Author: MARTIN, Emma
Biography:
MARTIN, Emma, formerly BULLOCK (1812-51: ODNB)
She was baptised on 23 Feb. 1812 at St James, Bristol, the youngest of four children of William Bullock and Anna/ Hannah (Jones). Around 1829 she joined the Particular Baptists and became deeply religious. She ran a ladies’ school in Bristol with her sister Louisa (1809-33) and married fellow-Baptist Isaac Luther Martin on 15 Feb. 1831 at St. Mary Magdalen, Twyning, Gloucester. They had four children, with three daughters surviving. “In Memory of L. G. M.” in The Exiles of Piedmont (1835) records the death of her first-born, Luther George Martin, who died in Mar. 1832. A commemorative poem, “My Mother,” had earlier appeared in the Baptist Magazine (1831). In Mar. 1839 she debated the Owenite missionary, Alexander Campbell, and swiftly moved from Baptist beliefs through Deism to freethought. She moved with her children to London and separated from Martin. (He died of secondary syphilis in Bristol in 1862.) From at least 1841 she lived with Joshua Hopkins (1801-52), an Islington watch engraver and freethinker. They had a daughter, Manon Roland, in 1847. From 1840 to 1846, with a small salary from the Owenites, she lectured at most of the radical venues in London and gave lecture tours in English manufacturing towns and in Scotland where the radical Matilda Roalfe (1808-80) assisted her. She later added lectures on Dickens, Shelley (q.v.), and the novelist Eugene Sue. She was also a prolific pamphleteer. Her lectures on the condition of women, marriage and divorce, and socialism were highly regarded but her inflammatory language on the Christian religion provoked anger and sometimes violence. Exhausted by lecture tours and hostility to her views, she retrained as a midwife and announced two works on the physiology of women which never appeared. She also published translations of Guicciardini (1845) and Boccaccio (1847). She died, aged 39, from consumption, on 8 Oct. 1851, at Hollyville Cottage, Finchley Common, and was buried at Highgate, with Holyoake giving the funeral address. Joshua Hopkins died the following year, also from consumption, and was buried in the same plot. (ODNB 2 June 2023; DLB 6: 188-91; ancestry.co.uk 2 June 2023; findmypast.co.uk; Bristol Mercury 18 Oct. 1851; George Jacob Holyoake, “The Death of Mrs. Emma Martin,” The Reasoner 22 Oct. 1851, 349-53; Matthew’s Bristol Directory, The New Moral World, The Reasoner [multiple issues]; Highgate Cemetery, Grave 4331) AA
Other Names:
- E. Martin