Vindication (37 page)

‘Nothing but my extreme stupidity could have rendered me blind for so long,' she said. ‘Yet, while you assured me that you had no attachment, I thought we might still have lived together.'

The pain of the night that followed was too unbearable to prolong what she called ‘my hated existence'. Imlay's indifference had left her ‘outcast' in Copenhagen; his prevarication had ‘pierced' her in Hamburg; but what he said to her in London was worse, for it left her helpless–a state alien to her active nature. After her three-month journey on Imlay's behalf, there was no more she could do. Rage at her betrayal gave way to the calm of surrender–an acceptance that struggle was useless.

‘Your treatment has thrown my mind into a state of chaos,' she told him. Yet she is clear as to his wrongdoing, and composed enough to assure him he has nothing to fear: ‘Let my wrongs sleep with me!' She is also capable of plans: begs him to put Fanny in the care of her German friend in Paris, and leaves her clothes to Marguerite. When she had taken an overdose in June, she had notified Imlay in time to be saved; this time she meant to die. In Hull she had looked at the sea as a possible ‘tomb'; her eye now fell on the Thames.

It was raining hard that Saturday night when she took a boat from the steps at the Strand and was rowed up the Thames as far as Battersea Bridge in the village of Chelsea. Too many people were about. She had to find a deserted spot, so offered the waterman six shillings to row her further upstream as far as Putney Bridge (near Walham Green where she'd lived long ago with Fanny Blood). No one was there. Trusting to sink more quickly if she weighted her clothes, she trod back and forth on the bridge for half an hour till shoes and dress were soaked with rain. Then, she climbed on to the frame of the central arch, and plunged into the dark water. Suffocation was slow and infinitely more horrible than she had expected. She pressed her skirts to her sides, trying to hasten death.

About two hundred yards from the bridge, a boatman found her unconscious, and rowed her to the Duke's Head Tavern at Fulham. There, she had the good fortune to be resuscitated by a member of the Royal Humane Society (set up to teach artificial respiration in an age of canal and river transport). Her recovery was quick, though drowning seemed less painful
than coming back to ‘life and misery'.
The Times
reported the rescue of an elegantly dressed lady who explained ‘that the cause of this, which was the second act of desperation she had attempted on her life, was the brutal behaviour of her husband'. This time, Imlay did not come in person–the rescue was too public–but within two hours he sent a physician, dry clothes and a coach to take Mary to their friends the Christies in Finsbury Square.

 

It was a spacious square, a little to the west of Mary's birthplace in Spitalfields. Rebecca Christie nursed her, and for some time she saw no one else.

‘I know not how to extricate ourselves out of the wretchedness into which we have been plunged,' Imlay wrote.

Mary replied with her mother's dying words–‘Have but a little patience'–promising him to ‘remove' herself beyond his reach.

Imlay behaved with respectful concern. He visited Mary, and once more offered to do her service if she would allow it. Though service of course fell short of love, he was shocked enough to offer the prospect of living together when his present affair came to an end. Mary realised the danger of continued waiting and uncertainty. She gave Imlay an ultimatum.

‘If we are ever to live together again, it must be now. We meet now, or we part for ever. You say, you cannot abruptly break off the connection you have formed. It is unworthy of my courage and character, to wait the uncertain issue of that connection. I am determined to come to a decision. I consent, then, for the present, to live with you, and the woman to whom you have associated yourself. I think it important that you should learn habitually to feel for your child the affection of a father.'

Mary's extraordinary proposal may seem similar to the threesome she had urged on Fuseli, but was fraught with parental bonds. Imlay's awareness of his responsibility towards Mary is nowhere more evident than in his agreement, at first, to her plan. He even took her to view a house he was on the point of renting, to see if it would suit her. It's tempting to clothe the mistress in resentment, as Mrs Fuseli has been clothed. Yet, according to Mary, she and the mistress were to some extent in sympathy: ‘I never
blamed the woman for whom I was abandoned. I offered to see her, nay, even to live with her, and I should have tried to improve her.' It's doubtful if the mistress longed to be improved, but she did probably hear Mary's version of Imlay's treatment. Not surprisingly, Imlay changed his mind. Mary was not one to play a tame third in a household; the situation was bound to be explosive.

Defeated, Mary took lodgings around the corner from the Christies, at 16 Finsbury Place, and asked Imlay to send her things, including her letters. For a while she cast the letters aside, unable ‘to look over a register of sorrow'. She therefore overlooked a new letter Imlay had enclosed. From November to January he was again in Paris, accompanied by his mistress. Thinking he had left without a word, Mary reproached him, and on 27 November received a lofty retort. He stood by ‘the most refined' feelings. He demonstrated this with an offer of ‘friendship'.

‘You will judge more coolly of your mode of acting, some time hence,' Imlay tried to comfort them both.

‘
Do you judge coolly
', she flashed back, flinging aside his flattering self-portrait, and, instead holding up the mirror to a man of caprice who had failed as a father. ‘If your theory of morals is the most “exalted”, it is certainly the most easy.–It does not require much magnanimity, to determine to please ourselves for the moment, let others suffer what they will!' She interpreted the offer of friendship as no more than the ‘pecuniary support' she had to refuse–together with his ‘
ingenious
arguments'.

It was wounding on both sides. Mary knew she tormented the man she still loved, but could not contain her ‘thirst for justice'.

Imlay accused her of ‘decided conduct, which appeared to me so unfeeling'.

Mary replied, ‘my mind is injured–I scarcely know where I am, or what I do'.

Even now she could not curtail her ‘grief'–not only over losing Imlay, but losing the frontier promise of the man she believed he was. ‘My affection for you is rooted in my heart.–I know you are not what you now seem,' she went on. ‘I have loved with my whole soul, only to discover that I had no chance of a return–and that existence is a burthen without it.' In
Finsbury Place, her life seemed ‘but an exercise of fortitude, continually on the stretch–and hope never gleams in this tomb, where I am buried alive'.

It did not help that gossip was circulating. Women whispered to one another that Mary Wollstonecraft's connection with Imlay had no legal sanction. The novelist Mary Hays told William Godwin that some ‘amiable, sensible & worthy women…especially lamented that it would no longer be proper for them to visit Mrs W'. Hays herself visited Wollstonencraft, and promised to come again.

One day, to Mary's astonishment, she had a proposal from a rich man of fifty. It was someone she had met through Johnson, to whom she had spoken of her attachment to Imlay and recent sufferings. The unnamed suitor fantasised a woman of reason by day who, by night, became ‘the playful and passionate child of love…One in whose arms I should encounter all that playful luxuriance, those warm balmy kisses, and that soft yet eager and extatic assaulting and yielding known only to beings…that breath[e] and imbibe nothing but soul. Yes: you are this being. Yet paradoxical to say, you never yet were this being. If you have been, I am unjust: toward him [Imlay] whom I estimate, not from my personal knowledge for I never saw him, but from your own affectionate descriptions. Well, well: I never touched your lips; yet I have felt them, sleeping and waking, present and absent. I feel them now…'

To Mary, it was an insult, ‘the bare supposition that I could for a moment think of
prostituting
my person for a maintenance'. He had ‘grossly' mistaken her character. ‘I am, sir, poor and destitute.–Yet I have a spirit that will never bend.'

Another source of income was now urgent. Mary approached Imlay's business associate, Mr Cowie of the firm of Chalmers & Cowie, to lend her a sum. Another associate who lent her a small amount is called a ‘long-tried friend' in a new-found letter. It reveals that Cowie was to repay himself out of a ‘venture or cargo of Mr Imlay's that would come into his hands'. Some of the lost silver had apparently made its way into London in the course of the preceding spring. If Imlay's gains produced more than £50, Mr Cowie felt ‘bound to pay the surplus into her [Mary's] hands'. She remained confident of this return, according to Godwin, writing on
2 January 1798: ‘she understood that the goods produced more than they were estimated at, I think about £1,000', and counted this ‘amongst her future resources'. The £1000 must have come from the silver ship, since this was the only Imlay venture in which Mary took part.

Mr Cowie's motive lies in shadow: Mary Wollstonecraft perceived a ‘friendly intention'; also that he felt ‘bound' to hand over the profit. But why did he not do so, and why was Mary content to receive a loan from Mr Cowie but somewhat reluctant to receive profits from Imlay, as the letter makes plain? A likely answer could be that until she reached Altona and Hamburg, she had not realised the fraudulent element in Imlay's transactions. Was the nature of his gains on Mr Cowie's conscience? Was the loan something of a silencer? And was Mary unhappy to accept tainted money–or was it simply that it was Imlay's money? Two facts are certain: a large sum for Imlay's ‘goods' did materialise, and Mary did not receive what his associate considered to be her due when she returned to London in October 1795.

 

That autumn the Ellefsen trial was still going on. A new witness was John Wheatcroft, the English trader in Le Havre who had been Imlay's landlord and probably the one to harbour Ellefsen and the silver in his house. He is likely to have testified in Imlay's favour. But the defence lawyers' objection to Judge Wulfsberg was eventually upheld by the Danish Supreme Court in 1796. Wulfsberg had to vacate his seat on the commission. The case dragged on till November 1797, without resolution, though, conceivably, a private settlement was reached. In any event, the payment due to Mary continued to be deferred. Imlay could have argued that her ‘surplus' was unearned because she left Hamburg without the information he wanted, yet he was not vindictive, more the sort of person who would have meant to pay her eventually after diverting the sum–temporarily, of course–into some other venture.

At Mary's most destitute moment in the autumn of 1795, Mr Cowie agreed to fund her on the basis of future writings and the returns due to her from Imlay. Accordingly, she began to prepare her travel letters for publication, improvising an artless manner designed to convince the
reader of their truth. However keenly these letters appear to come off the pulse in the course of her journey, they actually took their final cast in the aftermath of suicidal despair. The linear plot of an episodic journey carries a counterpoint of the traveller's up-down interior life: first, the restorative process during the northwards journey to Norway, aided by the healing effects of the northern summer–the finest summer she had ever experienced; then, on the traveller's return to Gothenburg, a reconnection with her lover plunges her back into a situation that darkens as she journeys in the opposite direction. Hamburg immerses her in a ‘whirlpool of gain'. She is exposed to a ‘swarm of locusts who have battened on the pestilence they spread abroad'.

When Godwin later came to write a life of Mary Wollstonecraft, he refers the reader to her
Travels
as though they were an unmediated report of what took place. Yet her Hamburg is surreal, not documentary truth, like a precursor to the ‘Unreal City' of
The Waste Land
. The horror inflates as the physical journey turns into an interior journey towards a collapse that will be all the greater for the intimations of recovery that precede it.

Wollstonecraft reinvents her traveller as a victim sent by her lover into hell. He is the type of all who sell their souls to commerce. The letter pretends to be a private whisper, but is designed for publication: it will be read by contemporaries, while the permanence of print will damn Imlay for all time. Instead of choosing to pair with a new genus, he proves to be ‘of the species of the fungus' aligned with the ‘mushroom' fortunes of Hamburg.

The traveller's dissociation of her own species from that of the fungus, omits two crucial facts: first, the real-life complexities of Imlay's attitude to his ‘dearly beloved friend and companion', and second, the fact that Imlay had co-opted Wollstonecraft as his accomplice. To earn her ‘surplus' she did wade into those ‘muddy channels'–before she wrenched herself away. Now, abandoned in Finsbury Place in the autumn of 1795, Wollstonecraft omits particulars of the sordid dealings to which she was party, and so conceals the full story of her darkening view of Imlay. In short, she conceals her complicity–perhaps no more than knowledge. She can't relay what she knows of the silver ship, yet we glimpse its unmarked passage,
treasure still intact, through her sight of ships stilled on the Elbe: ‘the silvery expanse, scarcely gliding though bearing on its bosom so much treasure'. She can't relay the deals that contaminate the muddier channels, but the facelessness of the passive voice–the artful grammar of power–resonates with her knowledge of ‘particular' gamblers: ‘Immense fortunes have been acquired by the
per cents
arising from commissions, nominally only two and a half; but mounted to eight or ten at least, by the secret
manoeuvres
of trade.' She does not mention the Swedish grain that the
Margrethe
failed to deliver to the starving of Paris before the nightmare winter she experienced there; she does say, though, that the ‘interests of nations are bartered by speculating merchants. My God! With what
sang froid
artful trains of corruption bring lucrative commissions into particular hands…and can much common honesty be expected in the discharge of trusts obtained by fraud?' Again, fraud.