It has been brought to light by beneficent action which is, in another view, altogether encouraging. Our benevolence towards the helpless, and our interest in personal morality, have grown into a sort of public pursuit; and they have taken such a hold on us that we may fairly hope that the wretched and the wronged will never more be thrust out of sight. But, in the pursuit of our new objects, we have fallen back—far further than 1688—in the principle of our legislative proposals—undertaking to provide by law against personal vices, and certain special social contracts.
Her devotion to freedom, and her belief in personal liberty, led her to write an article on "Meddlesome Legislation" for the Westminster Review.
Her pecuniary sacrifices for the Review had been made because she looked upon it as an organ for free speech. Her feelings may be imagined when the editor refused to insert this article, not on any ground of principle, but merely because it spoke too freely of some of the advocates of meddlesome factory laws. The essay was published however, as a pamphlet, and had such influence upon a bill then before Parliament that the Association of Factory Occupiers requested to be allowed to signalize their appreciation of it by giving one hundred guineas in her name to a charity. A somewhat similar piece of work followed in the next year, a rather lengthy pamphlet On Corporate Traditions and National Rights. She offered nothing more to the Westminster Review, however, for some time; not, indeed, until that subject in which she took so profound an interest, the welfare of the United States, and the progress of the anti-slavery cause, seemed to require of her that she should avail herself of every possible means of addressing the public upon it. Then, in 1857, she wrote an article on The Manifest Destiny of the American Union, which appeared in the Westminster for July of that year.
Having thus signalized her forgiveness of that Review, she went on writing again for it for a little while. In the October number of the same year there was a paper by her on Female Dress in 1857. Crinoline had then lately been introduced by the Empress of the French. If one good, rousing argument could have stood in the path of fashion, this amusing and vigorous paper from Harriet Martineau's sick-room might have answered the purpose. But, alas! crinoline flourished; and five whole years later on was still so enormous that she took up her parable against it once more, in Once a Week, as the cause of "willful murder."
About this time she determined to assume the prefix of "Mrs." "There were so many Misses Martineau," she said; and, besides, she felt the absurdity of a woman of mature years bearing only the same complimentary title as is accorded to a little girl in short frocks at school. Her cards and the envelopes of her friends bore thenceforward the inscription, "Mrs. Harriet Martineau."
Although she continued to write, contributing almost every day to the Daily News, as well as to these larger periodicals, she was, it must be remembered, an invalid. Her health fluctuated from day to day; but it may as well be explicitly stated that she was more or less ill during the whole of the rest of her life. She suffered a considerable amount daily of actual pain, which was partly the consequence of the medicines prescribed for her, and partly the result of the displacement of the internal organs arising, as her doctors led her to suppose, from the enlargement of the heart; but in reality, as was afterwards discovered, from the growth of a tumor. Her most constant afflictions were the difficulty of breathing, dizziness, and dimness of sight, resulting from disturbed circulation. At irregular, but not infrequent, intervals she was seized with fainting-fits, in which her heart appeared to entirely cease beating for a minute or two; and it was not certain from day to day but that she might die in one of these attacks.
Not only did she continue her work under these conditions, but her interest in her poor neighbors remained unabated. There is more than one man now living in Ambleside who traces a part of his prosperity to the interest which she from her sick-room displayed in his progress. A photograph of her, still sold in Ambleside, was taken in her own drawing-room by a young beginner whom she allowed thus to benefit himself. He and several others were given free access to her library. A sickly young woman in the village was made a regular sharer in the good things—the wine, the turtle soup, the game and the flowers—which devoted friends sent frequently to cheer Harriet Martineau's retirement. Every Christmas, there was a party of the oldest inhabitants of Ambleside invited to spend a long day in the kitchen of the "Knoll." The residents in her own cottages looked upon her less as a landlady than as a friend to whom to send in every difficulty.
Nor did she cease to do whatever was possible to her in the local public life. The question of Church Rates was approaching a crisis when she was taken ill; and when the Ambleside Quakers resolved to organize resistance to payment of these rates, they found Harriet Martineau ready to help. The householders who refused to pay were summoned before the local bench; and it was Harriet Martineau whom the justices selected to be distrained upon; but events marched rapidly, and the distraint was not made.
The next article that she contributed to the Westminster Review appeared in the July (1858) number, and, under the title of The Last Days of Church Rates, gave an account of the efforts by which Non-conformists in all parts of the country were rendering this impost impossible.
In October, 1858, there was another long article in the Westminster, entitled Travel during the Last Half-Century. She was now, however, growing tired of wasting her work in that quarter, and, as we shall presently see, she sought a more influential and appreciative medium for her longer communications with the public.