Vindication
Page 62
‘ black sweetheart’: RB to Robert Fulton, inventor of the submarine. Houghton. 000 Hazlitt on WG: The Spirit of the Age.
overstepped the mark: Deduced by St Clair as part of his convincing interpretation of coded marks in WG’s diary. Appendix 1, Godwins and Shelleys.
responsible: WG’s daughter, MWS, later said of her father (KP, i, 161–2 and Clemit et al, Lives of the Romantics, i): ‘He was in a supreme degree a conscientious man, utterly opposed to anything like vice or libertinism, nor did his sense of duty permit him to indulge in any deviation from the laws of society … which could not, he felt, be infringed without deception and injury to any woman who should act in opposition to them.’
‘I have not patience…’: KP, i., 139.
Cymon: Changed by love for the beautiful Iphigenia. MW’s source may have been Dryden’s version of the tale in his Fables Ancient and Modern (1700).
Maria and Darnford: WW, ch. 4.
Rousseau’s Solitary Walker: Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (1782).
effort: 6–7 Oct. 1796, Godwin, Godwin and Mary, 43.
lacked ‘…the pleasures of the imagination’: Memoirs, 2nd edn.
‘She was like a serpent…’: Memoirs, ch. 7.
MW and WG on a private ‘bill of rights’: Godwin, Godwin and Mary, 49–50.
Coleridge and Hazlitt on MW: Hazlitt, ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’ (1823), cited by Holmes, Sidetracks, 265.
‘no one knew better…’: Memoirs, ch. 9.
‘What can I say?’: Godwin, Godwin and Mary, 46.
Amelia on WG’s supposed interest: To friend (1 Nov. 1796). Abinger: Dep. b. 210/6.
Opie as suitor: Joseph Farington, diary (11 Nov. 1796), cited in Durant’s Supplement, 312. After MW married WG, Opie married Amelia Alderson.
‘I treated him…’: Quoted by James Marshall to Hazlitt, cited in ibid., 332–3.
Condoms: Porter, English Society, 27.
WG’s method of contraception: St Clair’s deduction, Godwins and Shelleys, Appendix 1. Myths to do with contraception derived from Aristotle’s Complete Master-piece (see above, ch. 7), wrongly attributed to Aristotle but going back to ancient Greece.
‘She has been deserted…’: JJ to Charles (15 Nov. 1796). JJ’s Letterbook.
‘with extreme unkindness’: WG to MW (31 Dec. 1796), Godwin, Godwin and Mary, 59–60.
14 ‘THE MOST FRUITFUL EXPERIMENT’
Uncited communications are from letters of Feb.–Aug. 1797 to WG, EW, Amelia Alderson, George Dyson, Maria Reveley and Miss Pinkerton, in MWL, 379–411 and MWletters, 396–437.
‘two persons of the opposite sexes…’: Essay VIII (‘Of Posthumous Fame’) in The Enquirer, publ. Feb. 1797, when he was contemplating the marriage he undertook the following month. Repr. Godwin, Political and Philosophical Writings, v: Educational and Literary Writings, ed. Pamela Clemit, 206.
fits of sleepiness: These began in 1795, according to WG’s case history for Dr Ash. Pf.
‘a recluse’: An autobiographical letter, unfinished and unaddressed. Quoted in KP, ii, 129.
Polygon: A plaque for MW is on the site, now Oakshott Court in Werrington Street, NW1, off Polygon Road. Nearby, on the wall of the local primary school, is a modern mural by Karen Gregory which shows MW and WG with Fanny in a pinafore, as well as Mary Shelley and Shelley on a bridge with Frankenstein’s monster lurking in the reeds below–looking like Vincent Price in the horror movie.
‘I love the country’: 21 May 1797. The context is an invitation to go to the country with WG’s friends Montagu and the Wedgwoods.
the signature: Similar in her letter to Bernstorff except that then she was ‘femme Imlay’.
‘Never’: St Leon (1799), ch. 4. The wife Marguerite in this novel is an idealised portrait of MW.
MW’s face; her look: Southey to Joseph Cottle, cited in KP, i, 234.
‘We were in no danger…’; a ‘worshipper’: Memoirs, ch. 9.
‘overflowings’; the English character; and treating others as books: To an unnamed correspondent, probably Mrs Inchbald (19 Sept. 1797). Abinger: Dep. b. 227/8.
The Times on the Godwin marriage: Holmes, Sidetracks, 208.
theatre visit: The play was referred to by WG as a comedy about a will.
snub: Godwin, Godwin and Mary, 75.
‘cruel, base, insulting’: WG to Mrs Inchbald (13 Sept. 1797). Abinger: Dep. b. 227/8.
MW reviewed Mrs Inchbald: MWCW, vii, 462–3. MW said there was not enough ‘lively interest to keep the attention awake’, that it was ‘improbable’, and characterised by ‘naïveté’. Cited by Todd, Wollstonecraft, 382.
‘I am pained…’: 20 Apr. 1797, Godwin, Godwin and Mary.
‘Those who are bold enough…’: Excerpt from undated letter to a friend whom Janet Todd identifies as likely to be Hays, and suggests this date, Apr. 1797 (MWLetters, 410.) Letter quoted in Hays, ‘Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft’.
WG’s letter justifying his marriage: Abinger: Dep. b. 229/1. Faded, on thin paper with a tatty edge, the pen marks (as in a number of WG’s letters) survive more clearly on the back of the paper which may be deciphered with the aid of a mirror. Some readings are therefore approximate.
WG’s feelings opposed the supposed gist of his doctrines: MWS, ‘Life of Godwin’, 113.
Hays on MW’s manners: ‘Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft’.
‘the deceitful poison of hope’: Emma Courtney, i, ch. 24.
‘murder’: Ibid., ii, ch. 5.
JB’s fury with James Wollstonecraft: To S. Williams, US Consul in London (21 Feb. 1799), asking him to recover the sum ‘by any means that the law will permit’. Letterbooks, iv, 205–6. Houghton.
JJ to Charles and other Wollstonecrafts: JJ’s Letterbook. Contrast an annoyed letter on15 July 1797 with his earlier letter of 1 Nov. 1795 when JJ had commended Charles for sending £200 (most of which was to be invested for his sister Bess). JJ’s annoyed letter to EW when she gave up a good post in order to start a school, seems unfair, but he feared further impositions.
WG’s appeal to Wedgwood: KP, i, 234–6.
visit to Bedlam: WG’s diary. Abinger: Dep. e. 201–2.
‘Women being confined…Madhouses’: Laws Respecting Women, 73.
BW and EW had not communicated: Since both sisters preserved MW’s letters, we can assume there were none. MW’s correspondence with EW (though not with Bess) resumed after EW’s visit.
‘have you lost…’: WW, ch. 9.
the Wedgwood post and WG: I assume that news of the post came from WG via MW–a peace offering from MW–though it’s often noted that Mrs Wedgwood, née Bessie Allen, who came from Cresselly, near Pembroke, Wales, had known the Wollstonecrafts in Laugharne when EW was a girl. Since the Wollstonecraft sisters had lived there for only a year, and since their father’s subsequent residence would hardly have recommended the family, this connection doesn’t appear very strong. The Wedgwoods were more likely to have been impressed with recommendations from WG and MW. EW told WG after MW’s death (24 Nov. 1797), ‘my sister dined with them [the Allens] once when on a visit at friends in that part of the country’. Abinger: Dep. c. 523.
‘looked like a spectre…anguish’: WW, ch. 6.
‘gross’: WW, chs 9, 10.
Sue Bridehead: Jude the Obscure (1891).
‘Let me exultingly declare’: WW, ch. 8.
‘witness of many enormities’: Ibid., ch. 5.
‘Such was the native soundness…’: Ibid., ch. 4.
Opie’s 1797 portrait: National Portrait Gallery, London.
‘Another evening…’: From Etruria (12 June 1797). Godwin, Godwin and Mary, 97.
Hays…plain: Coleridge cruelly called her ‘a thing, ugly and petticoated’. The Love-Letters of Mary Hays, ed. A. F. Wedd (London, 1923), 11.
portly: To James Marshall (21 Aug. 1797). Discovered by Stephen Wagner and Doucet Devin Fischer, ‘Visionary Daughters’. MWLetters, 435.
‘Letters on the Management of Infants’: MWCW, iv, 456–9.
Anthony Carlisle: He was later painted as an anatomist, a hand on a skull and behind him a drawing of the male body.
‘Lessons’: MWCW, iv, 467–74. May have appeared as a separate sixpenny pamphlet, as listed in a catalogue of MW’s works in an 1802 edition of the Travels.
‘Papa’ as Imlay: Holmes, Footsteps, 120–3.
letters for children in case of death in childbirth: Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, 98. In WW, ch. 7, Maria writes memoirs for her daughter ‘uncertain whether I shall ever have an opportunity of instructing you’.
‘most graceful expressions…of a mother’s love’: Brailsford, Shelley, Godwin, 204.
‘land of mugs’: Godwin, Godwin and Mary, 88.
‘struck out a path’: Advertisement in Posthumous Works. MWCW, iv, 467–74.
‘The first thing’: ‘Of Public & Private Education’, SC, i, 146.
Queenie Thrale’s education: Hester Thrale, author of Family Book (1764). Hardyment, Perfect Parents, 7.
‘have not distinguished themselves’; Greer; Daly: Ibid., 303.
‘delicacy’: MWCW, v, 218.
lying-in hospitals in the seventeenth century: Fraser, Weaker Vessel, 513.
deaths from home deliveries: Todd, Wollstonecraft, 448.
Jemima on hospitals: WW, ch. 5.
Florence Nightingale: See forthcoming Penguin biography by Mark Bostridge.
Jane Sharp: Fraser, Weaker Vessel. Vivien Jones explores MW’s extensive knowledge of obstetric texts in ‘Death of Mary Wollstonecraft’.
details of the delivery, the operation; MW’s comment to WG, and the following days: WG’s diary; Memoirs, ch. 10. Readers were shocked by WG’s explicitness.
MW’s possible objection to Dr Clarke: SC, i, 194–5.
WG in the anti-midwife camp: He felt ‘the very name of a female midwife odious in my ears’. To unnamed correspondent (19 Sept. 1797). Abinger: Dep. b. 227/8.
fatal course of sepsis: Fatal until sulphonamides became available in the 1930s and penicillin in the 1940s.
‘Heaven’: Milnes-Gaskell manuscript, quoted in Durant’s Supplement, 234. The source, Holmes suggests (in note to Memoirs, 307n.), was probably Basil Montagu.
MW supremely fitted, WG not: WG to Mrs Cotton (24 Oct. 1797). KP, i, 280–1.
‘the kindest…’: Letter to EW of 12 Sept. 1797. Quoted KP, i, 282–3.
‘Be sure…’: To unnamed friend (23 Oct. 1797). Abinger: Dep. b. 227/8.
‘they left…’: WG, ‘Analysis of own character’ (begun 26 Sept. 1798), Godwin, Novels and Memoirs, i, 58–9.
‘I would fain live in your heart’: MW to WG [30 Sept. 1796], MWL, 355; MWletters, 369.
15 SLANDERS
letters at the time of MW’s death: Abinger: WG’s letters: Dep. b. 227/8. John Opie’s letter: Dep. c. 507. JJ to Fuseli, announcing the death: Dep. b. 210/3. Carlisle asked WG for a set of Mrs Godwin’s works, showing that she was more than a patient to him: Dep. c. 514. Some letters in KP, i.
JJ’s letters to WG: Tyson, Joseph Johnson, 150–1.
Hewlett invited: Unable to attend the funeral.
HF’s part in MW’s life: The entire truth of this is impossible to determine. WG did himself continue to visit HF, and it’s conceivable that it was for this very reason that MW stayed away, since they did not visit together. Another possibility is that MW stayed at home more in the late stages of her pregnancy, since she did complain to WG of the want of company. She may have felt ostracised and shamed by a pregnancy that was advanced by the time she had married.
‘I firmly believe’: Abinger: Dep. b. 227/8.
WG’s portrait after MW’s death: By J. W. Chandler (Feb.–Mar. 1798). Tate Britain.
‘I love to cherish melancholy’: 24 Oct. 1797, KP, i, 280–1.
exchanges of WG and Hays: 5, 10, 22 and 27 Oct. 1797. Abinger: Dep. b. 227/8. The same possessiveness is to be found in the last days of Charlotte Brontë, when her recent husband, Arthur Bell Nicholls, did not summon her best old friend, Ellen Nussey.
WG’s correspondence with Mrs Inchbald: 13 and 14 Sept., 26 Oct., KP, i, 278–9.
WG to Skeys: Abinger: Dep. b. 227/8. A follow-up letter–much faded–is Dep. b 229/1(a), dated 17 Oct. 1797.
WG and EW with the Wedgwoods: 7–10 June 1797, Godwin, Godwin and Mary, 88, 94.
MW’s MS with the press within a month of her death: It’s unlikely that at this stage WG had included her Letters to Imlay in what was to be the four-volume edn of her Posthumous Works. Godwin’s diary notes that he was reading ‘I[mlay]’s letters’ on 27–30 Oct. It’s not impossible that these were GI’s lost letters to MW.
‘public curiosity’: WG to Skeys (17 Oct. 1797). Abinger: Dep. b. 229/1(a).
EW’s reply to WG about the memoir: 24 Nov. 1797. Abinger: Dep. c. 523.
suicidal Dido: Gladstone thought the same after reading–admiringly–MW’s Letters to Imlay in 1883. Gladstone went on to read Imlay.
‘She felt herself alone’: Memoirs, ch. 6.
‘firmness of mind’: Ibid., ch. 3.
image of MW in a masculine hat: Monthly Visitor (1798). Republ. in Eccentric Biographies; or Memoirs of Remarkable Female Characters (London: T. Hirst, 1803).
‘scripture…’: Anti-Jacobin Review (1801), cited in Barbara Taylor, Wollstonecraft, 247.
‘Fierce passion’s slave’ from ‘The Shade of Alexander Pope’(1799), repr. Clemit et al, Lives of the Romantics, ii, 169–73.
‘heart of stone’: Chandler, Roscoe, 84, 195, from Roscoe Papers: 3958A: Hard was thy fate in all the scenes of life As daughter, sister, parent, friend and wife But harder still in death thy fate we own Mourn’d by thy Godwin–with a heart of stone
WG met Jane Gardiner: Sun. 19 and Sun. 26 Jan. 1800, according to his diary.
WG on Fanny Blood: Memoirs, ch. 3.
‘Dr Gabell’s garden’: To Mrs Davids, College Street, Winton (27 May 1817): ‘Our lodgings are very comfortable. We have a neat little Drawing room with a Bow-window overlooking Dr. Gabell’s garden.’
John Adams and MW: Adams, marginalia, FR. See Internet site accompanying this book for a debate between Adams and MW.
Mary King’s history: King-Harmon, King House, 74–7.
Henry Fitzgerald: His identity as Lady Kingsborough’s cousin appears to be established in Todd, Rebel Daughters, 208–11, 234, 358. The source is a Times report of 10 Oct. 1797, reinforced by repetition that Henry Fitzgerald was ‘second cousin to Miss King’ in the Hibernian Chronicle of 12 Oct. 1797 and in the Annual Register for 1797, p. 68. This can’t be settled, though, without a doubt, since it may be another family blind (see ch. 5 above for other blinds). The reports are made at the family’s request in order to clear Mrs Fitzgerald’s son Gerald from a public confusion of him with the guilty man. There were conficting statements about Henry’s origins. If he were only a cousin why should the family have initially claimed that he was the illegitimate son of Colonel Fitzgerald’s dead son? What’s unconvincing is the absence of any record of this ‘son’ apart from family assertion, and dates make this highly improbable. Then too there is Mrs Fitzgerald’s statement to MW that her son Gerald was the ‘only’ son of her late husband. So violent, so implacable was the vengeance that we might consider whether the family could have concealed incest. Could Henry have been the son of Colonel FitzGerald himself, possibly conceived in the mid-1760s in the interval between the death of
his first wife in 1763 and his second marriage? If so, Henry would have been Caroline King’s half-brother, and uncle to the girl he loved. Nor can we entirely exclude the possibility that he was the illegitimate son of Lord Kingsborough, which would make the murder more like Greek tragedy–the difference being murder by an actual rather than foster father.
Lord K’s words on his murder of FitzGerald: McAleer, Sensitive Plant, 73.
‘horror’: MM’s note rebutting a false account. Pf: Cini Papers, file 26.
the trial; Bishop Percy’s reports: Bishop Percy in Dublin to his wife (14 and 18 May 1798). British Library: Add. MS 32, 335. Tomalin, Mary Wollstonecraft, 230.
‘A female…’: The British Critic (Sept. 1798) has a similar sneer at the salutary effects of a new system of education which MW introduced to a noble family. ‘One at least of these effects, we will venture to say, is fresh in the memory of our readers.’
‘left behind her’: WG’s draft of a letter to an unnamed correspondent (20 Jan. 1807) when Fanny was thirteen. Abinger: Dep. b. 229/1.
GI’s court case: Imlay v. George James (10 Feb. 1798). GI’s address is given as late of Harley Place in the London parish of Saint Mary Lebone, and at present, Upper Euston in the parish of Saint George, county of Gloucester. PRO, London: C12/2188/14.
GI’s opinion of himself as ‘upright’ citizen, ‘I like to be…’: Abinger: Dep. b. 229/1(b). No year is given. Jacobs, Her Own Woman, discovered this telling letter, published for the first time in her biography. I am grateful to her for passing on its precise location.
Smuggling corrupts the morals: Contradicts his statement (quoted in ch. 10, above) that ‘wealth is the source of power; and the attainment of wealth can only be brought about by a wise and happy attention to commerce’.
GI’s deed of 1810: Records of speculations in Old Kentucky Entries.
GI’s burial: This is assumed to be the GI we know, but so far unproven. Richard Garnett, who wrote the article on GI for the Dictionary of National Biography, reports this in the Athenaeum, no. 3955 (15 Aug. 1903), 219. GI is said to have been born on 9 Feb. 1758 (not 1754 or 1755, as GI indicates in his preface to Topographical Description), and died on 20 Nov. 1828. The epitaph doesn’t fit with his life, and upholds ‘rights divine’ which doesn’t exactly accord with American republicanism.