Harriet Martineau

Harriet Martineau explained political economy to a mass audience in monthly stories, was deaf from adolescence, and is now read as one of the first sociologists. She was born into a Norwich Unitarian manufacturing family that lost its money in 1829, which she said freed her to work. Illustrations of Political Economy, published monthly from 1832, turned Malthus, Ricardo and free trade into narrative fiction and outsold Dickens; ministers sent her their bills to popularise, and she used the platform to argue against slavery, for the Factory Acts and for women's education. She travelled in America for two years and published Society in America, which analysed a society against its own stated principles - a method later theorists recognised as sociology before the word - and made her unwelcome in the South for her abolitionism. She was deaf from about eighteen and used an ear trumpet all her life, writing about it directly. She translated and condensed Comte, which is how most English readers met him. She wrote from an invalid couch for five years, recovered, and attributed it to mesmerism, which cost her friendships. Her autobiography was written in three months when she expected to die and published twenty years later. She refused a civil list pension three times on the ground that she had criticised the governments offering it. She wrote around sixteen hundred leaders for the Daily News over fifteen years, mostly anonymous, which is one of the largest bodies of journalism by any Victorian woman. Her Retrospect of Western Travel and How to Observe Morals and Manners set out a method for studying a society systematically, the second of them before Comte published. She built a house at Ambleside and farmed two acres of it as a demonstration. She wrote her own obituary for the Daily News and it ran when she died.

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