Vindication

  There were as yet no schoolbooks for girls apart from conduct books. Most girls of the time were protected, even deflected, from serious books. Johnson thought Wollstonecraft introduced ‘some original pieces’–unusual enough for him to take the precaution of publishing this anthology under the name of a man, an elocution teacher called Mr Cresswick. Elocution–the classroom method of recitation–was not a practice Wollstonecraft would have encouraged, given her emphasis on inward growth rather than performance. Her aim was innovative: the first anthology for and about women, and in part, too, by women, with a view to a high-flying education. The editorial approach to women’s writing is participatory, not exclusive, and offers a longer-term model than women-only collections (useful as they have been for purposes of retrieval and reconstruction of gender since the 1970s). Wollstonecraft’s educative aim is more ambitious. Towards the end of the first century when numbers of women took up the pen, and just before the emergence of Jane Austen (fourteen at the time, reading at home, and the perfect recipient for this book), Wollstonecraft assumed that women (Mme de Genlis, Mrs Trimmer, Mrs Barbauld, Mrs Chapone, Lady Pennington, Miss Carter, Charlotte Smith and herself*) could start to hold their own beside the Bible, Shakespeare, Richardson, Dr Johnson and Cowper. Those heights are everywhere present, a stimulant, not a threat, like an extract from Edward Young about ‘Dying Friends’ as mentors of inward revolution:

  And shall they languish, shall they die in vain?

  Ungrateful, shall we grieve their hov’ring shades,

  Which wait the revolution in our hearts?

  Shall we disdain their silent, soft address…

  Johnson not only provided work and published everything Wollstonecraft offered him, he was able to pluck out her thorns, as he proudly recalled: ‘During her stay in George Street she spent many of her afternoons & most of her evenings with me. She was incapable of disguise. Whatever was the state of her mind it appeared when she entered, & the tone of conversation might easily be guessed; when harassed, which was very often ye case, she was relieved by unbosoming herself & generally returned home calm, frequently in spirits. [Fuseli] was frequently with us.’

  She looked on Johnson as ‘the only person I am intimate with’, to whom she owed an apology for her moods: ‘I have often been very petulant.–I have been thinking of those instances of ill-humour and quickness, and they appeared like crimes.’ Five years on, she still blushed to think ‘how often I…teazed you with childish complaints, and the reverses of a disordered imagination’.

  Johnson had a Unitarian friend, Thomas Christie, a doctor from Montrose in Scotland, who gave up medicine for literature in 1787 after travelling on horseback around the country for six months meeting writers like Erasmus Darwin in Derby, Anna Seward in Lichfield and Priestley in Birmingham. At the time Mary joined the circle, Christie persuaded Johnson to bring out the Analytical Review. It began in May 1788, promoting religious toleration and the extension of the vote. For the first issue, Wollstonecraft chose A Sermon Written by the late Samuel Johnson, LL. D., for the Funeral of His Wife from a selection of ‘trash’, taking a stand against her publisher who would have opposed so obdurate a pensioner of Pitt’s government. For Wollstonecraft, the soul took precedence over politics.

  ‘I seemed (suddenly) to find my soul again–It had been for some time I cannot tell where,’ she explained. ‘I felt some pleasure in paying a just tribute of respect to the memory of a man–who, in spite of his faults, I have an affection for–I say have, for I believe he is somewhere–where my soul has been gadding perhaps…’

  Wollstonecraft was the first woman to take up short-notice professional reviewing as a substantial part of her income. (Once, anonymously, she reviewed her own translation of Necker–favourably, it need hardly be said.) Though in the main she followed the magazine’s policy of objective summary together with extracts, she gradually introduced evaluation, and scorned the Analytical’s tame rival the Critical for its uncritical oozings over established fame.

  However provocative her content, the fact is that up to the end of the 1780s Wollstonecraft kept within the bounds of what were thought of as lesser genres, open to women (conduct books, children’s books, fiction, translation). But in 1790, backed still by her publisher, she entered the male preserve of politics.

  The occasion was the outbreak of the French Revolution. With the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, Cowper believed that he spoke for the nation at large in his ‘Address to the Bastille’: ‘Ye Dungeons, and ye Cages of Despair!–/ There’s not an English heart that would not leap, / To hear that ye were fall’n at last…’ It seemed the start of a new age of rights for all. Jefferson’s law of religious toleration passed for the state of Virginia in 1786 had encouraged Dissenters to campaign for a repeal of laws excluding them from public office (the Corporation Act of 1661 and the Test Act of 1673). The first reading of the bill in the British Parliament won a good deal of support, though not the majority needed to carry it; then, support had dropped with the second and third readings. The vogue for reform that had touched the ruling elite in England in the early 1780s had given way to renewed conservatism, reinforced by the impact of what had been lost with the colonies in America and also by fear of advancing notions of human rights in America’s ally, France. Though Dr Price reminded Parliament of Dissenters’ loyalty during the Jacobite uprising in 1745, this now seemed distant, and recent memory blamed Dissenters for disloyalty during the late war in America. British rulers were unnerved by events in France: the overthrow of the ancien régime (the nobility and higher clergy) by the mass of the people, represented by middle-class thinkers in a reforming National Assembly.

  The most unnerving event was the women’s march on Versailles on 5–6 October 1789: a starving mob from the markets of Paris who advanced on the King and Queen, demanding bread. There were reports of rabble invading the apartments of a hated Queen cut off in inaccessible opulence from ‘real life’; of Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and their children forced to move to Paris; of the danger to the royal family (averted by the King’s promise to side with the Revolution). All this alarmed the British landed classes in their newly enclosed estates. There had been sixty-four Enclosure Acts between 1740 and 1749, and 472 between 1770 and 1779, with the effect of driving the poor off what had been for centuries common land, and bringing an immense increase in riches to owners of estates, who controlled or were themselves the Members of Parliament who initiated and carried through these legalised appropriations. New boundaries–ditches, hedges and walls (including the new wall around Mitchelstown Castle)–were a visual reminder of the power of the landlord to exclude outsiders from territory over which he now exercised sole rights. Apart from changing the landscape for ever, the result was to wall off the landed from the labouring classes. So, the excluded were feared, and a counter-revolution settled on Britain, postponing urgent electoral reform for another forty years.

  It was in this divisive political context that Richard Price preached his sermon, On the Love of Our Country, at the Meeting House in the Old Jewry in London on 4 November 1789. Six editions appeared in three weeks. Officially, the sermon, invited by the Revolution Society, was a centenary tribute to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in which Dissenters had played a vital part. Dr Price’s motives were twofold: given the failure of Dissenters’ pleas for rights in Parliament (defeated by 122 votes to 102 in the spring of that year), he was reminding the powers that be of the peaceful liberties the country owed to them. At the same time he was celebrating the American and French Revolutions, and the right of the people to choose and ‘cashier’ their rulers. Price went on to prophesy further revolutions to complete the blood-free dissent of 1688: ‘Behold kingdoms…starting from sleep, breaking their fetters, and claiming justice from their oppressors! Behold, the light…after setting America free, reflected to France and there kindled to a blaze that lays despotism in ashes…’

  An opponent of Price, Edmund Burke, criticised the language of inspir
ation co-opted for the political sphere, and talked sarcastically of the spread of political preachers as ‘an addition of nondescripts to the ample collection of known classes, genera and species, which at present beautify the hortus siccus [the dry garden] of dissent’. Burke also claimed Price was sanctioning the mob rule of the women’s march on Versailles. Price insisted that he had referred, rather, to the fall of the Bastille. On its first anniversary he had toasted a United States of the World.

  Burke, at sixty, had long been the greatest orator in the Commons, never quite accepted by the grandees of his Whig party who looked on him as an Irish adventurer. He had risen out of the professional class into the landed gentry, and always represented the property interests of the gentry together with its blend of classical humanism and chivalry. His chivalric focus on Marie Antoinette ruffled Wollstonecraft and Paine, who remarked famously that in mourning the plumage, Burke forgot the dying bird. Burke, who had loathed Price’s late patron Lord Shelburne, condemned Dr Price with rhetoric that would have an impact on the course of history. His Reflections on the Revolution in France, published on 1 November 1790, slates the international, apocalyptic narrative of Dr Price in favour of the English historical narrative which is seen to be an unbroken contract between generations across time. The so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’, Burke argues, was merely a glitch in the continuum of hereditary monarchy. Burke would never see the future possibility of what Wollstonecraft calls a ‘new genus’, whether it be a person or a nation, because, for Burke, identity is cumulative; it comes from the past. ‘Upon that…stock of inheritance we have taken care not to inoculate any cyon alien to the nature of the original plant.’ Above all, Burke warns of mob rule and the breakdown of civilisation. Nineteen thousand bought his treatise in 1790–1; thirty thousand by 1793. The fear disseminated by this scare encouraged a counter-revolutionary coalition, and its combined might, in turn, fomented wartime terror in France and the climate of suspicion that led to the fall of the moderate Girondin party. Power passed to the extremist Jacobin party, led by Marat, Danton and Robespierre who had no compunction at shedding blood–and so, the guillotine went to work.

  When the Terror struck, Burke seemed vindicated. Yet during the earlier phase of the Revolution, from 1789 until a massacre in September 1792, its outcome looked promising to the circles of Dr Price and Joseph Johnson, as to most Britons. The streets of Paris were tranquil, according to Thomas Christie who, armed with introductions from Dr Price, spent the first six months of 1790 in Paris analysing the new order as it was promulgated by the National Assembly. His Letters on the Revolution of France, published by Johnson in 1791, used facts to counter Burke, but nothing could budge the alarm once it took hold. Burke split the Whigs when he crossed the floor of the Commons to join Pitt’s side, and the Whig leader, Fox, wept to see it. Scores of writers set out to answer Burke, the most famous being Tom Paine in 1791–2, who links monarchy with war-making, conflicts that ‘unmake men’–undo their natural benevolence: ‘Man will not be brought up with the savage idea of considering his species his enemy.’ But ahead of Paine, in fact the first protest, within four weeks, came from Mary Wollstonecraft at the end of November 1790.

  While writing A Vindication of the Rights of Men, Wollstonecraft stopped in the middle. She went to Joseph Johnson, who had been printing her work page by page as she wrote it, and told him she could not do it. Johnson’s response was perfectly judged: he reassured her that he would be willing to ditch the printed sheets. Eased and piqued, Wollstonecraft resolved to press on.

  The pulpit voice of Dr Price had taught her that truths ‘coming warm from the heart…find the direct road to it’. Her first target was the untruth of what we now call ‘spin’: social wrongs wrapped in Burke’s ‘flowers of rhetoric’: ‘Words are heaped on words, till the understanding is confused.’ Wollstonecraft identifies the dodges of rhetoric as the most dangerous enemy of human rights. Her answer is the dissenting voice of truth, above the puerile tit-for-tat of party debates that ‘narrow the understanding and contract the heart’. This is no hasty pamphlet. Wollstonecraft is taking on the whole edifice of power. Her adversarial heat appears to come off the pulse, but it’s under control, pruning the millenarian dreams of Dr Price in favour of facts, logic, exposure.

  A Vindication of the Rights of Men exposes a politician as a vain, verbose, self-interested climber. In the form of a letter, it confronts Burke with his secret motives. ‘You have raised yourself by the exertion of abilities, and thrown the automatons of rank into the back ground,’ she concedes. ‘But, unfortunately, you have lately lost a great part of your popularity: members [of Parliament] were tired of listening to declamation or had not sufficient taste to be amused when you ingeniously wandered from the question…You were the Cicero of one side of the house for years; and then to sink into oblivion…was enough to…make you produce the impassioned Reflections.’ Another of Burke’s motives was to redeem his loss of face over his treatment of George III during the King’s bout of madness in 1788–9. The Prince of Wales, manoeuvring to be king, had gained Burke’s support with the bribe of the post of Paymaster-General. When Pitt introduced a bill to limit the Prince’s powers, Burke had hurriedly collected statistics from mental institutions suggesting that, at the age of fifty-five, the King was unlikely to recover. Burke tried to convince the Commons that the hand of God was ‘hurling’ George III from the throne. When the King recovered, Burke’s self-interest did not go unnoticed in the press, and Wollstonecraft contrasts his tears for the French King with ‘unfeeling disrespect and indecent haste’ in trying to oust his own. ‘You were so eager to taste the sweets of power, that you could not wait till time had determined whether a dreadful delirium would settle into a confirmed madness; but, prying into the secrets of Omnipotence, you thundered out that God had hurled him from his throne…And who was the monster whom Heaven had thus awfully deposed, and smitten with such an angry blow? Surely as harmless a character as Lewis XVIth…’

  Wollstonecraft’s aim was not to weigh Burke’s conduct, she tells him–‘it is only some of your pernicious opinions that I wish to hunt out of their lurking holes; and to show you to yourself stripped of the gorgeous drapery [of rhetoric]’.

  This is not recognisably a woman’s voice, nor is it gentlemanly. Yet it’s not a vulgar voice. In fact, it can’t be placed according to the traditional registers of class or gender. It takes its eminence rather from the dignity of Reason holding up a mirror to irrational sentiment. Burke has no tears, she notes, for men taken by violence to fight wars, nor for people who can hang for stealing £5; his tears are reserved for ‘the downfall of queens’. She cites his demand that the poor ‘must respect that property of which they cannot partake’, and look for justice in the afterlife. ‘This is contemptible hard-hearted sophistry, in the specious form of…submission to the will of Heaven,’ Wollstonecraft retorts. ‘It is, Sir, possible to render the poor happier in this world, without depriving them of the consolation you gratuitously grant them in the next.’

  Burke opens the way to an attack on laws that put property before morality. Should ecclesiastical revenues, extorted in times long past, continue in the hands of the clergy ‘merely to preserve the sacred majesty of Property inviolate…’? To politicians, ‘an abolition of the infernal slave trade would not only be unsound policy, but a flagrant infringement of the laws (which are allowed to have been infamous) that induced the planters to purchase their estates’. Slavery on these estates ‘outrages every suggestion of reason and religion’ and is a ‘stigma on our nature’.

  The tide of her eloquence rises as she comes to the current issue of the slave trade. ‘Is it not consonant with justice, with the common principles of humanity, not to mention Christianity, to abolish this abominable traffic.’ While Burke mourns the pageant of the French aristocracy, ‘the lash resounds on the slaves’ naked sides…Such misery demands more than tears.’ Nowhere is her eloquence more affecting than at this point where, dramatically, words a
ppear to fail, and the reader stops short at two lines of silent dashes.

  A Vindication of the Rights of Men was published anonymously at the low price of 1s 6d, half the cost of Burke’s pamphlet. All the best journals of the day discussed it. The author, aged thirty-one, sent a copy to the sixty-year-old historian Catharine Macaulay, who said how it pleased her that the Rights of Men ‘should have been written by a woman and thus to see my opinion of the powers and talents of the Sex in your person so early verified’. Wollstonecraft also sent a copy to Dr Price in Hackney, and though sick and near to death, he replied on 17 December that he had ‘not been surprized to find that a composition which he has heard ascribed to some of our ablest writers, appears to come from Miss Wolstonecraft. He is particularly happy in having such an advocate; and he requests her acceptance of his gratitude for the kind and handsome manner in which she has mentioned him.’

  A newcomer, William Godwin, appeared at Johnson’s table on 13 November 1791. He looked pale, with thin, pale hair, a long, straight nose with an enquiringly tilted tip, and a pursed mouth–its slightly jutting lower lip belied the paleness of his presence. Talk turned to Voltaire and religion. Wollstonecraft would not have agreed with Godwin’s atheism, and a quarrel developed that spoilt the dinner. She was at this time writing a larger, more daring book than her Vindication of the Rights of Men called A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Godwin had little interest in women’s emergence, and had come, that evening, to meet Paine who was due to leave for France.