Sleepless nights were a source of great suffering to her in these latest years. Under medical advice, she tried smoking as a means of procuring better rest, with some success. She smoked usually through the chiboque, which she had brought home with her from the East, and which she had there learned to use, as she relates with her customary simplicity and directness in the appendix to ‘Eastern Life’: “I found it good for my health,” she says there, “and I saw no more reason why I should not take it than why English ladies should not take their glass of sherry at home—an indulgence which I do not need. I continued the use of my chiboque for some weeks after my return, and then only left it off because of the inconvenience.” When health and comfort were to be promoted by it, she resumed it.
Mrs. Fenwick Miller: ‘Harriet Martineau.’
Charlotte Brontë’s account of a visit to Ambleside.
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. I rise at my own hour, breakfast alone. I pass the morning in the drawing-room, she in her study. At two o’clock we meet, talk and walk till five—her dinner hour—spend the evening together, when she converses fluently and abundantly, and with the most complete frankness. I go to my own room soon after ten, and she sits up writing letters. She appears exhaustless in strength and spirits, and indefatigable in the faculty of labor. She is a great and good woman; of course not without peculiarities, but I have seen none as yet that annoy me. She is both hard and warm-hearted, abrupt and affectionate. I believe she is not at all conscious of her own absolutism. When I tell her of it, she denies the charge, warmly; then I laugh at her.
Charlotte Brontë: Letter in Mrs. Gaskell’s ‘Life of Charlotte Brontë.’ London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1857.
Her ear-trumpet.
Sense of humor.
Owing to her keen intelligence, I found it difficult to realize her extreme deafness, and used often to address her when she was not prepared for it. She never lost her sense of the absurdity of this practice, and I can see the laughter in her kind eyes now, as she snatched up her trumpet. She loved a good-natured pleasantry, even at her own expense.... A ludicrous incident happened. I had got so well accustomed to her ear-trumpet that I began to look upon it as a part of herself. It was lying on the table, a good distance away from her, and having some remark to make to her, I inadvertently addressed it to the instrument, instead of her ear. Heavens, how we laughed! She had a very keen sense of fun, of which, however, she was quite unconscious.