Martineau, Harriet

mar'ti-no, Harriet (1802-1876, an English author. She was born without the senses of taste and smell, and became very deaf at the age of sixteen. In 1830-1 she wrote three essays for the Unitarian Association, designed to be circulated as tracts, looking to the conversion of Catholics, Jews, and Mohammedans to Unitarianism. A critic writes: "The essays probably converted nobody, but brought in forty-five guineas." She traveled in the United States, lecturing in support of the Abolitionists. She wrote The History of England During the Thirty Years' Peace, The Philosophy of Comte, British Rule in India, The Endowed Schools of Ireland, Forest and Game Law Tales, Society in America, and A Retrospect of Western Travel. She is remembered chiefly as the author of The Peasant and the Prince, a story of French life for juvenile readers into which she weaves the theories of Malthus, Ricardo, and James Mill.