Vindication

by Lyndall Gordon

  It was raining hard that Saturday night when she took a boat from the steps at the Strand and was rowed up the Thames as far as Battersea Bridge in the village of Chelsea. Too many people were about. She had to find a deserted spot, so offered the waterman six shillings to row her further upstream as far as Putney Bridge (near Walham Green where she’d lived long ago with Fanny Blood). No one was there. Trusting to sink more quickly if she weighted her clothes, she trod back and forth on the bridge for half an hour till shoes and dress were soaked with rain. Then, she climbed on to the frame of the central arch, and plunged into the dark water. Suffocation was slow and infinitely more horrible than she had expected. She pressed her skirts to her sides, trying to hasten death.

  About two hundred yards from the bridge, a boatman found her unconscious, and rowed her to the Duke’s Head Tavern at Fulham. There, she had the good fortune to be resuscitated by a member of the Royal Humane Society (set up to teach artificial respiration in an age of canal and river transport). Her recovery was quick, though drowning seemed less painful than coming back to ‘life and misery’. The Times reported the rescue of an elegantly dressed lady who explained ‘that the cause of this, which was the second act of desperation she had attempted on her life, was the brutal behaviour of her husband’. This time, Imlay did not come in person–the rescue was too public–but within two hours he sent a physician, dry clothes and a coach to take Mary to their friends the Christies in Finsbury Square.

  It was a spacious square, a little to the west of Mary’s birthplace in Spitalfields. Rebecca Christie nursed her, and for some time she saw no one else.

  ‘I know not how to extricate ourselves out of the wretchedness into which we have been plunged,’ Imlay wrote.

  Mary replied with her mother’s dying words–‘Have but a little patience’–promising him to ‘remove’ herself beyond his reach.

  Imlay behaved with respectful concern. He visited Mary, and once more offered to do her service if she would allow it. Though service of course fell short of love, he was shocked enough to offer the prospect of living together when his present affair came to an end. Mary realised the danger of continued waiting and uncertainty. She gave Imlay an ultimatum.

  ‘If we are ever to live together again, it must be now. We meet now, or we part for ever. You say, you cannot abruptly break off the connection you have formed. It is unworthy of my courage and character, to wait the uncertain issue of that connection. I am determined to come to a decision. I consent, then, for the present, to live with you, and the woman to whom you have associated yourself. I think it important that you should learn habitually to feel for your child the affection of a father.’

  Mary’s extraordinary proposal may seem similar to the threesome she had urged on Fuseli, but was fraught with parental bonds. Imlay’s awareness of his responsibility towards Mary is nowhere more evident than in his agreement, at first, to her plan. He even took her to view a house he was on the point of renting, to see if it would suit her. It’s tempting to clothe the mistress in resentment, as Mrs Fuseli has been clothed. Yet, according to Mary, she and the mistress were to some extent in sympathy: ‘I never blamed the woman for whom I was abandoned. I offered to see her, nay, even to live with her, and I should have tried to improve her.’ It’s doubtful if the mistress longed to be improved, but she did probably hear Mary’s version of Imlay’s treatment. Not surprisingly, Imlay changed his mind. Mary was not one to play a tame third in a household; the situation was bound to be explosive.

  Defeated, Mary took lodgings around the corner from the Christies, at 16 Finsbury Place, and asked Imlay to send her things, including her letters. For a while she cast the letters aside, unable ‘to look over a register of sorrow’. She therefore overlooked a new letter Imlay had enclosed. From November to January he was again in Paris, accompanied by his mistress. Thinking he had left without a word, Mary reproached him, and on 27 November received a lofty retort. He stood by ‘the most refined’ feelings. He demonstrated this with an offer of ‘friendship’.

  ‘You will judge more coolly of your mode of acting, some time hence,’ Imlay tried to comfort them both.

  ‘Do you judge coolly’, she flashed back, flinging aside his flattering self-portrait, and, instead holding up the mirror to a man of caprice who had failed as a father. ‘If your theory of morals is the most “exalted”, it is certainly the most easy.–It does not require much magnanimity, to determine to please ourselves for the moment, let others suffer what they will!’ She interpreted the offer of friendship as no more than the ‘pecuniary support’ she had to refuse–together with his ‘ingenious arguments’.

  It was wounding on both sides. Mary knew she tormented the man she still loved, but could not contain her ‘thirst for justice’.

  Imlay accused her of ‘decided conduct, which appeared to me so unfeeling’.

  Mary replied, ‘my mind is injured–I scarcely know where I am, or what I do’.

  Even now she could not curtail her ‘grief’–not only over losing Imlay, but losing the frontier promise of the man she believed he was. ‘My affection for you is rooted in my heart.–I know you are not what you now seem,’ she went on. ‘I have loved with my whole soul, only to discover that I had no chance of a return–and that existence is a burthen without it.’ In Finsbury Place, her life seemed ‘but an exercise of fortitude, continually on the stretch–and hope never gleams in this tomb, where I am buried alive’.

  It did not help that gossip was circulating. Women whispered to one another that Mary Wollstonecraft’s connection with Imlay had no legal sanction. The novelist Mary Hays told William Godwin that some ‘amiable, sensible & worthy women…especially lamented that it would no longer be proper for them to visit Mrs W’. Hays herself visited Wollstonencraft, and promised to come again.

  One day, to Mary’s astonishment, she had a proposal from a rich man of fifty. It was someone she had met through Johnson, to whom she had spoken of her attachment to Imlay and recent sufferings. The unnamed suitor fantasised a woman of reason by day who, by night, became ‘the playful and passionate child of love…One in whose arms I should encounter all that playful luxuriance, those warm balmy kisses, and that soft yet eager and extatic assaulting and yielding known only to beings…that breath[e] and imbibe nothing but soul. Yes: you are this being. Yet paradoxical to say, you never yet were this being. If you have been, I am unjust: toward him [Imlay] whom I estimate, not from my personal knowledge for I never saw him, but from your own affectionate descriptions. Well, well: I never touched your lips; yet I have felt them, sleeping and waking, present and absent. I feel them now…’

  To Mary, it was an insult, ‘the bare supposition that I could for a moment think of prostituting my person for a maintenance’. He had ‘grossly’ mistaken her character. ‘I am, sir, poor and destitute.–Yet I have a spirit that will never bend.’

  Another source of income was now urgent. Mary approached Imlay’s business associate, Mr Cowie of the firm of Chalmers & Cowie, to lend her a sum. Another associate who lent her a small amount is called a ‘long-tried friend’ in a new-found letter. It reveals that Cowie was to repay himself out of a ‘venture or cargo of Mr Imlay’s that would come into his hands’. Some of the lost silver had apparently made its way into London in the course of the preceding spring. If Imlay’s gains produced more than £50, Mr Cowie felt ‘bound to pay the surplus into her [Mary’s] hands’. She remained confident of this return, according to Godwin, writing on 2 January 1798: ‘she understood that the goods produced more than they were estimated at, I think about £1,000’, and counted this ‘amongst her future resources’. The £1000 must have come from the silver ship, since this was the only Imlay venture in which Mary took part.

  Mr Cowie’s motive lies in shadow: Mary Wollstonecraft perceived a ‘friendly intention’; also that he felt ‘bound’ to hand over the profit. But why did he not do so, and why was Mary content to receive a loan from Mr Cowie but somewhat reluctant to receive profits fr
om Imlay, as the letter makes plain? A likely answer could be that until she reached Altona and Hamburg, she had not realised the fraudulent element in Imlay’s transactions. Was the nature of his gains on Mr Cowie’s conscience? Was the loan something of a silencer? And was Mary unhappy to accept tainted money–or was it simply that it was Imlay’s money? Two facts are certain: a large sum for Imlay’s ‘goods’ did materialise, and Mary did not receive what his associate considered to be her due when she returned to London in October 1795.

  That autumn the Ellefsen trial was still going on. A new witness was John Wheatcroft, the English trader in Le Havre who had been Imlay’s landlord and probably the one to harbour Ellefsen and the silver in his house. He is likely to have testified in Imlay’s favour. But the defence lawyers’ objection to Judge Wulfsberg was eventually upheld by the Danish Supreme Court in 1796. Wulfsberg had to vacate his seat on the commission. The case dragged on till November 1797, without resolution, though, conceivably, a private settlement was reached. In any event, the payment due to Mary continued to be deferred. Imlay could have argued that her ‘surplus’ was unearned because she left Hamburg without the information he wanted, yet he was not vindictive, more the sort of person who would have meant to pay her eventually after diverting the sum–temporarily, of course–into some other venture.

  At Mary’s most destitute moment in the autumn of 1795, Mr Cowie agreed to fund her on the basis of future writings and the returns due to her from Imlay. Accordingly, she began to prepare her travel letters for publication, improvising an artless manner designed to convince the reader of their truth. However keenly these letters appear to come off the pulse in the course of her journey, they actually took their final cast in the aftermath of suicidal despair. The linear plot of an episodic journey carries a counterpoint of the traveller’s up-down interior life: first, the restorative process during the northwards journey to Norway, aided by the healing effects of the northern summer–the finest summer she had ever experienced; then, on the traveller’s return to Gothenburg, a reconnection with her lover plunges her back into a situation that darkens as she journeys in the opposite direction. Hamburg immerses her in a ‘whirlpool of gain’. She is exposed to a ‘swarm of locusts who have battened on the pestilence they spread abroad’.

  When Godwin later came to write a life of Mary Wollstonecraft, he refers the reader to her Travels as though they were an unmediated report of what took place. Yet her Hamburg is surreal, not documentary truth, like a precursor to the ‘Unreal City’ of The Waste Land. The horror inflates as the physical journey turns into an interior journey towards a collapse that will be all the greater for the intimations of recovery that precede it.

  Wollstonecraft reinvents her traveller as a victim sent by her lover into hell. He is the type of all who sell their souls to commerce. The letter pretends to be a private whisper, but is designed for publication: it will be read by contemporaries, while the permanence of print will damn Imlay for all time. Instead of choosing to pair with a new genus, he proves to be ‘of the species of the fungus’ aligned with the ‘mushroom’ fortunes of Hamburg.

  The traveller’s dissociation of her own species from that of the fungus, omits two crucial facts: first, the real-life complexities of Imlay’s attitude to his ‘dearly beloved friend and companion’, and second, the fact that Imlay had co-opted Wollstonecraft as his accomplice. To earn her ‘surplus’ she did wade into those ‘muddy channels’–before she wrenched herself away. Now, abandoned in Finsbury Place in the autumn of 1795, Wollstonecraft omits particulars of the sordid dealings to which she was party, and so conceals the full story of her darkening view of Imlay. In short, she conceals her complicity–perhaps no more than knowledge. She can’t relay what she knows of the silver ship, yet we glimpse its unmarked passage, treasure still intact, through her sight of ships stilled on the Elbe: ‘the silvery expanse, scarcely gliding though bearing on its bosom so much treasure’. She can’t relay the deals that contaminate the muddier channels, but the facelessness of the passive voice–the artful grammar of power–resonates with her knowledge of ‘particular’ gamblers: ‘Immense fortunes have been acquired by the per cents arising from commissions, nominally only two and a half; but mounted to eight or ten at least, by the secret manoeuvres of trade.’ She does not mention the Swedish grain that the Margrethe failed to deliver to the starving of Paris before the nightmare winter she experienced there; she does say, though, that the ‘interests of nations are bartered by speculating merchants. My God! With what sang froid artful trains of corruption bring lucrative commissions into particular hands…and can much common honesty be expected in the discharge of trusts obtained by fraud?’ Again, fraud.

  So Imlay is fixed in his enduring image as rogue, while his arguments have vanished with his letters. The drama that survives is the one sustained by Mary Wollstonecraft’s fame: the drama of a new kind of creature who struggled against a persistent refusal of the way of life she’d conceived. The interior drama of the Imlay years was to see destroyed the independent and desiring creature she had become. Her two suicide attempts were temporary capitulations to that denial. Yet, reviving, she continued to reject Imlay’s determination to construct her as a grateful dependant of his largesse. Neither her reasoning nor her fondness had much impact; and though barbs did get through, he always resealed the carapace of the model man.

  ‘My conduct was unequivocal,’ he insisted; his principles were ‘exalted’; he was ‘magnanimous’.

  Mary had to point out that for all this, he had not seen to the needs of her father and sisters, as she had asked before she sailed; nor had he paid her small debts which now weighed on her. ‘Will you not grant you have forgotten yourself?’

  There was also the question of reputation: Mary pressed Imlay to admit he was abandoning two who bore his name. ‘The negative was to come from you.’ He refused to give it. The vehemence of this struggle for the high moral ground was subsumed in the passive sadness of the fictive traveller. This traveller combines the rarity of a lone woman in unvisited lands with a traditional icon of female vulnerability, bound to win readers of both sexes. Her story borrows its pathos from women’s laments of attachment (like Anne Hunter’s ‘My Heart Is Fixed on Thee’, set to music by Haydn in 1794–5). The Travels end with the journey home–only, there is no home, no finality. The narrative breaks off at Dover, and though the formal journey is over, the inward journey still moves towards the lover whose rejection the traveller foresees.

  The month after her plunge from the bridge, memory cast its beam back on this approach to death. It is the context for a narrative moving towards an end about to happen, which is just, only just, off-stage as the traveller returns, sadder and more shaken than ever, to the London she had left. It’s not an ending so much as a shutting off. Art shuts off when life is to end. In the immediate after-time of the narrative, an actual attempt at suicide sealed the pathos of this work with a tenacious ‘truth’. Yet, to prepare a book for the press was, in itself, an act of renewal. And as it turned out, the book was a huge success, with translations in Dutch, German, Swedish, and later, in 1806, extracts in Portuguese. Mary’s friend Rowan brought out an American edition in Wilmington, Delaware, and admiring comments came from contemporaries like Robert Southey who said: ‘She has made me in love with a cold climate…with a northern moonlight.’ At the same time, the book proved a lifeline to a further phase of its author’s existence. Addressed to a faithless lover, it touched a kinder man.

  Early in January 1796–the month the Travels appeared in London–William Godwin answered an invitation from Miss Hays to renew acquaintance with Mary Wollstonecraft, whose intrusive talk had put him off at the Tom Paine dinner four years before:

  Tuesday [5 January], 11 o’clock.

  I will do myself the pleasure of waiting on you on Friday, and shall be happy to meet Mrs. Wolstencraft, of whom I know not that I ever said a word of harm, & who has frequently amused herself with depreciating me. But I trust you a
cknowledge in me the reality of a habit upon which I pique myself, that I speak of the qualities of others uninfluenced by personal considerations, & am as prompt to do justice to an enemy as to a friend.

  So this cool philosopher met Mary Wollstonecraft once more, at 30 Kirby Street in Holborn. She saw a man with a head too big for his body and a nose too long for his face, holding forth amongst the teacups. His voice was that of a judging minister who confronts human flaws in a level tone of unabashed but not unforgiving truth. He was, in fact, a lapsed clergyman; a convert to rationalism. While Mary had lived in France, Godwin had come to fame with Political Justice (1793), the most radical of all English exposés of power. He was also a bachelor of forty waking up to the want of a woman in his life. Godwin’s diary records the Hays tea on the 8th and dining out in a party including Mrs Christie and Mary Wollstonecraft on the 14th. The next day he read the first seventy-eight pages of the Travels, and then as he continued day by day from 25 January till 3 February, his dislike of the ‘harsh’ feminist dissolved ‘in tenderness’ for her sorrows; at the same time, he recognised ‘a genius which commands all our imagination’. Perhaps there had never been a book of travels ‘that so irresistibly seizes on the heart’. It was ‘calculated to make a man fall in love with the author’.

  13

  WOMAN’S WORDS

  Godwin called on Mrs Christie on 13 February, hoping to find Mary Wollstonecraft. He discovered that she had left town to stay with a friend, Mrs Cotton, in the village of Sonning, on the Thames near Reading. There, in February–March 1796, Mary received the attentions of Mrs Cotton’s near-neighbours, Sir William and Lady East of Hall Place in Hurley, Berkshire. This couple was on visiting terms with Jane Austen’s aunt Mrs Leigh-Perrot, and their son had attended the school run by Jane Austen’s father at Steventon Rectory in the adjacent county of Hampshire. The connection was close enough for Sir William to have graciously sent the Austens a portrait of himself. Shortly after Mary’s stay near the Easts, Jane Austen, at twenty-one, proposed to turn doctor, lawyer or Guard at St James’s, should she find herself alone in London. It’s unlikely that so well known a visitor to the area as Mary Wollstonecraft went unnoticed. No scandal had touched her beyond some unproven gossip. Most pitied her as a serious-minded wife who had been deserted by her ‘infamous’ husband.