The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft Read online

  She had established the facts, which were indeed to be taken up and insisted on by many more writers after her;12 she was the first to state what came to seem obvious – then she collapsed. She had not yet learnt the courage of her anger; she fell into religious platitudes and spoke of the good that arose necessarily from the trials of life; the main business of existence after all was to learn virtue, not to have an interesting or well-paid job. She even called one chapter ‘The Benefits which arise from Disappoinments’ (sic). And it was also during this period that she wrote a letter in which she volunteered that she was trying ‘to do my duty in that station in which Providence has placed me’,13 the most conventional and cowed remark she ever made. Had such Christian resignation prevailed with her there would have been no Vindication, but luckily she continued to find difficulty in accepting what Providence had to offer.

  For the moment there was nothing very pleasant in store, apart from her book's acceptance. In May the Blood parents left, and soon Mr Blood wrote pressing Mary to join his household once again. Her answering letter went to George, declining the offer; although she loved Mrs Blood, she ‘could not live with your father and condescend to practise those arts which are necessary to keep him in temper’.14

  Everina and Eliza were trying to find jobs as teachers or companions; Mary, her ‘debts haunting her like furies’, was preparing to sell the furniture and take a small, cheap lodging with no servant at all, and try to keep on a handful of pupils. Presently – miserable defeat – Everina went back to Ned, who relented just enough to allow that. Mrs Cockburn took in Mary and Eliza, and Mrs Burgh found Eliza a teaching post in Leicestershire. Now that the worst had happened and the physical presence of her sisters was removed, Mary's spirits rose slightly again; anticipation had been more horrible than the event. And a job was being found for her by her friends – only she needed French for it, and started wrestling anxiously with the language which she did not know at all.

  She was going to Ireland after all, neither to the Bloods nor to run a school in Dublin, but to be governess to the daughters of Robert, Viscount Kingsborough, heir to an earldom and master of many thousands of Irish acres and peasants.

  It was a world of which she had no experience, and she considered it with a mixture of exhilaration and nervousness. She wrote to George that she was short of clothes and asked him to send her some material; her old maid Mason came to help her make a greatcoat, and Mrs Cockburn gave her a blue hat. Weeks passed in a frenzy of dressmaking and French verbs; and she was still teaching eleven pupils in August. In September she had her last recorded contact with her elder brother: ‘Edward behaved very rude to me and has not assisted me in the smallest degree’ she told Eliza in a letter.15 At the same time she mentioned the particular friendliness of Dr Price; his wife was dying, but he still had time to think of Mary's welfare. The contrast between the kindness shown by most of her Dissenting friends and the indifference or hostility of her own family was not lost on her during those last weeks at Newington.

  She was never tempted to abandon her comfortable and easy-going Anglicanism for Dr Price's faith, nor was he interested in making converts: his own wife had remained an Anglican throughout thirty years of devoted marriage. But Mary learnt a great deal from Dr Price all the same; he had set her on certain paths and prepared her to think critically about society. The actual position of the Dissenters, excluded as a class from education and civil rights by a lazy-minded majority, was something for an embryonic feminist to brood on. Later, she was to draw a direct comparison between the disabilities of women and those of Dissenters, and attribute the character defects of both groups to the oppression they had to endure.16 There can be no doubt that she identified with them, and that their views on human rights and equality of opportunity encouraged her to think of her own sex and its problems in the same light. Although she did not become a Dissenter, she learnt from them some of the ways of dissent.

  The Dissenters in fact had turned their disabilities to good purpose; debarred from the universities, for instance, they had set up their own academies which proved markedly superior to anything Oxford or Cambridge had to offer: in particular, and alone, they taught history, science and economics, suggested a critical approach to the text of the Bible and encouraged speculative thought and debate on points of religion. A true intelligentsia was developed through the academies at Warrington, Daventry, Northampton, Hoxton and later Hackney; a great many of Mary's later friends and acquaintances were to come from them. They were indeed nurseries for revolutionaries, turning out students trained to approach all subjects with a critical rather than a reverent eye, and consider institutions on their merits rather than the authority they derived from tradition. The Dissenting parliamentary reformers derived their democratic ideas from the concept of God-given rights, the principle of the greatest happiness of the greatest number (Priestley's before it was Bentham's) and the more basic proposition that all taxpayers should have a say in their own government. James Burgh had laid particular stress on this point, and his last work, Political Disquisitions, had led Wilkes to introduce the idea of universal male suffrage in his reform project in 1776; in the same year Price's Observations on Civil Liberty had proposed the abolition of the House of Lords as well.

  Mary would return to London to take up all these ideas and more, but for the moment she had to leave Dr Price's circle for outer darkness. It had been arranged that she should join the brothers of her future charges at Eton, where the boys were at school, and travel to Ireland with them. Although she had old friends from her Windsor days to stay with – their name was Prior and he was a master at Eton - she looked around sourly at the company of ‘witlings’ she found there, and dismissed the conversation of the masters and their wives as shallow and frivolous after what she had been lately used to. ‘Puns fly about like crackers’ she noted disapprovingly; if this was the atmosphere in which the sons of the rich, future members for parliament and lords were brought up, so much the worse for the country. Her experience of high-minded and plain-living Dissenting life had equipped her with the Dissenting brand of snobbery too, which looked down on the manners of social superiors. ‘There is not only most virtue, and most happiness, but even true politeness, in the middle classes of life,’17 was a dictum Mary was prepared to subscribe to even before she arrived at Lord Kingsborough's; an understandable and almost certainly justified attitude, but not the easiest state of mind in which to approach her new job.

  She remained at Eton, disapproving, for longer than had been expected, because of delays and muddles over the arrangements for her journey, and in the end she made the crossing to Ireland alone. On the boat she had a small adventure that cheered her up; she met a young clergyman who, like her, was going over to be a tutor in an aristocratic family. His name was Henry Gabell, and he was a future headmaster of Winchester and teacher of Thomas Arnold;18 for the moment, however, he was nothing more than a good-looking young man who fell into enthusiastic religious chat with Mary. He did not feel obliged to mention – why should he? – that he was already engaged to be married; and Mary, who knew only too well how ready she was to form sudden and imprudent attachments which ended in disappointment, was charmed by him. They agreed to correspond and hoped to meet again in Dublin should his employers visit town at the same time as the Kingsboroughs. And with this prospect at least to look forward to, Mary arrived in Ireland.

  [5]

  Ireland

  IN Dublin Mary parted from Henry Gabell, with a promise to exchange letters, and was greeted by the Kingsborough's butler, whom they had sent, with great civility, to escort her on the last part of her journey. Mitchelstown Castle was 120 miles to the south, and the coach journey was something of an ordeal, given the state of Irish roads and inns and the November weather. Wrapped in her home-made greatcoat and with her blue hat on her head, she braced herself for her reception at what she called the ‘Bastille’: it was in fact a newly built Palladian house.

  Mary's self-pity,
always liable to swell to huge proportions, was never so indulged as during her stay with the Kingsboroughs; but, upheld by a consciousness of moral superiority, she was rarely in danger of succumbing to despair. There are even moments when some sympathy for her employers is added to the pity we feel for her. It was a complicated ordeal for all concerned, the first battle on record in which a governess emerged with at least equal honours from the field and revenged herself in print, instead of being simply crushed and swept aside.

  A governess's position was undoubtedly awkward and lonely, the treatment handed out to her reflecting the ambiguity of her employers' expectations. She was neither servant nor one of the family. Ideally, she would be a well-bred girl whose father had suffered financial disaster, putting her thereby at the disposition of those upper-class households where a little assistance might be needed in bringing up younger and more fortunate daughters; but since it was not always easy to find a ready supply of suddenly impoverished young ladies, many governesses were less perfect than they ought to have been. Lord Palmerston, for instance, considered it entirely appropriate to obtain a position as governess for his cast-off mistress, and she found that her charges' father felt free to make automatic advances to her.1 In fiction, the governess was always as yet a subsidiary character, often morally equivocal in her role. Occasionally, in life, she edged forward: Lord Halifax, posted to Dublin as Lord-Lieutenant, decided to take his daughter's governess with him as his proclaimed mistress, breaking off the prospect of an advantageous second marriage to do so, though not of course going so far as to marry the governess. Mary, with her unsullied reputation and respectable references, scarcely expected trouble (or success) of that kind. Her misgivings related to the loss of freedom and friends, the sense of going into exile and isolation with almost nothing by way of compensation. At one time, it is true, she had longed to visit Ireland, and professed to know and admire the Irish character; while she was living with the Bloods in 1782 she had written to Jane:

  … of all places in the world, I long to visit Ireland and in particular the dear County of Clare – The women are all handsome, and the men agreeable; – I honor their hospitality and doat on their freedom and ease, in short they are the people after my own heart – I like their warmth of Temper, and if I was my own mistress I would spend my life with them: – However, as a friend, I would give you a caution, the men are dreadful flirts, so take care of your heart, and don't leave it in one of the Bogs. – Preserve your cheerful temper, and laugh and dance when a fiddle comes in your way, but beware of the sly collectors.2

  Her account of the pleasures and dangers of Irish life is knowing enough to suggest she had already made a visit, but if so she never spoke of it apart from this one inconclusive reference.

  Mrs Prior's gossip had warned Mary of Lord Kingsborough's notorious extravagance, disposing Mary to a sisterly sympathy for his Lady. But her reputation for finicky perfectionism where her daughters' education was concerned made Mary nervous about her own inadequate French and lack of skill with the embroidery needle. She winced at the thought of disappointing; however she was never criticized on these scores.

  The trouble that arose had deeper roots. Caroline Kingsborough and Mary, though their positions were officially unequal, had something in common: they both needed to establish ascendancy over their companions in order to be happy. They very soon became violently jealous of one another, and not only as concerned the children, orthodox battle ground between mother and governess. Things might have been easier had the Kingsboroughs simply oppressed and neglected Mary; had they been only frivolous, thoughtless and occasionally brutal, she could have kept within a defensive shell of formality. Instead, they tempted her out with shows of friendship; they seemed spontaneous and sympathetic, they made jokes, extended invitations to the drawing-room and introductions to their friends, a whole sequence of well-intentioned gestures she could not resist. It was because she found them attractive at times that things became intolerable for her.

  She might have been better armed against them had she known something of their history.3

  Robert, Viscount Kingsborough and heir to an earldom, and Caroline, his wife and cousin, were only a little older than Mary; they were just into their thirties. Their large brood of children was headed by a son of fifteen at Eton and a daughter of fourteen, Margaret. Robert and Caroline had been married themselves at sixteen and fifteen; in fact he had been taken out of Eton for the ceremony, and a tutor from the school, Mr Tickell, appointed to live with the young couple for several years after the marriage.

  In their portraits they look very much what they were: spoilt, beautiful, fine-boned children dressed up in wigs and pearls and party clothes to enact the roles laid upon them by family ambition. Their marriage had made them jointly the biggest landowners and possibly the richest family in Ireland, though the income from Irish estates was always larger in theory than in practice. There was some though not much true Irish blood in their veins. The King family had arrived in Ireland during the reign of Elizabeth I in the person of Sir John King, a Yorkshire squire eager, like most of his fellow English, to drive out the barbarous natives and grab their land for himself and his heirs. He fathered a long line of soldiers and administrators of the Protestant ascendancy. Various branches of cousins flourished during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, sending their sons to Eton and Oxford and then on the Grand Tour when it became fashionable, marrying their daughters into other Protestant landowning families, picking up quite impartially a knighthood from Cromwell and a peerage from Charles II.

  Caroline's great-grandfather, the third Baron Kingston, had married a pretty and persistent Irish scullery maid; their one son, James, in turn produced a single daughter who married a Richard Fitzgerald and died when her only child Caroline was nine. Thus Caroline Fitzgerald found herself heiress to huge rent rolls and vast estates, including the ruined castle of Mitchelstown. Her grandfather, seeking some way of securing the future – that of the estates rather than the little girl perhaps – decided that the best course would be to marry her to her third cousin Robert King before some other dynasty snapped her up.

  Robert was too young at this stage to record his own opinion, but his father was charmed with the arrangement. ‘I have procured for Him one of ye Prettiest Heiresses in ye British Dominions’ he wrote. A man of dogged tenacity of purpose where family aggrandizement was in prospect, he had married money himself and pestered the authorities for titles shamelessly and without ceasing. His hard work was rewarded: in 1764 he was created Baron, in 1766 he rose to Viscount and finally, with a last mighty effort, he achieved an earldom in 1768. When Robert and Caroline were married in December 1769 the King family had arrived at the peak of its success: Robert King had become Viscount Kingsborough and would in due course be upgraded to Earl of Kingston.

  The young couple went to live amongst their various in-laws: Mitchelstown had to wait till they came of age. They were given £6,000 a year to play with and had nothing to do but get a family. George was born in 1771, and Margaret followed in the summer of 1772. Then there were problems; Caroline could not endure her mother-in-law's interference with the babies, and found the company of her own father, Colonel Fitzgerald, who had acquired a second wife and family, equally trying. Robert's father, the Earl, managed to absent himself as much as possible from the household of squabbling women, and Robert's earliest letters as a married man are boyish apologies to his father about Caroline's rude and improper behaviour. Since things showed no signs of improvement, he decided to take his family to England. In December 1772, still accompanied by his tutor Mr Tickell, they departed, determined not to return until they were of age. They took a house in Hill Street in the West End, at £360 a year.

  The Earl continued to bombard his ‘dear Robin’ with exhortations not to quarrel with his wife, not to drink too much porter and not to forget his prayers, either at morning or evening. Robert sent back ever patient and respectful replies. In the summer of 1773 a thi
rd baby, politicly named Robert Edward for his grandfather, appeared; and in October Robert, Caroline, Mr Tickell and little George set off for the continent with a train of nurses, footmen and maids, leaving the two small babies in the care of four more maids at a house outside town, near the Kensington gravel pits.

  In Paris, Robert and Caroline attended dinners, balls and masquerades and visited the court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette at Versailles. Then they travelled on through France, Italy and Germany. At this time the Earl wrote a curious letter to Robert asking for the sum of £12,000 as a payment for having arranged his marriage for him; Robert agreed, docile as ever, only stipulating that he could not pay until he and Caroline had reached their majority. (It was after all largely her money he was handing over.) The Earl meanwhile had been giving her father large sums of money to compensate him for the financial loss he had suffered in letting his rich daughter marry so early. All the Kings understood perfectly that marriage was fundamentally a business matter of money and land. They were also lavish spenders who found it hard to grasp the idea that the cash might ever run low; in Robert's case it seems to have been part of his ‘finish of a perfect gentleman’, as Arthur Young put it, to spend without thought or calculation.

  Caroline stayed in Geneva while Robert continued his tour through France. She was pregnant again as she approached the age of twenty-one. In five and a half years of marriage she had produced four babies. Her father-in-law was not entirely satisfied with this record; his Countess was still bearing children herself, and he wrote to Robert: