Vindication

by Lyndall Gordon

  Mary Wollstonecraft had taught that women might ‘study the art of healing, and be physicians as well as nurses’. Margaret’s plan to study medicine was an ambition of this kind. With seven healthy children (all of whom would live full lives), she already had practical experience. She had not been one of those privileged women, like her mother, who left her children to hirelings. ‘In one thing alone have I succeeded for their advantage,’ she said, ‘and that is in giving them good constitutions, which I am convinced they owe to my good care during the first four or five years of their lives.’ It was an agony she never permitted herself to express to have surrendered six of the children, yet she was determined to build on the observation and expertise she had gained from motherhood in order to be ‘of use’ to other children. Jena was known for its medical school and liberal student body. Disguised as a man, Margaret Mount Cashell attended medical lectures at the university. Again, her height helped her disguise, and her German must have been good enough by this time; it was certainly good enough to translate, as she did, some medical texts.

  In years to come, Margaret revealed only the bare facts of her cross-dressing to two or three intimates. But a quasi-fictional manuscript (discovered amongst her papers by Cristina Dazzi, wife to an Italian descendant) allows a glimpse of the persona Margaret may have developed as a male. It purports to be the travel notes of a Frenchman whose chatter is as mundane as his history: he’s a harmless, rather sickly and plaintive traveller who goes to Jena soon after the battle and proudly inspects the positions of the French cannon on the battleground between Jena and Weimar. Jena’s surroundings, he finds, ‘are very pretty…and the town itself comes across as rather romantic with its old remaining walls and gothic towers’. He is marked wherever he goes for his French nationality. Why did Margaret choose to develop this character?

  Part of the answer may be her disguise as a man. French would have allowed her to pass as a stranger without revealing who she was. Her Italian at this point would have been negligible, and her German would have been recognisably not that of a native. It’s just conceivable that she wrote this travel piece to work up a man’s voice and account for her foreignness with a concocted history–a cover for an Irishwoman of thirty-five, seated amongst the tiers of medical students in a lecture theatre. She was not one to lower her head; in her breeches she would have sat as tall as at her tea-table in Dublin, arms characteristically folded across her breasts, and ready with the practised phrases of her story.

  Margaret’s husband stopped her funds. This is fictionalised in the piece which ends with a brave joke about encroaching poverty–far from the cosseted life of the Countess, Lady Mount Cashell: ‘…I have not received the money here[,] the money which I was expecting…I am beginning to experience what it is to be poor. I was advised by doctors to eat good food…and not to tire myself out. I am obliged to dine in a small way…and cannot get to my room without having to go up 89 steps. I am rather poor and close enough to the heavens to become a good poet but if that is not enough, I do not wish to become any poorer and climb any higher.’

  Poet she was not, but Margaret, pressed for funds, did begin to write for children. Stories of Old Daniel and Continuation of the Stories of Old Daniel were published, the first in 1807 and the sequel in 1820. As in Wollstonecraft’s stories, children were to learn from ‘real life’, but nothing in the Daniel stories is as sad as the fate of little Eliza whose mother was forced to hand her over to a father she scarcely knew. In 1807 Margaret made the journey to Ireland to give up this last child. Margaret never spoke of this except to say that she had been justly punished for breaking the laws of society. There is much pain that is soundless. Only the smallest hints may reach us: the fact that the two youngest Mount Cashell children, deprived at four and three of their mother, never married; or the fact that when Margaret and Tighe had a daughter called Laura (‘Laurette’) in 1809, she could not let this child out of sight or hearing. For many years Laurette slept in her mother’s room or adjoining it, and was never allowed to spend a night away.

  At length, in November 1812, a legal separation between Lord and Lady Mount Cashell was signed in London. She was to get £800 a year, and the settlement of her accumulated debts. Some advised her to stay in her husband’s London house–fortified of course by her title. But Margaret preferred independence as ‘Mrs Mason’ (the good governess in Wollstonecraft’s Real Life). Wollstonecraft had judged accurately the words she’d put into the mouth of Margaret’s counterpart in those stories: ‘I wish to be a woman and to be like Mrs Mason.’ Twenty-three years later, fiction became fact: Margaret as ‘Mrs Mason’ was ready to enter ‘that middle rank of life for which’, she said, ‘I always sighed’. It marked the end of her aristocratic identity.

  The defeat of Napoleon in 1814 opened the way through France to Tuscany. Margaret’s choice was a town she had seen briefly in 1803. Her lungs had continued to trouble her, and one of Pisa’s attractions was its reputation as a health resort. Another advantage was the decline, there, of English society. She wished to avoid Florence for that reason, and her determination to close her door to English connections suggests the exclusion she suffered during her stays in England between 1807 and 1814. Her choice of Pisa, though, had still more to do with medical ambitions. She was drawn not only by the renown of its medical school, she also wished to learn from Andrea Vaccà Berlinghieri (1772–1826), the famous professor of surgery at the University of Pisa known as ‘Dio della Medicina’, whose reputation attracted patients from England, Lisbon, the German principalities, and as far away as St Petersburg and Egypt. Vaccà (as she calls him) had studied under leading surgeons, Hunter and Bell in London and Pierre Joseph Dessault in Paris. As a student in Paris he had witnessed the fall of the Bastille. His radicalism had the same humane character as her own, so humane indeed that his republicanism did not prevent his being called in when a daughter of George III gave birth. He is one of the distinguished Italians in Byron’s dedication for canto IV of Childe Harold.

  In one way Margaret did not put her past behind her. Her attachment to Ireland speaks through the books she took to Italy: Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland (1596); A Narrative of what Passed at Killalla [County Mayo] during the French Invasion in the summer of 1798 (Dublin, 1800); Arthur O’Connor’s The State of Ireland (London, 1798); James Gordon’s History of the Rebellion in Ireland in the year 1798 (Dublin, 1801); and Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards by Joseph Walker (Dublin, 1786). Later, Margaret acquired Irish Melodies, National Airs by Thomas Moore (1823) and Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (1825).

  On 7 August, Margaret paid her final call on the Godwin family. At this time she also made a will, leaving all she had to Tighe. They arrived at Pisa on 18 October. It was a quiet city, with only eighteen thousand inhabitants in 1814. The family settled on the south side of the River Arno, in Casa Silva, a house with a garden shaded by walnut trees in the Via Mala Gonella, now 2 Via Sancasciani near the Church of S. Maria del Carmine. The garden remains, topped by high pines, on a corner facing the Via Pietro Gori as it runs south from the river. There, Margaret began to practise her ‘cures’ in consultation with Vaccà. He encouraged her prime idea that medical treatment of non-emergencies should be gentler, less interventionist, and doctors should avoid unnecessary drugs. In this she was ahead of much medical practice today. Like Mary Wollstonecraft she knew that sound care at home could prevent numerous deaths in childhood. Both women avoided the common extremes of neglect on the one hand and damaging treatments on the other–we recall how Mary shunned doctors, braving gossip in Le Havre, when Fanny had smallpox.

  Margaret also deplored the lucrative links between doctors and druggists, an issue George Eliot would bring to public notice through the scientific integrity of Dr Lydgate, bitterly challenged by the medical establishment in Middlemarch. Far in advance of her age, Margaret promoted the body’s own healing powers, and proposed preventative medicine.

  At the time she em
braced Pisa at the age of forty-three, another child–her last–was conceived, the girl who was to be the ancestor of a line of Italian descendants. On 20 June 1815 Catherine Elizabeth Ranieri (‘Nerina’) was born in Pisa. The girl’s middle name speaks more loudly than words of her mother’s pain at being forced by law to give up Elizabeth Mount Cashell eight years before–never to see her again. Margaret fancied that Nerina looked like her youngest son, Richard Mount Cashell, the boy born in Paris. Nerina was also thought to bear some resemblance to her mother’s favourite son, the amiable Robert, the only one to write and see his mother over the last ten years. He had joined the British Army, and the month after Nerina’s birth was badly wounded at Waterloo–it’s not known when, or how soon, or even if his mother was told. So effectively did her caste close ranks that slander had little to say to those outside the privileged circle–unlike the lasting public slander of Mary Wollstonecraft. When Miss Wilmot’s travels were published in 1920, the worst the editor could discover about her patron, Lady Mount Cashell, was that she was ‘imbued with what were then the most extravagant political notions’. The editor transmits a cover-up tale: in time, he says, she became ‘more prosaic. She was content to share her husband’s retirement at Moore Park, where she lived till his death.’ In other words, Lady Mount Cashell, as she had been, was no more. An entirely different and purposeful woman called Mason practised medicine–unofficially–in another country.

  It was her ‘religion to make the best of every thing’–this was her strength together with work. ‘I have always my medical studies & my patients, which do not allow me to be very idle,’ she said. Her consolations were her dispensary for the poor, her writing, and the two children who remained to her. She produced reading-books for children, dedicated to Nerina: Simple Stories for Little Boys and Girls and Stories for Little Boys and Girls, in Words of One Syllable. These are modelled more on the correctional aims of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories than on the maternal intimacy of her ‘Lessons’ for Fanny. Little Bob who, at four and a half, will not learn his ABC, is shamed at a fair by a pig who can spell; while Sal, who is ‘not a bad child’ but silly enough to parade her lace frock and plumed hat, wrecks them in a farmyard. Cross Ruth is shut off from friends, and orphaned Nell who slaps her cousin is put in ‘a dark room, at the top of the house’ until she learns to offer her hand with a smile. Compared with Wollstonecraft whose voice is warm with humorous affection–the familiar tone of parents today–Margaret’s reading-book is dated. Godwin, who had witnessed Wollstonecraft with Fanny, was probably right to think Margaret deficient in tenderness. A letter from Nerina is respectfully formal, addressing an exacting mother–not unlike Margaret’s own mother, Lady Kingsborough.

  Yet the loss of her seven Mount Cashell children did make Margaret anxious for Laurette and Nerina. Since her own health remained shaky, she wrote a set of ‘Memorandums respecting the children’, drawing on her medical experience. If fevered, children should be given plenty of liquids, she recommends. For a sore throat, the child must gargle with vinegar and honey in warm water. Vomiting should be encouraged at first with warm water, as it may be nature’s effort to liberate the body from excessive or infected food. Of course, should vomiting or any other symptom continue, it’s advisable to send for a good physician. She was not, then, ‘alternative’ in a dogmatic way; just sensible, as Mary Wollstonecraft had been in her insistence on cleanliness when Fanny was a baby. After Mary’s death, Godwin testified to her skill in childcare when he looked at Fanny: ‘She has…left a specimen of her skill in this respect in her eldest daughter…who is a singular example of vigorous constitution and florid health.’ When Margaret and the other King children had fevers, Mary had observed how they languished beneath the bedclothes in the presence of their mother’s indifference. As a mother herself, Margaret was attentive to what patients said, especially inarticulate children, and took quick action where necessary instead of prescribing palliatives that could postpone treatment until it was too late.

  Her cures were simple, homey, unthreatening to children, and refreshingly harmless. They compare favourably with eighteenth-century medical books filled with witches’ brews (viper was a common ingredient in tonics, and easily obtained from the apothecary); and they present a huge advance on misguided medical tortures inflicted on millions throughout the ages. ‘Madame Mason’ continued to defend midwives against the incursions of obstetricians: ‘the Midwives are very skilful & it is a mistake to suppose the aid of men necessary,’ she wrote. In childbirth, nature should be allowed to take its course. The placenta, she believed, should not be forced out–she would have known of the fatal consequences for Mary Wollstonecraft; it should take its own time to emerge, whether it be the usual ten minutes, or five hours, or even five days. Contrary as this is to present-day practice, her advice makes sense in an age when infection (not then understood) was the chief danger.

  In the early autumn of 1819, a set of visitors from London broke into this self-contained, professional life. The group consisted of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, aged twenty-two, and her stepsister Claire (Clara Jane) Clairmont, aged twenty-one, together with Mary’s husband Percy Shelley. On 30 September they came to the door of Casa Silva: Mary grave, milky-pale, and swollen in late pregnancy; Claire dark with a high colour, a cluster of black curls and wide black eyes; and the eccentric figure of the poet, showing the full length of his white neck–tinged with rose–from an open shirt, set off by a grey coat, like a dressing-gown, flapping at his heels. They were passing through Pisa on their way from Livorno to Florence. Mary presented a letter of introduction from her father.

  ‘Mrs Shelley, my daughter,’ Godwin had written, ‘thought it possible that in the course of her travels she might accidentally arrive at some town where one of her mother’s dearest friends had taken up residence.’ He went on hesitantly, unsure how Mary’s vagabond group would be received. If she were unwelcome, he adds, ‘you have only to put this billet in the fire; she will consider that is an answer sufficient’.

  The fears were groundless. Mrs Mason (as they called her) declared herself too ‘a vagabond on the face of the earth’. She kissed Claire twice, and rejoiced with Shelley in ‘the frankness of your or my character…You cannot abhor cant more than I do.’ Shelley’s complaints about his kidneys she judged to be harmless pains brought on by stress over the recent Peterloo Massacre, when, that August, workers in Manchester had gathered to petition for the reform of Parliament.

  ‘I have a sad opinion of the British Parliament,’ Margaret agreed. ‘Since my country sank never to rise again, I have been a cool politician, but I cannot forget how I once felt, & can still sympathize with those capable of similar feelings.’

  Letters pursued the Shelleys in Florence, urging their return, with offers of company, help, and medical advice for Mary’s newborn Percy Florence. Her advice again takes its sage tone from the voice Wollstonecraft had cultivated in Mrs Mason. This vein was not far off from the opinions of the great lady–and opinions came easily to a woman who had been Lady Mount Cashell. She thought Shelley should consult Dr Vaccà, happy though she was with her own diagnosis. ‘I am not sure that I should not myself be as good a physician for Mr S as any one, were not the first requisite wanting–I mean the confidence of the patient.’ So it happened that, late in January 1820, Mary, Claire and Shelley settled in Pisa. Their home was Casa Frassi on the Lung’Arno. Over the next three years, a daughter, a pupil and two followers of Mary Wollstonecraft formed an outcast society of their own.

  17

  DAUGHTERS

  A portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft had looked down on three girls as they grew up: on Godwin’s adopted daughter, Fanny Imlay; on his own daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin; and on his stepdaughter Clara Jane Clairmont. Opie’s grave portrait of 1797 was to become the lasting public image of Mary Wollstonecraft, on permanent exhibition in the National Portrait Gallery. In the opening years of the nineteenth century it still hung in what had been her study at
the Polygon. After her death this room became Godwin’s study, and here the continued presence of the dead broke through the limits of the lifespan. For girls growing up with Godwin, this thoughtful image of Mary Wollstonecraft was the model of what they must strive to be. No slander reached them; no questioning of marriage; no atheism. Faith was not absent from their home. The second Mrs Godwin was Catholic, and her own two children had attended the Chapel of St Aloysius in Somers Town. She took the view that one form of Christianity did not differ in essentials from another, so after her marriage to Godwin all the children attended Sunday service at St Paul’s. Godwin tested them on the sermon when they returned. In this home, religious conformity was endorsed, while the respectability of the second wife was ensured through two marriage ceremonies, in different places, to cover and legalise the alternate names she had used.

  Mrs Godwin was animated and hardworking, and these qualities seem to have sufficed in the main for so constant a man. His friends disliked her: a clever, second-rate woman without the finer sensibilities, Marshall judged. This new wife was given to ‘baby-sullenness’, Godwin discovered. Equable as he was, he did have to remonstrate over ‘the worst of tempers’. Twice, she threatened to walk out on the family. When she came back the second time Jane capered, but Fanny stood still in dismay. Her stepmother was moody, outspoken, and given to dramas. Similar, it might be thought, to the flaws of Mary Wollstonecraft, were it possible to separate those from the eager sympathy and truth. Once, while Godwin was away, he asked his wife to kiss her stepdaughters–but only if she could do so wholeheartedly. Fanny and Mary called her ‘Mamma’, though Mary loathed her–Mamma at once divined Mary’s romantic attachment to her father–while Fanny tried to see Mamma’s good points. Godwin was attracted by what he called her ‘unsinking courage under calamities that would have laid any other person level with the earth’. She told him a dramatic tale of going abroad alone to seek her fortune at the age of eleven. He believed her–but can we? She was liable to twist facts, and determined to fix her husband’s mind on money.