Life in the Sick-Room (review)

The year 2002, the bicentenary of Harriet Martineau's birth, was marked by special conferences, panels, and new publications – both scholarly analyses and reprint editions of Martineau's writing – in celebration of her contributions to Victorian literature and culture. Throughout a half-century career in which she wrote in genres ranging from triple-deckers to newspaper "leaders," Harriet Martineau (1802–76) produced political economy, history, biography, travel books, philosophy, fiction, and sociology; her eclectic professional interests earned her such epithets as "First Woman Sociologist," "First and Greatest Woman Journalist," and "Popularizer" of the new science of political economy. Although the elements of individual and family psychology permeate much of Martineau's "self-help" writing (the Autobiography and Household Education, for example), little scholarly analysis has been devoted to this topic until recently. Maria Frawley's new edition of Life in the Sickroom provides a thoroughly researched, richly contextualized reprint of one of the period's most significant contributions to the literature of invalidism and self-reflection.

Martineau's prolific literary output and extraordinary physical vigor (she traveled throughout the United States, Ireland, Europe, and the Middle East and was a formidable hiker) provides a vivid contrast with her periodic confinements in the sick-room (comprising about one-third of her life). When she became ill in 1839, Martineau was determined to eliminate all elements compromising her well-being – including certain family members – and moved to Tynemouth, where she was to spend the next six years confined to the invalid's couch. Her literary output diminished little despite her unrelenting illness, and Life in the Sick-Room was one of many books published in this period. During this illness, Martineau was treated unsuccessfully for a uterine tumor, prompting her to turn, at her physician's suggestion, to alternative healing methods, including Mesmerism. In a remarkable coincidence of timing, Martineau was miraculously "healed" and restored to an active physical life, prompting the inevitable conclusion that Mesmerism cured her while "orthodox" medicine did not. This coincidence, and the resulting firestorm of controversy played out in the periodical press, provides the basis for several of Frawley's editorial choices in this volume's appendices.

In her Introduction, Frawley emphasizes the unique combination of Martineau's sense of Victorian "duty" with her characteristic habit of self-assessment. A thorough utilitarian, Martineau felt compelled to share her pursuit of "truth" with her reading public, and this commitment underpins her most controversial publications, including Letters on Mesmerism and Letters on the Laws of Man's Nature and Development. Far from self-aggrandizing, this habit of self-assessment through the lenses of one's disability – early demonstrated in her "Letter to the Deaf" (1834) – represents honest self-scrutiny aimed at offering practical insight for similar sufferers. The Victorian cult of invalidism coincided with the popular urge to assert the ascendancy of scientific method and to professionalize medical practice. Several times throughout her career, Martineau participated in this discourse, not as a scientist but as one well instructed in the ways of invalidism and in the particular psychological challenges and social prejudices confronting invalids. In a sense, Life in the Sick-Room is about how to be an invalid, complete with instructions on managing one's caregivers (instead of being managed by them) and suggestions for exploring options to improve the invalid's quality of life.

Contrary to reigning wisdom, Martineau advocated, for example, fresh air and sunlight rather than a stuffy, darkened room, and urged the addition of fresh flowers and lively, youthful visitors to cheer up the chronically ill. On the other hand, she also insisted that invalids often need time alone, which to her was a healthy, rather than morbid, impulse. Her charming accounts of hours spent with her telescope, observing the nature outside her window as well as the active human community, offer poignant insight into the character of one who, rather than railing against her illness, strives to learn how to live with...