Vindication

by Lyndall Gordon

  ‘Poor tender friendly soul’: MW to BW (23 Sept. 1786), MWL, 115; MWletters, 79.

  sizar: See footnote on Waterhouse at Cambridge (above, ch. 2). Since Hewlett came from a landed background, this poor status suggests a problem about money. Either his father had become impoverished or had cut him off for some reason, perhaps his marriage.

  Dr Johnson’s eccentricities: See James Boswell, Life of Johnson (1791), Mrs Thrale’s letters, and for a caricature, Virginia Woolf, Orlando, ch. 4.

  Dr Johnson on beggars: Boswell, Life. Johnson was sixty-seven in 1776.

  Dr Johnson and MW: Only record is in Memoirs, ch. 3.

  Dr Johnson as conservative who opened up brave new world: Dr Paddy Bullard, lecture, ‘Dr Johnson versus Lord Chesterfield’, Oxford University, 7 May 2003.

  Dr Johnson’s romantic tenderness: Harmon, Fanny Burney, 126–7.

  Dr Johnson as rationalist: Prof. Roger Lonsdale, lecture on Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, Oxford University, c. 1998.

  Dr Johnson on Pope: In the last of his Lives of the Poets.

  melancholy admired: Todd, Wollstonecraft, 75.

  Dr Johnson on melancholy: Rambler, nos 85, 103.

  ‘constant nature’: ‘The Natural Beauty’, publ. in the Gentleman’s Magazine, Feb. 1784; repr. by MW in The Female Reader, MWCW, iv, 142.

  Smallweeds: Dickens, Bleak House.

  4 A COMMUNITY OF WOMEN

  Fanny’s letter to the ‘dear lasses’: Abinger: Dep. b. 210(9).

  ‘He is such a man…’: MWL (20 July [1785]), 91; MWletters, 53.

  ‘She is still very ill’: MWL (14 Aug. [1785]), 97; MWletters, 59.

  ‘difficulties’; ‘grown indefatigable’: MWL (4 Sept. [1795]), 98–9; MWletters, 61.

  letter from Lisbon: MWL, 100–1; MWletters, 63–4.

  ‘looks I have felt…’: Travels, letter 6; cited in Memoirs, ch. 3.

  ‘by stealth’: Memoirs, ch. 4.

  Palmer’s fraud: KP, i, 175.

  ‘the most uncivilised nation…’: Mary, ch. 14. MW quotes Dr Johnson’s saying ‘they have the least mind’. She used her experience of Portugal for her review of Arthur Costigan’s Sketches of Society and Manners in Portugal, AR (Aug. 1788); MWCW, vii, 29–32.

  wreck and rescue: Mary, ch. 20.

  ‘very disagreeable’: This and most subsequent details of the following months come from MW’s letters to George Blood. MWL, 101–12; MWletters, 66–77.

  Dr Johnson’s elegy: ‘On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet’ (1783), line 4: ‘Our social comforts drop away.’ MWL, 93; MWletters, 55.

  ‘cordial of life’: MWL, 110; MWletters, 74.

  ‘tenderness’: Education, 37.

  ‘whole train…’: MW to George Blood (27 Feb. [1786]), MWL, 103; MWletters, 67.

  ‘replete’: John Hewlett, Sermons (London: Rivington & J. Johnson, 1786). Published by subscription (subscribers included various people at Newington Green, Shacklewell and Islington: Mr Church and a Mr Price in Islington; Mrs Burgh, Thomas Rogers, Mr and Mrs Cockburn at the Green; and two teachers at Christ’s Hospital, Mr Benjamin Green, a drawing-master, and Mr William Wilcox).

  ‘the issues of life’: Proverbs 4: 23. ‘Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.’ Quoted in Hewlett’s sermon, and echoed in MW’s chapter ‘On the Misfortune of Fluctuating Principles’, Education, 42.

  ‘sublime harmony’: Ibid., 18.

  ‘Lothario’: BW to EW (17 Aug. 1786). Abinger: Dep. b. 210(7).

  ‘plunge’: MW to George Blood (1 May [1786]), MWL, 105; MWletters, 68.

  provincial narrowness: BW to EW (17 Aug. 1786). Abinger: Dep. b. 210(7).

  ‘very affectionate’ letter’: MWL, 113; MWletters, 78.

  Education as the fruit of long thought: It is often said that she wrote too fast. This is the age-old putdown (satirised by George Eliot in the voice of a provincial schoolmaster in The Mill on the Floss) that if a woman be quick, she must be shallow.

  ‘so different from nature’; ‘those who imitate it’: Education, 20.

  ‘The passion…’: Ibid., 28.

  editorial note: Cited by Todd, Wollstonecraft, 77.

  daughters’ education less constricted in the past: Deft summaries in Hufton, History of Women, 421–37; and in Stone, Marriage in England, 142–4, on ‘The Education of Women’ in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

  Katherine Parr’s intellectual attainments: Weir, Six Wives, 514–23, 549–50.

  strong women emerging during the Civil War: Stevie Davies, Unbridled Spirits: Women of the English Revolution 1640–1660 (London: Women’s Press, 1998).

  Basua Makin: Fascinating details in Fraser, Weaker Vessel.

  Catchat: Wright, Female Vertuosos, III, i, cited by Fraser, 378.

  ‘affected’; ‘designed to hunt…’: RW, ch. 5, sect. ii. MW refers here specifically to Fordyce.

  kinds of advice; Halifax and Fordyce: One of these advice books was Advice to a Daughter by George Savile, Marquess of Halifax; MW would publish an extract on the dangers of passion in her anthology, The Female Reader (1789). A popular preacher of the Scottish Enlightenment, Dr Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women was the most widely read in this genre in the England of the later eighteenth century. There were twenty reprints by 1800.

  The main women to precede MW with innovative advice are Mary Astell, in An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex (1696), which declares that as souls are equal, women’s minds should be developed to assist their salvation (the ‘Cause…of the defects we labour under is, if not wholly, yet at least in the first place, to be ascribed to the mistakes of our Education, which like an Error in the first Concoction, spreads its ill Influence through all our Lives’); the anonymous Sophia, a Person of Quality, whose Woman Not Inferior to Man (1739) argued that gender difference was a construct of education and custom, and that all professions should be open to women; and the respected educator Hester Chapone, who presents learning as a dignified consolation for women’s hard lot in Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, Addressed to a Young Lady (1773). Mrs Chapone also insisted that women aren’t naturally inferior to men. MW used an extract from the last in The Female Reader

  mocks one of Mrs Barbauld’s poems: ‘To a Lady, with some painted flowers’, RW, ch. 4, and MWCW, v, 122–3, 125.

  ‘bold…spirit’: More, Essays, 145.

  ‘I must be independant’: MW to George Blood (18 June [1786]), MWL, 107; MWletters, 71.

  MW realistic about the status of governess: Not for her the fantasy of high society, which would drop Charlotte Brontë into deep pits of disillusion.

  ‘’tis an unweeded garden’: Hamlet, I, ii, 135.

  A lawsuit: SC, i, 85–6. MWL, 111, 112n.; MWletters, 76.

  a creditor: MW to George Blood (6 July [1786]), MWL, 109; MWletters, 73.

  ‘uncommonly friendly’; ‘Mrs Burgh’s kindness’: MWL, 113–15; MWletters, 78–9.

  Clarissa dying: Richardson, Clarissa. Her protracted dying takes up the last third of the longest novel in the English language.

  5 A GOVERNESS IN IRELAND

  Mr Prior: I am grateful to Michael Meredith, Librarian at Eton College, for these facts.

  ‘actually on the road’; ‘witlings’: (9 Oct. [1786]), MWL, 117; MWletters, 79–80.

  a warped specimen: The higher a child’s prenatal testosterone, the less eye contact that child will make, unless inheritance be transformed–as up to a point it might–by training at home (Simon Baron-Cohen, Extreme Male Brain). See debate with Lynne Segal in ‘Sex on the Brain’, Guardian (3 May 2003).

  numbness: Joan Smith, Moralities, 97–8.

  ‘hotbeds’; ‘libertinism’; ‘tyranny and abject slavery’: RW, ch. 12, ‘On National Education’.

  ‘new ideas’: To EW (9 Oct. [1786]), MWL, 119; MWletters, 83.

  the ‘castle’: Mitchelstown Castle is no more. In Sept. 2000 I saw milk trucks trundle up this rise to the Dairygold butter factory which has replaced the last castle (rebuilt by Lord
Kingsborough’s heir George, the 3rd Earl, after his mother’s death in the 1820s). It was burnt down during the Troubles in 1922. Its stones were then carted off to build the Cistercian monastery of Mount Melleray. All that remains on the site is a pile of rubble on the edge of the hill overlooking what is now Mitchelstown’s sewage plant. Cattle graze across the valley on the next rise. It’s a tamer landscape than I had expected from Arthur Young’s books (see Bibliography) and MW’s letters–‘mountains’ topped by clouds had suggested more formidable peaks.

  the Ascendancy: Irish historian Roy Foster calls these the golden years, referring to the period from 1785 to the end of the century–terminating presumably with the Uprising of 1798 and the Act of Union in 1801 when the Ascendancy lost its separate Parliament.

  ‘the Bastile’: MW to BW (30 Oct. [1786]), MWL, 120; MWletters, 84. The fear of live burial, and the wall as barrier between being and nonexistence, is wonderfully imagined by Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, and repeated by Schama, Citizens, 394.

  violence in North Cork: Roy Foster in conversation, 20 Sept. 2000.

  a ‘solemn kind of stupidity’: MWL, 120; MWletters, 84.

  ‘decide with stupid gravity…’: Mary, ch. 11.

  servants dancing: MWL, 122; MWletters,

  85. Young, Tour, i, 446, describes dancing as almost universal amongst the poor. Dancing masters travelled across Ireland, at 6d a quarter, from cabin to cabin with a piper or blind fiddler. There were few who would not, after a hard day, walk seven miles for a dance.

  ‘the prettiest French expressions…’: Similar critiques of Lady K reappear in several of MW’s works. Here, from Mary, ch. 1.

  ‘Every part’ and quotations below: Except where indicated, all quotations about MW’s experience in Ireland are from her letters to her sisters and to George Blood, MWL, 120–54; MWletters, 84–127.

  ‘factitious’ femininity: See another critique of Lady K in the portrait of the dog-loving lady of fashion in RW, ch. 12.

  ‘unreadable’…bardic: Foster, Modern Ireland, 4–6.

  George’s official birth date ‘wrong’: King-Harmon, King House, 30, gives George King’s birth date as 1770. Many useful quotations from the King-Harmon Papers including some details from the 1st earl’s letters to his son.

  ‘the face of desolation’: Young, Tour, i, 460–2. Maria Edgeworth claimed that this book contained the most faithful picture of Irish peasantry ever to have appeared.

  Young and Lady Kingsborough: Young, Autobiography.

  Kingsborough’s Volunteers: Power, White Knights, 19.

  ‘gamy’: Foster, Modern Ireland, 169.

  Clonmell: Ibid., 176–7.

  ‘stupidity…victory’: Quoted by King-Harmon, The Kings, 31.

  Romney’s portrait of George: George Romney was a celebrated English portraitist of the day, along with Joshua Reynolds and Gainsborough. It was common at the time to present Eton College with a leaving portrait. George looks surprisingly innocent in this portrait, at the age MW knew him. Thanks to the Provost and English master Roland Martin.

  Mrs FitzGerald: The Colonel’s second wife, Mary Mercer, daughter and heir of Fairfax Mercer, of Fair Hill, Louth. As Caroline’s stepmother, she exercised a good influence, to judge by MW’s observations in 1786–7. The second Mrs FitzGerald lived till 1830, outliving her husband by fifty-four years.

  ‘just off to market’: As it turned out, only the youngest, Margaret, married.

  FitzGerald girls in Mary’s first novel: Mary, ch. 11.

  ‘baneful effects’: MM to WG (8 Sept. 1800), SC, i, 84.

  ‘a little fun not refined’: MWL, 123; MWletters, 87. Power, White Knights, 38, speaks of his exercise of the droit de seigneur. This is folklore, but could be borne out by this observation on the part of MW.

  overturned the regimentation: Memoirs, ch. 5: WG presumably heard this from MW herself.

  MW’s stories for children: The tradition of collections of moral tales for children originated with Sarah Fielding’s popular The Governess (1749). Each of nine girls tells her life story, illustrating a moral strength or weakness. The short lives use different genres, ranging from the moral fable to the fairy-story. Fielding’s strength lies in individualising the girls, whereas MW has more of an intellectual edge, and a wider social conscience, with a more radical view of diseased power. Both are withering about the airs of aristocratic girls. In Fielding’s book, a perfect model of wise womanhood is found in the girls’ governess Mrs Teachum, head of the Little Female Academy. There is no evidence that MW read this. Mme de Genlis published her miscellany of tales told to a family of children in 1784.

  Mme de Genlis on ‘luxury’ and ‘magnificence’: MW later inserts this extract in The Female Reader.

  ‘explain the nature of vice’; profligate lord’; ‘state’: Real Life, MWCW, iv, 359.

  ibid, 385, 387.

  Mrs Mason: Grandfather Wollstonecraft’s first wife was a Mason.

  ‘the society of my father’s house’: From MM’s revelations about her history for her youngest daughters. (See ch. 17 below.)

  ‘I wish to be…like Mrs Mason’: MWCW, iv, 389.

  alerted her pupils to falsehood: Ibid., iv, 384. This extract from Real Life is repr. in The Female Reader, MWCW, iv, 276–7.

  ‘narrow souls’: Mary, ch. 11.

  Ogle’s songs: The song was still popular at the start of the twentieth century. Burns described ‘Banna’s Banks’ as ‘heavenly’ and ‘certainly Irish’, but it was included in Wood’s Songs of Scotland in 1851. Some of Ogle’s songs appeared in Crofton Croker’s Popular Songs of Ireland.

  the Ogle family: Ogle , Ogle and Bothal, 213; also 133, 135, 215, 220. Further details in Burke’s Peerage.

  conversations of Ogle and MW: I’m drawing here on Mary, chs 12 and 18. In the novel, ‘Mary’ falls in love with ‘Henry’, but I’m assuming that’s fiction. All the other evidence suggests that MW found Ogle appealing as an intellectual who encouraged her, but that she was shocked by what appears in her letters to be his adultery with an unnamed woman.

  ‘of subtiler essence …’: MW quotes from Edward Young, The Complaint: or, Night-Thoughts, ‘Night the First’, line 100. Cited in Gary Kelly’s note to Mary, 213.

  ‘polished manners’: Ogle’s fictionalisation in Mary, ch. 24.

  distant connection: Assumed to be distant because it’s not traceable from the family records in Ogle , Ogle and Bothall. Dame Isabell Ogle had married, first, her cousin, an English admiral called Sir Challoner Ogle. The history of the Ogle line shows many different branches of the family.

  visit to the Baillies: MWL, 135; MWletters, 101.

  MW to JJ: MWL, 129–30; MWletters, 94–6.

  ‘into a consumption’: MWL, 139; MWletters, 108. This was in March 1787, three months after the fever.

  advocates the study of ‘physic’: Education, 34–5.

  ‘a GREAT favourite’: To BW , MWL, 131; MWletters, 97.

  6 THE TRIALS OF HIGH LIFE

  court case: SC, i, 85–6, has details of the suit.

  ‘disappointment’: To EW (15 May ([1787]), MWL, 153; MWletters, 126. Quotations about MW’s experience in Dublin, Feb.–May 1787, are from letters to her sisters, MWL, 134–54; MWletters, 101–27, unless otherwise indicated.

  without liberty, she would die: MWL, 130; MWletters, 97.

  ‘neglected in the education of women’: de Montolière, Caroline de Lichtfield, iii, 5.

  the house in Merrion Square: I have been unable to verify where MW stayed in Dublin. No address is given in her letters. In accepting Merrion Square I have followed Claire Tomalin. Biographers Janet Todd and Diane Jacobs follow SC, i, in assuming that MW and her employers stayed with the Earl of Kingston in Henrietta Street. Todd notes (MWletters, 82) that Henrietta Street is listed as the residence of Lady Kingsborough in A List of the Proprietors of Licences on Private Sedan Chairs, 25th March, 1787. It was the more prestigious of two possible addresses. Yet given Lady Kingsborough’s hatred of her mother-
in-law and refusal to continue to live with her some years back, I think it likely that she would have insisted on living, for the most part, in a Dublin home of her own, i.e. the alternative address in Merrion Square. What seems to weigh the balance towards Merrion Square is the fact that the Earl comes to dine with his daughter-in-law. ‘Her father-in-law had dined with her, and she repeatedly requested me to come down to the drawing-room to see him,’ MW wrote to EW on 25 Mar.: there would be no point in saying this unless the Earl came from another house.

  The Rotunda: Its profits helped Mosse’s Lying-In Hospital next door. The maternity hospital is still there, itself now called the Rotunda. The old Rotunda became a movie-house which is now closed and looks rather derelict.

  the most hospitable city: Travels, letter 2.

  Robert Home: Worked in Dublin in the 1780s, and went later to India where he made his fortune as painter to the Maharajah of Oude.

  a gift from George Blood: In MWL, 139, Wardle notes that the publisher, Bell, was bringing out two editions of Shakespeare in 1787: one in twelve volumes, ed. by Samuel Johnson and George Steevens, and another in sixteen volumes with Johnson’s and Steevens’s additional notes. I don’t agree with Wardle’s view that Blood’s gift would have been ‘more modest’, a single-volume edition of 1784 (a view repeated in Todd’s notes). It was in Blood’s nature to be extravagant; MW had long supported him and his parents in innumerable ways, and he’d finally settled into a position where he had a steady income; and finally, MW says clearly that it was a ‘new’ edition.

  Blair on genius and his influence on MW: Lectures, i, 52–4; ii, 36–7, 40–3, 47; iii, 19–21.

  ‘l’exercice…’: Epigraph to Mary–‘The exercise of the most sublime virtues raises and nourishes genius’.

  ‘a genius will educate itself’: Émile, book ii, cited in a letter to EW (24 Mar. [1787]), MWL, 145; MWletters, 114–15.

  eighteenth-century Henrietta Street: Information from the ‘Conservation Recommendations for Individual Building Elements for Henrietta Street, Researched for Dublin Corporation Historic Area Rejuvenation Project (Harp) by Dublin Civic Trust’, kindly photocopied in Sept. 2000 by Liam McNulty of the Society of Pipers at no. 15. Henrietta Street flourished 1720–1820. It began to decline when Leinster House (the Irish Parliament) was built, and fashion moved from north to south of the Liffey. What remains–now inhabited by the Society of Pipers–is half of the double-fronted house which the Kings inhabited. No. 16 was knocked down about fifty years ago.