Vindication (61 page)

not the only loving mother
: One of Jane Austen's brothers would be given up to better fortune; while Byron gained custody of his daughter Allegra from her extremely loving mother (ch. 17 below).

‘monstrous intervention'
:
Times Literary Supplement
(21 Apr. 2000).

MW unsure
: This continues to be overlooked in a persistent demonisation of MW (see ch. 15 below), lasting from her lifetime to a renewed round of attacks in the year 2000. An exception was Kate Chisholm in the
Sunday Telegraph
(30 Apr. 2000): ‘What else could she have done?'

Fanny Blood's letter
: Abinger: Dep. b. 210 (9).

3
NEW LIFE AT NEWINGTON

‘humane':
MWL
, 93;
MWletters
, 55.

‘exertions…twenty scholars'
: EW to WG (24 Nov. 1797). Abinger: Dep. c.523; extract of letter in
SC
, i, 45.

Disney family
: Included the liberal Unitarian theologian, John Disney (1746–1816).

Miss Mason
:
SC
, i, 87, identifies Mason as MW's servant. It is true that to use a surname alone, as MW occasionally does in speaking of ‘Mason', was usual with servants, but could there be other reasons? Men used surnames, and MW imitates this when she publishes extracts from her works, later, in an anthology (see below, ch. 7). An interesting suggestion appears in Todd's notes to
MWletters
, 4: a minister at Driffield, about ten miles north of Beverley in Yorkshire, was William Mason (1724–97). He was one of the ‘Driffield Bards' mentioned in a poem MW copied out for Jane Arden in 1773. Was ‘Mason' a relative? The clergy background fits MW's later linking of her with Mrs Gabell, a clergyman's wife who has ‘clearness of judgement'. (See below, ch. 9.)

Fanny confided
:
Memoirs
, ch. 3.

Sowerby
: He eventually contributed two and a half thousand illustrations to Sir Edward Smith's
English Botany
(1790–1814), and brought out his own
Coloured Figures of English Fungi
(1797–1815).

past and present inhabitants of Newington Green
: Defoe studied at Morton's Academy in the 1670s, and farmed civet cats (for perfume) in 1692. D'Israeli was the father of the Victorian Prime Minister, Disraeli. Anna Laetitia Aikin, afterwards Mrs Barbauld, who published
Lessons
for children (1781), grew up in Newington Green. Anne Stent and James Stephen were the great-grandparents of Virginia Woolf.

Poe
: Recalls Newington Green and the Revd Dr Bransby's school (where he studied 1817–20) in his tale ‘William Wilson'.

MW attended services
: It was not uncommon for Latitudinarian Anglicans to mix with Dissenters.

Burgh's tomes
: Collected as
The Dignity of Human Nature (
1754–67) and culminating in his three-volume
Political Disquisitions
(1774–5), which took a reformer's view of taxation without representation–he, too, published a pamphlet in support of the American revolt against the Crown.

‘I am sick…'
; ‘
I wish…'
:
Education
, 11, 21.

‘words of learned length'
: From Oliver Goldsmith,
The Deserted Village
(1770), lines 211–14: ‘…words of learned length, and thund'ring sound/ Amazed the gazing rustics rang'd around'.

‘A florid style'
:
Education
, 21.

‘Each child'
: Preface to
Real Life
, 360.

Jane Austen
: Tomalin,
Jane Austen
, 34–7.

‘mass of flesh'
; ‘
superior dignity'
: Burgh,
Human Nature
, 76–7, 276.

‘as if I had been her daughter'
: MW to BW (23 Sept. [1786]),
MWL
, 113;
MWletters
, 78.

‘I love most people best…'
: (20 July [1785]),
MWL
, 92;
MWletters
, 54.

‘When I think…'
: Gardiner,
Recollections
, 4, quotes this letter (2 July 1785).

‘With children…'
:
Memoirs
, ch. 3.

religious utopianism
: During MW's stay in Newington Green, Dr Price was preparing a new edition of his most famous work,
A Review of the Principal Questions in Morals
(1758).

‘next to the introduction of Christianity…'
:
Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution
(1784).

couldn't have cared less
: Priestley, ‘Death of Dr Price'.

Mirabeau co-opts Dr Price
: Tyson,
Joseph Johnson
, 85–6.

‘when the Dissenters…'
: Price,
Correspondence
, ii, 236, to an American friend, Ezra Styles, from Newington Green (15 Oct. 1784).

the unprecedented setting of New World republicanism
: Robert A. Ferguson, ‘The American Enlightenment 1750–1820', in
Cambridge History of American Literature
, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch, i, 380–5.

‘
Blue-stocking Club'
: A vivid portrait in Harmon,
Fanny Burney
, 180–1. See Le Doeuff,
Sex of Knowing
, for the history of the term. Blue worsted stockings, knitted in thick, warm wool, were originally worn in England by men at home. In the seventeenth century the term evolved to refer to the Parliament of 1653–suggesting that Cromwell's supporters were unconcerned with matters of dress. A century later the term referred to a group of men who preferred literary debate to cards, linking intellect with socially aberrant appearance. Both in English and French (bluestocking:
bas-bleu
) there was then a transfer of meaning across the sexes to a woman interested in intellectual matters–retaining a connotation of ignorance of social niceties. Le Doeuff places it with ‘intuition' in a category of terms, once used for men, that get transferred as cast-offs to women and function as a deterrent to women's intellectual aspirations.

‘never thrive'
:
MWL
, 98;
MWletters
, 61.

the American model of ‘rights'
: Exercised in a series of declarations by the first Continental Congress of American states in October 1774, which had led to their nine-year battle to free themselves from British rule.

‘to the United States…'
: Cited in article on Price in the old
Dictionary of National Biography
.

the London Friends of the People
: Marilyn Butler,
Romantics
,
Rebels & Reactionaries
, 42.

‘the whole scope of my life'
: McCullough,
Adams
, 417.

‘This is the 3d Sunday…'
: Abigail Adams,
Adams Family Correspondence
, vi, 196.

‘a new order…'
: Quoted in McCullough,
Adams
, 348.

‘snearing'
: Abigail Adams to Cotton Tufts (18 Aug. 1785),
Adams Family Correspondence
, 283.

‘titled Gamesters'
: Abigail Adams to sister (15 Sept. 1785), ibid. 361.

‘If I live…'
: ‘Abigail Adams, ‘Return Voyage', 215.

‘I thank you Miss W
.': Adams read
FR
twice (in 1796 and 1812), adding about twelve thousand words of combative marginalia (more than in any other of his books). Here was a conservative versus a radical, a man versus a woman who dares to enter the masculine arena. He did, though, respect her enough to concede her status as an honorary male. See below, ch. 10 and internet site for this book.

Jefferson to Price
: Price,
Correspondence
, iii, 261–2. See also Washington's response to Price's advice, 324–5.

‘Circular to the States'
: This was known at the time (1783) as ‘Washington's Farewell to the Army', and Ferguson, ‘American Enlightenment', calls it a text Americans ‘no longer know how to read', though arguably the most important document in the America of the 1780s.

contrast of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution
: I owe this point to Sacvan Bercovitch, in conversation in Newton, Mass. (June 2000).

‘the abominable traffick'
:
RW
, ch. 9. On this, the economy of the Southern states depended. Because of their pressure, the clause condemning slavery (acceptable to Washington and Jefferson) had been deleted from the Declaration, and would remain unresolved until Lincoln ruled against slavery in 1863 in the course of the American Civil War. The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery, was ratified in 1865 at the close of the Civil War.

Judge Mansfield's ruling
: The conservatism and limited intentions of Judge Mansfield have been proved beyond doubt by Gerzina,
Black England
, ch. 4, ‘Sharp and Mansfield: Slavery in the Courts', 106–23.

Price to Jay
: Price,
Correspondence
, ii, 292–93.

MW and Price sharing ideas on education
: She read Rousseau only later (see below, ch. 5 and 6), when she came to question his attitudes to women, which is given powerful expression in
RW
. During her career she both absorbed and knocked against Rousseau's ideas.

‘Poor tender friendly soul'
: MW to BW (23 Sept. 1786),
MWL
, 115;
MWletters
, 79.

sizar
: See footnote on Waterhouse at Cambridge (above, ch. 2). Since Hewlett came from a landed background, this poor status suggests a problem about money. Either his father had become impoverished or had cut him off for some reason, perhaps his marriage.

Dr Johnson's eccentricities
: See James Boswell,
Life of Johnson
(1791), Mrs Thrale's letters, and for a caricature, Virginia Woolf,
Orlando
, ch. 4.

Dr Johnson on beggars
: Boswell,
Life
. Johnson was sixty-seven in 1776.

Dr Johnson and MW
: Only record is in
Memoirs
, ch. 3.

Dr Johnson as conservative who opened up brave new world
: Dr Paddy Bullard, lecture, ‘Dr Johnson versus Lord Chesterfield', Oxford University, 7 May 2003.

Dr Johnson's romantic tenderness
: Harmon,
Fanny Burney
, 126–7.

Dr Johnson as rationalist
: Prof. Roger Lonsdale, lecture on Johnson's
Lives of the Poets
, Oxford University, c. 1998.

Dr Johnson on Pope
: In the last of his
Lives of the Poets
.

melancholy admired
: Todd,
Wollstonecraft
, 75.

Dr Johnson on melancholy
:
Rambler
, nos 85, 103.

‘constant nature'
: ‘The Natural Beauty', publ. in the
Gentleman's Magazine
, Feb. 1784; repr. by MW in
The Female Reader
,
MWCW
, iv, 142.

Smallweeds
: Dickens,
Bleak House
.

4
A COMMUNITY OF WOMEN

Fanny's letter to the ‘dear lasses'
: Abinger: Dep. b. 210(9).

‘He is such a man…'
:
MWL
(20 July [1785]), 91;
MWletters
, 53.

‘She is still very ill'
:
MWL
(14 Aug. [1785]), 97;
MWletters
, 59.

‘difficulties
'; ‘
grown indefatigable'
:
MWL
(4 Sept. [1795]), 98–9;
MWletters
, 61.

letter from Lisbon
:
MWL
, 100–1;
MWletters
, 63–4.

‘looks I have felt…'
:
Travels
, letter 6; cited in
Memoirs
, ch. 3.

‘by stealth'
:
Memoirs
, ch. 4.

Palmer's fraud
: KP, i, 175.

‘the most uncivilised nation…'
:
Mary
, ch. 14. MW quotes Dr Johnson's saying ‘they have the least mind'. She used her experience of Portugal for her review of Arthur Costigan's
Sketches of Society and Manners in Portugal
,
AR
(Aug. 1788);
MWCW
, vii, 29–32.

wreck and rescue
:
Mary
, ch. 20.

‘very disagreeable'
: This and most subsequent details of the following months come from MW's letters to George Blood.
MWL
, 101–12;
MWletters
, 66–77.

Dr Johnson's elegy
: ‘On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet' (1783), line 4: ‘Our social comforts drop away.'
MWL
, 93;
MWletters
, 55.

‘
cordial
of life'
:
MWL
, 110;
MWletters
, 74.

‘tenderness'
:
Education
, 37.

‘whole train…'
: MW to George Blood (27 Feb. [1786]),
MWL
, 103;
MWletters
, 67.

‘replete'
: John Hewlett,
Sermons
(London: Rivington & J. Johnson, 1786). Published by subscription (subscribers included various people at Newington Green, Shacklewell and Islington: Mr Church and a Mr Price in Islington; Mrs Burgh, Thomas Rogers, Mr and Mrs Cockburn at the Green; and two teachers at Christ's Hospital, Mr Benjamin Green, a drawing-master, and Mr William Wilcox).