Vindication (4 page)

Then, too, her continued stagnation in a ‘state of dependance' weighed on her, and she began to think anything would be better. Later, Mary Wollstonecraft would analyse the effect of dependence on women's natures; it was now that she herself experienced a creeping indolence. In this state, she could almost wish to delude herself with foolish hopes that might enliven slow hours, but home had taught her that marriage would soon prove a disappointment.

Her chief consolation was St George's Chapel. Although
Wollstonecraft has often been taken for an atheist, she remained all her life in the established faith. ‘I go constantly to the Cathedral,' she reported from Windsor, ‘I am very fond of the Service.' Later, when the cathedral was cleaned, she felt it lost something of its sombre grandeur. She would enter with ‘the measured pace of thought'. For her, principles could not be wholly imposed; they had to be affirmed from within by an expansive soul reaching out to the great questions: ‘Life, what art thou? Where goes this breath? This
I
, so much alive? In what element will it mix, giving or receiving fresh energy?' Her faith looked to a benevolent deity suggested by the sublimities of nature, a deity of forgiveness, not hell.

In the spring and summer of 1780 the King and royal family were in residence at Windsor Castle. Mary granted that George III was a family man, liking his children about him, but when he ‘killed three horses the other day riding in a hurry to pay a visit', he too lost her respect.

‘I cannot bear an unfeeling mortal,' Mary observed of the King. ‘I think it murder to put an end to any living thing unless it be necessary for food, or hurtful to us.–If it has pleased the beneficent creator of all to call them into being, we ought to let them enjoy the common blessings of nature, and I declare no thing gives me so much pleasure as to contribute to the happiness of the most insignificant creature.'

At the other end of the scale of significance was ‘the principal beau' of Windsor, none other than the youthful Prince of Wales (the future Regent and, later, George IV) who wore makeup and drenched himself in scent. Born in 1762, he was Mary's contemporary, one for whom she had no time, nor for local girls who hung on his smiles–‘forward things' said older women, pecking away at the reputations of those the Prince deigned to notice. These dramas served to keep ‘envy & vanity alive'. Mary was decidedly not one of the Windsor women who dreamt of impossible romance. She planned a future with Fanny Blood. ‘This connexion must give colour to my future days,' she told herself. She knew her resolve to put Fanny before all others would appear ‘a little extraordinary', but was prepared to defend it as a reasonable alternative to marriage as well as ‘the bent of my inclination.'

That spring she visited Fanny in Town. In the post coach she enjoyed the ‘entertaining and rational' conversation of a physician and his well-travelled son.

At the same time she was anxious over Fanny's weak health and thankful to find her somewhat better. They ‘passed a comfortable week together, which knew no other alloy than what arose from the thoughts of parting so soon'. She clung to the prospect of another and longer reunion: ‘to that period I look as to the most important one of my life'.

Her spirits returned whenever she was freed from being the paid companion. Once, when Mrs Dawson was away and she had ‘the whole house to range in', her mood lifted as she supped on bread and grapes. She mused on Fanny, drank Jane's health ‘in pure water', and relished her solitude. Bent in the poor light of her candle she sits sideways at a chest of drawers, making pale characters on her page with ink so watered that she fears her writing is too faint to read–and so she fades from sight into the late shadows of a summer night.

 

That summer of 1780, the Wollstonecrafts moved to Enfield. It was then a rural place ten miles to the north of the outlying north London villages of Hoxton, Hackney and Newington Green, an area of scattered country houses. It was typical of Mr Wollstonecraft to incur the expense of a new house while still committed to his rent in the south London village of Walworth. Mary asked why he was paying two rents at once–she ‘cannot divine the reason'–in the tone of one who knows that sense will never prevail. The disruptive elements in the family are plain: the father a spend-thrift; the mother dispirited and cold; the eldest son assuming the role of family ‘despot'; and now the second sister, Bess, taking Mary's place as the daughter at home, became jealous of a sister who was out in the world. She accused Mary of ‘condescension' and forgetfulness about her family, offered with ironic compliments.

‘You don't do me justice in supposing I seldom think of you,' Mary protested, ‘the happiness of my family is nearer to my heart than you can imagine–perhaps too near for my own health or peace–for my anxiety
preys on me.' She had not heard from her mother, and imagined a further withdrawal into harshness. ‘Some time or the other, in this world or a better she may be convinced of my regard…' This was nearer the bone than she imagined, for Mrs Wollstonecraft turned out to have dropsy–fluid retention in the legs, a sign of heart failure. In late summer or autumn, Mary went home as nurse. At first her efforts were received with gratitude; then, they were taken for granted as her mother deteriorated slowly over two years.

‘I was so fatigued with nursing her,' Mary complained to Jane at the end of this period, that she herself had become ‘a stupid creature', hard to rouse, and barely in the land of the living. Peering in the mirror she detected, at twenty-three, ‘the wrinkles of old age'. Mr Wollstonecraft's temper did nothing to ease the ordeal, especially when his wife's lingering led him to suppose her illness was fancied. Mrs Wollstonecraft's last words were ‘a little patience and all will be over'. Those words would return to haunt Mary during her own trials, and she would repeat them yet again in
The Wrongs of Woman
:

Mrs Wollstonecraft died in April 1782. Soon after, Mr Wollstonecraft married the housekeeper, Lydia, whom Mary despised but who probably saved the family a lot of trouble by taking on a ruined man and contriving small economies. He retired to Laugharne in Wales where he remained red-faced, rash and needy–ever on the point of death, but indestructible.

At this point the family scattered. Everina went to stay with Ned and his ‘agreeable' wife, Elizabeth Munday, at no. 1 St Katherine's Street behind the Tower of London. Bess became engaged to a shipwright called Meredith
Bishop from Bermondsey, across the river from the London Docks–not far from Ned. James, aged fourteen, went to sea, and only Charles, aged twelve, stayed with his father after a short spell at Ned's home.

Mary moved in with the Bloods. From 1782 until the late autumn of 1783, she lived in their house at 1 King's Row in the village of Walham Green, two or three miles to the west of Chelsea, near Putney Bridge on the Thames. It's not clear how she supported herself. She may have lent a hand in a little shop Fanny and Mrs Blood kept for a while; she certainly helped Mrs Blood with needlework, a common way for poor, respectable women to earn a living. It meant, though, punishing hours, strain on the eyes when a gown had to be hemmed by candlelight, and starvation pay. Though her line in chat could not engage Mary's mind, Mrs Blood was ‘our' mother. Mary had the emotional benefit of her transfer to Fanny's family, whose acceptance soothed the scar left by her real mother's partiality for Ned. She also drank in talk of Ireland. Half-Irish herself, she began to speak of ‘the dear County of Clare' as though she knew it.

‘The women are all handsome, and the men agreeable; I honor their hospitality and doat on their freedom and ease, in short they are people after my own heart–I like their warmth of Temper, and if I was my own mistress I would spend my life with them.'

Mrs Blood damped down this burst of enthusiasm with motherly warnings: the men were ‘dreadful flirts'; a visiting girl must beware not to leave her heart ‘in one of the Bogs'.

The Bloods sometimes entertained an Irish cousin called Neptune, about nine years older than Mary. His attentions led her to expect a declaration, but nothing definite was said. Neptune Blood was a snob. The poverty of the London Bloods put them beneath him; and so, too, the warm, attractive but penniless young woman who was part of the household. ‘Few men seriously think of marrying an inferior,' she saw. Such a woman can be deceived ‘until she has anticipated happiness, which, contrasted with her dependant situation, appears delightful. The disappointment is severe; and the heart receives a wound which does not easily admit of compleat cure.' Mary did not hide her resentment. Later, when she cooled down, she judged that she had been ‘as much to blame in
expecting too much as he in doing too little–I looked for what was not to be found.' Her cure co-opted reason instead of the usual misery of silent brooding. The latter was Fanny's lot.

Fanny had long been in love with an Irishman called Hugh Skeys. His hesitation left her disappointed (in the old sense of rejected); and since he continued to court her in his on-off way, disappointment was renewed over some eight years. Her favourite song was ‘In a Vacant Rainy Day You Shall Be Wholly Mine'. This ‘canker-worm', Mary saw, was ‘lodged in her heart, and preyed on her health'. All Fanny's earnings went to her family; she could offer a man nothing beyond her grace, artistic gifts and selfless character. It was considered foolish–even culpable, by a man's family–to take a bride without a dowry.
*
Could Skeys bring himself to ignore public opinion, another drawback lay in the fluctuations of Fanny's lungs: her troubled health was no good prospect for the sapping effects of yearly childbirth, the lot of almost all married women. Childbirth was full of dangers, and for ailing women like Fanny the chance of dying, very much higher. Fanny's longing for Skeys put friendship second. Mary, running to Fanny with eagerness, stopped short in the face of Fanny's pain. She hated to obtrude her affection, or receive a love warmed by the poor fuel of gratitude–she still longed to be first.

Bess married in October 1782; so did one of the Arden sisters. In confidence to Jane, Mary painted a bride's prospects. One month after the honeymoon ‘the raptures have certainly subsided', together with ‘the dear hurry' of wedding preparations and ‘the rest of the delights of matrimony'–all are ‘past and gone and have left no traces behind them, except disgust:–I hope I am mistaken, but this is the fate of most married pairs.' Her own resolve was unshaken: ‘I will not marry, for I dont want to be tied to this nasty world.' As a single woman she looked forward to pursuing her
‘own whims where they lead, without having a husband and half a hundred children at hand to teaze and controul a woman who wishes to be free'.

 

Bess Wollstonecraft's marriage turned out more disastrous than anything Mary predicted. It had been approved by her eldest brother as effectively head of the family. Bess had been married in Ned's parish church near the Tower. She had needed a home and protection, and her bridegroom's ‘situation in life was truly eligible', as the family put it to one another. He and his father built lighters (flat-bottomed barges) to unload cargo ships. The Bishops were well supplied with money.

Bess's baby, called Mary, was born ten months after the wedding, on 10 August 1783–a difficult birth followed by melancholia alternating with ‘fits of phrensy'.
*
Late that year Meredith called in Mary to nurse her sister. At first, Mary tried practical remedies: she held Bess in her arms; she took her for a drive in a coach, and sent the baby across the river to Everina (with an instruction to ‘Send the child home before it is dark'). Nothing Mary tried seemed to help. If anything, she found Bess's wandering mind more of a worry than her previous ‘raving'. ‘Her ideas are all disjointed,' Mary reported to Everina, ‘and a number of wild whims float on her imagination and unconnected fall from her–something like strange dreams when judgement sleeps and fancy sports at a fine rate–.' This fits the report of the ‘lovely maniac' in
The Wrongs of Woman
: ‘a torrent of unconnected exclamations and questions burst from her'. When she's put in a madhouse, it's said that she had been married against her inclination to a rich man, ‘and in consequence of his treatment, or something which hung on her mind, she had, during her first lying-in, lost her senses'.

Mary had to watch Bess every moment until she herself felt the infection of mental illness: ‘Poor Eliza's situation almost turns my brain–I
can't stay and see all this misery–and to leave her to bear it by herself without anyone to comfort her is still more distressing.'

This was the mounting crisis as autumn died into winter: was Bess falling into permanent madness? Was her sister to believe Bess when she said that her husband was the cause? ‘She seems to think she has been very ill used.' Whatever the exact meaning of ‘ill-use', Mary certainly believed that Bishop thought only of ‘present gratification'–coded words for clumsy sex with no pleasure in pleasing his wife. No word exists in manmade language for marital sex that verges on rape, but it's possible that Bess, tenser and more refined than Mary, shared her sister's homegrown shudder at the prostitution of wives in marriage. Mary listened with her usual attentiveness to what her sister was saying: ‘she declare[s] she had rather be a teacher than stay here'.