SOURCE: Hunter, Shelagh. “Social Criticism.” In Harriet Martineau: The Poetics of Moralism, pp. 148-94. Aldershot, Eng.: Scolar Press, 1995.

[In the following excerpt, Hunter discusses Martineau's social criticism, including Society in America.]

LANDSCAPE AND POLITICS: SOCIETY IN AMERICA

Society in America is Harriet Martineau's most extensive and sustained social criticism. A three-volume survey of the politics, economy, civilization and religion of America, it is based on the observations of a visit lasting two years, from September 1834 to August 1836. They were crowded years. She went as far south as New Orleans, west to Cincinnati and Chicago, and north to Lake Michigan, by stage, horseback, boat and train. Well-known in America for her writing and with the usual traveller's letters of introduction, she was the guest of ministers and statesmen in New York, Washington and other big cities. She went to parties, meetings, commencements, services, weddings, funerals, parades and picnics. She made life-long friends, including Maria Weston Chapman, innumerable acquaintances, many of whom, like Emerson, would visit her in England, and, above all, she found in the anti-slavery campaign a cause from which she would never waver. Society in America was social criticism by personal engagement; together the American experience and the writing which resulted from it mark a turning-point simultaneously in Martineau's professional life and in the personal life she called a ‘progress of worship’. The first part of this chapter examines the nature of the experience, as it shaped itself on immediate reflection in Society in America, then in the shift of emphasis in the later autobiographical narrative, and lastly in the modern perspective offered by the history of abolitionism; the second part of the chapter considers the consequences of the experience and its formulation, to her life and to her thinking.

She went in the first place for pleasure; this would be the holiday she had promised herself as soon as the Illustrations of Political Economy were completed, and an escape from the tension between daughterly submission and the obligations of her public role (Auto, II, p. 3). She had assumed that her vacation travel, with a party of friends, would take the ‘usual route, to Switzerland and Italy’. But Lord Henley, who, shaken by ‘“Cousin Marshall” and others of my Numbers’, had sought an interview with her about more productive kinds of charity, expressed surprise at this uncharacteristic conformity: asked for ‘a good reason’ (apart from the comparative novelty) why she should go to America as he suggested, he came up with what was on his mind when he asked to meet her—her decided views on poverty and her sympathetic powers of communication:

Whatever else may be said about the Americans, it is certain they have got at principles of justice and mercy in their treatment of the less happy classes of society which we should do well to understand. Will you not go, and tell us what they are? This, after some meditation, determined me to cross the Atlantic.¹

(Auto, I, p. 270)

She seized on this journey as a chance to ‘“rough it” for a while’, by which she meant ‘break through any selfish “particularity” that might be growing on me with years’, together with any ill-effects of success.

She went, she hoped, with an open mind. An ardent republican, she emerged from the experience buoyantly hopeful of democracy, disappointed only by failures and misdirections she thought had only to be pointed out to be corrected. In a letter to William Tait, written before she had finally decided to make the journey, she says that ‘the country should know more than it does of the principles of American institutions’ and that, though it might seem ‘presumptuous’, she would fill the gap if she were to go.² Nevertheless, she had no preconceived ideas of what would need to be said, and was scrupulous in keeping herself financially independent and free of any obligation to sponsor or publisher (Auto, II, pp. 1-3). Foreign as the experience undoubtedly was, in important respects she was particularly well-attuned to it. Her first recorded thoughts on things American are to be found in the contributions to the Monthly Repository of her apprentice years. Among the brief ‘Critical Notices’, as distinct from reviews, they are of sectarian rather than general interest, notices, largely, of sermons and addresses.³ In some ways as parochial as if no distance divided the American from the English portion of the sect,⁴ they nevertheless recognize a distinctive, even foreign, voice. An address, for instance, delivered at the induction of a young minister, is said to be ‘of the American fraternity; earnest, simple, true, and through this union of qualities, eloquent’. Such eloquence is of the spoken word: anticipating the good which will come from a new series called The Liberal Preacher if all are as good ‘as the discourse before us’, she finds the impression of the preacher's ‘earnestness’ so strong it is hard to believe that ‘we did not hear it delivered’, ‘true, fervid, and eloquent’ as it is. These are people she hears speaking persuasively from authentic, or ‘true’, feeling, the potential in Unitarianism she most wished to see developed. In the midst of the unwelcome flattery with which, as a literary celebrity she was first fêted in America, she and Louisa Jeffrey, her travelling companion, turned naturally to ‘those most homelike of our acquaintance,—the chief members of the Unitarian body, clergymen and others’ (Auto, II, p. 79). They seemed at the time like ‘fathers and brothers’.

Outside these private retreats she had more far-reaching social advantages. Unlike many European travellers to America at this time, she went well disposed, not to say conditioned, to like what she found. A new society without the encumbrance of ancient forms appealed to her radical politics as well as to her radical Protestantism. The serious and democratic voice she heard in American Unitarian publications circulated in England seemed the natural moral consequence of living in a society founded on the Declaration of Independence, in which she heard a magnificently enhanced echo of her own sense of individual moral worth.⁵ She had other qualifications for sympathetic observation of the new society in her class and her gender. These were both noted at the time by the Edinburgh reviewer of Retrospect of Western Travel,⁶ who thought that not only was she without the obvious disadvantages of being either ‘a supercilious Tory’ or a ‘disappointed republican’, but that it might ‘almost be said’ that ‘her mind and her habits were already … akin to those of America’:

She belongs to that party in England, religious and political, which, ever since the days of Priestly, (sic) has kept up a peculiar connection with one of the most important portions of American society. The very strongholds of that party in England—Liverpool and Manchester—are allied by close mercantile ties to Boston and New York; and the alliance of mind is closer still … Affinity of opinion has produced … on each side of the Atlantic, a sort of cousinship and similarity of manner and tone of thought, not to be met with between any other classes in the several countries. The slight peculiarities, both of habit and mind, which appear to characterize well-educated Americans of the Eastern States, are more nearly to be matched among the higher classes of Dissenters of the great provincial towns of England, than any where else, and an English Unitarian, especially if connected by family and acquaintance with the select people in his own country, is pretty sure of meeting in America, not with the kind and hospitable reception which all travellers with good recommendations can procure, but with a sort of family greeting.

Although he explains the lack of an Edinburgh review of Society in America to ‘a reluctance to follow the writer on that sea of political and social controversies into which she plunged so vigorously’, and Empson had advised her ‘not to put into [Society in America] any opinions concerning what are vulgarly called “The Rights of Women”’ (Auto, II, p. 164), this reviewer⁷ nevertheless thinks she had an advantage in being a female rather than a male reporter: men and women being more critical of the manners of their own sex, Miss Martineau was well placed to find charm, even (he says with some scepticism) ‘drollery’, in the conversation of the men who offered her information and opinions. Martineau herself thought that nothing was kept from her because she was a woman. She ‘never asked in vain’, and though she does not attribute it to her fame as she might well have done, her wants were prepared for: ‘I seldom had to ask at all; so carefully were my inquiries anticipated, and my aims so completely understood.’ The ease with which great men talked with her may be attributed to the habitual comfort and lack of competition a man of that time felt with a sympathetic woman, particularly one anxious to hear, and report, his views. There was also, not mentioned by the Edinburgh, the paradoxical advantage of her ear-trumpet; useful only in one-to-one conversation, the trumpet probably had the effect of prolonging exchange till it came to a natural rather than a socially interrupted end. This must have been at least some compensation for the loss to her, which she regretted, of casual conversation in which she was not herself involved. Meanwhile the natural access to the woman's world of housekeeping and child-rearing, enjoyed by this visitor to so many houses, gave her a better opportunity than would be easily obtained by a man, for the observation of prevailing ‘morals and manners’ in the places where they were taught and nurtured (SA, I, pp. xvi-xviii). There can be no doubt that the social ease of this fortuitous compatibility contributed to the outrage felt in America over the criticisms of their shortcomings, levelled in Society in America by this apparently complaisant guest. As a ‘fair lady of blue-stocking Boston said of [her] after [her] book appeared, “She has ate of our bread and drunk of our cup; and she calls dear, delightful Boston pedantic”!’ To which ‘a countryman’ of the lady's replied, ‘If she thinks Boston pedantic, did you think to bribe her, by a cup of tea, not to say so?’ (Auto, II, p. 20). On her anti-slavery views she experienced only the same verbal abuse and threats of physical harm meted out in these years in the press and in person to abolitionist Americans, but no doubt too, disappointed idealism gave an edge to her uncompromising exposure of the shortfall she observed between ideal and reality in American social practice.

Immediately on setting foot in New York, she plunged with enthusiasm and energy into the foreign experience,⁸ the ‘less happy classes’ by no means weighing on her mind.⁹ Apart from her travel journal, and hundreds of letters, she wrote virtually nothing for two years, only supplying the essay on ‘Moral Independence’ for Miscellanies (I, pp. 179-91)¹⁰ to ‘secure the copyright to the American proprietors’, and a story for a Sunday School festival (Auto, II, p. 7). Determined from the beginning to live and think through the experience undirected by preparations for any book which might result, she continued to withstand the offers of publishers. If she wrote it would be from authentic experience. She was particularly shocked by the blatant commercialism which regarded a book as a commodity:¹¹ Harper, ‘the head of the redoubtable piratical¹² publishing house in New York’, assured her how easy it would be to write up her travels: ‘So far as you have gone, you must have picked up a few incidents. Well! then you might Trollopize a bit,¹³ and so make a readable book. Come! what will you take?’ But, sure that ‘no traveller seeing things through author spectacles, can see them as they are’, Martineau was happy not to have tried to write a book as the varied experience of travel swept her along from one end of the country to another. According to Maria Weston Chapman, presumably the only person to have seen it, her travel journal recorded, not ‘feelings or opinions, but texts for the long-running commentary of conversation with family and friends on return’ (Mem, p. 229).

These ‘texts’ also furnished the material for reflection, as would the later journal of her Eastern travels. The process of shaping and distancing the experience of the American journey yielded four works in the two years following her return: Society in America in 1837, and in the following year, Retrospect of Western Travel, The Martyr Age of the United States and How to Observe: Morals and Manners. Retrospect, an answer, proposed by her publishers, to ‘solicitations’ for more of the ‘personal narrative’ which had not fitted with the theoretical purpose of the first book, offered to the English, she explains in the Preface, ‘what the Americans do not want—a picture of the aspect of the country, and of its men and manners’. The Martyr Age of the United States, is a historical account, even if one framed partly on personal encounters, of the current state of the fight against slavery. It marks the beginning of her own active engagement, over distance, in the anti-slavery cause, which Maria Weston Chapman would call ‘her mission to the United States of America’ (Mem, p. 283). How to Observe: Morals and Manners, an enlargement of a single chapter written on the voyage out (Auto, II, p. 6), professionalizes the travel, generalizing the experience by turning it into a basis for systematic observation.

It is in Society in America, first fruits of her encounter with her journal and begun within two months of her return, that the travel experience assumes the pattern it will retain in her mind thereafter. Society in America gives both locality and political shape to the emerging belief in the progress of mankind with which she ends her Autobiography. A human face is given to aspiration and a geographical location to the natural sources of authentic feeling. In the ‘personal narrative’ in Retrospect of Western Travel, she will reflect on the moral benefit of travel which results from the stranger's particular openness and susceptibility to feeling. All travel is thus morally beneficial, but a particular ‘freshness’ of the feelings evoked is specifically related to American travel. America affords ‘broader exhibitions of vice—of licentiousness and violence—than can be seen where slavery is not’, and at the same time, ‘in other regions or amid different circumstances there are brighter revelations of virtue than are often seen out of a primitive state of society’. The ‘diversities of society’ in America are not only numerous but, in this new-born or ‘primitive’ country, unreservedly open to the view (RWT, 2, pp. 57-64).¹⁴ In Society in America she first extracts a pattern from the amorphous record of experience in the journal, formulating the relation between democratic politics and the morality of ‘primitive’ living.

From a modern point of view this is probably her most important single work.¹⁵ A contribution to the understanding of democratic social process it is comparable in insight, as it is close in date, to Tocqueville's own.¹⁶ It lacks both the detachment and the structural clarity of Democracy in America, but its thorough personal engagement is its peculiar strength: it not only shows how many persisting characteristics of American society were early apparent to sympathetic observation,¹⁷ but also illustrates the Romantic origins of the democratic faith of ordinary people. The theme is the untold promise of the New World, where no ancient forms prevent the progress of mankind towards a ‘natural’ society, in the sense that natural law and human nature can work together from basic principles for the good of all.¹⁸ Education and informed purpose will work to bring ideal and practice closer where mistakes have been made. One great ‘anomaly’ has temporarily halted progress: slavery, a remnant of contact with the Old World, accounts in one way and another for most, if not quite all, the bars to ‘true feeling’, and so to the natural development of a sound moral society. Back at home in her study, the rich variety of remembered landscape and ways of life recalled all her democratic hope. Social ‘practice’ seemed in the memory so nearly to measure up to the hope engendered by political ‘theory’, that the book became an exhortation to Americans to go the last bit of distance towards realizing the principles on which their system of government was founded.

The publishers rejected her own title, Theory and Practice of Society in America. Presumably it seemed to them to promise more political analysis and fewer traveller's tales than a reader would find between the covers, while ‘Society in America’ would bring the book within the current expectations of travel literature. In the then flourishing market for such books, they might have asked her to call it something like, ‘Observations on American Society Gathered on Two Year's Travel Undertaken by a Lady’, from which readers would anticipate a tactful mixture of ‘observation’ and ‘reflection’ in smooth alternation.¹⁹ Martineau herself could ‘never bear to think’ of the title under which the book is known (Auto, II, p. 3). Her own, paradoxically in view of its promise of ‘theory’, was nearer to her personal experience, not so much of the travel itself, as of the shaping of the experience on reflection. She deliberately rejected the common, and most natural, observer's resource of comparison with the traveller's own country and sought to judge American life by the indigenous standards set out in the Declaration of Independence. She thought she had substituted a relevant frame of reference for an arbitrary and necessarily often unspoken set of foreign assumptions, against which she warned in the opening chapter of How to Observe: Morals and Manners written on the boat. Nevertheless, she came to reject her theoretical framework as ‘self-derived’, and Society in America is found in the Autobiography to suffer, like all her early work, from being written in her ‘metaphysical stage’. She quotes ‘some of her wisest friends at home’ (she remembers Carlyle and Sydney Smith particularly) as offering gentle criticism of her ‘more abstract American book in the pleasant form of praise of the more concrete one’. Carlyle, for example, wrote that ‘he had rather read of Webster's cavernous eyes and arm under his coat-tail, than all the political speculation that a cut and dried system could suggest’. But her hindsight is, as often, ambiguous: she remained ‘glad’ that she wrote the book, and puts the ‘abstract treatment of what must necessarily be a concrete subject’ down to infection from the ‘American fashion of theorizing’.²⁰ She also qualifies her view of Sydney Smith's wisdom by pointing out that ‘in his [own] dealings with American Repudiation, … he did not trouble himself with any study of the Constitution of the United States, for he crowded almost as many mistakes as possible into his procedure,—supposing Congress to be responsible for the doings of Pennsylvania, and Pennsylvania to have repudiated her debts; which she never did’.²¹ Thus Retrospect was preferred by readers ‘who read for amusement and skip the politics’ (Auto, II, pp. 102-6).

Society in America was written on the assumption, now taken for granted, that geography and human interest (or ‘amusement’) are not separable from politics.²² But the mixture of the strangeness of the ‘experiment’ in self-government and the familiarity to Europeans (particularly the English, of course) of so much of the life were difficult to reconcile in the pattern of a book. The principles of the Declaration, while foreign as a presiding myth, were well enough known in England as the subject of theoretical debate.²³ As Webb points out, the book is ‘a contribution to the British debate on the principles of society, for which America was a relevant experiment’ (1962, pp. 164-74). Oddly, he thinks it follows from this that Martineau ‘was not really interested in America at all’. But since an unframed view of the strange is hardly possible, it means rather that her focus on what she saw was sharp, and provided, at the time, an efficient shaping principle. With this focus, she was able to supply the need she identified to Tait before she went, as feeling ‘tired of being kept foundering among the details which are all that a Hall or a Trollope can bring away’.²⁴ The sharpness is conveyed in the qualities of the writing Webb identifies as her best: ‘a keenness of observation, a sense of significant detail, incisive portraiture, that is her good reporting’. Omitting these stylistic excellencies from his masterly summary of her political conclusions, he, not surprisingly, finds the remainder ‘limited, naive, even at times embarrassing’. Hoecker-Drysdale's account of the book, which restores appreciation of the sharpness of observation and the heady sense of discovery which is so marked a feature of Society in America, is not only personally more sympathetic, but professionally more accurate. Headed ‘The Sociologist Abroad’, Hoecker-Drysdale's chapter puts the emphasis where it belongs, on Martineau's assumption that the details of government and daily life are the direct result of political, that is moral, belief (pp. 49-77). All Martineau's commentary is shot through with anecdote (‘I was told …’, ‘a wise friend said …’) to indicate publicly the nature of her sources, which in the journal were named in case she was called on to substantiate unpalatable truths. Her personal experience is included as another device, beyond taking indigenous standards of judgement, of ‘lessening [her] own responsibility’, that is of enabling her readers ‘to judge for themselves, better than I can for them, what my testimony is worth’; that is to say, it creates the necessary distance by defining the nature of the data, which, as Hoecker-Drysdale says, is ‘anecdotal but nonetheless sociological’.²⁵ The ideals of the Declaration of Independence are not irrelevant to the way people live. Whatever the philosophic roots may be thought to be, the hold of the Declaration on the imagination of the average citizen is its articulation of individual capacity for moral choice. The extent to which myth informs social practice is a commonplace of modern sociology and not a case which needs arguing here so much as translating into the language of early nineteenth-century moralism.

Martineau calls her book a ‘compound of philosophy and fact’. The remark is less bland than it sounds now, ‘compound’ chosen advisedly to indicate in its scientific sense a mixture from which the elements are not extractable, and ‘fact’, to this Unitarian at home in her Bible, at times covers the tenable as well as the provable. Every traveller faces the same choice of how to relate detail and principle, but radical or reforming values need to be made explicit. For Hall and Trollope, who assume their conservative values to be shared by the reader, Europe is an unquestioned and unargued norm. Tocqueville, with whom Martineau can be more fairly compared than with her Tory compatriots, saw America as a blueprint for the future of France, the Old World having reached the certain end of its course. He chose rigorously to exclude anecdote from the argument in his text, demarking it clearly when he did use it, and reserving his comment on the morals of life in a democracy for the much later second volume of Democracy in America, but he saw that his own hold on a ‘perpetual silent reference to France was a principal cause of [his] book's success’.²⁶ Martineau, so determined to keep hold of her initial impetus for the journey to ‘learn and not to teach’ that in Boston she even pleaded the slaveholders' case, was a more openly exploratory traveller, just as the English situation (at least to a Radical view) was less clear than the French. She regarded the experiment as successfully over: whatever might happen in the future, self-government, having lasted for 50 years, had been proved possible. Further, ‘a true theory of government’ had been founded from first principles, those of ‘human nature’, as well as from the ‘experience of governments’. The morality of her book does not lie in what her most recent editor (and severe abridger), speaking in the familiar voice of our own time, calls ‘annoying moralizing’, but in its focus on what it meant to be living in a self-governing society, no longer experimental but everywhere in the visible process of formation (Lipset, p. 10).²⁷

The visibility of emerging civilization derives from the interdependence of progress and landscape. In Society in America this is both a fact of economic life and an indication of a Wordsworthian spirit at the centre of American social life. Martineau herself thought Wordsworth lay ‘at the heart of the people’; his works, ‘lie under the pillow, or open on the work-box, or they peep out of the coat pocket; they are marked, remarked, and worn’ (SA, III, pp. 219-20).²⁸ The appropriation of the entire natural world of America by the Radical imagination is at least as old as Tom Paine, who writes in the introduction to The Rights of Man:

As America was the only spot in the political world, where the principles of universal reformation could begin, so also was it the best in the natural world … The scene which the country presents to the eye of the spectator has something in it which generates and enlarges great ideas. Nature appears to him in magnitude. The mighty objects he beholds act upon his mind by enlarging it, and he partakes of the greatness he contemplates … The wants which necessarily accompany the cultivation of a wilderness produced among them [European emigrants] a state of society which countries long harassed by the quarrels and intrigues of governments, had neglected to cherish. In such a situation man becomes what he ought. He sees his species, not with the inhuman idea of a natural enemy, but as kindred; and the example shows to the artificial world, that man must go back to nature for information.

(Paine, 1, p. 354)

Forty years later Tocqueville would turn in the first volume of Democracy in America from the march of European history towards democracy, the subject of his introduction, to an overview of the ‘Exterior Form of North America’, in which he moves in imagination from the globe on which his eyes are apparently fixed, through the evolutionary upheavals of the ancient earth to the readiness for civilization of this vast and varied wilderness. Despite the difference of mode from the rest of the book, the chapter is organic, offering cause and analogy at once: the physical nature of the country is the primary force in shaping the new civilization, and the evolutionary theme of the chapter equates the courses of nature and history.

Charles Lyell,²⁹ writing in 1845 as a ‘foreign naturalist’, well describes the visual confusion of the European traveller as he adjusts his expectations to the New World. He finds his scientific purpose interrupted by sight of man's hand in the wilderness, and, rather to his own surprise, gives way, however cautiously, to the romance of social optimism:

They who are accustomed to connect the romance of their travels in Europe or Asia with historical recollections and monuments of former glory, with the study of masterpieces in the fine arts, or with grand and magnificent scenery, will hardly believe the romantic sensations which may be inspired by the aspect of this region [Upper New York State] where very few points of picturesque beauty meet the eye, and where the aboriginal forest has lost its charm of savage wildness by the intrusion of railways and canals … Here, instead of dwelling on the past, and on signs of pomp and grandeur, which have vanished, the mind is filled with the images of coming power and splendour. The vast stride made by one generation in a brief amount of time, naturally disposes us to magnify and exaggerate the rapid rate of future improvement. The contemplation of so much prosperity, such entire absence of want and poverty, so many schoolhouses and churches, rising everywhere in the woods, and such a general desire of education, with the consciousness that a great continent lies beyond which has still to be appropriated, fills the traveller with cheering thoughts and sanguine hopes.

(Lyell, 1, pp. 17-18)

Harriet Martineau nourished her own ‘sanguine hopes’ with stoic determination in the face of many disappointment till they eventually framed her philosophic outlook: they early found their objective correlative in the American scene. To the mind which sought the rules of living in the Bible, while reading it as the poetic history of the Jews, to the sensibility nurtured into spiritual growth under the tutelage of Wordsworth's work, the varied landscapes of the New World spoke in a language both transcendental and social. Extended accounts from her travel journal are long enough in places to suggest a more usual type of travel book, causing some readers to wish for more, some for less and still others for a different disposition of the theoretical and the personal.³⁰ But the longest personal records are strategically placed, and in their context show that, in the workings of this Radical imagination, landscape was at once both setting and message. Where, in the description of landscape, the travel stories are most like set pieces, they are remarkable for the way in which the figures in the landscape, the author and the reader are all shown as psychological participants in the scene. Idea and method are alike rooted in Romanticism. She sees in a real landscape the moral effect that Coleridge, describing the calm progress and moral health of his ‘true patriots’, turns into a metaphorical one: different from frenetic and violent reformers, his patriots are ‘men who have encouraged the sympathetic passions till they have become irresistible habits, and made their duty part of their self-interest’; they have long cultivated ‘that moral taste which derives our most exquisite pleasures from the contemplation of possible perfection, and proportionate pain from the perception of existing depravity’; they do not stumble in a ‘twilight of political knowledge’, but ‘press right onward with a vast and various landscape of existence around them’ (Coleridge, p. 333).³¹ Martineau authenticates her political commentary in accounts of her energetic and sociable travel experience, ‘amusing’ readers by engaging them in discovery. Nabholtz, defines the ‘domesticating of intellectual discourse by involving the reader in the experience of that discourse’ as ‘symptomatic of the venture of Romantic prose’: Martineau, like Nabholtz's Hazlitt, ‘sought to turn the exposition of ideas into an affective experience for the reader’ (pp. 65-6).

One of the facts of social life uniquely recognized by the American Constitution is that ‘politics are morals—i.e. matters of equal concern to all’ (SA, I, p. 6). In Society in America the table of contents gives fair warning that the book is conceived in such moral terms: of the four Parts, the first, ‘Politics’, concludes with ‘The Morals of Politics’, the second, and longest, ‘Economy’, with ‘The Morals of Economy’, while the third and fourth, ‘Civilization’ and ‘Religion’, are in such a context self-evidently moral. Martineau understands that the principles of the Declaration of Independence have become a myth, or, as she says, they ‘lie in the mind’, and that while people have not always lived with the spirit of the law as exhorted to do by ‘the fathers’, they will recognize the need eventually when, more generally understood, it will become ‘the will of the majority’. Appropriately then, ‘The Morals of Politics’ has an epigraph from Wordsworth's ‘Character of a Happy Warrior’, and the heart of the opening section, the first extended and formalized traveller's tale in the book, is an account of her enthusiastic participation in two popular festivals.³² The section, on ‘Office’ (SA, I, pp. 113-15) is about ‘political scepticism in a republic … of all heart-withering things … one of the most painful’.³³ Showing the healthy spirit of community betrayed by office-seekers, it links the preceding description of the ‘Apparatus of Government’, with the following chapter, ‘Morals of Politics’, where a variety of disparities in the relation of speech and action are considered.³⁴ The primary allegiance of the speakers at both meetings being, in the nature of their pursuit of office, to a wider world than the immediate community, they have lost contact with the sources of natural feeling and political reality at once. The consequent loss of ‘moral independence’ is revealed by their language, in which Martineau cannot detect any traces of the authentic voice which spoke from the American Unitarian publications she read for the Monthly Repository, but which she thinks could be demanded by ‘individual human will’ in the audiences at political meetings (SA, I, p. 42).

The first festival is a commemoration of an Indian massacre at Bloody Brook near Deerfield, thought of as ‘an occasion capable of being turned to good electioneering purposes’. Hopes of attracting ‘a celebrated orator’ were dashed by Mr Webster's refusal to ‘rake up old bloody Indian stories’, but the candidate himself was not so scrupulous. So the occasion, dubious in any case as an electioneering stunt offering little cause for wholehearted celebration, turned out to have been ‘for the political interest of one’. The ‘pacific’, amiable militia arrange a small, sober audience suitably, the band ushers in a procession of gentlemen and the oration follows. The foreign traveller finds herself ‘deeply disgusted’, her ‘sympathies baffled’:

If a Greenfield farmer or mechanic had spoken as he believed orators to speak, and if the failure had been complete, I might have been sorry, or amused, or disappointed; but not disgusted. But here was one of the most learned and accomplished gentlemen in the country a candidate for the highest office in the State,³⁵ grimacing like a mountebank before the assemblage whose votes he desired to have, and delivering an address, which he supposed level to their taste and capacity. He spoke of the ‘stately tree’ (the poor walnut) and the ‘mighty assemblage’, (a little flock in the middle of an orchard,)³⁶ and offered them shreds of tawdry sentiment, without the intermixture of one sound thought, or simple and natural feeling, simply and naturally expressed. It was equally an under estimate of his hearers, and a degradation of himself.

(SA, I, pp. 132-3)

The significance of the occasion inside the themes of the book as a whole is conveyed by the traveller's response to the landscape. The reader is enlisted to explore the ideas by the affective experience of the Beautiful and the Sublime, signifying community and transcendence, containment on the one hand, vision on the other.³⁷ The tranquil fertility of the Connecticut Valley, where the mild-mannered and thoughtful group gathers to be addressed in a manner which leaves his ‘highly imaginative’, susceptible hearers far too ‘dull’ and apathetic for a ‘republican’ audience, is of a kind familiar to an English eye and representative of the Beautiful:

The river, full, broad, and tranquil as the summer sky, winds through meadows, green with pastures, or golden with corn. Clumps of forest trees afford retreat for the cattle in the summer heats; and the magnificent New England elm, the most graceful of trees, is dropped singly, here and there, and casts its broad shade upon the meadow.

(SA, I, p. 121)

The surrounding hills are etched with forest trees which, in the manner of the Sublime, give ‘gravity’ to the ‘charm’ of the valley, the ‘gravity’ being both pictorial shadow and moral gravitas. The outline of trees suggests both the historical time in which the valley has been cleared, and the geographical extent of remaining forest. From the heaven's eye view of the writer's imagination, the forest remains ‘everlasting’ and inescapable (‘We threaded it in Michigan; we skirted it in New York and Pennsylvania; and throughout New England it bounded every landscape’), and like Milton's “verdurous wall of Paradise” confine[s] the mighty southern and western rivers to their channels'. To the traveller, conscious of being a stranger, and so peculiarly open to an extreme experience, the forest is ‘a newlycreated grace’, like ‘an infant planet that wanders across the telescope of the astronomer’. To the writer recalling the scene, the stored memory of the wilderness is a spiritual experience, a ‘grace’, which lies in the restorative power of the shafts of sunlight in forest darkness and Edenic profusion in the recaptured vision. When the narrative returns to the scene of the massacre and the oration, the description of the unfenced fields and ripening Indian corn of the valley recalls us to the historical present with the past written onto it. Intent on a different kind of imaginative reconstruction from a political future and a personal regeneration from humanity's paradisal past, Martineau and her party take a walk to ‘make ourselves acquainted with the geography of the catastrophe which was to be celebrated in a day or two’.

The second festival she attended in New England was Forefathers' Day at Plymouth Rock. She tells how on the bleak drive to the barren shore she attempted, as visitors continue to do, to reconstruct the settlers' first view. There is the solitary rock in miles of sand, relics in the museum and the burial ground, disguised in the first years as a corn field to guard the parlous state of the Pilgrims from the Indians. Her criticism of the orator on this occasion³⁸ is a continuation of the theme at Bloody Brook, where the speaker ignored all the topics near to the hearts of his local audience—education, slavery, any religious or charitable project—which would have roused them into democratic concern. Here, on the site of almost unimaginable personal stoicism, religious purpose and communal loyalty, the descendants of the Pilgrims were flattered by being told of their own singularity and superiority; the ‘worst circumstances of European society’ were used to infer the superiority of the best in their own society; bigotry and persecution in the past were excused because ‘they had come over to have the colony to themselves, and the only remark which drew approval (loud cheers) from the audience on whom these remarks ‘fell dead’ was on the ‘impossibility that the sons of the pilgrims should trust to violence for the maintenance of opinion’. Behind this remark, though not mentioned here, is all the force of her repeated assertions that the anti-slavery mobs of these years were composed of gentlemen, who tarred and feathered, and sometimes murdered, their victims in the way associated in Europe with an unlettered rabble.³⁹ Gentility in a republic is common humanity, or, as she will formulate it later in Household Education, ‘goodness and simplicity are indissolubly united’. True refinement can exist in a bunch of wild flowers, such as those presented to her in Chicago, which she visited at the height of land speculation in raw, boggy lots. She saw the democratic grace of the gift, just as she saw that out of the mud and the financial clamour, a settled society in a ‘thriving lake and river port’ would emerge (SA, 1, pp. 349-55). Her visit to Chicago is described in ‘Part II: Economy’, which contains all the remaining extended accounts of her travels. Nearly half of Part II consists of her travel experience, presented as a series of vignettes of the diverse ways of life she encountered, on the grounds that, ‘the position or prospects of men in a new country may best be made intelligible by accounts of what the traveller saw and heard while among them’, and ‘pictures serve the purpose better than reports’. The journey itself is integral: with its different modes of transport, some hardships and long distances between habitations, it links the pictures in the traveller's process of discovery through endurance and a fresh eye. She sees that the pictorial method is a fictionalizing one, but justified because of, rather than despite, the inclusion of the impressions made on the traveller. Of the figures in her landscapes, ‘with more worlds to conquer than Alexander’, she says, ‘no one of them, probably, is aware how vivid an idea he impresses on the mind of humanity; nor how distinct a place he finds in her records’. (SA, I, p. 214). ‘Humanity’, of course, can only be reached through the words of the writer.

Economics and geography will be found linked in the least ‘philosophical’ of text books, but in this ‘compound of philosophy and fact’ they are also inseparable from ‘morals’, that is, here, from politics. The first problem faced by the scribbling traveller is representation. Martineau's account of the rich variety of American scene and life is introduced by a demonstration of the effort of the imagination to comprehend and convey the new. Of the forest edging the Connecticut valley, she has said that those ignorant of the extent and pristine quality of the American wilderness will only find it sublime ‘when the imagination becomes able to realize the conception of what it is’ (SA, I, p. 52). In ‘Part II: Economy’ her lively scene-setting and the ‘reports’ on ‘Agriculture’, ‘Transport and Markets’, ‘Manufactures’ and ‘Commerce’ which will follow, are introduced by a disquisition on ‘world-making’, the pattern for which is written on the landscape. Well-known tourist sights of then accessible America—Mammoth Cave, Niagara Falls and the Mississippi River—furnish her with symbols in the manner of the geological sublime.⁴⁰ The imaginative effort she seeks to describe, and so to induce, is a denial of expectation and renewal of vision in the exploration of limits.

The epigraph to the Part is from Psalm 104: ‘That thou givest them they gather. Thou openest thine hand; they are filled with good’. But the introductory chapter opens by juxtaposing the Old and New Worlds with a comment on the Old World observer of all this New World plenty, who must learn to look with new eyes before ‘he’ can see with the old ones: ‘apt to lose himself in reflection when he should be observing’, he forgets, since he has no experience of such a thing, that what he is seeing is a world in formation. The mind in a long-established culture no longer has need or power to ‘analyze’: in England where ‘everything comes complete and finished under notice’, any one individual is only aware of ‘some one process of formation, which it is his business to conduct; but all else is presented to him in its entireness’. Society looks on the legislation which the statesman has honed from ‘facts and opinions’, as ‘a child does on a doll or a table’. Similarly, the ‘shoemaker … takes his loaf of bread, and the clock that ticks behind his door, as if they came down from the clouds as they are, in return for so much of his wages’. But ‘too many gentlemen and ladies analyze nothing at all’. Better educated, they could join those who ‘begin a fresh existence from the day when they first obtain a glimpse into this new region of discovery’. The fortunate traveller in ‘the wilder regions of America’ has the opportunity of having ‘old experience reversed’. Nothing is finished; nature, not yet instrumental, is ‘empress’, not ‘handmaid’ (SA, I, pp. 208-9).

This traveller's perception of an entire world in the process of formation is then conveyed by three separate experiences of unharnessed nature, arranged on reflection into a spatial and temporal sequence compressed into one paragraph. A descent into Mammoth Cave, a risky trip behind the spray at Niagara and a voyage up the Mississippi have convinced this traveller at least that in the New World nature and history are alike in a state of flux, and that her own presence there is as much a matter of historical as of personal chance. In the ‘noiseless workshop’ of the cave, Nature was ‘fashioning mysteries which the earthquake of a thousand years may bring to light’. Behind Niagara, Martineau had stood ‘in the wet whirlwind, with the crystal roof above me, the thundering floor beneath and the foaming whirlpool and rushing flood before me’. There she imagined, ‘those quiet studious hours of the future world when this cataract shall have become a tradition, and the spot on which I stood shall be the centre of a wide sea, a new region of life’.⁴¹ From this vision of quiet study in the conventional world of the far future, she recalls her own cultivated reflections on a very different process of world-making on the Mississippi, ‘where a sort of scum on the waters betokened the birth-place of new land’. The speed may be glacial but the process is inexorable: the river brings the soil detached from ‘the cliffs of the upper Missouri’, and ‘deposits it, in continual increase, till a barrier is raised against the rushing waters themselves’. Airborne seeds root, grow to little thickets, and while ‘the infant forest, floating, as it appeared, on the surface of the turbid and rapid waters, may reveal no beauty to the painter … to the eye of one who loves to watch the process of world-making, it is full of delight’ (SA, I, pp. 210-12).

The close and economical juxtaposition of three Sublime experiences makes its own rhetorical point. Her two visits to Niagara, out of which this brief historical point is distilled, and the Mississippi voyage with its adventures and fellow passengers are described at more expectable length as personal experiences in Retrospect of Western Travel. Mammoth Cave is described some twenty pages later in Society in America itself as part of the journey from Tennessee to Kentucky, where the travel account is included, not for any personal significance, but as part of her argument that in America social ‘finish’, or the promise of it, could appear out of extremes of solitude. The Sublimity of the cave, described in counterpoint with the tourist experience of the guided tour, lies in the strange sounds and flashes of light in the ‘chaos of darkness and rocks’ (SA, I, pp. 227-35). The travellers next appear in their muddy clothes amid the social graces of Virginia Springs, the account of which Tait's Edinburgh Magazine found tedious as being like spas anywhere, which, of course, was exactly the point Martineau was making. In the introduction to the current state of American economic affairs, the three experiences form one Sublime experience of geological flux, which provides the type of historical progress, the natural and conventional worlds shown to be similarly in the process of formation (SA, I, pp. 210-12). Her first set of ‘pictures’ follow immediately, depicting ‘solitaires’—people who live in an isolation inconceivable in the Old World.

Throughout Part II, describing the Economics of the new society, Martineau as traveller describes the imaginative effort to grasp the emergence of ‘art’, or artefact, in relation to nature, making her generalizations from an effortless telling of her own involvement. Waiting for a delayed train to Charleston, for example, in the chapter on ‘Transport and Markets’, she says:

I never saw an economical work of art harmonize so well with the vastness of a natural scene, as here. From the piazza of the house at Branchville, the forest fills the whole scene, with the railroad stretching through it, in a perfectly straight line, to the vanishing point. The approaching train cannot be seen so far off as this. When it appears, a black dot, marked by its wreath of smoke, it is impossible to avoid watching it, growing and self-moving, till it stops before the door. I cannot draw; but I could not help trying to make a sketch of this, the largest and longest perspective I ever saw.

(SA, II, pp. 182)

Constant reminders of the mind's effort to formalize the relation of a growing economy to the land which sustains it occur throughout Part II, the longest in the book, but the extended formalization of scene and response is found only once more. As the gallery of pictures is opened by the recall of sublime experience to describe the process of ‘world-making’, endings of more than one kind are contained in this last one. The description of the view from the junction of Lakes Huron and Michigan ends the sequence of ‘pictures’; this is the most northerly point in probably the most hazardous of her journeys, and (since she left for England within three weeks of reaching Detroit) the approaching end of her two-year stay as well as her goodbye to her travelling companions, the Follens, with whom, among all her American acquaintance, her affections had become most involved.⁴²

The description moves from a picturesque drawing of the Natural Bridge of Mackinaw to the effect on the observer's mind of the otherwise indescribable scene beyond it. In the picture above the limestone arch, ‘the horizon line of the lake fell behind the bridge, and the blue expanse of waters filled the entire arch’. The bases of the pillars were obscured with birch and ash, while ‘shrubbery tufted the sides, and dangled from the bridge’. But the expanse of lake seen from the ‘crown of the island’ beggars description: she ‘can compare it with nothing but what Noah might have seen, the first bright morning after the deluge’. She cannot imagine ever seeing anywhere else ‘such a cluster of little paradises rising out of the water’, so that ‘the capacity of the human eye seems here suddenly enlarged, as if it could see to the verge of watery creation’. Sheer extent in the distance suggests transience in the foreground:

Blue, level waters appear to expand for thousands of miles in every direction … Cloud shadows, and specks of white vessels, at rare intervals, alone diversify it. Bowery islands rise out of it; bowery promontories stretch down into it; while at one's feet lies the melting beauty which one almost fears will vanish in its softness before one's eyes; the beauty of the shadowy dells and sunny mounds, with browsing cattle, and springing fruit and flowers. Thus, and no otherwise, would I fain think did the world emerge from the flood.

(SA, II, p. 16)

This typological vision of unity, a novel experience, ‘seemed to be marred by any distinction of parts’. But, squarely facing ‘the state of the case’ by naming the lakes and islands and placing them on a mental map, she recalls that she is actually standing ‘at the confluence of those great northern lakes, the very names of which awed my childhood; calling up, as they did, images of the fearful red man of the deep pine-forest, and the music of moaning winds, imprisoned beneath the ice of winter’. Exploring the limits in this way has brought her face to face with the plight of the ‘gentlemen and ladies’ of the opening paragraphs of this section, the educated people to whom the finished products of civilization offer no challenge to curiosity. However ‘unwilling to have objects named’ as she was in the face of these vast waters, forcing herself to the effort of naming brings the reward, as it were, of contact with the sources of her own imagination in her early reading. In America the nearness of the wilderness is the extreme experience necessary for the receptiveness of the sensibility, which, together with moral effort, breaks the hard crust of convention formed over the primal sources of feeling.

Roused by such a vision, Harriet Martineau saw much on her travels to justify optimism. But her hopes were tempered by the insidious effect of slavery, and abolition became the task in hand. The reviewer in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine would have preferred a harsher word than ‘anomaly’ to describe slavery, as would Fanny Wedgwood (LFW, p. 3 n. 5), but inside the assumptions on which Society in America is based there is no harsher word than one, in common use in anti-slavery literature, which indicates the sanctity of the underlying principles of the society. It is justified in the structure of the book, where slavery is not, as in Tocqueville, a separate issue, but one which can crop up at any time as a deciding factor in a political situation. While she did not in any part of her travels meet with people willing to defend slavery itself, as distinct from the status quo,⁴³ she did, of course, meet with many who said this was not the first society in the history of the world to live with this sad fact of life, others who stressed the undeniable fact that, new as this society was, it inherited slavery, and many more, the majority, whose Christian faith and political imagination were alike bounded by their means of livelihood. The claims that many slaves were happy and some owners humane came nowhere near mitigation of the unmitigable moral outrage that her book assumes and demonstrates in stories of the final dehumanization of even cared-for slaves. She set out in Society in America to show how the ‘anomaly’, the relic of the Old World in the New, the denial of equality actually written into the Constitution, was, quite beyond immediate humanitarian concerns, a far-reaching political issue with ramifications in every aspect of the economic development of the society and the working of its institutions. It fuelled expansionism, which in itself was both absurd and pernicious in a sparsely settled land. If tyranny thrives on distance, as suggested in the epigraph from Rousseau to her section on ‘Agriculture’, the community which alone will keep democratic feeling alive and operative cannot develop. The annexation of Texas, with which she was much concerned,⁴⁴ was not only of benefit mainly to slaveholders and their economic dependents, but actually destructive of the most hopeful element in the new society, the establishment of self-determining community. No aspect of the social structure of America was better calculated to break aristocratic moulds of organization and behaviour than the abandonment of primogeniture, by the spread of wealth, and more fundamentally in attitudes to work; but in a society thus dependent on energy and cooperation, slavery vitiated the morally healthy assumption that there can be no ‘clear feeling’ of ‘your strength … save by what you have prospered in, what you have done’, that ‘our works are the mirror wherein the spirit first sees its natural lineaments’.⁴⁵ Not only did it take many white men to get work out of one slave, but, beyond this wasteful employment of labour, the aristocratic assumptions of ‘caste’ on which the Southern plantations depended, encouraged the North to compete with unproductive ostentation, which in turn accentuated the fear of opinion (or lack of ‘moral independence’) already emerging as one price of democracy. She saw slavery as ultimately threatening the Union, not simply as a consequence of States Rights, though on issues like the Gag Laws they threatened free speech throughout the Union, but because federal measures like the Tariff artificially supported the economic inefficiency of the South to the eventual harm of Northern manufacture (SA, I, pp. 58-61).⁴⁶

The Autobiography offers a new perspective on the American journey, as in a later chapter it will of her Eastern travels. Where the writing of Eastern Life Past and Present is the main subject of the autobiographical account of the later journey, by 1855 Society in America has been long finished and is consigned with resignation, in the Autobiography, to her ‘metaphysical stage’. But the concerns of the earlier book remain a matter of public interest. Although the struggle over slavery is still ten years and a war away from settlement, history has moved on and the public focus has changed as has Martineau's own. The opening of the second volume of the Autobiography is an account of her own ‘connexion with the great controversy on negro slavery which was then just beginning to stir the American community’, followed by a reassessment of people—the Emersons, the Sedgwicks, Margaret Fuller, ‘apathetic citizens’, ‘baffled statesmen’—all seen in relation to the history of the anti-slavery cause between 1835 and 1855. She can say personal things now about the journey which could not be said at the time. Society in America had not been conceived of as a record of her ‘personal adventures’, and, since those following her declaration of solidarity with the Bostonian abolitionists were very trying, ‘some undeserved suspicion of resentment on my own account might [have] attach[ed] to my historical narrative’. Now she can tell her story, of flattery followed by insult and violence, as one which, at ‘the dawning hour of the great conflict’, befell other travellers too. But beyond the unusual, and uncomfortable, events attendant on the ‘accident’ which took her to America at this dawn, there is the inner drama of her acceptance of the Garrisonian position on abolition.⁴⁷ This Christian commitment to a social cause will finally transform the American vacation to a stage in her spiritual pilgrimage or ‘progress of worship’. Like her childhood at the opening of the Autobiography, the American journey, mid-point in her life and in her Autobiography, has acquired a compelling narrative shape. The gradual move towards the Bostonian spearhead of the abolition campaign follows the itinerary, the real and spiritual journeys in this account both ending in Boston.

With an autobiographer's sharpened sense of significant detail and a novelist's skills, she tells a well-crafted story of initial wariness, not of abolition but of the Northern abolitionists, which grows into a total and lifelong identification with their cause. In the account, the double vision in which she, and we, know the end of the story is completely consistent. She arrives in the country with strong but not primary anti-slavery views, known for them from Demerara (the West Indian story among the Illustrations) and a review of a book on West Indian slavery in the Monthly Repository.⁴⁸ Her total ignorance of the situation she will encounter and the layers of time (two years of travel, one more of telling and then, after 20 years, recall and reassessment) are conveyed at its beginning in a ship-board vignette of the arrival of the newspapers in New York harbour. During the outward voyage pro-slavery riots had broken out in New York, ‘those riots by which the Messrs. Tappan⁴⁹ were driven from the city, their houses destroyed, and their furniture burnt in the streets’. But, of course, nothing was known of these on the boat, or indeed in Europe. At Sandy Hook, when the pilot boarded, he threw the New York newspapers on the deck and was instantly in such earnest conversation with the Captain that even the news-starved passengers noticed. On the departure of the pilot, the Captain requested an interview with a lady passenger who was known to have had much conversation with Martineau on the voyage:

Long after, I heard that he wanted to know from her what my opinions were upon Slavery; and, if anti-slavery, whether I had ever professed them publicly. It is odd that she did not tell him, (which she certainly knew) that I was completely committed to anti-slavery opinions by my writings. By her own account, her reply to the captain was that I was opposed to Slavery; but that I had been more than once heard to say on board, when questioned about my opinion of American institutions, that I went to learn and not to teach. The captain seemed satisfied to let Slavery pass muster among ‘American institutions’; and he declared that he should now know what to say. He avowed that if he had been less well satisfied, he should not have ventured to put me ashore: and he made it his particular request that I should hear nothing of what had passed. The pilot had warned him that if Mr Thompson⁵⁰ was on board, he had better hide him in his cabin; for, if his presence was known in New York, he would be a dead man before night.

(Auto, II, pp. 11-12)

After that the travellers, ‘Miss J. and I’, were carefully guarded, ‘as many resident ladies were’, from knowledge of the riots, and ‘long remained in a state of profound unconsciousness of the condition of society around us’. They were not quite as ignorant as the story demands: Martineau had been approached by a proponent of Colonization when only three numbers of Illustrations had appeared, and put right on the facts by a Quaker abolitionist who understood her to be about to write about Liberia (Auto, I, pp. 197-9). But in the immediate excitement they may well have been ‘unconscious’. On their first travels, up into Massachusetts and back into Pennsylvania and Maryland, the only reminder of slavery to these eager travellers was ‘virulent abuse of the Abolitionists in the Newspapers’. Their hosts did not talk of it and it was only afterwards that she ‘discovered’ that opinion was divided between ‘the Pro-slavery multitude, the Colonizationists, and the Abolitionists’. In Philadelphia she first became aware that labels they were ignorant of could be damagingly attached to foreigners: having been pressed to make clear that she would not interfere to stop a mixed marriage if she thought the affection was genuine, she was noised abroad as an ‘amalgamationist’.⁵¹ Hospitality on their Southern journey was lavish and open. Southerners, surer, she claims, than she was herself that a book would be forthcoming, were also sure that, shown whatever the author of Demerara asked to see, she would report with a mirror of their own resignation to the status quo. Warned by nervous hosts in the border States, she nevertheless met with no violence or threats of violence in the South. She heard so much plausible outrage there about the violence the Northern abolitionists were supposed to be inciting that she thinks she must have echoed some of it in a frosty reply to a ‘letter from Boston’ in which Maria Weston Chapman introduced herself and begged a fair hearing for their cause. Her reply was no doubt as self-righteously independent as Chapman's approach was ‘intrusive’ and ‘fanatical’. Martineau would discover that Garrison and his followers were ‘non-resistants, and thoroughly consistent opponents of physical force’. She came to see them as ‘blameless apostles of a holy cause’.

Public identification of herself with the ‘holy’ cause, not in the first instance very wholehearted, would earn her the personal abuse and restriction of movement as a traveller which makes the climax of this particular autobiographical story. At the Ladies' Meeting in Boston⁵² she rose reluctantly in response to a note from E. G. Loring,⁵³ husband of the President of the meeting, feeling that she could not publicly refuse sympathy with their purpose. She spoke a few sentences only, ending, ‘I should certainly say no less at the North than at the South concerning this utter abomination—and I now declare that in your principles I fully agree’. Though she says the emphasis was involuntary, the word was carefully chosen, her mind being ‘as yet full of what I had heard at the South of the objectionable methods of the Abolitionists’. As would become clear in the hills of Judea, Martineau was not the stuff of which instant convertites are made, but the newspaper attacks, social ostracism and physical threats which followed defined the position for her and there could be no hesitation now, let alone retreat. Though she only noticed the ostracism because her hosts were embarrassed that no one but their relatives would come to meet her, and those only under some pressure, she did read the papers they tried to keep from her, and she knew of the threats which caused her travelling companions to change their route on their Northern trip, and her brother James to advise her to send her papers home. She saw that speaking out would effectively close all doors to her except those of declared abolitionists, and she was particularly grieved and unsettled by the disapproval of a friend in Philadelphia,⁵⁴ who, though he did not disapprove of the cause, said she would ‘totally ruin the effect on the American public of any book [she] might write’ (Auto, II, pp. 42-3). She reminded him that he had urged her to stand fast in not thinking of a book in order to safeguard her ‘true and free’ impressions, but the ‘clamour’ leaving her no time for reflection, she had to act and stand by her actions. She was understandably flurried; speaking at the meeting only hastened her identification with the Garrisonian abolitionists, but the drama of the act and its consequences invested her allegiance with a rather desperate solemnity.

The drama of this moment belongs as much to the history of the anti-slavery movement as it does to Martineau's personal commitment to a cause: the nature of the historical moment explains the nature of her commitment, which was at once a confirmation of her spiritual past and an engagement with the social future. In the early 1830s a new meaning is given in the demand for abolition to ‘immediatism’ as opposed to ‘gradualism’ (Davis, 1962, passim).⁵⁵ Up to now the call for an immediate end to slavery had meant an immediate start on preliminary measures which, without infringing the rights of property, would set in train an inevitable but gradual process of attrition. Practical politics suggested that ending the slave-trade would reduce numbers, and that shipping freed slaves to Africa would remove the constant pressure to free others; in time it would become clear that free labour was less trouble and more profitable, and economics would work in harness with morality. Nevertheless, concurrently with these rationalist views, which in any case were proving over-sanguine about the slaveholders' anxiety to further the progress of mankind, ran the feeling that slavery was a sin. The change in abolitionism in the mid-1830s was a shift of emphasis to the moral responsibility of the individual to shoulder this sin like any other. Abolitionism became an articulate campaign in a way it had not been before, inspired and energized by a call to act as Christ would have done, without hesitation or compromise. Abandoning the need to speak in political practicalities, abolition acquired a new fervour under the banner of the new ‘immediatism’, which was raised by William Garrison in the Liberator.

Chapman, Garrison's ‘lieutenant’, recognized (at least with the hindsight of Memorials) a kindred spirit in Martineau, and awaited her arrival in Boston confident that she would in the end speak for them. In her writing Chapman had seen ‘the true painter of woman, the exalter and consoler of poverty’; in the frosty reply to her initial overtures Chapman recognized an instinctive immediatist. Most of Martineau's letter echoed the ‘very sentiments, and for the most part the phraseology of the more decent slaveholding world’: over and above ‘a full confirmation of the horror and loathing with which I have ever regarded the institution’, Martineau says her southern travels have brought ‘a great increase in the compassion I have always felt for those who are born to the possession of slaves’, since, particularly now when they are ‘persecuted by a foreign [Northern] interference’, they cannot free themselves ‘from their intolerable burden’. But one concluding phrase, ‘impossible to a slaveholder’, compassed the entire essential meaning of Garrisonian immediatism and revealed her as, at heart, one with them: such an ‘inheritance of crime’ as the slaveholders suffered, would rouse such ‘compassion and love in Jesus … [that] if his spirit were in us all the curse would be thrown off in a day … (Mem, pp. 255-8).⁵⁶

Martineau did not like and never adopted the fire and brimstone language of retribution: however pacifist in motivation it might be, she saw that it provoked physical violence. Chapman explained that the ‘harsh language’ and perpetual ‘rebuke’ of the Garrisonians was the ‘accepted mode of preaching of the vast majority of the clergy of the country, the evangelical custom,—not to say fashion’ though to ‘English Episcopy and Unitarianism … it [might seem] removed from the category of profane swearing only by being couched in Biblical language’ (Mem, pp. 264-5). It was certainly not the voice of the American Unitarianism Martineau had reviewed, but traditional Unitarian rationalism was dragging its feet on this issue⁵⁷ and the times had thrown up Garrison and his Liberator. When she aligned herself with the Garrisonians, Martineau gave voice in her own rational language to a perception of a direct and practical application of the relevance of Christ as model, that part of Unitarianism she had made peculiarly her own since Devotional Exercises, and which found here a clear and socially active expression. Immediatism as religious crusade spoke directly to both the Unitarian and the Romantic in Harriet Martineau. The direct appeal to Christian principle, unmediated and so unhampered by organized religion, called for the translation of sympathy and altruism into immediate action.⁵⁸ The fact that possible action could only effectively be gradualist, a meeting here, a speech there, a petition or an article, did not affect the immediate moral imperative. In the Autobiography the story of her visit to America (Auto, II, pp. 7-83) is the story of her progress, through the visit, to Bostonian immediatism.

But in 1835 and 1836 while Martineau was in Boston, it was becoming clear that the campaign for immediate abolition involved what appear in an understated parenthesis in the Autobiography as ‘liberties of every kind’. Most notably immediatism was coming to mean not only acceptance of individual responsibility for an immediate end to slavery, but immediate recognition of the parallel anomaly in the position of women. As in England, women led in anti-slavery moves and were active on other reform issues too, but in America it was their experience of the abolition campaign in the 1830s which politicized them, producing a coherent woman's movement long before one formed in England. The public stand taken by women in causes such as the treatment of prostitutes and the double standard which made their plight so dire, moved towards extending rather than changing the sphere of women's traditional caring role. The Temperance movement, in which many women were actively involved, was dependent on persuading people to pledge themselves to temperance, in effect to reform themselves, and so presented no need for either organization or direct action. Only abolition, with the Garrisonians in the lead, gave political experience to the women who were so devotedly active. As abolitionists they were already part of a movement towards far-reaching social improvement; not only was improvement in the situation of women an integral part of a more equal society, but women like Lucretia Mott, the Grimké sisters, Lydia Maria Child,⁵⁹ and others, were already learning the methods by which information could be disseminated and public pressure brought to bear on the State and Federal legislatures. The Garrisonians were in the lead on women's rights, as they were at this time in abolition, partly for the charisma of the man, but mostly for the extreme simplicity of the message: all men—and women—are equal in the sight of God; our business is to spread the word, yours to search for the political means to fulfil God's design on earth. The various freedoms turned out to be inseparable: the campaign depended entirely on free speech and freedom of information, and its participants on freedom to act on the dictates of conscience. America left its strongest mark on Harriet Martineau in the heady experience of these interrelated freedoms, all making a demand for immediate action.⁶⁰

While all Martineau's social observations on American society, hopeful and fearful alike, were influenced by the fluidity of this political moment half-way through Jackson's second term, in Boston her politics met up with her religion. In the receding wilderness, growing towns, and the political tensions of the threatened Union, she saw the process of ‘world-making’. In Boston where old aristocratic feeling had been absorbed into new social structures in the New World, her visit to America was charged in the end with a religious impulse which went to the depths of her nature. The one pervasive ‘anomaly’ in an open society, loosely structured in ways which, to make it work, called on the best in its citizenry—where men, as Tom Paine said, could be ‘as they ought to be’—could, and would, be removed by an unreserved acceptance of individual moral responsibility. Slavery, and with it the analogous slavery of women, would disappear under the force of moral pressure, and democratic institutions flourish without anomaly, or its pernicious ally, compromise.

AMERICA: THE CONSEQUENCES

For Harriet Martineau the consequences of the American journey were naturally unforeseen and would prove unclear. Her lifelong commitment to the anti-slavery cause was, of course, a clear consequence to her as it is to us. She would remain a dedicated Garrisonian, inveighing over the years against any blurring of the primacy of abolition, political and moral compromise being indistinguishable. With nagging doubts about the progress of democracy in America as civil war drew nearer, and disliking the degree to which the quarrel between North and South seemed increasingly to be about the Union rather than slavery, she would do her best to keep the cause of the North before the English public when sympathy and interest were together vested in the South.⁶¹ But in her personal life the way she could best serve the cause was not so clear to her. The idea of going to live in America, strong in her mind when she came back, lingered there for ‘many years’, but she did not go. To begin with there could be no question of deserting her ‘old ladies’ while they needed her. But even before her illness ruled out at once her capacity to care for elderly relatives and any thoughts of emigration, there were ‘immediate objections’ which she would have to have taken into account even had she been free to go or stay.

The first was common sense: ‘it seldom or never answers to wander abroad for duty; every body doing best what lies nearest at hand.’ The second objection offers the particular reason why Harriet Martineau, whatever the attractions, should not take the romantic way and ‘wander abroad for duty’. Had she gone it would have been to join the Bostonian abolitionists, in which case her relation with Maria Weston Chapman, who could be seen as dedicated or fanatical depending on your point of view, would need the ‘utmost moral care’. Only superficially personal, the objection is really about living between two cultures and finding direction in the foreign one:

The discovery of her moral power and insight was to me so extraordinary that, while I longed to work with and under her, I felt it morally perilous to lean on any one mind as I could not but lean on hers. Thus far, whenever we had differed, (and that had not seldom happened) I had found her right; and so deeply and broadly right as to make me long to commit myself to her guidance. Such a committal can never be otherwise than wrong; and this it is which, more than anything, made me doubt whether I ought to contemplate the scheme.

(Auto, II, pp. 84-5)

Such disagreements as Chapman records in the Memorials all show Martineau making English assumptions and Chapman explaining the foreign situation, local or national. Even a native-born American Garrisonian could find the past swept away by the compelling simplicity of Garrison's message. Lydia Maria Child, a writer with an established reputation, abandoned her literary life for the cause: ‘It is of no use to imagine what might have been if I had never met him. Old dreams vanished, old associates departed, and all things became new’ (Hersh, p. 259).⁶²

Simplicity was not to be found at home. Martineau returned to encounter not only the old domestic problems from which she had needed a holiday and the gradual onset, over two and a half crowded years, of her illness, but, more important professionally, what Henry James would call the ‘dark dense British social fabric’, from which Americans were fortunate to be free.⁶³ Quite apart from the fact that personal familiarity makes things seem more complex at home, neither the outlet for conviction in concerted action offered by an evolving democratic society nor a single binding issue or cause existed. Martineau's final comment on her indecision provides a clue to the interpretation of the rest of her career as she strove to forge it out of her circumstances in the post-America years. As in her earliest years she made her public acts out of response to contingency and inner conviction:

As usual in such cases events decided the matter. My mother was removed from under my care by my own illness; and when she died at an advanced age, I had a clear course of duty to pursue at home, in which perhaps there may be as decided an implication of human liberties of thought, action and speech as in the anti-slavery cause itself.

(Auto, II, p. 85)

The connection made here between publishing her views in Letters on the Laws of Man's Nature and Development and her experiences in America is not a compensatory, ex post facto interpretation of abolition as involving, among ‘other liberties’, that of free speech. Taken for granted in the Autobiography, it was explored in Society in America, where attempts to stop anti-slavery literature from entering the Southern states, and the blocking of petitions to Congress to end slavery in the District of Columbia are described as one of the chief ways in which slavery was undermining ‘republicanism’. The Martyr Age tells the now well-known stories of the heroes of the cause: Mr Birney⁶⁴ who removed from Alabama, freed his slaves, educated them ‘in defiance of the laws of Kentucky’, set up a newspaper in Cincinnati, ‘standing his ground there against many and awful attempts upon his life, and at length gaining a complete victory, and establishing freedom of speech and the press’; Mr Lovejoy⁶⁵ who paid with his life for the right to set up a newspaper in Alton; Amos Dresser, the Bible-selling student, examined for six hours by a committee including ‘seven elders of the Presbyterian church’ and flogged for possession of anti-slavery pamphlets (MA, pp. 12, 16, 41, 47). The ‘gentlemen of Boston’ were ingenious in their means of ‘hindering utterance’ of the Female Anti-Slavery Society: ‘when they found they could not stop the women's tongues by violence, they privily sprinkled cayenne-pepper on the stove of their place of meeting, thus compelling them to cough down their own speakers’ (MA, p. 39).

The Martyr Age, written after she has mined the personal vein in Society in America and Retrospect of Western Travel, shows explicitly how abolition, in the logic of immediacy, would loosen other chains than those of the slave: in a republic men and women properly share the essential social freedoms of speech, action and conscience. The coincidence or entanglement of ‘liberties’ is well illustrated in the description of the ‘spontaneous’ meeting called at Faneuil Hall in response to the murder of Lovejoy, in which free speech took precedence over abolition in the public perception (MA, pp. 49-50). Against the ‘discovery’ of the Massachusetts Attorney-General that ‘Lovejoy died “as a fool dieth” and that his murderers were patriots of the same order as the Tea-Party of the Revolution’, the young Wendell Phillips, ‘heard only because of his rank’, raised his voice. The unidentified writer of the private letter Martineau is quoting in her article ‘went (for the Woman Question) with fifteen others’.⁶⁶ To the objection that the presence of women gave the meeting the ‘colour’ of an abolition meeting, she says: ‘Good, is it not, that sixteen women can give a character to a meeting of twenty-five hundred men.’ She estimates that ‘one-third of the meeting … were abolitionists and free-discussionists (small proportion of the former); one third of bitter opponents; about one third swayed to and fro by every speaker’. Wendell Phillips's aristocratic voice, though faint, is heard (‘Republicanism!’ is her comment), and ‘free discussion of the subject of free discussion [sic] prevailed’.

The one remaining liberty gathered up in the anti-slavery cause—freedom of conscience inside the church—took Harriet Martineau back to her lifelong radical Unitarian distrust of priesthood, at the same time sharpening her perception of women's rights as a political issue. The familiarity which stamped the moment of her conversion to Garrisonian abolition, marked a continuity with her past, which made her visit to the ‘tranquil’ scene of Priestley's house of exile, at least in the retrospect of writing, more moving than her ‘sight of the spray of Niagara’ (RWT, I, p. 118). Her doctrinal objection to clerical mediation of religious experience was reanimated in Boston in a social context where the central moral issue was completely clear but the consequences complexly wide-ranging. The way in which the ‘orthodox’ clergy forced the issue of the relation of liberties implied in the abolitionist platform is exemplified in a short sequence in The Martyr Age, describing the first half of ‘the remarkable year 1837’ (MA, pp. 35-7). It begins with John Quincy Adams's ‘management of a low jest aimed at him by Southern members’. Adams presented to Congress, as a bone fide document, a petition purporting to come from nine slaves and requesting his expulsion ‘on the ground of the countenance he afforded to the petitions of persons who would put an end to the blessed institution of slavery’. In the House the jest was turned on its originators by Adams's bland but dramatic assumption of the right of everyone, including slaves, to petition. The right of petitioners to be heard was of particular importance to women, equally unenfranchised and increasingly attempting to make themselves heard by these means. The following paragraphs in The Martyr Age describe the events by which abolition and the ‘Rights of Woman’ are first ‘mixed up’, not by ‘the parties most interested’, but by the clergy who force the ‘agitation of it’. The ‘first General Convention of Women that was ever assembled’ was held in May. Among other well-prepared resolutions on such things as desegregated seating in churches, it pledged the women, in their traditional helpmate role, to the assistance of their menfolk in all their antislavery activities, but Martineau picks out one sentence in the convention report of a potentially more revolutionary tendency: the very existence of the convention ‘was the beginning of an examination of the claims and character of their clergy, which will end with only a reformation, hardly less startling or less needed than that of Luther’. The ‘orthodox’ clergy (as distinguished from chosen spirits such as Drs Follen and Channing) took up the gauntlet in June. Long ‘uneasy at the improvement of certain of their flocks in self-reliance’, they were provoked by the convention into ‘anger and fear’ at the ‘decay of deference to the pastoral office’, and ‘the alteration … taking place in the female character’. If their clergy did not preach abolition, ‘deference and subordination being essential to the happiness of society’, women should not listen to abolitionists outside their church but labour to ‘bring minds’ to the church, and most of all they should not, like the Grimké sisters, usurp the pastor's role, ignoring the natural, if metaphorical, relation between ‘a vine, a trellis and an elm’, with which Martineau says they habitually garnished their texts. While the women got on quietly with what they ‘found to be their duty’, the loud anger of the clergy gave abolitionist men something to ‘examine’, so that in January of 1838, the prospectus of Garrison's paper, the Liberator, announced that since ‘our object is Universal Emancipation … we shall go for the Rights of Woman to their fullest extent’. With this declaration and Adams's ‘pertinacious’ vindication of their ‘right of petition on the floor of Congress … the clergy are completely foiled’.

The immediate result of Martineau's return home was, of course, Society in America, at a time when ‘my reputation, and my industry, and my social intercourses were at the height of their prosperity’ (Auto, II, p. 146). Her reputation was such that the book everyone was sure she would write was much sought after by the publishers in a way that, 20 years afterwards at least, she can describe as farcical. Letters awaiting her at Liverpool included one from Mr Bentley, reminding her that they had met and ‘expressing his hope of having my manuscript immediately in his hands’, to which she replied that she had not promised a manuscript nor had she written one. She returned to London quietly with her mother, but the day the Morning Chronicle announced her return was such as she ‘hoped never to repeat’. Mr Bentley ‘reached her study’ first, Mr Colburn had to wait in the drawing-room, which meant that Mr Saunders, who had made a more straightforward and acceptable proposal, had to be ‘shown into my mother's parlour’. Even so she was afraid of ‘a quarrel on the stairs’. Bribes and false claims of promises proved of no avail to Messrs Bentley and Colburn, and Mr Saunders, amused at her modest request to name Saunders and Otley as her publishers to prevent further importunities, indicated that ‘it would be gratifying to them to be so named’. Meanwhile teatime saw amended proposals from Mr Bentley; Mr Colburn, who had spent the intervening time amending his in a ‘coffee-shop in the neighbourhood’, would thereafter on the appearance of any of her works, declare himself ‘“singularly unfortunate” in having been always too late’. Her industry at this time is indicated by the number of productions listed in the Autobiography as evidence of the variously fertile period between her return and her illness. Her other American books took their place along with ‘about half-a-dozen articles for the Editor of the Westminster Review’, articles for the Penny Magazine (earning ‘Mr Knight's “Gallery of Portraits” and some other valuable books in that pleasant way’), and some essays called ‘The Christian Seer’, of which she has no memory at all. Besides the review of Catharine Sedgwick's work,⁶⁷ which, among the Westminster articles, is obviously an offshoot of her American trip, she wrote on the ‘Housemaid’, the ‘Lady's Maid’ and the ‘Maid of all Work’ for Knight's Guide to Service, and an article on domestic service for the Westminster, all of which, without proclaiming the relation, develop thoughts on work and democratic relations between employer and employed interspersed through Society in America. Beyond the review, unusual for her, of Sedgwick's work, her thoughts were turning to fiction on her own account, as they had in her earliest search for direction. Immediately after Devotional Exercises, she dreamed of ‘enlightening the world’ with ‘a sort of theologico-metaphysical novel’ which would make a stir like ‘Mr. Ward's novel, “Tremaine”’ (Auto, I, pp. 120-1),⁶⁸ and, newly excited by the political focus of her interests, she had thought a novel on elections was one waiting to be written (Sanders, 1990, p. 24). In the unsettled years of her return she wrote Deerbrook, her most substantial novel, and The Man and the Hour is forming in her mind. Her combination of intellectual and, for all the approaching illness, physical energy seemed inexhaustible: she attended a meeting of the British Association in Newcastle, then toured Scotland sending Knight notes on the scenery for his illustrated Shakespeare, as she did from Padua and Verona on the journey from which she returned ill.

But for Harriet Martineau, now 35 years old, the return home raised all the hard questions about the way forward on the one hand and continuity on the other. A year after she came back she began a diary: ‘I saw so many wise people, and heard so much valuable conversation, that my memory would not serve me to retain what I was sorry to lose.’ Underlying the range and press of varied activity recorded in the long extracts Chapman included in Memorials—works planned and in progress, books read, letters received, letters sent, decisions pondered, decisions made, parties (‘I go out every evening’), breakfasts and country weekends—there was strain. Apart from her ‘fearful domestic trouble’, and her acceptance of single life which probably also belongs to her homecoming, these years most significantly represent a crux in her professional life.⁶⁹ In the Autobiography she says that the illness which would prostrate her two years later was already ‘making itself felt—though not recognized’ (II, p. 109). While a physical cause for a withdrawal in the face of social pressure cannot be ruled out, the fact that it was ‘not recognized’ means that at the time the conscious decisions were taken in terms of more general significance for the choices before a woman in what was, for all the public attention, a totally unstructured situation. The demands on her ‘industry’ and the relentless pressure of ‘social intercourses’ arose from her ‘reputation’, which was at once her triumph and her livelihood. But her defined role as ‘national instructress’ was over by the time she came home from America, leaving her committed to, as well as dependent on, a public life which she had no choice but to shape in the process of living it. Outside popular political economy, where she made her name, the field of causes, controversies and educational gaps was wide open, and her bibliography alone bears witness to the energetic competence with which, for the rest of her life, she would apply herself to those which came her way.⁷⁰ But until she put her skills of rapid gathering, sifting and communicating information to work on the regular leaders for the Daily News, she would not again have a continuous professional commitment. This last one, of course, she did not have either to invent or to organize: the ‘greatest literary engagement of my life’ represented her entry into the mainstream of professional life, where she could do the work while someone else took the heat.

In 1837, after the publication of Society in America, she took a decisive step away from what in the hindsight of a modern point of view might seem the logical trajectory of her career since the Illustrations. Probably the key event in the development of her post-America professional life is her rejection of the proposal from Saunders and Otley that she edit an ‘Economical Magazine’ (Auto, II, pp. 109-10). In the Autobiography she quotes extensively from her diary to show the ‘painful’ vacillation of mind she experienced, ‘in the morning pro and at night con the scheme’. The enterprise, which she, and evidently Saunders and Otley, thought much needed, would have paralleled in the general culture the increasing separate importance of political economy in the Universities.⁷¹ It certainly offered personal opportunities for what she most wanted throughout her life: ‘usefulness and activity of knowledge’. But besides the fear of failure and consequent loss of her ‘position’, in a situation where reputation and income were the same thing, ‘the realities of life’ as a woman in a man's world pressed on her. Besides difficulty there was responsibility, not just for herself, her contributors and publishers, but for the many silent women with energy and talent but no opportunity: one of the attractions of the project was that as well as spreading economic information which, of its nature, could only work for the betterment of society, she would have an immediate opportunity ‘of setting women forward at once into the rank of men of business’. She saw, of course, that ‘undertaking a man's duty’, she would have to accept ‘a man's fate’, standing by decisions, expecting no quarter—there could be ‘no more waywardness, precipitation, and reliance on allowance from others’. But accepting a man's fate by abjuring the privileges which attended a woman's often convenient helplessness was not all that Martineau felt was demanded of her by this exceptional occasion—a new magazine, exclusively devoted to the subject of the hour, edited by a woman, and furthermore one who had already demonstrated that she knew precisely how to make such material accessible. She saw herself using the opportunity to reform the masculine way, the only way to date, of conducting a review. Just recently bruised by the scurrility of the newspaper attacks in America and the reception there of Society in America,⁷² she vowed that she would bring female virtues to publishing: she would be ‘prudent, independent, serene, good-humoured’, and beyond the business success the publishers would expect, she would set herself a woman's mission to show ‘what a periodical with a perfect temper may be’. The pros and cons (unfortunately not surviving as she set them out) were ‘so nearly balanced’ she half hoped the publishers would settle the matter by not agreeing to her conditions, but they complied without demur, to among other demands, payment for contributors. ‘Friends at hand were all in favour of my undertaking the enterprise’ (Auto, II, p. 111); James, to whom she wrote, cast his deciding vote on the con side. The diary entries in Memorials do not show quite such unanimous enthusiasm as she implies here among those ‘at hand’: at an evening at the Wedgwoods' ‘two gave no opinion—two said yes rather than no’, this in answer to her very diffident introduction of the subject when her friends had troubles of their own.⁷³ The day after that she went to consult Richard Martineau, who was ‘rather in favour of it than not’ and asked for time to consider, after which he did come down in favour. He, Erasmus Darwin⁷⁴ and her brother Robert, notably all men, are the only people I have seen actually named as in favour. James, whatever his motives, cast his deciding vote with fears and doubts rather than with challenge and adventure. Certainly his abstract of her letter consulting him⁷⁵ suggests a more broadly and innovatively conceived project than emerges in the diary: the proposal is for ‘a monthly periodical to treat of philosophical principles, abstract and applied, of sociology’. Political economy is already, it seems, perceived in Comtean terms, as broadening out into a science of society as a whole.⁷⁶

At the time Harriet ‘thought his reasons good’, though she does not list them. In the diary she says the ‘liberty … feels delicious at present’. She can rest, think of a ‘new enterprise (a novel)’ when she likes, and read for pleasure not duty (Mem, p. 324). The same relief followed her ambivalent relation with a proposed periodical to be called The Woman's Friend, introduced to her, she does not say by whom, in ‘a rousing note’ suggesting that the success of the enterprise depended ‘wholly’ on her. On the subject of women she relied on her own good sense in place of her brother. She was deeply involved with the cause of women at this time, finding no letters about Society in America more moving than those relating to the sufferings ‘from the law and custom of the country’ endured by ‘women in England’. Some offered evidence from their personal stories ‘if I could point out how it might be used’, others endurance of any ‘obloquy … if I could show them how to obtain, and lead them in obtaining, arrangements by which they could be free in spirit, and in outward liberty to make what they could of life’ (Auto, II, p. 104).⁷⁷ Her self-abnegatory resolution is described in an entry of 25 September 1837:

This troubled me: thoughts of sacrificing my novel; of entering into new bondage, & c. But, meditating, I found that my conviction about the object requires me to make this sacrifice of money, ease, and purposes. If Mr ——— is to be relied upon for his judgment, and looks well, I hope not to fail in my part. Went to sleep resolving to do right about it, whatever that might be.

(Mem, p. 311)

Five days later she receives a ‘discouraging account in reply to my inquiry into character in the Woman's Friend business’, and ‘when the drawing back is once done, cannot help being glad of having time for my novel’. If the project went ahead she would write for it, but without risking money or ‘position’.

It was however more than the cares of business and its encroachment on her time that caused her, as she wound up her American writing, to long ‘inexpressibly for the liberty of fiction’:

for many years now my writing had been about fact: —facts of society and of individuals: and the constraint of the effort to be always correct, and to bear without solicitude the questioning of my correctness, had become burdensome. I felt myself in danger of losing nerve, and dreading criticism on the one hand, and of growing rigid and narrow about accuracy on the other.

(Auto, II, p. 108)

The pressure to be right was written into the role of ‘instructress to the nation’, a responsibility even more than a matter of pride. The Spectator review of Briery Creek had pointed out that her errors (in their view) and consequent lack of lucidity on gluts would not have mattered in a ‘scientific treatise’, aimed at an audience who would read ‘the refutation’ in another treatise, but that ‘Miss Martineau penetrates where philosophy neither of the old nor the new school are ever allowed to come’.⁷⁸ Martineau might also have said that, apart from the nature of her chosen audience, the lack of professional precedent was wearing, except that, in the nature of things, the practical innovator does not know it is lacking. How to Observe: Morals and Manners (also 1838) is a pioneering sociological text, stressing the necessity for disciplined and systematic observation before the traveller passes judgement or forms conclusions. Her personal experience is translated into professional data, distanced as a basis of useful activity for others. But while there is no sign that after her two American books were finished she had any reluctance in going over some of the same ground in her account of the ‘dawning hour of the great conflict’ in The Martyr Age, far-sighted persuasion was needed to push her into extending the chapter she wrote on the voyage out into a separate volume in Knight's How to Observe series (Auto, II, pp. 117-18): ‘Mr Ker begs me to write “How to Observe” but I recoil from it. I don't think I can or ought. I want rest and to keep out of the public view till my novel is ready’ (Mem, p. 326). Her own active engagement in the abolitionist cause proved to be one thing and professional containment of her observations in a theoretical framework quite another. Her interests remained practical, and, as is clear from her best work, she needed an imaginable audience for her direct message. Much of How to Observe consists of describing, however interestingly, observable differences between cultures rather than systematizing the means by which the traveller might acquire the material for comparison, or the methods by which inference might be fairly drawn from it.⁷⁹

It is not surprising that she did not allow her reputation at this ‘peak’ of her fortunes to push her into either theory or business. In sociology professionalization of achievements such as hers would wait on much later academic developments. In journalism, when Marian Evans, for example, began her work on the Westminster in 1851, not only was the Westminster established already, but Chapman was the only named editor; a woman editor, let alone founder, of a general-interest, theoretical periodical is not a common factor in publishing even now. Martineau was left with her writing, to which the diary shows her clinging for itself rather than for any clear line she wished to pursue. When the Woman's Friend project died she was still writing Retrospect: ‘How I love life in my study,—all alone with my books and thoughts! Books are not sufficient companions if one only reads. If one adds writing one does not want the world, though it is wholesome to have some of it’ (Mem, p. 312). While she is refusing the exposure and commitment of the business world, fending off her mother's anxieties over any criticism of her work and settling to a single life, she fears more than anything a change in the focal point of her life:

Wrote fourteen pages with much ease and pleasure,—‘Country Life in the South’ [RWT, I, pp. 208-23]. What a blessing is this authorship! It is pleasanter than my gayest pleasures; and it helps me over indisposition and failure of spirits better than any holiday. The thing is, can I now live without it? This is always my doubt and dread; but I will dread nothing.

(Mem, p. 315)

Martineau is being thrown back on herself, on her own resources, her courage, her circumstances. The writing of Deerbrook, although it was at the time an achievement in a new mode, turned out to confirm what she knew rather than offer ‘liberty’. She hoped much from it but wondered, while she finished Retrospect if she would ‘despise’ herself for her ‘expectations’ of her novel. If she felt herself ‘losing nerve’ in the face of ‘fact’, she did not go into fiction with much self-confidence either. She must have owed much to Mrs Bellenden Ker, the friend who was her confidante throughout (Auto, I, p. 375), the more perhaps because she seems to have been nearly as fearful and cautious as Martineau herself. She advised against Toussaint L'Ouverture as a subject, so Martineau, deflected for the time being from exotic heroism,⁸⁰ and then from a gloomy story in a police report she thought other people would remember as she had, spoiling surprise in the fiction, took to what she knew best, ‘middle life’. Even the plot, where matchmaking gossip forces the hero to marry the sister he does not love, came from her own family. The story turned out to have been mistakenly attached to the family member, but the constant grating of class tensions at the heart of her domestic life in London were all too real. Discomfort with all the notice of Harriet from ‘high’ people did not prevent her mother from fearing the ‘high’ might drop away if she continued to court the ‘middle-class’, whom Harriet herself felt she needed to know more of as her main audience. Harriet does not believe this alteration will occur, but will be resigned if it does: ‘I must keep my mission in view and not my worldly dignity’ (Mem, p. 333). The ‘liberty of fiction’ also presented a professional battle. Murray withdrew an offer to publish, and, whether or not it was Lockhart who had so advised him, ‘Mr Lockhart's clique gave out on the eve of publication [by Moxon] that the hero was an apothecary’. Martineau found it ‘droll to hear the daughters of dissenting ministers and manufacturers expressing disgust that the heroine came from Birmingham, and that the hero was a surgeon’. Deerbrook selling well, Murray sought to correct his error, not, however, by making open war on the ‘silver fork school’ or on current notions of suitable subjects for female fiction. He sent a secret proposal to publish her next novel if she would write it anonymously ‘in profound secrecy’, and in monthly parts. From the strength of her position of having only modest wants, Martineau declined, refusing to introduce either a mystery into her own life or too many closures into her fiction. Looking back she thinks Deerbrook has been ‘useful, not only in overcoming a prejudice against middle-class life in fiction, but in a more special application to the discipline of temper’.

This cool retrospective judgement was not unprepared for: fiction had proved disappointingly unliberating. Writing the novel which was ‘uttered from the heart’, afforded ‘relief to many pent-up sufferings, feelings and convictions’. But in her study in Fludyer Street, ‘where dingy red walls rose up almost within reach, and idle clerks of the Foreign Office lolled out of dusty windows, to stare down upon their opposite neighbours’, she could only summon ‘heart and hope enough’ to finish a book ‘of a new kind … by the benefaction’ of a landscape. This ‘singular source of refreshment’ was a picture she had admired at a British Institution exhibition, given to her by the friends with whom she had visited the exhibition: since she would ‘certainly be getting pictures together some time or other’, this would do ‘to begin with’. Even in Ambleside, among her own mountains, the Welsh landscape by Baker,⁸¹ with a ‘gush of sunlight between two mountains’, is still a favourite (Auto, II, p. 114). Deerbrook, although true to ‘her state of mind at the time’, is judged finally as a failure of altruism. In her 1855 autobiographical frame of mind, she would now seek ‘more simplicity, and a far more objective character … of scheme’, with fewer ‘laborious meditations’. This should not be as grateful to a twentieth-century critical ear as first appears. She had come to see that only cheerful, forward-looking topics should make the substance of fiction; with the removal of morbid self-examination, hope for the progress of mankind rather than the novelist's craft would simplify the design. The liberty she found in contemplation of a landscape, as she wrote her class-bound fiction in a Dickensian City street, she could find in Tynemouth in recalling the American landscape. Pressed by Lord Durham and Morton, mine-owner and mine-manager, to re-enter the social fray against the militant Miner's Advocate, she proposed a series of ‘Letters from a Pennsylvania Miner’: with her American journal to hand ‘in the closet’, the scene would be authentic, and she would confine herself to ‘the morale of the matter’ since she and her sponsors are agreed on ‘doctrine’ and she can ‘thankfully leave the facts to them’ (Webb, 1955, pp. 155-7). These liberating scenes would become real at last in Ambleside, the background to the conclusion of her ‘progress of worship’.

The liberty to speak as she then finds, to publish Letters on the Laws of Man's Nature and Development, telling the uplifting truth however unpalatable, is a direct legacy of her Boston experiences. By the time she comes to write the Autobiography, she is delighted to discover that she is still in 1855 ‘reviled … and held up in the good company of Mrs Chapman and Mrs Stowe, to the abhorrence of the South’, for the consistency of her abolitionist position. She is ashamed as well as proud of the company she keeps in reputation, as ‘Mrs Chapman and Mrs Stowe have really sacrificed and suffered, and thrown their whole future into the cause’ (Auto, II, p. 40): whatever the difficulty of exposure at the time and abuse from reviewers of Society in America afterwards, it fell short of martyrdom, as she well knew. Nevertheless Boston was a final strengthening experience, at the end of the American journey. That journey itself, or at least the reflections during the writing about it, was strongly self-confirmatory. Indeed Society in America and Retrospect of Western Travel together show the autobiographical pattern of 20 years later already in place, forced into consciousness by the defining nature of experience of a foreign culture.

Although Society in America was not designed as a personal travel book, Martineau's personal involvement with the experience was, as we have seen, at once sign and definition of the authenticity of what she had to say. In the process of writing the theoretical and the more personal accounts of her travels, recollection of the foreign experience returns her, as such experience commonly does, to origins, to the sources of her own imaginative response to the world. The light in darkness of Mammoth Cave recalled her intense and irrational childhood fear of flickering light, the dancing ‘prismatic colours’ from the sun on the ‘drops of the lustres on the mantelpiece’, and the menacing image of Minerva at the magic-lantern show, with the ‘intense’ love she felt for the strange lady who comforted the screaming child (Auto, I, pp. 16, 20). The flood-like scene in the Northern Lakes brings back her early reading. But these recollections at peak moments in her travels would be unremarkable if it were not for the emergence of the fully articulated autobiographical pattern of emotional development in the two books together, as though the travel experience laid down the groundwork for self-definition. Her chapter in Society in America on ‘Children’ (SA, III, pp. 162-78) anticipates Household Education, and both prefigure the portrait of her own childhood presented in the Autobiography as the source of the difficulties of her own growing-up. This first version in Society in America, like other chapters in the Section on ‘Civilization’, abandons judgement by indigenous standards and, in explicit comparison of American and English methods, comes down unequivocally in favour of republican child-rearing practices. In America democratic principles are not laid aside in the relation between parents and children just because the parents have unlimited power; the freedom in which the children grow up, much complained of by foreign visitors, is a republican upbringing for thoughtful, independent use of suffrage, but it is also for this traveller a source of present pleasure and retrospective pain:

One reason of the pleasure with which I regarded the freedom of American children was that I took it as a sign that the most tremendous suffering perhaps of human life is probably lessened, if not obviated, there: —the misery of concealed doubts and fears, and heavy solitary troubles,—the misery which makes the early years of a shy child a fearful purgatory. Yet purgatory is not the word: for this misery purges no sins, while it originates many …⁸² There is no doubt that many children are irrecoverably depressed and unnerved for want of being convinced that anybody cares for them. They nourish doubts, they harbour fears and suspicions, and carry with them prejudices and errors, for want of its occurring to them to ask questions; and though they may outgrow these defects and errors, they never recover from them. Unexplained and inexplicable obstacles are thrown in the way of filial duty … In short the temper is ruined and the life is spoiled; and all from the parents not having made friends of their children from the beginning.

(SA, III, pp. 169-70)

She thinks that this ‘mistake’ cannot, ‘in the nature of things, ever become common in America’, but that it is all too common ‘at home’.

Retrospect of Western Travel, represents two stages of reflection on the American experience, on the journey itself and, as a supplement to Society in America, on the book which had drained off her first reactions. Although it opens with the voyage out and lively first impressions in New York, that is with every promise to the armchair traveller, the Edinburgh Review thought the two books more similar than was represented: the difference ‘does not go much further than the title-page’, both containing ‘abstruse speculations in politics and philosophy, personal narrative, picturesque description, anecdote and illustration, mixed up in pretty equal proportions’. The mixture is as the Edinburgh says it is, nevertheless Retrospect, nearer to its slightly mannered title than it is to the apparent promise of the Preface and the opening chapters, is meditative rather than theoretical: it filters both the travel experience and the political assumptions explicit in the first book through reflection in an obviously personal way. The journey forms the spine of the book without being chronicled as a journey. Her itinerary could, with some labour, be plotted from the disconnected chapters, but many places on an apparently timeless journey are background to observations and meditations, on subjects as diverse as ‘Weddings’, ‘High Road Travelling’, ‘Hot and Cold Weather’ or ‘Restless Slaves’. The mild frustration of like-minded readers, hungry for portraits of ‘men and manners’ they did not find in the distorting Toryism of travellers such as Basil Hall or Fanny Trollope, is expressed in a generally admiring review in the Westminster.⁸³ The reviewer accompanies the long extracts from her descriptions of great men (Madison, Van Buren, Jackson, Channing and Garrison, among others) and his recommendations to read ‘Originals’ (quintessentially American characters from Emerson down to unknown eccentrics) with regrets for the lack of a generalizing principle. He complains too that she domesticates the ‘sublimity’ of her descriptions of the remarkable by including the matter of fact, marring the storm at sea by her search for the scattered contents of a work-box under a table, and the splendours of Niagara by an account of negotiating a muddy path behind the falls in grotesque waterproofs. The reason is more obvious now than it was to a contemporary reader with a vested interest in the political success of democracy, and, presumably, little hope of making the journey himself. For Harriet Martineau the travel experience recorded in the parts of the journal unused in Society in America gave rise in recollection to introspective reflection, which she distances by means of the generic persona of ‘the traveller’ engaged in keeping hold of the familiar in the face of the foreign.

Self-discovery is indicated by the emergence of the pattern on which nearly 20 years later she would frame her autobiography. The chapter, already noted, where she meditates on the particular moral benefits to the traveller ‘himself’ of observation in an open society, is not only exceptionally personal but is based on the shaping theme of her life-story—the summer flowering emerging (with the help of moral effort) out of the privations of winter (RWT, II, pp. 57-64). Called ‘Probation’, the chapter is largely devoted to a story of the cheerful fortitude of a minister and his wife under severe trial, including the onset of blindness in the pretty young wife, loss of a first child, and an incapacitating illness of the husband. The story has an unexpectedly happy ending, described in a last letter to the foreign acquaintance; the husband has returned to health and ministry and a second child is thriving. For a modern reader who may well come to the American books by way of the Autobiography the story is emblematic, an early articulation of lasting patterns of self-interpretation. The chance encounter with people known much more intimately to others than to herself, while short on enlivening detail from the twin needs for personal anonymity and moral clarity, is moving because of the firm hold, in the telling, of the onlooker's point of view. It is the narrator, and so the reader, who is moved by hearing of the protagonist's illness through the cracked voice of the young substitute reader of the absent poet's contribution to the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa commencement celebration, and the narrator who infers the fortitude of the bereaved mother from the visible grief of the nursemaid. The story is included in the travel book for its revelation to the writer, in thin disguise as an anonymous traveller, ‘of true kindred in a foreign land’. The ‘intellectual sympathy’ which comes to ‘him’ far from home is a ‘benignant rebuke of his narrowness’ and the story is told to show how, ‘when he meets with moral beauty which is a realization of his deep and secret dreams, he finds how true it is that there is no nationality in the moral creation …’. The story, demonstrating a faith which ‘practically asserts the supremacy of the real over the apparent, and the high over the low’, illustrates ‘the fundamental quality in the brotherhood of the [human] race’.

If this is a forward look to the end of the Autobiography where the future of the world stretches out in bright hope, this same short chapter also includes an unusually intimate glimpse of her autobiographical impulse. While a brief conversation with ‘a Boston merchant who had made several voyages to China’ furnished her with illustration of the brotherhood of man in an anecdote about the common philosophical ground between the New England Christian and his Chinese business friends, it is the discreet account of her friendship with the Follens, the richest relationship she made in America,⁸⁴ which shows her moving out with the confidence which comes from sharing into self-definition by recollection. ‘Every chapter of human history which comes under the mind's eye in a foreign country’ yields the same sympathetic experience as the private identification in friendship:

The most extensive agreement that I have ever known to exist between three minds is between two friends of mine in America and myself, Dr. F. being German, Mrs. F. American, and I English, by birth, education, and (at least in one of the three) prejudice. Before any of the three met, all had become as fixed as they were ever likely to be in habits of thought and feeling; and yet our differences were so slight, our agreements so extensive, that our intercourse was like a perpetual recognition rather than a gradual revelation. Perhaps a lively imagination may conceive something of the charm of imparting to one another glimpses of our early life. While our years were passing amid scenes and occupations as unlike as possible, our minds were converging through foreign regions of circumstance to a common centre of conviction. We have sat mutually listening for hours, day after day, week after week, to his account of early years spent in the range of a royal forester's domain, and of the political struggles of later years; to her history of a youthful life nourished by all kinds of American influences; and to mine, as unlike both theirs as each was to the other.

(RWT, II, p. 58)

If the American journey forced a retrospective perspective it also laid the groundwork for the remaining years of her progress of worship. The encounter with the New World was a decisive step towards her final religious position precisely because in it the personal was inextricably interwoven with the political; it gave political shape and personal drive to the Wordsworthian moral psychology freshly formulated when she went, and to her aspirations to altruism which fuelled desire for a life where feeling could translate into action. America, even if it did not everywhere or in all matters live up to the promise it offered, was proof not only that republicanism worked, but that it did so by providing the context for the best of human feelings to operate unhampered to establish community. Boston, uncomfortable as it was personally, provided in the single-minded immediatism of the anti-slavery movement in the mid-1830s, a pattern of Christian action, a reconfirmation of the mainspring of Martineau's religious belief that individual unmediated perception of Christ as model holds the key to meaningful religion in the world. The practical things Martineau could do to further the anti-slavery cause she would do at a distance, but immediatism remained with her as a simplifying and activating principle. While anti-slavery was not by any means the only radical and reforming cause she would support over the next 35 years (most were nearer home), the urgency of her religious feeling would be channelled towards schooling herself to turn outwards. The personal pattern as her ‘progress of worship’ reaches its conclusion repeats the philosophical one—the morbidly in-turned must be resolutely directed outward just as religious truth must find social expression.

First fruits of this resolve was Life in the Sickroom. The diary which, despite fears of becoming slave to another habit, she had begun in order to keep track of the flurry of activity which marked her return from America, would be sacrificed to the continual effort to turn thought and effort outwards, away from herself, when she found that recording her daily thoughts in illness and solitude had become ‘pernicious’ (Auto, II, p. 106). Of the increasingly scrappy entries included in Memorials, the last is dated 15 September 1843: ‘A new imperative idea occurred to me,—Essays from a Sick-Room.’ Giving up the diary because it encouraged morbid self-consciousness left immediate space for Life in the Sickroom, where just such efforts towards moral health in physical illness are detailed. The book describes the process by which the introspection which is all too easy in the sickroom can be transformed into a general concern. ‘Ideas’ must be nurtured out of immediate circumstance: pictures, a view from the window, newspapers, any little opportunity to do something useful—from these a sense of the world can grow in the mind of one removed from the press of it, in which it becomes clear that, ‘there is a deep heaven lying inclosed in the very centre of society, and a genuine divinity residing in the heart of every member of it, which might, if we could but recognize it, check our longing to leave the present scene, to search for God and heaven elsewhere’ (LSR, p. 100). The power to generalize self-interest into altruistic sympathy derives from the lack of a future which conditions the life of the chronic sick. The capacity to live fully in the present, commonly thought to be the happy condition of childhood, Martineau, who saw her childhood only as a miserable longing for escape into autonomy, claims to have found in middle-aged invalidism, when ‘the thoughts which stretched forwards, with eagerness and anxiety, now spread themselves abroad, more calmly and with disinteredness’ (LSR, p. 198). Nevertheless, at the centre of this general sympathy the power lies in the sense of self, which can only be patiently realized out of the gleams and glimpses which occasionally ‘rouse our spirit … —some sudden light showing our position on our pilgrim path,—some hint of our high calling …’. And, for one who hopes to ‘occupy the morbid powers with objects from without’ by means of reviving ‘healthy old associations’, no one will better illustrate the vanity of hoping for more dramatic success than Wordsworth:

‘Resolve!’ the haughty moralist would say:
‘This single act is all that we demand.’
Alas! such wisdom bids a creature fly,
Whose very sorrow is that Time hath shorn
His natural wings!(85)

(LSR, p. 218)

For Martineau the address to other invalids represented by the book itself turned personal loss to public service in a particularly intimate way. A letter to Fanny Wedgwood describes the inspiration for it in ‘a wise letter of Mrs Stanley's⁸⁶ about “The Crofton Boys”’, a story of a boy who, disappointed of an army career by injury in an accident at school, finds a different kind of active public usefulness in the Indian Civil Service. Mrs Stanley ‘lamented my not writing more, because there were so many sick and weary people, whose experience would be most valuable if told, but who had no art or practice of utterance’. Free from the need to make money because of the ‘Testimonial’ collected by her friends, (Auto, II, pp. 180-1)⁸⁷ she was able immediately to ‘snatch paper and pencil, and [note] down subjects of Essays and their contents (in a few minutes) just as they now stand’. The rapid writing was therapeutic, bringing ‘the rising glow of a warm relief’. Life in the Sickroom (published anonymously and a secret even from her family) sold out almost immediately. She can own to Fanny and her ‘little knot’ that she is ‘very happy’ now that the book is successful; it has not been the pain to her family that she expected and, above all it is ‘useful’: ‘A new aspect seems given to my whole lot, now it has become of service to others. This reconciles everything.’

Scepticism about such an apparently easy claim to altruism is forestalled partly by the detailed account inside the book itself of the process of psychological adjustment to illness, and partly by her instinctive acceptance of the workings of sublimation revealed in the letter to Fanny. Her assumption of Fanny's sympathy enables her to share her notion of authorship as parenthood, and to authenticate its reality by the flesh and blood appreciation of her friend's family life:

You know how your own personal fatigues and sufferings are made holy and dear, and how they assume the aspect of privileges by their being the essential conditions of life to a new human being. Your bodily sufferings are the elements of the life of an immortal being, and your mental anxieties, your conflicts under responsibility, all go to enrich its future spiritual existence … I congratulate you, be your present and coming struggles what they may. [Fanny, of course, is pregnant.] Every body congratulates you that sees your children,—not only for the sweet daily pleasure their manifold beauties must yield to your husband and yourself,—but because the plain evidences of your success in your noble trust cannot but strengthen and cheer your hearts for the time to come. I have always thought that your most shining time would be when your children grow up to a capacity for your entire friendship …

(LFW, pp. 71-2)

We owe to Fanny's negligence, dilatoriness or deliberate choice in not destroying the letters, this glimpse of how writing was for Martineau, for whom according to Maria Weston Chapman ‘words were life’, a means of reaching out. Recalling Life in the Sickroom for the Autobiography, she judged it ‘morbid’ and ‘crude’ in its ‘dismal self-consciousness’, dwelling only on the state of mind out of which the writing rescued her (II, pp. 172-7). Henry Crabb Robinson was nearer the mark in his view that ‘in the bad sense of the word there is no egotism in it’ (1927, p. 534). Life in the Sickroom represents her most personal step towards the altruism which would find final formulation in Letters on the Laws of Man's Nature and Development and obsessively direct the shaping of the Autobiography. Like the articles in Miscellanies assigned to the second stage of the ‘progress of worship’ it represents a search for what, in the preface written in America, she called ‘method’. As performative writing it belongs with Devotional Exercises, which effectively robbed her, at least for its short duration, of the early pious anxieties of which the Autobiography is so impatient.

A diary entry on the completion of Retrospect of Western Travel signifies a readiness, even a need, to move on: ‘I care little about this book of mine. I have not done it carelessly. I believe it is true: but it will find no place in my mind and life; and I am glad it is done.’ The entry, which brought back ‘some very deep feelings’ (Auto, II, p. 107), indicates that some drawing of a line under her work took place much earlier than the repudiation of early work which characterizes the Autobiography. The American experience absorbed, she has made a break with her past by shaping it, even though the way ahead is not clear. At the same time she is furnished for the end of her progress or pilgrimage with confirmation of the power in the world of her firmest religious ‘affections’, a vocabulary of political aims in which her actively ‘Benevolent’ Christ is a model for practical, achievable steps in the progress of mankind.⁸⁸ Of the ‘liberties’ bound up in the anti-slavery cause, abolition and the rights of women will for the rest of her life be public causes she will pursue whenever need arises. The freedoms of conscience and speech she will act out in her own life. That she could do this with less public execration than she feared may be because, as Catharine Sedgwick said of her in 1835 when she was known for Illustrations, Devotional Exercises, Traditions of Palestine, and the Monthly Repository essays, ‘her spirit and influence have been in harmony with the spirit of the age … she has gone with the current’. Sedgwick's journal entry ends with a character sketch of what with hindsight can be seen as the natural immediatist:

The most interesting part of her character is the sincerity and earnestness of her religion, her lively, effective faith, her knowledge of the Scriptures, and her delight in them as the records of her best friend. How few of us read them even with the interest with which we read a letter on common topics from one we love.⁸⁹

In a sense, Harriet Martineau read America as she read the Bible. If, as she maintains in her essay on Lessing, the New Testament replaces the ‘doctrines’ of the Old with ‘facts’, mankind has advanced politically to the point where the hierarchies and forms of the Old World have fallen before the ‘facts’ of the Declaration of Independence. These facts are written on the rich, various and magnificent landscapes of America, to be read, and more importantly preserved and nurtured, by those who can keep open the psychological route to authentic feeling. Thus are morals politics the concern and responsibility of every single person. The politicization of her Christianity in America is both a step in the direction of Comtism and the reason why she would remain finally unmoved by his late Religion of Humanity.

Notes

1. Robert Henley Eden (1789-1841), law and church reformer. He had ‘dropped his subscriptions to some hurtful charities, and had devoted his funds to Education, Benefit Societies and Emigration’. HM tells the story to refute the gossip about her going to America ‘on means supplied by Lord Brougham and his relative Lord Henley, to fulfil certain objects of theirs’ (Auto, I, pp. 269-70). It will be recalled that Tocqueville was able to make his American journey by persuading the authorities that an investigation of American prisons would be useful.

2. 29 August 1833, quoted by Hoecker-Drysdale, pp. 49-50.

3. Mineka identification.

4. The Monthly Repository had an American circulation. ‘In Charleston we found our host an Unitarian clergyman who knew more of the “Monthly Repository” than any English readers I was acquainted with.’ He was able to identify as hers (with her signature, ‘V’) a ‘Parable’ called ‘The Wandering Child’, taught to some children by Bronson Alcott (whom she attacked in Society in America) and used as a preacher's text (Auto, II, pp. 79-83).

5. ‘Within a short time, and happily before the energy of youth is past, I have been awakened from a state of aristocratic prejudice, to a clear conviction of the Equality of Human Rights, and of the paramount duty of society, to provide for the support, comfort, and enlightenment of every member born into it.’ Letter to the Manchester and Salford Association for the Spread of Co-operative Knowledge (Webb, 1962, p. 123).

6. Edinburgh Review, 67, April 1838, pp. 180-97.

7. Unidentified, but possibly on this evidence Empson. HM's reply to his advice and his reply to her remonstrance are given in full in the Autobiography (II, pp. 164-7).

8. The voyage out, the first days in New York and a trip up the Hudson are described (vividly) in the first four chapters of Retrospect of Western Travel.

9. ‘Sufferers’ (SA, 3, pp. 179-204) describes prisons and methods or punishment, treatment of the few poor, lunatic asylums (‘an honour to their country’), care of the blind, and the temperance movement. ‘The charity of a democratic country is heart-reviving to witness … the misery that is seen is all that exists.’ Her unaccompanied interviews with prisoners were much disapproved of but yielded some humane views on how to preserve a prisoner's self-respect, without which he would not be able to function in society on release.

10. See below Appendix, Section 1.

11. Her own word is ‘article’: ‘Even people who know nothing of books in a mercantile view seem to have as little conception of the true aim and temper of authorship as the book-merchants themselves, who talk of a book as an ‘article’,—as the merchant talks of a shawl or a dress.’

12. Copyright laws did not come into force between England and America till 1891. American friends ‘exerted themselves to protect the work from being pirated’, but Martineau received no money for any copies of the American books sold in America, through ‘the fault of my publisher's agent; and they were as sorry for it as I was’ (Auto, II, pp. 100-1).

13. Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), a notoriously unsympathetic but (now) amusing view of a democratic society.

14. See pp. 188-9 for the autobiographical pattern which emerges in the story of moral fortitude told in this chapter.

15. See Lipset, Introduction, passim.

16. Democracy in America, based on a journey made in 1831-2, was first published in 1835, translated into English by Henry Reeve in the same year. Reeve's translation was published in America in 1838.

17. Lipset (pp. 11-12) notes the similarity between SA and ‘perhaps the most influential work on an American social problem’, Myrdal, Gunnar (1944), An American Dilemma.

18. Her first epigraph is from Burke's Vindication of Natural Society, where ‘happiness’, that is ‘the practice of virtue’, depends on ‘the knowledge of those unalterable relations which Providence has ordained that every thing should bear to every other’ (SA, I, p. 1). Clearly she is one of Burke's readers who did not read the ‘Vindication’ as satire. Rejection of ecclesiastical authority is, of course, the Unitarian position. She welcomed the American ‘experiment’ as an opportunity to build sound political institutions.

19. See Batten (1978), Pleasurable Instruction: Form and Convention in Eighteenth-Century Travel Literature; Berger (1943), The British Traveller in America, 1836-1860; Mulvey (1983), Anglo-American Landscapes: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Travel Literature.

20. Cf. Tocqueville 2, Chapter 3.

21. See Smith's petition to Congress and letters to the editor, both in the Morning Chronicle, 18 May, 3 and 22 November 1843. Smith, 2, pp. 326-32.

22. Lipset (p. 11) places her work in line with that of Max Weber and Talcott Parsons.

23. Cf. Bodichon: ‘What an incredible amount of humbug there is in England never struck me before. They talk Christianity, all men equal before God—but it is only in the free States of America that that idea of Christ's about equality is beginning to be understood’ (p. 72).

24. Hall, Basil (1788-1844), naval Captain with much active service, author, fellow of the Royal Society and of the Royal Astronomical, Geographical and Geological Societies. Fanny Trollope (1780-1863) refers in Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) to the anger caused in America by Hall's Travels in North America (1829), which nearly equalled that caused by her own book.

25. Of HM's main sociological texts, SA is practical, or applied, sociology, How to Observe: Morals and Manners explores the principles behind social observation, the translation and synthesis of Comte popularizes the new notion of a social science.

26. Letter to Kergolay (19 October 1843), quoted by Lipset (p. 7).

27. Lipset's text is roughly half the length of the original. HM's ‘moralism’ is in the integrated, sociological nature of her text, which, as sociology, Lipset praises. Contemporaries who also found it ‘annoying’, were chiefly those who, like the reviewer in Fraser's Magazine, vol. XIX, January to June 1839, pp. 557-92, found both her radical politics and her Unitarian Christianity (the two unifying factors of the book) ‘absurd’.

28. From an account of British literature in America: Byron is ‘scarcely heard of’; favourites are Hannah More (‘much talked of’), Scott (‘idolised’), Mr Bulwer (‘much read’), Miss Edgeworth (‘revered’), Mrs Jameson (‘a favourite’), Coleridge (‘delight of a few’) and Lamb (‘loved’). Most influence is exercised by Carlyle: his Edinburgh Review articles ‘met the wants of several of the best minds of New England; minds weary of cant, and mechanical morals, and seeking something truer to rest on’. The exceptional popularity of Sartor Resartus is all the more remarkable for its having come to America anonymously in Fraser's, ‘unsanctioned by any recommendation, and even positively neglected at home’.

29. Charles Lyell (1797-1875), geologist.

30. Fraser's Magazine thought the book to some extent redeemed by description. The Edinburgh quoted description from SA in its review of RWT. Webb (1962, p. 157), echoed by Lipset (p. 39), says the book is ‘badly constructed’, i.e. is too personal too often.

31. From Essay XVI, The Friend, 1, first given as a speech at Bristol, 1795.

32. HM missed 4th July celebrations both years; all she saw in 1835 in Virginia were ‘some slaves dressing up a marquee, in which their masters were to feast, after having read, from the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created free and equal, and that rulers derive their just powers from the consent of the governed’ (SA, 1, p. 120).

33. The difference between this observation and Tocqueville's admiration for the participatory democracy he saw in action may be due to the comparatively domestic nature of Martineau's sources of information, and the informality of the hospitality extended to her.

34. The section headings in this chapter are: ‘Newspapers’, ‘Apathy in Citizenship’, ‘Allegiance to Law’, ‘Sectional Prejudice’, ‘Citizenship of People of Colour’, ‘Political Non-Existence of Women’.

35. Edward Everett (1794-1865). See Auto, II, p. 33 on the offence given in Boston by her opinion of his oratory, which caused ‘one cry of indignation from all the Whig political journals’, though, according to Chapman, HM's opinion was ‘always shared … by all who were awake to the condition of the country’. (Mem, p. 300) HM thought him totally discredited by his move from academia to politics, and robbed of influence by his sacrifice of honesty to ambition (Auto, II, pp. 63-4). But Everett's two-hour Gettysburg oration, in the style that earlier drew Martineau's fire, was more widely acclaimed at the time than Lincoln's.

36. For Chapman's explanation of American reaction to this passage, see below Appendix, Section 2.

37. Reference to contemporary and modern aesthetic theory is intended to place HM's style historically, indicating some contemporary resonance, not to suggest any aesthetic self-consciousness in a fluent, able but strictly practical writer. On pre-Romantic Sublime see Monk (1960), The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories of XVIII-Century England. For the use of the convention in eighteenth-century poetry, see Price (1969) ‘The Sublime Poem: Pictures and Powers’. HM would probably know Priestley's account of the Sublime in his Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism, and certainly knew Hartley's views on aesthetic pleasure as a moral experience. For later use see Weiskel, T. (1976), The Romantic Sublime. The relation of the Sublime and the Beautiful in Wordsworth, and the attendant political implications, are analysed in Kelley (1988), Wordsworth's Revisionary Aesthetics.

38. See also Auto, II, p. 44, where the orator, unnamed in SA, is given as ‘Senator Sprague, whom I had known well at Washington’, and where Martineau has her feelings confirmed by a young lady who said she was ‘sick of all this boasting … When I think of what we might be and what we are, I want to say only “God be merciful to us sinners”’.

39. Modern research confirms her observation: see Richards (1970), Gentlemen of Property and Standing: Anti-Abolition Riots in Jacksonian America. HM describes William Garrison's rescue by a ‘stout truck-man’ from a mob of ‘gentlemen’ (Westminster Review, 32, December 1838, pp. 22-3). The ‘truck-man’ is last helper in a long list in Garrison's own account: the proprietor of a carpenter's shop who kept the mob at bay while he attempted to hide, an ‘individual’ in the Post Office who reclothed him, the Mayor who sent for the cab and tried to escort him to it, the police who ‘vigorously repulsed’ the attacks (Garrison, pp. 384-6). See below n. 47.

40. See Kelley, pp. 14-23, on the ‘aesthetic progress in the region that mirrors its geological history’, developed in successive editions of Wordsworth's Guide to the Lakes.

41. For geology (including this current wisdom on the likely future of the area) as a contribution to the perception of the Sublime at Niagara, see McKinsey, pp. 229-48, where geology is described as a religious experience for the painter Frederic Edwin Church. McKinsey lists HM among the second wave of travellers who described Niagara as Beautiful rather than Sublime. This is true of the extended description in RWT (1, pp. 96-109), where HM is aiming at accuracy in the picture, though she labels the experience ‘sublime’ by an epigraph from Byron, where the flood ‘charm[s] the eye with dread’. In SA she does not describe Niagara, but uses its assumed sublimity inside an argument.

42. ‘Cemeteries’, the last chapter of RWT, brings the book to an end with reflections on the departing traveller's loss of friends, who become in memory and in the other country, the living dead, a linking of her personal feelings with her observations of the country whose ideals appealed so profoundly. The chapter describes the American pre-occupation with death as related to the comparative number of the dead in a land where the living are so few and the dead its history. I am indebted for the connection of death with a sense of popular community to the as yet unpublished Lewis Walpole Library Lecture by Marilyn Butler, New Haven, March 1994.

43. Her book was reviewed in Tait's along with Grund (1837), The Americans in Their Moral, Social, and Political Relations. Grund's section on slavery is concerned solely with the violence it was widely supposed would ensue on abolition, providing sufficient justification of the status quo.

44. Settlers won independence from Mexico in 1836; anti-slavery northerners opposed annexation till 1845. Martineau was approached in New Orleans (May 1835) with the offer of ‘an estate of several thousand acres in a choice part of the country, and every aid and kindness that could be rendered, if I would bind myself to live for five years in Texas, helping to frame their Constitution, and using my influence to bring over English settlers’ (Auto, II, p. 52).

45. Sartor Resartus, epigraph to ‘Morals of Economy’, SA, II, p. 293.

46. For another Englishwoman's less political view of the insidious effect of slavery cf. Bodichon: ‘slavery makes all labour dishonourable and walking gets to be thought a labour, an exertion’ (p. 56). Reporting a Southern lady who said, ‘If there's a living creature I hate it is that Mrs Beecher’, Bodichon comments: ‘I cannot come against these people without the perception that every standard of right and wrong is lost,—that they are perverted and degraded by this one falsehood. To live in the belief of a vital falsehood poisons all the springs of life’ (1972, p. 62).

47. William Lloyd Garrison (1805-79). Freed from jail for anti-slavery propaganda said to be libellous, he founded the Boston anti-slavery newspaper, The Liberator, in 1831, was a founding member of the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1832, and of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. His language was extreme but his protest, including in 1854 a public burning of the Constitution in opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, was non-violent. He was active in all the social causes associated with abolition, temperance, pacificism and women's rights.

48. Reprinted Misc, 2, pp. 375-87.

49. Tappan, Arthur (1786-1865) and Lewis (1788-1873), wealthy silk merchants, religious philanthropists, active abolitionists. They arranged Garrison's liberation from prison and supported his paper, The Liberator. They helped to establish Oberlin College, the first to admit blacks and women.

50. George Thompson (1804-78), English anti-slavery activist, worked with Garrison and Whittier. He barely escaped from Boston in 1835 in an open boat, but during the Civil War was given a reception in the House of Representatives, with Lincoln present.

51. This is one of the few reported occasions when she was confused by her deafness. ‘Miss J.’ had answered questions on her behalf while she was talking with someone else, and she entered the conversation near its end. She acknowledged that Louisa Jeffreys had no option but to speak as she did.

52. RWT, 2, pp. 161-5; Mem, pp. 275-7; ‘the Female Anti-Slavery Society in Boston’ is described in The Martyr Age, (Westminster Review, 32, pp. 18-19), with an account of a meeting interrupted by officers in search of George Thompson.

53. Ellis Gray Loring (1803-58), lawyer, abolitionist.

54. The young minister on whom she modelled Hope, the hero of Deerbrook.

55. See also Barnes (1957), The Anti-Slavery Impulse, 1830-1844; Fladeland (1972), Men and Brothers: Anglo-American Anti-Slavery Co-operation; Thomas (ed.) (1965) Slavery Attacked: The Abolitionist Crusade.

56. The letter to Chapman was lost; not being private it was probably ‘worn out’, from being passed round. The letter quoted is to E. G. Loring, but Chapman has ‘no recollection of her [HM's] reply as differing in tone or spirit from her letter to Mr. Loring’ (Mem, p. 258). Repetition would be consistent with Martineau's letter-writing practice: her personal letters to Fox are as spontaneously allusive and voluble in style as those to Fanny Wedgwood, but in the more formal of her thousands of surviving letters there is much repetition of quite extensive formulations of thought as well as of neat phraseology.

57. See Stange (1980), ‘Abolition as Treason: The Unitarian Elite Defends Law, Order and the Union’.

58. Davis (p. 229, n. 67) comments on the connection between anti-slavery and religious anxiety. The tone of much of the writing is evangelical but the appeal to searchers for direct, religiously motivated action cuts across sectarian, class and racial lines: HM notes, ‘The Female Anti-Slavery Society in Boston is composed of women of every rank, and every religious sect, as well as of all complexions. The president is a Presbyterian; the chief secretary is an Unitarian; and among other officers and members may be found Quakers, Episcopalians, Methodists, and Swedenborgians. All sectarian jealousy is lost in the great cause … (MA, p. 18).

59. Lucretia Coffin Mott (1793-1880), Quaker reformer and preacher; Sarah Grimké (1792-1873); Angelina Grimké (1805-79) married Theodore Weld; Lydia Maria Child (1802-80), novelist, writer of ‘An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans’ (1833), founder with David Lee Child (1794-1874) of the National Anti-Slavery Standard.

60. This paragraph is indebted to Dubois (1979), ‘Women's Rights and Abolition: The Nature of the Connection’, and to Hersh (1979), ‘“Am I not a Woman and a Sister?”: Abolitionist Beginnings of Nineteenth-Century Feminism’. The formal involvement of women in the abolition cause began with the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, started by Maria Weston Chapman and her sisters in 1832. Chapman effectively managed the American Anti-Slavery Society, founded in 1833, at a conference of anti-slavery workers from New England, New York and Philadelphia, joined on its second day by women workers. The Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society followed, and with the spread of branches, the first national convention in 1837. The movement was split by opposition from the clergy between 1838 and 1840 on the right of women to vote on matters within the organization. At the World's Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840, the women were refused seating with the men and Garrison joined them in the gallery. The historic Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, which drew up a Declaration of Sentiments on the model of the Declaration of Independence, asserting women's right to education, employment and suffrage, was the direct result.

61. The most substantial essays are ‘A History of the American Compromises’ (1856), reprinted from the Daily News, and ‘The Manifest Destiny of the American Union’, Westminster Review, July 1857. See Hoecker-Drysdale, pp. 68-9. Webb (1962, pp. 323-34) describes HM ‘hammer[ing] at her favourite American themes’ through the fifties, the Edinburgh Review an important outlet, The Times the great enemy, the Daily News articles her most important statements. He thinks her ‘dogmatic and parochial’, but her journalism does not stand out in this respect among contemporary expressions of partisan opinion on these or other issues.

62. MA describes the loss of Child's reading public after her public declaration for abolition, and her husband's loss of his legal practice.

63. ‘Modern Woman’, Nation, 7, 1868; see Helsinger et al., 1, pp. 119-23.

64. James Gillespie Birney (1792-1859) Liberal Party Presidential candidate 1840, 1844.

65. Elijah Parish Lovejoy (1802-37), said to have done at least if not more for the cause as a martyr than as an editor. His story provided the immediate impetus to The Martyr Age (Auto, II, p. 138).

66. Probably Chapman, from the account at the end of the letter of the ‘weary labour’ of having ‘just sent off 55,000 women's signatures for the abolition in the District [of Columbia]’.

67. Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789-1867). HM's review is in the Westminster Review, 1838, 6 and 28, pp. 42-65.

68. Ward, Robert Plomer (1825), Tremaine; or The Man of Refinement, a love-story which ends happily once, after long trials, the protagonist's moral health is established on the basis of ‘reasonable’ faith.

69. Mem, pp. 305-27 (September-December 1837), 330-8 (January-June 1838). Other scattered entries are included up till the diary ends in 1843. Extracts are chosen ‘with the nicest reserve … [to] betray the confidence of no one’ (p. 305). On single life, see below Appendix, Section 3.

70. Some few examples: she took over History of the Peace, a large assignment, from Knight who was too busy to finish it (Auto, II, pp. 316-22). The range of subjects on which practical advice is offered in Health, Husbandry, and Handicraft (1861) is no less than suggested by the title. She followed up her Daily News articles on India (republished as British Rule in India: A Historical Sketch (1857) with Suggestions Towards the Future Government of India (1858), an example of timely investigation and popularization, in the wake of the Indian Mutiny (1857).

71. The first English chair was established in Oxford in 1825; the extent to which the spread of political economy is seen as an integral part of a Christian society can be exemplified in F. D. Maurice's 1836 nomination for this chair, which he did not get because of ‘unsound opinions on infant baptism’. Cambridge appointed its first professor of political economy in 1828, King's College London in 1833. See Hilton (1988), The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795-1865, particularly Chapter 2, ‘The Rage for Christian Economics’, pp. 36-70.

72. See below Appendix, Section 4.

73. Hensleigh and Fanny Wedgwood, who have to decide what to do now Hensleigh has resigned his police magistracy from scruples over the administration of oaths. See LFW, pp. 4-8. Martineau's comment: ‘Such testimony to the supremacy of conscience ought to make one rejoice; yet I cannot help grieving. Such a household broken up! My head was full of them all the evening and in the night’ (Mem, p. 321).

74. Erasmus Darwin (1804-81), older brother of Charles. A confirmed bachelor, he was HM's constant escort during her years of ‘lionising’ and a lifelong friend. See LFW passim.

75. In Manchester College, Oxford; dated 12 December 1837.

76. OED first records ‘sociology’ in 1843, a quotation from Blackwood's, followed by one in 1848 from Fraser's: ‘The new science, sociology as it is barbarously called’. The idea of a new ‘science’ is thus being disseminated by periodicals with a wide general readership.

77. Indigenous standards by which to judge American ‘morals and manners’ are dropped for comparison with home in two major instances, marriage (‘In no country, I believe, are the marriage laws so iniquitous as in England, and the conjugal relation, in consequence, so impaired’ (SA, III, pp. 119-30), and child rearing (see p. 187).

78. Spectator, 9 November 1833, pp. 1050-51.

79. If as seems likely she was reading James Mackintosh at this time it is conceivable that ideas she cannot handle yet are looming. See pp. 99-102.

80. She returned to it when Mrs Ker was ‘far away’, for its pressing message rather than its exoticism (Auto, II, p. 156).

81. Probably Thomas Baker (1809-69), known as ‘Baker of Leamington’. He exhibited frequently at the British Institution.

82. It is worth noting that the religious language is not as purely metaphorical as it might seem to a modern ear. She records a conversation with ‘a wise [American] parent’, for example, in which they agree on the superiority of the American method in the event of parents and children recognizing one another after death ‘in a new life of progression’, where, of course, there will be no authority of one person over another (SA, III, p. 168).

83. Westminster Review, 28, pp. 470-502. Wellesley identifies the author (or collaborator at least) as John Robertson.

84. The diary records that ‘Mr. Child [David Lee Child, husband of Lydia Child, author, reformer, abolitionist] called. He says the Americans in Paris are frantic against me and my book [SA]. He agrees in the whole of it, except Dr. Follen being the greatest man I saw in the United States, yet he loves him much’.

85. Excursion, Bk 4, ll., 1081-5, spoken by the Solitary.

86. Wife of Edward Stanley, Bishop of Norwich.

87. Also LFW, pp. 50-1, 57-71.

88. Collini describes the emergence of the nineteenth-century debate between ‘egoism’ and ‘altruism’ out of the eighteenth-century debate between ‘Self-Love’ and ‘Benevolence’, and the nineteenth-century identification of ‘altruism’ with moral health (1991, pp. 60-90).

89. The whole entry is in Dewey, pp. 240-2. Dewey comments: ‘Miss Sedgwick's views of Miss Martineau's character were in some respects painfully altered by subsequent developments’. Martineau thought that Sedgwick should not have altered the moral outcome of a story in response to public opinion (showing a lack of ‘moral independence’), also that the political imperative of preserving the Union should give way to the moral imperative of abolition. Sedgwick appreciated the character but not the character in action.

List of Abbreviations

Page references are to the editions listed below.

AC: Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, freely translated and condensed by Harriet Martineau, New York: Calvin Blanchard, 1855.

Auto: Harriet Martineau's Autobiography, 2 vols. Third edition, republished Gregg International Publishers, 1869. Page numbers the same in the Virago paperback, ed. Gaby Weiner, 1983.

DE: Devotional Exercises: consisting of Reflections and Prayers for the Use of Young Persons to which is added A Guide to the Study of the Scriptures, by Harriet Martineau. Third edition, London: Rowland Hunter, 1832.

ELPP: Eastern Life Past and Present, Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1848.

LFW: Harriet Martineau's Letters to Fanny Wedgwood, ed. Elisabeth Sanders Arbuckle, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983.

LLMND: Letters on the Laws of Man's Nature and Development by Henry George Atkinson and Harriet Martineau, Boston: Josiah P. Mendum, 1851.

MA: Martyr Age of the United States. Review article, Westminster Review, 32, December 1838.

Mem: Maria Weston Chapman, Memorials of Harriet Martineau, in Harriet Martineau's Autobiography, vol. 3, Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1877.

Misc: Miscellanies, 2 vols., Boston: Hilliard, Gray and Company, 1836.

RWT: Retrospect of Western Travel, 2 vols., London: Saunders and Otley, 1838.

SA: Society in America, 3 vols., London: Saunders and Otley, 1837.

Bibliography

Works of Harriet Martineau mentioned in the text

Autobiography, with Memorials by Maria Weston Chapman (1877), 3 vols, London: Smith, Elder.

Deerbrook (1839), 3 vols, London: Edward Moxon.

Devotional Exercises, Consisting of Reflections and Prayers, for the Use of Young Persons; To Which is Added a Treatise on the Lord's Supper. By a Lady (1823), London: Rowland Hunter, and Norwich.

Household Education (1849), London: Edward Moxon.

How to Observe: Morals and Manners (1838), London: Charles Knight.

Illustrations of Political Economy (1832-4), 25 parts; 9 vols (1834), London: Charles Fox.

Letters on the Laws of Man's Nature and Development by Henry George Atkinson and Harriet Martineau (1851), London: John Chapman.

Letters to Fanny Wedgwood (1983), E. Arbuckle (ed.), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Letters, see below, Sanders (1990).

Life in the Sickroom by an invalid (1844), London: Edward Moxon.

The Martyr Age of the United States (1839), rprtd from the Westminster Review, New York: Benedict.

Miscellanies (1836), 2 vols, Boston: Hilliard, Gray.

Retrospect of Western Travel (1838), 3 vols, London: Saunders and Otley.

Society in America (1837), 3 vols, London: Saunders and Otley.

Traditions of Palestine, edited by Harriet Martineau (1830), London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green.

Primary sources

Dewey, M. E. (ed.), (1871), Life and Letters of Catharine Maria Sedgwick, New York: Harper.

Knight, C. (1864-5), Passages of a Working Life During Half a Century, London: Bradbury and Evans.

More, H. (1811), Practical Piety, 2 vols, London.

——— (1813), Christian Morals, 2 vols, London.

Smith, S. (1859), Works, Including His Contributions to the Edinburgh Review, 2 vols, London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts.

Tocqueville, A. de (1835 and 1840), Democracy in America, translated by Henry Reeve, 1945, 2 vols, New York: Vintage Books.

Secondary sources

Barnes, G. H. (1957), The Anti-Slavery Impulse, 1830-1844, Gloucester, MA: P. Smith (first published c. 1933).

Batten, C. L. (1978), Pleasurable Instruction: Form and Convention in Eighteenth-Century Travel Literature, Berkeley, CA, London: University of California Press.

Berger, M. (1943), The British Traveller in America, 1836-1860, New York: Columbia University Press.

Davis, D. B. (1962), ‘The Emergence of Immediatism in British and American Antislavery Thought’, The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 49, (2), September, pp. 209-30.

DuBois, E. (1979), ‘Women's Rights and Abolition: The Nature of The Connection’, in L. Perry and M. Fellmann (eds), Anti-Slavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Abolitionists, Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, pp. 239-51.

Fladeland, B. (1972), Men and Brothers: Anglo-American Anti-Slavery Cooperation, Urbana, Chicago, London: University of Illinois Press.

Helsinger, E. K., Sheets, R. L., Veeder, W. (eds), (1989), The Woman Question: Society and Literature in Britain and America, 1837-1883, 3 vols, Chicago and London: Chicago University Press. First published (1983), New York: Garland.

Hersh, B. G. (1979), ‘“Am I not a Woman and a Sister?”: Abolitionist Beginnings of Nineteenth-Century Feminism’, in L. Perry and M. Fellman (eds), Anti-Slavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Abolitionists.

Hoecker-Drysdale, S. (1992), Harriet Martineau: First Woman Sociologist, Oxford, New York: Berg.

Kelley, T. M. (1988), Wordsworth's Revisionary Aesthetics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lipset, M. S. (ed.), (1968), Harriet Martineau, Society in America, first published 1962, Gloucester, MA: P. Smith.

Monk, S. H. (1960), The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories of XVIII-Century England, Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press.

Mulvey, C. (1983), Anglo-American Landscapes: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Travel Literature, Cambridge, London, New York, New Rochelle, Melbourne, Sydney: Cambridge University Press.

Myrdal, G. (1944), An American Dilemma, New York: Harper and Brothers.

Price, M. (1969), ‘The Sublime Poem: Pictures and Powers’, Yale Review, 58, Winter, pp. 194-213.

Richards, L. (1970), Gentlemen of Property and Standing: Anti-Abolition Riots in Jacksonian America, New York: Oxford University Press.

Sanders, V. (ed.), (1990), Harriet Martineau: Selected Letters, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Stange, D. C. (1980), ‘Abolition as Treason: The Unitarian Elite Defends Law, Order and the Union’, Harvard Library Bulletin, 28, April, pp. 152-70.

Thomas, J. L. (ed.), (1965), Slavery Attacked: The Abolitionist Crusade, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Webb, R. K. (1962), Harriet Martineau: A Radical Victorian, first published 1960, New York: Columbia University Press.

Weiskel, T. (1976), The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence, Baltimore, London: Johns Hopkins University Press.