Harriet Martineau

From Philosopedia

Martineau, Harriet (1802–1876)

“From the moment a man desires to find the truth on one side rather than another, it is all over with him as a philosopher,” wrote Martineau in her “Letters on the Laws of Man’s Nature and Development.”

The youngest of eight children of a Norwich (England) silk manufacturer, she was a sister of the Rev. James Martineau, who attained a celebrity nearly equal to her own and was nearest to her in age. Her family had once been driven with thousands of their fellow Huguenots from France to England, a story she heard often from her parents. In spite of her increasing deafness as a child, she was sent to singing schools and became an accomplished performer upon the piano until her infirmity caused her to lose interest. As for her health, “I have never,” she once wrote, “had the sense of smell, nor, therefore, much sense of taste; and before I was twenty I had lost the greater part of my hearing. When my companions give me notice of distant objects by means of any of these senses - when they tell me what is growing in an invisible field or garden, or where there is music, or what people are saying on the farther side of a reach of the lake on a calm summer evening, I feel a sort of start, as if I were in company with sorcerers.”

Lacking the exercise of her senses, however, she developed an interest in writing, according to Sara A. Underwood. “When the great comet of 1811 appeared, I was nine years old,” Martineau wrote. “Night after night that autumn the whole family went up to the long range of windows in my father’s warehouse to see the comet. I was obliged to go with them, but I never once saw it! My heart used to swell with disappointment and mortification. No effort was wanting on my part; and parents, brothers, and sisters used to point and say, ‘Why, there! Why, it is as large as a saucer! You might as well say you cannot see the moon!’ I could not help it; I never saw it, and I have not got over it yet.”

Martineau’s religious education had been in the Unitarian faith, and her first work, published in 1823, was Devotions for Young People. Her next was a religious novel, Christmas Day. In 1930 when the British and Foreign Unitarian Association offered prizes for the three best tracts—“On the Introduction and Promotion of Christian Unitarianism among the Roman Catholics, the Jews, and Mohammedans”—Martineau competed for all three. Although there were three separate sets of judges, Martineau won all three prizes.

From 1839 to 1844, Martineau was a confirmed invalid. But she continued to write, even when prostrate in bed with illness. Somehow, with the aid of mesmerism, her health improved to the point that in 1840, ear trumpet in hand, she toured Egypt, Palestine, and Arabia, writing an account of her the friends she made and finishing an essay on the life and purposes of Moses and his dealings with the Israelites of old. “It is my deliberate opinion that the one essential requisite of human welfare in all ways is scientific knowledge of human nature,” wrote Martineau, whose collections of stories interpreted economics to the laymen of her time.

In her youth, Martineau had attended services at the Octagon Chapel, and she had an article published in Monthly Repository, which she described as “a poor little Unitarian periodical.” She wrote Illustrations of Political Economy (9 volumes) and Illustrations of Taxation (1834). Her unflattering description of the United States in Society in America (1837) was accompanied by her becoming an advocate for the abolition of slavery.

When she openly avowed her unbelief concerning religion, even her brother, James, censured her publicly for her atheism. One Christian reviewer remarked that her work “is exceedingly interesting, but it is marred by the mocking spirit of Infidelity which she allows for the first time to darken her pages and testify to the world her disbelieve in the Divine revelation.” Even her friend, Charlotte Brontë, “grieved sadly over this declension on the part of one whom she admired as combining the highest mental culture with the nicest discharge of feminine duties. The book (Eastern Life), Brontë said, was the first exposition of avowed atheism and materialism she had ever read - the first unequivocal declaration of a disbelief of God or a future life. Hundreds, she said, had deserted Miss Martineau on account of this book.” Martineau, however, denied losing any friends whatever by her book and, in fact, said she had gained a new world of sympathy. And she persisted: “There is no theory of a God, of an author of Nature, of an origin of the Universe, which is not utterly repugnant to my faculties; which is not (to my feelings) so irreverent as to make me blush; so misleading as to make me mourn. I can now hardly believe that it was I who once read Milton with scarcely any recoil from the theology; or Paley’s Natural Theology with pleasure at the ingenuity of the mechanic-god he thought he was recommending to the admiration of his readers. . . . What an emancipation it is—to have escaped from the little enclosure of dogma, and to stand—far indeed from being wise—but free to learn!”

Nathaniel Hawthorne described her as follows:

• She is a large, robust, elderly woman, and plainly dressed; but, withal, she has so kind, cheerful, and intelligent a face that she is pleasanter to look at than most beauties. . . . All her talk was about herself and her affairs; but it did not seem like egotism, because it was so cheerful and free from morbidness. And this woman is an atheist, and thinks that the principle of life will become extinct when her body is laid in the grave! I will not think so, were it only for her sake.

Martineau’s Autobiography, published after her death, shows the full extent of her unbelief, for she had also repudiated her Unitarianism. In it she described herself as “an atheist in the regular sense—that of rejecting the popular theology—but not in the philosophic sense of denying a First Cause.” However, addsJoseph McCabe, “her First Cause was impersonal and she rejected immortality.”

Martin Greif has praised her for her feminism and alleged lesbianism, although no specific names of her loves were cited. Fewer than six weeks before her death, Martineau wrote her last letter, to H. G. Atkinson, which included the following:

• I cannot think of any future as at all probable, except the “annihilation” from which some people recoil with so much horror. I find myself here in the universe—I know not how, whence or why. I see everything in the universe go out and disappear, and I see no reason for supposing that it is not an actual and entire death. And for my part, I have no objection to such an extinction. I well remember the passion with which W. E. Forster said to me, “I had rather be damned than annihilated.” If he once felt five minutes’ damnation, he would be thankful for extinction in preference. The truth is, I care little about it any way. Now that the event draws near, and that I see how fully my household expect my death pretty soon, the universe opens so widely before my view, and I see the old notions of death, and scenes to follow so merely human—so impossible to be true, when once glanced through the range of science—that I see nothing to be done but to wait, without fear or hope for future experience, nor have I any fear of it. Under the weariness of illness I long to be asleep.

Martineau’s funeral was entirely private and free from religious ceremonial.

{BDF; CE; EG; Freethought History #9, 1994; Pat Duffy Hutcheon, “Harriet Martineau, The Woman Who Thought Like a Man,” Humanist in Canada, Summer 1996; FFRF; JM; Harriet Martineau, Autobiography (1877); JMR; RAT; RE; SAU; TRI; WWS}