page_title: Harriet Martineau
section_title: Ambleside – views on religion, philosophical atheism, and Darwin
hierarchical_section_title: Harriet Martineau / Ambleside – views on religion, philosophical atheism, and Darwin
caption_attribution_description: English: Harriet Martineau (1802-1876), Social philosopher and writer; sister of James Martineau.
context_page_description: Harriet Martineau was a British social theorist and Whig writer, often cited as the first female sociologist.
  Martineau wrote many books and a multitude of essays from a sociological, holistic, religious, domestic and, perhaps most controversially, feminine perspective. She also translated various works by Auguste Comte, and she earned enough to support herself entirely by her writing, a rare feat for a woman in the Victorian era.
  The young Princess Victoria enjoyed reading Martineau's publications. She invited Martineau to her coronation in 1838 — an event which Martineau described in great and amusing detail to her many readers.
  Martineau said of her own approach to writing: "when one studies a society, one must focus on all its aspects, including key political, religious, and social institutions". She believed a thorough societal analysis was necessary to understand women's status under men.
  The novelist Margaret Oliphant said "as a born lecturer and politician [Martineau] was less distinctively affected by her sex than perhaps any other, male or female, of her generation".
context_section_description: In 1845 she left Tynemouth for Ambleside in the Lake District, where she designed herself and oversaw the construction of the house called The Knoll, Ambleside, where she spent the greater part of her later life. In 1845 she published three volumes of Forest and Game Law Tales. In 1846, she resided with her elderly mother, Elizabeth, in Birmingham for some time, following which she then toured Egypt, Palestine and Syria with some friends. On her return she published Eastern Life, Present and Past (1848), in which she reports a breakthrough realization standing on a prominence looking out across the Nile and desert to the tombs of the dead, where "the deceased crossed the living valley and river" to "the caves of the death region" where Osiris the supreme judge "is to give the sign of acceptance or condemnation" (Eastern Life, Present and Past, Complete in One Volume, Philadelphia, 1848, p. 48). Her summary: "the mortuary ideas of the primitive Egyptians, and through them, of the civilized world at large, have been originated by the everlasting conflict of the Nile and the Desert".
  This epiphany changed the course of her life. Eastern Life expressed her concept that, as humanity passed through one after another of the world's historic religions, the conception of the deity and of divine government became at each step more and more abstract and indefinite. She believed the ultimate goal to be philosophic atheism, but did not explicitly say so in the book. She 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. Describing an ancient Egyptian tomb, she wrote, "How like ours were his life and death!... Compare him with a retired naval officer made country gentleman in our day, and in how much less do they differ than agree!" The book's "infidel tendency" was too much for the publisher John Murray, who rejected it. Martineau's biographer, Florence Fenwick Miller, wrote that "all her best moral and intellectual faculties were exerted, and their action becomes visible, at one page or another" of this work.
  Martineau wrote Household Education in 1848, lamenting the state of women's education. She believed women had a natural inclination to motherhood and believed domestic work went hand in hand with academia for a proper, well-rounded education. She stated, "I go further than most persons... in desiring thorough practice in domestic occupations, from an early age, for young girls". She proposed that freedom and rationality, rather than command and obedience, are the most effectual instruments of education.
  Her interest in schemes of instruction led her to start a series of lectures, addressed at first to the school children of Ambleside, but afterward extended to their parents at the request of the adults. The subjects were sanitary principles and practice, the histories of England and North America, and the scenes of her Eastern travels. At the request of the publisher Charles Knight, in 1849 she wrote The History of the Thirty Years' Peace, 1816–1846, an excellent popular history from the point of view of a "philosophical Radical". 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. She has been described as having an "essentially masculine nature". It was commonly thought that a "progressive" woman, in being progressive, was improperly emulating the qualities of a man.
  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. This served as the definitive guidebook for the area for 25 years, effectively replacing the earlier guide by William Wordsworth, and continued in common usage until the publication of Baddeley's Thorough Guide to the English Lake District in 1880.
  Martineau edited a volume of Letters on the Laws of Man's Nature and Development, pub
caption: Harriet Martineau, 1861, by Camille Silvy
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