Vindication (46 page)

At that very time, Mary was penning a second letter, this one more teasing. Fanny had made their friend Mrs Reveley laugh by telling her, when she could not find her green monkey, ‘that it was gone into the country'. Mary's belly, in the seventh month, was growing ever larger, ‘and my appearance no longer doubtful–you, I dare say, will perceive the difference. What a fine thing it is to be a man!'

Trouble raised its head as Godwin began a fourth letter, on 12 June. Mary's second letter had not yet reached him, and a sliver of hoarfrost returned. When Godwin was put out he tended to become righteous. He would continue to inform her regularly of his movements, he told her: ‘I am the less capable of altering my method, if it ought to be altered, as you have not dealt fairly by me this post.' From now on he confined himself to travel letters, assured as he had been of her imaginative company. There is a comic portrait of the none-too-obliging Mrs Darwin who, having no notion of Godwin's celebrity, suspects him of lionising her important husband (with an earning power of £1000 a year); there is a prize booby with whom the lovely, accomplished daughter of Godwin's friend Dr Parr has eloped in obedience to her mother's advice to marry a fool; and there are bungling actors reducing the
School for Scandal
and
The Taming of the Shrew
to the counterpart of a puppet show at a country fair. Nothing of this pleased Mary. His later letters might have been addressed to anybody, she thought crossly, ignoring the fact that he had sent no less than six long letters, to her two shorter ones.

‘Another evening, & no letter,' he complains. ‘This is scarcely kind…What am I to think?'

Common sense told him that he would have heard of any serious accident. His anxiety was that she had succumbed to ‘sickness of heart, a general loathing of life & of me. Do not give place to this worst of diseases! The least I can think is, that you recollect me with less tenderness & impatience than I reflect on you. There is a general sadness in the sky: the clouds are shutting round me, & seem depressed with moisture: every thing tunes the soul to melancholy. Guess what my feelings are, when the most soothing & consolatory thought that occurs, is a temporary remission & oblivion in your affections.' Scarcely had he set this down when Mary's second letter arrived.

Godwin's lingering on the return road upset Mary further, prolonged as it was by his wish to view a Lady Godiva (the legendary benefactress of the poor who had to pay by riding naked through Coventry). This was to be reenacted at a Birmingham fair. The deferred date of return was Monday 19 June. Though he had warned Mary not to fix on a particular hour, she was still waiting at nearly midnight when the scab that had formed over Imlay's defection broke open afresh:

This was not the last of their tiffs. But Godwin was not Gilbert Imlay, and Mary had yet to see the full extent of his devotion.

 

To be a wife and mother was Mary Wollstonecraft's last role, again unorthodox. Her marriage was, in Virginia Woolf's words, ‘an experiment, as Mary's life had been an experiment from the start, an attempt to make human conventions conform more closely to human needs'. At times it seemed to Mary, as she mused in the shade of her green blind, that her experiment in marriage was not the new narrative she had meant to forge. ‘I am…thrown out of my track,' she thought, ‘and have not traced another.' How easy to feel sidelined when Godwin dined with Johnson or dropped in on Fuseli and others who had formed part of her single social life, from whom she was now cut off by ostracism or by the agreement that
she and Godwin should not go out together. Mary had to explain to him that she wanted company.

In testing out a new form of marriage, both made mistakes. If Mary neglected to write to Godwin as often as he to her and if she was excessively provoked by the Godiva delay, he reproached her for ‘savage resentment', calling it ‘the worst of vices'. Mary reproached him in return as a lover: ‘There is certainly an original defect in my mind–for the cruelest experience will not eradicate the foolish tendency I have to cherish, and expect to meet with, romantic tenderness.' Imlay's counter-drama had been a careless sensuality. Godwin's counter-drama was a measured reserve–a reserve coexisting with his kindness and loyalty. Mary responded either by abasing herself in ironically feminine terms, or pre-empting Godwin with expectation. Either way, romantic drama was not easy to put into action–going back to the time when they had bungled their first attempts at making love.

Then, too, the heat of her jealousy took him by surprise: her dislike of Mrs Perfection, and her resistance in June–July 1797 when Godwin felt free to visit and correspond with a certain Miss Pinkerton who intended more, Mary warned, ‘than comes out of her mouth'.

On the day of Godwin's return from the Midlands, with tensions running high, Miss Pinkerton arrives for tea. There she sits, cup lifted, smiling sweetly while Mary fumes. Godwin called women ‘Fairs', and Pinkerton was, in Mary's words, ‘a Fair in intellectual distress'. Such women continued to pursue Godwin, and Mary, who herself had been a ‘Fair' in distress, detected in her husband a vanity that encouraged pursuit. She went so far as to call him an intellectual ‘cocotte' with soft words for the pretty ones (like Miss Pinkerton), and nothing less than ‘insanity' for Hays, who was plain. At last, on 9 August, with the baby due in three weeks, Mary persuaded Godwin to back a rebuff to Miss Pinkerton, forbidding her the house unless she consented to ‘behave with propriety' towards a married man. With Godwin against her, pretty Pinkerton was forced to apologise–bathed in tears, so she claimed. All the same, she was a predator, beckoning Godwin while his wife's ‘portly shadow' met her eye as she walked. Her walk had slowed. In her eighth to ninth month, she was experiencing
discomfort, even some pain, as the full-grown baby pushed against the diaphragm.

During this second pregnancy, Wollstonecraft was planning a book to be called ‘Letters on the Management of Infants'. The first of the seven Letters was on pregnancy and the management of childbirth. In defiance of the custom for a mother to stay in bed for a month after a birth, she intended to come down for dinner the day after, much as she'd done after Fanny was born.

Wollstonecraft ridiculed the pathologising of women's bodies, the enfeebling invalidism of the middle and upper classes that was fashionable and remained so until the advent of ‘natural' childbirth in the mid-twentieth century. Later Letters would offer advice on the infant's diet and clothing, and its changing needs to the end of its second year. Her aim was to make infancy ‘more healthy and happy' at a time when a third of infants died. ‘I must suppose,' she wrote, ‘that there is some error in the modes adopted by mothers and nurses.' She had long thought ‘that the cause which renders children as hard to rear as the most fragile plant, is our deviation from simplicity'. By simplicity, Wollstonecraft meant cleanliness and the importance of bathing–not generally recommended in the eighteenth century. Dr Darwin, hearing her views, sent a message via Thomas Wedgwood to caution Mrs Godwin against cold bathing for children. He considered it ‘a very dangerous practise'.

The date of this message, 31 July, shows that Wollstonecraft was airing her ideas at the end of her eighth month of pregnancy. She discussed her ‘advice' with another friend of Godwin's, a young surgeon of Soho Square called Anthony Carlisle, whose hair stood up in a high crest and whose large ears projected attentively on either side of a gentle, enquiring face. He promised to vet her call to mothers to treat childcare as a profession to be learnt.

She also prepared ten ‘Lessons' for Fanny, filled with familiar domestic scenes (including times with ‘Papa') designed to hold a child's attention. The ‘Lessons' create an imaginary Papa, an omnipresent father figure who takes his domestic character from Godwin. Richard Holmes had an appealing idea that ‘Papa' could be Imlay, but Godwin was the man Fanny called
‘Papa', and Fanny is constantly invited to compare her able self with helpless baby ‘William'. The scenes are projected in the future when Fanny will be four and the baby about six months old. The presence of little William proves that the Lessons were devised while Mary was pregnant with William Godwin's child. This means that Godwin was wrong to suggest they were written as a legacy to Fanny when her mother was about to end her life in October 1795–a time when he and Mary were not yet friends. The Lessons were certainly a legacy for Fanny but conceived later, when Mary faced the dangers of childbirth. On the back of the manuscript is written: ‘The first book of a series which I intended to have written for my unfortunate girl'. Amanda Vickery's research on women's lives in Georgian England reveals that ‘it was still not uncommon for pregnant women to prepare themselves for death to the extent of drawing up conduct letters' for children too young to read. Wollstonecraft's Lessons are said to be ‘one of the most graceful expressions in English prose of the physical tenderness of a mother's love'.

If ‘Papa' had been Imlay, the Lessons would have opened up a trove of untapped memories. We should not be disappointed by the necessity to shift the date. A trove there is, though its scenes derive not from the Imlays at home in Le Havre but from the Godwins at home in London, the domestic unit that formed in April 1797 when Fanny's mother delighted in the affection growing between the child and her new father. This rosy child, ‘Fannikin' or ‘Lambkin', can draw baby-talk from the sober Godwin as she goes ‘plungity-plunge' early in the morning when she jumps out of bed. ‘Kiss Fanny for me,' Godwin writes from the Wedgwoods. ‘Tell Fanny, I am safely arrived in the land of mugs.' The mug he chose for her had an F in a garland of flowers. Meanwhile, he sends bantering messages about her lost green monkey–the one who, Fanny said, ‘went into the country'–who would be back where he belonged when Godwin returns. He admires Fanny as the product of her mother's ideas, a quick, sensitive child who is learning the primary lessons of Wollstonecraft's educational system as set out in
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters
and tested in Ireland on Margaret, Caroline and Mary King. Godwin thought these Lessons ‘struck out a path of her own'. The voice is all-important: it has the breath of life in it, the
breath of private attachment–unlike school readers. It reminds Fanny that she used to cry when her face was washed and demonstrates the appeal of cleanliness: ‘Wipe your nose. Wash your hands. Dirty hands. Why do you cry? A clean mouth. Shake hands. I love you. Kiss me now. Good girl.'

Here, in another education book, Wollstonecraft turns her imagination to the burgeoning consciousness of the very young child, teaching her how to be, as well as how to read. Her relation with Fanny was robust, physical, and anxious to ‘prepare her body and mind to encounter the ills which await her sex'. Godwin preferred to lay off the pressure while he backed the praise. ‘The first thing that gives spring & expansion to the infant learner,' he said, ‘is praise; not so much perhaps because it gratifies the appetite of vanity, as from a…satisfaction in communicated & reciprocal pleasure. To give pleasure to another produces…the most animated & unequivocal consciousness of existence.'

Fanny's second lesson is to sense the needs and feelings of others. ‘You are wiser than the dog, you must help him.' Theirs is a home where parents help each other when either is ill. ‘Papa opened the door very softly, because he loves me…When I brought him a cup of camomile tea, he drank it without…making an ugly face. He knows that I love him.' When Papa falls asleep on the sofa (Godwin, in fact, was prone to sleep in company), Fanny goes on tiptoe. ‘Whisper–whisper', as she asks for her ball. ‘Away you went.–Creep–Creep.'

The Lessons don't mimic the child's voice–we are spared the bleating of school readers, cheery or sentimental or righteous. We hear instead the voice of an attentive adult who knows a child for an eager, responsive creature. So Wollstonecraft went on exploding genre after genre:
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters
is not platitude for obedient girls; her
Travels
are not a travelogue; and the naturalness of her children's reader makes nonsense of damped-down girls on the one hand and, on the other, a hothouse exhibit like Queenie Thrale whose head was stuffed with unfelt knowledge. Her mother, Mrs Thrale, had boasted that two-year-old Queenie could repeat the Pater Noster, the three Christian virtues, the signs of the Zodiac, and all the Heathen Deities according to their attributes. No wonder
Queenie grew up to be a chill character who hated her mother. Wollstonecraft's passion for domestic education as well as more attentive childcare was carried on, as we shall see, by her pupil, Margaret King, but not borne out by subsequent feminists who, as Christina Hardyment says, ‘have not distinguished themselves in the ranks of practical advisers on child-raising'. Germaine Greer has suggested brightly that mothers could dump brats kibbutz-style in a farmhouse, to be visited when time allows. ‘Running through the women's liberation movement has been a thread of hostility to mothers and babies,' comments Ann Daly in
Inventing Motherhood
. ‘Few had children themselves when they tapped out their militant demands for equality.'