In her autobiography Harriet Martineau states emphatically that authorship was never "a matter of choice" for her. She wrote not "for amusement, or for money, or for fame, or for any reason but because I could not help it." Regardless of her subject-religion, economics, history, social reform, education, family relations, biography, or philosophy--Martineau wrote because "things were pressing to be said" and she was "the person to say them." Many of her contemporaries agreed. Her work was praised by such literary luminaries as George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Thomas Carlyle, William Wordsworth, Charlotte Brontë, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who were also her friends. Members of the government trying to gain public acceptance of proposed policies sought her journalistic and literary support.

Martineau's writings for children were as varied as those for adults, including devotional exercises and Sunday school stories, geographical and historical fiction, a boys' school story...