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Harriet Martineau and Anti-Catholicism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 February 2015
Extract
For the best-selling periodical Once a Week, Harriet Martineau wrote a pot-boiling story in 1861 called ‘Sister Anna’s Probation’. It tells the tale of an English squire’s daughter who devotedly takes the veil and, against the backdrop of the Henrician Reformation, emerges after a reasonably decorous series of vicissitudes to marry the honourable beau, Captain Fletcher. Together, they rescue a certain footstool belonging to Anna that had been appropriated by the abbess. Inside that footstool was concealed the very bible from which Anna had gained her first sense of the futility of the convent life and the oppressions of the Roman Catholic religion.
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References
Notes
1 Once a Week was Bradbury and Evans’s riposte to Charles Dickens’s All the Year Round. It ran from 1858 to 1880, was copiously illustrated and sold around a million copies in its first year of publication.
2 See Peschier, Diana, Nineteenth-Century Anti-Catholic Discourses: The Case of Charlotte Bronte (Palgrave, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Paz, D. G., Popular Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Victorian England (Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 59.Google Scholar
4 See Burgess, John, ‘The Roman Catholics and the Cumbrian Religious Census’, Recusant History 15 (1979), pp. 372–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
5 HM, ‘Sister Anna’s Probation’, Once a Week Series 1, vol. vi (March 1862), p. 369.
6 ‘Sister Anna’, p. 425.
7 ‘Sister Anna’, p. 425.
8 Chapman, M. W. (ed.), Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography (Osgood, 1877), 2 vols, i, p. 114 Google Scholar. Martineau won the prizes for all three essays.
9 The Essential Faith of the Christian Church: deduced from the sacred records (Unitarian Association, 1831), p. 47.
10 It would seem that Martineau’s visit to the Middle East in 1846–7, which gave birth to Eastern Life Present and Past (1850), contributed significantly to her loss of Christian faith through encouraging a phenomenological and comparative approach to Islam, Judaism and Christianity. The Autobiography arguably provides an over-hasty and excessively- linear account of the process, which, at the time of writing, Martineau interpreted as a personalised version of Comtean stages of progress from theological, and from metaphysical to Positivist. See Autobiography i, pp. 538–9. On the other hand, Martineau’s contemporary correspondence does echo, not only the relative rapidity of her changes of world-view, but also the imagery of paradigm shift. In one letter of 21 September 1848, she commented: ‘I do not believe that any thoughtful traveller who had explored the sources of the faiths of the world could ever again assist in the propagation of the Unitarian, any more than orthodox, opinions & views. To have explored thoughtfully the records of Egypt, Arabia & Palestine… is to have risen into a wholly new and higher world of knowledge, after which there can be no resumption of the works & ideas of a former stage of the mind’. HM letter to Henry Holland, 21 September 1848, in Logan, Deborah (ed.), The Collected Letters of Harriet Martineau 5 vols, iii, p. 126.Google Scholar
11 R. P. Graves, letter to HM, 11 January 1853, BUL, HM Papers HMLAdd.12.
12 HM letter to Graves, 12 January 1853, BUL HM Papers, HMLAdd.13.
13 HM letter to Miss E. S. Holt, 28 January 1854, in Logan, Collected Letters, iii, p. 306.
14 HM letter to E. J. Reid, ?1851, in Logan, Collected Letters, iii, p. 192. Significantly, this letter is in response to what appears to have been an anguished plaint from Mrs Reid, who had heard reports of the aggressive atheism apparently taught with relish in Martineau’s recently-published Letters on the Laws of Man’s Nature and Development. In her reply, Martineau links Mrs Reid’s anti-Catholic comments with her failure to distinguish between difference of philosophical opinion and the far-more-important identity of views on morality. Even so, Martineau cannot resist proclaiming, in the manner of J. S. Mill, ‘What the world wants, above everything, is that thinkers should think, and that the single-minded should say what they think. This is the only way to get out of our present slough of ignorance, superstition and hypocrisy’.
15 HM letter to Fanny Wedgwood, ?November 1850, in Logan, Collected Letters, iii, p. 178.
16 HM, A History of the Thirty Years’ Peace 1816–1846 (Irish University Press, 1981), 4 vols, ii, p. 39.
17 Thirty Years’ Peace, iv, p. 279.
18 Thirty Years’ Peace, iv, p. 270.
19 Martineau criticised the former Catholic priest turned Unitarian, Joseph Blanco White, for his narrowness of sympathy. In one letter, she commented: ‘B. White’s hatred of Dogmatic Theology might well appear an insane one. And his mind was, howr. acute, of so narrow an order that he could not enter into half the reasons or feelings which people attach to Orthodoxy’. See HM letter to W. J. Fox, 18 June 1845, in Logan, Collected Letters, iii, p. 14.
20 Unsurprisingly, Martineau rejected Comte’s vision of Positivist ritual based on the cult of ‘Sociolatry’. Basil Willey’s chapter on Comte in his Nineteenth Century Studies: Coleridge to Matthew Arnold (CUP, 1980), pp. 187–203 is still the best account of the odder aspects of Comte’s ‘Religion of Humanity’. Martineau commented, ‘It is a perpetual wonder to me how Comte’s religious institutions get a moment’s attention in this country from anybody’. HM letter to Henry Reeve, 7 June 1868, in Logan, Collected Letters, v, p. 222.
21 HM, ‘A Year at Ambleside’, in Hill, Michael R. (ed.), An Independent Woman’s Lake District Writings: Harriet Martineau (Humanity, 2004), p. 134.Google Scholar
22 HM letter to Miss E. S. Holt, 31 January 1854, in Logan, Collected Letters, iii, p. 308.
23 Her short story for Household Words (1851), ‘The Highest House in Wathendale’, is a truly dismal tale of parental intemperance, regressive farming practices and falling from cliffs. See Hill, Michael R. (ed.), An Independent Woman’s Lake District Writings: Harriet Martineau (Humanity, 2004), pp. 397–422.Google Scholar
24 HM letter to Lord Morpeth, 17 June 1848, Armitt Library 367.1. A letter to her sister-in-law, Helen Martineau (15 October 1848), is couched in virtually identical terms and refers to her ‘Sanitary conspiracy’ (HMC, HMMSSjfolio 24).
25 Warren, J. B., ‘Harriet Martineau and the Concept of Community: Ambleside, 1846–1875’, (unpublished Oxford MSc thesis, 2007)Google Scholar.
26 See Wilkinson, Melissa, Frederick William Faber: A Great Servant of God (Gracewing, 2007)Google Scholar. Wilkinson places Faber as curate of St. Anne’s, Ambleside. Reference to the Clergy List (1841–3) suggests that it is perhaps more likely that he assisted the perpetual curate, John Dawes, in the performance of his duties (as did Owen Lloyd).
27 Wilkinson, Faber, see pp. 40–2. Wilkinson comments: ‘It may be significant that Faber was having problems at Ambleside because he was preaching Tractarian doctrines’. She is attempting to account for Faber’s failure to complete a promised contribution to Newman’s Library of the Fathers. Although one must regard her comment as supposition, it may not be an unlikely one.
28 Hill, Alan G. (ed.), The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, 8 vols (Clarendon, 1988), iv, p. 359.Google Scholar
29 The Windermere Benefit Building Society represents Martineau’s most significant attempt at social reform in Ambleside. Sadly, it is given only cursory treatment by her biographers Webb, R. K., Harriet Martineau: A Radical Victorian (Heinemann, 1960)Google Scholar and Valerie Pichanick, , Harriet Martineau The Woman and Her Work, 1802–76 (University of Michigan Press, 1980)Google Scholar. For a fuller discussion of the reasons for its relative failure in providing housing for those most in need, see Warren, ‘Harriet Martineau and the Concept of Community’.
30 HM letter to Graves, 8 September 1864. BUL, HM Papers, HMLAdd.24.
31 HM letter to Philip Carpenter, 11 February 1855, HMC, HMMSS/folio 55. Martineau asked Carpenter if he would be prepared to conduct a burial service for her in a Unitarian churchyard. According to Carpenter’s biographer, he assented. See Carpenter, R. L., Memoirs of the Life and Work of Philip Pearsall Carpenter (Kegan Paul, 1880)Google Scholar.
32 Morris, Kevin L., ‘John Bull and the Scarlet Woman: Charles Kingsley and Anti-Catholicism in Victorian Literature’, Recusant History, 23, 2 (1996), pp. 190–218.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Martineau corresponded with Kingsley on issues of social reform but is unlikely to have countenanced his views of Catholicism as ably outlined by Morris. One might argue that her approach was not dissimilar to that of Mrs Humphry Ward in her Helbeck of Bannisdale (1898) which is, I think, far more nuanced in its view of Catholicism than Morris suggests (especially when one considers Mrs Ward’s anxiety to avoid the disapproval of her convert father). Martineau would be unlikely to disagree with Mrs Ward’s portrayal of the power of ritual.
33 Martineau sent her MS to Bronte, who was, it seems, very enthusiastic. For the publishers Smith, Elder, George Smith replied that he dared not publish it, ‘on account of some favourable representations and auguries on behalf of the Catholics’. Autobiography, ii, pp. 64–5.