The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft Page 12

  He came back with a glowing account. So did many more. Before the end of the month the Wedgwoods, good businessmen as well as staunch Unitarian Dissenters and friends of Priestley, had planned special celebratory medallions depicting ‘the figure of Public faith on an altar and France embracing Liberty on the front’, and snuffbox tops with the head of the Duke of Orleans upon them.3 These were to satisfy the general enthusiasm, but the Dissenters naturally enough saw the successful Revolution on the other side of the channel as a signal for pressing for an improvement in their own status at home. It was all part of the irresistible process of amelioration. Unfortunately there was a stubborn resistance to such improvements in England. Even Pitt, who had supported the Dissenters until now, turned against their cause in 1789.

  Mary's fervour for the principles of the Revolution developed rapidly and was unmixed with any doubts; having learnt her politics from the Dissenters she continued to adopt their attitudes and followed their particular struggles sympathetically. In October Priestley was writing to friends predicting the spread of revolution to other countries than France. On 4 November, the anniversary of the 1688 Revolution in England, Dr Price delivered a sermon at the Old Jewry meeting house which was attended by some at least who went in expectation of a political rather than a religious discourse (Godwin, for instance, was there). It took the form of a Nunc Dimitis at the end:

  And now methinks I see the ardour for liberty catching and spreading; a general amendment beginning in human affairs; the dominion of kings changed for the dominion of laws, and the dominion of priest giving way to the dominion of reason and conscience.

  Price then suggested that a congratulatory message be sent to the National Assembly in Paris; this was done, and the text published with the sermon.

  This speech and action of Price's set off a chain reaction of events in England. Burke was so infuriated by it that he started work on his Reflections on the Revolution in France. During the year in which he was writing it the old English hatred of Dissenters began to appear again amongst the people, encouraged by the government, quick to see how things might move if ordinary citizens were invited to admire those who had overthrown their rulers. In Birmingham, Priestley held himself braced for violence; almost febrile with anticipation, he bombarded Johnson with requests for books and pamphlets.4 No violence came for the moment, however, but in March 1790 Fox again proposed relief for the Dissenters in the House and again was outvoted. In July Dr Price spoke once more, this time a toast at a Bastille Day dinner at the Crown and Anchor tavern in London. He expressed his hope that a United States of the World might be established, and praised France for its intention of abandoning war as an instrument of policy. To the government, this may have seemed so much naive nonsense from an old and feeble man, but privately he was meditating worse things: the possibility that ‘a scheme of government may be imagined that shall by annihilating property and reducing mankind to their natural equality, remove most of the causes of contention and wickedness’.5 Levelling ideas were in the air once more after all, even if their exponents were exasperatingly saintly and gentle old theorists.

  Priestley wrote to congratulate Price on his Bastille Day toast, saying:

  I do not wonder at the hatred and dread of this spirit of revolution in kings and courtiers. Their power is generally usurpation, and I hope the time is approaching when an end will be put to all usurpation, in things civil and religious.6

  And Price wrote in October,

  The majesty of the people is the only sacred majesty… all civic authority is a trust from them… the governing power in every nation ought to be, not the will of any man or classes of men pretending to hereditary rights, but the collected wisdom of the nation drawn from the general mass.7

  If, as was perfectly possible, letters like this were intercepted and read by government spies they would fully confirm Burke's suspicions of the Dissenters; and whether he saw their letters or not, he became absolutely convinced that their presence was dangerous for England.

  In November his Reflections appeared. Mary read them at once, and seeing the principles she had so unhesitatingly taken up as her own under attack, and a smear set upon the good name of her beloved benefactor and teacher Dr Price, she was in a fury of indignation. ‘It is impossible to read half a dozen pages of your book without admiring your ingenuity or indignantly spurning your sophisms’ she wrote.8 It was a fair comment; Burke's Reflections became the Bible of reaction, and even his opponents had to concede that he had made a good job of it. Half a dozen people, amongst them Mary, set out to refute it. Johnson, who knew the value of quick publication in such circumstances, encouraged her to set to work at once and had the sheets printed as she wrote. Her pamphlet was to be called A Vindication of the Rights of Men (vindication was a fashionable title, amongst the quarrelsome tribes of non-conformists especially).

  In the middle of composing – her pamphlet ran to several scores of pages – she began to flag. This is Godwin's account of what happened next:

  When Mary had arrived at about the middle of her work, she was seized with a temporary fit of torpor and indolence, and began to repent of her undertaking. In this state of mind, she called, one evening, as she was in the practice of doing, upon her publisher, for the purpose of relieving herself by an hour or two's conversation. Here, the habitual ingenuousness of her nature, led her to describe what had just past in her thoughts. Mr Johnson immediately, in a kind and friendly way, intreated her not to put any constraint upon her inclination, and to give herself no uneasiness about the sheets already printed, which he would cheerfully throw aside, if it would contribute to her happiness. Mary had wanted stimulus. She had not expected to be encouraged, in what she well knew to be an unreasonable access of idleness. Her friend's so readily falling in with her ill-humour, and seeming to expect that she would lay aside her undertaking, piqued her pride. She immediately went home; and proceeded to the end of her work, with no other interruption but what were absolutely indispensible.9

  A Vindication of the Rights of Men was a ragbag into which Mary stuffed the ideas she had picked up over the past few years in her reading and conversation, without any attempt to sort them out or reason with Burke at the level he required. The tone was impatient, the arguments sketchy. But it was redeemed by its dominating emotion, a humanitarian sympathy for the poor, and by a passionate contempt for the wilful blindness of the privileged to what kept their system going. If anything held the writing in shape, it was this, from the early pages where she exclaimed ‘Security of property! Behold, in a few words, the definition of English liberty,’ to the end, where she suggested that waste land should be reclaimed and large estates divided into small farms as a cure for urban poverty.

  When she came to theorize about the good society, she imagined one in which ‘talents and industry’ should be encouraged and enabled to win just rewards, in which younger children should not be sacrificed to eldest sons, in which women should aspire to something more than the wish only to be loved, in which press gang and game law and slavery should be abolished, and the poor succoured as of right, not for charity's sake. All this was admirable no doubt, but so rapidly and allusively set down that it cannot have been expected to do more than dazzle readers already in agreement with her point of view. It could not make converts; the impression was of a mind darting to and fro over its own experience, so sure of its conclusions that it dispensed with discussion.

  She leapt over logical hurdles and indulged all her personal obsessions: feckless parents, noble ladies who neglected their children, tutors ignominiously treated by their aristocratic employers. There was even a reference to the consoling power of religion in the lives of those who had lost their youthful friends. It may have been this personal emphasis and wild indulgence in anger and enthusiasm that made Priestley ignore Mary's book rather pointedly, although he expressed a keen interest in seeing all the answers to Burke. Fuseli too was unimpressed, but the general public was easier to please than either o
f these gentlemen, and much more interested in the tone of the work than the detail of the argument.

  Mary's was the first reply to Burke to be printed, and it was manifestly written out of a good heart and generous indignation. It proved so popular that Johnson brought out a second edition in January, this time with her name upon it – the first edition had been anonymous. She was famous suddenly. Johnson was delighted: when Paine's Rights of Man appeared shortly afterwards, the names of Wollstonecraft and Paine were bracketed together as revolutionaries. (Johnson had planned to publish Paine too but been warned off; the whole crew of perfectibilists, from Priestley to Holcroft, held their breath while another publisher was found, and rejoiced when the book appeared uncut: ‘It will be read the more on account of the stoppage’ commented Priestley wisely.) 10

  Tributes were in order for Mary from the less precise. Johnson and Fuseli's Liverpool friend, William Roscoe, visited London and was so impressed by Mary that he commissioned a portrait of her. She took the trouble to have her hair powdered and curled for the occasion – a most un-revolutionary gesture – but was not very pleased with the painter's work.*

  Roscoe was something of a poet as well as a patron of the arts; he had already hailed the Revolution in several verses, and presently he produced a satirical ballad, The Life, Death and Wonderful Atchievements of Edmund Burke, in which Mary was again honoured. Burke was depicted in a mad mood:

  And wild he roam'd the country round,

  And angry scours the streets

  And tweaks the nose, or kicks the breech

  Of ever whig he meets.

  The neighbours first were all surpriz'd,

  Then sorry as he past,

  Then laugh'd his antic freaks to see,

  But angry grew at last.

  An lo! an Amazon stept out,

  One WOLLSTONECRAFT her name,

  Resolv'd to stop his mad career,

  Whatever chance became.

  An oaken sapling in her hand,

  Full on the foe she fell,

  Nor could his coat of rusty steel

  Her vig'rous strokes repel.

  When strange to see, her conq'ring staff,

  Returning leaves o'erspread,

  Of which a verdant wreath was wove,

  And bound around her head.11

  It was flattering to be offered a verdant wreath, even by Roscoe's less than sublime pen. Mary began a friendly correspondence with him, unburdening her cares about her brother Charles, who was still not settled, and some of her feelings for Fuseli.

  Dr Price may just have had time to be touched by Mary's loyalty in springing to his defence, but in April he died. It was as well for one who had said his Nunc Dimittis to the French Revolution to depart before the backlash grew too fierce; he was mourned by his friends, and by the political clubs in France, and remained the bane of the English reactionaries. Burke's abuse was continued after Price lay in Bunhill Fields, and by the same token the radical Skirving hung his portrait in his prison cell as he awaited transportation.12

  A month after Price's death Burke quarrelled with Fox in the House of Commons: the friendship and political alliance of years was broken by the Revolution. This was the signal for everyone to rush to extremes. In June Priestley formed a Constitutional Society in Birmingham. Almost at once rioting broke out; the houses of the Dissenters were now attacked and burnt as he had feared they might be a year before. Priestley's papers were stolen and handed over to the Secretary of State, Dundas, who never returned them, and his laboratory, probably the finest in the world, was smashed to bits. Citizens who wished to keep the ‘Church and King’ mobs at bay hastily wrote ‘No philosophers’ on their doors. ‘Philosopher’ and still worse ‘philosophess’ became dirty words with the English public for several decades.

  Priestley came to London. His wife was anxious to emigrate at once, before anything worse happened to them, but he was reluctant. Sheridan invited Priestley to meet Fox to discuss their future policy; Fox failed to turn up and Priestley was wary of becoming involved too far in party politics; nevertheless, he was promised more support. At Hackney, where Dr Price's place was vacant, there was wrangling amongst the congregation as to whether to appoint Priestley. Some of the old women were nervous; a young coal merchant, John Hurford Stone, already a keen revolutionary, was amongst those who pressed Priestley's claim.13 After a few months the congregation agreed to have him and he settled there with his family. He and Stone became good friends, and presently Stone decided to move himself and his wife and children to Paris, where Harry Priestley had also been sent. Mary's old friend the poet Samuel Rogers, also intimate with Stone and Priestley, made a trip to France too, not with any intention of settling but in order to taste the pleasure of the revolutionary way of life: he danced with peasant girls to the tune of Ça ira, and joined in intellectual parlour games with Madame de Condorcet.14 Anna Barbauld dashingly attended a Revolutionary dinner at the Crown and Anchor.

  In France, the king's attempted flight and interception at Varennes made the establishment of a republic increasingly likely. Thomas Christie, in Paris again, reported that everything was calm and that he had been amused to read English newspaper accounts of the streets running with blood even while he was enjoying his coffee at a table on the pavement.15 Perhaps he had missed the fifty-two deaths in the Champ de Mars.

  American acquaintances of Christie's did however choose this moment to leave Paris for London. They were Joel Barlow, a poet turned businessman, and his wife Ruth (he called her Ruthy) who trailed along gamely in the wake of her footloose and mercurial husband. Barlow and Ruthy were friends of Paine's and carried introductions from Jefferson to Priestley and Johnson too; almost at once they were on easy terms with all the London democrats, whose ideas they entered into enthusiastically. As soon as they met Mary, they struck up a warm friendship with her.

  Barlow was a man of some talent and more energy and charm, an intellectual adventurer of the kind who flourishes in a revolutionary climate and where there is a wide area to move about in. Born on a Connecticut farm, he was convinced of the superiority of American institutions over all others, but was still eager to visit Europe and spread the good news. He had fought in the battle of Long Island during a college vacation, and since then taken up teaching, the law, poetry: not lyrics but large-scale stuff, no less than the first American epic, The Vision of Columbus, which had brought him a certain fame. In 1788 he found an opportunity in business, acting as agent for a land company, and set off for Europe, leaving Ruthy behind for the moment. After a brief visit to London he settled in France, working in Le Havre and Paris, where he lived over a gambling club. In 1790 the company he worked for failed, but he brought his wife over just the same and found odd bits of business; he was never much at a loss.

  The Barlows' rearrival in England may have been due to a desire to escape from France in a troubled moment, but once in London he was perfectly happy to settle in Litchfield Street, talking poetry with fellow-writers, lending support to the English democrats, and still doing a little business at the same time. He told Mary about the pleasantness of life in America, offered jokingly to adopt her brother Charles since he himself was childless, and set about writing pamphlets along the same fervently republican lines as hers and Paine's. He even went so far as to predict a general and irresistible revolution that would give power to the class of men ‘that cannot write, and in a great measure… cannot read… men who reason better without books than we do with all the books in the world’. In spite of this phophecy, books still seemed appropriate for the moment, and Johnson promised to publish what Barlow wrote.16

  Like most of Mary's friends at this time, he was a theorist who enjoyed juggling with new ideas but had little sense of what practical politics might require in the way of manoeuvre, discretion and compromise. The contrast between their personal mildness and the easy way in which they talked of overturning the institutions of centuries baffled both English moderates, who grew terrified of them,
and French extremists, who expected more action of them than they ever saw. But Mary was equally delighted by their ideas and by the comradeship she found amongst them. ‘I never saw joy comparable in its intensity to that occasioned by the early promise of the French Revolution’ another lady who had known some of the believers said later.17 For three years this joy continued to bind them together in a certainty that they knew the truth and that it was bound to prevail. It was still possible to imagine the imminence of a brave new world, whatever Burke had to say on the subject.

  [9]

  A Vindication

  IN September 1791 Mary moved across the river to a larger house in Store Street, behind the British Museum.1 Immediately to the north lay fields, farms and nursery gardens stretching away to the distant heights of Hampstead. The streets around the Tottenham Court Road were not particularly salubrious, but writers, artists and theatrical people found the area cheap and convenient. The first faint whiff of the north London bohemian intelligentsia seems to rise in the air at about this time, to thicken, and remain hanging over the place ever after.

  Soon after her move, she must have heard news of her old pupil, Margaret King, who was married on 12 November, thus achieving the rank of Countess at the age of nineteen. It may have struck her ex-governess as a disappointingly conventional and undemocratic piece of behaviour, but she was too busy in her own world now to waste time grieving over the apparent defection. The next day she dined at Johnson's, and amongst her fellow guests were her friend Paine and William Godwin, whom she knew well by reputation but had not actually met before. Godwin records that he had not read any of her work, and that he found her insistence on talking when he wanted to listen to Paine irritating: Mary's refusal to hold her tongue, and Godwin's annoyance, made an apt starting point for their relationship.