Vindication

‘I want to see…’: MWL, 227; MWletters, 217.

  ‘the lash’: RM. See below, ch. 7.

  ‘I am…pushes me on’: MWL, 164; MWletters, 139.

  wildness: English Woman’s Journal, cited by Caine, ‘Victorian Feminism’, 268. Harriet Martineau called her a ‘poor victim of passion’ in 1855.

  ‘romantic sentiments’: RW, ch. 13, sect. ii.

  ‘firmest champion’ and ‘the greatest ornament’: Memoirs, ch. 9.

  ‘Europe was rejoiced…’: The Prelude, Book VI.

  ‘Every day…’: Woolf, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’. 3‘a foolish consistency…’: Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Self-Reliance’.

  ‘an experiment from the start’: Woolf, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’.

  ‘mad’…‘licentious’: John Adams, marginalia in his copy of FR.

  ‘little short of monstrous’: ‘A Heart that Scorned Disguise’, Times Literary Supplement (21 Apr. 2000), 36.

  Ned Wollstonecraft: Cousin to Edward Bland, who had been first officer on Grandfather Wollstonecraft’s part-owned ship, the Cruttendon.

  ‘apparent partiality’: Mary, ch. 2.

  ‘harsh’: MW to BW (17 Aug. [1781?]), MWL, 76; MWletters, 31.

  ‘women…’: Kames (1696–1782) participated in the Scottish Enlightenment as a writer on law, history and farming. His Elements of Criticism was published when MW was three years old.

  divide…between worker and gentleman: A telling instance of this divide is what happened to John Ruskin when he arrived as an undergraduate at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1837: though he had the gifts to be a scholar, his social-climbing parents had insisted on entering him instead for the higher class of gentlemen-commoners, who proceeded to ridicule Ruskin when his first essay was chosen to be read aloud. Gentlemen scorned work, and it was customary to bribe a scout (a college servant) to write the required weekly essay. (John Batchelor, John Ruskin: No Wealth but Life, London: Chatto, 2000, 36–7.)

  ‘a gentleman’s daughter’: Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, ch. 56.

  ‘an old mansion…’: Elizabeth Osborne, The History of Essex (1817), cited in SC, i, 40. Her information came from WG as well as hearsay.

  New Farm and neighbours: Alternatives could be Reeves Gate Farm or Hay Hill Farm. Todd, Wollstonecraft, assumes plausibly that Grandfather Wollstonecraft provided for this farm, and notes Mr Gascoyne’s origins in London trade.

  ‘reveries’: MW, Travels, letter 8.

  MW’s attempts to protect her mother: Memoirs, ch. 1.

  ‘Mary was continually in dread’: Mary, ch. 2.

  father beat her: WG to JJ (11 Jan. 1798). Abinger: Dep. b.227/8.

  status of women in Anglo-Saxon England: Whitelock, Beginnings, 45, 87, 94, 150–1. Legal historian Anthony Honore tells me that slaves in the Roman Empire, women as well as men, had a mass of legal rights which we might think of as human rights.

  The Lawes Resolutions: Fraser, Weaker Vessel, 527.

  Burney on marriage: Early Journals, cited by Harmon, Fanny Burney, 72.

  law and domestic violence: The Hardwicke matrimonial law was only slowly unpicked in the latter half of the nineteenth century. As late as the end of the twentieth, legal redress and protection from domestic violence were still at issue.

  farm at Walkington: Todd, Wollstonecraft, 459, notes a local tradition that the farm was the present mixed farm of Broadgate just off the road from Beverley to York, but there is no firm evidence of this.

  ‘a very handsome town…’: Memoirs, ch. 1.

  isolation of child victims of violence: Herman, Trauma, 99–100, 105. I am grateful to Margaret Bluman for recommending this innovative study.

  letters to Jane Arden while they were at school: MWL, 51–64; MWletters, 1–18.

  Yorkshire idiom: Used to GI in 1794, MWL, 247; MWletters, 244.

  on John Arden: His granddaughter Everilda Gardiner, Recollections.

  ‘The good folks…’: MWL, 66; MWletters, 23.

  leaving Yorkshire: Durant’s Supplement, gives the date as Sept. 1774 though the date of Henry’s apprenticing suggests 1775 as more likely.

  Henry’s fate: Insanity or criminality suggested by Sunstein, Wollstonecraft, 36ff.

  WG avoiding Henry’s name: WG does note that one of MW’s brothers predeceased her; i.e. he tells us indirectly that Henry was dead when his memoir of 1798 cites the brothers and sisters of MW who ‘are still living’. How Henry died remains unknown.

  Henry and Hoxton’s asylums: Todd, Wollstonecraft, 21.

  ‘amiable Couple…took some pains’: MW to Jane Arden, MWL, 66; MWletters, 24.

  meeting Fanny: Memoirs, ch. 2.

  Blood family background: Todd, Wollstonecraft, 23.

  Flora Londinensis: Bodleian.

  the Revd Mr Bishop: EW to WG (Nov. 1797) distinguishes him from the Mr Bishop who was to marry BW in 1782.

  MW’s education: Wagner and Fischer, Pforzheimer Collection, 25, suggest plausibly that education was more important for MW than feminism.

  ‘the prejudices’: Memoirs, Appendix, 277. WG’s revision of ch. 10 for the second edition.

  2 ‘SCHOOL OF ADVERSITY’

  ‘school of adversity’: Education, MWCW, iv, 36.

  ‘keen blast of adversity’: MWL, 69; MWletters, 27.

  ‘right of directing’; ‘forwardness’: WW, ch. 7.

  bequest from their Dickson grandfather: MW sent ‘several letters’ to a Mr Dickson in the summer of 1780 which, Wardle’s notes to her letters suggested, had to do with money.

  Balthazar Regis: Educated at Trinity College, Dublin. Chaplain to the King 1727–57 and Canon of Windsor 1751–7. Died in 1757.

  entering Bath: There is a profusion of contemporary detail in Jane Austen’s Persuasion, ch. 14.

  ‘flattery…wear a cheerful face, or be dismissed’: Education, 25.

  pay for companions: Hufton, History of Women, 79.

  MW’s management of Mrs Dawson: Memoirs, ch. 2.

  ‘very good understanding’: To Jane Arden, MWL, 69; MWletters, 27.

  ‘A mind accustomed…’: Education, 48–9.

  ‘Women are…’: Lord Chesterfield, Letters i, 330. A play on Dryden’s ‘Men are but children of another growth’ in All for Love.

  Waterhouse: W. H. S. Jones, St Catherine’s College, 129. In 1798, when he rigged votes so as to elect himself Master, Waterhouse instigated the worst quarrel in the history of the college. Three of the five Fellows who voted made the following declaration: ‘We whose names are underwritten declare this to be no Election, no one of us having voted for Mr Waterhouse.’ The Lord Chancellor declared against Waterhouse. In 1801 the Lord Chancellor was called in again over the diversion of a share in the dividends of a vacant fellowship into Waterhouse pockets. Ousted eventually from the college, he lost his glamour, and became mean and slovenly. As Rector of Little Stukely in Huntingdonshire, he was murdered on 3 July 1827 by Joshua Slade, a dismissed servant.

  ‘I knew a woman…’: Education, 29; SC, i, 46–7; Nitchie, ‘Early Suitor’, 163–9.

  MW and the Ardens: Quotations not noted separately below are from the second batch of letters to Jane Arden in 1779–c. 1783; see MWL, 64–80; MWletters, 19–39.

  Jane Arden as governess: Everilda Gardiner, Recollections.

  ‘I should be glad…’: MWL, 67; MWletters, 26.

  visit to Southampton: It’s probable that she stayed with a Wollstonecraft relation. MWL, 70, notes the existence of an Edward Bland Wollstonecraft of Gloucester Square, Southampton, who died in 1795–likely to be (as MWletters, 26, adds) the first officer of Grandfather Wollstonecraft’s ship the Cruttendon, a share of which he, as a grandson, inherited.

  ‘truth…’: Education, 16.

  Gunning sisters: Murray, High Society, 253.

  stays: It was considered indecent not to wear them. CC’s mother and stepfather, WG, were relieved when she took to wearing stays in 1817 after she ran away (see below, ch. 17). The sense of indecency remained as late as the early years of the twentieth centu
ry. When the feminist Olive Schreiner walked without stays down Adderley Street in Cape Town, after the Boer War, she heard hoots and insults.

  sombre grandeur; ‘measured pace of thought’; ‘Life…?’: Travels, letter 7.

  MW’s efforts for mother: Memoirs, ch. 2.

  father’s view of mother’s illness; ‘I shall not dwell…disagreeable’: Draws on WW, ch. 8.

  date of Mrs Wollstonecraft’s death: Discovered by Tomalin, Mary Wollstonecraft.

  James…went to sea: Aboard HMS Carysfoot: Durant’s Supplement, 155.

  ‘the dear County of Clare’: To Jane Arden, MWL, 78; MWletters, 37.

  ‘Few men…’: Education, 26.

  Her favourite song: MW to WG [3 July 1797], MWL, 402; MWletters, 426, notes: ‘Allan Ramsay’s poem The Kind Reception, sung to the tune of Auld Lang Syne. It opens with “Should auld Acquaintance be forgot/ Though they return with Scars?”’.

  ‘canker-worm’: Mary, ch. 5. Some details of the character Ann are based on Fanny’s history.

  marriage versus MW’s wish to be free: In English law the unattached woman was termed the feme-sole as distinct from the woman who had no legal existence apart from her husband, the feme-covert. To declare aversion to marriage was seen as resistance to performing the only function–to propagate the species–for which woman existed. To earn a living in trade, to be a mantua-maker for instance, was sometimes looked on as a form of prostitution. As late as the 1840s, Charlotte Brontë’s friend Mary Taylor emigrated to New Zealand in order to start a business. It was still unthinkable in England for a woman to do so on her own, and though Mary Taylor did amass a modest sum in the new colony, she had to put up with jeers.

  baby Mary: The child’s full name was Elizabeth Mary Frances, but she was called Mary according to a letter from MW to EW.

  held Bess in her arms: MW to BW (23 Sept. [1786]), MWL, 113; MWletters, 78: ‘I could have clasped you to my breast as I did…when I was your nurse.’

  Her ideas are all disjointed…’: MWL, 80; MWletters, 39 (replacing Wardle’s (MWL) reading of ‘unconnected’ thoughts with ‘uncorrected’). Wardle’s makes better sense (in the context of senselessness) and fits the repetition of ‘unconnected’ in the similar situation of WW, ch. 2.

  ‘Poor Eliza’s situation’: MWL, 81; MWletters, 40.

  ‘One of the most terrible…’: Stone, Marriage in England, 168.

  not the only loving mother: One of Jane Austen’s brothers would be given up to better fortune; while Byron gained custody of his daughter Allegra from her extremely loving mother (ch. 17 below).

  ‘monstrous intervention’: Times Literary Supplement (21 Apr. 2000).

  MW unsure: This continues to be overlooked in a persistent demonisation of MW (see ch. 15 below), lasting from her lifetime to a renewed round of attacks in the year 2000. An exception was Kate Chisholm in the Sunday Telegraph (30 Apr. 2000): ‘What else could she have done?’

  Fanny Blood’s letter: Abinger: Dep. b. 210 (9).

  3 NEW LIFE AT NEWINGTON

  ‘humane’: MWL, 93; MWletters, 55.

  ‘exertions…twenty scholars’: EW to WG (24 Nov. 1797). Abinger: Dep. c.523; extract of letter in SC, i, 45.

  Disney family: Included the liberal Unitarian theologian, John Disney (1746–1816).

  Miss Mason: SC, i, 87, identifies Mason as MW’s servant. It is true that to use a surname alone, as MW occasionally does in speaking of ‘Mason’, was usual with servants, but could there be other reasons? Men used surnames, and MW imitates this when she publishes extracts from her works, later, in an anthology (see below, ch. 7). An interesting suggestion appears in Todd’s notes to MWletters, 4: a minister at Driffield, about ten miles north of Beverley in Yorkshire, was William Mason (1724–97). He was one of the ‘Driffield Bards’ mentioned in a poem MW copied out for Jane Arden in 1773. Was ‘Mason’ a relative? The clergy background fits MW’s later linking of her with Mrs Gabell, a clergyman’s wife who has ‘clearness of judgement’. (See below, ch. 9.)

  Fanny confided: Memoirs, ch. 3.

  Sowerby: He eventually contributed two and a half thousand illustrations to Sir Edward Smith’s English Botany (1790–1814), and brought out his own Coloured Figures of English Fungi (1797–1815).

  past and present inhabitants of Newington Green: Defoe studied at Morton’s Academy in the 1670s, and farmed civet cats (for perfume) in 1692. D’Israeli was the father of the Victorian Prime Minister, Disraeli. Anna Laetitia Aikin, afterwards Mrs Barbauld, who published Lessons for children (1781), grew up in Newington Green. Anne Stent and James Stephen were the great-grandparents of Virginia Woolf.

  Poe: Recalls Newington Green and the Revd Dr Bransby’s school (where he studied 1817–20) in his tale ‘William Wilson’.

  MW attended services: It was not uncommon for Latitudinarian Anglicans to mix with Dissenters.

  Burgh’s tomes: Collected as The Dignity of Human Nature (1754–67) and culminating in his three-volume Political Disquisitions (1774–5), which took a reformer’s view of taxation without representation–he, too, published a pamphlet in support of the American revolt against the Crown.

  ‘I am sick…’; ‘I wish…’: Education, 11, 21.

  ‘words of learned length’: From Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village (1770), lines 211–14: ‘…words of learned length, and thund’ring sound/ Amazed the gazing rustics rang’d around’.

  ‘A florid style’: Education, 21.

  ‘Each child’: Preface to Real Life, 360.

  Jane Austen: Tomalin, Jane Austen, 34–7.

  ‘mass of flesh’; ‘superior dignity’: Burgh, Human Nature, 76–7, 276.

  ‘as if I had been her daughter’: MW to BW (23 Sept. [1786]), MWL, 113; MWletters, 78.

  ‘I love most people best…’: (20 July [1785]), MWL, 92; MWletters, 54.

  ‘When I think…’: Gardiner, Recollections, 4, quotes this letter (2 July 1785).

  ‘With children…’: Memoirs, ch. 3.

  religious utopianism: During MW’s stay in Newington Green, Dr Price was preparing a new edition of his most famous work, A Review of the Principal Questions in Morals(1758).

  ‘next to the introduction of Christianity…’: Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution (1784).

  couldn’t have cared less: Priestley, ‘Death of Dr Price’.

  Mirabeau co-opts Dr Price: Tyson, Joseph Johnson, 85–6.

  ‘when the Dissenters…’: Price, Correspondence, ii, 236, to an American friend, Ezra Styles, from Newington Green (15 Oct. 1784).

  the unprecedented setting of New World republicanism: Robert A. Ferguson, ‘The American Enlightenment 1750–1820’, in Cambridge History of American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch, i, 380–5.

  ‘Blue-stocking Club’: A vivid portrait in Harmon, Fanny Burney, 180–1. See Le Doeuff, Sex of Knowing, for the history of the term. Blue worsted stockings, knitted in thick, warm wool, were originally worn in England by men at home. In the seventeenth century the term evolved to refer to the Parliament of 1653–suggesting that Cromwell’s supporters were unconcerned with matters of dress. A century later the term referred to a group of men who preferred literary debate to cards, linking intellect with socially aberrant appearance. Both in English and French (bluestocking: bas-bleu) there was then a transfer of meaning across the sexes to a woman interested in intellectual matters–retaining a connotation of ignorance of social niceties. Le Doeuff places it with ‘intuition’ in a category of terms, once used for men, that get transferred as cast-offs to women and function as a deterrent to women’s intellectual aspirations.

  ‘never thrive’: MWL, 98; MWletters, 61.

  the American model of ‘rights’: Exercised in a series of declarations by the first Continental Congress of American states in October 1774, which had led to their nine-year battle to free themselves from British rule.

  ‘to the United States…’: Cited in article on Price in the old Dictionary of National Biography.

  the Lond
on Friends of the People: Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels & Reactionaries, 42.

  ‘the whole scope of my life’: McCullough, Adams, 417.

  ‘This is the 3d Sunday…’: Abigail Adams, Adams Family Correspondence, vi, 196.

  ‘a new order…’: Quoted in McCullough, Adams, 348.

  ‘snearing’: Abigail Adams to Cotton Tufts (18 Aug. 1785), Adams Family Correspondence, 283.

  ‘titled Gamesters’: Abigail Adams to sister (15 Sept. 1785), ibid. 361.

  ‘If I live…’: ‘Abigail Adams, ‘Return Voyage’, 215.

  ‘I thank you Miss W.’: Adams read FR twice (in 1796 and 1812), adding about twelve thousand words of combative marginalia (more than in any other of his books). Here was a conservative versus a radical, a man versus a woman who dares to enter the masculine arena. He did, though, respect her enough to concede her status as an honorary male. See below, ch. 10 and internet site for this book.

  Jefferson to Price: Price, Correspondence, iii, 261–2. See also Washington’s response to Price’s advice, 324–5.

  ‘Circular to the States’: This was known at the time (1783) as ‘Washington’s Farewell to the Army’, and Ferguson, ‘American Enlightenment’, calls it a text Americans ‘no longer know how to read’, though arguably the most important document in the America of the 1780s.

  contrast of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution: I owe this point to Sacvan Bercovitch, in conversation in Newton, Mass. (June 2000).

  ‘the abominable traffick’: RW, ch. 9. On this, the economy of the Southern states depended. Because of their pressure, the clause condemning slavery (acceptable to Washington and Jefferson) had been deleted from the Declaration, and would remain unresolved until Lincoln ruled against slavery in 1863 in the course of the American Civil War. The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery, was ratified in 1865 at the close of the Civil War.

  Judge Mansfield’s ruling: The conservatism and limited intentions of Judge Mansfield have been proved beyond doubt by Gerzina, Black England, ch. 4, ‘Sharp and Mansfield: Slavery in the Courts’, 106–23.

  Price to Jay: Price, Correspondence, ii, 292–93.

  MW and Price sharing ideas on education: She read Rousseau only later (see below, ch. 5 and 6), when she came to question his attitudes to women, which is given powerful expression in RW. During her career she both absorbed and knocked against Rousseau’s ideas.