Vindication

by Lyndall Gordon

  It’s perhaps not surprising that her germinating soil was at the margin of society. Mary had no contact with the metropolitan milieu of the ‘Bluestocking Club’, the fashionably learned women whose soirées were attended by Mrs Garrick, wife of the foremost actor of the age, Edmund Burke the parliamentary orator, Sir Joshua Reynolds the great portraitist, the conservative Fanny Burney soon to be waiting on the Queen, the equally conservative Hannah More (who would be one of Wollstonecraft’s most determined critics) and Horace Walpole (another of her future critics, the politely sneering author of The Castle of Otranto, a novel creaking with lifeless gender types), all brought together by the voluble, faintly absurd Mrs Vesey, wife of a Member of Parliament. It was not these celebrities of the capital but the outlying milieu of Dr Price, his friend Mrs Burgh and other Dissenters who met every fortnight in one another’s homes, who sowed in Mary Wollstonecraft the seed of ‘rights’ to life and liberty.

  How was Mary transformed from a young woman in hiding into the political thinker she was by the time she left Newington Green in the autumn of 1786? The answer does not lie in her surviving letters, nor will it do to fill this gap with the insistent self-pity of Mary’s lamentations over one difficulty or another. From February 1784 to September 1786 there remain only six letters to George Blood, and two to her sisters, a small fraction of what she would have written over the course of two and a half years. The surviving letters never speak of the educational and ideological interests she was developing. When Mary writes to George, she’s advising a young scamp who, when he wasn’t abandoning jobs for long spells of idleness, assisted in a haberdasher’s in Cheapside. He was responsive to Mary, his eyes danced, and she was fond of him as a ‘sister’, but this was no thinker–and, not surprisingly, her bond with George does not reflect that side. He helped her in so far as he allowed her to confide her setbacks and troubles, and she must have confided also in Mrs Burgh’s nephew Friendly Church, for he told her that she would ‘never thrive in the world’. But Church was wrong. When Mary said, ‘my harassed mind will wear out my body’, she did not expect imminent death. Cries and sighs were the commonplaces of eighteenth-century sensibility, introduced in the 1740s by Richardson’s hugely successful novels Pamela and Clarissa, whose heroine pits her integrity against those who control the world (exploiters, bullies, rakes). Clarissa is forever having her laces cut when she falls in a faint. She exhibits the virtue of weeping. It rebukes the heartless and vindicates her honesty. Mary’s sighs signal in the same way the honest, unprotected woman at odds with the world, a position she shared with her sisters. Her letters to them too leave out the stimulus of the Dissenters’ bid for rights in the face of political exclusion, and, more immediately, the impact of the American model as it came to her through Dr Price.

  Richard Price was sixty-one when Mary met him. A portrait of this time by Benjamin West shows a thinker beside a bookcase. His lined forehead and hollow cheeks are framed by a full-bottomed wig. His expression conveys the calm and sweetness of spirit of those whose strength comes from within. Repeatedly, Mary would be drawn to the gentleness of confident men (as unlike her father as it was possible to be). This kind of gentleness is far from weak: in Price it shows an edge in his rather formidable dark eyebrows, the right raised interrogatively, which together with the keen eyes behind the spectacles convey a quiet authority.

  He came from Llangeinor in Glamorganshire, the son of a Calvinist minister called Rice Price who was harsh and bigoted to the extent that his son rebelled. The son took up the rational faith of Unitarians who stressed the ethics of compassion, denying miracles and ‘superstitions’ in favour of Christ’s humanity. Richard Price never became fully Unitarian in so far as he retained a sense of Christ’s divinity, but a sectarian label is unimportant beside his embrace of Christ’s non-violence. He rejected religions with histories of coercive violence, Islam and Catholicism. Protestantism he thought little better, while pagans with their lewd and cruel deities sanctified the worst human traits. It was better not to believe in a deity, he thought, than to project a punitive being.

  Price moved to London in about 1740 to study for the ministry at Moorfields Academy, run by his uncle Samuel Price, with help from Isaac Watts the hymn-writer. It was a time when Dissenting academies were the real centres of education in England, while the established seats of learning, Oxford and Cambridge, dozed through the eighteenth century. In 1758 Price settled at Newington Green as preacher. After twelve years there he began to preach in the mornings to the much larger congregation of Unitarians at the Gravel Pit Meeting House in Hackney. A wider public read his pamphlet against the American war. Congress invited Price to become a citizen in 1778, and Yale University conferred on him, together with Washington, the degree of Doctor of Law on 24 April 1781. Price declined the invitation to leave England, but declared that he looked ‘to the United States as now the hope, and likely soon to become the refuge of mankind’.

  In the early 1780s reform was in the air; fellow-feeling for revolutionaries was marked at all levels of society, except perhaps the lowest. Aristocrats in the circle round the leader of the Opposition, Charles James Fox, and William Petty Shelburne (created Marquess of Lansdowne in 1784) joined associations like the London Friends of the People, as did the gentry and manufacturers all over the country. Even politicians like Pitt and Burke, who were to lead a counter-revolution in the 1790s, as yet appeared potential reformers. Lord Shelburne, who was Price’s patron, became Prime Minister from March 1782 until February 1783, and offered Price the post of Private Secretary. Price served as unofficial adviser on government finance, proposing a ‘sinking fund’ to cope with the national debt, while Shelburne brought the American war to an end.

  One of the foremost American admirers of Dr Price was the future second President, John Adams. The principles and sentiments that Price expressed had been, said Adams, ‘the whole scope of my life’. In 1785, aged fifty, Adams arrived in London as the first American Ambassador to the Court of St James. The Court and diplomatic community were taken aback when Adams and his wife Abigail chose to join the congregation of Dr Price at the Gravel Pit Meeting House. ‘This is the 3d Sunday we have attended his meeting,’ Abigail Adams wrote to her son John Quincy Adams on 26 June 1785, ‘and I would willingly go much further to hear a Man so liberal so sensible so good as he is. He has a Charity which embrases all mankind.’

  Price provided a refuge from the hostility the Adamses encountered that summer for having the ‘impudence’ to defend their country. Stared at or ignored, they had to withstand a repeated assumption that America would ‘of course’ return to the fold when it was weary of independence. British statesmen refused to comprehend Adams when he declared there was ‘a new order of things arisen in the world’. Journalists and American refugees took to ‘snearing at [John Adams] for having taken Dr. Price as Father confessor’, Abigail reports in August; and by September decides that she prefers the society of Dr Price to balls, card parties and ‘titled Gamesters’. She wondered repeatedly at his diffidence, so different in manner from an American’s air of independence. ‘If I live to return to America, how much shall I regret the loss of good Dr. Price’s Sermons,’ Abigail said during her return voyage three years later. ‘I revered the Character and Loved the Man. Tho far from being an orator, his words came from the Heart and reached the Heart.’

  Revolutionary rhetoric, in the mouth of John Adams, began with the premise, ‘all Men would be Tyrants if they could’. Abigail Adams suggested an application her husband had not considered. In March 1776, she had asked him to ‘remember the Ladies’ in the new code of laws yet to be formulated.

  ‘If particular care and attention is not paid to the Laidies,’ Abigail warned, ‘we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.’

  ‘As to your extraordinary Code of Laws, I cannot but laugh,’ her husband replied. The danger of revolution, he explained, is its knock-
on effect for disobedient children, Indians and Negroes. ‘But your Letter was the first Intimation that another Tribe more numerous and powerfull than all the rest were grown discontented.’

  Abigail Adams was to become an outspoken admirer of Mary Wollstonecraft. They were moving in the same religious milieu in the London of the mid-1780s, and possible evidence of their proximity is the fact that the Adamses spelt her name ‘Woolstoncraft’, as it’s pronounced in England. It’s conceivable that they sat in the same congregation when they heard Dr Price. His belief that American liberty derived from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was the source of Mary Wollstonecraft’s hopes of the American experiment. ‘The Anglo-Americans having carried with them the principles of their ancestors, liberty appeared in the New World with renovated charms and sober matron graces,’ she wrote when she came to contrast the American Revolution with the Terror unleashed by the French. At the outset of his Presidency, Adams underlined these words. ‘I thank you Miss W.,’ he remarks in the margin. ‘May we long enjoy your esteem.’

  Although Price looked on the American Revolution as ‘the fairest experiment ever tried in human affairs’, the real test would be to sustain it. In 1784–5 he warned its leaders that the collected wisdom of confederation, not war, should settle disputes. On 1 February 1785 he received a gracious acknowledgement from Jefferson, who in that year replaced Franklin as American Minister in Paris. ‘I have read [your Observations on the American Revolution] with very great pleasure, as have done many others to whom I have communicated it. The spirit which it breathes is as affectionate as the observations themselves are wise and just.’

  Price replied to Jefferson, slipping in another warning between the graces of this exchange:

  Newington Green Mch 21st, 1785

  Dear Sir,

  …Your favourable reception of the pamphlet which I desired Dr Franklin to present to you cannot but make me happy; and I am willing to infer from it that this effusion of my zeal will not be ill received in America. The eyes of the friends of liberty and humanity are now fixed on that country. The united states have an open field before them, and advantages for establishing a plan favourable to the improvement of the world which no people ever had in equal degree.

  …The character, however, of popular governments depending on the character of the people; if the people deviate from simplicity of manners into luxury, the love of shew, and extravagance[,] the governments must become corrupt and tyrannical…

  I am, Sir, your most obedient and humble servant,

  Rich d Price

  It’s not entirely possible to explain the success of America (in contrast with other revolutions, where thugs take over from intellectuals). Certainly, there was Washington’s ability to unite states with divided interests. During those first vital decades, from the 1770s to almost the end of the century, he had the standing to control dissensions. When the war came to an end in 1783 his ‘Circular to the States’ was designed to channel the energies of rebellion from potential anarchy towards subordination to government. Dr Price had his ear and those of other American leaders at the start of their debate on the Constitution. Where the Declaration of Independence had been idealistic, even utopian, the Constitution was realistic about the power-grabbing element in human nature. It was brilliantly balanced, with curbs on power on every side. Yet it had two flaws.

  The lesser was the failure to grant equality to women: I say lesser, because until Wollstonecraft publicised what would be for more than a century to come the contentious issue of women’s rights, no power remotely considered such a thing–woman being what the Bible termed ‘the weaker vessel’. The second and unforgivable flaw in the American Constitution was, of course, the perpetuation of the slave trade, what Wollstonecraft called ‘the abominable traffick’. In her later writings on the rights of woman, she repeated the common link between the positions of women and slaves. For this reason the long-forgotten words of Dr Price against slavery in 1784–5 are of the utmost importance to the way Wollstonecraft began to think.

  ‘The negro trade cannot be censured in language too severe,’ Price warned American leaders in 1784. ‘It is a traffic which…is shocking to humanity, cruel, wicked, and diabolical.’ Until the States should abolish it, they would not deserve their liberty. In this one respect he believes he can recommend to the States the example of his own country from the time of Lord Mansfield’s ruling in 1771. ‘In Britain,’ said Dr Price, ‘a negro becomes a freeman the moment he sets his foot on British ground.’ *

  Jefferson sent a dodging reply on 7 August 1785 to this anti-slavery plea. He appears to urge Price to speak out further against Southern opposition to emancipating slaves, but in reality distances the issue when he suggests that Price address his comments to young men who might influence some ‘future’ debate on the question. What he doesn’t say is that he will take it up himself. Nor does he question himself as slave-owner.

  That same summer Price confronted John Jay, New York president of a newly formed Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves (whose members had declined a proposal that they begin by freeing their own slaves):

  Newington Green, nr. London

  July 9, 1785.

  Dear Sir,

  …It will appear that the [American] people who have struggled so bravely against being enslaved themselves are ready enough to enslave others: the event which has raised my hopes of seeing a better state of human affairs will prove only an introduction to a new scene of aristocratical tyranny and human debasement: and the friends of liberty and virtue in Europe will be sadly disappointed and mortified…

  I am

  Your most obedient and humble servant,

  Richard Price.

  Nothing was more important than a plan of education in framing a new state, Price advised Americans in what was, by far, the longest part of his pamphlet. His educational ideas followed Wollstonecraft’s, or hers his. To Price in 1784, the ‘secret’ of education had yet to be found, but he points to the ‘turn’ given to the mind by the child’s earliest impressions, which Wollstonecraft in a sense answers when she points to a mother’s breast. Price, too, attacked formal learning that teaches what to think instead of how to think, and ‘perverts’ minds with ‘the jargon of the schools’. This ‘puffs up’ a child. Pride and dogmatism he called ‘the worst enemies to improvement’. Wollstonecraft, sweeping away words of thund’ring sound, the commonplaces of received opinion and other obstacles to communication, takes this to a logical conclusion when she shifts the power from teacher to pupil. It’s as though Price was invoking Wollstonecraft when he said, ‘I am waiting for the great teacher.’

  As long as she taught in Newington Green, Wollstonecraft found a mentor in a mind of this calibre: its eighteenth-century trust in continuing enlightenment, its compassion for victims and its commitment to liberty–all qualities she could share.

  Not far from the Green was the village of Shacklewell where lived a young Anglican priest, aged twenty-two, who served three parishes in London. The Revd Mr John Hewlett was the son of a gentleman, owner of Chetnole in Dorset and Milborne Wick in Somerset. He befriended Mary, who was three years older, and to some extent confided in her–or she was intuitive enough to guess his troubles–for she pitied his marriage at twenty to bossy Elizabeth Hobson of Hackney: ‘Poor tender friendly soul how he is yoked!’ It was a waste of a good man. At the height of his association with Mary, Hewlett was admitted as a sizar at Magdalene College, Cambridge, in January 1786 at the age of twenty-four–it would take all of ten years to take his degree in divinity while he ran his own boarding-school in Shacklewell. In the next century he became known as a biblical scholar and Chaplain to the Prince Regent, but when Mary met him in 1784 he mixed with editors and writers of the capital. Hewlett took Mary to visit the Great Cham of English literature Samuel Johnson, then seventy-five, scarred by scrofula and ailing from a stroke the previous year. He received her kindly in Bolt Court, seeming to propel himself forward by a constant roll o
f his head and body, and jerking his majestic head as he made his pronouncements as one speaking from on high. His voice was loud and deliberate; his slovenly clothes and convulsive motions of hands, lips, feet and knees at odds with graceful words.

  Dr Johnson loathed Mary’s hero. As a pensioner of the government he opposed radicalism, in particular the politics of Dr Price. Once, in Oxford, when Price entered a room, Dr Johnson left it. ‘All change is of itself an evil,’ he said. Johnson approved the war against the States, decried equality, and looked with equanimity on a beggar, pronouncing that some must be miserable so others might be happy.

  It says something for both Johnson and Mary Wollstonecraft that they did not clash. Dr Johnson is now recognised as more ambiguous than some of his pronouncements appear: a conservative political writer who in certain ways opened up a brave new world for more radical voices–brave, say, in his refusal to be gulled by the hot air of aristocratic amateurs. Then, too, Johnson could put by his occasional misogyny–he had long enjoyed cordial relations with several ‘Blues’. The biographer of Fanny Burney, Claire Harmon, detects a romantic tenderness in his later encounters with women that suggests a suppression of his sexual feelings with a resigned awareness how repellent his scars and twitches might be. He treated Mary ‘with particular kindness and attention’, had a long conversation with her, and asked her to come ‘often’. Despite overt differences, they actually had much in common.