ABSTRACT
Harriet Martineau (1802-76), best known as a popularizer of political economy, was born in Norwich, the sixth child of Thomas Martineau (1764-1826), manufacturer of bombazines, and his wife Elizabeth (née Rankin) (1771-1848) of Newcastle. The family were Unitarians, and strongly committed to educating their daughters as highly as their sons. Intellectual from childhood, Harriet was first taught at home by her older brother and sister before attending a co-educational day-school in Norwich, and then her aunt's boarding-school in Bristol. She was passionately attached to her younger brother, James (1805—1900), the Unitarian theologian, and to their youngest sister, Ellen (1811-89), but according to her Autobiography (1877) had a difficult relationship with her sister Rachel (1800—1878) and her mother, whom she blames for her undemonstrativeness: a view James strongly contested after her death. By the time their father's business failed in 1825, Harriet had already begun her literary career, writing short articles for the Unitarian Monthly Repository. Her deafness precluded her from earning her living by teaching, and her one and only love affair ended in 1827 with the death of her fiancé, a college friend of James's. Martineau regarded the family's financial ruin as providential: it saved her from being a genteel young lady with nothing to do, and the death of her fiancé left her free to enjoy an active professional life as a writer.
Martineau shot to fame in 1832 with the success of her Illustrations of Political Economy, a series of twenty-four short tales showing the operation of economic laws in specific communities. When the series was completed, she spent two years in America, and became an expert on the state of American society and politics. A committed abolitionist, she wrote regularly against the southern slave-holders in her journalism of the 1850s and 1860s. Proving exceptionally versatile, Martineau wrote a novel, Deerbrook (1839) which in many ways prefigures the concerns of George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-72); she wrote on tourism, Ireland, the Middle East, Birmingham manufactories and Lake District smallholdings. When she 115became ill in 1839 and was allegedly cured by mesmerism, she wrote about that. She also broke with her Unitarian faith and split with her once beloved brother, James. Moving away from London, where she had gone to live in 1832, Martineau built a house in Ambleside in the Lake District, where she wrote her Autobiography in three months in 1855, convinced she was about to die from heart disease. In fact, Martineau survived for another twenty-one years, but she added nothing to her Autobiography, which remained unpublished until after her death. Its freshness and vitality are especially evident in the opening sections, where she recalls her vivid sensory impressions as a young child.
