Vindication

  His Advice to the Privileged Orders recommended commerce as a corrective to ‘feudal’ privilege, and an end to monarchies. The British government ordered it burnt. Undeterred, Barlow proceeded to publish a volume of populist verse, The Conspiracy of Kings (March 1792), applauding the French as they ‘shake tyrants from their thrones and cheer the waking world’.

  ‘Be assured,’ Jefferson wrote to Barlow, ‘that your endeavours to bring the trans Atlantic world into the road of reason, are not without their effect here.’ This letter was to be carried by Mr Pinckney, the incoming American Minister in London. ‘He will arrive at an interesting moment in Europe. God send that all the nations who join in attacking the liberation of France may end in the attainment of their own.’

  The worsening situation (the war to which Jefferson refers: the coalition of Prussia and Austria against revolutionary France) offered gains for neutral foreigners like Barlow. An American was persona grata in Paris, a product of a successful revolution and possessor of a passport granting him freedom to move between warring countries: an advantage for spying. Barlow was in France on a mysterious ‘mission’ when riots broke out at the royal palace of the Tuileries in Paris on 20 June 1792. ‘The visit to the king by armed citizens was undoubtedly against the law,’ he wrote to Ruth, ‘but the existence of a king is contrary to another law of a higher original.’ Not so long ago he had dedicated The Vision of Columbus to his most gracious majesty Louis XVI.

  Fellow-Americans who had known Barlow in his earlier incarnations as chaplain and Hartford conservative were puzzled by the extremity of this shift. A simple explanation has been his conversion to the French Revolution. The completeness of this conversion–going further than others in Johnson’s circle–was a passport to their confidence, though its speed in the wake of Scioto suggests that Europe’s distance from America (and ignorance of America’s scope for nuance) allowed Barlow to assume the identity of a revolutionary American, a national image as cover for a more complex character. Mary Wollstonecraft, with her ‘fondness for tracing the passions in all their different forms’, picked up a performing note in his voice: phrases to Ruth like ‘I find heaven in your arms’ were too ready, Mary thought, to be entirely honest. When Benjamin Franklin had played up to a simplified, Parisian construct of American identity, he was a diplomat; Barlow, too, in time, became a diplomat–American Ambassador in Paris under Napoleon–but how should we distinguish between the legitimate shifts of the diplomat and the shadier shifts of the opportunist? If we bring to public life the morality of private life, there may be no distinction to be made.

  Fabulous wealth was to be the reward of the Barlow story. Where did it come from? When Ruth had joined Barlow in Paris in 1790, she had found herself ‘pent up in a narrow dirty street’; by the end of the decade, they owned a Paris house opposite the Luxembourg Gardens, grand enough to be coveted by Lady Hamilton (wife of the British Ambassador to Naples and mistress of Nelson); and soon after, Barlow, this opponent of ‘the privileged orders’, is able to buy a ‘seat’ in Washington, second only to Mount Vernon, home of the first President.

  This fortune was not made in America. It came about somewhere in Europe, but nowhere amongst Barlow’s account books and careful copies of business letters is there mention of any activity, after Scioto, that could lead to wealth on that scale. We’ll return to Barlow and his associate Imlay when this story shifts to France. Suffice to say now that Barlow lingered in Paris week after week in 1792, and eventually Mary decided that Charles must sail on his own for America. Her chief concern from spring to autumn that year was the fate of her favourite brother. For the Barlows stayed on in Europe, and the scheme of adoption faded. Everina made no contact with Ruth Barlow; she and Bess never tried their luck across the Atlantic where Ruth had promised answers to all their needs: money, security, homes, husbands, and the society closed to a governess. America hovered on the Wollstonecrafts’ horizon in the course of 1792, and not for the last time a fantasy of the fresh promise of the New World entered their minds. In the case of Charles Wollstonecraft it became a reality. He sailed in October with an introduction from Barlow to a Yale friend, James Watson, in New York: ‘This…will probably be handed you by Mr Wollstoncraft, a young gentleman of singular merit. I would thank you to notice him & give such advice as may be necessary to speed him on his way to the Ohio, where he goes to be an American farmer.’

  Every one of Mary’s plans for her brothers and sisters failed: none of them was satisfied. All kept their beaks open. Her father’s beak never ceased to clamour. In Wales, Bess found Mr Wollstonecraft in a poor state: skeletal, with a long beard, dirty, coughing, groaning, but still able to ‘drink very hearty’ and ride ten miles a day. When Bess and her horse had a fall, she came round to hear her father calling to know if the horse’s knees were hurt (for the horse had been borrowed). It was shaming for a governess to have her unkempt father turn up at the Castle, ostensibly to check whether a trunk had arrived but really after whatever pickings he could glean. When Mary wished him to ‘save in trifles’, he flew into a rage and threatened to chase her up in London. With the help of Johnson, she took his affairs in hand. Godwin records: ‘The exertions she made, and the struggle into which she entered…were ultimately fruitless. To the day of her death her father was almost wholly supported by funds which she supplied to him.’

  Mary’s efforts for her family were more practical than loving. Love had been Fanny’s, and the word returns in relation to Margaret King. Their correspondence has not survived–unsurprisingly, since it was secret–but Mary referred several times to their continued solidarity. On 3 March 1788, she enclosed a letter for her ‘dear Margaret King’ in one to George Blood, who still lodged with his Dublin employer Mr Noble. ‘Be very careful to not let any body see it,’ Mary warned, ‘–and keep it till she sends to Mr Noble’s for it.’ On 26 May she asked George again: ‘Have you delivered–or rather has my letter to M:K. been called for?…I have received another letter from that dear girl–I scarcely know how much I loved her till I was torn from her,’ Margaret said, ‘From the time she left me my chief objects were to correct those faults she had pointed out & to cultivate my understanding as much as possible.’ This fits the conclusion to Real Life, where Mrs Mason takes leave of her charges in this memorable way:

  I now…give you a book, in which I have written the subjects we have discussed. Recur frequently to it, [and you will not feel] the want of my personal advice…You are now candidates for my friendship, and on your advancement in virtue my regard will depend. Write often to me, I will punctually answer your letters; let me have the genuine sentiments of your hearts…Adieu! When you think of your friend, observe her precepts; and let the recollection of my affection give additional weight to the truths I have endeavoured to instill.

  Mary had hoped not to lose touch with Margaret’s step-grandmother Mrs FitzGerald. While in Dublin she had borrowed ten guineas on behalf of Betty Delane. The money had slipped through ‘quicksand’. Two years later she asked George Blood to return £10 (an amount due to Mary for Caroline’s care) to Mrs FitzGerald together with a friendly message: ‘Tell Mrs Fitz-Gerald that I am well, and enjoy more worldly comfort than I ever did–you may add, that I should have written to her if she had asked me, as it would really give me pleasure to hear some times of her welfare–enquire about my Margaret &c.’ George let this slide, and forgot. It was at this point that Mary let George know how he ‘disappointed’ her. His neglect of her letters and ‘inconsiderate’ excuses for his lack of punctiliousness in money matters were of a piece. Mr Noble had overworked him, he had whined, and he had again lent money to the painter Mr Home, a persistent borrower who had drained George before.

  In the play of Mary’s words, the sharp of ‘independence’ and the plangent note of ‘tenderness’ have as counterpoint the repeated flat of ‘disappointed’. Her brothers and George Blood repeatedly disappointed her efforts to renew their lives. Yet these years developed her own remarkable capaci
ty to rise, and rise again. ‘Blessed be that Power who gave me an active mind!’ she said in the manner so irritating to her dependants, ‘if it does not smooth[,] it enables me to jump over the rough places in life. I had had a number of draw-backs on my spirits and purse; but I still…cry avaunt despair–and I push forward.’

  Her resilience was reinforced by the kindness of William Roscoe and Joseph Johnson. Once, when she asked the latter to add up her debts so she might settle them, she added, ‘do not suppose that I feel any uneasiness on that score. The generality of people in trade would not be much obliged to me for a like civility, but you were a man before you were a bookseller.’

  Johnson, Mary, the artist Fuseli and his wife planned to visit Paris for six weeks in August 1792. They got as far as Dover, then turned back in fear of bloodshed when Louis XVI, Queen Marie Antoinette and their two children were caught trying to flee France. The flight to Varennes appeared to confirm a suspicion of the royal family as traitors to the Revolution, in league with France’s enemy, the Austrian monarchy, the family of the unpopular Queen. The French monarchy fell, revolutionaries slaughtered the Swiss Guard at the Tuileries, the King and his family were sent to prison, and a republic was proclaimed. During these momentous events, Mary stayed a few weeks with Johnson in the country. When they returned to London on 12 September, she heard with amusement that ‘the world…married m[e] to him whilst we were away’.

  She had set herself against marriage from the age of fifteen, but two samples of married happiness forced themselves on her attention: first, the Gabells with whom she had stayed for two or three weeks in the summer of 1790 at Warminster in Wiltshire; and more recently Ruth Barlow, whose husband found ‘heaven’ in her arms. Neither fitted Mary’s view of marriage as legalised rape. The caresses of the new-married Henry Gabell and large, sturdy Ann Gage had been absurdly unrestrained–though ‘as pure’, Mary assured herself, as those Darwin ‘lavishes on his favourites’. She had to concede ‘how much happiness and innocent fondness constantly illumines the eyes of this good couple–so that I am never disgusted by the frequent bodily display of it’. They made her think rather crossly of Milton’s Adam and Eve in Paradise, and count herself superior. Was this mistaken pride, she wondered, ‘whispering me that my soul is immortal & should have a nobler ambition’? Sometimes she felt an intruder, and then she longed for her little London room and a life wholly tuned to ‘intellectual pursuits’. She could not surrender those hard-won freedoms. There seemed no return route: ‘my die is cast’. Even so, the road not taken did not entirely fade from view.

  Mary’s independence as a single woman was threatened less by dependants than by her strange fixation on Henry Fuseli. In 1789 she had attended a masquerade at the Opera House with Fuseli and the son of an early object of his ardour, his Zurich friend Johann Caspar Lavater. On that occasion, Fuseli had stirred up trouble with a fancy-dress devil. From the autumn of 1790, and increasingly in 1791 and ’92, Mary took up with the artist, who was eighteen years older. It seemed to her that she had never before encountered a man of such ‘grandeur of soul’ and ‘quickness of comprehension’. In October 1791, Bess received a letter from her that was ‘brimful’ of Fuseli.

  After completing the Rights of Woman in a mounting burst of energy, Mary fell into inertia–‘palsied’, Johnson put it–during 1792. In that state she became dependent on Fuseli to bestir her. A later protégé of his, the artist Benjamin Robert Haydon, describes how Fuseli took hold of a disciple with ‘the most grotesque mixture of literature, art, scepticism, indelicacy, profanity, and kindness. He put me in mind of Archimago* in Spenser. Weak minds he destroyed. They mistook his wit for reason, his indelicacy for breeding, his swearing for manliness, and his infidelity for strength of mind; but he was accomplished in elegant literature, and had the art of inspiring young minds with high and grand views.’ Mary, always on the lookout for ‘genius’, found in Fuseli the real thing: a painter who, a century before Freud, explored the psyche. Fuseli was himself obsessed with the divinity of genius (his own above all), a worshipper of Rousseau, Shakespeare and Milton, and given to explosive quotations from Homer, Tasso, Dante, Ovid, Virgil and the Niebelungenlied. Between 1786 and ’89 he had painted a series of nine scenes from Shakespeare, exhibited with others by leading artists like Sir Joshua Reynolds and Angelica Kauffmann at Boydell’s gallery in London. At this time they were the rage. Fuseli’s figure drawings have a Michelangelesque muscularity. The Kiss is not confined to lips; it carries through arms and thighs to the extremities of fingers and heels.

  Fuseli’s own body looked a good deal tamer, but he held the eye with his intent gaze, provoking his listeners without relinquishing his own pre-eminence at the centre of attention. Godwin, who had reason to be jealous, recalled him as a monster of conceit and a great hater: ‘he hated a dull fellow, as men of wit and talents naturally do; and he hated a brilliant man, because he could not bear another near the throne’. He was about five foot five, with small eyes between which sprang a fierce nose. A faintly cynical smile turned down the corners of his mouth. There’s the look of a neat reptile in a portrait by John Opie: the narrowness of his green coat; the wide, down-turned mouth; and the dapper, darting steadiness of his turning head–turning a cold gaze on the viewer. The backdrop is a hellish dark red. Fuseli retained a strong Swiss accent, with a guttural, energetic diction. During a dinner at Johnson’s, an admirer called out to him from the other end of the room, ‘Mr Fuseli, I have lately purchased a picture of yours.’

  ‘Did you?’ said Fuseli, ‘what is the sobject?’

  ‘I don’t know what the devil it is.’

  ‘Perhaps it is the devil,’ Fuseli replied. ‘ I have often painted him.’

  ‘Perhaps it is.’

  ‘Well!’ said Fuseli, ‘you have him now; take care he does not one day have you!’

  He seemed always in a rage, on the point of a rage, or recovering from one–useful for keeping people at a distance. His habits were bisexual, if we are to believe his boasts–and he did like to boast and jolt civil company with sudden obscenities. It was certainly his habit to write erotic letters to both men and women. Though married, he did not father a child. The smallness of his frame matched that of ‘Little Johnson’: both had a tight look, evident in Johnson’s compressed lips and Fuseli’s tight, attenuated body. In character, they were opposites: Fuseli’s spitfire manner set off by Johnson’s calm. Their attachment–maybe love–was lifelong. Mary’s willingness to stay with Johnson in the summer of 1787 and again in the summer of 1792 shows he was no sexual threat, either too modest or uninterested in women’s bodies. The way his lower lip seals the upper, pressing hard upon it, the two tight rolls of hair on either side of his cheekbones, and the stiffness of elbows and clasped fingers all signal reserve. When Johnson shook hands, a mixed reserve and affability swung his trunk from side to side; Fuseli was reserved in a different way: he met the inward eye and reserved what he saw.

  To Mary, who longed to travel, Fuseli was a cosmopolitan with a worldliness beyond her range. He was born Johann Heinrich Füssli in Zurich in 1741, the son of an artist who brought him up to be a Protestant pastor. When he found Zurich too rule-bound, at the age of twenty-three he moved to London. There, he met Joseph Johnson who was three years older. He shared Johnson’s quarters until the fire in Paternoster Row (in 1770) destroyed all Fuseli’s paintings, manuscripts, clothes and savings. Soon after, he left for Rome, and when he returned to London near the end of the decade, Johnson welcomed him back. Their closeness lasted another forty years, with vacations on the coast at Margate or Ramsgate or, after 1804, at Johnson’s rented house at Fulham on the Thames.

  When Mary met Fuseli, he was at the height of his fame, following the success of The Nightmare when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy. In this painting a young woman in a white shift lies on her back. Her curved, exposed throat, head and hair fall back in terror, as a little, curled, grinning demon (with a look of Fuseli himself in the first sketch) plants
himself atop her helpless body. An early version of this painting hung in the dining-room of Johnson’s house. Later, Fuseli became pornographer to the Prince Regent. He could draw women with intent empathy, like his Swiss love, Martha Hess, and the graceful figure of her sister Magdalena (‘Madeleine’) Schweizer as she sits at work, but he could also obliterate character (on Pope’s principle that ‘women have no character at all’). He thought women were emotionally rampant and irresponsible, and that to believe in their virtue could only be an act of charity. When he uses his exquisite graphic skills to draw women flaunting their breasts, the viewer is invited to a voyeurism uncomfortably close to pornography–uncomfortable, because the breasts are delicately erotic, yet the woman’s desires are not involved. The appeal of Fuseli as witness of character makes him all the more disturbing when he wipes it out.

  Mary visited Fuseli at home at 72 Queen Anne Street East (later, Foley Street) to see his work, and he came to Store Street. Johnson encouraged their friendship, and they were often together at his house. Mary declared that she ‘loved the man and admired his art’ when she was seeking subscriptions for a volume of Milton, to be edited by Cowper, with forty-seven illustrations by Fuseli, engraved by Blake. Fuseli toiled slowly, subsidised by Johnson: the Milton project didn’t come out till 1799, and then was a commercial failure. Wollstonecraft foresaw problems in the first sketches.

  ‘Like Milton he seems quite at home in hell,’ she told Roscoe (who had exhibited Fuseli in Liverpool), ‘his Devil will be the hero of the poetic series; for, entre nous, I rather doubt whether he will produce an Eve to please me in any of the situations, which he has selected, unless it be after the fall.’ This was the day she sent her final page of the Rights of Woman to the printer: 3 January 1792. She knew, then, that Fuseli had little sympathy with her cause, for he believed that women’s genius was too ‘fugitive’ and ‘intangible’ to be communicated to posterity. Nor did she hesitate to alert Fuseli to his prime fault. ‘I hate to see that reptile Vanity sliming over the noble qualities of your heart.’ She also knew he was not to be trusted as a confidant.