ABSTRACT
Harriet Martineau (1802–76), novelist, journalist, and popularizer of political economy, contributed to Household Words 1850–5. On (a), see Humphry House, The Dickens World (1941), 74–6. She also attacked Dickens’s veracity in her Special Legislation: the Factory Controversy (Manchester, 1855), for the ‘mis-statements’ in Household Words and in Hard Times about the incidence of industrial accidents—though Hard Times was the less likely to do harm (she remarked) because ‘the Tale, in its characters, conversations, and incidents, is so unlike life,—so unlike Lancashire and English life,—that it is deprived of its influence. Master and man are as unlike life in England, at present, as Ogre and Tom Thumb: and the result of the choice of subject is simply, that the charm of an ideal creation is gone, while nothing is gained in its stead’ (p. 36). Her Autobiography was written in 1855, when she was expecting to die. In 1873, discussing Forster’s Life, she remarked: ‘At all times, in all his writings, Dickens opposed and criticized all existing legal plans for the relief of the poor’ (Autobiography (1877), iii, 416). The Autobiography contains a sharp attack on Dickens’s conduct of Household Words, explaining why she ceased contributing as a matter of principle (ii, 418–21).
