In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Victorian Periodicals Review 38.2 (2005) 141-157



[Access article in PDF]

Behind the Scenes of History:

Harriet Martineau and The Lowell Offering

George Washington University

Relatively early in Harriet Martineau's autobiography – at a point after her account of the "literary lionism" that followed upon the success of Illustrations of Political Economy and before her summary of her travels to America – she describes a "month of luxury" spent at the "Swiss Cottage" of her close friend, Mrs. Ker.1 While there, she had the opportunity to spend "a couple of days at Mrs. Marsh's," during which she was asked to read "'one or two little stories' which her hostess had written" (I: 283). Evidently brought to tears by Mrs. Marsh's story ("The Admiral's Daughter"), Martineau responded to her friend's request for advice about her publishing prospects by agreeing to reread the manuscript of her tales at home. "I had the pleasure of introducing the 'Two Old Men's Tales' to the world through Messrs. Saunders and Otley, from whom, as from the rest of the world, the author's name was withheld as long as possible, " she writes (I: 284). From that point on, Martineau recounts, Mrs. Marsh "managed her own affairs" independently; "I never again saw her works till they were published" (I: 284). Martineau moves on at this point in her autobiography to reflect about evenings spent with the Carlyles, figures who occupied, then as now, a far more prominent place on the literary landscape.

When reading the autobiography today, one finds it hard not to forget "Mrs. Marsh," to move with Martineau on to the Carlyles and to relish her gossipy account of the famous couple's foibles. Indeed, Mrs. Marsh seems forgotten, not just within the confines of Martineau's autobiography, but within nineteenth-century literary history more generally. Author first of Two Old Men's Tales in 1834, Anne Marsh-Caldwell (1834–1882) went on to author now forgotten works such as Tales of Woods and Fields, Mount Sorel or The Heiress of the DeVeres, Emilia Wyndham, Castle Avon, The Heiress of Houghton, and Chronicles of [End Page 141] Dartmoor, in short, to enjoy almost thirty years of sustained success in finding publishers, and presumably readers, for her fiction and plays. Yet Martineau's brief account of the aid she gave this aspiring author, and the fact that she so breezily glosses over it, strikes me as significant in its capacity to shed light on a dimension of nineteenth-century women's history that, though less visible than others, deserves our attention. Feminist historians of nineteenth-century Britain have long acknowledged the crucial role of networks in enabling women to advance a variety of agendas, but much of this scholarship has focused on the formal mechanisms for networking – "organizations" such as the Langham Place Circle, the Victoria Debating Society, the Ladies' Conference, or the Society for Promoting the Employment for Women.2 While Philippa Levine devotes a chapter of Feminist Lives in Victorian England to "Understanding the Empty Places: Love, Friendship, and Female Networks," her focus is largely on establishing the fact that Victorian feminism relied upon the sustained efforts of individual women to pursue and maintain friendships and that "networking" in the form of friendships was a dominant characteristic of nineteenth-century feminist circles (69). In this essay I want tentatively to explore a different but no less crucial form of networking – the practice of using one's connections to make contacts, to encourage relationships, to foster communities of people with similar concerns, and to circulate ideas. It would be hard to find a nineteenth-century woman more dedicated to and experienced in networking on her own behalf and for others than Harriet Martineau, and I turn to her record not only to extract more of the "nuts and bolts" of this kind of networking in practice but also to examine the role that the Victorian periodical press – a network itself – played in the process.3

Contained within Martineau's vignette of...

pdf

Share