George Eliots "Trump": Recent Work on Harriet Martineau

Abstract

The following books are under consideration in this review: Writings on Slavery and the American Civil War: Harriet Martineau, edited by Deborah Anna Logan; pp. xxiv + 359. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002, $49.00. The Hour and the Woman: Harriet Martineau's "Somewhat Remarkable" Life, by Deborah Anna Logan; pp. x + 332. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002, $42.00. Harriet Martineau: Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives, edited by Michael R. Hill and Susan Hoecker-Drysdale; pp. xvii + 233. London and New York: Routledge, 2001, £60.00, $85.00, £16.99 paper, $26.95 paper. The Woman and the Hour: Harriet Martineau and Victorian Ideologies, by Caroline Roberts; pp. ix + 253. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2002, Can $53.00, $53.00. In the last twenty-five years or so Harriet Martineau has emerged from the margins of Victorian writing to become the fertile subject of conferences, anthologies, and critical biography, her books on political economy, America, Eastern travel, and life in the sickroom (among many other topics) now nicely ensconced in the canon of Victorian prose. She is assigned in classes on women's writing, imperialism, and transatlantic studies, and her books on the Empire, history, military reform, and the Middle East can be had in expensive boxed sets. Dedicated industry, resolute independence, a democratic willingness to popularize for the general reading public abstract political and philosophical views—these are the hallmarks of Martineau's career, and she has herself become an industry, something she would probably [End Page 87] endorse, were she in a position to do so, since it signals much hard work undertaken by scholars who come at her remarkable, protean talents from different critical and theoretical positions. But however industrious the scholar and however sharp the critical approach, the very multiplicity of marks of identity we associate with Martineau—deafness, intellectual ambition, abolitionism, political popularizing, ambiguous feminism, intrepid travels, illness, mesmerism, domestic excellence, to name some—seem to impede production of that one fine book that will tackle everything in her life and career, that will address all that is to be discovered in her extraordinarily prolific corpus. With different degrees of success the four books under review here take as their respective foci Martineau as abolitionist, as representative of the Victorian "spirit of the age," as pioneer sociologist, and as subversive disseminator of Victorian ideologies. However, none deals quite fully enough with that aspect of her work for which the definitive reading of Martineau would need to account: she was first, last, and always a writer, regardless of what she was writing about, and this is something George Eliot knew when she declared her to be a "trump—the only English woman that possesses thoroughly the art of writing" (Letters 4). Deborah Anna Logan's meticulous scholarship, concise editing and annotation, and helpful introductions to the selections in Writings on Slavery and the American Civil War provide valuable background material for anyone interested in Martineau's abolitionism, her travel to America, and her ability to adapt her style to a variety of genres. Arranged chronologically under three different rubrics—"The American Travel Writings," "Newspapers and Periodicals," and "Journal Articles"—the selections emphasize Martineau's admirable resolution to match her principles with her practice, showing her refusal, for instance, to be cowed by threats of personal harm from anti-abolitionists if she set foot in America. Logan makes good use of her familiarity with reviews of Martineau's writing to show how often a hostile review actually discloses the genius of Martineau's capacious and popularizing imagination. Logan astutely notes that the London Times dismissal of Society in America (1837) as "fragmentary" actually highlights Martineau's "application of the scientific methodology employed by biologists, astronomers, and geologists—studying individual increments and their interrelationships as a precursor to comprehending the whole—to her study of society" (8). Perhaps the most illuminating of the three sections in this compilation of American writings is...