Deafness.
Her deafness, which was the most commonly known of her deficiencies of sensation, was not her earliest deprivation of a sense. She was never able to smell, that she could remember; and as smell and taste are intimately joined together, and a large part of what we believe to be flavor is really odor, it naturally followed that she was also nearly destitute of the sense of taste. Thus, two of the avenues by which the mind receives impressions from the outer world were closed to her all her life, and a third was also stopped before she reached womanhood.
Mrs. Fenwick Miller: ‘Harriet Martineau.’ (Famous Women Series.) Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1885.
Lack of the sense of taste.
She had no sense of taste whatever. “Once,” she told me, when I was expressing my pity for this deprivation of hers, “I tasted a leg of mutton, and it was delicious. I was going out, as it happened, that day, to dine, and, I am ashamed to say, that I looked forward to the pleasures of the table with considerable eagerness; but nothing came of it—the gift was withdrawn as suddenly as it came.” The sense of smell was also denied her, as it was to Wordsworth; in his case, too, curiously enough, it was vouchsafed to him, she told me, upon one occasion only. “He once smelled a bean-field and thought it heaven.”
James Payn: ‘Some Literary Recollections.’ New York: Harper & Bros., 1884.
Practical education.
“I could make shirts and puddings,” she declares, “and iron, and mend, and get my bread by my needle, if necessary—as it was necessary, for a few months, before I won a better place and occupation with my pen.” During the winter which followed the failure of the old Norwich house she spent the entire daylight hours poring over fancy work, by which alone she could with certainty earn money. But she did not lay aside the sterner implement of labor for that bright little bread-winner, the needle. After dark she began a long day’s literary labor in her own room.