The Hour and the Man, An Historical Romance
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- No scanning noise detected (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand)
- Extent:
- ~170,000 words · 821 passages
Cite this work
- APAHarriet Martineau. (n.d.). The Hour and the Man, An Historical Romance. Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/harriet-martineau/the-hour-and-the-man-an-historical-romance
- MLAHarriet Martineau. The Hour and the Man, An Historical Romance. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/harriet-martineau/the-hour-and-the-man-an-historical-romance.
- ChicagoHarriet Martineau. The Hour and the Man, An Historical Romance. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/harriet-martineau/the-hour-and-the-man-an-historical-romance.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
What it is about
The novel Harriet Martineau wrote in 1841 about Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian revolution, at a time when slavery was still legal across much of the world.
Context and history
Martineau was a writer and sociologist and an avowed abolitionist, which had brought her threats in the United States. To make a former black slave the tragic hero of a serious novel was, in 1841, a political decision as much as a literary one: the book asks the British reader to recognise moral greatness and a capacity to govern in a man whom his world denied both. As a historical novel it has the faults of the genre and of the period, and it idealises its protagonist; as a document of the abolitionist movement and of how fiction was used to change minds, it is of the first order. Her economic and sociological work, which is better known, is also in the corpus.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
this din, from being accustomed always to hear more or less of it, the boy amused himself with chasing the fireflies, whose light began to glance around as darkness descended. His sister was poring over her work, which she was just finishing, when a gleam of greenish light made both look up. It came from a large meteor which sailed past towards the mountains, whither were tending also the huge masses of cloud which gather about the high peaks previous to the season of rain and hurricanes. There was nothing surprising in this meteor, for the sky was full of them in August nights; but it was very beautiful. The globe of green light floated on till it burst above the mountains, illuminating the lower clouds, and revealing along the slopes of the uplands the coffee-groves, waving and bowing their heads in the wandering winds of that high region. Genifrede shivered at the sight, and her brother threw himself upon her lap. Before he had asked half his questions about the lights of the sky, the short twilight was gone, and the evening star cast a faint shadow from the tufted posts of the piazza upon the white wall of the cottage. In a low tone, full of awe, Genifrede told the boy such stories as she had heard from her father of the mysteries of the heavens. He felt that she trembled as she told of the northern lights, which had been actually seen by some travelled persons now in Cap Francais. It took some time and argument to give him an idea of cold countries; but his uncle Paul, the fisherman, had seen hail on the coast, only thirty miles from hence; and this was a great step in the evidence. Denis listened with all due belief to his sister's description of those pale lights shooting up over the sky, till he cried out vehemently, "There they are! look!" Genifrede screamed, and covered her face with her hands; while the boy shouted to his father, and ran to call his mother to see the lights.…