Vindication

  En route the ship sighted a French vessel in difficulties. If the more extensive detail of Mary is to be trusted, the ship was dismasted and drifting, its rudder broken. The sailors were starving, and begged to be taken on board. The English captain, with his own rations running low, was inclined to sail past. Mary wouldn’t have it. Assuming the manner George Blood called ‘the princess’, she threatened to report the captain if he did not rescue the Frenchmen–and so he did. Mary re-imagines the scene: ‘They bore down to the wreck; they reached it, and hailed the trembling wretches: at the sound of the friendly greeting, loud cries of tumultuous joy were mixed with the roaring of the waves, and with ecstatic transport they…launched their boat, and committed themselves to the mercy of the sea. Stowed between two casks, and leaning on a sail, [Mary] watched the boat, and when a wave intercepted it from view–she ceased to breathe, or rather held her breath until it rose again.’ When at last the boat arrives alongside, ‘Mary’ tends the rescued men, and joins them in thanking ‘that gracious Being’ who ‘rode on the wings of the wind, and stilled the noise of the sea; and the madness of the people–He only could speak peace to her troubled spirit!’ Then she sings–as well as she can recall–the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah: ‘The Lord Omnipotent reigned, and would reign for ever, and ever!’

  At length, in January 1786, Mary arrived back in Newington Green. A shock awaited her: the school seemed about to collapse, and the atmosphere was ‘very disagreeable’. Boarders had left or were leaving, the last being Mrs Disney. She and the Wollstonecrafts had quarrelled, and the two Disney sons were already installed as ‘whole’ boarders at the rival establishment of Mrs Cockburn. Without boarders, the house on the Green was too expensive, and, to make matters worse, Mrs Morphy, victim of some unexplained misfortune, had departed without paying her bill, as did the Disneys whose debt (roughly £70–£80), if paid, could have rescued the school. Mary had no hope that Mrs Disney would pay and, it appears, no means of retrieving the money–obviously, she didn’t dare extend her loss with legal fees. On top of all this, Mary felt for the Bloods who must suffer with her. ‘I am determined they shall share my last shilling,’ she declared, but was not ‘yet’ able to pay their last quarter’s rent. Skeys exasperated her with a ‘very short unsatisfactory’ letter apologising for not sending a promised sum for his father-in-law.

  ‘It would have been particularly acceptable to them at this time,’ she reported to George, ‘but he is prudent and will not run any hazard to serve a friend–indeed delicacy made me conceal from him my dismal situation, but he must know I am embarrassed.’ Three weeks later further letters from Skeys arrived, minus the awaited ‘trifle’.

  ‘I am certain a few pounds would not make any difference in his affairs,’ Mary thought, ‘yet why should I be surprised–did he not neglect Fanny–.’

  To keep the school going, and probably also to help the Bloods, she borrowed heavily from Mrs Burgh; also from Friendly Church, from the recently married Sowerby, and from a number of neighbours on the Green including a musician called Mr Hinxman, a vague man who could ill afford it. Meanwhile, George, who might have supported his parents, was again living off friends in Dublin. He implored Mary to keep his most recent defection a secret from his parents, who believed him still employed in Portugal. George was ready enough with bright suggestions. Why not open a school in Ireland? She explained that without financial backing it would be impossible to attract pupils; also, that she owed it to her creditors to find a safer means to pay them back.

  George urged Mary to run off to Ireland, leaving her debts behind. ‘Nothing should induce me to fly from England,’ she said. ‘My creditors have a right to do what they please with me, should I not be able to satisfy their demands.’

  Her first concern was to exert herself to save the school before it dwindled ‘to nothing’. In her present low spirits, exacerbated by fits of anxiety, this was particularly difficult: ‘’tis a labour to me to [do] any thing–my former employments are quite irksome to me’. She felt ‘haunted’ by the ‘furies’ of debt. ‘Let me turn my eyes on which side I will, I can only anticipate misery–Are such prospects as these calculated to heal an almost broken heart–The loss of Fanny was sufficient of itself to have thrown a cloud over my brightest days.’

  Even while Fanny was alive, her absence had been hard to bear. Bess and Everina could not compare as companions, and Mary’s spirits had sagged when weeks had passed without a letter. ‘How my social comforts have dropped away,’ she echoed Dr Johnson’s elegy for a friend. The worst of her grief was to acknowledge that friendship, which she still called the ‘cordial of life’, had been imperfect: ‘A person of tenderness must ever have particular attachments, and ever be disappointed,’ she said, ‘yet still they must be attached…’ Now, depleted of dreams, Mary had to press on day by day in a failing school, dreading the hour she must face that failure and almost wishing it would hasten, so struggle and dread might end.

  During the winter of 1786, there seemed no point to her continued life, and there were times she wished she had drowned at sea. ‘I have lost all relish for pleasure–and life seems a burthen almost too heavy to be indured,’ she confessed on 4 February. ‘My head is stupid, and my heart sick and exhausted.’ In this state, a month after her return, ills began to fasten on her body: a pain in her side ‘and a whole train of nervous complaints’. Her eyes felt strained, her memory lapsing–signs, she thought, of decline. She hoped it would not be slow. This wish to die goes beyond grief: she suffered from depression, manifesting often as irritability, hypochondria and self-pity. These are typical after-effects of a danger that has called up vigilance, protectiveness, fear and anger–emotions Mary had felt as a child when she had tried, and failed, to protect her mother or dog from her father’s fist. That ‘agony’ of helplessness, encoded in childhood, remained a recurrent threat to this active young woman. As witness to Fanny giving birth, she had again failed to save a victim she loved.

  One of the Revd Mr Hewlett’s sermons of this time seems to address her depression. The house of mourning, he urged, ‘is replete with instruction’. After ‘the calls of friendship led you to take a last farewell of those you loved’ and ‘you viewed the last struggles of nature, saw the shades of death gathering around’ and felt your ‘own weakness’, do not forget, Hewlett counselled. Consider, meditate, study scenes of sorrow. The source of knowledge is experience. Not the teachings of others, not example, but the few events that befall us make a more lasting impression on the heart: ‘Keep thy heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life.’ At a time when women were taught it was inconsistent with their nature to draw comprehensive conclusions from private experience, Hewlett encouraged her and others to shape, not blunt, traumatic memory. His idea of the uses of grief came from the Bible (Deuteronomy 4: 9): ‘Only take heed of thyself, and keep thy soul diligently, lest thou forget the things which thine eyes have seen, and lest they depart from thy heart all the days of thy life.’

  Another consolation was the music of Handel. His ‘sublime harmony’ raised Mary ‘from the very depths of sorrow’, she said. ‘I have been lifted above this little scene of grief and care, and mused on Him, from whom all bounty flows.’

  Although she did manage to retain eleven pupils, by April it was clear that however hard she tried, she could not make up her debt by trying to rebuild a large establishment. Pupils flocked to prosperous schools, which appeared to have no need for them. There was nothing for it. She must close her boarding concern, and continue in a smaller way with day pupils. But what would become of her dependants: moody, handsome Bess, unfit to fend for herself, yet tied for life to a cast-off husband; light-spirited Everina, only twenty-one and susceptible to a ‘Lothario’; and the pathetic Bloods who were once more penniless?

  From the beginning of May, Mary was preparing herself to ‘plunge again into some new scene of life’. In mid-June, still in Newington Green, she moved into cheap lodgings at a Mrs Blackb
urn’s, and went on teaching the residue of eleven pupils. She sold the school’s furniture and everything else she could spare, paid off the servant, and lived with ‘rigid’ economy–too stringent, she said, for her sisters, perhaps her way of letting them know that she could no longer support them. Everina went back to Ned on Tower Hill. Bess lingered on with Mary until mid-July when Mrs Burgh found her a lowly teaching post at Mrs Sampel’s school in Market Harborough, Leicestershire. The town lay in a valley surrounded by hills white with sheep. In the outlying hamlets, peeping from behind bushes, cottages were largely made of mud; some of stone. Bess was surprised to find these clean and comfortable, with woodbine and roses twined over their windows. Rural walks were an escape from a strict Presbyterian school. Her fellow-teachers were obsessed with hell, and damned plays and all books except for the Bible–a far cry from the enlightened Dissent of Newington Green.

  This was hard for Bess, who was less spiritual than Mary and with a keener taste for the ‘delightful little elegances of life’. She pictures the provincial narrowness in a letter to Everina: the lugubrious quoting from the Bible from morn to night, the four services on Sundays, her homesick awakenings, and lonely evenings in her attic room with Everina’s portrait for company. ‘Oh! How my heart pants to be free–’ was her secret cry, while she schooled her face. She felt ‘shut out from all society, or conversation whatever, I cannot make myself understood here; had I an inclination so to do, praying is their only amusement, not forgetting eating, and Marr[y]ing, and so on–the idea of parting from a husband one could never make them comprehend…’ At the same time, she spells out the economic case for marriage: ‘Oh! that you had a good Husband, to screen thee from those heart-breaking disagreeables…’ Even now, Bess did not regret leaving Meredith Bishop. She’s astonished when fellow-teachers can’t comprehend that a bad husband is worse than none.

  To Mary’s relief, Bess held up. After more than two months she sent a reassuring and ‘very affectionate’ letter which, Mary replied, ‘was a cordial to me, when my worn-out spirits required a very potent one–Indeed my dear girl I felt a glow of tenderness which I cannot describe–I could have clasped you to my breast as I did in days of yore, when I was your nurse–…I was pleased to find you endeavor to make the best of your situation, and try to improve yourself–You have not many comforts it is true–yet you might have been in a much more disagreeable predicament at present.’

  The most intractable of Mary’s problems had long been the Bloods and their feckless brood. Mr Blood was a mite sobered by the death of Fanny who, sick as she was, had taken his place as breadwinner. He did now exert himself to find work, and had the promise of a caretaker’s job in the Church of Ireland. Yet, without money, how could he get there? Mr Blood was not backward in putting this plea to Mary, though she was stretched to breaking point, as he must have known. As always, she took a daughter’s responsibility, and consulted the minister at Shacklewell how she might contrive to earn a little extra.

  Mr Hewlett suggested that she write a book, and Mary came up with her Thoughts on the Education of Daughters. He took her proposal to Joseph Johnson, who was handling his own volume of Sermons and whose print shop in St Paul’s Churchyard was near Hewlett’s town parish of Foster Lane. Hewlett’s face shone with ‘sensibility and goodness’ when he returned to Mary with the publisher’s offer of ten guineas. Unhesitatingly, she turned over the advance to the Bloods to pay their fare to Dublin. No sooner had they departed than a letter came from Skeys lamenting his ‘inability to assist them’, and dwelling on his ‘own embarrassments’.

  Now, when the day’s classes were done, night after night through the late spring and summer of 1786 Mary’s pen travelled over a sheaf of paper, and as it did so, her sense of purpose returned. ‘Whenever a child asks a question,’ she writes, ‘it should always have a reasonable answer given it. Its little passions should be engaged.’ Her bias was rational: children’s heads should not be filled with ‘superstitious accounts of invisible beings, which breed strange prejudices and fears in their minds’. The force of her writing, its unposturing directness, is plain. As she moved from her portrait of a girl reader discovering a taste of her own, to her portrait of an unmarried teacher braving the rigours of self-reliance, she drew on her experience of the last two years. Her Education looks deceptively slight; it was the fruit of long thought tested in a school of her own.

  Rising out of this book is the portrait of a professional woman. Though Wollstonecraft draws on her experience, it’s not a self-portrait, more a possibility. Here is her first attempt at the alternative life plot that could bring into being an exemplar of her sex. The first thing she learns at her mother’s breast is the ‘warmest glow of tenderness’; and the next most important lessons go back to ‘The Nursery’, the title of the first chapter. Unlike Mary, the model girl is not subject to excessive restraint in the nursery; affection calls out her ‘amiable propensities’. This loved child becomes a reader from her earliest years, searching out books that improve her whole being. She cultivates the intelligence to judge for herself, ignoring the craven chorus of those around her and dissociating her sensibility from fictional heroines ‘so different from nature’. Later, Northanger Abbey would mock the gush and tremors of girls who imitate fictional heroines. Wollstonecraft precedes Jane Austen when she dissociates genuine sensibility from affectation: ‘those who imitate it must make themselves very ridiculous’. Discipline is not imposed from above; it grows spontaneously from the secure ritual of the nursery, encouraging the responsiveness of the small child. Wollstonecraft in no way slights the domestic character of women–traditional achievements in nurture and emotional literacy are the heart of her model–but the outcome of training is realistic self-reliance, displacing the old model of passive dependence.

  One of the hardest trials, Wollstonecraft warns in a chapter on ‘Love’, is the single woman’s irrational susceptibility to unsuitable men. At twenty-seven, her advice is tough, born of her own disappointments with Joshua Waterhouse and Neptune Blood: ‘The passion must be rooted out, or continual excuses that are made will hurt the mind.’ Wollstonecraft’s confiding manner is free of the loftiness of men’s advice books, which took it upon themselves to school females in proper femininity, though ostensibly Thoughts on the Education of Daughters belongs to that genre. An editorial note to excerpts printed in the Lady’s Magazine commends their ‘many judicious observations’.

  Daughters’ education had not always been quite as constricted as in the era of advice books. Katherine Parr, the last of Henry VIII’s wives, was the daughter of a learned mother, published two books, and dared to debate with the King on risky questions of theology–nearly costing herself a horrible death when Henry began to fume: ‘A good hearing it is, when women become such clerks, and much to my comfort to come in mine old age to be taught by my wife.’ The intellectual training of Elizabeth I made study fashionable for aristocratic women, especially in the circle around Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (sister of the poet Sir Philip Sidney).

  In the seventeenth century during the English Civil War ‘bold impudent huswives’ emerged, and ‘preacheresses’ who would ‘prate’ an hour or more, some sanctioned by Dissenting sects like the Quakers and Levellers. Charles I employed a learned woman, Basua Makin, to teach his children, but at the licentious court of Charles II women were treated as toys and their standing declined. In the 1660s Basua Makin said that a female scholar was looked on like a strange comet that bodes mischief. In The Female Vertuosos (1693) Sir Maurice Meanwell complains that ‘now a-days Wives must Write forsooth, and pretend to Wit’. His sister Catchat protests that women’s wit is innate, not pretended. ‘’Tis the partial, and foolish Opinion of Men, brother, and not our Fault hath made it ridiculous nowadays.’ Catchat is in fact ridiculed as a single woman past her first youth who is out to catch a man. Sir Maurice: ‘A woman’s wit was always a Pimp to her Pleasures.’

  During the eighteenth century advice or courtesy boo
ks, stressing obedience and manners, became increasingly popular with the rising middle classes. These books are wordy and leaden beside Wollstonecraft’s, whose briskness is deliberate: a counter to the ‘affected’ style of others’ advice, ‘designed to hunt every spark of nature out of [girls’] composition’. Wollstonecraft said she would ban such books on the grounds of style alone. Her emphasis on domestic training does not rule out public life. She believes that nursery instincts like tenderness, if empowered by the right training to think and act, could one day redeem the world. The enormity of this claim widens the contrast between forbidding advice (the most influential advisers being Lord Halifax in 1688 and Dr James Fordyce in 1766) and the moral independence of the young Wollstonecraft. *

  Women a little older than Wollstonecraft–those born in the early to mid-1740s–tended to concur in the subordination of their sex. Mrs Barbauld, a writer from Newington Green, who had run a school in Suffolk, laid it down that girls ‘must often be content to know that a thing is so, without understanding the proof’. They ‘cannot investigate; they may remember’. Wollstonecraft’s ideas for girls’ education burgeoned in a context where millions of girls were taught to memorise, not to think. She mocks one of Mrs Barbauld’s poems, a cascade of clichés which likens women to ‘DELICATE’ flowers, free from toil, ‘born for pleasure and delight ALONE’. Mrs Barbauld’s concluding lesson is that ‘Your BEST, your SWEETEST empire is–TO PLEASE.’ Even Hannah More, a purveyor of popular pieties and leading member of the ‘Blues’, believed that the ‘bold, independent, enterprising spirit’ encouraged in boys should be suppressed in girls. Wollstonecraft recognised that it was through such misteaching that ‘daughters’ internalised their subjection. Education was therefore central to her message.

  At the time she completed the book, a new phase loomed. The Bloods had invited her to live with them in Ireland, but she refused: ‘I must be independant and earn my own subsistence, or be very uncomfortable.’ Nor could she forget her debts: she had hoped to save, but by early July, after two or three weeks of her Spartan regime, saw she could not. To pay off her debts, the only course was to become a governess. Dr Price, with the help of Mrs Burgh, alerted a friend at Eton, the Revd John Prior, an assistant master at the school, where he lived with his wife. Recommended by the Priors, Mary had several offers, amongst them a post in Wales and another with a noble family, the Kings, in Ireland. This last offer seemed handsome: £40 a year. (It’s been suggested that this was a poor sum, reflecting Mary’s educational limitations. But we need only compare it with the £30 accepted half a century on in the late 1830s by Charlotte Brontë who, as a governess, could offer French and highly developed skills in art as well as teaching experience.) Mary took up the Irish offer. Her plan was to use half her salary against her debts. Paying off £20 a year meant that she would have to work at least four years, and this was not to be the end of it, for she had a further plan to support Bess. Years of dependence seemed to stretch ahead as she sighed over the prospect of social isolation between employers on the one hand and servants on the other: the usual position of the governess. Mary Wollstonecraft was coolly realistic. The most she hoped for was civility.