The feminist and thinker Harriet Martineau (1802–76), ‘who made the nineteenth century the dawn of freedom for half the human race,’ can be classed as a political commentator, sociologist, historian, essayist, novelist, journalist, travel writer, autobiographer, and a writer on economics – the list could go on; she lived by her pen from the age of thirty onwards. She was certainly the most intelligent woman of her time, and she argued with uncompromising logic (which led her to abandon all religious faith, for instance). This made her notorious rather than popular: many women secretly admired her, for women were not expected to hold opinions – and certainly not to express them publicly. Others were ashamed of her, for the same reasons. She made men look stupid, for which they denigrated her, of course. Little has changed today. Her condensed translation of Auguste Comte’s Positive Philosophy into English was so much better than his original four-volume book that he had it translated into French and (quite logically) promoted her version in place of his own. Yet the current Wikipedia page recommends the original rather than her translation.

Between 1834 and 1836, Martineau travelled throughout America, interviewing everyone she met, from the President down to a black slave girl who sat at her feet. On her return she wrote Society in America (1837), a pioneering work of sociology. (For his contemporaneous Démocratie en Amérique, de Tocqueville spoke only to white men, and in broken English at that.) Because she was very deaf, Martineau took with her a companion-cum-assistant whom she referred to (in her Autobiography) as ‘Miss J’.

Martineau described Miss J as ‘remarkably clever, supremely rational, and with a faultless temper,’ and admitted that she ‘owed’ Society in America to her. They became life-long friends, yet Miss J was first named in print only in 1935; a Martineau scholar mis-identified her as recently as 2007.

‘Of all the personages to be encountered on this safari, none remains so shadowy as Miss Jeffery.
She was apparently a paragon of every virtue, but no one has any more to say than that.’

Elise Lynn Prentis in The Courier (Syracuse University Library Associates,
Vol XI, No. 4 and Vol XII, No 1. Winter 1975, pp.3–21; p.9)

So this is the first life ever of the admirable Miss J – Louisa Caroline Jeffery (1806–87) – and her daughter Ellen McKee (1844–1929), who was much influenced by Martineau. It is largely based on uncollected letters by Martineau and on Courtauld family letters dating from 1815 to 1850, which can be seen only in the British Library. Although Miss J was an orphan from the age of nine, she was very sociable and a good mixer; she greatly facilitated Martineau’s social contacts in America. ‘Our popularity so far I consider to be much owing to the cheerfulness and pleasantness of her manner,’ wrote Martineau, about a month into their tour.

This monograph – only 96 pages – situates Miss J in her extended family, notable for her uncle Samuel Courtauld (who founded Courtaulds, the great textile company). It shows the importance of her life-long friendship with Mary Barnes, who married the Unitarian minister John Relly Beard. Beard studied alongside Harriet Martineau’s brother James and William Gaskell (whose wife Elizabeth is universally known as the novelist Mrs Gaskell).

Miss J married Beard’s teaching assistant, James McKee. For their daughter Ellen, Harriet Martineau seems to have served as a kind of honorary aunt.

Encouraged by her cousin Peter Taylor and his wife Mentia (‘the mother’ of the English women’s parliamentary suffrage movement), Ellen McKee embarked on a life directed towards giving women a voice in local government, becoming one of fewer than thirty women elected to the London School Board during the thirty years of its existence.

In this context she also sought to provide suitable facilities for London’s physically impaired children, particularly the deaf, just as her friend Mary Dendy (John Relly Beard’s granddaughter) was doing in Manchester at exactly the same time. Thus both women were working (in the Beard tradition) toward what Harriet Martineau would have wanted.

In telling the lives of Miss J and her daughter, this book reveals previously unnoticed connections between famous people, and an unrecorded episode in Harriet Martineau’s life when she attempted to use Mesmerism to help one of Miss J’s aunts.

With three illustrations

Feedback

‘A very nice job! And the details of your book gave me a much better idea of life in the nineteenth century in England.... In addition, I find your style pleasing – fluid and with a brisk pace.’ — Barry Tharaud, editor of Nineteenth-Century Prose

Christina Hardiment, author of many books, writes that she was ‘absolutely fascinated. What ingenious and productive research you have undertaken!’

Laurence Bristow-Smith (a Letterworth Press author) writes, ‘This is a staggering piece of research. It’s fascinating in its own right. And fascinating also because of the way it gets inside nineteenth-century society.’

About the author
G. Peter Winnington has written acclaimed biographies of Mervyn Peake (Vast Alchemies (2000), re-issued in 2009 in an expanded edition titled Mervyn Peake’s Vast Alchemies) and Walter Fuller (Walter Fuller: the Man Who Had Ideas (Letterworth, 2014). For his other publications see his website.

Published in April 2019; updated with an additional illustration in June 2019.
Price (paperback only): £7.50, US$9.99, euro 9.00 ISBN 978-2-9701307-0-3

‘Of all the personages to be encountered on this safari, none remains so shadowy as Miss Jeffery. She was apparently a paragon of every virtue, but no one has any more to say than that.’

‘Of all the personages to be encountered on this safari, none remains so shadowy as Miss Jeffery.
She was apparently a paragon of every virtue, but no one has any more to say than that.’