Vindication

  In testing out a new form of marriage, both made mistakes. If Mary neglected to write to Godwin as often as he to her and if she was excessively provoked by the Godiva delay, he reproached her for ‘savage resentment’, calling it ‘the worst of vices’. Mary reproached him in return as a lover: ‘There is certainly an original defect in my mind–for the cruelest experience will not eradicate the foolish tendency I have to cherish, and expect to meet with, romantic tenderness.’ Imlay’s counter-drama had been a careless sensuality. Godwin’s counter-drama was a measured reserve–a reserve coexisting with his kindness and loyalty. Mary responded either by abasing herself in ironically feminine terms, or pre-empting Godwin with expectation. Either way, romantic drama was not easy to put into action–going back to the time when they had bungled their first attempts at making love.

  Then, too, the heat of her jealousy took him by surprise: her dislike of Mrs Perfection, and her resistance in June–July 1797 when Godwin felt free to visit and correspond with a certain Miss Pinkerton who intended more, Mary warned, ‘than comes out of her mouth’.

  On the day of Godwin’s return from the Midlands, with tensions running high, Miss Pinkerton arrives for tea. There she sits, cup lifted, smiling sweetly while Mary fumes. Godwin called women ‘Fairs’, and Pinkerton was, in Mary’s words, ‘a Fair in intellectual distress’. Such women continued to pursue Godwin, and Mary, who herself had been a ‘Fair’ in distress, detected in her husband a vanity that encouraged pursuit. She went so far as to call him an intellectual ‘cocotte’ with soft words for the pretty ones (like Miss Pinkerton), and nothing less than ‘insanity’ for Hays, who was plain. At last, on 9 August, with the baby due in three weeks, Mary persuaded Godwin to back a rebuff to Miss Pinkerton, forbidding her the house unless she consented to ‘behave with propriety’ towards a married man. With Godwin against her, pretty Pinkerton was forced to apologise–bathed in tears, so she claimed. All the same, she was a predator, beckoning Godwin while his wife’s ‘portly shadow’ met her eye as she walked. Her walk had slowed. In her eighth to ninth month, she was experiencing discomfort, even some pain, as the full-grown baby pushed against the diaphragm.

  During this second pregnancy, Wollstonecraft was planning a book to be called ‘Letters on the Management of Infants’. The first of the seven Letters was on pregnancy and the management of childbirth. In defiance of the custom for a mother to stay in bed for a month after a birth, she intended to come down for dinner the day after, much as she’d done after Fanny was born.

  Wollstonecraft ridiculed the pathologising of women’s bodies, the enfeebling invalidism of the middle and upper classes that was fashionable and remained so until the advent of ‘natural’ childbirth in the mid-twentieth century. Later Letters would offer advice on the infant’s diet and clothing, and its changing needs to the end of its second year. Her aim was to make infancy ‘more healthy and happy’ at a time when a third of infants died. ‘I must suppose,’ she wrote, ‘that there is some error in the modes adopted by mothers and nurses.’ She had long thought ‘that the cause which renders children as hard to rear as the most fragile plant, is our deviation from simplicity’. By simplicity, Wollstonecraft meant cleanliness and the importance of bathing–not generally recommended in the eighteenth century. Dr Darwin, hearing her views, sent a message via Thomas Wedgwood to caution Mrs Godwin against cold bathing for children. He considered it ‘a very dangerous practise’.

  The date of this message, 31 July, shows that Wollstonecraft was airing her ideas at the end of her eighth month of pregnancy. She discussed her ‘advice’ with another friend of Godwin’s, a young surgeon of Soho Square called Anthony Carlisle, whose hair stood up in a high crest and whose large ears projected attentively on either side of a gentle, enquiring face. He promised to vet her call to mothers to treat childcare as a profession to be learnt.

  She also prepared ten ‘Lessons’ for Fanny, filled with familiar domestic scenes (including times with ‘Papa’) designed to hold a child’s attention. The ‘Lessons’ create an imaginary Papa, an omnipresent father figure who takes his domestic character from Godwin. Richard Holmes had an appealing idea that ‘Papa’ could be Imlay, but Godwin was the man Fanny called ‘Papa’, and Fanny is constantly invited to compare her able self with helpless baby ‘William’. The scenes are projected in the future when Fanny will be four and the baby about six months old. The presence of little William proves that the Lessons were devised while Mary was pregnant with William Godwin’s child. This means that Godwin was wrong to suggest they were written as a legacy to Fanny when her mother was about to end her life in October 1795–a time when he and Mary were not yet friends. The Lessons were certainly a legacy for Fanny but conceived later, when Mary faced the dangers of childbirth. On the back of the manuscript is written: ‘The first book of a series which I intended to have written for my unfortunate girl’. Amanda Vickery’s research on women’s lives in Georgian England reveals that ‘it was still not uncommon for pregnant women to prepare themselves for death to the extent of drawing up conduct letters’ for children too young to read. Wollstonecraft’s Lessons are said to be ‘one of the most graceful expressions in English prose of the physical tenderness of a mother’s love’.

  If ‘Papa’ had been Imlay, the Lessons would have opened up a trove of untapped memories. We should not be disappointed by the necessity to shift the date. A trove there is, though its scenes derive not from the Imlays at home in Le Havre but from the Godwins at home in London, the domestic unit that formed in April 1797 when Fanny’s mother delighted in the affection growing between the child and her new father. This rosy child, ‘Fannikin’ or ‘Lambkin’, can draw baby-talk from the sober Godwin as she goes ‘plungity-plunge’ early in the morning when she jumps out of bed. ‘Kiss Fanny for me,’ Godwin writes from the Wedgwoods. ‘Tell Fanny, I am safely arrived in the land of mugs.’ The mug he chose for her had an F in a garland of flowers. Meanwhile, he sends bantering messages about her lost green monkey–the one who, Fanny said, ‘went into the country’–who would be back where he belonged when Godwin returns. He admires Fanny as the product of her mother’s ideas, a quick, sensitive child who is learning the primary lessons of Wollstonecraft’s educational system as set out in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters and tested in Ireland on Margaret, Caroline and Mary King. Godwin thought these Lessons ‘struck out a path of her own’. The voice is all-important: it has the breath of life in it, the breath of private attachment–unlike school readers. It reminds Fanny that she used to cry when her face was washed and demonstrates the appeal of cleanliness: ‘Wipe your nose. Wash your hands. Dirty hands. Why do you cry? A clean mouth. Shake hands. I love you. Kiss me now. Good girl.’

  Here, in another education book, Wollstonecraft turns her imagination to the burgeoning consciousness of the very young child, teaching her how to be, as well as how to read. Her relation with Fanny was robust, physical, and anxious to ‘prepare her body and mind to encounter the ills which await her sex’. Godwin preferred to lay off the pressure while he backed the praise. ‘The first thing that gives spring & expansion to the infant learner,’ he said, ‘is praise; not so much perhaps because it gratifies the appetite of vanity, as from a…satisfaction in communicated & reciprocal pleasure. To give pleasure to another produces…the most animated & unequivocal consciousness of existence.’

  Fanny’s second lesson is to sense the needs and feelings of others. ‘You are wiser than the dog, you must help him.’ Theirs is a home where parents help each other when either is ill. ‘Papa opened the door very softly, because he loves me…When I brought him a cup of camomile tea, he drank it without…making an ugly face. He knows that I love him.’ When Papa falls asleep on the sofa (Godwin, in fact, was prone to sleep in company), Fanny goes on tiptoe. ‘Whisper–whisper’, as she asks for her ball. ‘Away you went.–Creep–Creep.’

  The Lessons don’t mimic the child’s voice–we are spared the bleating of school readers, cheery or sentimental or r
ighteous. We hear instead the voice of an attentive adult who knows a child for an eager, responsive creature. So Wollstonecraft went on exploding genre after genre: Thoughts on the Education of Daughters is not platitude for obedient girls; her Travels are not a travelogue; and the naturalness of her children’s reader makes nonsense of damped-down girls on the one hand and, on the other, a hothouse exhibit like Queenie Thrale whose head was stuffed with unfelt knowledge. Her mother, Mrs Thrale, had boasted that two-year-old Queenie could repeat the Pater Noster, the three Christian virtues, the signs of the Zodiac, and all the Heathen Deities according to their attributes. No wonder Queenie grew up to be a chill character who hated her mother. Wollstonecraft’s passion for domestic education as well as more attentive childcare was carried on, as we shall see, by her pupil, Margaret King, but not borne out by subsequent feminists who, as Christina Hardyment says, ‘have not distinguished themselves in the ranks of practical advisers on child-raising’. Germaine Greer has suggested brightly that mothers could dump brats kibbutz-style in a farmhouse, to be visited when time allows. ‘Running through the women’s liberation movement has been a thread of hostility to mothers and babies,’ comments Ann Daly in Inventing Motherhood. ‘Few had children themselves when they tapped out their militant demands for equality.’

  Mary chose, again, a home delivery. She still thought a midwife more appropriate to women’s ‘delicacy’, but a stronger reason was fear. The establishment of lying-in hospitals in the seventeenth century, and many more in eighteenth-century London, had led to epidemics of childbed fever. Everyone knew that many more women died in hospital–now and then as many as eighty per cent. By the 1790s deaths from home deliveries were, by contrast, five or six per thousand. Mary’s own dark view is reflected in Jemima’s story: ‘I cannot give you an adequate idea of the wretchedness of an hospital…The attendants seem to have lost all feeling of compassion in the bustling discharge of their offices; death is so familiar to them, that they are not anxious to ward it off. Every thing appeared to be conducted for the accommodation of the medical men and their pupils, who came to make experiments on the poor…’

  In 1797, during an epidemic in an Aberdeen hospital, Dr Alexander Gordon wondered if the fever was introduced into the womb by a woman’s attendants. The medical establishment took no notice. Perish the thought that doctors themselves might be the cause of death. It was not until the work of Semelweiss, Lister and Pasteur later in the nineteenth century that bacterial infections began to be understood. At the Vienna teaching hospital, Semelweiss noticed that mortality from fever in one birth ward was astronomic, while there were fewer fevers in a ward closed to students. He begged fellow-obstetricians and students to wash their hands–in vain. Wollstonecraft’s insistence on cleanliness, later the cornerstone of Florence Nightingale’s revolution in hospital management, was common sense. For what made hospitals so lethal for women was that doctors and particularly students would come straight from dissection of cadavers or from infected patients in other parts of the hospital, and insert an unclean hand deep into the woman’s birth canal. The prouder of anatomical know-how doctors became, the more given to internal examination, the more at risk were women in labour. They had actually been safer from sepsis when midwives did little more than catch the baby–though ignorance of course had other dangers. In The Midwives Book (1671), a manual still in use in the eighteenth century, the experienced Jane Sharp gave some sound advice, disregarded by the more manipulative doctors who took over the field. Sharp notes that women are in as great if not more danger after the birth, and warns midwives to ‘be very gentle, for the woman is now grown weak and her womb is quick with feeling’. If the afterbirth does not come away, she goes on, herbal remedies are preferred to manual tearing (‘the midwife’s nails’). She is alert to the sensitivity of the patient and the need for comfort at this moment: ‘put the woman to as little trouble as you can, for she hath endured pain enough already’.

  Mary’s labour began at five on a Wednesday morning, 30 August.

  ‘I have no doubt of seeing the animal today,’ she informed Godwin after he went to his rooms. Matter-of-factly she asked him to send a newspaper and a novel to while the time away.

  At nine Mrs Blenkinsop, matron and midwife from the Westminster New Lying-In Hospital, arrived. She had seen Mary several times during her pregnancy. Nothing further is known of Mrs Blenkinsop, but midwives, who had low status in England, did not have the training they received in France. A hospital midwife performing a home delivery was a compromise between an untrained midwife and a doctor’s manipulations. The hospital where Mrs Blenkinsop was matron had been founded on the southern periphery of London to serve the needs of those who could not afford a home delivery, mainly the wives of tradesmen, soldiers and sailors reduced to want. Unmarried mothers, refused by the fashionable hospitals, were admitted at the Westminster. Though the fashionable maternity hospitals were closer to the Godwins’ northern suburb–there was one in Store Street where Mary used to live–her identification with the poor may explain her choice. Certainly, she and Godwin had no money to spare.

  Mrs Blenkinsop confirmed that the child was on its way, but so far contractions were slow. ‘I am very well,’ Mary reassured Godwin. ‘Call before dinner time, unless you receive another message from me–.’

  At two in the afternoon, she went upstairs to her bedroom on the top floor. At three she sent a third reassuring note to Godwin: ‘Mrs Blenkinsop tells me that I am in a most natural state, and can promise me a safe delivery–But that I must have a little patience.’ Calm as she sounds, the last words echo at difficult times in her life, going back to her mother’s deathbed.

  Unable to work, Godwin took Mary off his shelf and reread two-thirds of it. He dined at the Reveleys, and supped with a radical editor, John Fenwick, and his wife Eliza. At seven in the evening Godwin returned to Evesham Buildings. At ten, he walked back to the Polygon, accompanied by Mrs Fenwick, to find Mary in the final stages of what had turned out a long labour–different from the ease of Fanny’s birth. Mary had asked Godwin not to come to her room until all was over. While he waited in the parlour on the ground floor, Mrs Fenwick went upstairs to help. Until the end of the eighteenth century women usually gave birth in a crouching position that had the advantage of straightening the unfortunate curve in the human birth canal; from about this time it became customary for women to lie supine for the convenience of their attendants. At last, at 11.20, Godwin notes in his diary, a girl–Mary–was born. And still he waited. An hour passed, and then another, and no invitation came to go upstairs.

  By unlucky chance, the placenta had not come away. Normally this organ that supports the baby in the womb is expelled soon after its birth. At two in the morning a worried Mrs Blenkinsop sent Godwin for Dr Louis Poignand, a French physician at her hospital. Godwin had no coach, and may not have found one at that hour of the night. If he did not, it was a long walk from Somers Town to the doctor’s house in Parliament Street, Westminster, and an even longer walk to the hospital on the far side of Westminster Bridge, but Godwin did find the doctor.

  For the next four hours Dr Poignand tore out the placenta. He pulled it out in bits, torturing and resuscitating his patient, and almost certainly introducing an infection. The placenta, thick with blood vessels, is prone to haemorrhage. Godwin went into the room at four in the morning to find Mary fainting repeatedly from blood loss and the trauma of an operation without anaesthetic. She told him afterwards that she had not known before what pain was.

  ‘I would have died,’ she said afterwards, ‘but I was determined not to leave you.’ For a moment she smiled.

  Dr Poignand finished at about eight, believing that he had extracted every piece. Later that morning, Mary expressed her distrust of this rough treatment. She therefore asked Godwin to call in Dr Fordyce. Poignand bristled at what he regarded as interference, when Fordyce arrived at three that afternoon. There was some truth in Poignand’s contention that Fordyce was more a lecturer th
an a practitioner. So angry did Poignand become that three days later, on Sunday morning, he walked out on his patient. That same morning she had a spell of shivering, the first sign of sepsis. Godwin, who was out for a lot of the day, came back to anxious faces and Mary’s asking him why he had left her so long. He ‘felt a pang’ of self-reproach. That evening he witnessed a second shivering fit. ‘Every muscle of the body trembled, the teeth chattered, and the bed shook under her.’ This went on for about five minutes. When it was over, she said it had felt like a struggle between life and death. Even so, Godwin was not too alarmed: ‘her cheerings were so delightful, that I hugged her obstinately to my heart’.

  An unanswered question is the delay in calling in the leading authority on puerperal fever, Dr John Clarke, on the staff of the General Lying-In Hospital in Store Street and author of Practical Essays on…the Inflammatory and Febrile Diseases of Lying-In Women. He had published this book with Joseph Johnson in 1793. One reason for the delay could be that Mary herself refused to see Clarke, known for his attack on midwives’ continued presence in a field whose status he wished to raise. At this stage Mary may still have controlled the situation, for Godwin too was in the anti-midwife camp.