1. Harriet Martineau was an English social theorist.
88 Facts About Harriet Martineau
1. 2.
Harriet Martineau served as deacon of the Octagon Chapel, Norwich from 1797.
3.
Harriet Martineau was closest to her brother James, who became a philosopher and clergyman in the tradition of the English Dissenters.
4.
The Harriet Martineau family was of French Huguenot ancestry and professed Unitarian views.
5.
Harriet Martineau's family was financially comfortable and they were close friends with the Gurney family of Earlham Hall, Norfolk.
6.
Harriet Martineau claimed her mother abandoned her to a wet nurse.
7.
However the nurse that Harriet Martineau's mother hired could not produce sufficient milk.
8.
Mrs Harriet Martineau strictly enforced proper feminine behaviour, pushing her daughter to "hold a sewing needle" as well as the pen.
9.
Harriet Martineau's uncles included the surgeon Philip Meadows Martineau, whom she had enjoyed visiting at his nearby estate, Bracondale Lodge, and businessman and benefactor Peter Finch Martineau.
10.
Harriet Martineau was taught at home by several of her elder siblings in the beginning of her education.
11.
Harriet Martineau was taught French by her mother, which was the predominant language spoken by her father.
12.
Harriet Martineau taught her Latin and her brother Thomas taught Harriet maths and writing.
13.
When she was nine years old Harriet Martineau transitioned to a small school run by a man named Perry.
14.
Harriet Martineau was supposedly one of the first people to provide her with a positive and non-judgmental learning environment.
15.
Late in life, Harriet Martineau claimed that Perry's school was the catalyst for her intellectual development and interest in education.
16.
The next step in Harriet Martineau's education came when she received an invitation from the girls' boarding school that her Aunt and Uncle Kentish ran in Bristol.
17.
Besides the standard course she took at the school, Harriet Martineau began her lifelong self-directed research here.
18.
Harriet Martineau studied on her own Latin, Greek, Italian, and took a deeper interest in the Bible.
19.
James and Harriet Martineau had a great relationship, so James had suggested that Harriet Martineau begin writing as a way to cope with their separation.
20.
Harriet Martineau began losing her senses of taste and smell at a young age.
21.
Harriet Martineau was deaf and having to use an ear trumpet at the age of 12.
22.
However, it was said that Harriet Martineau did not utilise the ear trumpet until her late twenties as she was trying to avoid harassment from others by doing so.
23.
Harriet Martineau reveals in her autobiography that she was in a strange sense relieved in the long run that marriage was not an option, as their relationship was filled with stress and disagreements.
24.
Harriet Martineau's father died in 1826 and in 1829, the family's textile business failed.
25.
Harriet Martineau described how she could then "truly live instead of vegetate".
26.
Harriet Martineau's reflection emphasises her experience with financial responsibility in her life while she writes "[her] fusion of literary and economic narratives".
27.
Harriet Martineau's first commissioned book, Illustrations of Political Economy, was a fictional tutorial intended to help the general public understand the ideas of Adam Smith.
28.
Harriet Martineau then agreed to compose a series of similar monthly stories over a period of two years, the work being hastened by having her brother James work on the series with her.
29.
Harriet Martineau relied on Malthus to form her view of the tendency of human population to exceed its means of subsistence.
30.
Harriet Martineau was invited to the coronation of Queen Victoria by the Queen herself.
31.
Harriet Martineau's development included both her improvement of fictional writing but showed mastery of the theories she wrote about.
32.
Harriet Martineau met Florence Nightingale, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot and Charles Dickens later on in her literary career.
33.
Until 1834, Harriet Martineau was occupied with her brother James on the political economy series, as well as a supplemental series of Poor Laws and Paupers Illustrated and Illustrations of Taxation which was intended to influence government policy.
34.
Harriet Martineau met numerous abolitionists in Boston and studied the emerging schools for the education of girls.
35.
In Society in America, Harriet Martineau angrily criticised the state of women's education.
36.
Harriet Martineau found him spending his days "driving out Miss Martineau", who had returned from her trip to the United States.
37.
Harriet Martineau was very agreeable and managed to talk on a most wonderful number of subjects, considering the limited time.
38.
Harriet Martineau wrote Deerbrook, a three-volume novel published after her American books.
39.
Harriet Martineau portrayed a failed love affair between a physician and his sister-in-law.
40.
Harriet Martineau wrote The Hour and the Man: An Historical Romance, a three-volume novel about the Haitian slave leader Toussaint L'Ouverture, who contributed to the island nation's gaining independence in 1804.
41.
In 1839, during a visit to Continental Europe, Harriet Martineau was diagnosed with a uterine tumour.
42.
Harriet Martineau several times visited her brother-in-law, Thomas Michael Greenhow, who was a celebrated doctor in Newcastle upon Tyne, to try to alleviate her symptoms.
43.
Harriet Martineau next moved downriver to Tynemouth where she regained her health.
44.
Harriet Martineau stayed at Mrs Halliday's boarding house, 57 Front Street, for nearly five years from 16 March 1840.
45.
Harriet Martineau wrote a number of books during her illness, and a historical plaque marks this house.
46.
Harriet Martineau wrote that parents should be "wholly reliable" in order that they be "a joy to all hearts".
47.
In 1844, Harriet Martineau underwent a course of mesmerism, returning to health after a few months.
48.
In 1845, Harriet Martineau left Tynemouth for Ambleside in the Lake District, where she designed herself and oversaw the construction of the house called The Knoll, where she spent the greater part of her later life.
49.
Harriet Martineau began house-hunting and the first house she looked at did not have everything she was looking for.
50.
The next place Harriet Martineau was brought to look at was the land of a minister at Ambleside called the Knoll which she bought.
51.
Harriet Martineau took on planning the layout of the house, which she found enjoyable.
52.
In 1845, Harriet Martineau published three volumes of Forest and Game Law Tales.
53.
Harriet Martineau believed the ultimate goal to be philosophic atheism, but did not explicitly say so in the book.
54.
Harriet Martineau described ancient tombs, "the black pall of oblivion" set against the paschal "puppet show" in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and noted that Christian beliefs in reward and punishment were based on and similar to heathen superstitions.
55.
Harriet Martineau wrote Household Education in 1848, lamenting the state of women's education.
56.
Harriet Martineau believed women had a natural inclination to motherhood and believed domestic work went hand in hand with academia for a proper, well-rounded education.
57.
Harriet Martineau proposed that freedom and rationality, rather than command and obedience, are the most effectual instruments of education.
58.
Harriet Martineau spanned a wide variety of subject matter in her writing and did so with more assertiveness than was expected of women at the time.
59.
Harriet Martineau has been described as having an "essentially masculine nature".
60.
Harriet Martineau's work included a widely used guide book to the Lake District, A Complete Guide to the English Lakes, published in 1855 and in its 4th edition by 1876.
61.
Harriet Martineau edited a volume of Letters on the Laws of Man's Nature and Development, published in March 1851.
62.
Harriet Martineau expounded the doctrine of philosophical atheism, which she thought the tendency of human belief.
63.
Harriet Martineau did not deny a first cause but declared it unknowable.
64.
Literary London was outraged by its mesmeric evolutionary atheism, and the book caused a lasting division between Harriet Martineau, her beloved brother, James who had become a Unitarian cleric, and some of her friends.
65.
Harriet Martineau wrote more than 1,600 articles for the paper in total.
66.
Harriet Martineau believed she had experienced psychosomatic symptoms and later benefits from mesmerism; this medical belief of the times related the uterus to emotions and hysteria.
67.
Harriet Martineau had symptoms of hysteria in her loss of taste and smell.
68.
Harriet Martineau continued her political activism during the late 1850s and 1860s.
69.
Harriet Martineau supported the Married Women's Property Bill and in 1856 signed a petition for it organised by Barbara Bodichon.
70.
Harriet Martineau pushed for licensed prostitution and laws that addressed the customers rather than the women.
71.
Harriet Martineau supported women's suffrage and signed Bodichon's petition in its favour in 1866.
72.
Harriet Martineau began to write her autobiography, as she expected her life to end.
73.
From her "snow landscape", Harriet Martineau sent her thanks, adding that she had previously praised.
74.
Harriet Martineau supported Darwin's theory because it was not based in theology.
75.
Harriet Martineau is seen as a frontrunner who merges fiction and economy in a time period when "fiction claimed authority over emotional knowledge, while economics claimed authority over empirical knowledge".
76.
Harriet Martineau's goal was to popularise and illustrate the principles of laissez-faire capitalism, though she made no claim to original theorising.
77.
Harriet Martineau believed that some very general social laws influence the life of any society, including the principle of progress, the emergence of science as the most advanced product of human intellectual endeavour, and the significance of population dynamics and the natural physical environment.
78.
Harriet Martineau died of bronchitis at The Knoll on 27 June 1876, aged 74.
79.
Harriet Martineau was buried alongside her mother in Key Hill Cemetery, Hockley, Birmingham.
80.
Harriet Martineau explained how that, as she knew death was approaching, day by day she was not scared of it or dreading it, in fact she even described how she did not let this knowledge impact her daily life activities.
81.
Harriet Martineau left an autobiographical sketch, published by The Daily News on 29 June 1876, in which she wrote:.
82.
Harriet Martineau's book was regarded as dispassionate, "philosophic to the core" in its perceived masculinity, and a work of necessitarianism.
83.
Harriet Martineau explored childhood experiences and memories, expressing feelings of having been deprived of her mother's affection, as well as strong devotion to her brother James Martineau.
84.
Harriet Martineau's name is listed on the east face of the Reformers' Memorial in Kensal Green Cemetery in London.
85.
Anthony Giddens and Simon Griffiths argued that Harriet Martineau is a neglected founder of sociology and that she remains important.
86.
Harriet Martineau taught that study of the society must include all its aspects, including key political, religious and social institutions, and she insisted on the need to include the lives of women.
87.
Harriet Martineau was the first sociologist to study such issues as marriage, children, religious life, and race relations.
88.
Harriet Martineau called on sociologists to do more than just observe, but to work to benefit the society.