Harriet Martineau, 1802-1876

 


English writer, economist and popularizer of Classical Ricardian economics.

Harriet Martineau was born into a large Norwich family of Huguenot extraction.  Her father, Thomas Martineau, was a textile (bombazine and camlet) manufacturer. Despite the large brood  (she was the sixth child out of eight), Harriet obtained a thorough, if brief, education ("solid rather than showy").  Much of it was obtained at home, but part of her teens were spent in formal boarding school in Bristol.  She did not evince promises of future brilliance nor receive much encouragement in her youth  - sickly, timid, dutiful and overlooked in the family, Harriet struggled under the thumb of an overbearing mother and critical elder brothers. Partially deaf from a childhood disease, Martineau took to writing early on for self-amusement, critical to developing her talent as a writer.  The lonely deaf girl from Norwich would go on to become one of the most influential economic writers of the age.

Harriet's younger brother was the famous Unitarian minister and philosopher James Martineau. The intellectual contrast between them could hardly be greater - James the sensitive divine idealist of the past, Harriet the skeptical practical examiner of the future. 

Martineau began her intellectual life sharing those strong religious leanings.  Around 1822, after her abbreviated schooling, Harriet met John Hugh Worthington, a divinity student and friend of James's from Manchester New College in York, to whom she would be briefly engaged.  Her frustration at not being able deepen her theological studies at a college, like her brother and fiancé, may have prompted Martineau to publish her first piece on female divines in 1822, under the pen-name "Discipulus", for the Monthly Repository, a small Unitarian journal with which she would have a long association.  Her second article, a plea to open higher education for women, was written in a male voice.  In 1823, she published her first book, Devotional Exercises, signing it merely as "a lady", and covering some deep theological topics, like the doctrine of necessity.  It was something of a success in the Unitarian community and ran through several editions.  She followed this up with another religious book, Addresses, Prayers and Hymns in 1826.  

However, Martineau family fortunes soon took a turn for the worse.  It began with the outbreak of war in Spain in 1823, nearly bankrupting her father, who had shipments tied up there.  This was followed by the death of her eldest brother Thomas, a physician, in 1824.  Then came the financial crisis of 1825, wiping out much of the family's remaining wealth and leaving them swamped by debts.  Then, in 1826, came the death of her broken father.  This was followed quickly by difficulties of her fiancé Worthington - by now a  unitarian minister in Manchester.  Mental illness and dissolution led Worthington to commit suicide in 1826.  It was her first and last engagement - Harriet would remain unmarried for the rest of her life. To make matters worse, Harriet Martineau, always of a sickly disposition, had grown increasingly deaf.  With James then at university, the remainder of family had to scramble to make ends meet.

Hoping to make some extra pennies from her pen, Harriet Martineau contacted Houlston, a publisher for the religious mass market.  Martineau submitted a few fancifully-written tales she had lying around. Houlston agreed to pay her five guineas for each she could produce, publishing them as small volumes of Sunday school-style storybooks.   She ended up producing nearly a dozen.  It was anonymous hack-work, but it brought in some much-needed money.  At Houlston's request, she wrote a larger story, Principle and Practice (1827), which had strong autobiographical elements.

Two of her 1827 Houlston storybooks - The Rioters and The Turn-Out - touched on themes of political economy (Luddites and Wages, respectively).  She was not really familiar with economics then, having only an intuitive grasp gleaned from newspapers.  It was then that Martineau decided to learn it and picked up Jane Marcet's Conversations on Political Economy.  Marcet was a eye-opener, not only for introducing Martineau to the field, but also for demonstrating how it could be usefully conveyed by narrative tales.

In early 1828, on her doctor's orders, Martineau took a brief pause from her writing. But upon the appeal of the William Johnston Fox,  the unitarian preacher and new editor of the Monthly Repository, she began submitting articles - a steady stream of essays, poems and reviews -  in the latter half of 1828 straight through 1832.  Her contributions to the Monthly were mostly unpaid and anonymous (usually delivered in a male voice and signed by "V").

The Martineau family hit rock bottom in June 1829, when their textile business (under the guidance of her brother Henry since their father's death) finally went bankrupt, leaving them no means of support.  Her elder sisters were packed off as governesses,  but the sickly Harriet could not. Martineau and her mother took in needlepoint work to make ends meet.  Desperately appealing to Fox for compensation, he managed to provide Harriet with a small fixed salary of £15 per year.  Later that year, Fox found her a proofreading job with a London printer at a more generous salary, but she turned it down, unable to abandon her mother in Norwich.  In another setback, she wrote another book around this time, Life of Howard, on commission from Henry Brougham's Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK), on a promised payment of £30.  But there was some confusion - the manuscript was lost in Brougham's offices (it later re-appeared, cribbed wholesale into the publication of another writer (Hepworth Dixon?); Martineau went unpaid).

In between needlepoint and unpaid monthly articles, in 1830, Martineau produced Traditions of Palestine, the first work in which her own name appeared as author, and probably her biggest success thus far.  Around this time, the proselytizing Unitarian Association opened up three essay competitions, inviting writers to submit essays communicating the Unitarian message to Roman Catholics, Jews and Muslims.  Martineau submitted essays that won all three competitions.

However grand her reputation was now among Unitarians, Martineau's reach was still confined to a narrow sectarian community. She attempted to reach out to a wider audience with her Jane Austenesque novel Five Years of Youth, but it was not a success. 

By late 1831, having gone beyond Marcet to read Adam Smith and other economists, Martineau began planning a series of stories to illustrate the principles of political economy. Martineau's attempts to find a publisher met with failure (allegedly, James Mill was consulted  by a publisher on the project and advised against it, arguing that the narrative tales were unsuited for such a serious topic). Nonetheless, her old publisher W.J. Fox persuaded his brother, Charles Fox, to give it a shot.  The latter agreed, wrote up a contract with Martineau and began to collect subscribers.

In early 1832, Martineau's Illustrations of Political Economy began appearing, and, by 1834, she would put out 25 volumes in the series.  Unlike Marcet, she did not attempt to "smother it" in stories, but to expose economics systematically in a series of narratives. Her greatest intellectual influence was James Mill's Elements --whose order of topics she basically followed.  The volumes also contained the indelible democratic imprint of her reading of Jeremy Bentham.   Martineau was thoroughly "Ricardian" in her economics and "necessarianist" in her philosophy (which saw education as the salvation of society). She was also a doctrinaire supporter the wages-fund doctrine.

Martineau's Illustrations were a sensation. Volume after volume sold out instantly, at home and abroad.  Jane Marcet, James Mill (now repentant), Richard Whately and Robert Malthus praised her work.  Henry Brougham  remarked that his entire stable of SDUK writers had not nearly as much sense as "that deaf little girl from Norwich".

In November, 1832, after eight numbers of the series were published, Martineau moved to London,  where her mother soon joined her.  There, she concentrated on finishing the volumes and held court to London society: economists, reform activists, and politicians of every stripe called upon her and flooded her mail, requesting her to emphasize some theoretical principle or political cause in her stories : Henry Brougham badgered her to take up Poor Law reform; Lord Althorp, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, sent his secretary to provide her with details of his upcoming budget; the Royal Commission on Excise Taxes provided her with a draft of their report before they had officially submitted it - all in the hope that she would take it up in her Illustrations.

Martineau took her share of criticism too.  The Tory Quarterly Review denounced her work as crude apologism and for baldly serving the Whig agenda.  When she ventured a volume on the sensitive issue of Ireland, the Dublin press savaged her.  Her 12th volume, which contained critical comments of the French monarchy, led to the cancellation of an official French plan (arranged by her new friend, Marcet) to introduce translations of Martineau's books into the French state school curriculum.  Her works were banned in Russia and Austria-Hungary after she constructed one story (13th, Charmed Sea) around Polish exiles in a Siberian labor camp (she sought to illustrate the spontaneous emergence of money from barter).

As the series wound down in 1834, Brougham prevailed on her to take up Poor Law reform in a new series, Poor Laws and Paupers Illustrated and, having dashed off that, Martineau was soon at work on still another, Illustrations of Taxation.

Although ill and deaf, Martineau continued writing indefatigably, promoting notorious causes such as the abolitionist movement and the establishment of the Poor Laws.   Although pro-laissez-faire and pro-direct taxation, she also defended the right to unionize and strike (rare for most political economists of the time).  Even then, liberals such as John Stuart Mill "shuddered" at the way Martineau translated Ricardian political economy into an apologist doctrine.  After the 1830s, Martineau would return only occasionally to her youthful passion, political economy.  

Age emboldened her: Martineau's now-classic 1837 Society in America was vigorous in its critique of American society.   In 1839 she tried her hand at a novel (Deerbrook) and then went on to history (1841, 1849) and even hypnotism (1844). Her anti-religious 1851 treatise was rather controversial.  Her 1853 translation of Auguste Comte's Cours de philosophie positive is largely responsible for bringing his ideas to Great Britain.  Her work on the Indian crisis (1857, 1858) encouraged the introduction of natives in the colonial civil service, urging that British aim should be "developing India for the Indians". (1858: p.98).  Around 1858, she ceased her connection with the Westminster Review, and took up writing for the Edinburgh Review. Her 1859 book on the sanitary condition of the army was written for Florence Nightingale.  In 1859  she also began writing for the American Anti-Slavery Standard
 

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