James Martineau (; 21 April 1805 – 11 January 1900) was a British religious philosopher influential in the history of Unitarianism. He was the brother of the atheist social theorist, abolitionist, and atheistic Harriet Martineau. One of James Martineau's children was the Pre-Raphaelite watercolourist Edith Martineau.
For 45 years he was Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy and Political Economy in Manchester New College (now Harris Manchester College, of the University of Oxford), the principal training college for British Unitarianism.
Many portraits of Martineau, including one painted by George Frederick Watts, are held at London's National Portrait Gallery. In 2014, the gallery revealed that its patron, Catherine, Princess of Wales, was related to Martineau. The Princess's great-great-grandfather, Francis Martineau Lupton, was Martineau's grandnephew. The gallery also holds written correspondence between Martineau and Poet Laureate, Alfred, Lord Tennyson - who records that he "regarded Martineau as the mastermind of all the remarkable company with whom he engaged". Martineau and Lord Tennyson were familiar with Queen Victoria's son, Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany; they noted that Leopold, who had often "conversed with the eminent Dr. Martineau, was considered to be a young man of a very thoughtful mind, high aims, and quite remarkable acquirements". William Ewart Gladstone said to Frances Power Cobbe "Dr Martineau is beyond question the greatest of living thinkers".
Early life
The seventh of eight children, James Martineau was born in Norwich, England, where his father Thomas (1764–1826) was a cloth manufacturer and merchant. His mother, Elizabeth Rankin, was the eldest daughter of a sugar refiner and grocer. The Martineau family were descended from Gaston Martineau, a Huguenot surgeon and refugee, who married Marie Pierre in 1693, and settled in Norwich. His son and grandson, respectively the great-grandfather and grandfather of James Martineau, were surgeons in the same city. Many of the family were active in Unitarian causes, so much so that a room in Essex Hall, the headquarters of British Unitarianism, was eventually named after them. Branches of the Martineau family in Norwich, Birmingham and London were socially and politically prominent Unitarians; other elite Unitarian families in Birmingham were the Kenricks, Nettlefolds and the Chamberlains, with much intermarriage between these families taking place. Essex Hall held a statue of Martineau. His niece, Frances Lupton, who was close to his sister Harriet, had worked to open up educational opportunities for women.
Education and early years
James was educated at Norwich Grammar School where he was a school-fellow with George Borrow under Edward Valpy, as good a scholar as his better-known brother Richard, but proved too sensitive for school. He was sent to Bristol to the private academy of Dr. Lant Carpenter, under whom he studied for two years. On leaving he was apprenticed to a civil engineer at Derby, where he acquired "a store of exclusively scientific conceptions," but also began to look to religion for mental stimulation.
Martineau's conversion followed, and in 1822 he entered the dissenting academy Manchester College, then at York - his uncle Peter Finch Martineau was one of its vice-presidents. Here he "woke up to the interest of moral and metaphysical speculations." Of his teachers, one, the Rev. Charles Wellbeloved, was, Martineau said, "a master of the true Lardner type, candid and catholic, simple and thorough, humanly fond indeed of the counsels of peace, but piously serving every bidding of sacred truth." The other, the Rev. John Kenrick, he described as a man so learned as to be placed by Dean Stanley "in the same line with Blomfield and Thirlwall," and as "so far above the level of either vanity or dogmatism, that cynicism itself could not think of them in his presence." On leaving the college in 1827 Martineau returned to Bristol to teach in the school of Lant Carpenter; but in the following year, he was ordained for a Unitarian church in Dublin, whose senior minister was a relative of his.