Wednesday 15th July 2026

Venue: Online

7-8.15pm BST

Join us for a special partnership event with Chawton House, Charles Dickens Museum and Elizabeth Gaskell’s House.

Harriet Martineau – “Readers are plentiful; thinkers are rare”

“Now, dear, leave it to other women to make shirts and darn stockings, and you devote yourself to this (writing)”

-Letter to Harriet Martineau, 1823

Journalist, writer, traveller, translator, abolitionist, feminist and social reformer. Harriet Martineau may be the most famous Victorian woman you’ve never heard of. She broke boundaries with her work Illustrations of Political Economy and other writing including Society in America and The Hour and the Man.

Her friends and fans (and sometimes foes) included Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Queen Victoria, Charles Darwin and George Eliot. Despite being deaf since childhood, she rebelled against the restrictions on contemporary women’s lives. Martineau travelled to America, Europe, Egypt and the Middle East, rejected traditional religion and was a radical free thinker.

So why exactly was she so significant? What impact did she have? And why is she not as well-known as her contemporaries? Join us as we celebrate 150 years of Harriet Martineau – a woman ahead of her time.

About the Speakers

  • Molly Maslen is Assistant Curator at Chawton House. Best known for its connection to Jane Austen, Chawton House is now home to pre 20th-century women’s writing. The current exhibition, Homemade Histories includes letters by Harriet Martineau.
  • Kirsty Parsons is Curator at the Charles Dickens Museum. The Museum’s current exhibition Extra/Ordinary Women brings some of the women in his life out from Dickens’s shadow.
  • Jane Mathieson is a former Librarian and now volunteer gardener and speaker at Elizabeth Gaskell’s House in Manchester.

Tickets: £6

This is an online event. It takes place 7-8pm BST. The Zoom link should be visible on your ticket, but ticket holders will be also emailed the Zoom link on the day of the event. If you do not receive joining details by midday (UK time) on the day of the event, please email info@chawtonhouse.org with your order number. The talk will be recorded and emailed out to those who cannot join synchronously within 7 days. Access to working internet is required. Please note this event will take place live.