Harriet Martineau's Anti-Romanticism

Abstract

On May 23, 1850, exactly a month after death of William there a violent spring thunderstorm over Thirlmere and Helvellyn. Watching spectacle from Ambleside, a few miles away, Harriet Martineau wrote to her friend, Fanny Wedgwood, describing storm, and continuing: Cannot you fancy what it is to think of Wordsworth as knowing nothing of these things,--lying under sod,--vacating his place among these of nature?--It time, we all felt and saw: but feeling remains as fresh as it that sunny afternoon, when news spread that he gone, and every body on road looked grave, and blinds were down in his cottage ... (Letters to Fanny Wedgwood, 105). At this time, Harriet Martineau within a few days of her forty-eighth birthday--she born on June 12, 1802--and a well-established, if controversial, writer. She linked to Wordsworths and their circle by many ties of friendship, as well being a neighbour. William Wordsworth advised her on design of her garden at her Ambleside house, The Knoll. Her friend Fanny daughter of Sir James Mackintosh; Fanny had married Hensleigh Wedgwood in 1831. Like so many of her contemporaries, Martineau had to deal with death of Wordsworth at an emotional as well as an intellectual level. Wordsworth, she wrote to Elizabeth Barrett in 1845, was an educator of infinite value to me (Selected Letters, 110). She recognises that his death marks an epoch (It time), but she also feels it as a personal loss. Wordsworth had spoken for shows of nature as no-one else ever would. This remark to Fanny Wedgwood shows, then, how much there still in Martineau--how much of her writerly DNA, so to speak, shared with Wordsworth and his generation--along with a slight sense of relief that epoch now over. Yet, as Felicity James has suggested, few scholars have paid attention specifically to Martineau's position as a post-Romantic. (1) Shelagh Hunter, Barbara Todd, Elisabeth Arbuckle, Caroline Roberts and others have made argument for Martineau's significance as more than just a peddler of outdated 19th century ideas. However, Martineau is still often considered as a mere mouthpiece of conventional Victorian thought, when in fact she anything but conventional; or, even worse, as a complacently moralistic writer who handed down lessons in self-reliance to working class. This narrow view of Martineau overemphasizes and misreads Illustrations of Political Economy, which were produced over a short period of her career (1831 to 1834), and ignores fact that in later work (for instance, volume 3 of Society in America) Martineau modified her economic views, adopting some aspects of Owenite theory, and even suggesting that egalitarianism should be goal of society in America, and even in England, where however it would take longer (Roberts, 36, citing Society in America, 3:39, 3:50). She understood what achievements of American democracy and federalist doctrine would mean for Britain's painfully slow advance towards democracy. Her strong opposition to slavery- turned her into a committed advocate of a woman's right to engage in public political debate--an issue that dividing abolitionist groups on both sides of Atlantic. In this paper, my discussion will focus not on Martineau's personal connections with Wordsworths, but rather on Romanticism and polity. theme of 2009 Wordsworth Summer Conference at which this paper presented. Martineau's always an enquiring, questioning mind. She directed a lot of her intellectual effort into understanding and expounding philosophies that repudiated subjective, striving to reduce significance of individual subject, and to absorb individual into a larger totality--into what has been called the human collective (Lowy and Sayre, 25). But it is worth asking whether this apparently anti-Romantic purpose is actually a repudiation of Romanticism. …