Dawn Island.
Martineau, Harriet. Dawn Island. A Tale. Manchester: J. Gadsby, 1845.
8vo.; frontispiece illustration with tissue guard; half-title illustration; small portion cut from front endpaper; green cloth, stamped in gilt; a.e.g.; elaborate gilt illustration by J. Stephenson on upper panel.
First edition of Martineau’s social allegory about white European traders who land on an island in the South Sea inhabited by natives who know nothing of “civilized” culture. CBEL vol. 3 p. 496; Sadleir 1631. As the half-title and author’s preface state, Dawn Island is Martineau’s contribution to the Bazaar of the National Anti-Corn-Law League, a free-trade group of Manchester industrialists seeking repeal of the duties on the import of foreign corn. On Dawn Island, despite vast cultural differences, the traders and islanders set up a system of commerce that is mutually beneficial, despite the disparity between the levels of societal sophistication. This progression is narrated in nine chapters, beginning with “Nature and Man at War,” and concluding with “Nature and Man at Peace.” The Westerners bring structural organization to the island which, with no governing principle at work, is in a state of violent chaos when they first arrive. (As historians would later reveal, the white traders actually had quite a devastating effect on the South Pacific, but Martineau advocates the principle of free trade in her optimistic, if somewhat naïve, vision of intercultural harmony.)
Labeled the “first woman sociologist” by biographer Alice Rossi, Harriet Martineau (1802-1876) was raised in Norwich in a devout Unitarian household. For reasons unknown, she began to lose her hearing at fifteen and was almost completely deaf by her early twenties. Despite this disability, Martineau became engaged to John Hugh Worthington and might have lived her life as a traditional middle class Victorian housewife had not her fiancée suffered a nervous breakdown prior to their marriage. After the engagement ended, Martineau never again had a serious relationship, saying of her solitary lifestyle, “there is a power of attachment in me that has never been touched.”
Martineau quickly learned to support herself through her writing, submitting tracts and articles to national journals and regional publishers. Her early work was predominantly religious, but after adopting the beliefs of Necessarianism, her literary focus shifted to social science. In 1832, Martineau moved to London and was accepted into the elite academic circle that included writers and social theorists such as George Eliot, Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens and Thomas Malthus. Martineau traveled to America for the first time in 1834 for a two-year visit, and after returning to England, published her first studies of social theory based on the behavior she observed abroad: Society in America (London: Saunders and Otley, 1837), Retrospect of Western Travel (London: Saunders and Otley, 1838), and her own guide to conducting empirical social research, How to Observe Morals and Manners (London: Charles Knight, 1838).
Though Martineau is most known for her contributions to sociology, she did venture into other literary genres during her career, publishing one novel, Deerbrook (London: Edward Moxon,m1839) and several history books. Before Marx, Engels or Weber, Martineau examined in many of her books issues such as social class, religion, domestic relations, women's status, and criminology. She is also credited as having been the first to bring the principles of positivism into the discourse of American thought. Martineau eventually retired to London’s quiet Lake District, where she died in 1876 from an unidentified long-term illness. (http://www.webster.edu/~woolflm/martineau.html)
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