Vindication (13 page)

At Eton, Mary had heard gossip to the effect that his lordship had been extravagant in a way that hurt his wife. He had granted an annuity of £50 to one of Mary's predecessors, Miss Crosby, dismissed when she was said to be attracting the attentions of her master. Fifty pounds for doing nothing was £10 more than Mary was due to receive for a year's work. The amount itself is suspicious, as though Kingsborough had to compensate Miss Crosby for an injury to her reputation that would make it impossible to find another post. Mary Wollstonecraft, in turn, could not be unaware of the roving eye of Lord Kingsborough, ready for ‘a little
fun
not refined'. It didn't take her long to see the vacuity of a society marriage: a couple who met only in bed, he a little drunk, she with her head full of compliments from admirers at the card table. In this way the Kings had produced seven sons and five daughters. Their last child, James, was born the year Mary came to the castle, probably before she arrived, since the birth is not mentioned in her letters.

‘I am treated like a gentlewoman,' she wrote, ‘but I cannot easily forget my inferior station–and this something betwixt and between is rather awkward–it pushes me forward to notice.' Where the previous governess had been treated as a servant, Mary received extraordinary notice from the family.

The castle was ever more pleased with what it saw. The new governess
was dignified and devout; she kept to herself because she craved privacy, but the effect was to stimulate curiosity. She was gratified to find herself treated as a gentlewoman, but mystified, even put out, by numerous daily visits from Ascendancy ladies. In fact, she was soon complaining to her sister of too much company. This protest tells us of her unintentional charisma. The fact that she continued to attract conservatives–Dr Johnson, Henry Gabell, and now Irish grandees–tells us also that she expressed her views with disarming civility. These soon overturned the regimentation Lady Kingsborough had imposed on her daughters. But Mary's biggest gain was the confidence of her charges.

Within five days, they gave up their plan to drive out the governess. A prohibition against novels had led to surreptitious reading of shallow ones. Mary's policy was to free the girls to read what they liked, and govern them solely through their affections, with the result that they felt uneasy about reading what their governess despised. Her ladyship had to concede the benefit, and surrendered control to Mary.

It was decided that Margaret, who had exhibited certain ‘grave faults'–too shaming to be named, possibly incurable Mary thought–was to be given special attention. ‘She is to be always with me,' Mary reports to Bess on 5 November, while Margaret breaks in on the letter with happy offerings.

‘…I have just promised to send her love to my sister–so pray receive it.' Mary speaks with amused patience, bent on winning her pupil's affection. ‘My sweet little girl is now playing and singing to me–she has a good ear and some taste and feeling–I have been interrupted several times since I began this last side.'

What Mary Wollstonecraft taught Margaret over the next few months would lead her later to abandon class and country for her own experimental course that would allow her to develop a medical practice, decades ahead of the first professional women doctors. Margaret's was to be an original life–a sequel to come–and its inception in the ideas and methods of her governess is fortunately recorded in Wollstonecraft's
Original Stories from Real Life
(1788). It's another education book for girls, using fiction as a form of sermon. At night in her room, when the day's duties were
done, Wollstonecraft was reading letters on education by a French governess, Mme de Genlis; also her tales of castle life,
Les Veillées du château
, which taught ‘that luxury dazzles none but fools, and does not produce one real delight; for nothing is more troublesome than magnificence'.

Real Life
concurs. One of Wollstonecraft's stated aims was to counteract the effect of parents preoccupied with frivolities. The King girls had been brought up largely by servants, offset by their mother's severity that required formal obedience to a code of public conduct. This code taught the grace of decorum and civility, yet because it was imposed by a distant parent it did not reach daughters through their minds and feelings. This was Jane Austen's point when she dramatises the distant and ultimately ineffective severity of Sir Thomas Bertram whose elder daughter runs off with a rogue. Both
Mansfield Park
and, earlier,
Real Life
, show the futility of schooling daughters in manners without any real encounter with morality. To teach the King girls virtue, their governess found that she had to ‘explain the nature of vice. Cruel necessity!' She wished to give them the means to recognise the ‘profligate Lord', and to distinguish dignity from the ‘state' of the fine lady. Margaret was quick to apply this to her parents and their milieu.

Mrs Mason, the guardian and governess in
Real Life
, teaches that ‘friendship and devotion', not money, not power, is ‘what principally exalts man'. Emotional literacy has to be the fount of responsible public action; ‘compassion' must replace the vulgarities of ‘prejudice'. Margaret always saw this as her book; her education. It was an education in seeing–seeing, for instance, that the lower classes and all lower forms of life were no less alive than aristocrats. Neither at home nor at school had Margaret's father and eldest brother learnt the most important lesson of social existence: not to injure others. A woman or child doesn't have to witness horse-whippings and the tortures perpetrated (in years to come) by Margaret's brother George, in order to sense callousness. In middle age Margaret set down a record of her youth where she recalls that ‘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…'

There are two girls in
Real Life
, undergoing an equivalent to the secret curriculum in the schoolroom of Mitchelstown Castle. The elder, the Margaret figure, is called ‘Mary'. She is Margaret's age, plain, slothful, and indifferent to cleanliness. Her younger sister Caroline–like the real Caroline, aged twelve–is vain of her much-praised beauty, which makes her affected. Mrs Mason regrets their insensitivity. They should have learnt otherwise in the nursery. In order to reach these hardened older girls, she devises a new system, addressing the senses as ‘inlets to the heart'.

Sixty years before Henry Thoreau lost his post as schoolmaster for holding lessons in the Concord woods, Mrs Mason teaches the girls during exploratory walks each morning. Outdoors, they see ‘real life' for themselves, moving from ants whose lives and social structures can be observed, to birds shot by callous boys, to humans low in the social scale, who are not to be stared at and derided if they are disabled, or ignored if poor and unfortunate. These ‘stories' are discoveries of other forms of life. Some of the characters tell their own stories or they are told as flashbacks–opening up the lives of dying wives, starving children, brutalised dogs and human fodder for wars. All are disregarded by military commanders, landlords, rulers, or owners. This is an attack on power itself, and the elder of the pupils takes it on. ‘I wish to be a woman, said Mary, and to be like Mrs Mason…'

So Mary Wollstonecraft took the King girls beyond what their mother permitted: condescension to objects of charity. She thought it might be too late to wake compassion in girls habituated to non-seeing. There is no knowing the impact, if any, on the two younger girls, Caroline and Mary, whom Miss Wollstonecraft judged ‘middling', but in the course of 1786–7 Margaret's conscience, politics, and ultimately her future were permanently transformed.

Wollstonecraft alerted her pupils to falsehood in tones of voice, and in movements of hand or head. These were no less than ‘lies'. ‘I never, to please for a moment, pay unmeaning compliments, or permit any words to drop from my tongue that my heart does not dictate,' she assured them.

In this way the schoolroom questioned the drawing-room, in particular their mother's train of strong expressions with no meaning attached, as well as Lady K's preoccupation with ceremonial and outward shows. Miss Wollstonecraft remarked that all people have a sense of the sublime, but for many ignorant people the sublime is the grandeur of aristocrats. It may be all that ‘narrow souls' can imagine.

She ‘lived' at night when her charges were asleep. Her daytime duties were extended by elaborate preparations for bed. She had to pin up three girls' locks so that curls would cling to their necks in the morning, and bathe three young faces in milk of roses (at 10s 6d a bottle). Then, she would sit up till midnight or two in the morning, writing letters or reading. It was primarily through books and pamphlets that advanced thinkers of her generation came to withdraw their assent to the social system, a precondition for revolution. At this time she read Rousseau, who gave new meaning to the word ‘nature'. Followers of Rousseau dreamt of a return to ‘nature' where they might cultivate an authenticity impossible in society. This coexisted with talk of ‘rights', but Mary Wollstonecraft was seeking something more than political rights. There had been many women before her who had argued for rights, going back to Christine de Pisan in medieval France, followed amongst others by Mary Astell in the 1690s and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu earlier in the eighteenth century. Where ‘rights' could transform the external conditions of people's lives, ‘nature' offered a chance to shape existence from within.

She began to plan her novel
Mary
, which would ‘develop a character' different from Richardson's Clarissa, or Rousseau's Sophie whose perfections ‘wander from nature'. Her aim was to demonstrate ‘the mind of a woman, who has thinking powers': such a creature ‘may be allowed to exist' as a fictional
possibility
. As she taught Margaret, Caroline and little Mary, that shadow of possibility moved inside her, feeling its way on to the platform of action in the character of ‘Mary'–a survivor of setbacks.

 

One person in the castle detected something of this hidden purpose. Soon after her arrival, Mary noticed a handsome man in his early forties with a pale, rather melancholy face. George Ogle was neatly dressed without being too fine. His high forehead was accentuated by a neat wig, immaculately plain with a tight roll over each ear, and tied back in a queue. There was no lace at his wrists, and he was too sensible to spend time tying an elaborate cravat. He wore his well-cut coat and narrow shoes casually as though they had grown on him. His attention to the new governess marked her out as a person of intelligence. When the relations of landlords and tenants were discussed, he was willing to castigate the landlords as ‘great extortioners'. He spoke with firmness and enthusiasm, emphasising his superlatives, with the air of an orator. Two fingers of his right hand poised on his hip, he would bend forward slightly on his right foot to make a case for Irish independence–not in a ‘national' sense, but upholding the right of the Irish Parliament to make its own laws independent of England. At this time he was seen as a reformer, though later he was to fall out of favour with English reformers. An upholder of the established Church and opposed to Catholic emancipation, including ownership of property, as were most ‘patriots' of the Ascendancy, he nonetheless declared that he hated no man for his faith. As he spoke with lifted chin, he surveyed the room with large, alert eyes; his eloquence set him apart from those Mary called ‘the volubles'.

Enquiry revealed that he was none other than the author of ‘On the Banks of the Banna', a popular song of the day, beginning ‘Shepherds, I have lost my love.' (It was famous enough to be parodied in the caption of a 1790s cartoon about the change in women's fashions: ‘Shepherds, I have lost my waist.') Mary relayed his identity to Everina in some excitement. Unexpectedly, she had discovered a man of sensibility, even ‘genius', in the Kings' circle.

George Ogle of Bellevue, County Wexford, had been born in 1742 into a wealthy family. His uncle Samuel Ogle had been colonial governor of Maryland. His father had been a man of letters whose works had included imitations of Horace and a continuation of the squire's tale from the fourth book of Spenser's
Faerie Queene
. His son joined the Whigs,
and in 1768 became Member of Parliament for Wexford (on the coast to the east of Mitchelstown). The 1770s saw him doing the rounds of fashion in Bath (never crossing the obscure path of Mary Wollstonecraft). In 1779 he attacked Fox and the Opposition in England for not resisting with greater force the Prime Minister Lord North's coercive policy in Ireland. In Dublin he was thought to ‘shed a lustre on every society in which he moved', combining the attractions of a scholar with elegance. His statue in St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, memorialises him as ‘a perfect model of that exalted refinement which in the best days of our country characterized the Irish gentleman'. In 1783 he was admitted to the Irish Privy Council, and in 1784 became Registrar of Deeds (a post whose purpose was to keep land out of Catholic hands) at a salary of £1300 a year. Mary's £40 a year is a measure of the distance between them, laid down by current ideologies of class, position and gender. She was ready to demonstrate how little that distance need matter to true minds.

‘In solitude were my sentiments formed,' is the sort of thing Mary would confide, ‘they are indelible, and nothing can efface them but death–No, death itself cannot efface them, or my soul must be created afresh…'