Harriet Martineau

Suggestions Towards The Future Government Of India.

MARTINEAU,Harriet. Suggestions towards the future government of India. London, Smith, Elder & Co. 1858

Octavo, original publishers cloth, printed paper label, pp.viii +153, 16 adverts.

Octavo, original publishers cloth, printed paper label, pp.viii +153, 16 adverts.

First edition. Written at the time of the Indian Mutiny and when there was a feeling that the rule over so vast an area and people was too great to be left in the hands of the East India Company. Martineau argues for an inquiry to consider ways of modifying the rule by the East India Company but by making use of its influence and experience. Later that year an 'Act for the better government of India' was promulgated and the Company was swept away. Mill wrote in his Autobiography "I was the chief manager of the resistance which the Company made to their own political extinction, and to the letters and petitions I wrote for them, and the concluding chapter of my treatise on Representative Government, I must refer for my opinions on the folly and mischief of this ill-considered change". He had a strong aversion to the Whig passion for making dominion governments directly dependent on the English Parliament, as he had shown in the case of Canada. In 1858 he wrote five pamphlets against change and his petition to Parliament was praised by Lord Grey as the ablest state paper he had ever read.

Harriet Martineau had been present at the dinner party at the Taylor's in 1830 when Mill first met Harriet Taylor. Mill disliked her. Packe writes "Now that Harriet Martineau gossiped is undeniable…Mill thought her a cantankerous and opinionated creature, the hard and narrow core of the sectarian radicalism he was trying to puncture. He never liked her: she was not his friend. And from the first she disapproved of Harriet (Taylor) for being frivolous".

J.S.Mill, Autobiography, pp.249-250. Packe, Life of John Stuart Mill, pp.388-390; 321.

Price-£300