Harriet Martineaus Autobiography | Page 3

publication of my letters. I have no solicitude about fame, and no fear of my reputation of any sort being injured by the publication of any thing I have ever put upon paper. My opinions and feelings have been remarkably open to the world; and my position has been such as to impose no reserves on a disposition naturally open and communicative; so that if any body might acquiesce in the publication of correspondence, it should be myself. Moreover, I am disposed to think that what my friends tell me is true; that it would be rather an advantage to me than the contrary to be known by my private letters All these considerations point out to me that I am therefore precisely the person to bear emphatic practical testimony on behalf of the principle of the privacy of epistolary intercourse; and therefore it is that I do hereby bear that testimony.
Epistolary correspondence is written speech; and the onus rests with those who publish it to show why the laws of honor which are uncontested in regard to conversation may be violated when the conversation is written instead of spoken. The plea is of the utility of such material for biographical purposes; but who would admit that plea in regard to fireside conversation? The most valuable conversation, and that which best illustrates character, is that which passes between two friends, with their feet on the fender, on winter nights, or in a summer ramble: but what would be thought of the traitor who should supply such material for biographical or other purposes? How could human beings ever open their hearts and minds to each other, if there were no privacy guaranteed by principles and feelings of honor? Yet has this security lapsed from that half of human conversation which is written instead of spoken. Whether there is still time to restore it, I know not: but I have done my part towards an attempted restoration by a stringent provision in my Will against any public use whatever being made of my letters, unless I should myself authorize the publication of some, which will, in that case, be of some public interest, and not confidential letters. Most of my friends have burnt my letters,--partly because they knew my desire thus to enforce my assertion of the principle, and partly because it was less painful to destroy them while I was still among them than to escape the importunities of hunters of material after my death. Several eminent persons of this century have taken stringent precautions against the same mischief; and very many more, I fear, have taken the more painful precaution of writing no letters which any body would care to have. Seventy years ago, Dr. Johnson said in conversation "It is now become so much the fashion to publish letters, that, in order to avoid it, I put as little into mine as I can." Nobody will question the hardship and mischief of a practice which acts upon epistolary correspondence as the spy system under a despotism acts upon speech: and when we find that a half a dozen of the greatest minds of our time have deprived themselves and their friends of their freedom of epistolary speech for the same reason, it does seem to be time that those qualified to bear testimony against such an infringement on personal liberty should speak out.
"But," say unscrupulous book-makers and readers, "there are many eminent persons who are so far from feeling as you do that they have themselves prepared for the publication of their letters. There was Doddridge:--he left a copy of every letter and note that he ever wrote, for this very purpose. There was Madame D'Arblay:--on her death-bed, and in extreme old age, she revised and had copies made of all the letters she received and wrote when in the height of her fame as Fanny Burney,--preparing for publication the smooth compliments and monstrous flatteries written by hands that had long become dust. There was Southey:--he too kept copies, or left directions, by which he arranged the method of making his private letters to his friends property to his heirs. These, and many more, were of a different way of thinking from you."--They were indeed: and my answer is,--what were the letters worth, as letters, when these arrangements became known? What would fireside conversation be worth, as confidential talk, 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