CHAPTER I.

THE CHILD AT HOME AND AT SCHOOL.

When Louis XIV. of France revoked the Edict of Nantes, in 1688, a

large number of the Protestants who were driven out of France by the

impending persecutions came to seek refuge in this favored land of

liberty of ours. Many who thus settled in our midst were amongst the

most skillful and industrious workers, of various grades, that could

have been found in the dominions of the persecuting king who drove

them forth. They must have been, too, in the nature of the case,

strong-hearted, clear in the comprehension of their principles, and

truthful and conscientious about matters of opinion; for the

cowardly, the weak, and the false could stay in their own land. From

the good stock of these exiles for conscience-sake sprang Harriet

Martineau.

Her paternal Huguenot ancestor was a surgeon, who was married to a

fellow-countrywoman and co-religionist of the name of Pierre. This

couple of exiles for freedom of opinion settled in Norwich, where the

husband pursued his profession. Their descendants supplied a constant

succession of highly-respected surgeons to the same town, without

intermission, until the early part of this century, when the line of

medical practitioners was closed by the death of Harriet Martineau's

elder brother at less than thirty years old. The Martineau family thus

long occupied a good professional position in the town of Norwich.

Harriet's father, however, was not a surgeon, but a manufacturer

of stuffs, the very names of which are now strange in our

ears--bombazines and camlets. His wife was Elizabeth Rankin, the

daughter of a sugar-refiner of Newcastle-on-Tyne. A true Northumbrian

woman was Mrs. Martineau; with a strong sense of duty, but little

warmth of temperament; with the faults of an imperious disposition,

and its correlative virtues of self-reliance and strength of will.

These qualities become abundantly apparent in her in the story of her

relationship with her famous daughter. On both sides, therefore,

Harriet Martineau was endowed by hereditary descent with the strong

qualities--the power, the clear-headedness, and the keen

conscience--which she interfused into all the work of her life.

Thomas and Elizabeth Martineau, her father and mother, were the parents

of eight children, two of whom became widely known and influential as

thinkers and writers. Harriet was the sixth of the family, and was born

at Norwich, in Magdalen street, on the 12th of June, 1802, the mother

being at that time thirty years old. The next child, born in 1805, was

the boy who grew up to become known as Dr. James Martineau; so that the

two who were to make the family name famous were next to each other in

age. Another child followed in this family group, but not until 1811,

when Harriet was nine years old, so that she could experience with

reference to this baby some of that tender, protective affection which

is such an education for elder children, and so delightful to girls

with strong maternal instincts such as she possessed.

The sixth child in a family of eight is likely to be a personage of but

small consequence. The parents' pride has been somewhat satiated by

previous experiences of the wonders of the dawning faculties of their

children; and the indulgence which seems naturally given to "the baby"

gets comparatively soon transferred from poor number six to that

interloper number seven. Mrs. Martineau, too, was one of that sort of

women who, as they would say, do not "spoil" their children. Ready to

work for them, to endure for them, to struggle to provide them with all

necessary comforts, and even with pleasures, at the cost, if need be,

of personal sacrifice of comfort and pleasure, such mothers yet do not

give to their children that bountiful outpouring of tender, caressing,

maternal love, which the young as much require for their due and free

growth as plants do the floods of the summer sunshine. To starve the

emotions in a child is not less cruel than to stint its body of food.

To repress and chain up the feelings is to impose as great a hardship

as it would be to fetter the freedom of the limbs. Mothers who have

labored and suffered through long years for the welfare of their

children, are often grieved and pained in after days to find themselves

regarded with respect rather than with fondness; but it was they

themselves who put the seal upon the fountains of affection at the time

when they might have been opened freely--and whose fault is it if,

later, the outflow is found to be checked for evermore?

The pity of it is that such mischief is often wrought by parents who

love their children intensely, but who err in the management of them

for want of the wisdom of the heart, the power of sympathetic feeling,

which is seen so much stronger sometimes in comparatively shallow

natures than in the deeper ones that have really more of love and of

self-sacrifice in their souls. Those who lack tenderness either of

manner or feeling, those to whom the full and free expression of

affection is difficult or seems a folly, may perhaps be led to reflect,

by the story of Harriet Martineau's childhood, on the suffering and

error that may result from a neglect of the moral command: "Parents,

provoke not your children to wrath."

"My life has had no spring," wrote Harriet Martineau, sadly; yet there

was nothing in the outer circumstances of her childhood and youth to

justify this feeling. Her mother's temper and character were largely

responsible for what Harriet calls her "habit of misery" during

childhood. It is right to explain, however, that this unhappiness was

doubtless partly due to physical causes. She was a weakly child, her

health having been undermined by the dishonesty of the wet nurse

employed for her during the first three months of her life. The woman

lost her milk, and managed to conceal the fact until the baby was found

to be in an almost dying condition from the consequences of want of

nourishment. How far her frequent ill-health, during many succeeding

years, was to be ascribed to this cannot be known; but her mother

naturally attributed all Harriet's delicacy of health to this cause,

even the deafness from which she suffered, although this did not become

pronounced till she was over twelve years of age.

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.

The senses are the gates by which pleasure as well as pain enter into

the citadel where consciousness resides. Of all the senses, those which

most frequently give entrance to pleasure and seldomest to pain, were

those which she had lost. "When three senses out of five are

deficient," as she said, "the difficulty of cheerful living is great,

and the terms of life are truly hard."

She suffered greatly, even as a little child, from indigestion. Milk

in particular disagreed with her; but it was held essential by Mrs.

Martineau that children should eat bread and milk, and for years poor

Harriet endured daily a lump at her chest and an oppression of the

spirits, induced by her inability to digest her breakfast and supper.

Nightmares and causeless apprehensions in the day also afflicted the

nervous and sensitive girl, and she had "hardly any respite from

terror."

A child so delicate in health could not have been very happy under any

home conditions. Only a truly wise and tender maternal guardianship

could have made the life of such an one at all tolerable; but Harriet

Martineau was one of the large family of a sharp-tempered, masterful,

stern, though devoted mother, whose cleverness found vent in incessant

sarcasm, and in whom the love of power natural to a capable, determined

person degenerated, as it so often does in domestic life, into a severe

despotism.

Mrs. Martineau's circumstances were such as to increase her natural

tendency to stern and decided rule. Dr. Martineau tells me that all

who knew his mother feel that Harriet does not do justice in her

"Autobiography" to that mother's nobler qualities, both moral and

intellectual, and especially the latter. Harriet and James Martineau,

like so many other men and women of mark, were the children of a mother

of uncommon mental capacity. Her business faculties were so good, and

her judgment so clear, that her husband (a man of a sweet and gentle

disposition) invariably took counsel with her about all his affairs,

and acted by her advice. There are still inhabitants of Norwich who

remember Mrs. Martineau, and their testimony of her is identical with

her son's. "She was the ruling spirit in that house," says one of them.

"Whatever was done there, you understood that it was she who did it."

The way in which this gentleman came to know so much of her

corroborates Dr. Martineau's declaration that "she was really devoted

to her children, and would do anything for them; if we were miserable

in our childhood (a fact which he does not dispute) it could not be

said to be consciously her fault." Mr. ---- was the husband of a lady

who had been reared from early childhood by Mrs. Martineau, having been

adopted by her simply in order to provide her little daughter, Ellen,

who was nine years younger than Harriet, with a child companion

somewhat about her own age. This lady, her widowed husband tells me,

retained a most warm admiration and affection for Mrs. Martineau.

Mothers who have brought up eight children of their own can appreciate

the self-devotedness of this mother in receiving a ninth child by

adoption in order to increase the well-being of her own little

daughter.

Several other instances were told to me of Mrs. Martineau's benevolence

and kindness of disposition. Young men belonging to her religious body,

and living in lodgings in Norwich, were uniformly made welcome to her

house, as a home, every Sunday evening. One of the Norwich residents,

with whom I have talked about her, received a presentation from her to

the Unitarian Free School, and afterwards, in his school life, met with

constant encouragement and patronage at her hands. He tells me that he

has never forgotten the stately and impressive address with which she

gave him the presentation ticket, concluding with a reminder that if he

made good use of this opportunity he might even hope one day to become

a member of the Town Council of that city,--and at that giddy eminence

her _protege_ now stands.

For the sake of the lesson, it should be understood that she was thus

truly benevolent and kindly, and no vulgar termagant or scold. It is

for us to see how such a nature can be spoiled for daily life by too

unchecked a course of arbitrary rule, and by repression of outward

signs of tenderness.

Not the least evil which a stern parent, who maintains a reserve of

demeanor, and who requires strictness of discipline within the home,

may do to himself and his children, is that by denying expression to

the children's feelings he closes to himself the possibility of knowing

what goes on in their young minds. Thus, a child so restrained may for

years suffer under a sense of injustice, and of undue favoritism shown

to another, or under a belief that the parent's love is lacking, when a

few words might have cleared away the misapprehension, and given the

child the natural happiness of its age.

Speaking of her childhood, Harriet says: "I had a devouring passion

for justice; justice, first, to my own precious self, and then to

other oppressed people. Justice was precisely what was least understood

in our house, in regard to servants and children. Now and then I

desperately poured out my complaints; but in general I brooded over

my injuries and those of others who dared not speak, and then the

temptation to suicide was very strong."

The most vivid picture that she has drawn of the discipline under which

such emotions were induced in her is found in a story, _The Crofton

Boys_, which she wrote during a severe illness, and under the

impression that it would contain her last words uttered through the

press. Mrs. Proctor, in _The Crofton Boys_, is depicted with remarkable

vividness by a series of little touches, and in a succession of trivial

details, with an avoidance of direct description, that reminds us of

the method of Jane Austen. Harriet never achieved any other portrait of

a character such as this one; for this is treated with such minute

fidelity, and such evident unconsciousness, that we feel sure, as we

sometimes do with a picture, that the likeness must be an exact one. So

distinct an individuality is shown to us, and at the same time, the

evidences of the artist's close and careful observation of his model

are so obvious, that, without having seen the subject, we _feel_ the

accuracy of the likeness. So does the "portrait of a mother" in that

tale which Harriet wrote for her last words through the press, show us

the nature of Mrs. Martineau in her maternal relation.

"Mrs. Proctor so seldom praised anybody that her words of esteem went a

great way.... Everyone in the house was in the habit of hiding tears

from Mrs. Proctor, who rarely shed them herself, and was known to think

that they might generally be suppressed, and should be so."

If any person were weak enough to express emotion in this way in

her presence, Mrs. Proctor would promptly and sternly intimate her

disapproval of such indulgence of the feelings. When the little lad was

leaving home for the first time, all the rest of the household became a

little unhappy over the parting.

"Susan came in about the cord for his box, and her eyes were red,--and

at the sight of her Agnes began to cry again; and Jane bent down over

the glove she was mending for him, and her needle stopped.

"'Jane,' said her mother, gravely, 'if you are not mending that glove,

give it to me. It is getting late.'

"Jane brushed her hand across her eyes, and stitched away again. Then

she threw the gloves to Hugh without looking at him, and ran to get

ready to go to the coach."

So little allowance was ordinarily made in that house for signs of

affection, or manifestations of personal attachment, that the child who

was going away for six months was "amazed to find that his sisters were

giving up an hour of their lessons that they might go with him to the

coach." Even when Hugh got his foot so crushed it had to be amputated,

though his mother came to him and gave him every proper attention, yet

"Hugh saw no tears from her"; nothing more than that "her face was very

pale and grave." His anticipations of her coming had not been warm; his

one anxiety had been that he might bear his pain resolutely before her.

"As Hugh cried, he said he bore it so very badly he did not know what

his mother would say if she saw him." And it was well that he had not

anticipated any outburst of pity or expression of sympathy from her,

for, when she did come, "she kissed him with a long, long kiss; but she

did not speak." Her first words in the hearing of her agonized child

were spoken to give him an intimation that the surgeons were waiting to

take off his foot. The boy's reply was--not to cling to her for

support, and to nestle in her bosom for comfort in the most terrible

moment of his young life, but--"Do not stay now; this pain is so bad! I

can't bear it well at all. Do go, now, and bid them make haste, will

you?"

Later, when the leg was better, the poor boy's mental misery once

overpowered him, even in his mother's presence. Sitting with her and

his sister--"... He said, 'He did not know how he should bear his

misfortune. When he thought of the long, long days, and months, and

years, to the end of his life, and that he should never run and play,

and never be like other people, and never able to do the commonest

things without labor and trouble, he wished he was dead. He would

rather have died!' Agnes thought he must be miserable indeed if he

would venture to say this to his mother." Such was the idea that these

children had of maternal sympathy and love! So little did they look

upon their mother as the one person above all others to whom their

secret troubles should be opened!

It is proper to observe that the mother came out of this test well.

There is no record that Mrs. Martineau was ever found wanting in due

care for her children when the pent-up agony of their bodies or spirits

became so violent as to burst the bonds of reserve that her general

demeanor and method of management imposed upon them. Her children's

misery (for Harriet was not the only one of the family whose childhood

was wretched) came not from any intentional neglect, or even from any

indifference on her part to their comfort and happiness, but solely,

let it be repeated, from her arbitrary manner and her quickness of

temper. It is worth repeating (if biography be of value for the lessons

which may be drawn from it for the conduct of other lives) that the

mother whose children were so spirit-tossed and desolate was,

nevertheless, one who gave herself up to their interests, and labored

incessantly and unselfishly for their welfare. It was not love that

really was wanting; far less was it faithfulness in the performance of

a mother's material duties to her children; all that was lacking was

the free play of the emotions on the surface, the kisses, the loving

phrases, the fond tones, which are assuredly neither weaknesses nor

works of supererogation in family life. By means of candid expression

alone can the emotions of one mind touch those of another; and from the

lack of such contact between a child and its mother there must come, in

so close a life relationship, misery to the younger and disappointment

to the elder of the two.

"I really think," says Harriet, "if I had once conceived that anybody

cared for me, nearly all the sins and sorrows of my anxious childhood

would have been spared me." Yet, not only was she well fed, well

clothed, well educated, and sent to amusements to give her pleasure

(magic lanterns, parties and seaside trips are all mentioned); but

besides all this, when she did burst forth, like Hugh Proctor in the

book, with the expression of her suffering, she was soothed and cared

for. But this last happened so rarely--of course entirely because it

was made so difficult for her to express herself--that the occasions

lived in her memory all her life.

The moral consequences of all this were naturally bad. Even with all

motherly sympathy and encouragement, so sickly a child would have been

likely to suffer from timidity, and to fall into occasional fits of

despondency and irritability; but, with fear continually excited in

her mind, and with an eternal storm of passionate opposition to

arbitrary authority raging in her soul, it is no wonder that the poor

child made for herself a character for willfulness and obstinacy,

while internally she suffered dreadfully from her conscience. "In my

childhood," she says, "I would assert or deny anything to my mother

that would bring me through most easily.... This was so exclusively

to one person that, though there was remonstrance and punishment, I

was never regarded as a liar in the family." Her strength of will

was very great; and when she had been placed in a false position by

her dread of rebuke, the powerful will came into play to maintain

a dogged, stubborn, indifferent appearance. Yet all the while her

conscientiousness--the strong convictions as to what was right, and

the ardent desire to do it, which marked her whole career--was at work

within her, causing a mental shame and distress which might have been

easily aided by gentle treatment to overcome the fear and the firmness

which were acting together to make her miserable and a sinner.

It is altogether a sad story, but I have not told it at length without

reason. The fact that other children are suffering similarly every day

makes the record worth repeating. But, besides this, her vivid

remembrance of her childish pangs tends to show how warm and strong

were her natural affections. If Harriet Martineau's mind had not been

sensitive and emotional, and if her love for those united to her by

family ties had not been ardent, she would not have felt as she did in

her childhood, and she would not have remembered, all through her life,

how she had suffered in her early years from unsatisfied affection.

Now, this soft, loving, emotional side of her character must be

recognized before her life and her work can be properly appreciated.

The intellectual influences of her home life were not more happy than

the moral ones. She was thought by her family anything but a clever

child. Indeed, Dr. James Martineau (whose recollections are peculiarly

valuable, both from his nearness to Harriet in age and from their great

attachment in early life) still thinks that she really was a dull

child. Her intelligence, he believes, awoke only in her later youth,

coincidentally with some improvement in health. It is hard to guess

what the impression of her childish intellectual powers might have been

under different conditions. She suggestively remarks[1]: "It should

never be forgotten that the happier a child is the cleverer he will be.

This is not only because in a state of happiness the mind is free, and

at liberty for the exercise of its faculties instead of spending its

thoughts and energy in brooding over troubles, but also because the

action of the brain is stronger when the frame is in a state of

hilarity; the ideas are more clear, impressions of outward objects are

more vivid, and the memory will not let them slip." Moreover, it is a

fact worthy of note that the recognition by her family of her mental

development followed upon her return home after she had been away for a

time, and had been learning at a boarding-school under "the first

person of whom she never felt afraid." Still, the fact remains that

Harriet was the ugly duckling of her family, and supposed to be the

most stupid of the group of Martineau children.

[1] _Household Education_, p. 202.

She was active-minded enough, however, to begin early that spontaneous

self-education which only intellects of real power undertake, either

in childhood or in later years.

Milton was her master. When she was seven years old she came by

accident upon a copy of _Paradise Lost_ lying open upon a table. Taking

it up, she saw the heading "Argument," and in the text her eye caught

the word "Satan." Instantly the mind which her relations thought so

sluggish was fired by the desire to know how Satan could be argued

about. She sought the passage which tells how the arch-fiend was--

Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky,

With hideous ruin and combustion, down

To bottomless perdition, there to dwell

In adamantine chains and penal fire.

For the ensuing seven years her thoughts dwelt daily in the midst of

the solemn scenes, and moved to the sound of the sonorous music of

Milton's poetry. "I wonder how much of it I knew by heart--enough to

be always repeating it to myself with every change of light and

darkness, and sound, and silence, the moods of the day and the seasons

of the year." The dull child, who neglected her multiplication table,

did so because her mind was pre-occupied with thoughts of this grander

order.

Her love of books increased, and her range of reading became wide.

Milton, although the favorite, was by no means her only beloved

author. She read rapidly, and, as clever children often do,

voraciously. Whole pages or scenes from Shakespeare, Goldsmith,

Thompson, and Milton she learned by heart, until she knew enough

poetry to have fitted her for the occupation of a wandering reciter.

In this way her self-education in the English classics, and in

literary style, went on at the same time with her daily education by

living teachers.

Harriet's formal education was somewhat desultory; but it is a

noteworthy fact that it was, so far as it went, what would have been

called a "boy's education." In this respect the history of her mental

development is the same as that of many other illustrious women of

the past. Girls' High Schools, and University examinations for

young women, are products of the present day, and are rapidly

rendering obsolete the old ideas about the necessary differences and

distinctions between the education of boys and girls. But up to the

first quarter of this century, the minds of boys and of girls were

commonly submitted to entirely different courses of training. While

the boys learned precision in reasoning from mathematics, the girls

were considered sufficiently equipped for their lot in life by a

knowledge of the first three rules of arithmetic. While any faculty of

language that a lad possessed was trained and exercised by the study

of the classics, his sister was thought to require no more teaching in

composition and grammar than would enable her to write a letter.

Elaborate samplers, specimens of fine stitching, of hemming done by a

thread on the most delicate cambric, of marking in tiny stitches and

wonderful designs, and of lace more noticeable for difficulty in the

doing than for beauty, have come down to us from our grandmothers'

days, to show us how the school-time of the girls was being disposed

of, while the boys were studying Euclid, Virgil, and Homer. If we have

changed all that, and are now beginning to give a considerable

proportion of our girls the same mental diet for the growth and

sustenance of their minds with that which is supplied to boys, it is

largely owing to the direct efforts in favor of such a course put

forth by women such as Harriet Martineau, who had themselves been, at

least partially, educated "like boys," and were conscious that to such

education they owed much of their mental superiority over average

women.

In her earlier years Harriet was taught at home by her elder brothers

and sisters, with the addition of lessons in some subjects from

masters. She was well grounded in this manner in Latin, French and the

ordinary elementary subjects. But her systematic education did not

begin until she was eleven, when she and her sister Rachel were sent

to a school kept by a good master, at which boys also were receiving

their education.

The school-life was delectable to Harriet. Mr. Perry, the master, was

gentle in his manner, and methodical in his style of teaching; and

under his tuition the shy, nervous child felt for the first time

encouraged to do her best, and aided not merely to learn her lessons,

but also to expand her mental faculties. The two years that she

remained at Mr. Perry's school gave her a fair insight into Latin and

French, and enabled her to discover that arithmetic was to her mind a

delightful pastime rather than a difficult study. English composition

was formally and carefully taught. This was Harriet's favorite lesson;

but she would spend her playtime in covering a slate with sums for the

mere pleasure of the exercise.

When Harriet had been at this school for about two years, Mr. Perry

left Norwich. The home system of education was then resumed. She had

visiting masters in Latin, French, and music. For the rest, Mrs.

Martineau selected a course of reading on history, biography, and

literature. One of the girls read aloud daily while the others did

needle-work.

"The amount of time we spent in sewing now appears frightful; but it

was the way in those days among people like ourselves." Harriet became

a thoroughly accomplished needle-woman. She had, indeed, a liking for

the occupation, and continued to do much of it all through her life.

Many of her friends can show handsome pieces of fancy-work done by her

hands. Again and again she contributed to public objects by sending a

piece of her own beautiful needle-work to be sold for the benefit of a

society's funds. Not even in the busiest time of her literary life did

she ever entirely cease to exercise her skill in this feminine

occupation. In fact, she made wool-work her artistic recreation.

But with all her liking for needle-work, and with all the use that she

made of her skill in the art, she did feel very keenly how much her

time and strength had been wasted in childhood upon the practice of

this mechanical occupation that should have been employed in the

cultivation of her mental powers. A girl then was required to become a

proficient in the making of every kind of garment. It was considered a

good test of her capacity to know at an early age how to cut out and

put together a shirt for her father; drawing threads to cut it by, and

drawing threads to do the rows of fine stitching by, and stitching

evenly and regularly, only two threads of the finest material being

taken for each stitch! The expenditure of time out of a girl's life,

involved in making her capable of doing all this, was something

shocking. In these days, when the development of the means of

communication has made division of labor more generally practicable

than of old, and when nearly all men and women, from the richest to

the artizan classes, wear garments made chiefly by machinery, I doubt

if many readers can be got to realize how much a girl's intellectual

training was diminished when Harriet Martineau was a child by the vast

amount of time consumed in training her as a seamstress. Harriet was

taught how to make all her own clothes, even to covering shoes with

silk for dancing, and to plaiting straw bonnets. It is as though every

boy were taught in his school-life to be a thorough carpenter, so as

to be able, in youth, to turn out, unaided, any article of furniture.

It is obvious how much time such technical training must swallow up.

To conceive how a girl was held back by it, we must ask ourselves:

What was her brother doing while she was learning needle-work?

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:

[2] _Household Education_, p. 286.

"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.