Harriet Martineau

by Florence Fenwick Miller

Harriet did not return to Norwich entirely discouraged. Resolution such as hers was not easily broken down. The British and Foreign Unitarian Association had advertised three prizes for the best essays designed to convert Roman Catholics, Jews and Mohammedans respectively to Unitarianism. The sum offered for each was but small: ten guineas for the Catholic, fifteen for the Jewish, and twenty for the Mohammedan essays. But it was less the money than interest in the cause, and desire to see if she could succeed in competition with others, that led Harriet to form the intention of trying for all three prizes.

She went to work immediately upon the Catholic essay, which was to be adjudicated upon six months earlier than the other two. When it was finished, she paid a schoolboy, who wrote a good hand, a sovereign that she could ill spare, for copying the essay, which was about two-thirds the length of this volume. The essays were to be superscribed, as usual in such competitions, with a motto, and the writer's name and address had to be forwarded in a sealed envelope, with the same motto outside. In September, 1830, she received the gratifying news that the committee of adjudication had unanimously awarded this prize to her.

The other two essays were commenced with the spirit induced by this success. One of them was copied out by a poor woman, the other by a schoolmaster. Harriet was careful even to have the two essays written upon different sorts of paper, to do them up in differently shaped packages, and to use separate kinds of wax and seals.

The sequel may be told, with all the freshness of the moment, in a quotation from the Monthly Repository for May, 1831: "We were about to review it [i.e. the Catholic essay] when the somewhat startling fact transpired of her having carried off the other premiums offered by the Association's committee for tracts addressed to the Mohammedans and the Jews. We shall not now stop to inquire how it has happened that our ministers would not or could not prevent the honor of championing the cause of pure Christianity against the whole theological world from developing upon a young lady. However that may be, she has won the honor and well deserves to wear it."

The essays were published by the Unitarian Association. There can be little doubt that, however many ministers may have competed, the Committee did select the best papers offered to their choice. The learning in all is remarkable; the freedom from sectarian bitterness, from bigotry, and from the insolent assumption of moral and religious superiority, is even more striking, in such proselytising compositions.

While waiting the result of the prize competition, Harriet wrote a long story for young people, which she called Five Years of Youth. It is one of the prettiest and most attractive of all her writings of this class. It has a moral object, of course—a somewhat similar one to that of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility; but the warning against allowing sensitiveness to pass into sentimentality is here directed to girls just budding into womanhood; and the punishment for the error is not a love disappointment, but the diminution of the power of domestic and social helpfulness.

Harriet's work of this year, 1830, comprised the doing of much fancy-work for sale, making and mending everything that she herself wore, knitting stockings even while reading, studying a course of German literature, and writing for the press the following quantity of literary matter:—Traditions of Palestine, a duodecimo volume of 170 printed pages; Five Years of Youth, 264 small octavo pages; three theological essays, making a closely printed crown octavo volume of 300 pages; and fifty-two articles of various lengths in the twelve numbers of the Monthly Repository.

And now she had touched the highest point of sectarian fame. The chosen expositor to the outer world of her form of religion, and the writer of its favorite Sunday School story-book of the hour, she must already have felt that her industrious, resolute labor through many years had at last borne some fruit.

But the moment for wider fame and a greater usefulness was now at hand. In the autumn of 1827 she had read Mrs. Marcet's Conversations on Political Economy, and had become aware that the subject which she had thought out for herself, and treated in her little stories of The Rioters, and The Turn-Out, was a recognized science. She followed this up by a study of Adam Smith, and other economists, and the idea then occurred to her that it might be possible to illustrate the whole system of political economy by tales similar in style to those she had already written. The thought had lain working in her mind for long, and, in this autumn of 1831, the idea began to press upon her as a duty.

There were many reasons why it was especially necessary just then that the people should be brought to think about Social Science. The times were bitter with the evils arising from unwise laws. None knew better than she did how largely the well-being of mankind depends upon causes which cannot be affected by laws. It is individual conduct which must make or mar the prosperity of the nation. But, on the other hand, laws are potent, both as direct causes of evil conditions (and in a less degree of good conditions), and from their educational influence upon the people. Harriet Martineau felt that she had come to see more clearly than the masses of her fellow-countrymen exactly how far the miseries under which English society groaned were caused directly or indirectly by mischievous legislative acts. Moreover, the circumstances of the moment made the imparting of such knowledge not only possible, but specially opportune. The Bishops had just thrown out the Reform Bill; but no person who watched the temper of the time could doubt that their feeble opposition would be speedily swept aside, and that self-government was about to be extended to a new class of the people. Most suitable was the occasion, then, for offering information to these upon the science and art of society. Harriet was right in her judgment when she started her project of a series of tales illustrative of Political Economy, under a "thorough, well-considered, steady conviction that the work was wanted, was even craved for by the popular mind."