The new Settler in George Street, Blackfriars—Mary’s earlier Story—Woman of Letters—Her Five Years’ Work—Her Attachment to Mr. Johnson—Coteries of Philosophical Radicalism—Anti-Jacobinon the Free Contract—Godwin’s Apostasy—From Blackfriars to Store Street—The Slut becomes a modish Woman—Her Passion for Fuseli—Her Appeal to Mrs. Fuseli—Mr. Kegan Paul’s strange Treatment of Mr. Knowles—Rights of Woman—Plain Speech and Coarseness—Mary goes to Paris—She makes Imlay’s Acquaintance—Her Assignations with him at the Barrier—Their Association in Free Love—Mr. Kegan Paul speaks deliberately—His Apology for Mary’s Action—He falls between Two Stools—Wife in the eyes of God and Man—Letters to Imlay—Badness of Mary’s Temper—Her consequent Quarrels with Imlay—Her Sense of Shame at her Position—Birth of her illegitimate Child—Her Withdrawal from France—Her Norwegian Trip—Her Wretchedness and Rage—Dissolution of the Free Love Partnership—Mary’s Attempt to commit Suicide—Was she out of her Mind?—Her Union with Godwin in Free Love—Their subsequent Marriage—Their Squabbles and Differences—Their Daughter’s Birth—Mary Wollstonecraft’s Death—Mrs. Shelley’s biographical Inaccuracies.
The new Settler in George Street, Blackfriars—Mary’s earlier Story—Woman of Letters—Her Five Years’ Work—Her Attachment to Mr. Johnson—Coteries of Philosophical Radicalism—Anti-Jacobinon the Free Contract—Godwin’s Apostasy—From Blackfriars to Store Street—The Slut becomes a modish Woman—Her Passion for Fuseli—Her Appeal to Mrs. Fuseli—Mr. Kegan Paul’s strange Treatment of Mr. Knowles—Rights of Woman—Plain Speech and Coarseness—Mary goes to Paris—She makes Imlay’s Acquaintance—Her Assignations with him at the Barrier—Their Association in Free Love—Mr. Kegan Paul speaks deliberately—His Apology for Mary’s Action—He falls between Two Stools—Wife in the eyes of God and Man—Letters to Imlay—Badness of Mary’s Temper—Her consequent Quarrels with Imlay—Her Sense of Shame at her Position—Birth of her illegitimate Child—Her Withdrawal from France—Her Norwegian Trip—Her Wretchedness and Rage—Dissolution of the Free Love Partnership—Mary’s Attempt to commit Suicide—Was she out of her Mind?—Her Union with Godwin in Free Love—Their subsequent Marriage—Their Squabbles and Differences—Their Daughter’s Birth—Mary Wollstonecraft’s Death—Mrs. Shelley’s biographical Inaccuracies.
On or about St. Michael’s Day of 1787, a woman, whose dress betrayed an unfeminine indifference to the refinements of costume, and whose intelligent countenance possessed no beauty superior to ordinary comeliness, took possession of her new quarters in a small house in George Street, Blackfriars, which had been hired for her occupation, and provided with a few needful articles of furniture, by Mr. Joseph Johnson, the bookseller and publisher of St. Paul’s Churchyard. No longer young, though courtesy would still style her so, this woman,—whose abundant brown-auburn tresses showed no threads of grey, whose clear and clever brown eyes would have been more effective had not one of them suffered from a slight paralytic drooping of the lid, whose complexion preserved a girlish freshness, and whose countenance would have been more agreeable had it not been for certain indications of sadness and asperity,—was in the middle of her twenty-ninth year, when she crossedthe threshold of her new home for the first time. At that season of her history, no casual observer of her face was likely to regard it with admiration; but few attentive scrutinizers of its lineaments failed to discover in them the signs of intellectual force. To take a fair view of this woman’s future behaviour, and see how far she has been misrepresented by censors and flatterers, it is needful to glance at her earlier story.
The granddaughter, on her father’s side, of a Spitalfields manufacturer, the daughter of a man rich enough to live in idleness, Mary Wollstonecraft began her life’s battle with a miserably slender education and an embittering sense of having been defrauded of her birthright to gentility by her father’s vicious weakness. Regarding herself as a gentlewoman by reason of her grandfather’s opulence and the respectability of her mother’s ancestors, this daughter of a drunken father (with several children,—three sons and three daughters) found herself in a position that, denying her the enjoyments to which she had once thought herself entitled, required her to shift and provide for herself in default of a father capable of providing for her. It is not surprising that the girl, with a fervid and far from amiable temper, thought contemptuously of a sire, so careless for his wife’s happiness and the interests of his offspring. Other matters quickened her sense of life’s hardship. At the threshold of her twenty-second year she lost her mother (whom her self-indulgent father speedily replaced with a second wife), and became the indignant witness of the domestic troubles of her favourite sister, Eliza, who was married to a dissolute and brutal man, named Bishop. Under these circumstances, she could think her father and brother-in-law exceptionally bad men; or, rating them as average examples of masculine nature, she could form an equally unfavourable and unjust estimate of the sex they discredited. For a while Mary Wollstonecraft took the latter course. Had she possessed an admirer in the ranks of the hateful sex, she would no doubt have taken the other view of her sire and her sister’s husband. But in those days the woman, who became almost handsome in middle age, missed little of downright ugliness, and from personal experience knew nothing of masculine homage. The woman of quick temper and vehement emotionality may be presumed to have felt acutely the neglect coming to her from her want of girlish attractiveness.
Going out into the world, when fortunate girls are choosing their bridesmaids, Mary fought poverty in various ways,—now in the company of her friend Fanny Blood and Fanny’s mother (who took in needlework), now in the company of her sisters, and now in the dwellings of strangers. For a while she earned her livelihood with the needle. Then the sisters kept a school at Stoke Newington, one of London’s northern suburbs,—a school that declined to return the compliment and keep the enterprising sisters. Newington Green is memorable in Mary’s annals for other matters, besides this ungrateful seminary for young ladies. It was there that she wrote her first book,Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, for which she received ten guineas; and it was from the same Green that she started for her run to Lisbon, at the entreaty of her vehemently beloved Fanny Skey (néeBlood), who lived just long enough to die in her friend’s arms. On Mary’s return from Portugal to the north London suburb, the unremunerative school was given up; and parting from her sisters, Mary went off to Ireland to serve a dame of fashion and high quality (Lady Kingsborough) in the capacity of governess to her ladyship’s daughters, with a yearly salary of 40l.,—a situation procured for her by the Rev. Mr. Prior (an Assistant-Master at Eton, and one of the several clergymen who befriended her at the outset of her career); the situation in which she found time to go forward with her French studies, and write some stories for her publisher; the situation in which, though treated with abundant kindness, Mary was more than slightly miserable (as a young woman of her quick and querulous temper was bound to be anywhere). Thus she had spent her time from the middle of her twenty-second to the middle of her twenty-ninth year. She had worked by turns with her needle and her pen; she had failed at school-keeping, and been miserable as a governess, in a great family; and now she has just settled herself in the little house in George Street, Blackfriars, with the intention of earning her livelihood as a bookseller’s hack and author by profession.
Johnson, the bookseller and publisher, showed himself a shrewd man of business in engaging the young woman, who had been introduced to him by the scholarly and benevolent Rev. John Hewlett. Seeing from the little books he had already taken of her that she possessed the ‘literary knack,’ seeing also, from personal intercourse with her, that she wasindustrious and resolutely set on winning a position amongst women of letters, the publisher came to the conclusion that she would prove a more serviceable instrument in his hands than any of the tippling scholars he was in the habit of employing to write essays, translate French pamphlets, and dress manuscripts for the press. The woman, who, in her delight at finding herself in regular literary employment, regarded her publisher as her benefactor,—the woman, who seldom ate meat and rarely drank anything but water or tea, was a more intelligent, punctual, and manageable scribe, than any hack Mr. Johnson could have picked from the taverns, frequented by indigent men of letters. Temperate, sedulous, quick with her pen, and especially desirous to please her employer, the clever woman was glad to work twelve hours a-day in her tiny tenement, and deemed herself well rewarded by fair payment and the almost parental interest the publisher took in her proceedings. Working strenuously six days of the week, she usually dined on Sunday at Mr. Johnson’s table, where she met some of the most notable scholars, artists, and writers of the period.
For five years she led this laborious and upon the whole not unhappy life, re-writing the English translation (from the Dutch) ofYoung Grandison; translatingNecker on Religious OpinionsandLavater’s Physiognomyfrom the French; compiling theFrench Reader; producingElements of Morality from the German; working at a novel, entitledThe Cave of Fancy; throwing off countless articles and critical notices forThe Analytical Review; putting into English numerous French political pamphlets, that, keeping herau courantin the public affairs of France, quickened her sympathy with the revolutionary movement, and her admiration of the revolutionary leaders of that country; and together, with other original essays, sending through the press theAnswer to Burke, and theVindication of the Rights of Woman, written during the first outcry against the first part ofThe Rights of Man, by Thomas Paine, whose acquaintance she had made before she was so imprudent as to christen her comparatively inoffensive essay after his notorious book, and thereby to associate herself in the popular imagination with the man of evil fame, and with the work that only a few months later was declared by the King’s Bench jury ‘a false, scandalous, malicious, and seditious libel.’ In the fiveyears, during which she was thus busily employed, Mary Wollstonecraft helped her brother and sisters largely with her earnings, whilst in order to do so she denied herself comforts to which she cannot have been wholly indifferent, and pleasures which so lively and emotional a woman must have desired. Mr. Johnson, in his later time, was of opinion that she could not have spent in this period less than 200l.on her needy relatives; and there is no reason to think the publisher’s rough estimate excessive. The woman, who, whilst subsisting chiefly on vegetables and exercising a severe economy in every department of her strictly personal expenditure, used in this manner so large a proportion of her slender and toilsome earnings was, at least, a woman to be honoured on certain grounds and from certain points of view.
During the first four of these five years, Mary Wollstonecraft remained in the modest quarters, in George Street, taken and furnished for her in 1787 by Mr. Johnson, of whose tender and humane treatment of her she wrote with gratitude and affection. Writing and speaking in this strain of his goodness and tenderness, she was at no pains to conceal from the bookseller the feelings with which she regarded him. But though she sometimes styled it ‘love,’ there is no reason to think her liking for the staid and rather formal publisher resembled in any way or degree the idolatrous admiration she soon displayed for Fuseli the painter, or the passionate tenderness she somewhat later lavished on Imlay, the American man of letters. It was the affection a woman, of Mary’s essentially generous nature and peculiar circumstances, would necessarily feel for the man, greatly her senior, who had befriended her with equal delicacy and kindliness; had instructed her without assuming any air of authority over her; and had helped her out of difficulties, and introduced her to remunerative employment and congenial friends, without letting her feel herself patronized. At the end of her fourth year in the little house in George Street (Michaelmas, 1791), Mary Wollstonecraft moved to Store Street, where she resided till her departure for France in December, 1792, seeing probably something less of the Radical bookseller, but feeling no less affectionately towards him, working no less sedulously for him.
During these five years Lady Kingsborough’s whilom governess changed considerably in her views of life and society, her mental characteristics, and her appearance. Partly dueto time and natural development, these changes were in a greater degree due to the influence of her professional pursuits, of the books she read, of the circles in which she found recreation, and of the friendships she formed in those circles. Strongly disposed to liberalism before she settled in George Street, she would probably, under any circumstances, have developed into an ultra-liberal. It was therefore a matter of course, that the publisher’s hack, who in the way of her profession became a translator of revolutionary pamphlets, quickly adopted the views and conclusions of the revolutionists and republicans. It was also a matter of course that the emotional and sympathetic woman, who affected powerfully the sensibilities of those she encountered, was in like manner affected by them. Nor is it surprising that the woman who, after entering her thirtieth year, became better looking every year she lived, was in the earlier term of middle life more thoughtful of her appearance, and more anxious to exhibit it to the best advantage, than she had been when she was a plain and unattractive young person. In this last respect the change in Mary Wollstonecraft was almost comically striking to those who, on greeting her as a former acquaintance in Store Street, had not seen her since the opening of her second year in George Street. During her residence in Blackfriars, dressing with severe economy (partly in order that she might have more money to give to her brothers and sisters, and partly because personal vanity was still foreign to her nature), she was the veriest caricature of a philosophical sloven. Her costume in the streets consisted of an ill-fitting habit of such coarse cloth, as was generally worn by London milk-women of the succeeding generation, a badly kept beaver hat, black stockings and clumsy shoes. Indoors she wore the same coarse habit when the weather was cold. In summer she sate at her desk in a cotton dressing-gown, or with no garment over her stays. On changing the place of her abode she changed her dressmaker and consulted a milliner. A slut in Blackfriars, she dressed like a woman of fashion in Store Street. Though he was not the sole cause of it, Fuseli was largely accountable for this in Miss Wollstonecraft’s outward style.
Of all the numerous acquaintances she made in the coteries of Philosophic Radicalism, the three persons to influence Mary Wollstonecraft most powerfully and enduringly were Thomas Paine, Henry Fuseli, and William Godwin. Long beforeWilliam Godwin loved her, so far as it was possible for a man of his cold nature to love any woman; long before it ever occurred to her that she would live to be his wife, or even to have a liking for him, William Godwin’s declarations against marriage converted her to an open approval of the doctrines of Free Love, making her a Free Lover in principle, some while sooner than the time when she became a Free Lover in practice.
Of all this philosopher’s doctrines on social questions, none were more acceptable to his admirers than those that aimed at discrediting lawful wedlock, as an arrangement fruitful of misery and moral disease; fruitful of no kind of felicity, that would not flow in clearer and more liberal streams from a system of virtuous concubinage, under which spouses would be drawn together by love and a sense of mutual affinity, and remain at liberty to part from one another, as soon as they should cease to love, and should discover their unfitness for, one another. Whilst vicious libertines applauded the doctrines that seemed to justify, or at least to palliate, their immorality, and extolled the arrangement with which it was proposed to replace the old-fashioned wedlock, because it seemed to them an arrangement under which a profligate might have half-a-hundred mistresses in succession, without incurring the annoyances of social obloquy, virtuous libertines—enthusiasts of both sexes, wholly pure of wicked passion, with no fire of lust in their veins, no taint of lasciviousness in their blood—saw in Free Love the one wholesome remedy for certain of the worst ills of civilization. An entire bookcase might be filled with the literature that streamed from the press in commendation of Free Love (as a righteous substitute for debasing matrimony), during the last twenty years of the last century. TheAnti-Jacobinmade good fun of this literature on 18th December, 1797, in the letter written to theAnti-Jacobin’seditor, by Miss Lætitia Sourby, about certain deplorable changes for the worse in her papa’s temper, principles, and demeanour.
‘But’ (says Miss Lætitia) ‘to return to my father—who is now always reading Books and Pamphlets that seem quite wicked and immoral to my mind and my poor Mother’s, whom it vexes sadly to, hear my Father talk before company, that Marriage is good for nothing, and ought to be free to be broken by either party at will. It was but the other day that he told her, that if he were to choose again, by the New Law in the only Free Country in the world, he would prefer Concubinage—so he said in my hearing.’
‘But’ (says Miss Lætitia) ‘to return to my father—who is now always reading Books and Pamphlets that seem quite wicked and immoral to my mind and my poor Mother’s, whom it vexes sadly to, hear my Father talk before company, that Marriage is good for nothing, and ought to be free to be broken by either party at will. It was but the other day that he told her, that if he were to choose again, by the New Law in the only Free Country in the world, he would prefer Concubinage—so he said in my hearing.’
Thus it was that theAnti-Jacobinridiculed the Free Lovers and their literature at the close of the very year in which they were thrown into lively commotion by William Godwin’s shameful act of apostasy from his own lovely doctrines, in making Mary Wollstonecraft his lawful wife at St. Pancras Church:—a commotion curiously comparable with the stir of surprise and indignation, that greatly agitated the favourers of the Free Contract only a few years since, when Marian Evans (after living in free promise with George Henry Lewes till his death) gave herself to an excellent gentleman, and took him for better and worsenotin Free Contract, but in holy matrimony, duly solemnized in a place of public worship, in accordance with the ordinances and requirements of the Church of England. The favourers of the Free Contract (who had for many years talked of Marian Evans and her genius as though they had a peculiar property in them, and of hernom-de-plumeas though it were sheer profanity to hint that George Eliot could be wrong about anything) were comically moved and troubled by the incident, which told them how little (with all their fussy talkativeness) they had known of the great novelist’s reverence for the sanctity of marriage, and for every usage tending to hallow it in the minds of men and women. In like manner were the enemies of Marriage disturbed some ninety years since on hearing that, after all he had written and said against lawful wedlock, and after living with her for months in Free Love, William Godwin had taken Mary Wollstonecraft to St. Pancras Church.
Having accepted Godwin’s doctrines touching Marriage, and become a Free Lover in principle, during her residence in George Street, Mary Wollstonecraft conceived a strong sentiment of affectionate admiration for Henry Fuseli; a sentiment so fervid that, instead of being able to nurse it secretly in her breast, she was constrained to reveal it to him, and entreat him to give her place in his heart. Born in 1741, Fuseli was eighteen years her senior, and about fifty years of age, when he was thus entreated for affection by a woman, who at the time of making the prayer knew he was a happily married man. In justice to Miss Wollstonecraft it must be clearly put on the record, that Fuseli could have complied with the precise terms of her entreaty, without doing aught that would have rendered him guilty of conjugal infidelity, in the legal sense of the term. Averring to her friends (for beside worrying Fuseli with love-letters, shespoke freely of her passion for him to divers of her friends) that she fully recognized Mrs. Fuseli’s right to the person of her husband, Mary Wollstonecraft only desired that she and he should live together in sentimental union; that he should admit her to his confidence as a spiritual partner, and she be suffered to worship him as her spiritual mate; that they should cherish one another with mutual platonic fondness. It is not surprising, or much to her discredit, that she admired thus dangerously a man of Fuseli’s genius, personal attractiveness, and conversational brilliance; though it certainly does not speak much for her delicacy that she was so communicative to him and others respecting her passion and his cruelty in declining to respond, to it. What might have happened, had Fuseli been less resolute in the right way, may be left to the reader’s imagination. Enough for the present writer to speak of what actually took place. Touched by love, piqued by the coldness of the man she adored, Mary strove to lure him into regarding her case more tenderly and mercifully. Taking blame to herself for the ill-success of her suit, it occurred to her that she would fare better if she were more careful of her personal appearance. Hence the choice of a new dressmaker and the conference with a fashionable milliner.
Moving to a brighter quarter of the town, Mary arrayed herself elegantly. At the same time she rained down letters on the man who, neglecting to answer them, sometimes kept them for days together in his pocket without opening them. More than once Fuseli expostulated with her on her unworthy behaviour, and begged her to act more reasonably. ‘If I thought my passion criminal,’ she answered, ‘I would conquer it, or die in the attempt; for immodesty, in my eyes, is ugliness, and my soul turns with disgust from pleasure tricked out in charms which shun the light of heaven.’ Mary’s last attempt to achieve her purpose may surely be taken as evidence that she spoke sincerely of the purity of her passion. Going straight to Mrs. Fuseli, she implored the lady to receive her into her family, adding, ‘As I am above deceit, it is right to say that this proposal arises from the sincere affection I have for your husband; for I find that I cannot live without the satisfaction of seeing and conversing with him daily.’ Naturally Mrs. Fuseli declined to accede to the proposal, and thought it best for her and herhusband to withdraw from an engagement to accompany Mary on a six weeks’ trip to Paris.
This is the outline of John Knowles’s account of an affair that, known to many people through Mary’s extravagantly indiscreet communicativeness, was of course told in various ways, more hurtful than the true way to her character. The evidence of the story, so true to Mary Wollstonecraft’s human nature, is unimpeachable. Who was the narrator of the story? Fuseli’s intimate friend, executor, and biographer, John Knowles, Fellow of the Royal Society, was also Mrs. Fuseli’s intimate friend, after her husband’s death. A gentleman of high place in the Navy Office, of good social position, of known integrity, Mr. Knowles gives his account of Fuseli’s relations with Mary Wollstonecraft in the biography of the artist, which he wrote at Mrs. Fuseli’s request and with her assistance, from the great painter’s papers. The account, thus given to the world, and given (be it observed) in Mary Wollstonecraft’s interest, even more than for the sake of the painter’s reputation, is introduced to the readers of the biography with these words: ‘Several publications having gone so far as totally to misrepresent the nature of his intercourse with this highly gifted lady, it becomes the duty of his biographer to give a plain statement of facts.’ Written to clear Fuseli and his fair friend of imputations, more discreditable to her than to him, this plain statement is supported in several of its principal assertions by quotations from Mary’s letters to Fuseli; for the accuracy of which passages the historian of unimpeachable credit, and conscientious carefulness, pledges his honour in these words, ‘This and subsequent quotations respecting Mrs. Wollstonecraft are taken from her letters to Fuseli.’ One of these quotations (already given in this work) is the passage from one of her letters in which she avows her passion for the painter, whilst declaring that, were it criminal, she would conquer it, or die in the attempt. In another of the quotations she declares her hope of uniting herself to the painter’s mind. In a third quotation, after the failure of her application to Mrs. Fuseli, Mary begs the painter’s pardon ‘for having disturbed the quiet tenour of his life.’ A fourth quotation gives the whole of the angry letter (signed ‘Mary’) in which, after her return from France to England (and long after the death of her passion for the painter), she scolds Fuseli for notreturning a visit she paid him;—a letter curiously in harmony with Mr. Knowles’s narrative. Thus the character of the narrative is supported by the high character of the narrator; by his singularly good opportunities for ascertaining the truth; by the fact that he was Fuseli’s most confidential friend; by his intimacy with Mrs. Fuseli; and by the conclusive quality of his superabundant documentary evidence. The statement is in perfect harmony with Mary Wollstonecraft’s career. It is a statement in which Fuseli, his wife, John Knowles, and Mary Wollstonecraft herself, may be said to stand forth as witnesses to its truth. Yet further, the statement is supported in its most important assertion by Godwin himself, who speaking, in his memoir of his first wife, of her intimacy with Fuseli, expresses a strong opinion that, had he been unmarried, she would have wished to become the painter’s wife.
How are this statement and the superabundant evidence of its accuracy dealt with by one of the several gentlemen who, not content with white-washing and painting Shelley into a respectable member of a respectable county family, and white-washing Mary Godwin into a suitable wife for so respectable a member of so respectable a county family, must needs whitewash Shelley’s second mother-in-law into a suitable mother for so suitable a wife for so respectable a member of so highly respectable a county family? In hisLife of William Godwin, Mr. Kegan Paul ventures to say that ‘Mr. Knowles is so extremely inaccurate in regard to all else that he says of her, that his testimony,’ respecting Mary Wollstonecraft’s intimacy with Fuseli, ‘may be wholly set aside.’ This astounding statement is made by a gentleman who does not give a single fact in support of the baseless charge of inaccuracy. It is directly the reverse of fact that Mr. Knowles is extremely inaccurate in what he says about Mary Wollstonecraft. In the memoir of Mary, forming the preface of his edition of herLetters to Imlay, Mr. Kegan Paul calls Knowles’s careful and accurate statement a ‘preposterous story,’i.e.a story contrary to nature and reason; a wrong, foolish, monstrous, absurd story. Fortunately Mr. Kegan Paul gives his reasons for thus stigmatizing a truthful story and conscientious writer. (1) Mr. Kegan Paul says, ‘I have failed to find any confirmation whatever of this preposterous story.’ (2) He says, ‘I find much which makes directly against it, the strongest fact being that Mary remained to theend the correspondent and close friend of Mrs. Fuseli.’ What reasons for declaring the story ‘preposterous’! It is proved completely, proved (as the phrase goes) up to the very hilt; but it must be false because Mr. Kegan Paul has failed to discover any additional confirmatory evidence of its truth,—evidence needed by no discreet reader. It must be false, because Mrs. Fuseli corresponded with Mary to the last! This is Mr. Kegan Paul’sstrongest fact, making directly againstthe statement.
This strongest fact is quite accordant with Knowles’s statement, that Mary wanted from Fuseli nothing but such affection as he might have given her without breaking his marriage vow;—the statement made for the demolition of the stories that she had been guilty of criminal intercourse with him. Had the statement countenanced and confirmed these scandalous stories, the fact of Mrs. Fuseli’s intimacy with Mary would no doubt have made against Knowles. But according to the statement, there was no reason why Mrs. Fuseli should have ceased to be friendly with Mary, though at the close of 1792 she thought Mary had better keep away from Fuseli’s house and presence for a short time. On the other hand according to the statement, there were several reasons why Mrs. Fuseli should think generously and tenderly of Mary, who in the heat of her wild and fantastic passion had not wronged her, or wished to wrong her; had dealt frankly and fairly with her, and thrown herself upon her with entreaties for sympathy. As he admits this fact is hisstrongest factagainst the story, Mr. Kegan Paul admits he has no facts whatever wherewith to discredit the story which he ventures to call ‘preposterous.’ The explanation of the matter is this. Published in 1831, the statement was offensive to Mrs. Shelley, who was just then writing a lot of fantastic, and inaccurate, and romantic nonsense about her mother, declaring her ‘one of those beings who appear once, perhaps, in a generation, to gild humanity with a ray,’ &c., &c. In a pet Mrs. Shelley condemned the truthful story as preposterous. Hence, it became an article of the Field Place creed and duty to think and declare the story preposterous. It follows that, writing in the interest and for the pleasure of Field Place, Mr. Kegan Paul took Mrs. Shelley’s view of the story and thought it preposterous. Thinking the story preposterous, it was natural for Mr. Kegan Paul to discover egregious inaccuracy in one of the most conscientious and careful biographers of English literature.
Before they cross the Channel in the company of Mary Wollstonecraft, and take a look at revolutionary Paris, readers of this work should be told something more of herVindication of the Rights of Woman, with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects. In christening this book after Thomas Paine’s notorious work, and thereby rendering him the sincerest kind of flattery, Mary Wollstonecraft did herself a serious injury; for the inappropriate title caused her to be associated in public sentiment with her friend’s evil repute and evil principles,—an association from which she suffers to this hour. So named, the treatise on feminine disqualifications and grievances was naturally assailed with excessive virulence by all persons, who held Paine in abhorrence. Appearing under an inoffensive title, the treatise would have displeased the majority of educated Englishwomen, and been severely handled by reviewers; but it would not have sent its author down to posterity hand in hand with the scurrilous politician and flippant freethinker.
TheRights of Womanis a statement of woman’s need for a higher and healthier education; a demand that women should have equal educational advantages with the other sex; should be raised by education as nearly as possible to intellectual equality with men, and for this end should from earliest childhood be taught from the same books and trained in the same schools as persons of the male gender. The proposal that girls should be educated in the same schools with boys; that young women should pursue their higher studies in the same classrooms and colleges with young men; that from infancy to adult age, the young of both sexes should be reared and trained side by side, was a proposal certain ninety years since to provoke angry disapproval;—certain, even in these days of liberality and innovation, to cause fierce disputes, should it be put forward, as a serious suggestion to be acted upon by people of all classes throughout the country. But this bold and startling proposal was not the chief cause of the outcry against theRights of Woman. To show their urgent need of a better education, the author gave a picture of the women of her period and country that stung them to fury, and in so doing, caused their fathers, and sons, and brothers, to rise in wrath against so merciless an assailant of the gentler sex. Mary Wollstonecraft’s charge against Englishwomen was that they were frivolous, silly, deceitful, mean-natured, violent in their tempers, querulous,peevish, indolent, immodest, uncleanly in their habits, wanting in delicacy; so wanting in common decency as to be in the habit of exposing their persons shamelessly to one another, although they affected to be unutterably shocked if by any accident they let a man get a view of their ankles. All this Mary Wollstonecraft said of Englishwomen of her own social degree; and she said it coarsely. No wonder there was an outcry against the author of theRights of Woman! No wonder that simple English ladies spoke of her bitterly, as the arch-libeller of their sex; spoke of her with mingled terror, disgust, and indignation! No wonder that honest English gentlemen sided cordially with these simple English ladies.
Some of the coarseness of this censor of her sex may, no doubt, be regarded as a mere affair of superficial style, and was referable to the tone of the coteries in which she had been living for several years:—the coteries of Philosophic Radicalism, where speech was even more free than thought. But some of Mary Wollstonecraft’s coarseness was due to natural want of refinement and a vein of vulgarity that, instead of playing only on the surface of her life, had its source in the depths of her soul. Her view of men and their feelings was as sordid as her view of women and their failings. Her conception of love as a force in human affairs would have discredited a chambermaid. Having its source in sensation, the tenderest and most delicate passion rose and fell with the variations of bodily desire. The result of purely physical causes, it waxed and waned with increase and decrease of nervous excitement. According to Miss Wollstonecraft’s view of the relations of the sexes, wives were so many toys preserved for the diversion of the men who had appropriated them for their enjoyment, in compliance with a nervous disposition that, always more or less transient, was certain to perish in no long time. From its nature the sexual affection was the most inconstant and fickle of human forces. On marrying, every woman is admonished to anticipate the inevitable moment when her husband’s tenderness will cease, her power of pleasing come to end,—the time when, on discovering her inability to charm her proprietor any longer, she will, most likely, survive her desire and desist from her efforts to please him. ‘When the husband,’ says Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘ceases to be a lover—and the time will inevitably come—her desire’ (i.e.the young wife’s desire) ‘will grow languid, orbecome a spring of bitterness; and love, perhaps, the most evanescent of all passions, will give place to jealousy or vanity,’ On a later page of her treatise, she says in the same hopeless strain, ‘Love, from its very nature, must be transitory.... The most holy band of society is friendship. It has been well said, by a shrewd satirist, that “rare as love is, true friendship is still rarer.”’ Provided with the higher knowledge, brighter cleverness, finer tact, coming to her from higher education, a woman would be able to hold her husband’s love for the longest possible period, and in some cases be able to retain his friendship after he has ceased to love her. In all cases, where the former lover declines to sink in the sober friend, the woman of higher education would be able to make herself fairly comfortable, without either his love or his friendship. It was mainly on these grounds, and for these considerations, that Mary Wollstonecraft insisted on woman’s right to better training.
What doctrine,—what a teacher for Englishwomen! It was by such doctrine that Mary Wollstonecraft hoped to raise her sex from slavery and debasement to freedom and dignity. Such was the teacher of whom Mrs. Shelley wrote, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft was one of those beings who appear once, perhaps, in a generation, to gild humanity with a ray which no difference of opinion nor chance of circumstances can cloud.’ It must be remembered thatThe Rights of Womanis the only important original work by her pen that deserves serious consideration,—the solitary work in which she made a strenuous effort to influence the life and future of humanity. The busy woman of letters produced translations, compilations, slight essays, brief tales, critical notices by the score. A clever letter-writer, she produced during her life a charming volume of letters touching Sweden and Norway; and left behind her, for posthumous publication, otherLetters to Imlay,—letters curiously and dismally in harmony with the sentiments and feeling of the essay on English womankind. ButThe Rights of Womanwas her soleimportantoriginal work. The one work, to be studied for information respecting her social theories, it is the one work by which she must be judged as a social teacher. Whatever their merits (and the works are by no means meritless), her other writings afford nothing to justify her younger daughter’s estimate of her services to humanity. From what has been said ofThe Rights of Woman, readers may judge whether itwas a work ‘to gild humanity with a ray’ of moral sunshine, or a work to darken and depress humanity with dismal notions.
Unobservant of his heroine’s deep-seated and ingrained coarseness of sentiment, Mr. Kegan Paul cannot shut his eyes to what I term her superficial coarseness,—the coarseness of diction that is in some degree, though by no means altogether, referable to the tone of the coteries in which she had lived chiefly for some five years.
‘It may, however,’ he says of her book, ‘be admitted that her frankness on some subjects is little less than astounding, and that matters are discussed which are rarely named even among members of the same sex, far less printed for both.... Yet for extreme plain speaking, there was much reason and excuse. The times were coarser than ours, the days were not so far distant when the scenes were possible and the dangers real which Richardson’s novels portray.’
‘It may, however,’ he says of her book, ‘be admitted that her frankness on some subjects is little less than astounding, and that matters are discussed which are rarely named even among members of the same sex, far less printed for both.... Yet for extreme plain speaking, there was much reason and excuse. The times were coarser than ours, the days were not so far distant when the scenes were possible and the dangers real which Richardson’s novels portray.’
Readers may infer from these admissions (by a biographer who would fain have us think Mary Wollstonecraft an angel) that the plain speaking to which Kegan Paul refers isextremelyplain. Mr. Kegan Paul’s admissions on these points are significant of much more than he says, to the disadvantage of the angelic Mary. Significant also are the commonplaces with which he palliates what he is constrained to acknowledge. From these commonplaces one might imagine gentlewomen of George the Third’s time were so tainted with prevailing coarseness, as to be incapable of thinking and writing like gentlewomen. Sufficient evidence to the contrary may be found in the writings of Catharine Macaulay, Hester Chapone, Sophia Lee, Harriet Lee, Ann Radcliffe, Sarah Trimmer, Hannah More, Frances Burney, Lætitia Barbauld. Madame D’Arblay could exhibit the want of refinement, noticeable in the vulgar of her time, without ceasing to write like a woman of refinement. Though Elizabeth Inchbald lived in the same cliques as Mary Wollstonecraft, her pages are innocent of the ‘plain speaking’ that revolts the reader ofThe Rights of Womanand theLetters to Imlay. The simple fact is that, though her worst failing was aggravated by the society she kept, Mary Wollstonecraft sometimes wrote coarsely because she sometimes thought coarsely.
It is not surprising that at the close of 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft went to Paris, the capital to which all Englishmen and Englishwomen of revolutionary sentiment had for some time been looking with keen interest and enthusiastichopefulness. ‘Well up’ in contemporary French politics, the woman, who had translated the pamphlets of French politicians into English, and was known in Paris as their translator, naturally wished to see the people who had engaged so much of her thought, and to pass a few weeks in the capital where, without having seen it, she was no stranger.The Rights of Womanhad been translated into French and praised by Parisian reviewers. It was sold on the boulevards and at the bookstalls on the quays, as a companion-book toThe Rights of Man. At Paris she would be welcomed as a celebrity, honoured as one of the very few Englishwomen, clever and brave enough to be revolutionary,—the only Englishwoman who had at present rendered the Revolution good service with her pen. In the reception accorded so recently to Thomas Paine, by the garrison and municipality of Calais, and by the National Convention at Paris, she saw the honour and enthusiasm with which she would be welcomed at the port and the capital. Even though they forbore to plant the tricolour in her bonnet, the people of the department of Calais would hail her on landing as the friend and fellow-worker of Tom Paine, whom they had so lately chosen to represent them in the National Convention. At Paris she would receive the homage due to her literary success, and be welcomed as a daughter of ‘the Revolution.’
In the spring of ’92 she and the Fuselis had planned a six weeks’ trip to Paris. Through incidents, of which enough has been already said, this plan for a summer’s trip came to nothing. It remained for Mary Wollstonecraft to relinquish her scheme of going to Paris, to make it with other companions, or to go to France by herself. To relinquish the scheme she could not; for the course of events made her more and more desirous to go to Paris. Possibly she tried and failed to find other companions of the voyage. Anyhow she started for France alone on the 8th of December, 1792, going thither alone, and arriving at the capital, in the midst of the series of exciting incidents that closed with the King’s execution.
Going thither openly and in her own name (a name of notoriety in Paris), she made her abode first under the roof of Madame Fillietaz,néeBregantz, a lady in whose school at Putney, Eliza Wollstonecraft (Mrs. Bishop), and Everina Wollstonecraft, had been assistant-governesses. Thus suitably placed in the house of her sisters’ former employer, she remained therefor awhile, working hard at the language in whose accent she was greatly deficient. On getting a sufficient command of the French tongue, she went into Parisian society, and was so engrossed by its excitements that, instead of staying for only a few weeks, she remained at Paris for months, staying over February, though she had received ample warning that, if she would return to England, she should leave France promptly, before the declaration of war. Safe for the moment alike from danger, and the dread of it, Mary stayed on, congratulating herself on being the eye-witness of events of which she meant to be the historian. Entering France for a brief stay she remained in the country for two years and four months.
Going much into the world, she made the acquaintance (during the spring of 1793, if not earlier) of Captain Gilbert Imlay, citizen of the United States of America,—a handsome, clever gentleman of war, letters, and commerce; a soldier who had led his company in the struggle for American Independence; an author who had produced in a series of excellent letters aTopographical Description of the Western Territory of North America; a smart adventurer, who had come to Europe to act for the sale of land in America, and push his way to fortune in commercial enterprise. With a smooth and plausible tongue, Captain Imlay made a favourable impression on Mary, who (now grown into an almost handsome woman) found no difficulty in making a similar impression on him. In the course of their sentimental conversations on love and marriage, it struck both of them that it would be well for them to enjoy the former without assuming the fetters of the latter. It was enough for the handsome American that Mary returned his passion. As she consented to love him, and give him all he required, it was not for him to dictate the terms on which he would accept her kindness. As she had conscientious and philosophic objections to marriage, he was too gallant to draw her into an estate so repugnant to her sense of right. They loved one another. Mutual love was a sufficient sanction for the fulfilment of its own desire. As they loved one another, it was better for them to do so on terms, that would leave them at liberty to retire from one another when their mutual love, ‘the most evanescent of all human passions’ (videRights of Woman) should have perished. They agreed to dote on one another, not in lawful wedlock, but in Free Love.
Mr. Kegan Paul takes two different and quite irreconcilable views of Mary’s action in this business.In the first place, he insists that she determined to associate herself with handsome Gilbert Imlay, because she disapproved of lawful marriage. ‘She ran counter,’ Mr. Kegan Paul says, in theMemoir, p. v., ‘to the customs of society, yet not wantonly or lightly, but with forethought, in order to carry out a moral theory gravely and religiously adopted.’ Further on, p. xxxviii., Mr. Kegan Paul says, ‘Her view was that a common affection was marriage, and that the marriage-tie should not bind after the death of love, if love should die.’ Hence Mr. Kegan Paul’s readers are in the first place required to believe that Mary acted on and from religious principle in this business, and to honour her for so acting on and from principle, although ‘she yet made the grand mistake of supposing that it is possible for one woman to undo the consecrated custom of ages; to set herself in opposition to the course of society, and not be crushed by it.’In the second place, and almost in the same breath, Mr. Kegan Paul declares that religious principle was not Mary’s motive in this affair; but that she went into Free Love with Imlay, because a legal marriage could not have been readily effected between him and her, as she was the subject of a sovereign with whom France was at war; and that she would probably have insisted on being lawfully married—i.e.would have acted against her principles—if that course had at the same time been practicable and safe. It is obvious that if she acted on and from principle, Mary Wollstonecraft did not go to Imlay’s arms in Free Love, merely because the way by lawful marriage was for the moment blocked; and that if she would have married him if she could, she is not to be commended for sacrificing herself in this matter on the shrine of religious principle. It is too much to require us at the same moment to admire her for acting courageously from principle, and at the same moment to believe she would have acted against her principle, had there been no legal impediment to the latter course. Mr. Kegan Paul should have seated himself on one stool or the other. He is undergoing the proverbial punishment of the man who tries to sit between two stools.
What are Mr. Kegan Paul’s grounds for saying that a legal marriage with Imlay was certainly difficult, apparently impossible, to Mary Wollstonecraft in Paris, in the spring of 1793? His grounds for this quite erroneous opinion are (1)that she was a British subject; (2) that England and France were at war; (3) that her position as a British subject was full of danger; (4) that even if a marriage with Imlay was possible to her, she could not have made it without declaring her nationality to the civil officer; (5) that in Madame de Stael’s novel ofCorinne, Lord Nelvil could not marry Madame d’Arbigny, because to marry her he would have had to declare himself to the civil officer. In answer to these considerations, it is enough to say (1) that, though she was a British subject, Mary Wollstonecraft, as the child and favourer of revolution, and a famous writer, enjoying the friendship of Thomas Paine, and other powerful members of the National Convention, was in the spring of 1793 exempt from the perils and inconveniences pertaining to ordinary British subjects living at that time in Paris; (2) that, even had her position been perilous, it would not have been rendered more so by the declarations requisite for a marriage, as so celebrated an Englishwoman, living openly in Paris, was already well known to the civil functionaries; (3) that the case of the English noblemanin Madame de Stael’s novel does not apply to circumstances of the Englishwomanin Paris,—Mary being a woman already known to the civil officer, and a woman, whose nationality would, on the moment of marriage, merge in the nationality of her husband, and remain therein during coverture. Mr. Kegan Paul is wrong alike in his facts and his law. Though she was at war with England, France was in cordial alliance with the United States of America; and the citizen of those States could have married Mary Wollstonecraft almost as easily in Paris as he could have married her in New York. Mr. Kegan Paul’s hypothesis that Mary might have found it difficult and perilous to marry Imlay is a mere fancy, arising from misconceptions.
Further, Mr. Kegan Paul would have us believe that one of Mary Wollstonecraft’s reasons for making a contract of Free Love with Gilbert Imlay was that she might have the security that would pertain to her fromappearingto be the American gentleman’s wife. The answer to this is, that instead of giving her the position and appearance of being his wife, the contract of Free Love (on its becoming known to her friends in France) only gave her the position and appearance of being his mistress; that her friends in France never regarded her as Imlay’s wife; and that no security (in the sense suggested by Mr. KeganPaul) either came, or could be expected to come, to her from her notorious position, though, to palliate her action to her sisters, she used language in some letters that would countenance a different opinion. Events moved rapidly in France. Before the end of the year Thomas Paine had been turned out of the Convention and was in prison, whence he had reason for thinking he would be sent to the guillotine. Secure enough for the moment in the spring of 1793, Mary Wollstonecraft’s position became perilous some months later; and there is abundant evidence that when her position became uneasy, and even hazardous, her relations with Imlay neither gave her security, nor diminished her sense of insecurity.
Mr. Kegan Paul assures the gentle matrons and the young gentlewomen of England that from the commencement of her association in Free Love with Imlay, Mary Wollstonecraft was hiswife! In his biography of William Godwin, Mr. Kegan Paul says of her position towards Imlay, and her letters to him:—