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Notes In the early part of 1855, Martineau was suffering from heart disease. She began to write her
autobiography, as she expected her life to end. Completing the book rapidly in three months, she
postponed its publication until after her death, and lived another two decades. Her autobiography
was published posthumously in 1877.
When Darwin’s book The Origin of Species was published in 1859, his brother Erasmus sent a copy
to his old flame Harriet Martineau. At age 58, she was still reviewing from her home in the Lake
District. From her “snow landscape”, Martineau sent her thanks, adding that she had previously
praised “the quality and conduct of your brother’s mind, but it is an unspeakable satisfaction to
see here the full manifestation of its earnestness & simplicity, its sagacity, its industry, and the
patient power by which it has collected such a mass of facts, to transmute them by such sagacious
treatment into such portentous knowledge. I should much like to know how large a proportion of
our scientific men believe he has found a sound road.”
Martineau supported Darwin’s theory because it was not based in theology. Martineau strove for
secularism stating, “In the present state of the religious world, Secularism ought to flourish. What
an amount of sin and woe might and would then be extinguished.” She wrote to her fellow
Malthusian (and atheist) George Holyoake enthusing, “What a book it is! – overthrowing (if true)
revealed Religion on the one hand, and Natural (as far as Final Causes and Design are concerned)
on the other. The range and mass of knowledge take away one’s breath.” To Fanny Wedgwood
she wrote,“I rather regret that C.D. went out of his way two or three times to speak of “The
Creator” in the popular sense of the First Cause.... His subject is the “Origin of Species” and not
the origin of Organisation; and it seems a needless mischief to have opened the latter speculation
at all – There now! I have delivered my mind.”

21.3 Economics and Social Sciences

As early as 1831, Martineau wrote on the subject “Political Economy” (as the field of economics
was then known). Her goal was to popularise and illustrate the principles of laissez faire capitalism,
though she made no claim to original theorising.
Martineau’s reflections on Society in America, published in 1837, are prime examples of her approach
to the area later known as sociological methods. Her ideas in this field were set out in her 1838
book How to Observe Morals and Manners. She believed that some very general social laws influence
the life of any society, including the principle of progress, the emergence of science as the most
advanced product of human intellectual endeavour, and the significance of population dynamics
and the natural physical environment.
Auguste Comte coined the name sociology and published a rambling exposition under the title of
Cours de Philosophie Positive in 1839. Martineau undertook a translation that was published in two
volumes in 1853 as The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte (freely translated and condensed by Harriet
Martineau). It was a remarkable achievement, but a successful one. Comte recommended her
volumes to his students instead of his own. Some writers regard Martineau as “the first woman
sociologist”. Her introduction of Comte to the English-speaking world and the elements of
sociological perspective in her original writings support her credit as a sociologist.
Death
Harriet Martineau died at “The Knoll” on 27 June 1876. She left an autobiographical sketch to be
published by the Daily News, in which she wrote. “Her original power was nothing more than was
due to earnestness and intellectual clearness within a certain range. With small imaginative and
suggestive powers, and therefore nothing approaching to genius, she could see clearly what she
did see, and give a clear expression to what she had to say. In short, she could popularize while
she could neither discover nor invent.”

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