* Divorce was by mutual consent or on the petition of one party; the grounds then could be absence or abandonment, political migration, notorious infidelity, a prison sentence, madness or incompatibility of temper. The procedure involved a gathering of friends before a municipal officer, a discussion and an attempt at reconciliation. In the absence of mutual consent there must be three reconciliation attempts, and failing reconciliation divorce was granted in from one to six months. Both spouses were free to marry again a year after the divorce; children under seven went to the mother, older boys to the father; both parents had to contribute to the upbringing of the children according to their means, and each spouse kept the property brought to the marriage. As divorce laws go, they are remarkably humane and sensible. One of the propaganda purposes of Mary's novel Maria was to point out the need for similar legislation in England, where divorce was still extremely expensive, complicated and difficult to obtain.
* A passage in her book on the French Revolution, in which she condemns the behaviour of the women who marched to Versailles in 1789, is inexplicably ferocious in its condemnation of them unless it is read in the light of the behaviour of the citoyennes in 1793. I think she equated the two groups in her mind.
* She died in 1817. An autopsy showed an ‘abnormality’ of the brain, but did not indicate whether it was congenital or acquired as the result of the stoning by her fellow-women. A profile drawing of her by Gabriel, taken in the Salpêtrière asylum a year before her death, is the only authentic portrait: her hair is cropped and it is the face of a middle-aged woman, but the line of nose, forehead and ear are beautiful, though the mouth and eye have caved in.
* Mary's intense dislike of accepting money from Imlay relates to this.
* ‘As far as general happiness is concerned, one of the most important advances in human thinking must be the total destruction of the prejudices which have established differences in the rights of the two sexes (a difference which harms the favoured sex too). There is no justification for these differences, either in the physical nature of women, their intelligence or their moral sensibility. The only basis for inequality is the abuse of brute strength, and all the sophistry that has been brought to bear on the subject cannot alter this fact.’
* O'Connor was born at Mitchelstown; he was imprisoned by the English, later found favour with Napoleon, and subsequently lived a tranquil life under successive French regimes.
* Within a few years moves to repeal the divorce laws were begun, not on the grounds that women were suffering by them but that they abused them. The laws were repealed in 1816.
* He was referring to Mary's book on the Revolution. Moore was a novelist who published a journal of his life in Paris.
* At the same time as Mary was being enchanted by the French, Madame de Staël was forming the impressions of life in England which she set forth in Corinne, in which attitudes of the country ladies evoke the following reflections: ‘Le devoir, la plus noble destination de l'homme, peut être dénaturé comme toute autre idée, et devenir une arme offensive dont les esprits étroits, les gens médiocres et contents de l'être, se servent pour imposer silence au talent, et se débarrasser de l'enthousiasme, du génie, enfin de leurs ennemis. On dirait, à les entendre, que le devoir consiste dans le sacrifice des facultés distinguées que l'on possède, et que l'esprit est un tort qu'il faut expier, en menant précisément la même vie que ceux qui en manquent.’
* The numbers of Charlotte Street have been changed, and the house has gone.
* I suspect this may have been the job of correcting the first edition of Madame Roland's Memoirs; Johnson brought out two editions in two years, the second a marked improvement on the first, and supplied with a few footnotes that demonstrate a personal knowledge of French life. It would have been an obviously suitable piece of work for Mary to undertake.
* She told Godwin afterwards that nothing would have induced her to try to drown herself again after that experience, because the pain had been too great; she would have tried some other method had the occasion arisen.
* It seems possible that Imlay went with Christie to Surinam, and did not return to England until after Mary's death.
* Judd Place West, just north of the New Road (now Euston Road), is no longer in existence.
* She made a curious reference to what she called Godwin's ‘chance-medley system’ which may possibly have referred to an attempt at contraception on his part: perhaps an endeavour to follow some sort of rhythm method? English eighteenth-century medical books advised women that intercourse in the period immediately after menstruation was most likely to lead to conception; it did not require much imagination to suppose that the time just before might therefore be less likely to produce conception. But her remark is -not very clear: ‘Women are certainly great fools; but nature made them so. I have not time, or paper, else, I could draw an inference, not very illustrative of your chance-medley system – But I spare the moth-like opinion, there is room enough in the world &c.’
* The church, one of the most ancient in London, was very little used because most of its parishioners lived up in Kentish Town and had built themselves other, more convenient places of worship. At the time of Mary's wedding the river Fleet still flowed at the foot of the hill on which the church stood, with primroses on its banks in spring, and the outlook was quite rural.
† It is clear from contemporary map markings that No. 29 faced east on to Chalton Street, in which Evesham Buildings stood. The Polygon was a ring of houses built around gardens, three stories high and handsomely constructed; they were newly built and intended to attract middle-class families to what was planned as a garden suburb. The project failed in that only a few features, the Polygon being one, were finished, and a slump meant that the houses were sold and let very cheap. Somers Town soon became a notoriously evil slum, but when Mary lived there it was a place for artists and other interesting people to settle.
* A Gilbert Imlay was buried in November 1828 in the churchyard of St Brelade's, Jersey. His epitaph, engraved on his tombstone, read as follows (the version is a copy made in 1833 and cited by Richard Garnett in 1903):
Stranger intelligent! should you pass this way
Speak of the social advances of the day –
Mention the greatly good, who've serenely shone
Since the soul departed its mortal bourne;
Say if statesmen wise have grown, and priests sincere
Or if hypocrisy must disappear
As phylosophy extends the beam of truth,
Sustains rights divine, its essence, and the worth
Sympathy may penetrate the mouldering earth,
Recall the spirit, and remove the dearth,
Transient hope gleams even in the grave,
Which is enough dust can have, or ought to crave.
Then silently bid farewell, be happy,
For as the globe moves round, thou will grow nappy.
Wake to hail the hour when new scenes arise,
As brightening vistas open in the skies.
It is certainly odd, and leads one to question the fidelity of the copyist; but it is also touching and suggests that Imlay's interest in philosophy and human rights had been genuine, if not very studiously followed up.
* Thomas Christie died of a fever in Surinam in the same month as Mary. A letter announcing his death from Theophilus Lindsey to a friend in Dundee suggests that he was, like Holcroft, a believer in the power of mind over matter: ‘through his own obstinacy at last in refusing to take the usual remedies in his case’ he died. (MS. letter in Dr Williams's library.) He left less than £1,000 to his widow and died intestate: see Public Record Office, letters of administration for March 1798. The fate of his daughter Julie is not known, and though the French historian Robinet mentions Christies in Montrose in the 1890s who talked of their famous revolutionary forebear, there seem to be none left today.
* The poem Ruth, about an English girl wooed and abandoned by a young American, which Wor
dsworth wrote in Germany in 1799, had other sources of inspiration, but there are passages in it which evoke both Mary's and Imlay's story, as well as Wordsworth's carefully hidden remorse for his own treatment of Annette.
* The most likely candidate for authorship of the article is Mrs Barbauld, who never shared Mary's feminist views but equally never joined in the abuse other women heaped on her. As late as May 1797 the Barbauld family evidently regarded Mary with respect, as is clear from a letter written by their adopted son to Mrs Barbauld from Etruria, in which he mentions the Wedgwoods' governess, ‘a sister of Mrs Wollstonecraft (now Mrs Godwin is she not!)… She has much of her sister's good sense but is more reserved.’ The manuscript letter is in Stoke Newington library.
* A mass of gossip and legend has gathered around Mary King; according to some her baby was killed by her family. What is certain is that she lived to marry a Gloucestershire gentleman, G. G. Meares, in 1805, bore three sons and three daughters in wedlock, and died relatively young, in 1819, leaving no account of her history.
* The authorship of the Appeal is easily established: in 1825, when Mary Hays was still alive, William Thompson referred to her as its author in the Preface to his own Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women, against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to restrain in Political and thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery.
* See, for example, Beloe's outcry in 1817, which finished: ‘Daughters of England, be not beguiled; be assured that the study of politics is not essential to female accomplishments, that the possession of the Machiavellian knowledge will neither make you better mothers, wives or friends; that to obtain it, a long life, severe study, and the most laborious investigation are indispensably necessary. Must it not excite the strongest emotions of contempt, to hear pert misses, just escaped from boarding-schools, harangue in a more peremptory tone than Selden would have assumed, and with the slightest reading, and most superficial knowledge, presume to pass judgment on the political rights and conditions of nations?’ And, still more awfully, Lord Castlereagh, speaking in the House in 1819, expressed his belief that it was enough to restrain women from attending political meetings ‘to let them know that when the French Republicans were carrying on their bloody orgies, they could find no female to join them except by ransacking the bagnios or public brothels’.
* Maria, exceptionally dependent on her father's approval, wrote this story especially to please him. It seems possible that her insistence that women's lives must be envisaged in terms of restraint and endurance owes something to her feelings about her father, just as Mary Wollstonecraft's feminism may have owed something to her contempt for her father and brother. A man of brilliant inventiveness, Richard Lovell Edgeworth created amongst his other achievements the role of Victorian paterfamilias. His wives were perpetually pregnant and ailing, each one replaced within months of her death, until Maria had a ‘mother’ younger than herself and over twenty siblings; and she, the eldest daughter who always felt insufficiently loved, created an ideal of womanhood that could blossom only at the centre of a domestic circle, the children not even being sent to school, but carefully educated at home. See Marilyn Butler's excellent account in Maria Edgeworth (1972).
* Thomas Spence, a humble radical bookseller who wrote a pamphlet advocating easy divorce in 1801, also expressed clearly how people associated any idea of a change in the status of women with political revolution: ‘The subject is so feelingly understood in this country, that it is supposed the Chains of Hymen would be among the first that would be broken… in case of a Revoution.’ (Quoted by Edward Thompson in The Making of the Engish Working Class.)
* Steven Marcus's discussion, in The Other Victorians (1966), of the way in which nineteenth-century prudery, by encouraging girls to discipline and self-restraint and making their sexuality inaccessible even to themselves, produced rigid and thwarted women, but also allowed them to extend their humanity in other ways, seems relevant here. There remains the question as to why more women did not welcome the early birth-control campaigns, and the answer to this looks like deliberate, persistent and villainous suppression by the established male preserves of Church and State. See Peter Fryer, The Birth Controllers (1965) and N. Himes, Medical History of Contraception (1936).
* Though not in France. In 1843 Mill had corresponded with Auguste Comte at length on the subject of feminism; Comte had assured him that the championing of women was a passing phase he himself had been through twenty years before, and that Mill would soon see its fallaciousness, since women were clearly inferior to men: biologically, intellectually and morally they were closer to children. Comte even confessed that ‘je me rappelle trés bien, quant à moi, le temps où l'étrange ouvrage de miss Mary Wollstonecraft (avant qu'elle eût épousé Godwin) me produisait une forte impression’; but Mill refused to be drawn on the subject of Miss Wollstonecraft, here or anywhere else. No doubt he approved her views but was disturbed by her behaviour. There is a pleasant passage in this correspondence when Mill teases Comte gently about the supposed ‘femininity’ of the French character in general, a point that Mary had made more than once.
* This aspect of David Copperfield is discussed by Q. D. Leavis in a remarkable interpretative essay in Dickens the Novelist (1970).
The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft Page 36
