The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft
Page 32
CHAPTER 1
1 Information about Spitalfields from Malcolm's Londinium Redivivum (1802–7), Sabin's Silk Weavers of Spitfield, Charles Knight's London (1842) and Dorothy George's London Life in the Eighteenth Century (1925).
2 Parish rate books for 1712, Guildhall Library.
3 Parish registers of St Botolph's Without Bishopsgate, Guildhall Library. See also family tree (Appendix II).
4 However his name is not amongst those weavers who declared their loyalty to George II in 1745 in a printed address.
5 LCC survey of Wood-Michell Estate; the building lease for No. 21 Brown's Lane was granted to ‘Edward Wollstonecraft of Primrose Street, Bishopsgate, Gentleman’.
6 Parish register.
7 Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1st ed. (1798), p. 5.
8 Vaudeville to Le Mariage de Figaro by Beaumarchais, published in 1785 but written earlier.
9 Parish register.
10 Godwin's Memoirs, p. 60.
11 Parish register.
12 The will is in the Public Record Office.
13 Maria, her posthumous novel, vol. 1 in Posthumous Works (1798), p. 172.
14 Ballyshannon by Hugh Allingham (1879) gives information about the Dixons being in the wine trade, and sometimes spelling their name Dickson.
15 Everina referred to Dixon cousins in the army and navy in her letters now in the Mitchell Library, Sydney, New South Wales. Edward Sterling Dickson rose to be a rear-admiral; his name is in the navy lists.
16 Information from The Gascoyne Heiress by Carola Oman (1968), p. 27.
17 Mary, her first novel, p. 11.
18 Mary, p. 10.
19 Information about Beverley from T. Allen's Yorkshire (1831), Chs. vi-ix; also from N. Higson, county archivist, who found evidence of the Wollstonecraft leasing of the house in Wednesday Market.
20 All the quotations from letters addressed to Jane Arden are taken from Shelley and his Circle, ed. Cameron, vol. 11, pp. 933–84.
21 Information about the Ardens from Everilda Anne Gardiner's Recollections of a Beloved Mother (1842), p. 2.
22 See for example James Burgh's views on education of girls in his Thoughts on Education (1747), pp. 51–6.
23 Mary, p. 14.
CHAPTER 2
1 All the quotations from letters to Jane Arden are taken from Shelley and his Circle, ed. Cameron, vol. 11, pp. 933–84.
2 Maria, p. 152, vol. 1.
3 Godwin's Memoirs, p. 20.
4 Mary, p. 21.
5 ibid., p. 21.
6 Letter to Jane Arden, Cameron, p. 966, vol. 11.
7 In The Wanderer, or Female Difficulties.
8 Letter to Jane Arden, Cameron, p. 978, vol. 11.
9 ibid., pp. 976–7.
10 ibid., p. 966.
11 ibid., p. 983.
12 Abinger MS., my transcript.
CHAPTER 3
1 Parish register for St Andrew's, Enfield, gives Elizabeth Wolstingcroft, buried on 19 April 1782. Godwin was wrong in his dating of Mrs Wollstonecraft's death.
2 According to the parish register for St Katharine by the Tower, Edward (Ned) and his wife Elizabeth had a daughter Elizabeth born in 1782 and a son Edward born in 1783.
3 Mary, pp. 39–40.
4 His wife is named in his will, which is in the Public Record Office.
5 Maria, p. 173, vol. 1.
6 Abinger MS., my transcript.
7 Mary, p. 44.
8 Abinger MS., my transcript.
9 Abinger MS., my transcript.
10 His profession is given in the parish records of Bermondsey in GLC archives.
11 Parish register of St Katharine by the Tower, Guildhall.
12 Letter given in Shelley and his Circle, p. 983, vol. 11.
13 St Mary Magdalene, Bermondsey, parish register in GLC archives.
14 All Mary's letters to Everina are from the Abinger MS. They were evidently preserved by Sir Percy and Lady Shelley because they felt they were to Mary's credit; those that were not they had destroyed. I have used my transcripts.
15 Parish register for St Mary Magdalene, Bermondsey.
CHAPTER 4
1 This is what the Dean of Gloucester, Josiah Tucker, accused ‘the younger Dissenters, both clergy and laity’ of in his pamphlet A Series of Answers to Popular Objections &c, in 1776, p. 69, footnote.
2 Information about Richard Price from R. Laboucheix's Richard Price (1970), Peter Brown's The Chathamites (1967), J. T. Rutt's Life and Correspondence of Joseph Priestley (1831).
3 First published in 1754, it went into several editions including one published by Joseph Johnson in 1767.
4 Ann Jebb, 1753–1812, wrote under the name ‘Priscilla’ in the London Chronicle in the years 1772–4, corresponded with the reformer Cartwright in the Eighties and was still an ardent democratic pamphleteer in the Nineties.
5 Abinger MS., my transcript.
6 ibid., my transcript.
7 There has been much speculation about the identity of ‘Neptune’. I have now established that Neptune was a family name over several generations of the Blood family and that there was one contemporary with Mary. I owe this information to Mr Brian Inglis, whose mother was a Blood.
8 Abinger MS., my transcript.
9 ibid., my transcript.
10 ibid., my transcript.
11 Burgh was responsible for Thoughts on Education (1747) and Direction for the Use of the Youth at a Boarding School (1749) as well as his Dignity of Human Nature, which was substantially devoted to education.
12 e.g., Priscilla Wakefield, a Quaker lady from Tottenham, who published her Reflections on the Present Condition of the Female Sex with Joseph Johnson in 1798 and was an early advocate of equal pay as well as enlarging employment opportunities for women. Maria Edgeworth, also in 1798, suggested that governesses should be paid £300 a year in order that they might save and retire in dignified independence. Mary Anne Radcliffe, in 1799, in her Female Advocate, or an Attempt to Recover the Rights of Women from Male Usurpation, claimed that female employment was on the decline. By 1804 a Ladies' Committee had been set up to consider this particular problem – nearly twenty years after Mary's book.
13 Abinger MS., my transcript.
14 ibid., my transcript.
15 ibid., my transcript.
16 See Vindication of the Rights of Woman, final pages.
17 It was Joseph Priestley's, on leaving the employ of his aristocratic patron Lord Shelburne, a job arranged for him by his friend Richard Price: see J. T. Rutt, op. cit., p. 205, vol. 1.
18 Information from Shelley and his Circle, ed. Cameron, pp. 843–4, vol. iv
CHAPTER 5
1 See Portrait of a Whig Peer, Brian Connell (1957), p. 128.
2 From Shelley and his Circle, ed. Cameron, p. 982, vol. 11.
3 The details about the King family come largely from Captain Douglas King-Harman's The Kings (1959), which is based on unpublished family papers in his possession.
4 Printed by E. McAleer in The Sensitive Plant (1958), pp. 4–8. Lady Mountcashel wrote this document for her two illegitimate daughters by George Tighe, in 1818.
5 Arthur Young's Autobiography, ed. Edwards (1898), pp. 76–80.
6 This and all further quotes from Mary's letters in this chapter from Abinger MS., my transcript.
7 As 4.
8 Bishop Percy told his wife that this was the gossip in Dublin in 1798, when the Kings were much in the news; see British Museum additional MS. 32.335 f. 15–17. I am indebted to Thomas Pakenham for this reference, which is discussed further below on p. 295.
9 Godwin's Memoirs, p. 58.
10 Mary, p. 110.
11 ibid., p. 145.
12 Letter given in Shelley and his Circle, p. 860, vol. iv.
13 Mary refers to this in letters to George Blood, Abinger MS., my transcript.
14 See 4.
15 Bishop Percy again.
CHAPTER 6
1 Howell
s, State Trials, vol. xxiv (1818), p. 511.
2 William Cowper's Letters, ed. Frazer (1912), vol. II, p. 294, letter CCLXXXIV.
3 Unpublished and Uncollected Letters of William Cowper, ed. T. Wright (1925), P. 55.
4 Gentleman's Magazine for 1809.
5 The printed order form can be seen in Dr Williams's Library, used on its reverse side for a letter by Theophilus Lindsey.
6 Abinger MS., my transcript.
7 Letter by Thomas Campbell cited by M. MacGregor in her Amelia Opie (1932), p. 36.
8 She is referred to in a letter in Dr Williams's Library, dated 1782, MS. copy by Rutt.
9 Quoted in Eudo Mason's The Mind of Henry Fuseli (1951), p. 130.
10 See below, p. 115
11 Philip Magnus, Edmund Burke (1939), p. 150.
12 Peter Gay, The Enlightenment (1966), p. 431–2, vol. 11.
13 See Johnson's will in Public Record Office.
14 Letter printed in Posthumous Works (1798), p. 83, vol. iv.
15 ibid., p. 80, vol. iv.
16 Abinger MS., my transcript.
17 See J. E. Stock's Life of Beddoes (1811) for account of his political and feminist views, pp. 68, 144; Mrs H. Sandford's Thomas Poole & His Friends (1888) for Beddoes's medical lectures to women; also his own introductory lecture to an anatomy course, published by Johnson in 1797.
18 Information from Nicolas Barker.
19 Letters of Anna Seward (1811), p. 3, letter 1, vol. iv.
20 Abinger MS., my transcript.
21 See R. Laboucheix, Richard Price (1970), pp. 201–2, footnote 101.
22 The Sexagenarian (1817), pp. 314–15, vol. 1. Beloe is not always reliable, but there is no need to doubt this particular piece of information.
23 See Rutt's Life and Correspondence of Priestley (1831), p. 280, vol. i.
24 Godwin mentions Anderson as a particular friend of Mary's at this time; information from DNB. He died young and suddenly, and in the year he died it proved impossible to produce any figures for the India Office, so indispensable had he become.
25 Information about Christie from DNB; obituary in Gentleman's Magazine; Rutt's Life of Priestley; MS. letters in Dr Williams's Library; Meikle, The French Revolution in Scotland; Public Record Office; etc.
26 Letters of Anna Seward, p. 311, letter 67, vol. 1.
27 Letters Written during a Short Residence in Denmark, Norway & Sweden, 2nd ed., 1802, pp. 26, 27, 28.
28 See Dowden's Life of Shelley (1866), pp. 23–4, vol. ii.
29 Berry papers, Mitchell Library, Sydney, Australia.
CHAPTER 7
1 So she told Johnson, who told Godwin, Memoirs, p. 63.
2 Information on Fuseli, who was born Johann Heinrich Fuessli, from Knowles, Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli (1831); Allan Cunningham, Lives of the Painters (1829); Eudo Mason, The Mind of Henry Fuseli (1951); Ruthven Todd, Tracks in the Snow (1947); J. T. Smith, Nollekens and his Times (1829), as well as various catalogues, BM print room, etc.
3 Professor Gert Schiff, who is preparing a complete catalogue of Fuseli's work, states categorically that there is no drawing of Mary.
4 Quoted by Eudo Mason and translated by him, op. cit., p. 97.
5 ibid., p. 152.
6 ibid., p. 155.
7 Godwin's Memoirs, p. 92.
8 Knowles, op. cit., p. 380, vol. 1.
9 Abinger MS., my transcript.
CHAPTER 8
1 Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck, Life (1858), p. 216, vol. 1.
2 Letters of Anna Seward (1811), p. 28, letter 8, vol. 11.
3 Correspondence of Josiah Wedgwood, 1781–94 (1906), pp. 94–6,
4 See Life & Correspondence of Joseph Priestley, ed. J. T. Rutt (1831), p. 50, vol. ii.
5 Quoted by R. Laboucheix in Richard Price (1970), p. 203.
6 Rutt, op. cit., pp. 80–81, vol. 11.
7 ibid., p. 88, footnote, vol. 11.
8 A Vindication of the Rights of Men, p. 24.
9 Godwin's Memoirs, p. 77.
10 Rutt, op. cit., p. 106, vol. 11.
11 Quoted in William Roscoe of Liverpool by George Chandler (1953), pp. 389–90.
12 Information from The Chathamites by Peter Brown (1967).
13 Rutt, op. cit., pp. 170–71, vol. 11.
14 Diaries of Samuel Rogers, ed. Clayden (1888), pp. 126–7, 140.
15 Thomas Christie, Letters on the French Revolution (1791), p. 121. Christie quotes Mary's answer to Burke, calling her an ‘animated writer’.
16 Information on Barlow from Victor Clyde Miller's Joel Barlow, Revolutionist, London 1791–2 (Hamburg, 1932).
17 Schimmelpenninck, op. cit., pp. 217–18, vol. 1.
CHAPTER 9
1 The number of her house in Store Street is unknown; one eighteenth-century house still stands in the street.
2 See Complete Works of Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, edited in twelve volumes by O'Connor and Arago (1847). Information about Condorcet from Condorcet et la Révolution française by L. Cahen (1904), and Robinet's Condorcet (1893) – in which the historian takes it on himself to refute Condorcet's feminist arguments.
3 My translation.
4 Roscoe letters, Liverpool City Libraries, my transcript.
CHAPTER 10
1 The Letters of Horace Walpole (1905), p. 337, letter 2956, vol. xv.
At Covent Garden, the Prologue to Mrs Inchbald's new comedy, Everyone Has His Fault, referred to the book of the moment:
Our Author, who accuses great and small,
And says so boldly, there are faults in all;
Sends me with dismal voice, and lenthen'd phiz,
Humbly to own one dreadful fault of his:
A fault, in modern Authors not uncommon,
It is, – now don't be angry – He's – a woman.
The Rights of Women, says a female pen,
Are, to do everything as well as Men.
To think, to argue, to decide, to write,
To talk, undoubtedly – perhaps, to fight.
(For Females march to war, like brave Commanders, Not in old Authors only – but in Flanders.)
I grant this matter may be strain'd too far,
And Maid 'gainst Man is most uncivil war:
I grant, as all my City friends will say,
That Men should rule, and Women should obey:
That nothing binds the marriage contract faster,
Than our – ‘Zounds, Madam, I'm your Lord and Master.’
I grant their nature, and their frailty such,
Women may make too free – and know too much.
But since the Sex at length has been inclin'd
To cultivate that useful part – the mind; –
Since they have learnt to read, to write, to spell; –
Since some of them have wit, – and use it well; –
Let us not force them back with brow severe,
Within the pale of ignorance and fear,
Confin'd entirely to domestic arts,
Producing only children, pies, and tarts.
The fav'rite fable of the tuneful Nine,
Implies that female genius is divine.
Then, drive not, Critics, with tyrannic rage,
A supplicating Fair-one from the Stage;
The Comic Muse perhaps is growing old,
Her lovers, you well know, are few and cold.
‘Tis time then freely to enlarge the plan,
And let all those write Comedies – that can.
2 Roscoe letters, Liverpool City Libraries, my transcript.
3 Brian Connell, Portrait of a Whig Peer (1957), p. 259.
4 Love Letters of Mary Hays, ed. A. Wedd (1925), p. 5.
5 See J. E. Stock's Life of Thomas Beddoes (1811), p. 68. Beddoes was obliged to leave Oxford in the summer of 1792 because of his political opinions; he remained a feminist. I have not been able to find a copy of his Letters to a Lady.
6 Letters of Anna Seward, p. 117, letter xxxv, vol. III.
7 Note in Abing
er MS., my transcript.
8 Knowles, op. cit., p. 170, vol. 1.
9 Mary referred to the first Mrs Opie's behaviour in a letter, Abinger MS.; she eloped with an army officer soon afterwards.
10 Abinger MS., my transcript.
11 ibid., my transcript.
12 The evidence for this love affair and the birth of the child in London in the summer of 1792 is found in A. Douarche, Les Tribunaux civils de Paris (1905–7), vol. 1, pp. 637–8.
13 Printed by Victor Clyde Miller, op. cit., appendix.
14 Information on Talleyrand from Duff Cooper's Talleyrand (1932), p. 53, Cape paperback.
15 The Early Life of Samuel Rogers, diaries edited by Clayden (1888), pp. 244–5.
16 Information on Madame de Genlis from her Memoirs and other contemporary sources.
17 Speeches of Edmund Burke, edited by J. Burke (1853), pp. 414–24.
18 This description is taken from Amelia Opie's Adeline Mowbray, p. 47, vol. 1, a novel devoted to attacking her erstwhile friends’ ideas. See above, p. 293.
19 The phrase is in the Roscoe MS. letters, my transcript.
20 Rutt, op. cit., pp. 183–4, vol. ii.
21 Roscoe letters, my transcript.
22 According to Halévy, La Formation du radicalisme philosophique (1901), p. 35, vol. 11.
CHAPTER 11
1 Roscoe MS., Liverpool Public Libraries, my transcript.
2 Thraliana, Mrs Piozzi's diary, ed. K. C. Balderstone (1942), p. 797, vol. 11.
3 Brian Connell, Portrait of a Whig Peer, p. 262.
4 Abinger MS., quoted by Kegan Paul, vol. 1, p. 208.
5 Posthumous Works, pp. 94–5, vol. iv.
6 According to family tradition, reported in Robinet, Danton émigré (1887), p. 29.
7 Howells, State Trials, vol. xxiv, p. 536.
8 H. W. Meikle, The French Revolution in Scotland (1912), p. 98.
9 ibid.
10 Diaries and Letters of Madame D'Arblay (1842–6).
11 Mrs Piozzi's comment. Information about Helen Williams from L. D. Woodward's Hélène Maria Williams et ses amis (1929).