Vindication

by Lyndall Gordon

  The image of reckless intemperance persists to this day, varied by accusations of prudery. Both judgements perpetuate the prude/whore caricature of womanhood, oddly unwilling to engage with a woman who accepts our nuanced sexual nature–its romance, its modesty, its warmth, its capacity for pleasure–as nature’s endowment. A new imputation at the outset of the twenty-first century is that Mary misbehaved on her deathbed–manifesting the ‘self-centredness of the dying’. This contradicts the fondness and gratitude witnessed by those who were there. ‘Self-centredness’ over the course of her life can’t be denied–all art, all endeavour, is selfish to some extent–but deathbeds vary, and Mary’s was gracious, as Godwin testified in the Memoirs, as did Mrs Fenwick to Mary’s sisters and Hays in her obituary. So it happens that an untrue ‘self-centredness’ slips in to confirm the failure narratives imposed on Mary Wollstonecraft’s life: the doom of the fallen woman; the comedy of the dizzy enthusiast who presumes to pick up a pen–ephemeral fame, bound to come to grief; and the Victorian melodrama of Mrs Fuseli shutting her door on a sexual intruder.

  Biography, as we practise it now, will endorse Godwin’s principle that truth must be revealed. Accordingly, he steeled himself to expose his wife’s relationship with Fuseli. Godwin’s diary shows that he continued to see Fuseli often while he composed the Memoirs, so Fuseli had ample opportunity to insinuate his self-flattering version: Mary as sick with love for him. It’s a curious fact that this was the sole occasion when Johnson could offer Mary no comfort. Critics have concluded that her conduct put her beyond sympathy, but Mary’s response to Johnson’s rebuff was not the shame we might expect. It’s more like embarrassment–she jokes about wearing a fool’s cap. So might there have been another scenario? Is it possible that Mary stumbled on love at the heart of the lifelong intimacy of Johnson and Fuseli? Same-sex love could explain Mary’s silence on the subject of Fuseli after that talk with Johnson. It remained a capital offence in the eighteenth century. More often, convicted men were punished by exposure on the pillory where they were liable to be stoned and vilified, pelted with mud and excrement, and sometimes killed by a homophobic mob. Johnson’s author William Beckford was one of the homosexuals who had to flee England rather than face the threat of a criminal charge.

  It did not take long for a man like Fuseli to feel out Godwin’s susceptibility as husband and biographer to an untold story. Under normal circumstances Godwin would have been too imperturbable to give way to jealousy. It was not an emotion that troubled him at any other time. But in the disturbed aftermath of Mary’s death he was, briefly, the plaything of Fuseli, subject to a warped image of the reasonable person he knew his wife to be. Woman as sexual predator usurps attention: Odile, as it were, blots out Odette. Fuseli knew his man: a philosopher too truthful to conceal what he was made to believe. In the dark, melancholy, loathing Fuseli but attentive to his story, Godwin lent it undue credence in his Memoirs. There, the poison infiltrates his measured prose with a slander in Fuseli’s favour, and so seeps into the consciousness of future generations. Eighty years later, when Browning announced a forthcoming poem on ‘Mary Wollstonecraft and Fuseli’, Kegan Paul, one of the last people to see their correspondence (destroyed about two years later), asked Browning to reconsider the evidence.

  Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. Publishers

  1 Paternoster Square,

  London.

  January 12. 1883

  Dear Mr Browning

  I see among the Literary Notices of this week, that you are about to publish a Poem on Mary Wollstonecraft and Fuseli. Of course I cannot even guess how you are treating it, and have no doubt that you have considered all the evidence in the matter…May I ask if you will very kindly…accept my assurance that having read as I believe every letter of Mary’s or Godwin’s which now exist, and they are legion, I utterly disbelieve that there was anything whatever in the relations of Mary and Fuseli, than those of a young woman to an elderly fatherly married friend, with whose wife she was on most affectionate terms…Godwin in part adopted [the slander], but he really had known next to nothing of his wife’s early life. He is even demonstrably wrong in much that he says which he might have known…

  The letters [between Mary and Fuseli] which exist are of the most common place character, and I have read them all…

  With kind regards to Miss Browning

  I am yours most sincerely

  C Kegan Paul.

  Browning was not deterred. His dramatic monologue updates the old slanders as if it were from Mary’s own lips. She is made to confess to Fuseli that she is womanish in a helpless, Victorian way (‘Mine are the nerves to quake at a mouse’), futile as a writer, and a scary femme fatale. There’s no vestige of Wollstonecraft’s actual voice:

  Much amiss in the head, Dear,

  I toil at a language, tax my brain

  Attempting to draw–the scratches here!

  I play, play, practise and all in vain…

  Strong and fierce in the heart, Dear,

  With–more than a will–what seems a power

  To pounce on my prey…

  A ‘devouring’ love labours to win a lover, but has to concede defeat: ‘I have not quickened his pulse one beat.’

  This came out at a time when women in America and England were campaigning for the vote, contriving higher education and starting to enter the professions. Elizabeth Blackwell in the United States, followed by Elizabeth Garrett in England and Sophia Jex-Blake in the Edinburgh of 1869, had pioneered women’s medical training against stiff opposition, and these doctors were now in practice. A scandalous link between prostitution and women’s advance–disseminated in the late 1790s and renewed by Victorians–led a new generation of feminists to distance themselves from Wollstonecraft, lest her supposedly dissolute life should damage the Cause. Instead of questioning the transmission of fact, many (like political economist Harriet Martineau) chose to side with detractors. In 1885, when Karl Pearson founded the high-minded Men and Women’s Club to discuss the nature and relations of the sexes, he wished to name the club after Mary Wollstonecraft. Her Vindication was discussed and circulated, but women members refused. Wollstonecraft was not respectable.

  Volleys of slanders lined up to finish off her new genus. ‘She fancied that she who was merely a woman of lively, but neither strong nor profound genius, was a phenomenon of nature, born to give new direction to human opinion and conduct,’ was the close shot from Pitt’s propaganda machine in July 1798 (in response to the second edition of Godwin’s Memoirs). The most effective damage is when detraction creeps close to truth, killing it with elegant economy. ‘Fancied’ and ‘merely’ are all it takes. Wollstonecraft’s benevolence to her family and the poor, ‘hurried on by her feelings’ and uncontrolled by reason, was the second target. The third shot followed automatically: her constitution ‘was very amorous’. So the Woman Question was born anew–unconnected with Wollstonecraft–in the mid-nineteenth century, after a hiatus of fifty years. This myth ignores the transmission of the new genus through Mary’s daughters and heirs in the next generation, an independent set who seeded new species and kept them going underground.

  16

  CONVERTS

  Wollstonecraft’s was an interrupted life. The eager vehemence of a voice breaking off in mid-sentence and the originality of unfinished books continued to shape lives bound up with her own. Nearly three years after her death, in the summer of 1800, Godwin travelled to Dublin to pick up some ends. There, on 5 July, he met for the first time Mary’s sister Bess whose fine brown eyes and civilities put him at ease. As much as he likes her, he reports to Marshall, he ‘hates’ Everina–though ‘hate’ is not a word to repeat to her nieces, Mary aged two and a half and Fanny aged six. More curious was the prospect of an encounter with his wife’s favourite pupil whom she had known as Margaret King, now Lady Mount Cashell.

  She was in Dublin for the summer, Godwin heard. Her friend John Philpot Curran, the lawyer who had defended Rowan and other United Iri
shmen, reported to Godwin that she ‘speaks of you with peculiar regard, mixed with a tender and regretful retrospect to past times and to past events with which you have yourself been connected’.

  They met on 9 July when they dined with the politically independent Lady Moira, her daughter Selina, and her son-in-law the Earl of Granard, in a house overlooking the Liffey. At twenty-nine, Margaret had recently begun to bring her life into line with Mary Wollstonecraft’s. She was keen to discuss questions of politics and education, and welcomed Godwin to Mount Cashell House on St Stephen’s Green. He dined there on 13, 21 and 28 July. On the last of these days, Margaret took him together with two of her children to the Devil’s Glen, surrounded by ‘stupendous’ rocks and mountains. Beside her in her cabriole, Godwin eyed her, half-amused, half-wary. She was handsome, but her folded, ‘brawny’ arms were bared to the shoulder and her dress lacked the ‘linen’ to hide her cleavage–up to now, Godwin had associated its absence with the grey and grinding poverty of Mrs Fenwick. As his new friend’s breasts obtruded on his notice, he may not have realised she was six months pregnant. He observed her irregular teeth and ‘white eyes’ while she declared herself a democrat and republican. Her intelligence was undeniable, but instinctively he recoiled from a woman with much to say. Here was a ‘singular’ being who could be ‘gibbeted’ in a play. The manner of the great lady consorted oddly with her radical opinions, yet Margaret was genuinely keen to learn from Godwin.

  ‘In what you say concerning the propriety of treating children with mildness, kindness, and respect, you express exactly the opinions I have long entertained,’ she said with a veiled reference to the blend of severity and emotional neglect she had known at the hands of Lady Kingsborough.

  She confided to Godwin how much Mary Wollstonecraft had changed her.

  ‘I am convinced that had it not been my peculiar good fortune to have met with the extraordinary woman to whose superior penetration and affectionate mildness of manner I trace the development of whatever virtues I possess, I should have been, in consequence of the distortion of my best qualities, a most ferocious animal.’

  After her governess had left, Margaret was soon of an age to ‘go to market’. Mary Wollstonecraft had taught that early marriage is a bar to improvement: ‘many women, I am persuaded, marry a man before they are twenty, whom they would have rejected some years after’. The mistake of Margaret’s life was to marry Stephen Moore, 2nd Earl of Mount Cashell, in September 1791 when she was twenty. He, at twenty-one, was a good-looking young man with gentle manners. Apart from his seat at Moore Park near Kilworth, in flat agricultural land near Mitchelstown, he also owned a grand Dublin house where he stayed while the Irish House of Lords was in session. In truth, he had little interest in politics, and preferred the country. His horizons were bounded by turnips, rams, stallions, cows and bulls. Marriage locked Margaret to a husband whose education, she said, ‘had been of the meanest sort: his understanding was uncultivated and his mind contracted’. Wealth and titles were all he cared for. She had been aware that his character was ‘perfectly opposite’ to hers, and had thought to change it, as she herself had been changed by Mary Wollstonecraft. In the freshness of youthful confidence, Margaret had expected to govern him–‘the silliest project that ever entered a woman’s mind’, she owned later.

  Like her mother, Lady Kingsborough, Margaret was fertile. There were six births in the eight years between 1792 and 1800, and five children survived: Stephen (Lord Kilworth), Robert (whose amiable nature made him her favourite), Helena, Edward and Jane. As Margaret read her way through her twenties in the quiet of Moore Park, she drew apart from her husband. They could agree neither on politics nor on the education of their children. The Earl was disinclined to waste funds on something so worthless as education, since he meant his sons to follow him as country gentlemen–running the estate and making agricultural improvements. Determinedly, Margaret engaged United Irishman John Egan as a tutor. Politicised by Mary Wollstonecraft, who had pointed to the poor as victims, Margaret questioned the inequities and incompetence of landowner government.

  In May 1794, at the time Rowan was tried for treason and fled to Paris, United Irishmen were suppressed, and the society went underground as a revolutionary network bound by secret oaths. When a popular uprising came in the spring of 1798, Margaret, aged twenty-seven, was said to have declared herself a United Irishwoman and republican–but this is hearsay. Whether she actually took the oath (a capital offence) can’t be verified, nor a rumour that the cellars of Moore Park were used as a hideout. Safe to say, her sympathy–perhaps no more–with radical change fitted Mary Wollstonecraft’s teaching. It may not be entirely fortuitous that Wollstonecraft’s death coincided with Margaret’s first break with a family allied to the pro-Crown politics of Dublin Castle. The dead only die if we let them. Some, like Margaret Mount Cashell, ‘are born with the dead’ whose communication ‘is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living’.

  Margaret’s turn against the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy has a different shading from the glamour of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, a rebel-leader who knew Margaret and stayed occasionally at Moore Park. R. F. Foster has described his francophilia as ‘the current form of radical chic’, associated with a small intelligentsia ‘who preferred not to recognise the sectarian underpinning of all political activity in Ireland’. Fitzgerald, who had been in Paris in 1792, had a francophile associate in Arthur O’Connor, born in Mitchelstown eight years before Margaret. She acquired his 1798 pamphlet The State of Ireland, a protest against the ‘plunder’ of Irish resources, including England’s refusal to allow the colony to develop manufactures from its raw materials, which might compete with those of the imperial power. Meanwhile, the ‘land-sharks’, like the ‘tithe-sharks’, prowled after their ‘prey’–not the sort of thing a landowner like Mount Cashell would welcome in his library. The mind of Europe had changed, O’Connor claims: ‘See the armies of despotism advance against France and be annihilated by the armies of liberty.’

  On 17 May 1798, at the start of the rising, an idea was floated to kill all members of the Irish House of Lords when they collected for the trial of Margaret’s father. The plan was rejected by one vote, for fear of massive casualties as the United force broke through the soldiers on College Green. Fitzgerald was caught and died of wounds. It’s not known what Margaret thought of this, but we can gauge how far she diverged from her eldest brother, Big George, as commander of the notorious North Corks.

  His havoc outdid Mr Wollstonecraft, whose violence was confined to home. George promoted a form of torture known as ‘capping’, calculated to humiliate–to wound self-respect as well as the body. Men who cut their hair short in imitation of French republicans would have ‘caps’ of molten tar jammed on their heads by George and his men. One witness described their hideous acts:

  As a gentleman of respectability was passing near the old Custom House [Dublin], in the afternoon of Whit-Sunday, 1798, two spectacles of horror covered with pitch and gore, running as if they were blind through the streets arrested his attention. They were closely followed out of the old Custom House by Lord Kingsborough [Big George, who had succeeded by this time to the title], Mr John Beresford and an officer in uniform. They were pointing and laughing immoderately at these tortured fugitives, one of them John Flemming, a ferry-boatman, and the other Francis Gough, a coachman. They had been mercilessly flogged to extract confession, but, having none to make, melted pitch was poured over their heads and then feathered. Flemming’s right ear was cut off, both were sent off without clothes. Lord Kingsborough superintended the flogging, and almost at every lash asked them how they liked it.

  At the height of the Rising, when women came to plead for the lives of their kin, George raped some as fair exchange. He joked about his disappointment at having ‘only had two Maidenheads’. After the Rising was crushed in June, the British government resolved on Union, dooming Ireland to impotence and further poverty. Margaret defended her country’s independ
ence in three anonymous pamphlets, a woman taking political action as Mary Wollstonecraft had dared nine years earlier with her pamphlet exposing the self-interest of Burke. Margaret was thinking along similar lines when she published this warning:

  I cannot perceive what advantage it would be to Ireland to have a servile, artful and ambitious native of that country pursuing his own interest in the British Cabinet, nor how it could benefit our island to have him reproached with being an Irishman. Would this produce any commercial advantages to our cities? Would this occasion any civilization in our provinces?

  Political union could not be deflected, and by the time Margaret met Godwin in July 1800, reaction had ‘set hard’. Yet defeated as she was, alongside more famous defenders of Irish independence, she did assent to a different sort of union.

  This was the only kind open to women: a private bond between the Irish Margaret and the English Mary Wollstonecraft, beginning in 1786 and carried through to the end of Margaret’s life. Together they present an alternative to the routine narratives of ‘dominant history’. A counter-narrative to dominance is this women’s story of successive generations, as Margaret, nearing thirty, starts to command her own voice. The voice comes first; next, the challenge to leave a beaten track. Between 1800 and 1804 she lingered in an old track, much as Wollstonecraft had done during her period as Margaret’s governess.