how a farm of two acres could be made to pay. She started a building society, a mechanics’ institute, and evening lectures for the people. She was almost worshipped by her servants and immediate dependents, and was a powerful influence for good on all around her. On all moral questions, and all questions affecting the position of women, she was a tower of strength upon the right side. She heartily sympathised with Mrs. Butler in the work with which her name is identified. “I am told,” she said, “that this is discreditable work for women, especially for anoldwoman. But it has always been esteemed our special function as women to mount guard over society and social life—the spring of national existence—and to keep them pure; and who so fit as anoldwoman?”
In 1854 it was discovered that she had a heart complaint, which might have been fatal at any moment, but her life was prolonged for more than twenty years after this, closing at Ambleside on 27th June 1876. The words of her friend, Florence Nightingale, might have served as her epitaph—“She served the Right, that is, God, all her life.”