The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft

by Claire Tomalin

  When Mary arrived at the Bishops' she found Eliza in a severely disturbed state, talking disconnectedly but saying enough to suggest to her sister that she had been very ill-used by her husband. Whether this was a delusion of her breakdown or based on some real grievance is hard to say; Meredith would not have sent for Mary if he had felt too guilty, and most married couples can find some grievances, especially during the first year. Eliza and Meredith were more than likely casualties of their upbringings, she innocent and squeamish, he boorish and crude in his wooing. Mary's remark that ‘he can't look beyond the present gratification’ suggests a simple explanation for their trouble; if Eliza's sexual experience was confined to inept husbandly assaults, uncomfortable pregnancy and excruciating child-birth, she may have taken refuge from the situation in her breakdown (which never, as far as we know, recurred). It would also help to explain Meredith's alternations of anger and conciliatory gestures.

  Mary decided her sister was well enough to be taken out for a coach ride, and then sat down to write to Everina:

  I cannot yet give any certain account of Bess [i.e. Eliza] or form a rational conjecture with respect to the termination of her disorder. She has not had a violent fit of phrenzy since I saw you – but her mind is in a most unsettled state and attending to the constant fluctuations of it is far more harassing than the watching of those raving fits that had not the least tincture of reason.

  Her next letter asked anxiously whether Everina also had something preying on her mind, and exhorted her to patience and resignation, as though she too might suddenly go mad. Then Mary inquired whether Ned would consider taking in Eliza; Mary herself was in such a state that she talked of her own brain turning. Should she not ask Ned herself, she wondered, and would Everina please not let him discuss the business with Meredith, ‘for it would only put him on his guard, and we should have a storm to encounter that I tremble to think of’. Already it sounded as though she was plotting to counter a male conspiracy with a female one.

  Eliza herself now uttered the fatal words ‘she had rather be a teacher than stay here’; Mary added, rather surprisingly under the circumstances, that she expected her sister soon to be deprived of her reason. ‘B [Bishop] cannot behave properly – and those who attempt to reason with him must be mad or have very little observation. Those who would save Bess must act and not talk.’ The baby, cared for and fed by a nurse, seemed an insignificant person at this juncture.

  Presently the wretched Bishop fell ill too, after trying to reason with Mary, who had by now, at whatever cost, assumed her usual dominant position over the whole household. She wrote to Everina:

  My spirits are harried with listening to pros and cons, and my head is so confused that I sometimes say no when I ought to say yes. My heart is almost broken with listening to B. while he reasons the case. I cannot insult him with advice which he would never have wanted if he was capable of attending to it.

  Meanwhile Eliza was in fact recovering, though still very depressed; but she was well enough to receive a visit from Fanny, who was at once drawn into Mary's plan to rescue her sister from her husband.

  And so, in a state bordering on hysterical high spirits, Mary crept out of the Bermondsey house, with Eliza but without the baby, during Meredith's absence one day in January. They took a coach into central London and then another to the village of Hackney, far north of the river, where they installed themselves in lodgings under false names – Mary called herself Miss Johnson – and awaited developments.

  She had taken on her family before in acts of defiance, when she left home to work for Mrs Dawson and again to live with the Bloods; but this was her first open and general challenge to the conventions of society. It probably felt like a blow against all tyrannous husbands, against her father and her unloving and bullying brother, against Hugh Skeys who threatened to take Fanny from her but was too craven even to do so, against Mr Blood who gave his wife too many children and failed to support them, against all the men who claimed God-given superiority and enjoyed inheritances, education, professional careers and the right to choose or reject women. There was no thought of asking for help or shelter from Laugharne or, at this stage, from Ned; everything was to be done in defiance of their natural protectors.

  All the way across London Eliza in her distress had been biting her wedding ring. Mary's first letter from the Hackney lodgings sounded both terrified and exultant: she asked Everina to apply for Ned's advice on Eliza's legal position. Could she be forced to return? She herself now feared Meredith more than Eliza did, she added.

  Left to herself, there seems little doubt that Eliza would have returned to her repentant husband and innocent baby; she was soon sighing for the little creature. ‘The poor brat! it had got a hold of my affections; some time or other I hope we shall get it,’ said Mary; but she knew the baby was Meredith's trump and prepared to fight him, even though she herself was now ill with swelled legs and a stomach disorder. She and Eliza were both also suffering from an inconvenient shortage of chemises, handkerchiefs and aprons, but all this had to be borne. Ned was to be told that Eliza was ‘fixed in her resolution of never returning’.

  Having got so far in the drama, Mary's next step was to establish herself, her sister and friend as an independent female community; Fanny could be detached from her family and sell her sketches for a living, and Ned might after all be persuaded to provide furniture if he did not take refuge in his customary ‘prudence’. But Ned was obviously furious about Mary's intervention in the Bishops' marriage; and he had further distractions. His wife had just given birth to a son, yet another Edward, in September, so he was perhaps even less inclined than usual to give away his inherited household goods.

  Fanny knew perfectly well that Ned disapproved of her and her family, and she wrote an anxious letter pointing out the practical difficulties of Mary's plan and stressing her own reluctance to be a nuisance to anyone. Her suggestion was that Ned might set up his sisters in a small shop. Mr Blood now also intervened with an invitation to Mary, Eliza and the baby to share his humble home. But it was impossible to imagine them all crammed in with the Bloods, and his moods were not always so expansive and generous as his offer suggested. Mrs Clare, offering her advice, backed Fanny's plan for a shop, called on Mary in Hackney and expressed cautious approval of her action in regard to Eliza so far, but she wound up by saying a reconciliation with Meredith and return home must be the eventual solution. Mary's tone to Everina began to grow significantly fiercer when friends criticized:

  I knew I should be the Mrs Brown The shameful incendiary in this shocking affair of a woman leaving her bed-fellow… In short 'tis contrary to all the rules of conduct that are published for the benefit of new married Ladies by whose advice Mrs Brook was actuated when she with grief of heart gave up my friendship.

  Whatever the cost in disapproval, she was determined to remain in control of the situation and impose her will on everyone else. When Meredith showed signs of turning nasty she grew more cheerful, because it spared her feeling sympathetic towards him. She wrote to Everina carefully explaining that she felt ‘some pain in acting with firmness, for I hold the marriage vow sacred’. It was a surprising statement at this stage, and probably intended for Ned's eyes, but his furious disapproval did not waver.

  Fanny sent for news of the baby but was given none; no doubt by now Meredith had hired a whole troop of nurses. Mary wondered whether to go to Ireland to run either a shop or a school. The nights were freezing and by day it rained steadily.

  This state of affairs – cold weather, uncomfortable lodgings, increasing disapproval and uncertainty over the future – continued into February. Eliza never went home to Bermondsey and almost certainly never saw her little daughter again. No one has ever thought to ask what happened to Elizabeth Mary Frances Bishop, but we need only turn to the pages of the parish register for St Mary Magdalene, Bermondsey, to find out. On 4 August 1784, just before her first birthday, she was buried in a vault in the churchyard. Her fune
ral was an exceptionally fine one, her father paying ten shillings and tenpence for the coffin, shroud and dues, whereas the normal rate for a Bermondsey baby was only three and tenpence.15

  Whatever feelings of guilt and unhappiness Mary and Eliza suffered at that moment are not recorded. Thereafter Mary alternated between maternal and protective feelings for her sister and exasperation at her infuriating characteristics: she accused her of snobbery, and of a tendency to ‘turn up her nose and ridicule’. When Eliza complained, Mary reminded her that her lot could have been worse. Later, when Mary was thinking of sending her sisters to America, she so far forgot Eliza's married though separated state as to discuss the probability of her finding a husband in the United States. But Eliza did not forget, and her later bitterness and sarcasm about Mary must be attributable to her having helped to destroy her marriage before it had a chance to establish itself, and in so doing deprive her of the child she bore and the possibility of ever bearing any more. It is even likely that Mary's own daughter Fanny Imlay suffered the last effects of the incident, when her aunts refused to have her to live with them in Ireland many years later. Why should Mary's brat be succoured when Eliza's had been left to die?

  [4]

  Newington Green and the Dissenters

  FOR Eliza and her small family, the events of the winter were a disaster; for Mary there was a compensation. They enabled her to escape from the dead end she had worked into with the Bloods. The last two years had seen her trapped by her affection for Fanny and the entire family's dependence on her; all she had gained from the experience in return was an insight into the way in which poor women, clinging to respectability by taking in work at home, were paid at starvation rates and crushed in health and spirit. It was enough to ensure that she would neither return to the Bloods nor let Fanny remain at home longer than could be helped. But money was running out, she and Eliza could not stay idle in lodgings much longer, and the male members of the various families were ready to pounce and force a simple, humiliating conclusion if she showed signs of distress or wavering. That was out of the question. In February she announced decisively that she and Eliza and Fanny were going to keep a school together.

  The decision was to involve her in two more years of unhappiness and exhaustion, punctuated by further tragedies, but she began to plan with her usual energy and, under the circumstances, a remarkably cool head. Her companions were not in a state to be of much help, and from the start she was the only real driving force in the household of women. She had to borrow money to begin with, as well as to find rent and furnish a house with the basic necessities for a school. Since neither Ned nor Mr Wollstonecraft, who did not offer to intervene in his daughters’ troubles, were likely candidates for a loan, she must have persuaded someone else to put up the money: possibly the Clares, who were concerned for their girls, and conveniently near at hand at Hoxton.

  They may have helped in the house hunting too; the first place Mary decided on was at Islington, and for a few bad weeks pupils were awaited there in vain. There were too many would-be teachers about; because teaching required no qualifications and even less capital than shopkeeping - the very thing that made it attractive to Mary - it had become the traditional last resort of the penniless.* And like most others who put up optimistic boards announcing ‘An Academy’ or ‘Young Ladies Educated’, Mary had no vocation, no theories of child care, no special liking for children even: they were luxuries she could not yet afford. Still her mind was made up. Threatened failure, mounting debts, and the nervousness of Fanny and Eliza only emphasized her sense of responsibility as head of the enterprise; she was now as intent as a queen bee, determined at all costs to establish her group of frail dependants somewhere and renew their strength, if possible, from her own.

  As soon as she realized that the prospects at Islington were hopeless, she prepared to move again. She heard of a better possibility, not far away, at Newington Green; a large house was standing empty and a few pupils actually guaranteed. Everything was bundled up once more, and Everina, who could not get on with Ned and his wife, came to join the venture too. They plunged at once into a routine of daily lessons with the girls available, grateful for all comers. Most were day pupils; nothing sophisticated could be offered in the way of instruction, but Fanny could teach drawing and sewing, and Eliza and Everina hopefully pass on whatever expertise their Chelsea boarding school had given them. They could all cope with reading, writing and nature study. Mary had to organize as well as teach; maids and cook had to be given orders, timetables arranged, bills paid and sent out. She managed after a fashion, and she looked around the district and even began to make friends.

  Newington Green was a village south of Hackney and east of Islington, a leafy suburb far enough from the City to offer the pleasures of country life without being comatose. The Green itself was bordered by trees, and the trees sheltered solid, handsome houses, one of which was Mary's school. It had the air of a propitious place. Ever since Defoe had lived at Newington a hundred years earlier it had attracted dissident intellectuals, pedagogues with reforming ideas and Dissenters. From her windows Mary could see both the Dissenting chapel and the home of its minister, Dr Richard Price, a man famous far beyond the confines of his own village.

  She was soon introduced to him. He was the first radical intellectual she had encountered in her life: a small, bewigged man in black whose prim and dusty air concealed an intense idealism outrageous to his political opponents. In his presence, the words Whig, democrat and reformer began to take on flesh for her. As a political theorist he had favoured the American rebels and had been courted by the Whig politicians of England; he claimed that his primary concern was always with theology and ministering to his congregation, but he had devoted himself to agitating for parliamentary reform during the Seventies, and indeed written enough on the subject to fire the enthusiasm of many younger reformers: ‘levelling republican principles’ were what Tory churchmen suspected him of.1

  Price was in correspondence with the most eminent scientists and philosophers of his day, in England, France and America – men such as Franklin, Jefferson, Condorcet and Joseph Priestley, a fellow-Dissenter – and was looked to with respect by all who were not too blinkered by religious or political prejudice. But he remained an unpretentious man, and when Mary met him he was in fact in a subdued and quiescent state. He was in his sixties; the recent death of his closest friend and neighbour at Newington, James Burgh, a writer and schoolmaster who had worked with him for reform, had upset him badly, and the failing health of his wife was imposing limitations on his activities. Lately he had turned down both an invitation from the newly established American government to settle in the United States and another from Lord Shelburne, on becoming head of the English government in 1782, to become his private secretary.2

  As a neighbour, he was kind and particularly responsive to the young, the vulnerable and those in difficulties. He always had time for children and there were many stories current concerning his humanity to animals that must have appealed to Mary: he was said to free netted birds when he found them on his long country walks, and set upturned beetles carefully back on their legs. This was exactly the sort of quixotic goodness she liked, and though as an Anglican she was not officially one of his flock, it made no difference to his interest in her or her response to him. The opportunity to hear him preach was not to be missed, and she began to attend his chapel as often as her own church on Sundays.

  A network of men and women with ideas and ambitions a little outside the common run clustered about Price; Mary found herself made welcome on the Green by many Dissenting households. They included the large family of the banker Thomas Rogers, whose son Samuel was a poet – ‘the Poet’ Mary called him – and much under Price's influence politically.* Then there was the widow of James Burgh, an energetic and cultivated woman who took it upon herself to be particularly helpful to Mary; she was seconded by another schoolmaster's widow, a Mrs Cockburn. Yet another family on the Green o
ffered Fanny's younger brother George a job, at the request of the Clares, and George became something of a pet for Mary, uneducated and unsteady as he was. He worshipped her, and she found it easy to lavish uncritical affection on him in return.

  There was none of the usual village domination of squire or parson at Newington, but a more equal sort of society in which Mary, her sisters and Fanny could take their place with some dignity. Still, in any village day-to-day life is largely a matter of petty interests, quiet friendships, small irritations; if it is to be enjoyable there must be the temperament and the leisure to relish small change and a jog-trot pace. But Mary's temperament was geared to drama, violent emotion and struggle: when she was angry with Mrs Cockburn it was (temporarily) a boiling hatred; when she defended George from attack it was without reservation. She had no capacity for nuance or irony; and then she was always busy, too busy to pause and smile. The foreground of her attention was filled with cares that demanded constant exertion: the running of the school, the ever-pressing problem of money. The Blood family as a whole remained a drain on her from the other side of London; she had responded indignantly to Ned's warnings about their spongeing, but there was no doubt that the parents clung to her and had lost any inclination to help themselves. Throughout her time at Newington she had the steady burden of providing them with money, and she was never able to afford it.