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Notes 1 ‘A genius will educate itself’: Mary Wollstonecraft as Autodidact 1. William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, eds Pamela Clemit and Gina Luria Walker (Ontario and Letchworth, Herts: Broadview Press, 2001), p. 44. Henceforth cited in parenthesis as MAVRW. 2. The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (London: Pickering, 1989), 1: 124. All quotations are taken from this edition and will henceforth be cited in parenthesis. 3. Letterpress copy of letter dated 11 January, 1798. Abinger Archive. Dep.b.227/8. 4. See Matthew Mercer, ‘Dissenting Academies and the Education of the Laity, 1750–1850’, History of Education, 30:1 (2001), 35–58; and William St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys: A Biography of a Family (Baltimore, Maryland: The John Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 8–9. 5. Abinger Archive, Dep.b.214/3. 6. I am indebted to Michael Franklin for tracing the quotations except for William King, which was provided in Janet Todd’s The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 2. The latter only came out as this book was being revised. 7. Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain 1760–1800 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1989), p. 86. 8. Susan Gubar, ‘Feminist Misogyny: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Paradox of “It takes One to Know One”’, Feminist Studies 20:3 (1994), 453–73. 9. See Stuart Brown’s entry in The Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century British Philos- ophers, eds John W. Yolton, John Valdimir Price and John Stephens (Bristol and Sterling, Virginia: Thoemmes Press, 1999), 2, 872–4. 10. Letter of 18 Feb 1784. Abinger archive, Dep.b.210/9. 11. William Robinson, The History and Antiquities of the Parish of Stoke Newington in the County of Middlesex, Containing an Account of the Prebendal Manor, the Church, Charities, Schools, Meeting Houses etc (London, 1842). 12. Abinger archive, Dep.c.604/1. 13. John Gasgoigne, ‘Anglican Latitudinarianism, Rational Dissent and Political Radicalism in the Late Eighteenth Century’, in Knud Haakonsen (ed.), Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 219–240, p. 224. 14. Gasgoigne, ‘Latitudinarians, Rational Dissent and Radicalism’, p. 231. 15. Barbara Taylor argues for the religious context of Wollstoncraft’s feminism in ‘The Religious Foundations of Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminism’, in Claudia L. Johnson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 99–118. Her impressive monograph on the subject, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination 212 Notes 213 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) came out as this book was at the revision stage. Chapter 3 is essential reading on MW’s personal faith. 16. I am indebted for my summary of Price’s theology to D.O. Thomas, The Honest Mind: The Thought and Work of Richard Price (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), chs 1–5. 17. Thomas, The Honest Mind, p. 201. 18. See Cheryl Turner, Living By The Pen: Women Writers in the Eighteenth Century (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 36–9. 19. Thoughts on Education, Tending Chiefly to Recommend the Attention of the Public, some Particulars Relating to That Subject, which are not Generally Considered with the Regard their Importance Deserves (Boston, 1749), p. 15. 20. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (eds), The Ideology of Conduct: Essays in Literature and the History of Sexuality (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), p. 4. 21. Gary Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1992), p. 31. 22. Hannah More, Essay on Various Subjects, Principally Designed for Young Ladies, 2nd edn (London: Wilkie, 1778), p. 3. All quotations are taken from this edition and henceforth cited in parenthesis. 23. See John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: Harper Collins, 1997), p. 78. 24. Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 49. 25. Quoted in Claire Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1974), p. 75. 26. Katherine Sobba Green uses the term in connection with Mary: A Fiction in The Courtship Novel, 1740–1820: A Feminized Genre (Lexington, Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press, 1991), p. 96. 27. Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination, p. 193; see also: Jacqueline Pearson, Women’s Reading in Britain 1750–1835: A Dangerous Recreation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 28. Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, pp. 108–10. She comments that a strong Platonist element was discernible in Unitarian thought, especially in Price’s moral philosophy and the writings of Anna Barbauld. 29. Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, p. 205. 30. English Review, 16 (1790), 465. See also Monthly Review, NS 2 (1790), 352–3. 2 ‘When the voices of children are heard on the green’: Mary Wollstonecraft the Author-Educator 1. Linda A. Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent–Child Relations from 1500 to 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 269. 2. John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, eds John W. and Jean S. Yolton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 195–6. 3. The Works of the Rev. Isaac Watts, 7 vols (Leeds: Edward Baines, n.d.), VI: 359–60. 214 Notes 4. Mary V. Jackson, Engines of Instruction, Mischief and Mag!c: Children’s Literature in England from Its Beginnings to 1839 (Aldershot, Hants and Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), p. 104. 5. Harvey J. Graff, The Labyrinths of Literacy: Reflections on Literacy Past and Present (London, New York and Philadelphia: The Falmer Press, 1987), p. 34. 6. Bette P. Goldstone, Lessons To Be Learned: A Study of Eighteenth-Century English Didactic Children’s Literature (New York, Berne and Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1984), p. 43. 7. Mitzi Myers. ‘Impeccable Governesses, Rational Dames, and Moral Mothers: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Female Tradition in Georgian Children’s Books’, in Children’s Literature, eds Margaret Higonnet and Barbara Rosen (New Haven and London: Yale University, Press, 1986), 31–59. 8. Gary Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Woll- stonecraft (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1992), p. 58. See also: Isaac Kramnick, ‘Children’s Literature and Bourgeois Ideology’, in Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth- Century England and America (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 99–132; and M.O. Grenby, ‘Politicizing the Nursery: British Children’s Literature and the French Revolution’, The Lion and the Unicorn, 27:1 (2003), 1–26. 9. Quoted by Grenby, ‘Politicizing the Nursery’, p. 1. Grenby also notes the Privy Council’s investigation of Godwin’s Juvenile Library, which an informer said was propagating ‘the principles of democracy and Theophilanthropy’, p. 2. His argument that 1790s children’s literature was not political excludes the religious dimension of ideology. 10. Mrs Sarah Trimmer, A Comment on Dr. Watts’ Divine Songs to Children with Questions Designed to Illustrate the Doctrines and Precepts to Which They Refer; and Induce a Proper Application of them as Intruments of Early Piety (London, 1789), p. iv. 11. G.E. Bentley, Jr, ‘William Blake in France: The First Foreign Engravings after Blake’s Designs’, Australian Journal of French Studies 26 (1989), 125–47. I have obtained the information on the French edition from Bentley. 12. Reprinted in Essays in Honour of William Gallacher, eds P.M. Kemp-Ashraf and Dr J. Mitchell (Humboldt: Universität zu Berlin, 1966), pp. 339–340. 13. See Malcom Chase, ‘The People’s Farm’: English Radical Agrarianism 1775–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 21–2. 14. Susan Khin Zaw, ‘The Reasonable heart: Mary Wollstonecraft’s view of the relation between reason and feeling in morality, moral psychology, and moral development’, Hypatia, 13:1 (Winter 1998), 78–117, 96. 15. Compare Wollstonecraft’s emphasis on social conscience with the Cavinist concentration on personal salvation exhibited by Jane Taylor, author with her sister Ann of the phenomenally successful Original Poems for Infant Minds (1805), who wrote to a friend, ‘I have sometimes thought that more might be done than is commonly attempted in education, to familiarize the idea of death to the minds of children, by representing it as the grand event for which they are born’. See Memoirs, Correspondence and Poetical Remains of Jane Taylor, 3 vols (Boston and Philadelphia: Perkins, 1835), I: 209. 16. Alan Richardson comments that Wollstonecraft acknowledges ‘the inherently compromised nature of the fictionalized object lesson in the book’s preface, Notes 215 noting the vast superiority of proper habits “imperceptibly fixed” by daily experience’, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft on Education’, in The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Claudia L. Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 24–41, p. 29. 17. Saba Bahar, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Social and Aesthetic Philosophy: ‘An Eve to Please Me’ (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 138–9. 18. On Blake’s illustrations as ironic commentary on the stories, see, Dennis Welch, ‘Blake’s Response to Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories’, Blake: An Illus- trated Quarterly, 13 (1979), 4–15; Nelson Hilton, ‘An Original Story’, in Nelson Hilton et al. (eds), Unnam’d Forms: Blake and Textuality (Berkely: University of California Press, 1986); Jeffrey Parker, ‘Text and Iconography in the Commercial Designs of William Blake’, PhD thesis (University of South Carolina, July 1991). Orm Mitchell seems to me to exaggerate the irony in ‘Blake’s Subversive Illustrations to Wollstonecraft’s Stories’, Mosaic, 17:4 (Autumn, 1984), 17–34. 19. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p.
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