Vindication (17 page)

From August to November 1787, Mary kept her secret, even from her sisters. So long as the Kings remained in England people assumed she was still with them, merely taking time off to see her family. Mary had promised to pay the debt to Mrs Burgh in instalments of half her annual salary. She meant to continue this scheme, for she sent Mrs Burgh £20 at the time she was setting up house and found it hard to hand that sum over. She feared to reveal her new life until it was an accomplished fact, but her main reason, it appears from her actions, was a resolve to divert what she could spare from her windfall to Everina, and repay her debts in the gradual way she had undertaken. Only in November, when the Kings returned to Ireland without her, did her situation emerge–and even then she urged her sisters to say nothing to Ned or anyone else. Everina was made to promise that if she came to stay over Christmas she would comply with Mary's ‘whim', and not mention her ‘place of abode or mode of life'. Mary was ‘vehement' in her wish not to appear as an author.

‘You can conceive how disagreeable pity and advice would be at this juncture–I have too, other cogent reasons,' she confided to Everina when she broke the news. ‘I am then going to be the first of a new genus–I tremble at the attempt…My undertaking would subject me to ridicule–and an
inundation
of
friendly
advice, to which I cannot listen–I must be independant…This project has
long
floated in my mind. You know I was not born to tread in the beaten track–the peculiar bent of my nature pushes me on.'

When Mary Wollstonecraft made this declaration on 7 November 1787, the word ‘nature' implies a thing for which there was no word: a generic
mutation with a need to ‘seed', grow, and live out a new narrative of its own. She was taking up a position as an unchaperoned but respectable young woman living on her own and often the sole woman in a group of intellectuals and radicals. London grew from 500,000 to 800,000 in the course of the eighteenth century, a city large enough for opportunity, but small enough to retain a sense of community. Johnson's circle, including two of Mary's friends from Newington Green, Dr Price and John Hewlett, met for dinner on Sundays or Tuesdays in his crooked upstairs room.

‘I often visit his hospitable mansion,' Mary said, ‘where I meet some sensible men, at any rate my worthy friend–who bears with my infirmities.' In fact, she was in better health, she said, ‘than I have enjoyed for some years'.

This doesn't mean that she ceased to mourn for Fanny, but grief no longer undermined her, or only now and then, as when she heard of fortune smiling on Skeys. The thought of him sickened her and brought back ‘past tumultuous scenes of woe–thinking of that dear friend–whom I shall love while memory holds its seat'.
*
She went to hear a sermon Hewlett wrote especially for her, ‘on the recognition of our friends in a future state; the subject was affecting, and rendered more so by his tremulous voice'.

Once again, she pitied Hewlett his ‘domestic vexations', and now saw Sowerby too go under, with her infallible Austen eye for the tendency of able men to mate with inferiors: ‘Mrs S[owerby] is sunk into a mere nurse, her little stock of beauty not vivified by a soul, is flown–flown with the childish vavicity [
sic
] which animated her youthful face, and inspired her animal gambols–the sporting of lambs and kittens is pleasing when it does not occur too of[ten]. She is entirely the mother–I mean a fo[oli]sh one–and the child of course is not properly managed.' Domestic life in Newington Green was gradually receding from the City perspective of a professional woman in a man's world. Mrs Burgh, duly informed of this venture in November 1787, was not invited to comment. She died in 1788.

From November 1787 to December 1792 Wollstonecraft flourished with Johnson's support. This period in her life was relatively free of the resistance to women who pushed beyond the bounds of their sex–ridicule of the kind that Pope had unleashed on Anne Finch when her poems were published in 1713 and again on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in
The Dunciad
in 1728. There was a common assumption that a woman who published her writings violated her modesty. Anonymity was a cover, and Mary Wollstonecraft used it before her books were established; and further cover could be provided by menfolk, crucial to Jane Austen as she ventured into the arena of publication. Mary Wollstonecraft was fortified in a similar and in some ways more effective manner by closeness to her publisher and the clubbability of his circle. It was a form of protection that looks forward to Virginia Woolf writing from the citadel of the Bloomsbury set and fortified by a press of her own in the first half of the twentieth century.

Johnson's milieu included the German-Swiss artist of nightmares, Henry Fuseli; Cowper, whose poetry pitied those who are beyond effectual aid; the mathematician John Bonnycastle, long-headed like a horse dipping into a nosebag; and a doctor from St Thomas's Hospital and author of
Elements of the Practice of Physic
called George Fordyce, who had made two lasting observations–that the body's temperature is constant whatever the external conditions, and that digestion is a chemical not mechanical process. Then there was Thomas Paine, whose return to England from America in 1787 coincided with Mary's arrival in the group. Paine, like Fuseli, had an international reputation. He was an Englishman of Quaker family who had settled in Philadelphia in 1774 as editor of the
Philadelphia Magazine
, which proposed international arbitration, and more rational laws for marriage and divorce. Paine was the only revolutionary leader in America to promote women's rights in a sustained way.
An Occasional Letter on the Female Sex
(1775) broaches this issue: ‘Man with regard to [woman], in all climates, and in all ages has been either an insensible husband or an oppressor.' Five weeks after Paine attacked slavery, the first American anti-slavery society was founded in Philadelphia. After the British slaughter of Americans at Lexington, Paine had been the first to preach independence
and republicanism, and when fortunes were low during the Revolutionary War, his words had heartened the new nation. He had written by night, after long marches, by the light of a campfire: ‘These are times that try men's souls…Tyranny, like Hell, is not easily conquered…' During the Revolutionary War, he had served on Washington's staff and acted as Foreign Secretary to the insurgent Congress.

One other celebrity in Johnson's circle was the large, expansive naturalist Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles Darwin). His
Loves of the Plants
(1789) saw propagation as part of a natural, not divine, plan. ‘Nature' opposed ‘culture' as well as the Church's emphasis on the soul above the body. Dissenters did not demean the body, and Wollstonecraft concurred; she had opinions on nutrition, cleanliness, our susceptibility to ‘tenderness' in sustaining mental health, malpractice in childbirth, the advantage of breast-feeding, and the increasing awareness of an infant's need for intimate, hands-on parental care.

What did Wollstonecraft do when dinner was over? Johnson's dinners were at five in the afternoon. Did she linger after dark? Did any of the company see her home in a coach? It's unlikely: Mary did not invite gallantry. From the autumn of 1787 till that of 1791 she lived frugally, with no furniture to call her own. She could not afford new clothes, nor have her hair dressed in the puffed and powdered disarray of the day. Fuseli called her undressed hair ‘lank'; she was ‘a philosophical sloven'. This is the image of the unfeminine intellectual, dear to misogynist tradition. (Nearly a century later Henry Adams would warn his intellectual wife that a woman who reads Greek must dress well.) None of Wollstonecraft's portraits bears out Fuseli's slur; her hair is soft and curly, and she appears meticulously clean and neat (in accord with her belief in cleanliness as ‘an excellent preservative of health' in an age when bathing was a rare event, fleas infested even the rich, and vermin nested in the built-up structures of their hair). One of the two or three women in Johnson's circle, the novelist Mary Hays, confirms the ‘charm' of her looks and manners: ‘her form full; her hair and eyes brown; her features pleasing; her countenance changing and impressive; her voice soft, and, though without great compass, capable of modulation'. Since Mary could not have looked less a
‘philosophical sloven', the function of the slur was to undermine a woman who enters the male citadel. Rare women who succeeded in past centuries usually had fathers who empowered them. Elizabeth I is the most obvious example; and she had the additional advantage of the foremost Cambridge tutors of the day. Thomas More created a school in his house for his daughters, whose brilliance made a stir in the sixteenth century. Wollstonecraft presents the rare spectacle of a woman undertaking this on her own through her commitment to self-education and her extraordinary self-possession.

Mary Wollstonecraft may best be seen as she saw herself, a ‘solitary walker', unafraid of footpads in the shadows of St Paul's or lurking under the girders of Blackfriar's Bridge. Oil-lamps appeared every two hundred yards or so, but between lay a considerable stretch of darkness–settling on the City from late afternoon in winter. She would have heard, behind her, the faint rattle of a coach turning a corner, the clop of horses, and the night watch cry the hour. So this independent young woman wrapped in her cloak slips into darkness, taking her way to the next lamp, her step on the bridge fading in the direction of George Street.

 

Within three months, she rescued Everina. At Christmas, Everina left Miss Rowden's school, and in February 1788 Mary sent her to Paris. Fuseli helped to find lodgings with a Mlle Henry in the rue de Tournon, Faubourg Saint-Germain. Initially, the stay was to be for six months, but in the end Mary supported Everina abroad for two years, trusting a thorough training in Parisian French would secure her sister a superior post.

Johnson later testified that over the next few years Mary spent at least £200 on her family. In May 1788 she announced to George Blood that she would gain £200 that year–this, only six months into her new ‘plan of life'. It can't be proved, but £200 may have been close to the ‘present' Mary had received in June the previous year. Her early books were not amongst the big sellers of the day: only
Real Life
went into a second edition, and that after three years. If her first advance is a fair indication of what she might expect to earn, it's simply not possible that she could have earned much more than £100 for the two books she published and the three she began,
together with a few reviews, in the course of 1788. Her prediction of £200 (set against the £40 she had earned as a governess) was more by way of vindicating what would have seemed to others a rash venture. If the sum of £200 were already in hand, its existence would have had to be secret (except from Johnson), or people with claims on Mary–creditors and the improvident members of her family–would have snapped it up at once. All the same, she did manage to support each member of her family as their needs arose. What she didn't do was destroy herself by trying to fund them all at once. Mary did not invite her sisters to live with her, since this would have meant taking on two dependants whose presence interfered with work, as she learnt that Christmas. Johnson would have set boundaries for her survival as a writer, and when she exceeded them out of pity for one or other member of her family, he did advance small sums–as, later, when she had to fit Everina out for a post in Ireland.

As the months and years passed, Mary did manage to support herself by writing, and all her publications succeeded.
Original Stories from Real Life
was published (anonymously) in 1788. Here, we recall, a governess called Mrs Mason introduces two girls to the realities of poverty, hunger and child mortality. Their best education lies not in accomplishments with a view to the marriage market–in practice a property market–but in responsible fellow-feeling for the obscure, the rude, the weak and misused. Blake illustrated the second edition in 1791. His woodcuts break with earlier eighteenth-century styles, the rococo ornamentation associated with aristocratic frivolity in Watteau or the property-portraiture of houses, estates, horses, dogs, guns, wives and heirs. Blake's illustrations for
Real Life
have the purity of his poem ‘Visions of the Daughters of Albion', a protest against the existing order that ‘inclos'd [a woman's] infinite brain into a narrow circle'. In perfect harmony with Mary Wollstonecraft, he shifts inward and lights up states of being: pity, grief, devotion. His illustrations are wordless sermons. Mrs Mason appears in white, a stand-in for God; her arms are stretched out to form a cross, but without the usual iconography of pain: this model is not the martyr inducing voyeuristic emotions of horror. She has the purer, altruistic appeal of a teacher who wants to be of ‘use'. Her image is tender; her arms reach out and bless her pupils–‘Mary' and
‘Caroline' on either side–who fold their arms across their breasts like converts in prayer.

Johnson's tactic was to publish first the irreproachable stories (praised for ‘solid piety and virtue'), before he brought out (also, anonymously) the radical
Mary
soon after, in the spring of 1788. Meanwhile, Mary herself, more a survivor than her fictional namesake, turned to yet another genre: translation.

‘I really want a German grammar, as I intend to attempt to learn that language,' she wrote to Johnson in the autumn of 1787. ‘…I ought to store my mind with knowledge–the seed-time is passing away. I see the necessity of labouring now–and of that necessity I do not complain; on the contrary, I am thankful that I have more than common incentives to pursue knowledge, and draw my pleasures from the employments that are within my reach.'