Vindication (21 page)

In Quincy, Massachusetts, Abigail Adams read Wollstonecraft as an ally against her husband's laugh when she had asked him to ‘remember the Laidies' in framing the laws for the new American nation. In 1794, John Adams was Vice-President to Washington when Abigail drew his attention to the fact that of the few queens who had been called on to rule as absolute sovereigns, the greater part had excelled: ‘Pliny tells us that…among the Lacedemonians, the women had a great share in the political government and that it was agreeable to the laws given them by Licurg[us]'; and in Borneo, she added, ‘the women reign alone, and their Husbands enjoy no other privilege than that of being their most dignified subjects; but as reigning and ruling is so much out of fashion at the present day, my ambition will extend no further than reigning in the Heart of my Husband'. John Adams conceded more wit and matter in his wife's letters than he heard in Congress, but owned in private to Abigail that he remained unwilling to lose time in women's company. ‘Pardon me!' he teased, ‘Disciple of Woolstoncraft!'

‘
Pupil
of Woolsoncroft,' she retorted, ‘confess the Truth that when you are sick of the Ambition the intrigue the duplicity and the Treachery of the aspiring part of your own sex', there is consolation in ‘the simplicity the gentleness and tenderness of the Female character.' Where these qualities
exist–and Abigail was too civil to point to herself–they are, she argued, ‘more beneficial to the human race' than Adams prudence, ‘and when conducted with good sense, approach to perfection'.

Abigail's sister, Elizabeth, asked her for a copy of the
Rights of Woman
, while Aaron Burr, a future Vice-President, wrote to his wife from the seat of government in Philadelphia: ‘I made haste to procure [the book], and spent the last night, almost the whole of it, in reading it. Be assured that your sex has in
her
an able advocate.' He admired her ability to adapt the liberating style of Rousseau in such a way as to resist him when it came to his demeaning stance on female education. ‘It is, in my opinion, a work of genius,' Burr concludes. ‘I promise myself much pleasure in reading it to you.'

At the same time, the
Rights of Woman
provoked outrage. Thomas Taylor the Platonist, who had been the Wollstonecrafts' landlord at Walworth when Mary was eighteen, published
A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes
(1792) proposing animal rights with laboured sarcasm, and sneering at her case for sex education as ‘beyond all doubt a most striking proof of her uncommon capacity, and the truth of her grand theory,
the equality of the female nature with the male
'. Hannah More clung to her status as a rarity in what she called an ‘unstable and capricious' sex: ‘I have been pestered to read the “Rights of Women,” but am invincibly resolved not to do it,' she assured Horace Walpole. ‘There is something fantastic and absurd in the very title.' Another bluestocking, the classicist Elizabeth Carter, was also put out. At Pembroke in Wales, the gentry declared itself ‘shocked': ‘the most indecent Rhapsody that ever was penned by man or woman,' they said, and discussed which parts ‘wounded modesty the most'. When an effigy of Paine was burnt, people spoke of ‘immortalizing Miss Wollstonecraft in the like manner'.

 

One of the mature men who were impressed with Wollstonecraft was lawyer and banker William Roscoe, a Liverpool connection of Johnson. He was a tall, upright man with mild grey eyes and a cheerful expression, who went in for a range of aesthetic and reforming projects, amongst them a botanical garden for Liverpool, a poem against ‘The Wrongs of Africa', and a pamphlet against slavery. In 1791 he applauded Wollstonecraft as an Amazon who
conquers with her pen. Roscoe commissioned a portrait of her while she was writing
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
.

If it was not a good likeness, she told him, he would find a more faithful sketch in her newest book: ‘a book…in which I myself…shall certainly appear, head and heart–but this between ourselves–pray respect a woman's secret!'

Likeness was not the prime aim of this portrait. It's not designed to show the day-to-day Mary Wollstonecraft toiling behind her specs, or trudging City streets on her way to the printing house. The portrait is a statement designed to refute the lightweight image of women's nature. Something else stands forth–a presence in sober black, setting off the dignity of her powdered head and long white fingers like a set of sensitive tendrils. Her white fichu is swathed to her chin like a cravat, drawing attention from her breasts to her face. Here is a sight never pictured before: a stateswoman about to speak–as austere and reserved as Mr Pitt. Her reserves have shed all extraneous attributes of femininity: no frill, no smile, no winning ways, and no silence. It's a vindication of the ‘new plan of life', a public image of a new genus.

F
anny's sister Caroline Blood was always in trouble. She had remained in London when her parents returned to Dublin. At the end of 1787, just as Mary was completing
Real Life
, having her sisters to stay and planning to fund Everina abroad, Mrs Burgh heard that Caroline had been found ‘in a
dreadful
situation'–prostitution–by parish officers in Islington. The parish would give her shelter in its workhouse if Mary were prepared to pay half-a-crown a week for her keep.

‘I cannot allow them again to turn her out,' Mary thought, as she took in the girl's need for ‘a few clothes to cover her'.

The great are ordinary as well as great: they are friends, sisters, daughters; they lose heart; struggle; lose patience; and always, they are beset by conventional scenarios–in Caroline's case the Hogarthian downfall of the unprotected girl exposed to the predators of the town. Mary did not go to see Caroline, fearing to take on ‘a burden I could
not
bear' had Caroline discovered her hideaway. Instead, she sent the sum through Mrs Burgh, and in the meantime informed Caroline's father. Mr Blood did send the £10 Mary had requested, but then conveniently forgot any further responsibility for his daughter. Mary described him as a ‘sensualist' who thought of honesty as romance. She projects her resentment into the ‘torment' of Mrs Blood who, with no existence in law except as the property of her husband, could only wait to be delivered by his death. In the end it was not Mr
Blood but Caroline's brother George who had to be pressed, year by year, for her support.

It so happened that George himself was not above a dodge when conditions seemed favourable. Mary had offered him some business for Joseph Johnson, so was ‘disappointed' when he failed to acknowledge a sum of money he should have received. She had to tell George, in words that left no room for misunderstanding, ‘I wish when I transact any business for Mr Johnson to observe a certain degree of punctuality…I am convinced it is vain to attempt to teach some people to be punctual; but as I thought you were scrupulously so your silence alarms me.' Words like ‘alarm', ‘uneasy', ‘apprehension' warn George that she's getting a whiff of dishonesty in view of his recent ‘embarrassments', associated, she suspected, with ‘that artful, selfish man', his father. A rumour of ‘lame' schemes had reached her. Was George diverting Mr Johnson's money–temporarily, he would have told himself–into one of them? Could she sustain herself against others' plots of dependence or against diversionary narratives of helplessness, fortune-making and marriage, or, most dangerous, against the distorting narrative of a rival ‘genius' in the shape of the artist Fuseli?

Since the summer of 1786, her sister Bess had languished in a series of unsatisfactory posts. Her past dependence on Mary's protection left her the person most affected by Mary's decision to become a writer. It meant that Mary was never going to support Bess or initiate any further scheme to bring them together. If Mary's existence was an experiment, Bess provides the control: subject to the same kind of constricting employment, panting to be free and subject to depression–remarkably articulate depression. More ladylike and less spirited than her sisters, Bess lacked Mary's counter to self-absorption: an interest in others. She also had the bad luck to have to cope with the quarrelsome lodgers at Newington Green; the sticklers for piety at the school in Market Harborough; and now she quailed before Mrs Bregantz, the headmistress in Putney. When Everina returned from Paris and joined Bess intermittently at Putney, Mrs Bregantz deplored Everina's ignorance of fancywork, her ‘mere smattering of Botany' and her ‘
dread
ful indolence'. The head's ‘snarling' manner ‘unhinged' Bess, who trembled when Mrs Bregantz approached. Mary was hardly soothing when
she advised Bess to take some salts, since ‘ugly spots sometimes appear on your fair face'.

Of the Wollstonecrafts, Bess was the least adaptable, trapped as she was in the disheartening grind of a young woman without the will to discover in herself the germ of a new genus. This is to say that Bess was like most of us–a measure for the rarer creature who extends herself beyond predictable bounds.

Mary remarked that Bess ‘wants activity'. She was active enough when it came to walking and riding, but too often ‘on stilts', as Mary put it, to win the hearts of pupils. In Putney, there were impolitic rows with the head's daughter, Miss Bregantz. Once, Mary lost patience with her sister's habit of inflating minor irritations with the strongest expressions of anguish. Bess gave her no peace, she burst out. It would be a ‘holiday' to dismiss her from her thoughts.

Bess was still in her twenties in May 1791, when she moved from Putney to Wales, to take up a post as governess at Upton Castle on the Pembrokeshire coast. She travelled by coach to Bath and Bristol; then by sea across the Bristol Channel to Port Lewis in Wales; and finally on horseback via her father's home in Laugharne. At Pembroke, she took charge of dark, bustling Ria, almost grown-up in her plaid flannel skirts; sickly, beautiful Sophia lolling beside the fire; and the youngest, Harriot, clever and spoilt. They were the heirs of a nabob called Tasker who had bought a castle from an old family, retaining a steward called Rees and a housekeeper called Molley. Tasker was a reader, like Bess, and gave her an ancient turret room next to a fine library, but she took against him too much to talk of books. She didn't exert herself to know the girls beyond what were harmless faults: their idleness and addiction to ghost stories told by the servants. Bess swept off to read Robertson's history of America. Her only friends were the dogs and, for a short space, a little boy, Tasker's nephew, shipped from India to remote rainy Wales and received, according to Bess, with chill parsimony–Tasker refused to buy the child the outdoor shoes he needed if he was to have exercise. Bess did love this lonely, homesick boy; loved him as much as she dared, for she knew they would have to part.

Some of her plaints sound justified: snubs, for instance, at a naval party where officers' admiring glances at her black eyes and healthy cheeks faded to audible ‘Ohhhs' when they learnt that she worked for her bread. None offered to hand her downstairs as she watched Ria–so very plain, but an heiress–descend on an officer's arm. Those who greeted the governess did so with averted eyes when others weren't looking. Venus herself, Bess thought, would be ignored in the guise of a governess, as would ‘Mary's Sappho'.

Later in the evening all changed when she danced with a sailor who introduced her as ‘Wollstonecraft's sister' to a messmate of her brother James.

The messmate exclaimed with warmth, ‘You are dancing with the
cleverest
Woman in the World.'

She was another sister, Bess had to explain; all the same he insisted on a dance, and she took his hand with unaccustomed pleasure. Her cheeks glowed as she talked of Mary.

Though Bess found Welshmen free from affectation, they had little to say–any man who could speak was sure to be Irish. As for her employer, whom she called ‘the miser', he sat down to a dirty tablecloth on which reposed the remains of dead animals. ‘Learn,' she wrote to Everina, ‘that I can swallow cocks and hens that
die
of
diverse diseases
–nay can digest a
dead mutton
…' She was hungry enough to devour the whole flock.

The miser had to be persuaded to provide a fire in the draughty turret. He required Bess to ask permission if she went for a walk. She did like an autumn walk, the melancholy colours, the dogs bounding about her; but on her return, he met her with grumbles. ‘It is happy for fine ladies who have nothing else to do–' he would say. The more Tasker sniped, the more he smiled.

All this, Bess set down, page after page of wailing, raging letters. She often refers to herself in the third person–‘poor Bess'–an ill-used heroine, whose beauty and suffering make her worthy of rescue. A false narrative, of course–Bess could see this–yet the passive scenario was ingrained. Hers wasn't stupid wailing, but grim for her sisters to read because these were cries for release as youth passed–and release was not at hand. Mary could neither take her on nor encourage false hope.

So, in the 1790s, the gap between the sisters widened. While the productive years in Johnson's circle developed Mary's assurance, Bess, with no protector, abandoned by Mary, was slowly crushed. She wrote to Everina: ‘I never think of
our sister
but in the light of a
friend
who had been dead some years; and when all here is fast asleep and nought is to be heard but the screech-owl I sigh to think we shall never meet, as such, again–though perhaps in a better world the
Love of Fame cannot corrupt the soul
[.]' She speaks of ‘surprise' and ‘indignation' at Mary's ‘sudden change' of character. The date is 29 January 1792, the month
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
came out. Six months later Bess was further put out to hear ‘that
Mrs Wollstonecraft
is grown quite handsome', adding snidely that ‘being conscious that she is on the wrong side of slight Thirty she now endeavors to set of[f] those charmes (
she once
despised) to the best advantage'. Bess did concede that Mary had a Great Soul, and did occasionally show self-insight: ‘I blush to own that my temper is now so
soured
; and continually ruffled that I almost despise myself.' Damage to character is the darkest effect of the social exclusion Bess experienced as a governess. A doctor who at first invited her out, stopped doing so, and talked past her to the family, Bess noticed, ‘without one word or look at me–yet never did I strive so hard to please'. The harder she tried to please a gentleman, the more suspect she would, of course, appear. Respectability required self-effacement.

Bess languished at Upton Castle from year to year, ‘while the sad hours of life were
rolling
away'. It may have been impossible to find a post paying more than £40 a year, especially for a governess without French. Bess still looked to Mary to provide her a turn in Paris, and was jealous when the needs of their brothers came first.

 

During 1791, James Wollstonecraft left his ship. Mary took him in and sent him to study mathematics for a few months under Mr Bonnycastle at the Military Academy, Woolwich. James was master of fine turns of phrase in pursuit of money–he could tell a plausible and urgent story promising a quick return that soon turned out to be impossible; it could be, a friend to whom he gave the money for safe-keeping passed it on to a banker who, it just so happened at that moment, failed and killed himself. It was never
James's fault. But he knew how to pull out the stops of abjection: ever the well-spoken gentleman, he longed to call on his creditor but trembled to anger one whose good opinion mattered to him beyond that of anyone else in all the world. Mary was undeceived when James ‘threw some money away to dance after preferment when the fleet…paraded at Portsmouth', and then idled around her while she worked. At length, in September 1791, he ‘condescended to take command of a trading vessel'. It was a speculative voyage, bringing Mary further ‘vexation'. In the course of the following year, he tried her patience till she no longer wished to see him.

After James left, Mary moved to Store Street, off the Tottenham Court Road, to the north of Bedford Square. Here, she had the fresh air of the nursery gardens that used to stretch behind the British Museum (now the site of University College). At this point, she acquired good furniture, a cat, and a seven-year-old orphan called Ann, an Irish niece of Betty Delane who had married Hugh Skeys (and was said to be none too kind to the child). Again, Mary's hope to be of use came to nought: she could not warm to Ann, who was loud, stole sugar, and lied. No more is known, but to take on so young a child, far from home, and then dismiss her, has to be questionable. Mary passed her on, for a time, to a childless American, new to London, called Mrs Barlow.

Mary put her most sustained effort into her youngest brother and sister. When Everina returned from Paris, Mary continued to protect her: she was encouraged to wait for the right post, and in the meantime had a home with Mary who passed on translating jobs for Johnson, interspersed with teaching spells in Putney.

When Mary set up in London, her brother Charles had been an articled clerk in the law firm of their eldest brother. His connection with Ned made Mary careful not to divulge where she stayed. As he came to meet her at Johnson's print shop, she noticed the way his ‘warm youthful blood paints joy on his cheeks, and dances in his eyes'. When Mr Wollstonecraft removed Charles from Ned during a dispute over property, Mary placed Charles in another law firm. Dismissed in April 1789, he went to Ireland to ‘eat the bread of idleness', as Mary put it, when he thought to settle with
their relations in Cork who had no wish to keep him. Mr Johnson paid Charles's debts, while Mary begged help from George Blood in Dublin: