Deborah A. Logan. Harriet Martineau, Victorian Imperialism, and the Civilizing Mission. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009. ISBN 978-0754668312. Price: US$99.95/£55.00

A century ago, Lytton Strachey suggested that the history of the Victorian Age would never be written simply because we know too much about it. To their successors, the Victorians left an unprecedented mass of data, shifting the primary task of the historian away from hermeneutics toward selective determination. Strachey’s response to this challenge was a turn to biography. After reading Deborah A. Logan’s new book, I am thinking it is just as well Strachey did not choose Harriet Martineau as one of his eminent Victorians, for otherwise he might never have gotten started. As Logan reminds her reader, Martineau was a phenomenon, the author of over two-thousand periodical articles in addition to her fiction writing and her voluminous correspondence. Few scholars could be better positioned to engage this body of work than Logan, recently the editor not only of Martineau’s collected letters but also of her writings on history and on empire. Even so, and despite restricting its attention only to Martineau’s writing about Britain’s emerging empire, Logan’s study still requires seven chapters that, in their subjects, literally span the globe. To combat against such sprawl, Logan helpfully frames her analysis in terms of questions and so we have, among others, chapters on Martineau’s response to The Irish Question, The India Question, and The Scramble for Africa Question. Each chapter is well organized and provides detailed accounts of particular colonial situations that will be valuable to scholars interested not merely in Martineau, but in Victorian imperialism more broadly. This in fact is one of Logan’s great achievements: to insist that those today who would claim to speak about Britain’s empire would do well to remember the authority and respect Martineau carried amongst her Victorian peers as a popular commentator on colonial affairs. Martineau is presented here as a writer urgently committed to showing Victorian Britons the fullness of their relationship to the world. Sometimes, as in the Indian or Irish questions, Martineau wrote to correct what had become mistaken for a common knowledge. Her History of British Rule in India (1857), for example, proposed a new answer to the India question; its purpose being, argues Logan citing a letter from Martineau to her publisher, to challenge “people who will persist in talking of India as if he were the ruler of India” (123). At other times, as in her analysis of the 1833 tale Cinnamon and Pearls, Logan sees Martineau adopting a posture not unlike later cultural critics like Edward Said, when she writes simply to call her reader’s attention to colonial structures that have been deliberately obscured (105-111). Given the habitual way Victorians euphemized the intractable problems of their political discourse in terms of questions (we might recall, among others, the Woman Question), Logan’s strategy has the added benefit of illuminating a good deal about her object, which is not to present definite answers but rather to articulate a problematic. In analyzing Martineau’s response to these questions, Logan suggests that there is a “compelling coherence to [Martineau’s] world view” (20). However, Logan’s choice to name that coherence as the “Civilizing Mission”—always and curiously in this study as a proper noun—lends it a programmatic character that neither Martineau’s writing nor Victorian public discourse more generally warrants. The phrase derives from the French mission civilizatrice, an explicit ideology of the French state which autoidentified with the universal principles of the Revolution. As scholars such as Lauren Goodlad have argued, such declarative statements were notoriously difficult to make in the emerging liberal hegemony of the British state. What the Victorians called betterment, improvement and progress certainly belong to the …