Vindication

by Lyndall Gordon

  At the time the Wollstonecraft sisters settled in the village it was a bastion for Dissenters, who worshipped in a small church built in 1708 on the north side of the Green (the oldest Nonconformist church still in use in London). When Mary attended services, she thought it too plain; as an Anglican she preferred architectural grandeur. Since the Civil War in the seventeenth century there had been a proliferation of dissenting sects, drawing the bulk of their numbers from the poorer classes, but there were also Dissenters whose forebears had been ennobled by Cromwell, and others who’d grown rich during the Commonwealth. These gravitated to the area of Newington Green. So Mary Wollstonecraft encountered here the well-to-do edge of radical Protestantism, and its cutting-edge intellectually in the form of Dr Richard Price, a Welsh divine who preached political doctrines of liberty and equality. Dr Price’s congregation at Newington Green included Mrs Burgh, and he had been a close friend of her late husband, the Revd James Burgh.

  Mrs Burgh’s husband had been a Calvinist Scot, educated at St Andrews, who had opened an academy in Stoke Newington and then moved to the Green. There he had reigned as schoolmaster from 1750, his pupils attending the sermons of Dr Price. He had published his Thoughts on Education, followed by an array of educational and political tomes.

  This schoolmaster might have appeared a formidable personage to follow, but Mary Wollstonecraft took a line which contradicted Mr Burgh’s demeaning education for girls, summed up two years later in her Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (her title looks back to Burgh’s, as Burgh’s looks back to Locke’s Thoughts Concerning Education (1693). Burgh had held that a girl should know just enough arithmetic to do household accounts, and just enough geography to converse with her husband and his friends. Boys were generally trained to block tenderness as a form of weakness. The only emotion Burgh had encouraged was patriotism–no different, in this, from most educators. The schoolmaster writing so busily had not seen that the education he had meant to extend and refine had been skewed to feed the very materialism he deplored, that of a predatory nation moulding an elite of fighters and colonisers.

  Mary Wollstonecraft refused to shape her pupils to fit predetermined forms; she asked herself what girls learnt that left them lisping like infants and parading themselves in clothes whose ‘unnatural protuberances’ bore no relation to the shape of the female body. Ever since Bath and Windsor, she had deplored the triviality of female accomplishments: the tinkling on the harpsichord, and pride in landscapes touched up by a drawing master. It infuriated her to hear ladies bleating received opinions: ‘I am sick of hearing of the sublimity of Milton, the elegance and harmony of Pope, and the original, untaught genius of Shakespear.’ Such bleaters knew ‘nothing of nature’ and ‘could not enter into the spirit of those authors’. Her cure was simple: ‘I wish them to be taught to think.’

  As a thinker herself, Wollstonecraft stressed the ungendered possibilities of the mind–the ‘mind’, she repeats, wondering how it might come into its own. The answer came from her own history of self-education: agency must be transferred from teacher to pupil. The teacher can’t ‘create’ a child’s mind, she said, though ‘it may be cultivated and its real powers found out’. Basically, ‘it must be left to itself’. She was speaking as a disciple of Rousseau, who had enraged Burgh in the 1760s when he proposed that a child should follow nature, unwarped by formal education till the age of twelve. Mary Wollstonecraft did not put this literally into practice–it would have made her school redundant–but did grasp the crux of Rousseau’s theory when she urged pupils to look into ‘the book of nature’, and banned rote learning: ‘I have known children who could repeat things in the order they learnt them, that were quite at a loss when put out of the beaten track.’ Instead, she taught them to combine ideas, comparing things similar in some ways and different in others. Then too, where Burgh stuffed his language with Greek and Latin tags, Wollstonecraft cut through to the heart of matter, dismissing ‘words of learned length and thund’ring sound’ designed to cow the common reader: ‘A florid style mostly passes with the ignorant for fine writing; many sentences are admired that have no meaning in them.’ Milton had established a verbal league table with Anglo-Saxon monosyllables at the bottom and Latinate words at the top; the graver the subject, the more sonorous the language. Though Wollstonecraft did read Milton, her own practice favoured Enlightenment ideals of simplicity and clarity.

  Her primary aim as a teacher was to elicit an authentic character in place of sameness. The same things, she thought, should not be taught to all: ‘Each child requires a different mode of treatment.’ Nor were pupils urged to display uniform manners. In place of affectation, she encouraged naturalness: ‘Let the manners arise from the mind, and let there be no disguise for the genuine emotions of the heart.’ Other schools had a fixed code of manners, not for the good of the pupil but to promote an image of the school. Mary, on the contrary, put the weight on what she called ‘temper’, extending the benefits of a home education by those who knew the child best. Boarding establishments were schools of ‘vice’ and ‘tyranny’. There, vicious children were prone to ‘infect’ a number of others, while love and tenderness remained undeveloped in the absence of domestic affection.

  Home, then, was central to Wollstonecraft’s education; she did not compete with parents for control. Burgh had laid it down that boys should be removed to boarding schools to avoid the ‘weakening’ effect of maternal love; attachment to parents, he thought, should be a matter of ‘principle’, not instinct. Again, Wollstonecraft opposed this: she realised that the most important education of all begins with a baby’s mouth on the mother’s breast, responding to ‘the warmest glow of tenderness’. This grants mothers the central role in education. Her insistence on breast-feeding went against fashionable practice in her youth when it had been customary amongst the upper classes to send infants away to be cared for–in many cases, neglected–in the country. Jane Austen’s family was amongst those who followed this practice: Jane spent her first two years in a local cottage, the idea being that a child returned home when she was ready to be civilised. Mrs Austen must have had a superior arrangement, for all her infants survived. She was less well advised when, in 1783, she sent her daughter Jane, aged seven, to boarding-school. Girls in most schools of the time were poorly fed, callously treated, and in many cases succumbed to illness. It was only through the initiative of a fellow-pupil, Jane’s cousin, who managed to send an alarm to the Austens, that a sick Jane was fetched away.

  Mary Wollstonecraft ran her school along entirely different and what were then innovative lines: she had a maternal attentiveness to the physical as well as mental needs of a child; she was committed to wholesome food; and her methods were flexible. Godwin tells us that she ‘carefully watched symptoms as they rose, and the success of her experiments; and governed herself accordingly’. She was confident in her theories of education without pressing them too hard. She did believe in moral discipline, but not in the first place as a set of rules to be enforced, rather as a child’s imitation of tender parents whose principles take root in its earliest apprehensions. So, unlike other schools, Wollstonecraft’s did not disconnect the mind from domestic affections.

  Was Mrs Burgh aware of Mary’s deviance from her husband’s regime? If so, did she mind? It’s inconceivable that she would have backed Mary had she not been impressed with her ideas. Mr Burgh has his place in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; his dour voice drones on in his tomes in the manner of those too well informed to be aware of the person who listens–the occupational hazard of a schoolmaster. Marital sex, Burgh believed, should be curtailed. It is our duty, of course, to ‘support the species’, but abstinence at other times is to be desired. Women are vain creatures who should not obtrude their prattle on educated men. Beauty is nothing more than a ‘mass of flesh, blood, humours, and filth, covered over with a well-coloured skin’. Men’s admiration always contains a ‘filthy passion’. A wife must obey her husband because of
the ‘superior dignity of the male-sex, to which nature has given greater strength of mind and body, and therefore fitted them for authority’. These were his words in 1756, three years into his childless marriage to Hannah Harding, who appears in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and in The Dictionary of British Radicals only in her capacity as Mr Burgh’s wife, yet her help to Mary Wollstonecraft in the last four years of Mrs Burgh’s life, from 1784 to 1788, may be now more significant than any other fact about the Burghs.

  It’s unlikely that the Revd Mr Burgh would have approved as his successor an untrained young woman of twenty-five, pursuing intuitions instead of tried methods, opinionated and disinclined to curb her eloquence. And yet Mrs Burgh more than approved Mary Wollstonecraft; she came to treat her, Mary felt, ‘as if I had been her daughter’. All this suggests that Mary Wollstonecraft spoke to some part of Hannah Burgh that the schoolmaster had silenced. We might speculate further that Mrs Burgh’s feeling for Mary as ‘daughter’ found an answer in Mary’s maternal deprivation. At seventeen she had taken to Mrs Clare; she had loved ‘our mother’, Mrs Blood; and now a third ‘mother’, richer and well connected, became her benefactress.

  The school in Newington Green put Mary in a position to provide for her sisters and house Fanny–an asset to the school with her graceful manners and expertise in botany. This was the independence Mary had hoped for: Everina rescued from dependence on Ned; Bess freed from a husband who threatened her sanity; Fanny released from the exhausting demands of her family. In planning for others Mary exercised the emotional and practical responsibilities of an eldest sister, stretching those skills beyond the circumscribed role of the daughter at home. For the following eight years, she accustomed her sisters and the Bloods to her exertions on their behalf. ‘I love most people best when they are in adversity,’ she remarked to George Blood, ‘–for pity is one of my prevailing passions…’ Benevolence was the top virtue in eighteenth-century England; in Mary it shed the tone of patron, and took on the warmth of affection.

  As it happened, Jane Arden became a teacher so much in the same style that both may well have looked back to the encouraging schoolroom of John Arden, with its blend of benevolence and enquiry. In 1784, the same year that Mary’s school opened in Newington Green, Jane opened her own boarding-school in her home town of Beverley, and went on to publish grammars as well as a travel book filled with botanical observation and reflections on the lives of purposeful women. Jane said: ‘When I think that happiness…depends in a great degree on education, I most deeply feel the importance of the duties which I have to fulfil.’

  Mary too knew teaching as a passion, and even better, as a relationship. ‘With children she was the mirror of patience,’ Godwin testifies. ‘Perhaps, in all her extensive experience upon the subject of education, she never betrayed one symptom of irascibility…In all her intercourse with children, it was kindness and sympathy alone that prompted her conduct…I have heard her say, that she never was concerned in the education of one child, who was not personally attached to her, and earnestly concerned not to incur her displeasure.’

  It was different with her sisters. Sometimes they exasperated her, when Bess moped with her nose in the air or Everina seemed too light and casual to make an effort. Though Mary could make equals and superiors feel small, she never took advantage of those in subordinate positions as pupils or servants. She passed on to pupils the quality that prompted her from the age of fourteen: to have the courage to say what you know. ‘Indeed,’ she said, ‘it is of the utmost consequence to make a child artless, or to speak with more propriety, not to teach them to be otherwise.’ If she was ignorant in certain areas, she knew what not to teach. Her pupils were not taught to feign raptures they had not felt. They were not taught ‘pompous diction’. They were not taught ‘artificial’ manners or ‘exterior’ accomplishments. They were not to read in order to quote, nor were they to choose books on the basis of celebrity. Wollstonecraft’s radical programme was designed to free a child’s tongue; children were invited to tell stories in their own words. Her initiatives began with education, keen to retrieve human endowments the schoolroom shuts off.

  As she tried out these ideas, in her mid-twenties, Mary presided over a group of women who were supporting themselves entirely on their own. Lacking dowries, they were marginal to the dominant society, but as long as their school flourished they found a place in a larger marginal community of Nonconformists. Newington Green was no ordinary village. It was high-minded, politicised and literate: full of subscribers to published sermons, and supporters of America in its War of Independence. No letters survive from Mary’s first year at Newington Green, yet since this was the period when she became politicised, we must enter the experimental hothouse of ideas in which she lived.

  One person in Newington Green whom she would later recall with particular gratitude (together with Mrs Burgh) was the Revd Dr Price. Though she continued to attend Anglican services, she did also hear his political sermons. He was a thinker of many parts: a mathematician and economist, as well as political philosopher. He preached liberty as part of a programme of moral perfection, a religious utopianism stressing the divine image implanted in our nature. His humanitarian ideas were far-sighted: he dreamt of abolishing war and planned an international tribunal for settling disputes, but at the time Mary Wollstonecraft came under his influence his keenest thoughts were concentrated on the future of America. He even went so far as to declare that ‘next to the introduction of Christianity among mankind, the American Revolution may prove the most important step in the progressive course of human improvement’. The political core of what Wollstonecraft put forward after her contact with Dr Price reflects his thinking in relation to the new-formed United States.

  In August 1775, George III had declared the American colonists to be in a state of rebellion, and sent troops. When nine hundred British soldiers had fired on seventy Americans at Lexington, Thomas Rogers, a banker in Newington Green, put on mourning. Later that year Dr Price wrote a pamphlet in favour of the rebels, Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty. It sold sixty thousand copies when it was published in February 1776 (reinforcing the impact of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense which argued the case for a republic), and is said to have encouraged the American Declaration of Independence on July 4th. Britain, Price argued, could not win this war. His main point, though, was that Britain was in the wrong because political authority derives from the people, and is limited by natural rights and the common good. He held that there were no grounds for justifying imperialism.

  Anonymous letters threatened Price with death. He couldn’t have cared less for threats when it came to the cause of truth and liberty, but there was no egotism in his politics. His eyes had the keenness of intelligence, not the expressiveness of personality. He lived simply, and gave a fifth of his income to charity. A modest man, thin, in a plain black coat, with a shy bend to his back, he was never unkind or uncivil. So revered was Price by artisans and market women that when he trotted through London on his old horse he could hear orange-women calling, ‘There goes Dr Price! Make way for Dr Price!’ His objections to war and the corruption of the ruling class were shared by the artisan class in London (including the poet William Blake), by manufacturers and traders in the Midlands and North West, and also by the poor who provided the soldiers for the American war. The country lost the labour of at least a hundred and fifty thousand men for eight years. All these productive but disfranchised classes were struck by the American experiment in democracy, and crowds came to hear Dr Price.

  In 1781 the British surrendered to Washington at Yorktown. The mother country had lost one hundred thousand soldiers and £139 million in its attempt to hold on to the thirteen American colonies. Britain was forced to recognise the United States by the Treaty of Versailles on 3 September 1783, and Congress ratified a final peace treaty in January 1784. That year, at the very time Mary Wollstonecraft and company arrived in Newington Green, Dr Price was penning anothe
r influential pamphlet, Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution. It was designed initially for American leaders–George Washington, Benjamin Franklin (an old friend of Price), Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and John Jay–who all entered into correspondence with Price over his astute recommendations for the States’ future in peacetime. Franklin, the American Minister in Paris, gave the Comte de Mirabeau, a future leader of the French Revolution, an introduction to Price on 7 September 1784. Mirabeau had written an attack on the hereditary nobility for the radical London publisher Joseph Johnson. To fill out the volume, Mirabeau included Dr Price’s Observations, together with his own ‘Notes Détachées sur l’ouvrage de M. le Docteur Price’. Joseph Johnson then brought out an English translation of Mirabeau’s commentary on Price.

  The early and mid-1780s were a time of extraordinary optimism: the American victory, the newly freed nation, was greeted by supporters as a victory for all mankind. It resonated for classes blocked by existing institutions, who wished to shake off a hereditary ruling class and extend the rights of those not represented in Parliament. In April 1784 Figaro’s speech, vaunting the ingenuity of a servant, shocked and thrilled audiences when Beaumarchais’s play Le Mariage de Figaro opened in Paris. An English Dissenter and playwright, Thomas Holcroft, attended ten successive performances in order to memorise the play for the London stage. Political and theatrical radicalism was linked with a growing faith in the perfectibility of human nature proclaimed by Dr Price from the pulpit. Since political institutions shape our nature, the time had come, he said, ‘when the Dissenters in England have more reason to look to America, than America had to look to them’. Americans were applying ideas in the unprecedented setting of New World republicanism, where ideas had the chance to be different things altogether. This phase when Mary Wollstonecraft was putting into practice her radical ideas in education was also the phase in which she bent an ear to this remarkable pastor.