Vindication

by Lyndall Gordon

  One day, Mrs Clare took Mary to Newington Butts, a village just south of London. They came to the door of a house that was small but carefully furnished, neat and fresh. A young woman of eighteen, slender, elegant, was dishing out food to the younger members of the household–the youngest, a boy called George, was fifteen. Mary had never seen such delicacy as the way the young woman took charge of her sisters and brothers. Godwin tells us that the ‘impression Mary received from this spectacle was indelible; and, before the interview was concluded, she had taken, in her heart, the vows of eternal friendship’.

  This was Frances Blood, known as Fanny, who combined domestic responsibility with a remarkable gift for drawing. Like Mrs Wollstonecraft, the Bloods were Irish: they came from Cragonboy, County Clare. There were Bloods who owned land, some given by Charles II to an ancestor, Colonel Thomas Blood, who had served his king as a spy. The London Bloods were well bred and hospitable, but dreadfully poor. Matthew Blood, Fanny’s father, like Mary’s, had been an idle drinker who had squandered the sums he’d gained through no effort of his own–in his case, the substantial dowry of his wife, Caroline Roe. He had fled his creditors, first to Limerick, later to Dublin and London.

  The present mainstay of these parents and their seven children was Fanny’s professional work as an artist: her meticulous drawings of wild flowers. They were published by William Curtis in his Flora Londinensis. Curtis was a demonstrator in botany to the Company of Apothecaries, and had founded a garden where he was cultivating five hundred different species to observe each stage of their growth. He employed a number of artists, some of whom, like Fanny, did not sign their work, but the style was uniform: thin black outlines and scientific detail of every part of the flower and fruit, with washes of colour as delicate as nature’s own. The artists drew from ‘living specimens most expressive of the general habitat or appearance of the plant as it grows wild’, foxgloves in Charlton-wood, broom on Hampstead Heath, and violets found in watery ditches ‘on the right hand side of the Field Way leading from Kent-street Road to Peckham’ (the last not far from Fanny’s home). The point of the exercise was to establish each species of indigenous plant in the environs of London. In the first volume, published in 1777, two hundred and sixteen plants were named using the recent classification of botanical species by Linnaeus. Their uses in medicine, agriculture and rural economy were listed beside a full-page illustration. A second volume, on the same lines, was published in 1798.

  Fanny’s gifts extended to other arts: she played and sang, read literature, and wrote with the grace and application she brought to all she did. Since Fanny and Mary lived on opposite sides of London, they wrote to each other when they could not meet at the Clares. These letters have not survived, but later Mary told Godwin that those she received were better worded and more correct than her own. In Beverley and under the guidance of Mr Clare, Mary had devoured books with a thirst for knowledge, but until she met Fanny, she had not thought of writing as an art. This struck her now with the excitement of possibility–a passion to excel. Fanny, who was two years older, agreed to become her instructor, and so began a friendship based on learning. Mary’s Linnaean language of ‘genus’ and her metaphor for herself as an ‘opening flower’ may have come from her contact with Fanny’s botanical vocabulary. What Mary called Fanny’s ‘masculine understanding and sound judgment’, set off by ‘every feminine virtue’, bound her friend to her ‘by every tie of gratitude and inclination’. To live with Fanny and hear her ‘improving’ conversation seemed ‘the most rational wish’.

  Minimal schooling in Yorkshire can’t account for the level of Mary’s reading and the force of her style. Who taught her to write with such directness and conviction? Was it John Arden who gave her a lesson or two? Was it the Revd Mr Clare in Hoxton who took an interest in her mind? Was it possibly someone obscure like the Master of the Merchant Taylor’s School, the Revd Mr Bishop, whom she and Fanny used to meet at the Clares? Was it the verbal finesse of Fanny Blood? No one can say, but Mary came to believe that ‘a genius will educate itself’.

  What education came her way was nothing like the classical training of boys in public schools. The flourish of classical allusion was one of the ways gentlemen signalled their control of power to one another as members of a club closed to women and other lesser orders of society. The counter to this was not the battery of handbooks on girls’ education that continued to stress obedience as the prime quality to be cultivated. Coming into being in the late eighteenth century was an odd new creature whose urgent intelligence transforms miseducation into education. Mary’s curtailed schooling had an advantage: it never occurred to her not to think for herself. Another century had to pass before universities opened their doors to women, but already Mary Wollstonecraft was shaping the quality the best teachers of the future would look for: a searching, not obedient, intelligence. She presents a rare case of an intelligence that did not receive the impress of given moulds. Godwin found her untouched by ‘the prejudices of system and bigotry’ and with a spirit that ‘defended her from artificial rules of judgement’. Here were shoots of a new form of life: a girl who conceived her freedom to grow the fruit she was made to bear–and what else is genius in the making?

  2

  ‘SCHOOL OF ADVERSITY’

  When Mr Wollstonecraft lost money, his solution was to move, not work. In the spring of 1776 he hauled his family west across England to Wales, where he farmed–or attempted to farm–in Laugharne on the Pembrokeshire coast. Often, he jaunted off to London on the pretext of business. Mary, mindful of Fanny’s efforts to support her family, proposed leaving home to take up a post. Mrs Wollstonecraft wept–a working daughter was a comedown–and begged her not to go. Some financial disaster happened at this time, too shaming to reveal, though Mary did refer, tight-lipped, to her father’s ‘misconduct’ followed by ‘a keen blast of adversity’. She and her sisters were duty-bound to advance him whatever they had. Since the sisters would try to recover this money, their father must have asked for a loan, not a gift, but Mary had no hope that she would ever get it back. ‘I have therefore nothing to expect,’ she said in 1779 at the age of twenty.

  Money was to remain a problem for the rest of Mary’s life, as for everyone else in the family except for Ned, who combined his advantage as heir with professional prospects as an articled clerk in a London law firm on Tower Hill. Ned now took over the Primrose Street houses, and passed on the rents. In The Wrongs of Woman the eldest brother of the narrator, articled to an attorney, assumes a ‘right of directing the whole family, not excepting my father. He seemed to take a peculiar pleasure in tormenting and humbling me; and if I ever ventured to complain of this treatment to either my father or mother, I was rudely rebuffed for presuming to judge of the conduct of my eldest brother.’ This was ‘forwardness’ in a girl.

  Ned’s status embodied, for Mary, the unfairness of the patriarchal system. Her grandfather had left substantial assets and properties to Mary’s father. He, having squandered his own funds, called on his daughters to surrender what provision had been made for their futures–possibly part of their mother’s marriage settlement or a bequest from their Dickson grandfather. Girls without dowries would be unlikely to marry, and would have to work for a living in a society which barred middle-class women from all kinds of career except teacher, governess or paid companion. Mary Wollstonecraft would try all three.

  Soon after the Wollstonecrafts returned to London, Mary obtained a post in Bath as companion to a widow who was known for her temper. A succession of companions had left. Mrs Dawson belonged to the class Mr Wollstonecraft had failed to join: the landed gentry. She was born Sarah Regis, the daughter of the late Balthazar Regis, Chaplain to the King and Canon of Windsor. For the gentry and nobility, Bath was a centre of fashion and the second capital. Mary thought herself as a country girl attached to nature, more ill at ease than charmed as the coach drove through the long course of streets from the Old Bridge, amidst the dash of other carriag
es, the heavy rumble of carts and drays, the bawling of newsmen, muffin-men and milkmen. Though she admired the buildings of Georgian Bath as ‘the most regular and elegant I have ever seen’, the surrounding landscape could not compare with the ‘romantic’ vistas of Wales.

  Mrs Dawson received Mary in the house of her grown-up son William, in the prime position of Milsom Street. Mary’s childhood training in self-effacement and deference was now put to the test. If a companion ‘cannot condescend to mean flattery,’ she soon discovered, ‘she has not a chance of being a favorite; and should any of the visitors take notice of her, and she for a moment forget her subordinate state, she is sure to be reminded of it…She must wear a cheerful face, or be dismissed.’ A companion was paid no more than £10 to £20 a year, and was looked on as little better than an upper servant. Servants resented the drawing-room place of the paid companion, and treated her as a spy. To add to this, Mary missed Fanny, and brooded over her mother, wishing that the recent financial ‘storm’ would persuade her father ‘to see his error, and act more prudently in future, and then my mother may enjoy some comfort’. Vain hope. By this stage Mrs Wollstonecraft had lost interest in her own fate, a state of apathy her daughter took to be indifference.

  Throughout her time with Mrs Dawson, Mary longed to ‘haste away’, but managed to hold out and even to head off her outbursts–less alarming than Mr Wollstonecraft’s violence. Now and then, Mrs Dawson owned that no one had managed her better. After three months Mary was able to acknowledge her employer’s ‘very good understanding’, and since she was a woman who had ‘seen a great deal of the World’, Mary thought ‘to improve myself by her conversation, and…endeavor to render a circumstance (that at first was disagreeable,) useful to me’. From the age of eighteen to twenty she had the sense to mop up knowledge in whatever form it came her way: ‘A mind accustomed to observe can never be quite idle, and will catch improvement on all occasions.’ This will to pluck a shoot of improvement from the thorn of ‘adversity’ was often less blatant than her glooms and groans, yet always there.

  The main trial proved less Mrs Dawson’s temper than Mary’s own depression during her eighteen months in Bath. It was no place for a middle-class girl with a grandfather who had been in trade, a lost portion, and no friends to see her into society. During the first months, Mrs Dawson took her only twice to the Assembly Rooms, where she sat amongst ‘Strangers’. ‘A young mind looks round for love and friendship,’ she thought, ‘but love and friendship fly from poverty…The mind must then accommodate itself to its new state, or dare to be unhappy.’ To ‘dare’ was a drama never far from Mary’s sights, while the passivity of ‘accommodation’ acted as a blight on her active nature. As necessity forced her along the narrow track of a dependant’s life, unhappiness took hold. Her vivacity seemed to have ‘gone forever’; her present course was leading her to ‘a kind of early old age’.

  For such pain, Bath’s warm springs–thought to have healing powers–could offer no cure. The town, climbing gracefully up a hill, is built around the Roman bath where invalids, in brown costumes, hung suspended in the steam like wilting mushrooms, as the ill passed their infections unknowingly to one another and to floating hypochondriacs. Nearby was the Pump Room where ladies took their ‘turns’ about its limited space, parading their finery at the right hour of the morning. There, Mary first came into contact with women of the upper classes. ‘In the fine Lady how few traits do we observe of those affections which dignify human nature!’ she exclaimed. How disheartening to see before her eyes what the eighteenth century whispered in private when the gallantries of mixed company were done, and gentlemen like Lord Chesterfield picked up their pens to advise their sons (‘Women are but children of larger growth…A man of sense only trifles with them, plays with them, humours and flatters them’). Contemplating such specimens of her sex, and longing in vain for a sign of ‘moral beauty’, Mary felt her soul ‘sicken’. It was cold comfort to pride herself on the triumph of reason: ‘I am persuaded misfortunes are of the greatest service, as they set things in the light they ought to be view’d in.’ She would repeat this principle, out-staring her weaker self: ‘In the school of adversity we learn knowledge and control our inconsistent hearts.’ But her weaker self was not so easily subdued.

  It can only have been in Bath that she first met a handsome flirt, thirteen years older than herself. Joshua Waterhouse was the son of a yeoman farmer in Derbyshire, who had crossed class divides when he entered as a sizar* at St Catherine’s College, Cambridge, in 1770. He had been ordained as a priest and elected a Fellow of his college in 1774. It was not an age when Fellows took on many pupils or absorbed themselves in research, but idleness attained new heights in Waterhouse, who did the rounds of the watering-places in the company of a titled friend. Well-spoken and stylish, master of the smothered sigh and downcast look, he appealed to women. He amassed piles of love-letters–enough, he liked to boast, to cook a wedding feast–though his fellowship forbade marriage. Mary’s letters to Waterhouse have vanished in a sackful of others, but she did once describe her efforts to reform him: ‘I knew a woman very early in life warmly attached to an agreeable man, yet she saw his faults; his principles were unfixed…She exerted her influence to improve him, but in vain did she for years try to do it.’ In the process, Mary learnt something about herself that was hard to accept: it was driven home that however much she prided herself on good sense, her biological nature was, and would always be, as much prey to passion as that of lighter women. In fact, she acknowledged ruefully, the chaste woman who took a man seriously was ‘most apt to have violent and constant passions, and to be preyed on by them’. She was honest enough to record what reason deplored: the ‘extreme pain’ of unexpressed desire. Next to guilt, she thought, the greatest misery was to love a person whom her reason could not respect.

  Played on and lonely, Mary held fast to old ties. It came to her ears that the Ardens were living in Bath, and she hurried to see them in St James’s Street. She found Jane’s father and sisters at home, not Jane herself who had been employed since 1775–before she was seventeen–as governess to the six daughters of Sir Mordaunt Martin of Burnham in Norfolk. To be a governess had not been Jane’s wish, yet she had found it in her to accommodate. However much she missed her Yorkshire home and sisters, she found, as did her father, sufficient happiness in the exercise of her intellect and the importance she gave to education. So began a teaching career that was to last sixty years. Jane Arden was a born teacher who endeared herself to her pupils in an affectionate and cultured family. Through them she met Captain Nelson–later, Admiral–who gave her a list of paintings she should know, including a Rubens of Mary bathing Christ’s feet with her tears, which the family took Jane to see at Houghton, the seat of the Earl of Orford. This sort of attention meant much to Jane with her longing, like Mary’s, for knowledge. Mary wrote to her in the spring of 1779 ‘by way of a prelude to a correspondence’. She looked to Jane for a counter to sentimental dreams: ‘I should be glad to hear that you had met with a sensible worthy man, tho’ they are hard to be found–.’

  It was to Jane that Mary confided the ‘blast of adversity’ resulting from her father’s misconduct. Confessions of gloom (‘Pain and disappointment have constantly attended me since I left Beverley’) alternate with unconvincing efforts to act out the role of compliant paragon. It’s often assumed that Mary Wollstonecraft was a born depressive, though at this time her cause for gloom is patent in her father’s losses and the inferior positions for single women.

  Her depression was temporarily relieved by a visit to Southampton that summer. Sea bathing, recommended by a doctor, refreshed her, as did Southampton hospitality: ‘I received so much civility that I left it with regret.’ Depression hadn’t ‘frozen’ her feelings for others, she was relieved to find; attachments sprang up with all her old warmth. No complaint of Mrs Dawson ever crossed her lips; yet away from her, Mary revived. The problem lay in the post itself: the companion who treads
the round of another’s life.

  In April 1780, Mary moved with Mrs Dawson to her family home on St Leonard’s Hill in Windsor. If anything, she found Windsor more frivolous than Bath: ‘–nothing but dress and amusements are going forward;–I am the only spectator’. Women sported enormous ‘heads’ as much as two feet high. In order to cover the wire and cushions of the structure, hair from the top of the head was pulled upwards, teased or ‘frizzled’, then dressed with plumes for added height, while hair from the back and sides was arranged in tiers of curls like horizontal sausages curving round the neck. The whole structure was then smothered with white powder. As Mary put it, ‘truth is not expected to govern the inhabitant of so artificial a form’.

  It took prolonged efforts to look as theatrically artificial as the Quality aimed to be. The main ingredient of face powder was a lethal white lead (which did for two beauties of the age, the Gunning sisters). Mary was aware that ‘white’ was ‘certainly very prejudicial to the health, and can never be made to resemble nature’, since it took away the glow of modesty, affection, or indeed any expression. This chalky mask was set off by spots of rouge, and black ‘patches’, sometimes at the corner of the mouth, meant to be alluring. Mary disagreed with contemporary opinion that bathing was unhealthy: people disguised their smell with pomatum (a fragrant ointment) which she found ‘often disgusting’. The many layers of women’s clothes–the stays, the wide hoop (balancing on either side of the hips so that the feet had to process in a stately way to avoid seesaw sways), the skirts under satin panniers–all fastened at the back, and so required the help of a lady’s maid. Without a maid, Mary dressed with a plainness that made her appear ‘a poor creature’. She added, in the defensive tone she often adopted when she found herself in a weak position, ‘to dress violently neither suits my inclination, nor my power’.