Vindication

  Now, it was thought, Mary must get over Imlay. Godwin believed that her mood improved. Letters tell a different story. As the months passed, Mary continued to relive her incredulity that ‘the heart on which I leaned has peirced mine to the quick’–this cry of pain in Hamburg she now repeated to Archie Rowan in far-off America. Her voice seems to come in panting bursts, yet her hand is even. Each line begins in the margin and flows steadily across the page, as though she were a habituée of despair. Letters to Rowan in January 1796 and to von Schlabrendorf in May show no change. She is ‘weary’ of herself. She is ‘broken’. ‘I live but for my child,’ she told them both.

  The question of support for Fanny brought her back into contact with Imlay. One evening early in February she had visited her neighbour Mrs Christie, as she often did, when she caught sight of Imlay, returned from France, as she entered with Fanny, now aged twenty-one months. Mrs Christie tried to intercept Mary and persuade her to leave. But she swept past with Fanny in her arms, and–in front of an assembled company–dropped her at Imlay’s feet. It was a public rebuke for his failure to support his child.

  If Imlay was still in league with Leavenworth, the going was rough, for in January 1796 Leavenworth was ruined. It was a massive crash, a loss of £40,000 he told Ruth Barlow–‘he is quite in the horrors about it’, she said. On the 28th everything he had was seized, and he went to prison. If Imlay had been trying to avert that crash, he would have had sufficient reason to be in Paris for the previous three months. It’s possible, then, that in February 1796 his affairs were on the edge. In his gentle way, he promised to see Mary the following day to discuss what he could do. This interview must have felt futile, for it was the very next day that Mary left town.

  A month or two later, soon after her return to London, she spied Imlay riding along the New Road (as the Euston Road was called). When he saw her he reined and dismounted, and they walked some way together, with Imlay defending his ‘forbearance’. To Mary, words were irrelevant beside the facts of betrayal. Once more, they fought for the moral high ground. Mary’s part was to ‘disdain’ to reproach Imlay; then retorts–great sprays of indignant eloquence–would fountain from her opening throat. Imlay’s part was not to budge, as a man of ‘principle’. He was not about to shed his winning blend of high-mindedness and frontier vigour. His presence made it all the harder for Mary to forget a passion that was poisoning her residue of life. They agreed that she would continue to be ‘Mrs Imlay’, and Imlay offered to take out a bond for Fanny, the interest of which would contribute to her support.

  ‘You must do as you please in respect to the child,’ she returned in the last of their letters:

  I could wish that might be done soon, that my name may be no more mentioned to you…I am glad that you are satisfied with your own conduct…

  Your understanding or mine must be strangely warped–for what you term ‘delicacy,’ appears to me to be exactly the contrary. I have no criterion for morality, and have thought in vain, if the sensations which lead you to follow an ancle or step, be the sacred foundation of principle and affection. Mine has been of a very different nature, or it would not have stood the brunt of your sarcasms. The sentiment in me is still sacred. If there be any part of me that will survive the sense of my misfortunes, it is the purity of my affections. The impetuosity of your senses, may have led you to term mere animal desire, the source of principle; and it may give zest to some years to come.–Whether you will always think so, I shall never know.

  It is strange that, in spite of all you do, something like conviction forces me to believe, that you are not what you appear to be.

  I part with you in peace.

  The New Road saw the finale to what had been ending since 1794, with numerous curtain scenes. At this time the Christie household broke up, with Mr Christie’s departure for Surinam where he had business interests. There was no further reason for Mary to remain in Finsbury Place, and she moved to lodgings at 1 Cumming Street, off the Pentonville Road. She was now not too far from Godwin’s lodgings in Somers Town (a new-built suburb, still incomplete, near the present site of King’s Cross), and on 14 April she knocked at his door. In her soft voice she greeted the pale thinker with the prominent forehead and sharp edges who had been put out, but coldly just when she had fired up against him at Joseph Johnson’s table. His face was fine, thoughtful, likened by one contemporary to portraits of Locke with a long, elegant nose. He saw an intelligent face at once dreamy and resolute, the left eye very slightly veiled by its lid. There was attentiveness in each glance, and, he was now aware, a reserve of extraordinary passion. She was tall and well proportioned with a fullness of form that was thought ‘voluptuous’. Some of her auburn hair escaped from the modest cap worn by married women. It was one of the curiosities of English manners that though Mary never denied her history, and though whispers there were, the façade of a married name and dress did carry her day. Deceptive as this may seem, the deference to custom was obligatory if Mary was to survive with her child in a society which made female sexual conduct (more than violence, exploitation or fraud) central to its moral system.

  In appearing at Godwin’s door, Mary ignored a convention that forbade a woman to go alone to a man’s rooms. He lived at 25 Chalton Street on the wrong (northern) side–the workers’ side–of the New Road. Godwin did not take this visit amiss; he admired a woman who ‘trusted to the clearness of her spirit for the direction of her conduct’. Next day they met again for tea. Godwin was not drawn to women’s rights, but his response to her Travels, combined with a habit of enquiry, opened his mind to the novelty of Mary’s character. Here was a woman worth knowing, and he not only a competent judge but with a mind so fearless that there was nothing to block her disclosure of what she was. Hardly anything could be rarer than this conjunction.

  Godwin’s name goes back to Anglo-Saxon England. The Anglo-Saxons called their deity ‘God’, their word for ‘good’, as William Godwin did not fail to note, together with the fact that the founder of Saxon policy was called Wodin or Goden. His rooted Englishness contrasts with the shifting, half-Irish Wollstonecrafts. Godwin’s traceable forebears surface in the region of Newbury in Berkshire from the late sixteenth century. They were professional men of words, lawyers and divines. When William’s father, a Dissenting minister, moved northwards to Wisbech in Cambridgeshire, he retained a relic from the seventeenth century, the barrister’s wig belonging to his grandfather’s brother. His son, William, would sport it when he acted the Roman statesman Cato in the old barn–his image of Cato in a wig came from the frontispiece to Addison’s play of that name. William was born in 1756, the seventh child of thirteen in a family with little in the way of money. His grandfather, still alive during William’s childhood, was a minister and scholar; his father, less of a scholar, was devout in a strict, acerbic way–he once rebuked William for picking up the family cat on a Sunday. From the earliest age, William felt a call to follow in the line of ministers, and even before he could write he was delivering sermons from a kitchen chair. Written sermons were his first form of literary composition. His mother took pride in the speed of her retorts and knack for telling a story. Livelier than her husband, and rebuked by his congregation for unsober dress, she was the uneducated granddaughter of Northumberland landowners, called Hull, whose male line had died out.

  As a child, William was sickly. From the time the newborn was packed off to a wet-nurse till he caught smallpox at the age of twelve, he was not expected to live, and this may be one reason why his parents conserved their emotions where he was concerned. There was a tragedy two or three years after his birth: a younger brother was drowned while his two eldest brothers were absorbed in flying their kite. Though William was aware he was not a favourite with either parent, it did not trouble him unduly because he was the chosen bedfellow of his father’s cousin. Miss Godwin had been a schoolmistress and now lived with the family, probably since the death of William’s grandfather, when she came into an inheritance
of £40 a year, £16 of which she gave to the Godwins for board and lodging. Godwin’s autobiography calls her Mrs Sothren, but she married only later, in 1772. While he was growing up she was a single woman who virtually adopted him as her only child–to the happiness of both. Gentle and loving, she kept the boy close, taught him to read, praised his brains, and did not encourage outdoor activity apart from her enthusiasm for gardening. At a young age William read the whole of the Bible, The Pilgrim’ s Progress and the first children’s book, James Janeway’s A Token for Children, with its image of the dying Godly child surrounded by marvelling spectators whom the child rebukes and exhorts. His words are treasured; his immortality assured. Godwin recalled, ‘I felt as if I were willing to die with them if I could with equal success, engage the admiration of my friends and mankind.’ The high-minded writer, with a reserve of feeling that women sensed and were drawn to, was what the schoolmistress had backed in Godwin as a boy.

  In his teens, he was sent to board with a tutor called Newton in Norfolk. He was beaten, as all boys were, and bore with the vindictive caprice of an inferior mind. He was aware of Newton’s limitations, but like many a sensible child of poor parents, resolved to gain what he could from the education on offer. When Newton was away–a lot of the time–his pupil would slip into his library and read of the Greeks’ struggle ‘for independence against the assaults of the Persian despot’. Words like ‘independence’ and ‘despot’ fired him long before the American and French Revolutions. That volume of ancient history, written in the 1730s, awakened, he said, ‘a passion in my soul, which will never cease but with life’. The boy would sit close to the shelf so that he could slip the book back into place, should the master return. It did occur to him that he might ask to borrow it, but decided not to put himself in a position of being refused. It was a matter of not allowing a ‘despot’ to exercise his will, whenever he could prevent it. He would promise himself, ‘my mind, my mind shall be the master of me!’–one of those adult children who want to leave childhood behind as soon as they can.

  Newton promoted the harsh Calvinist doctrine of the Sandeman sect. Where most Calvinists believed that ninety per cent of people would be damned, Sandemans believed the number was closer to ninety-nine per cent. Later, in reaction, Godwin took up the liberal dogma of Unitarianism. Eventually, he discounted dogma itself. Though he trained at the Hoxton Academy and served as a minister for a few years, he lost his faith and resigned in 1783. At about that date, at the age of twenty-eight, he had a fit. The fits, with one minute’s notice–probably epilepsy–were to come back seventeen years later, without impairing his general health.

  Godwin began his literary career with biography: he proposed a biographical series for a magazine, but the first, on the former Prime Minister William Pitt, grew into a full-length study. Published in 1783, it was particularly well timed, as the Younger Pitt came to power. Godwin’s eventual biography of Mary Wollstonecraft in 1798 has been called his best work; and he turned out a third biography, on Chaucer, in 1803. He’s rarely thought of in terms of this genre, but his alertness to the inner life combined with narrative momentum is new, taking biography closer to the inwardness and readability of fiction without sacrificing the advantage of authenticity. Philosophically, Godwin defended individual over general histories as a way to promote the private transformation that, he believed, must precede a change in society: ‘the contemplation of illustrious men…kindles into flame the hidden fire within us’. For it is necessary, he argues, ‘to scrutinise the nature of man, before we can pronounce what it is of which social man is capable’. He is called an ‘Anarchist’ in politics and ‘Jacobin’ in fiction, but, like Mary Wollstonecraft, he’s an innovator across genres, defying classification. As an educator he backed the unpretentious language that Wollstonecraft upholds in her Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, what he termed ‘real English’ as opposed to rhetorical flourishes. He advised a correspondent to trust ‘to the strength & energy of your ideas…& do not think they stand in need of an embroidery of fine words to set them off’.

  In London his connections multiplied, including some who had crossed Mary Wollstonecraft’s track–Dr Price, Paine, Fuseli, Joseph Johnson–but Godwin’s circle was wider and more diverse. Where she was grateful for her publisher’s support, and loyal to him alone, Godwin worked for an array of publishers, amongst them the firm of the first John Murray which, under his son, would become pre-eminent for writers of the next generation like Scott, Byron and Jane Austen. In 1787, before the young Helen Maria Williams moved to France, she invited Godwin to her salon in London. There, he met the poet Samuel Rogers from Newington Green, and the diarist and letter-writer Mrs Thrale who had taken care of Dr Johnson and was now–to her family’s disgust (for marrying an impecunious musician)–Mrs Piozzi. Godwin knew the future American President, John Adams, during his tour of duty in London from 1785 to 1788, his son John Quincy Adams (another future American President), and Wilberforce (leader of the anti-slavery movement). In 1791 Godwin was living in Great Titchfield Street, Marylebone, when Joel Barlow settled there, and they discussed questions of justice. Godwin’s autobiographical fragments suggest how small educated society was, and how accessible to a penniless but able man. His leaning towards the Whigs led him into contact with certain members of the aristocracy, including Fox.

  Godwin was stirred to his depths by politics. From 1780 he had been a republican, and when the French Revolution came nine years later, his heart, he said, ‘beat high with great swelling sentiments of Liberty’. Yet, from the start, he could not condone mob government and violence.

  Overnight, it seemed, Godwin became a cult figure with the publication of his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice in February 1793. At this time, the poor, who were victims of the Industrial Revolution, were perceived as dangerous rabble. Godwin exposed the self-interest of the ruling class in its deployment of labour, property, law and punishment, and advanced in their place the voluntary redistribution of property and the free exercise of private judgement, especially in condemning the use of force. ‘Who shall say how far the whole species might be improved, were they accustomed to despise force in others, and did they refuse to employ it for themselves.’ War was justifiable only to repel invasion, not to prevent it, and he believed there would be less talk about a ‘justifiable’ cause for war if we trained our imaginations to call up the unfeeling carnage which ‘justifiable’ intended. It’s a fallacy, he warned, that our war may be ended by making it more and more terrible: ‘a most mistaken way of teaching men to feel that they are brothers by imbuing their minds with perpetual hatred.’

  Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminist friend Mary Hays was an early convert. Godwin suffered Hays to turn him into a confidant, and she deluged him with letters in which she analysed her unrequited feelings for a Dissenting minister called Frend. ‘I am sorry…that the nature of my avocations restrain me from entering into regular discussions,’ Godwin at length protested. He advised fiction as a consolation, with the result that she used their correspondence when she wrote The Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), an autobiographical novel in which Godwin appears as the ‘understanding’ Mr Francis.

  Three weeks after he completed Political Justice, Godwin began a novel. Things as They Are; or the Adventures of Caleb Williams remains a classic, dramatising the miscarriage of justice in a society where moral and psychological issues are too complex for the law, which in any case is the instrument of the squires and the nobility. Williams stumbles on the fact that his refined master has committed a murder. To get Williams out of the way, the master uses his power to trump up a false charge. When Williams is on the run, he finds refuge with thieves, who justify their lives in this way: ‘We who are thieves without a licence, are at open war with another set of men, who are thieves according to law.’ Godwin was the first to use courtroom drama in fiction.

  In the same month as this novel was published, May 1794, twelve leading members of the Society for Constitutional Infor
mation and the artisan-based London Corresponding Society were arrested for high treason. If convicted, the punishment was death. Amongst the accused was Godwin’s best friend, the dramatist Thomas Holcroft. The government believed that the men on trial presented a republican threat, whereas in fact their aim was the electoral reform that began in the course of the next century. Since Parliament was grossly unrepresentative of the population (including the accused), they were indeed questioning its legitimacy, but there was no infringement of the Treason Act of 1353, which limited high treason to an intent to kill the King or the use of armed force against him. Judge Eyre’s opening address to the jury went beyond this in attempting to construct a ‘conspiracy to subvert the Monarchy’, in effect a new crime for which there was no known statute or precedent. It was, then, an arbitrary attempt on the part of the judiciary to establish a law without recourse to the proper procedures of Parliament.

  During the Treason Trials that October, Godwin published–anonymously, for his own safety–a long piece in the Morning Chronicle. ‘Cursory Strictures on the Charge Delivered by Lord Chief Justice Eyre to the Grand Jury’ argued that a wish to reform institutions could not be classed as a crime, for this could not be construed a conspiracy to kill George III. Godwin’s method is to invoke the conservatism of law on its own turf, praising the Treason Act as a ‘wise and moderate law’ that had stood the test of four centuries. Repeatedly attacked by the encroachments of ‘tyrannical princes’ and the decisions of ‘profligate judges’, Englishmen had always found it necessary to restore the statute to its original simplicity. Godwin accordingly nails Judge Eyre for exploiting the ambiguity of the word ‘force’ to imply an armed force, and underpins legal conservatism with Judge Blackstone’s commentary on the law of treason as ‘a great security to the public’ that ‘leaves a weighty momento to judges to be careful, and not overhasty in letting in treasons by construction or interpretation’.