The End of Whig History: Dickens, Martineau and the Mid-Victorian Press

Chapter Seven examines the after-life of the 1855-56 dispute with a focus upon Martineau and Dickens’s final encounter or, rather, quasi-encounter, an aspect of the dynamic between them that has received no previous critical attention. Focused upon the cultural phenomenon that was Thomas Babington Macaulay, the chapter explores the ways in which Martineau and Dickens’s divergent responses to the great exemplar of Whig historical narrative reveal their own evolving concepts of history and their advocacy for those concepts in their late work in the press. After considering Dickens’s response to Macaulay and the model of history encoded into A Tale of Two Cities, the chapter turns to Martineau’s dispute with William Makepeace Thackeray. Though less overt than the earlier dispute with Dickens, the quarrel shows, first, how she intentionally positioned herself against Dickens’s new project at All the Year Round, and, second, how, through writing extensively about the nursing profession and educational opportunities for girls, she evolved her final roles in the press so as to continue her advocacy on behalf of progressive causes and her support for a vision of liberal social development that remained remarkably consistent with the positions she had first advocated in the early 1830s.