'I have an all important review to write': Harriet Martineau's journalism

Like many of her contemporaries who wrote non-fictional prose, Martineau is a distinctive stylist. Compared with the key ‘sage’ writers of her day – Ruskin and Carlyle – she may sound understated. As a journalist who felt strongly about the issues she discussed she needed to express herself clearly, and would always eschew the elaborate metaphors or biblical prognostications of her loftier rivals. Nevertheless her prose is rarely purely functional, and over her career of half a century she develops a recognisable ‘voice’, foregrounding the practical and commonplace over the extraordinary, and the homely over the exotic, while never quite losing sight of the romantic possibilities of the everyday. Either way her prolific periodical writing makes her integral to any history of nineteenth-century journalism, and key to our understanding both of its openness to newcomers and its initial distrust of those outside ‘the club’