The English travel writer, novelist, and political economist Harriet Martineau (1802–1876) makes an odd reference to not seeing the comet in her "Autobiography": "When the great comet of 1811 was attracting all eyes...ight after night, the whole family of us went up to the long windows at the top of my father's warehouse; and the exclamations on all hands about the comet perfectly exasperated me,—because I could not see it!... Such is the fact; and philosophers may make of it what they may,—remembering that I was then nine years old, and with remarkably good eyes."