'A Victorian woman living ahead of her time'

One of the world's first professional female journalists deserves far greater recognition, especially in her home town of Norwich, according to a historian.

Harriet Martineau was one of the most prolific and famous writers of the 19th Century, writing dozens of books and at least 1,500 newspaper articles.

Stuart Hobday said she also campaigned against slavery and for women's rights and also championed a scientific, evidence-based approach to the world taken for granted today.

The director of Norwich History Festival said she remained independently-minded all her life, describing her as "a Victorian living ahead of her time".

"She had a younger brother, James Martineau, famous as a theological thinker, but if you go and see the house in Norwich they were brought up in, there's a blue plaque for James, but not for Harriet," he said.

Martineau was born just off Magdalen Street in Norwich in 1802, the daughter of an affluent cloth merchant, and by the time she was 12, she had lost her hearing.

The family were Unitarians, a non-conformist Protestant church, which supported the education of girls, but unlike her brothers, she was expected to stay at home and not have a career.

In 1823, she published an anonymous article entitled On Female Education in a Unitarian journal, saying how unfair she thought that was.

"The family had no idea that she'd written it and were sitting at home reading it, saying to each other, 'This is an interesting article,' not knowing that little Harriet, who's in her 20s, had written it," said Hobday.

When her father lost his business and later died in 1826, it became necessary for Martineau to earn a living after all.

So she supported herself with needlework, while continuing to write.

Her fortunes were transformed from 1832 onwards, when she published Illustrations of Political Economy.

These included 25 short stories showing how economic conditions impacted the lives of ordinary people in a variety of social environments.

Hobday said: "They became a big hit around the world, so she was famous not just in Britain but in France and Russia and America."

This meant she was able to live independently off her writing, so she moved to London, where she became "a central figure in what was called the radical 1830s", mixing with scientist Charles Darwin and philosopher Thomas Carlyle, he said.

He believes her "influence on the development of that scientific view of the world and of nature that developed in the 19th Century" has been underestimated.

Hobday first came across Martineau while studying for his master's degree.

He said: "I did a lot on Charles Darwin and I was reading about this Harriet Martineau and then I found out she was from Norwich and I thought, 'I'm from Norwich, but I didn't know that'."

The more he dug into her life, the more impressed he was and he has written two books on her, one co-authored with Gaby Weiner.

Throughout her life, she campaigned on the dignity and value of women's work, arguing they should not have to hand their wages over to their husbands, as was legally the case then.

Martineau was already an abolitionist when she visited the United States during the 1830s and subsequently wrote books criticising slavery and the role of women in the fledgling American democracy.

After five years of ill-health, she made a recovery and joined the staff of the Daily News, moving to the Lake District and travelling to Egypt.

She has also been referred to as the "mother of sociology" because of her pioneering work studying the impact of society as a whole on people.

Hobday suspects one reason Martineau, who died in 1876, is little remembered today is because she became an atheist, which made her "a fairly notorious figure" at the time.

"That notoriety meant that some of that work in the second half of her life wasn't remembered at all - and women from the past generally haven't been well remembered," he said.

To try to remedy this, he founded the Harriet Martineau Lecture which has run as part of the Norfolk & Norwich Festival since 2013.

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