Her egotism.
Her conception of heaven.
Are not nearly all recent autobiographers egotists? A number of such works have appeared during the last ten years, and the position of the autobiographer has been in nearly every case the same,—namely, that God did a good thing when he made him; but that he should have made anybody else, and should have taken an interest in the other individual equal to that which he manifested in the autobiographer, is a proposition which he cannot bring himself for a moment to consider. Two books in which this view is conspicuous are the autobiographies of John Quincy Adams and Miss Harriet Martineau. Carlyle is a mild egotist beside these writers. Adams does not speak of himself as an individual, but as a cause which he has espoused. Of the two, Miss Martineau is the more naïve. She is for arranging the world entirely from her own point of view. For instance, she attacked the late Lord Lytton, because he did not carry an ear-trumpet. Lord Lytton was deaf, and preferred not to carry an ear-trumpet. Miss Martineau was deaf also, and did carry one. She did not believe in the immortality of the soul, and was very hard upon any one who was of a contrary opinion. Her heaven, had her belief permitted her to have one, would have been a place where they all sat round with ear-trumpets and derided the doctrine of the immortality of the soul.
—— ——: ‘Zweibak: or, Notes of a Professional Exile,’ in The Century, February, 1886.
Her lofty stand in money matters.
It is well known that a pension was offered to her by three Prime-ministers in succession—Earl Grey, Lord John Russell, and Mr. Gladstone—which, like Cæsar, she “did thrice refuse,” it being against her principles to burden the State with any such obligation. And yet she was entirely dependent upon that reed, the pen, for subsistence.
James Payn: ‘Some Literary Recollections.’
Her needlework.