CLAIRE TOMALIN
The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
List of Illustrations
1 Childhood: Spitalfields, Essex, Yorkshire
2 Two Sorts of Education
3 Eliza
4 Newington Green and the Dissenters
5 Ireland
6 Joseph Johnson and St Paul's Churchyard
7 Fuseli
8 The Amazon
9 A Vindication
10 London 1792
11 Paris: Expatriates and Politicians
12 Imlay
13 La Liberté des Femmes
14 A Book and a Child
15 Putney Bridge
16 A Social Round
17 Godwin
18 Marriage, Childbirth, Death
19 Aftermath and Debate
Epilogue
Illustrations
Bibliography
Notes
Chronology
Appendix I: Eighteenth-century References to Votes for Women
Appendix II: Family Tree of the Wollstonecrafts
Acknowledgements
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE LIFE AND DEATH
OF MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT
‘An admirable biography… In the hands of the author we are able to know much more about Mary Wollstonecraft than any one person did in her lifetime, and indeed more than she knew about herself’ – The New York Times Book Review
‘Repeatedly one wants to shout “Brava!”… a fine piece of work… the reader is rewarded again and again’ – Mary Ellmann in the Washington Post
‘Mrs Tomalin is a most intelligent and sympathetic biographer, aware of her impetuous subject's many failings, yet with the perception to present her greatness fairly. She writes well and wittily, and her treatment of the infinitely complex period of Paris during the Revolution shows a remarkable lucidity and understanding’ – Daily Telegraph
‘Gripping… Illuminates Mary's courage and pioneering political foresight’ – Sunday Times
‘Mrs Tomalin's account of Mary's life and times is a vivid evocation not only of what Mary went through but also of how women lived in the second part of the eighteenth century in England and France… Most of all, however, she makes Mary Wollstonecraft unforgettable’ – Mary Kenny in the Evening Standard
‘You have only to read Victorian biographies to realize how good our examples are. One of the best is Claire Tomalin's The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft’ – C. P. Snow in the Financial Times
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Claire Tomalin has worked in publishing and journalism all her life. She was literary editor first of the New Statesman and then of the Sunday Times, which she left in 1986. She is the author of The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, which won the Whitbread First Book Prize for 1974; Shelley and His World (reissued by Penguin in 1992); Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life (1988), a biography of the modernist writer on whom she also based her 1991 play The Winter Wife; the highly acclaimed The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens, which won the 1990 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography, the NCR Book Award in 1991, as well as the Hawthornden Prize; Mrs Jordan's Profession (1995), a study of the Regency actress; Jane Austen: A Life (1998); a collection of her literary journalism entitled Several Strangers: Writing from Three Decades (1999); and Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, which won the Whitbread Biography Award and which went on to win the Whitbread Book of the Year Award for 2002. All her books are published by Penguin.
FOR NICK
List of Illustrations
1 Portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft, 1791, artist unknown (by permission of the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; photo Elsam, Mann & Cooper).
2 Portrait of Richard Price, Dissenter (by permission of the British Museum; photo Freeman).
3 Drawing of Newington Green by T. H. Shepherd (by permission of Stoke Newington Library).
4 and 5 Caroline and Robert Kingsborough (courtesy of Captain Douglas King-Harman).
6 Portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft, artist unknown (author's collection).
7 Portrait of Joseph Johnson (by permission of the British Museum).
8 Self-portrait of Henry Fuseli, writer and artist (by permission of the Victoria and Albert Museum).
9 Etching of St Paul's Churchyard (by permission of the British Museum; photo Freeman).
10 Drawing of Thomas Holcroft and William Godwin by Lawrence, 1794 (courtesy of Dr Kenneth Garlick and Royal Academy of Arts).
11 Engraving by William Blake for Original Stories, 1791 (by permission of the British Museum).
12 Portrait of Manon Roland, republican and heroine of the Girondins (by permission of the National Portrait Gallery).
13 Portrait of Helen Maria Williams, radical poet (by permission of the British Museum).
14 Gouache by Le Sueur of Revolutionary Frenchwomen (courtesy of M. Bidault de L'Isle and Musée Carnavalet; photo Bulloz).
15 Fanny Imlay's birth certificate (by permission of Le Havre Archives).
16 Gouache by Le Sueur of a women's club in Revolutionary France (courtesy of M. Bidault de L'Isle and Musée Carnavalet; photo Bulloz).
17 Portrait by John Opie of Amelia Alderson, writer (by permission of the National Portrait Gallery).
18 Portrait of Elizabeth Inchbald, actress and writer (by permission of the British Museum; photo Freeman).
19 Title page of Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman,1798(author's collection).
20 Portrait of Mary by Opie (by permission of the National Portrait Gallery).
21 Etching of Mary based on Opie's portrait (by permission of the British Museum).
22 Marriage licence of Mary and Godwin (St Pancras Register of Marriages, courtesy of the Vicar of St Pancras and the Greater London Council).
23 Old St Pancras Churchyard (author's collection).
WIT in women is apt to have bad consequences; like a sword without a scabbard, it wounds the wearer and provokes assailants. I am sorry to say the generality of women who have excelled in wit have failed in chastity.
Elizabeth Montagu, 1750
The more I see of radical women, the less I desire to increase their number. I went to a Radical dinner party last week, and the bold, unfeeling faces of some of the ladies, and their reckless talk, quite shocked me.
Emily Davies, founder of Girton, writing to Barbara Bodichon in 1867
Up to the beginning of the nineteenth century the distinguished woman had almost invariably been an aristocrat. It was the great lady who ruled and wrote letters and influenced the course of politics. From the huge middle class few women rose to eminence, nor has the drabness of their lot received the attention which had been bestowed upon the splendours of the great and the miseries of the poor. There they remain, even in the early part of the nineteenth century, a vast body, living, marrying, bearing children in dull obscurity, until at last we begin to wonder whether there was something in their condition itself – in the age at which they married, the number of children they bore, the privacy they lacked, the incomes they had not, the conventions which stifled them, and the education they never received – which so affected them that, though the middle class is the great reservoir from which we draw our distinguished men, it has thrown up singularly few women to set beside them.
Virginia Woolf, 1927
Free thought has always been the perquisite of the aristocracy. So has the intellectual development of women.
Bertrand Russell writing to Gilbert Murray, 1943
[1]
Childhood: Spitalfields, Essex, Yorkshire<
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AT the ragged eastern edge of the City of London is a district known as Spitalfields. Today it is very sparsely peopled; wave after wave of immigrants has come and gone, leaving a few sad Indian faces on the streets and a floating population of tramps who build bonfires at the deserted corners on winter Sundays. The buildings are a mixed lot also: Victorian breweries and factories tower over tiny almshouses, whole streets are near derelict and the Georgian church has an even more theatrical and misplaced air than most of its fellows. Such eighteenth-century terraces as still stand are decayed and covered in grime; they have not housed families for many years.
Spitalfields has never been a particularly happy or prosperous place. Very far back, a Priory (or Spital) is supposed to have used the land as a burial ground, but in the seventeenth century it was all open fields. Then, as London drew more and more men and women from their native villages, the rows of houses began to go up, eating away the green to the north and east. Settlers came from far afield: Ireland, the north of England, East Anglia, the continent. The road from Cambridge and the north-eastern seaports ended in Bishopsgate, the busy main street of Spitalfields; behind its shopfronts and merchants' dwellings spread the warrens, alleys and courtyards of the immigrant poor. Many found work in the silk weaving trade established there, and in the 1680s came the French protestant weavers banished by Louis XIV, bringing some extra skills to the trade.
After this more and more weavers came crowding in, more and more rows of shoddy houses went up over the green lanes and along the lines of ancient meadow boundaries. By the middle of the eighteenth century the streets were dark, dirty and crammed; when the looms were humming in the houses the noise was drearily insistent, when they fell silent it meant hunger, sometimes riots. The trade was always insecure; weavers were generally despised, recognizable by their stunted height and pale faces. Their wives and children usually worked alongside them, and a whole family might be crowded into two rooms, where they laboured and lived the best they could. Outside, the street life of the apprentice boys who slept under the looms or in the cellars was brutal too: dog fights, duck hunts towards the Bethnal Green ponds, the baiting of an ox filched from Smithfield market. Here and there a weaver kept a caged bird high up at a window to whistle for his caged family as they worked, and the Huguenots tried to brighten their lives by tending narrow strips of garden: Vine, Elder and Blossom Streets still commemorate their efforts. But for the most part it was a place of stench, din and ruthless competition.1
As the century went by and still more workers came to the district, a few men from amongst the anonymous mass began to make considerable profits. They did it largely by remodelling the cottage industry: the old, direct dealings between craftsmen and clients were ended, and instead piece-workers were employed by the masters who organized orders and delivered on a large scale.
One of these successful capitalists was a man called Edward Wollstonecraft. Born in 1688, he had arrived in Spitalfields, probably from Lancashire,* early in the century, and settled in Primrose Alley, a turning off Bishopsgate, ‘all mean and poor people’.2 He married a wife, Jane, five years older than himself; it may have been the traditional and sensible match between the journeyman and his master's daughter. For her it meant a steady series of pregnancies, the deaths of almost all her children and the collapse of her health. Edward brought his mother and sister to live with them, and Jane died after twenty years of marriage, worn out. He took another wife, Elizabeth, continued to work hard, amassed money and invested it cleverly; he outlived his second wife also, eight of his children and several grandchildren.3 He served as a captain in the city militia in the middle of the century4 and acted as an officer of his parish: that of St Botolph Without Bishopsgate. By the time he reached his sixties he felt entitled to call himself not merely a man of substance but also a gentleman, and so he was described in the deeds of the house he built in 1756.5
Of all his sons, the only long-lived one was the youngest, Edward John, who served out his apprenticeship to his father in the days of his prosperity and became a handkerchief weaver, probably without having to apply himself too hard. When Captain Wollstonecraft moved to his splendid new establishment on the other side of Bishopsgate, Edward John remained in a cottage in what had now become Primrose Street, where his father owned half the houses. He continued to rule his family with a firm hand, but the son was chafing to escape from this domination.
He disliked his trade and he disliked London itself. He had married, whilst still an apprentice, a pretty young Irish wife, Elizabeth Dixon, and she too was reluctant to settle in the city. A son was born, followed on 27 April 1759 by a daughter, Mary.
On the twentieth of May Mary was carried from Primrose Street along Bishopsgate to St Botolph to be christened.6 For hereditary christening gifts, she had her paternal grandfather's willpower and ambition and her mother's Irish fluency of tongue. Otherwise there was not much for her: most of the Wollstonecrafts were short-tempered and liable to fits of depression; they were not noted for intellect or good looks, and displayed no interest in anything outside their purely personal affairs. Mary's father, having lost his mother young, had been brought up with a mixture of neglect and indulgence; he was sporadically affectionate, occasionally violent, more interested in sport than work, and not to be relied on for anything, least of all for loving attention. Her mother was indolent by nature and made a darling of her first-born, Ned, two years older than Mary; by the time the little girl had learned to walk in jealous pursuit of this loving pair, a third baby was on the way. A sense of grievance may have been her most important endowment.
Another was her sense of rootlessness. She never had a word to say about her grandfather except that he was ‘a respectable manufacturer’;7 and neither he nor her father could provide the anchorage into a place or a social class that a steady, solid line of male relatives might have done. She observed early that people rose by their wits and fell for lack of them; ‘l'esprit seul peut tout changer’, as Figaro sang.8 It was to be the creed of all her contemporaries who, like her, became revolutionaries in the Nineties.
If we are to trust Mary's own account, nobody was particularly interested in her as a child. She was not a prodigy of learning like some of the bluestockings of the age who read English at two and Greek at ten; she probably spent her time penned into the backyard in Primrose Street with her nurse, teased by her father's workmen, held back from the dangers of the main street, peeping out at the world when she could from the dark little house. When she was two her mother bore a second son, Henry Woodstock Wollstonecraft.9 He did not live long, and the loss of the baby boy must have made Ned doubly precious to his parents. It may also have helped to persuade old Edward to buy a farm out at Epping for the young family; so many of his infant sons and grandsons had died in Primrose Street. From now on the children lived partly in the country, and Edward John divided his time between business and farming.
Mary claimed that she did not know whether she was born in London or Epping.10 Most mothers talk to their children about these things, but evidently Mrs Wollstonecraft did not; and it may also be that Mary decided very early on to remember only the farm, where she was relatively free, and forget the noisy streets of Spitalfields and the dominating figure of a stern old man whose interests were confined to church affairs and the financial future of his family. But they were still in London a good deal; in the summer of 1764 a fourth baby was born, and christened in St Botolph again: a sister, Eliza, sometimes known as Bess.11
The following winter old Edward settled down to compose his long and carefully considered will.12 First he paid the protestant businessman's conscience money: extensive bequests to the parish paupers and all the inmates of three debtors' prisons. Then he made provision for a grandiose funeral. Then he divided his estate into three parts: one third for his daughter by his first marriage (already a middle-aged woman with children nearly grown up), another third to his son Edward John, and the final third to six-year-old Ned. Ned also in
herited his grandfather's portrait, a solemn reminder of the ambitions that were being laid on his shoulders. There was nothing for the little girls, not so much as a silver spoon apiece.
In February 1765, at the age of seventy-six Edward Wollstonecraft died. Mary was nearly six, Ned seven; he had a good opinion of himself already, and now he came into a fortune as big as his father's. In the years ahead there were to be many wrangles over money, but for the moment Ned was almost everyone's favourite: ‘the son, who is to carry the empty family-name down to posterity’ as Mary wrote scornfully later.13 The overt preference given to Ned in terms of love and money stung her quite as sharply as any of the injustices of her life.
Now, with nothing to keep them in London, the Wollstonecrafts moved further out to another farm at Barking, beside the river, and kept only a property-owning and business link with Spitalfields. Mary's aunt and cousins, if they had ever been at all close, were lost to sight; possibly Elizabeth Wollstonecraft was eager to cut their connections with the sources of their income. The satirists of the day, with their mockery of aspiring weavers and their families, encouraged such determined and absolute rejections by those who got away. In any case, Elizabeth was not a Londoner, but came from Ballyshannon on the west coast of Ireland, a pretty little town where her family lived genteelly, doing well out of the wine trade.14 To her it doubtless looked easy enough for a family to move up the social ladder; her brothers' sons would be able to buy commissions in the army and navy;15 she may have encouraged her daughters to turn up their noses at trade and consider themselves a cut above their origins; certainly Mary was capable of simple snobberies all her life and professed a deep contempt for business. Perhaps her mother told her tales of the delights of life in Ireland. If her father ever recalled the pleasures of his London apprenticeship, they were not calculated to win the admiration of his small curly-haired daughter, who developed an early passion for animals and a detestation of cruelty of all kinds.
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