ABSTRACT
Harriet Martineau (1802–76) was born in Norwich, into a Unitarian manufacturing family of Huguenot descent. Despite suffering from chronic ill-health and deafness for most of her life, she became a versatile woman of letters. Harriet Martineau was at the height of her early success as a disseminator of contemporary reformist doctrines when she met Godwin in March 1834 at the house of his friend Mary Heywood Gaskell, wife of the liberal MP Daniel Gaskell. In the passage from The History of England, Harriet Martineau assesses Godwin’s public significance. The passage shows an attempt to assimilate Godwin’s reformist social vision within the wider notion of nineteenth-century progress which this group sought to promote. While Harriet Martineau acknowledges the revolutionary potential of Political Justice, highlighting its appeal to ordinary working people, she also presents Godwin’s work as a stage in a larger movement of reform.
