THE COLLECTED LETTERS OF HARRIET MARTINEAU
Five volumes, 2,036pp. Pickering and Chatto.
By Deborah Anna Logan, editor
£450 the set (US $750) - 978 1 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".
