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".
