The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft

by Claire Tomalin

  His uncommunicativeness persisted even after his death: he contrived to leave scarcely a scrap of his own writing to the world, and his correspondence, which must have been one of the most extensive and interesting of his day, disappeared too; probably he destroyed it himself. Even the compliments he received run to the impersonal. The nineteenth century hailed him as ‘the father of the book trade’, which shows in what respect he was held but scarcely throws a flood of light on his character. His most famous author, William Cowper, ventured the private opinion that, ‘though a bookseller, he has in him the soul of a gentleman’.2 Booksellers, like governesses, were scarcely expected to cultivate their souls, and in any case the tribute was paid sight unseen, on the basis of letters and contracts. (The poet did invite Johnson and Fuseli to visit him at Olney in February 1789, but there is no record of the visit taking place.) 3 Cowper's friend Newton, who did meet Johnson, allowed that ‘though not a professor’ he was not absolutely ignorant either.

  His obituarist, the journalist Nichols, drew a little closer to the man, giving him the character of a good and generous friend: ‘the kindness of his heart was… conspicuous in all the relations of his life’ and the calls of ‘friendship, kindred and misfortune’ always found him ready to answer. But on the other hand he possessed ‘a temper the reverse of sanguine… a manner somewhat cold and indifferent’ and was ‘not remarkable for the encouragement he held out to his authors’.4 The picture is one of caution and benevolence in roughly equal parts.

  Johnson was a bachelor. He suffered from chronic asthma. He had begun his professional career as a specialist in medical books, branched out into general literature and become concerned to produce cheap, plain editions of whatever he published in order to reach as large a public as possible; clearly he took the Enlightenment view of publishing as an efficient means of raising the general intellectual and moral tone of society. He became official distributor of the literature of the Unitarians5 and this kept him in constant touch with the Dissenting Academies and various provincial centres, with the result that his shop became a focus for the intellectual activities arising in them. It meant that he was in the thick of reforming and radical ideas from early days.

  By the time Mary appeared on his doorstep he was already a figure of influence, a better patron than any lord. Mary's very evident need of practical assistance touched his humanity; her emotional and dramatic personality must have appealed to him too: he sought and enjoyed the company of talkers and enthusiasts. She had the recommendation of her friendship with Dr Price and her recent bitter experience at the hands of the aristocracy, for whom Johnson had no more love than she did. It seems unlikely that he judged her a genius on the basis of Thoughts on the Education of Daughters or even her new manuscript, Mary. All the same, when she arrived in his shop he at once invited her to stay with him. And almost in the next breath he proposed to set her up in a house of her own, and keep her for an indefinite period. Her payment was to be the work she undertook for him.

  It was an extraordinary proposal for a middle-aged businessman (he was forty-nine) to make to a youngish woman; perhaps he was in a manic moment such as come to certain asthmatics. Mary, whose emotions most certainly ran in cycles, accepted without inquiring into his motives, and a state of joint euphoria descended on them both. Johnson became at once her best friend, sole support, banisher of gloom and obliterator of the stinging humiliations inflicted by the Kingsboroughs. With his encouragement she could take a completely fresh view of her future: free of money troubles and with an assured supply of useful and interesting work, she was to become a new kind of professional woman – ‘the first of a new genus’.6 Only a few months before she had been writing, with careless condescension, of ‘little Johnson’ in her letters; now her need and his generosity dissolved the phrase and the feeling away entirely.

  Purely as a physical description the ‘little’ was apt. Johnson was short and slight, and his asthma had not been helped by breathing the smoke of the City for the past thirty-six years. But in spite of poor health and deficient stature, he was an attractive man: a neat, curled wig presided over large, dark eyes; the jaw was strong, clean-shaven but shadowed with black beard, a narrow top lip above a full and smiling lower one. His clothes were dark too, and severely cut, though not without traces of conscious elegance. And indeed he was neither ostentatious nor mean in any aspect of his life.

  Like other ambitious publishers, he knew the value of keeping a welcoming dinner table, and his three o'clock gatherings were eagerly attended: ‘a sort of Menagerie of Live Authors’ they were called.7 The domestic arrangements at St Paul's Churchyard were in the care of a housekeeper; a few years before a Miss Johnson, no doubt his sister, had been with him, but she had now departed.8 A young man named Rowland Hunter, nephew by adoption only, was also part of the household and gave a hand with the business. Johnson's interest in women as anything other than friends was either extremely discreet or, more probably, nonexistent. Still he was obviously inspired by the idea of what he could do for Mary; her presence charmed him; together they set up for a while that society for mutual admiration which is a good part of love. They played at fathers and daughters.

  She was not his only new friend. He had just been persuaded into another departure from caution by a dazzlingly clever young Scotsman of twenty-five, Thomas Christie; Mary's arrival coincided with Johnson's decision to partner Christie in setting up a new monthly magazine. It was to be called the Analytical Review, and was to play an important part in Mary's life.

  Mary told Everina that she found her patron's manner rather stiff at times. She also felt obliged to keep discreetly quiet the fact that she was lodging under his roof; probably she was awkward about how their association might be interpreted, and he may have wanted to reassure her that his intentions were businesslike. Still, nothing was too much trouble for him. He offered to send for one of his own cousins from the north to come and live with her and act as her maid, and was even prepared to interest himself in the fates of her younger brothers and sisters. Kindly and delicately, while the summer weather lasted, he sent her off to visit first Everina in Henley and then Eliza at Market Harborough; and while she was away he prepared the small house he found for her at 45 George Street, just south of Blackfriars Bridge, within easy walking distance of St Pauls.*

  Her letters flew back from this trip out of town, chatty and even exuberant; by the time she returned to London in September she was ready to confide her most intimate emotions to him, and took to addressing him directly as ‘a father and a brother’. George Street was to be her home for the next four years, but 72 St Paul's Churchyard was the centre of her existence, the place where she was in touch with work and friends, where she dined almost daily and met more and more people with backgrounds and ideas resembling her own; the place where she could always turn even when depression and self-hatred plagued her again, as they inevitably did from time to time.

  For his part, Johnson shrugged off any misinterpretations there may have been about his setting up a young woman in a rent-free house. If reasons were required, there were sound business ones: the market for books aimed at women and children was expanding rapidly and the loyalty of a promising new female writer was worth gaining early in her career. He persuaded the elderly Mrs Trimmer and Mrs Barbauld, both of unimpeachable respectability, to call on Mary and encourage her; Anna Barbauld was already a model contributor to his educational list as well as a poet. He knew he would need editorial staff and reviewers for the Analytical; this was the sort of work Mary could usefully undertake.* And finally, it seems clear enough that he had a real interest in the advancement of women. Injustice and oppression of all kinds were repugnant to him; here was an opportunity of demonstrating his belief in their capacities in a practical way.

  His own life provided a good enough example of how to break out of a constricting framework and make a career on a new pattern. He was the second son of a farmer at Everton, near Liverpool; born a Baptist, he had s
uffered under the usual educational disabilities of Dissenters, and lacked the physical strength for farming even if he had enjoyed the prospect of inheriting his father's land. So, at the age of fourteen, he had come to London as an apprentice to the bookseller George Keith, stuck out his seven years and in 1760 set up his first shop, selling medical books in Fish Street, close to Guy's and St Thomas's hospitals. His interests widened rapidly; he was one of the cooperative group who commissioned Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets. In the Sixties he formed a close and crucially important friendship with a young Swiss writer who had just arrived in London, and whom he invited to come and live with him: this was Johann Heinrich Fuessli, better known as Henry Fuseli (his own adaptation of the name to suit his adopted country). Fuseli's scholarship and multitudinous enthusiasms - for ancient and modern poetry, for painting and sculpture, for art history and entomology, for Rousseau, for the English theatre – impressed Johnson and must have spurred him on to a much greater adventurousness in what he published, notably in the direction of producing translations of modern works. One of the first was Fuseli's own translation of Winckelmann's Reflections on the Paintings and Sculpture of the Greeks (in 1765); and in 1767 he also published, anonymously, Fuseli's Remarks on Rousseau, a witty, splenetic apologia written in the aftermath of the quarrel between Rousseau (‘the purest moralist, the most penetrating politician – and a good man’) and Hume (a ‘c---’ according to Fuseli).9

  Another aspect of the early friendship between Johnson and Fuseli could throw some light on the relationship of both men with Mary later. Fuseli was without doubt bisexual in his youth; he has left letters and poems in German that make this clear.10 Johnson, having left no personal records, has made it impossible to be precise about his private emotions, but it seems at least likely that he shared some of Fuseli's inclinations. The problems and fears of male homosexuals in England in the eighteenth century were very great; in 1780 two men convicted and sentenced to the pillory for sodomy were pelted to death by the crowd. When Burke, to his eternal credit, tried to intervene to mitigate such sentences he was accused of a personal interest and felt obliged to bring a libel action to clear his name.11 Beckford, whom Johnson and Fuseli both had dealings with, ran into enough trouble to force him to become a recluse; the rich and the aristocracy were not altogether immune from public disapproval, and found it wiser on the whole to go abroad at least as far as Rome to indulge such tastes. In France even the philosophes took the view that sodomy was unnatural and reprehensible, although they did not approve breaking on the wheel by way of punishment.12 Such a climate of opinion meant that men with any tendency towards homesexuality were forced at the very least into outward conformity, and often into concealing even from themselves what they felt.

  There is no direct evidence that Johnson was a homosexual by inclination; failure to marry, close friendship with Fuseli and the adoption of a young protégé (Rowland Hunter ultimately inherited a substantial sum of money and a share in the business) 13 are all perfectly explicable in other ways, and I do not want to labour the point beyond suggesting that, if Johnson was lacking in sexual feelings for women, it may have helped him to respect and love those women who aspired to something more than a purely sexual role in life (much as Edward Carpenter, for instance, did later).

  In fact his relationship with Mary might not have remained as smooth as it did if he had allowed her to eye him as a possible husband; the subject of marriage was an awkward one between them. Mary cracked jokes about ‘the world’ having married her to Johnson; and when he tried to marry her off to a young man she reacted with hysterical anger:

  I will not be insulted by a superficial puppy – His intimacy with Miss ––– gave him a privilege, which he should not have assumed with me – a proposal might be made to his cousin, a milliner's girl, which should not have been mentioned to me. Pray tell him that I am offended – and do not wish to see him again! – When I meet him at your house, I shall leave the room, since I cannot pull him by the nose. I can force my spirit to leave my body – but it shall never bend to support that body God of heaven, save thy child from this living death! – I scarcely know what I write. My hand trembles I am very sick sick at heart.14

  The mistake was not repeated, though Johnson was clearly pleased when Mary did acquire a husband and children of her own initiative.

  Early in their relationship he realized he must exercise a controlling discipline over her if she was not to overpower him; she was the sort of person, he remarked, whose mood preceded her into the room whenever she arrived, an extra presence that could not be ignored. The observation is affectionate, but he sometimes told her off for over-indulging herself emotionally; she in turn was quick to feel his disapproval, and struggled to apologize. One of her sorrowing and penitent letters ends disarmingly, ‘Allow me to love you, my dear sir, and call friend a being I respect.’15

  For the New Year holiday of 1788 he offered to have her two sisters to stay with him. She decided however to find a spare bed for them to share in her George Street house; she wanted to be good to them, but perhaps preferred that they should not trespass too much on her territory. Eliza departed reluctantly again in late January for Market Harborough, but Everina remained in London until February, when Mary dispatched her to Paris to learn the language with a family of well-to-do shopkeepers. At this point Mary made one of her many resolves never to have her sisters living with her again; she found them harder to bear than Johnson found her, or them. To Everina indeed he sent a merry postscript in a letter of Mary's, written as they walked to deliver it at the mail coach soon after she had gone to Paris: ‘You see what room she has left me, not to make love surely! only to express my good wishes for your happiness J.J.’16 The prim joke could be risked safely to Everina at a distance; but there was to be no lovemaking at close quarters.

  The first phase of Johnson's friendship with Fuseli had ended abruptly when fire ravaged the house they were sharing in Paternoster Row in 1770, destroying everything they owned. Fuseli used this as a spur to leave for Rome to study painting, and Johnson was fortunate enough to have other friends who were ready to assist him in acquiring new premises in St Paul's Churchyard. Here, without any partners, and supervising every aspect of the business himself, he began to build up his large list. By the mid-Seventies he was already publishing political pamphlets; the effect of one on a Bristol election was sharply noted by the Dean of Gloucester. He had also embarked on his educational list, and was publishing everything written by Joseph Priestley, through whom he would make his contacts with other members of the Lunar Society later: R. L. Edgeworth and Erasmus Darwin, and then through them the next generation, Maria Edgeworth and Thomas Beddoes, the fiercely radical feminist doctor who became Maria's brother-in-law.17 He was also publishing in partnership with the Warrington Academy press. But Johnson's biggest single commercial triumph was with William Cowper, whom he took on when he was wholly unknown and helped to make into the most widely distributed poet of his time by a policy of progressively cheaper reprints.18

  This sort of success made it easier for him to expand further in the direction of publishing humanitarian and radical writings: a perfect example of a publisher using his flair as a businessman to promote the causes he had at heart. There were not many oppressed groups among his contemporaries who did not find a champion under his imprint: slaves, Jews, Dissenters, women, victims of the game laws and press gangs, little chimney sweeps, college fellows barred from matrimony, animals ill-used, the disenfranchised and the simply poor and hungry. Names associated with reform projects and sympathies studied his list: not only Priestley, Beddoes and Thomas Christie, but also John Horne Tooke and John Cartwright the parliamentary reformers, William Roscoe of Liverpool, Thomas Cooper of Manchester, George Dyer of Cambridge, Tom Paine, William Godwin, William Blake, Mary Hays, Anna Barbauld, William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, the American Joel Barlow. Some were also published by other firms, but all appeared under Johnson's imprint at one time or anot
her. And there is little doubt that he was active in seeking political works. In 1794, for instance, he wrote to Anna Steward, who was not one of his authors but was a leading poet of the day, asking her for a poem deploring the political condition of the country. She refused: the in-teresing thing is that he took the trouble to ask her.19

  So Johnson's shop was a place for the radical and unconventional to gather, both Londoners and provincials passing through. The upstairs rooms became something like a club, where they were sure of a welcome and could talk in comfort late into the evening. For Mary there could have been nothing more congenial. She told George Blood: ‘You would love Mr Johnson if you knew how very friendly he has been to the princess… Whenever I am tired of solitude I go to Mr Johnson's, and there I meet the kind of company I find most pleasure in.’20 The Green had given her a foretaste of such people and talk, but here there were fewer elderly widows and clergymen to set the tone, and the younger generation was a good deal more inclined to kick its heels intellectually and push away all the old props. Price and Priestley had read the French philosophes, and corresponded with some of them too, without losing their religious faith; but their disciples, more intoxicated than they allowed themselves to be by a diet of Helvétius, Holbach, Voltaire, Turgot, d'Alembert and Rousseau, showed a distinct tendency to throw out religion. Price and Priestley preached the perfectibility of the human race as a philosophical adjunct to political reform; for others, the creed of perfectibility came to replace all other creeds, and the good of posterity became at least as important as the fate of the individual soul. Advances in education and a reshaping of the formal structure of society were expected to level everything up and bring about a golden age in the future. In America such a golden age was thought to be beginning already, and those who found English church and government too despotic began to emigrate across the Atlantic; during the next decade many Dissenters from all over England and Scotland were to go, still more to dream of going. There were even already a few canny American businessmen who realized there were profits to be made out of such dreams, by selling land in the wilderness to European idealists.