14
HARRIET MARTINEAU (1802–1876)
The Ayn Rand of Victorian Britain
It is one thing to devise economic theories but quite another to get people to understand them. A perennial problem with almost all the people in this book is that they did not explain their theories in simple language. That is not simply because they expressed complicated ideas–though that is true. It is also because they were bad writers.
Which is where Harriet Martineau (1802–76) comes in. Though she is pretty much unknown today, she is unrivalled as an economics educator. In her time, her works probably sold better than any other economist’s. She wrote economics tracts with a thin coating of novel layered on top. In that sense, it is not much of a leap to compare Martineau with Ayn Rand (1905–82), who a century after Martineau produced bestselling books with a clear economic philosophy at their heart. With her works, Martineau did more than any other writer to instil basic economic ideas in the minds of Victorian Britain.
Martineau was the daughter of an upper-middle-class textile manufacturer from Norwich.1 Her parents held progressive views on the education of girls. Their four daughters received a similar standard of education to their four sons. Though Martineau received no formal training in “political economy”, from a young age the subject fascinated her.
A geography book that referred to Britain’s national debt originally sparked her interest. She appears to have been a barrel of laughs: before long, her family would “set me, as a forfeit at Christmas Games, to make every person present understand the operation of the Sinking Fund”. (The British government used the Sinking Fund to pay off debt.) In her autobiography Martineau recalls the amusement of Thomas Malthus “when I told him I was sick of his name before I was fifteen”.
Malthus was not Martineau’s only famous friend. In her day she was something of a celebrity, especially after she moved to London in the early 1830s. Eventually, says Michael Hill, “her intellectual circle came to include Charles Babbage, Thomas Carlyle, George Eliot, Florence Nightingale, Charles Dickens, Thomas Malthus, William Wordsworth, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Lyell, and Charles Darwin”. She was also exceptionally well-travelled. In 1837 Martineau published Society in America, a report from a two-year study trip around the United States. After a trip to the Middle East, which is detailed in Eastern Life, Present and Past (1848), she embraced atheism. In 1853 she made the first translation into English of Auguste Comte’s Positive Philosophy, reducing the 4,000-page doorstopper to a slightly more digestible 2,000 pages.
Learn then serve
The beginnings of Martineau’s literary career were not nearly so glamorous. In the 1820s the Martineau family hit hard times. In 1829 the family textile business failed.2 Following an aborted engagement Martineau had little chance of bringing in money through marriage. So, from the family home in Norwich, she contacted a publisher, and agreed to write stories for five guineas a pop, mainly on religious subjects. (“But for that loss of money,” Martineau was later to write, “[I] might have lived on in the ordinary method of provincial ladies with small means, sewing, and economising, and growing narrower every year.”)
The stories had some commercial and critical success. But before long she was moving away from religious stories. In the late 1820s she stumbled across a copy of Jane Marcet’s Conversations on Political Economy (1816). Conversations used an old technique to teach something new; Marcet (1769–1858) had turned to Socrates to inform readers about an exciting new field: “political economy”.
This is how she did it. In the form of a wooden conversation between “Caroline” and “Mrs B.”, Marcet explained the ideas of Adam Smith, Malthus and David Ricardo. Caroline would ask the elder lady leading questions, who would then expound on the ideas of the day. Marcet’s intention in Conversations was to educate people about political economy, but without them really realising it. Think of it as an early-19th-century version of Horrible Histories.
Marcet had noble ambitions. Her execution, however, was lacking. Unlike Horrible Histories, her works are extremely dull. In one notable passage Mrs B. says that “Capital, you know, has arisen solely from savings from revenue.” Caroline ploddingly responds, saying “the less we consume, and the more we save, the better”.
Martineau resolved to improve on Marcet’s work. “It struck me at once”, she wrote in her autobiography, “that the principles of the whole science [ie, political economy] might be advantageously conveyed in the same way… by being exhibited in their natural workings in selected passages.” As Margaret O’Donnell argues, “Martineau saw the need for economic education, not of the elite, but of the masses.” Unlike Marcet, Martineau would not use the Socratic method to illustrate the principles of political economy. Instead she would tell stories in prose.
By the early 1830s Martineau had moved into writing about political economy. She had spotted a gap in the market. As Max Fletcher puts it, “by the 1830s classical economists had developed a reasonably complete, well-rounded view of the functioning of an unregulated economic system–one the middle-class public was eager to learn about, but loth to gain their knowledge by struggling through technical treatises”. (Completely fair enough: those treaties are hard-going.) Martineau therefore began with the simplest concepts: things like capital, consumption and labour, which she tackled in Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–33). Then she moved on to more complex issues. In Poor Laws and Paupers Illustrated (1833) and Illustrations of Taxation (1834) Martineau broached the thorny question of the rights and wrongs of government intervention in the free market.
The important point about Martineau, however, is that like Ayn Rand she wanted to argue in favour of a particular type of economics. She was in favour of free markets, hard money and moral responsibility. One story, “Berkeley the Banker”, is an argument in favour of a gold standard–ie, where a currency could be freely exchanged for some quantity of gold bullion. A confectioner is given a five-pound note in exchange for some sweets. The confectioner finds that she does not have enough change, and says, “Oh, I can’t change that note.” People misunderstand her as saying that there is not enough gold to exchange the note; a bank run ensues. “Under a gold standard,” explains Annette Van, “citizens of the town… never could have misinterpreted [the] remarks–they would have known that the note must be honoured and that, therefore, the confectioner merely lacked the correct change.” (As you can probably tell, Martineau is not the world’s subtlest writer.)
Another story, “Demerara”, focuses on the idea of labour productivity.3 The protagonist is Alfred, the son of a plantation owner who returns to the West Indies from Britain, where he has learnt all about the joys of political economy. The son tries to prove to the other plantation owners something that Adam Smith had argued: that slave labour, though apparently “free”, was actually less economically efficient than paid labour.
Under the system that Alfred encounters, slaves are beaten into doing better work. “They will only be whipped a little,” observes one character, as she disdainfully looks towards the “sluggards who had not put in their appearance at the proper hour”. But a dam needs repairing, and Alfred sets up an experiment in which the slaves are paid, “making the slaves as much like English labourers for the occasion as possible”. Unsurprisingly, those slaves that were paid prove to be more productive. “The dam was finished, the mill fit for use, the slaves in good plight, the contractor satisfied and gone home, and all at a less cost than would have secured the reluctant labour of as many hands.” The moral of the story is clear: a free market in labour is better than slavery.
Martineau’s penchant for presenting economic ideas in the simplest possible way led to criticisms from many of her contemporaries. John Stuart Mill, for example, in a letter to Thomas Carlyle, moans that Martineau “reduces the laissez-faire system to absurdity”. Perhaps Mill felt slighted by what had happened to his dad, James. Annette Van notes that James Mill “wrote his own version of a popularising text for political economy, Elements of Political Economy, a text that was less successful than Martineau’s in reaching a mass audience”.
Martineau, however, was under no illusions. She knew that she oversimplified. It was her critics who were at fault, for they had misunderstood what she was trying to achieve. “No one can be more sensible than I am myself of the slightness and small extent of the information conveyed in my Tales,” she said. But simplification was for the greater good. She wanted to entertain and, most importantly, impart knowledge to the middle classes of Victorian Britain. “Political Economy has been less studied than perhaps any other science whatever,” she notes in a preface to one of her stories, “and not at all by those whom it most concerns–the mass of the people.”
The harsh reality
Martineau’s tales are somewhat better than Marcet’s. But unfortunately (as you may already be able to tell) they do not have much literary merit either. A typically gripping passage, presenting a conversation between two people, goes as follows:
“Then the only thing to be done is to open as many channels to industry as possible, and to remove all obstructions to its free course?”
“Just so.”
One biographer said that Martineau’s work was “for the most part wooden, the emotion is synthetic, and the rare attempts at humour are hopeless”. Mill did not hold back either. Martineau, he said, “learnt to put good women’s feelings into men’s words, and to make small things look like great ones”. Leslie Stephens, a historian of the utilitarians, went so far as to call Martineau “unreadable”.
Weirdly, though, the stories were enormously popular in their time. According to one estimate, the first volume of Illustrations of Political Economy sold around 10,000 copies, which the publisher estimated to mean around 144,000 actual readers. By way of comparison, John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy (1848) had total sales of 4,000 in the first four years after its publication. Many of Charles Dickens’s novels had sales of only 2,000 or 3,000 copies. One biographer called the commercial success of Martineau’s stories “miraculous”. This astonishing success irritated the highbrow economists. Mill, her sharpest critic, was embarrassed that his mighty Principles of Political Economy sold considerably fewer copies than Martineau’s plodding efforts.
If Martineau’s books were neither intellectually ambitious nor well written, then why were they so popular? It may be something to do with how Britain’s middle classes saw themselves in a rapidly changing world.
The best of all possible worlds
Martineau published her books during perhaps the most brutal period of the industrial revolution. Living standards were falling: in some big cities, like Manchester, life expectancy at birth was less than 30 years. It was difficult for Britain’s middle classes to reconcile such distress with the doctrines of the classical school, which held that free markets would lead to the best possible outcome. If capitalism was so good, then why were so many people suffering?
Martineau allowed such a reconciliation to take place. Her Illustrations revealed to readers “the happy endings that await those who place their faith in a market left to its own ‘natural’ workings”, in the words of Elaine Freedgood. Consider Life in the Wilds. In this tale, some British colonists in southern Africa are ransacked by local people. “The savages”, she says, “had carried off their tools and their arms, burned their little furniture with the houses, and left them nothing but the clothes they wore.”
Left with nothing, the colonists must build an economy from scratch. For a while, they “live like savages, on roots and fruit and fish”. One settler remarks that “fish is very good in its way; but we have had so much lately, that one might fancy it was to be Lent all the year round” (more of those “hopeless” attempts at humour). So they set to work on constructing a new economy, one which will give them variety and plenty.
Arnall, the hero, is a snobbish and lazy fellow who does not like work. But in his desperation, he devises a contraption that captures animals. What follows is a spontaneous evolution of the division of labour, Freedgood argues: some people make arrows, others set about preparing the meat. Before long, the settlers are once again living in a prosperous settlement. The moral of the story is simple: if markets are left to their own devices and everyone is allowed to follow their own self-interest, everyone will be better off. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but eventually.
Through such tales, Martineau tempts the reader not to worry too much about the social problems of mid-19th-century Britain. Freedgood memorably refers to it as “banishing panic”. Yes, Martineau says, things may be tough right now, but that is not capitalism’s fault (it is probably the result of some misguided government intervention). Eventually, the free market will lead to prosperity for all. To middle-class folk witnessing the birth of industrial capitalism, this was a reassuring message. All they had to do was let the market do its thing.
Not just a populist
Martineau also played a key role in shaping attitudes to one of the policy revolutions of the 19th century–the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834.
The old-fashioned poor-law system, which had existed since Elizabethan times, was by the early 1800s coming under serious attack. Under the old system, the poor were entitled to “outdoor relief”–in effect, welfare payments in the form of cash or food.
However, the system was looking increasingly unsustainable. In 1832 the total amount of expenditure on poor relief exceeded that of any year since 1818, even though the price of grain was far lower. Government reports published at the time speak of the “casual poor” who took advantage of a poorly organised system to commit small-scale fraud by claiming multiple times from the bureaucrats who managed the system. The worry among government ministers was that an overly generous, easy-to-game system discouraged honest toil. Thomas Malthus had given some of the most compelling arguments against the old poor-law system, arguing that it did not really help the poor. In fact, he argued, it did the opposite, by encouraging them to have more children, which had the effect of pushing up the supply of labour and pushing down average wages (see Chapter 11).
Martineau was at the centre of these debates. She was good friends with Malthus, as well as with Nassau Senior, one of the driving forces behind the efforts to reform the old poor law. The government commissioned the four tales in the Poor Laws and Paupers Illustrated series in order to aid the work of the Poor Law Commission, a government body tasked with establishing what needed to be done.
“Cousin Marshall”, one of those stories, is a critique of the old-fashioned poor-law system.4 The tale begins with a poor woman, Mrs Bridgeman, and her children, who have been made homeless through no fault of their own. They are in need of help, but Mrs Bell, Mrs Bridgeman’s sister, will not provide it. Mrs Bell, we learn, has been living off government assistance. Thus she has lost her sense of self-reliance, as well as any notion of familial responsibility.
Cousin Marshall, though not a particularly close relative, saves the day. We learn that Cousin Marshall is not receiving handouts from the state, and consequently has a “greater sense of social responsibility and family feeling”, as Freedgood puts it. The duty of care for those in need properly lies with families, not the state, the argument goes. Cousin Marshall takes in two of the four Bridgeman children (the other two, unfortunately, must go to a workhouse).
The stories reinforced an argument commonly made by poor-law campaigners. Government-provided assistance, the thinking went, blunted people’s sense of duty and charity. It turned them into people who expected the state to do stuff for them, rather than people who would get things done themselves. As historians such as Freedgood argue, the moral of stories such as this was that by making welfare much harsher, you would make people responsible and virtuous.
No one knows what effect Martineau’s stories really had on policymakers. Judging public opinion is practically impossible. Certainly, for people who were more sympathetic to the poor, she became a hate figure of sorts. Yet it is clear that before long the weight of governmental opinion turned against the old poor-law system. The 1834 Poor Law Act banned “outdoor relief”–the giving of aid to the poor outside of the workhouse–so as to compel people to work.
A quiet revolutionary
All told, Martineau has a strange place in the history of economics. She was not a “real” economist, insofar as she devised no new theories. She was not taken particularly seriously as a writer. Rarely if ever is she read today.
Yet Martineau was instrumental in creating economics–a discipline which is more than just a concern with public questions, but also a public concern with those questions. Martineau understood economic theory and could write about it in a way that normal people could understand. She coaxed the British public into understanding economics and convinced them that economic reasoning was valid. And crucially, she enticed them to believe that free-market economics was a good thing. She was central to some policy debates of the mid-19th century, mediating between wonkish experts and the general public. She may be a minor figure today but Harriet Martineau is one of the most influential economists in this book.