She is one of the strangest phenomena to me. A genuine little
Poetess, buckrammed, swathed like a mummy into Socinian and
Political--Economy formulas; and yet verily alive inside of that!
"God has given a Prophet to every People in its own speech,"
say the Arabs. Even the English Unitarians were one day to
have their Poet, and the best that could be said for them too was
to be said. I admire this good lady's integrity, sincerity; her
quick, sharp discernment to the depth it goes; her love also is
great; nay, in fact it is too great; the host of illustrious obscure
mortals whom she produces on you, of Preachers, Pamphleteers,
Antislavers, able Editors, and other Atlases bearing (unknown to
us) the world on their shoulders, is absolutely more than enough.

THOMAS CARLYLE TO RALPH WALDO EMERSON

June 1, 1837

WHEN Harriet Martineau moved from Norwich to Lon-
don in 1832, she was twenty-nine years old and famous.
Her tales to illustrate political economy had driven Lord
Brougham to the exasperated remark that a deaf girl in Norwich
was doing more good than any man in the country, ¹ and anyone
who could exasperate the Lord Chancellor by stealing a march
on his Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge deserved
the lionizing she got. When she sailed for America two years
later, the tales had multiplied and her reputation had grown.
Less accustomed then than now to visiting celebrities, the
Americans who saw her noted and noted down everything, in-
cluding much that London took for granted. To find out what
she was like, then, we can begin mostly with Americans.

A New York lawyer, Robert Sedgwick, saw Miss Martineau
in church on a Sunday morning in September, 1834, and recog-
nized her at once "by the singular ear-trumpet with which she
was drinking in Mr. Furness's sermon". She was, he wrote to his

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