Vindication (8 page)

Price moved to London in about 1740 to study for the ministry at Moorfields Academy, run by his uncle Samuel Price, with help from Isaac Watts the hymn-writer. It was a time when Dissenting academies were the real centres of education in England, while the established seats of learning, Oxford and Cambridge, dozed through the eighteenth century. In 1758 Price settled at Newington Green as preacher. After twelve years there he began to preach in the mornings to the much larger congregation of
Unitarians at the Gravel Pit Meeting House in Hackney. A wider public read his pamphlet against the American war. Congress invited Price to become a citizen in 1778, and Yale University conferred on him, together with Washington, the degree of Doctor of Law on 24 April 1781. Price declined the invitation to leave England, but declared that he looked ‘to the United States as now the hope, and likely soon to become the refuge of mankind'.

In the early 1780s reform was in the air; fellow-feeling for revolutionaries was marked at all levels of society, except perhaps the lowest. Aristocrats in the circle round the leader of the Opposition, Charles James Fox, and William Petty Shelburne (created Marquess of Lansdowne in 1784) joined associations like the London Friends of the People, as did the gentry and manufacturers all over the country. Even politicians like Pitt and Burke, who were to lead a counter-revolution in the 1790s, as yet appeared potential reformers. Lord Shelburne, who was Price's patron, became Prime Minister from March 1782 until February 1783, and offered Price the post of Private Secretary. Price served as unofficial adviser on government finance, proposing a ‘sinking fund' to cope with the national debt, while Shelburne brought the American war to an end.

One of the foremost American admirers of Dr Price was the future second President, John Adams. The principles and sentiments that Price expressed had been, said Adams, ‘the whole scope of my life'. In 1785, aged fifty, Adams arrived in London as the first American Ambassador to the Court of St James. The Court and diplomatic community were taken aback when Adams and his wife Abigail chose to join the congregation of Dr Price at the Gravel Pit Meeting House. ‘This is the 3d Sunday we have attended his meeting,' Abigail Adams wrote to her son John Quincy Adams on 26 June 1785, ‘and I would willingly go much further to hear a Man so liberal so sensible so good as he is. He has a Charity which embrases all mankind.'

Price provided a refuge from the hostility the Adamses encountered that summer for having the ‘impudence' to defend their country. Stared at or ignored, they had to withstand a repeated assumption that America would ‘of course' return to the fold when it was weary of independence.
British statesmen refused to comprehend Adams when he declared there was ‘a new order of things arisen in the world'. Journalists and American refugees took to ‘snearing at [John Adams] for having taken Dr. Price as Father confessor', Abigail reports in August; and by September decides that she prefers the society of Dr Price to balls, card parties and ‘titled Gamesters'. She wondered repeatedly at his diffidence, so different in manner from an American's air of independence. ‘If I live to return to America, how much shall I regret the loss of good Dr. Price's Sermons,' Abigail said during her return voyage three years later. ‘I revered the Character and Loved the Man. Tho far from being an orator, his words came from the Heart and reached the Heart.'

Revolutionary rhetoric, in the mouth of John Adams, began with the premise, ‘all Men would be Tyrants if they could'. Abigail Adams suggested an application her husband had not considered. In March 1776, she had asked him to ‘remember the Ladies' in the new code of laws yet to be formulated.

‘If particular care and attention is not paid to the Laidies,' Abigail warned, ‘we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.'

‘As to your extraordinary Code of Laws, I cannot but laugh,' her husband replied. The danger of revolution, he explained, is its knock-on effect for disobedient children, Indians and Negroes. ‘But your Letter was the first Intimation that another Tribe more numerous and powerfull than all the rest were grown discontented.'

Abigail Adams was to become an outspoken admirer of Mary Wollstonecraft. They were moving in the same religious milieu in the London of the mid-1780s, and possible evidence of their proximity is the fact that the Adamses spelt her name ‘Woolstoncraft', as it's pronounced in England. It's conceivable that they sat in the same congregation when they heard Dr Price. His belief that American liberty derived from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was the source of Mary Wollstonecraft's hopes of the American experiment. ‘The Anglo-Americans having carried with them the principles of their ancestors, liberty appeared in the New World with renovated charms and sober matron graces,' she wrote when she came to
contrast the American Revolution with the Terror unleashed by the French. At the outset of his Presidency, Adams underlined these words. ‘I thank you Miss W.,' he remarks in the margin. ‘May we long enjoy your esteem.'

Although Price looked on the American Revolution as ‘the fairest experiment ever tried in human affairs', the real test would be to sustain it. In 1784–5 he warned its leaders that the collected wisdom of confederation, not war, should settle disputes. On 1 February 1785 he received a gracious acknowledgement from Jefferson, who in that year replaced Franklin as American Minister in Paris. ‘I have read [your
Observations on the American Revolution
] with very great pleasure, as have done many others to whom I have communicated it. The spirit which it breathes is as affectionate as the observations themselves are wise and just.'

Price replied to Jefferson, slipping in another warning between the graces of this exchange:

It's not entirely possible to explain the success of America (in contrast with other revolutions, where thugs take over from intellectuals). Certainly, there
was Washington's ability to unite states with divided interests. During those first vital decades, from the 1770s to almost the end of the century, he had the standing to control dissensions. When the war came to an end in 1783 his ‘Circular to the States' was designed to channel the energies of rebellion from potential anarchy towards subordination to government. Dr Price had his ear and those of other American leaders at the start of their debate on the Constitution. Where the Declaration of Independence had been idealistic, even utopian, the Constitution was realistic about the power-grabbing element in human nature. It was brilliantly balanced, with curbs on power on every side. Yet it had two flaws.

The lesser was the failure to grant equality to women: I say lesser, because until Wollstonecraft publicised what would be for more than a century to come the contentious issue of women's rights, no power remotely considered such a thing–woman being what the Bible termed ‘the weaker vessel'. The second and unforgivable flaw in the American Constitution was, of course, the perpetuation of the slave trade, what Wollstonecraft called ‘the abominable traffick'. In her later writings on the rights of woman, she repeated the common link between the positions of women and slaves. For this reason the long-forgotten words of Dr Price against slavery in 1784–5 are of the utmost importance to the way Wollstonecraft began to think.

‘The negro trade cannot be censured in language too severe,' Price warned American leaders in 1784. ‘It is a traffic which…is shocking to humanity, cruel, wicked, and diabolical.' Until the States should abolish it, they would not deserve their liberty. In this one respect he believes he can recommend to the States the example of his own country from the time of Lord Mansfield's ruling in 1771. ‘In Britain,' said Dr Price, ‘a negro becomes a freeman the moment he sets his foot on British ground.'
*

Jefferson sent a dodging reply on 7 August 1785 to this anti-slavery plea. He appears to urge Price to speak out further against Southern opposition to emancipating slaves, but in reality distances the issue when he suggests that Price address his comments to young men who might influence some ‘future' debate on the question. What he doesn't say is that he will take it up himself. Nor does he question himself as slave-owner.

That same summer Price confronted John Jay, New York president of a newly formed Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves (whose members had declined a proposal that they begin by freeing their own slaves):

Nothing was more important than a plan of education in framing a new state, Price advised Americans in what was, by far, the longest part of his pamphlet. His educational ideas followed Wollstonecraft's, or hers his. To Price in 1784, the ‘secret' of education had yet to be found, but he points to the ‘turn' given to the mind by the child's earliest impressions, which Wollstonecraft in a sense answers when she points to a mother's breast. Price, too, attacked formal learning that teaches
what
to think instead of
how
to think, and ‘perverts' minds with ‘the jargon of the schools'. This ‘puffs up' a child. Pride and dogmatism he called ‘the worst enemies to
improvement'. Wollstonecraft, sweeping away words of thund'ring sound, the commonplaces of received opinion and other obstacles to communication, takes this to a logical conclusion when she shifts the power from teacher to pupil. It's as though Price was invoking Wollstonecraft when he said, ‘I am waiting for the great teacher.'

As long as she taught in Newington Green, Wollstonecraft found a mentor in a mind of this calibre: its eighteenth-century trust in continuing enlightenment, its compassion for victims and its commitment to liberty–all qualities she could share.

 

Not far from the Green was the village of Shacklewell where lived a young Anglican priest, aged twenty-two, who served three parishes in London. The Revd Mr John Hewlett was the son of a gentleman, owner of Chetnole in Dorset and Milborne Wick in Somerset. He befriended Mary, who was three years older, and to some extent confided in her–or she was intuitive enough to guess his troubles–for she pitied his marriage at twenty to bossy Elizabeth Hobson of Hackney: ‘Poor tender friendly soul how he is yoked!' It was a waste of a good man. At the height of his association with Mary, Hewlett was admitted as a sizar at Magdalene College, Cambridge, in January 1786 at the age of twenty-four–it would take all of ten years to take his degree in divinity while he ran his own boarding-school in Shacklewell. In the next century he became known as a biblical scholar and Chaplain to the Prince Regent, but when Mary met him in 1784 he mixed with editors and writers of the capital. Hewlett took Mary to visit the Great Cham of English literature Samuel Johnson, then seventy-five, scarred by scrofula and ailing from a stroke the previous year. He received her kindly in Bolt Court, seeming to propel himself forward by a constant roll of his head and body, and jerking his majestic head as he made his pronouncements as one speaking from on high. His voice was loud and deliberate; his slovenly clothes and convulsive motions of hands, lips, feet and knees at odds with graceful words.

Dr Johnson loathed Mary's hero. As a pensioner of the government he opposed radicalism, in particular the politics of Dr Price. Once, in Oxford, when Price entered a room, Dr Johnson left it. ‘All change is of itself an evil,' he said. Johnson approved the war against the States, decried equality,
and looked with equanimity on a beggar, pronouncing that some must be miserable so others might be happy.

It says something for both Johnson and Mary Wollstonecraft that they did not clash. Dr Johnson is now recognised as more ambiguous than some of his pronouncements appear: a conservative political writer who in certain ways opened up a brave new world for more radical voices–brave, say, in his refusal to be gulled by the hot air of aristocratic amateurs. Then, too, Johnson could put by his occasional misogyny–he had long enjoyed cordial relations with several ‘Blues'. The biographer of Fanny Burney, Claire Harmon, detects a romantic tenderness in his later encounters with women that suggests a suppression of his sexual feelings with a resigned awareness how repellent his scars and twitches might be. He treated Mary ‘with particular kindness and attention', had a long conversation with her, and asked her to come ‘often'. Despite overt differences, they actually had much in common.

Both remained staunch rationalists at a time when taste embraced the cult of sensibility. Though the prestige of the pre-Romantic Gray was at its height, Dr Johnson looked back to the rational incisiveness of Pope who ‘thought himself the greatest genius that ever was' and had the felicity ‘to rate himself at his real value'. Wollstonecraft, like Johnson, trusted the common reader; both shunned obscurities; both were devout Anglicans; and both had deep veins of melancholy. There was no social prohibition against melancholy; no need to hold back. Melancholy in the eighteenth century was admired, particularly in men, as a sign of sensitivity. Dr Johnson called melancholy ‘a rust of the soul', and his cure was work. For Wollstonecraft and Dr Johnson (as for many writers), melancholy coexisted with ambitious effort: Johnson's with his
Dictionary
and
Lives of the Poets
; Mary's with her case for women's education. Both were compulsive educators who wished to generalise about human nature; their minds turned on nothing less than our species. Johnson thought of his essays as ‘lessons'. He sanctioned novels as ‘lectures of conduct and introductions into life', which perfectly describes the novels Mary was to write–not ordinary novels because, like Dr Johnson's
Rasselas
, fiction is a shell for philosophical polemic.