The Book of Books

by Melvyn Bragg

  But what about those other words that we have found to describe the state we are in? What about romantic or wholly inappropriate, unsuitable, dangerous, foolish love – could that be broken down into reasonable particles? If not, does it not suggest that there may be more than one path to the top of the mountain? And the sway of music, does that come out of reason? And unexpected pleasure – ‘surprised by joy’ – is that in the same arena as logical thought? What about those artists and inventors and lovers who have ‘defied reason’ and taken imagination (as Einstein did: as Shakespeare did) and arrived at conclusions unexpected? Were they serving reason all along? This is not to suggest a heaven or hell or any form of reincarnation: it is however to suggest that something is going on for which, as yet, we have no satisfactory explanation – and perhaps we never will – and therefore there are still open doors.

  The biologist J.B.S. Haldane whom Richard Dawkins admires greatly, wrote (quoted in The God Delusion) in Possible Worlds: ‘Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose but queerer than we can suppose . . . I suspect there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy.’ Or even, one might add, in the philosophy of atheism.

  Dawkins’s non-religious Enlightenment is a place which has little or no flexibility. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment, to which we return, found benefits in plurality.

  SEVENTEEN

  MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT AND WILLIAM WILBERFORCE

  It is too easy to see this story in terms of ‘movements’. The Englightenment is one example of several – the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the Civil Wars and so on. It is tempting to see and over-emphasise the effect of these movements with the neatness of hindsight. It was all more stumbling, more fractured, more human than that.

  Because the overwhelming majority of the population led lives unchronicled until very recently, we have only a small pool of examples to choose from if we wish to put a face, a documented human being, on to these movements. So much of the face of our history is of kings and queens, aristocrats and archbishops: the mighty, who had the time, the wealth and the chroniclers to make and keep records of their lives.

  To illustrate how effective individuals were in this story of the impact of the Bible, I have picked out two people whose actions rather than their ancestry raised them into their history.

  Mary Wollstonecraft is credited with being a key early voice, even, by some, a founder, of the movement which became feminism. William Wilberforce is credited with being an essential voice in the long struggle to abolish first the slave trade and then slavery itself. Both came out of the late eighteenth-century Enlightenment when rational, distinguished and brilliant intellectuals had pronounced that the Bible was dead, or not much more than mumbo-jumbo. Yet both Mary Wollstonecraft and William Wilberforce were profound Christians and it was their Christian belief, nourished through intense study of the King James Bible, which drove them on.

  Their impact – based on their Christianity – came out of the eighteenth-century parallel with the Enlightenment (of which it could be argued it was in its way a fine example). It swept at first slowly but then irresistibly through the nineteenth century and it can still be seen clearly in the fabric of society today.

  Mary Wollstonecraft’s immersion in the faith came by way of reason, what was considered to be divinely originated reason: that of William Wilberforce came through revelation. There were elements of reason in Wilberforce’s conversion, though no evidence of revelation in the Protestantism of Mary Wollstonecraft. Both reason and revelation had been denied to Christianity by some of the Englightenment thinkers. Reason, it was thought, had no place in the unreasonable world of belief. Revelation, it was argued, had no place in the logical world of scientific investigation. But here were two individuals, two of many, who showed not only that a movement – such as the Enlightenment – can miss the exception but that the exceptional individual can have an effect greater than a movement.

  Mary Wollstonecraft’s book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was published in 1792 and, revised, in 1793. It can fairly be called the first feminist tract. Wollstonecraft sought, in her words, to ‘persuade women to endeavour to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment and refinement of taste are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness’.

  To today’s feminists hers would seem a rather timid voice. There was no frontal attack on patriarchy, no demand for women’s votes. But, in her time, she was radical and hounded down for it but what she wrote and what she did planted a seed on fertile soil. People live in their own historical period: for her time, Mary Wollstonecraft was, and was seen to be, revolutionary and dangerous.

  She believed that education was the key. Education, she argued, was to be as available for women as for men. She wrote about love, passion, sex, society, fashion and marriage, but the bedrock was education. Her own had been patchy.

  Her father inherited a small fortune and squandered it in a drunken attempt to become a gentleman. He was violent with his wife, the mother of his six children, and Mary’s youth was scarred by confrontations with him to protect her meek Irish Protestant mother.

  She found ways to get the beginnings of an education with the help of the kind parents of her friends and her strong habit of reading. She became a lady’s companion. She began to write for the cheap populist publications on what was known as ‘Grub Street’. It was rapid-turnover journalism, hack-work, but she had a flair for it and the guts to survive in a man’s world.

  Mary was a regular churchgoer, and it was her church which, in her young womanhood, gave her the education she needed to succeed as she wanted to do. Through the church she found a bookseller, Joseph Johnson, who published her first book ‘Thoughts on the Education of Daughters’ and her first novel Mary: A Fiction. Through Joseph Johnson, she fell in with a congregation of English radicals, Dissenters who had embraced the idea of equality emerging from the newly independent America. Dr Richard Price, the Unitarian minister of a beautiful plain church, which still exists, in Stoke Newington in east London, took Mary into his congregation and it was there that her yearning for an education was fulfilled. Nonconformists and other Dissenters were forbidden to go to university so they set up their own equivalents in their churches or in their homes. Their achievements in many fields – especially in the sciences – often outstripped Oxford and Cambridge.

  Price was a formidable polemicist and his impact on Mary was galvanising. In 1789 he set off the fuse which was to lead to her great work. He preached and then published a sermon congratulating the French Assembly for the new possibilities of religious and civil freedom offered by their revolution. In this sermon he developed this Christian idea of ‘perfectibility’: that the world could be improved through Christian human effort. Mary took up that idea.

  Dr Price’s sermon provoked one of the great intellectual battles in English history. Edmund Burke responded fiercely with his Reflections on the Revolution in France which argued that traditional authority could not be sacrificed for ideas of liberty. Thomas Paine replied to Burke with his magnificent The Rights of Men. Mary rushed into the battle with her own version, A Vindication of the Rights of Man. This was soon followed by A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792 – dashed off and revised in 1793. She argued passionately for the God-given (as she saw it) rights for women of civil and religious liberty.

  Her argument was that human beings have ‘natural rights’ validated by God’s will. And ‘virtue’, she also argued, like ‘wisdom’, both to be found in her King James Bible, were the keys to the kingdom currently occupied only by men. Because of that, she wrote: ‘if the present constitution of civil society is an almost insuperable obstacle, [to women] then the implication here seems very clear: the present state of civil society must be changed, if we are to progress.’ She proposed a revolution, on Christian principles.

&nb
sp; Mary Wollstonecraft’s Anglican faith never left her. It drew on the radical elements of Christ’s teachings in the New Testament which pointed the way to equality and a society released from traditional hierarchies. It also became plaited with the more secular revolutionary ambitions of Thomas Paine, with whom she enjoyed a platonic friendship and mutual admiration. Nor can her own personal frustrations with her education and her experience of a violent father be ruled out of the entwinement of ideas and ideals which became her voice.

  Yet at the root of it was a Protestantism based on the King James Bible and shaped by the Dissenters. It was they, the nonconformists, who kept her reputation and her works alive in a nineteenth century which turned its back on her because of the perceived shortcomings of her private life.

  That rejection points to another aspect of Protestantism: its capacity for pettiness, judgementalism and hypocrisy.

  Mary’s adult life was irregular. In London she had a wild affair with the artist-as-public-genius, Fuseli. In Paris to meet the French revolutionaries, she met and fell in love with an American, and went through what she thought of as a marriage. It was a sham. She had a child. It turned out to be illegitimate. Her American lover abandoned her. She made two attempts at suicide.

  Her next marriage was to the radical agitator William Godwin. When she died at the age of thirty-eight, he published an honest memoir on her which openly detailed what appeared to many commentators an immoral life. As the revolutionary mood changed to repressed piety during and after the French wars, Mary, who had been a radical heroine in revolutionary Paris, was thought to be too dangerous. Her ideas were feared to have been contaminated by the French connection and were even more unacceptable because of her apparently licentious and uncontrolled life. To take up the work of Mary Wollstonecraft was to forgive what were seen as her sins and that was beyond most of her successors, save for Dissenting women writers. They kept the faith.

  Thanks partly to them, her work prevailed. First in mid-nineteenth-century America, then in Britain and now across the world, she is acknowledged in ever more secular circles for what she was: a bold, fearless Christian radical whose work fed the early flickerings of feminism.

  Mary Wollstonecraft came out of one English Protestant Christian inheritance. William Wilberforce out of another. Both were tutored by the King James Bible. Both had a resounding impact on the character of the world we now live in. She emerged into her wider world through the route of divine reason. In that way she can be seen as widely allied to the many debates which grew into the Enlightenment Project. He emerged through conversion, a state of transition into Christianity reported on from the time of Jesus Christ Himself and most famously recorded when the young Jewish Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus met his sudden conversion to Christianity.

  In a sense, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Christian route could be seen as a new progression and one capable of further development in an increasingly scientific, questioning, analytical world. William Wilberforce’s conversion took root in the deep past, in the origin of faith itself. Both cases seem to prove that whatever victories the Enlightenment won, snuffing out the reforming zeal and intellectual vigour of Bible-based Christianity was not one of them.

  Wilberforce’s greatness lay in his success, over many years and despite often violent and virulent opposition, in leading forces which eventually pushed through the Parliament at Westminster an Act which abolished the slave trade in 1807. His continuing work and iconic place in Parliament meant that he was also a major instrument in the abolition of slavery itself a generation later.

  It was widely acknowledged, not least by Wilberforce himself, that he was by no means alone in leading this campaign. Nor was he the originator. In England, men like Clarkson – a key anti-slavery campaigner – had begun to work for the abolition of the slave trade several years before Wilberforce’s interest was enlisted. And the final abolition of slavery itself, though it formally began in the London Parliament, needed the efforts of many in the United States and the West Indies, including many influential former slaves.

  Yet Wilberforce played a unique and an essential role. There had to be that Act of Parliament to get the movement going. He did it out of a passionate Christianity. One of his religious disciplines was the daily reading of the King James Bible.

  He was born in 1759 into a secure and long-established trading family in the port of Hull, in Yorkshire in the north of England. His family was wealthy but not aristocratic. Their substantial home was in the middle of the city’s energetic business quarter with trading ships moored literally at the end of the garden. A narrow, teeming High Street was directly outside the front door. The Wilberforce family tree had long Yorkshire roots and claims were made that it had played a valiant part in the Battle of Hastings. He was the third of four children, two of whom died in childhood: and he too was feared for. He was and was to remain fragile, his eyesight was always poor, his full adult height was five feet four inches. From an early age his melodious speaking and singing voice was applauded.

  He went to a superb grammar school in Hull and then, after the unexpected early death of his father at the age of thirty-nine, he was housed with relations in the south, near London. He was hauled back north a couple of years later by his mother and packed off to a mediocre boarding school like most boys of his background and class. From there to Cambridge University. This saw the beginning of a life of luxury, profligacy and idleness which moved to London when, at twenty-one, through money and oratory he acquired a seat in Parliament and became the Member of Parliament for Hull.

  Mary Wollstonecraft struggled and then fought her way through a petticoat world that dismayed and devalued her. Hers was a landscape in which the best she could hope for was to be a companion to a rich lady or a governess to a rich family’s children. She saw polite society through spoiled women whose lassitude angered her and the rest of society through degraded women whose plight angered her even more. She saw the arrogance of privilege and the abyss of poverty.

  Mary finally managed to balance herself somewhere between the two, finding fulfilment in the public arena. She worked hard and read hard and met men (it was mostly men), whose manner of thinking was affiliated with the more extreme direction of Enlightenment thought. So although her circumstances taught her of a country ruinously and ruthlessly divided and riven by class, wealth and birth, her lifeline – her rational Christianity – and her companions – Dissenters and radicals – enable us to see her as part of that tide of enlightened religion.

  Wilberforce’s England was spectacularly unenlightened. It festered with inherited wealth and position, pagan in all but tokenistic outward observances, squalid, riotous, publicly immoral, gaming, drunken and almost insanely extravagant.

  As a youth at Cambridge and particularly in London, he came up against an Anglo-Saxon version of Sodom and Gomorrah. The aristocracy and the industrial nouveau riche were bloated with treasure which their younger element seemed bent on losing at gaming tables. Fortunes which had been accumulated through generations were lost on the throw of dice. And the poor were not only oppressed but only just finding enough air in the gutters of a polluted metropolis.

  Like several of the most passionate and effective converts to Christianity, Wilberforce before his conversion lived in, even basked in, a world he would later regard as sinful, slothful, unjust and intolerable.

  The Anglican Church had returned to the indolent and corrupt practices of the Roman Catholic Church which the Reformation had attacked. The King James Bible was often little more than a convenient calling card. For the upper classes and the lower aristocracy a pious, even a counterfeiting public observance and the swearing of oaths got you on to what would later be called a ‘gravy train’. It was a way in to more wealth for those who came from wealth but were not fortunate enough to be the eldest son – who would inherit the entire estate – or the daring son – who could be bought a commission in the army or the navy. The Church was fat with cash from the strictly en
forced tithing tax (10 per cent of income) from truly massive land and property holdings and from the flow of endowments. Be well born. Go to Oxford or Cambridge. Enjoy all that could be bought. Get any old degree and the Church was your oyster.

  There were exceptions. There were those of good family who were of good faith. There were valiant parish priests, scholarly bishops and upright archdeacons. But that was not the character of the Church that Wilberforce would have seen. He had enjoyed a taste of the other Church, the Methodists, when, as a boy, he had stayed with his uncle and aunt in Wimbledon near London. There he had seen the strict piety, the rule of Christian conduct, the practice of a deeply held faith; but his mother had hauled him out of that. She was afraid that he might be permanently stained by this lower-class Methodism and therefore unable ever to take his place in society. Ironically, her intervention enabled him to become a Member of Parliament where he did his great work.

  Wilberforce, though, would be more likely to know and to be, by class and inclination in those days, at ease with the likes of the Beresford family, for example. William Hague points out in his biography of Wilberforce that one of the Beresfords ‘had cumulatively received £350,000 from his Church living’ (i.e. £350,000 in eighteenth-century money – multiple millions today); ‘another lucky member of this not notably religious family received just under £300,000, a third £250,000 and a fourth, with four “livings” simultaneously, £58,000. In total, through eight clerics, this entrepreneurial Anglican family obtained £1.5 million [in eighteenth-century money] from the Irish [Protestant] Church.’ It was money that could have built a city.