A Healing Sense of Place: The Importance of Environment on healing in the nineteenth century

Throughout the 19th century healing spaces were constantly adapting and changing due to understandings of illness, popular treatment options and public opinion for example, while many people would consider a hospital nowadays to be a site of healing, the 1832 Anatomy Act left many poorer patients and their families concerned that they would face post…

Harriet Martineau – Radical Activism

Abstract Harriet Martineau (1802-1876) was a unique figure in Victorian culture, who contributed to a wide range of intellectual and social debates of the period. She was a writer, sociologist, economist, feminist and disabled activist and abolitionist. As a historical figure she attracts cross-discipline interest for her varied and interesting life. It would be impossible to fit…

Three Minute Thesis

Capturing the voices of those hidden within the past is what fuels my research, specifically those of disabled people, especially at the intersection with other marginalised groups. It can be hard to find these voices, as historically it has mainly been white upper class males who have had their voices heard, and as such it…

Harriet Martineau – Early Years to the publication of Illustrations of the Political Economy

When Harriet was 9 (1812) one of her first lemons was handed to her; the death of her Aunt Martineau.[1]  While Martineau wasn't unfamiliar with death having recollections of mournful feelings when Nelson died when she was four, this death was the first in her family, and her first real introduction to a chronic illness…

Harriet Martineau & Life in the Sick-Room

Following the publication of “Deerbrook,” in April, 1839, Harriet went abroad to transport an invalid cousin to Switzerland, while in Venice she was struck down by an illness and had to be brought back to England on a couch attached to the travelling carriage she and her friends were travelling in. She returned in such…

Harriet Martineau and Medical Authority

In I844, after five years of illness and confinement to her sick-room, Martineau published Life in the sick- room: essays by an invalid, a normative treatise on invalidism. While she was well known in the Victorian era for her work on the political economy and other social commentary, she is more recently remembered for her…

Harriet Martineau and Gender

In The Powers of Distance, Amanda Anderson identified the “prevalent Victorian preoccupation with distinctly modern practices of detachment, a preoccupation characterised by ambivalence and uncertainty about what the significance and consequences of such practices might be."[1] There is a central tension in the ambivalence, about achieving objectivity without losing sight of the subjects of observation,…

Harriet Martineau and Deafness

While her writing on issues of disability tends to seek the ‘truth’ that her utilitarianism inspires her to explore and to convey this to wider society, it must be read not only as educational and remote from the author and her lived experience, but influenced by it, in doing so she uses the lemons life…

Harriet Martineau and the Victorian Sickroom – Disabled #Herstory

Harriet Martineau (1802-1876) was a writer and intellectual of the Victorian period. She was best known for her short stories on the political economy for the layman. She was deaf from childhood, and required the use of an ear trumpet. Between 1839 and 1845, Martineau became housebound due to a uterine tumor, while in her…