Vindication

  Trust in Mary’s methods was heightened by her skills in the sickroom. Soon after she arrived, an epidemic had swept the castle: all the children fell ill. Their mother’s visits, Mary noted, were awkwardly formal: the girls lay silent under their covers while her ladyship babbled to her pets. Then, towards the end of December, Margaret’s temperature rose frighteningly. ‘My poor little favourite has had a violent fever–and can scarcely bear to have me a moment out of her sight,’ Mary wrote to Bess. It must have been a disease of the lungs–pleurisy or pneumonia–for Mary feared Lady K’s strenuous commands would drive her daughter ‘into a consumption’. Mary was able to soothe the mind of her patient. She had an instinctive understanding of the interdependence of physical and mental wellbeing. Her Education of Daughters advocates the study of ‘physic’, for soothing without knowledge, she believed, could do more harm than good.

  There came a moment when Margaret’s life was ‘dispaired of’, and the result of this crisis, when she began to recover, was to ‘produce an intimacy’ between this governess and her employers which ‘years of toil might not have brought about’. Within two months, the enemy who had entered the castle was now, she could not deny, ‘a GREAT favourite in this family’.

  6

  THE TRIALS OF HIGH LIFE

  The court case Ned Wollstonecraft had brought against Roebuck went in the Wollstonecrafts’ favour. At first Mary rejoiced: her share would enable her to pay off her debts after another half-year. Then, in the course of the early months of 1787, Ned’s silence bore it home that he would retain all gains for himself, apart from a small annuity for Everina–not enough to keep her, but an incentive to leave his home. Mary and Bess got nothing whatever. Nor was any explanation forthcoming. Mrs Burgh urged Mary to contact her brother, but she could not bring herself to plead.

  ‘It is so severe a disappointment,’ Mary said, ‘I endeavor not to think of it.’ What she could not face was the prospect of going on indefinitely in her present post. Yet, as always, blows to an unwanted way of life were not wholly unwelcome. They prompted shoots of a different kind to push out in other directions. One is just visible at the close of Mary Wollstonecraft’s letter to Joseph Johnson in December 1786: an apparent afterthought about her ‘state of dependance’. Its luxury, she tells her publisher, could never outweigh her loss of liberty, and without liberty, she would die.

  By the end of January, Mary had been almost immured within the castle walls for three months. Then came orders to join the family in Town for the season: she was to go on ahead with the children. Her thoughts at once turned to the prospect of reunion with her kind. ‘Is Neptune in Dublin?’ she asked George Blood. She had not forgotten this Irishman who had made up to her in London.

  While she readied herself for the move, Mary warmed to a French novel Caroline de Lichtfield that offered an alternative to traditional marriage. It starts out as a Beauty and the Beast story of a teenage heiress whose father marries her to a disfigured favourite of the Prussian King. On the day of her wedding, she writes her new husband a letter, asking to be allowed to return to her surrogate mother until she feels mature enough to enter on the duties of marriage. A sensitive reply from her ‘monster’ husband, Waldstein, frees her to do so. She learns that he is a man of generous character, and as time goes by he becomes less hideous: his disfigurements heal; he walks more upright. Love stirs when Caroline and Waldstein start living in the same house, though not as man and wife. Slowly, they come to know each other as Caroline shares her artistic skills, while her husband introduces her to studies ‘which are too generally neglected in the education of women’. He reads to her, watching as her face ‘assumed the passion or imbibed the wisdom of the writer’. This is a man to draw out a woman’s character.

  For all her independence, Mary Wollstonecraft at twenty-seven had led a life of total chastity. No man, apart from Neptune Blood, had sought her out, partly because she had no dowry and partly because she took a bleak view of marriage. She had long ruled out the terminations of the wedding-bell plot, but a form of love where mutual education begins with marriage took her back to it.

  In the first week of February, she and the children settled into Lord Kingsborough’s redbrick townhouse at 15 Merrion Square on the south side of the River Liffey. Mary had ‘comfortable’ apartments and a ‘fine’ schoolroom, and was invited to use the main drawing-room–the one with the harpsichord and long windows on the first floor. ‘Here is no medium!’ she had to concede. In addition, she was assigned a parlour for receiving her ‘Male visitors’. But no male came. The Ogles called to welcome her, as did the Bloods’ friend Betty Delane whose lively conversation, Mary said, ‘diverted–nay, charmed my little Margaret’; but the private parlour stood empty. Neptune Blood was known to be in Dublin. She had sent him word (through George) of her arrival, but the days went by and Neptune made no move. Mrs Blood said she never saw him–despite the hospitality he had enjoyed in London.

  It came to Mary’s ears that Neptune had enquired after her, yet still he did not call. The weeks passed. Then, one evening early in May, after three months in Town, Mary spied him at the Rotunda, a charitable concert hall at the corner of Sackville and Great Britain Streets. Neptune looked startled to see her in the party of ‘a Lady of quality’–not the neglected governess, and still less the penniless lodger with the Bloods who’d helped out as seamstress three years before. Here was a handsome young woman who had submitted to the attentions of hairdresser and milliner, and was mingling with fashion in pleasure grounds similar to London’s Vauxhall. As Neptune approached with new-found alacrity, Mary stepped back in sudden revulsion: this was the snob who, after all, had left her in London; who in the past three months had not found the time to visit. Face to face, she turned her head and looked past him, flashing a look of ‘ineffable contempt’ from the corner of her eye. The snub sufficed. When they saw each other again in the Green Room at the playhouse, Neptune did not attempt to speak.

  The social strata of Dublin, with a population of only 180,000, struck Mary as simpler than those of a metropolis: ‘there are only two ranks of people’. A governess, with her ambiguous status, was bound to shift up or down. Mary’s standing with the King family–signalled by their invitation to join them in their drawing-room–drew her, now and then, into high society. Years later, when she was travelling in Scandinavia and could look back on life in Paris as well as in London and Lisbon, she recalled Dublin as the most hospitable city she had known. The strength of the Ascendancy lay partly in its willingness to co-opt brains in the form of lawyers and other professionals, but it did look down on trade. Mary–and her sister Bess too–shared this prejudice. As children they had learnt this one lesson from Mr Wollstonecraft: to scrape off the taint of trade. Mary’s letters from Ireland never speak of her mother’s kin in the wine trade. There were kin in Cork, not too far from Mitchelstown Castle, but she did not contact them. Her visible connections were with the Church of Ireland–the impeccable Archdeacon Baillie–in Tipperary. In Dublin, she was prickly about her status, and resented her dependence on Lady K whose grand manner reminded her how precarious was her social position. A signal from Lady K could banish her to the underclass.

  Mary consoled herself with the company of Betty Delane, whose quickness matched her own. Betty lived with her tubercular eldest sister Susanna and rather snaky brother-in-law, the English painter Robert Home, at 48 Little Britain Street, a few doors from George Blood at 96 (the home of his employer, Brabazon Noble). When the two women talked of Fanny, it was a comfort to share their tears. Mary was pleased, too, by a gift from George Blood, a newly published set of Shakespeare’s plays edited by Dr Johnson.

  Books alone spoke to her secret self: ‘I commune with my own spirit–and am detached from the world–I have plenty of books,’ she told Everina. ‘I am reading some philosophical lectures, and philosophical sermons–for my own private improvement. I lately met with Blair’s lectures on genius taste &c &c–and found them an intellectual fe
ast.’ Hugh Blair was Professor of Rhetoric at Edinburgh University, and in 1785 had published his Lectures in Rhetoric in three volumes. It was to be another hundred years before universities in England opened their doors to women, and several more decades before some could take degrees; for Wollstonecraft, avid for higher education in the 1780s, Blair provided a first-rate substitute. During long winter nights in her room she put herself through his rigorous course in literature, genre and style. ‘Genius’ is the word echoing in her thoughts in 1787 as she gazed from Blair into the mirror of Rousseau. ‘L’ exercice des plus sublimes vertus élève et nourrit le génie,’ she noted, and ‘a genius will educate itself’. Blair’s distinction between genius and taste confirmed her own distinction between the power she sensed in herself and Fanny’s refinement. Genius, Blair assured her, was the higher power, a flair that might be improved by art and study, but not attainable by art and study alone. Enlightenment rules of correctness, regularity and accuracy were not enough. ‘The rays must converge to a point, in order to glow intensely,’ Blair urged. The result will be a simple, rapid, ‘torrential’ language, close to oratory.

  The grandparents of the King girls, the Earl and Countess of Kingston, still lived on the other side of the Liffey in the north-east quarter of Dublin at 3 (now 15) Henrietta Street, the home of Robert and Caroline King during the fraught early years of their marriage. Here their daughter Margaret was born and stayed for spells till she was eighteen months. It was a double-fronted house, the first on the left as the family coach turned into a short street, sixteen houses in all, rising up a hill towards the Primate’s garden (the site for Kings Inn, now the Law Library). The Kings’ house had been built in about 1740 at the height of the street’s Georgian grandeur. Earls and other grandees of the Protestant Ascendancy lived there behind tall, black ‘pigiron’ railings. Across the road was John Ponsonby, one-time Speaker of the Irish House of Commons, and still influential in political society. The dark doors and the windows painted a creamy Portland stone colour faced one another across the unpaved street. In a reception room on the ground floor of no. 3, Shakespeare and Milton (in papier-mâché mouldings) looked down on the heir and his wife, the grandchildren and their governess, from either side of the ceiling, while the four seasons held their own in each corner. From the top of the house was a spreading view of Dublin: St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin Castle, the law courts, and the hills beyond.

  In the wider society of Dublin, Mary’s manners appeared ‘gentle, easy, and elegant, her conversation intelligent and amusing, without…apparent consciousness of powers above the level of her sex’. At one large gathering a lady singled her out, and entered into a long conversation. Afterwards the lady, curious about this eloquent young woman, enquired about her–and found, to her mortification, that she was only ‘Miss King’s governess’. That this aristocrat did not detect Mary’s status tells us she could pass as part of Lady Kingsborough’s circle. It tells us too that Mary’s English accent, with a dash of Yorkshire, was close to the received registers of metropolitan or regional pronunciation. Mary later related this story as a joke; at the time, though, she fumed inwardly at women who looked down on one who worked. Ideas of equality took root in this semi-silent rebellion against her subordination, the sap of her superiority rising in a ferment of suppressed rage or depression.

  It sometimes happened that Lady Kingsborough ordered Mary to appear in the drawing-room, and Mary would try to excuse herself. She could not bear to ‘stalk in to be stared at’, and Lady K’s ‘proud condescension’ added to her discomfort.

  ‘I begged to be excused in a civil way–but she would not allow me to absent myself–I had too, another reason, the expence of hair-dressing, and millinery would have exceeded the sum I chuse to spend in those things. I was determined–.’

  Lady K, equally determined, offered Mary a poplin gown and petticoat, which she refused. This made Lady K ‘very angry’.

  Calm was restored when Mrs FitzGerald came to Mary’s rescue. Lady K had to ask Mary’s pardon, and consent to her staying, if she chose, in her room.

  To some extent she contrived to keep herself warm with small triumphs and self-congratulation. When the company of lords and viscounts was unavoidable, she queried what happiness was for one endowed like herself with ‘a greater refinement of mind’ and ‘a keener edge to the sensibility nature gave me–so that I do not relish the pleasures most people pursue–nor am I disturbed by their trifling cares’. Her proximity to a cliff-edge of contempt made it hard to keep underground. She felt a rising in the throat; she suppressed her ‘starts’; and then one Sunday in February, when she was in church with the family, her ‘starts’ became visible. Something in the service ‘hurried’ her emotions. They broke through her clamp on public conduct. Lady Kingsborough led her out of the family pew, and directed the coachman to Mary’s friend in Little Britain Street. Once in the house, Mary fell into an uncontrollable ‘fit of trembling as terrified Betty Delane–and it continued in a lesser degree all day’.

  Lady Kingsborough resolved to consult the family physician when he came to examine the lingering effects of Margaret’s illness. Mary, who knew her own problem was mental not physical in origin, resisted; she feared too the cost of a consultation with a fashionable doctor. Her ladyship, alert enough to the wants of peasants but unfamiliar with Mary’s middle-class cares, would have taken this resistance to be a creditable show of stiff upper lip. In the event, her ladyship had her way, and the physician diagnosed ‘a constant nervous fever’. It was necessary, of course, for Mary to restore her clamp in company. There was always a danger that truths would burst out at some unguarded moment, if only through Margaret whose outbursts against her mother were raising the temperature at home. Margaret, by now, had gone over to the radical camp, and was venting her young steam. What could rise only halfway in Mary’s throat, Margaret could utter with increasing fearlessness.

  Letters alone freed Mary’s voice. She corresponded with her sisters, Mrs Burgh, Mrs Prior, James Sowerby, and ‘poor Mason’ whose situation was ‘truly deplorable’. She asks repeatedly for news of Newington Green, Dr Price and ‘poor dear Hewlett’. Her misery in the surviving letters is insistent, yet her manner remains dignified: not the assumed dignity of rank, but that of a person who respects the dignity of every creature. She used humour (‘I am worried to death by dogs’) to deflect fury at the skewed model of a mother nursing her Irish wolfhounds.

  She was still confounded to find how sensibility plus ‘genius’ produced ‘misery’. To hold to ‘genius’ before it had yet been of ‘use’ often required more courage than she could find. This she confided to the Revd Henry Gabell (having sent him a copy of her book). Misery of this kind can appear self-indulgence, though it’s more like the self-doubt that can kill imagination when it sends out roots in the parching soil of incomprehension. Wollstonecraft prayed to ‘the Searcher of hearts’ to balance her ‘peculiar’ wretchedness with something else.

  Another confidant was again her publisher. She had met Joseph Johnson before she left for Ireland, when she had delivered the manuscript of her Education to his print shop in St Paul’s Churchyard. Johnson, whose initial manner towards her had been a little stiff, now proved ready to hear her plaints, though still cautious. He urged her to find her cure in present tasks. Her reply stressed her powerlessness. This letter is calmer than her first, but no less bent on an alternative existence:

  Dublin, April 14 [1787]

  Dear Sir,

  I am still an invalid–and begin to believe that I ought never to expect to enjoy health. My mind preys on my body–and, when I endeavour to be useful, I grow too much interested for my own peace. Confined almost entirely to the society of children, I am anxiously solicitous for their future welfare, and mortified beyond measure, when counteracted in my endeavours to improve them.–I feel all a mother’s fears for the swarm of little ones which surround me, and observe disorders, without having power to apply the proper remedies. How can I be
reconciled to life, when it is always a painful warfare, and when I am deprived of all the pleasures I relish?–I allude to rational conversation, and domestic affections. Here, alone, a poor solitary individual in a strange land, tied to one spot, and subject to the caprice of another, can I be contented? I am desirous to convince you that I have some cause for sorrow–and am not without reason detached from life. I shall hope to hear that you are well, and am yours sincerely

  Mary Wollstonecraft

  Lady Kingsborough seemed ‘more haughty’ in Dublin. Her daughters feared her. One ‘little girl’–probably the six-year-old Mary–sobbed herself ‘sick’ when she had to accompany her mother on a week’s visit.

  On Lady K’s birthday, Mary was tugged into ‘the mighty important business of preparing wreaths of roses for a birth day dress’. On such occasions ‘the whole house from the kitchen maid to the GOVERNESS are obliged to assist, and the children forced to neglect their employments’. The event of the season was the vice-regal ball at Dublin Castle in March. Charles Manners, the Duke of Rutland, had been appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in 1784 at the age of thirty. Pitt, the British Prime Minister, had been initially in favour of parliamentary reform for Ireland, but Rutland backed the Ascendancy, and charmed it further with the magnificence of his entertainments at Dublin Castle. Mary was cast in a servile Cinderella shade. Assisting her ladyship to adorn herself, she had to hear ‘fulsome’ civilities, a language of ‘untruths’ stretched out in a train of strong expressions ‘without ideas annexed to them’. ‘The conversation of this female can’t amuse me,’ Mary confided to Everina. ‘I try to entertain her with the result that I have more of her company.’