Harriet Martineau

by Florence Fenwick Miller

The matter did not end with the waste of time alone. Health, strength and nerve-force—in a word, power—was squandered upon it to a degree truly lamentable. Harriet Martineau's testimony[ [2] upon this point may be taken, because of her real fondness for the employment and the skill which she displayed in it:

"I believe it is now generally agreed among those who know best that the practice of sewing has been carried much too far for health, even in houses where there is no poverty or pressure of any kind. No one can well be more fond of sewing than I am, and few, except professional seamstresses, have done more of it, and my testimony is that it is a most hurtful occupation, except where great moderation is observed. I think it is not so much the sitting and stooping posture as the incessant monotonous action and position of the arms that causes such wear and tear. Whatever it may be, there is something in prolonged sewing which is remarkably exhausting to the strength, and irritating beyond endurance to the nerves. The censorious gossip, during sewing, which was the bane of our youth," she adds, "wasted more of our precious youthful powers and dispositions than any repentance and amendment in after life could repair."

Harriet's reading for pleasure in childhood had mostly to be done by snatches. She learned much poetry by keeping the book under her work, on her lap, and glancing at a line now and another then. Shakespeare she first enjoyed, while a child, by stealing away from table in the evenings of one winter, and reading by the light of the drawing-room fire, while the rest lingered over dessert in the dining-room. In this way, too, she had to read the newspaper.

The older she grew, the less time was afforded her from domestic duties for study. She was sent, at the age of fourteen, to a boarding-school near Bristol, kept by an aunt of her own, where she stayed fifteen months, and on her return home her education was considered finished. Thenceforth it was a struggle to obtain permission to spend any time in reading or writing, and such opportunities as she got, or could make, had to be taken advantage of in secrecy.

It is melancholy to read of her "spending a frightful amount of time in sewing," and being "expected always to sit down in the parlor to sew," instead of studying; of her being "at the work-table regularly after breakfast, making my own clothes or the shirts of the household, or about some fancy work, or if ever I shut myself into my own room for an hour of solitude, I knew it was at the risk of being sent for to join the sewing-circle;" and of the necessity that she lay under to find time for study by stealing secret hours from sleep. But it is needful to lay stress upon these hindrances through which the growing girl fought her way to mental development. Wide though her knowledge was, great though her mental powers became, who can tell how much was taken from her possibilities (as from those of all other great women of the past) by such waste of her powers in childhood and youth?

It is distressing to think about. The only comfort is that it was inevitable. Of all the causes that unite to make the women of the present more favorably circumstanced than those of the past, none is more potent than the progress of mechanical discovery having relieved them from the necessity of making all the clothing of mankind with their own hands. From the era when Errina, the Greek poetess, mournfully lamented that her mother tied her to her distaff, down to the days in which Harriet Martineau studied by snatches, and spent her days in making shirts in the parlor, an enormous amount of feminine power has been squandered wastefully in this direction. If women hereafter draw out a Comtist calendar of days upon which to reverence the memory of those who have helped them on in the scale of beings, assuredly they must find places for the inventors of the spinning-mule, the stocking-loom and the sewing-machine.

Religion formed the chief source of happiness to Harriet Martineau in childhood and early youth. Her parents were Unitarians, and their child's theology was, therefore, of a mild type, lacking a hell, a personal devil, a theory of original sin, and the like. She did not fear God, while she feared almost all human beings, and her devotion was thus a source of great joy and little misery.

When she was at the Bristol boarding-school, she came under the ministerial influence of the great Unitarian preacher, the Rev. Dr. Carpenter. The power of his teaching increased the ardor of her religious sentiments. She was just at an intense age—between fourteen and sixteen. Dr. Carpenter's religious instructions made the theism in which she had been educated become a firm personal conviction, and caused the natural action of a sensitive conscience, the self-devotion and humility of a deep power of veneration, and the truthfulness and sincerity of a rare courage, to be blended indistinguishably in their exercise with emotional outpourings of the spirit in worship, and with attachment to certain theological tenets.

Her younger sister well remembers that Harriet's fervent and somewhat gloomy piety was the cause of a good deal of quizzing amongst her elders, when she returned home from Bristol; their amusement being mixed, however, with much respect for her sincerity and conscientiousness. But, as her mind expanded, she thought as well as felt about her theology, and her religious development did not end with childhood.