Dr Price, who did so much to popularize this dream of America, had himself moved house following the death of his wife, but only as far as Hackney – about a mile from Newington Green – where a large congregation was devoted to him. Privately, as he grew older, even he began to query the immortality of the soul.21 Priestley was not afflicted with doubts on that score, but expected the Day of Judgement to arrive shortly, and retained an endearingly secular vision of eternal bliss: the company of wife and children, plenty of books and the conversation of friends. Both these good men were kind to Mary and there is a description in William Beloe's memoirs that mentions Mary, Price, Priestley, Mrs Barbauld and several others at a gathering that took place at the house of ‘an austere and rigid Dissenter of the old school’. According to Beloe he was
the devoted friend of Priestley and Price and of consequence took a most active and zealous part in what he was pleased to call the cause of political religious liberty, and what was a very customary and favourite phrase among them, the general melioration of the state of man.22
Like many Dissenting women, Anna Barbauld was a fierce champion of democracy as well as the rights of her coreligionists; Johnson published her political pamphlets, and she attended political dinners. She wore a perpetual and rather alarming grin on her face, according to Mrs Chapone, but it may have indicated social diffidence as much as optimism on the subject of human perfectibility. Priestley loved her dearly – he had known her from her childhood – and paid her the compliment of criticizing what she wrote seriously (he once scolded her for likening the love of God to the love between man and woman; she took the reprimand meekly).23 But although she was fierce about the rights of man, she was not prepared to champion her own sex; in fact she had turned down a proposal to run a college for young women on the grounds that such an institution was unnecessary. At this stage Mary had as yet said and done nothing to alarm her Dissenting friends, and they were very cordial towards the unpretentious, enthusiastic and hard-working young woman in her decent black dress. She in turn continued to find their mixture of optimism and social concern attractive and impressive.
She had not lost her own eye for the London scene, and the wretchedness she saw as she walked about the streets filled her with horror. In her Original Stories, a children's book that came out in 1788, the poor emerged as the most salient feature of every landscape. Callous landlords, rotten housing, inadequate diet, lack of medical care, the fate of unmothered children and the sufferings of unnecessarily bereaved parents roused her to indignation she did not hesitate to express to her young readers. And when a second edition was called for, Johnson invited an unknown artist, William Blake, to illustrate it, and she found that he entered fully into her rage at the sight of oppression and despair. She had a new ally: Blake was no perfectibilist, but his politics and Mary's sprang from a common feeling.
Blake had even less behind him in the way of family fortune than Mary. He was one of several friends she made at this time who had risen dramatically out of poverty and ignorance by their talents alone. Another was George Anderson, a civil servant of her own age: the son of Buckinghamshire farm labourers, he had been discovered amusing himself with geometrical problems scratched on the walls of a threshing barn, and sent to Oxford by a local vicar to receive a delayed education. Refusing to go into the church, as had been planned for him, he was found a post in the Board of Control and quickly rose to the top.24 Then there was the painter John Opie, who came from a family of Cornish carpenters and was born in a two-room cottage; now a court painter, he remained simple in his tastes and manners, and he and Mary took to one another at once.
Presently she was to meet Thomas Holcroft,* the translator of Figaro, and then his friend, William Godwin, philosopher and lapsed Dissenter. Their enthusiasm for perfectibility was such that they envisaged the end of all superstition, crime, war, illness and even (in their wilder moments) sleep and death itself. Unkind friends suggested that Holcroft's faith in perfectibility stemmed from too complacent a view of his own progress through life, and there is an element of truth in the notion that the English perfectibilists were the meritocrats of their day: but kindly, not ruthless meritocrats.
Few who gathered at St Paul's Churchyard, Dissenters or others, were enthusiastic in their religious observance. Johnson himself seems to have lacked any fervour (although the Analytical always stuck to a loosely Christian line). Fuseli, a lapsed Protestant priest, professed a brand of Christianity so primitive as to require no observance. Blake's angelic visions were unconnected with any formal brand of faith. Paine, born a Quaker, returned from America half-way to atheism. Holcroft's aggressive atheism was notorious, and Godwin's years of study at Hoxton Dissenting Academy had prepared him efficiently to become an unbeliever. In such an atmosphere Mary too gave up church attendance, though she retained a tenuous but stubborn belief in God.
Of all the new friends she was to make during the next few years, the one who represented most perfectly the intellectual atmosphere in which she now lived and worked was Johnson's partner in the Analytical, the young Scot Thomas Christie. His father was a banker and provost of Montrose, and he and his sister Jane had been nurtured in the first Unitarian Church to be set up in Scotland.25* Young Christie was too turbulent in spirit to remain in his father's business; he gave it up for medicine, studying in Edinburgh and London and planning to specialize in obstetrics, where he rightly perceived the need for much improvement; but he grew bored with that too and turned to journalism instead. In 1787 he made a tour of England, calling on all the provincial intellectuals he considered worthy of his attention, and expressing en passant a wish for an improvement in ballooning that would enable him to breakfast in the north and dine in the south. He won general approval for his ‘sprightly wit, scientific acquirements, ingenuous manners and literary ardour’.26
Then he brought his sister Jane, who shared his restlessness, to live with him in England; he took up the study of foreign languages, entered into correspondence with a number of French and German writers and persuaded Johnson into the Analytical venture with the idea of bringing continental ideas into better circulation in England. By now his faith in God was on the wane, though he remained discreet in expressing himself on the religious issue. His politics were of course radical, but he was also intent on making money, and he was one of a small band of business adventurers who were excited by the possibility of making fortunes for themselves by encouraging and working for the revolutionary movement.
With Johnson, Christie and Fuseli all keen to bring foreign ideas and literature to the notice of the British public, Mary was set to translating from the French – Necker's De l'importance des opinions religieuses – and later from the German, a book of edifying stories for children to which she added her own touches (the author, Christian Salzmann, was pleased enough to return the compliment and translate the Vindication into German later). Johnson also asked her to tackle Italian, but she found it too much of a strain and gave it up. Translating was a highly competitive affair; several of the works she started on were not published in the end because of rival translations appearing first (her Lavater, for instance: Holcroft beat her to it, Fuseli was rude about his translation in the Analytical, and there was a small literary row).
She worked hard; in spite of outings with Anna Barbauld and dinners at St Paul's Churchyard, the life of the hack reviewer and translator was essentially a lonely grind. And she imposed a stringent economy on herself. All her life she travelled light, and even in George Street, where she settled for a relatively long time, she did not accumulate much – a few sticks of furniture, a few clothes. The only worldly goods she ever fretted about were her books. Johnson saw that her household repairs were carried out and bills paid; domestic chores were in the hands of her maid, a necessary fixture who remained in the shadows and was never named in any letters, although Mary believed in democratic household arrangements and probably took her meals with her when she was at home: ‘I do not know a more agree
able sight than to see servants part of a family… We must love our servants, or we shall never be sufficiently attentive to their happiness’ she wrote later.27 In 1788 she may not have achieved quite this degree of love, but she was dependent on her maid for the basic organization of her life, the sweeping, washing and fire-lighting; probably she fetched what food was needed too. Mary could not afford to entertain and was largely indifferent to what she ate, preferring vegetables to meat although meat was the staple food of her class. London women who had no cook had most of their meals brought in from bakehouses, and no woman thought of cooking as a creative activity. Sewing on the other hand was supposed to be an ennobling as well as a necessary activity for women, but Mary detested and avoided it. She was still dedicated to looking as plain as possible, all the more defiantly perhaps after her experience with Caroline Kingsborough's rouge, poplin and asses' milk.
One of her main personal preoccupations was with settling her debts and her family's affairs. Her father's money had dwindled almost to nothing, Ned was not interested, and she tried to take on some of the financial burdens involved in assisting her younger siblings. Her brother James, whose current chances of promotion on merit alone in the Navy looked very slim, came to live with her at George Street while she arranged for him to go to Woolwich Academy to study mathematics under George Bonnycastle, a friend of Johnson's who had kept a school at Hackney before being appointed to his professorship. It was hoped that his coaching would improve James's prospects. Eliza was brought closer (but not too close) and installed in a Putney school run by a Frenchwoman, Madame Bregantz, and when Everina returned from Paris she joined Eliza there. Presently Johnson acquired a country house to the west of London at Purser's Green in Fulham; Mary could visit both establishments by taking a boat up the river to Putney Bridge, where the meadows came down to the water's edge. It was a pleasant trip and became a familiar one.
She kept up other old links and obligations, writing to George Blood in Ireland, and for some months using him to deliver clandestine letters to Margaret King. This did not persist for long, but George continued to be useful, carrying out small commissions for both Mary and Johnson. The chief topic of her letters to George soon became the fate of his sister Caroline, whom Mary discovered in a wretched state in a workhouse in December 1787: she offered to pay the parish authorities half a crown a week for Caroline's keep, and saw that she was found work as a servant and decently lodged. But she did not attempt to take Caroline in herself; perhaps by now she was beginning to concede that the Bloods were a hopeless cause, for they failed to send Caroline money and made no effort at all to rescue her. Her prospects in a London workhouse cannot have been bright, and she was still there when last heard of in January 1792. Mary was prepared to be dutiful to Fanny's sister, but no more; her tone to George grew more patronizing as the months went by, and the correspondence petered out.
But George never forgot Mary; in 1791 he proposed to Everina, the ‘princess’ being beyond his reach, but Everina turned him down. She pleaded sisterly feelings and also probably considered the Wollstonecrafts a cut above the Bloods. Many years later George, a middle-aged man with a large family, called on Mary's daughter Fanny in London and spoke to her reverentially of her mother. Fanny expressed surprise to her sister at his lack of education. For a while Mary had raised the Bloods in her imagination above their capacities, but not even her daughter could see them as she had done.28
Although she would not take on Caroline, Mary did want to have someone in her charge whose character she could mould; and presently a small orphan girl, Ann, a cousin of Hugh Skeys, was brought to her. But this fostering experiment proved a failure: Ann was not as tractable as Mary hoped, and reports in her letters refer mostly to her unsatisfactory behaviour. She does not seem to have made much of a dent in her foster-mother's time or consciousness, and when Mary had had enough of her she was passed on to Everina, then to another friend, and then who knows where. It was a common enough way of handling children, but still a sad one, and it is hard not to feel that Ann, like Eliza, was a victim of Mary's egocentric imagination. Those who came into her power and could not play the roles she had planned for them were not let off lightly.
This thread in Mary's character, a very faintly sinister one, is hinted at in parts of her Original Stories, where the virtuous governess, Mrs Mason, deprived by death of her husband and child, is endowed with absolute confidence in her power to direct the children in her care along the paths of virtue. She is entrusted with two orphan girls of twelve and fourteen (Mary and Caroline – again) and leads them through various lessons in sincerity, control of the appetites, punctuality, contempt for personal beauty and fashionable appearance (they learn of a young woman whose character has been much improved by a disfiguring attack of smallpox), kindness to servants and so on. She also takes them unhesitatingly into scenes of frightful misery in order that they shall appreciate the necessity of charity. On the whole they are chilly lessons. Mrs Mason does not scold when she is displeased, but the girls come to fear the expression in her eyes; one has the alarming feeling that the revolutionary eye of vigilance is already at work.
There are battling impulses at work in Original Stories: some talk of conscience and prayer, balanced by a definition of goodness that would satisfy a nonbeliever: ‘“Do you know the meaning of the word Goodness?” asked Mrs Mason. “I see you are unwilling to answer. I will tell you. It is, first, to avoid hurting any thing; and then, to contrive to give as much pleasure as you can.”’
Another problem faced her in the stories: she wanted to show women in a variety of roles, single, married and widowed, living equally useful and dignified lives and able to maintain themselves. But to do this she had to falsify reality: one woman, for instance, is presented as earning her living by selling the pincushions she makes. It is hard to believe that the girls who read Original Stories and absorbed its solemn warnings against marrying out of ambition or for fear of the prospect of spinsterhood could really have believed they might earn a satisfactory living by pincushions alone.
She prepared a characteristically tart introduction to the stories, suggesting that parents who had done their duty by their children would not stand in any need of her book as an adjunct to their education. Johnson asked her to tone it down, but Mary refused, and Johnson gave way on this occasion.
They had come to a pretty good general understanding of one another. Taking Mary on had been a rash act; coping with her as well as he did showed Johnson's real strength. He knew when to give way and when to defend himself against her personality, and he was able to give her the opportunities she needed. He seems never to have regretted his first impulse towards her, and long after they were both dead, Rowland Hunter would sometimes recall to the aged Everina the happy times and deep affection he and Johnson and Mary had shared together.29
[7]
Fuseli
1788, 89 and 90 were years of hard work and relative obscurity for Mary: her life was manageable at a practical level, thanks to Johnson, and her ideas were developing, but she was not making any great mark in the world. When bouts of depression overcame her she accounted for them by saying she was still mourning the loss of Fanny.1 Probably this was no more than a way of focusing the grief she felt for herself, the passing of her youth, the lack of major achievement, the sexual failure.
Johnson remained her emotional mainstay, but he was not able to answer all her needs. She knew her capacity for sustaining a grand passion, and was prepared to seek one out. Eventually she alighted on a man who did seem to promise everything she was hoping for: he was Johnson's most intimate and respected friend, Henry Fuseli, artist, scholar and self-proclaimed genius.2
Fuseli had the bravura of a great man. Whenever he appeared in St Paul's Churchyard he dominated the company; he expected to be admired and deferred to, and he was confident of his genius and the respect to which it entitled him. He had the healthy vanity of the artist who values his own achievement because he knows what it
costs him, what struggles, what discipline; and he studied and worked unremittingly. But he despised mere technique in art just as he despised the merely decorous life. Like Mary, he was a born romantic. Byronic heroes yet undreamed of were to be built on his model: vain, sardonic, lecherous, treacherous, bisexual, given to much declamation on the subject of his own desires and feelings, bored by other people's. He liked to play the moralist, and preened himself when it was suggested he received diabolical inspiration.
He produced for his own pleasure, and probably for private clients too, a steady stream of pornographic drawings, detailed but chilly in their eroticism. His most famous public picture, The Nightmare, showed a sleeping woman, head and shoulders dropped back over the end of her couch in an attitude of abandon that is in fact quite hard to imitate, visited by demons - in one version the ghostly head of a horse, in another a grinning goblin crouched on her chest. The story was that he had eaten raw pork in order to stimulate his imagination before taking up his brushes; he appreciated the notion. The Nightmare made Fuseli's reputation in England when he showed it in 1782.
From then on the applause of the world justified his opinion of himself, and in 1788 he was elected associate member of the Royal Academy. He was temperamental and touchy, and could be naive in his conceit, as when he boasted of being invited to all the best houses in London. Still he was at St Paul's Churchyard as often as anywhere else, and a special place was kept for him there. For decades he had been so much the most welcome and regular guest that his absence sometimes cast a gloom on the other diners. On introducing new friends to Fuseli, Johnson would advise them, ‘If you wish to enjoy his conversation, you will not attempt to stop the torrent of his words by contradicting him’: on the torrent came crushing sarcasms, obscene jokes, erudite references and, on occasion, direct rudeness. His voice was loud, he had a heavy German accent; someone described his wit as ‘a formidable force of gunnery’.
The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft Page 10