Deborah Logan’s newest book poses a compelling, and difficult, question: “Is it possible to reconcile the blatant racism of … passages [in Martineau’s published work] with other examples of Martineau’s writing on the topic?” (36). Based in Logan’s valuable work as editor of Martineau’s letters and writings on the British Empire and on history and military reform for Pickering and Chatto, this monograph has two ambitious and intertwined goals. The first, to place Martineau “on a more level playing field with the canonical authorities of Victorian culture” (5), such as Macauley, Mill, and Trevelyan, motivates Logan’s critical project and demands that the “blatant racism” of Martineau’s writing be grappled with and, arguably, subdued. The second, to explore Martineau’s “ambivalence towards imperialism” (7) in her writings on Australia, India, Ceylon, Jamaica, and Borneo—among many other countries—is at the heart of Logan’s enterprise. In these writings, she suggests, Martineau articulates “an extraordinarily prophetic comprehension of first-world economic interests and third-world cultural concerns—the mutual responsibility and moral culpability for what we now term globalization” (20). This second goal, rooted in response to postcolonial criticism that for Logan too quickly labels Martineau as simply another Victorian racist and imperialist, depends on the suggestion that Martineau expresses a fundamental coherence in her vision of empire across the many years of her professional writing. This coherence forms the basis of Logan’s claim for reconciliation.

In order to place Martineau among the canonical authorities of Victorian culture, Logan names her “an originator” (4) rather than popularizer of ideas, offering this in-depth study of Martineau’s writing on empire as critical evidence that Martineau deserves to be recognized as a central figure in Victorian historiography. Logan substantiates this claim through her detailed documenting of Martineau’s many relationships with leading intellectuals and activists of various reform movements, such as American abolition and Irish land reform, and her wide-ranging correspondence with such figures as James Brooke, the “White Rajah of Sarawak.” The dense network of international correspondents and hosts; the extensive professional connections; the significant intellectual, governmental, and specialist contacts and sources, which form the basis of Martineau’s writing, are ample proof that to read Martineau solely as a popularizer—with all the dismissal of intellectual heft and significance the term can uncritically imply—is unsustainable. In combination with the extensive, generous, and often engaging excerpts from Martineau’s work that Logan provides, the substance and clarity of Martineau’s writing is made clear.

The second claim, that it is not only possible but necessary to reconcile Martineau’s racism and liberality, her declaration of universal human rights, and her reliance on egregious racial stereotypes, grounds the undertaking of this book: “For Martineau, the boundaries delineating racism from humanism and both from the Civilizing Mission are more fluid than the post colonial, post modernist consciousness finds tolerable” (36). As a guide to an important writer’s thinking and writing on imperialism and its relation to a “civilizing mission,” Logan’s work is invaluable. She maps the historically specific construction (and interplay) of racist, nonracist, imperialist, and progressive thinking through the vastness of Martineau’s oeuvre with frankness and clarity. While interrogating the “what” and “how” of racist thinking in the nineteenth century, Logan does not explain away or reframe as palatable this collision of oppositional values. Insisting on Martineau’s “ambivalence,” Logan demonstrates its ubiquity in writing on Ireland, India, Jamaica, Borneo, and elsewhere. I applaud Logan’s insistence on looking at these racist and gender stereotypes up close, to investigate their operations and range, and her refusal to be satisfied with labels.

Nevertheless, there are limitations to Logan’s methods of reconciliation, the most jarring of which is the lack of engagement with the question of forms, the legitimacies that attach to them, the diverse audiences they address, and Martineau’s expert negotiation of these concerns. On the one hand, this is an elemental force shaping Martineau’s marginal status in the historiography of Victorian Britain, as many scholars of the newspaper and periodical presses have shown. But the question of forms—legitimacies, audiences, strategies—is vital to if and how “reconciliation” can be achieved. In assessing Dawn Island (1846), for example, Logan notes that Martineau “does not investigate [the text’s] complacent conclusion” (103), in which a stereotyped South Sea island culture based on infanticide and cannibalism is reformed by the introduction of trade with European explorers. Logan’s investment in reframing this repulsive tale, despite the lack of materials that enable her to do so, requires her to turn to “fuller critiques on empire exhibited in other texts explored in this study” (103), particularly an 1856 Westminster Review article, “Christian Missions: their Principle and Practice.”

In turning to this other, preferable, articulation of empire, Logan overlooks a critical opportunity. She notes that Dawn Island was written to benefit the Anti–Corn Law League, suggesting its strong emphasis on commerce can be thus explained. But the story’s trading in all the most sordid Western stereotypes of a non-Western culture needs a fuller reframing. Does Martineau “not investigate” these stereotypes because the commission to the League requires primarily the promotion of commerce? Are stories written on commission in this way less authentically revealing of the writer’s thinking than her essays in a prestigious monthly periodical? Do Martineau, her editors, publishers, and readers read their responsibilities to “investigate” or to reject racial stereotypes differently in different print culture forms? Elsewhere Logan notes that in Eastern Life (1848), Martineau “has written words fully intended for publication that are radically inconsistent with her humanitarianism, her emphasis on civil rights for all races and classes, her advocacy of gender and other social reforms, and her promotion of religious tolerance and the Civilizing Mission” (201). And, indeed, we have read excerpts documenting clearly Martineau’s dedication to these values throughout. Logan aims for reconciliation but ends up providing, instead, substantial evidence of the difficulty of such a task. Different methods of reconciliation, including perhaps attention to the question of forms and audiences for Martineau’s writing, might well have gotten us closer to that goal.