Vindication

by Lyndall Gordon

  EB’s appointment as American Consul: The letter appointing him is in the Riksarkivet, Stockholm: Americana, 5, no. 220. Published in facsimile in Sweden and the World (Stockholm: National Archives, 1960), 64.

  destruction of GI’s silver ship: Nyström, Scandinavian Journey.

  another story: For the Barlows’ later adventures, see the Internet site accompanying this book.

  ‘malicious calumnies’: Houghton: b MS Am 1448 (529).

  ‘wild ambition’: KP, i, 286–7.

  WG’s letter to JJ: Abinger: Dep. b. 227/8.

  height of crack-down in 179 7–8: Butler, Romantics, Rebels & Reactionaries, 83; Austen, 116–17, 121.

  WG’s obituary for JJ: Tyson, Joseph Johnson, 215–16.

  Edgeworth’s eulogy for JJ: Ibid., epigraph to ch. 1.

  ‘Of Posthumous Fame’: Essay VIII, The Enquirer, in Political Writings, v, 204.

  the ‘self-centredness of the dying’: Todd, Wollstonecraft, 456.

  Hays’s obituary for MW: ‘Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft’.

  intolerance of homosexuality: Fiona MacCarthy, Byron, 37, gives a useful summary as background to Byron’s ‘mingled fascination and revulsion’ while he was at school.

  MW’s correspondence with Fuseli: Their letters were subsequently lost to sight, thought to have been destroyed by her grandson, Sir Percy Shelley.

  Kegan Paul’s letter to Browning: Beinecke. Kegan Paul uses the word ‘slander’ (‘for such I believe it to be’) in the course of the letter. He is, however, mistaken in thinking the slander originated in an anonymous ‘Defence of the Character and Conduct of the late Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin’ (1803), which mingles defence ‘with a good deal of venom’, KP, i, 206). He believed it written by Mrs Inchbald, ‘who hated Mary like poison’, he told Browning. Of WG’s odd statement that if HF had been free, he would have been the man of her choice, Kegan Paul says convincingly: ‘It is probable that he had only heard of the more unfavourable version of the story at second hand.’ Browning’s reply (15 Jan. 1883) is in Wellesley College.

  Browning not deterred: Kegan Paul wrote back on the same day, 15 Jan. Browning’s second reply is now lost, but happily Mr Michael Meredith of Eton College, the general editor of the Poetical Works of Browning, has recovered part of the letter from North’s catalogue (Nov. 1906). He warns that he can’t vouch for the accuracy of the transcript. Browning dismisses his three-stanza poem as unimportant, ‘the merest trifle in the world’, and seems to argue that it is more impersonal than it may appear, ‘containing no word of reference to either of the persons in question’. (This is rather disingenuous, for the names appear in the poem’s title, as Kegan Paul delicately pointed out on 15 Jan.: ‘I regret just a little the names put to it, as giving some, faint, colour to a story which I think mythical.’) Browning went on to summarise his approach: ‘It is simply an attempt at expressing some such thought as: “I (presumably a woman of genius) could have done and suffered anything to please you–and this, in spite of whatever the weakness in me: while, in order to please you, my utmost has been exerted, and precisely by the real strength in my nature–and yet with no effect at all.” I hope this hasty scribble will answer its purpose …’.

  Blackwell and Garrett: Crawford, Enterprising Women.

  Sophia Jex-Blake: Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (Penguin Books, 1977), 74–6.

  women members refused: Burdet, ‘Schreiner’s Wollstonecraft’. Details about the club in Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Night (Virago, 1992), ch. 5.

  ‘She fancied…amorous’: Anti-Jacobin Review, i, 94–102.

  detraction: Amusing wisdom in Dr Johnson’s essay ‘On Detraction’.

  16 CONVERTS

  Curran on MM: 8 June 1800. Abinger: Dep. c. 507/1. KP, i, 363.

  WG’s first encounters with MM: WG to Marshall (2 Aug. 1800). KP, i, 368–70.

  ‘In what you say…’: MM to WG (8 Sept. 1800, 6 Apr. 1801, 6 Aug. 1801). Abinger: Dep. c. 507. Extracts in KP, i.

  ‘my peculiar good fortune’: MM to WG (8 Sept. 1800), SC, i, 84.

  marriage a bar to improvement: Chapter on matrimony, Education, 31.

  Moore Park near Kilworth: Young, Tour, ii, 394. Young visited the estate in 1776. The owner at that time, Stephen Moore’s father, was celebrated in Ireland for ‘his uncommon exertions in every branch of agriculture’. Principally cattle: ‘beautiful cows’, rams, stallions, a Craven bull imported from England. He was especially proud of his turnips–30 acres of them.

  ‘silliest project’; other comments about the marriage: Revelations of her past for her daughters (1818).

  a United Irishwoman and republican: Power, White Knights, 52.

  ‘born with the dead’; ‘tongued with fire’: T.S. Eliot: Little Gidding, I and V.

  francophilia as ‘radical chic’: Foster, ‘Remembering 1798’.

  on Fitzgerald O’Connor, and francophilia: Foster, Modern Ireland, ch. 12.

  MW’s copy of The State of Ireland: Remains amongst the Irish books in the nineteenth-century library of MW’s present-day descendants, the Dazzi family of San Marcello, Pistoiese.

  fear of massive casualties: Tillyard, Citizen Lord, 266.

  Big George’s atrocities: Power, White Knights, 56–7.

  ‘As a gentleman of respectability…’: Francis Plowden, An Historical View of the state of Ireland, from the invasion of that country, under Henry II to its union with Great Britain (London, 1801). Quoted by Power, White Knights, 53–4, 57.

  ‘only had two Maidenheads’: Ibid., 39.

  dooming Ireland to impotence: Tomalin, intro. to MWS, Maurice, 19.

  MM’s pamphlets: MM was proud of the quoted passage. She copied it to the Shelleys at the start of their friendship in the winter of 1819–20. Abinger: Dep. c. 517.

  ‘set hard’: Foster, Modern Ireland.

  alternative to ‘dominant history’: Foster, historiographical intro., Irish Story, xvi–xvii. The idea of counter-history goes back to Virginia Woolf, particularly her treatment of the Wars of the Roses in ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’ (1906), and more explicitly in the way she casts Trevelyan’s history into question in A Room of One’s Own (1929).

  Bible Stories: Parts of preface quoted in St Clair, ‘Godwin as Children’s Bookseller’.

  ‘driving at full speed’: Miss Wilmot’s travel letters to her lawyer brother, Robert Wilmot.

  ‘It would give me great pleasure…’: 6 Aug. 1801. Abinger: Dep. c. 507.

  shady history of ‘Mrs Clairmont’: Thoroughly researched by St Clair, Godwins and Shelleys, and a summary may be found amongst the fascinating notes to Marion Kingston Stocking’s edition of The Clairmont Correspondence (ClCor), 42–3. Her father appears to have been Peter (Pierre) de Vial, a French merchant who settled in Exeter. The family originated in the south of France, and in the eighteenth century migrated to Geneva.

  WG on the similarity of Mrs Clairmont’s letters to MW’s: 2 Apr. 1805. Abinger: Dep. c. 523.

  HMW in 1801–2; MM as ‘frosty moon’: Wilmot, Irish Peer, 27, 38–9.

  ‘very thick together’; ‘most excellent woman’: 31 May and 24 July 1802. Houghton.

  stays in Bond Street…: To RB (16 July 1802). Ibid.

  ‘He is an aristocrat…’: 24 July 1802. Ibid.

  cross-dressing in Paris: Wilmot, Irish Peer, 42–3, 50–1.

  ‘Talleyrand as cormorant’: Ibid., 47.

  ‘republican homage’: Ibid., 20.

  Mrs Opie’s Poems given to MM: Information from Cristina Dazzi. Cini–Dazzi Collection.

  ‘The glare of the arts…’: To RB (20 July 1802). Houghton.

  ballets of Vestris; ‘moderation of grace’: Wilmot, Irish Peer, 19.

  Tighe’s background: Pf: Cini Papers, folder 26, and Burke’s Landed Gentry of Ireland. An ancestor, Richard Tighe, had been Mayor of Dublin in the 1650s, and Member for Dublin in Cromwell’s Parliament of 1656. He was one of many in the Civil War generation who saw it as politic to shift sides. The family continu
ed to serve in the Irish Parliament. They were not titled, but married into the peerage. George Tighe’s grandmother on his father’s side had been Lady Mary Bligh, daughter of the Earl of Darnley and Lady Theodosia Hyde who was the daughter of the 3rd Earl of Clarendon.

  ‘very handsome’: Mrs Latouche (formerly Miss Tottenham) in conversation in 1837 with Laurette, the daughter of MM and Tighe, in Rome; reported by Laurette to her father shortly before his death that same year. Pf.

  ardent poems: Cini–Dazzi Collection, San Marcello. Tomalin selected apt quotations in intro. to MWS’s Maurice, 21.

  discreet adultery almost de rigueur: MacCarthy, Byron, 165, pictures the cynical sexual networks of adultery. Hufton, History of Women, 145, says that ‘no group, unless it was the very poor, so held in contempt the rules laid down in prescriptive literature concerning marital chastity than the European aristocracies’.

  ‘days of adversity’: To Scully (27 July [1806]), from Munich. Scully, Papers, 131–5.

  mother’s right to keep child to age seven: Extended to the age of fourteen by law in the Divorce Act of 1857, too late for the mother in Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), who has to go into hiding under an assumed name if she is to rescue her son from an abusive father.

  ‘I am resolved…’: Scully, Papers, 133.

  3rd Earl: Succeeded his father who died in 1799, a year after his trial.

  ‘his character’: Scully, Papers, 133.

  Another ‘Yes, Laura’ poem: ‘Palinode’, n.d., Cini–Dazzi Collection.

  ‘Let us cease…’: poem (untitled), dated 1808. Ibid.

  ‘Fall of Jena’: Alongside Tighe’s poem on the battle, MM wrote about ‘The Lost Boy’ who is separated from his family as people flee from an embattled town. Stories of Old Daniel.

  MW on women as physicians: RW, ch. 9.

  ‘In one thing alone…’: Scully, Papers, 133.

  MM disguised as a man: CC to Silsbee c. 1875. Silsbee Papers, box 7, file 2. Cited in ClCor, i, 135.

  travel notes of a Frenchman: Undated. Discovered and transcribed by Cristina Dazzi, Cini–Dazzi Collection. English translation (by Sandrine Sanos) is on the Internet site accompanying this book.

  MM’s income: Supplemented by Tighe, who had a small estate in County Westmeath. His father had left the estate in debt, but he still had £200 a year from his Irish rents, and in 1815 he also acquired an annual Civil List pension of £400. So, together, he and MM had £1400 a year. Contrast with the £40 a year middle-class women like the Wollstonecraft sisters could earn as governesses.

  ‘Mrs Mason’: It should be noted that Tighe did not consent to her being known as Mrs Tighe, unlike the willing way GI conferred his name on MW.

  ‘that middle rank’: Revelation for her daughters (Apr. 1818).

  decline of English society in Pisa: In an 1819 letter to the Shelleys, MM notes that the number of English families had fallen to five. MW’s letters to the Shellys are in the Abinger: Dep. c. 517.

  books taken to Italy: Inherited by Nerina Tighe. Listed in Pf: Cini Papers, folder 23.

  ‘extravagant political notions’…: Sadleir’s ignorant preface to Wilmot, Irish Peer, vii–viii.

  ‘religion’; ‘my medical studies’: To MWS (18 May [1826] and 29 Sept. [1823]). Abinger: Dep. c. 517

  Stories for Little Boys and Girls: Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College. With thanks to curator Karen Kukil to whom I wrote on the offchance of finding so rare a book.

  ‘Memorandums’: Pf: Cini Papers, folder 17. Amongst Tighe’s papers, but the content looks like MM’s. The hand remains to be ascertained. A note here from the 1950s by her biographer, McAleer, shows him uncertain.

  FI’s ‘florid health’: Memoirs, ch. 1.

  ‘the Midwives’: Marginalia to supercilious article ‘On the State of the Poor in Italy’, whose author blames deformities on ‘the extreme carelessness in the science of midwifery, that generally being practised by women’. Pf: Cini Papers.

  MM’s opinion on the placenta: From her Advice to Young Mothers. This defence of MM’s medical opinion in its historical context came from Siamon Gordon, Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, Oxford. More on MM’s medical opinions in ch. 17 below.

  Shelley’s eccentric appearance: CC’s recollections for Silsbee (26 Apr. 1876). Silsbee, Papers, box 8, file 4. Cited in ClCor, 169.

  WG to MM: Abinger: Dep. c. 524/7. Full text in Appendix II to MWSJ, 585.

  ‘vagabond’: To PBS [Jan. 1820]. Abinger: Dep. c. 517.

  kissed: CC to Mrs Gisborne (13 Nov. 1819), ClCor, 133.

  ‘frankness’ and ‘cant’: MM to PBS (14 Nov. [1819] and [winter 1819–20]). Abinger: Dep.c. 517.

  Peterloo Massacre: On 16 Aug. 1819, a month and a half before the Shelley party and MM met in Pisa. Soldiers charged a peaceful crowd of petitioning workers from the Manchester cotton factories who had gathered at St Peter’s Fields.

  ‘Since my country…’: MM to the Shelleys [winter 1819–20]. Abinger: Dep. c. 517.

  ‘as good a physician’: MM to MWS (31 Dec . 1819). Ibid.

  17 DAUGHTERS

  no questioning of marriage; no atheism: CC to Trelawny (30 May 1875), ClCor, 627.

  ‘baby-sullenness’; ‘the worst of tempers’: 28 Oct. 1803, KP, ii, 98–9.

  eager sympathy…truth: These were the qualities MWS emphasised in notes for a biography of her mother. Ibid., i, 231 and Clemit et al, Lives of the Romantics, ii, ed. Harriet Jump.

  ‘unsinking’: WG to Mary Jane Godwin (12 Sept. 1812), Appendix A to ClCor, ii, 643–4.

  intellectual women; Katherine Parr: See ch. 4 above and note to ch. 16.

  aim of education: The Enquirer, cited by Clemit, ‘Anarchism in the Schoolroom’, 67.

  more emphasis on republican virtues: St Clair, ‘Godwin as Children’s Bookseller’, 173.

  English Dictionary: Published under the pseudonym of Mylius.

  definition of ‘revolution’: Clemit, ‘Anarchism’, 48.

  Mounseer Nongtongpaw: St Clair, ‘Children’s Bookseller’, 175, suggests that MWS may have written other such works.

  the Wollstonecrafts and Fanny: Rowan to EW (8 Mar. 1805). Abinger: Dep. b. 214/3.

  £3000: Harriet Shelley to Mrs Nugent in Dublin (20 Nov. [1814]), Shelley, Letters, i, 421: ‘I told you some time back Mr. S. was to give Godwin three thousand pounds.’

  ‘one of the daughters of that dear MW’: To Mrs Nugent, ibid., i, 327.

  Shelley’s appearance and voice: CC’s wonderfully vivid recollections. Silsbee Papers, box 8, folders 3 and 4 (dated 18 Apr. 1874). A few cited in ClCor, ii, 657.

  a female court: Tomalin, Shelley, 3.

  ‘Then it was Fanny Imlay he loved’: CC in conversation with Silsbee (Silsbee Papers, box 8, folder 3). ‘Then’ refers to the period before he met their sister Mary. (Shelley and Mary first met on 11 Nov. 1812 when Mary was fifteen, but since Shelley left London two days later, he can’t ‘then’ have been much interested in her.) The first(1886) edition of Dowden’s Life of Shelley has an appendix demolishing the reliability of Mrs Godwin’s letters to MM, as well as CC’s copies of them. These letters include reports of the attraction between Fanny and Shelley, so doubt was cast on this, along with everything else. There is no way of proving so delicate a matter, but we might assume some level of attraction on the basis of Shelley’s romancing Fanny as MW’s daughter and on the evidence of his flirtatious letter to her.

  ‘as women love’: Ibid., box 7, folder 3. Shelley’s weakness, CC adds, was not for the ‘subordinate part of love’.

  ‘Fanny loved Shelley’: Ibid., box 7, folder 2.

  the plain girl; ‘odd’: Crabb Robinson, Diary (12 Feb. 1817), Books and their Writers. Harriet Shelley also calls her ‘plain’, though plainness is negated by the radiance of her mind–reflecting Shelley’s impression.

  ‘nothing’ of her mother: Aaron Burr, Journals.

  FI looked like GI: MW’s observation to GI.

  ‘Fannikin’: Travels, letter 12.
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br />   WG on his daughters’ education: To E. Fordham (13 Nov. 1811). Abinger: Dep. b. 214/3. KP, ii, 213–14.

  ‘There is a peculiarity in the education of a daughter…’: From MWS’s autobiographical novel, Lodore, quoted in Dunn, Mary Shelley, 20.

  ‘bad baby’: Humphrey Carpenter and Mari Prichard (eds), The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature (Oxford University Press, 1984).

  ‘amiable’…pitted with smallpox: Reveley, ‘Notes and observations’ (after Oct. 1859). SC, x, 1137.

  ‘So young in life…’: CC to FI (28 May 1815), ClCor, i, 10.

  ‘weight’: The Watsons, ed. Margaret Drabble (repr. Penguin Books, 1974), 142.

  nut-brown hair: Often said to be red-gold, but a lock preserved in Pf has no trace of red.

  ‘Shelley was in love with her’: Silsbee Papers, MSS 74, box 7, folder 2. CC says that FI was sent to Dublin but there is no supporting evidence.

  PBS told Mary that Harriet no longer loved him: Ibid., box 8, folder 4.

  ‘pride & delight’: To Frances Wright (12 Sept. 1827), MWSL, ii, 4: ‘The memory of my Mother has been always … the pride & delight of my life’, Mary said, and ‘the admiration of others for her, has been the cause of most of the happiness I have enjoyed.’

  ‘I would unite’: ‘To Mary——’, SPP, 101–5. Dedicatory verses to ‘Laon and Cythna; or the Revolution of the Golden City’ (later revised as The Revolt of Islam).

  ‘that churchyard…’: 18 June 1824, MWSJ.

  ‘spirit’s mate’; beautiful and free: ‘To Mary——’, SPP, 101–5.

  ‘It is no reproach…’: 14? July 1814, Shelley, Letters, i, 390.

  PBS draws on MW’s views of free love: 17 Aug. 1812, to James Henry Lawrence, author of The Empire of the Nairs; or the Rights of Woman (1811).

  Mrs Godwin…blamed Mary Godwin: Maria Gisborne, Journals and Letters, reports on discussions with WG in London in July 1820. Mrs Godwin refused to see her because of her closeness to MWS.

  ‘I shall ever remember…’: CC to Byron (?16 Apr. 1816), ClCor, i, 36.

  ‘I have determined…’: 29 May, 1816, ibid., i, 49.

  ‘the dreadful state of mind’: To MWS (29 July–1 Aug. 1816), ibid., i, 54.