Harriet Martineau’s Realized Abstractions

Andrea Kelly Henderson, “Harriet Martineau’s Realized Abstractions” (pp. 81–105) Critics have long noted—and often lamented—the formal incoherence of Harriet Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–34). This essay argues that the tales’ formal bifurcations can be understood not as a failing but as a conscious response to the absence of a contemporary consensus regarding the groundedness of economic abstractions. Martineau’s aesthetic of what I call “realized abstraction” offers a solution of sorts to this epistemological problem: unable to mediate between abstractions and particulars, she simply insists on the importance of both. Berkeley the Banker, her tale devoted to banking and currency, vividly dramatizes this dichotomizing logic. In this work, the relationship of concrete value to its abstract representation in paper money is analogized to a troubled marriage, one in which the husband forces his virtuous wife to subscribe to his false representations. Martineau’s story will explicitly argue for the usefulness of economic theory and paper money, but she resists the tendency of abstractions to render the concrete invisible in an act of metaphoric coverture; instead, she presents the abstract and the particular as autonomous realms. Martineau’s aesthetic of juxtaposition thus aspires to virtues quite different from those of Romantic organic wholeness or realist transparency: her tales aim not only to educate readers in abstract principles and historical particulars but also to train them to discriminate between the two. In subsequent decades, philosophers of science would formulate compelling new ways to bind abstractions to particulars, and the success of that project would mean that despite the Illustrations’s enormous popularity during the 1830s, they would seem to later generations to be marred by formal fragmentation.