Harriet Martineau: Encyclopedia II - Harriet Martineau - Mesmerism

Harriet Martineau - Mesmerism

Miss Martineau edited a volume of Letters on the Laws of Man's Nature and Development, published in March 1851. Its form is that of a correspondence between herself and the garrulous self-styled scientist Henry G. Atkinson, and it expounds that doctrine of philosophical atheism to which Miss Martineau in Eastern Life had depicted the course of human belief as tending. The existence of a first cause is not denied, but is declared unknowable, and the authors, while regarded by others as denying it, certainly considered themselves to be affirming the doctrine of man's moral obligation. Atkinson was a zealous exponent of mesmerism. The prominence given to the topics of mesmerism and clairvoyance heightened the general disapprobation of the book, which outraged literary London with its mesmeric evolutionary atheism, causing a lasting division between Miss Martineau and some of her friends.

She published a condensed English language version of the Philosophie Positive (1853). To the Daily News she contributed regularly from 1852 to 1866. Her Letters from Ireland, written during a visit to that country in the summer of 1852, appeared in that paper. She was for many years a contributor to the Westminster Review, and was one of the little band of supporters whose pecuniary assistance in 1854 prevented its extinction or forced sale. In the early part of 1855 Miss Martineau found herself suffering from heart disease. She now began to write her autobiography, but her life, which she supposed to be so near its close, was prolonged for twenty years.

She cultivated a tiny farm at Ambleside with success, and her poorer neighbours owed much to her. Her busy life bore the consistent impress of two leading characteristics – industry and sincerity.

When Charles Darwin's book The Origin of Species was published in 1859 Erasmus Darwin sent a copy to his old flame Miss Martineau who at 58 was still reviewing from her home in the Lake District. From her "snow landscape" Martineau sent her thanks, adding that she had previously praised "the quality & conduct of your brother's mind, but it is an unspeakable satisfaction to see here the full manifestation of its earnestness & simplicity, its sagacity, its industry, & the patient power by which it has collected such a mass of facts, to transmute them by such sagacious treatment into such portentious knowledge. I should much like to know how large a proportion of our scientific men believe he has found a sound road." She wrote to her fellow Malthusian (and atheist) George Holyoake enthusing "What a book it is! – overthrowing (if true) revealed Religion on the one hand, & Natural (as far as Final Causes & Design are concerned) on the other. The range & mass of knowledge take away one's breath." To Fanny Wedgwood she wrote "I rather regret that C.D. went out of his way two or three times to speak of "TheCreator" in the popular sense of the First Cause.... His subject is the "Origin of Species" & not the origin of Organisation; & it seems a needless mischief to have opened the latter speculation at all – There now! I have delivered my mind."

She died at "The Knoll" on 27 June 1876. The verdict which she recorded on herself in the autobiographical sketch left to be published by the Daily News has been endorsed by posterity. She wrote "Her original power was nothing more than was due to earnestness and intellectual clearness within a certain range. With small imaginative and suggestive powers, and therefore nothing approaching to genius, she could see clearly what she did see, and give a dear expression to what she had to say. In short, she could popularize while the could neither discover nor invent."

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Mesmerism", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki