The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft

by Claire Tomalin

  She was not the only active disciple. In 1792 Thomas Beddoes printed a poetical Letter to a Lady on the Subject of Education that was judged too free in its sentiments to be distributed. Such was his concern for the condition of women that he used a woman compositor to set up his work: ‘employment for females is among the greatest desiderata of society,’ he wrote.5

  ‘Have you read that wonderful book, The Rights of Woman?’ Anna Seward was asking her correspondents in February;6 her accolade in itself was probably worth some sales, the equivalent of a favourable review in a weekly today. French, German and Italian translations were planned, and American editions soon appeared. The sensible thing for Mary to do now was to work hard on the second volume; instead, she dithered and dissipated her energies in writing reviews. ‘Her exertions were palsied, you know the cause’ said Johnson;7 she was still obsessed with Fuseli, and he was more inclined to laugh at her for her great book than admire her for it: ‘the assertrix of female rights’ is not quite the phrase of a devotee.8

  Her feelings were a torment to her, and the more insistently she expressed them the more Fuseli withdrew from her into mockery, indifference, the protection of his marriage. Mary claimed to respect the institution, but the time she spent with other friends did little to increase this respect. Paine had found marriage an impossible state to endure, Johnson was never even tempted by it; John Opie and his wife Mary, whom she saw a good deal of, were heading for disaster, for she was a flirt and he was indifferent to her.9 Ruth Barlow, abandoned in London while Joel went off to pay visits here and there, in the country and later abroad to see Lafayette, comforted herself by calling constantly on Mary and reading aloud Joel's love letters; Mary was not impressed.10 She herself boasted of a proposal of marriage from a ‘proper man’ with a fine house at this period, but only to say she had turned it down.11 In the same letter to her sister she mentioned that Fuseli had given Charles a present of £10; evidently it was understood in her family how Fuseli dominated her life and excluded all other possibilities for her.

  She may even have hoped that society's attitude to marriage would change; in France an easy divorce law was talked of, and she must have known that Thomas Christie, Johnson's partner, had brought over a French mistress, Catherine Claudine Lavaux, a married woman, to await the birth of his child in London; no doubt Catherine Claudine hoped to marry Christie once she had obtained a divorce.12 The folly of indissoluble marriage was a subject much discussed amongst her radical friends. Thomas Holcroft's novel Anna St Ives was published, and reviewed by Mary; it contained a portrait of a spirited radical heiress who managed to reconcile her duty to society with her sexual inclinations, and was entertained by her lover's meditations on a future state of society in which marriage should have ceased to exist altogether:

  Of all the regulations which were ever suggested to the mistaken tyranny of selfishness, none perhaps to this day have surpassed the despotism of those which undertake to bind not only body to body but soul to soul, to all futurity, in despite of every possible change which our vices and our virtues might effect.

  Holcroft was careful to explain that women would be well advised to retain the protection of the law until the world had arrived at a state in which men had ceased to be libertines, and in fact he ended the story with Anna's marriage. But this book was certainly interpreted as an attack on established morality.

  Anna St Ives's lover was the son of a steward who managed to better himself even in the current state of society, and only dreamed of a different future for mankind. But in January a group of London working men, led by a cobbler called Thomas Hardy, decided dreaming was not enough. They founded a club on the French pattern with the avowed intention of pressing for parliamentary reform, annual parliaments and votes for all men (women of course were not mentioned): it was called the London Corresponding Society. Hardy's inspiration had come, he said later, from a Dissenting Minister who lent him books by Price, Cartwright and Jebb. The government was alarmed at this rousing of a class of men who had been silent for so long, especially when other clubs began to be formed all over England and Scotland; and what they particularly disliked was the link between working men and educated Dissenters. In the middle of February the second and more inflammatory part of Paine's Rights of Man appeared; it was distributed all over the country and passed eagerly from hand to hand. In the same month Johnson brought out Barlow's Advice to the Privileged Orders, which adopted the same stance as Paine and was received with ill grace by those for whom it was intended. Only Fox teased the House of Commons by making flattering references to it. Barlow followed up his prose suggestions with a poem entitled The Conspiracy of Kings in which he held up his native country for admiration and issued some solemn warnings both to ‘Burke, degenerate slave… the sordid sov'reign of the letter'd world’ and to the monarchs of Europe (Louis XVI was rumoured to be working on a translation of Burke):

  The hour is come, the world's unclosing eyes

  Discern with rapture where its wisdom lies;

  From western heav'ns th'inverted Orient springs,

  The morn of man, the dreadful night of kings.

  Dim like the day-struck owl, ye grope in light,

  No arm for combat, no resource in flight;

  If on your guards your lingering hopes repose,

  Your guards are men, and men you've made

  your foes… &c.13

  Mary naturally applauded both Paine and Barlow. At the same time her own book brought her a distinguished visitor in February: Talleyrand, Bishop of Autun, an aristocratic revolutionary who had come to England to win support to his cause. His mission was semi-official – he was supposed to be buying horses for the French army – and he was travelling with a party of friends with similar backgrounds and allegiances.

  Talleyrand was as cynical and corrupt a man as ever rode the course of a revolution, but to Mary at this moment he appeared in the welcome guise of a progressive bishop, a figure dear to left-wing idealists for his ability to attach a normally conservative God to the radical programme. The Vindication was actually dedicated to the Bishop of Autun, partly out of respect for what he stood for and had already written on the subject of education, and partly in the hope that he would be instrumental in improving the education of girls in France. Thus complimented, and always prepared to inspect a bluestocking, Talleyrand made an appointment to call at Store Street.

  He may have been amused at what he found: wine offered in teacups by a high-minded, intense and talkative spinster. The conversation was in English, as Mary's spoken French was not fluent, and unfortunately neither party recorded it. Talleyrand considered virtuous women a little ridiculous, and he was a snob, but he knew how to be charming to anybody.* And at least the welcome accorded at Store Street made a change from the reception given him at the English court, where the King froze and the Queen simply turned her back and walked away. Nor indeed were Pitt and his fellow government officials in the least disposed to be swayed from unsympathetic neutrality by anything Talleyrand had to say.14 The only other warm reception he had was from Mary's Dissenting friends, who gave a dinner for him in Hackney, to which Fox and Sheridan were also invited.15 Talleyrand was accompanied on this occasion by his friend Madame de Genlis and her adopted daughter Pamela; Pamela's beauty was toasted, and Stéphanie de Genlis wore a real stone from the Bastille, polished and set in gold, around her neck.16 Had the term radical chic been invented it would have done duty that evening.*

  In March the French party dispersed. In their wake another political club was formed in London, the Friends of the People, with a membership derived largely from the middle classes and the aristocracy; many of the Hackney diners joined. The old Society for Constitutional Information of 1780 was revived and began to cooperate with the London Corresponding Society. Barlow joined the SCI and became a leading spirit. In May the King issued a proclamation against seditious meetings and writings, which put political clubs, publishers and writers all into a potentially dangerous pos
ition. Priestley, still protesting that his concern was not with politics but religion, nevertheless encouraged his eldest son to take up French citizenship: he himself was awaiting the result of Fox's new appeal for the Dissenters in the House before making up his mind whether to leave for America. On 11 May Fox did propose yet again the repeal of the acts barring Dissenters from civil rights; Burke seized the opportunity to make one of his more violent speeches.

  He accused the Unitarians of being a political faction, bent on subverting the state and rebuilding it on the French model; he referred to ‘the Constitutional, the Revolutional and the Unitarian Societies’ in one breath, likening them to loathsome insects that might, if they were allowed, grow into giant spiders as large as oxen, building cables in which to catch everyone who opposed them. Even this grisly image did not exhaust Burke's vituperative powers; he named Priestley and Price (although he was dead) as hot and dangerous men; he said the Dissenters formed one fifth of the nation and made no attempt to dissociate themselves from their dangerous leaders, who were prepared to call in foreign forces to help them in their plots; and he added that, like Hannibal, they swore their very children at the altar. The implication, of course, was that they swore them to treachery.17 After such oratory the House not surprisingly voted against any relief for Dissenters.

  Meanwhile Paine took a trip into his native East Anglia, alarming the gentry and encouraging gatherings of the many flourishing Revolution Societies: at this time there was said to be one in every village. While he was there, he was served with a summons for sedition. He returned to London to appear in court in June, only to find his trial postponed. And still the membership of the clubs increased: in London, in the industrial centres of the north, in Scotland where Christie's friend Thomas Palmer was active in assisting the working men of Dundee. The government sent out spies and opened the mail of those they suspected of plotting its overthrow: Paine, Talleyrand, Johnson's old friend and author Horne Tooke, whose after-dinner toasts and singing of Ça ira were a noted feature of the SCI meetings. But the mood of the English radicals remained earnestly optimistic, and the singing of Ça ira continued.

  In midsummer Mary, Johnson and Fuseli agreed to make a trip to France together, as so many of their friends had already done. The plan was to set off in August for a stay of about six weeks, and whatever private qualms Johnson may have entertained about the effects of such an expedition on the mutual relationships of the group, he did not express them; in any case, Sophia was to be of the party. In preparation for the adventure, Mary decided to send her foster-child Ann to Ireland, where Everina was willing to take charge of her; later she went to Ruth Barlow, and after that Mary seems to have lost touch and interest.

  Success had brought other changes in her. Her brother Charles remarked on how handsome she had suddenly become: she had not bloomed with youth, but with success she began to. She gave up her insistence on the essential virtue of dowdiness; perhaps the sight of her own cross and hungry-looking schoolmarm's face in the Roscoe portrait had been enough to change her mind. She also had some money to spend on herself for the first time in 1792, and in spite of her self-appointed role as spiritual mate to Fuseli she must have noticed the sort of women he liked to draw. As it happened a general change of fashion, towards an informal and even childlike look, was taking place; it suited Mary as the stiff and elaborate styles of the Eighties had never done, and if she could not approach the appearance of an Emma Hamilton in her deliciously negligent clothes, she could at least let her hair take on its natural wisps and curls, cut it in a fringe like a girl's and adopt a plain, wrapped dress.* It did her no good with Fuseli, but allowed her to appear in a new light to those less determined to keep alive the memory of her beaver hat and bedraggled days. Amelia Opie's description says Mary was regarded as plain by her own sex, but attractive to men: tall, with a good figure, irregular features, a pleasant expression, soft, light hair curling over her cheeks; hazel eyes, long lashes and fair skin.18

  The Paris party set off as planned and got as far as Dover, but there they paused. There was news of trouble from France; Paris was in confusion and probably dangerous. It was no time for foreigners to be visiting and, although Mary would gladly have gone on, the others were less inclined to be bold. Presently they all returned to London.

  It was in the disappointment and désœuvrement of this moment in a dusty, half-empty London in August that Mary made her final bid to link herself with Fuseli. She called on Sophia, who had so far taken the line of deliberate, dignified ignorance demanded by the situation, and amazed her by asking to be admitted to the household on a permanent basis. Her wish, she explained, was to be his spiritual partner; she was not trying to supplant Sophia's position as the legal wife of the flesh, but she felt herself truly united to Fuseli by a mental affinity. She could no longer bear to live separately. She must see him every day.

  Whether she had warned Fuseli that she intended to spring such a proposal on Sophia we do not know; he had a habit of carrying her letters about in his pockets unopened, or so he told a friend later, so that he may have received a warning without heeding it. Perhaps he would not have bothered to intervene in any case, but trusted Sophia to cope. As it was, she broke into understandable fury as soon as Mary had finished her absurd and innocent request; she sent her packing and told her on no account ever to return to the house again.

  It was a simple enough solution to the situation that had caused Mary so much anguish, and she retreated at once, shrinking into herself as though she had been sprinkled with acid. Fuseli did nothing at all; doubtless he was a little nervous of a scandal. Somebody – Johnson probably - persuaded Mary to leave town for a while. Despondent and humiliated, she did so.

  She told herself that what she had wanted was quite reasonable, but whether she believed it in her heart is another matter. She felt that Fuseli had treated her badly: what had begun in pleasure and excitement had become a power struggle in which she had become increasingly exposed and vulnerable as he grew stronger and more ruthless. Perhaps that was the essence of any sexual relationship. When she arrived back in September, she found a parallel drama taking place amongst her friends. Thomas Christie's mistress had borne him a daughter at the end of July; the parents had named her Julie. There can scarcely have been a more perfectly endowed revolutionary baby than this Julie Christie, child of free love, born to a Unitarian radical Scotsman and a Parisian adulteress, in the heat of the London summer of 1792, and named for the sublime and sentimental heroine of the Nouvelle Héloïse. But now Christie proceeded to behave less like Saint-Preux than the author of the Confessions. When little Julie was six weeks old and the divorce laws were on the point of being passed in France, enabling Catherine Claudine to be legally rid of her husband at last, he announced that he himself was to be married to an English carpet heiress, Rebecca Thomson of Finsbury Square. Whether she knew about Catherine Claudine and the baby at this stage is uncertain; probably not. But Christie was confident that he could bring everyone round. He was also strongly motivated by a chronic shortage of money. Somewhat tactlessly perhaps he carried Rebecca off to Paris for a wedding trip, taking his sister too, in spite of the news of massacres and the refugees pouring into England.

  In October there was new sadness for Mary when her brother Charles travelled north to Liverpool to sail for America at last. She was bitterly upset at the parting – Charles was her favourite in the family, and she never saw him again – but she had to swallow this ‘bitter pill of life’ too.19

  Paine had now decided to return to Paris rather than linger in England to face his trial. Johnson was busier than ever, distributing unprecedented numbers of pamphlets with titles calculated to provoke the government: ‘Is all we Want, Worth a Civil War?’ was one. The clubs were pressing hard for a National Convention to be called in England, and the Analytical gave its support to this idea and deplored the folly of the parliamentary parties in refusing to entertain it. Barlow, shuttling between Paris and London, produced an
other pamphlet, this time addressed ostensibly to the French Convention (albeit in English), urging them to establish a truly democratic republic on humane and elevated principles: public education for all, no death penalty, no standing army, no colonies. Mary told Roscoe how much she approved of Barlow's ideas, but it must have become increasingly clear that there was no immediate prospect of their being adopted in England at any rate.

  The news of massacres of priests and prisoners in Paris produced faltering and revulsion amongst many English sympathizers. Cowper despaired of the revolutionary cause now, Blake laid aside his red cap of liberty and Anna Seward, the perfect barometer of middle-class opinion, announced that she found Burke more persuasive than she had done at first reading and was ‘sick of mischievous oratory’. Soon she was in full cry against Priestley and wishing he would leave the country. But he too was experiencing some doubts about the French; he wrote to Stone lamenting their public debates,20 and declined an invitation to become a member of the new Convention, pleading poor French and the old excuse that theology was his field, not politics.

  Mary adopted a brisk tone on the massacres; she wrote to Roscoe,

  let me beg you not to mix with the shallow herd who throw an odium on immutable principles, because some of the mere instrument of the revolution were too sharp. – Children of any growth will do mischief when they meddle with edged tools. It is to be lamented that as yet the billows of public opinion are only to be moved forward by the strong wind, the squally gusts of passion.21