Harriet Martineau (1802-1876)
Two autograph letters signed (‘H. Martineau’) to Richard Monckton Milnes [later 1st Baron Houghton], Ambleside, 1 March and 2 April [1855]
6½ pages in total, 97 x 156mm; [With:] with an engraved visiting card with ‘Mrs Harriet Martineau’ annotated in her hand with ‘Mrs’ underlined [and:] an engraving of The Knoll, Ambleside, annotated by Monckton Milnes ‘March 18^th 1855. Miss M sends her kind regards’. Provenance: Christie's, 29 June 1995, lot 354.

‘I cannot but wish that we could meet now – I am so much happier & stronger, & every way better, it seems to me. The last ten years of my life have been worth all the rest together’: expressing Martineau’s desire for Milnes to visit her after her recent diagnosis. Hoping to have a last 'quiet talk in this most serene of all places’, as her health is so precarious, ‘I think it not very probable that I shall live many weeks’, Martineau notes the severity of her condition, ‘my nurses never leave me alone for a minute [...] If this does not scare you, come without any anxiety. – It will be a pleasure to you hereafter to have done the kindness’. She remembers with gratitude, ‘how kindly & effectually you ministered to me in my other great illness’, and reminds him that she saw his wife first in 1851 before his marriage.

The letters probably date from 1855 when the heart disease from which Martineau suffered was diagnosed as fatal – although she survived for a further twenty years. Monckton Milnes dedicated a poem to her, Christian Endurance, which appeared as one of a series of Arabian Legends in Palm Leaves (1844). It was in 1844 that she had suffered her earlier severe illness which, though at the time thought to be fatal, was cured by mesmerism.