Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley

by Charlotte Gordon

  Bad weather trapped them in Holland’s port city of Maasluis, where Mary began writing a story with the angry title “Hate”; unfortunately, no drafts of this early work remain, but its title suggests Mary’s frame of mind. She had felt increasingly ill over the last few weeks, and before they boarded the boat to England, she discovered why. She was pregnant.

  CHAPTER 10

  MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: LONDON

  [ 1786–1787 ]

  Lady Kingsborough had hoped to vanquish her governess by firing her, she had sadly underestimated Mary Wollstonecraft. Mary’s departure from Mitchelstown that August marked the start of a new era for the twenty-eight-year-old. Never again would she allow herself to work in such a degrading situation. She had resolved to earn her living with her pen.

  She boarded the Bristol coach to London, her bags packed with her books as well as her completed manuscript. She did not let Eliza and Everina know where she was going—a secrecy that may seem trivial to the modern reader but was actually an assertion of her right to shape her own life. She had done her best to fulfill her responsibility as an eldest sister before she left for Ireland, finding a position for Eliza as a teacher in a school near Newington and persuading Ned to allow Everina to return to his house. Instead of being grateful, however, her sisters complained, and the exhausted Mary had little sympathy left for them. Most unmarried middle-class women, herself included, had to take what they could get: either demeaning wage labor or dependency on relatives and friends. Her sisters should be thankful they were not on the streets, and if they were unhappy, she felt they should exert themselves rather than depending exclusively on her.

  After a sixteen-hour coach ride Mary arrived in hot, crowded London, a dramatic contrast to the seclusion of the Kingsborough country estate. But the jostling strangers, the unfamiliar storefronts, even the foul smell of the sewers represented hope. In the anonymity of the city she could break free of the entanglements that had held her back. With this goal in mind, she headed directly to Joseph Johnson’s bookshop to hand him her novel.

  Dressed in a homespun shift and thick-soled, sensible walking shoes, with her hair hanging down her back under a dark beaver cap that sat flat on her head, she knew she looked dowdy compared to the stylish young ladies in their light summer muslins, petticoats, wide-brimmed hats, and dainty slippers. But to Mary, this disregard for fashion was part of her newfound liberty. She no longer had to fit into a world she loathed. Indeed, she would not have been at all distressed to hear that some of her new acquaintances would refer to her as “a philosophical sloven” behind her back. Having removed herself from the marriage market as well as the drawing rooms of the rich and well-connected, she no longer needed to waste time making herself attractive for the benefit of others.

  Johnson’s office was at 72 St. Paul’s Churchyard, the tallest house in the courtyard of St. Paul’s Cathedral. A swarm of interesting-looking people milled about on the cobblestones outside; after being the odd one out in a household of aristocrats and servants, it was a relief for Mary to mix with “the middling sort.” Very few lords and ladies came to this part of London, the heart of the book trade. Forty other publishers crowded nearby on Leadenhall Street, Paternoster Row, and Ave Maria Lane. Paper sellers, publicists, book buyers, authors, and auctioneers were joined by lawyers, jurists, and curious onlookers on their way to see the hangings at the nearby gallows, since the notorious Fleet and Newgate prisons were just a few streets away. Other women might have feared for their safety; the romantic heroines in the popular novels of the era would certainly have fainted at the squalor. But Mary was thrilled by it. This was exactly where she wanted to be.

  When Mary knocked on Johnson’s door, she expected him to greet her kindly, but she was surprised by the extent of his generosity. He invited her upstairs into his cluttered chambers, away from the bustle of the shop. They settled themselves in his dining room with its view of the cathedral to discuss Mary’s future. She showed him Mary, her novel, and mentioned another idea, a collection of educational tales based on her experience as a teacher and governess. Johnson agreed to publish the novel and the educational book as soon as it was written, and assured her that if she worked diligently she could earn enough to live on.

  In the meantime, Johnson offered to find her new lodgings, inviting her to stay with him until he found a suitable accommodation. Mary agreed, though it was an unusual and improper arrangement: a single woman and a single man sleeping in the same house without supervision. But Mary trusted him to be a safe roommate. They had not spent much time together, but they had corresponded while she was in Ireland; he had never evinced any romantic interest in her, or any woman, for that matter, and Mary was intent on carving out a literary career, not initiating a love affair.

  Johnson’s quarters were far from elegant. The floors were uneven, the walls rough. Every available surface was covered with books and dusty papers. Even the bedchambers and dining room were lined with volumes. From outside, the shouts of street vendors and the calls of the crowd could be heard late into the night. Yet Mary was overjoyed. Each day she felt more rejuvenated, freed from the stifling quiet of the Irish countryside. After breakfast, Johnson spent most of his day downstairs in the shop and she tagged along, the only woman in what was essentially a man’s world. Although Johnson did publish a few other female authors, they were the exception and were rarely seen in public.

  Many of Johnson’s writers stopped in to discuss politics or to ask for advances on their work. Often, they stayed for dinner. As the days passed, Mary found that she and her publisher had similar opinions on politics and literature. She already knew that Johnson had made a name for himself by publishing the works of famous radicals. What she found out now was how deeply he shared her hatred of injustice in all its forms, and how dedicated he was to promoting the rights of women, Jews, and slaves; he had also campaigned against the abuse of child labor. Like her, he hated convention and hypocrisy. Also like her, he believed that ideas could change the world, that the written word could reform humanity.

  But Johnson was not simply an otherworldly idealist. Canny and a shrewd negotiator, he would become one of the most successful publishers of his time. In order to keep his books affordable, he skimped on production costs. Thus the volumes he produced were not particularly elegant, but he supported his writers, bailing the fiery Thomas Paine out of jail, supplying William Blake with engraving jobs, lending William Cowper money during the poet’s early years, and sharing the profits liberally once an author’s work began to make money. Mary had found exactly the right man to help her launch a literary career. During the three weeks they spent together that summer, the two laid the foundations for what would come to be one of the most important friendships of Mary’s life.

  Toward the end of her stay, Mary confessed to Johnson that she was deeply troubled by “despair and vexations.” She was concerned that she’d be unable to take care of her sisters as well as herself and feared she might have to return to the grim life of a governess in order to do so. Johnson expressed empathy and told his protégée to be brave. Her talent would overcome the hurdles that blocked her path. He also made another offer, promising to supply Mary with steady writing assignments, enough to earn a regular income. But there was one caveat. She would have to believe in herself. In fact, Mary’s confidence was the linchpin of their whole enterprise. She would have to guard against her tendency toward self-doubt. Otherwise, her gloomy outlook would destroy her chances.

  Early that fall, Johnson found Mary a small yellow brick house at 49 George Street (now Dolben Street), about a ten-minute walk from St. Paul’s, on the other side of the river, near the newly constructed Blackfriars Bridge. The south side of the Thames was an unfashionable neighborhood, but Mary didn’t care; she was delighted to have a home of her own. She did not bother to decorate her rooms. A bed, a table, and a chair—that was all she needed, though Johnson supplied her with a servant to help with the daily chores of cooking, marketing, and clea
ning. From the window of the top floor where she worked she could survey the rooftops of the grimy city she was coming to love.

  In 1787, London was bursting at the seams. Between 1750 and 1801, it mushroomed from 675,000 to 900,000 souls, almost double the size of eighteenth-century Paris. As the novelist Henry Fielding wrote, “Here you have the Advantage of solitude without its Disadvantage, since you may be alone and in Company at the same time, and while you sit or walk unobserved, Noise, Hurry, and a constant Succession of Objects entertain the Mind.”

  London’s growth was all the more remarkable given that the mortality rate worsened with each decade. The Scottish physician George Cheyne attributed this high death rate to the city’s overcrowding and poor sanitation, noting that

  the clouds of Stinking Breathes and Perspirations, not to mention the ordure of so many diseas’d, both intelligent and unintelligent animals, the crowded Churches, Church Yards and Burying Places, with the putrefying Bodies, the Sinks, Butcher Houses, Stables, Dunghills etc…putrefy, poison and infect the Air for Twenty Miles around it, and which in Time must alter, weaken and destroy the healthiest of Constitutions.

  The poet William Cowper described the city as “a common and most noisome sewer,” and even Mary, despite her affection for her new surroundings, would have admitted that Cowper had a point. Twice as many people died as were born. Gin was the most popular drink of the poor. Violence and crime dominated the streets, from prostitution to murder. Dirt, trash, and even dead bodies littered the cobblestones. Privacy was nonexistent. The enclosed “water closet” had yet to be invented. People emptied their chamber pots out the windows, leaving puddles of waste for pedestrians to slosh through. The lack of clean water, the close quarters, and the pressures of poverty led to the rapid spread of seasonal epidemics, smallpox in the winter and dysentery in the summer. Since so many of its inhabitants died prematurely—the average age of death was around thirty-seven—London’s growth depended on the influx of newcomers rushing to the city, a number that increased steadily despite the many dangers of urban living. Not only were wages higher, London also offered relief from the constraints of provincial living, where family and friends enforced social conventions and restrictions. Besides, it was exhilarating. There was always something new to see or do. As Samuel Johnson famously claimed, “whoever is sick of London is sick of life.”

  In Mary’s area, the hubbub of the city was compounded by the busy waterfront nearby. Captains crowded their ships so closely together that the river “was almost hidden by merchant vessels from every country.” The poet James Thompson compared the long lines of ships to “a long wintry forest” with “groves of masts.”

  For Mary, the virtue of all this was that she could easily blend in. There were far greater oddities in this part of London than a professional writing woman. No one commented on her appearance or her habits. During the day, she worked on the revisions to Mary that Johnson had suggested and studied foreign languages, as he had told her that her first assignments would probably be translations from the French and German. She also began her new project of educational tales that she had decided to call Original Stories. At five o’clock, she would walk across the bridge to Johnson’s house for dinner, where she would meet men such as Henry Fuseli, a German-Swiss artist who bragged about his sexual exploits and scorned conventional morality; John Bonnycastle, a mathematician who wrote books that attempted to make math and science accessible to the common reader; and Erasmus Darwin, whose sexualized depiction of flowers in his bestselling book-length poem The Loves of the Plants had recently been deemed too explicit for unmarried female readers. Despite the diversity of their interests, what these men—with the exception of Fuseli—shared with Mary was a belief that educating everyone, including women, could improve society. Like Voltaire, they viewed themselves as popularizers of knowledge rather than inventors, believing that if they wrote clearly enough, their readers would learn from their ideas and be inspired to push for reform.

  The food at these dinners was simple: fish, vegetables, and occasionally a pudding for dessert. Fuseli’s semipornographic painting The Nightmare hung over Johnson’s dinner table: its depiction of a beautiful young woman flinging her head back in painful ecstasy while a devil sits suggestively on her loins shocked ordinary onlookers, but Johnson’s guests were not ordinary.

  Fuseli’s famous painting The Nightmare. (illustration ill.12)

  You could not be a prude and dine with Johnson. And Mary, despite her sexual inexperience, was no prude. Johnson’s guests enjoyed discussing topics usually deemed improper for female ears, anything from adultery to bisexuality. These issues were of great interest to Mary as they pertained directly to the lives of women, and so, although at first she was a quiet onlooker, it did not take her long to become passionately involved, eager to offer her own opinions and ideas. Like the Newington radicals before them, this group of intellectuals appreciated Mary’s originality and forthrightness. Before long she was a vital member of Johnson’s supper club.

  By November, Mary had finished revising her novel. She knew that her decision to be a writer was unorthodox, but she felt confident enough now to send a letter to her sisters to explain her new undertaking. To hide her fears, she used grandiose terms: “I am then going to be the first of a new genus.…I must be independent.…This project has long floated in my mind. You know I was not born to tread in the beaten track—the peculiar bent of my nature pushes me on.” She begged them not to say anything to their friends and family, as she did not want anyone to try to dissuade her: “You cannot conceive how disagreeable pity and advice would be at this juncture.”

  There were other women who earned a living with their pen, Anna Barbauld and Fanny Burney among the most famous. But Mary was the first female writer who would receive a reliable stream of work from her publisher on a retainer basis. Johnson could afford to be generous because of the boom in the publishing industry in the 1780s. Earlier in the century, most readers were aristocrats, men of wealth and family. But by the time Mary arrived in London, the middle class had entered the market, demanding books that would improve their minds and their manners, equipping them to move in the best circles. Lending libraries and book clubs had sprung up all over the country. Travel books, advice books, sermons, romances, poetry, and children’s books—the list of popular categories went on and on.

  As soon as Mary’s sisters received the news that she was in London, they clamored to come live with her. But Mary did not want to share her home. Alone, she could do as she pleased, eat and sleep when she wanted, write and study without interruption, and attend Johnson’s dinner parties. She wrote to Fanny’s brother George, “I have determined on one thing, never to have my Sisters to live with me, my solitary manner of living would not suit them, nor could I pursue my studies if forced to conform.” However, she considered the girls, as she still called them, her responsibility, and by Christmas she had made plans on their behalf, though she did not consult them about what they might desire for themselves. Eliza would stay in her current teaching position. Everina would go to Paris to learn French, which would enable her to get more desirable teaching jobs in the future. Mary’s independence was safe, but her sisters were indignant. Their eldest sister had always been high-handed, but this time she had gone too far. Everina did not want to go to Paris, and Eliza was jealous that she had to stay behind.

  But Mary kept moving forward with her plans. In her quest for her sisters’ welfare, it did not cross her mind that she should take their wishes into consideration. By January, she had supplemented her own earnings by borrowing from Johnson and gathered together enough money to house Everina with a Mademoiselle Henry in an elegant apartment on the Rue de Tournon, the center of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, a neighborhood that even then was crowded with intellectuals and artists. It would have been a perfect spot for Mary to live, but not Everina, who, from the moment she arrived, wrote to Mary complaining about trivial “disasters and difficulties” and begging her
older sister to visit because she was lonely. Mary, who had consigned herself to living in straitened circumstances for Everina’s sake, was annoyed: “If I have ever any money to spare to gratify myself, I will certainly visit France,” she wrote her younger sister sternly; “it has long been a desire floating in my brain.” Even the self-absorbed Everina could not miss her older sister’s point: Mary could not come because she had already spent all her money on Everina’s unasked-for sojourn in Paris.

  In the spring of 1788, only nine months after Mary had arrived in London, Johnson published two new books by Mary Wollstonecraft: Mary and Original Stories from Real Life. Mary, the novel, did not receive much notice from critics, but Original Stories would become a staple of the advice literature on the moral development of children for almost fifty years. In this, her second book on education, Mary returned to the themes she had emphasized in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, but this time she went further, highlighting the need for ethical training for young girls by depicting a series of lessons taught by a governess she named Mrs. Mason. Through Mrs. Mason, Mary demonstrated how easily girls can be educated, countering Rousseau’s belief that women’s minds were too weak to grasp moral truths and logical problems. She also included an aggressive assault on social and economic injustice. Mrs. Mason tells stories about the sufferings of the poor, made even more graphic by the genius Johnson hired to do the illustrations, William Blake. Blake’s six woodcuts for Mary’s book depict desperate haunted beggars and starving hollow-cheeked orphans. Mrs. Mason not only teaches the importance of caring for the indigent but also points an accusing finger at the callousness of the upper classes, which Mary had witnessed while living on the Kingsborough estate.