The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft

by Claire Tomalin

  At Barking, the Wollstonecrafts' neighbours and friends were the Gascoynes, sons of a lord mayor, Sir Crisp, whose money had been made in much the same fashion as theirs, albeit in larger amounts. The Gascoynes were to become members of parliament, see their family fortune increase and channel it into the aristocracy; already they inhabited an elegant country house, Bifrons.16 More modestly, the Wollstonecrafts planned to better themselves by farming in a gentlemanly way, and intended Ned for the law. Perhaps also they hoped one day to be able to give their daughters enough to make good marriages into the country gentry, if they were lucky, and pretty, and docile.

  But Mary was none of these things. It was soon observed that whereas Bess was nice-looking and polite, her elder sister was sharp in manner and often angry in appearance: her eyes bulged, the corners of her mouth turned down. From a very early age she nourished the sense that she was unappreciated and denied affection that was her due. In her fictional account of her childhood she described playing in a garden and a wood, making up songs and conversing with angels:17 the picture suggests loneliness and an early taste for the rather one-sided dramatic exchanges she practised all her life. Slighted on grounds of inferior age and sex by her elder brother, and never a candidate for the petting that went to each new baby in turn, she looked elsewhere. A third daughter was born at Barking, Everina – Mary wrote her name Averina, which suggests the family's pronunciation – and then a third son, James. All the children flourished now and the death of Henry could be forgotten. Ned started school, Mary made toys of dogs and flowers, and ‘an old housekeeper told her stories, read to her, and at last taught her to read. Her mother talked of enquiring for a governess.’18

  At Barking, where her parents were enjoying their first freedom to do as they pleased with their money, and emulating the high style of the Gascoynes, her mother might well have thought of a governess for her daughters. But Mr Wollstonecraft had the tastes and vices of a country squire without the acreage or capital; he loved both horse and bottle but proved impatient and incompetent as a farmer. Things went badly, the prospect of a governess receded, capital was already dwindling. Almost before Mary became aware of her position as a lady, the family began to slide back down the social scale.

  Her father's remedy for failure was to move on. So when she was nine they packed, said farewell to neighbours and set off up the Great North Road in a cavalcade of horses and coaches for what must have seemed like a foreign country. They were going to a farm near Beverley in Yorkshire, where the common people spoke an almost incomprehensible tongue and the land was as flat as Holland all the way to the North Sea. In those days it was not drained, and in winter it flooded and sometimes froze for mile on mile. It was good wild country for a child who preferred animals to people and liked to be out roaming in search of angels, and for some years Mary remained a solitary and a tomboy. The birth of her youngest brother, Charles, who became her favourite, reconciled her only a little to the role of eldest daughter and occasional childminder.

  As time passed she began to see the attractions of Beverley too. Mr Wollstonecraft took a house in the centre, overlooking the Wednesday Market; on one side stood the huge Gothic minster that dominates the town physically. A new organ was installed soon after the Wollstonecrafts arrived, and a festival of Handel's music held to celebrate the occasion. There was also a theatre, and a new set of Assembly Rooms for dancing had just been built by public subscription. Beverley society was lively in many ways. To the west of the town a racecourse stand was put up for the crowds who attended the famous races and horse fairs, which may have attracted Mr Wollstonecraft in the first place.19 Other local gentlemen were as interested in poetry as in horseflesh; a literary club flourished at Driffield near by. When Mary was fourteen she wrote to a friend quoting some of the deplorable doggerel turned out by the Driffield Bards, and wishing she were old enough to be celebrated amongst the beauties of Beverley; this is her earliest surviving letter.20

  The friend to whom she addressed herself was another fourteen-year-old, a girl called Jane Arden, born in Beverley of a similarly wandering family; Mr Arden had lived in Germany, described himself as a ‘philosopher’ and gave public lectures on science and literary subjects.21 Sensitive about the failings she was beginning to perceive in her own family, and contrasting them with the dignified, sober and well-read Ardens, Mary envied Jane her entire situation and attached herself determinedly to the family of the philosopher. The lessons he gave his daughter formed a striking contrast with Mr Wollstonecraft's professed scorn for the very idea of female learning. He was becoming notorious for his temper and extravagance in the district. Drinking was the general male habit, but he took his drink badly, and Mary's stories of sleeping on the landing and shielding her mother from his blows convey her view of him. Her willpower was strengthened in the process no doubt, but at the cost of learning to despise her father and pity her mother.

  The letters to Jane hinted at dissatisfactions at home but did not dwell on them. At first they were mainly given up to chat about poetry and the theatre, references to macaronis, arch and spiteful remarks about the failings of other girls. Then suddenly all this was swept aside in a storm of emotion. The same tone that Mary would use in her letters when she was twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five, appeared now, when she was a schoolgirl of fourteen; the voice is already unmistakable.

  There was a quarrel. Mary accused Jane of neglect and of having hurt her feelings and demanded her own letters back. She then said nothing could ever be the same again but asked Jane to call as usual so that their friends should not gossip. When Jane ignored this letter, a still more frantic one followed in which Mary confessed to jealousy of another girl; the torture was the worse because the Arden parents also favoured the rival. Perhaps they thought Mary was not a suitable friend? She explained herself further:

  If I did not love you I should not write so; – I have a heart that scorns disguise, and a countenance which will not dissemble: I have formed romantic notions of friendship. – I have been once disappointed: – I think if I am a second time I shall only want some infidelity in a love affair, to qualify me for an old maid, as then I shall have no idea of either of them. I am a little singular in my thoughts of love and friendship; I must have the first place or none. – I own your behaviour is more according to the opinion of the world, but I would break such narrow bounds.

  This seems to have produced some satisfaction, for the next letter started more warmly and admitted she might have been partly in the wrong in the first place; but

  Love and Jealousy are twins… I spent part of the night in tears; (I would not meanly make a merit of it.) I have not time to write fully on the subject, but this I am sure of, if I did not love you, I should not be angry. – I cannot bear a slight from those I love.

  And to round off the emotional battering she went on:

  I shall take it as a particular favour if you will call this morning, and be assured that however more deserving Miss R… may be of your favour, she cannot love you better than your humble servant Mary Wollstonecraft. P.S. I keep your letters as a Memorial that you once loved me, but it will be of no consequence to keep mine as you have no regard for the writer.

  However it was Jane who preserved the letters, not Mary.

  She had set up an emotional pattern she was never to break. Long before she had read Rousseau she arrived at her own conclusions about the supreme power of feelings and the divine right of the intense to cut a swathe through everything that was insipid, inadequate, conventional or disappointing; and where most of her female contemporaries insisted on the prime importance of protecting oneself by concealing emotion, Mary rejected the idea totally. She blazoned her hopes and her disappointments. She could never wear a mask or keep a weapon in reserve.

  Jane's failure to respond to her affection was not the first disappointment she had suffered, as she was at pains to point out. Perhaps she had her parents in mind. How much they were really to blame for making her unhappy is h
ard to say; apart from the drunken episodes they seem to have been cool rather than cruel, too preoccupied with their own interests and troubles to give Mary what she wanted of them, unable to fill the roles she wished to see them in, and unappreciative of her efforts to impress them. Some of the motive power of her personality was certainly derived from resentment of their attitude. She was not able to divert her feelings into the traditionally consoling path of prayer, and she was too vehement to sustain an ironical distancing from disappointment. Both Fanny Burney and Jane Austen (and no doubt thousands of other girls) compensated for other lacks in their lives by making sisters into their chief allies and supports. Mary could not. There may have been a little jealousy of Eliza; she had moments of tenderness towards her too, and more towards Everina, but regarded them persistently as children rather than equals, and both fostered and resented their dependence on her. She could never make friends of them; they were always her albatrosses, burdensome, irritating and inescapable.

  What formal education Mary received was in a day school, in Beverley or a neighbouring village: there was a grammar school with a good library for Ned, but not for the girls. She was spared being set to master the dubious accomplishments of the boarding school miss. In fact she learned little more than reading and writing, but had enough wit to flourish under this sort of neglect; she wrote of village schools later with a glow of enthusiasm that suggests she enjoyed hers. Her religious indoctrination was mercifully deficient too, product of the sleepy Anglicanism of the times: a scolding, an hour or two indoors and some perfunctory talk of hellfire was Mrs Wollstonecraft's not very rigorous way of dealing with sin.

  More tedious was the machinery of becoming a woman; the necessity for controlling the hair with pins and the body with whalebone, the mysteries and limitations, discreet laundering, pins, ribbons, cumbersome and vulnerable clothes. Twelve to fourteen was thought the correct age for putting girls on their guard against the opposite sex.22 Then the easy shifts and petticoats of childhood were supplemented by stays reaching from breast to thigh. If Mary would have preferred her brother's breeches she certainly never said so, but equally she never mentioned so much as a ribbon, a cap or a piece of lace.

  Instead, she began to ask for a room of her own, somewhere in which to be herself alone; she would not quite belong to the family even if she could not leave it, as she began to dream of doing; she would think for herself, by herself. She declared that she would never marry for money. She would find something nobler and more absorbing than the way of life her father and mother had attained. She began to notice the condition in which servants and the poor lived, the workhouse children and institutionalized widows who were to be seen in Beverley, where many charitable establishments clustered in the shade of the minster. There are scenes in both her novels that suggest she came into conflict with her parents over the treatment meted out to dependents. The story in Mary is dramatic:

  A little girl who attended in the nursery fell sick. Mary paid her great attention; contrary to her wish, she was sent out of the house to her mother, a poor woman, whom necessity obliged to leave her sick child while she earned her daily bread. The poor wretch, in a fit of delirium stabbed herself, and Mary saw her dead body… and so strongly did it impress itself to her imagination, that every night of her life the bleeding corpse presented itself to her when she first began to slumber… The impression that this accident made was indelible.23

  ‘Contrary to her wish’: she was to be reckoned with even if she did not prevail within the family. Of course the episode may be pure invention, but it sounds true, particularly the touch about the nightmares. The pattern was one she came to know well: poverty, motherhood and death juxtaposed, the vulnerable destroyed by those who should most have helped them.

  At fifteen, Mary was already a harsh judge of her parents for their social attitudes as well as their personal inadequacies; but they did not altogether destroy her faith in the possibility of domestic happiness: the ideal stayed at the back of her mind, masked for the moment by scorn. And there is no doubt that her family felt something unusual in her. So did Jane: why else keep her letters? But Mary did not know what to do with herself, and no one knew what to do with her. She was avid for life, as her grandfather and father had been, but she did not want to be settled in any way they could imagine for her; and the role of grown-up daughter at home was clearly not going to proceed smoothly.

  [2]

  Two Sorts of Education

  IN 1774, when Mary was fifteen, her father's financial situation forced him to move again. As she wrote to Jane later,

  the good folks of Beverley (like those of most Country towns) were ready to find out their Neighbours' faults, and to animadvert on them; – Many people did not scruple to prognosticate the ruin of the whole family, and the way he went on, justified them for so doing.1

  Despairing of success as a farmer for the time being at any rate, Mr Wollstonecraft settled the family at Hoxton, just north of his old Primrose Street home; but it was not felt as a homecoming for Mary or her younger sisters and brothers, who did not remember any London acquaintance or family and found themselves suddenly confined to a small suburban terrace house. Ned was better off; he was articled to a lawyer and came home at weekends only, to rule the roost: ‘taking particular pleasure in tormenting and humbling me’ wrote Mary.2

  Somehow she had gained the impression that she was entitled to a share in her grandfather's fortune. Her father may have led her to believe this in an endeavour to lay his hands on some of Ned's money; it would explain the later quarrel between the two men. But for the moment it simply meant that she undertook to resign what she imagined was her share of the money to her father in his need, an act of supposed martyrdom that was to rankle.

  With nothing congenial in her family, she looked about for new friends. Neighbours welcomed her, in particular an elderly couple called Clare who had no children of their own; he was a retired clergyman with a taste for poetry, so delicate that he almost never left the house, and mildly proud that his physical deformity was supposed to make him resemble Pope. Mrs Clare was active and hospitable, and they were both fond of the companionship of girls. They encouraged Mary to spend her time with them and gave her books to read: probably Milton and Shakespeare, Thomson and Pope, perhaps Johnson's Rasselas, with its message of quiet fortitude.

  As it happened, it was not only her formal education the Clares took in hand, but also her sentimental education. Another protégé of theirs, Frances Blood – Fanny – had lived in their house for some time and learnt from them some of the accomplishments proper to a young lady: sewing, drawing, a little music, poetry reading and the art of writing a pretty letter. The Clares held up Fanny as a model; but she had left them lately to return to her parents in South London. Mrs Clare offered to take Mary to visit her:

  She was conducted to the door of a small house, but furnished with peculiar neatness and propriety. The first object that caught her sight, was a young woman of slender and elegant form… busily employed in feeding and managing some children, born of the same parents, but considerably her inferior in age. The impression Mary received from this spectacle was indelible; and, before the interview was concluded, she had taken, in her heart, the vows of eternal friendship.3

  Thus, according to Godwin, the encounter ‘bore a resemblance to the first interview of Werther and Charlotte’. Fanny was eighteen to Mary's sixteen, slim and pretty and set apart from the rest of her family by her manners and talents. Mary could see in her a mirror-image of herself: an eldest daughter, superior to her surroundings, often in charge of a brood of little ones, with an improvident and drunken father (as it turned out) and a mother charming and gentle but quite broken in spirit.

  Fanny was a kindred being, but she was also superior, a creature of angelic appearance and goodness. She danced before Mary's eyes with a promise of happiness, exactly as Jane had done before. Fanny's love would make up for the injustices of life at home, and she might even teach Mary
to become as perfect as she was. Mary's determination to experience the ideal friendship rushed her into immediate commitment, and at first Fanny seemed eager to fill the role Mary assigned to her: there was a long initial period of discovery and enjoyment, shared enthusiasms, plans to meet whenever they could and teasing by their families over their urgent need to spend time together. What such a friendship meant to Mary we already know; to Fanny it was something much less exclusive and demanding. The fictional account Mary wrote of their relationship telescoped several years into a much shorter time, but it made clear that fairly soon she began to think she was offering her feelings at an unresponsive shrine once again; and while on the one hand she persisted in maintaining that she had found her ideal, on the other she began to complain that her hopes had ‘led her to new sorrows, and, as usual, paved the way for disappointment’.4 Fanny was no more able than Jane to sustain a passionate sentimental relationship of the kind Mary wanted; she found her eagerness greeted with an increasingly cool response. Everina and Eliza became as dear to Fanny as their sister; and there was a further barrier.

  Fanny's time with the Clares had underlined the painfulness of her position at home; with them, she had appeared as a young lady, whereas in fact the Bloods were really much poorer than the Wollstonecrafts, often in desperate straits for money. Mr Blood was incapable of finding or at any rate keeping a job; he could not even raise the money to get home to Ireland where he came from. (The idea of Ireland as a refuge from trouble that presented itself to the Wollstonecraft girls on several occasions later seems to have originated with the Blood family's enthusiastic belief that everything would be all right for them once they could get back there.) Dependence on the thoroughly undependable Mr Blood was a nightmare situation for Fanny, and to escape from such a family she knew only one way: she had to attract a man enough to make him overlook her family's deficiencies.