Harriet Martineau

What a visitation! Miss Martineau is the more formidable friend, however—Mrs. Jameson will be contented with a little confidence, you see, and ask no questions—but I doubt if you arrange matters so easily with the newcomer. Because no great delicacy can be kept alive with all that conceit—and such conceit! A lady told me a few weeks ago that she had seen a letter in which Miss M. gave as her reason for not undertaking then, during the London season, this very journey which empty London is to benefit from now, "that at such a time she should be mobbed to death": whereupon the lady went on to comment, "Miss M. little knows what London is, and how many nearly as notable objects may be found to divert its truculence from herself"—Tom Thumb, and Ibrahim Pacha, to wit.
- Robert Browning to Elizabeth Barrett Barrett (24 August 1846), quoted in The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett 1845–1846, Vol. II (1899), pp. 459-460

Of all these ornamented human creatures the one I take most delight in is Harriet Martineau. The horrid picture in Fraser with the cat looking over its shoulder was not a bit like; and the Artist deserved to have been hanged and quartered for so vile a calumny. Neither does the idea generally formed of the woman merely from her reputation as a Political Economist do her more justice than that picture! They may call her what they please, but it is plain to me and to everybody of common sense (as my Uncle Robert said) that she is distinctly good-looking, warm-hearted even to a pitch of romance, witty as well as wise, very entertaining and entertainable in spite of the deadening and killing appendage of an ear-trumpet, and finally, as "our Mother" used to finish off a good character, "very fond of ME."
- Jane Welsh Carlyle to Mrs. D. Aitken (6 March 1837), quoted in Early Letters of Jane Welsh Carlyle together with a few of later years and some of Thomas Carlyle all hitherto unpublished, ed. David G. Ritchie (1889), pp. 286-287

Miss Martineau had been extremely kind to me... Well, she is the sort of woman that would have made a good matron in an hospital.
- Thomas Carlyle, quoted in David Alec Wilson, Carlyle to Threescore-and-Ten (1853—1865) (1931), p. 289

After all, she is a trump—the only Englishwoman that possesses thoroughly the art of writing.
- George Eliot to Sara Hennell (2 June 1852), quoted in George Eliot's Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals, Vol. I, ed. J. W. Cross (1885), p. 282

I hope you have contradicted the story of my writing to Miss Martineau. I cannot understand how it originated except in some communication of yours to Miss M. which you intended to be serviceable to me. You must have made this communication in a moment of hallucination as to Miss M's character. Amongst her good qualities we certainly cannot reckon zeal for other people's reputation. She is sure to caricature any information for the amusement of the next person to whom she turns her ear-trumpet.
- George Eliot to John Chapman (30 October 1854), quoted in The George Eliot Letters: 1852–1858, ed. Gordon Sherman Haigh (1954), p. 180

He [Hans Christian Andersen] met a deaf lady with a long ear-trumpet at a garden party; she wrote "political things," and after talking to her he had to lie down the whole afternoon; it was the redoubtable Miss Martineau.
- Rumer Godden, Hans Christian Andersen (1955), p. 176

I think I neglected to record that I saw Miss Martineau, a few weeks since. She is a large, robust (one might almost say bouncing) elderly woman, very coarse of aspect, and plainly dressed; but withal, so kind, cheerful, and intelligent a face, that she is pleasanter to look at than most beauties. Her hair is of a decided gray; and she does not shrink from calling herself an old woman. She is the most continual talker I ever heard; it is really like the babbling of a brook; and very lively and sensible too;—and all the while she talks, she moves the bowl of her ear-trumpet from one auditor to another, so that it becomes quite an organ of intelligence and sympathy between her and yourself. The ear-trumpet seems like a sensitive part of her, like the feelers of some insects. If you have any little remark to make, you drop it in; and she helps you to make remarks by this delicate little appeal of the trumpet, as she slightly directs it towards you; and if you have nothing to say, the appeal is not strong enough to embarrass you. All her talk was about herself and her affairs; but it did not seem like egotism, because it was so cheerful and free from morbidness. And this woman is an Atheist, and thinks, I believe, that the principle of life will become extinct, when her great, fat, well-to-do body is laid in the grave. I will not think so, were it only for her sake;—only a few weeds to spring out of her fat mortality, instead of her intellect and sympathies flowering and fruiting forever!
- Nathaniel Hawthorne, journal entry (26 August 1854), quoted in Nathaniel Hawthorne, The English Notebooks, ed. Randall Stewart (1941), p. 77

M——, having called to see him, and affectionately asking what sort of night he had passed, Sydney Smith replied, "Oh, horrid, horrid, my dear fellow! I dreamt I was chained to a rock, and being talked to death by Harriet Martineau and Macaulay."
- Frances Anne Kemble, Records of Later Life, Vol. I (1882), p. 107

Only a little over a quarter of a century ago women were allowed to enter very few remunerative occupations. In 1840, when Harriet Martineau visited this country to study its institutions, that she might be able to forecast the type of civilization to be evolved from them, she especially investigated the position of women in the young republic. She was surprised to find the occupying a very subordinate position in a country calling itself free, and to find they had entered only seven paying occupations. They were allowed to teach, to be seamstresses, which included tailoring, dress-making, and millinery; they could keep boarding-houses, enter domestic service, become operatives in factories, compositors in printing offices, and folders and stitchers in book binderies.
- Mary Livermore, “Industrial Gains of Women during the Last Half-Century” (1888)

Women's position has variously been likened to that of the slaves, oppressed ethnic or racial minorities, or economically deprived groups. But these comparisons quickly prove inadequate. The slave comparison obviously was a rhetorical device rather than a factual statement even at the time when Harriet Martineau first made it.
- Gerda Lerner, The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History (1979)

We talked over many things and persons. She is a heroine, or to speak more truly her fine sense and her lofty principles, with the sincerest religion, give her a fortitude that is noble to the best height of heroism.
- Edward Nevil Macready, diary entry (28 March 1841), quoted in Macready's Reminiscences, and Selections from His Diaries and Letters, Vol. II, ed. Frederick Pollock (1875), p. 173

Lord Brougham remarked that the works of Harriet Martineau upon Political Economy were not excelled by those of any political writer of the present time. The first few chapters of her "Society in America," her views of a Republic, and of government generally, furnish evidence of woman's capacity to embrace subjects of universal interest.
- Lucretia Mott, "Why Should Not Woman Seek to Be a Reformer?" (1854)

When Harriet Martineau, a reformer of the 1830s, wrote Society in America, one reviewer suggested it be kept away from women: "Such reading will unsettle them for their true station and pursuits, and they will throw the world back again into confusion."
- Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States

Harriet Martineau

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