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Notes As we reconsider her influence, we realize that we are not recovering a “lost woman writer”
whose few small gems have been lost to the public for many years. Rather, hers is an enormous
output. She never revised, and although some of her writing is lively and brilliant, some of it is
very dull. She can be credited with neither painstaking attention to craft nor stylistic grace. Some
of her vast outpouring has remained in print, and she has continued to hold a small place of
historical recognition. Thus, it is neither because of neglect nor because of her virtuosity as a
writer that we should again turn our attention to her.
As she was not entirely lost to history, so she was not a typical woman of her time, either. Harriet
Martineau cannot be used as a case study of a nineteenth-century woman. She was not inarticulate
or limited in public expression as most women were. She was not even a typical woman writer, for
there were few women journalists, women writers tending to concentrate more on fiction and
poetry. As a single woman, she was not dependent on an individual man for her economic or
emotional well-being as the vast majority of women were. No one thing that she did, no one
aspect of her life makes her in any way a representative nineteenth-century woman.
On the other hand, even though she more often expressed new trends than typified currents, she
was not an original thinker. Her genius lay in her ability to discern new ideas with quick intelligence,
to communicate them clearly to the popular mind, and thus to rally, time and again, supporters
and advocates of the new viewpoints and causes. Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo,
James Mill, Joseph Priestley, Jeremy Bentham thought up the doctrines of political economy,
necessarian philosophy, and utilitarianism that she taught in the early years of her adulthood.
Mrs. Jane Marcet in Conversations on Political Economy even invented the format she first used, the
simplified lesson in print aimed at educating common people. Martineau took the ideas and
perfected the form—the primer textbook in a sophisticated field, the how-to manual—at a time
when the desire for general education was highly developed, but the instructional materials for it
were not. Similarly, her account of her travels in the United States helped change the shape of the
travel book. Although it was in vogue for Europeans to travel in the new republic and write about
it, Martineau did more than simply describe her journey. She formulated a comparative method
for studying societies and analyzed the new American culture by measuring it against carefully
stated principles. Quite possibly, she wrote the first “methodological essay” ever published, How
to Observe Morals and Manners.. Her greatest originality was in her method. Significantly, she
translated and abbreviated Comte’s Positive Philosophy, the wellspring of social scientific thought,
so effectively that it spread the Comtean word far and wide and gave Martineau herself a new
systematic framework in positivism. Comte himself believed it was so good that he had it
retranslated into French for his French disciples, and her translation and abridgment are still the
standard edition of Comte’s work used in English sociology textbooks today.
It was the same with political issues. She did not begin a single campaign, but whether it was
British reform politics, American abolitionism, nursing in the Crimean War, or feminism, she was
in the forefront, interpreting and fighting for the cause. John Stuart Mill took the first petition for
woman’s suffrage to Parliament in 1866, but Harriet Martineau signed it and had long worked for
it. American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison was her hero, and no other English writer wrote
so much in the cause of American abolition of slavery as she. Florence Nightingale was on the
battlefield, organizing and professionalizing nursing in the Crimea, and then back home organizing
nursing education and the War Office in England, but Martineau was her champion in the press.
It is the cumulative effect of Martineau’s numerous contributions that forms a part of her lasting
contribution.
Although in some ways Martineau was very much a woman of her time and a Victorian intellectual,
she was also, along with a group of her contemporaries, a true progenitor of the intellectual mode
that reigns in Anglo-American liberalism today and provides the dominant informing paradigm
of mainstream Western feminism. It is this intellectual influence that constitutes her greatest

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