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Unit 21: Harriet Martineau-On Marriage: Introduction and Detailed Study

friends, and on her return published Eastern Life, Present and Past (1848). This travelogue expressed Notes
her concept that, as humanity passed through one after another of the world’s historic religions,
the conception of the Deity and of Divine government became at each step more and more abstract
and indefinite. She believed the ultimate goal to be philosophic atheism, but did not explicitly say
so in the book. She described ancient tombs, “the black pall of oblivion” set against the paschal
“puppet show” in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and noted that Christian beliefs in reward
and punishment were based on and similar to heathen superstitions. Describing an ancient Egyptian
tomb, she wrote, “How like ours were his life and death!... Compare him with a retired naval
officer made country gentleman in our day, and in how much less do they differ than agree!” The
book’s “infidel tendency” was too much for the publisher John Murray, who rejected it.
Martineau wrote Household Education in 1848, lamenting the state of women’s education. She
believed women had a natural inclination to motherhood and believed domestic work went hand
in hand with academia for a proper, well-rounded education. She stated, “I go further than most
persons... in desiring thorough practice in domestic occupations, from an early age, for young
girls” She proposed that freedom and rationality, rather than command and obedience, are the
most effectual instruments of education.
Her interest in schemes of instruction led her to start a series of lectures, addressed at first to the
school children of Ambleside, but afterward extended to their parents, at the request of the adults.
The subjects were sanitary principles and practice, the histories of England and North America,
and the scenes of her Eastern travels. At the request of the publisher Charles Knight, in 1849 she
wrote The History of the Thirty Years’ Peace, 1816–1846, an excellent popular history from the point
of view of a “philosophical Radical”. Martineau productively spanned a variety of subjects in her
writing and did so with more assertiveness than was expected of women at the time. She has been
described as having an “essentially masculine nature”. It was commonly thought that a progressive
woman, in order to be progressive, was emulating the qualities of a man.
Martineau edited a volume of Letters on the Laws of Man’s Nature and Development, published in
March 1851. Its epistolary form is based on correspondence between her and the self-styled scientist
Henry G. Atkinson. She expounded the doctrine of philosophical atheism, which she thought the
tendency of human belief. She did not deny a first cause but declared it unknowable. She and
Atkinson thought they affirmed man’s moral obligation. Atkinson was a zealous exponent of
mesmerism. The prominence given to the topics of mesmerism and clairvoyance heightened the
general disapproval of the book. Literary London was outraged by its mesmeric evolutionary
atheism, and the book caused a lasting division between Martineau and some of her friends. From
1852 to 1866, she contributed regularly to the Daily News, writing sometimes six leaders a week. It
also published her Letters from Ireland, written during a visit to that country in the summer of 1852.
For many years she was a contributor to the Westminster Review; in 1854 she was among financial
supporters who prevented its closing down.
Martineau believed she was psychosomatic; this medical belief of the times related the uterus to
emotions and hysteria. She had symptoms of hysteria in her loss of taste and smell. Her partial
deafness throughout life may have contributed to her problems. Various people, including the
maid, her brother, and Spencer T. Hall (a notable mesmerist) performed mesmerism on her. Some
historians attribute her apparent recovery from symptoms to a shift in the positioning of her
tumor so that it no longer obstructed other organs. As the physical improvements were the first
signs of healing she had in five years and happened at the same time of her first mesmeric
treatment, Martineau confidentially credited mesmerism with her “cure.”
She continued her political activism during the late 1850s and 1860s. She supported the Married
Women’s Property Bill and in 1856 signed a petition for it organized by Barbara Bodichon. She
also pushed for licensed prostitution and laws that addressed the customers rather than the
women. She supported women’s suffrage and signed Bodichon’s petition in its favor in 1866.

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