Godwin on Wollstonecraft: The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft by William Godwin. William Godwin

Wollstonecraft of leading astray a whole generation of blue-stockings and female intellectuals. They are ‘unsex’d’ (presumably like Lady Macbeth), in the sense of having abandoned their traditional role as wives and mothers. They are a ‘melting tribe’ of vengeful, voracious and intellectually perverted women authors, who have been seduced by Wollstonecraft’s principles.

      Polwhele cites them by name in what is intended as a litany of shame: Mary Hays, Mrs Barbauld, Mary Robinson, Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams…It is also, perhaps more sinisterly, intended as a kind of ‘blacklist’ of politically suspect authors, whose books no respectable woman should purchase. Many of these were of course friends of Godwin’s, and they do indeed represent an entire generation of ‘English Jacobin’ writers, for whom the American and French Revolutions had been an inspiration, and against whom the tide of history was now ineluctably turning. For many of them the paths of their professional careers would henceforth curve downwards towards poverty, exile, obscurity and premature death.

      It was now open season on Godwin. Yet paradoxically the Memoirs were selling briskly, for a second edition was called for by the summer of 1798. There were also printings in France and America. After anxious discussion with Joseph Johnson, Godwin made a series of alterations in the text, most notably re-writing (or rather, expanding) passages connected with Henry Fuseli, Mary’s suicide attempt in the Thames, and the summary of her character with which the biography concludes. These three re-written sections from the second edition, are given in the Appendix at the end of the present text.

      He also suppressed the references to the Wedgwood family, and rephrased sentences that had been gleefully taken by reviewers as sexually ambiguous. But the overall character of the Memoirs was unchanged, and it remained an intense provocation. Other events also served fortuitously to keep up the sense of a continuing outrage against public morals. One of Mary’s expupils from the Kingsborough family was involved in an elopement (and murder) scandal; while Johnson himself was imprisoned for six months for publishing a seditious libel, though quite unconnected with the Memoirs. The sentence broke the elderly Johnson’s health, and effectively ended his career as the greatest radical publisher of the day.

      The Anti-Jacobin and other conservative magazines felt free to keep up their attacks for months, and indeed years, descending to increasing scurrility and causing Godwin endless private anguish. Three years later in August 1801, the subject was still topical enough for the young Tory George Canning to publish a long set of jeering satirical verses, entitled ‘The Vision of Liberty’. It was not even necessary for Canning to give Godwin and Wollstonecraft’s surnames. One stanza will suffice.

      William hath penn’d a wagon-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.

      With wond’rous 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,

      And lent, o lovely piece!, herself to half the town.

      Wollstonecraft’s name was now too controversial, or even ridiculous, to mention in serious publications. Her erstwhile supporter Mary Hays omitted her from the five-volumes Dictionary of Female Biography that she compiled in 1803. The same astonishing omission occurs in Mathilda Bentham’s Dictionary of Celebrated Women of 1804. Satirical attacks on Godwin and Wollstonecraft continued throughout the next decade, though many of them were now in the form of fiction.

      Maria Edgeworth wrote a comic version of the Wollstonecraft type in the person of the headstrong Harriet Freke (she promulgates adultery, intellectual repartee and female dueling) who appears in her novel Belinda (1801). The beautiful Amelia Alderson, now safely married to the painter John Opie (who had executed the tender portrait of Wollstonecraft that always hung in Godwin’s study) revised her views on the springs of domestic happiness. Using Wollstonecraft’s story, she produced a fictional account of a disastrous saga of unmarried love in Adeline Mowbray (1805). Much later Fanny Burney explored the emotional contradictions of Wollstonecraft’s life in the long debates on matrimony and love, which are played out like elegant tennis rallies, between the sensible Juliet and the passionate Elinor, in The Wanderer, or Female Difficulties (1813).

      Alexander Chalmers summed up the case against Wollstonecraft in his entry for The General Biographical Dictionary which appeared in 1814, at the very end of the Napoleonic Wars. This was a time when patriotic feeling was at its height, and distrust of subversive or vaguely French ideologies was at its most extreme. Mary Wollstonecraft was accordingly dismissed as ‘a voluptuary and a sensualist’. Her views on women’s rights and education were stigmatized as irrelevant fantasies: ‘she unfolded many a wild theory on the duties and character of her sex.’ Her whole life, as described by Godwin, was a disgusting tale best forgotten. ‘She rioted in sentiments alike repugnant to religion, sense and decency’.

      It is perhaps no coincidence that two years later Jane Austen’s Emma (1816) was published to great acclaim. A new kind of heroine was being prepared for the Victorian age.

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      From this time on Mary Wollstonecraft’s name was apparently eclipsed in Great Britain for the rest of the 19th century. There was only one further Victorian re-printing of The Rights of Woman until its centenary in 1892; and no further editions of the Memoirs until 1927. Respectable opinion was summed up by the formidable Harriet Martineau in her Autobiography, written in 1855, and published in 1870. Women of the Wollstonecraft order…do infinite mischief, and for my part, I do not wish to have anything to do with them.’ She concluded that the story of her life proved that Wollstonecraft was neither ‘a safe example, nor a successful champion of Woman and her Rights’.

      The force and endurance of these attacks, and the sense of shock and outrage that they express, suggest that the Memoirs had touched on a deep nerve in British society. It had arrived at a critical moment at the end of the 1790s, when both political ideology and social fashion had turned decisively against the revolutionary hopes and freedoms that Wollstonecraft’s life represented. It was a time of political reaction and social retrenchment. It was also wartime.

      As William Hazlitt later wrote of Godwin: ‘The Spirit of the Age was never more fully shown than in the treatment of this writer – its love of paradox and change, its dastard submission to prejudice and the fashion of the day…Fatal reverse! Is truth then so variable? Is it one thing at twenty and another at forty? Is it at a burning heat in 1793, and below zero in 1814?’ (The Spirit of the Age, 1825)

      It is now possible to see a little more clearly what made the Memoirs so provocative and so remarkable. No one had written about a woman like this before, except perhaps Daniel Defoe in the fictional Lives of his incorrigible 18^th century heroines, like Moll Flanders. But Godwin was writing strict and indeed meticulous non-fiction, using a plain narrative style and a fearless psychological acuity. He signally ignored, or even deliberately aimed to provoke, proprieties of every kind, especial political and sexual ones.

      Beginning with her uncertain birth in 1759 (Mary was unsure whether she was born in Spitalfields or Epping Forest), Godwin unflinchingly describes her restless and unhappy childhood, dominated by a drunken, bullying and abusive father, and a spoilt elder brother. His account gives the famous and iconic picture of Mary sleeping all night on the floor outside the parental bedroom, hoping to protect her mother from her father’s assaults. This upbringing left her the victim of life-long depressive episodes, alternating with periods of reckless energy and anger. ‘Mary was a very good hater’. But she was determined on a life-long ‘project of personal independence’, and revealed an instinctive desire to control and manage those around her. (Chapter 1).

      He next recounts her overwhelming and ‘fervent’ friendship for the beautiful Fanny Blood, ‘which for years constituted the ruling passion of her mind’. Godwin