SOURCE: Hobart, Ann. “Harriet Martineau's Political Economy of Everyday Life.” Victorian Studies 37, no. 2 (winter 1994): 223-51.

In the following essay, Hobart examines portions of Martineau's works that deal with economics and capitalism in England.

In her celebrated Autobiography, Harriet Martineau traces the real beginning of her literary career to the collapse of her father's firm in 1829. Before that happy “calamity,” Martineau claims to have effaced the signs of her professional ambition in compliance with the conventional standards of domestic propriety on which her mother insisted: Jane Austen-like, she wrote only “before breakfast or in some private way” so as not to disturb her family and their visiting acquaintance with an unwomanly display of intellectual application. The ruin of the family fortune, however, canceled the Martineaus' expectations of leisured domesticity for their unmarried daughters. As her father, Thomas Martineau, had died several years prior to the failure of his investments...