‘Called hither by the commotion of the times’: Martineau and the Press, 1837–1850

This chapter connects Martineau’s contribution to shaping the Victorian press during its extraordinary rapid evolution during the 1840s to her work for Dickens at Household Words and shows that her agenda for the press developed earlier and was far more nuanced than has been previously recognized. Establishing herself in the elite intellectual quarterlies, simultaneously working with Charles Knight on the Penny Magazine and other projects aimed at mass-market working-class readers, and contributing to Thornton Leigh Hunt and G.G. Lewes’s progressive weekly The Leader in 1850-51, Martineau developed a remarkably flexible and constantly evolving journalistic presence that, in the 1850s and early 1860s, would allow her to become a consistent presence in both mass-market and elite press venues, to appear, simultaneously, in daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly outlets.

‘Yield to the mighty mind of the Popular Instructor’: Print and the Press in Martin Chuzzlewit

Building on the case made in chapter 3, chapter 4 tunes to consider Martin Chuzzlewit and examines the ways in which the novel addresses the relationship between literacy, print media, and the experience of modern urbanism. Together eith its predecessor, the chapter argues that for Dickens America was far more than what has been generally perceived as an increasingly negative experience that chastened his understanding of the press and of mass culture. Rather, and notwithstanding all his complaints about Americans, tobacco, and spit, the encounter with America in fact provided him with a new sense, at once disturbing and alluring, of the potential power of a cheap mass-market press led by entrepreneurial editors operating in a print environment unconstrained by state controls. Moreover, in writing about America, and above all in writing about its newspapers in both American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens for the first time discovered a methodology for fusing fiction and the press in ways that would be foundational his most significant contribution to Victorian journalism, Household Words and its successor, All the Year Round.

Martineau, the Press and Jacksonian America

Chapter Two considers Martineau’s American visit, the ways in which the three books she wrote out of it depict the role of education and a free press in the formation of American democracy, and the critical reception they received on both sides of the Atlantic. By contrast with the dichotomous readings of a nation divided between North and South along the lines of slave-ownership that have been the norm in studies of her visit, this chapter argues that the American books offer a more nuanced analysis of a society whose regional variations are most fully understood in terms of the extent to which they either have developed or constrained the development of a free press and a print culture that facilitates the evolution and implementation of liberal ideals. It pays particular attention to Martineau’s representation of the western states and, above all, Cincinnati, which she portrays as an exemplar of economic and moral stadial progress and as a counter to Boston, for her the ‘city of cant’ and an unexpected bastion of resistance to liberal change. Finally, the chapter shows how Martineau returned home committed to finding ways in which her work could participate in and contribute to America’s continuing advance and, in particular, focused upon prospective roles for herself in supporting the interwoven causes of abolitionism and of women’s ability to become agents of social progress.

The End of Whig History: Dickens, Martineau and the Mid-Victorian Press

Chapter Seven examines the after-life of the 1855-56 dispute with a focus upon Martineau and Dickens’s final encounter or, rather, quasi-encounter, an aspect of the dynamic between them that has received no previous critical attention. Focused upon the cultural phenomenon that was Thomas Babington Macaulay, the chapter explores the ways in which Martineau and Dickens’s divergent responses to the great exemplar of Whig historical narrative reveal their own evolving concepts of history and their advocacy for those concepts in their late work in the press. After considering Dickens’s response to Macaulay and the model of history encoded into A Tale of Two Cities, the chapter turns to Martineau’s dispute with William Makepeace Thackeray. Though less overt than the earlier dispute with Dickens, the quarrel shows, first, how she intentionally positioned herself against Dickens’s new project at All the Year Round, and, second, how, through writing extensively about the nursing profession and educational opportunities for girls, she evolved her final roles in the press so as to continue her advocacy on behalf of progressive causes and her support for a vision of liberal social development that remained remarkably consistent with the positions she had first advocated in the early 1830s.

American Notes and the ‘frightful engine’ of the Press

Chapter Three examines Dickens’s American Notes. Interrogating John Drew’s sense that American Notes is largely concerned with ‘the invasive power of the press’ and Juliet John’s claim that it offers a ‘dystopian vision of mass culture’, this chapter and its successor position the American visit in the contexts of both Dickens’s ongoing efforts to find a role for himself in the press and his response to the widespread social unrest affecting Britain in the early 1840s. Showing how he arrived in the United States just as a newly established mass-market daily press was becoming ascendant on the East Coast, chapter 3 explores how American Notes responds to the phenomenon of new forms of urban literacy As with Martineau and chapter 2, this chapter also considers the critical reception of Dickens’s post-American books and the ways in which he in responded to that reception.

‘The display of woman’s naked mind to the gaze of the world’: Harriet Martineau and the Press, 1830–1834

Chapter 1 connects Martineau’s early writing for and about the press with the intellectual legacy she derived from Enlightenment thought. Specifically, it explores her modification of the stadial theory of social progress that she derived from Adam Smith as she blended elements from Smith’s work on moral sympathy with Schiller’s writing on aesthetics and the formation of a community of taste. After showing how both Smith and Schiller contributed to her understanding of the crucial role of public discourse as an essential agent of social progress, the chapter moves to examine her advocacy for the press in the years immediately before she traveled to America. Martineau’s own journalism in the early 1830s makes a popularized version of the argument that was simultaneously being developed in the elite reviews, emphasizing a vital connection between the promotion of universal access to education and the removal of the ‘taxes upon knowledge’ that inhibited the free circulation of information and ideas. Martineau’s distinctive contribution to that argument, however, appears in two articles on Sir Walter Scott that she published shortly after his death in 1833, and the chapter concludes by arguing for a new reading of these essays as a combined statement of the essential need to write women into the narrative of history and a claim for her own authority to undertake such work.

Conclusion: ‘Likeness in unlikeness’

Almost thirty years after he and Anne Smith published their foundational essay on the quarrel between Dickens and Martineau, Ken Fielding returned to the pair’s complex relationship, rounding out a lifelong interest in both authors. Writing on this second occasion for the Martineau Society Newsletter...

Introduction

Lays out the argument for the book and its central claim that the dynamic between Dickens and Martineau, which has been long read in the personalized terms of a quarrel that ended their professional connection, is more fully understood as the expression of incompatible visions of liberalism, the role of women in social progress, and the nature of democratic society. An essential element of their difference lay in their different experiences of and responses to the social experiment developing in the United States, and the book reconceptualizes their respective encounters with and writing about America.

The Factory Controversy: ‘What I dread is being silenced’

Chapter Six examines the dispute that brought an end to all direct connection between Martineau and Dickens and rewrites the established narrative of the quarrel. It argues for a reading of the dispute that shifts away from a focus on Hard Times and locates it, instead, simultaneously in the local disordered contingencies of the two authors’ lives in 1855-56 and, more fundamentally, in their differences over the formation of a modern liberal state and the ways in which print and the press could contribute to its development. The chapter also demonstrates how deeply embedded the quarrel was within the networks of mid-century journalism as the two combatants drew into their dispute friends and colleagues both of them had long known and with whom both had worked extensively. Framing this analysis with discussion of Martineau’s first and final contributions to Household Words, both of which draw upon American subjects, the chapter shows that a bitter dispute that appeared so unlikely at the time it occurred was, in fact, the almost inevitable expression of Martineau and Dickens’s fundamentally incompatible versions of liberalism.