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“... partly on his own encounters with mesmerism, and probably also on the famous case of the writer Harriet Martineau. Even his modest invalid knew enough to know that she was living in an age of prescientific ferment. One of Alison Winter’s main points in Mesmerised is that, in an age when so much of what was being discovered seemed extraordinary, a ...”

“... Greenhow, a retired surgeon, published an article in the British Medical Journal on the case of Harriet Martineau, who had died in her house in Ambleside the previous summer. Greenhow hoped to settle a heated debate about Martineau’s medical history that had been ignited – or rather, reignited – by some ...”

“... prizes, Alfred Nobel also required that his arteries be opened after his death, just in case. Harriet Martineau bequeathed ten guineas to the doctor willing to decapitate her; for others, the amputation of fingers or toes would do. Premature Burial: How It May Be Prevented, first published in 1896 and now reissued by Hesperus Press (£9.99), is a ...”

“... thro’ with prejudices and bits of injustice, as thick as tipsy cake with almonds’, Harriet Martineau observed) were compelled by his quick and ferocious intellectual energy, his belligerence (‘honesty’) and his histrionics (‘sincerity’) to admire what they could not approve. Perhaps his savageness was really an ‘intolerable ...”

“... we can vicariously share that horror. But what of that dauntless early Victorian intellectual, Harriet Martineau? She took to her bed for five years, complaining of unbearable abdominal agonies whose roots were quite obscure. Can we even guess what she was going through? ‘Language has not yet been adjusted,’ reflected the physician, Thomas ...”

“... Thiers, Renan, Turgenev. Her English friends included not only Mrs Gaskell but George Eliot, Harriet Martineau, the Thackerays, the Brownings, the Trollopes, the Stanleys, the Russells ... To Florence Nightingale she was much more than a friend.’She did not fall into the trap of identifying women with nature and nurture. To her, women were the ...”

“... Lady Olliffe,’ Robert Browning wrote in March 1877: I have just been reading my old friend Miss Martineau’s protest against the publication – and indeed, retention – of all correspondence. Here, now, is a sample of mine: be assured I shall never demand it again, from any apprehension that hereafter the friendliness in it may be at variance with ...”

“... made their way to Palestine saw things differently, and were inclined to find evidence of what Harriet Martineau called ‘home-feeling’. They wanted to discover a country which was like their own, and persuaded themselves that the Holy Land fitted the bill. Dean Stanley was struck by ‘the Western, almost the English, character of the scenery ...”

“... durable relics of his wit concern his fellow authors. ‘There is no God,’ he proclaimed, ‘and Harriet Martineau is his prophet.’ Dickens, he said, ‘had the showman instinct so strongly developed that if you only gave him three square yards of carpet, he would tumble on that like a street acrobat’. ‘I have known Thackeray for 18 years,’ he ...”

“... novel-readers in the mushrooming industrial cities consumed it with fervour; but the austere Harriet Martineau liked it too, as did General Gordon, Joseph Conrad and Edward VII. Its appeal spread far beyond British readers. R.K. Narayan dwells fondly on the ‘bitter tears’ he shed over East Lynne in his 1975 memoir, My Days: ‘Reading and ...”

“... at touching English soil suggests this, and his ‘little spot of earth’ was smaller still. Harriet Martineau was no doubt right in claiming that the personal state of Lakeland’s poor was ‘flagrant beyond anything I ever could have looked for’, but her ‘dear good old Wordsworth forever talking about rural innocence’ is not, as he was for ...”

“... easier to read than Carlyle’s. There were literary ladies about at that time. One of these, Harriet Martineau, made a great impression on the Carlyles. It is difficult not to feel that Jane might have been happier, and even healthier, as well as of more use, writing for publication rather than wringing out blankets or supervising the smoothness of ...”

“... that title, the aesthete Walter Pater and the statistician Karl Pearson, the political economist Harriet Martineau and Dickens’s John Harmon in Our Mutual Friend – all these Victorians, real and imaginary, deliberately extinguish some aspect of their personality in order to find out a hidden (and often unpleasant) truth. Levine calls these willed ...”

“... genre’s increasing respectability. Even works written for posthumous publication like those of Harriet Martineau and Anthony Trollope were sparing in their attention to the inner life. Documenting social or professional activity, they channelled their ideas about identity into a Bildungsroman-style plot of maturation. Victorianists sometimes talk in ...”

“... she might well fantasise about a place where a woman could be free to do as she liked.’ Harriet Martineau, half a century later, had different ideas: ‘I cannot now think of the two mornings thus employed without a heaviness of heart greater than I have ever brought away from Deaf and Dumb Schools, Lunatic Asylums, or even Prisons.’ When she ...”