Harriet Martineau's unburnt letters

Deborah Anna Logan, editor
THE COLLECTED LETTERS OF HARRIET MARTINEAU
Five volumes, 2,036pp. Pickering and Chatto.
£450 the set (US $750).
9781 85196 804 6

Morning broke on December 21, 1852 – the shortest day of the year – to find the journalist and social reformer Harriet Martineau characteristically preoccupied with concerns both personal and public. Writing “in haste” to her friend Frances Ogden, she covers plans for her annual Christmas kitchen party, conveys dismay about the likely eruption of war in the Crimea, and expresses anxiety about whether Prince Albert is up to the task of being Prince Consort. None of these matters could long occupy her, though, as she confesses herself to be “busy with an odd correspondence today, – about who is to have my ears after death”. As Martineau puts it, “An eminent surgeon begs for them; & the question is whether his having them is compatible with my legacy of my skull & brain to another”.

One cannot help but wonder how Frances Ogden – no matter how conditioned she was by her years of intimate correspondence to expect such eccentricities from her friend – digested this latest morsel of news from The Knoll, the home in Ambleside that Martineau had built and where she had lived since 1845. The reputation that she established in the 1830s, first as author of the series Illustrations of Political Economy and later of a number of books based on her travels to America, had, by the middle of the century, become altogether more complicated, thanks in part to the sensation created in 1845 by her Letters on Mesmerism, which documented her rapid return to health through “animal magnetism”, after nearly six years of sickroom sequestration. Yet more scandalous was the book she co-authored in 1851 with the phrenologist and philosopher Henry Atkinson, Letters on the Laws of Man’s Nature and Development; she described it to the publisher, Edward Moxon, as “daring to the last degree” (he declined it), and on publication it was immediately denounced “atheist” (she preferred the term “secularist”). Martineau’s contemporaries were familiar with her beliefs about phrenology, mesmerism and metaphysics, to say nothing of her sense of her own stature, and this familiarity may have helped the remark about her legacy of ears and head go down rather more easily for Frances Ogden than for today’s readers, predisposed as we are to dismiss phrenology as just one more example of early Victorian pseudoscience and to regard as dubious, at best, Martineau’s estimate of her own worth.

If the scientific community had, in the end, to do without the benefit of Martineau’s ears and skull, she did leave – albeit somewhat unwittingly – a substantial legacy in her vast correspondence. Her letters complement a formidable array of books and essays, and do what letters do best: they convey the inner life of the author, as she manages the routines of day-to-day living and confronts the occasional momentous event. One gleans as much about the woman from a comment, made after reporting the death of one of her farm animals – “There is no small attachment to a good cow; & we are all, – servants and all – rather grave on the occasion” – as one does from her commentary on important occasions like the accession of Victoria to the throne: “We are all somewhat romantic about our young Queen, poor thing! What chance has she of growing up simple & good?”

The eagerness with which Martineau bequeathed her body to posterity was not matched by an equal avidity to have her letters preserved. Indeed, one of the dominant themes to surface in these five volumes is her intense belief in individual freedom and the right to privacy which manifests itself in directives to her correspondents to destroy her letters. As she stresses in one written in 1843 to Henry Crabb Robinson, “I choose that my letters shall not be printed. I know under what feelings, & with what intent I write letters, & I will let no one judge for me what their destination is to be”, the emphasis making clear her determination to have the last word. Nearly two decades later, her passion on the subject unabated, she wrote to another correspondent, Edward Walford, “I am burning your note; & you will burn this”. Deborah Anna Logan, who has edited The Collected Letters of Harriet Martineau, pays tribute to the obvious editorial dilemma with prefatory “apologies to the author for going against her wishes”, but argues convincingly (though without irony) that “no text from her pen speaks with greater eloquence, in her favour and on her behalf, than the words that were most assuredly never written for publication”. Martineau clearly relished the power of letters to convey and invite confidences. “Entre nous” was a favourite and oft-invoked phrase, one that went hand in hand, somewhat paradoxically, with her frequent appeals for open, frank communication, for “no concealments”.

Yet the stridency of Martineau’s instructions to friends, family and colleagues to destroy her letters – her willingness to give up a correspondence rather than compromise – bespeaks not just a stubborn disposition, or what W. R. Greg called, in his memorial essay on Martineau published in The Nineteenth Century in 1877, a “too imperious and impetuous conscience”, but also a long-standing struggle to exert control over her image and public reputation, despite many claims to the contrary. After “giving notice” to the phrenologist George Combe of her injunction against any preservation of her letters, she writes in 1843, “Suffice it now that it arises from no care in regard to my own reputation, – wh[ich] I never tried to gain or to keep, & shall not begin to trouble myself about now”. But trouble herself she did, most famously by preparing her own obituary in 1855 (it wasn’t published until after she died, in 1876). One cannot blame Martineau for seeking control of her image, given the malicious reaction her writings inspired in those unable to accept the fact of a woman daring to write on subjects deemed off-limits. She laughs off John Wilson Croker’s characterization of her as “False, foul, and unfeminine” in the Quarterly Review, but one senses in much of the correspondence a careful and sustained counterattack, an entirely understandable desire to better those who questioned, criticized, or maligned. She chose the Athenaeum as the outlet for Letters on Mesmerism because it had previously ridiculed the practice; to Edward Bulwer Lytton she explains, “I refused all papers that were on our side already, & preferred disarming an enemy”.

Harriet Martineau was not nearly as cantankerous as that might imply, however, and given how many controversial topics she wrote about – American slavery, taxation, British India, among many others – it is remarkable how skilled she was at managing conflict among her correspondents. To be sure, she was inclined to make critical asides here and there. The publisher John Murray III is condemned as a “censor of the press”, the American newspaper Editor Horace Greeley’s “manners are detestable”, the Revd Sydney Smith is “such a Mammon priest”, the American statesman, and one-time President of Harvard University, Edward Everett is “a wriggling worm as I always knew him to be”. Nor was she immune to professional rivalry; she showed little patience with Carlyle’s “bellowing”, deplored George Eliot’s “bad art” and was ready to take Dickens to task both for his representation of the American people and for his treatment of his wife. If Martineau had an enemy, it was not an individual but an institution. The “wonderfully ignorant” Times newspaper comes under steady, sustained fire throughout her correspondence for “wickedly raising false alarms” and generally “villainous conduct”. It is, in her summation, a “rotten old oracle”. (Martineau’s allegiance was to the Daily News, the paper that treated her as a “gentleman of the press” during her fourteen years of writing for it.)

While a few relationships fell by the wayside under the pressure of conflicting opinion, none was more affecting to Martineau than that with her brother James, described in early idolizing days as “glorious” and as “that wonderful personage, the Reverend James”. Relatively few letters survive, but they document a steady erosion of feeling, intense pride in him giving way to more moderate respect, trust evaporating as feelings of betrayal come to dominate. No single calamitous disagreement was to blame; instead, differences over Martineau’s restriction on the use of her letters (James destroyed them but secretly took notes in shorthand), over the questions dearest to Martineau’s heart, especially abolition, and over James’s ponderous disposition and his scornful response to her own rising fame took their toll. James’s scathing review of Letters on Mesmerism (titled “Mesmeric Atheism” and published in the Prospective Review in 1851) was the final straw. “He has traduced & insulted Mr Atkinson”, Martineau wrote to Frances Ogden. “Above all, he has forfeited my esteem irreconcilably; & the only honesty and decency are in silence.”

One nevertheless comes away from the collected correspondence impressed with her many abiding friendships and strong working relationships, forged over years of shared work on pressing social problems, and surviving the inevitable strains. The Unitarian minister William Fox, Editor of the Monthly Repository, served as a crucial mentor to Harriet Martineau in her earliest stages of authorship; she made no bones of her disapproval when Fox abandoned his wife to live with his ward, Eliza Flower, yet their friendship continued. While in America in the late 1830s for an extended tour, Martineau established relationships with fellow supporters of the Abolition Movement that became the basis for some of her most enduring friendships. She referred to the Unitarian preacher Charles Follen as “the greatest man I ever knew”, and enjoyed decades of sustained correspondence with his wife, Eliza; she called the Revd William Furness and his wife her “American brother and sister”. Another Unitarian abolitionist who became close to Martineau was Maria Weston Chapman, the woman she chose to supervise publication of her autobiography after her death. William Lloyd Garrison, Lydia Child, Lucretia Mott and Ralph Waldo Emerson were among the many prominent Americans that Martineau counted as her friends. At home, too, her many professional relationships evolved into friendships; the seemingly endless letters to publishers and editors such as Moxon, Charles Knight and Henry Reeve often move far from the business at hand.

Martineau’s relationships were sustained in sickness and in health, although the scale undoubtedly tips towards the former. The letters are a veritable Merck Manual of nineteenth-century ailments and afflictions, in all their imprecise glory. Although biographers tell us that a prolapsed uterus and ovarian cyst were the main causes of Martineau’s chronic invalidism, her autobiography documents a far more diffuse “world of suffering”, commencing in childhood. References in her correspondence to any tangible disease, disorder, or symptom are rare. Instead, she writes almost incessantly of “internal complaint”, “sinkings”, “fainting tendency”, “neuralgic attacks”, “spring failure of strength”, a “pulse scarcely perceptible, and always intermitting”. “An enlarged heart” is frequently to blame for her prostration. She is “in no severe pain, but abundant malaise”; she has “a case of organic disease, not admitting of essential amendment”; she is “in her usual state – very suffering and very uncertain”. Today, when options for everyday pain relief seem limited to acetaminophen or ibuprofen, Victorian methods come across as delightfully varied. “The cold revives me as a dram does a drunkard”, Martineau tells one correspondent. Others she thanks for sending restoratives such as champagne, oysters and turtle soup her way. “I live by wine, laudanum, and ether, which keep the heart going, and in some sort of order”, she tells Eliza Flower in 1856.

It would, however, be just as much a mistake to view Martineau’s chronic ill health as backdrop to her authorial career as it would be to conclude that illness was something she had to overcome in order to write. Her letters make it clear that her constitutional “need for utterance” (the phrase she invoked in her 1855 obituary, and one with particular meaning for a woman who was increasingly deaf from adolescence onwards) was part integral to her sense of her self as suffering. If pressures to produce resulted in overwork and Martineau found herself “sick and ill – half dead with writing too much”, she often embraced her work as that which kept her alive. “I shall die as soon as I have to give up writing”, she told Samuel Lucas, the Editor of Once a Week, in 1862. At times, she described herself as “scarcely able to stand, and quite unable to converse for any length of time”, but still able to write – thanks in part to the ministrations and secretarial support provided by her beloved niece Maria Martineau, whom Deborah Logan describes as Martineau’s “Woman Friday”.

In fact, throughout her seventy-four years of life, Martineau often believed herself to be dying, an impression corroborated by the medical men who attended her through the years. Rather than quench her activist impulses, the notion that her life was “so very precarious” fuelled her passion for work, for writing. In a letter to the publisher George Smith in 1859, she summarized her plans to collaborate with Florence Nightingale on England and Her Soldiers, a book using the experience of the Scutari Hospital during the Crimean War to plead for better standards of military hygiene: “We two dying women are resolved to save the British Army . . . . if we live a few months, we have the strongest expectation of doing it”. Martineau lived for another seventeen years, Nightingale another fifty. Martineau’s early sense that she would be “laid on the sofa for life” makes her periods of good health all the more striking, her descriptions providing evidence of a robust personality: “I ride like a Borderer, – walk like a pedlar – climb like a Mountaineer”, she wrote to Emerson in 1845, shortly after deciding that Ambleside would become her home.

If Harriet Martineau lacked anything, it was the gift of prophecy. In 1837, she saw “little chance” that Queen Victoria could “turn out much”. She predicts a waning interest in Tennyson, but augurs that the poetry of her friend Richard Monckton Milnes will achieve “deep and lasting good”. In 1843, she laments “poor declining Boz”; a few years later, she notes that “the public are tired of fiction”. Happily, her failings as a prophet seem most to concern herself, at least so far as her frequent predictions of imminent death were concerned. As Greg wrote in his memorial essay on Harriet Martineau “her faults, which were neither few nor small, were readily forgiven her, for she loved much and laboured hard for the happiness of others”. An apt appraisal of a woman who believed herself so long to suffer from “an enlarged heart”.
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Maria Frawley is the author of Invalidism and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain, 2004. She is Associate Professor of English at George Washington University.