Vindication (86 page)

^*
Archimago, in
The Faerie Queene
, ‘the falsest man alive', is one of the devil's emissaries: false religion masquerading as truth's champion.

^*
The Imlay Family
by Hugh and Nella Imlay (1953) reports (p. 188) that ‘Captain' Imlay ‘was a British officer in the Revolution'. It could mean that he crossed sides in the course of the war when he was ‘omitted', but this is unlikely, given the high-ranking veterans of the American army with whom he associated after the war. Could he have become a spy who, as a double agent,
appeared
to spy for the British (like Harvey Birch in James Cooper's
The Spy
)? It would explain why the listings of revolutionary soldiers from Monmouth County (in the Van Kirk Historical Collection, Allentown Public Library) register other members of the Imlay family but not Gilbert. Coming as he did from a Tory town, men known to him were fighting for George III, so he could have joined them in the guise of a Loyalist convert. If he did so, it would seem to have been a secret kept from his family, who give no source for their identification of Gilbert as a ‘British officer', a fact tucked away without comment, as though it were shaming, in an appendix of the Imlays' book.

^*
There was a rumour that Imlay had spent a night with Helen Maria Williams. This has never been substantiated.

^*
Another possibility–hard to prove but one that can't be ruled out–is that, unknown to Mary, this particular cache of silver was always due to end up elsewhere. The ship's papers, obtained from the Danish Consul in Rouen on 20 July, give a Danish destination, but it's unclear whether this was genuine or a blind, or whether there was a change of plan.

^*
A telling exchange between Dr Johnson and Boswell in 1779
Johnson
: ‘A husband's infidelity is nothing.' [A couple is connected by children and fortune.] ‘Wise married women don't trouble themselves about infidelity.'
Boswell
: ‘To be sure there is a great difference between the offence of infidelity in a man and that of his wife.'
Johnson:
‘The difference is boundless. The man imposes no bastards upon his wife.'

^*
‘Considering the aggravated distress is the accumulated losses and damages sustained in consequence of the said Ellefsen's disobedience of my instructions I desire the said Mary Imlay will clearly ascertain the amount of such damages, taking first the advice of persons qualified to judge of the probability of obtaining satisfaction or the means the said Ellefsen or his connection, who may be proved to be implicated in his guilt, may have, or power of being able to make restitution and thus commence a new prosecution for the same accordingly…'

^*
Published as
A Short Residence in Sweden
,
Norway and Denmark
. William Godwin called it
Travels in Norway
, and shortened it to ‘Travels' in his Diary on 6 Sept 1796. His briefer title is adopted here.

^*
Risør was called East Risoer at this time.

^*
In contrast with Mr Bennet in
Pride and Prejudice
or Mr Palmer in
Sense and Sensibility
, sensible men who, in their youth (and to their later discomfort) had succumbed to female silliness.

^*
Mrs Siddons (1755–1831) was the daughter of the stage manager Roger Kemble. Her brother was John Kemble who took the lead in the dramatisation of
Caleb Williams
which opened on 12 March 1796. Mrs Siddons performed in
The Fair Penitent
on 22 and 23 November 1796. Mary Wollstonecraft recalls Calista's line in
The Wrongs of Woman
, ch. 9.

^*
A joke? Dr Slop is the male midwife who is disastrously clumsy with forceps in
Tristram Shandy
, a novel MW admired.

^*
A plaque in Werrington Street marks the spot where the Godwins lived.

^*
Dickens would later use a prison as a metaphor for Victorians locked in their mental attitudes. In the second half of
Little Dorrit
, the world outside the prison is revealed as a mirror image of the world inside the prison, locked in its absurd dramas and even more absurd rhetoric.

^*
Word play on the Polygon. There was, incidentally, a Paragon Place along the Surrey Road where Hays had lived in 1794–5 before moving to the centre of London.

^*
Virgil,
Aeneid
, VI: ‘
Procul, O procul este, profani
.' ‘Away, away, you uninitiated,' cries the Sybil, guide to the Underworld, as she points the hero towards the open cavern to see ‘things buried in the dark and deep of earth'.

^*
This is gossip. Mary Wollstonecraft had a poor opinion of Lord Kingsborough and his womanising.

^*
Presumably the bond Imlay had offered to take out when he and Mary had parted in 1796, the interest of which was to support Fanny.

^*
Tully (Marcus Tullius Cicero) (106-43
BC
); Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) (70-19
BC
).

^*
‘Constantia' was Claire's nickname, from the novel
Ormond
by Charles Brockden Brown.

^*
A verst and a half is roughly a mile.