Vindication

by Lyndall Gordon

  ‘barbarous’ marital laws: Imlay, Emigrants, 46.

  ‘I have so many books…’: I have kept to the sequence of letters set out by WG in 1st edn of Letters to Imlay in Wollstonecraft, Posthumous Works, and followed by Wardle in MWL. Todd, MWletters, shifts this letter to an earlier, pre-Neuilly date, April–May, even though the letter refers to returning to Saint-Germain and needing a carriage for all the books, which would fit the August move. I’m not convinced that there is sufficient evidence to justify the shift of this letter. Its effect is interpretative: its intimacy, its sense of MW’s life bound up domestically with that of GI, bolsters a long-held idea of MW’s quick plunge into sexual intimacy. This is an idea I question, especially as it leads to accusations that MW was inconsistent, throwing off the chastity expressed in RW. The myth of MW as reckless wanton (discussed below, ch. 15) was reinforced by a parallel history of misreading her attachment to HF.

  soon was pregnant: It is assumed too literally that sex took place at the barrier since the child, Fanny, was later called ‘the barrier child’. MW would have used the phrase metaphorically–it was where desire stirred. Conceivably, it was at one of their meetings at the barrier that she and G I first spoke of having children.

  ‘Tant pis pour vous …’: Recorded in Crabb Robinson, Diary (2 Sept. 1817), after he visited HMW, who repeated MW’s friend von Schlabrendorf’s report of the exchange. Crabb Robinson, Books and their Writers, i, 209.

  10 RISKS IN LOVE

  Uncited quotations from MW’s letters to GI, RB and EW from Nov. 1793 to Sept. 1794 are in MWL, 237–62; MWletters, 232–63.

  The prisoners: The four Williamses were arrested on 12 Oct. The Frenchman who intervened was Athénèse Coquerel, who later married Cecilia Williams.

  GI’s news and MW’s faint: MW described this scene to Amelia Alderson, recorded in Brightwell, Memorials, 49. I change ‘suppose’ to the American ‘guess’ in order to rectify the transmission through an English vocabulary.

  closed women’s clubs: Proposed in the Convention of 30 Oct. Hufton, History of Women, 479; Schama, Citizens, 802. Their precise dates do not agree, but this happened between the end of Oct. and early Nov. 1793.

  executed Mme Roland: JJ subsequently published her memoirs, which MW may have helped to edit in 1795. The work on Mme Roland’s Appeal to Impartial Posterity (1795) was suggested by Tomalin, Mary Wollstonecraft, 179, followed by Todd, Wollstonecraft, 482, who notes similarities in opinion and tone with MW’s Travels.

  rising cost of soap: Schama, Citizens, 708.

  GI to Le Havre: JB’s friend Nathaniel Cutting was appointed US consul there in Mar. 1793. Morris, Papers.

  Wheatcroft’s safety: He travelled on a passport issued by the Committee of Public Safety in 1795. His destination was Scandinavia and the purpose was to give evidence in a case to do with one of GI’s ventures, the silver ship. See below, ch. 12.

  alum: A whitish transparent mineral salt used for printing and tanning, and an ingredient in potash, soda, ammonia and iron.

  ‘money-getting face’; ‘honest countenance’: c. Dec 1793.

  GI on commerce: Imlay, Topographical Description, 75.

  Wentworth taking prizes: This was the most accepted way for those without a fortune to make one.

  ‘Speculation’: Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ch. 25. Appropriately, it is the player (in every sense) Henry Crawford who inducts the uninitiated–the incorruptible Fanny Price and stupid Lady Bertram–into the game. Incidentally, WG attended a play called Speculation on 7 Nov. 1795.

  ‘We know not…’: Appropriated from Hardyment’s fascinating chapter (Perfect Parents, 29) on the medical and domestic applications of ‘Nature and Reason 1750–1820’.

  ‘The way to my senses…’: Soon after they began living together, c. Sept. 1793.

  truth and facelessness: Truth versus face exerts a similar moral power in the facelessness of Fanny Price in Mansfield Park, but only if the reader can resist the amoral allure of the siren Miss Crawford.

  GI on the soul’s sympathy: See above, ch. 9. He promised a society in which ‘sympathy was regarded as the essence of the human soul’.

  ‘I do not want…’: 2 Jan. 1794.

  glassware: A letter to GI and Leavenworth in Paris (22 Mar. 1795) from William Jackson (1759–1828), once a major in the Continental army, now Secretary to the Federal Convention and President Washington, asks GI why the glassware he has ordered and paid for in advance has not arrived. He argues that there must be numerous vessels sailing from France to Philadelphia. (Collector, lxiii (Feb. 1950), item D358 (dealer’s catalog: 4207).)

  public sales: Another took place at Marly between 6 Oct. and 25 Nov.; another at Saint-Cloud beginning on 29 Mar. 1794; and yet another at Fontainebleau beginning in June of that year, with similar sales in Paris.

  Swan unprincipled: Monroe, then American Minister in France, to James Madison (30 June 1795). Swan, born in Scotland, fought at Bunker Hill, and then married a wealthy Bostonian who kept him in some comfort in prison. He refused to pay the debt against his release.

  Swan and JB: Swan advised Washington on 21 Dec. 1793 that the present American Minister, Gouverneur Morris, was unpopular with the French. Swan proposed JB as the person to replace him. One of Swan’s agendas had to do with the failure of Morris to effect an end to the embargo of American ships at Bordeaux (see above, ch. 9). Swan wrote similarly to General Henry Knox, US Secretary for War (21 Dec. 1793): ‘Should there be virtue enough left, to respect merit & talents in the election of diplomatick men, altho’ they are not rich, Mr Barlow … possesses every quality, that could render an agent usefull to the United States & this Republique, and who in the highest degree has the esteem of all[, ] but in daring to give you this hint, I can assure you that it did not originate in me, nor come from him; for I believe the last thing he thinks of is that.’ (Knox, Papers, reel 35/2.)

  GI and Copenhagen: Another contact was Christer Skaarup Blacks Enke & Co.

  A member of the Paris conspiracy: His name was Lyonnet.

  Genêt denounced: On 11 Oct. 1793 the Committee of Public Safety had recalled Genêt (who had the sense to save his neck by remaining in America).

  renewed plan, November 1793: Archives des Affaires Étrangères, Espagne, vol. 636, f. 391.

  the generals: Another general, Clark, was co-opted for the abortive Genêt Affair.

  ‘expatiating’: Imlay, Emigrants, 69.

  ‘the hard-hearted savage romans’: FR, 160.

  American Minister as spy: A letter from JB to Abraham Baldwin in Congress (4 Mar. 1798) offers his opinion that the highly conservative Morris ‘acted as a secret agent & spy’ for the British and Austrian Cabinets after their ambassadors left Paris. (JB’s Letterbook (1797–1803), Houghton: bMS Am 1448 (4), 86.) After Morris left office, the French intercepted a 1795 letter from Washington to Morris as secret agent to the Cabinet in London.

  Paine’s arrest and petition: Paine, Dossier. The agents of the Terror included Doilé, another Commissioner called Gillet, and a policeman; an admirer, Achille Audibert, who had invited Paine to represent Calais in the French National Convention; and citizens Jean-Baptiste Martin and Lamy from the Committee of Public Safety.

  Paine languished in prison: See his plea to the American Minister. Morris, Papers.

  Americans’ petitions to Morris: On 18 Nov. 1793 Angelica Church in London appealed to Morris on behalf of her imprisoned friend, Miss Catharine Herring of Albany, who had gone to France to learn the language in order to improve her credentials as governess. Morris was repeatedly asked to verify such prisoners’ claims to having been born in America.

  von Schlabrendorf’s escape of the guillotine: Crabb Robinson, Diary, Books and their Writers, i, 300.

  von Schlabrendorf recalled MW: Notes in his copy of Memoirs. Relayed by his friend Carl Gustav Jochmann and trans. in Durant’s edition of Memoirs, xxvii, 251–2.

  ‘every brute’; ‘haunted’: BW to EW (5 Nov. and 4 Dec. 1793). Abinger.

&n
bsp; ‘I am grieved…’: FR, MWCW, vi, 444.

  ‘Alas!’…: FR, book I, ch. 3.

  Havre-Marat: JB’s description of Le Havre a few years earlier in his diary. He had a sharp eye. Houghton: bMS Am 1448(9).

  lodgings: Address discovered by Tomalin, Mary Wollstonecraft, ch. 14.

  ‘I could not sleep’: GI was in Paris briefly in March.

  ‘View’ vs institutional history: Gary Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism, 154–5; Moore, Mary Wollstonecraft, 52–3.

  Jane Austen’s attack on institutional history: In the innocent voice of Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey (completed in 1799; published posthumously in 1817). Virginia Woolf, a century on, also questions history’s focus on war, and caricatures the staginess of kings with golden teapots on their heads (in her feminist treatise A Room of One’s Own (1929)). See also her early fable, unpublished in her lifetime, ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’ (1906), which questions a male bias in historical record.

  Clarissa vs lusty, conniving woman: Hufton, History of Women, 445.

  MW on the French character: FR, 213.

  ‘sober matron graces’; ‘maternal wing’: Ibid., 115, 22. MW overlooks the violence of the American Revolutionary War in favour of the welcome to immigrants and America’s more benign political system. This is close to what Henry Adams would write in his chapter on ‘American Ideals’ and their transformative effect on immigrants in his History of the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison. The second President John Adams (Henry Adams’s great-grandfather) didn’t find the mother bird over the top. See Adams, marginalia, FR: ‘I thank you Miss W.’

  MW on servility and the retaliation of slaves: Ibid., 126, 234.

  Grande Terreur: Began in June, and lasted until Robespierre’s fall on 27 July 1794.

  Paine condemned: On 24 July, three days before Robespierre met his end. The fall of Robespierre may not be unconnected with a French naval defeat in June (as the fall of the Girondists in the first six months of 1793 had been connected with earlier defeats).

  ‘My God…’: 8 July [17]94.

  registration of Fanny Imlay’s birth: Discovered by Tomalin, Mary Wollstonecraft, ch. 14. The witnesses were Wheatcroft and his wife, Marie Michelle.

  MW’s letter to RB about childbirth and breast-feeding: Carried by hand, as so often in this time of war, by an unnamed Imlay contact who presumably was to intercept the Barlows. The latter are hard to place at this time, shifting between Amsterdam and Hamburg. Ruth may have returned briefly to London, but it’s unlikely that Joel could have joined her, given his reputed sedition.

  ‘The suckling of a child’: ‘The Nursery’, Education, 7. I infer that she watched Fanny before MW hired a wet-nurse for Fanny’s baby, since she is unlikely to have watched anyone else. Possibly, she recalls her mother, though her mother was not a figure of tenderness.

  statistic on breast-fed babies in the 1780s: Schama, Citizens, 145–8.

  Galen and wet-nursing: Hardyment, Perfect Parents, 4–5, 16–17.

  ‘raven mother’: MW told this to von Schlabrendorf on her return to Paris. Relayed by his friend, Jochmann. Repr. in Durant’s Supplement, 251–2.

  Dr Haygarth on smallpox: An Enquiry How to Prevent Small-Pox (London: Johnson, 1784). MWletters, 263, notes his sequel, A Sketch of a Plan to Exterminate the Casual Small-Pox from Great Britain (1794), but it’s unlikely to have reached MW.

  11 THE SILVER SHIP

  Uncited quotations are from MW’s letters to GI, EW, BW and Archibald Hamilton Rowan from Sept. 1794 to May 1795. MWL, 262–89; MWletters, 263–94.

  newly discovered letter: To Danish Prime Minister, Bernstorff (5 Sept. 1795), written in Copenhagen. Discovered by Gunnar Molden in 2003 in the Danish National Archives. I am grateful to him for sending a photocopy for verification. Transcribed in ch. 12.

  JB the only American in Europe…honorary French citizen: I exclude Paine, a naturalised American, because the French treated him as English.

  JB’s dealings: Woodress, Yankee Odyssey, 145.

  export of luxury goods from France under the Terror: Pierre Verlet, French Royal Furniture (New York, 1963), 56–7, and Gerald Reitlinger, The Economics of Taste, ii (1963), 130. Cited by Fraser, Marie Antoinette, 393.

  Elias Backman: Came from Lovisa in Finland, which had been under Swedish dominion before it was taken by Russia. Having spent much time in France, his brother Pehr Backman was suspected of being a French spy when he settled in Gothenburg. Nyström, Scandinavian Journey, 29.

  Backman’s petition to the Crown: To the Swedish Regent, Carl. (Riksarkivet, Stockholm: Biographica.) Dated 21 Mar. 1794. Enclosed is a letter to Baron Carl Bonde (15 Mar. 1794), who is to present the petition. On 16 June, Backman took the oath as a burgess which gave him a licence to trade. Landsarkivet, Gothenburg.

  English cutter…Rambler: Obtained secretly by a French consul in Sweden.

  Backman as owner: EB was the formal owner. As Molden puts it in an email (July 2004), ‘who was the real owner is of course another question’. Is that GI in the shadows?

  secrecy and GI’s approach to EB: Their association at this point is speculative, a matter of circumstantial evidence. Because of the secrecy, proof is difficult. Scandinavian sources for the Rambler are confirmed by British letters (originally in cipher) which can’t as yet be cited.

  France’s rejection of the coup: The French were attempting to heal relations with the US. Early in Feb. 1794 it was decided that Genêt’s successor as French Minister to America, Fauchet, must issue a proclamation ending the Louisiana expedition (see chs 9 and 10 above) against Spain. He was instructed to announce: ‘Every Frenchman is forbid to violate the neutrality of the US.’

  dating the Barlows’ departure for Hamburg: American citizens had to be authenticated as genuine by their Minister if they were to obtain a pass to leave Paris. Morris, Papers, show that passports were supplied to RB and JB on 10 Mar. (Letter from Henry W. Livingstone to Gouverneur Morris (10 Mar.).) Colonel and Mrs Blackden, JB’s associates, were supplied with passports at the same time.

  MW to RB, backing the joint enterprise: 27 Apr. [1794], MWL, 253; MWletters, 251–2. Their friendship may have also mattered to RB at a time when a brother and sister suddenly died of fever in Connecticut.

  Bourbon platters: MW notes in FR, 173, that in 1789 ‘the king sent his rich service to the mint’ as a donation ‘to relieve the wants of the country’. Several others made similar donations of jewels and plate. It’s not known if GI’s thirty-six plates were saved from the mint, or whether they came from another silver service.

  £3500: GI to EB (24 Oct. 1794), reported by EB (18 Nov. 1794) in a letter transcribed by Gunnar Molden. (According to Judge Wulfsberg–who presided over the subsequent criminal case–the value was 17, 000 to 18, 000 riksdaler.) The sum was first cited in Nyström, Scandinavian Journey, a study that marks a turning-point in our knowledge of this phase of MW’s career. The author initiated research on the fate of the treasure ship and the subsequent trial. He surmised that the silver was to be exchanged for grain, one of the commodities Backman exported (and some of the money was to pay for repairing or re-rigging the ship).

  Ellefsen…pointed out a ship: Bought by GI from the Laïent brothers of Le Havre.

  oak: The accounts of the repairs later carried out in the Swedish port of Strömstad mention that oak was needed. Enclosed with the ship’s papers in the Riksarkivet, Stockholm.

  GI’s disguising of the ship: Buus, ‘Promethean Journey’, 228, makes clear that Scandinavian neutrality allowed resourceful types from all European countries to carry on business with France despite the British blockade and England’s Traitorous Correspondence Bill of 1793. It was common for French ships to be re-registered as neutral Scandinavian ones.

  Coleman: MW’s spelling of the name. Sometimes spelt ‘Colman’.

  draped the tricolour about his waist: When Ellefsen was interrogated in Arendal, Norway, on 28 Apr. 1795, he recalled this charming detail.

  A
lgerian pirates: They had recently captured twelve ships from the rich Hanseatic (north German) towns. Britain permitted these pirates to cruise the Atlantic to prevent France getting supplies from America and to punish the latter for recognising the French republic. (Before the US broke away, they had enjoyed Britain’s protection). Britain, France and other countries paid tribute to the pirates to ensure their ships’ safety.) Swan told the American Secretary of War that these pirates were expected as far as Elsinore, Denmark. (Swan to Knox (21 Dec. 1793): Knox, Papers.) In mid-July Ellefsen registered the ship with the Danish consul, Mr Pickman, in Rouen, the nearest inland town from Le Havre. Nyström, Scandinavian Journey, says that Ellefsen told the Danish consulate the ship was bound for Copenhagen. Elsewhere it is said be Elsinore. But since Ellefsen actually sailed to Norway, this was probably a sop to the Danes in order to be accredited.

  naming of the ship: There is no basis for the idea that GI had the ship named after MW and the Frenchwoman Marguerite who looked after Fanny. The latter was employed only later when MW went to Paris. The spelling is unstable: ‘Margrethe’ appears as ‘Margrethe’ or ‘Margareta’. Possibly, Peder Ellefsen was also recalling his baby sister Margrethe, who had died aged eight in 1790.

  Ellefsen and the mate…loaded the silver: Details from Judge Wulfsberg’s report (18 Aug. 1795) delivered to Danish Prime Minister Bernstorff and copied to the Stiftamtmann in Oslo, outlining Ellefsen’s actions as part of a case against him. The report emphasises that the silver was loaded ‘without the knowledge of the rest of the crew’. Report discovered by Gunnar Molden in the Oslo Regional Archives.

  receipt and other vital papers: GI’s instructions to Ellefsen, Kristiansand Town Magistrate, Notarialprotokoll 8 (1794–1804). The instructions (dated 13 Aug. 1794) don’t specify Norway. The orders are to procure Danish papers for the ship with ‘the utmost dispatch & economy’; EB will reimburse Ellefsen for expenses. This might, in fact, imply that Ellefsen was to go to Norway for properly legal papers, but he did already have papers from the Danish consulate before leaving France. Ellefsen’s agreement is witnessed by ‘Wheatcroft jun’. If produced in court this letter would prove that Ellefsen was Imlay’s subordinate and not the owner of the ship. Later, Wheatcroft would be called on to testify in court.