The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft Read online

  From Caroline's point of view Mary's fault as a governess was not just that she won the affections of the children too obviously or even attracted the attention of her own admirer. It was that she allowed herself to behave with all the capriciousness and displays of sensibility that were meant to be the prerogative of the leisured classes. If she thought Caroline had been rude she would sulk in her room. In March a deputation of Mrs Ogle, her sister and Caroline herself had to persuade Mary to come downstairs in order to meet the old Earl, and they had considerable difficulty with their mission. Caroline was just not prepared to keep up this sort of special treatment. Why should she have to worry constantly about the governess's nerves or wounded pride?

  Soon she was busy planning a ball to be given at Mitchelstown; her dress had to be prepared with artificial flowers, and the whole household ‘from kitchen maid to Governess’ was required to make wreaths of roses for it. Mary's short-lived enthusiasm for Ireland was now well and truly over; she disliked the place with all her heart and longed to be back in England. The King family was ‘proud and mean’, and Mrs Fitzgerald had failed to find jobs for Everina and Eliza as she had promised.

  When Mrs Fitzgerald left the house for a while, matters grew still worse: ‘You know, I never liked Lady K., but I find her still more haughty and disagreeable now she is not under Mrs Fitzgerald's eye. Indeed, she behaved so improperly to me once or twice, in the Drawing Room, I determined never to go into it again.’ Snubs or scoldings Mary would not take. She also worried about her clothes and the expense of hairdressing and hats, but when Caroline offered her a poplin dress Mary refused it and there was an explosion of anger from her employer. Mrs Fitzgerald arrived back to soothe everyone's feelings, and induced Caroline to apologize to her prima donna of a governess. Mary stayed in her room as much as she could, working on a novel.

  In the middle of March she wrote to Everina about her ‘spasms and disordered nerves’ and incurably broken heart. There was talk of a ‘constant nervous fever’, violent pains in the side, difficulty in breathing, fits of trembling, a rising in the throat and faintness. Caroline was accused of tormenting the children and Mary, in an access of priggishness, exclaimed, ‘Thank heaven I am not a Lady of Quality.’

  But she could not maintain her aloofness. Persuaded once more into the drawing room, she found herself facing George Ogle again:

  As he had not seen me lately he came and seated himself by me – indeed his sensibility has ever lead him to pay attentions to a poor forlorn stranger – he paid me some fanciful compliments – and lent me some very pretty stanzas – melancholy ones, you may suppose, as he thought they would accord with my feelings. Lord K. came up – and was surprised at seeing me there – he bowed respectfully – a constellation of thoughts made me out-blush her Ladyship's rouge. Did I ever tell you she is very pretty – and always pretty. Such is the style I live in…

  What made Mary blush? Lord Kingsborough's gallant bow on discovering her engaged in intimate conversation with his wife's flirt? Mary's knowledge, surely acquired by now, that Lord K had in the past been accused at any rate of a love affair with a governess? Her sensation of mixed triumph and confusion at finding herself in the drawing room attended by Caroline's husband and admirer all at once? Or her wish that she could indeed steal men's hearts and attentions from pretty Caroline, and not just in the drawing room?

  The fact is, Mary was later accused of having wanted ‘to Discharge the Marriage Duties’ with Caroline's husband.8 And perhaps Robert's ideas of ‘a little fun, not refined’ included routine attempts on the virtue of all the governesses his wife produced, though it is scarcely conceivable that Mary encouraged him: she had everything to lose by doing so. And yet she seems to have felt guilty about something, even if it was no more than envy or a half-formed inclination to join in a way of life she censured. A letter to Everina confessed:

  You know not, my dear Girl, of what materials this strange inconsistent heart of mine is formed, and how alive it is to tenderness and misery. Since I have been here I have turned over several pages in the vast volume of human nature, and what is the amount? Vanity and vexation of spirit – and yet I am tied to my fellow-creatures by partaking of their weaknesses. I rail at a fault – sicken at the sight – and find it stirring within me. New sympathies and feelings start up. I know not myself.

  None of this can have meant much to Everina, but she was accustomed to Mary's cryptic style where certain subjects were concerned; for Mary, it was a way of unburdening herself for her own relief, and it certainly suggests that she had become vulnerable to someone or something in the Kingsborough circle. In May she was talking about Ogle's great faults, balanced by his genius and sensibility; and pointing out the dreadful life of Society couples, ‘seldom alone together but in bed - the husband perhaps drunk, and the wife's head full of pretty compliments that some creature that nature designed for a man paid her at the card table.’ It was not the sort of observation expected of governesses.

  In June the whole family crossed over to England to take the medicinal waters at Bristol Hot Wells. They stayed for several weeks. And here, in August, the inevitable rupture came, and Mary was dismissed.

  In her account of the affair to Godwin she attributed the dismissal entirely to her too obvious success in winning the children's affections from their mother. She also recalled Ogle as ‘the most perfect gentleman she had ever known’,9 a remark Godwin printed with the additional comment that Ogle's later opposition to Catholic emancipation had disappointed Mary. But if we turn back to the letters we see Ogle had disappointed her on an earlier occasion. Something in his behaviour upset her enough to produce some odd and incoherent scrawled remarks to Eliza in a letter from the Hot Wells dated June 1787:

  Lords are not the sort of beings who afford one amusement – nor in the nature of Things do they – poor half-mad Mr Ogle was the only Rt. Honourable I was ever pleased with – and I pity him – I am sorry to hear a man of sensibility and cleverness talking of sentiment sinking into sensuality… such will ever I fear be the case with the inconsistent human heart when there are no principles to direct and sustain it.

  She went on to quote Paley severely, complain of the bad weather and the way she was treated by the ‘little souls’ about her, and mention a sum of money which ‘A friend whose name I am not permitted to mention has lent me.’

  Evidently the friend was not Ogle, whom she now disapproved of; nor was it Mrs Fitzgerald, whose loans to her were freely mentioned, or Church (of Newington) who had also advanced her money. It is usually assumed that it was sent to her by Joseph Johnson, and this is a probable enough explanation, although there was no particular reason for discretion about the payment of advance royalties from a publisher. One further possibility remains: Lord Kingsborough himself may have felt the governess had been ill-treated by his wife, and decided to assist her. He had after all given an annuity to a former governess; and the King men liked to regard themselves as patrons of needy literary women; his uncle Robert had been much involved with Laetitia Pilkington.*

  If he did in fact assist Mary, it would help to explain Caroline's later accusations against her; in that household there were always plenty of tale-bearers about, and if any of the servants learned that money had passed hands between his Lordship and Miss Wollstonecraft they would be very likely to jump to conclusions and pass their information on where it would do most damage. Caroline's jealousy was certainly aroused by some means, and although she could scarcely adopt a self-righteous pose over Ogle's small attentions to Mary, she felt herself fully entitled to be angry over any of her husband's.

  So Mary departed in disgrace. Only Margaret remained in a state of violent, rebellious loyalty to her governess. But she took her revenge with her: the manuscript of her completed novel, Mary.

  Mary is primarily an attempt at self-analysis, a portrait of a heroine equipped with intelligence and the social virtues in spite of an inadequate upbringing. She cannot help being a little conceited and
feeling that life owes her something more than the trials she has to endure. She finds herself at odds with her parents, with her status as a married woman and even to a degree with Ann, the friend (based on Fanny) to whom she devotes herself until her death from consumption in Lisbon. So far it is straightforward enough. The curious feature of the book is the way in which Wollstonecraft and Kingsborough characters are combined. The heroine's mother is called Elizabeth (and father Edward); but she is clearly a hostile sketch of Caroline, preferring dogs to children, jealous of her growing daughter and of her husband's affections (he spends a good deal of time visiting those of the tenants on his estate who have pretty daughters). Elizabeth's ancestors inhabited a romantic ruined castle, she was married under family orders without affection, and her own daughter ‘Mary’ is married off whilst still a child in order to join two estates. Thus in the novel the real Caroline, transformed into Mary's mother, is annihilated; whilst Mary herself is raised to the freedom and power of her social position and able to rectify in her own person the weaknesses and follies of her ‘mother’.

  The fictional Mary is attractive to men and enters into flirtatious relationships with several; her husband, dispatched abroad immediately after the marriage ceremony, plays no part in her story except as a barrier to other possibilities. She likes the awkward manners of literary men, men ‘past the meridian of life, and of a philosophic turn’; she is moved by an ugly, sensitive invalid, Henry, who plays simple Scottish ballads on his violin; and she enjoys some passionate embraces with him. ‘Have I desires implanted in me only to make me miserable?’ she asks, and ‘can I listen to the cold dictates of prudence, and bid my tumultuous passions cease to vex me?’10 One of her sneers at the character of ‘Elizabeth’ is that she is too prudent and cold to betray her unloved husband except in imagination. Nowhere in Mary is adultery openly defended, but the contrast between Elizabeth and Mary implies that feeling rather than prescription is the right guide to behaviour. Sensibility, ‘the most exquisite feeling of which the human soul is capable’,11 is not to be confused with gross sensuality, but the distinction becomes rather a fine one, maintained in the book largely by the device of making Henry a dying man.

  ‘I have drawn from Nature,’ Mary told Henry Gabell in a letter,12 but she was probably not directing his attention to her views on the matrimonial bond, since he had lately told her he was about to be married himself. The novel ended in fact with the death of the fictional Henry, and with Mary, heartbroken, retiring to her country estates determined to run them on model lines: she ‘established manufactories’ and ‘threw the estate into small farms’, a course of action not entirely unlike that of Robert Kingsborough in his younger and more idealistic days. Several other touches relate to the Kingsboroughs, and it must certainly have caused considerable displeasure to Caroline if it ever fell into her hands. No doubt the idea gave Mary some legitimate satisfaction.

  Mary's departure from the Kingsborough household did not bring it much relief from family disputes. Within two years, in 1789, Caroline insisted on a formal separation, accusing Robert of persistent ill-treatment, its nature unspecified though it is easy enough to guess at. They lived their lives apart thereafter; she became known as ‘the good countess’ around Mitchelstown and he busied himself with the militia as Ireland grew increasingly restless and violent; he is credited with the particular brutality of inventing ‘pitch-capping’, a form of torture in which short-haired (and therefore politically suspect) peasants had burning tar and gunpowder applied to their heads.

  The many Kingsborough sons took up conventional careers in the army and the church. Two of their daughters however retained a streak of wildness, for which some people held their governess responsible. Margaret kept up a short-lived clandestine correspondence with her.13 When she was nineteen she married her neighbour, the young Earl of Mountcashel, not because she loved or admired him but to get away from home, and confident that she could manage him.14 She bore him rows of children, in whom, like her mother, she seems to have taken little enough interest. Instead she became absorbed in Irish republican politics, to the considerable annoyance of her husband. By her late twenties she was

  a democrat and republican in all their sternness, yet with no ordinary portion either of understanding or good nature… uncommonly tall and brawny, with bad teeth, white eyes, and a handsome countenance… with gigantic arms, which she commonly folds, naked and exposed almost to the shoulders.

  (This description comes from Godwin, who became her firm friend, although he did not meet her until after the death of his wife.)

  Margaret Mountcashel spoke up loyally in defence of Mary when popular opinion credited her with having corrupted her charges,15 but she never attempted to make contact with her again and did not even name her in the autobiographical note she left. Perhaps while Mary still lived the younger woman was embarrassed by the memory of an intense relationship, which would have been impossible to revive; and later she may have had doubts about Mary's wisdom. ‘Misfortune must ever be the lot of those who transgress the laws of social life,’ she wrote for the benefit of her own youngest daughters. She was referring to her own personal transgressions: in 1803 she decided to leave her husband and settle in Italy with a lover, George Tighe. There she lived out her life, calling herself ‘Mrs Mason’, apparently contented with her calm exile in the sun and her respectable Irish companion, who busied himself growing potatoes in pots on the window-ledges of their palazzo. In time she befriended Shelley and the ladies who buzzed about him, preferring Claire Clairmont to the daughter of her old governess. She was a tender mother to her own extra-matrimonial daughters and even wrote a book on child care, Advice to Young Mothers by a Grandmother. Sadly, her Mountcashel children remembered her always as a harsh and unloving parent.

  Another scandal, far worse than Margaret's discreet elopement, involved the third King daughter, Mary, and Robert Kingsborough himself, and was followed eagerly by the whole newspaper-reading public of England and Ireland. The story belongs later in this narrative, but the fact that Mary's name was brought up when it happened, that she was accused of having corrupted her charges, and that Caroline herself joined in the attacks on her, indicates something of her success in ruffling the feelings of the good countess.

  Mary parted from the Kingsboroughs in haste, muddle, defiance and unhappiness. She had offended a peeress and become convinced that the ladies of the aristocracy were irredeemably frivolous and arrogant. No doubt other governesses had come to the same conclusion in silence. But her case was a little different. She was not an isolated figure, and she was moving back into a world of allies: the Dissenters, the London intelligentsia. Soon she would have Henry Fuseli's account of how he had boxed the ears of Lord Waldegrave's son and thrown up his tutorship; she might hear Joseph Priestley's strictures on Lord Shelburne, whom he had served as librarian for seven years but parted with coldly enough in the end. She would meet Thomas Holcroft, the playwright and translator, who had just brought the names of Beaumarchais’ Figaro and Susanna to London. Their message spoke directly to Mary's experience: My Lord, the man of empty honour and sexual obsession, and My Lady, the spoilt slave of his despotic whim, could not continue to hold the centre of the stage much longer.

  [6]

  Joseph Johnson and St Paul's Churchyard

  ALL the same, Mary was homeless again, without a job or a reference; she had nothing to live on, and she was in debt to several people. She had no marriage prospects. She was twenty-eight, with a face that looked as though it had settled permanently into lines of severity and depression around the fierce eyes. In her heart she knew herself for an enthusiast, but so far life had handed her more opportunities for contempt than enthusiasm, and her most remarkable trait was still that she had refused to learn the techniques whereby women in her situation usually attempted to make life tolerable for themselves: flattery, docility, resignation to the will of man, or God, or their social superiors, or all three.

  To turn to her fa
mily was out of the question. Her father was in Wales with his Lydia, and in any case down to his last penny; James was at sea, Charles indentured to Ned at St Katharine's Dock, Ned himself implacably hostile. She had to find somewhere to live and some means of earning money. The ladies of Newington Green would certainly have been willing to find her a post in a girls' school like her sisters, both now teaching again, but Mary was not prepared to be grateful to any more women, even well-intentioned ones, for the time being.

  She had one other resource: her publisher, Joseph Johnson. When she stepped out of the Bristol coach she made straight for his shop in St Paul's Churchyard. It was by far the best thing she ever did. Johnson was probably the only person she knew who was in a position to offer her an alternative to the treadmill turned by governesses, companions and schoolteachers, but better still he was ready to believe in the unusual and behave unconventionally.

  For us, Johnson is not an easy man to approach. We know that he was a successful businessman and a Dissenter with no love for the establishment; he was also wary, self-effacing and remarkably efficient at obscuring his own tracks. Put in the witness box during the treason trials of 1794, he contrived to appear almost wholly ignorant of the workings of his own business, which was all the more a feat as he ran it virtually single-handed.1 His cautiousness induced him more than once to abandon printing books already set up in type: the first part of Tom Paine's Rights of Man, Blake's French Revolution, Beckford's Travels. In each case his first instinct as a publisher was sound, but blocked by anxieties about political or other repercussions; he never betrayed a friend, but he had no desire to be a martyr either.