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Notes It is for you—the most worthy to be the apostle of all loftiest virtue—to teach, such as may be
taught, that the higher the kind of enjoyment, the greater the degree—perhaps there is but one class
to whom this can be taught—the poetic nature struggling with superstition: you are fitted to be the
saviour of such—If you’ve spent any time in Victorian England, you’ve undoubtedly run into
Harriet Martineau. She’s one of those persons who shows up everywhere there seems to be
something important happening. There she is in the summer of 1830 at the dinner party where
John Stuart Mill meets Mrs. Harriet Taylor. Two years later she can be spotted at Charles Babbage’s
home for a demonstration of a working component of his unfinished Calculating Engine. “All
were eager to go to his glorious soirées;” she later wrote in her autobiography, “and I always
thought he appeared to great advantage as a host. His patience in explaining his machine in those
days was really exemplary. I felt it so, the first time I saw the miracle, as it appeared to me...”
While Charles Darwin is sailing around the world aboard the Beagle, his older brother Erasmus is
making the acquaintance of Harriet Martineau, who later spends much time with the Darwins and
Wedgwoods, inspiring them with her strong anti-slavery politics. Some even think that marriage
might be in the future for Erasmus Darwin and Harriet. (Harriet Martineau never married.)
When the controversial pseudo-scientific Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation is published
anonymously in 1844, Harriet Martineau is suspected of being the author. (So is Charles Babbage,
Augustus De Morgan, Charles Lyell, Charles Darwin, Lady Lovelace, and many others.) In 1845
Harriet Martineau meets the 25-year old Mary Ann Evans, and inspires the younger woman to
become a professional writer and move to London, which she does to achieve great success under
the pseudonym George Eliot. All this time, Harriet Martineau is writing dozens of novels and
stories, and thousands of articles for periodicals, becoming the most famous female English journalist
of the 19th century.
Harriet Martineau was born in 1802 to a Unitarian household. At the age of 20 she contracted
otosclerosis, and as she aged she became increasingly deaf — requiring her to use an ear trumpet
for most of her life — with no sense of smell and a defective sense of taste. Her father’s business
collapsed in the financial crisis of 1825–26, leaving the family poor and Harriet in the position of
needing to earn an income. As a deaf woman, she couldn’t teach and she had already been
writing, so she began writing more, with fame and notoriety soon to follow. Her Illustrations of
Political Economy (1832—35) consisted of nine volumes of stories that explored various concepts of
economics of the sort preferred by free-trade Whigs. She traveled to America and was threatened
with lynching after speaking out against slavery, writing about her experiences in the three-
volume Society in America (1837) followed by the three-volume Retrospect of Western Travel (1838).
She wrote books on education, mesmerism, and history, became a follower of Comte, and published
The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, Freely Translated & Condensed by Harriet Martineau (1853),
which was then translated back into French because her condensation and elimination of repetition
managed to improve on the original.
In 1858, Harriet Martineau began writing for The Edinburgh Review — standard reading for politically
progressive households of the period, and one of several periodicals of the era that featured what
seemed to be book reviews, but were actually long, often unsigned, essays. For the October 1858
issue, Harriet. Martineau contributed “The Slave Trade in 1858”, one of her many articles about
slavery.
Harriet Martineau’s major contribution to the literature of 1859 was an April 1859 article for The
Edinburgh Review focusing on another subject she was passionate about — the political and economic
mistreatment of women in “Female Industry”.
“Female Industry” is a fascinating artifact, mostly for the vision it gives us of the wide scope of
jobs women performed in England 150 years ago. As Harriet Martineau indicates, English law of
the period assumed that “every woman is supported ... by her father, her brother, or her husband.”
But this was no longer the case. With the rise of the middle class, many women were working

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