Vindication (2 page)

Grandfather Wollstonecraft, the Spitalfields weaver, left £10,000–a small fortune–when he died in 1765. The family, on that side, came from the enterprising middle class at a time when English manufacturers were about to acquire industrial power with Watt's invention of the steam engine, in 1765, followed by the appearance of a spinning machine in 1768 and the earliest experiments in electricity by Joseph Priestley, Benjamin Franklin, Humphry Davy, and, eventually, Michael Faraday. It was Mr Wollstonecraft's misfortune to marry and start a family just before the Industrial Revolution. Instead of pursuing the profitable enterprise of his father, it entered his head to rise in the social scale.

Though the British class system had minute gradations, the big divide came between worker and gentleman. The category of ‘gentleman' covered a wide range. Elizabeth Bennet, heroine of
Pride and Prejudice
, contemplating her chances with the hero Mr Darcy, proud master of beautiful grounds at Pemberley (and therefore far above her embarrassingly
vulgar mother and younger sisters), can defend herself as ‘a gentleman's daughter'. What makes her father, Mr Bennet, a gentleman is not only that he has inherited a modest property: he does not work, and has the leisure to spend his days reading in his library.

When Mr Wollstonecraft came into his property he began to cultivate an air of leisure. It was not unknown for members of one class to cross into another, a residue of what was thought of as fine old English ‘liberty' triumphing in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 when the people drove out the high-handed James II. This ‘liberty' was not liberal–an oligarchy of nobles continued to rule the country well into the nineteenth century, and neither Dissenters, Jews nor Catholics, nor indeed women, could hold public office or take degrees–but what 1688 did achieve was the rule of law over the divine right of kings, and less rigid demarcations of class than in other European states. A gentleman could engage in making money, while a tradesman could buy land.

It was this social flexibility that encouraged Mr Wollstonecraft to rise out of the manufacturing class by acquiring a gentleman's blend of land and leisure. But leisure–extended with drink–does not fit the demands of farming. Mary's earliest memories, from the age of four, were of ‘an old mansion with a court before it' near Epping Forest in Essex, north-east of London. Possibly, this was New Farm, close to the main Epping road on a contemporary map. There she preferred outdoor games with Ned, aged six, and Henry, aged two, to girls' games with dolls and baby Bess (born the summer before the family left London in the latter half of 1763).

In 1764, Mr Wollstonecraft moved to another farm close by, near a bend in a road called ‘the Whale Bone', about three miles beyond Epping village, on the way to Chelmsford further along the route to the north-east. The local stopping-point was the Sun and Whalebone public house–Mr Wollstonecraft would have drunk there. Everina was born the following year, in 1765, and it was at this time that Mr Wollstonecraft, as chief legatee of his father, inherited three big houses, containing thirty apartments, back in Primrose Street. It is likely that income from the rents now paid for Mr Wollstonecraft's purchase of land eight miles from London, near
Barking, an Essex town with a thriving market and wharf on Barking Creek which flowed into the wide Thames at Gallion's Reach. Between the farm–it may have been Lodge Farm on the local map–and the river was uninhabited ground known as Barking Level, and south of the river lay the Marshes. Later, Mary recalled her ‘reveries' as a child when she looked up from this flat land at the expanse of the sky and her sight ‘pierced the fleecy clouds that softened the azure brightness'. Her sense of the Creator was born from her sense of creation. She had little religious teaching; it was the unspoilt natural world that woke her spirit.

From the time the family was settled in this part of Essex in the autumn of 1765, their ‘convenient' house, their land, Mr Wollstonecraft's ease with his money and his willingness to deal with the crazed and paupers, opened the doors of their nearest neighbour. Mr Joseph Gascoyne had also moved from London trade into country gentility, and his brother Bamber Gascoyne was a Member of Parliament for several boroughs. Mr Wollstonecraft's increasing taste for the leisure of the landed classes was to bring him, in time, a reputation for idleness. The farm at Barking lasted three years: an eighteenth-century pastoral, outwardly intact but germinating disruption.

With no background or training in agriculture, Mr Wollstonecraft failed repeatedly, and sank lower with each move. He found consolation in the bottle and in the vulnerability of his wife, who took the brunt of her husband's blows. There were times when Mary, as a child, threw herself in front of her mother or thought to protect her by sleeping whole nights on the landing outside her parents' door. In her novel
Mary
, when ‘Mary's' father threatens her mother, the daughter tries to distract him; when she is sent out of the room she watches at the door until the rage is over, ‘for unless it was, she could not rest'. This fictional father, like her own, was ‘so very easily irritated' when he was drunk ‘that Mary was continually in dread lest he should frighten her mother to death'. Her compassion for her mother became ‘the governing propensity of her heart through life'. This was complicated by a disturbing reflection of her father when she looked into her own nature: ‘She was violent in her temper…'

Mr Wollstonecraft could be jolly and extravagantly fond of his children and pets; but his children sat tight at such times, frozen in their knowledge that their father's exuberance could burst into violence. Mr Wollstonecraft was a common kind of bully, the failure who picks on the vulnerable. Mary, not being weak, was not his prime victim. ‘His passions were seldom directed at me,' she remembered when she was away from the family at the age of twenty. But his ‘ungovernable temper' had been a ‘source of misery'; her pity for his victims, her futile attempts to intervene, hovering as witness to abuse, would leave her depressed. This was worse than beatings. When her father beat her, Mary thought how stupid he was and, even as a child, showed her contempt. But this superiority, though it exercised her intelligence at an early age, writhed in the shadow of a mother trapped by marriage. In the supposedly civilised eighteenth century, women's legal status was, in fact, worse than it had been before the Norman Conquest. Then, the law had permitted married women to own land in their own right. The widow of Ealdorman Brihtnoth, the hero of the Anglo-Saxon poem on the Battle of Maldon, disposed of thirty-six estates, mostly inherited from her family. Such a wife had undisputed control of her ‘morning-gift', her husband's present to her the day after the consummation of the marriage. If she wished ‘to depart with her children', she could claim half the goods of the household, and defend her right in court.

Contrast this level of independence with
The Lawes Resolutions
of 1632, which allowed a man to beat ‘an outlaw, a traitor, a Pagan, his villein, or his wife because by the Law Common these persons can have no action'. In 1724 Defoe's heroine Roxana, pursuing a lucrative career in prostitution, declares that ‘the marriage contract was, in short, nothing but giving up of liberty, estate, authority, and everything to the man, and the woman was indeed a mere woman ever after–that is to say, a slave'. Sir William Blackstone's
Commentaries on the Laws of England
(1765–9) explains that ‘the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage'; she is turned into a
feme-covert
, in plain words a ‘covered' or ‘hidden woman', obliterated in her legal protector. In the mid-1770s the young novelist Fanny Burney thought of marriage with dread: ‘how short a time
does it take to put an eternal end to a Woman's liberty!' she exclaimed, watching a wedding party emerge from a church.

A new marriage law, the Hardwicke Act of 1753, designed to clarify the legality of marriage, had the effect of tightening a wife's bonds. She had no right to her own property or earnings, nor to her children, no grounds for divorce, and no recourse to physical protection in the home. In effect, a woman, when she married, lost the basic right of habeas corpus; since she became the property of her husband, the law allowed him to do with her whatever he wished
.
Another century had to pass before an Assaults Act in 1853 could convict violent husbands, followed in 1857 by a new matrimonial court recognising women's right to release from abusive marriages.

Mr Wollstonecraft treated his dogs, as he did his wife, to the same unpredictable switches of mood. Once, hearing a dog's howls of pain, Mary's abhorrence became, she said, an agony. ‘Despot' resonates like a repeated chord in the opening pages of Godwin's memoir of her childhood. In the second edition he modified that word, almost certainly at the wish of other Wollstonecrafts who were alive at the time. But most of Godwin's facts came from Mary herself in the last year or two of her life, so it's reasonable to assume that ‘despot…despot…despot' had been her mature judgement of her father.

He never learnt from his mistakes: the less of the gentleman he became, the more he clung to that dream. In October 1768 when Mary was nine, the family, increased by a third son, James, travelled to the North of England: to a farm at Walkington, about three miles from Beverley, a trim town in Yorkshire near the sea. Beverley appeared to the Wollstonecrafts still in the light of social possibilities: ‘a very handsome town, surrounded by genteel families, and with a brilliant assembly'. The terraced houses in the centre of town were filled with middle-class professionals and merchants. Here, after three years on the farm, the family moved with a new and last child, Charles. When he was born Mary was eleven, old enough to help with a baby. She would continue to love and help Charles. During the years in Beverley her eldest brother, destined for the law, was sent to a grammar school while Mary went to local day schools until she was fifteen and a half. She wrote later: ‘I cannot recollect without indignation the
jokes and hoiden tricks, which knots of young women indulge themselves in, when in my youth accident threw me, an awkward rustic, in their way.'

It was not only that she felt a rustic in town. A victim of domestic violence, especially a child, is isolated, an isolation enforced by the bully in order to preserve secrecy and control. His victims have to keep up appearances, so that the semblance of social life feels inauthentic. Set apart and awkward as Mary felt, there was a certain dignity and a longing to improve herself when, soon after she turned fourteen, she invited the friendship of a serious girl of fifteen called Jane Arden. The two girls took walks together on Westwood Common–Mary's ‘darling Westwood'–where she felt at ease with the woods and windmills. Jane's movements were quick and active; her commands came forth as polite requests. She was the leader of a set who addressed one another with self-conscious civility.

Through Jane, Mary passed messages to other girls, suggesting they too might correspond with her. She laboured over a letter, tossing off quotations like the best-educated girl in the world, and then, with a child's frankness, ends abruptly: ‘I wish you may not be as tired with reading as I am with writing.–' She spouted quotations whenever she got a chance, eager to prove herself literate to a friend of superior education: ‘you know, my dear, I have not the advantage of a Master as you have,' she wrote. Jane's father John Arden, then in his mid-fifties, had been disinherited by his Catholic family for turning Protestant. As a man of education and wide intellectual interests, including astronomy and geography, he exerted himself as an itinerant lecturer demonstrating electricity, gravitation, magnetism, optics and the expansion of metals. Arden's civility showed up the furies of Mary's own father. She said, ‘I shall always think myself under an obligation for his politeness to me.' When he invited Mary to join his lessons, Jane was first with the answers, but Mary led the way with questions. Arden had educated his daughter himself, and Mary was suitably impressed with Jane's understanding–but not too impressed to give way.

‘Pray tell the worthy Philosopher, the next time he is so obliging as to give me a lesson on the globes [planets], I hope I shall convince him I am quicker than his daughter at finding out a puzzle, tho' I can't equal her at solving a problem.'

At fifteen, this girl already has a voice of her own. Her phrasing is ‘spontaneous' (as she claimed), following an ideal of language based on the run of the speaking voice. A century earlier, Dryden had created a language that was clear and apparently artless, while John Locke had dismissed the affectation of unintelligible words as ‘the covers of ignorance, and hindrance of true knowledge'. The Enlightenment, which they promoted, offered more direct modes of communication than the learned flourishes of an expensive education or the languid drawl of the pampered; it's a polished and playful manner with the offhand informality of a modern voice. Mary took to the ‘downright' Yorkshire idiom: happiness was to feel ‘so lightsome', sure ‘it will not go badly with me'–phrases that she used long after she lived there.

In the course of her contact with the Ardens, her reading shifted from trite moralists to literature: Dryden's
Conquest of Granada
(1671–2) and Goldsmith's
Letters from a Citizen of the World
(1760–1) which she shared with Jane. Such books were above the ephemeral publications usually assigned to women: comedy, conduct books, platitudinous devotional rhymes and sentimental novels. It was through the Ardens that Mary discovered real books as the property of the professional middle class. She was a member of a stratum of the middle class that apprenticed its sons in the lesser professions (surgeon, not physician; attorney, not barrister), for the Wollstonecrafts fell just below the propertied class with access to the higher professions. As a keen-minded girl, alert to the ineffectual landed ambitions of her father, Mary had to find other ways to improve herself. One answer was reading, a conspicuous literacy in her early teens and sustained throughout her life; another answer was friends. Where other girls thought of hunting for husbands, Mary was determined to find a perfect friend.