The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft

by Claire Tomalin

  Epilogue

  EXCEPT in her younger daughter, Mary's talent did not appear again in the family, and none of the Wollstonecrafts flourished. Her father died in 1803 in Laugharne. He had not altered the will he made in 1791 in which he asked her to settle his debts for him, and he left nothing but a horse and a few cows. The only one of his children who tried to claim anything was James; he had been rudely rejected by his adopted country in the autumn of 1798 and imprisoned in the Temple, from which Mary had seen Louis driven to his trial six years before. Appeals to Talleyrand and John Hurford Stone were of no avail: ‘ainsi me voilà renvoyé dans mon pays, que mes opinions m'ont fait quitter, et rejeté d'une patrie devenue la mienne par adoption,’ he complained.1 He returned reluctantly to England, managed to rejoin the Navy in spite of his opinions, and died at sea three years after his father.

  In 1809 Joseph Johnson died: Fuseli wept bitterly at the news.2 Johnson directed that a bond for two hundred pounds in his possession should be returned to William Godwin ‘to be applied by him to the use of Fanny Imlay who is minor in his care’.3 Probably Fanny saw little enough of the money. When she was twenty-two she killed herself, swallowing laudanum in a Swansea inn she had travelled to alone, after Everina and Eliza had refused to take her to live with them and her existence in the Godwin household had become intolerable to her. It was a more efficient and whole-hearted enactment of her mother's suicide attempts.

  Fanny's younger half-sister Mary had some of her parents' brilliance, and some of their gift for scandal and tragedy. Her marriage to Shelley left her with one small son, Percy, to whom she determined to give as conventional an education as possible. When it was urged that he should be taught to think for himself, she exclaimed, ‘Oh God, teach him to think like other people,’ and sent him to Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge.

  Everina and Eliza ran a school together in Dublin, quarrelling and complaining a good deal, until Eliza's death in the 1830s. Everina then returned to London and took lodgings in Pentonville. Mary Shelley felt obliged to be kind although she disliked her; once she even took her to visit Godwin. Joseph Johnson's protégé Rowland Hunter was also attentive, lending her books and talking over his memories with her. She continued to lament Mary's residence in Paris and her subsequent union with Godwin; she never mentioned Fanny in her letters, but commented that young Percy Shelley at least seemed to be free from ‘immoral failings’. In 1841 she announced that she was writing a book, but by this time her handwriting had grown enormous, suggesting failing eyesight, and she was not clear in her mind either. She died in 1843.

  Ned's two children, Elizabeth and Edward, who had suffered so badly from the notoriety of their aunt Mary, both grew up into strait-laced conservatives. After the early deaths of their parents Edward went out to Lisbon and then to South America on business, sending his sister querulous letters and the present of a parrot to cheer her up. He then decided to go into partnership with another young Englishman, Alexander Berry, whom he had met in Lisbon, and the two of them agreed to settle in New South Wales and run a timber and tobacco business, using convict labour. Presently they sent for Elizabeth to join them; she married Berry in 1827, when she was forty-six. According to Berry's testimony she regarded herself as his ‘monitor and conscience’. Edward died unmarried in 1832, of a painful illness which made his temper deteriorate until it became intolerable during the last years. After his death Elizabeth made some effort to keep in touch with her surviving relations; she corresponded with Everina, who sent her mementoes of the once-dreaded Aunt Mary – a copy of the Opie portrait, a lock of hair, some inoffensive examples of her work: Mary and the Letters from Sweden. And when Elizabeth died in turn, Berry himself embarked on a correspondence with Mary Shelley. She always answered him kindly enough, but must have been amused at his fiercely reactionary tone; in 1848 he told her that the French were a hopeless lot, ‘now reaping the matured and bitter fruits of their first Revolution’. He continued to write to her daughter-in-law after her death in 1851, and was still lamenting the decline of the English into a nation of shopkeepers as late as 1871.4

  Mary's favourite brother Charles, who had settled in America during her lifetime, helped Hamilton Rowan to run a bleaching works in Philadelphia for a while, then joined the Army and rose to the rank of major. He went south to New Orleans and married Sally Garrison, the daughter of a judge; they had a daughter, Jane Nelson, in 1806. Three years later Charles detected his wife in adultery and, after some violent displays of rage, sent her home to her father without her child. He divorced her in 1811 and married a second wife, Nancy, with whom he lived till his death from yellow fever in 1817. Nancy had the care of Sally's child, but Sally kidnapped her daughter back and there was a threatened lawsuit which came to the ears of Edward Wollstonecraft in London; he sent for an account of the affair and kept it amongst his papers.

  Nancy managed to keep Jane Nelson and later took her to Cuba, where the trail disappears. Perhaps Jane Nelson Wollstonecraft's descendants are even now making their contribution to Castro's revolutionary society.

  Godwin's life story is well known; debts, disciples, a second marriage to a woman his friends detested and who brought him troublesome step-children; more debts, more troubles, hack work, still more debts. Finally he took a government pension; he died in 1836 and was buried beside Mary. In due course the second Mrs Godwin joined them also, but before long their bodies were all dug up in order to make way for the railway line coming in to King's Cross. They now lie in Bournemouth, where Sir Percy Shelley decided to install them beside his parents. Only the stone which Godwin set up still stands in old St Pancras churchyard, flanked by railway lines, gasometers, a hospital for tropical diseases, a children's playground and a municipal convenience. Few if any flowers are laid upon it, but it is worth a visit on a sunny day.

  Percy Shelley died childless in 1888, having done his best to protect his grandmother's reputation by buying and destroying her letters to Fuseli. His education had achieved the desired effect and he lived a blameless life, his chief pursuits yachting and amateur theatricals.

  A Sydney suburb is named after Edward Wollstonecraft; a block of council flats in Somers Town is called Godwin Court; not a house Mary lived in in London is still standing, and not a street or college is named after her.5 ‘The English Mignon’ Carlyle called her, echoing Godwin's sentimentality, even though he condemned the Memoirs for contriving to imprison ‘Ariel in a brickbat’. But there is after all something more solid to Mary than an Ariel. She was tough – the role of governess came naturally to her; her ideas were enduring and, in practical terms, more successful than Carlyle dreamed. If she was not the perfect heroine, she was at least, like Fanny Burney's Elinor, an anti-heroine to be reckoned with. She got herself an education as best she could, she wooed her own men, and was sometimes selfish and insensitive, sometimes comical. She endured ridicule and beat it down by sheer force of personality; she faced extreme unhappiness with the outrage of one determined to impose her will on fate; and, while the world busied itself with great concerns, she spoke up, quite loudly, for what had been until then a largely silent section of the human race.

  1 Sober clothes and powdered hair: this earliest known portrait of Mary, painted by an unknown artist in 1791 when she was thirty-two, shows her very much as the governess and frequenter of Dissenting circles. It was commissioned by William Roscoe, the Liverpool radical, who hailed her as an ‘Amazon’.

  2 Richard Price (1723–91) had only a few years to live when he befriended Mary. From early poverty he had become a leader of Dissent; he advised British statesmen and corresponded with French and American political theorists. Mary adopted many of his views on reform and revolution and shared his hopes for a utopian future.

  3 Newington Green, a north-eastern suburb of London where Mary ran her school with her sisters. Here she met Price, whose chapel can be seen in the centre; together with a couple of the eighteenth-century houses, it is still standing today, though the sheep hav
e gone.

  4 and 5 Caroline and Robert, Lord and Lady Kingsborough, young Anglo-Irish aristocrats who employed Mary as governess to their elder daughters. She fell out with them in less than a year, and within another year they had separated; the family was later involved in a series of scandals which were attributed to Mary's influence.

  6 A second portrait of Mary, again by an unknown artist. She looks still fiercer than in the Roscoe one, though younger and more attractive; but the haircut, the dress and the hat, which resembles hats worn by French revolutionary women, suggest a later date, probably after 1795.

  7 Joseph Johnson (1738–1809), Mary's chief benefactor, patron and adviser. He was the second son of a Dissenting Liverpool farmer, a lifelong bachelor, asthmatic and secretive. His shrewdness made him one of the most eminent publishers of his time; his concern for the oppressed led him to publish radical books and finally earned him a spell in prison.

  8 Self-portrait of Henry Fuseli (1741–1825), born Johann Heinrich Fuessli in Zurich, writer turned artist, friend of Johnson, Blake and Mary. She had the bad luck to fall in love with him at the time when he was casting off an extravagantly unconventional role in order to become a correct Royal Academician.

  9 In St Paul's Churchyard stood Joseph Johnson's shop. He lived in rooms above, and entertained ‘a Menagerie of Live Authors' here, including Mary, who dined several times a week with him during the years 1787–92.

  10 Lawrence's pencil drawing of Thomas Holcroft (left) and William Godwin at the Treason Trials of 1794. Their posture, clothing and spectacles give them a Robespierrean air, but they never sought anything more than moral influence, and achieved little enough of that.

  11 One of the engravings made by William Blake for Mary's Original Stories in 1791.

  12 Manon Roland (1754–93), republican and heroine of the Girondins. She befriended Mary in the winter of 1792–3, and helped to form her views on French life and politics; like Mary, she was born into the petty bourgeoisie, unlike her she did not care about the condition of her sex. She was imprisoned in June 1793 and guillotined in November.

  13 Helen Maria Williams (1762–1827), the radical poet who inspired Wordsworth in his youth. She sacrificed ‘her Reputation to her Spirit of Politics’ by crossing the channel with a married English revolutionary, John Hurford Stone. Stone, Helen, Mary and Mary's American lover Gilbert Imlay talked of establishing a farming community together in the States.

  14 A gouache by Le Sueur showing a Frenchwoman wearing the striped trousers of the revolutionary soldiers, and another dancing Ça Ira in more conventional dress.

  15 Fanny Imlay's birth certificate issued in Floréal, l'an II, and preserved at Le Havre ever since. Gilbert Imlay signed and testified to his ‘légitime mariage’ to the ‘Citoyenne Marie Wolstonecraft’.

  16 Le Sueur's view of a women's club in Revolutionary France; they are reading improving literature and donating their jewelry to the Cause.

  17 Amelia Alderson (1769–1853), daughter of a Dissenting doctor in Norwich. Godwin proposed to her shortly before becoming Mary's lover, and though Amelia had turned him down the friendship between the women did not survive Mary's marriage to Godwin.

  18 Elizabeth Inchbald (1753–1821), actress and writer, another lady admired by Godwin. Mary was jealous of her and called her ‘Mrs Perfection’; she dropped Mary and Godwin on their marriage. Coleridge said he would run away through ‘worlds of wildernesses’ to avoid her ‘heart-picking look’.

  19 Title page of Godwin's Memoirs of Mary. The prettified portrait did nothing to quell the storm of abuse that greeted the book in 1798.

  20 Opie's famous portrait of Mary, looking plump and rather sad. It was probably painted when she was pregnant with her second child.

  21 Another version of Mary, brought much closer to conventional standards of beauty.

  22 The marriage licence of Mary and Godwin at old St Pancras Church. She set herself down firmly as ‘spinster’.

  23 Old St Pancras Churchyard, still quite rural when Mary was married and buried there, with the Fleet River running at the foot of the hill. It was soon encroached on by Somers Town slums, railway lines and gas works. Mary's body was removed to Bournemouth in 1851, but the gravestone put up by Godwin remains.

  Bibliography

  This is a slightly revised bibliography, in view of the fact that the book was written twenty years ago; essentially it remains an indication of the sources I used, though I have added some titles published since I wrote.

  1 Works by Mary Wollstonecraft

  Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: With Reflections on Female Conduct, in the more important Duties of Life, London 1787.

  Mary: A Fiction, London 1788.

  Original Stories from Real Life, with conversations, calculated to regulate the affections, and form the mind to truth and goodness, London 1788.

  A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, London 1790 (second edition 1790).

  A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects, London 1792 (second edition 1792, reprinted 1796).

  An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution, London 1794.

  Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, London 1796 (second edition 1802).

  Posthumous Works of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman in four vols, ed. William Godwin, London 1798 (vols I and II containing The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria; A Fragment; vols III and IV containing letters to Imlay, letters to Joseph Johnson, The Cave of Fancy, notes for work on infant management and some lessons, headed by Mary ‘The first book of a series which I intended to have written for my unfortunate girl’, probably begun in October 1795 and continued later).

  Of these, only A Vindication of the Rights of Woman has remained in print steadily throughout the two hundred years since it first appeared. The two novels were reprinted together by Oxford in 1976, ed. Gary Kelly, and an Oxford paperback of this edition followed in 1980; a Penguin edition by Janet Todd will appear in 1992. Mary's letters to Imlay were reprinted in London in 1879 by Charles Kegan Paul and in 1908 by Roger Ingpen. Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark was republished in the U S in 1976 by the University of Nebraska Press, ed. Carol Postan, and in the UK in 1987 in Penguin Classics, edited and introduced by Richard Holmes (together with Godwin's memoir of his wife); I have drawn gratefully on the information assembled by Holmes to supplement my account of the book.

  A Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft appeared in 1979, edited by Ralph M. Wardle, from Cornell University Press.

  The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft in a magnificent (and very costly) seven-volume edition, edited by Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler assisted by Emma Rees-Mogg, was published by Pickering & Chatto, London 1989. This contains all her printed works, including translations, journalism (mostly book reviews) and some, though not all, of her letters. There is an introduction by Marilyn Butler.

  2 General Historical Background

  J. G. Alger, Englishmen in the French Revolution, London 1889.

  Analytical Review, London 1788–99.

  H. N. Brailsford, Shelley, Godwin and their Circle, London 1913.

  P. A. Brown, The French Revolution in English History, London 1918; New York 1965.

  James Burgh, Thoughts on Education, London 1747; New York.

  James Burgh, The Dignity of Human Nature, London 1754.

  Ed. K. N. Cameron, Shelley and his Circle, London and Cambridge, Massachusetts, vols 1 and 2 1961, vols 3 and 4 1970.

  Thomas Christie, Letters on the French Revolution, London 1791.

  Coleridge, The Watchman, ed. L. Patton, London and Princeton 1970.

  Condorcet, Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat, marquis de, Œuvres Complètes, ed. O'Connor and Arago, 12 vols, Paris 1847.

  C.A. Dauban, La Démagogie à Paris en 1793, Paris 1868.

  A. Douarche, Les Tribun
aux Civils de Paris, Paris 1905–7; New York.

  Maria Edgeworth, Practical Education, London 1798.

  Peter Gay, The Enlightenment, 2 vols, London 1967 & 1970; New York 1973.

  Dorothy George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century, London 1925; Peregrine edition, Harmondsworth 1966.

  Thomas Gisbourne, An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex, London 1797.

  Elie Halévy, Formation du radicalisme philosophique, 3 vols, Paris 1901–4.

  Mary Hays, Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of the Women; published anonymously by Joseph Johnson in 1798, it was thought to have disappeared at the time I wrote, but a copy turned up in America and was published in 1974 in a facsimile edition by Garland Publishing, New York.

  W. Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age, London 1825.

  T. S. Howells, State Trials, vols xxiv and xxv, London 1823.

  Georges Lefebvre, The French Revolution from its Origin to 1793, London and New York 1962.

  D. Lysons, Environs of London, London 1792–9; New York.