Anna Jameson (1794-1860)
Last week’s essay about an icon (a
real, painted one) set me to thinking briefly about Anna Jameson, an early
Victorian “independent scholar” (to use the current term) who introduced me to
the fascinating topic of Christian iconography long before I had developed any
serious leanings toward Medieval Studies.
Two of her books in particular—Sacred
and Legendary Art and Legends of the
Monastic Orders—opened up for me a world of early European painting years
before I would ever lay eyes on an actual painting.
So persistent was the male
domination of her cultural world that her title pages generally identified the
author as “Mrs. Jameson”. That put her
in the same class with several other Victorian writers I stumbled upon in my
early years, including the poet “Mrs. Hemans,” the novelist “Mrs. Humphry
Ward,” and the novelist and popular historian “Mrs. Oliphant”. Anna’s most famous work, a study of
Shakespeare’s heroines, is enjoying a revival in the feminist turn taken by
literary study.
One thing (Anna Jameson) leads to
another (Harriet Martineau). During the
week I was surprised to come upon a review from the pen Henry James of a biography of Anna Jameson (1878).* The
biographer was Anna’s niece Geraldine Macpherson, one of whose principal
motives, according to James, was to do “justice to a memory cruelly disparaged
by that very heavy-handed genius, Miss Martineau…” A “very heavy-handed genius” being even more
intriguing than a “very stable genius”, this naturally sent me off to search
for some cruel disparagement in the pages of Harriet Martineau’s memoirs.
(Harriet Martineau, 1802-1876)
But I never got there, having been providentially sidetracked by an extraordinary essay by Martineau entitled “The Martyr Age of the United States”. There are not too many obscure nineteenth-century journal articles that every thoughtful American ought to have read, but I dare suggest this is one of them. Martineau published it in the December, 1838, number of the London and Westminster Review. She had made a long visit to the United States in the 1830s, her fame preceding her. Her fabulously successful Illustrations of Political Economy (1832) was a great international best-seller, which in its sales left the novels of Dickens in the dust.
Ostensibly “The Martyr Age” is a
review of three anonymous pamphlets she attributes to the Boston abolitionist
Maria Weston Chapman, each entitled “Right and Wrong in Boston in ---,” the
blank being filled by the dates 1835, 1836, and 1837. It is actually a spirited account of the
principal abolitionists in New England, their character, their modus operandi, and their
tribulations. Martineau hardly
suppresses her own attitudes toward chattel slavery, but she writes as a
sociologist, not as a polemicist. “There
is a remarkable set of people now living and vigorously acting in the world,
with a consonance of will and understanding which has perhaps never been
witnessed among so large a number of individuals of such diversified powers,
habits, opinions, tastes and circumstances,” she writes. “A well-grounded faith, directed towards a
noble object, is the only principle which can account for such a spectacle as
the world is now waking up to contemplate in the abolitionists of the United
States.”
Maria Weston Chapman (1806-1885)
While is it historically inspiring that a woman of Martineau’s moral character could so praise a large group of our American forebears, there is a cascade of less welcome news around the edges. Some of the sobering facts that a reader picks up incidentally in reading the essay include the following. She entitles her piece “Martyr Age” because of the great physical danger that faced public opponents of slavery not in Charleston or New Orleans but in Boston and New York. Abolitionist meetings in the North were frequently barracked and mobbed, sometimes with lethal violence.
The abolitionist movement, though
broadly based, is extraordinary for its female leaders. Such famous male abolitions as William Lloyd
Garrison and the Unitarian clergyman William Ellery Channing were generally
shunned by elected politicians (all of whom were of course male). The abolitionist movement was overwhelmingly and
explicitly Christian in its inspiration, but it was vehemently deplored by many
church leaders. As at so many other
moments of social crisis, the conflict tended to be “generational”, and in a
way that sheds little honor on the elders.
At a Presbyterian seminary in Cincinnati (Lane) virtually the entire
student body was expelled by a scandalized faculty—the offense being the public
endorsement of the words of Jesus and Paul.
Large swaths of the white population of the northern states opposed
slavery but were more or less enthusiastic proponents of various “resettlement”
schemes, often thinly disguised efforts to transport as much of the black
population as possible to Africa! Even
among highly educated Americans belief in the social equality of black and white,
even of its eventual possibility, was exceedingly rare. That is another way of saying that white
supremacy was the national default.
Martineau reports that in 1834 a group of “Young Men” in New York City “pledged
their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, (in the language and spirit
of the Declaration of Independence), to overthrow slavery by moral assault, or
to die in the attempt.” Whether Henry
James would hold that Harriet Martineau is “heavy-handed” in her essay on “The
Martyr Age of the United States” I cannot say for certain. But given its power to startle and shame an
American reader a hundred and eighty years later, and to remind us that the
“words and spirit” of the Declaration still await plenary fulfillment, I’d say
that heavy-handedness is perhaps a virtue.
I’ll have to wait for another day to find out what Miss Martineau said
about Mrs. Jameson.
*Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature /American Writers/English
Writers (Library of America, 22),
pp. 1067-68.
