Vindication

by Lyndall Gordon

  Royal Commission: Set up 30 Jan. 1795, under Judge Wulfsberg of Tønsberg and Lauritz Weidemann, Magistrate of Nedenes.

  further judicial inquiries: On 28 and 30 Apr. 1795. There was also an investigation on board ship. Mr Isachsen translated questions into English for Coleman who, on 15 Apr., handed over the ship’s papers, the documentation of the sale of the Liberté (the original name of the Margrethe), which was confirmed by a Danish consul in Rouen on 20 July. Coleman and the investigators searched the captain’s quarters in vain for Ellefsen’s receipt for the silver. When Ellefsen was asked to produce GI’s final instructions to him, he ‘declared that the said communication had been mislaid amongst his papers’ in Risør.

  GI’s instructions to Ellefsen: Dated 13 Aug. Ellefsen had signed an agreement to deliver unspecified ‘articles’ to EB in Gothenburg, who would then give him further instructions. (Kristiansand Town Magistrate. Notary Protocol 8 (1794–1804). Discovered by Molden.)

  ‘Who were fooled?’: Email to Verhoeven, co-editor of Imlay, Emigrants.

  Waak arrived in June: He had signed on a crew to sail the ship at the end of Apr., and it may be at this point the extent of its damage was made known to EB.

  ‘Marin Inclay’ oversees the sale: Gunnar Molden has discovered an amusing document showing that the magistrate of Strömstad registered the sale, instigated in Gothenburg on 26 Mar. 1795 by ‘Gilbert Inckay’, and carried through by ‘Marin Inclay his wife according to the lettre of Horning’ (meaning, presumably, a letter of attorney). Curiously, the document introduces a sentence in English as though ‘Mary Imlay’, dictating it, was misheard by an official so anxious to get it right that he did not translate. Records of the repairs to the ship are enclosed with the ship’s papers in the Riksarkivet, Stockholm: Kommerskollegium Huvudarkivet 1795 F IIb. Fribrevshandlingar vol. 143.

  cost of repairs: The ship was sold for 1210 kroner. The repairs cost 3202 kroner.

  French dress: A guess. MW had lived for the past two and a half years in France, and in London a few months later was described as elegantly dressed.

  ‘health’: Travels, letter 8.

  ‘You have often wondered…’: Ibid., letter 8.

  ‘a golden age of stupidity’…, Ibid., letter 9.

  Fanny Blood’s voice and fears for Fanny Imlay: Ibid., letter 6.

  ‘my desultory manner’: Ibid., letter 5.

  foreshadow anthropological travel: Holmes, Sidetracks, 251.

  ‘the art of travelling’: MWCW, vii, 277.

  Lars Lind: Wulfsberg’s report to Bernstorff.

  a smugglers’ haven: Nyström, taking MW at her word, is surprised. Anka Ryall makes the point (in her intro. to Norwegian translation of Travels) that MW’ s distorted view of Risør reflected her feelings about her errand there.

  another judicial hearing in Risør: Molden, ‘The Shipwreck That Never Was’.

  MW’s meeting with Ellefsen: MW to the Danish Prime Minister. New-found letter transcribed below.

  Wulfsberg to Bernstorff: Written on 18 Aug. 1795, the day Mary left Risør and returned to Tønsberg.

  ‘self-applause’: Travels, letter 12.

  Coleridge and MW: Holmes, Sidetracks, 260, hears her words enter the ‘great echo chamber of Coleridge’s mind’. Coleridge read her Travels at Nether Stowey in Somerset in 1797. Another source is the waterfall at Trollhättan (near Gothenburg). This echo first picked up by John Livingstone Lowes in The Road to Xanadu (1927).

  ‘chained to life…’: Travels, letter 15.

  ‘indifference’; heaps of ruins’; ‘strangely cast off’; ‘I do not understand you’: MW to GI (6 Sept. [1795]). She refers to the letter he’d sent on 20 Aug. immediately following her failure to secure restitution from the Ellefsens.

  ‘goods’ in the hands of Ryberg & Co.: GI’s power of attorney for MW, quoted in ch. 11, refers repeatedly to Ryberg. Information from the commercial history centre in Copenhagen shows it to have been a flourishing, powerful firm.

  MW’s letter to the Prime Minister of Denmark: This long letter was buried for two centuries in the State Archives in Copenhagen. A brilliant discovery by Gunnar Molden, revealing unknown aspects of the hidden business. I am grateful to him for permitting me to transcribe and publish this letter for the first time.

  Crèvecoeur: His son Alexandre, who may have stayed with GI in Le Havre in 1793–4, was now in business in Hamburg. His father had lived in Paris before this move.

  Hamburg as spy capital, and ‘emporium of mischief’: Tillyard, Citizen Lord, 191.

  Hamburg in the late eighteenth-century: Hamburg History Museum.

  witnesses bribed to conceal the truth: Wulfsberg’s report to Bernstorff.

  may be impossible to solve the case: The record of the Royal Commission, which would have run to several hundred pages, has disappeared. Nyström assumed that the Ellefsens bribed officials to get rid of it, but that may not be the whole or final answer.

  not entirely a guilty voice: Gunnar Molden, in conversation. Arendal (July 2001).

  Gjessoy: Outside the large island of Tromoy.

  Ellefsen’s fate: Molden, ‘No Riches for the Descendants’, reports archival records of business transactions that prove Ellefsen’s continued presence in the district, and his ships registered in the Arendal customs data. He died in the port of Marazion in Cornwall in 1807.

  Holsteiner crew on the silver ship: Judicial interrogation at Arendal, 28 Apr. 1795.

  EB and France: EB married Julie Éléonore Bonamy in 1786.

  EB as good citizen: Municipal records (Politie-protokoll Kontrollbok (1789–1804), Landsarkivet, Gothenburg, show EB scattered all over the records of his time, concerning himself with the employment of sailors, the sinking of level ground, the transportation of goods, fines for an oil-lighter of the streets, and property changing hands. This is the image of a man who is dug into his society. GI, by contrast, slides back and forth from Paris to London, unmarked.

  Ellefsen’s confession: Judicial Inquiry, Arendal (30 Apr. 1795).

  Backman buys the ship: It may or may not be relevant that on 20 Mar. 1795 JB ‘paid Swedish Capt. [Waak?] 4 days demurrage’. JB’s rough notes on money, 1795–6, Houghton: b MS Am 1448 (697). The Rambler returned to circulation on 1 Apr. 1795.

  property ‘now lying in Paris’: Draft will (June 1796) to RB from Algiers. Beinecke.

  ‘silver’ in JB’s notebook: Pocket-sized memorandum book with loops at the side, used 1795–6. Some puzzling letters, carefully transcribed–a code?–are on the same page as the ‘silver’. (Houghton: b MS Am 1448(7). JB notes Hamburg connections: John Parish & Co. (the super-rich Parish was American Consul there); Waage & Bagge; Dobbeler & Stetz; C.D. Dede in Altona. JB also notes London connections: Louis Goldsmith, 24 Princes St, Spital Square, and Francis Pitman, 9 Lime St; a contact, Bögel & Co., in Copenhagen; Cohn & Co. in Amsterdam; and Isaac Clason in New York.

  crookedness…under her skin: Buus, ‘Promethean Journey’, 221–39, notes how MW tries to ‘distance herself textually from … commercial entanglement’, and observes her ‘uneasy oscillation between being bound [by links with degrading business] and unbound’ as Romantic loner. These strategies amount to an attempt to ‘write out’ her relationship to commerce in favour of the sentimental narrative of the Travels. Gary Kelly, too, Revolutionary Feminism, 179, mentions this distancing.

  ‘fraud’: Since this was published as part of her Travels, Godwin did not have to edit it out in the way he had to eliminate all reports of business from private letters to GI.

  calm of surrender: Herman, Trauma, sees this calm following trauma as a state of ‘partial anaesthesia’ which is a protection against unbearable pain.

  MW’s attempt to drown: Memoirs, ch. 8. WG would have heard this from MW.

  coming back to ‘life and misery’: MWL, 317. Henry Reveley recalled MW saying that the pain of drowning was less. SC, x, 1137.

  The Times: 24 Oct. 1795, a fortnight later. Tims, Social Pioneer, 273.

  �
�If we are ever…’: Confided later to WG, who repeats her words in Memoirs, ch. 8.

  ‘I never blamed…’: MW to WG [4 July 1797], MWL, 404; MWletters, 429.

  Finsbury Place: On the eastern side of Finsbury Square. It no longer exists.

  GI to Paris with his mistress: Could the mistress have been a Frenchwoman whom GI met during his summer visit to Paris?

  proposal: Abinger: Dep. b. 214/3. See SC, i, 144, for the unidentified admirer who pleaded for ‘a cold second place in her heart’. Some say it was Thomas Holcroft, but I doubt it. The proposal is dated 2 Jan. 1796. MW declared that she would have nothing further to do with this man, whereas Holcroft was invited to Mary Hays’s tea, together with MW and WG, only a week later (8 Jan.). As WG’s best friend, he was a guest at the dinner WG gave to introduce MW to his friends in Apr. 1796, a visitor to their home, and on one occasion even dined with MW alone. MWletters places MW’s retorts in an earlier period, but the date of the proposal, reinforced by the fact that it was addressed to MW at Finsbury Place, puts the incident unquestionably in this period.

  prostituting my person: She takes the opposite view of marriage to that of Charlotte Lucas in Pride and Prejudice, who sees it as ‘the pleasantest preservative from want’. Intelligent, unromantic Charlotte is prepared to marry a fool (Mr Collins) for the sake of security. The explosiveness of ‘want’ in Jane Austen’s mannered world spells out the economic necessity facing women with little or no dowry.

  Chalmers & Cowie: Morris, Diary. Morris dealt with this firm.

  Mr Cowie, MW and GI’s gain of £1, 000 for ‘goods’: WG to Cowie after MW’s death (2 Jan. 1798). Abinger: Dep. b. 227/8. How much did MW know of GI’s gain?

  Wheatcroft testifies: Granted a French passport to Norway by no less a body than the Committee of Public Safety–an odd position for an Englishman whose country was at war with France.

  travels as autobiography: Tamara Follini, ‘Improvising the Past’, offers a stimulating theory of autobiography in her article on Henry James’s memoirs.

  omits two crucial facts: These are perceived by Richard Holmes who talks of ‘a brilliant piece of emotional projection, casting GI as villain for withholding his love and driving her to the limit of her endurance’. Sidetracks, 256.

  complicity: Holmes, Intro. to Travels, 34, and Sidetracks, 253: ‘not only must she have felt betrayed by Imlay but to some extent self-betrayed’.

  ‘the silvery expanse’: Travels, letter 24.

  ‘interests of nations…fraud’: Ibid.

  GI’s image of himself as model man: MWL, 321, 323–4 and MWletters, 333, 335, quote GI’s actual words.

  GI had not paid MW’s debts: MWL, 323; MWletters, 335.

  Haydn: Six English Canzonettas.

  Southey: Wardle, Critical Biography, 256. Buus, ‘Promethean Journey’, notes that Travels reinforces ‘a particular fiction of Scandinavia popular in the late eighteenth century: that of a peripheral northern Other–at once Arcadian and archaic …’.

  Addressed…: Holmes phrased this perfectly in Sidetracks, 263.

  ‘in tenderness’; ‘a genius…’: Memoirs, ch. 8, 249.

  13 WOMAN’S WORDS

  Uncited quotations are from letters to Rowan, von Schlabrendorf, Hays, GI and WG from Jan. 1796 to Jan. 1797, in MWL, 328–77, and MWletters, 337–94.

  Mrs Cotton: The Wollstonecraft sisters may have come to know her when EW taught in Henley and MW visited her in 1786.

  East family: Claire Tomalin established the connections with the Austens in Jane Austen, 158–9, 317.

  Jane Austen, at twenty-one: Tomalin provides the telling detail in ibid., 123. Austen had acquired a copy of a women’s rights novel, Hermsprong (1796), by her contemporary Robert Bage.

  No scandal: Hays did report to WG that MW felt some friends in London shunned her as an unmarried mother, but this seems to have been a fear rather than a reality. The gentry would not have received her had there been scandal attached to her name.

  ‘infamous’: JJ to Charles Wollstonecraft, in JJ’s Letterbook (15 Nov. 1796).

  MW’s hand in letter to Rowan: (26 Jan. [1796]). Berg Collection, New York Public Library.

  Leavenworth ruined: RB to JB (6, 14, 28 Jan. 1796). Houghton: b Ms Am 1448 (542, 543, 550). RB’s surviving letters are substantially fewer than those of her husband, and one possible reason is that she acted as an agent for his interests in Paris. If so, he would have destroyed letters to do with that, in the same way that Imlay probably destroyed the business sections of MW’s letters from Scandinavia and Hamburg.

  ‘forbearance’; ‘delicacy’; ‘principle’: GI’s words repeated back to him in MWL, 329–30; MWletters, 339.

  her soft voice: Hays, ‘Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft’.

  WG’s face like John Locke: Hazlitt, ‘William Godwin’.

  ‘voluptuous’: Amelia Alderson to MW (28 Aug. 1796). Abinger: Dep. b. 210/6.

  WG’s background and early history: Intro. by Marilyn Butler and Mark Philp to Godwin, Novels and Memoirs.

  WG’s mother’s family background: A northern version of the déclassement that Hardy was to dramatise in the Wessex of Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

  Janeway and WG: Avery, ‘The Puritans ’, Children and their Books, 112.

  like many a sensible child of poor parents: Charlotte Brontë at Miss Wooler’s school in 1831–2 mopped up in the space of a year whatever it had to teach.

  WG’s fits: WG to Dr Ash (1831). Pf. Abinger, microfilm reel 9.

  WG as biographer: Holmes recognised his innovation in this genre in Memoirs.

  ‘the contemplation of illustrious men’; ‘to scrutinise…’: WG, unpubl. essay, ‘Of History and Romance’ (1797), cited by Philip Cox, Reading Adaptations (Manchester University Press, 2000).

  ‘real English’…: WG to unnamed person (27 Feb. 1796). Abinger: Dep. b. 227/8.

  WG stirred by politics…‘beat high’: KP, i, 61.

  WG on Violence: Political Justice, book v, chs 16,18.

  WG and Hays: Some of the wording here appropriated from Wagner and Fischer, ‘Visionary Daughters’, 54–6.

  ‘I am sorry…’: WG to Hays (7 May 1795). SC, i, 139.

  ‘We who are thieves’: Godwin, Caleb Williams, 216.

  WG and Tooke at dinner: Godwin, Novels, and Memoirs, i, 50–1.

  ‘Imlay’ in WG’s diary: Abinger: Dep. e. 201. It’s true that WG’s letters to MW were addressed on the outside to ‘Mrs Imlay’, upholding her public identity. But WG never at any other time referred to her in the privacy of his diary as ‘Imlay’. To this man of regular and truthful habits, she remained always ‘Wolstencraft’ (and appears as such the day before the ‘Imlay’ entry). ‘Wolstencraft’ was shortened (as she appears more frequently) to ‘Wt’. She remains ‘Wt’ after their marriage and after her death.

  Mrs Inchbald: Her best-known novel is A Simple Story (1791), strong on plot and repartee, but poor in characterisation–the men and secondary characters are mere types: the supportive friend, the dashing faithless suitor.

  ‘the worst of all laws’: Godwin, Political Justice, quoted in KP, i, 113.

  the English losing common sense in 1796: Letter to Rowan (26 Sept. 1796).

  WG’s advice to MW: Blends details from his Memoirs and his letters to a woman, perhaps Hays, also depressed by unrequited love. Abinger: Dep. b. 227/8.

  ‘adrift’: MW to HF (c. late 1795), MWL, 324; MWletters, 336.

  ‘I found…’: Godwin, Godwin and Mary, 75.

  ‘by almost imperceptible degrees’; ‘Nor was she deceived’: Memoirs, ch. 9.

  couplet by Butler: Hudibras, II, canto I, lines 591–2.

  ‘I send you…’: WG’s diary records ‘Propose to Alderson’ and some have believed that WG proposed to Amelia Alderson, the doctor’s daughter. St Clair, Godwins and Shelleys, argues convincingly that ‘propose’ refers to a conversation with her father. Amelia continued to flirt with WG in a way that would have been unlikely had she turned him down.

&nb
sp; WG’s playfulness: Pamela Norris, letter to author (26 Sept. 2002).

  site of 16 Judd Place West: Elizabeth Crawford deduced this during our memorable ‘footsteps’ tour of MW’s London.

  ‘Perdita’: One of her best-known roles (in A Winter’s Tale), during 1779–80, just before her affair with the Prince. When she and MW met, she was near the end of a long affair (1782–97) with a soldier from a rich family, Banastre Tarleton, who became MP for Liverpool. Abandoned a second time, she made an effort to support herself by her pen, but one of MW’s later reviews notes that she wrote too fast. She was an exact contemporary of MW. WG thought her the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. She was famous for ‘breeches’ roles.

  Mrs Siddons on Travels: Mrs Siddons to WG (c. 1797–8), quoted in Memoirs, ch. 9.

  Amelia Alderson and MW: Abinger: Dep. b. 210/6. Todd, Wollstonecraft, 369, 382.

  ties with women: Jacobs, Her Own Woman, 242.

  rue du Bac: RB heads her letters from no. 555. The street has since been renumbered. According to Morton’s delightful but not always accurate Americans in Paris, RB lived at what is now no. 102 with citoyenne Hilaire.

  Humphreys, Barlow, Imlay: For the larger picture see ‘American Spies’ in Europe on the Internet site accompanying this book.

  O’Brien’s mission; Washington; JB: Humphreys to JB (30 May 1796 and 23 July 1796), Beinecke: MS Vault Shelves: Pequot (Barlow) M992. O’Brien moved about on the brig Sophia and his code identity was ‘the affair of Wales’.