Footsteps

by Richard Holmes

  Characteristic, too, that her claims were based on “Reason”—not on “Imagination”, a word she was still inclined to associate with what was fanciful and frivolous.

  All Mary Wollstonecraft’s works had been published by Joseph Johnson, and he was the linchpin of her professional career. She had led a penurious early life as a schoolteacher at Newington Green, in North London, and as governess to the aristocratic Kingsborough family in Ireland (a job she detested) before he encouraged her to return and settle in the capital in 1787. He took lodgings for her in Blackfriars, and she began to mix with his circle of radical intellectuals and religious nonconformists. While working on her books she supported herself by translating and writing essays and reviews on the books and topics of the day for Johnson’s newly founded magazine, the Analytical Review. Johnson found in her a person of exceptional intelligence and forceful views, who could write with great speed and fluency—though not always elegantly—and argue in mixed company without reserve or embarrassment.

  A harsh and unhappy childhood, dominated by an unstable and drunken father whom she never respected, had given Mary Wollstonecraft an unusual sense of her own independence and reliance in her own judgment; and a corresponding lack of respect for all kinds of male authority that she did not feel had been genuinely earned, whether in life or in literature. At the same time this passionate, ebullient and frequently opinionated woman was given to terrible swings of mood, from hectic noisy enthusiasm to almost suicidal depression and a sense of futility and loneliness.

  It was typical of her that after a violent disagreement with Johnson one evening she should flash round a note of hand the next morning which said simply:

  You made me very low-spirited last night, by your manner of talking.—You are my only friend—the only person I am intimate with.—I never had a father, or a brother—you have been both to me, ever since I knew you—yet I have sometimes been very petulant.—I have been thinking of those instances of ill-humour and quickness, and they appeared like crimes. Yours sincerely, Mary.

  It was this spontaneous warmth of heart and feeling, this direct touch upon the chords of life, that seems to have captivated almost everyone, man or woman, who got to know her well. Although among those who only knew her public persona as a feminist author, she frequently excited scorn and even hatred. Horace Walpole, the friend of the poet Gray, and the kindly eccentric of Strawberry Hill, called her a “hyena in petticoats”. The philosopher William Godwin, a man of almost studied calm and self-control, came home in a fever of irritation from a dinner at Johnson’s in 1791 where he had hoped to be introduced to Tom Paine. The fourth member of the dinner-party had not allowed him to get a word in edgeways with the author of The Rights of Man before he decamped to France. The vexatious person who had dominated the conversation was the author of The Rights of Woman. She was also to be, six years later, Godwin’s wife. He called her a “sort of female Werther”—after Goethe’s popular novel of the new, “emotional” sensibility.

  Certainly the fact that she was still unmarried in her early thirties excited considerable speculation. She was a large, handsome woman with a striking pair of brown eyes, an unruly mass of chestnut hair and long expressive hands—not the trim, dowdy blue-stocking of eighteenth-century convention. She had noticeable dress sense, and each of the half-dozen different portraits I found of her in the 1790s showed a different fashion of clothes and a completely different hairstyle.

  The portrait of late 1791, especially commissioned by her friend Roscoe to celebrate the publication of her Rights of Woman, showed her in her Amazonian phase: lean-featured, with the severe dark dress and high white stock of the nonconformist intellectual, her carefully curled and powdered hair brushed back from her brow and shoulders. She looks like a formidable young headmistress. Yet some two years later an engraving shows her as a thoroughly romantic femme de trente, wearing the loose white gown of the progressive woman, with high waist and low décolletage, her chestnut hair falling in a mass of wild tresses over her forehead and shoulders, uncombed and unpowdered, and her head crowned with a sort of half-stovepipe riding hat, a racy Parisian affair, with a velvet band and curved brim.

  These outward changes of style give some clue to her mercurial and passionate temperament, and certainly belie any suggestion of mannish coldness or lesbian hauteur. In fact, in 1792, gossip not surprisingly gave her a romantic connection with her publisher, which she laughingly denied in her letters to Roscoe, while trailing her petticoat in a most unhyena-like manner: “Our friend Johnson is well—I am told the world, to talk big, married me to him while we were away; but you know that I am still a spinster on the wing. At Paris, indeed, I might take a husband for the time being, and get divorced when my truant heart longed again to nestle with its old friends; but this speculation has not yet entered into my plan.”

  This talk of a husband was actually bravado, or at least putting a brave face on matters. For the truth was that Mary Wollstonecraft had passed the summer of 1792 in the agonies of an unrequited love affair with another of Johnson’s friends, the gifted and highly unstable painter Henri Fuseli. Mary had insisted that her passion was platonic, or anyway based on a marriage of true minds. But Fuseli’s wife had not been of the same opinion, especially when Mary suggested a trip to Paris with Fuseli and Johnson; and, when this fell through, planned a ménage à trois with Fuseli in London. That September a domestic row ensued, and Fuseli’s door was for ever closed to Mary—the abrupt but inevitable termination of what she had described, curiously, as “a rational desire”. This story—largely based on the hearsay of friends, for Mary’s letters to Fuseli were destroyed—gave me a further clue to Mary’s character: headstrong, entirely impatient with conventions (though the ménage à trois was, a generation later, to be a typical Romantic solution to the “problem” of marriage), and yet with an odd kind of sexual innocence. For there can be no doubt, from later events, that Mary Wollstonecraft was still a virgin at this time.

  She had, moreover, fallen for a perhaps unexpected kind of man. Fuseli was brilliantly imaginative to the point of neurosis, philandering, foreign (he was Swiss by birth) and extremely demanding. Many of these qualities are summed up in his most famous painting, the disturbing and sexually symbolic picture The Nightmare—with its abandoned female sleeper flung back across a bed, while a hideous incubus crouches on her breast. That this man should have been Mary’s type made me think that any simple interpretation of her emotional character—a frustrated spinster intellectual (as she jokingly implied) or a hungry, dominating, even man-hating woman—would be rather short of the mark.

  Moreover, Mary had not led an emotionally sheltered life, hidden away in books or schools. As a child she had protected her mother physically from the assaults of her drunken father; and when her mother was dying in 1782 it was Mary—aged twenty-three—who came home to nurse her. When her younger sister Eliza lapsed into depression after the birth of her first child, it was Mary who spirited her away in a carriage and insisted on a separation from her bullying husband. It was Mary, too, who set up the school in Newington Green where her other sister, Evarina, taught; and where her greatest friend, Fanny Blood, found independence. Most indicative of all, when Fanny Blood married and went away with her husband to Portugal, it was Mary who answered the call to attend her in childbirth, in November 1785, sailing to Lisbon alone to do so. Mary’s feelings for Fanny were the most important thing in her early life, and showed both her loyalty to those she loved and her powerful organising and maternal instinct, at its best in a crisis.

  When Fanny, too, died in her arms after giving birth, Mary’s profound sense of vocation to speak for the plight of women crystallised. Two years later she was beginning to write for Johnson, and with her intensive reading and her eager pursuit of the intellectual debate aroused by the Revolution in France—most especially by the work of Tom Paine and Condorcet—the intense awareness of women’s plight leapt forward into the powerful and socially revolutionary concept
of women’s right.

  A journey to Paris was, on the face of it, not such a mad adventure for a woman who had already travelled to Dublin and to Lisbon. Besides, Mary Wollstonecraft, whatever her private uncertainties, was now a writer with a growing public reputation both in England and France. She had met Talleyrand in London—he remarked on her insouciant manner of serving tea out of unmatched cups and saucers. Her book had been widely reviewed, and attacked, in the English press; and a translation of it had rapidly appeared in Paris, under the title Une Défense des Droits des Femmes. There it had attracted the attention of the Girondists, the moderate party opposed to Robespierre’s Jacobins. They already had close contacts with Johnson through White’s Hotel and specifically through Citoyen and Député Tom Paine. The Girondists’ group were particularly interested in social and educational reform, and the Rights of Woman was a carte de visite to Madame Roland’s salon and those leading deputies who met there, like Brissot, Condorcet, Pétion and Vergniaud. It also gave Mary great standing among the more eccentric and active feminist campaigners, like the flamboyant Olympe de Gouges (originally an actress called Marie Gouze) and the glamorous Madame Stéphanie de Genlis, author of several polemical works on women’s rights, who always wore a polished piece of Bastille stone on a gold chain in her plunging cleavage, to the confusion of her male colleagues—an early case of radical chic.

  Yet Mary Wollstonecraft’s decision to go alone to Paris was a brave one. On the eve of her departure in mid-December she wrote frankly to her sister Evarina that she was struggling with “vapourish fears”. She was alarmed by the increasingly hostile attitude to the Revolution that was becoming apparent even in liberal circles in London, ever since the arrest of the King. Had she not already booked and paid for her place in the Dover mail she says she would “have put off the journey again on account of the present posture of affairs at home”. In his Memoir of her, Godwin later said that she would not have gone at all had it not been for her anxiety to forget Fuseli, and there may be much truth in this. However, her practical arrangements show that the expedition was well thought out, and only intended to last about six weeks. She had kept on the small apartment she now rented at Store Street behind the British Museum (on the present site of the University gardens east of Bedford Square) and left her cat with a neighbour. She had arranged to draw money through Johnson’s publishing contacts in Paris, and accepted a commission from him to write a series of “Letters from the Revolution”, with a Paris dateline in the best tradition of the foreign correspondent.

  Like Wordsworth, she appears to have had notes of introduction to Helen Williams, and probably also to Madame Roland. She had wisely arranged to stay with private friends in the rue Meslay in the third arrondissement—a quiet street in the north-east corner of the city, off the boulevard Saint-Martin and near the present place de la République. The large house at No 22 was owned by a well-to-do French merchant, Monsieur Fillietaz, who had married Aline Bregantz—one of Mary’s friends from her teaching days. So familiar faces, as she supposed, awaited her in Paris. What she did not realise was that the Fillietaz family had left for the country, and that the rue Meslay stood within five minutes of the King’s prison at the Temple.

  Mary Wollstonecraft finally arrived in Paris on about 12 or 13 December 1792—almost the exact day that Wordsworth was leaving the city. She carried the obligatory tricolour cockade in her hatband (these were forced on prudent travellers at Calais, at exorbitant prices), and also caught a heavy head cold on the three-day diligence. For three weeks Johnson and her friends in London heard nothing: Mary had disappeared into the heart of the Revolution.

  Once again I followed her, wandering up and down the narrow, rising thoroughfare, the home of cheap china and plumbing shops which is the modern rue Meslay, trying to make sense of her extraordinary story, to catch the echoes of her voice and the glimpses of what she had witnessed.

  The broad outline of her adventure soon became clear enough. Mary’s journalistic expedition of six weeks prolonged itself into a sojourn of two years, the most transforming and probably the most crucial years of her life. She remained in France during the trial and execution of Louis XVI and his family; during the declaration of war against England and her continental allies who aligned themselves against the Revolution; during the struggle for power which led to the execution of all the leading Girondists; during Robespierre’s Terror and the arrest of all the English; during the wartime famine, and the terrible dictatorship of the Committee of Public Safety, and the guillotining of Danton, Desmoulins and all the original heroes of the Convention; and at last into the relatively tranquil period following Thermidor—the execution of Robespierre and Saint-Just on 29 July 1794—and the repeal of the dreaded Maximum Laws.

  During these hectic months she was, successively, in Paris, then at Neuilly, then at Le Havre, and finally back in Paris again for the winter of 1794–5. She wrote fifty-two extant letters, one long journalistic article for Johnson—the first of the “Letters from the Revolution”, laconically entitled “On the Present Character of the French Nation”—and the first volume of a projected Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, which was published by Johnson in late 1794. But much more important than all this—and to me the biographical fact that transformed my conception of the inner nature of the revolutionary experience—she fell violently in love with a fellow-enthusiast of the French cause, and had an illegitimate child. Like Annette Vallon (though far more tragically) she was abandoned by the child’s father in circumstances that led to her almost despairing of everything she believed in and had struggled to achieve. This story is now much better known, through the fine modern biography by Claire Tomalin (1974); but at the time, as I pieced it together in the retreating hopes of “Imagination au Pouvoir”, it came to grip my mind like one of those recurrent dreams—half mysterious symbol and half fretful nightmare—that seize on our unconscious with inexplicable power and authority during times of confused action and ill-defined aims in life. Oddly, I associated Mary’s whole story with an isolated line of Wordsworth’s which had nothing at all to do with Paris: “The sounding Cataract haunted me like a passion.” There was something, I suppose, like a wild waterfall in the headlong, broken, plunging quality of Mary’s life. I stood and gazed at it roaring through the streets of Paris, visible only to me.

  4

  What were Mary Wollstonecraft’s initial impressions of Paris, the first liberated city of Europe? I expected a paean of praise and excitement; a wild traveller’s letter full of the crowds, the Fédéré soldiers, the tricolour flags and the wall-posters, impressions of the cafés and arcades, and news of the Convention. Thomas Carlyle, in his great pageant-history of the Revolution, described the English sympathisers arriving with “hot unutterabilities in their hearts” and, having felt something of the same myself, I thought Mary would express no less.

  What she actually wrote, on 24 December, was a hurried note to Evarina, saying that Madame Fillietaz was away, the servants were largely incomprehensible, she went to bed every night with a headache, and she had still “seen very little of Paris, the streets are so dirty”. The one introduction she had used was that to Helen Williams, whom she described as affected in manner but with a “simple goodness of her heart” that continually broke through the varnish. “She has behaved very civilly to me and I shall visit her frequently, because I rather like her, and I meet French company at her house.” There was only one brief observation that gave any clue to how she was really reacting. It referred to the forthcoming trial: “The day after tomorrow I expect to see the King at the bar—and the consequences that will follow I am almost afraid to anticipate.”

  It gradually dawned on me that Mary, for all her genuine revolutionary enthusiasm, was frightened and isolated; but being Mary, she was not going to show it—at least to her sister.

  Writing much later in her History of the Revolution, she put some of the ambiguity of her first feelings into the description of the King
being brought by the mob from Versailles to the Tuileries. She describes how he would have been struck, as he rode down the Champs-Elysées, by the “charming boulevards, the lofty trees, the alleys and the noble buildings”; and by the way the ordinary people “walk and laugh with an easy gaiety peculiar to their nation”. But then his gaze—which was really her gaze—would have rested on the great barrier towers and walls of the city, originally built in 1784 by the Fermiers-Généraux for tax collection purposes, but now producing a terrible effect of “concentration”—an ominous word to use—and so “cutting off the possibility of innocent victims escaping from the fury, or the mistake of the moment”. The barrier wall was built of stone, about twelve feet high, and enclosing a perimeter of twenty-three kilometres round the whole city along the line of the boulevards from the present place Charles de Gaulle, place Clichy, and place de la Nation on the Right Bank, to the place Denfert-Rochereau and the place d’Italie on the Left Bank. This formidable wall was guarded by sixty barrier towers, each enclosing a narrow iron gateway, controlled and guarded by troops and customs officers, and bolted for the curfew at dusk. Thus Mary felt these “magnificent porticoes”, instead of being the great welcoming gateways into a new paradise, seemed insensibly to reverse their roles, and to threaten to become “gates to a great Prison”, preventing anyone getting out.