Sidetracks

by Richard Holmes

  Nystrom’s evidence is less clear-cut from this point onwards, but it appears that a preliminary Board of Inquiry was appointed according to the Danish protocol in dealing with Norwegian matters. This consisted of three local judges or commissioners drawn from leading members of the Norwegian business community. The great significance of Nystrom’s researches on this point is his identification of the Scandinavian towns in which they lived. Christoffer Nordberg and A.J. Ungar came from Stromstad, north of Gothenburg, on the Swedish–Norwegian border. Jacob Wulfsberg came from Tonsberg, on the southern Norwegian coast. If we add to these Peter Ellefsen’s home port of Risor, we have at last the complete outline of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Scandinavian itinerary in the summer of 1795.

  It is now clear that, after an indecisive preliminary investigation by the Board of Inquiry in the spring of that year, Imlay had confided to ‘his best friend and wife’ the task of trying to reach some legal settlement through personal intervention. She was to discover the fate of the treasure ship, the attitude of all parties concerned, and to reach if possible some financial agreement, probably on an ‘out of court’ basis. It was by any standards an onerous undertaking, involving a foreign legal system, a series of delicate interviews, a six-hundred-mile round trip from Gothenburg and the prospect of an extremely difficult meeting with Peder Ellefsen himself on his home ground at Risor. Only someone as daring and determined as Mary Wollstonecraft would have attempted it.

  VI

  ‘A Dark Speck of Life’

  FOR THE LITERARY PURPOSES of A Short Residence, no explicit reference is made to this saga of the treasure ship. But Nystrom’s discoveries allow us to plot the stages of Wollstonecraft’s northern journey with new understanding. They also help us to appreciate better than before the extraordinary skill with which she transformed a prosaic business venture into a poetic revelation of her character and philosophy.

  The range of Wollstonecraft’s practical interests is both delightful and formidable. She has strong views on everything from gardening to prison reform and even sea-monsters. She may spend her time visiting a salt works, discussing farmers’ land rights, going sea-bathing, studying divorce laws, chatting to domestic servants, or simply climbing a cliff at sunset to blow a hunting horn and listen to its echoes swelling and fading among the distant, shadowy promontories. All these things tell us as much about her as about Scandinavia, and her individual observations vividly reveal her cast of mind:

  The women and children were cutting off branches from the beech, birch, oak, &c, and leaving them to dry – This way of helping out their fodder, injures the trees. But the winters are so long, that the poor cannot afford to lay in a sufficient stock of hay. By such means they just keep life in the poor cows, for little milk can be expected when they are so miserably fed.

  It was Saturday, and the evening was uncommonly serene. In the villages I every where saw preparations for Sunday, and I passed by a little car loaded with rye, that presented, for the pencil and heart, the sweetest picture of a harvest home I had ever beheld! A little girl was mounted astraddle on a shaggy horse, brandishing a stick over its head; the father was walking at the side of the car with a child in his arms, who must have come to meet him with tottering steps, the little creature was stretching out its arms to cling around his neck; and a boy, just above petticoats, was labouring hard, with a fork, behind, to keep the sheaves from falling.

  My eyes followed them to the cottage, and an involuntary sigh whispered to my heart, that I envied the mother, much as I dislike cooking, who was preparing their pottage. I was returning to my babe, who may never experience a father’s care or tenderness. The bosom that nurtured her, heaved with a pang at the thought which only an unhappy mother could feel. (Letter 16)

  Wollstonecraft also uses certain intense, often solitary, moments of her travel, almost like Wordsworthian ‘spots of time’, to establish the confessional themes, the hopes and fears, that give the book its inward and Romantic quality. Often these are achieved by the way in which, with perfect naturalness, she places herself within a landscape, or minutely observes it.

  In Letters 5 and 6 she describes how she sets out alone in a small open boat to cross the Christiania Sound for Larvik. She adopts the dauntless tone that vividly caught the imagination of her readers.

  The wind had changed on the night, and my boat was ready. A dish of coffee, and fresh linen, recruited my spirits; and I directly set out again for Norway; proposing to land much higher up the coast. Wrapping my great coat around me, I lay down on some sails at the bottom of the boat, its motion rocking me to rest, till a discourteous wave interrupted my slumbers, and obliged me to rise and feel a solitariness which was not so soothing as that of the past night … The sea was boisterous; but, as I had an experienced pilot, I did not apprehend any danger. Sometimes, I was told, boats are driven far out and lost. However, I seldom calculate chances so nicely–sufficient for the day is the obvious evil! We had to steer amongst islands and huge rocks, rarely losing sight of the shore, though it now and then appeared only a mist that bordered the water’s edge. (Letters 5 and 6)

  In this description of the solitary voyager, sailing through dangerous waters towards an unknown, misty shoreline, Mary Wollstonecraft’s whole life seems for a moment to be symbolized. But more than that, something of the Romantic predicament itself is prophesied. How many other boats would be driven ‘far out and lost’!

  At the old merchant town of Tonsberg her business with Judge Wulfsberg detained her for three weeks. She settled into an inn overlooking the sea, walked daily over the rocks, rowed in the bay, and began to write her travel book (Letters 6 to 9). For the first time she sounds cheerful – ‘I have recovered my activity, even whilst attaining a little embonpoint’ – and her quick eye and inquiring spirit rove with marvellous freedom through these chapters. She notices everything: the sea captains who sing Republican songs but still venerate the Danish prince; the women who dress so charmingly but are ill-paid as domestic servants; the criminal who was branded on his third conviction, but who praised Judge Wulfsberg for providing him with financial relief afterwards (she sends him some money herself). But the most revealing of all is the way she shifts with startling ease from an abstract, sententious, philosophic reflection in the eighteenth-century manner, to a minute and poetically detailed observation of nature, which reminds us of nothing so much as the Notebooks of Coleridge or the Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth.

  I wished to avail myself of my vicinity to the sea, and bathe; but it was not possible near the town; there was no convenience. The young woman whom I mentioned to you, proposed rowing me across the water, amongst the rocks; but as she was pregnant, I insisted on taking one of the oars, and learning to row. It was not difficult; and I do not know a pleasanter exercise. I soon became expert, and my train of thinking kept time, as it were, with the oars, or I suffered the boat to be carried along by the current, indulging a pleasing forgetfulness, or fallacious hopes. – How fallacious! yet, without hope, what is to sustain life, but the fear of annihilation – the only thing of which I have ever felt a dread – I cannot bear to think of being no more – of losing myself – though existence is often but a painful consciousness of misery; nay, it appears to me impossible that I should cease to exist, or that this active, restless spirit, equally alive to joy and sorrow, should only be organized dust – ready to fly abroad the moment the spring snaps, or the spark goes out, which kept it together. Surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable – and life is more than a dream.

  Sometimes, to take up my oar, once more, when the sea was calm, I was amused by disturbing the unnumer-able young jelly fish which floated just below the surface: I had never observed them before; for they have not a hard shell, like those which I have seen on the sea-shore. They look like thickened water, with a white edge; and four purple circles, of different forms, were in the middle, over an incredible number of fibres, or white lines. Touching them, the cloudy substance would turn or c
lose, first on one side, then on the other, very gracefully; but when I took one of them up in the ladle with which I heaved the water out of the boat, it appeared only a colourless jelly.

  I did not see any of the seals, numbers of which followed our boat when we landed in Sweden; for though I like to sport in the water, I should have had no desire to join in their gambols.

  It is in the close combination of these two kinds of observation that her romantic genius is so well displayed. Her intense awareness of inner life and identity, is projected on to even the most humble forms of nature.

  At Peder Ellefsen’s home port of Risor, hidden away among wild rocky headlands some 150 miles out from Christiania, she is overcome by fears. They are vividly expressed in her description of the claustrophobic, primitive and backward place, where a ‘contraband trade makes the basis of their profit’. They seem, too, to have revived memories of the old regime in France, and the terrors of imprisonment, the deepest nightmare, perhaps, of her spirit.

  We were a considerable time entering amongst the islands, before we saw about two hundred houses crowded together, under a very high rock – still higher appearing above. Talk not of bastilles! To be born here, was to be bastilled by nature – shut out from all that opens the understanding, or enlarges the heart. Huddled one behind another, not more than a quarter of the dwellings even had a prospect of the sea … The ocean, and these tremendous bulwarks, enclosed me on every side. I felt the confinement, and wished for wings to reach still loftier cliffs … I felt my breath oppressed, though nothing could be clearer than the atmosphere. (Letter 11)

  Of the business finally transacted here, she says little, except that she was ‘prevailed upon to dine with the English vice-consul’. One is amazed to learn such a person existed in such a place. For the rest she notes only her utter relief on departing after several days – ‘It seemed to me a sort of emancipation.’

  Returning to Christiania (Letters 13 and 14) she was notably well entertained by the family of Bernhard Anker, an anglophile and one of the leading merchants in Norway. Anker was a Fellow of the Royal Society, and besides owning the best private library in Norway and a fine collection of scientific instruments, he was also proprietor of a hundred of the 136 licensed saw mills in the district. No doubt she was still trying to get support and advice over the Ellefsen affair. But she also had time to tour the city (quarrelling with William Coxe’s description in his Voyages and Travels), and to be taken out to the younger Anker’s country estate, with its famous English-style gardens.

  Here occurs one of those touching details which suddenly bring a sort of intimacy to our knowledge of the past. Four years later, in the summer of 1799, another young English traveller, Edward Daniel Clarke, also came to the Ankers’ country estate. Wandering out of the house, he came upon an unexpected sight, which he must be allowed to tell in his own words. ‘In the gardens we were shown an old Norwegian dwelling, preserved as a specimen of what the Norwegian houses were two centuries before, with all its furniture and other appurtenances, as it then stood. Upon the walls of this building we observed the names of many travellers who had visited the spot, and, among others, that of the late Mrs Godwin, thus inscribed, with a pencil, near the door – “Mary Wollstonecraft” ’ (Travels in Various Countries, 1824, Vol. 10, p. 389).

  It is difficult to say which is the more memorable aspect of this sudden, homely detail; that she wrote her name like any other English traveller (though modestly, in pencil, ‘near the door’). Or that she signed herself not ‘Imlay’, but her real name, her writing name, ‘Wollstonecraft’. It must have been worth the glimpse of a dozen ‘Byrons’ scrawled over the monuments of Europe.

  Almost her last sight in Norway was the dramatic cascades near Frederikstad, which she approached through a devastated pine forest leading down to a dark, narrow valley booming with the sound of roaring water. This place seems to have hypnotized her, with its white crashing waters bursting out against the black rocks and overhanging trees, an elemental force both thrilling and disturbing. The ideas of death – suicide perhaps – but also rebirth and immortality, filled her mind. It is a passage that I think may particularly have struck Coleridge when he read it the following year at Nether Stowey, and we shall return to it:

  Reaching the cascade, or rather cataract, the roaring of which had a long time announced its vicinity, my soul was hurried by the falls into a new train of reflections. The impetuous dashing of the rebounding torrent from the dark cavities which mocked the exploring eye, produced an equal activity in my mind: my thoughts darted from earth to heaven, and I asked myself why I was chained to life and its misery? Still the tumultuous emotions this sublime object excited were very pleasurable; and, viewing it, my soul rose, with renewed dignity, above its cares – grasping at immortality – it seemed as impossible to stop the current of my thoughts, as of the always varying, still the same, torrent before me – I stretched out my hand to eternity, bounding over the dark speck of life to come. (Letter 15)

  But her observations on the pine woods themselves, those living symbols of wild nature throughout Scandinavia, have remarkable particularity and philosophic power. Beginning with almost botanical precision, and curiously foreshadowing the Darwinian notion of the ‘struggle for existence’, they move characteristically towards a poetic vision of death as a kind of regeneration of the spirit, of ‘something getting free’. The organic society of the woods, Wollstonecraft seems to suggest, reflects the evolutionary possibilities of the human spirit. This was to become a major theme, a commanding vision, for later Romantic poets; and one can glimpse, perhaps, the shadowy outline of some future ode by Shelley.

  The spiral tops of the pines are loaded with ripening seed, and the sun gives a glow to their light green tinge, which is changing into purple, one tree more or less advanced, contrasting with another. The profusion with which nature has decked them, with pendant honours, prevents all surprise at seeing, in every crevice, some sapling struggling for existence. Vast masses of stone are thus encircled; and roots, torn up by the storms, become a shelter for a young generation … The grey cobweb-like appearance of the aged pines is a much finer image of decay; the fibres whitening as they lose their moisture, imprisoned life seems to be stealing away. I cannot tell why – but death, under every form, appears to me like something getting free – to expand in I know not what element; nay I feel that this conscious being must be as unfettered, have the wings of thought, before it can be happy. (Letter 15)

  At Copenhagen she seems to have obtained an audience with Count Bernstorff himself on the Ellefsen affair. But she describes the city at length – it had recently been gutted by fire – with detailed reflections on the Danish government (Letters 18 to 21). The story of Princess Mathilda and Struensee obviously touched her deeply – she suggests their error was in attempting to push through liberal reforms too quickly. She criticizes many aspects of Danish life, from the heavy drinking to the public execution of criminals. She looks ‘in vain for the sprightly gait of the Norwegians’ and their sense of liberty – and was repelled both by the ‘promiscuous amours of the men of the middling class with their female servants’ and the ‘gross debaucheries’ of the lower orders. ‘Love here seems to corrupt the morals, without polishing the manners, by banishing confidence and truth, the charm as well as the cement of domestic life.’ She particularly criticizes the ‘cunning and wantonness’ of the Danish women, and the illiberal and tyrannical behaviour of Danish husbands.

  I have every where been struck by one characteristic difference in the conduct of the two sexes; women, in general, are seduced by their superiors, and men jilted by their inferiors; rank and manners awe the one, and cunning and wantonness subjugate the other; ambition creeping into the woman’s passion, and tyranny giving force to the man’s; for most men treat their mistresses as kings do their favourites: ergo is not man then the tyrant of the creation? (Letter 19)

  This letter is her most explicitly feminist chapter, and in a revealing as
ide she quickly meets the sarcastic objections that she feels sure Imlay, and perhaps other readers, will raise. ‘Still harping on the same subject, you will exclaim – How can I avoid it, when most of the struggles of an eventful life have been occasioned by the oppressed state of my sex: we reason deeply, when we forcibly feel.’ It is a remark that rings out with heartfelt conviction, and makes any idea that Mary Wollstonecraft had trimmed her views in later life not only absurd, but impertinent.

  Yet the more tender side of her beliefs is also evident in the pleasure with which she describes the sexual freedom of the young people in Scandinavia (a subject which became notorious in Victorian England), and the ‘kind of interregnum between the reign of the father and the husband’ which the young women enjoyed in courtship.

  Young people, who are attached to each other, with the consent of their friends, exchange rings, and are permitted to enjoy a degree of liberty together, which I have never noticed in any other country. The days of courtship are therefore prolonged, till it be perfectly convenient to marry: the intimacy often becomes very tender; and if the lover obtain the privilege of a husband, it can only be termed half by stealth, because the family is wilfully blind. It happens very rarely that these honorary engagements are dissolved or disregarded. (Letter 19)

  This liberal praise of premarital sexual understanding is typical of Wollstonecraft’s lack of hypocrisy in such matters, and her fearlessness in saying exactly what she means. It is a fearlessness matched by Godwin, when he made it clear in the Memoirs that it was just such a relationship that he and Mary shared in 1796.