Harriet Martineau and the Concept of Community: Deerbrook and Ambleside

Faced with the fiction of Harriet Martineau, scholars have rarely concealed an unease bordering on distaste. In her early popular tales Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–4), Martineau attempted to employ the resources of fiction to stimulate a reader’s emotional engagement with what she saw as universal truths on production, distribution, exchange and consumption; Orazem duly complains of simplistic cause-and-effect preaching, a reductive view of human nature and a moralistic tone.¹ David is no more enthusiastic. She sees the tales as ‘very heavy going. Characters speak like the embodiment of stiff Principles that they are, the creation of settings is toilsomely mechanical . . . ’ Indeed, they are ‘almost embarrassing in their unambiguous ratification of the benignity of the greatest happiness principle’². Freedgood’s disapproval surfaces through the employment of some surprising imagery. In claiming that their ‘law-governed plots’ are ‘inefficacious’ since they attempt the impossibility of ‘realist myth’, she nevertheless argues for a temporary narcotic effect (‘like ‘short-acting drugs’) as the tales briefly assuage the guilt and anxieties of the middle class readership.³ Martineau’s novel Deerbrook (1839) – the focus of this article – has received similarly short shrift. The novel is widely seen as a lumbering pastiche of Jane Austen, where a convoluted set of love-stories are unalleviated by a near-risible didacticism. Even Valerie Sanders, editor of the Penguin Deerbrook and author of a full-length study of Martineau and the Victorian novel, comments that ‘Martineau seems to have been suitably (my stress) embarrassed by the novel’.⁴ Embarrassment all round, it seems: clearly, scholars feel let down.

Martineau scholars have often also failed to recognise the importance of her engagement in Ambleside in understanding her thought. Her life there is treated in a variety of ways, none of them satisfactorily. Hill and Hoecker-Drysdale’s recent attempt to establish Martineau’s credentials as a pioneer sociologist and an exponent of engaged social practice barely mentions her engaged social practice in the town itself, let alone how the theoretical and methodological perspectives might be illuminated by considering the vital local perspective. Hoecker-Drysdale elsewhere assures us, despite compelling evidence to the contrary, that Martineau’s life in Ambleside offered ‘a balanced existence of the soothing pleasures of rural life and the active life of the mind’.⁵ Pichanick’s biography skates over Ambleside in four pages, briefly mentioning her ‘civic conscientiousness’ alongside ‘her domestic occupations, and her rigorous walks’.⁶ Webb’s superior account makes good use of the Martineau correspondence to describe some of her activities (including the setting up of a building society), but lacks an awareness of the way in which her wider thought fed her concept of household and community; nor does he explore in detail the Ambleside context and her relationships with the elite.⁷ Peterson’s discussion of the Autobiography struggles to reconcile Martineau’s radicalism with her domesticity, and offers judgments which a firmer understanding of the local context, and of the fundamental consistency between Martineau’s ideology and practice, would reveal to be jejune. Describing Martineau’s life at Ambleside as ‘midlife retirement’⁸, or arguing that Martineau’s decision to settle in the township reflected the physical and emotional strains of her deafness rather than any belief in the ‘moral virtues of domestic life’, perhaps reveals the value-systems of Peterson rather than those of Martineau.⁹ An appreciation of Martineau’s intentions in Deerbrook, allied to an understanding of the nature of her engagement in the town itself, would serve as a meaningful corrective.

My article offers such a corrective. Deerbrook, it will be argued, is not primarily a love-story (convoluted or otherwise), but a novel about the correct relationship between individual, household and community: a heartland concept which was as dear to Martineau as it is crucial to an understanding of her work and life. The teaching of Deerbrook, then, is markedly consistent with Martineau’s wider oeuvre, but we shall focus on the extent to which the fictional household and community of the novel were replicated by Martineau in her adopted Cumbrian community...