The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft

by Claire Tomalin

  I remember the time when my desire of seeing you was repressed by fear – but as soon as I read your letters from Norway, the cold awe which the philosopher has excited, was lost in the tender sympathy called forth by the woman. I saw nothing but the interesting creature of feeling and imagination.11

  By now her personal history was beginning to be fairly widely known, and at this stage people were more inclined to sympathize than condemn her. Coleridge's friend Thomas Poole, for instance, who had been an admirer of Mary's work for some years, wrote to a young schoolmistress he corresponded with:

  I have heard with pain from my sister Mrs Wolstonecraft's story… It is a sublime though melancholy instance of the injustice of Providence, that we seldom see great talents, particularly that class which we peculiarly denominate genius, enjoying an even tenour of human happiness… In their moments of mind… they form plans which would be practicable only if those moments were of continued duration; but in their career they feel like other mortals the sad burdens of mortality, and these being overlooked in their scheme of life, in the form of various passions they enter the fenceless field, making unbounded havoc. What a striking instance of this is Mrs Wolstonecraft! What a striking instance is my beloved friend Coleridge!12

  Poole concluded that ‘people of genius ought imperiously to command themselves to think without genius of the common concerns of life’ – a thought that would be echoed many, many times by English readers as they surveyed with a mixture of intense disapproval and covert envy the erratic and self-indulgent lives of so many of their writers.

  Her name appeared before the public in another context in January, when the letters of John Hurford Stone to his brother William were read out at length in court during William's trial for treason. Sheridan spoke for his innocence, Mr Barbauld stood up stoutly as a character witness, and William, patently innocent of anything worse than trying to dissuade his brother from harebrained schemes of invasion, was acquitted; but John's letters were incriminating enough to make it impossible for him to return to England, and Mary's family no doubt winced as they heard of her presence at revolutionary Christmas festivities in Paris during the Terror.13 Political feeling in England was running higher and higher. As Mary put in the postscript of a letter to Hamilton Rowan at this time, with more feeling than regard for grammar, ‘The state of public affairs here are not in a posture to assuage private sorrow.’14

  At the end of October 1795, the same time she had made her attempt to drown herself, a small riot had taken place in London in which a crowd surrounded the royal coach and threw a stone at the king. Food was short all over the country, partly because of the bad harvests and partly because of the war. The men who attacked the king were heard to shout: ‘Peace’, ‘Down with George’, ‘No Pitt’, ‘No War’, and, most pointedly perhaps, ‘Bread’. Shortages had swelled the membership of the political clubs, and for a while the fiercer leaders of the London Corresponding Society commanded a good following. When the government was able to prove that a single member of the crowd who had frightened the king was also a member of the Corresponding Society, it used this as a pretext for suppressing all clubs.

  In mid-December two acts were passed in Parliament which made political meetings of more than fifty people illegal and speeches or writings against the king or constitution treasonable. The Two Acts outraged all democrats, even though some were less keen on militancy than others. Godwin had written during the autumn a pamphlet, published by Johnson and discreetly signed simply ‘By a Lover of Order’ (which deceived nobody). ‘Be tranquil. Indulge in the most flattering prospects. Be firm, be active, be temperate,’ he advised, insisting that all would inevitably turn out well in the long run and that it would be a pity to bring violence to hurry things up, as the French had done. The activities of the Corresponding Society were calculated, in Godwin's view, ‘sooner or later to bring on scenes of confusion’.15 The pamphlet produced a certain breach in the ranks of the radicals, some of whom abandoned all hope of justice in Great Britain. Thomas Christie's uncle left to settle near Priestley in the American wilderness, while Thomas himself found his situation so bad that he too decided to set off on a long business trip to Surinam.

  Mary was still undecided about her own future. At the end of January 1796 she was far from calm, as her letter to Hamilton Rowan shows:

  Though I have not heard from you I should have written to you, convinced of your friendship, could I have told you any thing of myself that would have afforded you pleasure – But what can I say to you – I am unhappy - I have been treated with unkindness – and even cruelty, by the person from whom I have had every reason to expect affection – I write to you with an agitated hand – I cannot be more explicit – I value your good opinion – and you know how to feel for me – I looked for something like happiness – happiness! in the discharge of my relative duties – and the heart on which I leaned has pierced mine to the quick – I have not been used well – and I live, but for my child – for am weary of myself – When I am more composed I will write to you again, mean time let me hear from you – and tell me something of Charles – I avoid writing to him, because I hate to explain myself – I still think of settling in France, because I wish to leave my little Girl there – I have been very ill – Have taken some desperate steps – But now I am writing for independence - I wish I had no other evil to complain of than the necessity of providing for myself and child – do not mistake me – Mr Imlay would be glad to supply all my pecuniary wants; but, unless he returns to me himself I would perish first – Pardon the incoherence of my style. I have put off writing to you from time to time, because I could not write calmly. It would afford me the sincerest satisfaction to hear that you are reunited to your family, for I am your affectionate and Sincere friend, Mary Imlay.16

  It did not occur to her to write a formal or even a discreet letter to Hamilton Rowan; he was not a very old friend, but he was bound to her by their shared experience of crisis in France, and by their common political views. Though she found it intolerable to communicate with her own family, she wanted to establish with him the facts of her virtue and the injury done to her.

  At the end of February Imlay returned from Paris and she inevitably found him at the Christies' one evening when she was calling with Fanny. Rebecca tried to warn her as she came along the corridor, but she entered the room determinedly and led Fanny up to him where he sat. Confronted in public by a bewildered little girl and a reproachful woman, he suggested that all three should retire to another room for a talk, and as usual found it impossible to be as harsh face to face as in a letter. He promised to have dinner with Mary the following day; for the last time she allowed herself to believe that a reconciliation might be possible. But the dinner led to nothing but disappointment, and the next day she left her lodgings and went to stay for a month with a woman friend, a Mrs Cotton, in Berkshire. And at last the affair was finished, and she could write to him, ‘I part with you in peace’.17

  On her return to London in March she met him by chance in the New Road (now the Euston Road). He was on horseback, but he dismounted and walked with her for a while and she found herself able to keep calm. It was their last encounter.*

  Now, although she still kept all her furniture in store, she decided to change her lodgings again: it seems probable that, with Christie's departure, Rebecca was less often in town, and apart from her Finsbury Place had no charms for Mary. She moved west, settling with Fanny and Marguerite in Cumming Street, off the Pentonville Road. Here the land begins to rise out of London towards Islington. It was a pretty semi-rural spot then, beside a church which still retains its green graveyard today amid the acres of brick and asphalt that now surround it. Here she was visited by Mary Hays, eager to fill the role of best friend, though she was unable to share Mary's memories of Paris or enter into her grief with quite the same understanding as Rebecca Christie. And here Mary's resolve to forget Imlay led her into a characteristically impulsive and direct action: from Cumming
Street she set out on the morning of 14 April 1796, to call alone and uninvited on William Godwin at his near-by lodgings in Chalton Street, Somers Town.

  [16]

  A Social Round

  MARY'S call at Chalton Street in Somers Town marked her readiness to become a leading lady amongst the London intellectuals once again. There had been a prologue to this moment in January, before her trip to the country, which may have helped to give her courage; Mary Hays had invited her to a small party at her lodgings in order to renew her acquaintance with William Godwin and Thomas Holcroft. Godwin accepted the invitation with the comment that he would be happy to meet Mrs Wollstonecraft (he did not call her Mrs Imlay) in spite of the harsh things she had amused herself with saying about him. Perhaps she had joined in the criticism of his ‘lover of order’ pamphlet; it had been attacked in the Analytical where she was known to work. Nevertheless, both men were pleased to be invited.

  They enjoyed the company of women. Holcroft's third wife had died in 1790, and when his ancient father wrote asking if he planned to remarry he had answered despondently that he seemed to have had his share of womankind already, and that it was not easy in any case to find another suitable wife at his age. By 1796 he was fifty-one and still looking; Godwin was only forty and a bachelor. As a young man he seems to have taken no interest at all in women, absorbed in his religious and intellectual life, but lately he had begun to hover about them with a sort of nervous enthusiasm: he had even attempted to seduce a young married woman, Maria Reveley, a couple of years before. Mr Reveley had proved less philosophical about the affair than Godwin expected, and insisted that it be abandoned before resuming his friendship.1

  Mary Hays's intentions in arranging her party however were sociable and friendly rather than matchmaking. It is also possible that she was hoping to fire the two eminent writers with a greater enthusiasm than they had so far shown for the cause of women's rights, by renewing their contact with its leading English exponent. But it appears that Mary Imlay held her tongue on that subject for the time being. Possibly she had developed an instinct which told her it was not a theme to dwell on in the company of men, however sympathetic they might be in theory.

  Holcroft was a sentimental and idealizing, not at all a practical feminist. He had portrayed a series of high-spirited girls in his plays and novels, girls who did not panic when their horses bolted, girls who could quell would-be rapists by sheer force of personality, girls who browbeat their parents and reformed their foolish lovers, but none of these girls aspired to serious study or useful employment, and all were safeguarded by money.2 He dodged the real problems for women altogether. Godwin's work showed even less evidence of a feminist sympathy. The attempt to rationalize sexual relations in Political Justice simply sidestepped the fundamental issue of economic dependence. Indeed it is possible to see in it a deep uneasiness in the face of something intractable: women threatened to act as pieces of grit in the otherwise smooth-running machinery of the ideal state.

  Mary Hays had tried to take Godwin up on his insistence that independence was the first necessity for the good life, asking him how a woman was to arrive at independence:

  Why call woman, miserable, oppressed, and impotent woman – crushed, and then insulted – why call her to independence – which not nature, but the barbarous and accursed laws of society, have denied her? This is mockery! Even you, wise and benevolent as you are, can mock the child of slavery and sorrow!3

  The passage comes from Emma Courtney, the novel she brought out in 1796, in which Godwin figured as the philosopher Mr Francis; some of his actual letters were transcribed. But Mr Francis was unwilling or unable to answer the heroine's (or the author's) anguished demands as to what an unmarried woman who wished to earn an honest living should do. And when Mary Hays complained vehemently and asked more questions, Godwin grew uneasy and warned her she was in danger of becoming unbalanced. To this she produced a very reasonable further reply:

  While men pursue interest, honor, pleasure, as accords with their several dispositions, women, who have too much delicacy, sense, and spirit, to degrade themselves by the vilest of interchanges, remain insulated beings, and must be content tamely to look on without taking any part in the great, though often absurd and tragical drama of life. Hence the eccentricities of conduct, with which women of superior minds have been accused – the struggles, the despairing though generous struggles, of an ardent spirit, denied scope for its exertions! The strong feelings, and strong energies, which properly directed, in a field sufficiently wide, might – ah! what might they not have aided? forced back, and pent up, ravage and destroy the mind which gave them birth.4

  Godwin let the subject lapse; what more could he say? It was not however necessary for him to express perfect sympathy with the views of Mary Hays or Mary Imlay in order to be of interest to them. He was now at the height of his fame. In Hazlitt's phrase, ‘he blazed as a sun in the firmament of reputation’.5 Political Justice had made his name as a philosopher, just as he had hoped. His crucial intervention (with a newspaper article that undermined the prosecution) during the treason trials of 1794, when Holcroft, Home Tooke, Thomas Hardy and a number of other democrats stood in danger of their lives had further increased his stature. Even those who disagreed with his political opinions admired the hypnotic power of his latest book, Caleb Williams, a novel set against an English landscape depicted in terms of nightmare. Godwin refused to see his country as the libertarian paradise the establishment insisted it was.

  He had a large circle of friends; scarcely a day passed without his being consulted, or receiving admiring callers, or being invited out. He had in fact stepped in to fill the position of intellectual leadership left vacant amongst the English democrats by the death of Price and the emigration of Priestley. He fell short of the moral majesty of their generation: where they had been innocent, he sought, strenuously and sometimes embarrassingly, to be candid; where they were sustained by faith in God, he found himself increasingly disappointed with mankind. Where they had been scientists, mathematicians and ministers, leading quiet personal lives, he was that more vulnerable figure, the man of letters dependent on his pen for his bread. He could be vain, pompous and slippery. He and Holcroft, both firmly persuaded of the power of beneficent mind to overcome physical and emotional problems, displayed in practice a prickly querulousness in their dealings with other people, and were repeatedly wounding one another's feeling too.6

  Still, Godwin was hugely admired. Holcroft was less popular, and some of his contemporaries found him a blustering bore. He was short-tempered, partly perhaps because of his determination to ignore his own physical symptoms of pain and fatigue: he was a Christian Scientist avant la lettre. But he was also a tender and humorous man. His best writing was informal; he kept a notebook in which he entered his observations of human nature, noting with delight (for instance) that the prostitutes of Newman Street, where he lived, invited God's assistance when they prayed for fine weather, the better to walk the streets in comfort.

  As a militant atheist, he refused to instruct his children in Christianity; they were to be liberated from all superstition – an insistence that shocked most of his acquaintance. And as it happened he suffered a fearful tragedy with his only son, a clever, restless boy who ran away repeatedly and finally stole money from his father in order to emigrate. Holcroft pursued him to the ship, and the boy shot himself dead before his eyes. Godwin was present when it happened, and the horror of it remained a silent bond between them.

  Mary and Holcroft developed a warm affection and respect for one another. She did nothing to provoke his temper, she appreciated his humanity and sense of humour and the strenuous effort of self-education his life had been. Probably she was not shocked by the religious ignorance of his children. Her own little book of lessons for Fanny7 contained no mention of God or any religious precept. She shared some of his belief that willpower could control bodily pain, and above all she must have sympathized with the bereavements he h
ad suffered.

  Still, it was Godwin Mary chose to call on. He was in a better position to be professionally helpful to her; he was the more eminent; he had no children or previous experience of women; he was of the same generation and the same world. She found she had stumbled into a ‘situation’ of sorts when she was quickly introduced to two other ladies who were dividing between them the attention of both Holcroft and Godwin. One was a widow in her early forties, the actress, playwright and novelist Elizabeth Inchbald; she is supposed to have looked like a perfect blend between a duchess and a milkmaid, and she had a sharp tongue and a ready wit. The other was Amelia Alderson of Norwich, a clever, pretty girl in her twenties, full of what she herself described as ‘animal spirits’.8 Amelia wrote an account of the position she found herself in when she visited London early in 1796, for the delectation of a married friend at home:

  Godwin drank tea and supt here last night; a leave-taking visit, as he goes tomorrow to spend a fortnight at Dr Parr's. It would have entertained you highly to have seen him bid me farewell. He wished to salute me, but his courage failed him. ‘While oft he looked back and was loth to depart.’ ‘Will you give me nothing to keep for your sake, and console me during my absence,’ murmured our philosopher, ‘not even your slipper? I had it in my possession once, and need not have returned it!’ This was true; my shoe had come off, and he had put it in his pocket for some time. You have no idea how gallant he is become; but indeed, he is much more amiable than ever he was. Mrs Inchbald says, the report of the world is that Mr Holcroft is in love with her, she with Mr Godwin, Mr Godwin with me, and I am in love with Mr Holcroft! A pretty story indeed! This report Godwin brings to me, and he says Mrs I. always tells him that when she praised him I praise Holcroft. This is not fair in Mrs I. She appears to be jealous of G's attention to me, so she makes him believe I prefer H. to him. She often says to me, ‘Now you are come, Mr Godwin does not come near me.’ Is not this very womanish?9