Vindication (16 page)

As summer approached, Mary encouraged Lady Kingsborough to go
abroad. A consolation for the loss of her inheritance, and for continuing a governess, would be to travel: to contemplate new scenes as a release from the narrowness of the female life. Plans for a Grand Tour with Mary and the children began to go forward. Their first stop, on crossing the Irish Sea, was a spa in Bristol.

 

At Bristol Hot Wells, from June to August, the gulf between Lady Kingsborough and Mary deepened. After taking unusual pains to draw Mary into the pastimes of high society, Lady K finally lost patience with a governess who cast a cold eye on these efforts. She took to introducing Mary in a manner that put her in her place. Her tone warned society not to be deceived: this dignified and articulate young woman of twenty-eight, who was travelling with the family, should not be mistaken for a friend; this was a dependant who worked for a living. Mary was stung repeatedly, yet she was indeed no friend to the Ascendancy–with the exceptions of Mrs FitzGerald, the Ogles and, above all, her favourite pupil whom she called fondly ‘my little Margaret'.

It's at this moment that we catch Mary Wollstonecraft in the act of greatness. She was not a born genius; she became one. Here is someone with ordinary abilities transgressing the limits of ordinariness. Throughout her period as governess, and moving behind the constraints of that position, are hints of enterprise: the sea of ideas at Eton which she can't set in order; her studies at night; and the ‘schemes' that she cannot reveal to Everina. In Bristol, the purpose sounds again when she reminds Everina of her identity as an Author, and hints of some ‘writing'. To be great, neither innate ability, nor ideas, nor ready words, nor shafts of criticism were enough: there had to be the character to press on. She had the will to rise again when prospects appeared to fade and life felt untenable. She can confess a death wish (‘I long to go to sleep–with my friend [Fanny] in the house appointed for all living') at the very time that a new form of life bursts its chrysalis: ‘to make any great advance in morality genius is necessary,' she writes, ‘–a peculiar kind of genius which is not to be described, and cannot be conceived by those who do not possess it'.

The advancing genius; the fading nerve: we might say the contradiction is the character, or we might see a woman strung out between extremes.
Her letters do vent the extremes, but letters can be misleading, especially those like Wollstonecraft's which appear so confessional. They have suggested a pattern of collapse and failure, but to read them collectively in the context of her actions indicates the reverse: a pattern of renewed purpose. The letters do state once more how ‘
flat
,
stale
and
unprofitable
' the things of this world appeared, and her impatience to leave its ‘
unweeded
garden'. Yet Hamlet's intellectual melancholy, alienation and almost suicidal inability to take action, join with Wollstonecraft's sense of purpose. We see energy interfused with melancholy, and in some way, the one depended on the other. Her sister Bess acted out the melancholy without the counterforce. This is the difference: on Mary's lips, Hamlet's words laid claim to heroic possibilities, even as they proclaimed her powerlessness as a temporary, even necessary, phase. To see this merely as self-dramatisation for its own sake is to lose sight of latent powers that Mary Wollstonecraft had to bring to bear in ways she had not yet determined.

There was a daily balance to her Hamlet role in the steady occupations of teaching and reading. In June, she was studying a very sober book,
The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy
. Its author William Paley asks how ‘adventitious' rights (the rule of one over another in a manmade system) might be distinguished from ‘natural rights' (what people who found themselves on a desert island would be entitled to claim, the right to life and liberty, to air, light and water). Though a manmade system may be capricious and absurd, it would be a ‘sin' to oppose it, Paley argues, because God wills civil society to exist for the happiness of mankind. Paley takes his reader to the border of revolution, then leads him away, and likewise with issues of gender: ‘Nature may have made and left the sexes of the human species nearly equal in their faculties, and perfectly so in their rights'; but, he goes on, to guard against competition with men, which women's equality would produce, Christianity rightly enjoined obedience on the wife in a marriage. Mary's unqualified respect for Paley in June 1787 should not surprise us. She was still faithful to the Anglican Church, and this fits her loyal Cordelia aspect. Yet her prime trait of compassion, the visibility for her of suffering individuals, drew her at the same time to a Dissenter like Dr Price, who brought religion and revolution together.

Christianity preached resignation to the earthly lot, and in 1786–7 Wollstonecraft was repeating this, albeit with difficulty. Since resignation reinforced the status quo, some radicals like Godwin lost their faith during the revolutionary course of the 1780s. The radicalism of Mary Wollstonecraft differed from theirs in that her politics did not lose sight of the soul. In remaining a Christian, she was tugged between the claims of human rights and those of an otherworldly faith that emphasised the virtue of suffering.

Suffering seems to be the only course open to the heroine of Mary Wollstonecraft's first novel, which she was writing in Bristol that June. She draws on herself in a way so close to actual event as to leave us uncertain what is fiction. Title and subtitle,
Mary
,
A Fiction
, appear a contradiction. An ‘Advertisement' owns at the outset that ‘the soul of the author is exhibited and animates the hidden springs'. Using the author's own name and those of her parents (‘Edward, who married Eliza'),
Mary
starts with parents and childhood, and continues in the measure of biographic record. ‘Mary's' mother is untender and sickly. She favours her son and ignores her daughter, who learns to seal off her real life as a thing apart. Wollstonecraft blends her own mother with Lady Kingsborough as an heiress who ‘carefully attended to the
shews
of things'. ‘Mary's' correspondence with a friend called Ann trains her in taste and correctness, but Ann is indifferent to ‘Mary's' attachment because she pines for a lost love. In Lisbon, ‘Mary' cares for this friend who is dying of consumption in a sanatorium, and can't articulate her fears because it would be like pronouncing a sentence of death.

The plot of
Mary
is designed to expose the futile plots of women's lives, drawing on lives the author could validate and distilling their pathos to make this point: Fanny's decline as a result of the dowry system, Mrs Blood's squandered patrimony, and the weak position of Bess in a damaging marriage. The novel makes a case against marriage, from which the only escape is death: the closing words tell us that ‘Mary' was ‘hastening to that world
where there is neither marrying
, nor giving in marriage'. In 1748 the protracted death of Richardson's Clarissa, refusing to paper over her rape with the legality of marriage, had vindicated the independence of a virtuous woman for a generation of readers across Europe and America. A callous
father marries ‘Mary' to a man who repels her. The one ‘Mary' could have loved, Henry–a man who values her intelligence–is a dying, dim figure. No established form of life can answer ‘Mary's' need for learning, philosophy and a meaningful existence, expressed in soliloquies that mark the growth of her ‘original' mind.

She is, then, a lone phenomenon as she moves–restless–with no institutional habitation. When she communes with the wind ‘which struggled to free itself' from whatever ‘impeded its course', she ‘rejoiced in existence, and darted into futurity'. Hidden in her consciousness are phantom forms of purpose, frail shoots of a buried life–too shaded, too yellow, to burgeon in the light of day, but a possible answer to Rousseau's artificial Sophie.

The only real character in this novel is ‘Mary' herself, with the interest of a self-portrait: a young woman who is ‘tender and persuasive' in conversation, yet whose subdued energy shows in her quick movements and a flash of contempt from her eyes such as ‘few could stand'. ‘Mary's' prime trait is her ‘uncommon humanity'. Her ‘knowledge of physic' leads her to ‘prescribe' for an apparently dying woman, and her practical sense tells her that physic is not enough: cleanliness and wholesome food are essential for recovery. More than half a century before Florence Nightingale cleaned up army wards at Scutari, ‘Mary' makes the connection between dirt and disease. She understands, too, the links between physical and mental illness: the efficacy of ‘the healing balm of sympathy' as ‘the medicine of life'.

This young woman does want a sexual tie. There are transient likings for men, ‘but they did not amount to love'. Her preference, like that of the author, is for philosophic ‘men past the meridian of life'. ‘The society of men of genius delighted her, and improved her faculties. With beings of this class she did not often meet; it is a rare genus.' Her own has a rarity to match. The Advertisement for
Mary
spells out its intention ‘to develop a character different from those generally portrayed'.

It's a character whose philosophic questionings blend Hamlet with the sermons of Dr Price–‘Le Sage' as Wollstonecraft called him. She herself ‘
lived
', she says, in Hamlet's ‘witching time'. ‘I think and think, and these reveries do not tend to fit me for enjoying the
common
pleasures of this
world,' she had scribbled in March. Failing biographic plots crumple around ‘Mary's' soliloquies, as she ruminates on life's purpose, on eternity, immateriality and happiness, in the long shadow of her friend's death: ‘Still does my panting soul push forward, and live in futurity, in the deep shades o'er which darkness hangs.–I try to pierce the gloom, and find a resting-place, where my thirst of knowledge will be gratified, and my ardent affections find an object to fix them.'

Fiction was a strategic choice: ‘Without arguing physically about
possibilities
–in a fiction, such a being may be allowed to exist.' It's a being apart from the model of fine ladies, trusting to ‘the operations of its own faculties'. And it's drawn from real life: ‘the original source'. The real Mary differed from ‘Mary' in her resilience. Unlike ‘Mary', she was not married, not tied for life, on course for early death. Yellow shoots, transplanted in a more favourable place, could turn green.

 

‘I have been lost in stupidity,' she told herself at Bristol Hot Wells. Impatience brought her again to a psychic verge where she contrived to sit tight, listening to the chat of ‘some people of quality'. A letter from Betty Delane reminded her what true quality was: ‘a truly elegant friendly epistle'. She missed Betty. ‘Lords are not the sort of beings who afford me amusement,' she wrote, ‘–nor in the nature of things can they.' Her thoughts turned to Ogle, who had certainly amused her with his verse and cleverness; she had been sorry to see him ‘sink into sensuality'. Lonelier in Bristol, she felt less inclined to conceal her superiority–never far from the surface. Her refusal to play the obligatory game of self-deprecation would have jarred an employer. Dismissal, it seemed to her, was in the air, and it could be sudden. Again, rescue came at a critical moment.

In June 1787 Mary had an offer of money from a mystery donor. To spare her feelings, it was offered as a loan but was really ‘a present'. Godwin hints that he's keeping the lid on a secret when he tells us he has ‘reason to know' that Mary's debts were repaid. For the first time in her life, she felt ‘rich', and this meant she could end her servitude as governess. Mary told Godwin that she left when the Kings ruled out a tour of the Continent. Godwin is the closest we get to Mary's voice outside her writings–her
intimate, eager tones filtered through his calmly factual narration. He implies that Mary might have stayed on with the King family and complied more readily had they offered her the opportunity of travel; failing this, she wished to leave on the strength of the donation, backed by her novel and plans for further writing.

Who freed Mary? She agreed not to divulge the name of the donor. Speculation has it that it was Lord Kingsborough or Joseph Johnson, but given Mary's indifference to Lord K as a hunter of ‘
fun
', and the unlikeliness of any mystery about the known generosity of her publisher, another candidate seems to gaze past our heads. He has the ‘genius' to discern Mary's promise; he stands with two fingers on his hip in the stance of the perfect gentleman at the height of the Ascendancy; and seats himself beside her when the gentlemen join the ladies after the Earl's dinner in Merrion Square–real scenes predating fictional scenes in
Pride and Prejudice
: a hero of high society distinguishing the only woman minus social credentials in the drawing-room; the annoyance of the hostess that a gentleman can prefer this nobody to her own high-born and fashionable self; followed by his nameless largesse when our heroine runs into trouble. Who then but that admiring–and wealthy–Irish statesman with a need to redeem himself in Mary's eyes? Ogle was, she reflected, ‘the only R[igh]t Honourable I was ever pleased with'.

The pretext for her dismissal in August was Margaret's quarrels with her mother, and the girl's unconcealed lament when her governess was away. Margaret's allegiance remained staunch, and after Mary departed, they corresponded in secret.

W
hen Mary was dismissed, she did not go to her sisters. She did not inform Ned Wollstonecraft nor raise her voice to plead for what he owed her. This was not a moment to waste her strength in futile struggle, and experience had taught her to hide her windfall from her brother's legal jaws. She did not return to Newington Green, nor contact friends there including her benefactress, Mrs Burgh. At this point, they appeared in the light of her debts, people who had a right to expect her to stay in a safe post–if not the Kings, then like employers. She could not, as yet, take the risk of returning large sums until she had secured some new income. What she hoped to do had to be tested in secret to see if it would work; the decisiveness of her moves tells of long planning.

An inn in Bristol saw a lone young woman board a coach that trundled for sixteen hours over country ruts along the route to London. Once there, she made her way through the narrow, dark lanes of the City, past the London Coffee House, towards St Paul's Cathedral on Ludgate Hill. On the north side of the churchyard, to the left of the sweep of steps leading to the lofty entrance of St Paul's, she found the door of no. 72, a three-storey building with an alley on one side and a yard on the other. Here, Mary entered the print shop of Joseph Johnson, alongside some forty other publishers who clustered in Georgian houses round the great baroque pile of the church: this place, and adjoining it, Leadenhall Street, Paternoster Row
and Ave Maria Lane, had been the centre of the book trade since the seventeenth century, and remained so until the Blitz wrecked almost the whole of the area to the north of St Paul's. An eighteenth-century drawing shows a bustle of business and shoppers, not far from the Fleet Prison, Newgate Prison with its public hangings, and the skewed old justice of the Old Bailey which looked away from extortion, seduction and other gentlemanly mis demeanours while it savaged the minor crimes of subordinates–the poor and women–as though this were God's order.

Mary had been here a year before. This time, she brought Johnson news of
Mary
, as well as the prospect of her children's stories. He received her with astonishing ‘
tenderness
and humanity', and offered her refuge in his rooms above his shop for as long as she needed to stay. The second and third storeys with walls at odd angles were used for storage as well as living-quarters. This was a bachelor's establishment–none too comfortable, none of the luxuries of Merrion Square or Henrietta Street–but to Mary it brought mental comfort. For it was during the three weeks she stayed here in the late summer of 1787 that her publisher heard her hopes, and assured her that if she worked hard, she could support herself. She was to be a writer and translator, and later a contributor and editorial assistant for Johnson's forthcoming
Analytical Review
. He would prove the best friend she ever had.

Joseph Johnson (Mary called him ‘Little Johnson' to distinguish him from Dr Johnson) was the son of a Baptist farmer at Everton, near Liverpool. As the younger of two sons, asthmatic, with a delicate frame and bookish tastes, farming was not for him. He came to London at the age of sixteen in 1754, only months before Dr Johnson defined a patron as ‘one who looks with unconcern on a Man struggling for Life in the water and when he has reached ground encumbers him with help'. These famous words were addressed to Lord Chesterfield. ‘The notice you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed until I am indifferent and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary and cannot impart it; till I am known and do not want it.' This letter signalled the demise of patrons like Pope's ‘Bufo'–‘fed with soft dedication all day long'. The bookseller's bond with the author became paramount from
the later eighteenth century. Toadying to patrons is spoofed by Laurence Sterne in his 1760s novel
Tristram Shandy
, where the narrator's thanks come, belatedly, halfway through the text–outdated flourishes, forced, absurdly over-the-top. Joseph Johnson served his apprenticeship at the very onset of this shift, and by the end of his life in 1809 was known in London as ‘the father of the book trade'.

He learnt the trade in an age when the five hundred titles published a year in the 1750s rose to seven hundred and fifty by the 1790s. During the Restoration, reading had been largely confined to a sophisticated circle; during the late Stuart years it had extended to merchants and rich citizens of London; and now, during the Hanoverian decades of the eighteenth century, the reading public was drawing in the aspiring middle class and ladies' maids, avid for advice books on conduct, manners, letter-writing and mental improvement. Dr Johnson observed in 1758 that ‘the knowledge of the common people of England is greater than that of any other vulgar'. In the early 1760s the young Joseph had a bookshop in Fish Street Hill (opposite the Monument marking the spot where the Fire of London had broken out a century before). Then he had a partnership in Paternoster Row and helped to publish Joseph Priestley's experiments with electricity, as well as his
Essay on the First Principles of Government
(1768), arguing the state's obligation to provide for the good of the greatest number of citizens. It impressed Jefferson, as future writer of the American Declaration of Independence. In 1770 a fire destroyed Johnson's stock, which was not insured. Friends set him up on his own at 72 St Paul's Churchyard, where he remained for the rest of his life.

In 1777 he brought out an anonymous volume on the
Laws Respecting Women
,
as they Regard Their Natural Rights
, and in 1780, at the height of the American war, the political essays of his friend Franklin. Many booksellers specialised, like Egerton's Military Library and Taylor's Architectural Library. Joseph Johnson went in for politics and theology (he became the official distributor of Unitarian works), but didn't limit himself when he saw a winner, and his list grew to include medical and surgical books, more science (Humphry Davy and Thomas Malthus), educational books and a lot of literature. He was the first to publish the poems of William Cowper
in the early 1780s, and not only did he hearten the poet when initial sales were poor, but volunteered an extra £1000 when recognition came. He was one of the cooperative group who commissioned Dr Johnson's
Lives of the Poets
. In the year he befriended Wollstonecraft, he brought out the first English edition of William Beckford's oriental tale,
Vathek
(1787), which became something of a private cult for same-sex lovers. Later, he was to publish early Wordsworth and Coleridge. He also provided Blake with much-needed work as an illustrator in the early years of his career; though Blake's mysticism divided him from the religious rationalists in Johnson's circle, he shared their vision of a new earth. At a time when large bookshops carried the newspapers, and rivalled coffee-houses as social centres, Johnson's buzzed with an extraordinary range of innovation.

He himself belonged to the radical Club for Constitutional Information, in an age when the House of Commons represented only fifteen thousand voters, a half of one per cent of the adult male population of Britain. What made his politics appealing to Mary Wollstonecraft was what had appealed to her in Dr Price: compassion, sharpened by Dissenters' exclusion from power. When Bess Wollstonecraft eventually met Johnson, she noticed his simplicity of heart and the ray of ‘
tenderness
' in his dark eyes. He sympathised with slaves, Jews, women, chimney-sweeps, maltreated animals, press-gang victims and those who fell foul of the game laws. When the pamphleteer of the American Revolution, Thomas Paine, was tried (
in absentia
) for high treason, Johnson testified in his defence; and when Paine was arrested for debt, Johnson rescued him. He always maintained the practicability of compassionate conduct.

This publisher succeeded in his business without the sacrifice of quality. He had the gift of discerning greatness–lasting greatness–while still in the making. Happy Mary Wollstonecraft! He proved more a father than her own, as she was quick to acknowledge. ‘I never had a father or a brother. You are both to me.' At the age of twenty-nine, she had a new ‘plan of life': to live entirely by her pen as few women had done without a supporting career in theatre or the drudgery of low-grade publications. Her first effort was an edge-of-existence fable called ‘The Cave of Fancy'. A sage (more aged than her own ‘Le Sage', Dr Price) commands the entrance
to a subterranean cave of spirits. The spirits come forth to educate an orphan girl, Sagesta, whom the sage has adopted. It doesn't seem to have set her back that this was too high-flown and unfinished.

‘I am determined!' she told Johnson. ‘Your sex generally laugh at female determinations; but let me tell you, I never resolved to do any thing of consequence, that I did not adhere resolutely to it, till I had accomplished my purpose, improbable as it might have appeared to a more timid mind.'

Independence was Mary's watchword; she felt chained by obligation. So she said to Johnson, recalling Lady Kingsborough's offers of high society with a graciousness that could have kept her in place. The very fact she could say this to Johnson tells us that she felt
no
obligation of this kind to her publisher (which suggests again that her windfall came from someone else). Johnson was less an employer than a mentor, and as she talked to him, Mary adjusted her aims. The pressing question was: should debts, sisters or work take precedence?

Mary did not separate professional from private life. She still wished to be a mother to her sisters, and in September set out to visit them in order to assess their needs. Her first stop was Henley in Oxfordshire where Everina was teaching at Miss Rowden's school. Of the two sisters, Everina had a first claim, as Mary saw it: she had nursed Bess and rescued her from her damaging marriage in 1783–4; it was now Everina's turn. Mary saw her favourite sister wasting her youth and high spirits in an inferior school.

Filled with schemes and possibilities, Mary was buoyant as she tramped along the Thames, listening to the falling leaves or the sound of a watermill, while her mind strayed ‘from this
tiny
world to new systems'. When she returned to the school at mealtimes, she tried out her ‘real' stories on the pupils. ‘They think me
vastly
agreeable,' she told Johnson, and proceeded to write
Original Stories from Real Life
in the course of that autumn.

On her return to London, Johnson saw her onto the coach bound for Leicester. When its black curtains were closed, she found herself in a group of businessmen who bored her with the tricks of their trade. Mary had dismissed all memory of trade for the life of the mind; she was not just averse to business as a way of life, but prophetic, as was Dr Price, on the power of commerce to infect the body politic. At Market Harborough, Bess still
languished as a teacher locked into narrow piety. Mary had to break it to her that no help was at hand. There were ‘painful emotions', for Mary could not even promise to pay for Bess to join her in the holidays. She tried to hearten this unhappy sister with a hope of finding a situation nearer her, and a year later, did manage to place her in a cosmopolitan school in Putney, first in a paying position as parlour-boarder, then as teacher.

While Mary was away, Johnson found her a small terrace house at 49 George Street (now Dolben Street, with a few remaining Georgian houses) on the Surrey side of the Thames, an area newly accessible to the City with the construction of the first Blackfriars Bridge. Mary moved in at Michaelmas with little more than a bed and table. There she sat in her spectacles–finding them dim when an organ under her window played ‘
for tenderness formed
' and ‘
welladay my poor heart
', trying to curb her ‘fancy' and ‘live to be useful–benevolence must fill every void in my heart'. Affectionate letters from Margaret King filled her ‘with all a mother's fondness', and sometimes vexed her with ‘childish complaints'–forgetting her own propensity to complaint. She missed the girl's ‘innocent caresses' and wondered if Margaret might one day cheer her childless old age. As with Fanny, she told herself it was reasonable for those who shunned marriage ‘to love a female'.

In fact, solitude at this stage gave her the privacy she needed in order to write; and to free her further, Johnson engaged a servant, a member of his family from the country. He also introduced Mary to another children's writer, Mrs Sarah Trimmer, whom she visited while preparing her own stories. In November, she handed Johnson the manuscript of
Mary
. His care for her continued to amaze, and she expressed her gratitude with characteristic directness.

‘Without your humane and
delicate
assistance, how many obstacles should I not have had to encounter–too often should I have been out of patience with my fellow-creatures, whom I wish to love!–Allow me to love you, my dear sir, and call friend a being I respect.'

‘You can
scarcely
conceive how warmly and delicately he has interested himself in my fate,' she repeated to Everina, ‘whenever I am tired of solitude I go to Mr Johnson's, and there I me[e]t the kind of company
I
find
most pleasure in.' Most afternoons, she walked from her house along the thoroughfare of Great Surrey Street, and across Blackfriar's Bridge to Johnson's print shop. On the way, she passed Albion Mill, the first mill to use rotary power from steam–an advance on water- and windmills of the period–built in 1786 on the Surrey side of the bridge. Here, as Mary came up to the bridge, she would have had a panoramic view of London. To the west lay Westminster Abbey and the squares of Mayfair; downstream was the Billingsgate fish-market, the spires of City churches, the distant Tower; and across the way, her own landmark: the dome of St Paul's floating above crooked lanes and coffee-houses.