The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft Read online

  It gives me great pleasure to hear that Caroline is again breeding, I should be glad, if it was God's will, that you should have a numerous family, but besides I was apprehensive that her bad state of health might be the cause of not having children as fast at first as we had reason to expect.

  Caroline however continued to do her duty, and bore the Earl twelve grandchildren during his lifetime. She did not lose her looks; even Mary commented on her ‘perpetual prettiness’ when she was in her thirties. She was not very tender to her children, but this is not so surprising in a girl married off at fifteen, eager to enjoy the pleasures her money and rank and good looks could provide, and constantly hampered by pregnancies. The accepted system of wet-nurses and nursery maids naturally estranged her further from the small creatures she bore whether she wanted them or not. Caroline was ambitious for her children as her family had been for her, but she seems to have had little patience or love for them and Mary observed at once that they in turn feared rather than loved her.

  Her eldest daughter Margaret has left a description of her childhood, written from the perspective of her own middle age:

  My father Robert King Earl of Kingston, was married very young to his relation Caroline Fitzgerald… I was the second of their twelve children and being born in that rank of life in which people are too much occupied by frivolous amusements to pay much attention to their offspring I was placed under the care of hirelings from the first moment of my birth – before three years old I was subjected to the discipline of governesses and teachers whose injudicious treatment was very disadvantageous to my temper. As I advanced in years I had various masters (for no expense was spared to make me what is called accomplished) and at a very early age I was enabled to exhibit before my mother's visitors, whose silly praises would probably have injured me if I had not suffered so much in acquiring the means of obtaining them that they afforded me no pleasure. With this sort of education it is not extraordinary that I should have learnt a little of many things and nothing well.4

  Her parents came of age when Margaret was three. Now they could spend their money and do exactly as they pleased. They returned to Ireland, eager to turn Mitchelstown into a fashionable earthly paradise. The house was to be entirely rebuilt as a Palladian mansion, the gardens also designed on classical lines. So the medieval ruins gave way to a large square house with wings at each side, its ceilings adorned with frescoes executed by an Italian artist. However, a touch of the past was retained at the young Viscount's insistence: the thirteenth-century White Knight's tower was incorporated into the structure of the building, and a second tower which had formed part of the outworks of the castle was converted into a library.*

  Twelve hundred acres of land were enclosed by a thick wall six and a half miles long (it is still standing today), and gardens were laid out, acres of vineries and conservatories established, thousands of oak, ash and beech trees planted. Robert also had mulberry trees put in so that a silk industry could be started; he was eager to do something to improve conditions amongst the wretchedly poor peasantry in their mud huts, now sited outside the walls of his estate, but still a burden to his conscience. Whatever his defects, he was not going to be the light-hearted absentee landlord of Irish tradition, spending rents in London whilst his tenants starved and his agent grew fat. In fact, eager to command the best of everything, he invited the celebrated agricultural expert Arthur Young to come and be his agent and reform the management of his estates altogether. Although Young had formed a very unfavourable impression of the Irish gentry when he toured the country the year before, he was tempted by the large sums of money offered him and accepted the position.† His account of his time at Mitchelstown is funny in its own right; it also throws some light on Mary's later experience.5

  When he arrived everything seemed pleasant enough. There was a temporary house for him on the estate but he had been promised a new one to be built to his own specification. As a rule he dined at the castle and generally played chess with Caroline after dinner for an hour or two. ‘I learned by report that her Ladyship was highly pleased with me, saying that I was one of the most lively, agreeable fellows.’ Young found Lord Kingsborough ‘of a character not so easily ascertained’ and feared that he was too easily influenced by ‘persons of inferior abilities’. Soon it became clear that the situation was far more complicated than anything Young could have expected. The castle hummed with conspiracies.

  Young's first aim was to persuade Lord Kingsborough to let his lands directly to the cottagers, without using any middlemen at all, and this had indeed been Robert's plan in the first place. But now it appeared that a Major Thornhill, one of Caroline's relations, was casting covetous eyes on the position of agent; and worse, his wife, ‘an artful designing woman’, had embarked on a plot to secure the job for her husband.

  Mrs Thornhill's plot was in the style of Feydeau: it hinged on the current governess, a Catholic girl called Miss Crosby, whom she persuaded Caroline into believing to be the object of Robert's attentions. Caroline decided to sack her and asked Young to draw up some sort of agreement whereby she should be paid an annuity of £50 a year; it was an exceedingly handsome sum for a discharged governess who cannot have been with the family for long and must have been still young, and makes one wonder just what she had done or suffered to be rewarded so handsomely. But that was no concern of Young's; the actual drafting of the agreement however obliged him to be at the castle more often than usual. This gave Mrs Thornhill a pretext for persuading Robert that Young was in love with the Viscountess. At the same time she worked on Caroline until she believed that Young was plotting to further the supposed affair between Miss Crosby and Robert.

  The outcome of this preposterous intrigue was the dismissal of the innocent Young, who departed thankfully in October 1778. In one respect he did very well out of the episode: when he asked to be paid, Robert found himself short of ready cash, so Young proposed that he should have (like Miss Crosby) an annuity of £72 a year in lieu of payment. As far as we know he continued to draw it until his death. If Miss Crosby did likewise she was a uniquely lucky member of her calling. When Mary came to her more arduous task with the children ten years later she was offered only £40 a year.

  When she arrived finally at Mitchelstown castle, Mary was told that Lady Kingsborough was confined to her room with a sore throat, but a score of surrogates appeared to greet her: Caroline's widowed stepmother, Mrs Fitzgerald, her three big daughters (‘just going to market’ as their brother put it) and the King girls, Margaret, Caroline, Mary, little Jane and Louisa. The three eldest were to be Mary's especial charges. There were ‘Mrs and Misses without number’ she wrote to her sister later, a little dazed by the size and clamour of the household.

  Lord Kingsborough turned up also to take a look at another of Miss Crosby's successors. Mary dismissed him mentally for the moment: ‘his countenance does not promise much more than good humour, and a little fun not refined’.6 Soon she was summoned for an interview with his Lady in her room. The bed was a turmoil of satins and pet dogs; Mary perceived that the human occupant was a beauty and she established herself, through the yapping, as a woman to be reckoned with. She was clever – better read than her governess in fact; Mary was more intimidated by her than she had expected to be. To keep her courage up, she decided at once to disapprove of the dogs, who were obviously receiving affection that should have gone to the children.

  Leaving Lady Kingsborough to her dogs, Mary found she had been given a comfortable room with a view over the mountains. There was even a fire burning; she could spend her first evening alone. She sat writing to her sisters, and heard a new sound stealing up the stairs towards her closed door: the fiddler was playing below. To her it was not a cheering noise. It served to emphasize the peculiarity of this great house, the contrast between its Italianate splendours and the miles of desolate Irish bog around, the fact that the servants with their different gradations were all, from fiddler to governess, there to serve one end alo
ne: the pleasure of My Lord and My Lady.

  But when daylight came again there was little time to brood. The children left her alone for scarcely a moment. They told her very frankly that they had been determined to plague and annoy her, but finding her to their liking they changed their minds and merely hung about her with affectionate demands. And she herself, rather to her surprise, began to feel a maternal emotion.

  The children cluster about me. One catches a kiss, another lisps my long name – while a sweet little boy, who is conscious that he is a favourite, calls himself my son. At the sight of their mother they tremble and run to me for protection. This renders them dear to me – and I discover the kind of happiness I was formed to enjoy.

  For the moment the power of children to ‘plague and teaze’ was forgotten; and indeed it is considerably reduced where there is a household of servants to share the burden. Almost at once she made a favourite amongst the big girls; Margaret, the eldest, responded with the enthusiasm of adolescence. This is more of Margaret's own account:

  ... the society of my father's house was not calculated to improve my good qualities or correct my faults; and almost the only person of superior merit with whom I had been intimate in my early days was an enthusiastic female who was my governess from fourteen to fifteen years old, for whom I felt an unbounded admiration because her mind appeared more noble and her understanding more cultivated than any others I had known – from the time she left me my chief objects were to correct these faults she had pointed out and to cultivate my understanding as much as possible.7

  However deficient the society at Mitchelstown appeared to Margaret and her governess, the situation seemed happy enough all through November, and Mary wrote to George Blood that ‘the whole family make a point of paying me the greatest attention – and some part of it treat me with a degree of tenderness which I have seldom met with from strangers.’

  She confided some of her family troubles to the Kingsboroughs and felt that her confidences were respected and encouraged. In December she wrote to Eliza about plans to bring both her sisters over to Ireland; Lady K said she would help to find them places in reputable schools, and Mary had the impression they might even be invited to stay at Mitchelstown. Wollstonecrafts and Kingsboroughs were to be equally delighted with one another in Mary's new dream, and she grew almost exultant at this point in her delight at being such a great favourite with her employers.

  She tried in turn to be useful to them, writing to Joseph Johnson to ask if he could suggest a respectable clergyman's family who might take on the education of Mrs Fitzgerald's wild young son (‘his temper is violent and his mind not cultivated’). Johnson does not seem to have been able to oblige; but his exchange of letters with Mary, whose book was now printing, grew increasingly friendly.

  One of the reasons for the immediate favour she found with her employers was a dramatic illness that afflicted Margaret: ‘my poor little favourite has had a very violent fever – and can scarcely bear to have me for a moment out of her sight – her life was dispaired of – and this illness has produced an intimacy in the family which a course of years might not have brought about.’ Warm-hearted and dictatorial, Mary made a good nurse. Margaret recovered quickly enough and intensified her devotion to a governess who gave her the tenderness and attention her mother could not spare. And at Mitchelstown in midwinter the new governess was of course a distraction, a new source of amusement for all the ladies, who were certainly bored, cooped up in their country paradise with nothing to do but read, chatter, play chess and spend five hours a day dressing, applying rouge and washing in asses' milk. The men were as likely as not to disappear, fishing or hunting or visiting the tenants; there was not much to keep them interested at home. Mary, shocked by the rouge and the asses' milk, described them carefully all the same for Eliza's benefit, adding an admonishment not to become too curious about the habits of titled people. She herself, she announced, intended to go out visiting the poor in their cabins.

  Her letters to Everina were more caustic on the subject of the conversation and manners of the ladies of the family; all matrimony, dress and dogs, but without any feeling, she said, adding that her own temper was considered ‘angelick’. ‘If my vanity could be flattered by the respect of people, whose judgment I do not care for – why in this place it has sufficient food.’

  Her moods and her estimate of her surroundings rose and fell from day to day: called on to perform an exceptional task, such as nursing Margaret, she felt a sense of purpose and satisfaction with herself and looked more kindly on those about her: when things settled down again, she had more time to brood and think of herself as a ‘poor Melancholy wretch’. She often felt unwell with what she herself called a nervous complaint. To Johnson she even wrote that ‘it is with pleasure that I observe my declining health, and cherish the hope that I am hastening to the land where all these cares will be forgotten’.

  Before dismissing remarks of this kind as pure self-dramatization intended to evoke sympathy, it is worth remembering that she had lately seen her mother and Fanny die, neither of them old women; she had the news of the death of Mrs Price; Eliza and Fanny's babies were both dead, Margaret's life had been in danger. To George Blood she wrote: ‘life is but a frightful dream’, and in a mood like that it might well seem worth exchanging one frightful dream for another sort of sleep.

  Fortunately a new distraction appeared on the scene. There were visitors to Mitchelstown; Robert invited a fellow MP and privy councillor, George Ogle, with his wife and sister. Ogle was a man in his forties, good-mannered and intelligent; and he was a poet. His arcadian lyrics had won the praise of Burns:

  Shepherds, I have lost my love, –

  Have you seen my Anna?

  Pride of every shady grove

  On the banks of Banna.

  I for her my home forsook,

  Near yon misty mountain,

  Left my flocks, my pipe, my crook,

  Greenwood shade and fountain.

  Never shall I see them more

  Until her returning;

  All the joys of life are o'er -

  From gladness changed to mourning.

  Whither is my charmer flown?

  Shepherds, tell me whither?

  Ah! woe for me, perhaps she's gone

  For ever and for ever?

  Heavenly, said Burns, and the verses are certainly accomplished; this Anna bathed in asses’ milk without a doubt and did not herd sheep from a mud hut outside the walls. But if Ogle worked within the limitations of his class, he still made a great impression on Mary; he was ‘a Genius, and unhappy: such a man, you may suppose, would catch your sister's eye’. Unfortunately he had already caught Lady Kingsborough's eye. Mary was delighted by his attentions; he found her worth talking to, and she probably told him about her forthcoming book; he made her feel that she was at least as interesting as her employer. Caroline was not so pleased.

  For the moment she gave the governess a few days’ holiday. Mary paid a brief visit to Tipperary, where she stayed with an uncle and aunt of Fanny's; she was not impressed by them, finding them chilly and correct. She returned to Mitchelstown to travel with the children to Dublin, ahead of their parents. The Kingsboroughs had a new house in Merrion Square, where the governess was installed in a suite of rooms that included a drawing room furnished with a harpsichord, which she could not play (but no matter), and a parlour in which to receive male visitors. The idea sent her into one of her maidenly flurries of underlining and exclamation marks, and she could not resist adding that the last governess had been treated quite differently, like a servant. However, there was now no longer any talk of bringing her sisters over to join her.

  The letters from Dublin continued to alternate between skittishness and deep, despondent self-pity and hypochondria. Fanny Burney said that to find the true meaning of a woman's letter you must always look to the post script; Mary's ran to rows of dashes and references to being in love, but she offered no names and probably she wa
s ready to consider herself in love with any one of at least three candidates: Henry Gabell, who turned up in Dublin for a while and who exchanged letters with her; Neptune, who also appeared in Dublin in May; and George Ogle. He took the trouble to call on her before the adult Kingsboroughs arrived in town, and presented her with a poem of his own composition. There was nothing sentimental about it, but it was still something for Mary to receive such an attention, and she copied out the lines carefully for her sister:

  Genius – 'tis th' ethereal Beam –

  'Tis sweet Willy Shakespeare's dream –

  'Tis the muse upon the wing

  ‘Tis wild Fancy's magic ring –

  ‘Tis the Phrenzy of the mind –

  'Tis the eye that ne'er is blind –

  'Tis the Prophet's holy fire,

  'Tis the music of the lyre

  ‘Tis th'enthusiast's frantic bliss

  ‘Tis anything – alas – but this.

  A real rivalry with Caroline began; Mary noted that her employer ‘wishes to be taken particular notice of by a man of acknowledged cleverness’ and later she said that Ogle was in fact Lady K's ‘flirt’. She cannot have been delighted when her flirt took to calling on her children's governess, encouraging her moodiness, which he professed to find interesting, and offering her poems.

  Still Caroline made efforts to get on with Mary; she took her to the Dublin Handel festival, and persuaded her into attending a masquerade. Mary wore a black mask and indulged herself in satirical talk as interpreter for another woman dressed, probably not too accurately, as a female from the newly discovered islands in the South Seas. But these distractions did not help matters much. In March Mary was ill and Caroline called her own doctor; he confirmed Mary's diagnosis of a nervous complaint and charged her an aristocratic fee, which outraged her. Margaret also fell ill again. This time Mary was critical of her mother's treatment, fearing it would bring on a consumption, something she always feared after Fanny. Probably she did not express herself with much tact to Lady Kingsborough.