The Collected Letters of Harriet Martineau

"I thought her the smallest creature I had ever seen (except at a fair) and her eyes blazed, as it seemed to me. She glanced quickly round; and my trumpet pointing me out, she held out her hand frankly and pleasantly. (...) When she was seated by me on the sofa, she cast up at me such a look, -so loving, so appealing- that, in connextion with her deep mourning dress, and the knowledge that she was the sole survivor of her family, I could with the utmost difficulty return her smile, or keep my composure. I should have been heartily glad to cry."

That's the way in which Harriet Martineau remembers in her Autobiography (1877) her first encounter with Charlotte Brontë in 1849. Later a literary friendship was developed in letters and some meetings until 1853 when Harriet Martineau wrote her (in)famous review of "Villette". The subsequent bitter quarrel ended their friendship.

Pickering & Chatto Publishers are publishing the complete works of Harriet Martineau. This year is scheduled (although in some sources it is said 2007) to appear "The Collected Letters of Harriet Martineau" in an impressive 5-volume edition coordinated by Deborah Logan and Valerie Sanders.

Throughout her fifty-year career, Martineau's prolific literary productivity was exceeded by her epistolary exchanges with a range of correspondents who comprised a virtual Who's Who of nineteenth-century England, America and Europe. The Collected Letters of Harriet Martineau, by assembling material almost exclusively never published before, documents this life-long correspondence impressively. Martineau's letter-writing encompassed a wide variety of disciplines and subjects, ranging from social and political to cultural issues. This scholarly edition of her extant letters is therefore relevant to research not only on Martineau but also to wider disciplinary and interdisciplinary studies.
Some of the issues with which Martineau was involved include the 1832 Reform Bill controversy (which occurred during her work on the series Illustrations of Political Economy) and the tax- and poor-law reforms (working with Lord Brougham and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK)). Other correspondents are writers, politicians, social reformers and thinkers of the period, such as William E Gladstone, Robert Peel, Charlotte Bronte, John Chapman or Elizabeth Gaskell, among many more. Martineau's life in the Lake District documents exchanges with such notable figures as the Arnolds, the Wordsworths, Hartley Coleridge (the poet's son) and John Ruskin.
As this sampling reveals, Martineau's letters provide a unique avenue through which to study the life and times of a writer who, as a young woman, entertained parliamentary members in her humble London walk-up and, as an old woman, continued to exert her influence on political and social circles from her home in the Lake District, far from London's political and literary centre. This in itself is a strong testimony to her influence on public affairs over the course of a fifty-year career.

The volumes 3 and 4 cover the period 1850-1860. The relation of Harriet Martineau and the Brontë story doesn't finish with the Villette quarrel. There's also correspondence between Martineau and Patrick Brontë and Arthur Bell Nichols in 1857 due to the appearance of Elizabeth Gaskell's biography of Charlotte and the controversy that generated. Quoting Barker's The Brontës, Chapter 26, a "warlike correspondence" was "carried on at a fast and furious pace - there are twelve extant letters written in only ten days"

Engraving of Harriet Martineau by Evert A. Duykinck from A Portrait Gallery of Eminent Men and Women of Europe and America, with Biographies, 2 vols (New York: Johnson, Wilson and Company, 1873). Image courtesy of the Noel Collection: http://www.noelcollection.org/noel/

Categories: Books, Scholar, Victorian_Era, Charlotte_Brontë