Vindication (10 page)

She remained in Lisbon for almost a month. The Portuguese seemed to her ‘the most uncivilised nation in Europe' in their treatment of women and workers. She rode along the banks of the Tagus feasting her eyes on the river's magnificence; gazed at historical paintings in churches; and inspected the ruins of the earthquake of 1755 that had killed between ten and twenty thousand, and provoked a debate on God's beneficence in
Voltaire's ‘Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne' (1756). During this month she almost certainly took charge of the baby, who was alive when she left on about 20 December. After she sailed, William was handed over to Skeys's sister-in-law, and soon died. Skeys felt neglected by his brother, he complained in a letter sent after Mary–an implied contrast with her attentions. The extent of his gratitude for the expense Mary had incurred for a return passage to Portugal, for nursing his wife and child, and her consideration in staying on, was to offer her a gown. She would have been glad of a gown, but Skeys never sent it.

The return voyage, prolonged by winter storms, took a month. Mary recalled the heaving seas in her novel
Mary
written eighteen months later, where the heroine goes on deck to survey the ‘contending elements' as the vessel rises on a wave and descends into ‘a yawning gulph'. The squalls rattle the sails, which are taken down. Every so often, when the wind dies away, ‘the wild undirected waves rushed on every side with a tremendous roar'. Where the other passengers are appalled, ‘Mary' faces into the storm: as her soul mounts and sinks with the waves, ‘she felt herself independent'.

En route the ship sighted a French vessel in difficulties. If the more extensive detail of
Mary
is to be trusted, the ship was dismasted and drifting, its rudder broken. The sailors were starving, and begged to be taken on board. The English captain, with his own rations running low, was inclined to sail past. Mary wouldn't have it. Assuming the manner George Blood called ‘the princess', she threatened to report the captain if he did not rescue the Frenchmen–and so he did.
Mary
re-imagines the scene: ‘They bore down to the wreck; they reached it, and hailed the trembling wretches: at the sound of the friendly greeting, loud cries of tumultuous joy were mixed with the roaring of the waves, and with ecstatic transport they…launched their boat, and committed themselves to the mercy of the sea. Stowed between two casks, and leaning on a sail, [Mary] watched the boat, and when a wave intercepted it from view–she ceased to breathe, or rather held her breath until it rose again.' When at last the boat arrives alongside, ‘Mary' tends the rescued men, and joins them in thanking ‘that gracious Being' who ‘rode on the wings of the wind, and stilled the noise of the sea; and the madness of the people–He only could speak peace to her
troubled spirit!' Then she sings–as well as she can recall–the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's
Messiah
: ‘The Lord Omnipotent reigned, and would reign for ever, and ever!'

At length, in January 1786, Mary arrived back in Newington Green. A shock awaited her: the school seemed about to collapse, and the atmosphere was ‘very disagreeable'. Boarders had left or were leaving, the last being Mrs Disney. She and the Wollstonecrafts had quarrelled, and the two Disney sons were already installed as ‘whole' boarders at the rival establishment of Mrs Cockburn. Without boarders, the house on the Green was too expensive, and, to make matters worse, Mrs Morphy, victim of some unexplained misfortune, had departed without paying her bill, as did the Disneys whose debt (roughly £70–£80), if paid, could have rescued the school. Mary had no hope that Mrs Disney would pay and, it appears, no means of retrieving the money–obviously, she didn't dare extend her loss with legal fees. On top of all this, Mary felt for the Bloods who must suffer with her. ‘I am determined they shall share my last shilling,' she declared, but was not ‘yet' able to pay their last quarter's rent. Skeys exasperated her with a ‘very short unsatisfactory' letter apologising for not sending a promised sum for his father-in-law.

‘It would have been particularly acceptable to them at this time,' she reported to George, ‘but he is prudent and will not run any hazard to serve a friend–indeed delicacy made me conceal from him my dismal situation, but he must know I am embarrassed.' Three weeks later further letters from Skeys arrived, minus the awaited ‘trifle'.

‘I am certain a few pounds would not make any difference in his affairs,' Mary thought, ‘yet why should I be surprised–did he not neglect Fanny–.'

To keep the school going, and probably also to help the Bloods, she borrowed heavily from Mrs Burgh; also from Friendly Church, from the recently married Sowerby, and from a number of neighbours on the Green including a musician called Mr Hinxman, a vague man who could ill afford it. Meanwhile, George, who might have supported his parents, was again living off friends in Dublin. He implored Mary to keep his most recent defection a secret from his parents, who believed him still employed in
Portugal. George was ready enough with bright suggestions. Why not open a school in Ireland? She explained that without financial backing it would be impossible to attract pupils; also, that she owed it to her creditors to find a safer means to pay them back.

George urged Mary to run off to Ireland, leaving her debts behind. ‘Nothing should induce me to fly from England,' she said. ‘My creditors have a right to do what they please with me, should I not be able to satisfy their demands.'

Her first concern was to exert herself to save the school before it dwindled ‘to nothing'. In her present low spirits, exacerbated by fits of anxiety, this was particularly difficult: ‘'tis a labour to me to [do] any thing–my former employments are quite irksome to me'. She felt ‘haunted' by the ‘furies' of debt. ‘Let me turn my eyes on which side I will, I can only anticipate misery–Are such prospects as these calculated to heal an almost broken heart–The loss of Fanny was sufficient of itself to have thrown a cloud over my brightest days.'

Even while Fanny was alive, her absence had been hard to bear. Bess and Everina could not compare as companions, and Mary's spirits had sagged when weeks had passed without a letter. ‘How my social comforts have dropped away,' she echoed Dr Johnson's elegy for a friend. The worst of her grief was to acknowledge that friendship, which she still called the ‘
cordial
of life', had been imperfect: ‘A person of tenderness must ever have particular attachments, and ever be disappointed,' she said, ‘yet still they must be attached…' Now, depleted of dreams, Mary had to press on day by day in a failing school, dreading the hour she must face that failure and almost wishing it would hasten, so struggle and dread might end.

During the winter of 1786, there seemed no point to her continued life, and there were times she wished she had drowned at sea. ‘I have lost all relish for pleasure–and life seems a burthen almost too heavy to be indured,' she confessed on 4 February. ‘My head is stupid, and my heart sick and exhausted.' In this state, a month after her return, ills began to fasten on her body: a pain in her side ‘and a whole train of nervous complaints'. Her eyes felt strained, her memory lapsing–signs, she thought, of decline. She hoped it would not be slow. This wish to die goes beyond grief: she
suffered from depression, manifesting often as irritability, hypochondria and self-pity. These are typical after-effects of a danger that has called up vigilance, protectiveness, fear and anger–emotions Mary had felt as a child when she had tried, and failed, to protect her mother or dog from her father's fist. That ‘agony' of helplessness, encoded in childhood, remained a recurrent threat to this active young woman. As witness to Fanny giving birth, she had again failed to save a victim she loved.

One of the Revd Mr Hewlett's sermons of this time seems to address her depression. The house of mourning, he urged, ‘is replete with instruction'. After ‘the calls of friendship led you to take a last farewell of those you loved' and ‘you viewed the last struggles of nature, saw the shades of death gathering around' and felt your ‘own weakness', do not forget, Hewlett counselled. Consider, meditate,
study
scenes of sorrow. The source of knowledge is experience. Not the teachings of others, not example, but the few events that befall us make a more lasting impression on the heart: ‘Keep thy heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life.' At a time when women were taught it was inconsistent with their nature to draw comprehensive conclusions from private experience, Hewlett encouraged her and others to shape, not blunt, traumatic memory. His idea of the uses of grief came from the Bible (Deuteronomy 4: 9): ‘Only take heed of thyself, and keep thy soul diligently, lest thou forget the things which thine eyes have seen, and lest they depart from thy heart all the days of thy life.'

Another consolation was the music of Handel. His ‘sublime harmony' raised Mary ‘from the very depths of sorrow', she said. ‘I have been lifted above this little scene of grief and care, and mused on Him, from whom all bounty flows.'

Although she did manage to retain eleven pupils, by April it was clear that however hard she tried, she could not make up her debt by trying to rebuild a large establishment. Pupils flocked to prosperous schools, which appeared to have no need for them. There was nothing for it. She must close her boarding concern, and continue in a smaller way with day pupils. But what would become of her dependants: moody, handsome Bess, unfit to fend for herself, yet tied for life to a cast-off husband; light-spirited
Everina, only twenty-one and susceptible to a ‘Lothario'; and the pathetic Bloods who were once more penniless?

From the beginning of May, Mary was preparing herself to ‘plunge again into some new scene of life'. In mid-June, still in Newington Green, she moved into cheap lodgings at a Mrs Blackburn's, and went on teaching the residue of eleven pupils. She sold the school's furniture and everything else she could spare, paid off the servant, and lived with ‘rigid' economy–too stringent, she said, for her sisters, perhaps her way of letting them know that she could no longer support them. Everina went back to Ned on Tower Hill. Bess lingered on with Mary until mid-July when Mrs Burgh found her a lowly teaching post at Mrs Sampel's school in Market Harborough, Leicestershire. The town lay in a valley surrounded by hills white with sheep. In the outlying hamlets, peeping from behind bushes, cottages were largely made of mud; some of stone. Bess was surprised to find these clean and comfortable, with woodbine and roses twined over their windows. Rural walks were an escape from a strict Presbyterian school. Her fellow-teachers were obsessed with hell, and damned plays and all books except for the Bible–a far cry from the enlightened Dissent of Newington Green.

This was hard for Bess, who was less spiritual than Mary and with a keener taste for the ‘
delightful little elegances of life
'. She pictures the provincial narrowness in a letter to Everina: the lugubrious quoting from the Bible from morn to night, the four services on Sundays, her homesick awakenings, and lonely evenings in her attic room with Everina's portrait for company. ‘Oh! How my heart pants to be free–' was her secret cry, while she schooled her face. She felt ‘shut out from all society, or conversation whatever, I cannot make myself understood here; had I an inclination so to do, praying is their only amusement, not forgetting eating, and
Marr[y]ing
, and so on–the idea of parting from
a husband
one could never make them
comprehend
…' At the same time, she spells out the economic case for marriage: ‘Oh! that you had a good Husband, to screen thee from those heart-breaking disagreeables…' Even now, Bess did not regret leaving Meredith Bishop. She's astonished when fellow-teachers can't comprehend that a bad husband is worse than none.

To Mary's relief, Bess held up. After more than two months she sent a reassuring and ‘very affectionate' letter which, Mary replied, ‘was a cordial to me, when my worn-out spirits required a very potent one–Indeed my dear girl I felt a glow of tenderness which I cannot describe–I could have clasped you to my breast as I did in days of yore, when I was your nurse–…I was pleased to find you endeavor to make the best of your situation, and try to improve yourself–You have not many comforts it is true–yet you
might
have been in a much more disagreeable predicament at present.'

The most intractable of Mary's problems had long been the Bloods and their feckless brood. Mr Blood was a mite sobered by the death of Fanny who, sick as she was, had taken his place as breadwinner. He did now exert himself to find work, and had the promise of a caretaker's job in the Church of Ireland. Yet, without money, how could he get there? Mr Blood was not backward in putting this plea to Mary, though she was stretched to breaking point, as he must have known. As always, she took a daughter's responsibility, and consulted the minister at Shacklewell how she might contrive to earn a little extra.

Mr Hewlett suggested that she write a book, and Mary came up with her
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters
. He took her proposal to Joseph Johnson, who was handling his own volume of
Sermons
and whose print shop in St Paul's Churchyard was near Hewlett's town parish of Foster Lane. Hewlett's face shone with ‘sensibility and goodness' when he returned to Mary with the publisher's offer of ten guineas. Unhesitatingly, she turned over the advance to the Bloods to pay their fare to Dublin. No sooner had they departed than a letter came from Skeys lamenting his ‘inability to assist them', and dwelling on his ‘own embarrassments'.

Now, when the day's classes were done, night after night through the late spring and summer of 1786 Mary's pen travelled over a sheaf of paper, and as it did so, her sense of purpose returned. ‘Whenever a child asks a question,' she writes, ‘it should always have a reasonable answer given it. Its little passions should be engaged.' Her bias was rational: children's heads should not be filled with ‘superstitious accounts of invisible beings, which breed strange prejudices and fears in their minds'. The force of her writing,
its unposturing directness, is plain. As she moved from her portrait of a girl reader discovering a taste of her own, to her portrait of an unmarried teacher braving the rigours of self-reliance, she drew on her experience of the last two years. Her
Education
looks deceptively slight; it was the fruit of long thought tested in a school of her own.