Harriet Martineaus Autobiography | Page 4

if it
was known that the speaker meant to make it a newspaper article the
next day? And when Doddridge's friends, and Southey's, heard that
what they had taken for conversational out-pouring on paper was so
much literary production, to appear hereafter in a book,--what was the
worth of those much-prized letters then? Would the correspondents not
as soon have received a page of a dissertation, or the proof of a review
article? Surely the only word necessary as to this part of the question is
a word of protest against every body, or every eminent person, being
deprived of epistolary liberty because there have been some among
their predecessors or contemporaries who did not know how to use it,
or happen to value it.
We are recommended, again, to "leave the matter to the dis- cretion of
survivors." I, for my part, have too much regard for my Executors to
bequeath to them any such troublesome office as withstanding the
remonstrances of any number of persons who may have a mind to see
my letters, or of asserting a principle which it is my business to assert
for myself. If they were to publish my letters, they would do what I
believe to be wrong: and if they refused to publish them, they might be
subject to importunity or censure which I have no right to devolve upon
them. And why are we to leave this particular piece of testamentary
duty to the discretion of survivors, when we are abundantly exhorted,
in the case of every other, to do our own testamentary duty
ourselves,--betimes, carefully and conscientiously?
Then comes the profit argument,--the plea of how much the world
would have lost without the publication of the letters of A. B. and C.
This is true, in a way. The question is whether the world has not lost
more by the injury to epistolary freedom than it has gained by reading
the letters of nonconsenting letter-writers. There will always be plenty

of consenting and willing letter-writers: let society have their letters.
But there should be no others,--at least till privacy is altogether
abolished as an unsocial privilege. This grossly utilitarian view does
not yet prevail; and I do not think it ever will. Meantime, I claim the
sanction of every principle of integrity, and every feeling of honor and
delicacy, on behalf of my practice. I claim, over and above these, the
sanction of the law.--Law reflects the principles of morals; and in this
case the mirror presents a clear image of the right and the duty. The law
vests the right of publication of private letters solely in the writer, no
one else having any such right during the author's life, or after his death,
except by his express permission. On the knowledge of this provision I
have acted, in my arrangements about my own correspondence; and I
trust that others, hitherto unaccustomed to the grave consideration of
the subject, will feel, in justice to myself and others who act with me,
that there can be no wrong, no moral inexpediency, in the exercise of a
right thus expressly protected by the Law. If, by what I have done, I
have fixed attention upon the morality of the case, this will be a greater
social benefit than the publication of any letters written by me, or by
persons far wiser and more accomplished than myself.
I have only to say further, in the way of introduction, a word or two as
to my descent and parentage. On occasion of the Revelation of the
Edict of Nantes, in 1688, a surgeon of the name of Martineau, and a
family of the name of Pierre, crossed the Channel, and settled with
other Huguenot refugees, in England. My ancestor married a young
lady of the Pierre family, and settled in Norwich, where his descendants
afforded a succession of surgeons up to my own day. My eminent uncle,
Mr. Philip Meadows Martineau, and my eldest brother, who died
before the age of thirty, were the last Norwich surgeons of the
name.--My grandfather, who was one of the honorable series, died at
the age of forty-two, of a fever caught among his poor patients. He left
a large family, of whom my father was the youngest. When established
as a Norwich manufacturer, my father married Elizabeth Rankin, the
eldest daughter of a sugar-refiner at Newcastle upon Tyne. My father
and mother had eight children, of whom I was the sixth: and I was born
on the 12th of June, 1802.

HARRIET MARTINEAU'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY.

FIRST PERIOD.
TO EIGHT YEARS OLD.
SECTION I.
MY first recollections are of some infantine impressions which were in
abeyance for a long course of years, and then revived an inexplicable
way,--as by a flash of lightning over a far horizon in