Vindication (66 page)

JB to Baldwin
: On 3 May 1791 he promised Baldwin that if the Scioto schemers started up again, ‘I shall have nothing to do with them.' Houghton, bMS Am 1448 (65).

JB's new role
: To Baldwin, again. Ibid.

JB invited MW to tea
: WG's diary: ‘Tea at Barlow's with Jardine, Stuart, Wollstencraft [
sic
], and Holcroft.' Abinger: Dep. e. 201.

JB's
Advice
burnt
: Reports contradict.

Jefferson to JB
: 20 June 1792. Houghton *56M–52.

‘The visit to the king…'
: JB to RB from Paris (25 June 1792). Houghton, 1448 (195).

‘fondness for tracing
…':
MWL
, 162;
MWletters
, 137.

‘pent up'
: RB to Mary Dwight (3 Oct. 1790). Houghton, bMS Am 1448 (650).

coveted by Lady Hamilton
: JB described the house in detail to Lady Hamilton. Letterbooks, Houghton.

‘will be handed you by Mr Wollstoncraft'
: 1 Oct. 1792. Beinecke: Za Barlow folder 29.

‘The exertions…'
:
Memoirs
, 228.

correspondence with MM
:
MWL
, 167, 172, 176;
MWletters
, 143, 150, 156.

‘From the time she left me…'
:
SC
, viii, 909–11.

Mrs Mason takes leave
:
Real Life
, ch. 25,
MWCW
, 449–50.

‘do not suppose'
: c. mid-1788.
MWL
, 177.

planned to visit Paris
: In June, JB sent word to RB that he had found lodgings for MW in Paris. Houghton.

‘the world…married me…'
: To Roscoe (12 Nov. [17]92),
MWL
, 218;
MWletters
, 208.

Adam and Eve
:
Paradise Lost
, iv, 411–504.

Lavater
: MW was translating Lavater. HF's translation ousted hers. See ch. 7.

‘grandeur of soul' and ‘…comprehension'
: MW's letters to HF, quoted by Knowles,
Life of Fuseli
, i, 163.

‘brimful'
: BW to EW (4 Oct. [1791]). Abinger: Dep. b. 210.

‘palsied'
: JJ, ‘A few facts'. MW managed only a few reviews.

‘grotesque mixture'
: Haydon,
Autobiography
(1853).

WG on HF
: Letter to Knowles (28 Sept. 1826), cited in Knowles,
Life of Fuseli
.

Opie's portrait of HF
: National Portrait Gallery, London. At one time it hung opposite Opie's 1797 portrait of MW.

exchange at JJ's dinner
: ‘Memoir of HF' in
18 Pamphlets on British Art 1797–1934
, Bodleian.

HF and JJ
: In 1979 JJ's biographer, Tyson, contested Claire Tomalin's plausible 1974 suggestion that JJ could have been homosexual. Tyson,
Joseph Johnson
, xvii, argues (rather unconvincingly) that a lot of London shopkeepers never married because of economic insecurity, and that HF had a lot of single friends who are assumed to be heterosexual. Since it can't be proved either way I have left the matter open.

HF as pornographer
: Drawings at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

‘women have no character…'
: Pope,
Moral Essays
, Epistle II. HF agrees in his
Remarks on Rousseau
(1767), which MW almost certainly would have read.

HF on women
: Fuseli,
Aphorisms
(1788–1818), 225–7. Selections in Fuseli,
Mind of Henry Fuseli
.

HF's address
: Information from Elizabeth Crawford. HF was still there in 1794.

home visits of HF and MW
:
Memoirs
, ch. 6.

‘loved the man'
: To George Blood [c. 1791].

‘Like Milton…'
: MW to Roscoe,
MWL
, 206;
MWletters
, 194.

‘fugitive' and ‘intangible'
: Fuseli,
Aphorisms
.

‘I hate…'
: Knowles,
Life of Fuseli
, i, 363, quotes this snippet from MW's letters to HF. Knowles put it about that MW's letters were too ardent for their own good. This one seems decidedly unardent.

not to be trusted
: MW to JJ [c. spring 1790],
MWL
, 189;
MWletters
, 170.

Sophia as model
: Knowles,
Life of Fuseli
, presents a more respectable image: Sophia, he says, was visiting an aunt in London when she met HF. In fact, HF often drew and painted her as something of a dressy courtesan–probably a fantasy.

needy of paternal protection
: Did MW's fixation on HF have to do with her father? Looking at HF's
Nightmare
, as MW did every week at JJ's dinners, the viewer is put in the position of voyeur of a woman in danger, with no protector. This repeats MW's position as a child watching her father abuse her mother. Could MW have been drawn to HF's awareness of a woman's vulnerability? Judith Herman,
Trauma
, 111, has done a convincing study of the after-effects of domestic violence (aligning it with military trauma). For all that, we must take care not to impose on this distinctive woman a pattern of neurosis in place of the caricature of lust.

snips
:
MWletters
, 205, a speculative assemblage of a few separate and questionable snippets selected to fit the prevailing slander and quoted out of context by Knowles,
Life of Fuseli
, i, 162. Richard Holmes, in notes to
Memoirs
, 301, calls MW's involvement with HF ‘something of a puzzle' and suggests, I think rightly, the innocence of her proposal as another experiment in living. JJ recalls her ‘love' in a note to HF on the day of MW's death (see ch. 15 below), but I suspect that JJ's view was coloured by what HF reported to him. Kegan Paul, in his prefatory memoir,
Letters to Imlay
, rebuts slander. ‘The slander stuck sufficiently to make even Godwin surmise that had Fuseli been free, Mary might have been in love with him. But in fact Godwin knew extremely little of his wife's earlier life.' Kegan Paul finds the strongest indication against Knowles in the fact that MW remained friends and corresponded with Mrs Fuseli for the rest of her life. No one questions the plan of the young stage-struck Hannah More to live as a permanent guest with Garrick and his wife.

acquired elegant furniture and better clothes
: Knowles,
Life of Fuseli
, i, 166.

apologised to HF
: Ibid., i, 168.

winterly smile
;
‘fool's cap'
:
MWL
, 221;
MWletters
, 205–6.

‘the temerity…'
: Knowles,
Life of Fuseli
, i, 167–8. More myth of MW, 162–3.

MW–HF letters have vanished
: Knowles was Fuseli's executor, and MW's letters to HF passed into his hands. Fearing unkind use, Roscoe requested them but Knowles refused declaring them ‘chiefly but not entirely amatory…for the sake of all parties [they] had better be consigned to oblivion'. All the same, he quoted from them (against Godwin's plea) in
Life of Fuseli
. In 1870 his heir, a nephew called the Revd E.H. Knowles, announced that the letters were in his possession. In 1884 they were bought by MW's grandson Sir Percy Florence Shelley, who refused Elizabeth Robins Pennell permission to use them in her biography of MW in 1885. It's thought that the Shelleys destroyed them. See Richard Garnett,
Letters about Shelley
(London: Hodder, 1917). Transmission and the slanderous consequences are discussed further in ch. 15.

ran away to Paris
: An anonymous ‘friend' who published a supposed ‘Defence of the Character and Conduct of the late Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin' in 1803 propagates this gossip: she made ‘a sacrifice' of her private desires and ‘prudently resolved to retire to another country, far remote from the object who had unintentionally excited the tender passion in her breast'. KP, i, 207, who had seen MW's harmless letters to HF before they vanished, tried in vain to dispel this myth. He said that the story elaborated by Knowles ‘is supposed to be confirmed by extracts from her letters which are given. But
…
Mr Knowles is so extremely inaccurate in regard to all else that he says of her, that his testimony may be wholly set aside.'

‘I intend…'
: To Roscoe (12 Nov. [17]92),
MWL
, 218;
MWletters
, 206–7. Both editors of MW's letters are amongst those who misread ‘desire' to conform with the myth.

women's rights in France
: Excellent detail in Tomalin,
Mary Wollstonecraft
, ch. 13.

‘a just opinion…'
: MW to EW (Mar. 1794).

‘neck or nothing'
:
MWL
, 218;
MWletters
, 207. According to a letter from HF to Roscoe, she set out on 8 Dec.

9
INTO ‘THE TERROR'

Uncited quotations are from MW's letters to EW, JJ, Roscoe, GI and RB between Dec. 1792 and Sept. 1793 in
MWL
, 225–35, and
MWletters
, 214–29. The letters are poorly dated; the order uncertain. I follow the order in
MWL
, which allows for a more flexible interpretation of her conduct.

rue Meslée
: Now the rue Meslay in a drab, lifeless immigrant area.

‘edged tools'
: She took the phrase from a poem by one of the Connecticut Wits, David Humphreys, a friend of JB: ‘The Monkey Who Shaved Himself and His Friends'. Another source is Dryden's ‘Men are but children of another growth',
All for Love
, IV, i, 43.

MW witnessed
: When Richard Holmes looked at the narrow rue Meslay (as it's now spelt), he was at first puzzled how MW could have watched the procession; then he realised (
Footsteps
, 99) that a back window would have given a grandstand view.

renewal
: The trial had begun on 11 Dec. 1793, when MW would have been en route from Calais to Paris.

the Temple
: A medieval keep.

British reaction to the King's guillotining
: RB to JB (1 Feb. 1793). Houghton: bMS Am 1448 (540).

‘place of fear…'
: Wordsworth,
The Prelude
, Book X.

Mirabeau
: Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau (1749–91).

JB's political impressions
: Diary (3 Oct. 1788), Houghton, bMS Am 1448 (10).

women's march on Versailles
: According to Schama,
Citizens
, 633, it was led by Stanislaus Maillard who liked to swagger around as the captain of a paramilitary troop of strong-armed men at the service of the most militant sans-culottes. He was commissioned to undertake summary ‘trials' during the September Massacre in 1792.

massacre as turning-point for English opinion
: Analogous to English revulsion over the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew in the sixteenth century, and again in the seventeenth century with the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV when Protestants were forced to flee France.

no. 7 passage des Petits Pères
: Tiny, leading into the Place des Petits-Pères dominated by the Basilique de Notre Dame des Victoires, at the convergence of several streets. The passage looked too small to admit of a number 7, until I realised that it must have once extended across a present road into a development that took place in 1820, the Galerie Vivienne, today an elegant shopping complex.

French citizenship for JB
: Procès-Verbaux de la Convention (7 Nov. 1792, year one of the republic). (Archives Nationales, Paris.) JB had offered a critique of the 1791 constitution:
‘Un membre fait hommage à l'Assemblée
,
au nom de Joel Barlow
,
Citoyen Anglais
,
d'un ouvrage sur les vices de la Constitution française de 1791
,
& sur les bases à donner à la Constitution nouvelle
.
'

MW's February article
: The first of her intended series for JJ was this ‘Letter on the Present Character of the French Nation'. If she sent this to JJ, he didn't publish it, but since her response to France was unsure or ambivalent at this moment, it's likely she held it in reserve. Eventually published in Wollstonecraft,
Posthumous Works
.

‘a plan of education'
: Nothing of her contribution in the records of the Committee.

Condorcet's support for women
: In
Lettres d'un bourgeois de Newhaven
(1787) and
Sur l'admission des femmes au droit de Cité
(1790).

HMW…support for the Revolution
:
Letters from France
; Todd,
Wollstonecraft
, 212.

‘Authorship'
: MW to EW (24 Dec. [1792]),
MWL
, 226;
MWletters
, 215.

HMW's salon
: In the rue Helvétius (now the rue Sainte-Anne).

Brissot de Warville
: Author of
New Travels in America
(1788, trans. JB, 1792).

MW and Mme Roland
: There is conflicting evidence as to whether MW met Mme Roland. I. B. Johnson (who saw MW in Paris from Apr. to Sept. 1793) says that she
did know her. Hays, in her ‘Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft', says that MW regretted not meeting Mme Roland.