Vindication

by Lyndall Gordon

  As summer waned she took lessons in French, and looked through her clothes in dismay–they were worn, unequal to a proper appearance amongst grandees. Miss Mason came for two days to help her make a coat (‘I do not know what I should have done without her,’ Mary said), while Mrs Cockburn, having won the contest for lodgers, could afford the conciliatory gift of a rather weird blue hat. Regretting the modish gown Skeys had promised, Mary was driven to ask George if he could send her fabric for an old pattern Mrs Blood could supply.

  Beneath this wave of activity rolling her towards Ireland were undertows tugging her back to the deep sea of inertia. Some unkindness could make her turn, sick, from social ties. One night her friend seemed to beckon her towards death like Hamlet drawn to the ghost of the beloved dead: ‘I dreamt the other night I saw my poor Fanny, and she told me I should soon follow her[.] I am sick of the world, “’tis an unweeded garden”–…I want a friend[.] I am now alone and my heart not expanded by the usual affection preys on itself. I can scarce find a name for the apathy that has seized me–I am sick of every thing under the sun–…all our pursuits are vain…’ Part of this sickness was self-despair. Repeatedly she questioned her affections, ‘which are too apt to run into extremes’–apt to carry her ‘beyond the pitch which wisdom prescribes’, then fall into ‘apathy’. Two things she trusted to carry her through: she held by her understanding, and her faith never faltered: ‘He has told us not only that we may inherit Aeternal life but that we shall be changed if we do not perversely reject the offered Grace.’

  A lawsuit to do with a ‘lapsed legacy’ remained unsettled in late August. Ned had brought a court case against a man called Roebuck, the senior partner in a firm of insurance brokers called Roebuck & Henckell of 49 Threadneedle Street, for an annuity or trust which the Wollstonecrafts claimed was theirs. It’s likely this was the ‘fortune’ Mary spoke of losing in her late teens–what she and her sisters had loaned to their father during the financial ‘storm’ associated with the family’s move to Wales in 1776–7. An outcome in favour of the Wollstonecrafts would wipe out the bulk of Mary’s debts–she would need to remain a governess for no more than a year. Correspondence flew back and forth without much result; Ned was rude and unhelpful; the day school went on through August; the pupils teased their distracted teacher; and then, in the midst of her daily life, Fanny’s image would blot it out.

  Her debts pressed on her conscience: certain people could not wait for what they had lent her. One day, when a creditor was rude, her confidence as a teacher faded into the squirm of an unprotected female. It seems that Dr Price absorbed certain of these debts. ‘He has been uncommonly friendly to me,’ she told Bess. ‘I have the greatest reason to be thankful–for my difficulties appeared insurmo[u]ntable.’ Mrs Burgh, too, showed endearing solicitude, inviting Mary and Hewlett to dine, and offering a further loan to set Mary’s mind at rest about some remaining creditors, including the vulnerable Hinxman. ‘Mrs Burgh has been as anxious about me as if I had been her daughter–I have paid all my trifling debts and bought all the things I think absolutely necessary–,’ she reported to Bess. ‘You have no conception of Mrs Burgh’s kindness.’

  As she packed her bag, and took leave of the faithful Mason and benevolent Mrs Burgh, it was the end of her Newington years–underlined by the death of Mrs Price that same September. For Dr Price, too, was leaving the Green. ‘I am at present literally speaking on the wing,’ she wrote to Bess at the end of the month. Her farewell letter was ‘the last…from this Island’.

  The spring and summer of 1786 saw the end of the community of women, and the start of her writing life. This resurgence after loss, failure, mourning marks the inception of a new story. It’s not her father’s narrative of moving from place to place, nor the Bloods’ narrative of running away, nor–still tempting to Mary–the eighteenth-century tragedy of female independence: Clarissa dying in protest against her abuse. For Mary would repeatedly find the strength to go on in the face of disaster. In doing so, she was never idle and ever mindful what she owed to others–a responsible alternative to persisting master-plots of greed and power. As a friend, Mary groans over loss; as educator and writer, loss turns to gain. Her book confirms her vocation as an educator, for though she never taught in school again, everything she wrote from this time was driven by the transforming passion of the born teacher.

  It’s often assumed that greatness is produced by circumstance. We say that domestic violence gave rise to rebellion; we say that adversity in Mary’s late teens set her apart as a middle-class girl who must work to survive; yet neither, on its own, can explain greatness. In fact, these conditions usually produce victims like Mary’s mother or frustrated strugglers like her sisters. It’s impossible to explain genius, but certainly, in the case of Mary Wollstonecraft, it was not thrust upon her. She would describe herself later as ‘a strange compound of weakness and resolution!’ When it came to resolution, she showed extraordinary vigour; her groans were the obverse of daring, in part its cost in genuine suffering, in part a protective shield for missions too embryonic to expose. These don’t appear in her letters, where she relieves her feelings during the hard times she certainly endured. In reading her letters, then, we must not allow the volume of the groans to muffle the rising voice of an educator: a voice designed to be heard beyond the range of one failing school on a village green in 1786.

  Though her Thoughts were delivered in the acceptable guise of innumerable guides to girls’ education, the message itself cut through the feminine model of weakness and passivity. Mary’s new post now offered an opportunity to try her alternative model on three young members of the Irish aristocracy: the eldest daughters of Lord and Lady Kingsborough.

  5

  A GOVERNESS IN IRELAND

  The first stage of Mary’s journey to Ireland took her to Eton College in Windsor. Stepping down from the coach early in October 1786, she was welcomed by Mr Prior who had taught classics in the school since 1760. He was the Master of a red house opposite the west doorway of the chapel, and his family also owned a boarding-house on the south-east corner of Keate’s Lane, where Mary may have stayed. Orders were to await the arrival of George and Robert King, aged sixteen and thirteen, the eldest sons of her employers, who would travel with her post-chaise via the Welsh port of Holyhead to Dublin, and from there to Mitchelstown Castle, County Cork, another hundred and thirty miles to the south.

  At the time, it was not uncommon for boys to be away from school during term. A message came that the Kings were ‘actually on the road’ to Eton; they were expected hourly. But day after day passed. Possibly, they had instructions to escort the new governess, a proper attention to a young woman about to cross into unknown territory. Certainly, this explanation never occurred to Mary, accustomed as she was to move about alone. For a traveller to Portugal who had braved the Bay of Biscay, the Irish Sea presented no fears.

  Waiting over two or three weeks for boys who never appeared, she became uneasy, then impatient and put out by the strange ways of Etonians. All appeared to ‘move in the same round’, permitting no boy to ‘fly off to any other sphere’. Two of the boys in Mr Prior’s house were younger sons of the King family: Edward who had been at the school for five years, together with his elder brothers, and Henry who had joined them in 1785. Laughter at private jokes exploded around her. ‘Witlings abound,’ she wrote to Everina on 9 October, ‘and puns fly about like crackers, tho’ you would scarcely guess they had any meaning in them, if you did not hear the noise they create–.’ Wit and politeness appeared to have banished love, ‘–and without it what is society?’ In tears over a ‘tender unaffected letter’ from Everina, she proposed a visit from her sister, and then, when Mrs Prior could not accommodate Everina as well, Mary almost fainted and had to be nursed. Depressed to be once more on course as a subordinate, she found herself in the nursery of this ruling class, and excluded by its lingo. Eton alerted her to her place as foreigner in her own country.

  Two week
s were enough to see how the school of that day reared a warped specimen with an undeveloped heart. Boys, removed from home to school, developed instead their physical strength, competitive aggression and caste solidarity, preparing them to wrest an empire from inferior races. Future rulers were schooled in Spartan conditions to endure hardships far from home. Mary Wollstonecraft is already a revolutionary, original, far-sighted, when she identifies the problem as domestic atrophy: the disempowering and exclusion of the mother. In theory, the House Master and Mrs Prior provided a substitute home; in practice, Mary saw, this didn’t work: the boys were repressed with the Master, and rampant the moment they left his presence. After a silent dinner they would swallow a hasty glass of wine, ‘and retire’, she observed, ‘to ridicule the person or manners of the very people they have just been cringing to’. The masters seemed indifferent to morals. Mary overheard them saying that ‘they only undertook to teach Latin and Greek; and that they had fulfilled their duty, by sending some good scholars to college’.

  Public schools were rough places in the eighteenth century. Boys of the upper classes were trained to numb sensitivity to bullies and defer to their seniors, biding their time until they could take their turn as top dogs. Part of the ethos was caste loyalty: not to ‘sneak’–not to expose the defects of the system to outsiders. This was still the brutal period before Dr Arnold, headmaster of Rugby, introduced fair play (‘cricket’) and chastity as attributes of manliness in the 1820s–and chastity, through those long, shut-up nights in dormitories, was not to be expected. Boarding-schools, Mary said, were ‘hotbeds’ of furtive sex. They pushed boys into ‘libertinism…hardening the heart as it weakens the understanding’. She deplored the ‘vice’ of senior boys, linked as it was to ‘the system of tyranny and abject slavery’ of younger boys.

  Her voice is so forthright that it’s easy to miss what she holds back: a hint of a sea change at the age of twenty-seven during these weeks of enforced idleness. She has ‘so many new ideas of late’, she tells Everina, she ‘can scarcely arrange them’. She is plunged ‘in a sea of thoughts’.

  On the packet to Dublin, she fell in with a clergyman fresh from New College, Oxford. Henry Dyson Gabell, aged twenty-two, was bound for the household of John O’Neill of Shane’s Castle near Antrim, where he was to serve as tutor. Two years later he would enter on duties as an Anglican priest in Wiltshire. The men who appealed most strongly to Mary in these early years were alert to the soul. They did not impose the falsities of gallantry. Like Dr Johnson, Dr Price and the Revd Mr Hewlett, young Gabell heard ‘the tone of melancholy’, a balm after her sojourn with the witlings. One issue she longed to discuss was why the deity–‘the Searcher of hearts’–should burden people (like herself) with a sensitivity that seemed to have no use in society, and only complicated the effort to ready the soul for heaven. As with Dr Johnson, it didn’t put her off that Gabell’s politics were opposed to hers. In the late 1790s he would use the pulpit to preach counter-revolution. In the meantime, he took the view that the masses should be kept down in ‘fat contented ignorance’.

  ‘The appetites will rule if the mind is vacant,’ Mary argued.

  Gabell countered that our reasoning is often fallacious and our knowledge conjectural.

  Mary had to concede this. But it seemed to her also true that ‘flights into an obscure region open the faculties of the soul’. Afterwards, when she had to mute her mind to some extent in the company of Right Honourables, she recalled this opportunity to flex her eloquence.

  In Dublin she was welcomed by Mrs Blood, George Blood and a family friend called Betty Delane who had known Fanny. It was a relief to find old Blood at last in comfortable circumstances. After a few days, a civil and unexpectedly kind butler from the castle arrived to escort Mary on the long last lap of her journey. She would have enjoyed it, she said, had she not been in tears all the way at the prospect of the journey’s end. Dr Price’s talk of ‘aristocratical tyranny and human debasement’ had warned her what she would find.

  She approached her destination along a road that ran parallel to the northern slopes of the Galtee Mountains–a boundary to the Kingsboroughs’ lands. It was a landscape of peaks and drops, with torrents of water falling between birch and whitethorn trees on the mountainsides. After six or seven miles the road turned over a hill, opening a vista of their other side. Mary looked down on a long plain, bounded to the south by the furred, dark-green tops of the Knockmealdown Mountains. At the centre of this plain, fed by its rivers, was Mitchelstown.

  They were approaching the spreading elegance of a stately home. It had a square Palladian centre with wings on either side, a massiveness stretched out rather than high–height was provided by the position of the house on a rise. It backed on to a gorge with a river below. In the fourteenth century and for the next three hundred years a castle had provided a lookout over the surrounding countryside. It had been destroyed (except one tower) and rebuilt in 1645 with an upstairs gallery seventy feet long, overlooking the Galtees. Lord Kingsborough had recently added a storey and moved what had once been the adjacent medieval village of Villa Michel, or Baile Mhisteala, to a safer distance, the present site of Mitchelstown. All that remained of the old village was a graveyard, its mossy, rain-washed stones there to this day.

  Between what continued to be called the ‘castle’ and the town–between, that is, the Protestant Ascendancy and Catholic natives–was the buffer of a spreading Georgian square of two-storey houses, named Kingston College. * Protestant occupants had been brought in to fill this buffer zone nine years prior to Mary’s arrival.

  As she drove through the new-built town, on through the new square, and reached the gates in the wall that surrounded the castle, she felt cut off in a setting contrary, she said, ‘to every feeling of my soul’. It struck her as a prison: ‘I entered the great gates with the same kind of feeling as I should have if I was going into the Bastile.’ The prison in Paris had come to stand for an oppressive regime; its thick walls that made it impossible for an inmate to be heard meant live burial: walls rearing up as a frontier between being and nonexistence. Mary’s apprehension of a Bastille appears excessive–the Wollstonecraft proneness to moaning, and moaning here in the midst of luxury–but apprehension did have some basis in North Cork, a settler part of Ireland with a long history of violence, where tension between rulers and ruled was reflected in the layout: the distanced town and the containment of the castle with its new-built barrier of a ten-to-twelve-foot wall.

  In contrast with its austere façade, the interior of the castle was ornate, with elaborate plaster mouldings. The Rape of Proserpina decorated the ceiling of the hall. The butler would have conducted Mary upstairs to the drawing-room and gallery on the first floor. Waiting to greet her was Lady Kingsborough; her stepmother Mrs FitzGerald, with three grown-up daughters; and what appeared to Mary a ‘host’ of Ascendancy ladies. All were examining her minutely.

  As a ‘solemn kind of stupidity’ froze her ‘very blood’, the children, her charges, presented themselves. ‘Wild Irish’ was her first impression. The eldest, Margaret, was fourteen or fifteen, tall for her age, with a high pointed nose and eyes so pale as to appear almost colourless. Her brown hair fanned out on either side of her face, frizzled in fashionable disarray and ending in locks curled about her neck. Her gaze had the directness of a girl who nerves herself not to fear. Next came her prettier sister, Caroline, aged twelve; and last, Mary who was only six, with blue eyes and abundant dark-brown locks like her mother’s. The three had planned to drive out this English governess, or at least amuse themselves by giving her a hard time. She would be shut up in the schoolroom with these aliens from whom she could expect little mercy for her meagre French and nonexistent accomplishments. It crossed her mind that the Priors had oversold her.

  After these none too promising introductions, she had to contemplate the parade and diversions of high life. Politeness required her to hear this set ‘decide with stupid gravity, some trivial points of c
eremony, as a matter of the last importance’, and join in jollities about the getting of husbands. It was an effort to hide her dislike. Save me from the ‘volubles,’ she sighed a few months later, longing for time to think and read.

  She did not see the castle in Georgian terms of ceremonial, grace and order; she questioned its deference to custom and public opinion. Her faith went beyond the formal Anglicanism which, above all, defined membership of the Ascendancy; to her, faith meant something close to her idea of genius: reaching beyond the frontiers of consciousness towards divine intentions–the sort of talk she continued to exchange in letters to Henry Gabell. She was in her element with clergymen who could sift the higher claims of the moral life, or hear the sweet, sad music of humanity. Lady Kingsborough was charitable, more so than most, but had not the remotest notion of the interior drama–soulfulness crossed with Hamlet–in which her governess specialised. It upset the latter, in the way it embittered Hamlet–and she was always quoting Hamlet–to have to hide her true self. Without losing her professional effectiveness, Mary nursed ‘that within which passes show’. There were, anyway, no exact words for her drama of imprisonment or invisibility. Here again is a glimpse of a new form of life, sprouting apart from the flower of the Ascendancy, in the concealed ground of Mary’s gloom. No amount of consideration from her employers could make up for their failure to know who, in this sense, she was.