Vindication (9 page)

Unfortunately, Dr Johnson died in December 1784 before Mary could take up his invitation to visit again. For a long time she revered his memory, read his posthumous
Prayers and Meditations
, and, in her anthology for women readers in 1789, included one of his last poems expressing his preference for ‘constant nature' over contrived charms.

To impress men like Johnson and Price was no mean feat for an obscure schoolmistress in her twenties with no languages or formal accomplishments who as yet had published nothing. It's plain that Mary Wollstonecraft's originality invited attention from those discerning enough to see it. Meanwhile, fussing lodgers and the gossips of the Green–the busy Smallweeds–were doing what they could to choke her enterprise. Yet, throughout her hard second year at Newington Green, she did retain the support of Mrs Burgh, Friendly Church, Miss Mason, James Sowerby, the Revd Mr Hewlett and Dr Price. And all through the troubles that lay ahead, the shape of an alternative was coming into being in the shadow of the American Revolution: a woman's claim to life and liberty.

At the time John and Abigail Adams joined the congregation of Dr Price in London, Mary Wollstonecraft too heard that gentle voice urging reform on the model of the Americans, who had ‘established forms of government favourable in the highest degree to the rights of mankind'. The rights of womankind were no more than a logical step from what Dr Price preached.

A
t first the school flourished. The staff held together as a community of women, Mary's dream during her depressed time as companion to Mrs Dawson and the grim years nursing her mother. In August 1784 came news that Bess's baby had died a few days short of her first birthday. We don't know how this affected her and her sisters, but Fanny's presence would have been a comfort. Her love for Mary extended in a playful way to ‘the girls', as her sisters were called. And the energy Mary put into trying out radical views of education had, for parents, a reassuring complement in Fanny's tact. Her humour would have teased ‘the girls' into compliance, as it would have caught the drip of complaints from the boarding mothers. But towards the end of that year came an ominous warning: Fanny spat blood.

Doctors advised her to leave the damp of England for a southern climate. Since she had no money, the only way to provide for a voyage and subsistence was to join her uncertain suitor Hugh Skeys who had remained a merchant in Lisbon for some years and was now willing to marry her.

When Mary discussed this possibility with Fanny, she was not thinking of her own wishes or the interests of the school; she was weighing the best course for her friend. In favour of marriage was Lisbon's sun, provision for Fanny, rest from work, and the hope that an end to her miseries over this man would prolong her life. Against this was a voyage through the stormy
Bay of Biscay; and the more worrying fact of Fanny's unfitness to bear children. Mary told Godwin, later, that she advised Fanny to choose Lisbon because she was certain that Fanny would die if she stayed in London, and any chance for improvement–if not recovery–should be tried.

So, Fanny sailed for Lisbon early in 1785, and married there on 24 February. A month later she was pregnant, which may account for ‘an extreme depression of spirits' at the start of a letter that goes on with brave humour to the ‘dear lasses' at Newington Green:

Fanny sounds content with marriage, and it's hard to decide whether Mary was sceptical, jealous, or declaring a hidden truth when she thought Skeys unworthy of her friend. He seemed to Mary strangely passionless, a lover whose feeling bestirred itself in Fanny's presence, but so long as the woman he loved was far away, willing to bear years of separation. Mary, whose love for Fanny intensified in her absence, wondered at Skeys for his blindness to Fanny's declining health and long struggle to support her family. In Mary's analysis, he went about well wadded with pride, content to look fondly on his chosen wife without perceiving her fidelity as more than his due.

When Dr Jeffray reached England, Mary received him like an old friend.
‘He is such a man as my fancy has painted and my heart longed to meet with–his humane and tender treatment of Fanny made me warm to him.' If Fanny had directed Jeffray to Newington Green as a potential husband for one of the Wollstonecrafts, nothing came of it. Sooner or later they all discovered the reluctance of even kind men like Dr Jeffray and Sowerby to link their fortunes to penniless women, however attractive–and the Wollstonecraft sisters were very attractive, Mary with her full breasts and curly auburn locks, and Everina with her young vivacity. Mary tried to stay her disappointment that the news the doctor brought from her friend proved little more than a letter of introduction. Until July she hoped Fanny's health would improve, but by August Fanny's letters made it plain that Lisbon was failing to heal her lungs.

‘She is still very ill and low spirited, a poor solitary creature,' Mary informed George Blood. She was tugged between the school and a growing responsibility to nurse Fanny through an ordeal bound to be complicated by consumption. Early in September 1785, Mary resolved on the journey to Portugal.

‘I have many difficulties to overcome,' she said, ‘yet I am not intimidated tho' worried almost to death.' She faced down opposition from a busybody on the Green, Mrs Cockburn. This opposition was not disinterested. Mrs Cockburn and her husband took lodgers, which meant that Mary had to contend with a business rival who spied an opportunity in Mary's departure, and moistened her lips on the moral luxury of warning her in advance. Pretending concern for prospective lodgers, Mrs Cockburn let it be known that if Mary took off, she would warn three ‘very advantageous' ones against rooming with the Wollstonecrafts.

‘I'm not to be governed in this way.' Mary brushed Mrs Cockburn aside.

After all, her sisters were there. She would not be the first to leave a school in assistants' hands. Everina had recently ‘grown indefatigable in her endeavors to improve herself' and assist in school and house. But at twenty-six, Mary was too inexperienced to realise the damage that Smallweeds can do.

Fortunately, Mrs Burgh backed Mary so keenly that she almost quarrelled with Mrs Cockburn. Mrs Burgh supplied a loan for Mary's passage
(though Mary believed the money came from Dr Price). No offer came from Hugh Skeys. At no point did he enquire into her expenses, and she couldn't bring herself to mention them. Later, she commented that his behaviour had been ‘uniform'–tight-fisted–throughout his wife's ordeal.

The voyage to Lisbon took thirteen days, relatively fast for a sailing ship, but autumn gales were high and rough waves broke through Mary's porthole. It was precarious to move while the vessel rolled from side to side. She fixed her attention on a dying fellow-passenger, holding him up as he coughed and gasped for breath–his consumptive paroxysms lasted for hours at a time. She didn't expect him to survive the journey. On a Monday in November they landed in Lisbon, the very day Fanny gave birth to a puny boy. Mary was just in time for the delivery. She at once found baby William a wet-nurse, for Fanny appeared too depleted to live. Writing in intervals of hope, broken by days of fear and despair, Mary relayed the crisis to her sisters:

Mary poured life into her friend and prayed for her. She ends her letter at Fanny's bedside saying that, were it not for prayer, ‘I should have been mad before this–but I feel that I am supported by that Being–who alone can heal a wounded spirit…' It was now she came to know ‘the lot of most of us to see death in all its terrors, when it attacks a friend; yet even then we must exert our friendship'.

Fanny died on 29 November. Mary closed Fanny's eyes and cut a lock of her hair to make a ring. She had lost her ‘best earthly comfort'. Ten years later, she still remembered ‘looks I have felt in every nerve, which I shall never more meet. The grave has closed over a dear friend, the friend of my youth; still she is present with me, and I hear her soft voice…'

 

The day after Fanny was buried–‘by stealth and in darkness' as a Protestant in a Catholic country–her brother George arrived to take up a post Skeys had arranged for him with the British consulate at St Obes, near Lisbon. At once, George abandoned his post and returned to Dublin. This was his way, careless of embarrassment to those who had backed him. Earlier that year he had abandoned the post with the haberdasher in London–on that occasion too, he had run off to Dublin where he had remained unemployed and dependent on friends of the family. The Clares, who had
recommended him, were furious; as were his employers, Mr and Mrs Poole; as was his landlord, an attorney called Palmer, for murkier reasons.

Palmer had tried to pass off a client, a Mrs Jones, as a clergyman's widow whose son would have been entitled to a pension. This fraud, George had witnessed. He himself had been in a scrape with a girl called Mary Ann, and was dreading that this would go against him when another girl, Mr Palmer's servant, named him as the father of her child. (It was a common means of survival for poor women to get pregnant and name a father who, if caught, was obliged to marry the woman and support her child. This was encouraged by the parish, who otherwise had to bear the cost of a bastard.) The accusations of Palmer's girl had been loud enough to collect a mob that pursued George through the streets of London. When he succeeded in throwing them off, a group of thugs turned up at Mary's school, led by the fraudulent Mrs Jones who hoped to discredit a witness for the prosecution. In tow came the pregnant servant, wailing her injuries at a local alehouse. The scandal raced round the Green. George denied sex with Palmer's girl. Mary and his family believed him, fairly it seems in this instance. (When George put himself beyond the reach of the law, by leaving England, the girl shifted the blame to Palmer himself–by this time, in prison.) All the same, George was bad news on the Green, where it was felt Mary indulged him. Mary dismissed this as the tattle of fools. Loyal as ever to the Bloods, she trusted George's ‘honest heart', and liked him the more for his willingness to let her improve him. Not once did she blame him for leaving her with the burden of supporting his parents. Even when Mary had been hastening to Fanny's side, she made sure that Mr and Mrs Blood would not be in want while she was away. But the Clares, who had linked their name to a scamp, did not forgive George. Mary resented this, and her attachment to the Clares cooled.