SOURCE: Sanders, Valerie. “‘The Cotton-spinners' Romance of Real Life’: Harriet Martineau and the Poor Man's Tale.” In Reason Over Passion: Harriet Martineau and the Victorian Novel, pp. 30-57. Sussex, Eng.: The Harvester Press, 1986.

[In the following excerpt, Williams comments on the economic themes in Martineau's work.]

Harriet Martineau's Illustrations of Political Economy grew out of turbulent times:

The year 1831 opened gloomily. Those who believed that revolution was at hand, feared to wish one another a happy new year; and the anxiety about revolution was by no means confined to anti-reformers. Society was already in a discontented and tumultuous state; its most ignorant portion being acted upon at once by hardship at home and example from abroad; and there was every reason to expect a deadly struggle before Parliamentary Reform could be carried.

(History of England during the Thirty Years' Peace 1816-1846, II, p. 24)

The ‘example from abroad’ was the French Revolution of 1830, which conservatives feared might prompt the English poor into concerted action for a new social order. Before the Reform Bill was passed in June, 1832, the country was swept by machine-breaking, rick-burning, rioting and the cholera. To the superstitious, the cholera epidemic of 1831-2 was a sign of Divine displeasure, a plague sent to punish a nation of wrongdoers, but Harriet Martineau was exhilarated by the prospect of reform, glorying in every advance against corruption, ignorance and misrule in the working of human institutions. In retrospect, she felt that people living ‘in the years succeeding 1832 were living in times perhaps as perilous as the history of England has to show—amidst a romance of peril as striking, when fully understood, as any of the times of the Plantagenets and the Stuarts’ (History, II, p. 257).

The actual ‘revolution’ was, in her view, very much a gradual transition from a mainly feudal and aristocratic state of society to a more enlightened one of freedom and democracy. Her view of history was an idiosyncratic compound of Whig, Saint-Simonian and Necessarian ideas, embodying a steady faith in human progress; but her own times she considered provisional, unstable, possibly eruptive. ‘We may get over this year quietly,’ she told Richard Monckton Milnes in 1842; ‘but not thirty years,—nor twenty,—in my belief.’¹ To Henry Crabb Robinson, she added that Britain would probably escape the worst dangers: ‘I think the bloodshed, w^h I fear has still to come, will be on the continent, & when you & I are gone hence; & that there will be a bouleversement at home, probably with more or less violence, but not civil war.’²

The revolution scare brought out shoals of educators from the middle and upper classes, who believed that only the ignorant rioted, while sober, informed men accepted things as they were, and kept to their own business. As R. K. Webb has shown in his Harriet Martineau, political economy came to be offered alongside religious teaching as one of the ideal preventives of misguided rebellion. The reformers assumed that once working men knew their function in the national machine, they would perform it unquestioningly and acknowledge the error of their former ways. Moreover, they would lose the worst characteristics of their own class, and assume the finer virtues of the educated. Harriet Martineau's friend, Charles Knight, wanted to make the poor man ‘a thinking man—a man capable of intellectual pleasures; he must be purified in his tastes, and elevated in his understanding.’³ Few of the professional educators apparently wondered whether so much new information might inspire its recipients to organise a better revolution.

Optimistic about society's prospects, Harriet Martineau felt, like other disciples of the philosophers David Hartley and Joseph Priestley, that an efficient education system would spread wisdom, contentment and peace throughout the nation. Her Illustrations teem with teacher-figures, mostly clergymen and manufacturers, who try to enlighten the poorer members of their local community. ‘A steady employer,’ she added in 1837, ‘has it in his power to do more for the morals of the society about him than the clergy themselves.’⁴ Everyone, she insisted, should feel it their duty to help channel fresh knowledge, like drinking water, to every man's door. Nor was anyone excused from learning the new science. In her Preface to the complete series, she announced her intention of showing the principles of political economy at work in specific communities. This would emphasise the interdependence of all classes in their subjection to laws that she believed, as a Necessarian, were natural and universal. She was the first nineteenth-century social novelist to draw serious attention to the influence of daily, and especially adverse, conditions on the lives of ordinary men and women, recognising that few human virtues or vices evolve spontaneously, irrespective of environment. She was quick to acknowledge how closely readers would identify with individuals in her stories. The ‘faithful history of an upright man, his sayings and doings, his trials, his sorrows, his triumphs and rewards,’ she argued, would teach far more than the same truths expounded in a dry lecture.⁵ Fourteen years later, George Eliot (still Marian Evans of the Westminster Review) made a very similar comment on readers' responses. ‘Appeals founded on generalisations and statistics,’ she wrote in ‘The Natural History of German Life’,

require a sympathy ready-made, a moral sentiment already in activity; but a picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment.

(Essays, ed. Pinney, p. 270)

Still closer to Harriet Martineau's artistic ethic was an idea proposed by Beatrice Webb in her diary, and reprinted afterwards in My Apprenticeship, where she recalled her longing to write a novel. Weary of handling commercial facts, she wanted to present some clear and attractive account of the forces governing society,

some more dramatic representation of facts than can be given in statistical tables or in the letterpress that explains them; some way of bringing home to rich and poor those truths about social organisation that I may discover, illustrations of social laws in the terms of personal suffering, personal development and personal sin.⁶

Harriet Martineau also wrote about ‘sin’ in economic terms, making a religion of the relentless science she had adopted as her guide to life. In her tales, sermons slide deceptively into economic lectures; meditations take an unexpectedly mercantile turn; rectors try to secure their parishioners a competence on earth before they win one in heaven. Wherever possible, her characters sin conjointly against the laws of political economy and Christianity, so as to underline the close relationship of human and Divine providence. The result, as she herself recognised at the end of her series, was a succession of melancholy fables, surprisingly cheerless for one who believed as confidently as she did in the progress of society. She pleaded, in her own defence, that tribulation must come before the discovery of truth. ‘Could I,’ she asked, ‘by any number of tales of people who have not suffered under an unwise administration of social affairs, have shown that the administration was unwise?’⁷

In theory, at least, this idea anticipates Dickens's approach in his social-problem novels. Bleak House, for example, shows how numerous lives are connected and blighted by the maladministration of the Chancery laws. In Little Dorrit countless people disappear without trace into the Circumlocution Office. Of course, Harriet Martineau never achieves the rich complexity of a Dickens plot, with its pattern of pervading images and symbols, but she at least connects personality defects and family problems with bad legislation. Adam and Cuddie Eldred in A Tale of the Tyne, resent the apprenticeship and impressment laws; Aaron Le Brocq, in The Jerseymen Parting, turns smuggler to cheat the unfair excise laws, while Mr. Durell, the exciseman, dies oppressed by his work for the system; Jane Bridgeman, in Cousin Marshall, gets pregnant after a workhouse upbringing (under the old, unreformed Poor Law) has brought her into bad company. Society is not just the background to a personal drama, but its leading influence; and from the range of communities which her tales explore emerges her ideal of the virtuous working-class family.

Harriet Martineau's father was a Norwich manufacturer, so she had no first-hand childhood memories of a working-class upbringing. By her own admission, she exchanged her ‘aristocratic prejudice’ for ‘a clear conviction of the Equality of Human Rights,’ though she still felt the poor should urge their claims with moderation, and ‘bear about with them the credentials of intelligence and good deserts’.⁸ She stated her position more fully in ‘Domestic Service,’ a review article she wrote for the Westminster in 1838. Here she admitted that there was much at fault in the relations between employers and their employees, whatever the nature of their work. By taking domestic service as representative of most work contracts, she anticipates Ruskin's analogy in Unto This Last. ‘We shall find the best and simplest illustration of the relations of master and operative in the position of domestic servants,’ he suggests in ‘The Roots of Honour,’ arguing that the servant's affections should be used as the motive force in his work.⁹ Harriet Martineau's stance is more complex, in that she blames both sides for their irrationality, but she does reproach householders for treating their servants as drudges, without souls. Contemporary tract-writers, she felt, did little to heal the centuries-old breach, which thrived on misunderstanding. ‘There is perhaps no parallel instance,’ she wrote, ‘of two classes of people living in such close conjunction amidst so entire a mutual ignorance, as in that of masters and servants.’¹⁰

More than fifteen years before Mrs. Gaskell wrote Mary Barton, this was repeatedly the message of Harriet Martineau's tales about industrial life. In The Turn-Out (1829), an early story about a failed factory strike, Robert Wallace, the employer, tells one of his operatives, ‘I have wished all along that the men should have a little talk with the masters, that they may learn to understand one another better about this affair.’¹¹ He attends a public meeting of the men, where he insists that the fortunes of masters and men rise and fall together, so that their interests are identical. Here and elsewhere, the employer-figure in the story gains something from closer contact with his men. One of the most interesting is the narrator of The Rioters (1827), a London businessman visiting Manchester during a spate of machine-breaking. As he watches two rioters evading arrest, he becomes absorbed by the drama:

The young men both attempted to escape; and I really could not help wishing they might, so strong was the compassion excited by their famished and miserable appearance. I felt for the moment that their poverty almost excused their violence; and hoped that after such a narrow escape they would hardly be caught rioting again.¹²

After a restless night, he launches his mission to save a Manchester family from evil influences. By the end of the story he has found knitting jobs for the mother, seen two sons through trials for rioting, and taught them all the basic rules of political economy; but he feels the conventional teachings about human suffering are inadequate for families like the Bretts:

Time and patience were, no doubt, the best remedies: but how to preach patience to starving people, how to sustain patience by sustaining life, in times of such general hardship, was the difficulty. That these trying events were in better hands than ours, and at the disposal of a wiser Being than ourselves, was the only consolation I could find, the only means of soothing my harassing doubts and fears.

(pp. 45-6)

A more mature or skilful novelist might have developed the narrator's anxieties with greater psychological insight. As it is, he swallows his doubts and goes on preaching obedience to the laws but the doubts are there, and resurface in the ambiguities of later tales.

For instance, Harriet Martineau's attitude to trade unions and strikes varies considerably according to context. As Ivanka Kovačević has pointed out, in Fact into Fiction, Harriet Martineau creates no example of a ‘lovable industrialist’; moreover, her paternalist employers are often patronising and unattractive. Even her kindest, Mr. Wentworth in A Manchester Strike, treats his men too much like children with wilful dispositions. ‘“Come, Clack,”’ he invites his chief troublemaker, ‘“tell us, (for who knows if you don't?) tell us what wages Adam gave his under gardeners. You can't say? Why, I thought you knew all that the masters did at the beginning of the world”’ (p. 35). Clack excepted, the men are generally courteous and sober, unlike another manufacturer, Elliott, who flicks their petition into the mud. The tale's hero, William Allen, is a responsible, melancholy man, persuaded, against his better judgment, into active membership of the strikers' committee. The Spectator looked forward to this story as ‘the Cotton-spinners' Romance of Real Life,’ but its grim realism soon destroys any romantic potential.¹³ Even the upright, steady Allen loses his job and spends the rest of his life sweeping the streets, because he is a proscribed man among Manchester manufacturers. Harriet Martineau explained in her Moral of Many Fables that she had tried to present the ‘fairest instance’ of a strike, to emphasise the badness of principle involved. ‘I trust and believe that there are many William Allens among the class of operatives,’ she granted; ‘but I also believe that few of these are leaders of strikes’ (p. 55). She was convinced that the most intelligent workers refused to join a ‘turn-out’; indeed here, and in The Rioters, the men's wives are a restraining force, as they are traditionally in modern industrial communities.

Regarding factory operatives as the most enlightened group within the working class, she blamed subversive outsiders for stirring up class hatred among working men, and inciting them to strike against their employers. Lurid passages in her History show how deeply she feared the mindless violence of a trade union uprising. ‘Half-a-dozen uneducated men—sometimes one able but half-informed man—commanded an obedient host of tens of thousands,’ she reminded readers in Book IV; till, in 1834, it became ‘a serious question’ whether the existence of trade unions was ‘compatible with the organisation of society of England’ (II, 154). Her remarks in the Moral of Many Fables do much to counteract any favourable impressions she might have given in A Manchester Strike. Such workers' associations, she concluded, afford facilities.

for meddling and governing, for rioting, for idling, and tippling, and journeying, and speechifying at other people's expense. No better occasion could be devised for exposing the simple, and timid, and unwary to be robbed, and jobbed, and made tools of by a few sharpers and idle busybodies.

(p. 56)

As the industrial novel developed in the 1840s and 1850s, this became the accepted middle-class attitude towards strike-leaders. Most mid-Victorian novelists wanted to believe that all classes could work together for their mutual benefit, and attacked the ‘sharpers and idle busybodies’ like Dickens's Slackbridge, and Moses Barraclough in Shirley. Dickens saw such self-appointed demagogues as essentially inferior to their followers. ‘He was not so honest, he was not so manly, he was not so good-humoured,’ Dickens writes of Slackbridge; ‘he substituted cunning for their simplicity, and passion for their safe solid sense.’¹⁴ ‘Simplicity’ and ‘safe’ are the key words here, the buffers against revolutionary violence. In Shirley, Charlotte Brontë sees riot leaders as chiefly outsiders, ‘“downdraughts,” bankrupts, men always in debt and often in drink’.¹⁵ The beneficial aspects of unions were largely forgotten in the overriding dread of violence. Harriet Martineau, however, insisted that workmen should unite to support each other in difficult times, and to combat genuinely unfair conditions. ‘If they are oppressed by their masters, they will best resist oppression by being combined,’ she allowed in 1834, the year of the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union, and the Tolpuddle Martyrs.¹⁶

Approving the function of unions as benefit societies, she used the general argument of ‘identical interests,’ and, more specifically, the Wage Fund theory of the classical economists, to prove that masters could not afford to raise their employees' pay when their own profits were low. ‘I repeat, that your interests and ours are the same,’ says Mr. Wallace, the master in The Turn-Out; ‘that when we make good profits, you get high wages; and that by insisting on high wages when trade does not afford them, you bring your masters to poverty, and yourselves to destruction’ (p. 127).

This is very much Mrs. Gaskell's argument in Mary Barton, where she defends the masters' decision to buy cheap cotton, and reduce their men's wages. The workmen, she feels sure, would have benefited. ‘Distrust each other as they may,’ she argues, ‘the employers and the employed must rise or fall together’ (p. 221). But the masters do not explain this to their men (a complaint made repeatedly by Harriet Martineau), and a strike follows quickly upon class distrust, with damaging effects. Harriet Martineau understands, in her ‘Domestic Service’ article (Westminster Review, 1838), that careworn workmen, hearing the sounds of music and laughter from ‘well-warmed and lighted houses’ may feel exiled to the ‘cold, dim, region of hardship’ (pp. 418-9). The contrast between the two states is like John Barton's vision of the jellies and Stilton cheese bought by prosperous wives, while his own son is dying for want of good food; but no striker in Mrs. Gaskell's novels gains anything from his action, and Nicholas Higgins, in North and South, ends, like William Allen, a proscribed man. Only Mr. Thornton's final change of heart saves him from a dismal redundancy like Allen's.

Dickens, too, upheld the workman's right to combine, but disapproved of specific strikes, especially the Preston lock-out of 1854, and a threatened rail strike on the North Western line in 1851. In ‘Railway Strikes’ (Household Words, 11 January, 1851), he imagines a dialogue between Engine Driver John Safe and Fireman Thomas Sparks, on the advisability of strike action: a dialogue reminiscent of Harriet Martineau's in many of her Illustrations. How can it serve the workman's case, asks Safe, ‘to show a small body of his order, combined, in a misuse of power, against the whole community!’ (p. 363) Even Dickens uses the standard argument about ‘identical interests’ when he comments on the Preston Strike (Household Words, 11 February, 1854). In its tremendous waste of time, wages wealth, and energy, he declared, ‘in the gulf of separation it hourly deepens between those whose interests must be understood to be identical or must be destroyed,’ the strike was ‘a great national affliction’ (p. 558). Of course, Dickens dismissed the theories of the economists, as such, in finding a solution. Instead he wanted an impartial body, like the modern arbitration service, to mediate between the two sides. But, like Charles Kingsley, he was impressed by the Preston strikers' orderly behaviour, and conceded a certain respect for their perseverance. By different routes, by the compassion Mrs. Gaskell took as her guide, through Christian Socialism or humanitarianism, Kingsley's and Dickens's guides respectively, the first industrial novelists arrived at an overall response to trade unions that was very similar to Harriet Martineau's. Compared with Disraeli, who endows his strikers in Sybil with the manic leadership of Bishop Hatton and the Hell-cats, she was quite restrained in her response and if, as Valerie Pichanick suggests, she ‘really had very little understanding of employer-employee relations in the impersonal world of large industry’ (pp. 221-2), neither had the well-meaning, but often impractical writers who followed her. With her emphasis on communication, rationality rather than violence, mutual understanding and the binding economic tie between masters and men, she was the first imaginative writer of the age to express the fears and beliefs of the middle classes about what was, in effect, a disturbing new force in society.

The reaction to trade unions was only part of a wider response to industrialisation as it rapidly transformed familiar scenery, and even people, before the dazed vision of observers. Harriet Martineau adapted quickly to the mushrooming of cities and factories, and the blaze of furnace fires. They stimulated her imagination, as symbols of man's increasing power over nature, pledges of his coming freedom from the lowest forms of drudgery, which would soon be performed for him by machinery. More people would be released to pursue what she grandly, if vaguely, called ‘science’.¹⁷ Besides, she found it satisfying to survey an industrial landscape pounding with productivity. In her second Illustration, The Hill and the Valley (1832), a group of children see the coke-hearth of an iron-works by night:

The flame blazed and flickered, and shot up in red and white spires, and disappeared and kindled again, as the wind rose and fell; and there were black figures of men, brandishing long rakes, sometimes half-hidden by red smoke, and sometimes distinctly marked against a mass of flame.

(p. 55)

The scene is impressive, but not menacing, like Nell's first view of the furnace in The Old Curiosity Shop:

In this gloomy place, moving like demons among the flame and smoke, dimly and fitfully seen, flushed and tormented by the burning fires, and wielding great weapons, a faulty blow from any one of which must have crushed some workman's skull, a number of men laboured like giants.¹⁸

Harriet Martineau saw the wonders, Dickens the dangers, of industrialisation. Already there are signs of their future quarrel about factory machinery; yet both were intrigued by the distorted grandeur of much industrial scenery. In 1851-4, Harriet Martineau sent Dickens reports on certain factories she was visiting, for a series in Household Words. Inspired by vats and sacks and grotesque cascades of dough (in Lucy's Bread Mill, Birmingham), she spun strange visions of wondrous landscapes. Prettiest of all the manufactures was ribbon-making, shimmering by gaslight. ‘The flare of the separate jets,’ she noted, ‘is lost behind the screens of silken threads, which veil the backs of the looms, while the yellow light touches the beams, and gushes up to the high ceiling in a thousand caprices.’¹⁹ Nothing pleased her more than the sight of clean, efficient operatives deftly sewing or cutting, with the aid of vast, superhuman machines. By the 1850s, the age of the Great Exhibition and of her own personal prosperity in Ambleside, she had come to focus mainly on the attractive, soul-stirring aspects of industry. Yet her Illustrations show her, at times, acutely conscious of urban dreariness as it impinged on the lives of poor working families. She sketches streets and factories, children's games and cramped houses. She looks behind the rigid laws of political economy, and sees the squalor of daily living conditions in Manchester: ‘There were heaps of rubbish, pools of muddy water, stones and brickbats lying about, and cabbage-leaves on which the unwary might slip, and bones over which pigs were grunting and curs snarling and fighting’ (A Manchester Strike, p. 2). Later in the story she describes dawn breaking slowly over the mill where Martha Allen works:

It was a strange scene that the dawn shone upon. As the grey light from the east mingled with the flickering, yellow glare of the lamps, it gave a mottled, dirty appearance to everything; to the pale-faced children, to the unshaved onlooker, to the loaded atmosphere, and even to the produce of the wheels.

When a bright sunbeam shone in through the window, thickened with the condensed breath of the work-people, and showed the oily steam rising through the heated room, the lamps were extinguished, to the great relief of those who found the place growing too like an oven to be much longer tolerable.

(p. 66)

Avoiding emotive language, she presents her material starkly, resisting the temptation to lament over special cases, like lame Martha's. She is a particularly astute observer of children, here, and throughout her series of tales and novels. ‘Was your father ever tipsy?’ Martha's friend, Hannah Bray asks her coolly. ‘Not that I know of,’ answers Martha; ‘but our neighbour Field is often tipsy. I am afraid every day that he will topple down stairs.’ When Hannah exclaims ‘Lord!’ Martha tells her primly, ‘Father and mother never let us say those sort of words’ (p. 21). Cousin Marshall, which opens with an account of Saturday night's drunkards reeling home on Sunday morning, pauses over a scene in the workhouse, where some inmates are busier than others:

The court was half-full of people, yet two women were washing dirty linen at the pump in the midst. Several men were seated cutting pegs for the tilers and shoemakers, and others patching shoes for their fellow-paupers; while several women stood round with their knitting, laughing loud; and some of the younger ones venturing upon a few practical jokes more coarse than amusing. At a little distance, sat two young women shelling peas for a grand corporation dinner that was to take place the next day, and beside them stood a little girl whose business was apparently to clean a spit on which she was leaning, but who was fully occupied in listening to the conversation which went on over the pea-basket.

(pp. 16-17)

The little girl photographed in this full survey of insignificant people is Jane Bridgeman, slipping for the first time into bad company. Her story is interwoven with those of her blind sister Sally, kind Cousin Marshall, several scroungers and imposters, and her hard-working brother Ned.

Elsewhere, Harriet Martineau reveals a taste for rudimentary social satire, of the familiar kind later perfected by Dickens: portraits of eccentric mothers and children, and bizarre schoolteachers. Mrs. Mott, who keeps the workhouse school in Cousin Marshall, tries, ineffectually, to punish one boy for biting another. ‘We are going to prayers,’ she reminds the children, ‘and I will have no disturbance while prayers are going on; but I will have justice. So, as soon as prayers are over, Jemmy shall bite Tommy in whatever part he chooses’ (pp. 26-7). Luckily, a visitor intervenes before Jemmy gets his revenge. Mr. Pim, the schoolmaster in The Loom and the Lugger, fends off lady visitors until he has crammed some hasty knowledge into his pupils. ‘“Suppose we say the end of the week, ma'am,”’ he suggests, ‘“when they are furbished up for the parson. You will be more sure of being pleased towards the end of the week. I make my scholars very moral”’ (I, p. 38). The tale as a whole is written in a strange patchwork of styles, sympathising with the Spitalfields weavers, while focusing on comic individuals. When a silk manufacturer's daughters visit the home of an employee, Mrs. Ellis, they notice all the odd details of its decor and ornaments: ‘a tea-tray with a tiger upon it, and above it two fine pictures,—viz., the Duke of Wellington staring mightily upon his companion, a Madonna, as if meditating war against her child—’ The beds are still unmade in the evening, and ‘a curl-papered girl, with a face grimed with dust from her loom, was lazily undrawing the curtains, and about to let in the fresh air for the first time that day’ (II, p. 37). Mrs. Ellis is later visited by the Treasury Inspectors, who find her ‘so subject to sinking of her inside,’ that she keeps a peppermint bottle close at hand for comfort. ‘“And do you take any of it, boy?”’ ask the Inspectors. ‘“Why no, sir,”’ Tom replies: ‘“my inside don't sink often till night: and then I go and garden”’ (II, pp. 121-2).

Rarely blank personifications of Capital and Labour, her characters are given their own distinguishing marks beyond the immediate requirements of the principles being illustrated. They have to overcome personal difficulties, often the result of undeserved hardship or unhappy family relationships. Ella of Garveloch acts as mother to her idiot brother; Effie, the heroine of A Tale of the Tyne, worries about a father and brother impressed into the navy; Mary Kay, in Sowers Not Reapers, helps her brother look after an alcoholic wife; Hester Parndon, in Berkeley the Banker, marries a forger, and becomes implicated in his fraudulent activities. Harriet Martineau's tales divide into those, like the Poor Law series, which defend new government proposals and those, like the Taxation stories, which attack unfair or outdated legislation. Chatham, in Sowers Not Reapers, wishes the authorities could be set down in his valley, among the poor, ‘to find out how dismal night-lights are when they shine upon scowling brows and hollow cheeks’ (p. 59). Chatham's rhetoric relies too much on stale images of starving lambs and stony fields; yet unlike Dickens, with Jo in Bleak House, or Stephen Blackpool in Hard Times, she allows her working men to put their views articulately. They rarely utter incoherent truths, or fumble for the right words. It may be a fault in Harriet Martineau's writing that she makes so little distinction between the speech of the educated and the ignorant, but her poor men were meant to appeal directly to the cabinet ministers and politicians who read her tales. Chatham is not a trade union delegate, we should remember but, like Harriet Martineau herself, an advocate of free trade; yet even where she disagrees with her speaker she can project the mood of resentment. ‘Here we sit perishing with cold and hunger, and our children dying before our faces,’ cries Mary Brett in The Rioters, ‘while they set up their machinery, and pocket the wages we ought to have’ (p. 8). ‘It's a fine thing to be a baronet,’ complains a man in Brooke and Brooke Farm (1832). ‘It's a fine thing to have one's own way with parliament, and to do as one likes with land that belongs to people who can't defend their right to it’ (p. 29). Naively, Le Brocq and Anna, in The Jerseymen Parting (1834), write to the King, objecting to the British taxation laws. For too much of each story her characters are as flat as the figures on a banknote; yet most, at some stage, begin to quiver with real resentment, despair, or the weary incomprehension which we associate with Mrs. Gaskell's Manchester operatives. They rarely wrinkle into caricatures, or dissolve into saintly waifs beckoned to a happier beyond. This is always a danger where children are included in social-problem novels but Harriet Martineau's child characters belong very much to the working-day world. Park ducks look to Brennan, a young pottery-worker in The Jerseymen Meeting (1834) ‘just like soda-water bottles with wings, when they are flying’ (p. 54).

Twenty years later much of this sympathy had hardened into a belief that the poor man's lot was greatly improved, and that further developments were dependent on individual efforts towards self-help and education. When she visited the Midlands manufactories, she was impressed by the advanced technology without worrying unduly about the health and safety of workers. K. J. Fielding and Anne Smith have shown how Dickens's simplification of the Coketown ethos may well be a response to Harriet Martineau's apparent insensitivity in her Household Words articles.²⁰ One can add to this even small verbal tricks, which Dickens recycled as the philosophy of Gradgrind and Bounderby. At the Kendal carpet factory, for example, she peered doubtfully at the pattern of a Landseer dog, woven into a rug. ‘Very soft are the eyes and muzzle of this prize dog,’ she conceded,

and very tufty are his black spots. To be sure, we do not think him a very good subject for a rug, as we do not habitually tread upon dogs; but then the same might be said of a large proportion of the carpets bought by people who do not suppose themselves deficient in taste.²¹

‘You are not to have, in any object of use or ornament, what would be a contradiction in fact’, proclaims the visitor to Mr. Gradgrind's school. ‘You don't walk upon flowers in fact; you cannot be allowed to walk upon flowers in carpets.’ Nor must ‘quadrupeds’ be represented going where they do not logically belong (p. 52).

A close reading of these articles shows how thoroughly Harriet Martineau was hypnotised by the workers' disciplined movements so that they merged into the general background of pistons and pulleys. Whereas the ‘melancholy-mad elephants’ in Coketown are machines, their originals at the Birmingham Glass Works were human beings. ‘All have glistening faces; and all swing their glowing cylinders as if they were desperate or demented’ (HW 27 March, 1852, 5, p. 34). ‘In that other room are three or four men, who seem to be seized with a frantic convulsion, at intervals of a minute or so,’ she noticed at Elkington's Electroplating Works (HW 25 October, 1851, 4, p. 115). She found it wonderful; but not, as Dickens thought, profoundly distressing.

The Fielding/Smith argument can be extended to include Ruskin, though as he was in Italy when Harriet Martineau published her articles, his reaction may be only coincidental. Nevertheless, a famous passage in ‘The Nature of Gothic’ (1853) uses similar images of unnatural action to describe men being turned by modern industry into mindless machines: ‘The men who chop up the rods sit at their work all day, their hands vibrating with a perpetual and exquisitely timed palsy, and the beads dropping beneath their vibration like hail’.²² Reality, in Harriet Martineau and Ruskin, is as horrific as Dickens's fiction about a dehumanised society controlled by political economists; but whereas Dickens and Ruskin recoil in moral disgust, Harriet Martineau jokes about getting drunk from the spiritous fumes of a lacquering process (HW 15 May, 1852, 5, p. 196). Where she does feel qualms, her doubts carry little conviction. She is moved only briefly by a shawl-weaver, who is, ‘to say the truth, a mere shuttle-throwing machine. The poor man does not even see and know what he is doing’ (HW 28 August, 1852, 5, p. 554). She never strikes a note of real anguish or indignation to match Ruskin's indictment of the bead-buying young ladies who engage in the ‘slave trade’.

She was also cool about accidents. Where these happened, she assumed they were caused by sheer negligence, as she suggests in The Hill and the Valley, when ‘a boy, who had in charge the management of some part of the new machinery, was careless, and put himself in the way of receiving a blow on the head, which killed him on the spot’ (p. 92). Her tone is similar when she remarks on the good safety record of the Bobbin-Mill at Ambleside; ‘but, elsewhere, it has been no uncommon thing for a careless workman to have all the fingers of one hand sawn off across the middle’ (HW 29 November, 1851, p. 227). Within four years from the date of this article she was involved with Dickens in a dispute about the fencing of factory shafts. She attacked Hard Times in her pamphlet, The Factory Controversy: A Warning against Meddling Legislation (1855); but it was Dickens who had the last word.²³

A steady opponent of government intervention in the relations between employers and workforce, she still pursued the workmen into their homes, and observed how they spent their leisure time. Ideally, the virtuous workman kept out of public houses and gin shops, where he might meet social and political undesirables. It is surely no accident that William Allen is drawn into trade union activities when he goes to the Spread Eagle public house to find a drunken neighbour. Similarly, Mrs. Brand's beer-shop in The Parish (1833) attracts all the local poachers, demagogues and layabouts, while Mrs. Brand herself slides swiftly down the moral scale into poverty and disrepute. Florence Nightingale was so moved by Mrs. Kay's addiction to hard spirits in Sowers Not Reapers, that she remembered it over twenty years later.²⁴ By this time reading-rooms had come into vogue, as Harriet Martineau noted on her tour of the Birmingham Glass Works:

Of late, reading-rooms have been opened, which appear to be an inestimable resource. There the workman may enter at any hour during the day, and find a good fire, a table covered with newspapers and other periodicals, and some comrades reading the news. There is a good and increasing library; and the men may take the books home, and are encouraged to do so, that they may spend the evenings with their families.

(HW 27 March, 1852, 5, p. 36)

She tried to impress on the working classes the value of domestic habits, good living conditions and steady savings. At times she adopts a brisk, bossy, school-mistressy tone, as in her report on Lucy's Bread-Mill when she advises Birmingham workmen to eat their loaves, not steaming hot, but one day old (for better digestion) and to finish the crusts, instead of throwing them in the gutter. At her most idealistic, she makes her exceptional workman, Paul, in The Hill and the Valley, dream of a time when ‘the labourer might refresh himself with his newspaper or his flute when the task of the day is over, while the rose and the jessamine bloom beside his cottage door’ (p. 81). The picture was, to say the least, idyllic and was greatly modified when she reviewed the Birmingham manufactories; but she continued to favour the more civilised and rational amusements that were likely to keep a man within his home circle. Dancing was acceptable when it was properly supervised, as in Briery Creek (1833) where Mrs. Sneyd, the reasonable, liberal-minded philosopher's wife, organises a respectable dance for the people, though opposed by Mrs. Hesselden, the Evangelical chaplain's wife:

There was no inducement to extravagance, and no room for imprudence, and no encouragement to idleness. There was no scope for these vices among the working-class of Briery Creek, and dancing was to them (what it would be in many another place, if permitted) an innocent enjoyment, a preventive of much solitary self-indulgence, and a sweetener of many tempers.

(p. 105)

Even under secular auspices, public amusements become self-controlled, decorous affairs, and there seems little to choose between Mrs. Hesselden's joyless morality and Mrs. Sneyd's supervised dancing. As the educated can find recreations for themselves, suggests Mr. Reid, a young barrister in the third of the Three Ages (1833), ‘it behoves the guardians of the public to be especially careful in furnishing innocent amusements to those who are less fitted to choose their pleasures well’ (p. 97). He refers to sports fields, theatres, museums and reading-rooms; but above all, Harriet Martineau was convinced that the poor wanted books. ‘The more I know of the workies,—of all sorts but the low & wretched class of rural labourers,’ she told Richard Monckton Milnes, ‘the more I find how keen is their appetite for books, & how sure they are to stick to the best, whenever they can get them.’ Despising religious tracts ‘written down’ to them, they made hungrily for the Bridgewater Treatises and Shakespeare.²⁵ Hers was very much the middle-class educator's outlook, shared by Charles Knight and Lord Brougham, who believed that working men would willingly devote part of their leisure time to improving literature. Nor were they altogether mistaken, judging by the development of libraries, and the novelists' portrayal of self-educated working men. ‘Mathematical problems are received with interest, and studied with absorbing attention by many a broad-spoken, common-looking, factory-hand,’ Mrs. Gaskell insisted in Mary Barton (p. 75). Alton Locke and Felix Holt are similar cases; but significantly, they are the creations of middle-class, intellectual novelists. Dickens, for one, reacted irritably against the educators' image of the bookish operative, when he introduced Stephen Blackpool as one who ‘took no place among those remarkable “Hands”, who, piecing together their broken intervals of leisure through many years, had mastered difficult sciences, and acquired a knowledge of most unlikely things’ (p. 103). Charles Kingsley's hero, Lancelot Smith, in Yeast (1851), also learns that agricultural labourers are too exhausted after a day's work to have much energy for reading. The gamekeeper, Tregarva, tells him that they prefer sleeping or drinking to practising ‘light and interesting handicrafts at home, as the German peasantry do.’²⁶ Dickens believed that the poor needed ‘play,’ by which he meant theatre-going, fairs, circuses, singing and dancing; and yet even Dickens was a keen patron of mechanics' and polytechnic institutions, ‘a zealous advocate for the diffusion of knowledge among all classes and conditions of men.’²⁷ He shared Harriet Martineau's admiration for the Lowell factories, which they both visited on their American tours: having seen the factory girls' pianos, and periodical, The Lowell Offering, both went away convinced that English mill-owners had much to learn from the American example.²⁸

Most of Harriet Martineau's stories contrast good and bad labourers, praising the industrious, cautious families, who eke out their wages by means of steady habits and hard work. Sometimes they need to be given some initial impetus by another character in the story, as in the third Illustration, Brooke and Brooke Farm (1832), where the girl narrator's middle-class parents take a protective interest in the Gray family. ‘We hoped to improve their condition, without either lending or giving them money,’ explains Lucy, the young, but teachable heroine; ‘and they were industrious and tolerably prudent, and we ourselves much interested for them’ (p. 38). This is a perfect summary of the relationship between rich and poor illustrated by Harriet Martineau's tales together. Those who are willing to learn, like the Grays, are assured of success. George Gray digs and hoes his garden after work, his eldest girl tends the cow, and the others knit, clean the house, or cut grass for seed. While they are on the way up, their neighbours, the Williams family, plummet into debt and a diet of tea and potatoes. There are numerous other examples: Cousin Marshall's family, contrasted with the Bells who go on claiming allowances for a dead son; Ashly, the independent labourer in The Parish, and his weak friends, the Goodmans; the prudent Joneses in The Hill and the Valley, and their feckless opposites, the Davisons, who like ‘a glass of spirits each at the end of the day, and a debauch at the fair as often as they can get there’ (p. 76). It was the simplest division into good and bad, a kind of economic pilgrim's progress, as Dickens implied in his account of the Coketown educators. ‘Body number three’ who wrote the ‘leaden little books,’ showing how ‘the good grown-up baby invariably got to the Savings-bank, and the bad grown-up baby invariably got transported’, may well be a reference to Harriet Martineau and her Illustrations (Hard Times, p. 90).

A resolute believer in the importance of self-help, over twenty years before Samuel Smiles published his famous version of the philosophy, Harriet Martineau peoples her tales with wise fathers who ‘put by’ and feckless fathers who don't. In The Hill and the Valley we learn that Mr. Wallace's great-grandfather gained interest on his savings, and spent the rest on his children's education, which benefited the different generations of his descendants. The History of the Peace is still more explicit on the lasting effects of self-help: ‘Many of the Birmingham Chartists might have been ten-pound householders, and in possession of all the substantial comforts of life, if they had been capable of the prudence and self-denial which had raised some of their employers from a position like their own’ (II, p. 412). ‘They reckoned their income by the week instead of by the year, and spent it within the week,’ she complained of factory operatives who ‘had nothing to reply when asked, in a time of prosperity, why they who worked so hard had not mansions and parks like people who did nothing’ (II, p. 265).

This philosophy could easily appear hard and callous, besides impracticable in real life. It made no allowance for differences of temperament and circumstances, or for the destitute, who had no opportunity to save. The Poor Law Commissioners and economists often blamed the indigent for not doing more to help themselves, and for mopping up state funds in benefits. By mid-century, the novelists had begun to formulate an emotional response to the harsher aspects of this ideology, often transferring its leading theories to unsympathetic characters like Bitzer and Bounderby. ‘What one person can do, another can do,’ declares Bitzer; and Dickens adds:

This, again, was among the fictions of Coketown. Any capitalist there, who had made sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, always professed to wonder why the sixty thousand nearest Hands didn't each make sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, and more or less reproached them every one for not accomplishing the little feat. What I did you can do. Why don't you go and do it?

(Hard Times, p. 152)

John Thornton in North and South (1855) propounds a modified version of the same philosophy, before he has been tamed and educated by Margaret Hale. ‘It is one of the great beauties of our system,’ he tells Mr. Hale

that a working-man may raise himself into the power and position of a master by his own exertions and behaviour; that, in fact, every one who rules himself to decency and sobriety of conduct, and attention to his duties, comes over to our ranks; it may not be always as a master, but as an overlooker, a cashier, a book-keeper, a clerk, one on the side of authority and order.

It follows that the suffering of the Milton workpeople appears to Mr. Thornton ‘but the natural punishment of dishonestly-enjoyed pleasure, at some former period of their lives.’²⁹ He himself succeeded by means of the self-denial and prudence that Harriet Martineau so much respected.

Like all missionaries, she was out to recruit converts; and the telling phrase ‘over to our ranks’ may be taken as the slogan on her banner. With the workmen's co-operation, she wanted to raise their condition, so that they would accept her own values, and conduct their lives in accordance with correct moral, as well as economic principles. ‘If we do but apply ourselves to nourish the taste for comfort in the poor,’ she argued, speaking on this occasion without a surrogate,

—to take for granted the most, instead of the least, that they ought to require, there is little fear but that, whenever circumstances allow, they will fall into our way of thinking, and prefer a home of comfort, earned by forethought and self-denial, to herding together in a state of reckless pauperism.

(Moral of Many Fables, p. 83)

‘Over to our ranks,’ ‘they will fall into our way of thinking’: the pattern of verbal repetition, expressing a shared, if sometimes only half-acknowledged wish among middle-class writers, is completed by Ruskin who, in Unto this Last, urges the rich to grant wisdom, virtue and salvation to the poor. Either the poor were ‘of a race essentially different from ours,’ or else, ‘by such care as we have ourselves received, we may make them continent and sober as ourselves—wise and dispassionate as we are—models arduous of imitation’ (Works, XVII, p. 106). Ruskin wanted to offer the poor ‘not greater wealth, but simpler pleasure’: a higher standard of living, spiritually more than materially. This seemed accessible only through the acquisition of responsible, mid-Victorian middle-class virtues.

When she wrote about the indigent, Harriet Martineau was, in effect, producing government propaganda. Lord Brougham sent her all the evidence collected by the Poor Law Commissioners, which she then processed into tales illustrating features of the Old Law, and the radical improvements she expected to see resulting from the New. ‘How long I shall go on, I do not know,’ she confessed excitedly, ‘but I might go on for 50 years to come. I have materials for a thousand & one tales before me.’³⁰ Disraeli and Kingsley were stimulated in the same way by reading government Blue Books, which they plundered for evidence of bad living and working conditions in certain industries. The Poor Law reports tended to range individuals in contrasting types: the diligent, clean poor, who worked hard to maintain themselves, and the slatternly paupers, who neglected their children and let their cottages fall into disrepair. ‘The wives of paupers are dirty, and nasty, and indolent; and the children generally neglected, and dirty, and vagrants, and immoral,’ reported Mr. Charles Hodges, Assistant-Overseer to the Parish of Windsor; while the independent labourer's wife and children are clean, and their cottage tidy. The Commissioners were particularly worried about an increased willingness to go into the workhouse. The poor no longer seemed ashamed of losing their independence. Indeed, complained Mr. Wall, vestry-clerk of St. Luke's, Middlesex, people liked the workhouse life so much more than they expected, ‘that they are ANXIOUS AND ENDEAVOUR TO REMAIN THERE.’³¹ Fuelled by such evidence, Harriet Martineau made her bad workhouses places of ‘Ease and Plenty,’ as she heads the crucial chapter of her Poor Law tale, The Parish (1833). This is the chapter in which a respectable poor family, the Goodmans, file unwillingly into the workhouse, only to find that they enjoy it. They appreciate the good meat dinners (a luxury beyond their own means); they fall in with old friends, and begin a congenial social life. There are no apparent drawbacks: so that Goodman is frankly dismayed when he is offered work, and has to come out. Meanwhile, his former neighbour, Ashly, resists temptation, and gradually earns himself, with his children's help, a reasonable competence. ‘If there is heroic virtue to be found on earth, it is in the dwellings of the independent poor,’ says Dr. Warrener, a reforming clergyman in the story (p. 122). Ashly can be compared with William Farren in Shirley, who also saves himself from total indigence. Farren's wife and Ashly's daughter both set up ‘a bit of a shop,’ proving that even the poorest can always pull themselves up, with determination to succeed. Ashly is certainly Harriet Martineau's ideal heroic labourer, battling manfully against an unfair system which has supported the idle at the expense of the deserving. And there were strong temptations to give in. The governor of a Reading workhouse assured the Commissioners that his paupers received ‘a bellyful’ of food three times a day, and that the way of life agreed with them ‘wonderfully well,’ unless they were overwhelmed by the unaccustomed luxury.

Dickens, of course, disagreed. One passage in Oliver Twist (1838) looks very like a direct attack on Harriet Martineau's tale of the Goodmans, though the Poor Law controversy was familiar to Dickens through many other current sources. Still, the passage occurs at a point in the novel equivalent to 1833-4, when ‘the board’ proposes changes in the Poor Law, and Harriet Martineau was writing The Parish. Dickens's ‘board’ discovers that the poor like the workhouse: ‘It was a regular place of public entertainment for the poorer classes; a tavern where there was nothing to pay; a public breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper all the year round; a brick and mortar elysium, where it was all play and no work’.³²

The new regime was very different, as Harriet Martineau shows in The Hamlets (1833), her second story in the Poor Law series. ‘I never wrote any thing with more glee than “The Hamlets”,—the number in which the proposed reform is exemplified,’ she remembered in her Autobiography (I, p. 222); not, presumably, because she enjoyed describing bread-and-water meals and workhouse tasks, but because her reforming instincts were warmed by the picture of efficient management. At the end of her story the workhouse is closed, emptied of bad grown-up babies who have learnt their lesson, and discovered the worth of mutual assistance in hard times. Two further tales deal with jobbery and other problems of workhouse government, sifting out the corrupt and lazy from the heroic poor, who always find some way of maintaining their independence. The most extreme case, though, is Granny Stott's in Gentle and Simple (1846), the last Game Law tale. When her grandson is imprisoned for poaching offences, she burns down her own cottage and takes her remaining grandchildren to live in the lane, ‘like the wild animals, with no old things for the workhouse people to come and seize, for the neighbours to laugh at.’ (p. 236) She might have been as sane as anyone, Farmer Onslow tells his wife, ‘but for such cruel provocation as would put most of us off our balance’:

‘The pride and study of her life have been to be respectable, thrifty and tidy; and her heart has been breaking this long while as she saw her place and family sinking into wretchedness and ruin. When everything was gone to shivers and tatters, she shut her door, and let nobody see what was within. And then, the prospect of the officers coming to make a seizure in the eyes of all the neighbours was too much for her, and she took care to burn up every thing.

(p. 239)

Harriet Martineau sees Granny Scott primarily as a victim of the Game Laws, which she assailed vigorously during the 1840s; but the parallel with Dickens's Betty Higden in Our Mutual Friend (1865) is worth considering. ‘You pray that your Granny may have strength enough left her at the last,’ Mrs. Higden tells her great-grandson,

(she's strong for an old one, Johnny), to get up from her bed and run and hide herself, and swown to death in a hole, sooner than fall into the hands of those Cruel Jacks we read of, that dodge and drive, and worry and weary, and scorn and shame, the decent poor.³³

Both old women are upheld by the proud knowledge that they have always paid their way in life, and can hide, like animals, if all fails at the end. Both have the emotional backing of their creators, though Harriet Martineau still felt the workhouse offered food and shelter of a reasonable standard.

As if to prove it, she slept in one herself in 1851: ‘very comfortable and agreeable I found it,’ she said afterwards (Autobiography, II, p. 380). The following year she toured Ireland, and visited several more workhouses, which she reviewed in Household Words, determined to make the best of what she saw. ‘How healthy they look!’ she exclaimed of the children; ‘Their hair, how glossy; their eyes, how clear and bright!’ Children, she felt, could not look ‘more clean and wholesome,’ though she was sorry that some had lost an eye, from an epidemic of ophthalmia. She pitied those who were still unwell, when she visited the workhouse hospital, and was moved momentarily by the bleakness of the dining arrangements: the uniform meal, ‘the soup poured out from the boiler like wash, and ladled into hundreds of tin pans, all alike’. But reminding herself that the paupers would be much worse off outside she insisted that ‘Sentiment on the subject would be quite misplaced’ (HW 6 November, 1852, p. 172).

This is typical of her refusal to judge by the heart instead of the head. Having given her allegiance to the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, and the parallel Irish measure of 1838, she meant to be consistent. This determination to avoid ‘sentiment’ explains much of her seeming hardness, but gives her narratives a redeeming detachment and simplicity. She avoids the gush of ‘Charlotte Elizabeth’ (Mrs. Tonna) in Helen Fleetwood (1841), which traces a poor family's physical and emotional suffering under the factory system; the emotional perplexity of Mrs. Gaskell in Mary Barton, and the occasional mawkishness of Dickens in his early novels, especially Oliver Twist. In fact, she wrote with remarkably sober realism for an inexperienced author experimenting with a new subject, and her tales offer a marked contrast with the more passionate pages of her History. Discussing the Poor Laws, for example, she warned that ‘industry, probity, purity, prudence—all heart and spirit—the whole soul of goodness—were melting down into depravity and social ruin, like snow under the foul internal fires which precede the earthquake’ (II, p. 83); while her fiction calmly traces a girl beginning farm-work, children out shrimping on the seashore, unemployed youths looking for jobs, and a young, religious couple losing their sick baby, and wondering whether they should move to South America. Her tales are valuable for the way they treat the everyday concerns of ordinary people with keen interest. She shows us how they live: what they eat, how they manage their money, the pressures of hardship on family relationships, the interaction between domestic and industrial problems. Her tales reflect the gradual breakdown of an old hierarchical order into a transitional phase of rapid industrial development, intense political excitement, and social fragmentation. Even in the country, the familiar feudal customs were disappearing. Farmer Goldby in The Parish is ready to end the old arrangement of farmers and labourers living contentedly in one household, now that men prefer to take their chance between the workhouse overseer and the local squire. In Brooke and Brooke Farm, Lucy notices that more village families are seeking parish relief and protesting about the enclosure of the common. Their protests may be misdirected, but Harriet Martineau at least treats them seriously.

Professor R. K. Webb has calculated that the Illustrations averaged a monthly sale of about ten thousand copies; or, as her publisher saw it, they reached roughly 144,000 readers.³⁴ Many of these were educated members of the middle classes, including Mary Russell Mitford, Henry Crabb Robinson, Fanny Kemble, John Stuart Mill, and S. T. Coleridge (‘the last person whom I should have suspected,’ (Martineau admitted in her Autobiography, I, p. 397); but there is no evidence that her Illustrations were read by Dickens, or any other major novelists. Humphry House has suggested that Dickens probably read little or nothing of the economists themselves;³⁵ but then there was no real need to. Their theories soon became public property, diffused as much by hearsay and angry reactions in the periodicals, as by the works of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and the Mills. On the other hand Dickens, as editor of Household Words, certainly read her industrial articles, having himself urged her to write for his magazine. Probably Mrs. Gaskell, who had read Adam Smith, and proposed reading him with her eldest daughter, Marianne, also knew Harriet Martineau's articles, since her own North and South was being serialised in Household Words, and the two women were interested in one another's work, as well as Charlotte Brontë's.³⁶ In any case, Harriet Martineau was, by the 1850s, something of a legendary figure, the butt of many jokes, the subject of literary allusions. Most informed people knew what she had said, without necessarily reading it for themselves. Kingsley's Tregarva, in Yeast, and Crossthwaite in Alton Locke, both refer to her casually as a benevolent, but misguided moralist with some odd ideas.³⁷ Arguing from the available evidence, it seems reasonable to suggest that Dickens voiced the strongest and most emotional opposition to all that Harriet Martineau represented, while Charlotte Brontë, Mrs. Gaskell and Charles Kingsley returned more confused, conflicting responses to the current economic controversies, sympathising with the oppressed poor, but fearing any radical alteration to the balance of social or class influence.

Yet closely compared, idea for idea, the respective politicoeconomic positions of Harriet Martineau and the novelists are similar in most essential aspects: perhaps because political economy, in the first half of the nineteenth century, was very much a moral code taught by the educated to the ignorant, on whose co-operation the middle classes felt their own wellbeing depended. Indeed, political economy was dislodging even religion from its prominent place in the ideal curriculum, or else merging with it in the works of theologians such as Richard Whately (Introductory Lectures on Political Economy, 1831) and Thomas Chalmers (On Political Economy in connexion with the Moral State and Moral Prospects of Society, 1832). Even Hannah More took her principles from a combination of Christianity and applied economics, in stories like The Lancashire Collier Girl (in Cheap Repository Traits, 1795-8) and Betty Brown, the St. Giles's Orange Girl (in Stories for the Middle Ranks of Society, 1818). Harriet Martineau largely advocated social virtues that were the staple matter of the classical economists, and were to become those of mid-Victorian tract-writers and novelists: prudence, providence, self-help and rationality. However much Dickens admired Cheeryble-style beneficence, he could not condone living beyond one's means, or idling through a life of selfish dissipation. He was a notorious commender of clever housewives who cook up magnificent pies out of nothing, and keep their tiny kitchens bright and clean. Moreover, squalid conditions increased the dangers of disease. There was every incentive to teach the poor hygienic habits, to encourage them to read instead of drink, and to avoid militant trade union activity.

It made sense, too, to emphasise the interdependence of different classes, the lesson taught by George Eliot, through Felix Holt, in his ‘Address to Working Men’ (1868). ‘The nature of things in this world has been determined for us beforehand,’ Felix Holt declares, ‘and in such a way that no ship can be expected to sail well on a difficult voyage, and reach the right port, unless it is well manned.’ The conditions of the voyage will not accommodate themselves to ‘drunken, mutinous sailors.‘³⁸ The burden of this message is like Harriet Martineau's: that all members of society must work together towards a productive, harmonious state. Other writers suggested specific remedies for the ills of society. Mrs. Gaskell wanted increased communication between masters and men; Carlyle recommended education, emigration and work; Kingsley saw Christ as the true People's Friend; Disraeli looked more to an enlightened aristocracy; Dickens to an infusion of feeling into the harsh laws of political economy. But Harriet Martineau came to realise that the answer must be many-sided and elusive. She too had begun by preaching education and, in Homes Abroad (1832), emigration. Mutual understanding was also part of her proposed solution and so, even, was human feeling, though the traditional view of political economy seemed to deny it. Bad laws, like the Corn and Game Laws, had to be repealed; good ones, like the New Poor Law, had to be properly implemented. And yet, as she admitted in 1850, the poor were still suffering, and could not all achieve independence:

The tremendous Labour Question remains absolutely untouched—the question whether the toil of a life is not to provide a sufficiency of bread. No thoughtful man can for a moment suppose that this question can be put aside. No man with a head and a heart can suppose that any considerable class of a nation will submit for ever to toil incessantly for bare necessaries—without comfort, ease, or luxury, now—without prospect for their children, and without a hope for their own old age. A social idea or system which compels such a state of things as this must be, in so far, worn out. In ours, it is clear that some renovation is wanted, and must be found.

(History, II, p. 715)

This is an honest admission of society's failure, by then, to do anything very positive for the poor; and Harriet Martineau deserves fuller recognition for being the first influential nineteenth-century writer to express these basic anxieties through the conversation and thoughts of fictitious labourers and artisans. Several short tales she contributed to the Leader in 1850-1 emphatically minimise the poor man's responsibility for his own misfortunes, as in the story of George Banks, a farm labourer. ‘We want no prompting from him to feel what wrong must exist somewhere when a glorious integrity, a dignified virtue like his, has been allied with sinking fortunes through life, and has no prospect of repose but in the grave,’ she ends Part I of George's story.³⁹ In the 1860s she softened further, and urged readers of Once a Week to send money and clothing to distressed Lancashire mill families: now a legitimate object of charity because of the cotton famine caused by the American Civil War. She began to say more about the employers' duties towards their workers. ‘As the capitalist profits most in prosperous times,’ she argued, ‘he cannot reasonably or fairly leave the heaviest weight of adversity to be borne by his partners, the labourers.’⁴⁰ But the bulk of her fiction appeared at a time of revolution scares, and when she herself was still optimistic about clear-cut solutions. With all her sympathy for the decent poor, and imaginative portrayal of their sufferings, with her unusual awareness of the comic potential in certain working-class characters, she fell short of the full delineation of their lives that would also make consistently good fiction. She stood between the professional educators, Knight and Brougham, and the novelists of the 1840s, offering a picture of the ideal workman who improves himself by their recommended methods. As she grew older she hoped, characteristically, that social ‘renovation’ (a cautious, neutral term) would come gradually, without some tumultuous upheaval. Radical though she was, Harriet Martineau, like the novelists who followed her, believed that England, at least, should try to find a peaceful way out. ‘We have now the best heads and hearts occupied about this great question of the Rights of Labour, with impressive warnings presented to us from abroad, that it cannot be neglected under a lighter penalty than ruin to all,’ she wrote in 1850. She had lived through a similar crisis in 1832. ‘Is it possible,’ she wondered, ‘that the solution should not be found?’ (History, II, p. 716).

Notes

1. HM to Milnes, 22 June, 1842, TCC.

2. HM to Crabb Robinson, 20 July, 1843, DWL.

3. Charles Knight, Passages of a Working Life during half a Century, 3 vols (1864), II, pp. 243-4.

4. Society in America, 3 vols (1837), II, p. 355.

5. Preface to Illustrations of Political Economy (1832), p. xiii.

6. Beatrice Webb, My Apprenticeship (1926), p. 399; cf. Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Tales in Political Economy (1874). Her Preface apologises to HM for ‘plagiarism’ of the original idea of ‘hiding the powder, Political Economy, in the raspberry jam of a story’.

7. The Moral of Many Fables (1834), p. 2.

8. R. K. Webb, Harriet Martineau, p. 123.

9. The Works of John Ruskin, 39 vols ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, (1905), XVII, p. 28.

10. ‘Domestic Service’, London and Westminster Review 7 and 29 (August, 1838), pp. 405-32.

11. The Turn Out; or, Patience the Best Policy (Wellington, Salop, 1829), p. 37.

12. The Rioters; or, a Tale of Bad Times (Wellington, Salop, 1827), pp. 15-16.

13. Spectator, 7 July, 1832, p. 639.

14. Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854), ed. David Craig (Penguin, 1969), p. 170.

15. Shirley, p. 370.

16. The tendency of strikes and sticks to produce low wages, and of union between masters and men to ensure good wages (Durham, 1834), p. 7.

17. Briery Creek (1833), p. 81.

18. Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), ed. Malcolm Andrews (Penguin, 1972), p. 417.

19. ‘Rainbow Making,’ HW 4 (14 February, 1852), pp. 485-90.

20. K. J. Fielding and Anne Smith, ‘Hard Times and the Factory Controversy: Dickens vs. Harriet Martineau,’ in Dickens Centennial Essays, ed. Ada Nisbet and Blake Nevius (California, 1971), pp. 22-45.

21. ‘Kendal Weavers and Weaving,’ HW 4 (15 November, 1851), pp. 138-42.

22. Ruskin, Works, X, p. 197.

23. In ‘Our Wicked Mis-statements’ (with Henry Morley), HW 13 (19 January, 1856), pp. 13-19. See Fielding and Smith, op. cit. for details of this controversy.

24. Florence Nightingale to HM, 4 December, 1858, Add. MS. 45788, F.5, British Library.

25. HM to Milnes, 12 June, [1844?], TCC. She did recognise, however, that there were ‘endless varieties of cultivation & there is a long gradation of ranks & orders among the working-classes,’ HM to Reeve, 9 March, 1859, RM.

26. Charles Kingsley, Yeast, a Problem (1851), Everyman edn., p. 172.

27. The Speeches of Charles Dickens, ed. K. J. Fielding (Oxford, 1960) p. 153.

28. Charles Dickens, American Notes (1842), Ch. 4; HM, Introduction to Mind Amongst the Spindles: The Lowell Offering: A Miscellany Wholly Composed by the Factory Girls of an American City (1844).

29. Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (1855), intro. Martin Dodsworth (Penguin, 1970), pp. 125-6.

30. HM to William Tait, 28 December, 1832, Ogden MS. 101, UCL.

31. Extracts from the Information Received by His Majesty's Commissioners, as to the Administration and Operation of the Poor-Laws (1833), pp. 203-4; p. 227.

32. Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (1838), intro. Angus Wilson (Penguin, 1971), p. 55.

33. Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (1865), ed. Stephen Gill (Penguin, 1971), p. 248.

34. Harriet Martineau, p. 113.

35. Humphry House, The Dickens World (Oxford, 1941), pp. 73-4.

36. Mrs. Gaskell to Marianne Gaskell, [7 April, 1851], Gaskell Letters, p. 148.

37. Yeast, p. 67; Alton Locke, p. 112.

38. Essays, ed. Pinney, p. 422.

39. ‘The Farm-Labourer.—The Father,’ Leader, 15 February, 1851, p. 156.

40. ‘Help for the “Workies”’ Once a Week 7 (4 October, 1862), p. 399.

Abbreviations

Blackwood's: Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine.

Bodleian: Bodleian Library, Oxford.

Brontë Letters: The Brontës, Their Lives, Friendships and Correspondence, ed. Thomas J. Wise and J. A. Symington, 4 vols., 1932.

DWL: Dr. Williams's Library, London.

ER: Edinburgh Review.

Fraser's: Fraser's Magazine.

Gaskell Letters: The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, ed. J. A. V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard, Manchester, 1966.

GE Letters: The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight, 9 vols., London and New Haven, 1954-78.

Hertford: Hertford County Record Office.

History: Harriet Martineau, The History of England during the Thirty Years' Peace 1816-1846, 2 vols., 1849-50.

HW: Household Words.

MR: Monthly Repository.

QR: Quarterly Review.

RM: Letters in the collection of Mr. Richard Martineau of Walsham-le-Willows, Suffolk.

TCC: Houghton Papers, Trinity College Library, Cambridge.

UBL: Harriet Martineau Papers, University of Birmingham Library.

UCL: University College, London.

WR: Westminster Review.

Works Cited

Place of publication is London and references are to the 1983 Virago edition of the Autobiography (ed. Gaby Weiner), unless otherwise stated.

I Works by Harriet Martineau

The Factory Controversy: A Warning Against Meddling Legislation, Manchester, 1855.

Forest and Game Law Tales, 3 vols, 1845-6.

Volume I: 1845

Merdhin

The Manor and the Eyrie

The Staunch and Their Work

Old Landmarks and Old Laws

Volume II: 1845

The Bishop's Flock and the Bishop's Herd

Heathendom in Christendom

Four Years at Maude-Chapel Farm

Volume III: 1846

Gentle and Simple

Harriet Martineau's Autobiography, with Memorials by Maria Weston Chapman, 3 vols, 1877; Virago reprint, Autobiography only, ed. Gaby Weiner, 1983.

The History of England during the Thirty Years' Peace 1816-1846. 2 vols, 1849-50.

Illustrations of Political Economy, 9 vols, 1832-4.

Volume I: 1832

Life in the Wilds

The Hill and the Valley

Brooke and Brooke Farm

Volume II: 1832

Demerara

Ella of Garveloch

Weal and Woe in Garveloch

Volume III: 1832

A Manchester Strike

Cousin Marshall

Ireland

Volume IV: 1832-33

Homes Abroad

For Each and For all

French Wines and Politics

Volume V: 1833

The Charmed Sea

Berkeley the Banker I

Berkeley the Banker II

Volume VI: 1833

Messrs. Vanderput and Snoek

The Loom and the Lugger I

The Loom and the Lugger II

Volume VII: 1833

Sowers Not Reapers

Cinnamon and Pearls

A Tale of the Tyne

Volume VIII: 1833

Briery Creek

The Three Ages

Volume IX: 1834

The Farrers of Budge Row

The Moral of Many Fables

Illustrations of Taxation, 5 parts, 1834.

1. The Park and the Paddock

2. The Tenth Haycock

3. The Jerseymen Meeting

4. The Jerseymen Parting

5. The Scholars of Arneside

The Rioters; or, a Tale of Bad Times, Wellington, Salop, 1827.

Society in America, 3 vols, 1837.

The Turn-Out; or Patience the Best Policy, Wellington, Salop. 1829.

Select Bibliography of Works by Other Authors

Brontë, Charlotte, Shirley, 1849.

Chalmers, Thomas, On Political Economy in connexion with the Moral State and the Moral Prospects of Society, 1832.

Fielding, K. J., The Speeches of Charles Dickens, Oxford, 1960.

Gaskell, Elizabeth, Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life, 1848.

———. North and South, 1855.

House, Humphry, The Dickens World, Oxford, 1941.

Kingsley, Charles, Yeast, A Problem, 1851.

Knight, Charles, Passages of a Working Life during Half a Century, 3 vols, 1864.

Kovacević, Ivanka, Fact into Fiction: English Literature and the Industrial Scene 1750-1850, Leicester and Belgrade, 1975.

More, Hannah, Cheap Repository Tracts, 1795-98.

———. Stories for the Middle Ranks of Society, and Tales for the Common People, 1818.

Nisbet, Ada, and Blake Nevius, eds., Dickens Centennial Essays, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1971.

Pinney, Thomas, ed., Essays of George Eliot, New York, 1963.

Ruskin, John, Unto This Last, 1862.

Webb, Beatrice, My Apprenticeship, 1926.

Webb, R. K., Harriet Martineau: A Radical Victorian, 1960.

Whately, Richard, Introductory Lectures on Political Economy, 1831.