The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft

by Claire Tomalin

  1790 Mary still working on the Analytical; Johnson publishes her translation of Elements of Morality by Salzmann, with illustrations by Blake. Burke publishes his Reflections on the Revolution in France, and Mary's answer, A Vindication of the Rights of Man, is published anonymously in December. Everina and Eliza both now at Putney school.

  1791 Second edition of Mary's Vindication of the Rights of Man, with her name, published.

  Paine's Rights of Man, part 1, published.

  Dr Price dies in April.

  Fox and Burke quarrel in May. In July, the Birmingham riots; Priestley comes to London, dines with Sheridan but refuses to enter directly into political activities.

  Joel Barlow arrives in London.

  William Roscoe visits London and commissions a portrait of Mary.

  In September she moves to Store Street and starts writing Vindication of the Rights of Woman. In November she meets William Godwin at Johnson's; he has just started work on his Political Justice.

  In France, the Legislative Assembly is formed;

  Olympe de Gouges's Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne appears.

  1792 Publication of Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Talleyrand visits London, calls on Mary and dines at Hackney with a party of Dissenters and English radicals.

  Part 2 of Paine's Rights of Man published. London Corresponding Society founded. Friends of the People founded. Barlow's pamphlets published by Johnson, also George Dyer's poems.

  In August Mary, Johnson and the Fuselis set off for Paris but turn back; crisis with Fuseli.

  September, Paine goes to Paris; October, Charles Wollstonecraft sets off for US. Mary Hays and Mary W. meet. November, Barlow to Paris; Johnson ill. December, Mary sets off for Paris alone.

  Imlay's A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of Northern America published in London. In France, Etta Palm addresses Legislative Assembly on women's rights, especially public education and divorce, and the first divorce laws are passed.

  1793 Political Justice published in London; Godwin sends copies to Paris.

  Execution of Louis XVI; war declared between England and France.

  Mary meets Imlay.

  Imlay's The Emigrants published in London.

  In June, the Girondins proscribed. Mary moves to Neuilly.

  In July, Charlotte Corday kills Marat and is guillotined. Condorcet goes into hiding. Olympe de Gouges arrested.

  In August, Mary conceives baby; in September she returns to Paris and is registered at US embassy as Imlay's wife; he goes to Le Havre.

  In October the Terror brings the arrest of most of the English.

  Manon Roland, Olympe de Gouges and the queen guillotined .

  Théroigne de Méricourt confined to madhouse. Women's clubs closed.

  Mary spends Christmas in Paris with Helen Williams, John Hurford Stone, the Barlows; she is writing her book on France .

  Condorcet, in hiding, is writing his Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain and a fragment, Sur l'Atlantide, both containing further statements of his feminist views.

  1794 Mary goes to Le Havre, where Fanny is born in May. In August Imlay goes first to Paris and then to London. Mary spends the winter in Paris.

  In London, the Treason Trials occupy the autumn; Godwin publishes Caleb Williams, Coleridge and Southey discuss their Pantisocracy scheme.

  Publication of Mary's Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution.

  1795 Mary returns to London and makes her first suicide attempt, probably with laudanum. In June she takes Fanny and her French maid Marguerite to Scandinavia with her on Imlay's business, returning via Hamburg in September. In October she makes a second suicide attempt, jumping off Putney Bridge. Rioting in London leads the government to pass the Two Acts which make meetings of more than fifty people illegal and certain publications seditious. Mary lives in Finsbury Square and tries to write a play. In France, Madame Condorcet publishes the Esquisse.

  1796 Publication of Mary's Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark.

  Mary's name mentioned at trial of William Stone for treason.

  She moves to Cumming Street and calls on Godwin. Godwin proposes to Amelia Alderson and is turned down.

  Godwin and Mary become lovers.

  Death of Christie in Surinam.

  In December, Mary conceives her second child.

  1797 In March, Mary and Godwin marry at St Pancras church and she moves to the Polygon. In August, Mary Godwin born; 10 September, death of Mary Wollstonecraft.

  1809 Death of Joseph Johnson.

  1816 Suicide of Fanny Imlay.

  1828 Supposed death of Gilbert Imlay.

  Appendix I

  Eighteenth-century References to Votes for Women

  A reference to votes in local government (i.e., parish council meetings) occurs, by pleasant coincidence, in the register of Mary Wollstonecraft's native parish of St Botolph Without Bishopsgate, in the minutes of a meeting held in December 1765, when she was six:

  NB There was several Disputes concerning whether women who kept House and paid to the Poor, has a Right to Vote for Parish Officers.

  It was agreed to be unprecedented, therefore their Votes were not Counted in ye Division.

  This suggests that women were actually present at the parish council meeting, though their names are not entered. Perhaps they were weavers' widows, used to working and earning in their own right; but the weaving industry was going into a decline, and no more seems to have been heard of their claim.

  In 1776 Josiah Tucker, the Dean of Gloucester, raised the question of female suffrage in what was intended as a heavily satirical passage (in his Series of Answers to Certain Popular Objections, against Separating from the Rebellious Colonies, being the Concluding Tract of the Dean of Gloucester, R. Raikes & Cadell):

  … were Taxation and Representation so essentially connected, and so absolutely inseparable, as Mr Lock and his followers would make us believe; – then most certainly every Man's Consent (the Consent of every moral Agent of every Sex and Condition) ought to be previously obtained for divesting him, her or them of any Part of his, her, or their natural Rights and Liberties in any Respect whatever. For indeed our personal Rights are nearer and dearer to us, and are more essentially our own (our own Property) than any adventitious Accession of Lands or tenements, Goods or Chattels.

  John Cartwright responded to this joke in his Legislative Rights of the Commonwealth Vindicated; or, Take Your Choice! published in the same year.

  For want of arguments against an equality of representation, some authors have been driven to the sad expedient of attempting to be witty on the subject. A dignitary of our church, and a writer also who takes upon him to assert the rights of Great Britain, have in particular been pleased to advance that provided this equality be due to men, it must equally appertain to women; and that then of course all the women, as well as all the men, must be free to vote at elections.

  It might be want of politeness to ask these gentlemen if they seriously meant what they say; but, as I am serious myself, I will beg leave to refer the Dean to the Scriptures, and the other gentleman to the law of nature and the common law of England, and both of them to the fair sex, in order to settle this point. Man and wife are called in scripture one flesh, in law one person; and by both, the temporal dominion is given to the man. With regard to God and his salvation, the sexes are equal in dignity. Now the matron is the highest of her sex in temporal dignity; and yet, as a wife, she is commanded ‘to submit herself to her husband in everything’; and he, both in scripture and in law, is considered as her representative, her lord, her head. If this be the condition of the matron, it will be difficult, even for a Dean, to show that her inferiors should enjoy a privilege denied to her. But, were the Rev Dean and the bold assertor to receive no greater thanks from the ministry than they are likely to obtain from the fair sex for such attempts to serve them, p
oor indeed would be their reward. Women know too well what God and nature requires of them to put in so absurd a claim for a share in the rights of election. Their privilege and power are of another kind; they know their sphere.

  Who the women consulted by Cartwright were he does not say, though it is possible that one was Ann Jebb. I have not been able to trace the other writer mentioned.

  Bentham's notes on female suffrage are discussed in the text, p. 134.

  Appendix II

  Family Tree of the Wollstonecrafts

  Acknowledgements

  I SHOULD like to acknowledge the assistance of the staff of the London Library; the GLC archivists; the Public Record Office, London; the Dr Williams Library; the Library of the Society of Friends in London; the Guildhall Library; University College Library, London; Stoke Newington Library; the Wellcome Medical Library; the British Museum; the Bodleian; the Archives de France; the department of archives, Ville du Havre; the Kunsthaus, Zürich; the Liverpool City Libraries and the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; the Mitchell Library, Sydney, Australia; and the county archivist of the East Riding of Yorkshire.

  I am indebted to Lord Abinger for allowing me to examine microfilms of the manuscripts in his possession.

  I should like to express my gratitude to Captain Douglas King-Harman for friendly assistance in looking through his family papers for me.

  Bernard Mason kindly allowed me to quote from his late brother Eudo Mason's The Mind of Henry Fuseli; and the Carl Pforzheimer Library and Oxford University Press permitted quotations from Shelley and his Circle, edited by K. N. Cameron.

  I am grateful to Thomas Pakenham for drawing my attention to a reference to Mary's relationship with the Kingsboroughs in the manuscript letters of Bishop Percy of Dromore, and to Professor Gert Schiff for assuring me that there is no drawing of Mary by Fuseli in existence.

  I should like to acknowledge assistance and encouragement from Edward Thompson, Professor Eric Hobsbawm, Professor D. V. Glass and Professor Richard Cobb in directing my attention to various sources of information I should otherwise have missed.

  The medical aspect of Mary's death was most kindly illuminated for me by David Morris, MD, FRCS, MRCOG.

  Brian Inglis most generously lent me a family tree of the Blood family, which finally cleared up the vexed question of the identity of ‘Neptune’: my thanks to him.

  Thanks are also due to Nicolas Barker for information about Joseph Johnson's publishing practice; to Martina Mayne and Rachael Harris for translating passages of German for me; and to Eric Korn and John Bunting, both of whom tracked down rare books for me with the greatest patience and kindness. It was also John Bunting who first drew my attention to the portrait of Mary mentioned on page 126.

  My debt to my editor, the late Tony Godwin, is great indeed: he left me alone when necessary, and gave me all the advice and help possible when it was needed.

  Finally, it would be inappropriate to bring out a book on Mary Wollstonecraft without a domestic acknowledgement to all those who held the baby whilst I worked, the most constant being Gail Coté, Theresa McGinlay, Josephine, Susanna, Emily and my husband. To all of them, thank you.

  He just wanted a decent book to read ...

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  We believed in the existence in this country of a vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price, and staked everything on it’

  Sir Allen Lane, 1902–1970, founder of Penguin Books

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  PENGUIN BOOKS

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  First published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1974

  Published in Pelican Books (without illustrations) 1977

  Reprinted in Penguin Books 1985

  Reprinted with revisions, illustrations and revised notes and bibliography 1992

  Copyright © Claire Tomalin, 1974, 1992

  Front cover: Portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft by J. Opie, reproduced by courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery. Figures: London Musee Carnavalet/ Leemage/ Lebrecht Music & Arts

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  ISBN: 978-0-14-191226-4

  * Wollstonecraft is a Lancashire name; amongst the wills proved in Lancashire and Cheshire in the seventeenth century there are several Wollstonecrafts (and variant spellings) in the under £40 category, none richer. A gardener, Thomas Wollstonecraft of Ardwick, who died in 1693, looks like a possible father of Edward; his death might have persuaded the orphan boy to move south. Edward's mother Martha and sister Mary died in London.

  * Mrs Piozzi, for instance, spoke freely enough in her diary about the lesbianism of actresses, and the medical manuals written for women, e.g. The Lady's Dispensatory, warned mothers against allowing their daughters to be corrupted, with the implication that such corruption was most likely to come from the lower classes.

  * Waterhouse led an eccentric life: he tried to rig his own election as master of his college, but was driven out and became a miser. He was murdered by a thief in 1827 and a sackful of love letters from various women was found by his nephew, who destroyed them as of no interest. A contemporary report mentions that some were ‘ardent’ and some ‘prudent’, and goes on: ‘Amongst the many fair ones to whom the singular rector of Stuke-ley paid his addresses was the once-famous Mary Wollstonecraft, distinguished during the period of the French Revolution for her democratical writing, and afterwards united to Mr Godwin, author of St Leon, &c. How far the reverend gentleman sped in his wooing with this intellectual amazon we have not been able to ascertain; but, like all his other attachments, his passion for the author of the Rights of Women was destined to evince the truth of the poet's observation, the course of true love never did run smooth.’

  * Wendeborn, a German observer of English life
in the 1780s. noted how many schools were set up by failed tradesmen, or ‘a woman, who never had a proper education herself, or whose moral character cannot very well bear a strict enquiry’.

  * Sam Rogers was twenty at this time; his fame as a poet later led him to be offered the laureateship by Queen Victoria, in 1850, when he was eighty-seven. According to tradition in Newington, he sat in the pew adjoining Mary's when she attended the chapel, but in his respectable old age he was not inclined to include this amongst his pleasant memories.

  * Thomas Day was an old resident of the Green; his Sandford and Merton began to appear in the Eighties, and his educational ideas, with their emphasis on character training, impressed Mary very much.

  * This particular brand of nonconformity was something quite distinct from Methodism, of which Price thoroughly disapproved, describing it as a faith that ascribed ‘particular feelings, without reason, to supernatural suggestion’.

  * They were the two standard all-purpose medical procedures at the time nevertheless: one involved drawing blood from a vein in the arm, and usually produced fainting; the other meant the application of scalding cups to the skin.

  * Unfortunately the house Mary knew was pulled down by the third Earl in 1820 and replaced by an enormous mock-medieval structure. This was burnt during the Troubles in 1922 and the stones carted off to build a fake Gothic church. A cooperative dairy stands on the site today. The square of small, terraced town houses built by the Kingsboroughs for ‘decayed Protestant gentlefolk’ early in the nineteenth century, known as College Square, is their most handsome legacy to Mitchelstown.