[In the following excerpt, Thomas analyzes Martineau's fiction.]

ILLUSTRATIONS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY

The utilitarian philosophy which offered the “greatest happiness of the greatest number” as the ultimate social goal attempted to provide a remedy for all social ills through the doctrine of “political economy.” Most notably, Adam Smith's Inquiry Concerning the Wealth of Nations (1776) provided an economic counterpart to the utilitarian theories of Jeremy Bentham by arguing for free trade and maximum freedom of economic competition as the economic means by which the greatest happiness of the greatest number could be achieved. Although Smith greatly influenced the formative ideas of philosophers like John Stuart Mill and middle-class intellectuals like Martineau, the “principles of political economy,” widely thought of by utilitarian adherents as a “science,” were largely unknown beyond the middle class.

By the time Martineau began the first numbers of her Illustrations of Political Economy (1832-34) there had already been two attempts to popularize the theories. Mrs. Marcet's Conversations on Political Economy (1816) and James Mill the Elder's Elements of Political Economy (1812) had both been aimed primarily at an audience of young readers. Martineau's object was to reach working-class readers, anticipating the time when they would be fully enfranchised.

The format of the series was of self-contained monthly numbers, individual volumes, each one no longer than a long short story. Each number described a particular social problem and then applied a solution in accordance with the theory of political economy. Thus Demerara dealt with slavery, A Manchester Strike with labor unrest, Weal and Woe in Garveloch with population increase, and so on. Each topic was painstakingly researched, especially through government blue books, the official reports that were beginning to chart the social and economic problems of the time. Despite Martineau's attempt to digest complex information of this kind, the tales inevitably strike the modern readers as simplistic and somewhat preachy. Occasionally, however, there are glimpses of a genuine imaginative gift, as in A Manchester Strike, which prefigures the more complex and satisfying portraits of industrial life in Dickens's Hard Times (1854) or Mrs. Gaskell's North and South (1855).

The two series that she produced to follow Illustrations of Political Economy offer no such relief from dry didacticism. Illustrations of Taxation (1834) attempted to show the need for taxation reform. For example, in The Tenth Haycock she attacked the practice of tithing for the established church and in The Scholars of Arneside she examined the effects of the stamp tax on newspapers, making a surprisingly harsh attack on the radical working-class press. Her Forest and Game Law Tales (1845) and Dawn Island (1845) were written on behalf of the Anti-Corn Law League to promote their arguments against protectionist trade legislation. Martineau's contemporaries were moved by these accounts of the hardships endured by country dwellers, especially those resulting from the heavy legal penalties for poaching, but as fiction they are insufficiently realized to be read today as much more than economic homilies.

Vera Wheatley comments that in the Illustrations of Political Economy “is to be found the novelist manqué, the novelist impaired, even blasted by the passionate urge for propaganda and reform.”¹ Her remark reflects a typical response of most modern readers to Martineau's illustrative and didactic tales: the explicitness of the “principles” that are pointed out in the course of the narrative and then summarized at the end of each volume strikes the modern reader as both naive and heavy-handed. We wonder at the appetite for “morals” of Martineau's nineteenth-century readers, especially when we arrive at the final volume of the political economy tales to find that the last “tale,” The Morals of Many Fables, is simply a collection of the “principles” which have appeared at the end of each preceding volume. It is impossible now to reconstruct a full sense of the readership that received the Illustrations of Political Economy and later didactic fables with such enthusiasm. One clue lies in the sheer novelty of simple educative literature directed at an audience of adult readers many of whom were newly literate. A review from a newspaper published in Martineau's home town of Norwich gives an indication of the readership of the tales: “We call upon all those who love their country, who would wish to see their fellow-countrymen happy, contented, wealthy, and wise, to disseminate as widely as it is possible, not only among those who can read, but even among those who have not yet enjoyed the good effects of the schoolmaster, in order that they may hear read, this cheap and unpretending little volume, which, while it teaches how to spread around the greatest good to the greatest number, inculcates a morality which must lead to the best results.”² Many readers who had “not yet enjoyed the good effects of the schoolmaster” undoubtedly did enjoy Martineau's tales, not least because her didacticism is unusually open and straightforward, shot through with naive enthusiasm rather than high-handed sermonizing. Other working-class readers were almost certainly skeptical about the “principles” of political economy that Martineau asserted so uncritically in the series: “The juggle of the political economists … is now seen through; when translated into plain English, political economy means nothing more or less than this—Give up the whole produce of your labour—fill everybody's cupboard but your own—and then starve quietly!!!”³

Whether or not they agreed with Martineau's views, her contemporary readers would certainly have regarded the subjects covered in the political economy series as urgently topical. Martineau herself was evidently stimulated by a sense of actively participating in the important events of the day when writing a tale on a subject that was a current topic of parliamentary debate: “I sat down to read it [the new Poor Law Bill] with no little emotion, and some apprehension; and the moment when, arriving at the end, I found that the government scheme and my own were identical, point by point, was not one to be easily forgotten. I never wrote anything with more glee than ‘The Hamlets,’—the number in which the proposed reform is exemplified: and the spirit of the work carried me through the great effort of writing that number and ‘Cinnamon and Pearls’ in one month,—during a country visit in glorious summer weather” (1:221-22).

Like Dickens and Mrs. Gaskell, Martineau is much preoccupied with the subject of unions, factory legislation, and strikes. Her doctrinaire theories of political economy lead her to argue obduratedly that the interests of worker and capital are identical despite all the evidence to the contrary. In many ways the fictional portrait of workers and their unions she presents is very similar to that presented by Mrs. Gaskell in North and South or by Dickens in Hard Times. All three make a distinction between the “responsible” working men like Martineau's William Allen or Dickens's Stephen Blackpool in Hard Times and the rabble-rousing orator who stirs such men to political action against their own best interests. The scenario was a comforting one to middle-class readers. All efforts of workers to improve their conditions of employment could then be seen as the interference of the mysterious figures usually referred to, in a twentieth-century context, as “outside agitators.” Both Dickens and Mrs. Gaskell, however, take the grievances of workers a good deal more seriously than Martineau, who argues relentlessly against legislation establishing proper wages as an infringement of the workers' freedom to sell their labor in a “free” market: “wages-laws involve the same absurdity as the combination laws we are so glad to have got rid of. Every man who is not a slave has the right to ask a price for his labor. …”⁴

Even within the cramped confines of Martineau's dogmatic laissez-faire views, there is a glimpse of a considerable fictional power in the way in which, for example, she sketches the figure of William Allen at the end of The Manchester Strike as a totally demoralized and alienated figure as a result of his unsuccessful attempt to lead a strike. Yet here, as well as in her tale about machine-breaking, The Turn Out, her perspective on her working characters is always essentially that of the bombazine manufacturer's daughter rather than of an observer who fully grasps the significance of the ferment of industrial unrest in the textile factories.

Demerara, which had the effect of making Martineau notorious among antiabolitionists in America, is, for all its undisguised didactic intentions, a surprisingly well-realized work of fiction. Although much of it is thoroughly contrived, it has some powerful moments, particularly when Martineau steps beyond the strictly economic argument and reveals the climate of covert fear and loathing that existed between slave and owner. The long commination against his master offered up by one of the slaves as his only prayer in the chapter understatedly headed “Christianity Difficult in Demerara” is powerful and convincing. More subtly, Martineau reveals the disparity between slave owners' avowals that the relationship between master and slave is one of benign protective custody and the underlying terror of all slave owners that they and their families may become the victims of violent slave mutiny: “The cause of all this terror now flashed upon Alfred: the same cause which made Mitchelson carry his family with him wherever he went. He was afraid to leave his household in the power of his slaves. Yet this was the country where (so people are told in England) slaves are contented and happy, and, in every respect, better off than the free peasantry of the empire.”⁵ Similarly, the scene in which the slaves “accidentally” botch the rescue of the overseer Horner from the flood so that he is drowned in a rushing torrent to the accompanying cheers of his apparent rescuers gives the reader an insight into the moral vortex of a slave-owning society infinitely more eloquent than the sentimental appeal made in Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) a few decades later.

The social ideals that Martineau promotes in the Illustrations of Political Economy and in her other didactic works are best summarized in the picture of idyllic well-ordered village life she provides at the end of Brooke and Brooke Farm, which is characterized by indefatigable labor and shrewd planning and management based strictly on the principles of political economy:

George was a pattern of industry. Before and after his hours of daily labor, he was seen digging, hoeing, planting, and pruning in his garden; his boys and sometimes his wife helping him; his eldest girl tending the cow, and the others mending or knitting stockings, or cleaning the house. Even the very little ones earned many a shilling by cutting a particular sort of grass in the lanes for seed for Mr. Malton's pasture land. Each with a pair of scissors, they cut the tops off about six inches long, and filled their sack in a few hours. Mr. Malton's steward paid them threepence a bushel for it, measured as hay. Their work was made easier by this grass being sown in lines along the hedges; and it was well worth the little trouble this cost to secure a constant supply of the seed which was greatly in request; the sheep being very fond of this pasture.

Gray's boys had all shoes and stockings now, and the girls were tidily dressed. The rent was regularly paid, and their fare was improved. How happened this?—From having ground and keeping a cow?—Not entirely, though in some measure. The wages of labor had risen considerably at Brooke since the common was inclosed, as there was more work to be done, and the number of hands had not increased in proportion, though the population was already one-third larger than five years before. Gray felt the advantage of this rise of wages, and of having his family employed. He now wondered at his neighbors for letting their children be wholly idle as much as we once wondered at him.⁶

Significantly, the crowning feature of this picture of orderly management and prosperity is the schoolhouse. Over and over again in Martineau's work we find her returning to the theme that education rather than legislation will eventually prove the more effective means of improving the lives of working people. This conviction that social progress was the result of changes in attitude derived from education underlies the sense of a crusading mission in the tales. Undoubtedly Martineau believed that her tales would educate her audience to the principles of political economy and that this would be the most effective means of bringing about important social changes. It should also be noted that among nineteenth-century writers it is most frequently the women writers who perceive education in itself as a form of salvation. Although in an age in which the idea of formal education as a universal right was gradually gaining ground, the idea of education as a panacea was a fairly common one, it is noticeable that the women writers are most apt to fix on the idea with real passion. Instances abound in the works of novelists like Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot in which education is shown to have a beneficent effect on the lives of the characters, but Martineau's tales and her expository writing contain some of the most ardent pleas for the value of education. Indeed, unlike such writers as Charlotte Brontë, Martineau's writings scarcely admit that such a thing as a bad school can exist. For her, the schoolhouse, like the one at the end of Brooke and Brooke Farm, is almost invariably presented as an unequivocal symbol of social progress.

NOVELS: THE HOUR AND THE MAN AND DEERBROOK

Martineau wrote only two full-length works of fiction intended for adult readers. The Hour and the Man (1841) is by far the less successful of the two. In it Martineau attempts to set the historical record straight concerning the character and the career of the Haitian popular leader Toussaint L'Ouverture, who had died in a French prison at the end of the previous century after leading a rebellion against French colonial rule. Toussaint had been vilified in French accounts of his capture and death and, perhaps, because of this, had become something of a minor popular hero to the British. He had been the subject of a sonnet by Wordsworth, “Toussaint the most unhappy Man of Men!”⁷ Martineau, however, had first become interested in Toussaint's career through reading an article in the Quarterly Review on the history of Haiti. She reacted with immediate enthusiasm and wrote in her diary: “it flashed across me that my novel must be on the Haytian [sic] revolution, and Toussaint my hero. Was ever any subject more splendid, more fit than this for me and my purposes? One generally knows when the right idea, the true inspiration, comes, and I have a strong persuasion that this will prove my first great work of fiction. It admits of romance, it furnishes me with a story, it will do a world of good to the slave question, it is heroic in its character, and it leaves me English domestic life for a change Hereafter” (3:216). Some of Martineau's criteria offered here in her recognition of the “right idea” give us some significant clues to her approach to the novel. She is noticeably grateful for a ready-made story and, even more importantly, sees the resulting novel as doing “a world of good” in the struggle against slavery.

She proposed the idea of a novel based on Toussaint's career to a friend but received such a discouraging response that she set the plan aside. She had continued, however, to be sufficiently intrigued by the subject during her 1838 travels in Europe to go out of her way to see the prison at Joux in which Toussaint had died and to visit his nearby grave. Two years later, when confined to her Tynemouth sickroom, she returned to her original idea.

Martineau's difficulties with fictional structure are more evident in The Hour and the Man than anywhere else in her work. The narrative sequence is often extremely difficult to follow because new characters are introduced and then abandoned. The majority of these structural difficulties arise from Martineau's decision to write a fictional biography rather than an historical account. She seems to have felt compelled to dramatize every known event of Toussaint's life to the fullest possible extent. As a result, there is no building of pace and tension, but rather the reader has the impression of a flat gallop from beginning to end.

Martineau used the term “novel” for only one of her fictional works. Deerbrook (1842) is based on the story which Martineau had heard of a family friend who “had been cruelly driven, by a match-making lady, to propose to the sister of the woman he loved,—on private information that the elder had lost her heart to him, and that he had shown her attention enough to warrant it. The marriage was not a very happy one, good as were the persons concerned, in their various ways. I altered the circumstances as much as I could, and drew the character, not of our English but of an American friend, whose domestic position is altogether different …” (2:113). The theme of three lives blighted by a mistaken marriage choice based on social pressure is one that would have fully taxed the gifts of either a George Eliot or a Henry James. Although the emotional hothouse atmosphere of resentment and sexual jealousy that exists between the young doctor, Hope, and the two sisters, Hester and Margaret, was evidently beyond Martineau's powers as a novelist, her account of the way in which the three come to terms with the constraints of their lives is a surprisingly convincing one. Martineau's hero is a man condemned to inhabit the nightmare of having married the “wrong” sister. He is still in love with Margaret Ibbotson, who, after the custom of the day, was to live with the newly married couple as a companion for her sister: “A strange trouble—a fearful suspicion had seized upon him. He was amazed at the return of his feelings about Margaret, and filled with horror when he thought of the days, and months, and years of close domestic companionship with her, from which there was no escape. There was no escape. The peace of his wife, of Margaret—his own peace in theirs—depended wholly on the deep secrecy in which he should preserve the mistake he had made. It was a mistake. He could scarcely endure the thought; but it was so” (D [Deerbrook], 176).

However, the most intense emotional dynamic in the novel is the relationship between the two sisters. Martineau's portrait of the way in which Hester possessively interferes with her sister's pursuits and friendships, insisting that she herself must be her only close companion, is particularly well-observed. Especially convincing is the way in which the possessive Hester nourishes a deep sense of personal grievance. She accuses her sister: “You go to others for the comfort you ought to seek in me. You place that confidence in others which ought to be mine alone. You are cheered when you learn that the commonest gossips in Deerbrook care about you, and you set no value on your own sister's feelings for you. You have faith and charity for people out of doors, and mistrust and misconstruction for those at home. I am the injured one, Margaret, not you” (D, 248). Even though the emotional conflict of the scene is truthfully rendered, Martineau seems to feel compelled to replace the real drama of the struggle between the sisters with an absurdly melodramatic conclusion: “She raised herself up on the sofa, and timidly held out her hand to her sister. Hester thrust it away. Margaret uttered a cry of agony, such as had never been heard from her since her childhood. Hope fell on the floor—he had fainted at the sound” (D, 248). The scene is strikingly reminiscent of the domestic melodrama which was to become so popular on the stage later on in the century. Probably, however, what we are seeing here is not so much an identifiable theatrical influence as a simple failing to sustain a dramatic fictional scene within its own terms and based on its own internal logic. Quite simply, the most powerful dynamic element in the scene is the conflict between the two sisters, and Martineau seems uncertain as to what Hope's role and his response should be. Unable to find a better way of removing a problematical and extraneous character from the action, she simply has him lose consciousness in a faint.

Florid overwriting of this kind is usually the result of a lack of confidence on the part of the writer and is generally based on a sense of uncertainty about the dramatic effect already achieved. In this respect Martineau's modest estimate of her own fictional abilities becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy whereby the power of her writing is undermined by her insecurity about her capabilities.

Deerbrook is strongest when Martineau portrays the petty conflicts that make up the fabric of village life rather than where she attempts to deal with the major emotional drama of love and jealousy. Of all Martineau's fiction, Deerbrook is the most strongly rooted in a sense of place. Much of the scenery is based on her memories of the country house of a relative to whom she was sent for the sake of her health when she was eight years old. One of the main strengths of Deerbrook as a novel is Martineau's acute sense of the ironic contrast between the idyllic appearance of the village and its spacious houses and the cramped and constrained lives resulting from village hypocrisies and conventions. The fantasy of a peaceful country life is the starting point for the novel:

Every town-bred person who travels in a rich country region, knows what it is to see a neat white house planted in a pretty situation,—in a shrubbery, or commanding a sunny common, or nestling between two hills,—and to say to himself, as the carriage sweeps past its gate, “I should like to live there,”—“I could be very happy in that pretty place.” Transient visions pass before his mind's-eye of dewy summer mornings, when the shadows are long on the grass, and of bright autumn afternoons, when it would be luxury to saunter in the neighbouring lanes; and of frosty winter days, when the sun shines in over the laurustinus at the window, while the fire burns with a different light from that which it gives in the dull parlours of the city.

(D, 1)

The town-bred Hester and Margaret Ibbotson arrive in Deerbrook with precisely this sense of optimism about country life but quickly find that village protocol is infinitely more restrictive than anything they have known in Birmingham. They plan to go for a walk together but Sophia Grey runs after them with a message from her mother: “mamma wished they would be so good as to defer their walk; mamma was afraid that if they were seen abroad in the village, it would be supposed that they did not wish to receive visitors: mamma would rather that they should stay within this morning. There was nothing for it but to turn back; and Hester threw down her bonnet with no very good grace, as she observed to her sister that, to all appearance, a town life was more free than a country one, after all” (D, 24).

Mrs. Grey, who interferes so disastrously in Hope's courtship, is one of the most complex minor characters. The subtlety of Martineau's portrait of a woman who pries and interferes with others' lives not so much out of malice but because her own life is unexciting would not be out of place in a Jane Austen novel. The way in which the difficulties of other people's lives present such a person with a relief from the monotony of her own is subtlely sketched in Mrs. Grey's response to the series of disasters that overtakes Hope: “Mrs. Grey's countenance wore an expression of solemn misery with a little of the complacency of excitement about it” (D, 237).

Like other nineteenth-century novelists, Martineau tends to see economic and social factors as playing a very significant role in the development of her characters' attitudes. Throughout the novel she makes it clear that Mrs. Grey is as she is mainly because village life leaves little room for anything but petty conniving for a woman of her social class and position.

One of the most interesting analyses of character arising from social circumstance in Deerbrook is the portrait of the governess, Maria Young. Unlike Anne Brontë in Agnes Gray, Martineau does not explore the pattern of humiliation which arises from the relationship between the governess and the family that employs her but dwells rather on the solitariness of the occupation, the frustrations and the limitations of teaching only a narrow range of knowledge, the long hours of work, and the penurious wages. Maria Young counsels stoicism as the only possible recourse in her situation: “let a governess learn what to expect; set her free from hankering after happiness in her work and you have a happy governess!” (D, 21). A similarly bleak stoicism is presented as the best means of Hope tolerating his marriage: “Let us put the thought of making happiness out of our minds altogether. … I am persuaded that half the misery in the world comes from straining after happiness!” (D, 145).

Despite her loneliness, Maria Young's lot is seen as in some ways preferable to that of Hester and Margaret. She, at least, has work to do while the more leisured life of the sisters presents the prospect of frittering away their days in futile or trivial occupations. Events intervene to save Hope and his wife and sister-in-law from a life of comfortable ennui. Hope votes against the candidate supported by the local landowner in the election and the whole family is shunned by the community. His medical practice collapses under the pressure of malicious rumors and they are forced to undertake their own household manual work for the first time in their lives. Physical work has the immediate effect of freeing them from the pettiness and emotional claustrophobia that has blighted their domestic life. Their existence is, quite suddenly, pleasurable and meaningful: “The three who sat down to breakfast were as reasonable and philosophical as most people; but even they were taken by surprise with the sweetness of comforts provided by their own immediate toil. There was something in the novelty, perhaps; but Hope threw on the fire with remarkable energy the coals he had himself brought in from the coal-house, and ate with great relish the toast toasted by his wife's own hands. Margaret, too, looked round the room more than once with a new sort of pride in there not being a particle of dust on table, chair or book” (D, 465).

At first sight this preoccupation might seem the product of a Puritan inclination whereby the virtues of hard work are extolled as part of a general asceticism. In fact, she is often eloquent about the effects of grinding or routine work. Maria Young speaks feelingly in Deerbrook about the often futile and exhausting work of being a governess and explains how much more intensely she experiences her rare moments of leisure: “Let none pretend to understand the value of such whose lives are all leisure; who take up a book to pass the time; who saunter in gardens because there are no morning visits to make; who exaggerate the writing of a family letter into important business. Such have their own enjoyments: but they know nothing of the paroxysm of pleasure of a really hardworking person on hearing the door shut which excludes the business of life …” (D, 32-33). Martineau makes a clear distinction between the type of work to which those like Maria are condemned day in and day out by relentless necessity and, on the other hand, the salutary experience of the previously privileged who are suddenly compelled to make contact with mundane realities like shoveling snow or preparing food, tasks from which they had previously been cushioned by their economic and social status. In some respects, though, she sees hard work, whether for Maria Young or for Edward Hope and his family, rather as Chekov does in Uncle Vanya, as a solution to lives which have been otherwise blighted through unwise choices or through external constraints.

Martineau caters to her readers' tastes by providing a less austere conclusion than that of salvation through hard work alone. Hope inherits a small bequest and is able to resume his medical practice. Margaret marries the relatively wealthy Philip Enderby and thus, at the end of the novel, economic prosperity is restored to all three central characters. Yet the abiding impression throughout is that the severest difficulties can best be ameliorated, not by marrying well or inheriting a fortune, but by hard work. “Come, let us be up and doing” (D, 208), says Margaret, when the whole family is being shunned and pilloried by the villagers. Her admonition expresses the resolve in adversity that Martineau most admires, and the reader has the distinct impression that the fortuitous wealth which the characters receive at the end of the novel is essentially a reward for their grace in adversity.

Although Martineau's portrait of the corrosive petty rivalries of a small community in Deerbrook begins in a quiet Cranford-life atmosphere, it incorporates a grand guignol tone as the narrative progresses. Once Hope has voted against the favored candidate in the election, his medical practice is ruined by the spreading of rumours about body-snatching and accidental poisoning of patients. Hester goes to the husband of the woman who has instigated most of the rumors and demands a public retraction: “I would have you see that every false charge she has brought is retracted—every vile insinuation recanted. You must make her say everywhere that my husband has no stolen dead bodies; that he is not a plotter against the peace and order of society; that he has not poisoned a child by mistake, or cut off a sound limb for sake of practice and amusement. Your wife has said these things, and you know it; and you must make her contradict them all” (D, 307).

Martineau's documentation of the way in which political unpopularity can escalate to hysterical rumor-spreading and even mob violence is undoubtedly a perceptive and accurate account of the partisan politics of the day. Yet she frequently seems to lack confidence in her ability to dramatize the events themselves and resorts instead to melodrama in such episodes as the theft and restoration of a ring or in the way in which her characters accompany the dialogue with stagy gestures and exclamations. It may be that this reliance on crude melodramatic effects arose partly from an uncertainty of intention. On the one hand, Martineau admired Jane Austen and deliberately attempted to emulate her manner of portraying provincial life. She noted in her diary that Emma was “most admirable,” but also that “The complexities of the story are beyond my comprehension, and wonderfully beautiful” (3:218). For all her admiration of Austen, one senses that Martineau was apt in her own writing to become impatient with the “little complexities” and the miniscule dramas of provincial life and to yearn after a wider canvas which could show such events in their broader political context. Consequently, she often attempts to evoke a response from the reader by means of a melodramatic short cut rather than, like Jane Austen, patiently showing each scene evolving with its own inevitable logic.

Deerbrook is a seriously flawed novel, but it is one that remains worth reading for the modern student of nineteenth-century literature if only for the insight it provides on social and political life. Her account of partisan politics and corruption in an election, for example, is one of the most detailed and revealing to be found in a nineteenth-century novel. The novel as a whole remains frustrating reading, however, for the glimpses it gives us of a powerful but unevenly developed fictional gift.

THE PLAYFELLOW

Martineau's four children's stories first published in a single volume under the title The Playfellow (1841) remain her only works that have continued to be regularly republished for a general audience. Although Feats on the Fiord has proved the most popular of the four, in that it has been more frequently reprinted, it is far less successful than The Crofton Boys over which George Eliot had such “delightful crying.”⁸Feats on the Fiord frequently appears as the solitary mention of Martineau's work in histories of children's literature, while (with the notable exception of Kathleen Tillotson in The Novels of the Eighteen Forties)⁹The Crofton Boys is very rarely discussed by critics or literary historians. All four stories, however, remain eminently readable and certainly rank as Martineau's most successful efforts in fiction.

The central idea of The Settlers at Home arose from Martineau's reading an article by De Quincey about snowstorms. She toyed with the idea of writing a story in which a snowstorm was the major event but decided that a flood was a less hackneyed natural disaster in fiction. She studied Thomas Dick Lauder's book about the 1829 floods in Morayshire and articles about the Lincolnshire fenland in Knight's Penny Cyclopadia. The character of Roger Redfurn was gleaned largely from an account of a Gypsy she had read in one of the Poor Law Reports.

Compared with some of the Illustrations of Political Economy, where the source material seems to have been hastily patched together into a narrative, The Settlers at Home has a relatively seamless construction. Her story relies, like so many children's books, on the situation in which children are separated from their parents or guardians and forced to survive as best they can. Countless children's books rely on this device of temporary or permanent orphanhood of the child characters to bring about a Robinson Crusoe-like situation in which the children pit their wits against an unfriendly or an unfamiliar environment. Captain Marryat used this formula in his children's adventure tales like Masterman Ready (1841), Settlers in Canada (1844), and Children of the New Forest (1847). In the 1850s R. M. Ballantyne's boys' stories interwove the Crusoe formula with an empire-building theme intended to stir patriotic fervour. The same formula has continued to be popular among twentieth-century writers for children, though they are apt to release their parentless child characters into less threatening environments.

The children in The Settlers at Home lose their parents in a flood and have to feed and shelter themselves, a servant, and their baby brother with the grudging and intermittent help of the Gypsy boy, Roger Redfurn. Martineau does not flinch from portraying the real dangers of the flood for her child readers. People and animals are drowned, houses destroyed, and the children's baby brother dies when they can no longer obtain milk for him because their cow has starved to death. The flood itself has been the result, not of strictly natural causes, but of the malice of neighboring townspeople toward the settlers of French and Dutch origin who had fled to England because of religious persecution. The bleak picture is relieved somewhat at the end of the story when the children are rescued and there is some suggestion that Roger the Gypsy is likely to undergo a gradual moral reform, but no assurance is given that the townspeople's xenophobia, which caused the deliberate flooding of the fenland, has really diminished.

Like the other three volumes of The Playfellow, The Settlers at Home is surprisingly free of either the didactic intention or the mawkish sentimentality that was the hallmark of the children's fiction of the period. It is surprising to realize that it was written at a time when, with a few notable exceptions like Catherine Sinclair's Holiday House (1813), there was very little fiction for children that was not crushingly didactic in the manner of Mrs. Sherwood's grim work, The History of the Fairchild Family: or, The Child's Manual; being a collection of stories calculated to show the importance and effects of a Religious Education (1818), with its notoriously gruesome scene in which the father lectures the children on the evils of theft under a gibbet carrying the decaying body of an executed felon. By no means all works intended for children were as unremittingly grim as Mrs. Sherwood's work, however. The boys' adventure stories which began to appear during the 1840s were relatively free of obvious didacticism, but the literature for children with a domestic rather than an exotic setting still tended to be self-conscious about its moral responsibilities to its audience.

In some respects it is rather surprising that Martineau should have chosen to write for children at all. During the 1840s children's literature barely existed either as a literary genre or as a commercial product. For the most part children were reading a selection of the literature intended for their elders. We can perhaps trace part of Martineau's impulse to write for children to the intensity of her own reading experiences as a child. As noted earlier, she could well recall in adult life the way in which her childhood imagination had been deeply stirred by reading Milton, and it may be that she was attracted by the idea of reaching an audience who might be similarly receptive.

Martineau believed The Peasant and the Prince to be the least popular of her Playfellow tales among child readers, though she does not speculate about the reasons for this. The most obvious hindrance to its popularity with children is the fact that, unlike the other three Playfellow tales, all its principal characters were adults. Interestingly enough, however, she remarks in her Autobiography that The Peasant and the Prince was extremely popular “among poor people, who read it with wonderful eagerness. Some of them called it ‘the French revelation,’ and the copy in Lending Libraries was more thumbed than the others” (2:161). The book is less a work of fiction than an absorbing simplified historical account of the final days of the French monarchy during the revolution. We see Martineau as a popular historian at her best, showing how the protected, blinkered lives of the monarchy made them unable to understand either the people's genuine grievances or the force of the wave of powerful popular feeling which had resulted from centuries of oppression.

The structure of the story as an intended work of fiction presents serious problems. She devotes the first four chapters to a mini-narrative of peasant hardship, but focuses the rest of the book on the fate of the monarchy. The title is therefore a misleading one, since it leads the reader to expect some fictional link between the fate of the peasants and that of the royal characters. In fact, the only link is the episode in which the carriage of the young Marie Antoinette passes through the village when she is on her way to be married to Louis XVI. Martineau's story is plagued by the same fictional dilemma as troubled Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities. Both writers wish to stress the real oppression experienced by peasants and by the poor in cities, but the description of scenes of mob violence by their very nature swing the reader's sympathies toward the beleaguered aristocrats and monarchy who, within the framework of the story, begin to seem like the real victims.

Despite the intrinsic difficulties presented by the subject itself and despite the further problems created by the divided narrative, Martineau's account of the last days of the French royal family sustains a dramatic tension throughout. She ends the work with a brief appeal to her readers to recognize that “It is not only France that has been ignorant, and guilty, and miserable. Every country is full of blessings given by the hand of God; and in every country are those blessings misused, more or less, as they were in France.”¹⁰ The events of the French Revolution were by no means remote to the early Victorian sensibility, and Martineau's brief account is one of the most balanced of those to be addressed to a popular audience. However even-handed Martineau's treatment of the Revolution may seem to the modern reader, the subject at the time was a sufficiently inflammatory one for her old enemy the Quarterly Review to condemn The Peasant and the Prince out of hand as a work “which has a reprehensible purpose and tendency.”¹¹

Feats on the Fiord is now Martineau's single best-known work. The reasons for its continued popularity are fairly evident. By luck or good judgment she hit upon a plot which built and sustained tension and interest. Although at times the Norwegian setting is rather contrived, and some descriptions of scenery and customs give the impression of having been written with guide book or encyclopedia in hand, the narrative is an extremely absorbing one. The story interweaves two central ideas. Throughout, especially with the character of the housemaid, Erica, Martineau stresses the “superstitious” beliefs of the Norwegian peasantry in malicious evil spirits like Nipen, the wood demon. The real threat to the security of their community, however, is from the pirates who rob and loot isolated farm houses and villages. Rolf, Erica's betrothed, who does not believe in wood demons and water spirits, is able to manipulate the pirates' own superstitious fear of these spirits to bring about their defeat and capture. Even though belief in wood and water spirits is shown throughout the novel as primitive and irrational, Martineau succeeds in avoiding a patronizing tone by presenting Kollsen, the pastor, who argues sententiously and relentlessly against “superstition” as being almost comically pompous and insensitive.

The story has many of the ingredients of an exciting adventure tale: chase, escape, a secret hiding place, disguise, and a final battle in which the pirates are ambushed when attempting to loot a farmstead. It has more depth, however, than the fast-moving action tales involving similar elements which later writers like Marryat and Ballantyne were to develop. Many of the figures are constructed from something more than the pasteboard which one usually expects in adventure stories. For example, Hund, the villain who betrays the villagers, is a relatively complex figure, not so much conventionally wicked as doomed and haunted by his evil deed in the past when he saved himself from the wolves by sacrificing two small children in his stead. Despite the restrictions on character development within the framework of an adventure tale, we see Erica, one of the two central figures in the story, gradually shed her pantheon of wood and water spirits and grope toward a more rational sense of cause and effect in the world. Throughout Feats on the Fiord there is a surprising sureness of touch which makes the tale an outstanding example of early Victorian fiction for children.

By far the most sensitive and complex work in The Playfellow is The Crofton Boys, which has the distinction of being the first work written for children in English which fully merits the genre-description of “psychological novel.” It tells the story of Hugh Procter, the youngest son of a chemist and druggist who lives in central London. Hugh longs to attend Crofton School where his older brother Phil is a pupil. Fed by his brother's stories of life at school, his only ideal is to be a “Crofton Boy.” Though he is really too young to be enrolled at boarding school his parents relent since they feel he is already too abstracted by his fantasies of Crofton to pursue his home studies with the governess with much success. Once enrolled at the school, Hugh discovers that his youth and his dreamy abstracted personality present difficulties with his studies and with dealing with the rigid ethos of a public school. His troubles at school are brought to a sudden crisis by an accident in which he is pulled from the top of a wall by a group of his classmates, and his foot is crushed by a heavy coping stone that has been loosened by the frost. His crushed foot has to be amputated, and the remainder of the story is concerned with how Hugh adjusts to his disability and attempts to reintegrate himself into the life of the school. Hugh matures largely as a result of adjusting to his lameness and through his friendship with Holt who at first displays some of the babyishness and self-indulgence which Hugh himself has had to outgrow. Hugh's puzzle over his future is resolved when Holt's father offers to have the two boys educated together and to secure Hugh a position in the Indian Civil Service. This plan salvages Hugh's dream of travel, which he had earlier feared would be precluded by his lameness.

Martineau's portrait of Hugh Procter is one of the subtlest explorations of a child's state of mind in nineteenth-century children's books. His straining to emulate the behavior of his older brother and his fantasies about school life are sketched with striking insight and sensitivity. She captures perfectly the excited, preoccupied mental state of a child going to school for the first time:

The sun seemed to Hugh to glare very much; and he thought he had never known the streets so noisy, or the people so pushing. The truth was, his heart was beating so he could hardly see: and yet he was so busy looking about him for a sight of the river, and everything he wished to bid good-bye to, that his father, who held him fast by the hand, shook him more than once, and told him he would run everybody down if he could,—to judge by his way of walking.¹²

Hugh's ingenuousness proves a constant hazard in the context of school life from the time when on his way to Crofton he is excessively garrulous to the school usher about his “secret” pocket for his money to his attempts to elicit compliments from his schoolmates about a theme he has written. Martineau's point of view in describing Hugh's experiences in such episodes is very different from that of Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857) and the host of imitations that followed it. Hughes tends to show the public school ethos in a relatively favorable light and suggests that the brutality of characters like Flashman and his friends is really an exception to the ethos rather than a product of it. While Martineau's account does not make a point of condemning the collective schoolboy attitudes that taboo “telling tales” under any circumstances or routinely mock any boy with an unusual-sounding name, she sees these as part of the taboo on the expression of tender feelings that pervades schoolboy culture. Another boy gives Hugh an informal lecture on what is expected of him in the chapter headed “What Is Only To Be Had At Home”:

“Ah! you don't understand school and schoolboys yet,” replied Firth. “To do a difficult lesson well is a grand affair at home, and the whole house knows of it. But it is the commonest thing in the world here. If you learn to feel with these boys, instead of expecting them to feel with you (which they cannot possibly do), you will soon find that they care for you accordingly.”

Hugh shook his head.

“You will find it in every school in England,” continued Firth, “that it is not the way of boys to talk about feelings—about anybody's feelings. That is the reason why they do not mention their sisters or their mothers—except when two confidential friends are together, in a tree, or by themselves in the meadows. But, as sure as ever a boy is full of action—if he tops the rest at play—holds his tongue, or helps others generously—or shows a manly spirit without being proud of it, the whole school is his friend. You have done well, so far, by growing more and more sociable; but you will lose ground if you boast about your lessons out of school. To prosper at Crofton, you must put off home, and make yourself a Crofton boy.”¹³

Hugh “grows up,” not by accepting the schoolboy ethos wholesale like Tom Brown, but as a result of his accident and the way in which he has to learn to cope with his disability. He takes his mother's advice that the wisest course is not to attempt to minimize the likely effects of his lameness, but rather to face all the hindrances coolly. One of his hardest lessons on his return to school is that, after the initial novelty, he is no longer the recipient of special treatment. He leaves his theme behind at his aunt and uncle's house and pleads for his brother or one of his companions to go and fetch it for him. Their early reluctance is followed by a rush of guilty volunteering when Hugh bursts into tears of frustration. A few moments later Hugh is clearly feeling guilty about his own selfishness: “Before Phil returned, it struck Hugh that he had been very selfish; and that it was not a good way of bearing his trial to impose on any one a walk of four miles, to repair a piece of carelessness of his own. Nobody blamed him; but he did not like to look in the faces round him to see what people thought.”¹⁴ The sensitivity of Martineau's dramatization of scenes like this almost certainly springs from her own lifelong awareness of the possibility of unlikeable character traits developing as a result of a disability. Her stern handling of the problems of her own deafness clearly gave her an insight into Hugh's striving to prevent his personality from becoming distorted through depending unnecessarily on others or “to make use of his privation to obtain indulgences for himself.”¹⁵

The space devoted to analyzing Hugh's response to his disability is likely to seem disproportionate to most modern readers. John Rowe Townsend, for example, dismisses The Crofton Boys as “a somewhat harrowing didactic work whose hero is crippled for life at an early stage in the proceedings.”¹⁶ Townsend evidently finds the hearty muscular Christianity of the later boys' school stories more appealing, but his comment essentially misses the point. The Crofton Boys, while it has two or three explicit didactic passages, is not nearly as committed to promoting a particular ideology as the better-known Tom Brown's Schooldays. The final description of the nineteen-year-old Tom as “captain of the eleven” which appears at the conclusion of Hughes's book has a very palpable intent on the reader's scale of moral values even though it is not couched in conventionally didactic or admonitory language. Townsend is really objecting less to the “didacticism” of The Crofton Boys than to the nature of the moral lesson being taught. Unlike Hughes, Martineau implicitly rejects the public school ethos of blind loyalty and team spirit as surpassing all other virtues in favor of a rather introspective individualism tempered by a sense of moral duty.

The Crofton Boys ends with Hugh traveling to India, “conscious that he went out well prepared for honourable duty.” This may have a dated air for the modern reader, but the story itself is almost without a false note in its portrait of a child's psychological development. Hugh Procter is one of the first fully realized child characters in the history of literature for children. His desperate attempts to live up to his own conception of “a Crofton boy” despite the fact that he is both too young and too immature is convincingly shown. Most striking of all is Martineau's account of Hugh's daydreaming at his studies and his ineffectual attempts to make himself concentrate:

When his eyes were wandering, they observed boy after boy frowning over his dictionary, or repeating to himself, earnestly and without pause; and presently the business was done, and the learner at ease, feeling confident that he was ready to meet his master. After double the time had passed Hugh was still trying to get the meaning of his lesson into his head—going over the same words a dozen times, without gaining any notion of their meaning. … Sometimes he would begin saying his syntax in the middle of the night, fancying he was standing before Mr. Carnaby; and once he walked in his sleep as far as the head of the stairs, and then suddenly woke, and could not make out where he was.¹⁷

Hugh's painful transition from this dreamy abstractedness to a conscious taking of responsibility for himself and others through coming to terms with his lameness is the real subject of the novel. Not only is The Crofton Boys the first psychological novel in English for children, but it was not for another four or five decades until a substantial number of books for children with a comparable psychological depth and complexity would exist. Of all Martineau's rarely read publications, it most deserves the attention of a modern audience.

THE POWER AND SCOPE OF HER FICTION

Martineau estimated her own powers as a fiction writer very modestly. Despite the extraordinary popular success of her early illustrative and didactic tales, she claimed that her abilities as a writer of fiction were extremely limited, so that about ten years after the publication of Illustrations of Political Economy she “nearly ceased to write fiction, from simple inability to do it well” (3:462). In her assessment of her own career as a writer in the autobiographical sketch she intended to serve as her obituary she dismisses the significance of her fiction:

none of her novels or tales have, or ever had, in the eyes of good judges or in her own, any character of permanence. The artistic aim and qualifications were absent. She had no power of dramatic construction; nor the poetic inspiration on the one hand, nor critical cultivation on the other, without which no work of the imagination can be worthy to live. Two or three of her Political Economy Tales are, perhaps, her best achievements in fiction,—her doctrine furnishing the plot which she was unable to create, and the brevity of space duly restricting the indulgence in detail which injured her longer narratives, and at last warned her to leave off writing them.

(3:462)

Although only such novels and tales as Deerbrook, The Crofton Boys, and Feats on the Fiord continue to be of interest, many of the features she isolates as flaws do not seem to the modern reader to be readily identifiable as serious defects. The lack of “critical cultivation,” for example, and an “indulgence in detail” do not seem to be the central problems in her writing. She is closer to the mark in pointing to her lack of “power of dramatic construction.” Except in some of the more tightly structured short tales, she seems to have experienced enormous difficulty with the action and plot of her narratives. Despite her extraordinarily systematic mind, she seems to have been totally bewildered by the prospect of having to construct a consistent plot. She readily admitted, for example, that The Hour and the Man had a hopelessly chaotic structure: “there are prominent personages who have no necessary connexion whatever with the story; and the personages fall out of sight, till at last, my hero is alone in his dungeon, and the story ends with his solitary death. I was not careless, nor unconscious of my inability. It was inability, ‘pure and simple’” (1:239). She goes so far as to suggest that “creating a plot is a task above human faculties” and that, as a power, it is akin to prophecy. She claims that the only well-made plots in Dickens, Scott or other novelists are “taken bodily from real life” (1:238). Her frank disbelief in the possibility of generating action and plot as an organic development of a fully imagined fictional world is an important clue to the nature of her shortcomings as a novelist. The origin of these difficulties lies in part in the literal-mindedness which seems to have been an essential part of her personality, and secondly in her approach to her “source material,” which more closely resembled the working method of the journalist who consciously evaluates and incorporates deliberate research as “background” to a story rather than the novelist who must fully absorb background information and material before writing. The journalist's method, necessitated by the exigencies of writing to a deadline, inevitably involves working with material that is not thoroughly assimilated. Martineau's early experience as a writer was one of working under constant pressure of deadlines, and it seems that she never revised her working method to take advantage of a less pressing schedule.

Although the vast majority of Martineau's fiction is of interest to the modern reader because of the light it sheds on the history of the period rather than because of its literary merit, her novels and tales are chequered with episodes and passages which suggest that she narrowly missed becoming a Victorian novelist of some significance. Certainly her main preoccupations as a novelist and many of the characteristics of her fiction parallel those of other nineteenth-century writers with more significant achievements in fiction. Like Mrs. Gaskell, Dickens, and Charlotte Brontë she writes of unions, strikes, and the earlier machine-breaking phase of the industrial revolution. Like Scott, Bulwer-Lytton, and other popular novelists of the period, she was attracted to historical subjects. The sense of place and the precise observation of social life in a small community in Deerbrook has much in common both with Gaskell's Cranford (1853) and the larger canvas of George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-72).

Some of her preoccupations in her fiction are more idiosyncratic. She is fascinated by the precise details of domestic management and economy to a degree unusual even for a nineteenth-century novelist. In Deerbrook, when Margaret and Hester are shunned by the villagers, they are most distressed and inconvenienced by the reluctance of the village shopkeepers to serve them. Fascinated as always by the interaction between economic and social life, Martineau shows how Hester is intensely aware of the necessity of retaining the goodwill of shopkeepers in a small community: “She saw at once the difference in the relation between tradespeople and their customers in a large town like Birmingham, and in a village where there is but one baker, where the grocer and hatter are the same personage, and where you cannot fly from the butcher, be he ever so much your foe” (D, 197-98). In this and in numerous other similar episodes we see how Martineau's interest focuses on how social life is constructed and the way in which the shape of social interactions is largely predetermined by economic considerations.

In Illustrations of Political Economy she devotes long expository passages to the lengthy advice given by those who have learned sound domestic management to their less provident neighbors. In Brooke and Brooke Farm we are treated to pages of advice directed to an improvident cottager on how to drain land, make a compost heap, mend thatched roofs with furze, and so forth. Another cottager is warned about the way in which the tea-drinking habit can “ruin a very poor family.”¹⁸ Given her attraction to the problems of domestic management on very small means and resources, it is not surprising that Martineau, like other nineteenth-century writers of popular and children's literature, was drawn to the Robinson Crusoe theme in Life in the Wilds, one of the political economy tales, and in The Settlers at Home. The Crusoe theme inevitably appealed to Martineau and other like-minded writers of the period. It provided the opportunity to extrapolate lovingly on the minutiae of domestic management extolling the virtues of provident housekeeping. It also offered the chance to promote the idea of self-reliance and, by implication, the whole political notion of laissez-faire capitalism.

Like other writers of fiction with an implicit or explicit didactic purpose, Martineau frequently uses the point of view of a naive or child character. This device was used ironically by other nineteenth-century novelists to show the moral failings or the folly of adult characters in a scene where the child's naive questions go inadvertently to the heart of the matter. The famous “What is money papa?” interchange between Paul Dombey and his father in Dombey and Son¹⁹ is, perhaps, the most memorable example. For the most part, however, Martineau's naive child characters, like those of Mrs. Sherwood, seek and require instruction from adults, as, for example, the way in which the young girl in Brooke and Brooke Farm is persuaded by her “wise” father that the enclosure of “our pretty common” will eventually benefit everyone. Occasionally, even in her didactic fiction, Martineau is able to make use of a naive character's point of view to show the deficiencies of an apparently more sophisticated or more worldly view. An interesting example of this is in her tale Demerara where she uses the point of view of Alfred and Mary who return to their slave-owning father's plantation in Guiana after having been educated in England. Rather than lecturing the reader directly on the evils of slavery, Martineau has Alfred and Mary comment on the poverty-stricken and unthrifty appearance of everything they see on the slave-run estate compared with the prosperity of English farms run by wage-labor.

Perhaps Martineau's greatest weakness as a writer of fiction is her indulgence in exposition where dramatization would have served her purpose better. Although direct addresses to the reader occur frequently in nineteenth-century novels, in the hands of a George Eliot or a Mrs. Gaskell, they exist as an integral part of the novel's structure since they spring from a narrative voice that is a fully realized persona in the novel. Martineau, on the other hand, often volunteers what sounds like an idiosyncratic personal opinion on the action. While she does not indulge in frequent authorial interventions of the “Dear reader” variety, she has a tendency to tell rather than show what she wants the reader to know about the characters. The action of the novels and tales only rarely fully embodies the ideas she wishes to incorporate and she is thus compelled to frame the action within passages of exposition to guarantee the reader's comprehension.

In Deerbrook some of the heavy-handedness of direct authorial comment is softened through her use of the governess, Maria Young, as a kind of alter-ego figure. Thus, many of her comments on education, on the grinding hard work of a governess's life, and some of the perspective on Deerbrook society are provided through Maria rather than through direct authorial intervention.

Nor are all her authorial interventions ill-conceived or poorly executed. Like George Eliot, Martineau is preoccupied, not only with external events of her characters' lives, but with their moment-to-moment mental life. For example, Hope's state of mind when he contemplates the prospect of the Ibbotson sisters leaving Deerbrook is one of perfect preparedness for falling in love:

It was already a heavy thought how dull Deerbrook would be without them. He was already unconsciously looking at every object in and around the familiar place with the eyes of the strangers, speculating on how the whole would appear to them. In short, his mind was full of them. There are, perhaps, none who do not know what this kind of impression is. All have felt it, at some time or other,—many have felt it often,—about strangers whom they have been predisposed to like, or with whom they have been struck at meeting. Nine times out of ten, perhaps, the impression is fleeting; and when it is gone, there is an unwillingness to return to it, from a sense of absurdity in having been so much interested about one who so soon became indifferent: but the fact is not the less real and general for this. When it happens between two young people who are previously fancy-free, and circumstances favour the impression till it sinks deeper than the fancy, it takes the name of love at first sight. Otherwise it passes away without a name, without a record:—for the hour it is a secret: in an after time it is forgotten.

(D, 40)

Such a passage is not a piece of expendable authorial commentary, but is intrinsic to the total view of events provided in the novel. It sketches her characters' emotional susceptibility so that we are well-prepared for subsequent events, but, more important, her readers are reminded that we are ourselves all too familiar with such moments of susceptibility, and thus we are effectively prevented from condemning Hope's feelings as arbitrary or superficial.

Martineau's excessive reliance on exposition in her fiction may have arisen, in part, from her method of composition. She generally composed in her head and then committed herself to a single final copy, “thus saving an immense amount of time which I humbly think is wasted by other authors” (1:121). She evolved this method while attempting, early in her career, to write an historical novel but “found that it would not do to copy what I wrote; and here (at the outset of this novel) I discontinued the practice for ever … there was no use copying if I did not alter; and that if ever I did alter, I had to change back again; and I once for all, committed myself to a single copy” (1:121-22). Martineau was adamant that further revision would result only in “botching”:

I have always made sure of what I meant to say, and then written it down without care or anxiety,—glancing at it again only to see if any words were omitted or repeated, and not altering a single phrase in a whole work. I mention this because I think I perceive that great mischief arises from the notion that botching in the second place will compensate for carelessness in the first. I think I perceive that confusion of thought, and cloudiness or affectation in style are produced or aggravated by faulty prepossessions in regard to the method of writing for the press. The mere saving of time and labour in my own case may be regarded as no inconsiderable addition to my term of life.

(1:122)

Though there is always the salutory example of Ben Jonson's assertion that Shakespeare “never blotted a line,” examining the manuscripts of major writers shows that the majority go through extensive revisions from the first draft to the final form. Even Dickens, who, like Harriet Martineau, wrote under the intense pressure of monthly publication, revised his manuscripts more and more extensively as his career developed.

Many of Martineau's tales show the effects, not so much of insufficient revision, but of a too deliberate use of background material and “setting.” This is especially noticeable when she is writing of a place she has never visited, such as Guiana in Demerara or Norway in Feats on the Fiord. The reader has the impression at times that passages of description of landscape and local customs have been quickly adapted from a mélange of encyclopedic sources rather than imaginatively realized. The same sort of guide book approach frequently leads her into generalizations about national or regional characteristics, which prevents her from developing her characters as particular individuals. The individual characters in Feats on the Fiord, for example, remain rather indistinct for the first few chapters because she is relying so heavily on generalizations about the food preferences, customs, and behavior of “all Norwegians.” This overly deliberate use of barely digested source material is absent from the historical tales where Martineau is so familiar with the various historical accounts that she can draw on a rich fund of material rather than on scanty generalizations. Similarly, in a novel with a contemporary English setting like Deerbrook, where she relies on her own reminiscences and observation, she has no need of formal descriptive passages outlining the setting or local customs.

Martineau wrote in what many consider to be the Golden Age of novel writing, and we are therefore compelled to judge her fiction according to somewhat rigorous standards. The nineteenth-century novelists who are currently ranked highest in the critical pantheon are probably those who, like Dickens, provide a huge cast of characters, or, like George Eliot or Mrs. Gaskell, delineate a comprehensive relief map of the social landscape of the time. Martineau's fiction never aspires to this sort of scope. The election scenes in Deerbrook might, at times, be mistaken for the work of a writer like Mrs. Gaskell, but the dramatic realization frequently falters and drops into crude melodrama because she is so uncertain about the effect she is creating. Martineau lacks the sustained fictional power required to paint a large social canvas, nor, on the other hand, do we find in her fiction the passionate intensity of a Charlotte or Emily Brontë. Indeed Martineau, like many of her contemporaries, was strongly repulsed by Charlotte Brontë's most ambitious novel, Villette, precisely because its intensity seemed to her to come perilously close to morbidity. Her vision is essentially a cool and rational one, but one that lacks the comprehensiveness of a George Eliot or the intricate patterning of a Jane Austen.

Despite these shortcomings, her fiction is still of considerable interest to the serious student of nineteenth-century history and literature. While the modern general reader is usually impatient with obvious didactic or illustrative works, the serious student of the period will find a good deal to admire even in such works as Illustrations of Political Economy. Deerbrook, despite its unevenness, is of much greater interest and gives clear indications of a genuine and significant fictional gift. Martineau's only fully achieved works of fiction that can still be read for their strictly literary merit rather than their historical significance are The Playfellow stories and especially The Crofton Boys, which, alone among her fictional works, allows us to see the operation of a highly original intelligence on a vividly imagined fictional world.

Notes

1. Wheatley, Life and Work, 96.

2. Norwich Mercury; quoted in preliminary pages (unpaginated) of Demerara (Boston: Leonard C. Bowles, 1832).

3. Poor Man's Guardian, 7 January 1832; quoted in Webb, Harriet Martineau, 103-4.

4. A Manchester Strike (Boston: Leonard C. Bowles, 1832), 177.

5. Demerara, 120.

6. Brooke and Brooke Farm, 117-19.

7. Thomas Hutchinson, ed., The Poetical Works of Wordsworth (London: Oxford University Press, 1904), 242.

8. Gordon S. Haight, ed., The George Eliot Letters, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), 1:192.

9. Kathleen Tillotson, The Novels of the Eighteen Forties (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 5, 549.

10. The Playfellow (London: George Routledge, 1856), 243.

11. Quarterly Review 74 (1844):21.

12. The Playfellow, 401.

13. Ibid., 440.

14. Ibid., 485.

15. Ibid., 498.

16. John R. Townsend, Written For Children (London: Kestrel Books, 1965), 112.

17. The Playfellow, 423.

18. Brooke and Brooke Farm, 126.

19. Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), 52.