Harriet Martineau

by Florence Fenwick Miller

"I am at Miss Martineau's for a week. Her house is very pleasant both within and without; arranged at all points with admirable neatness and comfort. Her visitors enjoy the most perfect liberty; what she claims for herself she allows them.... She is a great and good woman.... The manner in which she combines the highest mental culture with the nicest discharge of feminine duties filled me with admiration; while her affectionate kindness earned my gratitude. I think her good and noble qualities far outweigh her defects. It is my habit to consider the individual apart from his (or her) reputation, practice independent of theory, natural disposition isolated from acquired opinion. Harriet Martineau's person, practice, and character inspire me with the truest affection and respect.

"I find a worth and greatness in herself, and a consistency and benevolence and perseverance in her practice, such as win the sincerest esteem and affection. She is not a person to be judged by her writings alone, but rather by her own deeds and life, than which nothing can be more exemplary or nobler. She seems to me the benefactress of Ambleside, yet takes no sort of credit to herself for her active and indefatigable philanthropy. The government of her household is admirably administered; all she does is well done, from the writing of a history down to the quietest feminine occupation. No sort of carelessness or neglect is allowed under her rule, and yet she is not over-strict, or too rigidly exacting; her servants and her poor neighbors love as well as respect her.

"I must not, however, fall into the error of talking too much about her, merely because my mind is just now deeply impressed with what I have seen of her intellectual power and moral worth."

Some of her lectures were given with the express object of inducing the people to form a building society. Rents were excessively high for the working classes from the scarcity of cottages; and therefore they lived and slept crowded together, while the open country extended all around them. The moral screw was turned upon them, too, about politics and religion, by the threat of the landlord that, if they offended him, he would turn them out of the only cottages they could get. With that true philanthropy which her studies in political economy had taught, Miss Martineau went to work to aid the people to improve their own condition. She obtained a loan of £500 from her old friend, Mrs. Reid, of London (to whom the foundation of Bedford college is mainly due), with which she purchased a field just above the village at Ellercross, and parcelled it out, drained it, and made the road. Then, by her lectures, she showed the people how they could "buy a house with its rent"; and she undertook all the infinite trouble that devolved upon her when the society was formed, as the only member of it with legal and general knowledge, and, therefore, the only one able to guide its affairs. Before me there lies a package of the notes that she sent at different times on this business to Mr. Bell, the Ambleside chemist, who was the nominal chairman—though she was the real one—of the society. "Jealousy and ridicule went to work against the scheme"; but her philanthropic energy and wisdom were fully successful. The cottages are healthily planned and well built, and remain there as a monument to the efforts which she made for the good of her poor neighbors.

Besides these more general undertakings for their benefit, there yet live many amongst them who are grateful to her for personal kindness and assistance. While her strength lasted, she was ever ready to try to relieve others from illness by the means which she believed to have cured herself; and seven mesmerized patients were sometimes asleep at one time in her drawing-room. She was a powerful mesmerist. Most of her patients were at least relieved—some cured. A present resident of Ambleside, who owes his success in business life to her kindness, told me how she mesmerized him for nearly an hour every day for a year; and to show that she did not do this without very decided results to herself, he remembers that her fingers used to swell during the process, so as to almost hide her rings, if she forgot to take them off before beginning.

Again, her library was placed freely at the service of deserving young men in the village, and only book-lovers will be able to appreciate the generosity of this neighborly kindness. Old Miss Nicholson tells me of Miss Martineau's kindness to her invalid sister; sharing with her the luxuries which were not to be bought in Ambleside, but which the famous writer frequently received from some of her many friends. Nor was the mere personal human sympathy wanting in her; those who needed no gifts or material aid from her knew her as a kind friend, ready to think for them and advise with them in their troubles or perplexities.

In mentioning her activities other than literary, during those ten busy and healthy years of home life, I must not omit her "farming"—her farm of two acres. She had no intention, at first, of embarking in such an enterprise. She let on hire that portion of her land which she did not wish to have in her garden, and her maids and herself, with the occasional help of a man, kept the garden in order. But this plan did not answer well. The tenant allowed the grass to get untidy, and his sheep broke into the garden to eat the cabbages. Neither the vegetable nor the flower garden could be kept so nicely as might be wished. Milk, butter, eggs, and hams, all had to be bought at high prices; and so small was the supply at times that these articles of country produce were actually unattainable by purchase.

The energetic lady of the small domain was profoundly dissatisfied with this state of affairs. So to work she went to study the science of agriculture and practical farming; and soon a Norfolk laborer was established on her land, and this small farm was under her own management. She set up a cross-pole fence around her estate, the first one ever seen in the Lake District; and, like a true woman, she planted roses all along the fence, to wreathe and decorate it in summer. Then she initiated her fellow-farmers into the mysteries of high farming, and stall feeding. "A cow to three acres" was the Lake rule; but she hired another half-acre of land, to add to her own, and showed that upon this total of two acres she could almost keep two cows. Fowls and pigs were, of course, kept also; and all the household comforts which cows, hens, and pigs supply were obtained from her land at, practically, no cost at all. The subsistence of the laborer and his wife was created out of the soil; and the house had a constant supply of vegetables, milk, eggs, and hams, at a less expense than buying had previously been, and with a much nicer and always certain supply.

The experiment became famous in a small way. "People came to see how we arranged our ground, so as to get such crops out of it,"[ [16] and one of the Poor-Law Commissioners, having asked her for a private account of how she had managed her little farm, printed her letter in the Times, without asking her consent. This brought such a flood of correspondence on her that she was compelled to write on the subject for publication, and so the farm superintendence resulted in a piece of literary work for the mistress.

Now we will see what her pen was doing while all these activities were helping to fill her days.