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2017 The Three Stages of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Ten-Year Writing Career (1787-1797)
Bell, Janet Clarke
Bell, J. C. (2017). The Three Stages of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Ten-Year Writing Career (1787-1797) (Unpublished master's thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB. doi:10.11575/PRISM/28402 http://hdl.handle.net/11023/3917 master thesis
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The Three Stages of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Ten-Year Writing Career (1787-1797)
by
Janet Clarke Bell
A THESIS
SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES
IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE
DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS
GRADUATE PROGRAM IN RELIGIOUS STUDIES
CALGARY, ALBERTA
June, 2017
© Janet Clarke Bell, 2017
Abstract
This thesis argues that Wollstonecraft’s ten-year writing career can be divided into three
distinct periods of time. In the (1787-1788), when she was a regular attendant at the Church of
England and influenced by Anglican Trinitarianism, she published a book on education and a
novel while living and teaching in Newington Green, London. The middle period (1789-1992)
details her career as a professional writer in London and a member of Joseph Johnson’s circle of
political and religious Dissenting radicals. Wollstonecraft became a celebrated figure in history
as a result of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). During late stage of
Wollstonecraft’s writing career (1793-1797), she became disillusioned with rational Dissenters,
after she witnessed the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, had a failed relationship and an
illegitimate daughter, and travelled to Scandinavia, where she expressed her religious beliefs
through a more distant and abstract Romantic Deism. I will examine the changing religious
influences that impacted her writing: from Anglicanism, to Radical Dissent, and Romantic
Deism.
ii Table of Contents
Dedication v
Acknowledgements vi
Mary Wollstonecraft: Timeline vii
List of Illustrations:
Portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft. 1
Wollstonecraft’s School for Girls at Newington Green, London. 28
George Cruickshank, Dr. Price indulged with his favorite scene. 40
Thomas Rowlandson, Repeal of the Test Act. 48
James Gillray, “Smelling out a rat.” 49
Frederick Byron, Contrasted Opinions of Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man 64
George Cruickshank, The Age of Reason 65
Portrait of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft 83
Introduction 2
Chapter One: Methodology, Sources, and Review of the Literature. 7
1. Methodology.
2. Sources.
3. Review of the Literature.
iii 4. Historiography of Rational Dissent.
5. Historiography of Deism.
6. Historiography of Mary Wollstonecraft.
Chapter Two: The Early Stage of Wollstonecraft’s Writing Career: (1787-1788). 22
1. Wollstonecraft’s Early Life.
2. Newington Green: Center of Radical Dissent and Rev. Richard Price.
3. Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787).
Chapter Three: The Middle Stage of Wollstonecraft’s Career (1789-1792) 35
1. Wollstonecraft and the Analytical Review (1789).
2. The French Revolution Controversy (1789-1795).
3. The Revolution Society and English Jacobism.
4. Edmund Burke’s Reflection on the Revolution in France (1790).
5. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792): Enlightenment’s Influence.
6. The Dissenting circle around publisher Joseph Johnson.
7. Anti-Slavery and Women.
8. Mary Wollstonecraft’s Theory of Human Rights for Children.
Chapter Four: The Late Period of MW’s Writing Career (1793-1797). 71
1. Wollstonecraft in Paris.
2. Gilbert Imlay Affair.
3. Travels in Scandinavia.
iv 4. Wollstonecraft Reunites with William Godwin.
Conclusion. 91
Bibliography 100
Dedication
v I dedicate my thesis to my dear husband and my son, both named Robert Bell, for providing me with unfailing support and continuous encouragement throughout my years of study and through the process of researching and writing this thesis. This accomplishment would not have been possible without them. Thank you so much.
vi Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my thesis advisors, Drs. Warren Elofson of the History Department, and
Dr. Douglas Shantz in the Religious Studies Departments at University of Calgary. The door to both their offices were always open whenever I ran into a trouble spot or had a question about my research or writing. They consistently allowed this paper to be my own work, but steered me in the right the direction whenever they thought I needed it.
I would also like to thank my colleagues in the Religious Studies Department at the University of
Calgary, in particular PhD candidate Jenna Ferry. Without her passionate participation and input on my writing, my project could not have been successfully completed.
Janet Clarke Bell
vii
Timeline: Mary Wollstonecraft
1759 -Mary Wollstonecraft was born in Spitalfields, London. She was the second of seven
children.
1766 -Rousseau published Emile.
1774 -MW met Fanny Blood through Mr. and Mrs. Clare.
1775 -American Revolution begins.
1778 -As father’s fortunes deteriorated, MW’s found first job was in Bath as companion to a widow.
1781 -She returned home to nurse her dying mother.
1782 -MW lived with best friend Fanny Blood.
viii 1783 -Treaty of Versailles signed ending the American Revolution.
-William Pitt became Prime Minister.
1784 -Wollstonecraft established School for Girls in Newington Green with her two sisters and best
friend Fanny Blood.
-She became friends with mentor Dr. Richard Price.
-Introduced to celebrated author Samuel Johnson.
1785 - Fanny got married and because of failing health, moved to Portugal with her husband.
-Wollstonecraft travelled alone to Lisbon to nurse her dear friend Fanny, who dies in
childbirth.
1786 - Newington Green School closed due to finances.
-MW’s third job, governess in Ireland for Anglo-Irish aristocratic family.
-She began work on Thoughts on the Education of Daughters.
1787 -Thoughts on the Education published by Joseph Johnson.
- MW wrote her first novel, Mary a Fiction, based on life of Fanny Blood, and a
children’s story, The Cave of Fancy.
-August - MW returned to London from Ireland and began her fourth job as a reader and
translator with Joseph Johnson.
ix -September MW joined Johnson’s circle of progressive writers and authors, including
celebrated artist Henry Fuseli.1
1788 -Wollstonecraft began reviewing books for Joseph Johnson’s Analytic Review.
-Johnson published MW’s Mary: A Fiction, Original Stories From Real Life (for children),
and her translation of Jacques Necker’s Of the Importance of Religious Opinions, from
French to English.
1789 -Johnson published MW’s anthology The Female Reader, and her review of a former slave’s
memoir The Interesting Narrative Life of Olaudah Equiano.
- July 14- Storming of the Bastille. French Revolution began.
-On November 4 Richard Price gave his sermon A Discourse on the Love of Our
Country at a meeting of the Revolution Society.
1790 -Publication of MW's translation from Dutch to English of Maria Geertruida van de Werken de
Cambon's Young Grandison, and her translation of Christian Gotthilf Salzmann's Elements of
Morality, for the Use of Children, from German to English and illustrated by William Blake.
-29 November MW's treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Men is published anonymously in
response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France.
-18 December Publication of the second edition of The Rights of Men, with MW's name on the
title page, which established her as a partisan reformer.
1791 -April –The British parliament rejected William Wilberforce's bill to abolish the slave trade.
1 Claudia Johnson, ed. Chronology, The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft, p. xvii.
x -April 19 - Dr. Richard Price died at Newington Green, London.
--July The Priestley Riots; “church and king” rioting aimed at religious
Dissenters in Birmingham.
- MW falls in love with Henry Fuseli.
-September – MW began writing A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
-November – She first met William Godwin at one of Johnson's famous dinners.
1792 -January: Johnson published MW’s treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
-MW met Charles Talleyrand, French bishop, politician and diplomat, to whom she dedicated
The Rights of Woman, but whose proposals regarding women’s education disappointed her.
- MW, Fuseli and his wife come to an emotional crisis.
-8 December – Paine was found guilty of seditious libel for the Rights of Man and sentenced to
death in Britain. He left London for Paris.
-Late December – Wollstonecraft departed London alone to observe the unfolding of the French
Revolution first-hand.
-December - In Paris, MW met and supported the Girondins.
1793 -January - MW met with English friends of the Revolution in Paris including Thomas Paine.
-21 January – Execution of Louis XVI
-MW met American fellow radical Gilbert Imlay and began an affair with him.
-The Girondins fell from power in late May.
-The Jacobins, under Robespierre, began the Reign of Terror.
-May, MW left Paris for Neuilly to escape the revolutionary violence.
-September. Pregnant, MW returned to Paris and registered at the American Embassy as
xi Imlay’s wife (although they were not married).
-October, Marie Antoinette is executed.
1794 -January – MW moved to Le Havre, France and began writing An Historical and Moral View
of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution.
-May- Fanny (named after MW’s dear Fanny Blood) Imlay was born.
- Late July- The Fall of Robespierre and the Reign of Terror ends. -- ---
-December, Johnson published MW’s History of the Origin and Progress of the French
Revolution.
1795 -April – MW returned to London from Paris to join Imlay and learned of his infidelity.
-May – MW's first suicide attempt and was saved by Imlay.
-June–September – Wollstonecraft travelled to Scandinavia with infant daughter Fanny on
business for Imlay and wrote Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway
and Denmark.
- September - MW returned to England and faced with the end of her relationship with Imlay,
she attempted a second suicide by jumping off Putney Bridge into the River Thames and was
saved by strangers.
1796 -January – Publication of MW's Letters During a Short Residence are published.
-April, MW re-introduced to William Godwin
-August – MW began affair Godwin and began to write Maria: or The Wrongs of Woman.
1797 -29 March – MW and Godwin married in Old St. Pancras Church, London, yet the couple
maintained separate households. Godwin adopted three-year-old Fanny Imlay.
xii -30 August – Birth of MW and Godwin's daughter, Mary Shelley, future author of
Frankenstein.
-10 September – Death of Mary Wollstonecraft from complications in childbirth and buried at
the Old St. Pancras Graveyard.
1798 -Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, the first
biography of Wollstonecraft was published. His openness regarding her love affairs, suicide
attempts, and illegitimate child destroyed her reputation for a century.
-Joseph Johnson is arrested and imprisoned for seditious libel
xiii
Mary Wollstonecraft
1
Introduction: Overview of the Thesis
My thesis argues that Wollstonecraft’s writing career can be divided into three distinct
periods:
1) The early period (1787-1788) was influenced by an Anglican belief that divine justice would
only come in the next life. She had moved to Newington Green, London, and published her first
book on education and her first novel. She met Dr. Richard Price, Unitarian minister, who
became a mentor.
2) The middle period (1789-1792) was impacted by the radical Dissenters while she worked as
a professional writer in London and became a member of Joseph Johnson’s circle of political
and religious radicals. Wollstonecraft became a celebrated figure in history as a result of the
publication of A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of
Woman (1792).
3) In the late stage of Wollstonecraft’s writing career (1793-1797), she moved to Paris during
the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution, had a failed relationship with a American Gilbert
Imlay in Paris and an illegitimate daughter, travelled to Scandinavia, had two suicide attempts,
married William Godwin and finally died giving birth to their daughter Mary, future author of
Frankenstein. Wollstonecraft became disillusioned with rational Dissent and instead expressed
her religious beliefs through a more distant and abstract Romantic Deism, which blended a
mystical appreciation of the world with an abstract, philosophical and almost melancholic view
of God.
In the ten years before she died, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote two novels, an advice book
on education, translated three works from three languages into English, reviewed over two
2 hundred articles for the Analytic Review, and wrote her two Vindications: Rights of Men, and
The Rights of Woman. She wrote a history of the French Revolution, and published her letters from Scandinavia. My thesis will examine three figures in Wollstonecraft’s inner circle, including her first mentor the Unitarian Reverend Richard Price (1723-1791), her second mentor, the radical publisher Joseph Johnson (1738-1809), and finally her husband William
Godwin (1756-1836), political philosopher and novelist.
At the time of Wollstonecraft’s birth in 1759, the Church of England dominated the religious landscape in late eighteenth century England.2 Parliament represented the interests of the landed gentry, the church and the King, who was also the head of the Anglican Church.3 The radical Dissenters were united in opposing the Test and Corporation Acts, which excluded them from public office because they were unwilling to take the sacraments according to the rites of the Church of England or from attending Universities. They supported the American colonies in the 1760s and 1770s, were in favour of abolishment of the slave trade, and approved of the
French Revolution’s inception.4
The first chapter examines my methodology, looks at my sources, and offers a brief historiography of late eighteenth century English religious history. The method that I embrace for my thesis is cultural and intellectual in its approach to history, and the sources include newspapers, political pamphlets, and satirical cartoons. The secondary sources include academic historical reviews and biographies of Wollstonecraft.
The second chapter describes the early stage of Mary Wollstonecraft’s writing career
(1787-88), when she was still a member of the Anglican Communion, and still influenced by the “fixed principles of religion” of the Anglican faith which emphasized that through the grace
2 J.C.D. Clark, English Society 1660-1832. Cambridge University Press, 2nd Edition, 1990, p. 5. 3 Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980, p. vii. 4 Daniel E. White, Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent. Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 9. 3 of God, life would be better in the next life, and there was little to do about the difficulties of life today. The early Wollstonecraft, with her conservative Anglican outlook, looked for God’s grace to provide for the realization of justice and happiness in the next life. A strict morality can be found in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), which she wrote while in Ireland working as a governess. At the same time, she was reading Enlightenment ideas on education, expressed by John Locke (1632-1704) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). During this period, she met her two great mentors while working as a teacher at Newington Green: Dr.
Richard Price, a central figure in radical Dissenting circles, and Joseph Johnson, the prominent radical Dissenting publisher.5
The third chapter will examine the middle period of Wollstonecraft’s professional writing career (1788-1792) when she became a professional writer and embraced the radical ideas of the Dissenters in her social circle. She worked as a translator and reviewed over two hundred articles in Johnson’s Dissenting publication the Analytic Review. The Revolution
Controversy began when Dr. Richard Price presented A Discourse on the Love of Our Country
(1789) in support of the French Revolution, which led to Whig statesman Edmund Burke’s
(1729 –1797) reaction to Price in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1789).
Wollstonecraft lent her support to Dr. Price in A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke; Occasioned by His Reflections on the Revolution in
France (1790). I also look at the intellectual milieu of radical Dissenters who gathered in
Johnson’s salon in the 1790’s, including artist Henry Fuseli (1741-1825), who became a romantic friend to Mary.6 Wollstonecraft’s most famous work, A Vindication of the Rights of
Woman (1792) was written during this period. During this middle period of Wollstonecraft
5 Ana M. Acosta, “Spaces of Dissent and the Public Sphere in Hackney, Stoke, Newington Green. Eighteenth-Century Life, 27.1, 2003, p. 1. 6 Leslie Chard, "Joseph Johnson in the 1790s." Wordsworth Circle 33.3, 2002: pp. 95–101. 4 argued in favor of the egalitarian family, the education of girls and boys, the centrality of physical activity in education, and for human rights of children. She argued in favor of the abolition of slavery, both on the American plantation and at home, where women had no rights.
She had faith in the power of radical politics to change society and believed that all human beings, no matter what their sex, class or race, are equal in the eyes of God.
The fourth chapter examines the late period in Wollstonecraft’s writings, which includes her travels to Paris during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror in December 1792, where she wrote An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (1794). She fell in love with American adventurer Gilbert Imlay, with whom she had an illegitimate child, Fanny
Imlay. Because of the traumatic experiences that Mary experienced during the Revolution, I argue in this chapter that she became disillusioned with the rational God of the radical
Dissenters. Following a suicide attempt, Wollstonecraft travelled alone with her illegitimate child to Scandinavia on a business venture for Imlay, where she wrote Short Residence in
Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796). This travel guide, in the form of letters, revealed newfound ways of expressing her religious beliefs through a more distant and abstract Romantic
Deism. The late Wollstonecraft only had meager hope for the positive transformation of humanity. I also examine William Godwin’s (1756-1836) publication of his Memoirs of the
Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798), which portrayed his wife with love, compassion, and sincerity, but many readers were shocked when he revealed Wollstonecraft's illegitimate child, her love affairs, and suicide attempts. As a result, scholars in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries ignored or derided Wollstonecraft because of her scandalous personal life.
5
6
Chapter One: Methodology, Sources, and Review of the Literature
Methodology
Scholars who have investigated radical Dissenting ideas and Mary Wollstonecraft have generally used three methodologies in their studies: a traditional church-based method, a social historical method, or a cultural and intellectual historical method.7
Early in the twentieth century, the traditional church historians tended to be church- insiders who dismissed the Wollstonecraft sphere of influence, as atheistic because it rarely followed a traditional religious path. They examine church attendance records and focus on the voice of the leaders in the various Dissenting communities.8 In the nineteen sixties, the social historical method was embraced by feminist historians. They tended to ignore religion and studied Wollstonecraft principally within the context of the history of the woman's movement.
They focus on her voice of reason, her ideas on political freedom, and her progressive views on education.9 My thesis engages in a cultural/intellectual historical method in order to examine the differing religious, philosophical and literary discourses during the last ten years of
Wollstonecraft’s life.
7 Callum G. Brown, Professor of Late Modern History, University of Glasgow has described the three methodological approaches to religious history in The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800-2000. London: Routledge, 2001, p. 12. 8 Dissenting church historians included Irene Parker, “Dissenting academies in England: their rise and progress and their place among the educational systems of the country” (1914), republished by Cambridge University Press, 2009; Herbert McLachlan, English Education under the Test Acts: being the history of the nonconformist academies, 1662–1820; Manchester University Press, 1931; an Earl Morse Wilbur, Our Unitarian Heritage (1925), Berkeley, CA: Starr King School for the Ministry. 9 Feminist scholars on Wollstonecraft include: Maria J. Falco, ed. Feminist Interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania University Press, 1996; Gary Kelly. Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft, London: MacMillan, 1992; Karen Offen. European Feminisms, 1700-1950: A Political History, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999; Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor, eds. Women, Gender and Enlightenment, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2005.
7
Sources
For my sources, I have consulted manuscripts, special collections, and caricature collections from the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection at the New York Public Library and the
Bodleian Library at Oxford University, which I visited in 2016. I have looked at caricature collections, which were popular in the eighteenth century, in the British Museum, London and at the galleries of Buckingham Palace.10 It was the age of the pamphlet wars, and Mary
Wollstonecraft used the medium to promote her ideas. I examined newspapers such as the eighteenth century Analytical Review, published by radical Dissenter Joseph Johnson, and the satirical journal the Anti-Jacobin, which ridiculed Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Price, Paine,
Priestley and other radical Dissenters associated with pro-French sympathies.11 I also examined the letters, autobiographies, political pamphlets and diaries of Wollstonecraft, Dr. Price, Joseph
Johnson and William Godwin. The secondary sources I examined include academic studies of
British culture and intellectual history in the late eighteenth century, along with biographies of
Wollstonecraft.
Review of the Literature
Although most scholars of Wollstonecraft touch upon the religious content of her work, they all describe its dominant discourse as a rationalist moral philosophy.12 For nearly two hundred years the standard readings of Wollstonecraft and her social circle have been primarily secular. My thesis argues that in order to fully understand the philosophical ideas of the
10 “High Spirits: The Comic Art of Thomas Rowlandson.” The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, 13 Nov 2015-14 Feb 2015. 11 Marilyn Butler, “Culture’s Medium: the role of the Review.” The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, 2nd Edition, ed. Stuart Curran. Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 136. 12 Claire Tomalin, in The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (1974), Emily Sunstein, A Different Face: The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (1975), Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: a Revolutionary Life (2000), and Lyndall Gordon, Mary Wollstonecraft: A New Genus (2005). 8
Wollstonecraft’s circle, it is important to highlight the religious context in which they lived.
They stood in opposition to the powerful elites in their society, while at the same time identified themselves as radical Dissenting, non-conforming members of their community.
Historiography of Radical Dissent
In the 1960s scholarship on radical Dissent began to deepen. Ursula Henrique’s study of
Religious Toleration in England 1787-1833 (1961) looks at the political struggles over the laws restricting the rights of religious minorities.13 My research examines how the Dissenters were subjected to the Test Acts, discriminatory laws that barred them from holding office under the
Crown or in municipalities, from voting in elections and from studying at Oxford or Cambridge.
Henrique argues that Dissenters began to be accepted following the Toleration Act of 1688, but they continued to be treated as second-class citizens.14.
Scholarship on the Dissenters grew in popularity during the 1970s. Michael Watt’s three- volume examination of The Dissenters argues that no serious scholarship had been done in the history of the movement in over one hundred years.15 Only church insiders (primarily
Unitarians) were doing the research until the 1970’s.16 In his first volume, The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution (1978), Watts investigates the social appeal of
Dissent and the factors that created internal cohesion, including family values, the status of the individual, preaching and participatory worship, and its educational endeavors. These factors were part of the waves of religiosity that were being experienced during the eighteenth century,
13 Ursula Henrique, Religious Toleration in England 1787-1833. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1961. 14 Henrique, p. 3. 15 Michael Watts, The Dissenters, vol. I. The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution The Expansion of Evangelical Nonconformity, 1791–1859. Oxford University Press, 1978, 1978) abstract. 16 Michael Watts, The Dissenters, abstract. 9 a time when politics, religion and culture issues were inseparable. Methodists, Calvinists,
Puritans, Quakers and the number of Dissenters grew tremendously in numbers, and by 1851 one person in five worshipped in such nonconforming chapels.17 Watts’s second volume, The
Expansion of Evangelical Nonconformity, 1791–1859 (1995), contextualizes the French
Revolution by looking at the response of various members of the radical Dissenting movement to the events in France. 18 Mary Wollstonecraft was swept up by the wave of Dissenting radical opinions, and supported the cause of liberty expressed in the early days of the Revolution. The
Whigs however, led by Edmund Burke, along with mainstream Anglicans, found their sympathies with the French aristocratic Roman Catholics. They saw the execution of Louis XVI as a crime against a king who was anointed by God.19 Watts highlights the Dissenters 1791 anti- slavery campaign with the Quaker William Wilberforce as their leader. The Abolition of
Slavery finally became law in 1831.
Useful in my study is Knud Haakonssen’s 1996 edited collection of twelve essays in
Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britain, which emphasizes the importance of religion in the life of Mary Wollstonecraft and her social circle.20 It also considers the origins of radical Dissent, with a particular emphasis on the contribution of
Dissenting academic institutions to its development.21 Many radical Dissenters, such as
Wollstonecraft’s mentor Richard Price, questioned the doctrine of the Trinity, and some became full-blown Unitarians, emerging as an alternative to Calvinism.22
17 Ibid. 18 Watts, The Dissenters, vol. II, The Expansion of Evangelical Nonconformity, 1791–1859. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995, p.7. 19 Watts, The Dissenter, vol. II, p. 10. 20 Knud Haakonssen, ed., Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge University Press, 1996. 21 Haakonssen, ed., Enlightenment and Religion, p.6. 22 Haakonssen, p. 7. 10
A cultural-intellectual academic scholarship began to study Dissent in terms of its relationships to the public sphere, starting around the year 2000. Martin Priestman’s Romantic
Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1780-1830 (2000) argues that the atheism embraced by
William Godwin or the Deism of Thomas Paine was never considered acceptable by religious or cultural authorities.23 Priestman provides evidence confirming both the range and complexity of atheistic thought, where "distinctions between republicanism, reform agitation, Unitarian
Dissent, millenarian enthusiasm, deism and atheism seem to break down . . . as groups leaning towards one or the other combine and interconnect."24 Priestman convincingly argues that religion, for Wollstonecraft’s circle, became based on recovering the truths of nature or the imagination.25
J.C.D. Clark’s 2nd edition of English Society 1660-1832:Religion, Ideology and Politics during the Ancien Régime (2000) argues that Mary Wollstonecraft advanced the position of women by arguing against the biblical belief that, “Eve was, literally speaking, one of Adam’s ribs.”26 Clark’s work is one of the classic books of modern British history, and openly rejects
Marxist/reductionist interpretations of English history, with their secular approach to progressive movements. This book systematically reintegrates religious history into the secular mainstream of English history.
Radical Dissent was largely associated with the communities around Hackney in north- east London. Historian Ana M. Acosta explores the relationship between the Dissenters, the neighborhood where they practiced their religious beliefs, and their networks of class, politics
23Martin Priestman, Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1780-183. Cambridge University Press, 2000, p.13. 24 Priestman, Romantic Atheism, p. 43. 25 Priestman, p. 30. 26 J.C.D. Clark, English Society 1660-1832. Religion, Ideology and Politics during the Ancien Régime Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, p.181. 11 and religious beliefs.27 She closely looks at the dissenting educational academies and radical religion and pamphleteering written by Joseph Priestley and Richard Price.
Satirical cartoons and political pamphlets feature in my thesis, as evidence of the cultural method that I have embraced. The French Revolution stirred debates among all members of society, which were expressed in these mediums. Tamara L. Hunt’s Defining John Bull:
Political Caricature and National Identity in Late Georgian England (2003) describes how
Dissenters began to petition Parliament to end the restrictions they had been suffering under since the Restoration.28 Taking their lead from Edmund Burke, whose attack on Dissenters in a parliamentary debate reflected in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), the caricaturists were emboldened to criticize the Dissenters for their French republican ideas, which they believed were a danger to British stability. They saw the Dissenters as a threat to
Church and State and ridiculed their religious beliefs.29 The caricaturists reflected the widespread belief in England that being an Anglican equaled respectability. The satirists followed Edmund Burke’s lead and portrayed the Dissenters as having low status who would buy their way into public offices held by Anglicans. Burke warned that revolutionary religious
Dissenters were undermining Britain, and suggested that they secretly approved of French violence against the British monarch.30
The Dissenters believed that repeal of the Test Acts was a real possibility in the 1790s.
The political cartoonist Thomas Rowlandson’s The Repeal of the Test Act (1790) suggests that the true aim of the Dissenters was to overthrow both Church and State. Radical Dissenters, such
27 Ana M. Acosta “Spaces of Dissent and the Public Sphere in Hackney, Stoke Newington, and Newington Green,” Eighteenth Century Life, Vol 27, Number 1, Winter 2003, p. 1-26. 28 Tamara L. Hunt, Defining John Bull: Political Caricature and National Identity in Late Georgian England. Hampshire, UK: Ashgate Publishers, 2003. 29 Hunt, Defining John Bull, p.87. 30 Ibid. 12 as Dr. Richard Price, were opposed to the hierarchical structure of the Established Church, and desired an educated ministry. They supported the abolition of slavery, and rejected the Trinity and original sin.31 Members of the Church of England, according to the Dissenters, were irrational and Popish.32 Daniel E. White’s Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent (2006) clarified religious denominations and sectarian cultures in the late eighteenth century. For example, he studies William Godwin’s political writings in light of his early childhood in a
Calvinist Dissenting family. White describes Godwin’s marriage to Wollstonecraft as a,
“Godwinian variant of Dissenting collaboration”.33
Historiography of Deism
Deism is a philosophical position, which gained prominence in the Age of the
Enlightenment, particularly in Britain, France and the United States. The intellectuals who promoted this position were generally brought up as Christians, but had become disillusioned with organized religion, and its orthodox teachings such as the Trinity, Biblical inerrancy, and supernatural events like miracles.34 Most eighteenth century Deists shared the following beliefs:
1) Rejection of religions that are based on books that claim to contain the revealed word of God;
2) Rejection of religious dogma and demagogy; and 3) Skepticism of reports of miracles, prophecies and religious "mysteries". Some Deists believed that God exists and created the universe; and that God gave humans the ability to reason.35
The earliest academic reflection on Deism was Sir Leslie Stephen's English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1881), which was written during Stephen’s own crise de conscience in
31 Daniel E. White, Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent. Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 18. 32 White, Early Romanticism, p. 21. 33 White, p. 113. 34 Peter Gay, Deism: An Anthology. London: D. Van Nostrand Company, 1968, p. 11. 35 Gay, Deism, p. 12. 13 the 1860’s while he was a student at Cambridge.36 In his discussion on Tom Paine, Stephens argued that Paine was not uncovering anything new in his The Age of Reason (1794). The early
Deists were writing for educated men, but Paine was writing for the mob: "His readers could see in the background a church in ruins, and a guillotine waiting for priests."37 Stephens described the works of freethinking English Deists Anthony Collins, John Toland, Matthew Tindal and
Thomas Chubb that were written before Paine, but acknowledges that people have forgotten about them, claiming that, "Deism was not dead, but sleeping." In Paine’s words, his readers recognized “not the mere echo of coffee-house gossip, but the voice of deep popular passion."38
How was Paine answered? Conservative critics "shouted Blasphemy! Obscenity! Atheism!"39
Historian Peter Gay’s text on Deism: An Anthology (1968) criticizes Leslie Stephens’ distinction between constructive and critical Deism, a distinction that most historians had accepted up until the 1960’s. The constructive Deists tried to substitute natural religion and pagan morality for Christian doctrine, and the critical Deists tried to prove the classic Christian stories were naïve, absurd and oppressive, according to Stephens.40 Gay argues that such a distinction reveals nothing because all Deists were critical and constructionist. Nor was Deism, simply radical Protestantism, but actually it was a complete break with Christianity: “If it is true that the Deists took only a single step, it is also true that the step they took was across an unbridgeable abyss.” 41
Some deists, including Tom Paine, rejected miracles and prophecies but still considered themselves Christians because they believed in what they felt to be the pure, original form of
36 Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought, Volume 1 (1876) London: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1962. Preface by Crane Brinton, p. vii. 37 Stephen, History of English Thought, p. 388. 38 Ibid, p. 391. 39 Ibid, p. 392. 40 Peter Gay, Deism: An Anthology, p. 12. 41 Ibid. 14
Christianity before it was corrupted by additions of such superstitions as miracles, prophecies, and the doctrine of the Trinity. Other Deists, like the Unitarian Dr. Richard Price, rejected the claim of Jesus' divinity but continued to hold him in high regard as a moral teacher, a position known as Christian deism, exemplified by Thomas Jefferson's famous Jefferson Bible and
Matthew Tindal's Christianity as Old as the Creation. Late eighteenth century conservative writers often charged Deists such as Wollstonecraft and Tom Paine with atheism.
Historian Wayne Hudson begins his work Enlightenment and Modernity: The English
Deists and Reform (2009) by rejecting facile attempts to create ‘over unified conception' of
Deists and he outlines how his interpretation offers a more contextualized interpretation, which emphasizes the multiple personalities these writers exercised and the diversity of their contributions to the Enlightenment.42 He places the Deists in the religious climate of their day, which was deeply Protestant, rather than simply assuming that they existed outside of it, simply because they were Deists. He explores the attempts by Deists to question accepted truths regarding Christianity, and he is careful not to equate interrogations of the Christian faith with atheism or anti-Christian sentiments.
Historiography of Mary Wollstonecraft
In the first biography of Mary Wollstonecraft, written by her husband William Godwin,
Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication for the Rights of Woman (1798), he described her lack of a strong religious belief, which alienated many of its readers, and influenced the next two hundred years of scholarship about her life.43 Godwin described his wife as receiving just a few
42 Wayne Hudson, Enlightenment and Modernity: The English Deists and Reform. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009, p.1. 43 White, Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent, p. 114. 15 lessons in religion during her youth and was otherwise Godless. “Her religion was in reality little allied to any system of form… her religion was almost entirely of her own creation.”44
I note in my thesis that Wollstonecraft’s writings were infused with images of God, in contrast to Godwin’s opinion. In her first published work, Thoughts on the Education of
Daughters (1787), she advocated “fixed principles of religion” and warned of the dangers of rationalist speculation and deism.45 This was written during a time when Wollstonecraft expressed a belief that the afterlife was waiting and the world was ordered by God for the best.46
My thesis argues that her ideas on religion evolved, and in her last published work, Letters
Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796), she extolled the virtues of free thinkers who were willing to “deny the divinity of Jesus Christ and question the necessity or utility of the Christian system.”47
Because of Wollstonecraft’s scandalous life, as revealed by Godwin, she was either ignored by nineteenth-century scholars or pitied by them. She was known as the writer of A
Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), and a supporter of the French Revolution, but she was even better known for her affair with a married man, for having a child out of wedlock, as well as for her depression, her two suicide attempts, and finally for her death giving birth to her daughter, Mary Shelley.
The scholarship in the hundred years after her death did not examine Wollstonecraft’s literary life works in any detail. Instead they focused on the details of her scandalous life.
Starting in the 1960s and 1970s, feminist studies began to make an impact on academic history
44 William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication for the Rights of Woman (1798). London: Constable & Co., 1928, p. 27. 45 Mary Wollstonecraft, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, Complete Works, Vol. 4, p. 33. 46 Vivien Jones, “Mary Wollstonecraft and the literature of advice and instruction.” The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Claudia Johnson, pp. 124-125. 47 Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written During a Short Residence, Complete Works Vol. 6: p. 276.
16 and literature departments, and turned the attention from Wollstonecraft’s scandalous private life to that of the breadth of her political and feminist writings. Finally in the 1970’s, she was viewed as an authority on the education of women, a political activist, a woman of letters, and a voice of reason.
Wollstonecraft’s work was not traditionally read as religious discourse despite its many biblical allusions and its outspoken premise that women and men should be equally educated.
Wollstonecraft biographies written since the 1980s began to fleetingly address the role of religion in her life. Claire Tomalin’s The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (1992) stated that the few who gathered with the radical Dissenters around Dr. Richard Price, including
Wollstonecraft, lacked religious fervor.48 Janet Todd’s Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary
Life (2000) argues that Price and the radical Dissenters in his circle influenced Wollstonecraft, although she rarely attended his church.49
Barbara Taylor was the first biographer to look at, “The religious foundations of Mary
Wollstonecraft’s feminism,” (2002) which argues that scholars are reluctant to see
Wollstonecraft as a religious thinker because the Enlightenment project and the feminist schools had a stake in seeing their radical thinkers as secular.50 Most scholars and biographers view religion as being pushed upon her by the times in which she lived, however Taylor points out that Wollstonecraft’s Vindication for the Rights of Women contained at least fifty references to religious themes.51 Taylor’s sources include a Wollstonecraft letter found amongst William
Godwin’s notes, written in 1787, where she equates religion with nature: “Religion is among the
48 Claire Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft. New York: Penguin, 1992. 49 Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2000, p. 59. 50 Barbara Taylor, “The religious foundations of Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminism,” The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft, 2002, pp. 99-118. 51 Taylor, “The religious foundations of Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminism,” p, 106. 17 most beautiful and most natural of all things; that religion which ‘sees God in clouds and hears
Him in the wind,’ of nature whatever is holy, mysterious, and venerable, and inspires the bosom with sentiments of awe of veneration.”52
The wide-ranging nature of Wollstonecraft’s writing can be found in The Complete
Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, in seven volumes (1989) and The Collected Letters of Mary
Wollstonecraft (2003), which contain multiple examples of her religious worldview.53 Barbara
Taylor’s Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist (2003) argues that the western feminist movement always had undercurrents of religious belief, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when active feminists were also active Christians.54 Understanding
Wollstonecraft’s theology gives us insight into her political and philosophical ideas.55 Taylor insists that Wollstonecraft must be read in the context of her own times: “she was not a
Women’s Liberation avant la lettre but a writer immersed in the boldest of ages.”56 She offers an innovative reading of Wollstonecraft’s “uncompromising egalitarianism” and her intense religiosity.57 In a more recent essay, “Mary Wollstonecraft and Modern Philosophy,”(2016)
Taylor reiterates that, “to recall that Wollstonecraft was a religious thinker.”58
Reverend Price’s religious influence on Wollstonecraft can be found in biographer
Lyndall Gordon’s Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (2005).59 Gordon also uncovers information about Reverend John Hewitt, an Anglican priest and biblical scholar, who took a
52 Taylor, “The religious foundations of Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminism,” p. 117. 53 The Complete Works of Mary Wollstonecraft (seven volumes), ed. Janet Todd & Marilyn Butler. London: Pickering, 1989 and The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. 54 Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, p. 99. 55 Ibid. 56 Taylor, Feminist Imagination, p. 8. 57 Ibid, p. 3. 58 Barbara Taylor, “Mary Wollstonecraft and Modern Philosophy,” The Social and Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft, eds. Sandrine Berges and Alan M.S.J. Coffee. Oxford Scholarship Online, 2016. 59 Lyndall Gordon’s Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft. London: Harper Collins, 2005. 18 great interest in Mary’s early education. Gordon explores Edmund Burke’s attack on Reverend
Price and Thomas Paine’s meetings with Wollstonecraft in Paris, using Wollstonecraft’s letters and other primary sources in her biography.
The philosopher Sandrine Berge’s Guidebook to Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the
Rights of Woman (2013) makes a convincing case that her religious life was conventional despite the time she spent with the Dissenters and the fact that she married the atheist William
Godwin.60 God was central to her beliefs, but it was not a traditional creed or belief that she followed. Wollstonecraft had a rational and un-gendered image of God.61 Berge reads
Wollstonecraft as a feminist who was motivated by the belief that woman had to be educated for the sake of God’s love.
The historian Andrew Cayton’s Love in the Time of Revolution (2013) offers a well- written imaginative re-creation of the motives, thoughts, arguments, and interrelationships of
British and American radicals, including Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. Cayton uses snippets from their letters or published writings, and paraphrases of their major works.
Cayton describes Wollstonecraft's motives for going to Paris in 1792: “Disappointment drove her from London as much as hope brought her to Paris.”62 Wollstonecraft was still trying to let go of her desire for the married painter Henry Fuseli, who had recently refused her proposal that she live with him and his wife. Cayton notes that the generation following Wollstonecraft and
Godwin era of public religious radicalism faced a more conservative Christianity.63
D.O. Thomas’s The Honest Mind: The Thought and Work of Richard Price (1977) is a comprehensive historical study of Price’s life and work. He supported the American Revolution
60 Sandrine Berge, Guidebook to Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. London: Routledge, 2013. 61 Berge, Guidebook to Wollstonecraft, p. 7. 62 Cayton, Love in the Time of Revolution, p. 50. 63 Andrew Cayton, Love in the Time of Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. 19 and was visited in London by the American Founding Fathers Benjamin Franklin, Thomas
Jefferson, and John Adams.64 Thomas argues that Price's morality can be understood only within the framework of his theology, which is rationalist in character.65
Rational Dissenters, particularly Price, were the first Enlightenment figures to argue in favor of abolishing slavery. Anthony Page’s “Richard Price’s Rational Dissent and
Antislavery,” (2011) argues that Price was the first left-wing intellectual in British history who advocated for the abolition of the slave trade, but his profile as an abolitionist is seldom mentioned in scholarship on this issue. Historians have only recently begun to appreciate the important role of radical Dissenters in the late eighteenth-century campaign against the slave trade.66
I have argued that the impact of religion on Wollstonecraft’s writings evolved over her ten-year writing career. In the beginning (1787-1788), when she arrived in Newington Green she was still influenced by the Anglican faith of her youth. She manifested a blind faith in God, and lacked the ability to critique societal problems; by the middle period (1789-1792) radical
Christian Dissenters Dr. Richard Price and publisher Joseph Johnson in London played a pivotal role in Wollstonecraft’s ideas about the egalitarian family, anti-slavery and women, and the human rights of the child. She developed these ideas while working as a translator and reviewer with the Analytic Review, and articulated them in her two Vindications: Rights of Men and
Rights of Woman; and finally in the latter period (1793-1797), Wollstonecraft became disillusioned with radical Dissent after living through the Reign of Terror in the French
Revolution, where she witnessed the violence of the Terror, and when the father of her
64 D.O. Thomas, The Thought and Work of Richard Price, p. 294-296. 65 Thomas, p. 13. 66 Anthony Page, ‘A Species of Slavery’: Richard Price’s Rational Dissent and Antislavery.” A Journal of Slave and Post Slave Studies, February 2013, p. 3. 20 illegitimate child abandoned her in Paris. Romantic deism, best expressed in her Letters from
Scandinavia (1796) replaced radical Dissent as the inspiration for her religious faith.
Ultimately, in the pages that follow, my objective is to show that during the last ten years of her life, Wollstonecraft’s religious ideals changed as a result of her social relationships and radical events, like the French Revolution and the abolition movement that occurred during this period. In the course of this ten-year period, three basic schools of thought impacted her thinking: Anglicanism, radical Dissent and romantic deism. I will illustrate this by exploring her various relationships while examining some of her best-known and most widely recognized publications.
21
Chapter Two: The Early Stage of Wollstonecraft’s Writing Career (1787-1788):
Newington Green, London
Wollstonecraft’s Early Life:
Wollstonecraft was born in Spitalfields, London in 1759, as the second of seven children, into a conventional family, which valued its sons more than its daughters. Her father lost much of his inherited money on speculative land deals, and became alcoholic and abusive to his wife and children. “Her father was a man of a quick and impetuous disposition, subject to alternate fits of kindness and cruelty.”67 The beatings from her father did not humble her, but instead made her indignant.68
Her family members were inactive members of the Church of England and she "received few lessons of religion in her youth."69 Nevertheless for the first twenty-eight years of her life, she was a regular Anglican churchgoer. When she went to church, Wollstonecraft would have followed the five-part rites and sacraments of the Anglican Mass, laid out in the Book of
Common Prayer of 1552, which included 1) the Gathering, begin with a Trinitarian-based greeting with prayers; 2) the Proclamation of the Word, which included three readings from
Scripture, followed by the Apostles or Nicene Creed; 3) the Prayers of the People; 4) The Peace, where people stand and greet one another and exchange signs of God’s peace; 5) the
Celebration of the Eucharist, where the Holy Spirit gifts of bread and wine and sanctifies them to be the Body and Blood of Jesus. Anglicans held to a belief in the real objective presence of
67 William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798), p. 9 68 ibid. 69 Godwin, Memoirs of the Author, p. 12. 22
Christ in the Eucharist, but maintained that the details of how Christ is present remain a mystery of faith.70 "
Wollstonecraft’s father moved the family frequently around England and Wales, looking to improve his fortunes. Wollstonecraft always enjoyed playing sports in the open air and in nature.71 At the age of sixteen she met an Anglican clergyman, Mr. Clare, who had a fondness for poetry and the Bible, and opened his home and library to her. Wollstonecraft was indebted to him for educating her and expanding her mind.72 Through the Clares, Mary met her dearest friend, Fanny Blood, who was a bright and accomplished young woman. She was musical, an excellent reader and an experienced writer. Mary felt quite intimidated by Fanny, who was two years older on their first meeting, yet they bonded over literature and writing.73
In 1778, at the age of nineteen, Wollstonecraft moved out of her father’s home and took her first job as a companion to a widowed lady in Bath. To be a caregiver, governess or teacher were the only career options for unmarried women at that time. After two years in Bath, Mary was forced to return to London to care for her dying mother. Upon her death, Wollstonecraft took up residence with Fanny Blood and moved to London, where they opened a school for girls in Newington Green, along with two of Wollstonecraft’s sisters in 1784. She derived her
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787) while working here. Fanny had become consumptive, therefore needed to move to a warmer climate in Portugal with her new husband.
She was soon pregnant and ill, so Wollstonecraft set sail for Lisbon to help nurse her dying
70 Philip Seddon, “Word and Sacrament,” Celebrating the Anglican Way, ed. Ian Bunting. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1996, p. 107. 71 Godwin, Memoirs, p. 13 72 Godwin, p. 16. 73 Godwin, p. 20. 23 friend. The child was still born and Fanny died as well, leaving Wollstonecraft devastated.74 She returned to London in January 1786 and was forced to close her school due to financial difficulties.
Newington Green: Center of Radical Dissent and Reverend Richard Price
The school was located in the center of a group of Protestant Dissenters during the most radical period of the English Dissenting era (1785-1795). In 1784 Wollstonecraft met the celebrated Reverend Richard Price (1723-1791), moral philosopher, Fellow of the Royal
Society, political pamphleteer, and mathematician.75 Although she was baptized and grew up as
Anglican by following the practices of the Church of England, she attended services at Price’s
Unitarian church on the Newington Green where everyone felt welcomed.76
Price was “well known for the simplicity of his manner and the ardor of his benevolence.”77 He led his congregation for fourteen years, from 1770 until 1791 at his death.78
Price was celebrated for supporting the American Revolution (1776) with the publication of his internationally successful Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty (1776). He was a close friend of Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of the United States. Price received a
Doctor of Law, along with George Washington, from Yale College in 1781 and was elected to
74 Emily Sunstein, A Different Face: the Life of Mary Wollstonecraft. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1975, chapter seven. 75 D. O. Thomas, ‘Price, Richard (1723–1791).’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, first published 2004; online edition, January 2017. 76 Claire Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974, p. 60. 77 Godwin, Memoirs, p. 27. 78 Alan R. Ruston, Unitarianism and Early Presbyterianism in Hackney. Oxhey Watford: A.R. Ruston, 1980, p. 12. 24 the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society in 1782.79
He was highly critical of the Church of England, arguing that laws that penalized Dissenters led to the prosecution of many tutors and schoolmasters.80 Price was aware that the United States had no theological tests, and argued in favor of freedom of religion for all faiths.81
Perhaps the most influential Dissenter in Price’s circle of radical friends was the chemical scientist and theologian Joseph Priestley (1733-1804). Price and Priestley were members of the
“The Club of Honest Whigs,” which met fortnightly at the London Coffeehouse on Ludlow
Hill.82 The Honest Whigs were a close-knit group of radical Dissenting ministers who discussed
Enlightenment ideas and entertained guests such as Benjamin Franklin. Franklin supported
Price and Priestley’s involvement in the Dissenters’ struggle for freedom of worship and representative government, but their shared interest in the defense of the American colonists was their most enduring bond.83
Priestley moved to Hackney following Birmingham’s ‘Church and King’ Riots of 1791, which were launched against Priestley’s support for the French Revolution and his criticism of the English monarchy and the Church of England. His house, library, manuscripts and laboratory equipment were burned to the ground and when his personal safety was in danger he fled to Newington Green in order to be close to his friend Price, who was in ill health at that time.84 Priestley eventually immigrated to Pennsylvania, where he died ten years later in 1804.
79 Ruston, Unitarianism and Early Presbyterianism in Hackney, p. 14. 80 D. O. Thomas, The Honest Mind: The Thought and Work of Richard Price. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977, p. 178. 81 Thomas, The Honest Mind, p. 177. 82 D.O. Thomas, The Honest Mind: The Thought and Work of Richard Price. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977, p. 142. 83 Thomas, The Honest Mind, p. 144. 84 Ibid. 25
Church historians defined nonconformists as Protestant Christians who did not conform to the governance of the established Church of England. Nonconformists or Dissenting
Christians (Presbyterians, Methodists, Unitarian, Baptists) were persecuted following the Act of
Uniformity (1662), which prescribed public prayers, rites and sacraments of the Established
Church of England, according to the rites dictated by the Book of Common Prayer. Adherence to the Thirty Nine Articles (1563) was made mandatory by the Test Act of 1672, which was designed to restrict the rights of Dissenters. The Toleration Act of 1688-89 allowed freedom of worship to Nonconformists who had pledged to the oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy, which allowed Dissenters to have their own places of worship and their own teachers, but it did not apply to Catholics, Dissenting non-Trinitarians, or atheists. Intolerance and discrimination against Dissenters continued with the Blasphemy Act 1698, which made it a crime to deny the
Holy Trinity or deny the .; the Occasional Conformity Act of 1711, which prevented Dissenters or Roman Catholics from taking “occasional” communion in the Church of England in order to become eligible for public office; and the Schism Act of 1714, which stipulated that anyone who wished to act as a tutor must first be granted a license from an Anglican bishop. This was aimed particularly against Dissenting schools, but was repealed by the Religious Worship Act of 1718.85 Dissenters could not hold public office, serve in the military or attend Oxford or
Cambridge Universities. They repeatedly petitioned parliament to repeal the Acts, but they were not successful until 1824. Until then Dissenters were forced to create their own educational academies where students trained for the ministry. Students at Oxbridge were still expected to adhere to rigorous theological tests until the passing of the University Reform Act of 1854.
85 The Oxford History of the Laws of England, ed. John H. Baker. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, Volume XI, p. 27-32. 26
Price and the radical Dissenters advocated for repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts and promoted parliamentary reforms such as extension of the voting franchise, the abolition of corrupt practices, more equitable representation, and for the abolishment of slavery. In practice, many Dissenters were exempt from these laws through the passage of the Acts of Indemnity following the Glorious Revolution in 1690. After 1800 these restrictions were seldom enforced except at Oxbridge where Dissenters and Catholics could not graduate. The necessity of receiving the sacrament as a qualification for office was finally repealed in 1828 and all acts requiring the taking of oaths and declarations against transubstantiation were repealed by the
Catholic Relief Act 1829.
In 1778 Price received the honor of United States citizenship from the US Congress.86 In addition to Ben Franklin, he received visits in London from American Founding Fathers
Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Thomas Paine.87 His American friends appreciated the pamphlets that Price had written in support of their cause. Both Joseph Priestley and the prison reformer John Howard counted Price as a close friend, while American and French revolutionaries hailed Price as an “Apostle of Liberty”.88
Price played an influential role in Mary Wollstonecraft’s changing views of religion and her political activism. Under his tutelage, she became a political and rational reformer, while
God was always central to her thoughts. Her early Anglican faith evolved under Price’s
Dissenting ideas on eternal truth and reason and his sermons led to her political and religious awakening.89 Through the radical Dissenters she learned about the anti-slavery movement, prison and political reforms, and the hope that repeal of the Test Acts was a real possibility in
86 US Congress XII, pp. 984-5, quoted in D.O. Thomas, The Honest Mind, p. 260. 87 Jenny Graham, The Nation, the Law and the King: Reform Politics in England, 1789-1799. Lanham: University Press of America, 2000, p. 131. 88 Thomas, The Honest Mind, p. 145. 89 Gordon, A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft. New York: Little, Brown, 2005, p. 51. 27 the 1790s. In a letter to her sister, Wollstonecraft expressed her belief that Dr. Price had financed her trip her trip to Portugal to help nurse her dying friend.90 For Wollstonecraft, Price was her sympathetic male mentor.
Just before leaving Newington Green for Lisbon to care for her dying friend,
Wollstonecraft met the celebrated author Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), who was well known in England as an essayist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer. He was the subject of one of the foremost biographies in the English language, The Life of Samuel
Johnson by James Boswell. The doctor treated her with particular kindness and attention.91
Samuel Johnson was a committed Tory, who despised Dr. Richard Price and his radical ideas.92It was quite surprising that Wollstonecraft and Johnson did not clash. “The doctor treated her with particular kindness and attention, had long conversations with her, and desired her to repeat her visit often. This she firmly purported to do, but the news of his last illness, and then of his death, intervened to prevent her making a second visit.”93 For a long time afterwards,
Wollstonecraft idolized his memory and read his posthumous Prayers and Meditation.94 Her ability to impress men like Dr. Price and Dr. Samuel Johnson, as well as the publisher Joseph
Johnson, was no normal accomplishment for an obscure schoolmistress in her twenties with no formal accomplishments.95
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787)
90 Wollstonecraft, The Collected Letters, #30, p. 63. 91 William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of “Rights of Woman,” p. 216. 92 Lyndall Gordon, Mary Wollstonecraft: A New Genus. London: Little Brown, 2005, p. 58. 93 William Godwin, Memoirs, p. 216. 94 Gordon, A New Genus, p. 60. 95 Gordon, A New Genus, p. 61. 28
Although Wollstonecraft’s school had failed due to financial difficulties, it outlived many other ventures owned by women at that time. The school supported and sustained
Wollstonecraft, her two sisters and Fanny for two and a half years. She was by most accounts, an excellent teacher: “No person was better formed for the business of education” than
Wollstonecraft.96 After her school failed, Wollstonecraft was forced to find work as a governess in Ireland, where she began to write her conduct book Thoughts on the Education of Daughters
(1787), published by Price’s friend Joseph Johnson.
John Locke’s (1632-1704) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) and The
Reasonableness of Christianity as Delivered in the Scriptures (1695) were the first philosophic texts that elevated reason as a criterion for assessing revelation, giving powerful indirect support to the radical Dissenters.97 He had a great influence on Enlightenment thinkers and was known as the “father of liberalism.”98 Locke was raised according to Calvinist Trinitarians, but he later advocated Socinian views on tolerance and Christology who rejected the doctrine of the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the pre-existence of Christ.99 Unitarianism, the faith of Dr. Price, is the direct descendant of Socianism. Dr. Price believed that he was both following and expanding the work of Locke. In the preface to his Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty (1776),
Price wrote: “The principals on which I have formed the foundation of every state as far as it is free, and are the same with those taught by Mr. Locke, and all the writers on Civil Liberty, who have been hitherto most admired in this country.”100
96 Godwin, Memoirs, p. 218. 97 J.C.D. Clark, English Society: 1660-1832, p. 328. 98 William Uzgalis, "John Locke", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Spring 2016 Edition. 99 Uzgalis, “John Locke.” 100 Price, Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty (1776), Preface, p. 5. 29
French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) influenced the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Price’s glorification of rural life was influenced by Rousseau’s
Discours sur l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1755).101 For Price, a life based on the land would allow simplicity of manners, a virtuous life, the pursuit of happiness and the growth of the population. Social inequalities only became greater with the growth of cities and properties, which turn luxuries into necessities.102 Price desired a return to a simpler rural way of life, which Rousseau had also encouraged. Price stated: “Let us then value more the simplicity and innocence of a life agreeable to nature, and learn to consider nothing as savageness but malevolence, ignorance, and wickedness. The order of nature is wise and kind. It consists of health and long life; grace, honor, virtue and joy.”103
Wollstonecraft read both Locke and Rousseau during her time in Ireland, particularly their writings on education, no doubt influenced by her mentor Price’s reading habits. She was informed by Locke’s treatise on Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), which advocated the importance of encouraging good habits in the young, based on positive parental examples rather than abstract rules and punishments.104 In her Thoughts on Education, she wrote: "To be able to follow Mr. Locke's system (and this may be said of almost all treatises on education) the parents must have subdued their own passions, which is not often the case."105 It appears that she faithfully followed Locke's advice and in turn used it in her own book.
Wollstonecraft also read Rousseau’s treatise on education: Emile: or on Education (1762).
Locke and Rousseau wrote the two great pedagogical treatises of the 18th century. Locke's
101 D.O. Thomas, Richard Price: The Honest Mind. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977, p. 136. 102 Thomas, p. 137. 103 Price, Observation on Reversionary Payments (1773), Full text online. p. 281. 104 Mary Wollstonecraft, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Vol. IV, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler. London: William Pickering, 1989, p. 9. 105 Wollstonecraft, Thoughts on the Education, p. 11-12. 30 method of education was based on rationalism, whereas Rousseau's method was based on mental inactivity. Emile was educated by the senses. "Childhood, is the sleep of reason," says
Rousseau, "and since children are not capable of independent judgment it would not be wise to make them acquainted with subjects that are beyond their comprehension."106 On the other hand, Locke stated that: "Children are at an early age susceptible to reason, and consider it an honor to be treated as reasonable beings, a philosophy that Wollstonecraft agreed with."107
Wollstonecraft warned that many young women were left without money from their families and are therefore forced to become a companion to a rich cousin, or to live as a governess with tyrannical strangers.108 She was living in Ireland, working as a governess in similar circumstances, when she wrote Thoughts on the Education. This book moves from “The
Nursery” in the first chapter, to “Public Places” in the last. It begins with the rational duty of mothers, to breastfeed their children to ensure that they would achieve the Lockean ideal of sound mind and body.109 The book ends with a criticism of the frivolous woman of fashions, who go from one place to another, showing off their finery. These women do not show strength of body or mind: “The taint of vice poisons every environment, and affectation, though despised, is very contagious.”110 As an Anglican, Wollstonecraft believed that only God could become, “the kind parent who chastens and educates, and indulges us not when it would tend to our hurt. He is compassion itself, and never wounds but to heal, when the ends of correction are answered.”111
106 Rousseau and Locke quoted in Emma Rauschenbush-Clough’s "Her Demands for the Education of Woman," (1898), A Study of Mary Wollstonecraft and the Rights of Woman. London: Logmans, Green & Co., p.142. 107 Ibid. 108 Wollstonecraft, Thoughts, p. 25. 109 Wollstonecraft, Thoughts, p. 7. 110 ibid. 111 Wollstonecraft, p. 27. 31
Wollstonecraft advocated for girls to be encouraged to observe, be truthful, and to respect their superiors. They should also be taught about the beauties of nature, the vegetable and animal worlds, and above all, to compare and contrast their ideas: “I wish them to be taught to think.”112 It offered advice on morality and etiquette, but also contained many Enlightenment ideas. It encouraged mothers to teach their daughters analytical thinking, self-discipline, and honesty in addition to marketable skills in case they should ever need to support themselves.113
She criticized women who "squander" their money on clothing, "which if saved for charitable purposes, might alleviate the distress of many poor families, and soften the heart of the girl who entered into such scenes of woe.”114 Wollstonecraft stressed the importance of fixing devotional habits in a young mind: “If the presence of the Deity be inculcated and dwelt on till an habitual reverence is established in the mind, it will check the sallies of anger and sneers of peevishness, which corrode our peace, and render us wretched without any claim to pity.”115
During this early period of Wollstonecraft’s writing, it is divine love that remains of the image of the Deity that will improve our tempers and our vanity.116 In Wollstonecraft’s
Thoughts, she still has blind faith in God, without the ability to critique societal problems, which came later in her Vindications. The early period invokes the consolations of a private religious sensibility rather than political radicalism. For example, she described how: “That calm satisfaction which resignation produces, though thorny path which leads to bliss, shall sanctify the sorrows, and dignify the character of virtue.”117
112 Wollstonecraft, p. 11. 113 ibid, p. 13. 114 ibid, p. 15. 115 ibid p. 24. 116 ibid. 117 Wollstonecraft, Thoughts, p. 30. 32
Soon she began to hear voices supporting the French Revolution, criticizing the Church of England, demanding the abolition of the slave trade, supporting for the rights of women, calling for real democracy against the aristocratically dominated society, and supporting liberal education.118 In Newington Green she heard people calling for the “rights of mankind.” It would not be long before she was calling for “the rights of womankind.”
Mary Wollstonecraft’s School for Girls in Newington Green
118 Iain McCalman ed., An Oxford Companion to: The Romantic Age: British Culture 1776-1832. Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 17-42. 33
34
Chapter Three: The Middle Stage of Wollstonecraft’s Career (1788-1792):
Vindications
Wollstonecraft scholars generally agree that she was an Anglican in her early years of her
writing, but by 1788 she was lending her support to the Dissenting ideas of her Unitarian
mentor Dr. Richard Price. Feminist historians placed her in a secular framework concerned with
rights, and they argue that religious references in Wollstonecraft’s works can be explained away
because they were socially normative for the time she was living in.119 Religious outlooks were
seen by feminist historians as irrational, therefore Wollstonecraft’s “religious” arguments are
not as important as her political ones. I argue that Wollstonecraft’s radical philosophy and
writings in the middle period of her writing career (1788-1792) were the direct result of the
Dissenting ideas that she was exposed to in London’s cultural milieu. In this chapter I will
examine cultural references such as newspapers, poetry and political cartoons that were
immensely popular during this period. Wollstonecraft’s cultural identity and changing religious
views were informed by her social class and her gender, which was seen in contrast to more
conservative values expressed by the Church of England, the monarchy and anti-revolutionary
advocates for stability, who ignored the rights of women.
Wollstonecraft and the Analytical Review (1789)
119 Falco, Mary, ed. Feminist Interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft. University Park: The Pennsylvania University Press, 1995. In Barbara Taylor’s essay, “The religious foundations of Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminism,” The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft, 2002, p. 99, states that scholars are reluctant to see Wollstonecraft as a religious thinker because the Enlightenment project and the feminist schools had a stake in seeing their radical thinkers as secular. 35
Late in 1787, Wollstonecraft abandoned her teaching career and settled into London, to write children’s books and to work as a translator for the publisher Joseph Johnson (1738-
1809). The following year, Johnson established the Analytic Review, a radical Dissenting journal, and hired Wollstonecraft to be a translator, reader, reviewer, and assistant for the journal.120 The friendship between Johnson and Wollstonecraft was pivotal in both of their lives. Wollstonecraft faced major financial difficulties after being dismissed from her governess-teaching position in Ireland and Johnson dealt with her creditors, secured lodgings for her, and advanced payments for her first two books, Thoughts on the Education of Young
Daughters (1787) and the novel Mary: A Fiction (1788).121 Her political awakening began while working on the Analytical Review, where she wrote some two hundred reviews.122
Because of her talents in writing, and her ability to financially support herself, she declared she was going to be ‘the first of a new genus,' with great enthusiasm.123 Wollstonecraft embraced this new life as a writer, and in Johnson’s vibrant intellectual circle her ideas developed rapidly.
Her newfound fearless political optimism quickly embraced a more abstract, rationalistic and politically progressive theology influenced by the radical Dissenters who were also supporters of the republican cause in France.
During this middle period of her writing career, Wollstonecraft was known for her linguistic skills, and she translated several books for Johnson including the revolutionary statesman Jacques Necker’s Of the Importance of Religious Opinions (1788) from French into
English, E. G. Salzmann’s Elements of Morality, for the Use of Children (1788) from German
120 Claudia L. Johnson, “Mary Wollstonecraft: A Brief Chronology,” The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft. 121 Carol Hall, "Joseph Johnson". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004. 122 The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Volume 7: Analytical Review, 1788-1797, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler. London: William Pickering, 1989, pp. 13-487. 123 Wollstonecraft, Collected Letters, November 7, 1787, p. 139. 36 into English, and Maria de Cambon’s Young Gradison (1790) from Dutch to English. Gradison consisted of a series of letters, which described a model child that Wollstonecraft almost completely rewrote, according to Johnson, and is now contained in her collected works.124
Wollstonecraft edited the literary anthology The Female Reader (1789), a pragmatic guide that would help women to function as intellectual adults. This was a new type of literature, which reflected the educational reform movement being waged by the radical Dissenters.125
Wollstonecraft's work for the Analytical Review soon reflected the new influence of the abolition debate. In 1785 her mentor, Richard Price published his Observations on the
Importance of the American Revolution and the Means of making it a Benefit to the World, in which he supported the abolishment of the British slave trade, declaring: “the negro trade cannot be censured in language too severe. It is a traffic which, as it has been hitherto carried on, is shocking to humanity, cruel, wicked and diabolical.”126 In America, slavery conflicted with the principles that justified the country’s struggle for independence. Price argued, “it is self-evident that if there are any men whom they have a right to hold in slavery, there may be others who have had a right to hold them in slavery.”127 Scholars have focused on Quaker and evangelical Anglicans as the originators of the free-slavery movement in Britain, ignoring the role played by rational Dissenters.128 Because of prejudice against their religious and political beliefs, radical Dissenters like Price had more sympathy for those who were subjected to legal inequality.
124 Joseph Johnson quoted in Charles Kegan Paul, William Godwin: his friends and contemporaries (1876), p. 193. Wollstonecraft, Young Grandison, The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Vol. 2, pp. 215-354 125 Moira Ferguson, “The Discovery of Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Female Reader,” Signs, Vol. 4, No. 4, summer, 1978, p. 945-46. 126 Price quoted in Anthony Page, “‘A Species of Slavery:’ Richard Price’s Rational Dissent and Antislavery,” Slavery & Abolition, Vol. 32, March 2011, p. 55. 127 Ibid. 128 37
Wollstonecraft’s first political commentary for the Analytic Review was a positive review of Price’s A Discourse on the Love of our Country, which he delivered to the Revolution
Society in 1789.129 She praised Price’s sermon for its “ardent virtue” and simple style, where the “heart speaks to the heart.”130 He gave an account of true patriotism based on reason rather than emotion and she endorsed his views on the revolution in France and his support for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, noting the injustice of the imposition of civil disabilities on Dissenters.131 She argued that he gave a clear definition of what love for one’s country really meant. Wollstonecraft reminded her readers of Price’s words on justice and world-encompassing goodwill:
Our first concern, as lovers of our country, must be to enlighten it. Why are the nations of
the world so patient under despotism? Why do they crouch to tyrants, and submit to be
treated as if they were a herd of cattle? Is it not because they are kept in darkness, and
want knowledge? Enlighten them and you will elevate them. Show them they are men,
and they will act like men.132
Price believed that liberty of conscience is a sacred right, according to Wollstonecraft, and he detested passive obedience, and the divine right of kings. According to Price, they were doctrines that implied, “God made mankind to be oppressed and plundered.”133
The Dissenters were campaigning for the repeal of the Test Acts, which required office holders to subscribe to the Established Church of England, but they were not strictly enforced.
129 Wollstonecraft reviews were published in Analytical Review, 1788––1797, The Complete Works, vol. 7. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 185-187. 130 Wollstonecraft, Analytical Review, December 1789, p. 185. 131 Ibid. 132 Ibid. 133 Wollstonecraft, Analytical, p. 186. 38
These laws were more of a psychological barrier to acceptance in society than a stringent measure.134 The Act of 1688 allowed freedom of worship to Dissenters if they accepted certain oaths of allegiance, which led to a great advance towards freedom and equality. But Price reminded his readers that the toleration obtained in 1688 was imperfect, because it only included those men who were willing to declare their faith in the doctrinal articles of the Church of England. There still existed penal laws for those who did not share in the religious opinions of the established church. Price was hopeful that the radical Dissenters would free themselves from the oppressive restrictions that they did not deserve. To the dismay of the radical
Dissenters and Wollstonecraft, Prime Minister William Pitt opposed the repeal of the Test Acts and full equality was not granted until 1871.135 What outraged Price the most was the inequality in Dissenters’ representation in the House of Commons. Britain would possess true liberty only if parliament’s representation was fair and equal. But if its members were chosen through corruption, then it would, “produce the worst kind of government—a government by corruption—a government carried on and supported by spreading venality and profligacy through a kingdom. May heaven preserve this kingdom from a calamity so dreadful!”136
The French Revolution “floats uppermost in the Doctor’s mind, and appears to be such a favorite subject of contemplation that it tinctures all his reflections,” according to
Wollstonecraft.137 When Price addressed the Revolution Society, and declared that the light of freedom, “after setting America free, reflected to France, that there kindled into a blaze that lays despotism in ashes; and illuminates Europe.”138 He began what historians called:
134 The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, Vol. 3: Party, Parliament and the American War: 1774: 1780, eds. Warren M. Elofson, John A. Woods and William B. Todd. Oxford University Press, 1996. 135 J.C.D. Clark, English Society 1660-1832, p. 311. 136 Wollstonecraft, Analytical, December 1789, p. 187. 137 ibid. 138 ibid. 39
The French Revolution Controversy 139
The Controversy played out in the cultural landscape of London between 1789 and
1795.140 It was expressed primarily in a political pamphlet war, which began after Dr. Richard
Price presented a treatise on A Discourse on the Love of Our Country (1789) to the London
Revolution Society on November 4, 1789. Whig statesman and orator Edmund Burke replied to
Price in a pamphlet called the Reflection on the Revolution in France (1790), which criticized the abstract Enlightenment ideas that the revolution was founded upon, and argued in favor of gradual constitutional reform. He was against the anti-clerical policies of the new French government and supported the French aristocrats over the mob. Wollstonecraft defended Price in her treatise, A Vindications of the Rights of Man, in a Letter to the Right Honorable Edmund
Burke; Occasioned by his Reflection on the Revolution in France (1790). The themes expressed in her work represented a break from her passive Anglican past and reflected a more strident activist view that expressed radical Dissenting ideas, leading her to support the egalitarian family, the equal education of girls and boys, the abolition of slavery, and human rights for children.
The tumultuous events of the French Revolution in 1789 were developing rapidly in
France.141 On the 20th of June, the Third Estate (the common people), now calling itself the
French National Assembly, had taken the Tennis Court Oath (Jeu de Paume), where they vowed to remain united until a new constitution was established. The storming of the Bastille prison in
Paris occurred on the 14th of July, and proved to be a pivotal event in the initiation of the French
Revolution. The French National Assembly abolished most of the aristocratic feudal rights on
139 Ibid. 140 Marilyn Butler, ed. Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy, Cambridge University Press, 1984, Introduction. 141 Jack Lynch, Eighteenth Century Chronology, http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Chron/1789.html 40
August 4th and adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man on the 26th of August. When they were faced with the high price of bread, Parisian women marched in the thousands armed with pitchforks and muskets, to the palace at Versailles on the 5-6th of October, in order to bring the royal family back to Paris to face trail.
The Revolution Society and English Jacobism
The Revolution Society in London was formed in 1788 to commemorate the centennial of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which originated with the landing of Dutch Protestant
William of Orange, who replaced Catholic James II of England. The new King William and his
Queen Mary along with the English Parliament passed the Toleration Act of 1689, which allowed freedom of worship for nonconforming Dissenters who had pledged to the oaths of
Allegiance and Supremacy and rejected transubstantiation.
The Dissenters were allowed their own places of worship and could hire their own teachers, but their newfound freedom of worship remained ambiguous. Social and political disabilities continued to exist for the Dissenters and they were excluded from universities and public office.142 The Dissenting ministers, tutors and schoolmasters were required by the terms of the Act to subscribe to the doctrinal articles of the Thirty-nine articles of the Church of
England.143 Many Dissenters regarded a requirement to subscribe to articles of belief as an intrusion upon their consciences and a departure from their belief in the sufficiency of scripture.
Despite their feelings of persecution, the radical Dissenters were confident of their own value to the state and society.
142 Martin Hugh Fitzpatrick, “From Natural Law to Natural Rights? Protestant Dissent and Toleration in the Late Eighteenth Century,” History of European Ideas, 42.2, 2014, p. 198. 143 Fitzpatrick, “From Natural Law to Natural Rights?” p. 199. 41
Dr. Richard Price and his colleagues were enthused by the revolutionary events in
France. The Revolution Society was made up of a large group of English radical Dissenters and
Unitarians, along with some Anglicans. They actively promoted a number of radical publications in addition to producing a large number of pamphlets and periodicals.144 Their meetings were held at the London Tavern, which Mary Wollstonecraft, her future husband
William Godwin and Tom Paine also attended.145 In his 1789 address to the Society, Price welcomed the French Revolution with great enthusiasm, arguing that the French were doing what the British had tried to do in the Revolution of 1688 and what the Americans had done in the War of Independence.146 He closed the meeting with a claim of support for the fall of the
French monarchy:
What an eventful period is this! I am thankful that I have lived to see it… I have lived to
see thirty millions of people, indignant and resolute, spurning at slavery, and demanding
liberty with an irresistible voice; their king led in triumph, and an arbitrary monarch
surrendering himself to his subjects.147
Price’s main objective was to see a restored and purified constitution, so that there could be a stronger House of Commons that could check the power of the King. He saw a clear connection between the Glorious Revolution of 1688, American independence in 1776, and the French
Revolution that began in 1789. The French National Assembly formally thanked Price and
144 Daniel E. White, Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent. Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 214. 145 Frederick Dryer, “The Genesis of Burke’s Reflections,” The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 50, September 1978, p. 465. 146 D.O. Thomas, “Richard Price,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 4. 147 J.C.D. Clark, Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France: a Critical Edition. Stanford University Press, 2001, p. 63. 42 remarked upon “his wisdom and prudence.”148 But Price’s critics in England questioned his support for France. By proposing a toast at the Revolution Society meeting that linked the
Parliament of Britain to France’s National Assembly, Price left room for his conservative critics to misrepresent his views.149 It gave the impression that his intentions were more radical than they actually were. Price wanted to see an eradication of the abuses in the British system, not an overthrow of the system. However his clarifying explanations, published in the fourth edition of the Discourse, came too late to save him from the misunderstanding and the wrath of conservative statesman and orator Edmund Burke, whose attack on Price’s Discourse was published the following year.
The English Jacobins, as they were known, wrote many critiques of the government and novels containing revolutionary ideas. Tom Paine, in The Age of Reason (1794) argued that true religion had been corrupted by ‘priestcraft:’ “As priestcraft was always the enemy of knowledge, because it supports itself by keeping people in delusion and ignorance, it was consistent with its policy to make the acquisition of knowledge a real sin.”150 Paine’s Deist tract was a bestseller in the United States, but it was received with hostility in Britain because of the rising violence of the French Revolution. His work and William Godwin’s Political Justice embraced republicanism and atheism. One of the most successful Jacobin novels was Godwin’s
Things as They Are: The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794). This three-volume story called for the end of a tyrannical government’s abuse of power. Conservatives commentators preferred to tar the British reformers with the French term Jacobin, who were the most radical revolutionaries.
148 D.O. Thomas, The Honest Mind: The Thought and Work of Richard Price, p. 308. 149 Thomas, The Honest Mind, p. 308. 150 Tom Paine, The Age of Reason, ed. Kerry Walters. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2011. Volume II, p. 129. 43
By the middle of the 1790’s moderate voices like Dr. Richard Price had died in 1791, and
Joseph Priestley had moved to America. The Conservative government of William Pitt the
Younger responded to the British radical movement by prosecuting several reformers for seditious libel and treason in the 1794 Treason Trials, followed by the Seditious Meetings Act
1795.151 The intention of these prohibitive acts was to cripple the British radical movement.
The French Revolution had invigorated the British reform movement, but between 1792 and 1794, over one hundred radicals were prosecuted for treason.152 Parliament introduced the
Alien Act (1793) to keep out the influx of foreigners. Newspapers began to focus on suspicious
Frenchmen in England who could be Jacobin agents. The Anti-Jacobin or Weekly Examiner was a popular paper in the 1790’s, which opposed the radicalism of the French Revolution. Its readers were outraged by the killing of Louis XVI, the expulsion of the nobles, and the Reign of
Terror.153 It satirized many of England’s most famous poets and intellectuals because of their pro-French attitudes, including Mary Wollstonecraft, Richard Price, Joseph Priestley and Tom
Paine. Caricatures of the radical Dissenters by political cartoonists including James Gillray,
Thomas Rowlandson and George Cruickshank, were read throughout the city of London.154
151 White, Early Romanticism, p. 215. 152 John Barrell and Jon Mee, eds. Trials for Treason and Sedition, 1792-1794. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007, Introduction. 153 David A. Kent and D.R. Ewan, eds. Romantic Parodies, 1790-1831, Rutherford, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992. 154 Tamara L. Hunt, Defining John Bull: Political Caricature and National Identity in Late Georgian England, p. 68. 44
155
155 Isaac Cruickshank depicts Dr. Price indulged with his favorite scene: He is kneeling on a crown with a demon on his back peering through a peep-hole into the royal bedroom at Versailles, watching ruffians destroy the Queen's bed and bedroom in search of her; Queen Marie Antoinette is seen fleeing down a staircase. 1790. Held by the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs, Washington, DC.
45
Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).
Price’s pamphlet received a number of responses, but by far the most important and celebrated reply came from the eminent orator and statesman Edmund Burke in a political pamphlet entitled Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Burke’s pamphlet immediately became a bestseller throughout Europe due to his predictions on the violent course of the French Revolution. The political Whig party members like Burke, which supported constitutional monarchy, were nevertheless paternalistic, aristocratic champions of liberty and the Established Church of England. However the Whigs shared some values with the Dissenters.
Their populist leader Charles James Fox supported Dissenting views on toleration, the
American Revolution, and was even positive about the early days of the French Revolution. But the Dissenters could not align themselves with him because they had disdain for Fox’s private life, where he was an infamous womanizer, gambler and drinker.156 Burke argued the Dissenters were ungrateful to Fox, who supported their causes, while at the same time, he rejected the
Whig’s “naïve” support for the French revolutionary cause.157
Price equated the French Revolution to Britain's own Glorious Revolution of 1688, which had restricted the powers of the monarchy, but Burke argued that the appropriate historical analogy was the English Civil War (1642-1651), when King Charles I had been executed by the
Puritans or “Roundheads” in 1649.158 According to literary historian Stephen Greenblatt, part of Burke’s Reflections appeal to contemporary readers lay in the highly emotional accounts of the mob's violent treatment of the French king and queen, who at the time Burke was writing,
156 Iain Hampsher-Monk, Burke: Revolutionary Writings, editor’s introduction. Cambridge University Press, 2014, p. xix. 157 Ibid. 158 Butler, Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy, p. 1. 46 were imprisoned in Paris and would be executed three years later. Greenblatt argues that,
“Burke’s pamphlet had become the most eloquent statement of British conservatism favoring monarchy, aristocracy, property, hereditary succession, and the wisdom of the ages.”159
Burke’s anger about the radical nature of the Dissenters was disclosed in a letter to a friend before the publication of his Reflections: “I mean to set in full view, the danger from their wicked principles and their black hearts. I mean to do my best to expose them (Dr. Price and his followers) to the hatred, ridicule, and contempt of the whole world.”160 In the opening pages of the Reflections, Burke described how on the anniversary of the English Revolution of 1688, a club of Dissenters, “but of what denomination I do not know,” gave a celebratory address to
France’s National Assembly.161 Burke insinuated that money has infiltrated the Dissenters’
Revolution Society for political purposes, adding that they “are careful to conceal the hand which distributes the dole.”162 Since Price’s Discourse was delivered as a sermon, Burke argued that, “politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement. No sound ought to be heard in the church but the healing voice of Christian charity.”163 He added that no morally sensitive observer could celebrate the removal of the king and queen of France:
I find a preacher of the gospel (Price) profaning the beautiful and prophetic ejaculation,
commonly called ‘nunc dimittis,’164 made on the first presentation of our Savior in the
Temple, and applying it, with an inhuman and unnatural rapture, to the most horrid,
atrocious, and afflicting spectacle, that perhaps ever was exhibited to the pity and
159 Stephen Greenblatt, The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Period. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2012, p. 187. 160 Edmund Burke, The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, Cambridge University Press, ed. Barbara Lowe, John A. Woods, and Peter James Marshall, Vol. 6, 1978, pp. 91-92. 161 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Revolutionary Writings, p.6. 162 Ibid. 163 Burke, Reflections, p. 14. 164 Nunc Dimittis: The Song of Simeon (Luke 2:29–32) used as a canticle in Christian liturgy, especially at compline and evensong. 47
indignation of mankind. This ‘leading in triumph,’ a thing in its best form unmanly and
irreligious, which fills our Preacher with such unhallowed transports, must shock, I
believe, the moral taste of every well-born mind.165
The ferocity of Burke’s denunciation of Richard Price had a profound affect on
Wollstonecraft’s indignation.166 Price’s health had been failing for some time, and he produced a short reply to Burke in the fourth edition of the Discourse before his death. It was left to his friends Mary Wollstonecraft and the revolutionary Thomas Paine to make stronger replies to
Burke’s attacks.167 Price died in April 1791, and was remembered by his friends as a champion of human rights, who supported the abolition of slavery, and was deeply concerned for the welfare of others.
Wollstonecraft Defends Price in A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790)
Wollstonecraft was the first to respond to Burke’s attack on Price, only a month after the publication of his Reflections, with her political pamphlet A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790). While clergyman Richard Price, whose sermon was the target of Burke's treatise, was the hero of Wollstonecraft’s work. Her intention was to express indignation and contempt for
Burke because of his description of her mentor.
Both Wollstonecraft and Burke associated Price with Enlightenment thinking, particularly the notion that civilization could progress through rational debate, but they interpreted his stance differently. Burke believed that relentless debates over rights would lead
165 Burke, Revolutionary Writings, p. 159. 166 Burke, Revolutionary Writings, Appendix I. 167 D.O. Thomas, “Richard Price,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. David Cannadine. Oxford University Press, 2004, accessed March 2017, p. 4. 48 to anarchy, whereas Wollstonecraft connected Price with reason, liberty, free discussion, mental superiority, the improving exercise of the mind, moral excellence, active benevolence, orientation toward the present and future, and the rejection of power and riches.168 She supported the Enlightenment views on civil and religious liberty informed by John Locke’s Two
Treatises of Government (1690).169 Religion was central to Wollstonecraft’s views on morality, which was based on God’s foundation.”170 She wanted to make her definition of morality clear because the word “atheism” had been rumored to be her motive.171
Burke had made a connection between the British legal system and the Magna Carta
(1215), which was based on the ancient laws of England going back to King John at
Runnymede.172 Wollstonecraft argued that these laws were not based on natural rights, but rather on property laws. The early English crown, that “barbarous monarchy” had sacred rights simply based on inheritance.173 A strong prince would lead to a strong monarch, while a weak king led to a strong aristocracy, and the superstitious led to a triumphant Catholic clergy. The common majority always remained weak, and the poor were always at the mercy of their
Lord.174 When Burke declared himself to be a friend of liberty, Wollstonecraft replied that he was in fact “a champion of property, the adorer of the golden image which power has set up.”175
Using the Bible to attack Burke, “Had you been a Jew—you would have joined in the crowd, crucify him!176 Wollstonecraft argued that we are born with natural rights, inherited at birth
168 Mitzi Myers, "Politics from the Outside: Mary Wollstonecraft's First Vindication." Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 6, 1977, pp. 113–32. 169 Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Men, p. 9. 170 Ibid. 171 Ibid. 172 Burke, Reflections, p. 33. 173 Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, p. 11. 174 Ibid. 175 Wollstonecraft, Rights of Men, p. 13. 176 Wollstonecraft, p.14. 49 from God as rational creatures. She argued that we cannot be sold as slaves by our parents, nor must be believe that bread becomes flesh or wine becomes blood simply because our parents blindly swallowed the Eucharist.177It appears to me that Wollstonecraft is rejecting her Anglican ideology. She asked her readers how Burke could support American independence and freedom while at the same time arguing that the slave trade ought never to be abolished.178 Security of the rich man’s property appeared to be the Burke’s definition of liberty: “the man who lives by the sweat of his brow has no asylum from oppression.”179 British penal laws punished to death the thief who stole a few pounds, “making the life of a deer more sacred than the life of a poor man or woman.”180 Burke’s tears were reserved for the downfall of the Queen of France, while desperate mothers with their helpless hungry babies were ignored.181 Wollstonecraft took issue with Burke’s praise of the aristocracy because of his paternalistic attitude towards the poor.
Wollstonecraft argued that Burke’s critiques were unfair: “You might have spared the man, and if you had half his grey hairs of virtue you wouldn’t have treated him with so much indecent familiarity and supercilious contempt… Price’s ideas were fixed by piety and reason, and his virtues are consolidated into goodness,” which commanded her support and fidelity.182 She granted that Price’s political ideas were utopian dreams. The world might not be ready to adopt
“such a sublime system of morality that could only be the dreams of a benevolent mind.”183
Why should Price be the man who deserved such contemptuous comments, with such “unmanly sarcasms and puerile conceits…of willful misrepresentation and wanton abuse.”184 While Price
177 ibid. 178 ibid, p. 15. 179 Wollstonecraft, Rights of Men, p. 15. 180 Wollstonecraft, Rights of Men, p. 14. 181 Wollstonecraft, p.15 182 ibid. 183 Ibid. 184 Wollstonecraft, p. 19. 50 was on the verge of death, Wollstonecraft guaranteed that he had never dreamed of riches or power and stated that:
I could almost fancy that I now see this respectable old man, in his pulpit, with hands
clasped, and eyes devoutly fixed, praying with all the simple energy of unaffected piety;
or, when more erect, inculcating the dignity of virtue, and enforcing the doctrines his life
adorns; benevolence animated each feature, and persuasion attuned his accents; the
preacher grew eloquent, who only labored to be clear; and the respect that he extorted,
seemed the only respect due to personified virtue and matured wisdom.”185
Price believed that people need their own place of public worship and had demanded that those who do not approve of the Anglican liturgy should be able to establish their own church for themselves. However Burke “tortured it into a very different meaning.”186 He described
Price as someone who was caught up in a “Dissenting frenzy,” who instead of spreading the truth favored the spread of contradictions.187 Price asserted that the king should be a servant to his people rather than the sovereign of his people, while Burke claimed, “the law, which knows neither to flatter or to insult, calls this high magistrate not our servant, as this humble Divine
Price calls him, but ‘Our sovereign Lord the King.’ ”188 Wollstonecraft rejected people like
Burke, the defenders of the law, “the dictators of this adultery language of the law… they are parasites and worldly priests.”189
185 Wollstonecraft, Rights of Men, pp. 18-19. 186 Wollstonecraft, p.19. 187 ibid. 188 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J.G.A. Pocock. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987, p. 40. 189 Wollstonecraft, p. 21. 51
Wollstonecraft proposed that an egalitarian family was the key to the morally and religiously progressive change in society and politics at large. Edmund Burke believed that if the patriarchal family would fall, it could lead to the fall of Christian civilization. For Burke, the traditional family was the “little platoon” that instilled moral, social and civic virtues to the citizens of England.190 Burke wrote: “To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in Society is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love of our country and to mankind.”191
Burke’s fear of the destruction of the traditional family amidst the political tumult of the
French Revolution was central to his argument in his Reflections. Although Wollstonecraft was more radical than Burke, she never advocated a complete overhaul of the family. She desired a more egalitarian transformation of the relationships between husbands and wives and brothers and sisters. She called for reform in marriage, divorce and property law that would encourage equality between spouses and siblings, but she still expected parents to educate and care for their children. Enlightenment ideas espoused by John Locke informed Wollstonecraft belief that children need to be prepared for the rigorous demands of democratic citizenship through the moral and intellectual instruction by their parents.
In this work, Wollstonecraft constructed a positive proposal for the transformation of the family from its corrupt hierarchical state into an egalitarian form. When she was an Anglican,
Wollstonecraft believed in the traditional understanding of original sin and the atonement, but as an evolved radical Dissenting Christian, she discarded the doctrines of original sin and embraced a belief in radical progressive changes for society. Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men established her as a first-rate political writer.
190 Burke, Reflections, p. 41. 191 Ibid. 52
Repeal of the Test Act. Doctor Priestley oversees the demolition of a church to make way for a new one. Richard Price, the non-conformist, sits high up on a beam setting fire to another
192 church.
192 Thomas Rowlandson, Repeal of the Test Act, 20 February 1790. Now held in the Royal Collection Trust of Her Majesty the Queen, London, UK. 53
193
“Smelling out a rat; Dr. Price stares in horror as the ghost of Burke appears
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792): Enlightenment’s Influence
Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman was addressed to M. Talleyrand-
Périgord, who represented the clergy in the Estates-General during the opening of the French
Revolution in 1789.194 Talleyrand participated in the writing of the Declaration of the Rights of
193 James Gillray, “Smelling out a rat; -or- the atheistical-revolutionist disturbed in his midnight "calculations." Dr. Price (right), seated in an armchair at a small writing-desk, turns in horror towards a vision emerging from clouds (left): Burke is represented by an enormous spectacled nose which rests on the back of Price's chair and by two gigantic hands, one holding a crown, the other a cross, both of which are surrounded by star-shaped haloes. Now held in the British Museum. 194 Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792). The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Vol. 5, p. 65. 54
Man, and wrote women out of the constitution.195 Wollstonecraft met him between the first and second Vindications, and she hoped that she could influence his opinions about women and the vote.196 In her Introduction to The Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft asked Talleyrand why women were shut out of the civic and moral interests of society: “if women are to be excluded, without having a voice, from participation of the natural rights of mankind, to ward off the charge of injustice and inconsistency, this flaw is in your NEW CONSTITUTION” (capitals in the text).197 Wollstonecraft argued that woman can no longer be confined to domestic activities and hoped that France’s constitution might be revised to include rights for women, because she demanded, “that the country needs: JUSTICE for one half of the human race.”198
In the first chapter of this work, Wollstonecraft began with several philosophical questions:
1) Why does man have a higher status than the brute animal? Her answer is found in Reason.
2) What accomplishment glorifies man over beast? “Virtue, we spontaneously reply.”
3) Why were the passions passed on to man? It was so that man “might attain a degree of knowledge denied to the brutes.”199
Wollstonecraft argued in favor of enlightenment values such as our ability to find happiness must be based on reason, virtue and knowledge and pointed out “the deeply rooted prejudices that have clouded reason.”200 One of Wollstonecraft’s objectives was to answer the
195 Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000, p. 179. 196 Todd, A Revolutionary Life, pp. 179-180. 197 Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman p. 66. The French constitution of 1791 excluded women from all areas of political life. Olympe de Gouges, in Les Droits de la Femme (1791) made the same demand for female political rights. Women did not get the right to vote in France until 1944. 198 Wollstonecraft, p. 69. 199 ibid, p. 82 200 ibid, p. 83
55 question of why a good God permits evil and suffering in the world. Theodicy was an
Enlightenment literary and philosophical exercise, which attempted to answer this question.201
She brushed aside the Anglican otherworldliness, pessimism and fatalism of her earlier works.
Instead it was the radical religion of the Dissenters that began to play a foundational role in her moral and political philosophy. Her strongest arguments were based on rational Christianity, a belief that asserts, “God is Justice itself! Women were destined by providence to acquire human virtues” and therefore should receive education on equal terms with all humans.202 She was indebted to eighteenth-century thinkers who dealt with the problems of evil such as Rousseau and Voltaire and her Vindication of the Rights of Woman testified to her knowledge of Milton
Pope and Shakespeare.
Wollstonecraft biographer Claire Tomalin suggests that Wollstonecraft was no longer willing to accept the “seemingly hard dispensations of providence,” which was part of the
Anglican tradition.203 By the time she wrote the second Vindication, Wollstonecraft saw the problem of evil in a different light: on the questions of injustice, resignation to divine providence was no longer a defense in the face of such a formidable enemy. She argued that humanity should strive for social change and progress, strive to perfect what is wrong with the world, which Wollstonecraft now believed was part of God’s design. It was this shift in her religious outlook that allowed Wollstonecraft to become a Christian political optimist, like her mentors Richard Price and Joseph Johnson. She no longer believed that only death could relieve the presence of evil.
201 Daniel Robinson, “Theodicy versus Feminist Strategy in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Fiction,” Eighteenth Century Fiction 9, 1997, p. 188. 202 Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, p. 100. 203 Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, p. 158. 56
Wollstonecraft exposed the futility of Anglican theology that was dominant in her early years. She understood that the Church of England may have soothed a theologically troubled individual, but did little to assuage the evils of society.204 The Rights of Woman rejected the religious fatalism and the Anglican pessimism of her earlier works. Her rational Christianity, based on Dissenting principles, asserted that God is Justice and therefore, “women were destined by providence to acquire human virtues,” which would allow them to receive education on equal terms with all humans.205 She believed in natural, equal, and God-given that included equality between the sexes, social classes and fellow citizens. Men would give up gaming such as gambling and dueling for more virtuous activities, women would give up coquetry to be rational women and good mothers who breastfeed their own children and fulfilled their part in the social contract.
Rousseau’s writings on maternal breastfeeding influenced Wollstonecraft. He stated in his educational treatise Emile: or One Education (1762), “Let mothers deign to nurse their children, morals will reform themselves, nature's sentiments will be awakened in every heart, the state will be re-peopled."206 She agreed with Rousseau and was critical of the common practice of mothers sending their children to others to nurse: “Parental affection can scarcely deserve the name, when it does lead (a woman) to suckle her children, because the discharge of this duty is equally calculated to inspire maternal and fulfill the duties, which give birth to affections that are the surest preservative against vice…and what sympathy does a mother exercise who sends her babe to a nurse, and only takes it from a nurse to send to school.207
Wollstonecraft’s utopian vision imagined pleasing and useful pastoral farms replacing
204 Robinson, “Theodicy versus Feminist Strategy in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Fiction,” p. 1908. 205 Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, p. 100. 206 J. J. Rousseau, Emile: or On Education. Trans. Alan Bloom. New York: Basic Books, 1979, p. 46. 207 Wollstonecraft, p. 234. 57 aristocratic estates filled with superficial luxury. She imagined an enlightened age, where a
“garden more inviting than Eden” would grow, and bliss and harmony would reign in the family, the school, the playing fields, and the church.208 Wollstonecraft asked, “Why cannot large estates be divided into large farms? This sight I have seen, the cow that supported the children grazed near the hut, and the cheerful poultry were fed by the chubby babes who breathed clean air, far from the diseases and vices of cities.”209 No longer torn apart by conflicts over hereditary property, families could be a haven of comfort, civility and contentment.
Unnatural hierarchies would no longer pervert natural affections between parent and child, brother and sister, husband and wife. Both women and men could work together according to the dictates of the “sublime” and the “beautiful” to preserve the family as the source of the social virtues that bind people together as neighbors, citizens and fellow human creatures. She desired that both men and women become equal partners in the maintenance of “domestic comfort” and for women to join men as equal participants in the realms of civil society and politics. Rather than relying on man, Wollstonecraft called on her female readers to “attain conscious dignity by feeling themselves dependent only on God.”210 Depending on God rather than man might be a Utopian dream, but “I view, with indignation, the mistaken notions that enslave my sex.”211 Her submission was to “reason, not to man.” She dwelled on these “truths” because women had been “decked with artificial graces…. Liberty is the mother of virtue, and if women be by their very constitution, slaves, and not allowed to breathe the sharp invigorating
208 Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, p. 60. 209 Ibid, p. 61. 210 Wollstonecraft, p. 105. 211 Ibid. 58 air of freedom, they must ever languish like exotics, and be reckoned beautiful flaws in nature.”212
Anti-Slavery and Women
Wollstonecraft was concerned about the condition of life for girls and women in the late eighteenth century, which she argued was similar to slavery. Those who had good lives were lucky. Women could not own property, or have any legal rights of their own; they could be separated from their children if they left an abusive husband, and could be legally raped or beaten by their husbands, fathers or brothers.213
Through the influence of the radical Dissenters, Wollstonecraft also learned the theory and rhetoric of the abolitionist cause. The logic of abolition was simple and elegant: people bought and sold into forced labor were human (not beasts), and therefore deserved the same rights as other humans, including the fundamental right not to be enslaved. Slavery was thus the ultimate form of domination: extinguishing the possibility of freedom through the totalizing and oppressive use of force.
Wollstonecraft reviewed one of the earliest books written by Britain's most renowned
African and a former slave in April 1789, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah
Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African Written by Himself (1789).214 This text was based on first-hand experiences of colonial slavery. Equiano graphically chronicled being kidnapped
212 Wollstonecraft, Rights of Women, p. 105 213 Sandrine Bergès, Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, p. 89. 214 Wollstonecraft, Analytical Review: Volume IV, 1789, p. 100. 59 from Africa, and living as a slave. Wollstonecraft revealed her ability as antislavery writer to put herself, “in the Negro’s place:”215
Is sugar always to be produced by vital blood? Is one half of the human species,
like the poor African slaves to be subject to prejudices that brutalize them, when
principles would be a surer method to sweeten the cup of man?216
The Analytical Reviews on slavery reflected the new influence of the abolition debate. In her reviews and in her Vindications, Wollstonecraft forcefully condemned institutionalized slavery and explicitly argued that no slavery is natural and all forms of slavery, regardless of context, are the fault of man. She was aware that wealthy men had glorified wars, justified slavery and denigrated women for a thousand years:
On what principle Mr. Burke could defend American independence, I cannot conceive for
the whole tenor of his plausible arguments settles slavery on an everlasting foundation.
Allowing his servile reverence for antiquity, and prudent attention to self-
interest, to have the force which he insists on, the slave trade ought never to be abolished;
and, because our ignorant forefathers, not understanding the native dignity of man,
sanctioned a traffic that outrages every suggestion of reason and religion, we are to
submit to the inhuman custom, and term an atrocious insult to humanity, the love of our
country, and a proper submission to the laws by which our property is secured.217
215 Ibid. 216 Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Man, p. 215. 217 Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Men, p. 215. 60
Wollstonecraft challenged the legal bounds of slavery in The Rights of Men and represented it as, “authorized by law to fasten its fangs on human flesh and ... eat into the very soul.” 218 News about slavery continued to flow in the press, so that anti-slave activist William
Wilberforce (1759-1833) was able to initiate a series of inquiries before the Privy Council and select committees of the Houses of Commons and Lords, which brought the truth of slave trade and plantations out into the open between 1789 and 1791.219 But in April 1791, the Abolition
Bill was defeated in the House of Commons by a vote of 163 to 88, a massive blow to the antislavery campaign. Another important historical turning point happened in August of 1791 when slaves in the French colony of San Domingo (now Haiti), inspired by the events of the
French Revolution, revolted, and abolished their enslavement.
Wollstonecraft made more than fifty references to slavery in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman: writing, “ Is one half of the human species, like the poor African slaves, to be subject to prejudices that brutalize them?”220 The reason women were enslaved is because they were unable to think for themselves and simply followed their husbands’ inclinations. Although women were little more than slaves to their families, she noted that women are often enslaved to themselves and their senses: “Their senses are inflamed and their understanding neglected, consequently they become prey to their senses, delicately termed sensibility, and are blown about by every momentary gust of feeling.”221 Wollstonecraft defined sensibility as “quickness of sensation, quickness of perception;” which ends up weakening women’s intellect, because
218 Michael Craton, Sinews of Empire: A Short History of British Slavery. New York: Anchor Books, 1974, p. 261. 219 Ibid. 220 Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, p. 140.
221 Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, p. 129. 61 their senses are valued more than their reason.222
I do not believe that Wollstonecraft blamed women for their condition because they were educated to obey their senses, and their reason was deliberately neglected. She pointed out that men have manipulated their consciousness: “Man, after taking her body, her mind is left to rust; so that while physical love enervates man, as being his favorite recreation, he will endeavor to enslave woman.”223 Chapter Four of the Rights of Woman is ripe with references to women and slavery. The references she used were the peasants in pre-Revolutionary feudal France and
African slaves in America. Anti-slavery movements were growing in popularity in England during Wollstonecraft’s lifetime, and the radical Dissenters were calling for the abolition of the slave trade.224 Wollstonecraft reviewed a memoir in the Analytic Review by former slave
Olaudah Equina, which revealed the horrors of living on the plantation. She wrote of her shock in which: “the treatment of male and female slaves, on the voyage, and in the West Indies, makes the blood turn its course.”225
Mary Wollstonecraft’s Theory of Human Rights for Children
Wollstonecraft developed the first theory of the human rights of children, which had no philosophical precedent. This theory can be found in Chapters 10-12 in A Vindication of the
Rights of Woman. Children deserved full rights to be free from parental psychological or physical abuse, according to Wollstonecraft.226 Parents often love their children in the most brutal way, and sacrifice every duty to promote their child’s advancement in the world. But to
222 Ibid. 223 Wollstonecraft, p. 130. 224 Anthony Page, “’A Species of Slavery’: Richard Price’s Rational Dissent and Antislavery,” pp. 53-73. 225 Wollstonecraft, Analytic Review, p. 28. 226 Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, p. 221-2. 62 accomplish this goal, parents use “the most despotic stretch of power… Obedience, unconditional obedience is the catch-word of tyrants of every description.”227 Parents are often convinced they have the right to “tyrannize where it can be done with impunity.” Convinced that they have the right to tyrannize, they do not fear reason or natural justice, nor do they believe in an enlightened mind.228 The father must inflict the punishment and be the judge in all disputes.229 Children have the right to be free from abuse because humans in general had a duty to respect each other as “moral being” and capable of rational self-governance.230 She encouraged making children and youths independent of masters who respected punishments.
Children should be tried by their peers, not their masters.231 When children are slavishly bonded to their parents, every faculty of mind gets cramped, and their spirits are debased and broken.232
Wollstonecraft had a rank-ordered definition of duties and rights: 1) To never abuse children in general; 2) To care for children; 3) To equally care for and rationally educate your own children, without discrimination among the siblings; 4) To equally provide the material means of development among your own children, without discrimination among siblings; 5) To care for your elderly parents as they cared for you when you were dependent on them.
John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the two great educational theorists of the eighteenth century, had the greatest intellectual influence on Wollstonecraft’s writings about children’s rights. Most English educational writers typically followed Locke’s Some Thoughts on Education (1693) in advocating for children’s physical, intellectual, and moral freedom.
Wollstonecraft built on his ideas but moved beyond them in developing her extended
227 Wollstonecraft, p. 221. 228 Ibid, p. 222. 229 Ibid, p. 223. 230 Ibid, p. 224. 231 Ibid, p. 242. 232 Ibid, p. 226. 63 philosophical argument for the fundamental human rights of children. From Locke and
Rousseau, she took a general interest in the physical education, health care, physical freedom, and outdoor exercise of children. From Rousseau she had a special concern for the physical and moral benefits of maternal breastfeeding for infants. Rousseau noted that infants at that time were too often handed over women, other than their mothers, for breastfeeding. Wollstonecraft was inspired to apply Locke and Rousseau’s arguments on her utopian ideas of the best form of early education that applied equally to girls and boys.
The immediate historical context of Wollstonecraft’s concern for children’s human rights was the radical politics of late eighteenth-century England, especially in London’s radical
Dissenting community. Under the tutelage of Rev. Richard Price and Joseph Johnson,
Wollstonecraft’s position on children’s rights, rooted in the philosophy of her mentors, was based on an ethical conception of the human being, who viewed humans as being made in
God’s rational image.233
I argue that the greatest influence on Wollstonecraft’s arguments for the human rights for children was based on her own personal experiences. She was born in London, as the second of seven children, to a family that was struggling. Her father lost much of his inherited money on speculative land deals, and became alcoholic and abusive to his wife and children. He was bad- tempered and veered from kindness to cruelty, and was violent to his wife and also to Mary.234
When she was a young child, she was punished for trivial matters with, “an unconditional submission to orders.”235 She was often forced to sit for three of four hours in front of her parents, without uttering word.”236Her father was “a despot in his domestic kingdom,
233 Richard Price, Political Writings, ed. D.O. Thomas. Cambridge University Price, 1991, p. 23. 234 Godwin, Memoirs of the Author, p. 45. 235 Ibid. 236 ibid. 64 dominating the resentful childhood of his daughter.”237
Wollstonecraft called for a national plan for day schools where boys and girls would be educated together.238 A school for younger children from five to nine years of age would be free and open to all classes of society and where boys and girls, rich and poor would meet together.
The schoolroom would be surrounded by a large piece of grass where the children could exercise, and they would never be confined to any sedentary activities for more than an hour at a time. Physical exercise would take the primacy over all other forms of education, for no school subjects would, “encroach on gymnastic play in the open air.”239Reading, writing, arithmetic, natural history and philosophy would be taught, along with botany, mechanics and astronomy. Religion, history and politics would be learned through the Socratic method.240
The young people who had superior abilities could be taught the “dead and living languages”, the elements of science, and continue in the study of history and politics, and polite literature.241 Girls would not be confined to needlework or be shut out of all political and civic employment. Narrowing the minds of girls, argued Wollstonecraft, would only make them unfit to fulfill the duties which nature had assigned to them.242 If women were educated, they could go into the law, or accept places in government, or become physicians.243 Girls needed to be taught anatomy and medicine in schools, not only so they can take care of their own health, but to make them rational doctors to their infants, parents, husbands and their communities.
The reason women have been so inferior to men is because of female ignorance; thereby they become slaves to pleasure or slaves to men. “If you make women free, they will quickly
237 Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000, p. 5. 238 Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, p. 237. 239 Ibid. 240 Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, p. 240. 241 Ibid. 242 Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, p. 241. 243 Wollstonecraft, pp. 218-219. 65 become virtuous and wise.”244 It was not literary or scientific pursuits that led women astray from their duties. Rather it was “indolence and vanity—the love of pleasure and the love of sway” that would fill an empty mind.245 It is empty because the education that women receive
“scarcely deserves the name.”246An egalitarian school would be women’s only hope to become enlightened citizens, able to earn on their own, independent of men, and when women can become companions to men rather than mistresses. Wollstonecraft called upon an enlightened nation to try and bring women back to reason and to allow them to share in the advantages of education and government with man.
Wollstonecraft was highly critical of tyrannical abuse of power that some parents hold over their children, and she accepted that the dependence of children upon their parents serves as a basis for the natural hierarchy between them. She counseled parents to view themselves as divinely ordained caretakers and educators who train children to gradually accept the responsibilities of adulthood. In return, parents could expect that their children would care for them in their old age, when the natural hierarchy is reversed. The hierarchy between parent and child is morally justified, according to Wollstonecraft, because it involved the practice of the
“reciprocal duty” to care for one another in different stages of life. That natural hierarchy between parent and child reinforces the understanding of their fundamental equality as human beings, who are dependent on each other for their survival, happiness and prosperity.
The Dissenting Circle around Joseph Johnson
The middle stage of Wollstonecraft’s writing career is linked with the publisher Joseph
Johnson (1738-1809), who played a major role in Wollstonecraft’s life, as both publisher and
244 Wollstonecraft, p.220. 245 ibid. 246 Ibid. 66 friend, and she became a member of his circle of political and religious radicals. She absorbed their opinions and expanded her approach to ideas.247 Johnson’s company published radical
Dissenting texts, pamphlets, novels and poetry. Because of her talents in writing, and her ability to financially support herself, she declared to her sister that she was going to be ‘the first of a new genus.'”248
The radical intellectual group that gathered in Johnson’s salon in the 1790’s included the political activist Thomas Paine, slave trade abolitionist and botanist Erasmus Darwin, theologian and scientist Joseph Priestley, moral philosopher Jeremy Bentham, poet and artist
William Blake, dramatist Thomas Holcroft, American poet and diplomat Joel Barlow, the linguist, clergyman and politician Horne Tooke and poet and essayist Anna Letitia Barbauld.249
Johnson included Wollstonecraft in the exalted company of his weekly soirées, where she met her future husband, the anarchist political philosopher and novelist William Godwin, who was attending a dinner at Johnson’s in honor of Thomas Paine.
Henry Fuseli, the Swiss-born, British Gothic artist was one of Johnson’s oldest friends, and wrote reviews for the Analytic Review. He spoke five languages and was educated as a
Zwinglian minister in Switzerland.250 He became attracted to radical German philosophy and literature in addition to art before moving to England in 1764. Fuseli was quickly introduced into literary society, including publisher Joseph Johnson, whom he lived with. He had published his own Remarks on the Writings and Conduct of J. J. Rousseau (1767), based on the philosophical arguments between Rousseau and the Scottish philosopher and historian David
247 Michael Craton, Sinews of Empire: A Short History of British Slavery. New York: Anchor Books, 1974, p. 2 248 Wollstonecraft, Collected Letters, November 7, 1787, p. 139. 249 Claudia Johnson, ed. Chronology, The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft, p. xvii. 250 The theology of Swiss Reformer and Humanist Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531) took scripture as the inspired word of God and placed its authority higher than what he saw as human sources such as the ecumenical councils and church fathers. 67
Hume.251 Fuseli had a reputation as a “gentleman, a scholar, a philosopher, a genius, and a man of wit.”252 He had come from a highly educated middle-class Swiss family, which was unusual at that time, and which enabled him to have access to the cultured world of London.253 His subjects were drawn from English literature, theatre, and the Gothic sublime. He did a series of paintings based on the works of Shakespeare, but perhaps his most celebrated work was The
Nightmare (1781), which was exhibited at London’s Royal Academy in 1782. It portrayed a woman in deep sleep with her arms above her head, and with a demonic and apelike character crouched on her chest. Fuseli’s works were often filled with dread, ghosts, and demons. This painting was a huge success, in part because it portrayed an erotic, nightmare portrayal of obsession. His forty paintings depicting scenes from Milton’s life were grand in scale and summarized the aspirations of the early Romantics.254His literary and philosophical interests heralded the end of the Age of Reason and the Age of Enlightenment.255
Wollstonecraft met Fuseli in 1788 at one of Johnson’s weekly soirées, where she became enraptured by his intelligence, and described him as a genius because of, “the grandeur of his soul, that quickness of comprehension, and lovely sympathy.”256 She enjoyed her long talks with the artist, and he was the first man, close to her age, who had respected her opinions.257
Wollstonecraft was attracted to his genius and he encouraged a romantic friendship with her.
Both Wollstonecraft and Fuseli were admirers of Rousseau and they believed in the power of
251 Martin Myrone, Henry Fuseli. London: Tate Gallery Publishing Ltd, 2001, p. 11. 252 Myrone, p. 15. 253 Ibid, p. 16. 254 John David Farmer, “Henry Fuseli, Milton and English Romanticism,” Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago, Vol. 68, No. 4, 1974, p. 15. 255 Ibid. 256 Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life, p. 153. 257 Cayton, Love in the Time of Revolution, p.52. 68 genius: “Mary attached herself to Fuseli with all her soul.”258 They planned to travel to Paris together in 1792, but he was married, and he soon broke off his relationship with Wollstonecraft after she naively proposed that he and his wife join her.259 She left for France on her own, to join other English intellectuals such as Thomas Paine, in celebrating the French Revolution.
Wollstonecraft and Paine attacked the French monarchy and the aristocracy, and insisted that political constitutions must arise from the vote of the people. They defended representative government as taking “society and civilization for its basis; nature, reason and experience, for its guide.”260 In Paris, Paine became a vigorous defender of the sans-culottes, the common people of the lower classes and radical partisans of the French Revolution in response to their poor quality of life under the Ancien Régime, and published his views in pamphlets, placards and newspapers. The Jacobins denounced him because of his religious background as a Quaker, which prevented him from supporting capital punishment, as this was against the principles of the Quaker religion.261 On January 19, 1793 after the National Convention had found Louis XVI guilty of treason, Thomas Paine spoke to the National Assembly through a translator, arguing that the king should be imprisoned and exiled but not executed.
Joseph Johnson’s Analytical Review offered British radicals a voice in the public sphere.262 But their voices were ridiculed in caricatures, satirical novels, and in the new satirical journal The Anti-Jacobin Review.263 Johnson courageously supported his friends when they
258 Wollstonecraft, Collected Letters, p. 207f. 259 Leslie Chard, “Joseph Johnson in the 1790’s,” p. 97. 260 Paine, Complete Works, Volume I, pp. 358-9 261 Patricia Howell Michaelson, “Religion and Politics in the Revolutionary Debate: Burke, Wollstonecraft, Paine.” The French Revolution Debate in English Literature and Culture, ed. Lisa Plummer Crafton. London: Greenwood Press, 1997, p. 27. 262 Marilyn Butler, “Culture’s Medium: the Role of the Review.” The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, ed. By Stuart Curran. Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 129. 263 Stuart Andrews, The British Periodical Press and the French Revolution, 1789–99. New York: Palgrave, 2000. 69 needed him. He published a number of works supporting theologian and scientist Joseph
Priestley after the ‘church and king’ rioters in Birmingham burned down Priestley’s home and laboratory in 1791. Johnson testified on behalf of various friends arrested in the treason trials of the 1790’s. He helped raise bail for Tom Paine, following the publication of his The Rights of
Man in 1791 and after his arrest for seditious libel in 1792.264
With the violence of the Reign of Terror in France (1793-94), many in Britain who had supported the French Revolution, began to rethink their positions, and the government became concerned that radical elements may cause the same problems at home. Radical booksellers were arrested for seditious libel, and many of Johnson’s authors either stopped writing or became more conservative. Johnson’s Analytical Review collapsed after he was put on trial and spent six months in prison.
The middle period of Wollstonecraft’s writing career may be her most celebrated, because of the radical nature of her Vindications. She moved to Newington Green as a reserved and passive Anglican, but once she was hired as a professional writer in London for Johnson’s
Analytic Review, Wollstonecraft developed a political optimism, which quickly embraced a rationalistic and politically progressive theology influenced by the London-based radical
Dissenters who were also supporters of the republican cause in France.
264 Helen Braithwaite, Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent: Joseph Johnson and the Cause of Liberty, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, p. 162. 70
“Contrasted Opinions of Paine’s Pamphlet The Rights of Man.”265
265 Frederick George Byron, 1791, held at the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. On the top row, far left is Edmund Burke. The rest are prominent individuals expressing their dismay over Paine’s radical pamphlet on The Rights of Man.
71
The Age of Reason or the world turned topsy-turvy is exemplified in Tom Paine’s
works!! 'Dedicated to the Archbishop of Carlile-!!!' In the center of the design Carlile, helped by
Radicals wearing bonnets rouges, burns emblems of Church and State; in the center of the flames is a tall
crucifix which a chain of three radicals (left) is pulling down by a rope, while Carlile (right), trampling on
the heaped emblems, pushes with a spear. The placard which is tied to the cross announces the infernal
New Order of Reason: “No Christianity, No Religion, No King; No Lords, No Commons, No Laws!
Nothing but Tom Paine and Universal Suffrage!!!”266
Chapter Four: Wollstonecraft’s Late Period 1793-1797
266 George Cruikshank satirical cartoon (1819) attacking Tom Paine. Now held at the British Museum, Collection Online. Carlile, whose Temple of Reason bookshop in London, was the only shop distributing radical and freethinking tracks. The reason he was mocked was because he republished Tom Paine’s works. 72
Paris, Scandinavia & Godwin
Wollstonecraft’s religious beliefs shifted to a more abstract Romantic Deism during the
late period (1793-1797) of her writing career. The middle period (1788-1792) reflected the
rationalist and politically progressive Unitarian beliefs of her mentors Richard Price and Joseph
Johnson, when she optimistically believed that Enlightenment ideas could produce an
egalitarian family where men and women would have equal rights, where boys and girls would
be freely educated, and there would be human rights for children. But once she lived through
the bloody Reign of Terror in France (1793-1794) and witnessed twenty-one members of the
Girondins getting guillotined under Robespierre’s rule, she became disillusioned with
rationality.267 She could no longer make sense of the problem of moral and political evil that
she witnessed in the Reign of Terror in a rational framework. During her travels in Scandinavia
in the summer of 1795, Wollstonecraft’s faith evolved into Romantic Deism, a philosophical
opinion, which had become disillusioned with organized religion and orthodox teachings such
as the Trinity, Biblical inerrancy and supernatural events such as the miracles.
During this period in her life Wollstonecraft experienced a move to Paris during the
bloody Reign of Terror; her relationship with American adventurer Gilbert Imlay (1754-1828)
and the illegitimate birth of her daughter Fanny (1794-1816); her voyage to Scandinavia and her
return to London; and the prospect of happiness with William Godwin, whom she married, but a
prospect cut short by her death in childbirth.
267 Dr. Marissa Linton, “The Terror in the French Revolution,” Choosing Terror: Virtue, Friendship, and Authenticity in the French Revolution, Oxford Scholarship Online, September 2013, p. 4.
73
During this last period of her writing career, which lasted four years, Wollstonecraft wrote A Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794), and Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796). In addition, the Letter on the Present Character of the French Nation (1793), and The Wrongs of
Woman, or Maria (1798), were published posthumously.
Wollstonecraft in Paris (1792-1795)
In Wollstonecraft’s Letter on the Present Character of the French Nation (1793), she revealed the shift in her theological and political views that residence in revolutionary France produced:
Before I came to France, I cherished, you know, an opinion, that strong virtues might
exist with the polished manners produced by the progress of civilization… I am not
become an Atheist, I assure you, by residing at Paris; yet I gin to fear that vice, or if
you will, evil is the grand mobile of action, and that when the passions are justly
poised, we become harmless, and in the same proportion useless.268
Wollstonecraft explained to her readers that she was not optimistic that France had become more virtuous through the revolution, but instead had become more evil. The
Enlightenment ideas did not turn her into an atheist, but the traumatic events of the Terror changed her faith in the God of rational radical Dissenting ideas and his progressive plan to bring humanity to its highest moral, intellectual and political form. She no longer viewed evil as something to be overthrown, and instead accepted it as something that is behind all human activity. In her Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution
268 Wollstonecraft, Letter on the Present Character of the French Nation, Vol. 6, The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, pp. 443-445 (published posthumously in 1798). 74
(1794), she doubted that humans would be able to dampen their passions or their vices in order to practice the rationalistic theory of Price or the ideas espoused in her Vindications. She was critical of the political optimism of the French and British radicals, from Robespierre to Paine and Godwin, who believed that extreme political reform would easily restructure the institutions of education and government in order to promote an egalitarian social order: “But from the commencement of the revolution, the misery of France has originated from the folly or art of men, who have spurred the people on too fast; tearing up prejudices by the root, which they should have permitted to die gradually away.”269 Ironically, Wollstonecraft began to sound like
Edmund Burke, when she called for caution in all attempts at social and political reform, and condemned the violent actions of the revolutionaries in France, despite her support for their objectives.
Just before she left London for Paris in 1792, Wollstonecraft was introduced to the
French diplomat and statesman Charles Talleyrand, the leader of the French National Assembly, to whom she dedicated her Vindication of the Rights of Woman. He discussed with her the principles of the Revolution, the objective of female enfranchisement and better educational opportunities. Hearing this discussion, she quickly departed, on her own, for Paris in December
1792. Her hasty departure was in part to escape the humiliation of the Fuseli incident (chapter three). But her plan all along was to observe the unfolding events of the Revolution first-hand, and she remained in Paris until 1795.
Upon her arrival in Paris she watched the king of France pass through the streets of Paris on his way to his trial. Biographer Richard Holmes speculates that Wollstonecraft probably
269 Wollstonecraft, Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794), Vol. 6, The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, p. 159. 75 watched the procession from the high attic of her building.270That night, she wrote to Joseph
Johnson: “I want to see something alive; death in so many frightful shapes has taken hold of my fancy. – I am going to bed – and, for the first time in my life, I cannot put out the candle.”271
France had been defeated by Austria and Prussia, and Louis XVI was blamed. He was tried for treason, found guilty, and held at the Prison of the Temple, close to Wollstonecraft’s lodgings.272
Before the Revolution turned violent during Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, women became members of clubs and popular societies. Wollstonecraft developed a friendship with poet Helen Maria Williams, whose Paris salon was frequented by leading Girondin deputies and prominent French women. By 1793, Wollstonecraft was working on a plan of education for consideration in the French National Assembly. The invitation probably came from Thomas
Paine or the French philosopher Condorcet of the Comité de l’instruction publique, who were sympathetic to Wollstonecraft’s views.273 Both Paine and Condorcet were members of the same committee preparing the new constitution. On January 21, 1793, Louis XVI was executed.
Wollstonecraft initially believed that “Paris has remained perfectly tranquil ever since the death of the King.”274
In her writing of The French Revolution, Wollstonecraft referred to philosopher John
Locke who had recommended a tolerant attitude to religious differences in An Essay
Concerning Toleration (1667). He had analyzed the principles of civil liberty in Two Treatises
270 Richard Holmes, Footsteps. Adventures of a Romantic Biographer, New York: Viking Press, 1985, p. 99f. 271 Wollstonecraft, Collected Letters, Paris, December 26, 1792, p. 216. 272 Ibid. 273 Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd. Collected Letters, p. 221f. 274 ibid, February 1, 1793, p. 221. 76 of Government (1690), where he opposed the divine right of kings.275 She respected French writer Voltaire who repeatedly criticized the superstitious nature of religion: “Voltaire, leading the way, and ridiculing with that happy mixture of satire and gaiety, calculated to delight the
French, the inconsistent puerilities of a puppet-show religion.”276 Rousseau supported Voltaire’s position while he depicted the evils of a priest-ridden society, and the civic sources of oppressive inequality.277 Wollstonecraft observed that there had never been justice in France, but sadly only retaliation and revenge were its substitutions.278 The only way she could explain the ferocity of the Parisians during the Reign of Terror was because the people had no confidence in law and order. They were used to being punished for simply being in the way of the rich: “When Justice, or the Law, is so partial, the day of retribution will come with the red sky of vengeance.”279 Since her hopeful days at the beginning of the Revolution, Wollstonecraft had come to realize that, France had matured and had become corrupt and diseased.280 Only a philosopher would be able to understand the causes, which led to so many horrible effects.281
The French Assembly from 1791-93, campaigned for the end of the French monarchy, but opposed the escalating violence of the Revolution. The British and American radicals, including Wollstonecraft and Paine, supported them. But they came into conflict with the
Jacobin (Montagnards) elements of the Assembly. The Girondins lost and the Reign of Terror under Maximillen Robespierre (1758-1794) began in June 1793. Between June of 1793 and July
1774 there were over 16,000 official death sentences in France, however some historians
275 Wollstonecraft, The French Revolution, p. 16. 276 Wollstonecraft, p. 18. 277 Wollstonecraft, The French Revolution, p. 19. 278 ibid, p. 40. 279 Wollstonecraft, The Collected Letters, p. 234. 280 Wollstonecraft, Collected Letters, p. 235. 281 Ibid. 77 estimate that as many as 500,000 were killed without official sentences.282 The Jacobins had two goals, to win the war with Britain, and to establish the Revolution’s ideology throughout
France. They resorted to the Terror, with the help of the sans-culottes (the lower classes) in order to enforce their authority. On September 17, 1793 the Jacobins passed the Law of
Suspects, which permitted the government to arrest and demand rapid trials for anyone suspected of opposing the Revolution. In October 1793, twenty-two members of the Girondins, many of whom Wollstonecraft knew, were arrested and guillotined283
Gilbert Imlay Affair
During the relatively permissive ambiance of Revolutionary Paris, Wollstonecraft met
American Gilbert Imlay at the home of mutual friend, where he paid her considerable attention.284 She soon began a love affair with the charismatic Imlay, author of A Topographical
Description of the Western Territory of North America (1792) and The Emigrants (1793), which might have been ghost written by Wollstonecraft.285 John R. Cole has suggested that
Wollstonecraft is a suitable source for his passages on the victimization of women in English marriage laws. Imlay was a skilled writer who mixed with radical thinkers in England and might have picked up the ideas from them.286 Imlay’s works suggest that he abhorred the slave trade and was sympathetic to women’s rights, which made him a compelling figure in her eyes. She believed that she had formed an egalitarian partnership with Imlay, untrammelled by the marital
282 Dr. Marissa Linton, “The Terror in the French Revolution,” Choosing Terror: Virtue, Friendship, and Authenticity in the French Revolution, Oxford Scholarship Online, September 2013, p. 4. 283 ibid, p. 232f. 284 John R. Cole, “Imlay’s Ghost: Wollstonecraft’s Authorship of The Emigrants, Eighteenth Century Women: Studies in Their Lives, Work and Culture, ed. Linda V. Troost. New York: AMS Press, 2001, pp. 263-298. 285 Janet Todd, ed. The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft 286Todd, Collected Letters, p. 223f. 78 bonds that subordinated women to their husbands.287 The relationship, which was never formalized, eventually led to the illegitimate birth of their daughter Fanny Wollstonecraft.
Robespierre’s Law of Police, passed in April 1794, banned all foreigners from Paris, so
Wollstonecraft was forced to move to a nearby village, where she began writing her Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (1794).288 Americans were not included in the ban and could therefore remain in Paris, so in January 1794, Wollstonecraft quietly returned to the city, and Imlay registered her at the American Embassy as his wife.289 She hoped that they would move to America with their child.290 Imlay then left for Le Havre, leaving Wollstonecraft alone in revolutionary Paris for over three months while she was pregnant, and anxious letters from Mary followed Imlay. 291 She eventually joined him in Le Havre and their baby was born in May.292
Wollstonecraft’s Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution addressed the events of the revolution that happened before the Jacobins came to power. She deplored the ferocity of the Parisians, and declared the bloody events of the Reign of Terror as a betrayal of the principles of the revolution.293 In a letter to a friend, Wollstonecraft lamented, “Of the state of things here…my God, how many victims fall beneath the sword and the Guillotine! My blood runs cold, and I sicken at thoughts of a Revolutions which costs so much blood and bitter tears.”294 The picture Wollstonecraft drew of the ancien régime France was of a country ruled by superstition, and which was morally and politically degenerate. She envisioned a possible
287 ibid. 288 Wollstonecraft, Collected Letters, p. 230f. 288 ibid, p. 230f. 289 ibid, p. 229f. 290 Todd, Collected Letters, p. 219f. 291 Wollstonecraft, Collected Letters, p. 233f. 292 ibid, p. 252f. 293 ibid, p. 248. 294 ibid, p. 255, July 8th, 1794. 79 future society in which the sexes would be not only educated together but they would be encouraged to work together in family units. While in France, she had already begun to write less critically of the English system of government and developed a respect for their rule of law.
Robespierre finally fell in July 1794, but Imlay had fled France for London, leaving behind Wollstonecraft and the baby. She returned to Paris with her child and when Imlay did not return she left the city for London to look for him. On their re-meeting, they tried to live together, but Wollstonecraft soon learned that he was unfaithful to her, and upon hearing the news, she tried to kill herself. 295 Her failed love affair with Imlay, which led to the birth of
Fanny, left her in a depressed state of mind. Although Wollstonecraft was a progressive radical in terms of advocating for the egalitarian family and the rights of boys and girls to be educated, she had a moral conservatism, which embraced a vision of a happy marriage, based on friendship. Imlay was not to live up to that vision for Wollstonecraft.
Travels in Scandinavia
Imlay persuaded Wollstonecraft to go to Scandinavia on a personal business prospect. He was pursuing a lawsuit against a Norwegian sea captain who had apparently stolen their ship and its cargo of silver. He sent Mary on a mission to find the sea captain, and promised to meet her in Switzerland at the end of the trip. Taking baby Fanny, who was only a year old, along with a French maid, she travelled to Scandinavia as his “best friend and wife.”296 They left on a boat from Hull and sailed to Gothenburg, Sweden, an unknown place to the British, during the summer of 1795 while Wollstonecraft was thirty-six years old.
295 Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Vol.1, Introduction, p. 11. 296 Todd and Butler, The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, vol. 1, p. 11. 80
Wollstonecraft’s publisher, Joseph Johnson, offered her a contract to write a travel journal, which produced Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Denmark and
Norway (1796). The twenty-five letters were published in January 1796, and were warmly received by readers who wanted to understand this little-known region and “its display of intense private grief.” 297 Her first impressions of the Swedish landscape with it’s wild strawberries, rocky coastline, the silence and peace, were like a balm, making her forget the horrors that she witnessed in France.298 Using the poetic language of Shakespeare’s The
Tempest, Hamlet, Henry VIII, and Twelfth Night, she described the natural setting: “Is it not the witching time of night? The waters murmur, and fall with more than mortal music, and spirits of peace walk abroad to calm the agitated breast. Eternity is in these moments; world cares melt into the airy stuff that dreams are made of.”299
She commented on how far the Swedes were away from having a just sense of rational equality between men and women. The most menial tasks were left to women. In the winter, women were forced to do the heavy laundry in the frozen waters of the rivers, and the men never helped them.300 Like the early and middle periods of her writing, Wollstonecraft maintained a concern for the plight of the human race, but doubts were now apparent on whether Christian charity or social and political reform would have any lasting impact on its condition.
Wollstonecraft had always seen physical exercise as progressive as opposed to lazy, which she viewed with contempt. Beginning with childhood, she had spent her life moving.
Born in Spitalfields, London, her family moved to the country when she was two years old. By
297 ibid, p. 12. 298 Wollstonecraft, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Denmark and Norway, The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Vol. 6, p. 247. 299 Wollstonecraft, Collected Letters, p. 252. 300 ibid, p. 253. 81 the time Wollstonecraft was eighteen, she had lived in seven different residences. Biographer
Claire Tomalin noted that her father's remedy for financial failure was to move on.301
Wollstonecraft wrote to her sister in 1789, stating, “I have a number of drawbacks, but still I cry avant despair – and I push forward” (her italics).302 Movement as necessity was central in
Wollstonecraft 's life. When she left her parents home, she travelled to various English resorts as a paid companion to an elderly lady. She then arrived in Newington Green to establish a school for girls and subsequently went to Portugal to care for a dying friend. After being employed in Ireland as a governess to a wealthy family, Wollstonecraft found herself in
London, where she made a name for herself as a paid writer at the Analytic Reviews and author of her two Vindications. She uprooted herself again to go to Paris to witness and write about the
French Revolution. From there she was back in London, but Imlay sent her to yet another residence, this time in Scandinavia. Wollstonecraft hoped that this voyage would pull her from the depression, which had been brought on my Imlay’s infidelity. The purpose of a travel journal was her way of fighting off “idleness, rather than ill-nature, gives birth to scandal, and to the observation of little incidents which narrows the mind.”303
The Rational Dissenters who had so greatly influenced Wollstonecraft during the middle period of her writing career, avoided enthusiasm and advised their followers to control emotions. Instead, Wollstonecraft in the later period embraced flights of fancy and reveries, which allowed her to walk in the footsteps of kings and queens, or "drop down from the clouds in a strange land."304 Wollstonecraft had already traveled in foreign territories with sovereign waste, while with her newfound flights of fancy, "taking its flight with fairy wing to the misty
301 Claire Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft. New York: Harcourt, 1974, p. 18. 302 Wollstonecraft, 28 February, 1789, Collected Letters, p. 160 303 Wollstonecraft, Letters From Sweden, p. 256. 304 Wollstonecraft, Letters, pp. 329, 330 and 269 82 mountains that bounded the prospect...tripped over new lawns more beautiful even than the lovely slopes on the winding shore before me."305 Wollstonecraft cherished the opportunities when she was able to walk outside:
Let me kind strangers, escape sometimes into your fir groves, to wander on the margin
of your beautiful lakes, or climb your rocks to view still others in endless perspective;
which, piled by more than giant’s hand scale the heavens to intercept its rays, or to
receive the parting tings of lingering day-day that, scarcely softened into twilight,
allows the freshening breeze to wake, and the moon to burst forth in all her glory to
glide with solemn elegance through the azure expanse.306
During the Scandinavian journey Wollstonecraft developed a new faith, which could be called Romantic Deism. It blended “a mystical appreciation of the wonders of Creation and a belief in the immortality of the soul, along with an abstract, philosophical and melancholic view of God as the impersonal Creator of a paradoxical world filled with both great beauty and terrible evil.”307 Deists embraced a Newtonian worldview and believed that all things, even
God, must obey the laws of nature. She developed a more contemplative view of religion with feelings, the language of the sublime, and imagination, which became central to her spirituality.
While traveling in Scandinavia, Wollstonecraft acted like an anthropologist, observing the family life of the towns and cities that she visited. She criticized the harmful childrearing practices that she observed, where children were dressed in dirty, smelly clothes, fed with
305 ibid, p. 279-280. 306 Ibid, p. 252. 307 Eileen Hunt, Family Feuds: Wollstonecraft, Burke, and Rousseau on the Transformation of the Family. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006, p. 179. 83 unhealthy food and often infected by their nurses, yet she felt compassion for them.308 When she saw Swedish women washing their loathing in the freezing rivers, she saw that ice had cut their hands, which were cracked and bleeding.309 The impoverished state of many Scandinavian families led her to speculate that the Deity had created the world to display all the forms of evil.
The unexpectedly dismal state of these families, cut off from civilization, amidst the natural world that Rousseau had so romanticized, confirmed what the Terror had taught her, that evil is the irresistible driving force behind the natural world and human history.
As Wollstonecraft’s Letters progressed she began to embrace sorrow as life affirming:
"emotions that trembled on the brink of ecstasy and agony gave a poignancy to my sensations which made me feel more alive than usual," which contrasted with her endorsement of feeling and is the opposite of her early Anglican pessimism and reserve.310 Commenting on her early writing years, Wollstonecraft noted that she was, "laboring to make my feelings take an orderly course--It was striving against the stress--I must love and adore with warmth, or I sink into sadness."311 In the Letters, reason and imagination play equal roles in educating her readers.
Wollstonecraft no longer equated reason with the philosophy of John Locke, and instead defined reason’s primary function as self-reflection: "Reason is an inward-turning faculty that allows the individual to examine his or her own prejudices and to emphasize with other as a consequence of heightened self-knowledge."312 She dropped reason as the superior faculty because it could not control feelings. A sign of her newfound maturity was her willingness to explore death and accept human limitations without turning to religious consolations. The specific loss at this time in her life, was her lover Imlay, which she recognized as a kind of
308 Wollstonecraft, Letters, p 280. 309 Ibid, p. 258. 310 Wollstonecraft, Letters, p. 248. 311 Wollstonecraft, Letters From Sweden, p. 248. 312 Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer. University of Chicago Press, 1984, p. 86. 84 death, "a sort of separation of the soul," "something torn from ourselves."313
The Scandinavian Letters have fewer references to God than earlier periods of her writing, and she is less religiously orthodox in her descriptions. She referred to God in non- theological terms such as "a mighty whole," and "all is great and beautiful” rather than traditional monotheistic terms. She noted that her religious beliefs were based more on fear and desire rather than clear-cut evidence. Wollstonecraft admired the Norwegians who regularly attended church services, but they never let religion interfere with their enjoyments.314
In looking back at her life as a radical Dissenter, Wollstonecraft expressed surprise that when she entered their meeting-houses (churches),
They had not laid aside all the pomp and vanities of life. Whilst men have senses,
whatever soothes them lends wings to devotion; else why do the beauties of nature where
all that charm/them are spread around with a lavish hand, force even the sorrowing heart
to acknowledge that existence is a blessing; and this acknowledgement is the most
sublime homage we can pay to the Deity.315
Wollstonecraft claimed that she wanted faith but: "My imagination hurries me forward to seek an asylum in such a retreat from all the disappointments I am threatened with: but reason drags me back, whispering that the world is still the world, and the man the compound of weakness and folly, who must occasionally excite love and disgust, admiration and contempt."316
While admiring a beautiful waterfall, Wollstonecraft connected nature with spirituality:
313 Wollstonecraft, Letters, p. 279. 314 Wollstonecraft, Letters, p. 288. 315 ibid, p. 307. 316 Wollstonecraft, Letters from Sweden, pp. 308-309. 85
My thoughts darted from earth to heaven, and I asked myself why was I chained to
life and it’s misery? Still the tumultuous emotions that sublime object excited, were
pleasurable, and in viewing it, my soul rose, with renewed dignity, above its cares—
rasping at immortality—it seemed impossible to stop the currents of my thoughts…I
stretched my hand out to eternity.”317
Rather than reason, which was profoundly important in the middle stage of
Wollstonecraft’s writing career, her religious faith evolved into feelings, the language of the sublime in nature, and her imagination, which became central to her spirituality. Many of the
Letters from Sweden… contains ideas that illustrate Wollstonecraft's connections between nature, God, and the self. Literary historian Mary Poovey notes that Wollstonecraft's travelogue did not have the desired effect of winning over Imlay's affections, but it accomplished a great deal for Wollstonecraft, including Godwin’s love for the letters from Scandinavia and its writer.318 The prospect of a second suicide attempt in London lay ahead of her trip to
Scandinavia, but so did the prospect of happiness and marriage with William Godwin, a prospect cut short by her death in childbirth.
Wollstonecraft and William Godwin
After her return to London in early October 1795 from her Scandinavian travels on behalf of Imlay, Wollstonecraft again attempted suicide when she discovered that Imlay continued to be
317 Wollstonecraft, Letters, p. 311. 318 Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer. The University of Chicago Press, 1984, p. 83. 86 unfaithful. A small circle of Wollstonecraft friends rallied around to help her in the recovery from her depression caused by Imlay’s duplicity. Among her friends was the radical intellectual
Mary Hayes, a “professed admirer of Wollstonecraft” and friend of William Godwin, the most famous radical reformer of his time. She invited them to tea at her place on January 8, 1796.319
Godwin recorded in his Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman that he had first met Mary Wollstonecraft in November 1791 at one of Johnson’s weekly dinners in honor of Tom Paine, who had just published the openly republican The Rights of Man.
Godwin noted that their first meeting did not go well: “Mary and myself parted, mutually displeased with each other.”320 He had not read her Rights of Men or the Rights of Woman, so he was not curious about meeting her, but very interested in talking to Tom Paine. However Paine was not very talkative, and as a result, Godwin remarked: “I heard Mary very frequently when I wished to hear Paine.”321 But that night they talked about numerous subjects, including French polymath Voltaire, the English man of letters Samuel Johnson, and John Horne Took, radical politician and philologist. When the subject of religion came up, “her opinions approached much nearer to the received ones than mine.”322 Godwin was already the very successful author of An
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1790), a major treaty of political anarchism, and was ready to publish his novel The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), which was an attack on aristocratic privilege. Based on the success of both, Godwin was the most celebrated radical in
London in the 1790s. Before Wollstonecraft had left for Paris, they had met again two or three times at other events over the course of that year, but had not established a friendship.
319 Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life, p. 379. 320 William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, p. 80. 321 Godwin, Memoirs of the Author, p. 81. 322 Godwin, Memoirs, p. 80. 87
Godwin was born in 1756 in Cambridgeshire and brought up in the traditions of strict
Calvinism. His father was a Dissenting minister, and Godwin was educated in his father’s profession at Hoxton Academy in London, not far from Newington Green. Upon graduation, he stayed in London as a minister, but decided instead to become a writer after reading the French philosophers. In a short period of time, he dropped his religious outlook in favour of atheism.323
His aim was the complete overthrow of all existing political, social and religious institutions. He believed, however, that calm discussion was the only thing needful to carry every change, and from the beginning to the end of his career he deprecated every approach to violence.
When Godwin re-met Wollstonecraft over tea, he was immediately attracted to her for her Letters from Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, which he spent three days reading, writing in his Memoirs, “If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book. She speaks of her sorrows, in a way that fills us with melancholy, and dissolves us in tenderness, at the same time she displays a genius which commands all our admiration.”324 By the summer of 1796, the couple was intimate but lived in two different apartments.
Godwin linked Mary's religious beliefs to her intuition, where she adopted one opinion and rejected another, then reasoned a little, so there was soundness in her determination.325
Godwin sounded dismissive to say that she "reasoned little" after Wollstonecraft's had translated three books in three languages, was familiar with most of the theological writings of the century, and had argued that true religion was not mere sentiment, but rather "a governing
323 Peter H. Marshall, William Godwin, philosopher, novelist, Revolutionary. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984, p. 240. “The poet Coleridge also introduced Charles Lamb to Godwin. Lamb had shown some sympathy for the New Philosophy but the arguments of Coleridge and his own religiosity and common sense quickly turned him against it. He was particularly repelled by Godwin's atheism.” 324 Godwin, Memoirs, p. 95. 325 Godwin, pp. 96-97. 88 principle of conduct, drawn from self-knowledge, and rational opinion expecting the attributes of God."326
As Wollstonecraft and Godwin progressed from being acquaintances to friends and eventually to lovers, she celebrated his divergence from Imlay. With Godwin she experienced,
“one of those moments, when the senses are exactly tuned by the rising tenderness of the heart, and according reason entices you to live in the present moment, regardless of the past or future.
It is not rapture - it is a sublime tranquility I have felt in your arms.”327 This was a tranquility that she had never felt before in her life. Godwin promised her that she would no longer be a
“solitary walker.”328
They did not marry right away because she was nervous about making a serious commitment, “with a heart withered by desertion.”329 Godwin was a known skeptic about marriage, but admitted, “I had never loved till now; or at least had never nourished a passion to the same growth, or met with an object so worthy.”330 They decided to marry on March 29,
1797 at Saint Pancras Church, because Wollstonecraft was already pregnant. Their marriage worked well because they lived in separate residences and they maintained different social circles.331 But the news of their marriage shocked their acquaintances, because they assumed that she was married to Imlay, since she had nearly two-year old Fanny.332 In his Memoirs,
Godwin insisted that Wollstonecraft made it clear she was not married to Imlay when she returned to London from Paris. Only a few people knew the truth of the situation, such as
326 Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, p. 218. 327 MW to Godwin, September 30, 1796, in Todd, ed. Collected Letters, pp. 369-371. 328 Reference to Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker (1776), Godwin wrote “Do not become a solitary walker” in response to a letter that MW wrote to him, August 17th, 1796, Collected Letters, pp. 348-349. 329 Godwin, Memoirs, p. 105. 330 Ibid. 331 Andrew Cayton, Love in the Time of Revolution, p. 159. 332 Godwin, pp. 107-108. 89
Joseph Johnson and Mary Hayes. They remained quiet about their marriage, but his friend
Thomas Holcroft pronounced them, “the most extraordinary married pair in existence.”333
On August 30, 1797, Wollstonecraft gave birth to her second daughter that the couple named Mary. But complications arose, the placenta did not follow the baby, and Wollstonecraft lost a great deal of blood. The baby was healthy, but within a few days, on September 10,
Wollstonecraft died of puerperal fever. She was buried on September 15 in the churchyard at
Old Saint Pancras, the church they were married in. Mary Wollstonecraft was thirty-eight years old when she died.334
Wollstonecraft’s daughters Fanny Imlay and Mary Godwin grew up under their father’s tutelage. Both girls read Godwin’s scandalous memoir, and they were entranced by their mother’s books, and cherished their mother’s memory.335 Godwin had adopted Fanny, but she kept her father’s last name of Imlay. He took his two daughters on educational outings and they had access to his library and the many intellectuals who visited him, including the Romantic poet Samuel Coleridge and the former vice-president of the United States, Aaron Burr.336 Burr, who had killed Alexander Hamilton, the US statesman and American Founding Father, in a duel, fled America to avoid his creditors and to move forward with his life.337 After moving to
England in 1812 Burr acquired a painting of Mary Wollstonecraft, which he hung over his fireplace.338 He greatly admired the works of Wollstonecraft and had educated his own daughter according to the precepts of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Burr was excited to meet the
333 Godwin, Collected Novels and Memoirs, Holcroft to Godwin, April 6, 1797. Oxford: Bodleian, p. 58. 334 Godwin, Memoirs, p. 120. 335 Pamela Clemit, “The Legacies of Godwin and Wollstonecraft,” Cambridge Companions Online, 2006, p. 29. 336 Betty T. Bennett, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: An Introduction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998, pp. 16-17. 337 Nancy Isenberg, Fallen Father: The Life of Aaron Burr. New York: Viking, 2007, p. 380. 338 The painting is currently held at the New York Historical Society (170 Central Park West, NYC 10024), viewed in June 2016. 90 daughters of the woman he revered and referred to Fanny and Mary as "goddesses" and spent most of his time talking with Fanny about political and educational topics.339
In 1814 Mary Godwin, at the age of sixteen, ran away from her home with the married charismatic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and at age eighteen wrote the Gothic novel Frankenstein while they were visiting Lord Byron in Switzerland. Historian Janet Todd suggests that Mary
Godwin sister Fanny’s imagination was sparked by the arrival of Percy Bysshe Shelley to the
Godwin household.340 Her infatuation with Shelley was quickly shattered when he chose the company of her sister Mary instead. Fanny was never quite the same after Mary and Shelley eloped along with her stepsister Claire. She spent a great deal of time as a go-between, helping smooth over the endless intrigues of the Shelley and Godwin circle, while realizing none of her own dreams. At the age of twenty-two, in 1816, Fanny committed suicide by taking a fatal dose of laudanum.
Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft revealed her loving care for infant Fanny in her letters from Scandinavia: “I grow more and more attached to my little girl and I cherish this affection without fear, because it must be a long time before it can become bitterness of the soul. She is an interesting little creature…and her playful smiles seem to cling and twine around my heart.”341
Todd notes that Fanny was immortalized in her mother’s Letters, but she did not become a writer, so her own voice was rarely heard in any letters or other works.342
339 Janet Todd, Death and the Maidens: Fanny Wollstonecraft and the Shelley Circle. London: Bloomsbury Reader, 2013, p.64. 340 Todd, Death and the Maidens, p. 65. 341 Wollstonecraft, Letters to Imlay, Letter LV, The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Vol. 6, p. 418. 342 Todd, Death and the Maidens, p.70. 91
William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft
Conclusion
The reconstruction of Mary Wollstonecraft’s life began with Godwin’s Memoirs of the
Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798), which he wrote immediately after her death. This biography shocked its readers because of the honesty used in the description of the
92 private events of her extraordinary life, and his revelation that she lacked little religious faith.
Although Godwin believed telling all would boost her reputation, it unleashed a firestorm of controversy, and her unsettled personal life became an easy excuse to belittle her ideas. The poet Robert Southey joined the chorus of disapproval and condemned Godwin for
“stripping his dead wife naked.”343
Godwin argued that her religion “was in reality, little allied to any system of forms; and as she has often told me, was founded rather in taste than in the niceties of polemical discussion,” finding her delights in the beauty of nature, and “the splendid reveries of imagination.”344 Godwin noted that she enjoyed Dr. Richard Price’s sermons, but she never developed a superstitious belief in his doctrines.345 Wollstonecraft attended the Church of
England in her early years, but once she moved to Newington Green, she stopped going to church. Revealing his own atheistic bias, Godwin stated, “I believe it may be admitted as a maxim of a well furnished mind, that has shaken off the implicit subjection of youth can bring him self to conform to the public and regular routine of sermons and prayers.”346 Most people who read Godwin’s memoir were shocked when they read because he revealed Wollstonecraft’s attempted liaison with the artist Fuseli, her affair with Imlay, her illegitimate child Fanny, her two suicide attempts, and her affair and subsequent marriage to Godwin. One of Godwin and
Wollstonecraft’s most bitter critics, the Anti-Jacobin Review attacked the memoir and their marriage in 1801:
343 Henry Cockburn, University of Oxford Podcasts, Part of the Shelley's Ghost Exhibition, December 2010. 344 William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of the ‘Rights of Woman’ (1798), p. 95. 345 Ibid. 346 Godwin, Memoirs, p. 123. 93
The saw I mounted on a braying ass,
William and Mary, sooth, a couple jolly;
Who married, note ye how it came to pass,
Although each held that marriage was but folly?
And she of curses would discharge a volley
If the ass stumbled, leaping pales or ditches:
Her husband, sans-culottes, was melancholy,
For Mary verily would wear the breeches—
God help poor silly men from such usurping b—s.
Whilom this dame the Rights of Women writ,
That is the title to her book she places,
Exhorting bashful womankind to quit
All foolish modesty, and coy grimaces;
And name their backsides as it were their faces;
Such licence loose-tongued liberty adores,
Which adds to female speech exceeding graces;
Lucky the maid that on her volume pores,
A scripture, archly fram'd, for propagating w—s.
William hath penn'd a waggon-load of stuff,
And Mary's life at last he needs must write,
Thinking her whoredoms were not known enough,
Till fairly printed off in black and white.—
94
With wondrous glee and pride, this simple wight
Her brothel feats of wantonness sets down,
Being her spouse, he tells, with huge delight,
How oft she cuckolded the silly clown,
347 And lent, O lovely piece! herself to half the town.
I have argued in my thesis that Wollstonecraft’s ten-year writing career can be divided into three distinct stages. In the first period, between 1787 and 1788, Wollstonecraft’s Anglican theology shaped her pessimism regarding family and political reform, yet it inspired hope for divine justice in the next life. Her ability to impress men like Dr. Price and Dr. Samuel Johnson, as well as the publisher Joseph Johnson, was no normal accomplishment for an obscure schoolmistress in her twenties with no formal accomplishments. Dr. Price played an influential role in Mary Wollstonecraft’s changing views of religion and her political activism. Under his tutelage, she became a political and rational reformer. Her early Anglican faith evolved under
Price’s radical Dissenting ideas, which emphasized eternal truth and reason. His sermons at
Newington Green led to her political and religious awakening. During this stage, she became the owner of a school for girls in Newington Green, and then became a governess for an aristocratic family in Ireland. She was reading John Locke and Rousseau, who influenced her ideas on the education of children. Wollstonecraft still had a blind faith in God, without the ability to critique societal problems, which came to her later while writing the Vindications. The early period invokes the consolations of a private religious sensibility rather than political radicalism. She knew that girls needed to be educated, because so many were left without money from their
347 “The Vision of Liberty,” written in the manner of Spencer. Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine 9, Appendix, 1809, pp. 515-520. 95 families and were forced to become companions to a rich cousins, or to live as a governess with tyrannical strangers. Wollstonecraft had first-hand experience with being left penniless by her family.
In the second stage between 1789 and 1792, I have argued that her philosophy and writings were the direct result of the radical Dissenting ideas that she was exposed to in
London’s cultural and literary milieu. Wollstonecraft’s identity and changing religious views were informed by her social class, her gender, and the radical voices around her at Johnson’s
Analytical Review, where she had become a professional writer, in comparison to the more conservative values expressed by the Church of England, the monarchy and the anti- revolutionary advocates for stability, who ignored the rights of women. Because of her talents in writing and translating, she declared she was going to be ‘the first of a new genus.' Her newfound fearless political optimism quickly embraced a more abstract, rationalistic and politically progressive theology influenced by the radical Dissenters who were also supporters of the republican cause in France. The themes expressed in her work represented a break from her passive Anglican past and reflected a more strident activist view that expressed radical
Dissenting ideas, leading her to support the egalitarian family, the equal education of girls and boys and to promote human rights for children. In her first Vindication: Rights of Man
Wollstonecraft critiqued Edmund Burke’s belief that Price’s call for relentless debates over rights would lead to anarchy. She equated Price with reason, liberty, free discussion, mental superiority, the improving exercise of the mind, moral excellence, active benevolence, and the rejection of power and riches. Wollstonecraft supported Enlightenment views on civil and religious liberty informed by John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1690). Burke argued that the British legal system had its roots in the Magna Carta (1215), whereas Wollstonecraft
96 argued that these laws were not based on natural rights, but rather on property laws and inheritance. When Burke declared himself to be a friend of liberty, Wollstonecraft replied that he was simply a champion of property. Her utopian vision imagined useful pastoral farms replacing aristocratic estates filled with superficial luxury. She imagined an enlightened age, where gardens would grow, and bliss and harmony would reign in the family, the school, the playing fields, and the church. She would be considered a Leftist Communist today, as she argued that large estates should be taken from aristocrats and divided into large farms.
Wollstonecraft, echoing her mentor Richard Price, argued that we are born with natural rights, inherited at birth from God as rational creatures.
In the second Vindication, Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft advocated for the abolishment of plantation slavery. She was also deeply concerned about the condition of life for girls and women in the late eighteenth century, which she argued was similar to slavery. Those who had good lives were lucky, because women at that time could not own property, or have any legal rights of their own. They could be separated from their children if they left an abusive husband, and could be legally raped or beaten by their husbands, fathers or brothers.
I have argued that the philosophers John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the two great educational theorists of the eighteenth century, had a great intellectual influence on
Wollstonecraft’s writings about children’s education. But the greatest influence on her arguments for the human rights for children was based on her own personal experiences, as the daughter of an alcoholic violent man.
Wollstonecraft’s religious beliefs shifted to a more abstract Romantic deism during the late period (1793-1797) of her writing career. In revolutionary Paris, where she wrote her history of revolution, she was again informed by philosopher John Locke’s recommendation for
97 tolerance in regards to religious differences in An Essay Concerning Toleration (1667). She respected French writer Voltaire who repeatedly criticized the superstitious nature of religion; and Rousseau who depicted the evils of a priest-ridden society.
During this period, when living and writing in revolutionary Paris, Wollstonecraft met
American Gilbert Imlay and soon began a love affair with him. She believed that she had finally found an egalitarian partnership with Imlay, untrammelled by the marital bonds that subordinated women to their husbands. Living through the revolution, ironically brought her closer to Burke in his condemnation of violence. Imlay and Wollstonecraft’s relationship eventually led to the illegitimate birth of their daughter Fanny Wollstonecraft Imlay, and shortly thereafter, he abandoned them in Paris. When she returned to London, she attempted suicide and
Imlay persuaded Wollstonecraft to go to Scandinavia on a personal business prospect to help her recover. She travelled there with her baby, to a land unknown by most people in Britain, during the summer of 1795 at the age of thirty-six. Joseph Johnson offered her a contract to write a travel journal, which produced Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Denmark and Norway (1796). I have argued that during the Scandinavian journey Wollstonecraft developed a new faith, which could be called Romantic deism, which blended a mystical appreciation of the wonders of Creation along with an abstract, philosophical and melancholic view of God as the impersonal Creator of a paradoxical world filled with both great beauty and terrible evil. Deists embraced a Newtonian worldview and believed that all things, even God, must obey the laws of nature. She developed a more contemplative view of religion with feelings, the language of the sublime, and imagination, which became central to her spirituality.
Her deistic, skeptical and atheistic world view led her to despair of ever reforming the family or society, as well as ever realizing justice in this world or the next.
98
Despite the fact that Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of
Woman plunged Wollstonecraft into more than a century of scholarly neglect, her ideas played an important role in shaping the leading figures of Romanticism, including daughter Mary and her husband Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. Coleridge’s psychological pain in the poem Dejection: An Ode (1802) echoed Wollstonecraft’s record of her suffering in
Scandinavia. Many of the lines from his Kubla Khan (1797) were directly inspired by Letters from Sweden, including:
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover.348
Romantic poet Robert Southey stated that the Letters from Sweden “made me fall in love with a northern moonlight.”349
American suffragettes Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony endorsed
Wollstonecraft’s view that women should possess the same civil and political rights as men in order to crate a truly democratic republic.350 Wollstonecraft influenced author Virginia Woolf’s feminist orientation. In 1925, she described Wollstonecraft’s “form of immortality” through the idea that “she is alive and active, she argues and experiments, and we hear her voice and trace her influence even now among the living.”351
348 Coleridge’s Kubla Khan quoted in Richard Holmes, introduction, A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark and Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. New York: Penguin Books, 1987, p. 41. 349 349 Southey quoted in Holmes, p. 17. 350 Botting, Eileen, “Wollstonecraft’s Impact on Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Rights Advocates.” American Journal of Political Science, October 2004, p. 716. 351 Virginia Woolf, “Four Figures,” The Common Reader (1925), ed. Andrew McNeillie. London: Hogarth Press, 1984, p. 163. 99
Scholars have insisted on situating Wollstonecraft and Burke on opposite poles of the
French Revolution Controversy. They point out the obvious differences between them, but I claim that there are important similarities between the two rivals. Both Wollstonecraft and Burke are morally conservative and she introduced Christian imagery in her philosophy of the family, found in both of her Vindications. Her radical Dissenting theological principles, which animated her work before the French Revolution, make it difficult to categorize Wollstonecraft under modern secular feminist labels.
Nineteenth-century biographies took greater care in illuminating the stages of
Wollstonecraft’s theological development, arguing that she shifted from Anglican Christianity to the rationalistic theology of Dissenting Christianity.352 The early scholars tried to refute
Godwin’s boast that his once religious wife died an atheist and tried to redeem Wollstonecraft as a good Christian in the eyes of Victorians by revealing the Anglican and Dissenting Christian theological basis of her early and middle writings. However they failed to look in detail at the influence of the anti-Trinitarian and Unitarian theology of her middle period, or the deistic and possibly atheistic orientation of her later years. The second wave of feminist scholarship claimed Wollstonecraft as the founding mother of their movement and to their credit, lobbied hard for her rightful place in the Western Canon of Literature. Most scholars have represented
Wollstonecraft as a radical thinker who called for the complete overthrow of family life and who rejected any hierarchy between family members.353
352 Elizabeth Pennell, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. London: W.H. Allen & Co, 1885; C. Kegan-Paul, William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries, London: H.C. King, 1876. 353 Claudia Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender and Sentimentality in the 1790’s, University of Chicago Press, 1995, p. 48 and Mary, Maria and Matilda, ed. Janet Todd, London: Pickering & Chatto, 1991, p. viii and xxvi present a skewed view of Wollstonecraft’s philosophy of the family in favor of single motherhood and an all female support network. 100
My thesis has traced the centrality of her religious views on the development of her theories on the anti-slavery and women, her radical critique of property, which was intertwined with her conception of rights, the egalitarian family whereby the rights of girls and boys were to be educated together, her support for physical activity, and for human rights for children. I have argued that Wollstonecraft was a religiously motivated and morally conservative thinker, and I have tried to escape the trap that has ensnared many Wollstonecraft biographers who have simply subjected her writings to biographical psychoanalysis, particularly in regards to her relationships with Fuseli, Imlay and Godwin, but I cannot deny that these three figures greatly influenced her life. Wollstonecraft biographers endlessly debate whether it was her unrequited love for the artist Henry Fuseli, her failed romance with Gilbert Imlay, or her marriage to the atheistic William Godwin that triggered her disillusionment with Christianity in the final period of her life. Instead, I have tried to focus on the central role religion played in her unique philosophy in regards to women’s rights, anti-slavery, her critique of property, her support for the egalitarian family, her advocacy for the equal education of boys and girls, her belief that physical exercise should play a central role in education, and her support for the human rights of children, rather than just her personal life.
.
101
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Museums
Bodleian Library, Oxford University. “Shelley’s Ghosts,” a collaboration between the Bodleian Library
and the New York Public Library which united the two collections to chart the history of the
Wollstonecraft-Shelley Family. Visited in 2015.
British Museum, London. Cartoons, British: Prints and Photographs Division, 1790’s. Visited in 2016.
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Pforzheimer Collection: New York Public Library. Holds a collection of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters.
Visited in 2016.
Queen’s Gallery: Buckingham Palace, London. “High Spirits: The Comic Art of Thomas Rowlandson.”
Visited in 2016.
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