In 1840, the Phrenological Journal published an anonymous personal testimony of phrenological salvation titled “Remarkable Case of Change of Character and Pursuits.” The article appears in the “Cases and Facts” section of the periodical, commonly reserved for correspondents who provided personal accounts of the truth of phrenology. The correspondent in this “Case” makes use of the conventional structure of the conversion narrative: youthful deviance, a moment of illumination, and rebirth into a new life of virtue, peace, and joy. Beginning with a description of his former life, he explains that being “Born in the lap of luxury – bred in the tainted atmosphere of opinion” led to the “best years of [his] existence [being] passed in idle, if not in sinful pursuits.” After becoming a military officer, his dissolute behavior increases until he finally decides to correct his character, and “the great instrument employed was phrenology” (342). After adopting a disciplined regimen of moral and intellectual mental exercises, he triumphantly emerges as a man who better knows himself and his capabilities. With his “new” character comes a new life more suited to his cultivated faculties: realizing that a soldier's advancement depends on the “number of victims” sacrificed for the country's cause, he “selected the more humble profession of the Civil Engineer, for which [he] believed, phrenologically, nature had made a fair provision.” He concludes by noting that his life has since been prosperous, and that he hopes now to “aid the cause of that science” through the phrenological education of his own children and his public confession in the journal (343).

While the writer obviously makes use of the narrative elements that characterize a religious conversion in confessional prose, his rebirth can hardly be classified as spiritual. His new life results from a professional transition and his recognition of the practical benefits of a phrenological education. Anticipating the reader's possible objection to his substitution of the brain's materiality for an immaterial spirituality, he explains that only when “the principles of phrenology became developed” in him did “the beauties of Christianity become exalted.” He claims that his conversion allowed him to recognize “the happy accordance which subsisted between the system of Jesus Christ and that of Gall: the one making its appeal to sentiments which the other showed to have a positive existence, capable of the most direct and unequivocal proof” (343).Footnote ¹ This reconciliation between the tenets of phrenology and Christianity attempts to avoid the charge of atheistic materialism by positing the brain as physical evidence of God's benevolent creation. George Combe, the most eminent champion of phrenology in Great Britain, advanced a similar position in The Constitution of Man (1828), remarking that “if mental organs exist at all, they have been bestowed by the Creator; and if we discover their functions and their uses, and distinguish these from their abuses, we shall obviously obtain clearer views of what God has instituted” (14).Footnote ² Unlike the Cartesian model that posits mind and body as disparate entities that can only be reconciled through God, Combe claims that mind is body, and moves God's position prior to a perceived (but not extant) division between external reality and the mind that confronts it.

Despite the respectful nod to Christianity, this article illustrates how the materialist philosophy following from phrenological theory implicitly challenged a traditional understanding of theism's relationship to personal identity. Rather than looking toward God to understand his purpose on earth, the article's author can only know God by first knowing himself, which can only be facilitated through an understanding of his innate physiological attributes. Further, realizing God's benevolent design results not from an abdication of his quotidian life to follow Christ (characteristic of both the Pauline and Augustinian models of conversion), but rather from an acceptance of the professional life that suits his brain: a Christian conversion might yield a missionary, but a phrenological conversion produces a “Civil Engineer.” By adopting the structure of a conversion narrative to recount his phrenological rebirth, the author elevates the importance of phrenology by aligning it with spiritual discovery.

Although this author uses the confessional form to unite phrenological introspection with spirituality, a decade later Harriet Martineau would employ the rhetoric of confession in relation to this science to articulate an anti-theistic argument in her Letters on the Laws of Man's Nature and Development (Reference Martineau1851).Footnote ³ This strange work of epistolary scientific prose, co-written with the phreno-mesmerist Henry George Atkinson, was the product of Martineau's continued interest in the sciences of phrenology and mesmerism. In recent scholarship, the Letters have become a curious footnote in biographical criticism that attempts to maintain Martineau's literary reputation by deemphasizing the book's importance within the larger context of her work.Footnote ⁴ Martineau, however, emphasized the book's significance in her Autobiography (Reference Martineau1877) by devoting an entire chapter to the conception, composition, and reception of the work. In the chapter's concluding sentence, she explains that her estimation of the “great importance” of this work “may excuse, as well as account for, the length to which this chapter of my life has extended” (2: 370). For Martineau, this importance was both textual and personal, since the Letters served as her first explicit public disavowal of theism. A testament to Martineau's belief that in publishing the work she was jeopardizing her career, she recalls, “It seemed to me probable that, after the plain-speaking of the Atkinson Letters, I might never be asked, or allowed, to utter myself again” (2: 343). The cursory critical treatment of the Letters owes much to the assumption that it is largely a book about phrenology and mesmerism. Martineau certainly respected and used phrenological and mesmeric theory in the Letters, but the work itself is about science, its connection to consciousness, and what such a connection might reveal about human subjectivity. These topics have recently garnered serious attention from literary writers who explore the issue of identity in relation to scientific advancements in artificial intelligence, virtual reality, genetic mapping, and brain imaging techniques.Footnote ⁵ Thoroughly interdisciplinary in her interests, Martineau similarly explored the possibilities of identity in the context of a theory of mind that revised the notion of what constituted the self. Unfortunately for Martineau, she based this exploration on phrenology, a science that would not survive the century – this, however, hardly negates the importance of her primary motive: to use a physiological theory of mind to dislodge prevailing notions of identity from socio-cultural concepts rooted in religious belief.

The Letters represent an important phase in Martineau's private formulation and public expression of anti-theism. Biographical scholarship has tended to depict Martineau's “conversion” as one progressing from rationalist Unitarianism to Comtean positivism.Footnote ⁶ Valerie Pichanick, for instance, describes Martineau's acceptance of positivism as “at heart nothing more than” Unitarian doctrines “altered to conform to a new secular faith” (198). Viewing her conversion in this way, however, relies on a specific definition of the secular that fails account for the philosophical sophistication of Martineau's position in the Letters. As Jean-Claude Monod points out, as a historical process secularization tends to refer to one of two contradictory concepts: either it denotes an ideological transference of religious forms to non-religious life, or it indicates a complete withdrawal of religion in order to rebuild society on a non-religious basis (23). The first of these alternatives retains an ethical dimension by locating authority in a non-transcendent source of power outside of the self, thereby avoiding the potential hubris of self-sufficient reason. Charles Taylor describes such an orientation as one in which the “mind has to open itself to something deeper and fuller” (9), citing positivism as just such an “attempt to retain some of the force of Christian piety while denying the dogmatic basis for it” (389). Martineau certainly makes use of this rhetoric of receptivity in the Letters when advocating a “surrender to Nature” which provides fullness or satisfaction in the form of “mental and moral health” (285). The ultimate objective of the Letters, however, is to argue that a correct understanding of how the brain works undermines the foundation of existing institutions, making possible what Martineau calls a new “study of Mind and Morals, and of much of external Nature” (95). The Letters, then, do not offer a straightforward case of secularism as transference, but rather serve as an instance of what Vincent Pecora calls “the twisting ambiguities and reversals of the secularizing process” (23). Martineau's rhetorical position in the Letters manages to embrace both sides of Monod's dualism by aligning secularism with a performative transference that makes explicit the conditions through which a radical break with inherited forms might occur. To accomplish this, Martineau appropriates the formal elements of confessional narrative in order to perform a secular conversion, replacing the theme of spiritual growth and illumination with a model of self-discovery based in biological science.

Viewing the Letters in terms of Martineau's use of the confessional mode also clarifies the work's specific function in relation to her autobiographical treatment of disbelief. In Eastern Life, Present and Past (1849), the Letters, and the Autobiography, Martineau addresses her break with Christian theism, but in ways that correspond to the generic conventions and rhetorical strategies that further her larger anti-theistic argument. As a historical study in comparative religion, Eastern Life made Martineau's theological dissent more or less explicit, but without including a personal admission of disbelief. As Maria Frawley observes, in Eastern Life Martineau “makes a direct correlation between scenery (outer life) and the ideas and emotions (inner life) that can be recovered from the landscape” (142). This thematic strategy afforded her both a tone of objectivity and the opportunity to “embrace recovery as a mode of inquiry” through history (135). While the scenery catalyzes reflection, the rhetorical presentation of Martineau's internalized movement away from theism through a travel narrative is of necessity externalized. In the Autobiography, however, Martineau offers a history of a different sort – one in which the history of the world does not catalyze a change within her, but rather, her personal narrative serves as a sign of future historical change. To this end, she applies a Comtean framework that progresses through theological and metaphysical phases to arrive at the final stage of scientific positivism. As Linda Peterson has argued, the “Comtean phases became Martineau's hermeneutic substitute for the biblical typology of orthodox spiritual autobiographers,” allowing her to represent her “individual development as a specific version of general, human progress” (64). Unlike the observational travel narrative or the retrospective autobiography, confession is a performative externalization of personal knowledge in order to claim a new public identity. Whereas Eastern Life focuses on how external objects act upon the mind and the Autobiography attempts to demonstrate general principles about human progress through an individual's experience, the Letters publicly announce a privately apprehended truth about the origin and nature of cognition. For these very different aims – historical, philosophic, and scientific – Martineau uses (often irreverently and paradoxically) the generic conventions best suited to her larger ontological argument. Viewing the Letters in terms Martineau's strategic use of the confessional discourse reveals the text to be integral to her ongoing examination of identity outside of faith.

* * *

While living in Tynemouth in 1844, Martineau experienced an immediate withdrawal of the debilitating symptoms caused by an ovarian cyst after a miraculous “laying on of hands” by the phreno-mesmerist Spencer Hall.Footnote ⁷ Like Atkinson, Hall studied the connection between mesmeric phenomena and phrenological theory, a subject variously referred to as “Phreno-Mesmerism,” “Mesmero-Phrenology,” or “Phreno-Magnetism.” Atkinson succinctly explains the practice as “the power of throwing persons of peculiar constitution with regard to nervous susceptibility, into a state of somnambulism or sleep-waking; and in such condition, of exciting or paralyzing the different cerebral organs at will” (“Mr. Atkinson on Mesmero-Phrenology” 326). As Hall explains in his introduction to the first volume of his journal, The Phreno-Magnet, phreno-mesmerism confirms the existence of discreet organs through their agitation and subsequent display of power (2). Like phrenology, mesmerism assumed a material cause for the effects it produced, positing the existence of a rarefied liquid permeating the body which led to mental discomfort or illness when unbalanced (Parssinen 105). Phreno-mesmerists combined this model with the more exacting somatic tenets of phrenology by concentrating their passes on precise organs of the brain. Atkinson describes his experience with the process, stating, “I found that I could excite into action any portion of the brain . . . I could play upon the head, and produce what actions I pleased, just as distinctly as you play upon the keys of the piano” (Atkinson and Martineau, Letters on the Laws of Man's Nature and Development 39).Footnote ⁸ Phreno-mesmerists affected cures by absorbing physical pain directly from the sufferer, believing that since the brain controls the entire body, drawing pain out of a specific phrenological organ would result in a corresponding cure elsewhere in the body.Footnote ⁹

After Hall's visit, Martineau became intensely interested in the experiential effects of mesmerism rather than with the phrenological theory of mind upon which the treatment was based. A few months later she published an account of her cure and the successful mesmeric treatments of others in “Six Letters on Mesmerism,” which appeared in the Athenaeum in 1844 and was later republished as a book.Footnote ¹⁰ Although closely connected in theme, nearly seven years separate this book and the publication of the Letters in 1851. Martineau began her friendship and correspondence with Atkinson after their first meeting in 1845, during which time he described the mesmeric and phrenological theories that explained the salutary effects she experienced from the earlier treatment (Pichanick 183). Referencing her conversations with Atkinson, Martineau demonstrates an early interest in phrenology in an unpublished letter to George Combe dated 14 May 1846. She writes:

The letter reveals that Martineau came to view mesmeric cures (what she “saw of Mesmerism at Tynemouth”) as phenomena closely connected with a phrenological theory of mind. Further, it reveals that Martineau's experience of a cure preceded a complete understanding of, and respect for, the science of mind that made possible her recovery. The gap between her cure and subsequent introduction to phrenology accounts for the divergent concerns in the related texts of the Letters on Mesmerism and the Letters on the Laws of Man's Nature, the former dealing solely with the experience of mesmeric trance, whereas the latter explores the origins of experiential phenomena as an effect of the brain's operations. In essence, the Letters on Mesmerism detail a conversion experience not fully grasped, whereas the more fully articulated statement of faith in scientific materialism emerges in the Letters on the Laws of Man's Nature and Development – the first text records a miracle, the second presents the creed.

As Martineau well knew, phrenology was central to popular understandings of psychology in the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹¹ Along with physiognomy and mesmerism, phrenology offers an example of the nineteenth-century fascination with “reading” the body in order to access the hidden self, but its materialist premise also aligns it with the concerns of Victorian physiological psychology. Like the phrenologists, physiological psychologists such as G. H. Lewes, Herbert Spencer, and Alexander Bain were interested in the implications of a materialist theory of mind on such issues as free will, the origin and nature of unconscious impulses, and the effect of environmental influences on individual development (Shuttleworth and Bourne Taylor 68–69). As Rick Rylance observes, unlike the physiological psychology that would succeed it, phrenology offered a “thoroughly imagined attempt to see the functional identity of physical and mental states” (100–01). While its explanation for behavior (the relative size of discrete mental organs) was incorrect, phrenology offered an early physiological model for understanding thought and action, and the material skull reinforced the science's claims with corroborative visual and tactile evidence. In this respect, phrenology was an oversimplified forerunner to physiological psychology that popularly advertised the premise of a materialist mind through the contours of the skull rather than through dissection.Footnote ¹²

In addition to its popularity and explicit materialist basis, phrenology also connected Martineau to a more specialized public debate concerning the spiritual implications of a physiological theory of mind. The atheistic valance of materialism not only affected the lay public's opinion of phrenology, but also caused dissention among the ranks of the phrenologists themselves. The issue came to the forefront of the phrenologists’ attention in June of 1842 at the fifth annual session of the Phrenological Association in London. At the meeting, the physician William Engledue delivered an opening address boldly asserting that mind has no existence independently of matter.Footnote ¹³ James Simpson then rose and made a motion to thank Engledue for his address with the qualifying statement that the comments concerning the material nature of mind should not be viewed as representative of the Association's opinion. Simpson carefully constructed a third position in relation to the issue, claiming,

In Simpson's formulation, the theory of mind phrenology sets forth exists outside the province of either religious or materialist doctrine. Reasoning that the brain's relationship to spirit may or may not reside outside the empirically observable, Simpson dismisses the necessity of engaging in the issue. Simpson's motion to thank Engledue with qualification was seconded, but a flurry of dissent erupted, many calling for the complete dismissal of Engledue's materialist position while others announced that they failed to see any reason for Simpson's qualifying remark (317–18).Footnote ¹⁴ Engledue's address generated even more intellectual heat in the following issue of the Phrenological Journal, which included a special section titled “Materialism and the Phrenological Association,” printing, in full, no less than six letters responding to Engledue's claims. Five of these express a strong disapproval of the address as an avowal of materialism, the most severe being that of John Isaac Hawkins, whose response succinctly summarizes the divide between materialists and anti-materialists within the association. After announcing his withdrawal from the organization “upon Christian principles,” Hawkins states, “I would not separate myself upon slight grounds, especially as I continued a member for many years after numbers of my Christian friends had resigned in disgust at the Materialism so often obtruded on the meetings by influential characters” (50). Hawkins's vehement reaction illustrates the abiding prevalence of materialist notions among the phrenologists, which increasingly “obtruded” into the association's annual meetings, while simultaneously demonstrating how a materially-based notion of mind proved problematic for theists.

Only one of the six letters, by T. S. Prideaux, overtly supports Engledue's stance by affirming the necessity of supporting a materialist view of mind if phrenology is to remain a science. Because legitimate sciences only investigate observable phenomena, he argues that phrenology should follow suit by eliminating any consideration of God, and concentrating on the brain's physiology:

Prideaux eschews overtly denying the existence of a spiritual identity or deity; however, his argument differs from the ameliorative third position proposed by Simpson by solidifying the legitimacy of phrenology's qualitative claims. Whereas Simpson argued that phrenology neither affirms nor denies materialism or spiritualism, Prideaux avers that the only knowledge of human nature available to science is through the “arrangement of nervous matter,” and for this reason phrenologists must assume, without recourse to a deity, that an understanding of humans’ moral and intellectual qualities are only physical effects of an aggregate of organs.

Like Prideaux and Engledue, Martineau belonged to this materialist school of thought, which she unapologetically champions in the Letters. Although the work addresses a broad range of interrelated issues, including positivism, the scientific method, and the nature of time, the basis for all of these discussions and the unifying theme of the book is the material nature of mind.Footnote ¹⁵ In the first sentence of the first letter, Martineau initiates the epistolary discussion with an observation on Atkinson's unique insight into psychology: “I rather think the reason why we have so much pleasure in talking over, and writing about, the powers and action of men, and the characters of individuals, is, that your observations proceed upon some real basis of real science” (1). Atkinson responds that the “different characters of men arise from the differences in the substance and form of their being. . . . For every effect, there is a sufficient cause; and all causes are material causes” (7–8). Martineau's letter and Atkinson's response, respectively titled, “Inquiry for a Basis,” and “Proposal of a Basis,” imply not only that the material nature of mind forms the premise of the book, but also that it serves as the foundation for, and origin of, all real knowledge. As Atkinson explains, because phrenological theory allows an investigator to “perceive precisely why men think as they do,” perceptions informed by an understanding of the natural basis of character necessarily have more ideational substance and validity. Atkinson and Martineau envision the book's overarching purpose as a revelatory declaration that will free individuals from constructed knowledge by claiming identity as an effect of physiological organization. As Martineau asserts in the third letter, titled “Preparation of the Ground”: “We deny, for our part, having any interior consciousness which informs us of any spiritual existence antagonistic to, or apart from, matter. If we once fancied we had, we have learned that it was through an ignorant and irreverent misapprehension of the powers and functions of matter” (14). Only by denying the existence of spirit as an illusory “shadow of ourselves” can humans progress to a further stage of existence founded on the secure knowledge that it is “matter through which Mind is manifested” (15).

Martineau and Atkinson advance this theory through an epistolary exchange that antagonistically parallels Christian doctrine in order to emphasize the radically different perspective that informs their scientific philosophy. Early on, Martineau replaces humanity's “misleading partiality” for origins with a knowledge of the brain, claiming, “By what combination of elements, or action of forces, I came to be what I am, does not at all touch my personal complacency, or interfere with my awe of the universe” (13). Rather than emphasizing an immortal spirit as the seat of identity, she posits “physical fact” and “matter” as the most basic and important sources of self-knowledge (12–13). Making the secular appropriation of Christian symbolism more explicit, Atkinson suggests creating a new “trinity” to “clear our understandings from the beginning,” composed of “Matter, Form” and the immutable “laws of Nature” (169). Rather than humans being made in the image of God, he declares that the “material of the brain is an impress of Nature, and corresponds with the nature and principles of the world without” (193). In place of a Christian teleology involving “the belief of a future, and of a retribution” he proposes the “idea of the infinite and the eternal omnipresent Law, and principle of Nature” (189). Finally, and perhaps most shockingly for a nineteenth-century reader, he implicitly likens himself to Jesus: “A Christ for these times will be persecuted by these times; for a true prophet must ever be an offence to the world, until the philosophy of Man has become recognized as a true science, based wholly upon natural causes” (209).Footnote ¹⁶

This pattern of appropriating conventional Christian forms to announce a new era of materialist thinking also appears less obviously, but more significantly, in the book's sustained use of confessional narrative devices. The constituent elements of the conversion narrative are well-recognized, but typically include most or all of the following: seeing oneself in a public role, assuming a rhetorical posture of humility, awakening to formerly unknown truths, the recognition of a higher power's influence, and finally, the expectation of persecution for one's beliefs.Footnote ¹⁷ These themes appear in the writing of St. Paul and in the book of Acts, but they reemerge fully developed in Augustine's Confessions, the representative work of the confessional form. Each of these elements also appears in the Letters, which Martineau also casts as a confessional narrative in her Autobiography. Expressing her trepidation about personal disclosure, she reports that although she “anticipated excommunication from the world of literature, if not from society” for publishing the work, she and Atkinson were nevertheless obligated to share the good news: “we were both pursuers of truth, and were bound to render our homage openly and devoutly . . . we could not see them [members of the public] suffering as we had suffered without imparting to them our consolation and our joy” (2: 343–44). Although Martineau presents the publication of the Letters as a confessional act, it is a confession with a crucial difference. As Peter Brooks defines the concept, confession is “a speech-act that has a constative aspect (the sin or guilt confessed to) and a performative aspect (the performance of the act of confessing)” (52). Although the Letters have constative and performative aspects (through the creed espoused and the reception anticipated and experienced), the work differs from a conventional confession in that Martineau and Atkinson are not admitting to any “sin or guilt.” What Martineau anticipates as the charge of sin rests solely outside of herself, in the mind of the public who will judge her admission. She performs confession not to be accepted by the social order (like the confessing prisoner or criminal facing the gallows), but to announce her willingness to be separated from it, like a martyr willing to be, as she puts it, “burned at the stake” (Autobiography 2: 346). Martineau views her own confession as a performative act that will, at the price of alienation, reconcile her to herself – her “freedom from old superstition” can only be fully realized if she articulates it to the world. As Foucault observes of the personal perception of modern confession:

In accordance with this model, Martineau perceives “power” as public opinion, and her own disbelief in God and the immaterial nature of mind as a fundamental aspect of her identity after her experience at Tynemouth. As a result, she “had no further choice” besides full disclosure, explaining that “any concealment would have been most imprudent. A life of hypocrisy was wholly impracticable to me, if it had been endurable in idea; and disclosure by bits, in mere conversation, could never have answered any other purpose than misleading my friends, and subjecting me to misconception” (Autobiography 2: 344). Before the work's publication, Martineau claims to live uncomfortably with herself, deeply committed to her personal beliefs while simultaneously aware of the unpopular reaction her avowal would occasion. This double existence enslaves her because the price of silence is to be “subject” to “misconception.” The act of confession reunites her public and private identity and wins her a sense of freedom through the cathartic surfacing of personal truth.

Although confession carries with it an unburdening of conscience, its public purpose lies in making known individual truths that correspond to universals. As Augustine explains in his Confessions: “This I desire to do [to confess], in my heart before you [God] in confession, but before many witnesses with my pen” (X.i). As M. H. Abrams observes, Augustine seeks self-knowledge through the act of confessing, but simultaneously sees himself in a public role as one whose life has been transformed and thus must bear witness for the good of others. In the confessional mode, the personal becomes public so it may become personal again in the life of the reader, but this textual transference can only occur if that which the author communicates contains a truth beyond the personal (84). For Augustine, this greater truth is Christianity (the spiritual); for Martineau and Atkinson, it rests in the material nature of mind. The Letters attempt to expose as illusory the idea that individual freedom arises from spiritual development, and posit in its place freedom from institutional dogma. Atkinson claims that modern man “remains ignorant of himself – of physiology and the laws of Man's nature,” and thus “imbibe[s] a confused notion of unintelligible dogmas, – which are called religion, it is true, and which are vainly supposed to be all-sufficient to guide him through life” (203). Since the “power to govern is in the knowledge of the nature of the thing governed” (286), and the nature of mind is material rather than spiritual, Martineau and Atkinson attempt to reveal how spirituality has imprisoned individuals in a false system of power.

In the work's preface, Martineau makes explicit her hope that by speaking plainly, she and Atkinson might catalyze such an awakening. Taking full responsibility for the decision to publish the work, she states that all systems of belief except those articulated in the Letters fail to satisfy her. Convinced of the validity of their views, she explains that personal conviction called for a public expression: “[it] seemed to me to require of us both the discharge of that great social duty, – to impart what we believe” (v). The “social duty” derives its importance from a readership of two kinds: those who are sympathetic but afraid to voice their beliefs, and those who will accept the truth, but do not yet fully know the nature of that truth. She reasons that it “may be, or it may not be, that there are some who already hold our views, and many who are prepared for them, and needing them” (vi). Like Augustine's announcement, “to sympathetic readers I will indeed reveal myself,” Martineau locates the importance of her public admission in hailing others who already share her beliefs. More important for Martineau, however, is the second kind of reader, who intuitively suspects that institutional forms have distorted perception but has no basis for dismissing these constructed beliefs. Martineau claims that she and Atkinson are morally obligated to slake this thirst for enlightenment, explaining that having found “a spring in the desert, should we see the multitude wandering in desolation, and not show them our refreshment?” (344). Voicing their beliefs thus becomes the first act of obedience to the physiological basis of mind, and in doing this they make possible a secular salvation for those who might not otherwise survive in the vast wilderness of ignorance.

The form Martineau selects to “discharge” her “great social duty,” however, seems to belie the commitment she repeatedly emphasizes in the work's preface. Atkinson's letters far exceed her own in length and atheistic content, and Martineau often assumes a rhetorical position of deference in relation to Atkinson's opinions. In a most uncharacteristic tone, she prepares the way for Atkinson's responses by asking questions to which she already knows the answers. In her fifth letter, after expressing her dissatisfaction with other theories of mental philosophy, she remarks, “You will teach me better. You will open the matter to me . . . with some curious secrets that I know you hold thereupon. Now then, – what is our brain?” (28). She later positions herself as a willing student of phrenology, insisting, “you must give me some lessons from an actual skull, that may guide me in mesmerizing the sick,” adding enthusiastically, “Now for the cerebrum! Where do you begin?” (72). Throughout the Letters, Martineau writes as if she were in need of constant instruction and correction, appealing to Atkinson's knowledge with giddy anticipation and unqualified admiration. Having achieved wide popularity and a considerable reputation as a writer, it seems strange that Martineau would willingly assume this posture in relation to a little-known phreno-mesmerist. As Susan Hoecker-Drysdale observes, “This acclaimed popular educator, teacher of the public, assumes the role of student in sycophantic posture, playing the servile listener to the supposed expert. Quite out of character, [Martineau] assumes a position of awe and openness in the face of Atkinson's instruction on matters for which she, quite inaccurately, disclaimed all knowledge and opinion (159).Footnote ¹⁸

This deferential posturing, however, crucially creates a space in the text for a privileged listener – a quality that distinguishes confession from other generic modes of self-disclosure.Footnote ¹⁹ As Foucault observes, confession always “unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority that requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it” (63). Within this relationship, the person to whom one confesses has the authority, occupying a position closer to the church (the priest), closer to the law (the interrogator), or closer to truth (God). As Peter Brooks explains, even as a means of self-exploration, in the confessional form the “expression of inwardness cannot, it appears, proceed without a responsive interlocutor in the search for self-knowledge” (96). In the Confessions, this “interlocutor” is God, who Augustine posits as the privileged “You.” Only through God can knowledge come to Augustine, and any approach to God's understanding requires humility and deference in relation to this wisdom. In its legal, private, and religious forms, the act of confession implies the confessor's acknowledgement that he or she lacks, but hopes to receive, the power and knowledge already invested in the confessant.

In the Letters, Martineau strategically situates herself within just such a confessional power dynamic, but the knowledge before which she must humble herself cannot be mediated by someone representing conventional forms of authority. Like Augustine, who admits that he believes in a God he cannot yet fully understand, Martineau admits that she believes in, but fails to completely grasp, the material nature of mind. In her third letter, Martineau introduces the key subject of the Letters as that which Atkinson can “teach” her: “If we cannot set ourselves back to the beginning of our reflective existence, and trace the whole course of our ideas and experience, you can teach me much of that particular department of matter through which Mind is manifested” (15). For Martineau, the origin and purpose of existence cannot be known, and for that reason, it hardly warrants further interrogation; what can and should be investigated, however, is the “structure and functions of the brain” (27). As Atkinson explains later in the work, the desire to encounter something greater than the self and the posture of humility that attends this desire are natural phenomena. Nonetheless, when individuals are led astray by dogma, they unnaturally submit to a deity and the “affections are perverted from their proper sphere.” To remedy this, humans must “learn to submit to the rule of nature, and remember that unhappiness and discontent are selfishness – impossible to a truly heroic and loving nature” (207, emphasis added). In this formulation, the human tendency to deferentially submit to a higher power illustrates a beneficial tendency exercised toward an inappropriate object.

In order to rhetorically model a proper attitude of humility toward nature, Martineau enacts submission in her epistolary relationship with Atkinson. Claiming that he is the only person she has ever known to be “altogether above” prejudice, Martineau treats Atkinson not as an expert, but as an exemplary figure embodying the correct attitude toward seeking true knowledge based in nature (12). Martineau trusts Atkinson's doctrine because it emerges from a careful study of the only knowable first cause of consciousness: the brain. By reenacting through the Letters her own progress in studying the mind's material nature since first meeting Atkinson in 1845, Martineau provides the reader with an exemplar of how one should approach new scientific ideas. She explains, “If we, – you with your habit of study, and I with my growing conception of what study is, – are daily sensible of the enjoyment of that ‘perpetual spring of fresh ideas’ . . . what must be the privilege of future generations who shall at the same time be more naturally free to learn and find themselves in a bright noon-day region and season of inquiry!” (284). Through her self-conscious posturing as a disciple, Martineau attempts to prefigure the appropriate habits of mind for one seeking enlightenment: a willingness to disavow preconceived ideas and a spirit of receptivity. Only by sweeping away the relics of inherited social, cultural, and religious assumptions can a “season” of knowledge begin.

After assuming the identity of a willing student, Martineau further demonstrates the personal effects of new knowledge through another confessional theme: the experience of awakening characterized by emerging from darkness to embrace the new light of understanding. In St. Paul's conversion experience on the road to Damascus, the literal and symbolic movement toward such “light” converges when a “light from heaven” renders him blind. When Ananias restores his vision three days later, the former persecutor of Christians preaches of Christ in the synagogues, remade into an instrument of God for the conversion of the Gentiles (Acts 9.3–20). In the Confessions, Augustine patterns his own mental experience after Paul's, casting his former confusion with darkness and his new clarity of conscience with light. In the garden at Milan, Augustine's conversion fittingly occurs after reading a passage by Paul (Rom. 13.13–14) which rids him of disbelief “as if a light of relief from all anxiety flooded into [his] heart. All the shadows of doubt were dispelled” (153). Similarly, in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1684), the metaphorical movement of the wayward soul towards God's wisdom is described as voyage toward light. Christian must advance toward “yonder shining light,” always keeping “that light in [his] eye” in order to obtain salvation (12). The sudden apprehension of light allegorically represents the new or re-created world properly seen by the spiritually remade Christian wayfarer.Footnote ²⁰

Preserving the imagery of light and darkness and the metaphorical valance of each, Martineau communicates her own progress toward wisdom as one fundamentally counter to a Christian epistemology. The central tension in Augustine's Confessions is between two contradictory wills; one which is “of the body” and the things of this world, and the other which is “of the spirit,” beyond crass matter and the senses (127). For Martineau, however, the movement toward enlightenment must progress in an entirely opposite direction. Because belief in the immaterial spirit has become so ubiquitously engrained in the concept of consciousness, it has achieved the position of an assumed truth. In her estimation, a genuine rebirth can only occur after a rejection of intangible spirit in favor of physical knowledge. Precisely because phrenology insists on the material nature of mind, the science strikes her as a useful tool for dislodging illusory notions about what constitutes human character. Remarking on the innovations brought to the science of mind through phrenological inquiry, she states:

The “tangible exhibition” of mental power rests in the organs of mind which can be seen, felt, and subjected to scientific scrutiny. Martineau aligns this knowledge with “the dawn” and the “light” in the East, while shadowy apparitions or “phantasmagoria” bedizen past understandings of what constitutes human nature. Rather than understanding interiority through soul or a connection with the divine, she envisions understanding public and personal identity as a metaphorical voyage into the brain.

Martineau further claims that the persistent belief in the immateriality of mind has caused the history of mental philosophy to follow a false path. She explains in her opening letter that because “Natural Philosophy and Mental Philosophy are arbitrarily separated,” science has progressed while understanding the mind remains stagnate in the quagmire of perpetual debate, stymied by the misrecognition of human existence as something containing an immaterial component. She declares, “Science has disabused us of our blinding and perplexing notions of spiritual anti-types of material things, and of spiritual interference in material operations” (3–4). She later likens embracing science to the act of “coming out of a cave full of painted shadows” (219), aligning the state of blindness not with an inability to compass the immaterial nature of the soul, but rather with a misguided preoccupation with spiritual phenomena. In so doing, she deploys the language of conversion against itself, casting supposed knowledge of the soul as intellectual darkness, and the re-discovery of the material conditions of the body and its power as a journey into light.

Enlightenment for enlightenment's sake, however, fails to provide the psychological benefits that attend religious conversion. Anticipating this need, Martineau argues that a perceptual reorientation toward the mind's material nature carries with it experiential benefits similar to a mystical union with the divine, but she attributes these effects to as yet unexamined physiological properties of the brain. Believing that “whatever powers we have, have always been there,” she asserts that finally “science is tracing [them] to their origin, or abiding place, in the brain” (123). In her thirteenth letter, Martineau offers her own testimony of the sensations caused by the brain's typically untapped extrasensory powers, describing the experience of exercising a “new faculty” (i.e., one yet unaccounted for by phrenologists) under phreno-mesmeric influence. “Nothing,” she explains, “in the experience of my life can at all compare with that of seeing the melting away of the forms, aspects and arrangements under which we ordinarily view nature” (122). Martineau's encounter with what may have been termed a vision or mystical union with a greater power only reconfirms her belief that the brain's structure and capabilities have not been sufficiently explored. Rather than personifying and exteriorizing the “forces” felt, she directs her attention inward, to the mind's inherent capabilities. Reinterpreted through the lens of biological essentialism, Martineau uses her “visionary” experience to justify a return to, rather than an escape from, the body. Working against the Augustinian tradition in which the Christian sojourner must deny the pleasures of the body to secure inner peace through the spirit, Martineau claims that an escape from religious dogma produces pleasurable and healthful physical sensations. She declares,

Rather than positing the next world as a spiritual constant, Martineau locates stability in nature's laws. One receives compensation for giving up the “selfish hope” in an afterlife through a renewed vigor in the organs of the brain, and rebirth into a secular and materialist worldview is accompanied not by a “new set of nerves” rather than a new life.Footnote ²¹

Importantly, Martineau presents her rebirth as a “return” to nature, which gestures toward the confessional practice of distinguishing between secondary causes and a primary or First Cause. Augustine demonstrates this key aspect of spiritual autobiography in his continual reinterpretation of experience through the lens of a providential plan.Footnote ²² While Martineau views the ideational connection between secondary causes and a divine will as absurd, she and Atkinson nonetheless retain the notion of a force greater than the self through natural law, a power she defines as “a system of ever-working forces” which remain “under the operation of immutable Law” (219). Martineau argues that the rules of matter's physical manifestations can be systematized and scientifically understood, but the refusal to apprehend this law and its influence leaves individuals estranged from a true knowledge of their unconscious motivation.

For Atkinson and Martineau, self-knowledge built on the premise of a divine plan and belief in divine influence results in a false concept of individual subjectivity. In the Christian confessional tradition, the pilgrim sees “through a glass darkly” while maneuvering past life's obstacles, but a greater purpose reveals itself through divine wisdom. For Augustine, understanding one's purpose follows from reading scripture and engaging in prayer, activities that lead the individual toward the true self, created by God for a specific spiritual purpose. Opposing this view, Martineau and Atkinson attribute unconscious motivation to the directing force of matter that operates in accordance to natural law. As Atkinson explains, the very idea of having a “Will” apart from one's physiological predispositions is an illusory effect of the brain's multiple organs:

This passage provides the solution to the riddle posed by the volume's title, Letters on the Laws of Man's Nature and Development: localized brain functions determine “Man's Nature,” and their interaction creates an individual's “Development.” The “Laws” by which they operate are organic, manifesting themselves as “harmonies, transitions and motions” which often are not consciously recognized by the subject, but which, nevertheless “determine” one's character, decisions, and behavior. As Atkinson admits of his own subjectivity, “At this moment it is not I, but the nature within me, that dictates my speech, and guides my pen. I am what I am. I cannot alter my will, or be other than what I am” (191). The notion of the “two wills” with which Augustine struggled, one of conscious awareness, and a second ascribed to a higher power realizing itself through spirit, can be explained as the phantom effect of unconscious matter. The individual might feel as if there were a will (and a superior being that bestowed it and exists in relation to it), but this only leads to misrecognition of what really constitutes human character. Mirroring Atkinson's observation, Martineau states, “I am what I am; – something far beyond my own power of analysis and comprehension” with “an origin in matter which cannot think, and forces which cannot feel” (13). Martineau posits unconscious motivation as an a priori physiological fact which, whether accepted or rejected, will inexorably direct one's life.

* * *

Whereas the text of the LETTERS itself operates as the constative element of Martineau's confession, the performative aspect appears in Martineau's expectations regarding the book's reception and her incredibly defensive reaction to critics. In the nineteenth letter, she boldly announces not only her philosophic atheism, but also the revulsion that theism instills in her:

This announcement, couched among discussions of such controversial topics as positivism, materialism, and the idea of God as a social construction, predictably incited a great deal of controversy. Charlotte Brontë wrote of the Letters, “It is the first exposition of avowed atheism and materialism I have ever read; the first unequivocal declaration of disbelief in the existence of a God or a future life I have ever seen. . . . If this be Truth, man or woman who beholds her can but curse the day he or she was born” (qtd. in Gaskell 441). Patrick Brontë expressed a similar opinion when he wrote to Martineau on 5 November 1857, observing, “your unfortunate book on Atheism, made you many opponents and enemies, and gave a smack to those who gave you credit for reasoning powers.” News of the book's negative reception reached Edinburgh soon after its publication, prompting George Combe to write Atkinson on 19 October 1851, stating, “I wholly dissent from the obloquy that has been thrown on you & Miss Martineau, for the publication of your letters.” Even complete strangers were prompted to respond: in January of 1856, a Mrs. Harcourt, anticipating Martineau's immanent death and certain damnation, sent two personally annotated Christian tracts accompanied by a letter begging the perusal of both and “hoping that the facts there stated may be made by the blessing of God the means of rousing you from your present fancied security.” Of more personal significance was James Martineau's vitriolic review of the book in the Prospective Review, titled “Mesmeric Atheism.” James took umbrage at his sister's insistence that free will did not exist, the denial of God as a First Cause, and especially her disbelief in a spiritual nature of mind. He writes, “So far as Science has effected the ‘exorcism of the spirit’ from nature, has science produced, we believe only a delusion” (257).

Although the public reaction was largely negative, Martineau's defensive reaction to the outcry seems overdetermined given the unorthodox nature of the views she so frankly expressed and the fact that she fully anticipated, and even braced herself for, an unfavorable reception. On 6 November 1850, before submitting the manuscript to Edward Moxon for publication, she warned him that it was “daring to the last degree; and the public wh. certainly is ready for such works, may not be your public” (qtd. in Pichanick 187).Footnote ²³ Despite being steeled for the uproar, and her oft-reiterated belief that it is “never worth while . . . to notice reviews” (Autobiography 2: 354),Footnote ²⁴ Martineau appears to have noticed, with great particularity and interest, the negative reception of this particular volume. In her Autobiography, Martineau discusses in detail the persecution she expected and received in relation to the book's publication. After moving to Ambleside, she avoided visiting her neighbors, knowing that “a book was in the press which would make them gnash their teeth” (2: 350). At length she describes the reactions of two unnamed “intimate friends” who, after the Letters appeared, found Martineau's beliefs “too much for them” and “blamed [her] excessively” (2: 352–53). One of the two women “went about every where, eloquently bemoaning [Martineau's] act, as a sort of fall, and doing [her] more mischief . . . than any enemy could have done” (2: 353).Footnote ²⁵ She also writes of neighbors who stopped speaking to her, of a decrease in visitors, a “diminution of letters” in general, while “scolding letters” from friends multiplied (2: 355–57). She claims that had she not been prepared for the reaction and fortified by Atkinson's support, she “might have declined into a state of suspicion, and practice of searching into people's opinion” during the ordeal (2: 358).

In order to perform confession, however, the convert must assume a posture of righteous fortitude characterized by an expectation of persecution and a willingness to accept censure. Martineau casts her experience of the hostile reception in precisely this way:

What Martineau claims did not “matter” to her personally in fact mattered very much in her performance of confession. In the Autobiography she refers to the volume as her “testimony” (2: 348, 370), compares herself to Martin Luther (2: 351–52), and includes an anecdote in which a friend compared her to St. Paul (2: 353). The motive behind this posturing as a martyr surfaces when she writes, “I am endeavouring now to revive the faded impressions of any painful social consequences which followed the publication of the ‘Atkinson Letters,’ that I may not appear to convey that there is no fine to pay for the privilege of free utterance” (2: 358). Martineau, it seems, wanted to pay, and in so paying, join the ranks of other reformers persecuted for their beliefs.

In her correspondence, Martineau adopts a similarly defensive position. Although she played the part of pupil to Atkinson's teacher in the Letters, the power dynamic shifts dramatically in her response to criticism as she assumes the role of protector by shouldering the responsibility for the volume's publication. A central complaint in her quarrel with James was his attack on Atkinson, and in an unpublished letter to Helen Martineau on 11 July 1851, she complains that James took “advantage of his safe position as [her] brother to slander & insult Mr. Atkinson” – an act both egregious and unjust because, as she emphatically observes, “my preface had declared that I induced Mr. Atkinson to write those Letters.” Similarly, in an unpublished letter to John Elliotson regarding an article criticizing the book in his journal, the Zoist, she writes: “In the preface to the book noticed I had published the fact that I had induced Mr. Atkinson to publish his letters. Any insult to him in consequence of the publication must therefore be resented by me.”Footnote ²⁶ Despite her former epistolary guise of submissiveness, she suddenly emerges as the more experienced co-writer, desiring recognition as the instigator and compelling force behind the publication. Martineau now presents Atkinson as a sensitive and vulnerable young man quite unprepared for the malicious reaction that she, a veteran writer inured to unfavorable reviews, can easily endure. Years later she would claim that her only regret about the enterprise was the possibility that she was “dragging forth a good man into persecution” (Autobiography 2: 359) – if someone were going to be persecuted, Martineau wanted to accept the burden.

In addition to assuming the role of a self-sacrificing martyr, her response to fierce critics repeatedly and insistently ties the injustice of her treatment to her resolute moral allegiance to an intellectual conviction. In this way, she demonstrates that her persecution serves a principled purpose by allowing her to translate an avowal of belief into a new identity and an outward expression of that identity. In an unpublished letter to Helen on 11 July 1851, Martineau explains that her decision to “disown” James had nothing to do with “personal offence,” but rather, with “moral reprobation.” Similarly, in a letter to Arthur Nicholls on 10 November 1857 regarding Patrick Brontë's willingness to go “out of his way” to insult the Letters, she concludes with the satiric observation, “It is a pleasure to me to see clergymen showing such a state of temper & of conscience. . . . If such conduct had been exhibited by two priests in the diocese of Trent you would have known how to estimate & characterize it.” In the analogy, Martineau likens her persecutors to the priests of Lucens, infamous for torture during the Inquisition, while implicitly figuring herself as a victim of their hypocritical morality.Footnote ²⁷

As an experienced public intellectual who, of her own admission, knew better than to “notice” criticism, Martineau's disproportionate reaction to the outcry seems, like her posturing as Atkinson's pupil, uncharacteristic. In order for confession to be recognized as such, however, what one claims to believe must be attended by a testimonial act that legitimizes its signifying power through a public performance. In this vein, Atkinson repeatedly emphasizes in the Letters that a price would, and must, be paid for their admission, noting “the history of Man is a history of the persecutions of the world's benefactors” (171). Later he repeats the sentiment, observing “We may preach these things, and men will think us mad, or something worse. Truth and the progress of humanity have at every step of advance been thought a desecration” (190). Nevertheless, Atkinson knew that as a public figure Martineau had a reputation to lose, and would inevitably carry the burden of ridicule. In a letter Martineau received from Atkinson which she claimed “supported” her during the aftermath of publication, he writes:

Atkinson and Martineau's understanding of what the “Cause” required extends the significance of their work beyond the constative text. Although words may be the “leading incident” in performing an act, they usually are not (if ever) the only thing required; and, the pair well understood that an act must accompany their statement of belief in order for those words to “do” something (Austin 8). As Atkinson makes clear, the way in which Martineau weathers the “storm” of the public outcry will also clear a path for future materialists. In other words, her speech becomes an act only if she pays a price. As Atkinson observes in another letter, “With regard to what they say about us. . . . It seems that we ought to have something to bear” (Autobiography 2: 365).

Although Martineau believed that her secular conversion was the most important and formative event in her life, her philosophy precluded the demonstrative aspect of faith conventionally associated with conversion.Footnote ²⁸ Whereas St. Paul and Augustine could provide evidence of conversion through a radical change in character, an act consonant with “the crises, cataclysms, and right-angled changes of the Christian pattern of history” (Abrams 48), Martineau's acceptance of the mind's materiality did not usher her into a new identity or lifestyle. Ultimately, her doctrine is not a rebirth into a new life, but a rebirth into an acceptance of an essential and inherent character – a transition away from the belief that there was ever a “new life” to be had. Something else was needed to make her confession an act, which she found in assuming Atkinson's projected role for her as a freethinking martyr who would rejoice in her persecution for the cause of materialism.

Throughout the Letters, Martineau attempts to envision and embody, to write and to become, the new subject – one who would not locate consciousness outside the mind, but within its someday knowable mysteries. The work is not persuasive, but apocalyptic – Martineau's attempt to sound the death-knell of spirit. Characterized by R. K. Webb as “one of the strangest books to carry the name of a reputable writer,” the work was nevertheless prescient in limning how identity would be viewed in the future. The idea that the brain is the organ of mind, that personality is in large part determined by our physiological dispositions, and that localized mental functions account for behavior, are now mainstays of neuroscience and physiological psychology. The significance of The Letters on the Laws of Man's Nature and Development is perhaps best characterized by James Anthony Froude: “Such a book as this [has] a strange echo of . . . forebodings. We may turn away from it, affect horror of it, slight it, laugh at it; but it is a symptom of a state of things, it is the first flame of a smoldering feeling now first gaining air, and neither its writers, nor we, nor any one, well know how large material of combustion there may be lying about ready to kindle” (434). Martineau was among the first to set foot upon the disputed territory of a new “state of things,” risking her public reputation for a belief in science's ability to revolutionize the way we would see ourselves in the coming age.