Harriet Martineau exhibited remarkable intellectual precocity, discovering John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) at age seven. Beginning with her study of Malthusian political economy at age fourteen and culminating in her editorializing against the Contagious Diseases Acts in her seventies, Martineau's lively participation in the issues and controversies of her time marks her as a true representative of the Victorian age. She was learned, articulate, opinionated, and, detractors claimed, intellectually inflexible. Martineau's life and work reveal a consistent determination never to lapse into what she regarded as middle-class complacency or superficial gentility. There was much work to be done in the world, and there was, as she put it in her autobiography (1877), "more or less evidence" that she was the one to do it.

Born on 12 June 1802 in Norwich, England, Martineau was the sixth of eight children of Elizabeth Martineau, née Rankin, and Thomas Martineau, a bombazine manufacturer...