University of California Press

Open Accounts: Harriet Martineau and the Problem of Privacy in Early-Victorian Culture
Author(s): AERON HUNT

Source: Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 62, No. 1 (June 2007), pp. 1-28
Published by: University of California Press
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Open Accounts: Harriet

Martineau and the
Problem of Privacy in
Early-Victorian Culture
AERON HUNT
ith her fame well established by

writings in such diverse fields as political economy, travel, sociology, and fiction, the early 1840s
found Harriet Martineau preoccupied by the problem of letters. Consumed with worry that letters to her friends would be
hustled into publication upon her death, Martineau embarked
on a campaign requesting that her correspondents agree to
burn or return the letters they received from her. In 1843 she
wrote to Fanny Wedgwood: What an enormous encroachment
on ones liberty of speech this [publication] is, when one
reflects upon it! For long, my close intimates . . . have been in
the habit of burning my letters, as I have theirs, as a matter of
course: and I certainly feel that I can write with freedom and
pleasure only to such. 1 This justification rests on grounds that
feel appropriate to Martineau, the spokesperson for political
Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 62, No. 1, pp. 128. ISSN: 08919356, online ISSN:
1067 8352. 2007 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please
direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Presss Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpress.edu/
journals/rights.htm.
1 Harriet Martineau, letter to Fanny Wedgwood, 7 January 1843, in Harriet Martineaus Letters to Fanny Wedgwood, ed. Elisabeth Sanders Arbuckle (Stanford: Stanford
Univ. Press, 1983), p. 43.

ninet eenth -c en t u ry l it e r at u r e
economy: the healthy, free circulation of ideas and feelings depends on maintaining a zone of privacy just as a strong market
rests on a foundation of private property. In her autobiography, however, she goes beyond this invisible-hand reasoning,
justifying what she calls so serious a step as forbidding the
publication of her private letters by declaring privacy a value in
and of itself: I claim the sanction of every principle of integrity, and every feeling of honor and delicacy, on behalf of
my practice, she writes in the introduction to her Autobiography
(1877). There will always be plenty of consenting and willing
letter-writers. . . . But there should be no others,at least till
privacy is altogether abolished as an unsocial privilege. 2
At the same time, however, neither argument appears to sit
entirely comfortably with her. Even as Martineau pulls herselfas represented in her letters out of circulation, she also
asserts that this step had rendered unquestionable the duty
of writing her autobiography, thus putting herself back in (Martineau, Autobiography, I, 1). She then spends over half of the introduction to that work justifying the decision to forbid the
publication of her correspondence. Further, in the Autobiography she repeatedly insists that her own life has been marked by
complete openness: to give just one instance, Martineau claims
that she refused a publishers urging to write a novel secretly because, in her words, I could not undertake to introduce a protracted mystery into my life which would destroy its openness
and freedom (Autobiography, I, 416). In moments such as these,
Martineau seems to be operating according to the assumption
that privacy is suspect: if knowledge of her self is not going to be
made available through the publication of letters, then it is her
duty to make it available in some other way, and something that
cannot be revealed is represented as a threat to happiness.
Such concerns about the proper limits to privacy may
seem pedantic in the context of personal letters: only the most
committed devotee of the principle of free circulation, it would
seem, would be troubled by the need to justify keeping their
contents private. Martineau, of course, was just such a devotee.
2 Harriet Martineau, introduction (1855) to her Autobiography, ed. Maria Weston
Chapman, 2 vols. (Boston: James R. Osgood and Co., 1877), I, 2, 5.

harri et martineau
Thus, the advocacy of secrecy in her response to another set of

lettersa commercial rather than personal correspondence
may seem even more surprising. In her account of the origins
of the rash of bank failures that undermined British economic
stability in the late 1830s, Martineau blames wayward information. When the Bank of England extended aid to two northern
banks in an effort to head off a panic, she recounts,
there was much surprise at the quantity of American paper that
came in, disclosing the existence of an unsound system of credits
carried on by six houses in London and one in Liverpool. . . .
The Bank Directors sent orders to their agent at Liverpool to
refuse the paper of certain American houses. By some strange indiscretion, the names of these firms got abroad.3
She claims that this untoward accident . . . increased the public distrust in the state of commercial affairs and greatly worsened an already unstable situation (History of England, II, 329).
Martineau was not the only proponent of classical economic
theory to blame indiscretion for the economic distress that
ensued. As J. R. McCulloch wrote in the Edinburgh Review,
whatever may be thought of the act of writing . . . a letter containing the names of the proscribed American banks,
there can certainly be only one opinion as to the necessity that
existed for making it most confidential, and of maintaining
profound secrecy with respect to it. Whether, however, it were
owing to the inexcusable negligence of the letter-writer, or to
some inconceivable folly on the part of the agent at Liverpool, to
whom it was addressed, the latter did not regard it as confidential, but, on the contrary, showed it to certain parties! The effect
was like magic. The credit of the American houses, that had previously stood so high, was instantly annihilated.4
It is striking that two writers otherwise so devoted to the principle of free circulation would advocate secrecy in this matter.
After all, the theory held that in order for the market to work
3 Harriet Martineau, The History of England during the Thirty Years Peace: 1816 1846,
2 vols. (London: Charles Knight, 1849 50), II, 329.
4 [ J. R. McCulloch], Causes and Consequences of the Crisis in the American
Trade, Edinburgh Review, 65, no. 132 ( July 1837), 233.

perfectly, information should move as freely as goods: investors

or clients of the shaky banks would want to know about uncertain credit, just as insiders did.5 In fact, in the wake of the banking crisis, a chorus of voices (including McCullochs own, elsewhere) advocated for more publicity, not less: these observers
blamed the disaster on the secret and dishonest practices of
bank directors, shielded by the principle that private property
was not to be interfered with or inquired into. Only by allowing
true information to circulate, it was argued, would the possibility of concealment and fraud be eliminated and the soundness
of the money market and the health of the national economy
be preserved. But as Martineau and McCulloch noted, such
knowledge was not without danger; publicity could accelerate
and broaden a crisis, foreclosing all chances for individual
banks and the broader economy to pull out of the dive.
I introduce these two sets of letters and the intellectual inconsistencies that they evoke as exemplars of a tension that
plagued early-Victorian culture: in both the personal and commercial spheres, privacy and publicity make equally insistent
and inherently irreconcilable moral and practical claims. The
instability of the Victorian public/private divide has frequently
been emphasized, especially by critics and historians who have
noted the ways in which the private especially domestic
sphere exercised public symbolic and material functions. In
particular, the private spheres theoretical separation from the
processes of commerce was invoked as a safeguard to manage
the tensions of capitalism, either by acting as an imagined outside to a system that threatened to be all-consuming, or by supplying the confidence in the stability of value and representation that was necessary for the market to work.6 Ideally, the
5 On the importance of information to political economy, see Mary Poovey, Writing about Finance in Victorian England: Disclosure and Secrecy in the Culture of Investment, Victorian Studies, 45 (2002), 17 41. See also Adam Smiths discussion of secrets as the first of a series of causes that disturb the tendency of the law of supply and
demand to move goods toward their natural price (An Inquiry into the Nature and
Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd, 2 vols.
[Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976], I, 7778).
6 See, for instance, Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of
the Novel (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987); and Gordon Bigelow, Market Indicators: Banking and Domesticity in Dickenss Bleak House, ELH, 67 (2000), 589 615.

harri et martineau
home was to be sheltered not merely from the competitive fray

but also from the public flow of information: in Sarah Stickney
Elliss classic formulation, around every domestic scene there
must be a strong wall of confidence, which no internal suspicion can undermine, no external enemy break through. 7 Recently, scholars such as Regenia Gagnier and Mary Poovey have
emphasized the way in which business, most often classed on
the public side of the divide, was similarly inflected by the values and practices of privacy, both through the central politicaleconomic principle that property was a private matter not to be
lightly interfered with or even inquired into, and through the
profit-driven necessity to keep business secrets.8 But the insistence on business privacy was at odds with the markets need
for the circulation of regular, reliable information about
financial matters, which, as Poovey has noted, itself served
practical needs beyond mere theoretical consistency, enabling
the development of far-flung trade networks and confidence in
new financial institutions and instruments (Writing about Finance, p. 17). The tension between publicity and privacy in
financial mattersbetween the imperative to disclose facts
about finance and the incentive to keep aspects of the financial
institutions hidden (Writing about Finance, p. 30)thus
constitutes, in Pooveys view, one of the central dynamics
of Victorian capitalism. To demand open accounts, whether
of business or of home life, risked treading on the principle of
privacy that gave the commercial and domestic spheres their
practical and ideological force; yet a too-solid information
shield could undermine that force and introduce new risks.
Martineaus stance on both sets of correspondence highlights this tension: she deems privacy, whether in personal or
public activities, both necessary and suspect. Recognizing this
ambivalence, I suggest, may shed new light on Victorian
Britains public/private divide, critiques of which model have
come to feel almost as familiar as the model itself. In particular,
7
[Sarah Stickney] Ellis, The Women of England, Their Social Duties and Domestic Habits,
20th ed. (London: Fisher, Son, and Co., [1839]), p. 26.
8 See Gagnier, The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000); and Poovey, Writing about Finance in
Victorian England.

it may complicate our sense of what is often presumed, even in

our most skeptical analyses: the Victorian faith in the private as
the guarantor of morality and ethical identity under capitalist
social relations. In fact, this faith was neither easily nor completely established during the early-Victorian period: the notion of privacy itself produced its own attendant concerns, even
in the realms that it was supposed to inhabit most comfortably.
Harriet Martineau represents a particularly apt case-study
of this ambivalence, as a woman whose usefulness as a feminist
thinker has been more controversial than her assured status as a
feminist model with a path-breaking public career might lead
one to expect. As Deirdre David has noted, Everyone who
writes about Martineau must address the nagging problem
raised by her writings about women: Was she a courageous feminist? Do her calls for women to become skilled in the domestic
arts compromise a call for them to enter the public sphere? 9 As
this comment suggests, disagreement has frequently centered
on the place given to the private sphere in Martineaus thinking.
Some critics find in her work surprising endorsements of conventional domestic ideologies; others emphasize her insistence
on the importance of public labor, reading this either as a kind
of feminist mission statement or as a failure to overturn gendered hierarchies that forecloses avenues for female solidarity.10
What all of these approaches tend to assume, however, is
that there was a stable meaning to domesticity and privacy that
9 Deirdre David, George Eliots Trump: Recent Work on Harriet Martineau, Victorian Studies, 47 (2004), 89.
10 On Martineaus echoes of convention, see for instance Leonore Davidoff and
Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780 1850
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987); and Deirdre David, Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy: Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1987). On Martineaus emphasis on public labor, see Valerie Kossew
Pichanick, Harriet Martineau: The Woman and Her Work, 180276 (Ann Arbor: Univ. of
Michigan Press, 1980); and Linda H. Peterson, Traditions of Victorian Womens Autobiography: The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia,
1999). Ann Hobart suggests the limitations that this emphasis on public labor puts on
Martineaus feminism (see Hobart, Harriet Martineaus Political Economy of Everyday
Life, Victorian Studies, 37 [1994], 22351). Deborah Anna Logan attempts to reconcile Martineaus feminism and the private sphere by claiming that her notable domestic skills form a model for her writing (see Logan, The Hour and the Woman: Harriet Martineaus Somewhat Remarkable Life [DeKalb: Northern Illinois Univ. Press, 2002]).

harri et martineau
Martineau could accept or reject to different political ends. I

revisit the question of the value of privacy for Martineau, and
for the culture within which she was so prominent a voice, by
examining her sole domestic novel, Deerbrook (1839), in which
she experimented with the genre most associated with the private at a moment when privacy and publicity were becoming
particularly charged terms in discussions of contemporary economic challenges. David suggests that Deerbrook espouses a disappointingly pious stance toward the virtues of the private
sphere.11 I suggest, rather, that the novel be read as a struggle
to reconcile the claims of privacy with Martineaus intellectual,
social, and political commitments to free circulation. Though
the novels narrative voice and structure are less pointedly didactic than in Martineaus earlier political economy tales, its
account of domestic life and intimate relationships reconceptualizes the private world according to a version of the model
of free circulation that Martineau generally supported in political economy, arguing for an ethic of openness by locating
hitches in the flow of information as the source of both public
and personal troubles.
But just as information posed a problem for strict orthodoxy in Martineaus analysis of the banking crisis and her personal accounts, Deerbrooks main subjectthe intimate details
of family, love, and marriage in a small townproves resistant
to the novels political argument. Martineaus acknowledgment
of the dangers inherent in making these realms part of the information economy suggests a desire to maintain the privacy of
the private sphere. Yet the very fact that these matters are
difficult to assimilate into the ideal of openness makes them
problematic for the novel. I argue that the unease with intimate matters evident in Deerbrook grows in large part out of its
engagement with contemporary debates about publicity and
privacy in the economic sphere, extending the ambivalence
that these debates revealed into a space (the home) where privacy has frequently been taken to be unproblematicand thus
straightforwardly available to perform the ideological work of
responding to social and commercial transformations. In other
11
See David, Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy, p. 85.

words, in early-Victorian culture even the accepted roles and

characteristics on the private side of the divide gave cause for
concern, particularly as they intersected with other socially
powerful discourses. For Martineau the cause for concern was
the valuation of a private realm coming into conflict with her
commitment to free and open circulation.
As she contemplated the ways in which her

life might straddle the public/private divide, from the campaign to control her letters to the writing of her autobiography,
Martineau was forced to juggle her intellectual commitment to
political economy, her personal commitments to relationships,
and her professional and public commitment to her place as a
historical figure. Just how open did ones accounts need to be in
order to satisfy these competing demands? And how could information be limited without jeopardizing the mechanism of
the information marketplace as it worked to increase the public
store of knowledge? Echoes of these questions may be heard
from the opening scenes of Deerbrook in the plea of Margaret
Ibbotson, the novels rational and sensitive heroine, to her sister
Hester: Our confidence must be as full and free, our whole
minds as absolutely open, asas I have read and heard that two
minds can never be. 12 As the narrator recounts the story of
the two sisters, their romances and marriages, and their negotiation of the cutthroat domestic politics of the country village
where they have come to stay with their relatives, the Greys, the
reader is presented with a model of intimate relationships that
accords with the ideals of free circulation but that at the same
time seems troubling or hard to maintain. In the novels frequent discussions of the place of secrecy and openness in love,
friendship, and sisterhood, openness generally wins out as the
preferred mode of conduct, and concealment signifies the fall
away from happiness. Thus, relationships are threatened when
the information economy is limited or poisoned, just as disas12 Harriet Martineau, Deerbrook, introduction by Gaby Weiner (1839; rpt. London:
Virago Press, 1983), p. 14. Further references are to this edition and appear in the text.

harri et martineau
ter, in the form of hunger and a deadly plague, strikes in the

novels public sphere when trade is not allowed to compensate
for poor harvests and slanderous misinformation is spread
about a doctor whose science might save lives. The novel thus
presents the case that, as the sisters friend, the governess Maria
Young, puts it, those who are really wise will find that, amidst
the actual business of life, there is so much more safety, and
ease, and blessing in perfect frankness than in any kind of concealment, that they will give themselves the liberty and peace of
being open as the day-light (Deerbrook, p. 62).
In focusing her novel on the choice between concealment
and openness, Martineau engaged an economic debate that
would have been familiar to her contemporary readers. The
tension between privacy and publicity in commercial affairs
came into sharp focus during the late 1830s, notably in responses to the crisis in banking that Martineau was later to describe (with some intellectual inconsistency, as I have noted) as
springing from indiscretion with names. This crisis elicited calls
to harness the power of information in order to discipline businesses: perfect publicity would tame the possible excesses of
the money market.13 If information about the composition
financial and, it was assumed, moral of banks and their directors and investors was required to be made public, it was argued, investors and depositors would be able to make informed
decisions, the money market would be placed on more solid
foundations as flimsy establishments were driven out, and the
system of free competition would be able to work more effectively for both investors and the wider public. One virtue of this
solution, to many of its supporters, was that in requiring openness it preserved a more fundamental respect for the private
13 See [ J. R. McCulloch], Joint-Stock Banks and Companies, Edinburgh Review, 63
(1836), 434. Perfect publicity was not the only remedy suggested; greater regulation
of currency issues was an important proposal, eventually implemented in Peels Bank
Acts in 1844 and 1845. Neither was there agreement on what would actually constitute
effective publicity: McCulloch wonders, for instance, about the relative effectiveness of
releasing account books and balance sheets, or personal information about directors.
For a history of the banking debates, see Frank Whitson Fetter, Development of British
Monetary Orthodoxy, 17971875 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1965); and
Lawrence H. White, Free Banking in Britain: Theory, Experience, and Debate, 1800 1845
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984).

10
operations of the banking business by bypassing the more controversial proposal to interfere with its operations by regulating
the actual production and circulation of currency.14
The shared focus on openness and concealment in Martineaus novel and in the contemporary debate over the banking crisis highlights the dilemmas that privacy raised in both its
domestic and its economic modes. In the banking debates, the
propensity of Victorians to look to the private spherethe
world of the household and familyto counterbalance their
experience of new, volatile capitalist social relations was expressed in suspicion about the new joint-stock banks, which
seemed to be displacing the older private banks that had formerly been the norm. Although private banks had themselves
been prone to shakiness, and though joint-stock banks could
and did boast of the improved stability that their larger share
capital provided, the private bank retained a good deal of force
as an ideal because, unlike the undomesticated joint-stock
bank, the private banker could be known through his person
and his household. The representation of Mr. Pearie, one of
the partners in the firm Pearie, Peat, & Patieson in a Blackwoods story of the period, illustrates the way in which the private bank seemed to promise more direct, immediate access to
the truth about its solvency. Pearie is described as
a gentleman of mature years,with a plump expression of body
and feature, which told as plainly as words could have done, that
he had all his life long been a prosperous gentleman. . . . Trade
had indeed flourishedhis consequence and dignity expanded
in exact proportion with his bodily configurationand an eye
with any speculation in it, could see at a glance that one hundred thousand pounds at least were written in the swell of his
waistcoat.15
The private firm, in this tales imagination, is one that can bypass the referential slipperiness of signifierswords; instead,
14 See, for instance, the proposals in George Warde Norman, Remarks Upon Some
Prevalent Errors, with Respect to Currency and Banking, and Suggestions to the Legislature and
the Public as to the Improvement of the Monetary System (London: Pelham Richardson,
1838), pp. 107 8.
15 [ James White], The Murdering Banker, Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, 44
(1838), 824.

harri et martineau
11
the visual signs of Pearies physique point squarely to the composition and property of the firm. The tendency to ascribe to
the private sphere a resonance of dependability and clarity,
and to harness this resonance in order to stabilize the value
represented in economic institutions, found perhaps its most
striking instance in the common nickname for the Bank of
England, the Old Lady in Threadneedle Street. 16
But although the enlistment of the private sphere as a site
of representational stability has come to seem a touchstone of
Victorian culture, the call for perfect publicity that many observers recommended as a response to the late-1830s banking
crisis reveals a different take on privacy. Rather than assuming
a mystical quality of truth grounded in the privacy of the
household, McCulloch, for instance, called for the name, address, and number and amount of shares of each investor to be
made visible to common scrutiny, equating resistance with
criminality:
The accounts of the names and residences of the proprietors are
not published, but are carefully secluded from the public eye, in
the repositories of Somerset House! . . . To render them of any
real utility, they should be brought under the public eye, by being hung up and periodically published in the newspapers of the
places where the banks carry on business. (Joint-Stock Banks
and Companies, pp. 424 25)
Later in the essay he emphasizes that to this degree of publicity no honest man will ever object (p. 437). In other words, it
is the public eye, rather than any intrinsic feature of the
household, that has moralizing force. Privacy itself often came
to have a negative valence, as the testimony of one self-critical
banker before the 1836 Secret Committee on Joint Stock
Banks illustrates. In his statement, this banker represents the
practice of bank directors buying and selling their own shares
even though it were for the benefit of the banka manipulation of private property to achieve private interestsas false
16 See Bigelows analysis of the domestic metaphors and narratives attached to the
Bank of England, particularly in the years following the 1844 Bank Act (Market Indicators, pp. 599 604).

12
simply because it is kept private: I think it would be a very false

proceeding, inasmuch as it would be a secret proceeding, and
totally unknown to the public. 17
To be sure, this more suspicious view of the function of
privacy in economic affairs was itself complicated by the fact
that the convention regarding the privacy of business and
property was just as deeply held as the notion that the household must be shielded by Mrs. Elliss strong wall of confidence. This principle was so central that even as the 1836
Secret Committee demanded that the joint-stock banks
demonstrate readiness to meet inquiry as a mark of trustworthiness, its first move was an overture to reassure the banks that
the confidentiality of customers accounts would be preserved
(Report of the Secret Committee, p. v). The first document
discussed in the Secret Committee proceedings is a letter from
the manager of the joint-stock Bank of Manchester addressed
to other bankers, suggesting that the disclosure of our private
affairs was perhaps more than is usually required by a Parliamentary Committee. Nonetheless, he insists, we have no desire whatever for any concealment in the establishment which I
represent (Report of the Secret Committee, p. 2).18
When Maria Young celebrates the liberty and peace that
come with being open as the day-light in personal relationships, then, she has a parallel in a chorus of bank officials and
economic commentators eager to establish their position as an
avowed enemy of all mystery and concealment (Norman, Remarks Upon Some Prevalent Errors, p. 107). And just as the call for
perfect publicity stood in tension with the principle of business privacy, so Martineaus efforts to reimagine domesticity exhibit the strain of contradictory impulses to insist on both
openness and privacy. Conversations between characters and
the complications of the novels love plots make the case, on
the one hand, that the private sphere should be characterized
17 Report from the Secret Committee on Joint Stock Banks: Together with the Minutes of Evidence, and Appendix, Parliamentary Papers, 591 (1836), p. 118.
18 Timothy L. Alborn has suggested that joint-stock banks adopted this posture of
openness and responsiveness as part of a political strategy of self-justification (see Alborn, Conceiving Companies: Joint-Stock Politics in Victorian England [London and New
York: Routledge, 1998]).

harri et martineau
13
by openness; yet the negative figure of gossip simultaneously

insists, on the other hand, that circulating intimate matters may
be dangerous and that limits should existthat the private
should remain outside the processes of exchange that make it a
subject of speculation. But the very fact that the domestic
sphere, characterized by women, emotions, and desires, seems
to require privacy renders it deeply suspect. As Martineau
struggles with her efforts to assimilate this sphere to the ideal of
free circulation, the resulting ambivalence about privacy frequently shades over into something darker: love becomes
doom and women in love become criminals (Deerbrook,
pp. 159, 163), though they are performing the task that standards of propriety demand of themguarding their privacy.
In carrying her arguments for free circulation into the private sphere, Deerbrook registers the ambiguity of publicity that
Martineau had expressed in blaming leaked information for
the run on banks. In the crisis environment of the late 1830s,
the circulation of information especially in the form of rumors and storieswas as liable to be deemed pathogenic as
salubrious, promoting either an unhealthy fever of speculation or an equally destructive panic.19 As if acknowledging the
force of this contention, Martineaus novel is replete with images more commonly associated with circulation gone awry:
epidemics, riotous mobs, wandering thieves, and in particular a
devastating rumor mill that threatens to ruin the career of a
progressive, professional man. Ultimately, however, Martineaus narrative places the blame for such deformities not on
an excessive freedom in the movement of information but on
concealments or manipulations that render that movement not
perfectly free.
Two related elements in Deerbrooks public plot make this
point most clearly: the smear campaign against Edward Hope,
the scientific medical man, and the economic devastation of
the town and its accompanying pestilence. Hopes trials begin
19 See McCulloch, Joint-Stock Banks and Companies, p. 421. The appearance of
this negative evaluation of the power of circulating information in the same article that
proposes bringing information about banks under the public eye to preserve the
health of the money market testifies to the double-edged nature of both privacy and
publicity in economic discourse at the time.

14
with a marriage that plunges him into the center of the bitter
domestic politics of Deerbrook, when he offends the ruthless
Mrs. Rowland by marrying Hester Ibbotson, whose relatives,
the Greys, are the object of Mrs. Rowlands prodigious hatred.
Mrs. Rowland starts a series of rumors that the town quickly accepts: that Hope is stealing bodies for dissection, pulling and
selling healthy teeth, and so forth. As his practice dwindles, the
newly married Hopes and Margaret, who lives with them, face
severely reduced circumstances.
Though Mrs. Rowlands impressive venomous energy
alone might be enough to doom the young family, Martineau
grants her powerful and significant allies in the local landowners, Sir William and Lady Hunter, whom Hope has also offended. Sir William does not use his influence with the poor to
dispel the rumors, going so far as refusing to encourage the
family of a dying almshouse patient to accept Hopes scientific
care and encouraging a mob to attack Hopes house. Economic
crisis brings new images of threatening circulation that supplant healthier forms, as when after the harvest fails: The
poachers were daring beyond belief. . . . The oldest men and
women, and children scarcely able to walk, were found trespassing day by day in all plantations. . . . There was no end to
repairing the fences. There were unpleasant rumours, too, of
its being no longer safe to walk singly in the more retired
places (Deerbrook, p. 425). Finally, an epidemic endangers the
safety of the entire town. Social exchange through trade is severely reduced: shopkeepers close up their shutters, while the
Hunters not only refuse to leave their estate but even require
that goods be left at the front gate (Deerbrook, p. 476). In an environment poisoned against the circulation of reason, information becomes, as often as not, a malignant force: conjurors,
and fortune-tellers, and quacks who have early information
of the disease come to take advantage of the first panic of the
inhabitants, where there are enough who are ignorant to make
the speculation a good one, while the church bells incessant
tolling of recent deaths spreads the panic even further, leading
Hope to wonder whether it is absolutely necessary for bad
news to be announced to all Deerbrook every day, and almost
all day long (Deerbrook, pp. 463, 474).

harri et martineau
15
Hopes statement advocating a freeze on a certain kind of

information is a rare departure, however. More often than not
in the novel, the proper response to dangerous circulation is
not to limit or restrict information, but rather to meet it with
more. For instance, although stories are spread that discredit
Hope, he does not leave town to begin anew in a place more responsive to scientific principles, but rather he stays in Deerbrook, allowing the good deeds he performs to spread correct
information about his motives and skills. In Martineaus village,
the remedy for bad publicity is more publicity.
In addition, Martineau employs another strategy to manage the possible negative valences of information circulation:
she feminizes its more unwholesome forms through the figure
of gossip. While trade is a presence in the novel, it is easy to feel
as though it has been displaced as the circulatory lifeblood of
the town, with talknot always accuratetaking center stage
in its stead. As much as it is a place to buy winter boots and
worsteds, for example, Mrs. Howells and Miss Miskins shop is a
place to exchange information about Hester and Hopes upcoming wedding, or their supposed marital discord, or Hopes
imagined medical malpractice. Similarly, in the novels representation of the political life of the town, the election pales in
comparison to the struggles for influence that occur on the domestic front, with information leaks and strategic lies the primary weapons in Mrs. Rowlands and Mrs. Greys scramble to
recruit their mutual acquaintances into their rival parties
(Deerbrook, p. 368). But although these examples might seem to
invite suspicion of the process of circulating information, it
would be a mistake to read from this a critique of the process in
general. In fact, as the novel casts women as the major offenders in hijacking or limiting the free flow of information upon
which the domestic and political vitality of the town depends, it
shields circulation from the negative associations that frequently accompanied it.
To this end, Martineau contrasts two highly gendered
models of communication, each representing a decidedly different notion of free speech. She figures womens conversation
as a species of speculative bubble in which meanings proliferate and much is generated out of very little substance, while

16
mens conversation, with some exceptions, is a sober, grounded

exchange, well backed up by a stock of knowledge and facts.
From the novels opening scene this notion is foregrounded, as
Mr. Grey chastises his wife for forming and expressing, after a
brief afternoon of socializing, the idea that Hope is in love with
Hester:
Be careful, my dear. Let no one of these young people get a
glimpse of your speculation. Think of the consequences to them
and to yourself.
Dear me, Mr. Grey! you need not be afraid. What a serious
matter you make of a word or two!
Because a good many ideas belong to that word or two, my
dear. (Deerbrook, p. 12)
As gossip wreaks havoc on the town, Mr. Grey is, of course,

proven correct that speculationgenerating a good many
ideas out of a word or twois a serious matter. A similar
notion of unhealthy growth is attributed to his wifes archenemy, Mrs. Rowland, who nearly destroys the romantic happiness of Margaret and her own brother, Philip, when she nourishe[s] the few facts she was in possession of, till she had made
them yield a double crop of inferences (Deerbrook, p. 412),
transforming a couple of overheard words between Hope and
Margaret into a scenario in which they were thwarted lovers.
Tellingly, this sentence immediately precedes the first mention
of the failure of the harvests in the novel: healthy production is
displaced by feminine speculation, and the agricultural
metaphor, combined with Mrs. Rowlands association with the
local landowners, links feminine gossip to the Corn Laws, the
periods very model of restricted circulation. The characterization of Mrs. Rowlands transactions abroad and at home as
regulated by the principle of eclipsing the Greys (Deerbrook,
p. 156) represents in a nutshell the problem with feminine
conversation: it does not obey the rational principles governing
conversational exchange, but is instead swayed by irrational
emotions and interests so as to endanger the proper workings
of the information economy.
In contrast, Martineau represents masculine conversation
in the novel as a free exchange of grounded information and

harri et martineau
17
ideas. One explicitly pedagogical moment, in which the Greys

daughter, Sophia, speculates that Mr. Walcot, Mrs. Rowlands
intended replacement for Hope, cannot ride a horse properly,
exemplifies this argument. Sophias younger brother Sydney
responds to her fanciful imaginings with a catalog of facts that
he has gleaned from personal experience and that posits a
direct equivalence between words and reality, exclaiming:
Mr. Walcot can ride, and he does ride well; and he is very civil
to me, and asks me to go fishing with him; and I am sure he always inquires very respectfully after the rest of them. I never
said any more than that in praise of him; and I cant say less, can
I . . . ? (Deerbrook, p. 372). When his mother scolds him for not
considering the feelings of the women in the family who do not
want to hear Walcot praised, Sydney retorts that he will then say
nothing at all of him, and asks Hope to confirm the correctness
of this strategy. Hope replies that saying nothing would be fine
in theory, but that it would be too difficult to be tied down not
to speak on any subject (p. 372). The value of freedom to exchange ideas and information in conversation, as against being
tied down and limited in speech, is underscored for the
reader in this passage: conversation must be free so that true
information can be allowed to circulate, and information must
be true in order for conversational exchange to be free.
The dangers inherent in transforming the towns information economy into the exchange of the insubstantial products
of feminine speculation are highlighted in the scene in which
Mrs. Rowland attempts to introduce Mr. Walcot into the Greys
house. Far from a friendly social call, this visit is an act of aggression in the battle between the two families, and the conversation quickly degenerates into a riot as the elder daughters
in the two families compete to outdo each other in praise for
their respective parties (Deerbrook, p. 349). This is a comic riot,
to be sure, but the return of this word just a few scenes after the
mobs attack on Hopes house recalls the very real threat associated with feminine speech, which was, after all, at the heart of
the earlier attack. The significance of this characterization becomes all the more clear in a striking conversation between
Hope and Hester a few scenes later, in which the masculine
world of commerce is represented as a haven in the heartless

18
feminine world of the village. When Hester expresses anger

that Mr. Grey does not more strongly take issue with Mr. Rowland about his wifes behavior, Hopes responsea reminder
that in the midst of all of the intrigue and feuding between the
women of the Grey and Rowland families, the husbands are
partners in a corn, coal, and timber businessreverses the
usual terms with which the public and private spheres would be
characterized: Remember . . . that these gentlemen must be
more weary than we are . . . of these perpetual squabbles; and
they must earnestly desire to have peace in the counting-house.
God forbid that their dominions should be invaded for our
sake (Deerbrook, p. 370). The world of business, here, is a haven
of partnership and peace; cutthroat competition and speculative excess, the downside to which trade could be linked in
early-Victorian England, are instead made to characterize the
domestic sphere of the village. In displacing the negative associations of exchange and circulation onto their exercise in
feminine modes, Martineau shifts the focus from trade, the
form of circulation that is most important to her political economy, and thus preserves it from criticism.
But alongside this critique of the feminine private sphere
runs a reformist impulse. A common motif at several key moments in Deerbrook is the conversation or narratorial comment
enjoining openness and deploring secrecy in personal relationships. Following Margarets early entreaty to Hester to maintain
perfect confidence, she asks on the occasion of Hester and
Hopes engagement, Did you speakspeak openly? of her
passion for Hope, to which Hester replies: Yes: it was no time
for pride. . . . He knows all that you know, Margaret,and I am
not ashamed (Deerbrook, p. 126). Hope himself, following his
marriage, is said to hat[e] mysteriesany concealments in
families and to feel that it was due both to Hester and to himself that there should be no concealment of important affairs
from her (p. 268). Earlier, Hester exclaims at Mrs. Greys impertinence at having sent her a letter marked Private now
that she was married (Deerbrook, p. 173).
This representation of the proper mode of conduct within
a family continues a theme developed in Martineaus more
didactic treatments of political economy, which on several

harri et martineau
19
occasions embed appeals for rational and open exchange

within a family within their arguments for the virtues of free
circulation in the wider economy. For instance, The Loom and
the Lugger in Martineaus Illustrations of Political Economy
(183234), which condemns protectionist tariffs, contains a
husbands instructions to his wife to keep no secrets from him,
contrary to the advice that the wife gets from her less-rational
sister-in-law not to tell him everything. 20 In Sowers Not Reapers
(an argument for free trade in agricultural products), a husband calmly explains to his wife, who has a drinking problem:
as often as I see you not yourself, I shall tell the children, not
that their mother is ill, or low-spirited, or any thing else,but
what is really the case. 21 Within a family, as in the economy,
free circulation of information should rule.22
Most notably in Deerbrook, an extended discussion of the
relative virtues of mystery and openness in courtship takes
place in the schoolroom between Margaret, Maria, Hester, and
Philip. The little hidden tokens with which a man may make
his feelings secretly known where he wishes them to be understood;tokens which may meet the eye of one alone, and carry
no meaning to any other that Philip argues supply all of the
graces of courtship are rejected by Margaret as small artifices
and sly compliments that could only be appreciated by silly
girls and weak women (Deerbrook, pp. 62 63). Hester continues the argument by asserting that nothing is so graceful as the
simplicity of entire mutual trust, which Philip elaborates into
love, and mutual knowledge, and mutual reverence, and perfect trust (p. 64). Beneath the bantering tone of Philips conversation, however, the scene is replete with indications that
point to the seriousness of the matter under debate. There is a
private motivation behind Philips advocacy of mystery in
courtship: he has just secretly slipped a book into Margarets
20 See Harriet Martineau, The Loom and the Lugger, in her Illustrations of Political Economy, 9 vols. (London: Charles Fox, 183234), VI, 48; see also pp. 5354.
21 Harriet Martineau, Sowers Not Reapers, in Illustrations of Political Economy, VII, 99.
22 In the case of marriage, it hardly needs saying, free circulation does not extend to
sex, but is limited to the sharing of information and feelings. In familial and friendly
relationships, Martineau advocates free circulation by condemning jealousy and the
desire to hoard attentions and affections.

20
desk as a love token. But without his knowledge the entire interaction is shot through with a different kind of unspoken
feeling, as Maria has loved Philip quietly for years. Rather than
enjoying the spice of romance, the reader is struck most by the
pain that this secret feeling and Philips flirtatious, indirect
conversation engender: Marias hand shakes; she experiences a
sickness of heart when she discovers the book addressed to
Margaret; and the mood of the women changes so that no one
is able to derive pleasure from their reading (Deerbrook, p. 64).
Maria is in pain because she has a secret or, perhaps,
that she has reason to have a secret causes her pain. In fact, secrecy and concealment are the most frequent indicators of and
correlates of a fall away from happiness in the novel. In another
significant example of this pattern, the necessity of secrecy
springing from his initial (and continued) attraction to his
wifes sister causes Hope sorrow, as it means that his marriage
cannot be what he imagined when, early on, Hesters openness
about her flawed temper prompts him to the observation that
all must be safe between them while such generous candour
was the foundation of their intercourse (Deerbrook, p. 141). Instead, soon after his marriage, Hope realizes that he himself
cannot live up to this ideal:
He was amazed at the return of his feelings about Margaret, and
filled with horror when he thought of the days, and months, and
years of close domestic companionship with her, from which
there was no escape. . . . The peace of his wife, of Margarethis
own peace in theirs depended wholly on the deep secrecy in
which he should preserve the mistake he had made. (Deerbrook,
p. 176)
Instead of being able to maintain a sense of peace, however,

Hope experiences moments of despair, when his marriage
seems a prison of thoughts and feelings that cannot be expressed: It is home to be more lonely than ever beforeand
yet never to be alone with my secret! At my own table, by my
own hearth, I cannot look up into the faces around me, nor say
what I am thinking. . . . How have I abhorred bondage all my
life! and I am in bondage every hour that I spend at home
(p. 212). Having something to conceal renders Hope self-

harri et martineau
21
inconsistent; transposing this inconsistency into the domestic

sphere, where authenticity and free exchange are supposed to
reign, produces a heightened rhetoric of disaster. As Ann Hobart has argued, it is this self-inconsistency that must be disciplined out of the marriage: if Hope has feelings that prevent
him from revealing his true self, then these feelings must be
eradicated so that the possibility of openness can be restored
and the pain that accompanies concealment can be healed.23
Martineaus effort to reimagine the world of love and relationships according to an ethic based in the free flow of information is not uniformly upheld, however; a countervailing tendency to hold on to a division between matters properly private
and matters available for circulation works against this new
model. Though the necessity of concealment signals that
Hopes marriage is not from the start ideal, and though it
causes him some anguish, his secrecy does not seem to translate into a character flaw. Instead, he is presented as a rational,
principled model of conduct in his response to his mistake. In
fact, Deerbrook is so far from casting blame on the doctor that
the Westminster Review praised the beautifully contrived way in
which Hopes inward struggles . . . are always a secret between
him and the reader, producing quite a tragic impression. 24
A couple of explanations may account for the way in which
Hope can be seen as a tragically noble figure despite his failure
to measure up to the standard of openness. Most obviously, his
secrecy is grounded in kindness toward Hester and her sister.
But just as important, Hopes behavior is also consistent with
the contemporary social designation of love and desire as
properly private matters, belonging to a realm of interior experience and not to be spoken of too freely. The discretion that
Hope demonstrates would seem to conform to this value, and
by portraying his behavior in an approving light, the narrator
displays a degree of sympathy with this definition of a private
realm. Similarly, the novels condemnation of those who make
intimate relationships into the subject of gossip also suggests a
23 See Hobart, Harriet Martineaus Political Economy of Everyday Life, pp.
244 45.
24 [Margaret Mylne], rev. of Deerbrook, by Harriet Martineau, Westminster Review, 34
(1840), 503.

22
desire to hold on to privacy. While Hester and Hopes marriage

should ideally be a space in which free exchange occurs, it is
not acceptable to spread the news that Hester has been seen
crying and to speculate on what this says about the state of their
relationship.
But gossip proves an untrustworthy mechanism by which
to preserve the distinction between acceptable and unacceptable circulation of information. In the first place, where does
the line get drawn between those for whom talk is permitted
and those for whom it is a violation? Can perfect openness and
a respect for privacy exist simultaneously within all of the various intimate relationshipsbetween Margaret and Hester,
Margaret and Maria, Hester and Hope, and so onand thus
within the wider society that their participants make up? Further, talk that is practically indistinguishable from gossip frequently is used to positive effect in the novel. One telling example occurs when Maria tries to stop the young Grey children
from spreading tales about Hesters tears by relating a story of
a friend of hers (Deerbrook, p. 215), sharing a story about another person as a stimulus to improvement. Finally, even the
criteria of truth and falsity cannot quite preserve the distinction between bad and good talk. Even in Mrs. Rowlands darkest moment, when she nearly comes between Philip and Margaret with tales of a wayward, frustrated passion between Hope
and Margaret, there is at least a grain of truth within the lies:
Hope had originally preferred Margaret. In sum, once certain
lines get drawn around particular groups of people or between
different kinds of information, it becomes less and less clear
where these lines should finally be placed, and more and more
likely that true information that might be beneficial to the
health of the community may be taken out of circulation. Ultimately, then, this countertendency to want family life and the
details of personal relationships to remain outside of the
processes of circulation produces an ambivalence in Martineaus treatment of information that is never fully resolved:
perfect freedom of circulation cannot, finally, coexist with a
private, intimate sphere.
This tension erupts most forcefully in Martineaus account
in Deerbrook of the experience of desire by women, in passages

harri et martineau
23
that have sustained the attention of many critics. In a highly

wrought scene in the schoolroom, Maria describes love to Margaret as the grand influence of a womans life . . . whose name
is a mere empty sound to her till it becomes, suddenly, secretly,
a voice which shakes her being to the very centremore awful,
more tremendous, than the crack of doom (Deerbrook, p. 159).
Some critics have interpreted this scene psychologically and
biographically as evidence that Martineau herself had known
the trials of passion, while others have judged her not-alwayssuccessful attempt to blend romantic and political narrative as
revealing her lack of experience of desire, her technical
deficiencies as a writer, and her inability to overcome the gender stereotypes of her time.25 While there may be an element of
truth in these interpretations, it may not be necessary to resort
to difficult-to-verify psychological explanations or to judgments of skill that raise the question of why Martineaus authorial powers should prove unable to smooth out the bumps in
this particular arena rather than others. I argue instead that
the treatment of love is unevenswinging from dramatic representations of love as disaster to pat pronouncements of the
joys of domesticitybecause love and desire, particularly for
women, are troubled concepts in ways that critics have not always recognized. Loaded as they are with the burden of representing the possibility of being outside the laws of the public
and economic spheres (a value that the novel does seem to
hold for them, at times), love, desire, and women are difficult
to assimilate to the ethic of free circulation that was being debated at the time in the economic and political arena, and that
Deerbrook promotes even for the realm of the private. At once
proper and improper within the terms of the novel, the private
natures of desire and of women renders them susceptible to
the taint of suspicion that lingers around the private in earlyVictorian culture.
From this treatment comes the rhetoric of secrecy and peril
evident in Marias speech. Love takes on its force, as she puts it,
25 See Weiner, introduction to Deerbrook, pp. xixii; Pichanick, Harriet Martineau:
The Woman and Her Work, p. 117; and David, Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy,
pp. 81, 84 85.

24
From the struggle which it calls upon [woman] to endure,
silently and alone;from the agony of a change of existence
which must be wrought without any eye perceiving it. . . . there is
nothing in death to compare with this change; and there can be
nothing in entrance upon another state which can transcend the
experience I speak of. . . . Our being can but be strained till not
another effort can be made. This is all that we can conceive to
happen in death; and it happens in love, with the additional burden of fearful secresy. One may lie down and await death, with
sympathy about one to the last, though the passage hence must
be solitary; and it would be a small trouble if all the world looked
on to see the parting of soul and body: but that other passage
into a new state, that other process of becoming a new creature,
must go on in the darkness of the spirit, while the body is up and
abroad, and no one must know what is passing within. The
spirits leap from heaven to hell must be made while the smile is
on the lips, and light words are upon the tongue. The struggles
of shame, the pangs of despair, must be hidden in the depths of
the prison-house. Every groan must be stifled before it is heard:
and as for tearsthey are a solace too gentle for the case. The
agony is too strong for tears. (Deerbrook, pp. 159 60)
The heightened rhetoric in this passage emphasizes the trouble

that desire poses to the ideal of openness: desire introduces
self-division, producing interior depths that must be guarded to
the point at which the self becomes a kind of fortress, a prisonhouse rather than an open book. This process, to be sure, is
not unique to women; for instance, the moment that Hope begins to feel desire for Margaret (even before his marriage to her
sister renders the telling impossible), he is already harboring a
secret of sorts, experiencing feelings that he cannot share with
the one person most concerned, let alone with a wider community. In this way, desire may be seen to be a fundamental problem for the ideal of openness: once it enters the scene, the
possibility of maintaining perfect publicity of the self vanishes. But for women the necessity of keeping hidden the
depths produced by desire is even greater, as Maria observes:
There is not on earth a being stronger than a woman in the concealment of her love. The soldier is called brave who cheerfully
bears about the pain of a laceration to his dying day; and crimi-

harri et martineau
25
nals, who, after years of struggle, unbosom themselves of their

secret, give tremendous accounts of the sufferings of those years;
but I question whether a woman whose existence has been burdened with an unrequited love, will not have to unfold in the
next world a more harrowing tale than either of these. (Deerbrook, p. 163)
Prison-house, soldier, criminal: the images that come to define

a woman in love cast an aura of danger and disrepute over her
not merely because she is experiencing desire that may press
against the bounds of feminine propriety, but also because she
becomes necessarily self-concealing, secretive, unknowable.
Such moments of tortured rhetoric suggest the degree to
which intimate matters and women sit uneasily within Martineaus political framework.26
Finally, the novels treatment of Maria Young may also be
read as a symptom of Martineaus difficulty reconciling the private and the call for openness. As Margarets confidant, Maria
is the repository of many secrets. She also guards a secret of her
own even from Margaret: while she reveals that she herself has
experienced desire and its torments, her confession is incomplete, as she does not let on that the object of her desire is
Philip. Other characters make progress toward openness, but
Marias secret is never disclosed to anyone. Further, Maria is at
the center of some key information transactions in the novel.
As governess to the children in both feuding families, Maria
becomes privy to a great deal of knowledge, some of which she
does not hesitate to share with others outside the family concerned, as when she reveals to Margaret Mrs. Rowlands contention that Philips affections are engaged elsewhere. This
case, in particular, raises a curious parallel between the rational, generally admirable governess and the novels monstrous
feminine gossip, since Maria becomes Mrs. Rowlands tool in
spreading false and, in any case, properly private information.
As a figure who combines suspect secretiveness with a role at
the boundaries of public and private within the information
26 For a rich account of the way in which women are problematic for Martineau because of her privileging of traditionally male forms of public labor, see Hobart, Harriet Martineaus Political Economy of Everyday Life.

26
economy, Maria thus becomes a site onto which the tension

surrounding the issue of privacy and circulation gets displaced,
and the plot reserves for her the kind of punishment that no
other character save Mrs. Rowland experiences. Maria is already in delicate health from an early accident that killed her
father, lamed her, and left her to earn a living by her own devices, when the violent mob that attacks Hopes household
knocks her down, breaking her leg once more and rendering
her economic situation even more precarious. As the end of
the novel brings together the newly happy couples, Maria alone
is left infirm and suffering in body, poor, solitary, living by toil,
without love, without prospect (Deerbrook, p. 521).
This punishment becomes particularly important in light
of another connection that can be made: that between Maria
and Martineau herself. Many critics have noted a similarity in
Marias status as a single, working woman, but another parallel
arises in Marias role as observer of those around her, which
links her to the practice of the domestic novelist. In the following passage, for instance, Marias voice blends with the narratorial function, acting as the conduit through which the reader
learns what is actually happening at an early gathering of the
young people, as well as the feelings that might be underlying
the scene, even as Maria reflects on the ethics of her activity of
creating stories:
How I love to overlook people,to watch them acting unconsciously, and speculate for them! . . . There are those two
strangers busy gathering cowslips, and perhaps thinking of nothing beyond the fresh pleasure of the air and the grass, and the
scent of their flowers,their minds quite filled with the spirit of
the spring, when who knows what may be awaiting them! Love
may be just at hand. . . . They think themselves now as full of happiness as possible; and a little while hence, upon a few words spoken, a glance exchanged, they may be in such a heaven of bliss
that they will smile at their own ignorance in being so well
pleased to-day. Orbut I pray they may escape the other
chance. . . . I am out of the game, and why should not I look
upon its chances? I am quite alone; and why should I not watch
for others? Every situation has its privileges and its obligations.
What is it to be alone, and to be let alone, as I am? It is to be put

harri et martineau
27
into a post of observation on others: but the knowledge so

gained is anything but a good if it stops at mere knowledge,if it
does not make me feel and act. (Deerbrook, pp. 34 35)
The parallels of Marias practice to the novelists practice are

clear: Maria observes those around her and imagines stories
from the information she gleans concerning their inner lives;
the cowslip-gatherers are transformed into characters in a romance, happy or unhappy. And yet a curious defensiveness may
be read into the passages prolix quality: the build-up of rhetorical questions (Why should I not . . . ?) and the very length of
this discussion (the entire passage goes on for two-and-a-half
pages) seem to indicate an underlying concern that perhaps
the practice of probingand, for Martineau even more explicitly than for Maria, of sharingprivate matters and feelings is
not entirely savory. The language of speculation further contributes to this sense. In fact, behind the generally selfjustificatory tone, the entire passage reveals a concern about
the novel-writing project: while Martineau herself may have a
parallel in Maria, she also has another parallel, in speculating
from her observations and generating stories about private affairs, in the detestable Mrs. Rowland.
From debates over the extent to which the

business of banking should be made available to public
scrutiny, to concerns over the place of private correspondence
in a public life, to tension in a domestic novels representations
of intimate relationships and desire, the question of where the
proper limits to privacy should be drawn was very much in play
as the Victorian era opened. Far from being wholeheartedly
and unproblematically valorized, qualities and entities understood as privateintimate thoughts and conversations, desire,
women, the home, and, from a different standpoint, businessbecame particularly charged in large part because they
suggested stress within the very discourses that define them as
private: for a business, or a woman, or a family, or a friendship,
or a feeling to be properly private is also to be a problem for

28
the rationalistic laws of political economy that depended, in

their ideal form, on a notion of perfect information.
The problem is highlighted by the challenges that Martineau faced in adhering to this principle of political economy
as she considered the power of information in her own life and
world and as she attempted to reconstruct the ideological
and generic conventions of the domestic novel. The lack of satisfying resolution to these challenges points to a wider
significance. Though we should not underestimate the extent
to which the private came to be a touchstone with profound
metaphorical and ideological power as Victorians attempted to
locate stable standards of value for subjects and the marketplace, we also should not misread its rise as either already effected or a foregone conclusion as the period opened. The task
of straddling the strong wall of confidence protecting home,
women, and business vexed social thinkers, commentators, and
even novelists as they confronted a shield that seemed both
necessary and threatening.
University of New Mexico
abstract
Aeron Hunt, Open Accounts: Harriet Martineau and the Problem of
Privacy in Early-Victorian Culture (pp. 128)
In this essay I examine Harriet Martineaus domestic novel Deerbrook (1839), in which
the author, famous for her works in the public discourse of political economy, experimented with the genre most associated with the private. I suggest that the novel be read
as a struggle to reconcile the claims of privacy with Martineaus intellectual, social, and
political commitments to free circulation. I link the tensions in Martineaus efforts to
imagine a domestic sphere organized around the free circulation of information to an
ambivalence about privacy in discussions of contemporary economic challenges and
argue that this ambivalence lingered even where privacy has been understood to be
most at easein business, in the novel, and in the home. I trace Deerbrooks uneven
treatment of love, desire, and women to the difficulty assimilating them to the ethic of
free circulation of information. The taint of suspicion that lingers around the private
sphere in the novel suggests that we reconsider what is sometimes presumed: the
Victorian faith in the private as the guarantor of morality and ethical identity under
capitalist social relations.
Keywords: Harriet Martineau; Deerbrook; privacy; economics; women


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Open Accounts: Harriet Martineau and the Problem of Privacy in Early-Victorian Culture

Author(s): AERON HUNT

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Open Accounts: Harriet

ith her fame well established by

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Thus, the advocacy of secrecy in her response to another set of

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perfectly, information should move as freely as goods: investors

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home was to be sheltered not merely from the competitive fray

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it may complicate our sense of what is often presumed, even in

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Martineau could accept or reject to different political ends. I

See David, Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy, p. 85.

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words, in early-Victorian culture even the accepted roles and

As she contemplated the ways in which her

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ter, in the form of hunger and a deadly plague, strikes in the

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simply because it is kept private: I think it would be a very false

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by openness; yet the negative figure of gossip simultaneously

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Hopes statement advocating a freeze on a certain kind of

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mens conversation, with some exceptions, is a sober, grounded

As gossip wreaks havoc on the town, Mr. Grey is, of course,

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ideas. One explicitly pedagogical moment, in which the Greys

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feminine world of the village. When Hester expresses anger

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occasions embed appeals for rational and open exchange

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Instead of being able to maintain a sense of peace, however,

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inconsistent; transposing this inconsistency into the domestic

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desire to hold on to privacy. While Hester and Hopes marriage

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that have sustained the attention of many critics. In a highly

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The heightened rhetoric in this passage emphasizes the trouble

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nals, who, after years of struggle, unbosom themselves of their

Prison-house, soldier, criminal: the images that come to define

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economy, Maria thus becomes a site onto which the tension

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into a post of observation on others: but the knowledge so

The parallels of Marias practice to the novelists practice are

From debates over the extent to which the

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the rationalistic laws of political economy that depended, in

Keywords: Harriet Martineau; Deerbrook; privacy; economics; women