The Martineaus were descended from a French Huguenot surgeon, who left his native country in 1688, after the revocation of the edict of Nantes. He settled at Norwich, and became the progenitor of a long line of distinguished surgeons in that city. Harriet’s father was a manufacturer; she was born on the 12th June 1802, the sixth of eight children. There is nothing in the outward circumstances of her youth to distinguish it from that of the substantial but simple comfort of any middle class family of that period, save that her education was above the average. The independence of judgment in religious matters that had made their ancestor a Huguenot, made the latter Martineaus Unitarians; and it was to this fact that the excellence of the education of the family was in part due. For the Rev. Isaac Perry, the head of a large and flourishing boys’ school in Norwich, became converted to the principles of Unitarianism, with the consequence of losing nearly all his pupils. The Unitarian community felt it their duty to rally round him, and support him to the utmost of their power. Hence those who, like the Martineaus, had children to educate sent them, girls as well as boys, to him. Harriet therefore had the inestimable advantage of beginning her career with a mind well equipped with stores of knowledge that were at that time usually considered quite outside the range of what was necessary for a woman. She speaks of herself as having, especially in her childhood, “a beggarly nervous system”; and her description of her utterly unreasonable terrors, which she bore in silence, because of the want of insight and sympathy around her, ought to be a lesson to every parent. “Sometimes,” she says, “I was panic-struck at the head of the stairs, and was sure I could never get down; and I could never cross the yard into the garden without flying and panting, and fearing to look behind, because a wild beast was after me. The starlight sky was the worst; it was always coming down to stifle and crush me, and rest upon my head.” “The extremest terror of all,” she says, was occasioned by the dull thud of beating feather beds with a stick, a process in which the housewives of Norwich were wont to indulge on the breezy area below the Castle Hill. A magic-lantern, or the prismatic lights cast by glass lustres upon the wall, threw her into the same unaccountable terror-stricken state. If she could have been coaxed into speaking of these panics, they might probably have ceased to assail her. But this she never dreamed of doing. There was too little tenderness in her family life to overcome her natural timidity. Once when her terror at a magic-lantern so far overcame her as to find vent in a shriek of dismay, “a pretty lady, who sat next us, took me on her lap, and let me hide my face in her bosom, and held me fast. How intensely I loved her, without at all knowing who she was.”