Vindication

by Lyndall Gordon

  Return me a line–and I pray thee put this note under lock and key–and unless you love me very much do not read it again.

  This prompt was either lost on Godwin, or else he avoided lovers’ language. ‘What can I say?’ he scratched while Marguerite waited for his reply. ‘What can I write with Marguerite perched in a corner by my side? I know not…I do not lament my failure of resolution: I wish I had been a spectator of the live fire you speak of.’ Then, as he turns to a practical matter–she must return his bottle of ink–the right words come. ‘Fill it as high, as your image at this moment fills my mind.’ This noncommittal truth was as far as he would go.

  Both were wary of commitment. For seven months they retained their own households, dining at one house or the other in the late afternoon, going separate ways of an evening, and then sleeping together in the darkest hours of the night. Their secret remained secure.

  London saw a Godwin still taken with Amelia Alderson.

  ‘You have no idea how gallant [Godwin] has become,’ she boasted to a friend on 1 November, ‘but indeed he is much more amiable than ever he was. Mrs Inchbald says, the report of the world is that Mr Holcroft is in love with her, she with Mr Godwin, Mr Godwin with me, and I am in love with Mr Holcroft!’

  A further rumour was that John Opie, a divorced artist, was Mary’s suitor. He was two years younger, a self-taught son of a Truro carpenter who was hailed in London as ‘the Cornish wonder’.

  How can you pursue this woman, one Joseph Farington pressed Opie in November. ‘She is already married to Mr Imlay an American.’

  No obstacle there, Opie replied. ‘Mrs Wollstonecraft herself informed me that she never was married to Imlay.’

  ‘Opie called this morning–But you are the man,’ Mary reassured Godwin that same month. Another suitor was a Dr Slop* who extolled her in a sonnet, and threatened their secret when he took to visiting Godwin in the morning, with Mary sometimes there. ‘I treated him so unceremoniously,’ Godwin confided to a friend, ‘that he at length ceased to call.’

  Continued secrecy depended on contraception. Condoms (called ‘armour’ by Boswell, and ‘English overcoats’ by Casanova), made of sheep’s guts and tied on with pink ribbons, were on sale in London at prohibitive expense. Aristocrats alone could afford them, and used such armour less for contraception than to protect themselves from venereal disease. Godwin adopted what he called the ‘chance-medley system’, based on abstinence during what was believed to be three fertile days following the end of menstruation, and frequent sex at other times, for it was widely held that frequency, as in the case of prostitutes, diminished the chance of conception. A code in Godwin’s diary (a dash for sexual contact; a dash followed by a dot for full intercourse) shows how responsibly he and Mary followed this system. Unfortunately, though, it was wrong. Godwin might have done better to consult a rabbi in preference to common opinion in late eighteenth-century England. For Jewish practice is based on an accurate observation–going back to biblical times–that women are most fertile a fortnight into their cycle. Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, unknowingly, were following a scheme for procreation. The inevitable happened. By 20 December, Mary began to fear she might be pregnant.

  Godwin was due to call that day. She wrote thankfully: ‘Fanny says, perhaps Man come to day–I am glad that there is no perhaps in the case.–As to the other perhaps–they must rest in the womb of time.’

  Three days later there was still no sign: ‘I am still at a loss what to say–.’ One unexpected consolation was Godwin himself. ‘There was a tenderness in your manner,’ she noticed, ‘as you seemed to be opening your heart, to a new born affection, that rendered you very dear to me. There are other pleasures in the world, you perceive, besides those know[n] to your philosophy.’

  By 28 December she gave up hope: ‘I am not well to day. A lowness of spirits, which I cannot conquer, leaves me at the mercy of my imagination, and only painful recollections and expectations assail me…I dare say you are out of patience with me.’ They spent a fraught evening on the 30th, and Godwin was displeased when Mary’s irritability went on.

  ‘You do not, I think, make sufficient allowance for the peculiarity of my situation,’ she muttered. ‘But women are born to suffer.’

  She spoke repeatedly of sickness, ‘the inelegant complaint, which no novelist has yet ventured to mention as one of the consequences of sentimental distress’. Nausea and pre-natal depression were exacerbated by her debts. Mary had incurred certain debts on the strength of Imlay’s promise of maintenance for Fanny. Marguerite, for a start, must be paid. Fanny must be clothed. There were food and other bills. But no sum from Imlay appeared. In mid-November she had approached Joseph Johnson, who thought the time had come for her brother Charles to repay her help.

  ‘She has been deserted by Mr. Imlay whose affairs are in a very deranged state,’ Johnson wrote to Charles in America, ‘she has herself and child to support by her literary exertion and you will not be surprised to learn has occasion to apply to me long before her productions can be made productive.’ Mary, Johnson added, ‘deserves more than most women, and cannot live upon a trifle; she has suffered much from the infamous behaviour of Imlay, both in her health and spirits, but she has a strong mind and has in great measure got the better of it.’

  Charles did not answer. Godwin himself could not help, but offered to write to his friend Thomas Wedgwood (son of Josiah, founder of the potteries) for a loan of £50.

  Mary replied on a wet Sunday morning. ‘I cannot bear that you should do violence to your feelings, by writing to Mr Wedgewood. No; you shall not write–I must think of some way of extricating myself. You must have patience with me,’ she added, ‘for I am sick at heart–dissatisfied with every body and every thing.’

  Between them, unspoken, loomed the spectre of marriage and Mary’s renewed fear of abandonment. There were further lapses into irritability, requiring apology, self-questioning and veiled anger at Godwin for taking time to deliberate his part in her plight.

  ‘I believe I ought to beg your pardon for talking at you, last night,’ she said, ‘because there was nobody else worth attacking…But, be assured, when I find a man that has any thing in him, I shall let my every day dish alone.’

  Her struggle to make no demands succeeded only in an air of grim control. Godwin reproached her for treating him ‘with extreme unkindness: the more so because it was calm, melancholy, equable unkindness. You wished we had never met; you wished you could cancel all that had passed between us. Is this,–ask your own heart,–Is this compatible with the passion of love?…You wished all the kind things you had ever written me destroyed.’

  ‘This does not appear to me just the moment to have written me such a note.’ She was plaintive; then stiffened. Her tones become ominously close to those with Imlay: ‘I am, however, prepared for any thing. I can abide by the consequence of my own conduct, and do not wish to envolve any one in my difficulties.’ Gloom resounds through her notes to Godwin:

  1 January: I have a fever of my spirits that has tormented me these two nights past.

  5 January: I was very glad that you were not with me last night, for I could not rouse myself…

  12 January:…You have no petticoats to dangle in the snow. Poor Women how they are beset with plagues–within–and without.

  Her landlady laid a trap one Friday night at the end of January. The plot was to catch Mary in bed with a lover who, it turned out, was not there. Mary brushed off the pry with the same impatience she had felt long ago for the Smallweeds of Newington Green: she had no time for a ‘foolish woman’ who wished to ‘plague’ her, and ‘put an end to this nonsense’. She tried to keep up her walks, but it was hard to hold back the nausea. It rained, and she came home so drenched she had to undress. When a fine day dawned at last on Friday 3 February, she set out to see Dr George Fordyce, the physician at St Thomas’s Hospital, in the early afternoon, before it grew dark. He was the son of James Fordyce who wrote the pre-eminent condu
ct book that Wollstonecraft had dismissed in her Rights of Woman. She knew the doctor as a member of Johnson’s circle, a learned eccentric with few private patients–patients did not greatly interest him. His portrait shows a scholar fingering the pages of an open book, a sedentary, rather hunched figure with balloon cheeks and a chin receding into a fur collar. He wears a loose coat like a dressing-gown. The doctor would have confirmed Mary’s pregnancy.

  At two months gone, she was facing an impossible choice. If she chose to remain the lone Mrs Imlay, she would be stigmatised as soon as her belly began to swell. If she married Godwin, she would have to repudiate the fiction of an Imlay marriage, and Fanny would become illegitimate. And even if she chose that second course, would Godwin, who had publicly repudiated marriage, go through with it? Either way, she would be ostracised.

  14

  ‘THE MOST FRUITFUL EXPERIMENT’

  Mary no longer opposed marriage. Well before she was pregnant there are signs of a shift. The first–so tenuous as to be almost unstated–appears three weeks after she began to sleep with Godwin. ‘You are a tender considerate creature, she told him, ‘but, entre nous, do not make too many philosophical experiments, for when a philosopher is put on his metal [mettle], to use your own phrase, there is no knowing where he will stop–and I have not reckoned on having a wild-goose chace after a–wise man–You will ask me what I am writing about–Why, as if you had been listening to my thoughts–.’ Then, at the end of September, she asked Godwin for a key to his home, teasing him that a free woman would not observe the punctuality he could expect from a wife. Eventually, on 10 November, the appeal of domesticity became explicit: ‘I send you your household linen–I am not sure that I did not feel a sensation of pleasure at thus acting the part of a wife, though you have so little respect for the character.’

  Godwin’s opposition to marriage was widely known. Nor did his attachment to Mary change his mind. During the period they were lovers he stated ‘that two persons of the opposite sexes may be lovers for half their lives, and afterwards a month of unrestrained, domestic, matrimonial intercourse shall bring qualities to light in each, what neither previously suspected’. There could have been an unstated reason for this resistance: earlier signs of latent catalepsy. Though Godwin had no fits in this period, he had fits of sleepiness in the afternoon, even in company. Then, too, he believed his temper unsuited to marriage. ‘My temper is of a recluse,’ he told himself. His home was no domestic haven; it was a workplace, only partially furnished and shared with an indexer called James Marshall who acted as a kind of factotum. In his early London years Godwin had often pawned his watch so as to eat. He now lived on £110–£130 a year, three times what an educated woman could earn, but not enough to take on the dependants who followed a bride’s train. Mary had debts, and a husband would become legally responsible for them. Godwin continued to pity men who were condemned to a lifelong domestic prison, and when circumstance forced him to marry, he made it abundantly plain that he was doing so only to relieve a woman who mattered to him. Calm, deliberate as ever, he reconciled himself to the jeers that would come his way. Mary had reservations of her own, kept in her case under wraps. Only once, in confidence to Amelia Alderson (after a trying day), did she own that she had not got over Imlay.

  ‘The wound my unsuspecting heart formerly received is not healed. I found my evenings solitary; and I wished, while fulfilling the duty of a mother, to have some person with similar pursuits, bound to me by affection; and beside, I earnestly desired to resign a name which seemed to disgrace me,’ she said. ‘Condemned then to toil my hour out, I wish to live as rationally as I can; had fortune or splendour been my aim in life, they have been within my reach [through other suitors], would I have paid the price. Well, enough of the subject; I do not wish to resume it.’

  This was a sober version of her remark to Godwin that she found not rapture but tranquillity in his arms. ‘Sublime tranquillity,’ she had said, for, to her, sex was ‘sacred’–in practice (if not in theory) a commitment. They married quietly on 29 March 1797 at Old St Pancras Church, which still stands with its graves on St Pancras Way. In the eighteenth century the setting was pastoral with the River Fleet, as yet unenclosed, running down from the heights of Hampstead and Highgate. After the ceremony, wife and husband walked back to their separate lodgings as if nothing had happened. A note from Godwin’s rooms has an air of detachment. No bridegroom, he. ‘Non,’ he replies coolly to a question as to whether he was vexed over this event, ‘je ne veux pas être fâché quant au passé. Au revoir.’ His diary ignores the event apart from a laconic ‘Panc[ras]’. Two days later, Mary asked her husband to send over some of his dinner, since she was now the sharer of his worldly goods–nonexistent goods, as she well knew.

  ‘But when I press any thing it is always with a true wifish submission to your judgment and inclination,’ she joked.

  Godwin, too, passed off their new status as a joke when he informed Mary Hays. ‘My fair neighbour desires me to announce to you a piece of news, which it is consonant to the regard that both she & I entertain for you, you should rather learn from us than from any other quarter. She bids me remind you of the earnest way in which you pressed me to prevail upon her to change her name, & she directs me to add, that it has happened to me, like many other disputants, to be entrapped in my own toils: in short, that we found that there was no way so obvious for her to drop the name of Imlay, as to assume the name of Godwin. Mrs Godwin (who the devil is that?) will be glad to see you at No. 29, Polygon, Somers Town, whenever you are inclined to favour her with a call.’

  Four days earlier, on 6 April, they had moved into the Polygon, a circular block of three-storey houses in Somers Town. * There was a parlour near the entrance, a dining room on the first floor, a balcony, and bedrooms on the top floor. Opposite, to the north (now Polygon Street) and west (now Werrington Street), were fields where Fanny played at making hay with her toy pitchfork. Godwin, at forty-one, and Mary, at nearly thirty-eight, each continued to prize independence. Godwin especially, as a long-time bachelor, was alert to the dulling effect of proximity. In The Enquirer, published a month before they married, he expressed his concerns in an essay, ‘Of Cohabitation’: ‘It seems to be one of the most important of the arts of life, that men should not come too near each other, or touch in too many points. Excessive familiarity is the bane of social happiness.’

  Mary too wished to maintain her space: ‘A husband is a convenient part of the furniture of a house, unless he be a clumsy fixture,’ she told Godwin. ‘I wish you, for my soul, to be rivetted in my heart; but I do not desire to have you always at my elbow.’ So Godwin rented separate quarters for himself, about twenty doors away, at 17 Evesham Buildings in his old haunt of Chalton Street, where he sometimes slept or went in the morning as soon as he woke. It was his habit to wake between seven and eight; read a classic for an hour before breakfast; then to write for the rest of the morning. In the afternoon he took a walk. At dinnertime, between four and five, he would return to the Polygon. Occasionally Mary joined him for his walk, but more often they communicated by letter–Fanny, attended by Marguerite, would trot down the road with a message too hot to wait out the day. They would wait while Godwin (once ‘Man’, now ‘Papa’) set down his reply. Evenings were spent, as before, with separate friends. Mary urged her husband to attend Johnson’s dinners, declaring, by way of inducement, that she would not be there.

  They agreed to disregard the convention that a couple had to move in mixed company as a pair, and that in matters of opinion they would free each other to go their own ways. One potentially divisive area was Mary’s faith–her sense of a spirit that rolls through all things.

  ‘I love the country and think with a poor mad woman, I knew, that there is God, or something very consolatory in the air’, she defied Godwin who shunned the supernatural.

  ‘I still mean to be independent,’ she told Amelia, ‘even to cultivating sentiments and principles in my children’s minds (s
hould I have more), which he disavows.’ To Amelia, she still signed herself ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’ with ‘femme GODWIN’ beneath, and Godwin continued to call her ‘Wt’ in his diary, but she did her husband the courtesy of being ‘Mary Godwin’ to his friends, and she addressed him in the usual respectful manner by his surname. Before, when they had been lovers, she had called him, at first, ‘William’ as well as ‘Godwin’; marital manners were more formal. Only after two months as man and wife did Godwin invite a return to the familiarity of first-name terms.

  ‘Your William (do you know me by that name?) affectionately salutes [kisses] the trio M[ary], F[anny], & least (in stature at least) little W[illiam, their unborn child],’ he wrote when he was away.

  Though Godwin often assumed the role of reason, and Mary that of feeling, these roles did not entirely reflect the combinations of thought and feeling both cultivated–Godwin of course with more deliberation. He was astonished at the rightness of her spontaneous judgements and the vividness of her feelings. ‘Never,’ he said, ‘does a man feel himself so much alive as when, bursting the bonds of diffidence, uncertainty and reserve, he pours himself entire into the woman he adores.’ The poet Southey thought Mary’s face ‘the best, infinitely the best’ amongst the London literati, ‘with a proud look of independence rather than superiority’. This marriage of two independent characters was sustained on the basis of separate quarters. ‘We were in no danger of satiety’, Godwin reflected later. ‘We seemed to combine, in a considerable degree, the novelty of lively sensation of a visit, with the more delicious and heart-felt pleasures of domestic life.’

  This was a new man talking of heart and the pleasures of domesticity. He was surprised–but not put out–to find his wife ‘a worshipper of domestic life’. She loved to observe the growth of affection between him and Fanny, and his anxiety about the child to come, for pregnancy was ‘the source of a thousand endearments’. He was prepared to admit, ‘I love these overflowings of the heart’, as he came to question that part of the English character that feels a ‘sort of mauvaise honte, which prevents men from giving utterance to their sentiments’. The longer he lived with this wife he had never meant to have, the readier he was to regret (though not wholly alter) his custom of treating others ‘as if they were so many books’. Virginia Woolf was right to look back on the marriage as the most fruitful experiment of Mary Wollstonecraft’s life. ‘I think you the most extraordinary married pair in existence,’ their friend Thomas Holcroft told them.