Vindication (65 page)

domestic affections cut across distinctions of gender
: Moore,
Mary Wollstonecraft
, 39.

‘ridiculous falsities'
:
RW
, ch. 7 (on modesty).

Preface to
Elements of Morality: ‘Address to Parents'. A ‘new and improved' edition in 1821 eliminated sex education together with the opening ‘Advertisement', which had carried MW's name in the 2nd edn, 1792.

no precedent for naming the sex organs
: Vivien Jones, ‘Sex Education'. Dr Jones led the way in shedding an accretion of prejudice about MW's supposed prudery, in order to demonstrate what was innovative.

Aristotle's Complete Master-Piece: Ibid.

‘Children very early see…'
:
RW
, ch. 7.

‘not only to enable [women] to take proper care…'
: Ibid., ch. 12, on national education.

hard fact in copious footnotes
: Marilyn Butler, comments after Dr Jones's lecture, ‘Sex Education'.

change institutions
…
change human nature itself
: Schama,
Citizens
, denies any advantage resulting from the French Revolution, despite this psychological effect (described memorably in the American context by Henry Adams in his chapter on ‘American Ideals' in his
History of the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison
). In France the psychological consequence is overlaid by violence, but had its impact on the mind of MW, which in turn is having its impact now in the transformation of women's agency.

Talleyrand on girls' education
;
‘the will of nature'
: Girls were to be allowed to attend primary schools up to the age of eight, where they would learn handiwork ‘suitable to their sex'. (Tallyrand,
Rapport sur l'instruction publique
.)

‘the natural emotions…'
;
‘pretty superlatives'
:
RW
, Introduction to the 1st edn.

‘a premature unnatural manner'
: Ibid.

‘a road open…'
: Ibid., ch. 9.

Catharine Macaulay
: Comments on women's education in letter 4,
Letters
, 46–50. Reviewed by MW in
AR
(1790). She expressed her admiration in
RW
, ch. 5, when Macaulay (Mrs Graham) had recently died.

‘Brutal force…'
:
RW
, ch. 2.

‘Man accustomed to bow down to power…'
: Ibid., ch. 3.

‘It would puzzle a keen casuist'
: Ibid., ch. 9.

‘moral agents'
: Ibid., end ch. 12.

‘It is time to effect a revolution…'
: Ibid., ch. 3.

mainstream of British and American politics
: I've taken this wording from Barbara Taylor's innovative study of the impact of MW on Owenite feminism in the first half of the nineteenth century, a period in which MW is still often taken to have been in eclipse (
Eve and the New Jerusalem
, 1). Owen's meeting with MW's elder daughter in 1816 will figure in ch. 17.

debated by women in the British provinces
: Hufton,
History of Women
, i, 450.

Mrs Grant's response to
RW: Noted by Elizabeth Crawford, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft: “the first of a new genus”'.

Catherine
,
or the Bower
:
The Juvenilia of Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë
, ed. Frances Beer (Penguin Classics, 1986), 136–77. The connection between Aunt Philadelphia and the fictional orphan Miss Wynne, forced to sell herself to an unattractive man twice her age, was made originally by Chapman, and is sensitively developed in Tomalin,
Jane Austen
, 80.
Catherine
was written a few months after Aunt Phila's death. Later, in
Mansfield Park
, a slave-owner, Sir Thomas Bertram, tries to force his niece Fanny into a lucrative marriage to a faithless flirt–again a demand that a dependant should prostitute her person for ‘a maintenance'. Kathryn Sutherland's introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of
Mansfield Park
suggests that ‘in the intensity and even violence of her feelings, Fanny can seem the heir of a Romantic revolutionary feminine tradition, of heroines like Wollstonecraft's Maria [in
WW
]'.

‘Upon my word…'
:
Pride and Prejudice
, ch. 29.

‘Her manners…'
: Ibid., ch. 8.

Fanny Price as legatee of
RW: Hufton, i, 450.

Anne Elliot
:
Persuasion
, ch. 23.

‘remember the Laidies'
:
Adams Family Correspondence
, i, 329, 370: ‘That your sex are naturally tyrannical is a truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute…Why then not put it out of the power of the vicious and lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity. Men of sense in all ages abhor those customs which treat us only as vassals of your sex.' ‘I desire you would remember the Laidies, and be more favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of husbands.'
Adams replied (382): ‘ I cannot but laugh', noting complaints that American freedoms had fomented disobedience amongst ‘Indians' and ‘Negroes'. ‘But your letter was the first intimation that another tribe more numerous and powerful than all the rest were grown discontented
…
Depend on it, we know better than to repeal our masculine systems.'

Abigail Adams and
RW: Adams MS correspondence: John Adams in Philadelphia to Abigail Adams in Quincy, Massachusetts (22 Jan. 1794); Abigail Adams to John Adams (2 February 1794); and on women rulers (26 Feb. 1794). Elements of this exchange cited in Akers,
Abigail Adams
, and Paul C. Nagel,
The Adams Women
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 57.

Aaron Burr's response to
RW: To Mrs Burr (16 Feb. 1793),
Memoirs of Aaron Burr
, i (New York: Harper, 1855), 363; extract in
SC
, i, 328.

Hannah More to Walpole
: 18 Aug. 1792, Walpole,
Correspondence
, xxxi, 370.

the gentry…‘shocked'
;
effigy of Paine
; ‘
immortalizing Miss Wollstonecraft'
: BW to EW (20 Jan., 10–20 June 1793). Abinger: Dep. b. 210. BW was a governess in Pembroke at this time.

William Roscoe applauded MW
: ‘Life, Death and Wonderful Achievements of Edmund Burke' (quoted Chandler,
Roscoe
, 390). Roscoe (1753–1831), elected MP for Liverpool in 1806, backed the bill to abolish the slave trade which became law in 1807.

Roscoe commissioned a portrait
: Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Painted in Oct. 1791. The artist is unknown, but a possible clue may be in an unpublished letter (20 Aug. 1834) from WG to his second wife (Abinger: Dep. c. 523). He is pestered for money, he says, by William Perry, who did a portrait of JJ ‘& another of first mamma' (as MW was called after WG remarried).

‘ a book'
:
MWL
, 202–3;
MWletters
, 190.

8
RIVAL LIVES

MW's letters to George Blood and her sisters between Nov. 1787 and early Dec. 1792 are in
MWL
, 163–223;
MWletters
, 138–213.

‘a
dreadful
situation'
: 1 Jan. [1788].

‘I wish when I transact…'
: 15 Sept. [1789].

Mrs Bregantz's ‘snarling'
…: BW to EW (Apr. 1791). She writes to George Street, where EW was staying with MW after her return from Paris.

Tasker and Rees
: I'm dependent here on Todd,
Wollstonecraft
, 170–1, having myself not come to satisfactory conclusions. BW's rage is so pervasive that she doesn't make the exact nature of the relationships sufficiently clear.

‘It is happy…'
: BW to EW (29 Mar. 1792).

‘Mrs Wollstonecraft
is grown quite handsome
': BW to EW (3 July 1792).

‘while the sad hours of life…'
: BW to EW (10 Feb. 1793).

‘threw some money away'
: MW to Roscoe,
MWL
, 203;
MWletters
, 191.

James Wollstonecraft's future
: According to JJ, ‘A few facts', James afterwards served ‘on board Lord Hood's fleet as a midshipman, where he was presently made a lieutenant'. This doesn't take account of the shadier aspect of his history, which includes a spell in a French prison; money borrowed from his sister's friend, John Barlow, and not returned, to JB's outspoken fury; and four subsequent letters to WG with excuses for not repaying a debt.

MW and Ann
: Unclear whether this was always to be a temporary arrangement. It seems that Ann was later returned to Mrs Skeys.

Mrs Skeys none too kind
: EW to BW (n.d. but post-1798, because the letter refers to the publication of
WW
). Abinger: Dep. b. 210/5.

JB's revisionist view of ‘nature'
: Beinecke: Za Barlow folder 5: MS ch. 6, headed ‘Means of Subsistence', of an unidentified work.

MW meets Mrs Leavenworth
: Stiles,
Diary
, iii, 502–3.

‘the easy…behaviour' of American women
: MW's review of J. Brissot,
Nouveau Voyage dans les États-Unis de L'Amérique
,
AR
(Sept. 1791).
MWCW
, vii, 391. This issue came out one month after RB's arrival in London in Aug. 1791, which makes it just possible for MW to have met her through JJ.

‘What I feel
,
I say'
: RB to JB (Jan. 1796). Houghton: bMS Am 1448 (539).

RB's concern with private integrity
: J.B. Cutting to JB (19 May 1810). Beinecke: Pequot M 969.

‘could never contrive to make any boys…'
: MW to EW (23 Feb. [1792]).

‘heavy expence'
: MW to EW (20 June [17]92).

‘snap'
:
MWL
, 208;
MWletters
, 196.

‘Mrs. B….'
: 20 June [17]92.

resemblance of GI and JB
: Seelye,
Beautiful Machine
, 117.

JB's family
: The son of Samuel and Esther Hull Barlow, JB was a descendant of farmers who had settled in Connecticut in the 1650s.

JB's war record
: He fought in the battle of Long Island and was chaplain to the 4th Massachusetts Brigade.

‘the tenderest…of
Lovers': From Hartford (13 Aug. 1781). Houghton, bMS Am 1448 (537).

‘the Hartford Wits'
: Timothy Dwight, John Trumbull, Lemuel Hopkins, and David Humphreys who reappears later in JB's correspondence as one of Washington's spies in Europe. See below, ch. 14. During these early years in Connecticut, Barlow tried law–with little success–and then was employed to revise Isaac Watts's version of the Psalms for the Congregational Church.

JB's epic
: In its foretelling the triumph of liberalism, a forerunner of Constantin Volney's
Ruins
(1791) and Shelley's
Queen Mab
(1813).

Scioto Land Company
: On 1 Mar. 1784 Jefferson proposed a plan for the government of the entire West which led to the Northwest Ordinance of 13 July 1787, providing for government of the territory north-west of the Ohio River. Under the direction of the Revd Manasseh Cutler, a group of Revolutionary War veterans from New England organised the Ohio Company. The group signed a contract
on 27 Oct. 1787 for 1, 500, 000 acres on the Ohio and Muskingum Rivers.

JB's first visit to London
: Diary: Houghton, bMS Am 1448 (9). See also JB in London to Hazard (27 Aug. 1788), Beinecke: MS Vault Pequot M886–M937.

JB to Sargent
: Winthrop Sargent Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston.

‘I thot you were dead…'
: JB to RB (9 Mar. 1790). Houghton, bMS Am 1448 (181).

RB's voyage
: RB to Mary Dwight (3 Oct. 1790) from Paris. Houghton.

JB enamoured of Mrs Blackden
: Morris,
Diary
(May 1789).

‘I have not slept with any body but God…'
: JB to Mrs Blackden (11 July 1790). Houghton.

Scioto scheme
: Trans. of the Paris agreement in is Beinecke: Za Barlow, folder 8.

JB and a Virginia merchant
: JB to Mr Fitzgerald of Alexandria, Va, from 162, rue Neuve des Petits Champs, Paris (17 Jan. 1790). (Scioto Land Co. Papers, MSS Division, New York Public Library.) This letter exhibits the high-toned graces Barlow could command. On the Internet site accompanying this book.

agreement with Hallet
: Trans. in JB's hand (14 Aug. 1790). (MSS Division, New York Public Library: Ohio box, Scioto Land folder.) JB's address is the Hôtel de la Grande Bretagne, rue Jacob, Paris. Agreement dated 28 June 1790, between JB and M. Hallet, by which Hallet entered the employ of the Scioto Co. for two years at an annual salary of 1500 livres.

‘taken infinite pains'
: He goes on: ‘If the first 100 people find themselves happy, the stream of emigration will be irresistible, they may be followed by a million of European settlers into the western country. This will greatly increase the value of all those lands, & enable Congress to sink the national debt by the sale of lands.'

‘the period of our deepest difficulties'
: JB's reflective will-letter to RB from Algiers during the plague of 1796. See below, ch. 14. Draft of letter in Beinecke, Za Barlow folder 13.