Vindication (7 page)

It's unlikely that the Revd Mr Burgh would have approved as his successor an untrained young woman of twenty-five, pursuing intuitions instead of tried methods, opinionated and disinclined to curb her eloquence. And yet Mrs Burgh more than approved Mary Wollstonecraft; she came to treat her, Mary felt, ‘as if I had been her daughter'. All this suggests that Mary Wollstonecraft spoke to some part of Hannah Burgh that the schoolmaster had silenced. We might speculate further that Mrs Burgh's feeling for Mary as ‘daughter' found an answer in Mary's maternal deprivation. At seventeen she had taken to Mrs Clare; she had loved ‘our mother', Mrs Blood; and now a third ‘mother', richer and well connected, became her benefactress.

The school in Newington Green put Mary in a position to provide for her sisters and house Fanny–an asset to the school with her graceful manners and expertise in botany. This was the independence Mary had hoped for: Everina rescued from dependence on Ned; Bess freed from a husband who threatened her sanity; Fanny released from the exhausting demands of her family. In planning for others Mary exercised the
emotional and practical responsibilities of an eldest sister, stretching those skills beyond the circumscribed role of the daughter at home. For the following eight years, she accustomed her sisters and the Bloods to her exertions on their behalf. ‘I love most people best when they are in adversity,' she remarked to George Blood, ‘–for pity is one of my prevailing passions…' Benevolence was the top virtue in eighteenth-century England; in Mary it shed the tone of patron, and took on the warmth of affection.

As it happened, Jane Arden became a teacher so much in the same style that both may well have looked back to the encouraging schoolroom of John Arden, with its blend of benevolence and enquiry. In 1784, the same year that Mary's school opened in Newington Green, Jane opened her own boarding-school in her home town of Beverley, and went on to publish grammars as well as a travel book filled with botanical observation and reflections on the lives of purposeful women. Jane said: ‘When I think that happiness…depends in a great degree on education, I most deeply feel the importance of the duties which I have to fulfil.'

Mary too knew teaching as a passion, and even better, as a relationship. ‘With children she was the mirror of patience,' Godwin testifies. ‘Perhaps, in all her extensive experience upon the subject of education, she never betrayed one symptom of irascibility…In all her intercourse with children, it was kindness and sympathy alone that prompted her conduct…I have heard her say, that she never was concerned in the education of one child, who was not personally attached to her, and earnestly concerned not to incur her displeasure.'

It was different with her sisters. Sometimes they exasperated her, when Bess moped with her nose in the air or Everina seemed too light and casual to make an effort. Though Mary could make equals and superiors feel small, she never took advantage of those in subordinate positions as pupils or servants. She passed on to pupils the quality that prompted her from the age of fourteen: to have the courage to say what you know. ‘Indeed,' she said, ‘it is of the utmost consequence to make a child artless, or to speak with more propriety, not to teach them to be otherwise.' If she was ignorant in certain areas, she knew what
not
to teach. Her pupils were
not
taught
to feign raptures they had not felt. They were
not
taught ‘pompous diction'. They were
not
taught ‘artificial' manners or ‘exterior' accomplishments. They were
not
to read in order to quote, nor were they to choose books on the basis of celebrity. Wollstonecraft's radical programme was designed to free a child's tongue; children were invited to tell stories in their own words. Her initiatives began with education, keen to retrieve human endowments the schoolroom shuts off.

 

As she tried out these ideas, in her mid-twenties, Mary presided over a group of women who were supporting themselves entirely on their own. Lacking dowries, they were marginal to the dominant society, but as long as their school flourished they found a place in a larger marginal community of Nonconformists. Newington Green was no ordinary village. It was high-minded, politicised and literate: full of subscribers to published sermons, and supporters of America in its War of Independence. No letters survive from Mary's first year at Newington Green, yet since this was the period when she became politicised, we must enter the experimental hothouse of ideas in which she lived.

One person in Newington Green whom she would later recall with particular gratitude (together with Mrs Burgh) was the Revd Dr Price. Though she continued to attend Anglican services, she did also hear his political sermons. He was a thinker of many parts: a mathematician and economist, as well as political philosopher. He preached liberty as part of a programme of moral perfection, a religious utopianism stressing the divine image implanted in our nature. His humanitarian ideas were far-sighted: he dreamt of abolishing war and planned an international tribunal for settling disputes, but at the time Mary Wollstonecraft came under his influence his keenest thoughts were concentrated on the future of America. He even went so far as to declare that ‘next to the introduction of Christianity among mankind, the American Revolution may prove the most important step in the progressive course of human improvement'. The political core of what Wollstonecraft put forward after her contact with Dr Price reflects his thinking in relation to the new-formed United States.

In August 1775, George III had declared the American colonists to be in a state of rebellion, and sent troops. When nine hundred British soldiers had fired on seventy Americans at Lexington, Thomas Rogers, a banker in Newington Green, put on mourning. Later that year Dr Price wrote a pamphlet in favour of the rebels,
Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty
. It sold sixty thousand copies when it was published in February 1776 (reinforcing the impact of Thomas Paine's
Common Sense
which argued the case for a republic), and is said to have encouraged the American Declaration of Independence on July 4th. Britain, Price argued, could not win this war. His main point, though, was that Britain was in the wrong because political authority derives from the people, and is limited by natural rights and the common good. He held that there were no grounds for justifying imperialism.

Anonymous letters threatened Price with death. He couldn't have cared less for threats when it came to the cause of truth and liberty, but there was no egotism in his politics. His eyes had the keenness of intelligence, not the expressiveness of personality. He lived simply, and gave a fifth of his income to charity. A modest man, thin, in a plain black coat, with a shy bend to his back, he was never unkind or uncivil. So revered was Price by artisans and market women that when he trotted through London on his old horse he could hear orange-women calling, ‘There goes Dr Price! Make way for Dr Price!' His objections to war and the corruption of the ruling class were shared by the artisan class in London (including the poet William Blake), by manufacturers and traders in the Midlands and North West, and also by the poor who provided the soldiers for the American war. The country lost the labour of at least a hundred and fifty thousand men for eight years. All these productive but disfranchised classes were struck by the American experiment in democracy, and crowds came to hear Dr Price.

In 1781 the British surrendered to Washington at Yorktown. The mother country had lost one hundred thousand soldiers and £139 million in its attempt to hold on to the thirteen American colonies. Britain was forced to recognise the United States by the Treaty of Versailles on 3 September 1783, and Congress ratified a final peace treaty in January 1784. That year, at
the very time Mary Wollstonecraft and company arrived in Newington Green, Dr Price was penning another influential pamphlet,
Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution
. It was designed initially for American leaders–George Washington, Benjamin Franklin (an old friend of Price), Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and John Jay–who all entered into correspondence with Price over his astute recommendations for the States' future in peacetime. Franklin, the American Minister in Paris, gave the Comte de Mirabeau, a future leader of the French Revolution, an introduction to Price on 7 September 1784. Mirabeau had written an attack on the hereditary nobility for the radical London publisher Joseph Johnson. To fill out the volume, Mirabeau included Dr Price's
Observations
, together with his own ‘Notes Détachées sur l'ouvrage de M. le Docteur Price'. Joseph Johnson then brought out an English translation of Mirabeau's commentary on Price.

The early and mid-1780s were a time of extraordinary optimism: the American victory, the newly freed nation, was greeted by supporters as a victory for all mankind. It resonated for classes blocked by existing institutions, who wished to shake off a hereditary ruling class and extend the rights of those not represented in Parliament. In April 1784 Figaro's speech, vaunting the ingenuity of a servant, shocked and thrilled audiences when Beaumarchais's play
Le Mariage de Figaro
opened in Paris. An English Dissenter and playwright, Thomas Holcroft, attended ten successive performances in order to memorise the play for the London stage. Political and theatrical radicalism was linked with a growing faith in the perfectibility of human nature proclaimed by Dr Price from the pulpit. Since political institutions shape our nature, the time had come, he said, ‘when the Dissenters in England have more reason to look to America, than America had to look to them'. Americans were applying ideas in the unprecedented setting of New World republicanism, where ideas had the chance to be different things altogether. This phase when Mary Wollstonecraft was putting into practice her radical ideas in education was also the phase in which she bent an ear to this remarkable pastor.

It's perhaps not surprising that her germinating soil was at the margin of society. Mary had no contact with the metropolitan milieu of the ‘Blue
stocking Club', the fashionably learned women whose soirées were attended by Mrs Garrick, wife of the foremost actor of the age, Edmund Burke the parliamentary orator, Sir Joshua Reynolds the great portraitist, the conservative Fanny Burney soon to be waiting on the Queen, the equally conservative Hannah More (who would be one of Wollstonecraft's most determined critics) and Horace Walpole (another of her future critics, the politely sneering author of
The Castle of Otranto
, a novel creaking with lifeless gender types), all brought together by the voluble, faintly absurd Mrs Vesey, wife of a Member of Parliament. It was not these celebrities of the capital but the outlying milieu of Dr Price, his friend Mrs Burgh and other Dissenters who met every fortnight in one another's homes, who sowed in Mary Wollstonecraft the seed of ‘rights' to life and liberty.

How was Mary transformed from a young woman in hiding into the political thinker she was by the time she left Newington Green in the autumn of 1786? The answer does not lie in her surviving letters, nor will it do to fill this gap with the insistent self-pity of Mary's lamentations over one difficulty or another. From February 1784 to September 1786 there remain only six letters to George Blood, and two to her sisters, a small fraction of what she would have written over the course of two and a half years. The surviving letters never speak of the educational and ideological interests she was developing. When Mary writes to George, she's advising a young scamp who, when he wasn't abandoning jobs for long spells of idleness, assisted in a haberdasher's in Cheapside. He was responsive to Mary, his eyes danced, and she was fond of him as a ‘sister', but this was no thinker–and, not surprisingly, her bond with George does not reflect that side. He helped her in so far as he allowed her to confide her setbacks and troubles, and she must have confided also in Mrs Burgh's nephew Friendly Church, for he told her that she would ‘never thrive in the world'. But Church was wrong. When Mary said, ‘my harassed mind will wear out my body', she did not expect imminent death. Cries and sighs were the commonplaces of eighteenth-century sensibility, introduced in the 1740s by Richardson's hugely successful novels
Pamela
and
Clarissa
, whose heroine pits her integrity against those who control the world (exploiters, bullies, rakes). Clarissa is forever having her laces cut when she falls in a faint. She
exhibits the virtue of weeping. It rebukes the heartless and vindicates her honesty. Mary's sighs signal in the same way the honest, unprotected woman at odds with the world, a position she shared with her sisters. Her letters to them too leave out the stimulus of the Dissenters' bid for rights in the face of political exclusion, and, more immediately, the impact of the American model as it came to her through Dr Price.

 

Richard Price was sixty-one when Mary met him. A portrait of this time by Benjamin West shows a thinker beside a bookcase. His lined forehead and hollow cheeks are framed by a full-bottomed wig. His expression conveys the calm and sweetness of spirit of those whose strength comes from within. Repeatedly, Mary would be drawn to the gentleness of confident men (as unlike her father as it was possible to be). This kind of gentleness is far from weak: in Price it shows an edge in his rather formidable dark eyebrows, the right raised interrogatively, which together with the keen eyes behind the spectacles convey a quiet authority.

He came from Llangeinor in Glamorganshire, the son of a Calvinist minister called Rice Price who was harsh and bigoted to the extent that his son rebelled. The son took up the rational faith of Unitarians who stressed the ethics of compassion, denying miracles and ‘superstitions' in favour of Christ's humanity. Richard Price never became fully Unitarian in so far as he retained a sense of Christ's divinity, but a sectarian label is unimportant beside his embrace of Christ's non-violence. He rejected religions with histories of coercive violence, Islam and Catholicism. Protestantism he thought little better, while pagans with their lewd and cruel deities sanctified the worst human traits. It was better not to believe in a deity, he thought, than to project a punitive being.