As we know, Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë published their work anonymously by using the pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. Emily and Anne took their anonymity, at least as far as the reading public was concerned, to the grave, but Charlotte Brontë achieved fame in her own right during her lifetime. It allowed her to forge friendships with some of the greatest writers and thinkers of the time, but one notable friend drifted in and out of her favour. In today’s post we will look at a letter sent on this day 1851 in which Charlotte Brontë opined that one such person had received a “death-blow” to her reputation: Harriet Martineau.
Harriet Martineau (a portrait of her by George Richmond sits at the head of this post) may not be as celebrated today as some of Charlotte’s other literary friends such as Elizabeth Gaskell or William Makepeace Thackeray, but she is still rightly regarded as an important nineteenth-century figure, and was both a celebrated and controversial writer at the time Charlotte penned the following letter to her friend James Taylor:
Taylor was one of the chief clerks of Smith, Elder & Co, Charlotte’s publisher, and a friendship had grown between them by the time of this letter. A month later their friendship would be irretrievably strained; en route to India on behalf of Smith, Elder, Taylor called at Haworth Parsonage and proposed to Charlotte Brontë. She refused his proposal and their friendship was never the same again.
A similar strain happened in the friendship between Charlotte and Martineau. At the start of 1851 Charlotte (who had originally met Martineau in London two years earlier) accepted an invitation to visit Harriet Martineau in Ambleside. This meeting went well, and Charlotte wrote to her publisher George Smith, exclaiming: “I did enjoy my visit to Miss Martineau very much.” She then tried to cajole Smith into publishing Harriet’s novel Oliver Weld, going as far as to tell him that Harriet Martineau was “a greater writer” than Elizabeth Gaskell.
Just two months later, Charlotte’s attitude to Harriet seems to have changed greatly. The reason was the publication in that month of a book entitled Letters On the Laws of Man’s Nature and Development. The book consists of a series of letters between Henry George Atkinson and Harriet Martineau (who edited the book), in which they examine the nature of man, humanity and religion. It was a book in which Martineau declared to the world her atheism, a declaration which shook Charlotte’s views on her friend to the core.
Charlotte had long known of Martineau’s atheism, and had enjoyed theological debates with her, but she feared that this new book would shock the reading public and damage Martineau’s standing forever. It is possible Charlotte also feared that being associated with so radical and unapologetic an atheist as Martineau would damage her own reputation.
Charlotte was the daughter of a Church of England curate, and a devout Christian. Her moral response to Atkinson and Martineau’s book is summed up in the following line to Taylor: “Who can trust the word or rely on the judgment of an avowed Atheist?”
Nonetheless, Charlotte did later place her faith once more in the judgment of her once close friend. Two years later, in 1853, she urged Harriet Martineau to review her new novel Villette. It was the subsequent scathing review, not any profession of atheism, that put an end to their friendship forever.
I hope you can join me on Sunday for another new Brontë blog post, as we mark a day of celebration and look ahead to a day of mourning in the Brontë story.