The Mother of Social Science: The Works of Harriet Martineau

By Tami Richards | On October 10, 2024 | Comments (0)

As a social scientist, Harriet Martineau (1802–1876) published at least fifteen book titles, some of them spanning several volumes.

As a journalist, Martineau made a living by writing for mid-19^th century journals and newspapers, encouraging intellectual and social debates across her native England and around the world.

As a writer, she engaged readers of novels, travelogues, biographies, and much more – she probably would have a book in every section of the library if her work were still in print today.

How did Martineau come to be known as the mother of social science, and even more curiously, how did she manage to support herself with the writing of her philosophic and social opinions and observations in a time when the role of women was assigned to the household sphere?

It was an age when, according to Regan Penaluna in How to Think Like a Woman, women were allowed, even encouraged, to work as writers as long as they confined themselves to novels, reviews, translations, and home and hearth. They were encouraged to leave the heavy ideas to male journalists.

How did such a prolific, insightful, and relevant writer become nearly obscure, her work lost in the shadow of the acknowledged great thinkers such as Rousseau, Kant, and her contemporary social scientists?

Harriet Martineau was born in 1802, the sixth of eight children born to textile manufacturer Thomas Martineau and his wife, Elizabeth Rankin Martineau. Harriet’s father’s work provided a middle-class upbringing for the family, but she suffered from things a comfortable lifestyle could not cure.

. . . . . . . . . .

Learn more about Harriet Martineau
. . . . . . . . . .

She endured debilitating fears and panic attacks, chronic stomach ailments, an increasing hearing loss, and had no sense of smell. She wrote in her autobiography:

“Sometimes, I was panic-struck at the head of the stairs, and was sure I could never get down; and I could never cross the yard into the garden without flying and panting, and fearing to look behind, because a wild beast was after me. The starlight sky was the worst; it was always coming down to stifle and crush me, and rest upon my head.”

Martineau also makes mention in her autobiography, of her “daily pain from chronic inflammation of the stomach.” And that “my education was considerably advanced before my hearing began to go.” Also, because she suffered with having no sense of smell, her sense of taste was “exceedingly imperfect.”

She was largely educated at the family’s home in Norwich. Despite her painful stomach discomforts, crippling fears (which she never told anyone about), and her increasing hearing loss which would render her almost totally deaf by the age of twenty — Martineau was able to attend a private school for two years. She also spent a year in a boarding school for girls, where her parents felt the country air would benefit her health.

Women were not allowed to study at a university level, but Martineau continued the self-study she’d practiced since childhood; reading books, asking questions, writing arguments and essays in search of answers, in all subjects she could think of, including those normally taught only to males.

First published writings

Having grown up with strong Unitarian influences, Martineau’s natural first writing endeavor was a submission to the Monthly Respository, a unitarian magazine. Under the pen name of “V. of Norwich,” her first article was published and, along with the praise from her esteemed older brother, swelled her heart with pride at becoming an “authoress.”

She was nineteen years old, and this success sent her back to the empty pages of her notebooks, excited to fill each page with her thoughts. She did not spend a lot of time and effort in revising her work, committing herself to a single copy, as “distinctness and precision must be lost if alterations were made in a different state of mind from that which suggested the first utterance.”

Tragedy struck when Martineau’s older brother, her biggest supporter, died of consumption (tuberculosis). Soon after, her father’s business began to flounder, which landed the family in tenuous financial straits. Her father died in 1826, and though the manufacturing business provided a livable income for the Martineau mother and daughters, its failure in 1829 sent them scrambling to maintain their home.

The industrious Martineau women rose from tragedy like worker bees to a vacant hive, and Harriet was the most tireless of all. She produced needlework by day and did her studying and writing at night. Her spirit soared under these circumstances of seemingly crushing hours and responsibility. In her autobiography, she wrote that the exertion of all her faculties made her very happy and gave her a “deep-felt sense of progress and expansion.”

Illustrations of Political Economy

Spending all those late nights writing into the wee hours paid off when Martineau won £45 in an essay contest sponsored by the Unitarians. She entered and won all three categories: arguments of Unitarianism to the notice of Catholics, Jews, and Mohammedans. Such success spurred her to write her famous series Illustrations of Political Economy, which was itself a great feat in publishing.

The presses at the time (1832) were concerned with a couple of pretty hot political topics — first, that the reform bill was causing much raucousness among citizens, clergy, and politicians alike, and second, that cholera was becoming like a plague from the Middle Ages, decimating the population at an alarming rate.

It was no small victory when Martineau negotiated an agreement with a publisher which stipulated that once 500 subscribers were obtained, the book would go to print. Her success was tremendous with Illustrations of Political Economy, the fictionalized tales illustrating the concept of the new political science.

Subscribers signed up in droves, and the publisher wrote to ask her to make any needed corrections, for Illustrations of Political Economy was going to be sent for a second printing of 5,000 copies. Letters poured in from readers who wanted her to include their hobby or work in the next installment in the series. She began receiving offers from many publishers who wanted to be a part of her future work.

Illustrations of Political Economy grew into a 9-volume series of short stories intended to illustrate the social and political activities taking place in a free market economy. Martineau published these volumes between 1832 and 1834, hoping to make political economy an accessible study for readers of all stripes.

The series is a marriage of politics, economics, social structure, and literature that heralds the birth of Martineau as a philosopher and a much sought after social/political commentator, which is evidenced in the 1836 publication of Miscellanies.

Martineau moved herself and her mother to London in order to better meet the demands of the incoming requests for her increasingly popular work, but almost immediately her desire for writing her observations took her to the United States. From 1834 to 1836 she toured the U.S. for Society in America (1837 ) and Retrospect of Western Travel (1838) and How to Observe Morals and Manners (also 1838) was published. The latter is considered the first systematic methodological writing in sociology.

Persevering through poor health

Since childhood, Martineau’s stomach pains were chronic, and she learned to live with the ailment as best she could. But from the time she arrived home from the United States until 1842, her pain was such that she stayed on her couch, desperately hoping the doctor could find a cure.

During this sick time, she wrote a collection of endearing whimsical children’s stories including The Crofton Boys, The Peasant and the Prince, The Settlers at Home, and Feats on the Fiord.

Although she was under the care of some of the best doctors available, it was believed that her condition would not improve, and Martineau accepted that she would never get any better. When her brother suggested that she give mesmerism a try, Martineau agreed, having run the gamut of local doctors and all other remedies.

Mesmerists were, in many circles, considered quacks, but even today some of their techniques using magnetism and hypnosis are used in the treatment of modern ailments. After a successful treatment with magnetism, she rose from her sick bed and wrote:

“For my part, if any friend of mine had been lying in a suffering and hopeless state for nearly six years, and if she had fancied she might get well by standing on her head instead of her heels, or reciting charms, or bestriding a broomstick, I should have helped her to try; and thus was I aided by some of my family and by a further sympathy in others, but two or three of them were induced to regard my experiment and recovery as an unpardonable offence, and by them I never was pardoned.” (Autobiography, Volume 2)

A fevered pitch of writing and translation

Upon healing from her illness, Martineau moved to the countryside, where her writing took on a fevered pitch, as if making up for lost time (though her work only slowed down during her illness and she never did fully stop writing). After publishing several popular books and articles, she translated Auguste Comte’s famous social work, and titled it The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, Freely Translated and Condensed, 2 volumes, (1853).

Her translation won her great esteem, even from Compte himself, and made a significant contribution to the scholarly conversation on positivism in Britain. Having often been referred to as the Father of Social Science, Martineau’s translation of Comte’s work, coupled with her own social commentary, earned her the title of Mother of Social Science.

For the next twenty-three years, Martineau worked her land, kept her house, and published more books, writing her thoughts and observations up to the very day she died and amassing quite an extensive bibliography. In part:

1832–1834. Illustrations of Political Economy. 25 nos. in 6 vols
1836. Miscellanies. 2 vols.
1837. Society in America. 3 vols. London: Saunders & Otley. Abridged ed. by Seymour Martin Lipset
1838. Retrospect of Western Travel. 2 vols.
1838. How to Observe Morals and Manners.
1839. Deerbrook. A novel
1840 The Hour and the Man (a novel)
1841 The Playfellow. (a series of children’s stories)
1844. Life in the Sick-Room.
1848. Eastern Life, Present and Past
1859. England and Her Soldiers
1861. Health, Husbandry, and Handicraft
1877. Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography, edited by Maria Weston Chapman. 2 vols.
1983. Harriet Martineau’s Letters to Fanny Wedgewood, edited by Elisabeth S. Arbuckle

(In addition, more than 1,500 newspaper columns, and several magazine articles. Not listed)

Co-wrote/translated:

Atkinson, Henry George, and Harriet Martineau. 1851.
Letters on the Laws of Man’s Nature and Development
Comte, Auguste. The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte,
translated and condensed by Harriet Martineau. 1853

Harriet Martineau’s legacy

Martineau wrote about such topics as Unitarianism, abolitionism, feminism, disability, social science, atheism, and more. She was a biographer and critic who spared nothing from the printing press as she wrote about education, history, husbandry, legislation, manufacturing, mesmerism, occupational health, philosophy, political economy, religion, slavery, and travel.

Her most popular work in the United States today is Society in America, an exploration of the political economy of America with special interest in the slavery of the South. After a biographical introduction detailing Martineau’s travels and social interactions (unencumbered by her ear trumpet), page 3 states,

“The United States have indeed been useful in proving these two things, before held impossible; the finding of a true theory of government, by reasoning from the principles of human nature, as well as from the experience of governments; and the capacity of mankind for self-government.”

After that assent, the rest of the book measures and probes the prisons, schools, factories, plantations, farms, tribal establishments, and literary and scientific institutions, from north to south and east to west of the United States in order to find if life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were actively apparent among everyone in equal measure.

Finding this not to be the case, Martineau aligned herself with the abolitionist movement. She sold embroidery to donate money to abolition and worked for the the Anti-Slavery Standard until the end of the Civil War. It was in the United States, too, where Martineau was further inspired to reveal gender inequality and its effects on society, championing women’s suffrage.

In 1846 Martineau toured Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, focusing her analytical eye on religion and customs. Her later writings reflect that she became an atheist during this time.

One of Martineau’s most downloaded works on Project Gutenberg is Life in the Sick-room: Essays. In this work, Martineau reaches out to encourage others: “We know and feel, to the very centre of our souls, that there is no hurry, no crushing, no devastation attending Divine processes.” (Dedication).

Harriet Martineau’s vast compilation of work, opinions ranging from politics, to philosophy, to pain, was, and still is, sought after reading fodder among many social scientists. We might not find Martineau’s work among the scholars while browsing the philosophy section at the bookstore, but some of her books can be found at online books stores and her many of her titles have been made into e-books as well.

It is indeed is a glaring slight that her work is not readily found in the library stacks among the great thinkers, but its digital availability can be seen as a social redemption of sorts. I’m sure we have the social scientists to thank for that.

Contributed by Tami Richards, a history enthusiast and freelance writer living in the Pacific Northwest. More of her work can be found here.

Literary Ladies Guide

An archive dedicated to classic women authors and their work