The fifteen hundred pounds which she thus earned exceeded in amount the whole of what she had then received for her Illustrations of Political Economy. The last-named great work was nearly all published upon the absurdly unequal terms which Charles Fox had secured from her in the beginning. It was characteristic of her generosity in pecuniary matters and her loyalty to her friends, that although her agreement with Fox was dissoluble at the end of every five numbers, she nevertheless allowed it to hold good, and permitted him to pocket a very leonine share of her earnings throughout the whole publication of the original series, only claiming a revision of the terms when she commenced afresh, as it were, with the "Poor-Law," and "Taxation" tales. Thus the immense popularity of the Illustrations had not greatly enriched her. A portion of her earnings by them was invested in her American tour; and now that she received this return from her books of travels she felt it her duty to make a provision for the future. She purchased a deferred annuity of one hundred pounds to begin in April, 1850. It displayed a characteristic calm confidence in herself that she should thus have entirely locked up her earnings for twelve years. She clearly felt a quiet assurance that her brain and her hand would serve to maintain her, at least as long as she was in the flower of her age.
The six volumes about America were not the whole of her work during the first eighteen months after her return to England. She wrote an article on Miss Sedgwick's works for the Westminster Review, and several other short papers for various magazines. The extraordinary industry with which she returned to labor after her long rest requires no comment.
Early in 1838 she wrote a work called How to Observe in Morals and Manners. It forms a crown octavo volume of two hundred and thirty-eight pages, and was published by Mr. Charles Knight. The book is an interesting one, both for the reflections which it contains upon the subject of its title, and as indicating the method which she had herself pursued in her study of the morals and manners of the country in which she had been travelling. There is certainly no failure in the courage with which she expresses her convictions. She admits elsewhere that the abuse which she received from America had so acted upon her mind that she had come to quail at the sight of letters addressed in a strange handwriting, or of newspapers sent from the United States. But there is no trace in this her next considerable work of any tendency to follow rather than to lead the public opinion of her time. One paragraph only may be quoted to indicate this fact:
Persecution for opinion is always going on. It can be inflicted out of the province of Law as well as through it.... Whatever a nation may tell him of its love of liberty should go for little if he sees a virtuous man's children taken from him on the ground of his holding an unusual religious belief; or citizens mobbed for asserting the rights of negroes; or moralists treated with public scorn for carrying out allowed principles to their ultimate issues; or scholars oppressed for throwing new light on the sacred text; or philosophers denounced for bringing fresh facts to the surface of human knowledge, whether they seem to agree or not with long established suppositions.[ [8]
The next piece of work that Harriet did in this spring of 1838 was of a very different order. The Poor-Law Commissioners were desirous of issuing a series of "Guides to Service," and application was made to Miss Martineau to write some of these little books. She undertook The Maid of All Work, The Housemaid, The Lady's Maid and The Dress-maker. These were issued without her name on the title-page, but the authorship was an open secret.
She was a thoroughly good housekeeper herself. Her conscience went into this, as into all her other business. "Housewifery is supposed to transact itself," she wrote; "but in reality it requires all the faculties which can be brought to bear upon it, and all the good moral habits which conscience can originate." It was in this spirit that she wrote instructions for servants. The fine moral tone invariably discoverable in her works, is as delightful here as elsewhere. But the little "Guides to Service," contain also the most precise and practical directions for the doing of the household duties and the needlework which fall to the hands of the classes of servants for whom she wrote. Practical hints are given from which the majority of these classes of women-workers might learn much, for brains tell in the mean and dirty scrubbery of life as well as in pleasanter things, and science is to be applied to common domestic duties as to bigger undertakings. The heart and mind of Harriet Martineau were equal to teaching upon matters such as these, as well as to studying the deeper relations of mankind in political economy, or the state of society in a foreign land. Her great power of sympathy enabled her to enter fully into every human position. So well was the maid-of-all-work's station described, and her duties indicated, and her trials pointed out, and how she might solace herself under those troubles discovered, and the way in which her work should be set about detailed, that the rumor spread pretty widely that Harriet had once occupied such a situation herself. She regarded this mistake with complacency, as a tribute to the practical character of her little work.
As a fact, she was herself a capable housewife. Her housekeeping was always well done. Her own hands, indeed, as well as her head, were employed in it on occasion. When in her home, she daily filled her lamp herself. She dusted her own books, too, invariably. Sometimes she did more. Soon after her establishment at the Lakes (an event which we have not yet reached, but the anecdote is in place here), a lady who greatly reverenced her for her writings called upon her in her new home, accompanied by a gentleman friend. As the visitors approached the house by the carriage-drive, they saw someone perched on a set of kitchen steps, cleaning the drawing-room windows. It was the famous authoress herself! She calmly went for her trumpet, to listen to their business; and when they had introduced themselves, she asked them in, and entered into an interesting conversation on various literary topics. Before they left, she explained, with evident amusement at having been caught at her housemaid's duties, that the workmen had been long about the house; that this morning, when the dirty windows might for the first time be cleaned, one of her servants had gone off to marry a carpenter, and the other to see the ceremony; and so the mistress, tired of the dirt, had set to work to wash and polish her window for herself.
An article on "Domestic Service," for the Westminster Review, was written easily, while her mind was so full of the subject, in the beginning of June, 1838. But a great enterprise was before her—a novel; and at length she settled down to this, beginning it on her thirty-sixth birthday, June 12th, 1838. The writing of this new book was interrupted by a tour in Scotland during August and September, and by writing a remarkable and eloquent article on slavery, "The Martyr Age of the United States," which occupies' fifty-five pages of the Westminster Review in the January, 1839, number of that publication. The novel got finished, however, in February of this latter year; and it was published by Easter under the title of Deerbrook.
Great expectations had been entertained by the literary public of Harriet Martineau's first novel. The excellences of her Illustrations as works of fiction had been so marked and so many, that it was anticipated that she might write a novel of the highest order when released from the trammels under which she wrote those tales. To most of those who had expected so much Deerbrook was a complete disappointment. I believe I may justly say that it is the weakest of all Harriet Martineau's writings. It is, indeed, far superior in all respects to nine hundred out of every thousand novels published. But she is not judged by averages. A far higher standard of literary art is that to which we expect Harriet Martineau's writings to conform.
The book is deficient in story. Deerbrook is a country village, where two sisters from Birmingham, Hester and Margaret Ibbotson, take up their temporary abode. Mr. Hope, the village surgeon, falls in love with Margaret; but being told that Hester loves him, while Margaret is attached to Philip Enderby, Hope decides to propose to Hester; is accepted, married to the sister he does not love, and sets up housekeeping with the sister with whom he is in love as an inmate of his home. The wife, moreover, is of a jealous, exacting disposition, ever on the watch for some token of neglect of her feelings by her friends, anxious, irritable, and hyper-sensitive.