From French Revolution to English Reform: Hannah More, Harriet Martineau, and the "Little Book"
During the 1820s Harriet Martineau undertook the writing of tracts and "little books"
for the Shropshire publisher Houlston and Son, a firm specializing in religious and didactic
literature. This apprenticeship allowed Martineau to master the generic features
and literary style of the didactic tract and turn those techniques to new uses in her industrial
tales, The Rioters (1827) and The Turn-Out (1829). Later, Martineau transformed
the politics of the "little book" in her Illustrations of Political Economy (1832-
1834), a series exemplifying the economic theories of Adam Smith, James Mill, David
Ricardo, and Thomas Malthus but intending to further the political goals of the Unitarian
radicals. This essay argues that Martineau9s "little books" were meant as the radical
counterpart to Hannah More9s Cheap Repository Tracts (1795-1798), a series of
moral tales and didactic poems written during the 1790s in order to stifle the revolutionary
impulses of the working classes and divert them into religious channels. By using
the format and rhetorical features of the "little book," Martineau signals her desire
to attract a popular audience and her intention, in the era of the First Reform Bill, to
redirect knowledge from a conservative social and religious framework to a progressive,
theory-based economics, politics, and literature.