ABSTRACT
The Working-Man’s Companion presents the reader with two types of people, one prudent, one imprudent. Both working-men and working-women occupy these Malthusian categories, and they both play a part in managing desires and cultivating more refined tastes. But these types hardly exhaust the number of social categories that readers in the 1830s and 1840s could imagine. Edgar Allan Poe quipped in 1843, for instance, that, “gentlemen of elegant leisure are, for the most part, neither men, women, nor Harriet Martineaus” (Poe 1984: 1003). Poe’s jest about the English novelist, social scientist, and journalist reminds us that for her contemporaries Martineau’s own gender and occupational class were as much an issue in how they classified Martineau as was the status of her work. The two were in fact inseparable as signifiers of her place in the social hierarchy. Poe’s “for the most part” also reminds us that for men and women neither these signifiers nor the (boundaries of) categories themselves are pellucid. Reviews of Illustrations, the texts that made Martineau famous and economically independent, demonstrate that the conversations on the characteristics of ideal economic beings and family behavior, and the extent to which real individuals measure up to these outlines, are ongoing and uncertain. Martineau’s own position as a financially independent unmarried woman, with a publicly influential, paid occupation, marked her as belonging to a category apart.
