The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft

by Claire Tomalin

  † Young's stories of Irish life perfectly illustrate the atmosphere in which Mary found herself. One concerns Sir James Caldwell, who decided to entertain Lord Shelburne by enacting the meeting of Captain Cook and the New Zealand savages on his own ornamental lake with two hundred of his men suitably dressed to represent the opposing groups. Lady Caldwell pointed out that the harvest was in full swing, and that they could ill spare the men, but he brushed her objections aside and called for the men, tailors to dress them and boat furbishers to disguise his boats in the appropriate styles. As it turned out Lord Shelburne was obliged to cancel the visit and the hay harvest was lost too.

  * Laetitia Pilkington, usually described as an ‘adventuress’ (so she still stands in the DNB), was in fact a talented divorcée of a generation earlier than Mary who tried to earn her living by her pen. She suffered much persecution; gentlemen who took an interest in her assumed she was eager for their advances and simultaneously abused and tried to take advantage of her. She had a witty pen but took to drink and died at the same age as Mary, thirty-eight. One of her last patrons was Robert Kingsborough, our Robert's uncle, to whom she addressed this somewhat ambivalent complimentary poem in 1748:

  The Peers of Ireland long have been a jest,

  Their own, and every other climate's pest:

  But King shall grace the coronet he wears,

  And make it vie with Britain's noblest stars;

  And when, in time, to grace his nuptial bed

  Some chaste, illustrious charmer he shall wed:

  May love, and joy, and truth the pomp attend,

  And deathless honour to his race descend.

  But Laetitia's verses were not prophetic: the subject of her poem died unmarried.

  * Now called Dolben Street, it has been almost entirely demolished to make way for a railway.

  * The Analytical Review was the first British literary and scientific monthly aimed at the general public and made up almost entirely of book reviews. The leading reviews took the form of long and serious essays, but there were also shorter notices; medical books, poetry, art, history, fiction and a good deal of what would be called sociology today were covered. Reviews were anonymous or signed with initials only, usually not the initials of the writer but some arbitrarily chosen ones such as ‘Y.Y.’; it makes attribution difficult. The Analytical never sold well, though it had a better reception in Scotland than England, probably thanks to Christie's connections; Mrs Piozzi commented on its ‘Scotch’ affiliations and speculated that most of the reviewers were of that nation (in her diary in 1790). But Fuseli, Cowper and Dyer were all contributors and most of Johnson's authors seem to have been pressed to work for it; its bias was of course towards radicalism. The first number appeared in May 1788 and it died in June 1799, six months after Johnson had been forced to withdraw his support. In format it was a small, thick magazine, with close-set, tiny print; the size was roughly that of the Reader's Digest today.

  * Holcroft, son of a London cobbler, spent his childhood roaming and sometimes begging with his impoverished parents, taught himself to read, became a Newmarket stable boy and then decided to try his luck as an actor. He had some success writing plays, learned French and German and lived as a hack translator, turning out novels as well. His most dramatic achievement was the memorizing (with one friend to help) of Le Mariage de Figaro in Paris, in order to bring it to London, where he played the part of Figaro himself on the first night in 1786. Alas, his version is not very good and cuts out altogether the intrigue involving Marceline and the comments on women's rights.

  * The link between Dissent and radicalism appears here, for the Montrose Unitarian Church was founded under the guidance of Priestley and its first minister was a young Eton and Cambridge divine, Thomas Fysshe Palmer, who remained in Scotland to work with the radical movement there and was later tried and sentenced for sedition; Dundas, the Secretary of State, called him ‘the most determined rebel in Scotland’ and had him shipped to Australia for seven years.

  * Until 1950 this unattributed painting remained in the possession of the Roscoe family; it is now in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.

  * Godwin lists a man called ‘Shovet’ as one of the company. A barrister called Shove advised Priestley about the theft of his papers in Birmingham: possibly this was the same man.

  * But see George Dyer's comments, below, p. 143. Coleridge was also of course an ardent feminist during his Unitarian phase; his plans for the Pantisocracy included releasing women and servants from domestic drudgery by the following means: ‘Let the married Women do only what is absolutely convenient and customary for pregnant Women or nurses – Let the husbands do all the rest – and what will that all be –? Washing with a Machine and cleaning the House. One Hour's addition to our daily labour – and Pantisocracy in its most perfect Sense is practicable. – That the greater part of our Female Companions should have the task of Maternal exertion at the same time, is very improbable – but tho' it were to happen, An Infant is almost always sleeping – and during its Slumbers the Mother may in the same room perform the little offices of ironing Cloaths or making Shirts.’ It is certainly a charming picture Coleridge paints.

  * See Appendix I, p. 341. The Dissenting women apparently agreed with him; their ablest political writer, Ann Jebb (1735–1812), wife of the reformer and herself an ardent advocate of universal male suffrage, never broached the question of female. ‘She had a nice and even scrupulous sense of honour and propriety, and a delicacy of mind which admitted no compromise with masculine boldness in which some females, of a highly cultivated intellect, have at times indulged’, according to her obituarist. She corresponded with Cartwright, and may have been his authority for saying that women themselves did not want the vote.

  * Halévy listed Bentham's objections in an appendix to his Formation du radicalisme philosophique (1901) but curiously omitted the marginal annotations which answered them. They can be seen in the Bentham MS. at University College, London, Portfolio 170, p. 115, folder 5.

  * A survey of the views of Italian married women on sex, taken in 1973, showed that most of them regarded it as a trial rather than a pleasure.

  † According to Peter Fryer's The Birth Controllers (1965), eighteenth-century prostitutes were the repositories of female wisdom on the subject of birth-control in England, and it was not practised by decent women. In France however the bourgeoisie contrived to have very small families and there were reproaches from the church aimed at the successful efforts of married people to avoid conception from the 1770s onwards. The sponge was mentioned directly in a book called Le Rideau levé, ou l'éducation de Laure in 1786. In 1797 Bentham made the first English reference to the sponge, and in 1823 the radical Francis Place tried to start a campaign to popularize its use in England amongst married people of all classes. Coming from those concerned with human rights and feminism (the young J. S. Mill was a distributor of Place's pamphlets), the campaign had little success (and was furiously suppressed by the authorities). The sponge was not wholly reliable, but had the great advantage of simplicity – French women were reputed to wear one attached to a ribbon tied round the waist – and of course control by the woman herself. In 1798 the doctor Thomas Beddoes referred to ‘the means [the ▓poor] use to prevent increase of family’, but without specifying what the means was; he was of course a feminist and a radical. And, again in the mid-1820s, William Thompson, the most outspoken of feminists, appeared to take for granted that birth-control was easily practicable in planning his ideal communities.

  *A Wolverhampton pamphleteer seems to be referring to Paine in a rather laboured joke in answer to a scurrilous right-wing suggestion that Paine was sexually inadequate as a husband: ‘Well, if that really be Thomas Paine's way, I would advise him to study the Rights of Woman, which may be the title of his next book; which, as he seems to be a sharp fellow, will, no doubt, teach a good lesson to our wives and daughters.’ (A Letter from Timothy Sobersides, Extinguisher Maker, 1792, published, cu
riously enough, by Johnson.) Another satirical pamphlet, this time hostile to Mary, on the Rights of Boys and Girls, linked her ideas with those of Paine, Barlow, Priestley and Price, and referred to her (rather pleasantly) as ‘Mrs Mary with the hard German name’.

  * In fact Dyer was distinctly feminist in his sympathies. In a footnote to his Poems, published in 1792 by Johnson, he wrote: ‘I have observed, that the most sensible females, when they turn their attention to political subjects, are more uniformly on the side of liberty than the other sex… The truth is, that the modes of education and the customs of society are degrading to the female character; and the tyranny of custom is sometimes worse than the tyranny of government. When a sensible woman rises above the tyranny of custom, she feels a generous indignation; which, when turned against the exclusive claims of the other sex, is favourable to female pretensions; when turned against the tyranny of government, it is commonly favourable to the rights of both sexes. Most governments are partial, and more injurious to women than men.’

  * Madame de Staël's transvestite portrait of Talleyrand as ‘Madame de Vernon’ in Delphine is worth looking up to see how slippery, treacherous but irresistibly charming he seemed to his contemporaries.

  * Madame de Genlis, at this time in her mid-forties, was born into the minor aristocracy and started her career as a lady-in-waiting to the family of Philippe, the royal duke who became known as Égalité during the Revolution. She became his mistress, and when the official post of tutor to his children fell vacant, she had the wit to propose herself for the job, becoming the first woman to invade this masculine preserve. She was a prolific writer and her educational ideas were similar to Mary's; politically she was of course liberal and supported the early stages of the Revolution. Mary was not polite about her in the Vindication and there is no record of direct contact between the two women. English society, which had taken no notice of Madame de Genlis's sexual indiscretions before the Revolution, used them as a pretext to shun her later: a familiar pattern.

  * In one respect Mary resisted the new fashion: she did not abandon her stays. Dress reform interested some of her contemporaries, but not her: Erasmus Darwin expressed satisfaction on medical and aesthetic grounds that women were leaving off stays in the Nineties, but the care with which Mary looked after hers is evident from the fact that her daughter Fanny was wearing a pair marked M. W. when she died in 1816! In 1789 Alexander Jardine, an army officer friendly with Godwin, published a book (Letters from Barbary, France, Spain, etc.) in which he advocated shorter skirts to be worn over drawers for women: drawers were still the prerogative of men at that time. ‘The sex would certainly gain by shewing a little more of their legs’ said Jardine; ‘such things though apparently trifling, may have great influence over female character’. He also considered women should be given ‘more influence in the councils of taste and learning; and it might be as well if they were not entirely excluded from other councils’., Unfortunately neither Mary nor anyone else took up his recommendations.

  * A French jurist had already asked whether the new divorce laws might not lead to the abandonment of ageing and helpless wives, but they were generally regarded as a liberation rather than a threat to women: see Ph. Sagnac, La Législation civile de la Révolution française (1898).

  * The famous lines in The Prelude describe Wordsworth's euphoria; others from The Excursion look back at the same period:

  For rights,

  Widely – inveterately usurped upon,

  I spake with vehemence; and promptly seized

  All that Abstraction furnished for my needs

  Or purposes; nor scrupled to proclaim,

  And propagate, by liberty of life,

  Those new persuasions…

  Here nature was my guide

  The Nature of the dissolute.

  Goethe had something similar to say:

  Alle Freiheitsapostel, sie waren mir immer zuwider;

  Willkur suchte doch nur jeder am Ende für sich.

  (I always disliked them, all those apostles of freedom; in the last resort each of them was merely seeking licence for himself.)

  *

  She wept. – Life's purple tide began to flow

  In languid streams through every thrilling vein;

  Dim were my swimming eyes – my pulse beat slow

  And my full heart was swell'd with dear delicious pain.

  Helen also supplied Wordsworth with part of the subject for Vaud-racour and Julia (Annette providing the rest); but the poet claimed that he did not actually meet Helen until much later in life.

  * Stone was concerned in a piece of matrimonial fixing that culminated in a wedding at the end of December between the United Irishman, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, and Pamela, Madame de Genlis's charge. The affair drew together almost every thread in the world Mary now inhabited: expatriates, educationists, revolutionaries, bluestockings and idealistic adulterers. Lord Edward had already been cashiered for his political opinions. He had served in America, where he had spent some months in the wilderness, making so favourable an impression on the Indians that he was offered honorary tribal status: thus he could claim to be a Bear as well as a United Irishman. He had refused to meet Pamela when she was in London in the spring, explaining that he had disapproved of bluestockings; but when he came to Paris at the end of October he saw Madame de Genlis and Pamela at the theatre and was instantly struck by the girl's appearance. Stone was called on to arrange a meeting. It took place at White's, and within weeks the couple were married. They departed at once for Ireland, where Pamela became the intimate friend of yet another radical lady, Margaret Mountcashel.

  * Though German by birth, Forster, born in 1754, had spent his boyhood at Warrington Dissenting Academy (where his father taught), like so many of Mary's circle, and he may have learnt his French from Marat, who was teaching there in the early Seventies.

  * ‘I announce to Wollstonecraft and Lavater in Elysium that in any portrait of you the hardest element must be your heart!’

  * The Supplément was written in 1776 and although not published until 1796 circulated in manuscript in Paris and was certainly much discussed. The abbé Bourlet said that Diderot, through his ‘joyeuseté de philosophe’ was ‘le vértable initiateur de la sans-culotterie’.

  * ‘Carpet’ was the revolutionaries' name for Louis.

  * Cobban estimates that only about seven per cent of the population actually voted.

  † M. Sydenham's The Girondins (1961) demonstrates how difficult it is to use the term Girondin with any strict accuracy, but it is used here in the usual broad sense and applied to those conventionnels who were proscribed in the summer of 1793.

  * Lanthenas saved his own skin by abandoning the Rolands, and survived the Terror, despised by Robespierre. Evidence of Mary's friendship with him is found in the fact that her brother James Wollstonecraft had Lanthenas as his sponsor when he applied for French citizenship; see below, p. 256.

  * The history of this remark is as follows: Mary must have made it to Southey when she was seeing a good deal of him in 1797; he stored it up for over thirty years, during which his own political views changed, and used it in his ferocious (and anonymous) attack on Babeuf in the Quarterly Review in 1831 (lxlv 177). The article and its sequel were pretexts for attacking Robert Owen and the cooperative movement too. Owen told Mary's daughter Fanny how much he admired her mother: see Dowden's Life of Shelley.

  * See below, p. 192 et seq.

  * ‘This woman, described by some observers as very pretty, was not pretty at all; she was a fleshy virago, grubby and graceless like most female wits and philosophers. Her expression was hard and arrogant, her face red and scabby. True, she was well-built, young and confident, which was enough to let her pass as a beauty during interrogation. None of this would be worth insisting on were it not that beautiful women who care for their appearance usually want to live, and fear death. Charlotte Corday was twenty-five; in our society that means she was almost an old maid, especially when h
er mannish behaviour and build are taken into consideration… Her head was stuffed with booklearning; she said, or rather confessed with ridiculous affectation, that she had read everything there was to be read… she was a woman who simply cast off her sex; when nature recalled it to her. she experienced only disgust and annoyance; romantic love and other tender emotions cease to touch the heart of a woman who aspires to knowledge, wit, learning, politics and philosophy, and who wants to make a name for herself. Decent men do not care for such women, and because of this they in turn profess to despise men; they come to regard their own scorn as a sign of character, and their bitterness as energy; and their tastes and habits soon degenerate into foolishness and licence, which they label philosophic behaviour.’2

  * Etta d'Aelders, or Etta Palm as she became, was later accused of spying; her name disappeared after 1792, like so many others.

  * ‘Civil and political liberty is of no use to women and should therefore be kept from them. Since they are destined to spend their entire lives under their fathers' or husbands' protection, and are born to be dependent from the cradle to the grave, they have been endowed only with private virtues… A woman is acceptable only in the context of her father's or her husband's household. She needs to know nothing of what goes on outside beyond what they may see fit to tell her.’5