LETTER: ALS to William Hickson.
MARTINEAU (Harriet), 1802-1876, writer and journalist. Autograph letter signed to William Hickson. Three pages. 12mo. From Ambleside, Cumbria, dated 31 December 1856.
The letter is addressed to William Edward Hickson (1803-1870), the author, educationalist, and sometime owner and editor of the radical "Westminster Review", for which Martineau often wrote in the 1830s and 50s. The opening of Martineau's letter suggests Hickson had sent her a book of his under separate cover, and a letter followed. Martineau here replies to both. The likeliest candidate for the book is Hickson's two-volume "Time and Faith: An Inquiry into the Data of Ecclesiastical History", published in London by Groombridge and Sons. Its title-page gives the date 1857, but the date of Martineau's letter certainly suggests the book was available for presentation by late 1856.
Martineau thanks him for the gift, but declines to read it, citing her heart troubles, of which she gives harrowing detail: "... I am too weak now to read. Even a newspaper is too much for me at times; & Voyages & Travels & the like are all I am up to. You have been misinformed about my being better. The heart disease has gone too far for that. By absolute stillness I am kept alive; but I am in no respect better, except in as far as abstinence from all disturbance keeps off seizures which we did not at first know how to avert. I can still write a little, & sew a good deal; but neither read nor walk." The letter supplements our understanding of Martineau's health at a time soon after she had fallen extremely ill (1854/5) with an illness that would gravely affect her for the rest of her life. (Illness had been a constant feature of her life since 1838 and indeed gave her the subject of her book "Life in the Sickroom" (1844), a volume which attracted equal measure of admiration and hostility.)
R. K. Webb says of Martineau's last illness in the "ODNB": "In 1855 Harriet Martineau had been once more stricken with illness, caused, she believed, by heart disease -- a not inaccurate, but insufficient, diagnosis. She died on 27 June 1876 at The Knoll, Ambleside. The attending physician gave as the cause of death fatty degeneration of the heart and an ovarian tumour; the tumour, which the autopsy showed to be of enormous size, had grown, severely compressing and distending the internal organs and producing the symptoms that reduced her to invalidism in the last twenty years of her life." Unpublished, not in Deborah Logan's five-volume edition of Harriet Martineau letters (Pickering and Chatto, 2007).
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