Vindication (47 page)

Mary chose, again, a home delivery. She still thought a midwife more appropriate to women's ‘delicacy', but a stronger reason was fear. The establishment of lying-in hospitals in the seventeenth century, and many more in eighteenth-century London, had led to epidemics of childbed fever. Everyone knew that many more women died in hospital–now and then as many as eighty per cent. By the 1790s deaths from home deliveries were, by contrast, five or six per thousand. Mary's own dark view is reflected in Jemima's story: ‘I cannot give you an adequate idea of the wretchedness of an hospital…The attendants seem to have lost all feeling of compassion in the bustling discharge of their offices; death is so familiar to them, that they are not anxious to ward it off. Every thing appeared to be conducted for the accommodation of the medical men and their pupils, who came to make experiments on the poor…'

In 1797, during an epidemic in an Aberdeen hospital, Dr Alexander Gordon wondered if the fever was introduced into the womb by a woman's attendants. The medical establishment took no notice. Perish the thought that doctors themselves might be the cause of death. It was not until the work of Semelweiss, Lister and Pasteur later in the nineteenth century that bacterial infections began to be understood. At the Vienna teaching hospital, Semelweiss noticed that mortality from fever in one birth ward was astronomic, while there were fewer fevers in a ward closed to students. He begged fellow-obstetricians and students to wash their hands–in vain. Wollstonecraft's insistence on cleanliness, later the cornerstone of
Florence Nightingale's revolution in hospital management, was common sense. For what made hospitals so lethal for women was that doctors and particularly students would come straight from dissection of cadavers or from infected patients in other parts of the hospital, and insert an unclean hand deep into the woman's birth canal. The prouder of anatomical know-how doctors became, the more given to internal examination, the more at risk were women in labour. They had actually been safer from sepsis when midwives did little more than catch the baby–though ignorance of course had other dangers. In
The Midwives Book
(1671), a manual still in use in the eighteenth century, the experienced Jane Sharp gave some sound advice, disregarded by the more manipulative doctors who took over the field. Sharp notes that women are in as great if not more danger
after
the birth, and warns midwives to ‘be very gentle, for the woman is now grown weak and her womb is quick with feeling'. If the afterbirth does not come away, she goes on, herbal remedies are preferred to manual tearing (‘the midwife's nails'). She is alert to the sensitivity of the patient and the need for comfort at this moment: ‘put the woman to as little trouble as you can, for she hath endured pain enough already'.

Mary's labour began at five on a Wednesday morning, 30 August.

‘I have no doubt of seeing the animal today,' she informed Godwin after he went to his rooms. Matter-of-factly she asked him to send a newspaper and a novel to while the time away.

At nine Mrs Blenkinsop, matron and midwife from the Westminster New Lying-In Hospital, arrived. She had seen Mary several times during her pregnancy. Nothing further is known of Mrs Blenkinsop, but midwives, who had low status in England, did not have the training they received in France. A hospital midwife performing a home delivery was a compromise between an untrained midwife and a doctor's manipulations. The hospital where Mrs Blenkinsop was matron had been founded on the southern periphery of London to serve the needs of those who could not afford a home delivery, mainly the wives of tradesmen, soldiers and sailors reduced to want. Unmarried mothers, refused by the fashionable hospitals, were admitted at the Westminster. Though the fashionable maternity hospitals were closer to the Godwins' northern suburb–there was one in
Store Street where Mary used to live–her identification with the poor may explain her choice. Certainly, she and Godwin had no money to spare.

Mrs Blenkinsop confirmed that the child was on its way, but so far contractions were slow. ‘I am very well,' Mary reassured Godwin. ‘Call before dinner time, unless you receive another message from me–.'

At two in the afternoon, she went upstairs to her bedroom on the top floor. At three she sent a third reassuring note to Godwin: ‘Mrs Blenkinsop tells me that I am in a most natural state, and can promise me a safe delivery–But that I must have a little patience.' Calm as she sounds, the last words echo at difficult times in her life, going back to her mother's deathbed.

Unable to work, Godwin took
Mary
off his shelf and reread two-thirds of it. He dined at the Reveleys, and supped with a radical editor, John Fenwick, and his wife Eliza. At seven in the evening Godwin returned to Evesham Buildings. At ten, he walked back to the Polygon, accompanied by Mrs Fenwick, to find Mary in the final stages of what had turned out a long labour–different from the ease of Fanny's birth. Mary had asked Godwin not to come to her room until all was over. While he waited in the parlour on the ground floor, Mrs Fenwick went upstairs to help. Until the end of the eighteenth century women usually gave birth in a crouching position that had the advantage of straightening the unfortunate curve in the human birth canal; from about this time it became customary for women to lie supine for the convenience of their attendants. At last, at 11.20, Godwin notes in his diary, a girl–Mary–was born. And still he waited. An hour passed, and then another, and no invitation came to go upstairs.

By unlucky chance, the placenta had not come away. Normally this organ that supports the baby in the womb is expelled soon after its birth. At two in the morning a worried Mrs Blenkinsop sent Godwin for Dr Louis Poignand, a French physician at her hospital. Godwin had no coach, and may not have found one at that hour of the night. If he did not, it was a long walk from Somers Town to the doctor's house in Parliament Street, Westminster, and an even longer walk to the hospital on the far side of Westminster Bridge, but Godwin did find the doctor.

For the next four hours Dr Poignand tore out the placenta. He pulled it out in bits, torturing and resuscitating his patient, and almost certainly introducing an infection. The placenta, thick with blood vessels, is prone to haemorrhage. Godwin went into the room at four in the morning to find Mary fainting repeatedly from blood loss and the trauma of an operation without anaesthetic. She told him afterwards that she had not known before what pain was.

‘I would have died,' she said afterwards, ‘but I was determined not to leave you.' For a moment she smiled.

Dr Poignand finished at about eight, believing that he had extracted every piece. Later that morning, Mary expressed her distrust of this rough treatment. She therefore asked Godwin to call in Dr Fordyce. Poignand bristled at what he regarded as interference, when Fordyce arrived at three that afternoon. There was some truth in Poignand's contention that Fordyce was more a lecturer than a practitioner. So angry did Poignand become that three days later, on Sunday morning, he walked out on his patient. That same morning she had a spell of shivering, the first sign of sepsis. Godwin, who was out for a lot of the day, came back to anxious faces and Mary's asking him why he had left her so long. He ‘felt a pang' of self-reproach. That evening he witnessed a second shivering fit. ‘Every muscle of the body trembled, the teeth chattered, and the bed shook under her.' This went on for about five minutes. When it was over, she said it had felt like a struggle between life and death. Even so, Godwin was not too alarmed: ‘her cheerings were so delightful, that I hugged her obstinately to my heart'.

An unanswered question is the delay in calling in the leading authority on puerperal fever, Dr John Clarke, on the staff of the General Lying-In Hospital in Store Street and author of
Practical Essays on
…
the Inflammatory and Febrile Diseases of Lying-In Women
. He had published this book with Joseph Johnson in 1793. One reason for the delay could be that Mary herself refused to see Clarke, known for his attack on midwives' continued presence in a field whose status he wished to raise. At this stage Mary may still have controlled the situation, for Godwin too was in the anti-midwife camp.

Following her three calm messages to Godwin during labour, there are
echoes of her voice during the days that followed: her call for Fordyce; her plea for her Berkshire friend, Mrs Cotton, to come and nurse her; her gratitude to Eliza Fenwick for untiring attentions; and her agreement with Dr Fordyce that if her milk were contaminated, the baby must stop feeding at the breast. The abrupt removal of the baby on the Monday–she was taken to join Fanny at Mrs Reveley's–would have left Mary's breasts rock-hard within hours. A bizarre solution was to put puppies to her breasts to draw off the milk. This would have granted some relief in a situation where gradual weaning was not deemed in the baby's interest. While the puppies did their work, Mary managed ‘some pleasantry' with Godwin and others in the room.

‘Nothing,' Godwin said, ‘could exceed the equanimity, the patience and affectionateness of the poor sufferer. I intreated her to recover; I dwelt with trembling fondness on every favourable circumstance; and, as far as it was possible in so dreadful a situation, she, by her smiles and kind speeches, rewarded my affection.'

Joseph Johnson, who had seen Mary on the Friday when she had appeared better, returned that Monday to see her growing worse. At a guess, it was Johnson–her trusted adviser and seasoned publisher of medical texts–who persuaded her that Clarke should take a hand.

Clarke was brought in next day, nearly a week after the birth. It's likely that he blamed the midwife, for Mrs Blenkinsop, who had been called on Sunday and Monday, now disappeared from the scene. The agreed diagnosis was that Dr Poignand had been mistaken in thinking he had removed all the pieces of the placenta. Dr Clarke arrived with some idea of surgery, but judged it too late. Sepsis had spread through the body. In fact, no surgery could have counteracted its fatal course, and Mary's resistance to the surgeon would have been sound in that it spared her the unspeakable agony of another operation without anaesthetic. In desperation, the following day Godwin called in yet another doctor, their friend Carlisle, who prescribed the routine palliative, a wine diet with an idea of keeping up the patient's strength. Godwin was opposed to wine. Spirits would demean the spirit his wife continued to show, teasing Godwin for his refusal of divine consolations.

‘I feel in Heaven,' she told him.

‘I suppose, my dear, that that is a form of saying you are less in pain.'

It wasn't unfeeling rationalism, as it seemed later to Victorians; it was their old repartee of mind and feeling. Even in the shadow of death, they still joked. They were still themselves. Reluctantly, Godwin resigned their spark to the doctors' distorting regime and, starting on Wednesday afternoon at about four, fed Mary as much wine as she would take over several hours. Of course, it was futile. By ten o'clock on Thursday night, Carlisle, who never left the house, had to tell his friend that his wife was dying.

Whatever the effects of the wine on Wednesday and Thursday, on Friday Mary's head cleared. For Godwin's diary records a ‘solemn communication' as she faced the ‘Idea of Death'. Mary always had a robust constitution, and lingered longer than doctors predicted. On Saturday morning, Godwin spoke to her of Fanny and Mary. What did she wish for her daughters? He would try to fulfil that wish, even though she–the author of
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters–
had been supremely fitted to care for them, while he, alas, was not. His reasonable voice, addressing a prone and silent form, asked her guidance. No answer. Then, after he repeated the question a few times, she managed to reply, ‘I know what you are thinking of.' Her last conscious words were that Godwin was ‘the kindest, best man in the world'.

That night he stayed by her side till one in the morning, when the faithful Carlisle persuaded him to sleep, promising to call in case of a change. The doctor woke him at six, and he sat with Mary until she died at twenty minutes to eight. His diary for 10 September 1797 sets down the precise time, underscored by three wordless lines across the page.

Fanny was returned home for dinner later that day, and then sent back to Mrs Reveley. It would have been customary to take the child upstairs to kiss her mother goodbye. Godwin sat with a copy of
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters
to hand–though he could not bring himself to read. The ‘poor animals' his wife had left behind were ‘hers'; he could not feel as a father, and spoke of the newborn as ‘it'. During the following week ‘it' became alarmingly ill at Mrs Reveley's; doctors were called; then little Mary took a turn for the better when she came home to Mrs Fenwick's skilled arms.

Mrs Fenwick stayed on for two nights to ensure her recovery. At Godwin's request, she wrote to Everina, who was to tell Bess and assure her of Mary's fondness. In this letter Mrs Fenwick reports Godwin's ‘unremitting and devoted attentions' to his wife, and her gratitude for ‘the kindest, best man in the world'. The baby, she adds, is the finest she ever saw.

The Wollstonecraft sisters did not melt. Godwin received no word from them.

 

‘Be sure I feel it,' he declared to a friend. ‘Be sure I am not the fool to look for that happiness in any future vicissitude of life, that I was beginning to enjoy, when I was thus dreadfully deprived of it. My understanding was enlarged, my heart was improved, as well as the most invaluable sensations of admiration & delight produced in me by her society.' Privately, he thought Mary had been too quick in conceiving resentments, yet ‘they left no hateful and humiliating remembrances behind them'. His passion had always been to associate with the intellectually great. Godwin never thought to exclude women from this category, and when it came to his wife, he ‘honoured her intellectual powers and the…generosity of her propensities'. It was characteristic of him to slight ‘mere' tenderness. ‘Mere tenderness,' he ruminated, ‘would not have been adequate to produce the happiness we experienced.' Mary had been glad, she once told him, ‘to discover great powers of mind in you', but remained convinced ‘that the strongest affection is the most involuntary'. She wished he would find himself, rather, ‘enamoured of some fugitive charm that seeking somewhere, you find every where: yes,' her voice went on, teasing, transforming the austerity of his singleness, ‘I would fain live in your heart and employ your imagination–Am I not very reasonable?'