In Our Time - Harriet Martineau

Episode Date: December 8, 2016

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Harriet Martineau who, from a non-conformist background in Norwich, became one of the best known writers in the C19th. She had a wide range of interests and used a new, sociological method to observe the world around her, from religion in Egypt to slavery in America and the rights of women everywhere. She popularised writing about economics for those outside the elite and, for her own popularity, was invited to the coronation of Queen Victoria, one of her readers. WithValerie Sanders Professor of English at the University of HullKaren O'Brien Professor of English Literature at the University of OxfordAndElla Dzelzainis Lecturer in 19th Century Literature at Newcastle UniversityProducer: Simon Tillotson.

Hi, I'm Hugh Dennis, and just before you joined the erudite Melvin Bragg, the man we'd most want to do a pub quiz with, for this week's In Our Time podcast, I want to tell you about the Radio 4 Christmas Appeal. For 90 years, BBC radio listeners have been there for thousands of homeless and vulnerable people across the UK by supporting the work of St Martin in the fields. Here at St Martin, staff and volunteers work around the clock, helping people get off the streets so they can re-repearl. build their lives. And through the Vickers Relief Fund, St. Martins makes thousands of crisis grants each year to homeless people or those at risk of homelessness rise across the UK. Help change lives and make a difference by making a donation to the BBC Radio 4 Christmas Appeal. You can make a donation by going to the Radio 4 website. Now, please enjoy In Our Time with Melvin Bragg. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list

to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC in Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programmes. Hello, Harriet Martineau is one of the most prolific and famous writers of the 19th century. Born into a Unitarian family in Norwich in 1802, she made her name writing popular stories about the economic and social problems of her time. They reached a very wide audience with Queen Victoria among them. Martinot was a phenomenon, but she was divisive. She argued for the abolition. of slavery and went to the American slave states for two years to drive her points home. She stood for the rights of women to work and be educated and to earn property.

She also followed Malthus, and his view that poor people shouldn't have children they couldn't afford to feed. So for all the criticism that came her way, she heard unbowed, aiming to show by her own example how a single woman could live independently, influential and morally. With me to discuss Harriet Bartineau are Valerie Sanders, Professor of English at the University of Hull. Karen O'Brien, Professor of English literature at the University of Oxford, and Ellett Selzenes lecturer in 19th century literature at Newcastle University.

Karen O'Brien, Harriet Martin O's life began in Norwich in 1802. What was her childhood like? She had a reasonably happy childhood. Her father was a wealthy cloth manufacturer in Norwich, as you mentioned, and they were part of a dissenting Unitarian family with a large family network that stretched across the country. She was clearly

an extraordinarily bright, interesting, but somewhat rebellious and defiant child. And we get a very vivid picture of her childhood. from the autobiography she wrote in 1855. She was the sixth of eight children, and she clearly had to fight for her sibling position in that environment. So the autobiography describes incidents where she actively defies her mother

because she feels that her mother is favouring her sister, refuses to back down and gains her point. As she grew up, she became increasingly resentful of her overbearing mother, although her father often appears to be a rather invisible figure in the story. She was clearly highly intelligent. She had some formal schooling, quite high-quality formal schooling, She learned Latin and Greek. She learned a great deal from her brothers.

But as she grew older, she became increasingly death and lost some of her sense of taste and smell. Initially, her family didn't really recognize that deafness for what it was. They thought she was just being awkward and difficult. And again, I think this consolidated her sense of defiance and injustice. Norwich has got a great cathedral town, town of many churches, and so on. But the dissenters were very strong there.

And we're finding again and again over the last 200 years, the centre is providing an underground university, really. They weren't allowed to go to university. They weren't allowed to go to church. And so and so forth. And that happened there too. She was sent to Bristol, wasn't she, to a very fine teacher who helped her taught her mathematics as well as the Latin and Greek you mentioned.

She was. She spent a couple of years in Bristol, and although she doesn't say a great deal about it in her autobiography, it clearly was very formative. You'll write about this dissenting milieu, and particularly in Norwich, that Unitarian atmosphere. So Unitarianism has a long history, had a long history, of being exceptionally committed to education, including women's education.

So some of the earliest essays that Martineau published were concerned with Unitarian writers like Anna Leticia Barbald, who advocated education for women. What opportunities would there have been for a young woman in Norwich? She's born in 18 or two, so let's say she's say it's 25. What opportunities were around at the time in 1830 for a young woman? It depended very much on your social class, and Harriet Martino was always at pains to emphasise that women across the social classes worked. They worked in manufacturing, they worked as tradeswomen, they worked in shops, they worked as servants.

For a middle-class girl, the opportunities were more limited. She learned needlework, and when her father's business went bankrupt in the 1820s, she made some money out of her exceptional talent for needlework. So that was one avenue open to her. But clearly another avenue that was increasingly open in this period was for women as writers, women contributing to burgeoning periodicals, women as novelists, and Harriet Martineau started to take advantage of that, and to write essays for money for the unitary,

in journal the monthly repository in the late 1820s. Now, something that began when I understood she was 12, was deafness which became an increasing deafness and led to her having to use an ear trumpet, which might have seemed extrinsical. Some idiots are ridiculous. So can you describe the effect that that began to have on this young woman? I mentioned how initially it wasn't understood by her family.

I think when she learned to use an ear trumpet, in some way she used it as a kind of social prop. So it's certainly a way of gaining attention placing herself at the centre of a social environment in forcing people to pay attention to her. But what she does say in her autobiography is that she always refused to say the phrase, please say that again.

She made a kind of moral and personal commitment to observe, to listen, and not to make her disability the focus for other people's energies. Thank you very much. Anna Selgaidness, Martinus Pam Neu, Unichagher, as you said that, can we just explore that a little more?

How resolute were they? How independent were they? Did they mix in with the rest of people in Norwich? What's going on there? I think that the important aspect of Unitarianism really is that it's a branch of Protestant non-conformity. And one of the priorities that it has is, as the name suggests, they're anti-Trinitarian. That is that they don't believe in the Holy Spirit. They don't believe in hell either, do they?

No, and, you know, there is no elect. and they don't believe in original sin. So one of the consequences of that is that there's a really strong emphasis on the environment, as Karen has suggested, there's a strong emphasis on education. People are improvable. And so for somebody like Harriet, that means that society can be changed. And one of the aspects of her thinking, I think that's particularly important is that she was a Necessarian.

When she goes off to Bristol to be educated by Lank Carpenter, she comes under his influence and he is a powerfully committed Necessarian himself. Necessarian. One of the things about Necessarianism is the doctrine of causation. What that means is that there are laws

operating in the universe. And if we can just understand those laws, they're fixed laws. If we can just modify our behaviour in accordance with those laws, then our lives will become much happier. How do we find out about them? Pardon? How do we find out about these laws? But this is

part of a long process really. Yeah, but what's the long process? Inquiry. Well, where do you look for them? Where do you look for them? I think through science, through thought. So, you've mentioned Malthus, you know, Malthus is one of

Malthusian laws are one of the sets of laws governing the universe that Martin O'Fields has been revealed. So it's a long process that she goes through. And I think although she loses her faith later in her life, she always sticks to her necessarianism. So that's the sort of particular strand of

her thinking that's very important to her. So the Unitarian, you don't believe in an original sin. That, in a sense, liberates her from a lot of young women around her. Well, it means that you're brought into life as a blank slate. And so education is very important. And it's liberatory in that sense that Unitarian women were very often more highly educated than your standard 19th century.

Not believing in hell must have been rather relief as well, wasn't it? Yes, I'm sure it was. I mean, it's a big thing not to believe in at that time. Did she ever refer to it? I'm not sure. Well, it doesn't matter. We'll go on here for it. What else would shape her education from a Unitarian?

Let's get the education complete. As a Unitarian, she would get this, but she would not get that. What? She was taught mathematics, for instance, which she would not have got as a young woman in any Anglican possibility. Well, she read works by Joseph Priestley, by David Hartley, you know,

all key figures from Unitarianism. She did read the classics, as Karen suggests. I mean, it was a very broad-ranging education that she received at the hands of her Unitarian teachers and of Lank Carpenter down in Bristol. So she's well-educated young woman by all the standards of that time with certain opportunities, but there would often be opportunities to be a governess, wouldn't that? That would be the big break. Well, yes, I mean, if you're a middle-class woman who's fallen on hard times,

which Martinot certainly did when her father's business failed and then he died, and so she was required to go, she needed to earn a living somehow. But obviously, governessing was not available to her really with her hearing difficulties. So I think that one of the things that happened in a sense was that her father's death released her into a writing career. It became more permissible for her to write than it would have been previously. Paul Reis Anders, I mentioned that it was being made of a father's death. Her writing career was propelled forward massively by the success of her book,

illustrations of political economy. Can you tell us about that book? Yes, this was the book that actually... She was about 30 was it? Yes, it was published. It was a series of 24 stories and a summary story brought out between 1832 and 1834, one per month. and apparently 10,000 copies of each number were sold. That means more were read, weren't there?

There was interesting statistic there. I think it's more like 144,000 would actually read it because they'd circulate around families and people would... So everyone, 10,000 bought, 140,000 would read. Yes, so it was extraordinary, and it's very difficult for us to understand now how this happened. But it seemed to hit a note at the time in that if you think about the dates,

Walter Scott had died in 1832, and Dickens only began writing in the late 1830s. So there was a kind of gap for writing realist fiction, and she happened to insert herself into that gap in a very productive way. Can you tell us how realist fiction was and give us two illustrations from the stories, and why were they so different from everybody else's? They were different from everybody else's, I think,

because they were based on the tracked idea, but they weren't really tracts. They were like mini-novels or novelettes and novellas. And each one was about a particular community. So she creates a new community afresh in each of the stories. So, for example, in a Manchester strike in 1832, this is obviously about how strikers take action against their employers and how this is a bad thing to do.

And it was to illustrate the theory of identical interests between employers and employees. So if the employees come out on strike, then they're going to pull down their employers with them. So that's all set in a kind of world that Elizabeth Gaskell would take up perhaps 15 years later. So I think they have that kind of prophetic quality really as works of fiction that other people will take up that sort of idea later on. Can you give us another sort?

There's a story followed by a little tract at the end saying, Yes. This is the economics behind it. Yes, there's the economics behind it. And contemporary references suggest that in fact a lot of people skipped that bit. they read for the story. And she goes to extraordinary lengths, actually, to create these communities

and to create subplots and interwoven lives and families. And there are families who obey the economic laws, and they do very well, and they're economic disasters from the people who don't obey the economic laws, and they end up in the workhouse or worse, they die, or they end up cleaning the streets, or something like that.

So they're moral tales, but I think they go a long way beyond that, because she goes beyond what's necessary to create these examines, She actually creates families, she creates dialogues. And people at the time tended to say that these were picturesque stories. The scenery was distinctive for each of the stories. And the characters all have personalities and their dialogues were interesting to read.

So it went way beyond what was necessary for a kind of economic tract. And the 25, there's quite a range of locations, you're saying, yeah. Yes, and also she goes back into the past. She goes into the French Revolution. She goes into Russia, South Africa, South Wales. Wales, London, there are London ones as well, there are all kinds of exotic locations. But this is remarkable, isn't she, not self-educated by a long way, but she's outside university education and so on. And she's ranging all over the place. She's also,

she isn't inspired, as it were, by the poets of the past. She's inspired by Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, the economist, and brings that to bear. She's talking about this is the reality of your commercial political life in this country. Look what is happening to you? Yes, I think she thinks these are exciting scenarios and they're very modern, people can relate to them and that they have a certain sort of beauty as well, because she did seem to enjoy describing the landscapes and setting the characters in scenes that people could actually enjoy. So, for example, she has one set in Ceylon. She has another one in Russia. She has them in hilly landscapes and she has a Scottish island. And we've talking about this being phenomenally popular,

her reputation, and more importantly for her, making her living. I mean, she moves to London because of this. She sets up a place in London. Her mother mellows, and she relents to her mother. Her mother comes and live with her. So she gets going. Yes. And then she quite soon goes to the United States for two years.

Yes. She was a restless soul, wasn't she? Karen O'Brien, we might be lionizing Martineau, which wouldn't do, would it? Can you put her work into perspective? What was she thought of as a writer by other writers of the time? She didn't like to be lionized. She was critical of lionization, as we might say. To put her word into perspective, she said in an obituary that she wrote about herself when she thought she was dying in the 1850s, she could popularise while she could neither discover nor invent.

Now, that's an interesting statement. She does understand herself as a populariser, and she was certainly very well respected and regarded for the sheer range and clarity with which she condensed and distilled ideas and the kinds of topics that she covered. But I think it is fair to say that she's not intrinsically a highly original thinker. The moment that really changed life for her was reading political economy through a popularised account of classical political economy that she read in the 1820s. But she adopted this mode of thinking in a really rather doctrinaire way. So she believes in a kind of laissez-faire economics wedded to a utilitarian idea that you measure society according to how happy it makes people.

And she takes that to really quite simplified and extreme lengths. And she has very little sense, it seems to me, that the harmony of interest that Valerie referred to are really not manifesting themselves in Victorian society, that there is no intrinsic harmony of interest between the worker and the manufacturer and strikes are a symptom of something profound and real rather than just a misunderstanding on the part of the worker.

So she can be quite a coarse thinker in my view, but she has an astonishing ability to take very key Victorian ideas about reform, about hygiene, about social relations, about economics, and make them work across a huge variety of content. And for that she was very well respected and a writer as intelligent as George Elliott had a great deal of respect for that.

I was going to bring in George Elliot. She was because of her, I think partly because her fame because she was an unmarried woman because she had an e-traum, but so people like Carlisle, do you got laughed at it? Well, mocked, let's put it that way. Maybe not to her face, but probably they don't, I hope they dared.

By people like Carlisle, the grandees of the time. She did get mocked and she had slightly difficult relations with Carlisle. That's not very surprising. Most people did. Most people did, but they came from a very different end of the political and moral spectrum. Having said that, given that she was a woman writer and given that, except for a very few early essays, she never wrote under a pseudonym, unlike Bronte and others, she used her name and she was very forthright about her identity. And given that she covered very difficult topics, including, as Valerie mentioned, issues about reproduction in the illustrations of political economy,

she was attacked but she was never less respected and I think she always managed to stand on the firm ground that she was a respectable woman. There was no whiff of scandal about her and that helped her a great deal. You mentioned Bronte, Charlotte Bronte admired her too, didn't she? Charlotte Bronte admired her initially but she became worried by what she saw as Martino's

atheism. And she also was worried that she gave her a bad review. She gave Charlotte Bronte a bad review. She read Lelette. Nothing more is a writer like a bad review, I know that? And she said it, she said of Lillette, she said the author has no right to make readers so miserable and understand Charlotte Bronte resented that.

Anna, can we look at one of the... We've mentioned Malthus and birth control and that sets off flares in people's mind at the moment. What was her view on it? And can you tell her how she arrived at that view? Well, she is... The variety of political economy that she's interested in is Malthusian political economy,

as you say. And to explain Malthus, Malthus in 1798, wrote the essay on the principle of population. And in that he sets out the theory that population increases geometrically, whereas food supply increases arithmetically. And what that means is that population is always going to be pressing against food supply. And that Britain has reached the point where this is causing poverty and it's going to become a crisis. And his answer to that is for the poor to control their numbers, that sexual restraint and delayed marriage is the answer to the problem of poverty.

We're talking about non-controception virtually. Yes, that's right. Absinence is the only contraception. Yes, yes, yes. And he certainly does not support birth control. And neither does Martauno, even though she gets accused of that later on. And what you can see, I think, from that is the attraction for Martano. It's another one of those fixed laws governing the universe that has been revealed by Malthus' inquiry.

And she seizes on it with alacrity, really. But the problem with it, of course, is that it appears to punish the poor for their poverty. where Maltha sees himself as benevolent and Martino sees herself as benevolent to her critics, this is denying the poor man the blessing of a family life and it flies in the face of biblical injunction, you know, God's message to know about go forth and multiply and replenish the earth, so it flies in the face of that. And she writes a particular story in illustrations of political economy called Wheel and Woe in Garvalhoch, which is extremely controversial because it's set on the Garvalhoch Isles,

just off Scotland. And one of the key scenes in that story is a scene where two Highland Fisherwoman, Ella and Katie, have a discussion about whether Katie, who's recently widowed, should remarry. And the conclusion is, because the herring harvest is failing and there are too many people on the island, that no, Katie shouldn't marry. It's her duty. It's her social duty to refrain from marriage in order to keep population numbers down. And the response to that in the Tory press, was absolute outrage.

You know, she was attacked viciously in periodicals like the Quarterly Review. And what they did was they used the fact that she was a single young woman as the line of attack. It's a way of attacking Malthus through Martineau. But the idea was that, you know, a woman like this should not be talking about sexual matters. And one of the lines of attack was that she was only doing this. because she herself was so unattractive that nobody would want to marry her anyway. So this kind of anti-marriage, it was an anti-marriage propaganda that was a kind of sour grapes. Nasty stuff, isn't it?

It was, it was absolutely vicious. And there were cartoons, you know, there's a cartoon of her sitting over the fireplace stirring a kind of a cauldron with a cat nuzzling up against her bustle. And she's clearly being positioned as, you know, some spinsterish old witch that nobody would want to marry. Yeah, I mean, sometimes we guess Because we kind of think these jolly Victorian chapsed Long Beards and amiability all about them are vicious people. A lot of them, not all of them, but their streak

when somebody stepped out of line came to bear quite nastily. Yeah, well, she's... Not quite, very nastily. Yeah, well, she's transgressed all sorts of, you know, gender codes by writing in the way that she has. By writing about economics, you mean? On every subject under the sun as well.

Yeah, well, by writing about economics, but also writing, by writing, by writing about sex and sexual restraint. And also because the illustrations were, you know, they're popular short stories and they're aimed at men and women and children of all classes, the objection is that she's producing these stories every month about matters of sexual restraint.

And they're landing on the breakfast tables, as they phrased it, of the young and the fair. So she's corrupting the young. And they make some fairly brutal comparisons of her with Mary Wollstonecraft also in, in the reviews, you know, that she's propagating a sort of feminism by talking about what they call the mystical topics of generation.

Sex, sex, no way. Yes, that's right. Valerie, she scandalised magicists as we've heard, but her own life was above criticism. Well, I've used the phrase, I've known, it's a rotten phrase, there you go. And she set out to be like that. So what did she set out to be? Well, she had, the only moment of excitement, I suppose, romantically that she had in her life

was that she was briefly engaged to a school friend of her brothers in 1827, and something strange happened to him. He went mad. He had a brain fever and he died. And though she was a bit distraught at the time, she said afterwards that she was very thankful not to have married and declared herself probably the happiest single woman in England. And she said that she had never been tempted in that way, as she put it, afterwards.

So she did, however, have a sort of penchant for young men who were attractive. She did like male company. And she became friends successfully with publishers, with editors. There were men that she liked. But ultimately, she set up her house in Ambleside, in an all-female house with devoted servants and her niece, Maria, who came to live with her when she became ill. It's important to say that she was devoted to her servants too.

She made it a special thing that they were equals. She ate with them, that she had a marriage, she was in her house of the servants and so on. So she set up a feminine household. She did. In a very democratic way. She carried it through to a private life. Her belief in democracy was very keen and steady,

and it was in her own life as well. Very much so. For example, when the Crimean War was happening, she got out globes and maps and explained to the servants where it was all going on and she let them read the newspaper. She encouraged them to read the newspapers. And as you say, one of her servants actually got married from her house

and she created the wedding breakfast and it was all happening in Ambleside. So she was very warm and generous, I was very upset when her servants moved on, but they didn't want to move on particularly. They were very loyal to her and she to them, as you say. Karen, Karen O'Brien, the role of women in society was known as the woman question. What answer did Martin have to the woman question?

She had long and many answers and they evolved throughout her life. She starts, as I've indicated, with this interest in female education, which is very typical of her unitarian background. She then goes to America in the 1830s and writes this famous book called Society in America, which is actually very focused on the rule of women within American democracy. She was very disillusioned by what she found. She set out to test and evaluate America against its constitutional principles and its Declaration of Independence.

And what she found was women who were, in her view, very subservient, particularly in the South, but not only in the South. So one of the chapters of that book is called the Political Non-Existence of Women. She believed that you could measure society's level of advancement by the way that it treated its women and that America and Britain and the rest of Europe felt very short indeed. She was never a proponent of women's rights. She was cautious about the issue of suffrage.

She thought that might be something that could come eventually, but it wasn't for her the highest priority. One of the most significant sustained fokey of her life was on the area of women's work. So she had this kind of approach to the woman question, which was about creating a civic identity for women focused on the dignity and value of their work, whether that was domestic work or paid work.

She advocated for women to keep their wages, and not to have to hand them over to their husbands, as was legally the case, and she always campaigned for good working conditions for needle women. So that idea of women's work was fundamental to her feminism. Also, as we've been discussing, she was interested in female independence as it relates to the autonomy of their bodies,

so their reproductive rights, their dignity as physical beings. She campaigned later in life alongside Josephine Butler for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act, which in the 1860s gave magistrates, and police the power to physically examine women if they were suspected of prostitution. She thought that was outrageous, and she thought the state had no right to control women's bodies in this manner.

Ella, she traveled to America. Why, what's her off from America? She's had this great success. She's anti-ablishness, but that's one thing. But to go, and she's still, and we've got to keep remember, we must keep remembering the constant illness, not only the deafness, but she turned out later when she was post-mortembourg,

the growth of a massive ovarian disc cyst inside her. So she's an ill woman. But off she goes to America. He goes to America for two years. Now that's a long time to go to America at any stage. And she was going there as an anti-ab abolitionist. Can you tell us a bit about that?

Yes. Well, as Karen suggests, one of the things that she does there is that she goes and she measures what she sees against the Declaration of Independence, and particularly the line about all men are created equal. So she travels there as an abolitionist. And she also travels as an early feminist. And as Karen suggested, there's this sort of measuring of the treatment of women against this idea of equality.

But she travels like many other people, actually, in the period to witness this great democratic experiment in action. And I think it's almost inevitable that she finds fault in it. but she connects this sort of question of slavery and gender persistently in the way she writes about society in America afterwards. She comes back and she publishes this text called Society in America in 1837 and a second one called retrospect of Western travel in 1838. One of the striking things that she says in the text is about about about, about, about, gender in the southern state. So southern slave owners boast about the way in which there is less vice in the southern states than there is in the northern states, suggesting that there's nothing wrong with the state of slavery. But she makes the point very powerfully

that the reason that there's no vice, this is, you know, this is Victorian for prostitution as a term. The reason that there's no less vice in the southern state is because white plantation owners are having sex with their slaves. And she extends that point to thinking about the condition of southern white women. She quotes a white plantation owner's wife saying that she regards herself as simply the chief slave of the Harim. So there's this persistent linking of women's condition with the condition of slaves in the text. On her way to America, Valerie Sanders, she wrote about ways of a... observing without judging. It might be useful in parenthesis now to say she wrote

massively, she wrote across a range of subjects, travel, she wrote children's book, education books, she wrote for these great essays for the big periodicals of the day. Dickens asked her to write for him, she turned him down because she disapproved of his morals and leaving his wife and so on, but people were, she was in great demand. Anyway, she wrote this about

observing, and all, this has been some people call him the mother of sociology for this particular book. Can you tell us what is about? Yes, how to observe was published in 1838, and she wrote it after she'd come back from America. And what it is really is a methodology for people who want to go and observe another society or another country. And she said, first of all, you have to start with the things by which you meant the institutions in another society.

And you have to approach it without any of the prejudices and preconceptions from your own experience. What you need to do is ask these institutions certain questions. For example, how do they treat their women? how do they treat people with disabilities, how do they punish their criminals or manage their criminals? And she said, you need to be a philosophical traveller in many ways.

You have to think these things through philosophically. And one thing is a good idea to do. This is a slightly idiosyncratic thing, she says. You need to get up onto a high point like the top of a hillside or the top of a rock or a tower. And then you get this huge view, an aerial view of the whole of the society laid out. at your feet, which gives you the perspective and a new way of seeing it in different proportions.

So you have to be philosophical, you have to understand what it is the people there are trying to achieve. And she said that all societies should really be aiming for the happiness of their members. So you're testing it against whether they are promoting the means of living happily in that society. I rather jump the gun there, Karen, because I was going to ask you about her relation with Dickens. So I just mentioned en passant. Could you mention it rather more fully? Yes, she knew Dickens.

She wrote for a time for his journal household words, a number of pieces, but as she was writing, I think, her reservations about him and about the ethos of the journal gathered. As Valerie mentioned, she knew a little bit at secondhand about his really very cruel treatment of his wife as she saw it, and she didn't greatly like Dickens' view of women. She thought that Dickens' view of women that they should just look pretty and kind of sit in a corner.

Similarly, they disagreed very much about factory legislation, And here, this is a very fundamental difference of point of view. So Harriet Martineau, as a manufacturer's daughter and as a laissez-faire economist, doesn't really believe that you should over-regulate factories even on grounds of safety. And she thought that a lot of factory accidents could be avoided if workers could be educated. Dickens in Hard Times clearly presents us with a very different view of factory conditions. So there's a big difference there. But she finally broke with the journal over the issue of his anti-Catholicism.

She had written a story about a Jesuit missionary, and she got a very strong steer that no, the journal wouldn't be. publish it so she very definitely resigned and that was it with Dickens. Seems she's a lot to disagree with, didn't she? I mean, she disagreed a lot of good points. She did disagree on a lot of good points. How did he react to this? I just imagine not a chap

particularly like being disagreed with, especially at that time. He didn't greatly like it and he was quite critical of Harriet Martineau. But I think she recognised that Dickens had shared with her a compassion for the plight of working people, but that he lacked kind of systematic thinking. And that was her critique

of him. He would have said that she had a real lack of imaginative insight into the lives of people in factories. Ella, we've gone on about this illness. At one time it struck her very badly and she retired to Tynmouth for five years. She wrote children's stories there and one or two books. But she is really ill. And how did she come through that? She thought that she was going to die young because of the pain

and it turned out to be this massive cyst that nobody could diagnose at the time and so on. Right. Can you tell us about those five years? and how she got out of them, because she lived both 20 years after it. Yeah, well, she collapses in Venice in 1839 and this ovarian cyst or growth of some kind is

diagnosed, and she goes to Timeth because it's just down the coast from Newcastle, which is where her sister lives with her brother-in-law, Thomas Greenhow, who is a doctor. So she takes rooms and timeth and spends five years you know, in the window on the sofa, looking out to see through a telescope and doesn't really

leave the house. And she is absolutely convinced that she is going to die and she's in a great deal of pain. She's treated with opiates. But she does carry on writing. She talks about the way in which she had need of utterance. You know, this is one of the explanations for her prolific writing career. And that need of utterance continues even though she's in a great deal of pain and if prostrate. But towards the, in 1844, she tries the mesmeric cure. Now mesmerism is a, we think of it now as a form of hypnosis or hypnotherapy, really. It's to do with sort of animal magnetism and the passing of hands between mesmerism and patient. And to her, this works. She is relieved from pain. She's able to walk. She's able to leave the house.

And she goes to Egypt, Palestine. Up she goes off on her camel. But before she goes, she publishes this series of letters called Letters on Mesmerism in the Atheneum, where she announces to the world that mesmerism is true. It is real, it does work in her usual Martinovian forthright way. But this again causes huge consternation. You know, biblical literalists see her as having been taken captive by Satan. She signed up to a kind of witchcraft.

There's a public letter from a writer called Charlotte Elizabeth Tonner, denouncing her for being in league with the Antichrist. But also the medical establishment are in a state of turmoil because she has questioned their authority. And her brother-in-law, particular Thomas Greenhow, feels the need to defend his position. And he writes a pamphlet under his own name called the medical evidence on the case of Ms. H.M.

So nobody's in any doubt about who he is referring to, particularly because she's written these letters on mesmerism. And in that 26-page pamphlet, he goes into the most jaw-droppingly intimate and grotesque detail about the sort of shape, size and texture of her body when he gives her an internal examination. It's really staggering. What do you do that for?

I think to defend, his own reputation and to defend his own medical authority because to say that you're being cured by mesmerism is to question, you know, current medical thinking. Well, he didn't get out here under bed up to five years any, did he? No, no. I mean, unsurprisingly, she never spoke to him again. And as you said, you know, she gets up, she heads off to Egypt,

she's, you know, trotting around the pyramids on a camel shortly after. So for her, it has worked. And I think it's very tempting to see mesmerism as, you know, it's just, you know, Martineau being a little bit eccentric and it's a form of pseudoscience. But for her, it's completely in accord with her thinking that there are things about the universe that we don't know, that we just have to learn and understand that.

It goes back to the Necessarianism, really. Yes. Valerie Sanders, we back to this memoir, autobiography, which she wrote things she was going to die. She didn't. She stayed on. from another 20 years. It was published after her death and it caused great shock the way

she talked about her mother. She tested her mother and she also sort of was unafraid to lambast let's call them celebrities for want of her another word. Can you give us one or two examples of that? How her lambasting went on. She seems to be good at making enemies and sticking to them, doesn't she? Yes,

this was something that surprised people I think when the autobiography came out. Why did she need to do it? And it goes on for pages and pages and pages because she went to great many evening parties in London and she met all these people. Which people? And what did she say? Well, authors mainly, but she has a particular section on vain men, and I think this is one of her funniest bits where she says that Edward Bullwollwletton, for example, the novelist, was like a man in a serralio surrounded by

biddy, he himself is bedizened and sparkling and surrounded by women similarly attire. She also says the portrait painter, the artist Edward Lansier was part of this group as well. And the poet Thomas Campbell, she describes. And she says, There was a very funny occasion when he was really vain and he sat down on a chair in somebody's house with caster's on it. And wisely, the chair shot across the room and he was so discomforted that he had to sort of creep away rather embarrassed. So she's noticing all this and perhaps because she's deaf,

she notices more by watching people's behaviour than she does by listening to them. Then she says Carlisle is a wonderful man, but he's so sort of eaten up with all his own anxieties and worries and things. You can imagine how badly he behaved. He had a good spot because he retorted that he had a dream where she talked him to death. Yes, yes. Well, I think it was probably a dream based on reality with real fears. But she tended to be kinder to some women.

She admired people like Mary Somerville, the mathematician. She admired people who were quiet and modest. She didn't like show-offs. And she didn't like people who just talked about themselves all the time. Karen, has there anything much more to say about her literary friendships? Another George Yelley admired him, another Charlotte Bronte admired it, if she did a bad review of Viette. Is there anything much more to say about that?

I think one might say in general terms that she's in the way that Valerie described extraordinarily harsh on people who make the personal or political. So the criticism of Charlotte Bronte and writing about governesses is that bringing one's private passions into one's public life is really not a good idea. She was very critical of Mary Walsencraft on the same ground.

So she had that kind of harshness, I think, towards those people that she met and those around her. And the autobiography that we've been hearing about It's partly about an exemplary self, a person that she presents that has acquired self-mastery, mastery over her disability, mastery over her passions, and has created a civic identity for herself. And she measures others on that standard. And so she could be very difficult. She fell out disastrously with her own favourite brother, and she could be very unforgiving in her fallings out.

It's sad the way she turned against Mary Worsencraft, because Mary Walsoncraft's, I suppose you'd call it sexual excesses, having an illegitimate child and so. because in many ways they'd a lot in common, not least the Unitarianism, the dissenting education, what they did, the way they strove for women and so. And also their conservatism, those are a lot they had in common. A great deal in common, but I think for her it was about, in some ways you could say a lack of imagination on Martinus Park,

but also actually a reluctance to have the person on the passionate side of women kind of up for grabs in public discourse about the woman question, and she felt very strongly that Wollstonecraft had made that mistake. How did, can you give us some way, haven't really touched on. Can you give us some quick idea of the range of our output? She was prolific, but that takes it, that doesn't take us very far. How many subjects did she write about? What was her rate of output?

Well, I mean, I think what's fascinating about her is the number of disciplines that she ranges across. So, you know, you've got the literature and the economics in the illustrations, but you've got also something like the history of England during the 30 years piece. So she's writing, you know, nearly contemporaneous history. You've got sociology with society in America and how to observe. There's the short stories for children. And all the trouble writing.

There's the trouble. Yeah, there's a novel. 2,000 periodical articles in her career. Yeah, the journalism output is immense. So she, you know, I think it's one of the most interesting things about her really is that although we don't read her much now, she was really innovative and experimental at the time. And I think that, you know, that has gone unrecognised about her really.

Finally, what would you say her legacy was today? You actually put your finger on something that has prevented it being as clear because of the amount she did, and she wrote for the moment and, of course, the moment passes. And she has a legacy, does she, all you three things she does? Can we start with every thing? Well, yes, I think, you know, we live in an age now where academics are being encouraged to be interdisciplinary,

and she is a perfect embodiment of this because, as Ella has just said, she flitted from one thing to another, but with great confidence so she could write content. history, but the contemporary history draws partly on her own memories. In her autobiography, she can talk about religion and the decline of Unitarianism and so on. Karen? I think she's the grandmother to first wave feminism in the late 19th century, and she was very important in terms of American abolitionism in the campaign against slavery. Hello? I would agree with both of those points, but also say that I think she's very useful for thinking through the problems of liberalism.

She's there at the sort of moments of formulation and is interesting to look at, terms of all the problems. Well, thank you all very much indeed. Karen O'Brien, Valerie Sanders, Ella tells me this. Next week we'll be talking about the gin craze, when British drinking culture changed from beer to spirit in the 18th century. Thank you very much for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. I generally start by saying, what did we miss out? So what do we miss out? Well, I wanted to say more about abolitionism and slavery. There is an early story. It's one of the illustrations I think called Demerera, where she's got from Ricardo this idea of the

labour theory of value, and she says one of the reasons why slavery should go is because it doesn't pay. So she can, some of what she says, because she is this somewhat doctrinaire classical liberal economist, can be quite difficult to swallow. So the argument, and she has powerful moral arguments for the abolition of slavery, and she uses the voices of slaves themselves and society in America. So it's not to diminish that side of her work, but there is this sort of of economism where,

you know, a reason to abolish slavery is that it doesn't pay. Yeah, I mean, I would add to that, actually,

that this idea of slavery is deforming, deforming not just the character of the slave, but also deforming the character

of the person who is tyrannising over the slave. That interesting, me, and the notes that you wrote here, but the women

were deformed, the women were by this, and that's not being, she spotted that right away. Yes. And it hasn't been developed. Yeah,

yeah, I mean, that language, you know, this language of tyranny slavery spreads across early feminism really. You know, the idea that women are also enslaved. And so she picks up on that language and she uses it about black slavery,

but also, you know, there's the language of feminism and slavery also. I think so with adding in the society in America, one of the things she says is imagine growing up as a child and your, you know, your black nursemaid is physically cruelly punished because she's forgotten to do something for you. What does that, what kind of an upbringing is that for a child? And it's unthinkable, isn't it? It's very powerful.

But she really sees how profoundly formative of everybody this institution is. There was a fearlessness about her, wasn't I? I mean, when you went to America, people said, don't go to these meetings with black people because it's all very violent. And she didn't take the slightest bit of notice. And she took somebody with her, Louis Jeffress, was he? A friend of him. Louisius Jefferson, yes.

Who could tell her what she couldn't hear from the stage, as it were. She received death threats as a consequence of speaking out of slavery is against God's law. I think at the end of her life, people recognised her as both, it had been a noble life, which is what Beatrice Webb said about her, and also that she was very courageous. She didn't let anything stand in her way. When critics attacked her, she was able to recover from it. She didn't take it to heart particularly, and she just moved on. And I think the last 15, 20 years of her life, even though she was ill by this time, or a lot of the time, she was a very prolific journalist. she was writing for the Daily News, three or four leaders a week between 1852 and 1866. And she became, she thought, terminally ill in 1855, but she carried on writing. And again, a huge range of topics.

And I think her style is something we ought to just mention, that she wrote in a much plainer style than many other Victorians. And it was quite personal. She often cited a personal experience. She was really writing her autobiography in lots of different places, not just in the autobiography, but in something she wrote, called household education in 1849, a lot of which is about her household education and in her journalism. So I think she deserves recognition for being one of the first, not perhaps not the first,

but perhaps one of the first professional women journalists. And she's a truly efficient stylist. Yes. She didn't. Except when she writes novels. That one novel is stylistically horrendous, but the journalism is really crisp, really to the point. She always said that she didn't revise what she wrote. She just let it come straight out. And if you read her manuscripts or letters, there's very little crossing out. So that gives her much more direct style than some of her. I think one of the other things that we didn't touch on really is the way in which she was just, she was a terrible gossip. So at the same time as not being apparently much troubled by erotic feeling

herself, she was very interested in the sex lives of others. So, you know, and would break with people once they, you know, their their sex lives had been revealed. So George Elliott is one example. J.S. Mill and his relationship with Harriet Taylor is another. In fact, you had rich tones to go on, rather. One of my favorite bits of anecdotes about her is the way in which she described J.S. Mill as an enormously overrated man.

And also talked about him being, you know, his feminine weakness because he kept changing his mind. And I think it shows you, you know, just how dogmatic and difficult she was, you know, what the rest of us think, yes, that's great, you know, Mills, thought about things he's changed in his mind in the light of it. Spirious and Martin is going, no, he's like a woman. I think maybe she was getting her own back, though, because everybody thought she was like a man, so she's sort of picking up overfeminized women and overfeminized men and saying, well, there you are. It works both ways. But, yes, I mean, one of her favorite giveaway phrases in her letters was entranue.

meaning I'm about to do some gossip and it occurs over and over again don't tell anybody else but here's a bit of gossip It's rather like Oscar Wilde saying When somebody says to be frank you know they're lying When someone says Andre Neue you know they're telling everybody But she didn't want her letters to be published And of course most people disobeyed her

And they kept their letters Which means that we now have to give their letters back This was in the 1840s She suddenly wrote to all her friends And said send back your letters I'm not going to allow you to publish them And I will not have my published Which is very odd

The other bit we didn't touch on was we got a bit of a flavour of that Ambleside life that she built around her. And that involved the Wordsworths, of course, and also... How'd you get on the wordsworth? She's very interesting on the subject of Wordsworth. She talks about him kind of wandering around in his Scotch bonnet, and she paints a portrait of a man just consumed with grief for the death of his daughter and really quite grim. But she was a great walker, too.

And in fact, even Wordsworth would warn people if she offered a walk, they might want to think twice about it. They were really up to, which coming from Wordsworth is extraordinary. And I think she really was very sympathetic towards Mrs. Wordsworth. So I think she had a great deal of compassion for Wordsworth's wife. But she was in the ambit of their circle and people visited Wordsworth. It's a fascinating circle at Amherstead. Amazing.

You had John Julius I'm sitting up as a painter setting up in Ambleside. The whole business of local painters going there and they take you on a bit. If you visited them and say, well, come and ever look up this hill. Do you want me to paint that valley and so on? So that was going on. It was a real artistic hub in those days. And the geology was going on. I was going on that at that time.

She liked Mrs Arnold, Arnold's widow, and she was always prattling on about the Arnold family and commenting on the characters of the children and how they're all been damaged by their upbringing by Dr. Arnold. So she's very interesting. She prattles a lot about the neighbours and talks about them. Is it true?

She would give the local working lectures on temperance. On what temperance? Temperance. Temperance. And show them pictures of a stomach disfigured by alcohol. Yes, it is absolutely true. And apparently one or two people fainted. Is that why Hartley-Colridge took against her?

Probably, yes. Oh, yes, but she talked about his alcoholism at great length. I'm not surprising. The way he's smart. I mean Richard's smashing book, it isn't, I don't know, I near mention how Coleridge persecuted that boy. Absolutely persecuted him. And why didn't it, why isn't it mentioned?

I mean, he treated that boy as an experiment from the time he was a little boy. this was the experiment an ideal education, ideal boy made him say this, made him do that it was a terrible thing to do why has nobody to go about that? I don't know, I mean there were

a number of young people of that generation experimented. Yeah, it were. The idea of the ideal person. So we've got a chance to do it in the house. Right, time to go now. He's going to help for you something you can't refuse. This is the producer.

Who'd like tea, we like coffee. And for more podcasts on arts and ideas from the BBC. Follow the link on our website to the best of BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking Program.