Vindication (18 page)

In practice, she found it harder than she had expected to mop up enough Italian to cope with a translation of a difficult hand which Johnson offered first. ‘I cannot bear to do any thing I cannot do well,' she told him, ‘–and I should lose time in the vain attempt.' By March 1788 she was ‘deeply immersed' in the study of French with a view to translating Jacques Necker's
De l
'
importance des opinions religieuses
. Once she made a start, Johnson trained her to prefer cohesion to literal translation.

‘My dear sir,' she wrote, ‘I send you a chapter which I am pleased with, now I see it in one point of view–and as I have made free with the author, I hope you will not have often to say–what does this mean?'

Soon, she said, initial difficulties began ‘imperc[ep]tibly [to] melt away as I encounter them–and I daily earn more money with less trouble'. She thought of translation as ‘study', and to be paid to study as she breathed the fragrant gale of spring, made her ‘excellently well'. Johnson published
On the Importance of Religious Opinions
at the end of 1788. The Advertisement owns to ‘some Liberties…taken by the Translator, which seemed necessary to preserve the Spirit of the Original'.

By then she had secured a good contract to translate a 1782 collection of German tales for children,
Moralisches Elementarbuch
by Christian Gotthilf Salzmann. Wollstonecraft felt an affinity for this author. As in
Real Life
,
morality is taught not as precept but through experience, as when a child with toothache is unsure whether he can accept the offer of a cure from a Jew. His parents, who are absent, have taught him that Jews are not to be trusted. The child in the end allows the Jew to fill the tooth, admitting his fear and prejudice. The Jew gives a rational answer: not all Jews are good, he says, but ‘in every religion there are good people'. Wollstonecraft adapted the text to suit English children, and given the current dispossession and extermination of native Americans as the frontier pushed westwards, she thought it necessary to introduce an episode ‘to lead children to consider the Indians as their brothers'.

When she refers to ‘learning' German in 1789 she was at work on this translation, while keeping her sights on a larger aim: an encounter with a culture where, she heard, ‘the people have still that simplicity of manners, I dote fondly on'. In the winter of 1790–1 Johnson published this work as
Elements of Morality
in three volumes, followed by a second edition with fifty plates, some by Blake. This translation took longer–not surprisingly, since German was new to her, and it's therefore all the more remarkable that Salzmann was so pleased that, later, he translated her
Rights of Woman
and, still later, Godwin's memoir of Mary Wollstonecraft.

During these healthy, hard-working years, she undertook abridgements: Maria Geertruida de Cambon's
Young Grandison
, a series of letters characterising the model child, translated from the Dutch, which Wollstonecraft ‘almost rewrote', and Johann-Caspar Lavater's unconvincing treatise on the pseudo-science of physiognomy, the analysis of character from facial features. At some point Wollstonecraft, not one to hide her doubts, lost this commission to a rival translator aided by Lavater's friend Fuseli. Yet another project, begun in mid-1788, was to compile selections of prose and verse for
The Female Reader
, including a few extracts from her own
Education
and
Real Life
, Cowper's abolitionist poem ‘On Slavery', and Mrs Barbauld speaking as one woman to another: ‘Negro woman, who sittest pining in captivity, and weepest over thy sick child: though no one seeth thee, God seeth thee; though no one pitieth thee, God pitieth thee: raise thy voice, folorn and abandoned one…'

There were as yet no schoolbooks for girls apart from conduct books.
Most girls of the time were protected, even deflected, from serious books. Johnson thought Wollstonecraft introduced ‘some original pieces'–unusual enough for him to take the precaution of publishing this anthology under the name of a man, an elocution teacher called Mr Cresswick. Elocution–the classroom method of recitation–was not a practice Wollstonecraft would have encouraged, given her emphasis on inward growth rather than performance. Her aim was innovative: the first anthology for and about women, and in part, too,
by
women, with a view to a high-flying education. The editorial approach to women's writing is participatory, not exclusive, and offers a longer-term model than women-only collections (useful as they have been for purposes of retrieval and reconstruction of gender since the 1970s). Wollstonecraft's educative aim is more ambitious. Towards the end of the first century when numbers of women took up the pen, and just before the emergence of Jane Austen (fourteen at the time, reading at home, and the perfect recipient for this book), Wollstonecraft assumed that women (Mme de Genlis, Mrs Trimmer, Mrs Barbauld, Mrs Chapone, Lady Pennington, Miss Carter, Charlotte Smith and herself
*
) could start to hold their own beside the Bible, Shakespeare, Richardson, Dr Johnson and Cowper. Those heights are everywhere present, a stimulant, not a threat, like an extract from Edward Young about ‘Dying Friends' as mentors of inward revolution:

Johnson not only provided work and published everything Wollstonecraft offered him, he was able to pluck out her thorns, as he
proudly recalled: ‘During her stay in George Street she spent many of her afternoons & most of her evenings with me. She was incapable of disguise. Whatever was the state of her mind it appeared when she entered, & the tone of conversation might easily be guessed; when harassed, which was very often ye case, she was relieved by unbosoming herself & generally returned home calm, frequently in spirits. [Fuseli] was frequently with us.'

She looked on Johnson as ‘the only person I am
intimate
with', to whom she owed an apology for her moods: ‘I have often been very petulant.–I have been thinking of those instances of ill-humour and quickness, and they appeared like crimes.' Five years on, she still blushed to think ‘how often I…teazed you with childish complaints, and the reverses of a disordered imagination'.

Johnson had a Unitarian friend, Thomas Christie, a doctor from Montrose in Scotland, who gave up medicine for literature in 1787 after travelling on horseback around the country for six months meeting writers like Erasmus Darwin in Derby, Anna Seward in Lichfield and Priestley in Birmingham. At the time Mary joined the circle, Christie persuaded Johnson to bring out the
Analytical Review
. It began in May 1788, promoting religious toleration and the extension of the vote. For the first issue, Wollstonecraft chose
A Sermon Written by the late Samuel Johnson
,
LL
.
D
.,
for the Funeral of His Wife
from a selection of ‘trash', taking a stand against her publisher who would have opposed so obdurate a pensioner of Pitt's government. For Wollstonecraft, the soul took precedence over politics.

‘I seemed (suddenly) to
find
my
soul
again–It had been for some time I cannot tell where,' she explained. ‘I felt some pleasure in paying a just tribute of respect to the memory of a man–who, in spite of his faults, I have an affection for–I say
have
, for I believe he is somewhere–
where
my soul has been gadding perhaps…'

Wollstonecraft was the first woman to take up short-notice professional reviewing as a substantial part of her income. (Once, anonymously, she reviewed her own translation of Necker–favourably, it need hardly be said.) Though in the main she followed the magazine's policy of objective summary together with extracts, she gradually introduced evaluation, and
scorned the
Analytical
's tame rival the
Critical
for its
un
critical oozings over established fame.

However provocative her content, the fact is that up to the end of the 1780s Wollstonecraft kept within the bounds of what were thought of as lesser genres, open to women (conduct books, children's books, fiction, translation). But in 1790, backed still by her publisher, she entered the male preserve of politics.

 

The occasion was the outbreak of the French Revolution. With the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, Cowper believed that he spoke for the nation at large in his ‘Address to the Bastille': ‘Ye Dungeons, and ye Cages of Despair!–/ There's not an English heart that would not leap, / To hear that ye were fall'n at last…' It seemed the start of a new age of rights for all. Jefferson's law of religious toleration passed for the state of Virginia in 1786 had encouraged Dissenters to campaign for a repeal of laws excluding them from public office (the Corporation Act of 1661 and the Test Act of 1673). The first reading of the bill in the British Parliament won a good deal of support, though not the majority needed to carry it; then, support had dropped with the second and third readings. The vogue for reform that had touched the ruling elite in England in the early 1780s had given way to renewed conservatism, reinforced by the impact of what had been lost with the colonies in America and also by fear of advancing notions of human rights in America's ally, France. Though Dr Price reminded Parliament of Dissenters' loyalty during the Jacobite uprising in 1745, this now seemed distant, and recent memory blamed Dissenters for disloyalty during the late war in America. British rulers were unnerved by events in France: the overthrow of the
ancien régime
(the nobility and higher clergy) by the mass of the people, represented by middle-class thinkers in a reforming National Assembly.

The most unnerving event was the women's march on Versailles on 5–6 October 1789: a starving mob from the markets of Paris who advanced on the King and Queen, demanding bread. There were reports of rabble invading the apartments of a hated Queen cut off in inaccessible opulence from ‘real life'; of Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and their children forced to move
to Paris; of the danger to the royal family (averted by the King's promise to side with the Revolution). All this alarmed the British landed classes in their newly enclosed estates. There had been sixty-four Enclosure Acts between 1740 and 1749, and 472 between 1770 and 1779, with the effect of driving the poor off what had been for centuries common land, and bringing an immense increase in riches to owners of estates, who controlled or were themselves the Members of Parliament who initiated and carried through these legalised appropriations. New boundaries–ditches, hedges and walls (including the new wall around Mitchelstown Castle)–were a visual reminder of the power of the landlord to exclude outsiders from territory over which he now exercised sole rights. Apart from changing the landscape for ever, the result was to wall off the landed from the labouring classes. So, the excluded were feared, and a counter-revolution settled on Britain, postponing urgent electoral reform for another forty years.

It was in this divisive political context that Richard Price preached his sermon,
On the Love of Our Country
, at the Meeting House in the Old Jewry in London on 4 November 1789. Six editions appeared in three weeks. Officially, the sermon, invited by the Revolution Society, was a centenary tribute to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in which Dissenters had played a vital part. Dr Price's motives were twofold: given the failure of Dissenters' pleas for rights in Parliament (defeated by 122 votes to 102 in the spring of that year), he was reminding the powers that be of the peaceful liberties the country owed to them. At the same time he was celebrating the American and French Revolutions, and the right of the people to choose and ‘cashier' their rulers. Price went on to prophesy further revolutions to complete the blood-free dissent of 1688: ‘Behold kingdoms…starting from sleep, breaking their fetters, and claiming justice from their oppressors! Behold, the light…after setting America free, reflected to France and there kindled to a blaze that lays despotism in ashes…'

An opponent of Price, Edmund Burke, criticised the language of inspiration co-opted for the political sphere, and talked sarcastically of the spread of political preachers as ‘an addition of nondescripts to the ample collection of known classes, genera and species, which at present beautify the
hortus siccus
[the dry garden] of dissent'. Burke also claimed Price was
sanctioning the mob rule of the women's march on Versailles. Price insisted that he had referred, rather, to the fall of the Bastille. On its first anniversary he had toasted a United States of the World.

Burke, at sixty, had long been the greatest orator in the Commons, never quite accepted by the grandees of his Whig party who looked on him as an Irish adventurer. He had risen out of the professional class into the landed gentry, and always represented the property interests of the gentry together with its blend of classical humanism and chivalry. His chivalric focus on Marie Antoinette ruffled Wollstonecraft and Paine, who remarked famously that in mourning the plumage, Burke forgot the dying bird. Burke, who had loathed Price's late patron Lord Shelburne, condemned Dr Price with rhetoric that would have an impact on the course of history. His
Reflections on the Revolution in France
, published on 1 November 1790, slates the international, apocalyptic narrative of Dr Price in favour of the English historical narrative which is seen to be an unbroken contract between generations across time. The so-called ‘Glorious Revolution', Burke argues, was merely a glitch in the continuum of hereditary monarchy. Burke would never see the future possibility of what Wollstonecraft calls a ‘new genus', whether it be a person or a nation, because, for Burke, identity is cumulative; it comes from the past. ‘Upon that…stock of inheritance we have taken care not to inoculate any cyon alien to the nature of the original plant.' Above all, Burke warns of mob rule and the breakdown of civilisation. Nineteen thousand bought his treatise in 1790–1; thirty thousand by 1793. The fear disseminated by this scare encouraged a counter-revolutionary coalition, and its combined might, in turn, fomented wartime terror in France and the climate of suspicion that led to the fall of the moderate Girondin party. Power passed to the extremist Jacobin party, led by Marat, Danton and Robespierre who had no compunction at shedding blood–and so, the guillotine went to work.