The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft

by Claire Tomalin

  A few more pupils arrived. Seeing how things were, Mrs Burgh pointed out that the house was far too big for its inmates, and suggested that the gaps might as well be filled with lodgers, who would at least contribute to the rent and the servants' wages. Mary had not imagined herself as a lodging-house keeper, but she was in no position to be anything but grateful for the proposal, and Mrs Burgh triumphantly produced a friend who needed rooms, and installed her with her three children. This was a Mrs Disney, almost certainly connected with more Dissenting females: John Disney was a Cambridge clergyman who left the established church in 1782 to join his brother-in-law Theophilus Lindsey, founder of the Unitarian chapel at Essex Street, close to Newington.

  Mary did her best as a landlady; as a schoolmistress she was a failure. Her letters, which discuss neighbours, callers, servants and lodgers freely enough, do not mention so much as the name of a pupil, although the ideas she had begun to acquire about education, filtered down from Rousseau and Thomas Day,* required close and constant supervision of each child. It was an approach that must have had its difficulties in a newly and uncertainly established school, and was perhaps more likely to lead to exasperation and frustration than any short-term success.

  When Everina and Eliza ran a school together in Dublin much later, Eliza was regarded with great affection by her small pupils, who remembered her gentleness and sugar-plums for years, but Everina had the reputation of a tartar: judging from Mary's own account of an ideal teacher in her Original Stories, she came closer to Everina. She might have dispensed justice, one feels, but never sugar-plums, unless they were intended to demonstrate the ill effects of gluttony.

  Even where pupils were not in question, the atmosphere of the house was uncertain. Eliza pined for her baby through the spring and summer, and mourned her after her death. Fanny's illness made her listless by day, and in the evenings put her into a state of febrile gaiety that seemed inappropriate to Mary. Everina was beginning to establish her lifelong reputation for shortness of temper. Privacy was lacking, as always in villages and institutional houses; everyone knows who calls on whom, who has quarrelled, who is in love, who is slighted. The kindest neighbours are not above treating one another as peepshows. When Mary received calls, as she began to, from local schoolmasters and clergymen who were disposed to admire her intelligence and battling spirit, it was observed. When she wished to talk on what she called rational subjects, she found the track of the conversation lost in the chatter of the other women of her household, drawn like steel filings to the room where the magnetic male presence was lodged. There were times when Fanny, her sisters and her lodgers all appeared quite simply as a crew of infuriating distractions and liabilities.

  Very occasionally she got away. A young schoolmaster called John Hewlett, who kept his establishment at Shackle-well near by and had ambitions to become a writer, found her interesting enough to carry her off early in her first summer at Newington to visit the great Dr Johnson, who was staying at Islington in the hope that the clean air of the suburbs might mend his health. Johnson was impressed by her conversation too, so much so that he invited her to visit him again. During this last year of his life, when he was seventy-four, he enjoyed the company of argumentative young women and liked to tease them, as old men often do. Boswell does not mention Hewlett or Mary, but records several other spirited conversations with women: ‘Women have a perpetual envy of our vices; they are less vicious than we are, not from choice, but because we restrict them’ the doctor informed the daughter of an Oxford friend shortly after his stay in Islington; he may have tried the idea out on Mary. But as it turned out she was more interested in Dr Price on natural virtue than Dr Johnson on natural vice. The two men had deeply opposed views on most subjects, and it was Price who won and kept her allegiance. She never saw Johnson again; by the time he returned to London he was too ill for callers, and he died in December 1784. She cherished the memory of meeting him, but turned decidedly against his view of life.

  Mary wanted to believe that individual willpower and energy could better the state of the world, and that human nature was improving, as Price and his friends thought. It seemed to her far preferable to hope that men might grow less vicious as the circumstances of their lives grew gentler, rather than accept that women were given an appearance of virtue only by the crack of the whip; and both the example and the stated beliefs of the Dissenters who surrounded her on the Green encouraged her in this optimistic view. Rational Dissenters, or Unitarians, worshipped reason and Locke; they represented the critical and sceptical tradition of protestantism without its black insistence on guilt.* They had thrown out the doctrine of the Trinity, the idea of original sin and the concept of eternal punishment, explaining them all as purely poetic myths. James Burgh's book The Dignity of Human Nature breathed the spirit of prudent optimism in which they were inclined to view this world and the next.3

  There was a blend of enthusiasm and gravity about the Rational Dissenters that was congenial to Mary; they were domestic, sober in the strict sense, hard-working, humane, respectful to their womenfolk. Whatever cynicism she had picked up earlier about the relations of the sexes was softened a little at Newington, where she began to hear the names of Dissenting women writers who were not afraid to tackle a variety of subjects: Ann Jebb, the wife of Price's friend and fellow reformer John Jebb, who wrote political articles for the press,4 and Anna Barbauld, daughter of the Dissenting Doctor Aikin, was a successful poet and educational writer. Mrs Burgh too, though her husband had preached the essential inferiority of women and the necessity of obedience to husbands, was a living example of a strong-minded and independent widow who could cope with life and deal with men on equal terms where practical matters were concerned.

  This provided an undercurrent of inspiration and hope for Mary even if it did not have very much effect on the continuous anxieties and problems of her day-to-day life. She knew that her own energy and willpower were the only things that kept the household going, and that the prospect of the school paying its way remained distant, but she could at least dream of becoming an intellectual woman.

  Fanny's health was growing steadily worse; the winter of 1784 threatened to bring as much distress as its predecessor. Then, providentially, Hugh Skeys made up his mind to summon her to Lisbon for the wedding. What prodded him to action after so many years is mysterious; it may have been Mary's persuasion.

  Fanny set off in January. In her sickness she had become increasingly difficult, and it was a relief to see her going to a better climate, but Mary missed her and feared for her once she was gone. This was indeed the end of the dream she had lived with for seven years; at least half the point of setting up the school had been that she and Fanny should live together. ‘I could as soon fly as open my heart to Eliza or Everina’ she wrote; and ‘without someone to love this world is a desert’.5

  The question of whom she might reasonably love was a difficult one. Soon after Fanny's departure, George also set off hastily for Ireland. He had abandoned his job without giving proper notice because he was accused, not for the first time, of fathering a child: Newington Green begins to look less and less like a Jane Austen village and more and more like a corner of Hogarth's world as one reads on in Mary's letters. The pregnant servant girl who accused George was more probably the victim of her employer, said Mary; but the Clares fussed lest their good name should become involved in this deplorable business, gossip proliferated, and Mary was obliged to ‘assume the Princess’, she wrote to George, when faced with rudeness from local busybodies. At least her sisters and the Poet shared her faith in George's innocence of paternity.

  Deprived of Fanny, and determined in her defence of George, she wrote him a series of tender letters, using him as her confidant. Her mind was harassed, she said, her heart broken, and she often wanted to die. In her illness, she had herself bled and blistered, neither process likely to raise depressed spirits.* Another blow fell when Mason, a favourite maid, had to leave. The Green had become a
Deserted Village, she lamented, and her description of her state of mind did at times sound like that of someone about to break down altogether: ‘my heart sometimes overflows with tenderness – and at other times seems quite exhausted and incapable of being warmly interested about anyone.’6

  Not all her grief was for Fanny, or her remorse for Eliza. There was trouble over several men too. What she thought of as tendrils of affection could evidently look like tentacles to those at the receiving end. She had grown fond of the clever and attractive John Hewlett, who was only three years her junior; there were many mentions of his kindness in her letters, and alongside one the wistful remarks that she knew herself to be ‘too apt to be attached with a degree of warmth that is not consistent with a probationary state, as I have learned on earth and have been sorely hurt’. Several times she compared Hewlett with Rousseau, whom she had begun to read and worship. When Hewlett married, she burst into a series of acid remarks about his wife – ‘how he is yoked!’ and so on; but he himself seems to have been perfectly satisfied with his choice, and only poor Mary suffered on his behalf.

  Another man mentioned in her letters to George was Neptune Blood, a cousin of her Bloods;7 of him she says, ‘perhaps I was as much to blame for expecting too much as he in doing too little – I looked for what was not to be found’. Then a Mr Church, a frequent caller during her first year on the Green, disappointed her too; he hardly came any more, offered Mary his opinion that she would never thrive in this world, and earned from her the description ‘prudent Church’ (although he lent her money). ‘Prudent’ was always one of her favourite terms of disparagement, often applied to her brother Ned, but there is no doubt that her own over-enthusiastic behaviour was sometimes responsible for an access of prudence in others. She remained baffled and hurt by her inability to find the ardently responsive friends or lovers she dreamed of.

  Fanny's letters from Lisbon were less than ecstatic about married life. Advanced tuberculosis did not prevent her from becoming pregnant immediately, and it was not comfortable to be dying and breeding at the same time under the sun of Portugal. The expected confinement was referred to only as ‘a certain occasion’ but loomed dreadfully in her and Mary's minds. Mary decided to go out to Lisbon. Skeys, whom she again castigated as ungenerous and conceited, was not consulted and she had to find the money for her passage. Mrs Burgh, learning of the problem, produced the fare for her and urged her to go; Mary suspected the money came from Dr Price, and prepared to set off with such encouragement. Mrs Cockburn, on the other hand, advised her not to go and even warned some prospective lodgers to keep clear; and from a practical point of view she may have been right, because Mary's presence was essential to keep things running even tolerably well in her household. As soon as she had gone Eliza and Everina quarrelled and were quite unable to manage either the school or the lodgers.

  The voyage to Lisbon in late November would have been wholly unpleasant to anyone without Mary's passion for travel, but she had her father's love of moving on, and treated the condition on board as a challenge:

  We were only thirteen days at sea. The wind was so high and the sea so boisterous the water came in at the cabin windows, and the ship rolled about in such a manner it was dangerous to stir.8

  Mary stirred constantly. Her fellow travellers were a seasick woman and a consumptive man,

  so opprest by his complaints that I never expected he would live to see Lisbon - I have supported him hours together gasping for breath, and at night if I had been inclined to sleep his dreadful cough would have kept me awake.9

  It was a cruel enough reminder of what she was travelling towards, but she rose to the occasion and spent thirteen days and sleepless nights nursing. Evidently there was a rewarding side to this devotion, since she used her experience of tending a feverish man as the basis for a mildly erotic episode in her first novel.

  Once the ship docked at Lisbon she forgot everything but Fanny, and when she arrived at her bedside she found her already in labour. It was obvious that she was past any help. Dismissed from the room where the double process of birth and death was struggling to complete itself, Mary tried to assume a religious resignation that did not come easily to her. She sat down to write to Eliza about Fanny, carefully avoiding any words that might seem ‘like signing her death warrant’.10

  A moment of hope came when the baby was born, frail but miraculously alive, and had to be found a wet-nurse. But within days first Fanny and then the child too were indeed dead; its life was of so little moment that Mary did not say whether it had been a boy or a girl.

  Mary's passionate love for Fanny, which had long since settled into a lesser, protective emotion, now flared up again; she could be restored to her position as ideal romantic friend and mourned with bitter sincerity. Mary and Skeys were drawn together for the first time in their common grief, and revised their views of one another after so many years of hostility: perhaps they both now realized they had more in common in their relationships with Fanny than they could acknowledge.

  Mary stayed on in Lisbon for several weeks, looking about with an intolerant eye at the Portuguese and English society, nuns and colonial-style ladies, neither to her taste. She and Skeys became lasting friends; but she had to return to her school, and she set off again in the New Year of 1786.

  This time her passage was longer, stormier and still more dramatic. At one point she took it on herself to force the reluctant captain to take aboard some French sailors whose own ship was in trouble. She was rightly proud of her strength of character on this occasion: sea-captains are not notorious for listening to a woman's bidding. They did not reach London again until February, and her first sight of her home town was as grim as anything she had seen in Portugal or at sea: the dockland prostitutes falling upon the sailors like so many birds of prey, a scene of ‘complicated misery’ that a young woman of her background should have affected not to notice at all. It impressed itself upon her and was not forgotten.

  She had been rushed through too many emotions and exhausting experiences in too short a time; but there was to be no relaxation at Newington. The school had dwindled in her absence almost to nothing, while her sisters quarrelled both with one another and with the lodgers. Mrs Disney left, disputing her bill and leaving it unpaid. Mary wrote to George that she was in extreme distress for money, and could therefore no longer help the Blood parents. She added that her eyesight was impaired – she took to wearing glasses – and her memory gone, and, once again, she hoped to die.

  At this moment Ned disclaimed responsibility for any of his sisters: they had chosen to defy him, and they must bear the consequences. George wrote suggesting that Mary should flee her creditors and join him in Ireland, and she did wonder again whether to try to set up a school in Dublin. But she rejected the idea in favour of a better one of her own: she would send the Blood parents across, so that George could take over responsibility for them.

  And in spite of her own desperate and deteriorating situation, she came up with one of her bursts of energy and inventiveness, and produced within weeks the £10 necessary for shipping Mr and Mrs Blood across the Bristol channel. The sum was an advance on a book, and it came from a friend of John Hewlett's, a publisher called Joseph Johnson, of St Paul's Churchyard. Johnson was another Dissenter with radical leanings who had published some of James Burgh's works, and who had a special interest in educational books. He was to become the most important man in her life, but for the moment Mary viewed him rather condescendingly, as a tradesman and a useful person to know. His money however solved one of her problems, and his acceptance of her manuscript encouraged her in the hope she might one day make a career as a writer.

  Like almost all her subsequent books, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters was written at high speed. It may well have been inspired in part by James Burgh's copious educational writings, which took small account of girls but did at least acknowledge the importance of encouraging them in rationality.11 It is easy enough to imagine Mrs Burgh u
rging Mary to fill in a few gaps left by her late husband. Mary's tone in her book fluctuated in a way that suggests there may have been some conflict in her own mind as to whether she represented the Dissenting tradition or the school of Rousseau and Day. On the one hand she adopted a deliberately severe pose over such matters as cosmetics, hair powder, card-playing and the theatre, and added that it was better for girls not to marry young (announcing for good measure that it was ‘sufficient for women to receive caresses, not to bestow them’). On the other, she held forth against the bad effects of teaching by rote, and premature Bible reading: better to read animal stories, she said, recommending one called The Perambulations of a Mouse.

  A striking omission from her book, as from her letters, was any mention of her own pupils. There were plenty of personal references, but they were almost all to herself. She never could write without inserting more or less veiled remarks about her own emotional state, and though they read a little curiously in the middle of an educational manual, they make it abundantly clear that she was far more interested in the state of her own life and the prospects that lay ahead of young women than in their years at school.

  Burgh had not thought it necessary to mention the subject of female employment at all, but it is the one point in Mary's book in which her arguments take fire. In the case of men, Mary said, ‘if they have a tolerable understanding, it has a chance to be cultivated’, but not so with women; and then, ‘few are the modes of earning a subsistence, and those very humiliating’. They were listed: companion, schoolteacher, governess, and a few trades which were ‘gradually falling into the hands of men, and are certainly not very respectable’. Probably she meant occupations such as hairdressing, millinery, mantua-making, midwifery and dentistry; all were undertaken by women, especially if they were the widows of men who had practised them, but none would have been considered suitable for someone of Mary's background. Governesses, she pointed out, had nothing to live on when they grew old unless ‘perhaps on some extraordinary occasion, some small allowance may be made for them, which is thought a great charity’. Schoolteachers might scrape together some money by taking on too many pupils if they had the chance but, as she knew full well, they would be lucky if they did.