MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT.

BY

ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL.

BOSTON:
ROBERTS BROTHERS.
1890.

Copyright, 1884,
By Roberts Brothers.

University Press: John Wilson and Son, Cambridge.

PREFACE.

Comparatively little has been written about the life of Mary Wollstonecraft. The two authorities upon the subject are Godwin and Mr. C. Kegan Paul. In writing the following Biography I have relied chiefly upon the Memoir written by the former, and the Life of Godwin and Prefatory Memoir to the Letters to Imlay of the latter. I have endeavored to supplement the facts recorded in these books by a careful analysis of Mary Wollstonecraft’s writings and study of the period in which she lived.

I must here express my thanks to Mr. Garnett, of the British Museum, and to Mr. C. Kegan Paul, for the kind assistance they have given me in my work. To the first named of these gentlemen I am indebted for the loan of a manuscript containing some particulars of Mary Wollstonecraft’s last illness which have never yet appeared in print, and to Mr. Paul for the gift, as well as the loan, of several important books.

E. R. P.

London, August, 1884.

CONTENTS.

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT.

INTRODUCTION.

Few women have worked so faithfully for the cause of humanity as Mary Wollstonecraft, and few have been the objects of such bitter censure. She devoted herself to the relief of her suffering fellow-beings with the ardor of a Saint Vincent de Paul, and in return she was considered by them a moral scourge of God. Because she had the courage to express opinions new to her generation, and the independence to live according to her own standard of right and wrong, she was denounced as another Messalina. The young were bidden not to read her books, and the more mature warned not to follow her example, the miseries she endured being declared the just retribution of her actions. Indeed, the infamy attached to her name is almost incredible in the present age, when new theories are more patiently criticised, and when purity of motive has been accepted as the vindication of at least one well-known breach of social laws. The malignant attacks made upon her character since her death have been too great to be ignored. They had best be stated here, that the life which follows may serve as their refutation.

As a rule, the notices which were published after she was dead were harsher and more uncompromising than those written during her lifetime. There were happily one or two exceptions. The writer of her obituary notice in the “Monthly Magazine” for September, 1797, speaks of her in terms of unlimited admiration.

“This extraordinary woman,” he writes, “no less distinguished by admirable talents and a masculine tone of understanding, than by active humanity, exquisite sensibility, and endearing qualities of heart, commanding the respect and winning the affections of all who were favored with her friendship or confidence, or who were within the sphere of her influence, may justly be considered as a public loss. Quick to feel, and indignant to resist, the iron hand of despotism, whether civil or intellectual, her exertions to awaken in the minds of her oppressed sex a sense of their degradation, and to restore them to the dignity of reason and virtue, were active and incessant; by her impassioned reasoning and glowing eloquence, the fabric of voluptuous prejudice has been shaken to its foundation and totters towards its fall; while her philosophic mind, taking a wider range, perceived and lamented in the defects of civil institutions interwoven in their texture and inseparable from them the causes of those partial evils, destructive to virtue and happiness, which poison social intercourse and deform domestic life.” Her eulogist concludes by calling her the “ornament of her sex, the enlightened advocate for freedom, and the benevolent friend of humankind.”

It is more than probable, however, that this was written by a personal friend; for a year later the same magazine, in its semi-annual retrospect of British literature, expressed somewhat altered opinions. This time it says: “It is not for us to vindicate Mary Godwin from the charge of multiplied immorality which is brought against her by the candid as well as the censorious, by the sagacious as well as the superstitious observer. Her character in our estimation is far from being entitled to unqualified praise; she had many faults; she had many transcendent virtues. But she is now dead, and we shall

‘No farther seek her merits to disclose,
Or draw her frailties from the dread abode;
There they alike in trembling hope repose,
The bosom of her father and her God!’”

The notice in the “Gentleman’s Magazine” for October, 1797, the month after her death, is friendly, but there are limitations to its praise. The following is the sentence it passed upon her: “Her manners were gentle, easy, and elegant; her conversation intelligent and amusing, without the least trait of literary pride, or the apparent consciousness of powers above the level of her sex; and, for fondness of understanding and sensibility of heart, she was, perhaps, never equalled. Her practical skill in education was ever superior to her speculations upon that subject; nor is it possible to express the misfortune sustained in that respect by her children. This tribute we readily pay to her character, however adverse we may be to the system she supported in politics and morals, both by her writings and practice.”

In 1798 Godwin published his Memoir of Mary, together with her posthumous writings. He no doubt hoped by a clear statement of the principal incidents of her life to moderate the popular feeling against her. But he was the last person to have undertaken the task. Outside of the small circle of friends and sympathizers who really loved him, he was by no means popular. There were some who even seemed to think that the greatest hardship of Mary’s life was to have been his wife. Thus Roscoe, after reading the Memoir, expressed the sentiments it aroused in him in the following lines:—

“Hard was thy fate in all the scenes of life,
As daughter, sister, mother, friend, and wife;
But harder still thy fate in death we own,
Thus mourned by Godwin with a heart of stone.”

Moreover, Godwin’s views about marriage, as set forth in his “Political Justice,” were held in such abhorrence that the fact that he approved of Mary’s conduct was reason enough for the multitude to disapprove of it. His book, therefore, was not a success as far as Mary’s reputation was concerned. Indeed, it increased rather than lessened the asperity of her detractors. It was greeted by the “European Magazine” for April, 1798, almost immediately after its publication, by one of the most scathing denunciations of Mary’s character which had yet appeared.

“The lady,” the article begins, “whose memoirs are now before us, appears to have possessed good abilities, and originally a good disposition, but, with an overweening conceit of herself, much obstinacy and self-will, and a disposition to run counter to established practices and opinions. Her conduct in the early part of her life was blameless, if not exemplary; but the latter part of it was blemished with actions which must consign her name to posterity (in spite of all palliatives) as one whose example, if followed, would be attended with the most pernicious consequences to society: a female who could brave the opinion of the world in the most delicate point; a philosophical wanton, breaking down the bars designed to restrain licentiousness; and a mother, deserting a helpless offspring disgracefully brought into the world by herself, by an intended act of suicide.” Here follows a short sketch of the incidents recorded by Godwin, and then the article concludes: “Such was the catastrophe of a female philosopher of the new order, such the events of her life, and such the apology for her conduct. It will be read with disgust by every female who has any pretensions to delicacy; with detestation by every one attached to the interests of religion and morality; and with indignation by any one who might feel any regard for the unhappy woman, whose frailties should have been buried in oblivion. Licentious as the times are, we trust it will obtain no imitators of the heroine in this country. It may act, however, as a warning to those who fancy themselves at liberty to dispense with the laws of propriety and decency, and who suppose the possession of perverted talents will atone for the well government of society and the happiness of mankind.”

This opinion of the “European Magazine” was the one most generally adopted. It was re-echoed almost invariably when Mary Wollstonecraft’s name was mentioned in print. A Mrs. West, who, in 1801, published a series of “Letters to a Young Man,” full of goodly discourse and moral exhortation, found occasion to warn him against Mary’s works, which she did with as much energy as if the latter had been the Scarlet Woman of Babylon in the flesh. “This unfortunate woman,” she says in conclusion, “has terribly terminated her guilty career; terribly, I say, because the account of her last moments, though intentionally panegyrical, proves that she died as she lived; and her posthumous writings show that her soul was in the most unfit state to meet her pure and holy judge.”

A writer in the “Beauties of England and Wales,” though animated by the same spirit, saw no reason to caution his readers against Mary’s pernicious influence, because of his certainty that in another generation she would be forgotten. “Few writers have attained a larger share of temporary celebrity,” he admits. “This was the triumph of wit and eloquence of style. To the age next succeeding it is probable that her name will be nearly unknown; for the calamities of her life so miserably prove the impropriety of her doctrines that it becomes a point of charity to close the volume treating of the Rights of Women with mingled wonder and pity.”

But probably the article which was most influential in perpetuating the ill-repute in which she stood with her contemporaries, is the sketch of her life given in Chalmers’s “Biographical Dictionary.” The papers and many books of the day soon passed out of sight, but the Dictionary was long used as a standard work of reference. In this particular article every action of Mary’s life is construed unfavorably, and her character shamefully vilified. Judging from Godwin’s Memoir, it decides that Mary “appears to have been a woman of strong intellect, which might have elevated her to the highest ranks of English female writers, had not her genius run wild for want of cultivation. Her passions were consequently ungovernable, and she accustomed herself to yield to them without scruple, treating female honor and delicacy as vulgar prejudices. She was therefore a voluptuary and sensualist, without that refinement for which she seemed to contend on other subjects. Her history, indeed, forms entirely a warning, and in no part an example. Singular she was, it must be allowed, for it is not easily to be conceived that such another heroine will ever appear, unless in a novel, where a latitude is given to that extravagance of character which she attempted to bring into real life.” Beloe, in the “Sexagenarian,” borrowed the scurrilous abuse of the “Biographical Dictionary,” which was furthermore accepted by almost every history of English literature and encyclopædia as the correct estimate of Mary’s character and teachings. It is, therefore, no wonder that the immorality of her doctrines and unwomanliness of her conduct came to be believed in implicitly by the too credulous public.

That she fully deserved this disapprobation and contempt seemed to many confirmed by the fact that her daughter, Mary Godwin, consented to live with Shelley before their union could be legalized. The independence of mother and daughter excited private as well as public animosity. There is in the British Museum a book containing a collection of drawings, newspaper slips, and written notes, illustrative of the history and topography of the parish of Saint Pancras. As Mary Wollstonecraft was buried in the graveyard of Saint Pancras Church, mention is made of her. A copy of the painting[1] by Opie, which was supposed until very recently to be her portrait, is pasted on one of the pages of this book, and opposite to it is the following note, written on a slip of paper, and dated 1821: “Mary Wollstonecraft, a disgrace to modesty, an eminent instance of a perverted strong mind, the defender of the ‘Rights of Women,’ but an ill example to them, soon terminated her life of error, and her remains were laid in the cemetery of Saint Pancras, amidst the believers of the papal creed.

[1] It was engraved and published in the “Monthly Mirror,” with Mary’s name attached to it, during her lifetime. When Mr. Kegan Paul published the “Letters to Imlay,” in 1879, there seemed no doubt of its authenticity. But since then it has been proved to be the portrait of the wife of an artist who lived in the latter part of the eighteenth century.

“There is a monument placed over her remains, being a square pillar.” (The inscription here follows.) “A willow was planted on each side of the pillar, but, like the character of Mary, they do not flourish. Her unfortunate daughters were reared by their infamous father for prostitution,—one is sold to the wicked poet Shelley, and the other to attend upon her. The former became Mrs. Shelley.” The prejudice of the writer of these lines against the subject of them, together with his readiness to accept all the ill spoken of her, is at once shown in his reference to Claire, who was the daughter of the second Mrs. Godwin by her first husband, and hence no relation whatever to Mrs. Shelley. This mistake proves that he relied overmuch upon current gossip.

During all these years Mary was not entirely without friends, but their number was small. In 1803 an anonymous admirer published a defence of her character and conduct, “founded on principles of nature and reason as applied to the peculiar circumstances of her case,” in a series of nine letters to a lady. But his defence is less satisfactory to his readers than it is to be presumed it was to himself. In it he carefully repeats those details of Godwin’s Memoir which were most severely criticised, and to some of them gives a new and scarcely more favorable construction. He candidly admits that he does not pretend to vindicate the whole of her conduct. He merely wishes to apologize for it by demonstrating the motives from which she acted. But to accomplish this he evolves his arguments chiefly from his inner consciousness. Had he appealed more directly to her writings, and thought less of showing his own ingenuity in reasoning, he would have written to better purpose.

Southey was always enthusiastic in his admiration. His letters are full of her praises. “We are going to dine on Wednesday next with Mary Wollstonecraft, of all the literary characters the one I most admire,” he wrote to Thomas Southey, on April 28, 1797. And a year or two after her death, he declared in a letter to Miss Barker, “I never praised living being yet, except Mary Wollstonecraft.” He made at least one public profession of his esteem in these lines, prefixed to his “Triumph of Woman:”—

“The lily cheek, the ‘purple light of love,’
The liquid lustre of the melting eye,
Mary! of these the Poet sung, for these
Did Woman triumph ... turn not thou away
Contemptuous from the theme. No Maid of Arc
Had, in those ages, for her country’s cause
Wielded the sword of freedom; no Roland
Had borne the palm of female fortitude;
No Condé with self-sacrificing zeal
Had glorified again the Avenger’s name,
As erst when Cæsar perished; haply too
Some strains may hence be drawn, befitting me
To offer, nor unworthy thy regard.”

Shelley too offered her the tribute of his praise in verse. In the dedication of the “Revolt of Islam,” addressed to his wife, he thus alludes to the latter’s famous mother:—

“They say that thou wert lovely from thy birth,
Of glorious parents, thou aspiring child.
I wonder not; for one then left the earth
Whose life was like a setting planet mild
Which clothed thee in the radiance undefiled
Of its departing glory.”

But the mere admiration of Southey and Shelley had little weight against popular prejudice. Year by year Mary’s books, like so many other literary productions, were less frequently read, and the prediction that in another generation her name would be unknown bade fair to be fulfilled. But the latest of her admirers, Mr. Kegan Paul, has, by his zealous efforts in her behalf, succeeded in vindicating her character and reviving interest in her writings. By his careful history of her life, and noble words in her defence, he has re-established her reputation. As he says himself, “Only eighty years after her death has any serious attempt been made to set her right in the eyes of those who will choose to see her as she was.” His attempt has been successful. No one after reading her sad story as he tells it in his Life of Godwin, can doubt her moral uprightness. His statement of her case attracted the attention it deserved. Two years after it appeared, Miss Mathilde Blind published, in the “New Quarterly Review,” a paper containing a briefer sketch of the incidents he recorded, and expressing an honest recognition of this great but much-maligned woman.

Thus, at this late day, the attacks of her enemies are being defeated. The critic who declared the condition of the trees planted near her grave to be symbolical of her fate, were he living now, would be forced to change the conclusions he drew from his comparison. In that part of Saint Pancras Churchyard which lies between the two railroad bridges, and which has not been included in the restored garden, but remains a dreary waste, fenced about with broken gravestones, the one fresh green spot is the corner occupied by the monument[1] erected to the memory of Mary Wollstonecraft, and separated from the open space by an iron railing. There is no sign of withering willows in this enclosure. Its trees are of goodly growth and fair promise. And, like them, her character now flourishes, for justice is at last being done to her.

[1] Her body has been removed to Bournemouth.

CHAPTER I.

CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YOUTH.

1759-1778.

Mary Wollstonecraft was born on the 27th of April, 1759, but whether in London or in Epping Forest, where she spent the first five years of her life, is not quite certain. There is no history of her ancestors to show from whom she inherited the intellectual greatness which distinguished her, but which characterized neither of her parents. Her paternal grandfather was a manufacturer in Spitalfields, of whom little is known, except that he was of Irish extraction and that he himself was respectable and prosperous. To his son, Edward John, Mary’s father, he left a fortune of ten thousand pounds, no inconsiderable sum in those days for a man of his social position. Her mother was Elizabeth, daughter of Mr. Dixon, of Ballyshannon, Ireland, who belonged to an eminently good family. Mary was the second of six children. The eldest, Edward, who was more successful in his worldly affairs than the others, and James, who went to sea to seek his fortunes, both passed to a great extent out of her life. But her two sisters, Eliza and Everina, and her youngest brother, Charles, were so dependent upon her for assistance in their many troubles that their career is intimately associated with hers.

With her very first years Mary Wollstonecraft began a bitter training in the school of experience, which was to no small degree instrumental in developing her character and forming her philosophy. There are few details of her childhood, and no anecdotes indicating a precocious genius. But enough is known of her early life to make us understand what were the principal influences to which she was exposed. Her strength sprang from the very uncongeniality of her home and her successful struggles against the poverty and vice which surrounded her. Her father was a selfish, hot-tempered despot, whose natural bad qualities were aggravated by his dissipated habits. His chief characteristic was his instability. He could persevere in nothing. Apparently brought up to no special profession, he was by turns a gentleman of leisure, a farmer, a man of business. It seems to have been sufficient for him to settle in any one place to almost immediately wish to depart from it. The history of the first fifteen or twenty years of his married life is that of one long series of migrations. The discomforts and petty miseries unavoidable to travellers with large families in pre-railroad days necessarily increased his irascibility. The inevitable consequence of these many changes was loss of money and still greater loss of temper. That his financial experiments proved to be failures, is certain from the abject poverty of his later years. That they were bad for him morally, is shown in the fact that his children, when grown up, found it impossible to live under the same roof with him. His indifference in one particular to their wishes and welfare led in the end to disregard of them in all matters.

It is more than probable that Mary, in her “Wrongs of Woman,” drew largely from her own experience for the characters therein represented, and we shall not err in identifying the father she describes in this novel with Mr. Wollstonecraft himself. “His orders,” she writes, “were not to be disputed; and the whole house was expected to fly at the word of command.... He was to be instantaneously obeyed, especially by my mother, whom he very benevolently married for love; but took care to remind her of the obligation when she dared in the slightest instance to question his absolute authority.” He was, in a word, an egotist of the worst description, who found no brutality too low once his anger was aroused, and no amount of despotism too odious when the rights and comforts of others interfered with his own desires. When contradicted or thwarted his rage was ungovernable, and he used personal violence not only to his dogs and children, but even to his wife. Drink and unrestrained selfishness had utterly degraded him. Such was Mary’s father.

Mrs. Wollstonecraft was her husband’s most abject slave, but was in turn somewhat of a tyrant herself. She approved of stern discipline for the young. She was too indolent to give much attention to the education of her children, and devoted what little energy she possessed to enforcing their unquestioning obedience even in trifles, and to making them as afraid of her displeasure as they were of their father’s anger. “It is perhaps difficult to give you an idea of the petty cares which obscured the morning of my life,” Mary declares through her heroine,—“continual restraint in the most trivial matters, unconditional submission to orders, which as a mere child I soon discovered to be unreasonable, because inconsistent and contradictory. Thus are we destined to experience a mixture of bitterness with the recollection of our most innocent enjoyment.” Edward, as the mother’s favorite, escaped her severity; but it fell upon Mary with double force, and was with her carried out with a thoroughness that laid its shortcomings bare, and consequently forced Mrs. Wollstonecraft to modify her treatment of her younger children. This concession on her part shows that she must have had their well-being at heart, even when her policy in their regard was most misguided, and that her unkindness was not, like her husband’s cruelty, born of caprice. But it was sad for Mary that her mother did not discover her mistake sooner.

When Mary was five years old, and before she had had time to form any strong impressions of her earliest home, her father moved to another part of Epping Forest near the Chelmsford Road. Then, at the end of a year, he carried his family to Barking in Essex, where he established them in a comfortable home, a little way out of the town. Many of the London markets were then supplied from the farms around Barking, so that the chance for his success here was promising.

This place was the scene of Mary’s principal childish recollections and associations. Natural surroundings were with her of much more importance than they usually are to the very young, because she depended upon them for her pleasures. She cared nothing for dolls and the ordinary amusements of girls. Having received few caresses and little tender nursing, she did not know how to play the part of mother. Her recreation led her out of doors with her brothers. That she lived much in the open air and became thoroughly acquainted with the town and the neighborhood, seems certain from the eagerness with which she visited it years afterwards with Godwin. This was in 1796, and Mary with enthusiasm sought out the old house in which she had lived. It was unoccupied, and the garden around it was a wild and tangled mass. Then she went through the town itself; to the market-place, which had perhaps been the Mecca of frequent pilgrimages in the old times; to the wharves, the bustle and excitement of which had held her spellbound many a long summer afternoon; and finally from one street to another, each the scene of well-remembered rambles and adventures. Time can soften sharp and rugged lines and lighten deep shadows, and the pleasant reminiscences of Barking days made her overlook bitterer memories.

That there were many of the latter, cannot be doubted. Only too often the victim of her father’s cruel fury, and at all times a sufferer because of her mother’s theories, she had little chance for happiness during her childhood. She was, like Carlyle’s hero of “Sartor Resartus,” one of those children whose sad fate it is to weep “in the playtime of the others.” Not even to the David Copperfields and Paul Dombeys of fiction has there fallen a lot so hard to bear and so sad to record, as that of the little Mary Wollstonecraft. She was then the most deserving object of that pity which later, as a woman, she was always ready to bestow upon others. Her affections were unusually warm and deep, but they could find no outlet. She met, on the one hand, indifference and sternness; on the other, injustice and ill-usage. It is when reading the story of her after-life, and learning from it how, despite her masculine intellect, she possessed a heart truly feminine, that we fully appreciate the barrenness of her early years. She was one of those who, to use her own words, “cannot live without loving, as poets love.” At the strongest period of her strong womanhood she felt, as she so touchingly confesses in her appeals to Imlay, the need of some one to lean upon,—some one to give her the love and sympathy, which were to her what light and heat are to flowers. It can therefore easily be imagined how much greater was the necessity, and consequently the craving caused by its non-gratification, when she was nothing but a child. Overflowing with tenderness, she dared not lavish it on the mother who should have been so ready to receive it. Instead of the confidence which should exist between mother and daughter, there was in their case nothing but cold formality. Nor was there for her much compensation in the occasional caresses of her father. Sensitive to a fault, she could not forgive his blows and unkindness so quickly as to be able to enjoy his smiles and favors. Moreover, she had little chance of finding, without, the devotion and gentle care which were denied to her within her own family. Mr. Wollstonecraft remained so short a time in each locality in which he made his home, that his wife saw but little of her relations and old acquaintances; while no sooner had his children made new friends, than they were separated from them.

To whatever town they went, the Wollstonecrafts seem to have given signs of gentility and good social standing, which won for them, if not many, at least respectable friends. At Barking an intimacy sprang up between them and the family of Mr. Bamber Gascoyne, Member of Parliament. But Mary was too young to profit by this friendship. It was most ruthlessly interrupted three years later, when, in 1768, the restless head of the house, whose industry in Barking had not equalled the enterprise which brought him there, took his departure for Beverly, in Yorkshire.

This was the most complete change that he had as yet made. Heretofore his wanderings had been confined to Essex. But he either found in his new home more promising occupation and congenial companionship than he had hitherto, or else there was a short respite to his feverish restlessness, for he continued in it for six years. It was here Mary received almost all the education that was ever given her by regular schooling. Beverly was nothing but a small market-town, though she in her youthful enthusiasm thought it large and handsome, and its inhabitants brilliant and elegant, and was much disappointed, when she passed through it many years afterwards, on her way to Norway, to see how far the reality fell short of her youthful idealizations. Its schools could not have been of a very high order, and we do not need Godwin’s assurance to know that Mary owed little of her subsequent culture to them. But her education may be said to have really begun in 1775, when her father, tired of farming and tempted by commercial hopes, left Beverly for Hoxton, near London.

Mary was at this time in her sixteenth year. The effect of her home life, under which most children would have succumbed, had been to develop her character at an earlier age than is usual with women. In spite of the tyranny and caprice of her parents, and, indeed, perhaps because of them, she had soon asserted her individuality and superiority. When she had recognized the mistaken motives of her mother and the weakness of her father, she had been forced to rely upon her own judgment and self-command. It is a wonderful proof of her fine instincts that, though she must have known her strength, she did not rebel, and that her keen insight into the injustice of some actions did not prevent her realizing the justice of others. Her mind seems to have been from the beginning too evenly balanced for any such misconceptions. When reprimanded, she deservedly found in the reprimand, as she once told Godwin, the one means by which she became reconciled to herself for the fault which had called it forth. As she matured, her immediate relations could not but yield to the influence which she exercised over all with whom she was brought into close contact. If there be such a thing as animal magnetism, she possessed it in perfection. Her personal attractions commanded love, and her great powers of sympathy drew people, without their knowing why, to lean upon her for moral support. In the end she became an authority in her family. Mrs. Wollstonecraft was in time compelled to bestow upon her the affection which she had first withheld. It was the ugly duckling after all who proved to be the swan of the flock. Mr. Wollstonecraft learned to hold his eldest daughter in awe, and his wrath sometimes diminished in her presence.

Pity was always Mary’s ruling passion. Feeling deeply the family sorrows, she was quick to forget herself in her efforts to lighten them when this privilege was allowed to her. There were opportunities enough for self-sacrifice. With every year Mr. Wollstonecraft squandered more money, and grew idler and more dissipated. Home became unbearable, the wife’s burden heavier. Mary, emancipated from the restraints of childhood, no longer remained a silent spectator of her father’s fits of passion. When her mother was the victim of his violence, she interposed boldly between them, determined that if his blows fell upon any one, it should be upon herself. There were occasions when she so feared the results of his drunken rage that she would not even go to bed at night, but, throwing herself upon the floor outside her room, would wait there, on the alert, to meet whatever horrors darkness might bring forth. Could there be a picture more tragical than this of the young girl, a weary woman before her time, protecting the mother who should have protected her, fighting against the vices of a father who should have shielded her from knowledge of them! Already before she had left her home there must have come into her eyes that strangely sad expression, which Kegan Paul, in speaking of her portrait by Opie, says reminds him of nothing unless it be of the agonized sorrow in the face of Guido’s Beatrice Cenci. No one can wonder that she doubted if marriage can be the highest possible relationship between the sexes, when it is remembered that for years she had constantly before her, proofs of the power man possesses, by sheer physical strength and simple brutality, to destroy the happiness of an entire household.

It was fortunate for her that she spent these wretched years in or very near the country. She could wear off the effects of the stifling home atmosphere by races over neighboring heaths, or by walks through lanes and woods. Constant exercise in the open air is the best of stimulants. It helped her to escape the many ills which childish flesh is heir to; it lessened the morbid tendency of her nature; and it developed an energy of character which proved her greatest safeguard against her sensitive and excitable temperament. Besides this, she seems to have taken real delight in her out-of-doors life. If at a later age she loved to sit in solitude and listen to the singing of a robin and the falling of the leaves, she must, as a child, have possessed much of that imaginative power which transforms all nature into fairyland. If, in the bitter consciousness that she was a betrayed and much-sinned-against woman, she could still find moments of exquisite pleasure in wandering through woods and over rocks, such haunts must have been as dear to her when she sought in them escape from her young misery. It is probable that she refers to herself when she makes her heroine, Maria, say, “An enthusiastic fondness for the varying charms of nature is the first sentiment I recollect.”

Mary’s existence up to 1775 had been, save when disturbed by family storms, quiet, lonely, and uneventful. As yet no special incident had occurred in it, nor had she been awakened to intellectual activity. But in Hoxton she contracted a friendship which, though it was with a girl of her own age, was always esteemed by her as the chief and leading event in her existence. This it was which first aroused her love of study and of independence, and opened a channel for the outpouring of her too-long suppressed affections. Her love for Fanny Blood was the spark which kindled the latent fire of her genius. Her arrival in Hoxton, therefore, marks the first important era in her life.

She owed this new pleasure to Mr. Clare, a clergyman, and his wife, who lived next to the Wollstonecrafts in Hoxton. The acquaintanceship formed with their neighbors ripened in Mary’s case into intimacy. Mr. Clare was deformed and delicate, and, because of his great physical weakness, led the existence of a hermit. He rarely, if ever, went out, and his habits were so essentially sedentary that a pair of shoes lasted him for fourteen years. It is hardly necessary to add that he was eccentric. But he was a man of a certain amount of culture. He had read largely, his opportunity for so doing being great. He was attracted by Mary, whom he soon discovered to be no ordinary girl, and he interested himself in forming and training her mind. She, in return, liked him. His deformity alone would have appealed to her, but she found him a congenial companion, and, as she proved herself a willing pupil, he was glad to have her much with him. She was a friend of Mrs. Clare as well; indeed, the latter remained true to her through later storms which wrecked many other less sincere friendships. Mary sometimes spent days and even weeks in the house of these good people; and it was on one of these occasions, probably, that Mrs. Clare took her to Newington Butts, then a village at the extreme southern end of London, and there introduced her to Frances Blood.

The first meeting between them, Godwin says, “bore a resemblance to the first interview of Werter with Charlotte.” The Bloods lived in a small, but scrupulously well-kept house, and when its door was first opened for Mary, Fanny, a bright-looking girl about her own age, was busy, like another Lotte, in superintending the meal of her younger brothers and sisters. It was a scene well calculated to excite Mary’s interest. She, better than any one else, could understand its full worth. It revealed to her at a glance the skeleton in the family closet,—the inefficiency of the parents to care for the children whom they had brought into the world, and the poverty which prevented their hiring others to do their work for them. And at the same time it showed her the noble unselfishness of the daughter, who not only took upon herself the burden so easily shifted by the parents, but who accepted her fate cheerfully. Cheerfulness is a virtue but too lightly prized. When maintained in the face of difficulties and unhappiness it becomes the finest heroism. The recognition of this heroic side of Fanny’s nature commanded the instant admiration and respect of her visitor. Mary then and there vowed in her heart eternal friendship for her new acquaintance, and the vow was never broken.

Balzac, in his “Cousine Bette,” says that there is no stronger passion than the love of one woman for another. Mary Wollstonecraft’s affection for Frances Blood is a striking illustration of the truth of his statement. It was strong as that of a Sappho for an Erinna; tender and constant as that of a mother for her child. From the moment they met until they were separated by poor Fanny’s untimely death, Mary never wavered in her devotion and its active expression, nor could the vicissitudes and joys of her later life destroy her loving loyalty to the memory of her first and dearest friend. “When a warm heart has strong impressions,” she wrote in a letter long years afterwards, “they are not to be effaced. Emotions become sentiments; and the imagination renders even transient sensations permanent, by fondly retracing them. I cannot without a thrill of delight recollect views I have seen, which are not to be forgotten, nor looks I have felt in every nerve, which I shall never more meet. The grave has closed over a dear friend, the friend of my youth; still she is present with me, and I hear her soft voice warbling as I stray over the heath.”

There was much to draw the two friends together. They had many miseries and many tastes and interests in common. Fanny’s parents were poor, and her father, like Mr. Wollstonecraft, was idle and dissipated. There were young children to be reared, and an incompetent mother to do it. Fanny was only two years older than Mary, but was, at that time, far more advanced mentally. Her education had been more complete. She was in a small way both musician and artist, was fond of reading, and had even tried her powers at writing. But her drawing had proved her most profitable accomplishment, and by it she supported her entire family. Mary as yet had perfected herself in nothing, and was helpless where money-making was concerned. Her true intellectual education had but just begun under Mr. Clare’s direction. She had previously read voluminously, but, having done so for mere immediate gratification, had derived but little profit therefrom. As she lived in Hoxton, and Fanny in Newington Butts, they could not see each other very often, and so in the intervals between their visits they corresponded. Mary found that her letters were far inferior to those of her friend. She could not spell so well; she had none of Fanny’s ease in shaping her thoughts into words. Her pride was hurt and her ambition stirred. She determined to make herself at least Fanny’s intellectual equal. It was humiliating to know herself powerless to improve her own condition, when her friend was already earning an income large enough not only to meet her own wants but those of others depending upon her. To prepare herself for a like struggle with the world, a struggle which in all likelihood she would be obliged to make single-handed, she studied earnestly. Books acquired new value in her eyes. She read no longer for passing amusement, but to strengthen and cultivate her mind for future work. It cannot be doubted that under any circumstances she would, in the course of a few years, have become conscious of her power and the necessity to exercise it. But to Fanny Blood belongs the honor of having given the first incentive to her intellectual energy. This brave, heavily burdened young English girl, accepting toils and tribulations with stout heart, would, with many another silent heroine or hero, have been forgotten, had it not been for the stimulus her love and example were to an even stronger sister-sufferer. The larger field of interests thus opened for Mary was like the bright dawn after a long and dark night. For the first time she was happy.

There was therefore much in her life at Hoxton to relieve the gloomy influence of the family troubles. Work for a definite end is in itself a great joy. Many pleasant hours were spent with the Clares, and occasional gala-days with Fanny. These last two pleasures, however, were short-lived. The inexorable family tyrant, her father, grew tired of commerce, as indeed he did of everything, and in the spring of 1776 he abandoned it for agriculture, this time settling in Pembroke, Wales, where he owned some little property. With a heavy heart Mary bade farewell to her new friends.

It is well worth recording that in 1775, while Mary Wollstonecraft was living in Hoxton, William Godwin was a student at the Dissenting College in that town. Godwin, in his short Memoir of his wife, pauses to speculate as to what would have been the result had they then met and loved. In his characteristic philosophical way he asks, “Which would have been predominant,—the disadvantages of obscurity and the pressure of a family, or the gratifications and improvement that might have flowed from their intercourse?” But the vital question is: Would an acquaintanceship formed [between] them at that time have ever become more than mere friendship? She was then a wild, untrained girl, and had not reduced her contempt for established institutions to fixed principles. Godwin, the son of a Dissenting clergyman, was studying to be one himself, and his opinions of the rights of man were still unformed. Neither had developed the ideas and doctrines which afterwards were the bond of sympathy between them. One thing is certain: while they might have benefited had they married twenty years earlier than they did, the world would have lost. Godwin, under the influence of a wife’s tender love, would never have became a cold, systematic philosopher. And Mary, had she found a haven from her misery so soon, would not have felt as strongly about the wrongs of women. Whatever her world’s work under those circumstances might have been, she would not have become the champion of her sex.

Of external incidents the year in Wales was barren. The only one on record is the intimacy which sprang up between the Wollstonecrafts and the Allens. Two daughters of this family afterwards married sons of the famous potter, Wedgwood, and the friendship then begun lasted for life. To Mary herself, however, this year was full and fertile. It was devoted to study and work. Hers was the only true genius,—the genius for industry. She never relaxed in the task she had set for herself, and her progress was rapid. The signs she soon manifested of her mental power added to the respect with which her family now treated her. Realizing that the assistance she could give by remaining at home was but little compared to that which might result from her leaving it for some definite employment, she seems at this period to have announced her intention of seeking her fortunes abroad. But Mrs. Wollstonecraft looked upon the presence of her daughter as a strong bulwark of defence against the brutal attacks of her husband, and was loath to lose it. Mary yielded to her entreaties to wait a little longer; but her sympathy and tender pity for human suffering fortunately never destroyed her common sense. She knew that the day must come when on her own individual exertions would depend not only her own but a large share of her sisters’ and brothers’ maintenance, and, in consenting to remain at home, she exacted certain conditions. She insisted upon being allowed freedom in the regulation of her actions. She demanded that she should have a room for her exclusive property, and that, when engaged in study, she should not be interrupted. She would attend to certain domestic duties, and after they were over, her time must be her own. It was little to ask. All she wanted was the liberty to make herself independent of the paternal care which girls of eighteen, as a rule, claim as their right. It was granted her.

At the end of another year, the demon of restlessness again attacked Mr. Wollstonecraft. Wales proved less attractive than it had appeared at a distance. Orders were given to repack the family goods and chattels, and to set out upon new wanderings. On this occasion, Mary interfered with a strong hand. Since a change was to be made, it might as well be turned to her advantage. She had, without a word, allowed herself to be carried to Wales away from the one person she really loved, and she now knew the sacrifice had been useless. It was clear to her that one place was no better for her father than another; therefore he should go where it pleased her. It was better that one member of the family should be content, than that all should be equally miserable. She prevailed upon him to choose Walworth as his next resting-place. Here she would be near Fanny, and life would again hold some brightness for her.

It was at Walworth that she took the first step in what was fated to be a long life of independence and work. The conditions which she had made with her family seem to have been here neglected, and study at home became more and more impossible. She was further stimulated to action by the personal influence of her energetic friend, by the fact that the younger children were growing up to receive their share of the family sorrow and disgrace, and by her own great dread of poverty. “How writers professing to be friends to freedom and the improvement of morals can assert that poverty is no evil, I cannot imagine!” she exclaims in the “Wrongs of Woman.” She cared nothing for the luxuries and the ease and idleness which wealth gives, but she prized above everything the time and opportunity for self-culture of which the poor, in their struggle for existence, are deprived. The Wollstonecraft fortunes were at low ebb. Her share in them, should she remain at home, would be drudgery and slavery, which would grow greater with every year. Her one hope for the future depended upon her profitable use of the present. The sooner she earned money for herself, the sooner would she be able to free her brothers and sisters from the yoke whose weight she knew full well because of her own eagerness to throw it off. Unselfish as her father was selfish, she thought quite as much of their welfare as of her own. Therefore when, at the age of nineteen, a situation as lady’s companion was offered to her, neither tears nor entreaties could alter her resolution to accept it. She entered at once upon her new duties, and with them her career as woman may be said to have begun.

CHAPTER II.

FIRST YEARS OF WORK.

1778-1785.

Mary Wollstonecraft did not become famous at once. She began her career as humbly as many a less gifted woman. Like the heroes of old, she had tasks allotted her before she could attain the goal of her ambition. And Heracles in his twelve labors, Jason in search of the Golden Fleece, Sigurd in pursuit of the treasure, did not have greater hardships to endure or dangers to overcome than she had before she won for herself independence and fame.

It is difficult for a young man without money, influential friends, or professional education to make his way in the world. With a woman placed in similar circumstances the difficulty is increased a hundred-fold. We of to-day, when government and other clerkships are open to women, cannot quite realize their helplessness a few generations back. In Mary Wollstonecraft’s time those whose birth and training had unfitted them for the more menial occupations—who could neither bake nor scrub—had but two resources. They must either become governesses or ladies’ companions. In neither case was their position enviable. They ranked as little better than upper servants. Mary’s first appearance on the world-stage, therefore, was not brilliant.

The lady with whom she went to live was a Mrs. Dawson, a widow who had but one child, a grown-up son. Her residence was in Bath. Mary must then have given at least signs of the beauty which did not reach its full development until many years later, her sorrows had not entirely destroyed her natural gayety, and she was only nineteen years old. The mission in Bath in those days of young girls of her age was to dance and to flirt, to lose their hearts and to find husbands, to gossip, to listen to the music, to show themselves in the Squares and Circus and on the Parades, or, sometimes, when they were seriously inclined, to drink the waters. Mary’s was to cater to the caprices of a cross-grained, peevish woman. There was little sunshine in the morning of her life. She was destined always to see the darkest side of human nature. Mrs. Dawson’s temper was bad, and her companions, of whom there seem to have been many, had hitherto fled before its outbreaks, as the leaves wither and fall at the first breath of winter. Mary’s home-schooling was now turned to good account. Mrs. Dawson’s rage could not, at its worst, equal her father’s drunken violence; and long experience of the latter prepared her to bear the former with apparent, if not real, stoicism. We have no particulars of her life as companion nor knowledge of the exact nature of her duties. But of one thing we are certain, the fulfilment of them cost her many a heartache. Those who know her only as the vindicator of the Rights of Women and the defiant rebel against social laws, may think her case calls for little sympathy. But the truth is, there have been few women so dependent for happiness upon human love, so eager for the support of their fellow-beings, and so keenly alive to neglects and slights. In Bath she was separated from her friends, she was alone in her struggle, and she held a position which did not always command respect. However, her indomitable will and unflagging energy availed her to such good purpose that she continued with Mrs. Dawson for two years, doubtless to the surprise of the latter, accustomed as she was to easily frightened and hastily retreating companions. Her departure then was due, not to moral cowardice or exhaustion, but to a summons from home.

Mrs. Wollstonecraft’s health had begun to fail. Her life had been a hard one, and the drains upon her constitution many. She was the mother of a large family, and had had her full share of the by no means insignificant pains and cares of maternity. In addition to these she had had to contend against poverty, that evil which, says the Talmud, is worse than fifty plagues, and against the vagaries of a good-for-nothing drunken husband. Once she fell beneath her burden, she could not rise with it again. She had no strength left to withstand her illness. Eliza and Everina were both at home to take care of her, but she could not rest without the eldest daughter, upon whom experience had taught her to rely implicitly. She sent for Mary, and the latter hastened at once to her mother’s side. Her own hopes and ambitions, her chances and prospects, all were forgotten in her desire to do what she could for the poor patient. Fierce and fearless as an inspired Joan of Arc, when fighting in the cause of justice, she was tender and gentle as a sister of charity when tending the sick. She waited upon her mother with untiring care. Mrs. Wollstonecraft’s illness was long and lingering, though it declared itself at an early stage to be hopeless. In her pleasure at her daughter’s return she received her services with grateful thanks. But, as she grew worse, she became more accustomed to the presence of her nurse, and exacted as a right that which she had first accepted as a favor. She would allow no one else to attend to her, and day and night Mary was with her.

Finally the end came. Mrs. Wollstonecraft died, happy to be released from a world which had given her nothing but unkindness and sorrow. Her parting words were: “A little patience, and all will be over!” It was not difficult for the dying woman, so soon to have eternity to rest in, to bear quietly time’s last agony. But for the weary, heart-sick young girl, before whom there stretched a vista of long years of toil, the lesson of patience was less easy to learn. Mary never forgot these words, nor did she heed their bitter sarcasm. Often and often, in her after trials, they returned to her, carrying with them peace and comfort.

This event occurred in 1780. The family were then living in Enfield, which place had succeeded Walworth in their periodical migrations. After her mother’s death Mary, tired out from constant nursing, want of sleep, and anxiety of mind, became ill. She sorely needed quiet and an interval from work. But the necessity to depart from her father’s house was imperative. He had fallen so low that his daughters were forced to leave him. The difficulty was to find immediate means to meet the emergency. A return to Mrs. Dawson does not seem to have suggested itself as a possibility. Mary’s great ambition was to become a teacher and to establish a school. But this could not be easily or at once accomplished. She must have time to prepare herself for the venture, to make friends, and to give proof of her ability to teach. Fortunately, at this juncture Fanny Blood proved a true friend, and offered her at least a temporary home at Walham Green.

Fanny was still gaining a small income from her drawings, to which Mrs. Blood added whatever she could make by her needle. Mary was not one to fare upon another’s bread. Too proud to become an additional charge to these two hard-working women, she helped the latter with her sewing and so contributed her share to the family means. It was not a congenial occupation. But to her any work was preferable to waiting, Micawber-like, for something better to turn up. Though she was happy because she was with her friend, her life here was wellnigh as tragic as it had been in her father’s house. The family sorrows were great and many. Mr. Blood was a ne’er-do-weel and a drunkard. Caroline, one of the daughters, had then probably begun her rapid descent down-hill, moved thereto, poor girl, by the relief which vice alone gave to the poverty and gloom of her home. George, the brother, with whom Mary afterwards corresponded for so many years, was unhappy because of his unrequited love for Everina Wollstonecraft. He was an honest, good-principled young man, but his associates were disreputable, and he was at times compromised by their actions. But still sadder for Mary was the fact that Fanny, in addition to domestic grievances, was tortured by the unkindness of an uncertain lover. She had met, not long before, Mr. Hugh Skeys, a young but already successful merchant. Attracted by her, he had been sufficiently attentive and devoted to warrant her conclusion that his intentions were serious. He seems to have loved her as deeply as he was capable of loving, but discouraged perhaps by the wretched circumstances of the family, he could not make up his mind to marry her. At one moment he was ready to desert her, and at the next to claim her as his wife. Instead of resenting his unpardonable conduct, as a prouder woman would have done, she bore it with the humble patience of a Griselda. When he was kind, she hoped for the best; when he was cold, she dreaded the worst. The consequence of these alternate states of hope and despair was mental depression, and finally physical ill health. Through her troubles, Mary, who had given her the warmest and best, because the first, love of her life, was her faithful ally and comforter. Indeed, her friendship grew warmer with Fanny’s increasing misfortunes. As she said of herself a few years later, she was not a fair-weather friend. “I think,” she wrote once in a letter to George Blood, “I love most people best when they are in adversity, for pity is one of my prevailing passions.” She realized that she had made herself her friend’s equal, if not superior, intellectually, and that, so far as moral courage and will power were concerned, she was much the stronger of the two. There is nothing which so deepens a man’s or a woman’s tenderness, as the knowledge that the object of it looks up to her or to him for support, and Mary’s affection increased because of its new inspiration.

It has been said that it was necessary for all Mr. Wollstonecraft’s daughters to leave his house. Mary was not yet in a position to help her sisters, and they had but few friends. Their chances of self-support were small. Their position was the trying one of gentlewomen who could not make servants of themselves, and who indeed would not be employed as such, and who had not had the training to fit them for higher occupations. Everina, therefore, was glad to find an asylum with her brother Edward, who was an attorney in London. She became his housekeeper, for, like Mary, she was too independent to allow herself to be supported by the charity of others. Eliza, the youngest sister, who, with greater love of culture than Everina, had had even less education, solved her present problem by marrying, but she escaped one difficulty only to fall into another still greater and more serious. The history of her married experience is important because of the part Mary played in it. The latter’s independent conduct in her sister’s regard is a foreshadowing of the course she pursued at a later period in the management of her own affairs.

Eliza was the most excitable and nervous of the three sisters. The family sensitiveness was developed in her to a painful degree. She was not only quick to take offence, but was ever on the lookout for slights and insults even from people she dearly loved. She assumed a defensive attitude against the world and mankind, and therefore life went harder with her than with more cheerfully constituted women. It was almost invariably the little rift that made her life-music mute. Her indignation and rage were not so easily appeased as aroused. Altogether, she was a very impossible person to live with peacefully. Mr. Bishop, the man she married, was as quick-tempered and passionate as she, and, morally, was infinitely beneath her. He was the original of the husband in the “Wrongs of Woman,” who is represented as an unprincipled sensualist, brute, and hypocrite. The worst of it was that, when not carried away by his temper, his address was good and his manners insinuating. As one of his friends said of him, he was “either a lion or a spaniel.” Unfortunately, at home he was always the lion, a fact which those who knew him only as the spaniel could not well believe. The marriage of two such people, needless to say, was not happy. They mutually aggravated each other. Eliza, with her sensitive, unforgiving nature, could not make allowances. Mr. Bishop would not. Much as her waywardness and hastiness were at fault, he was still more to blame in effecting the rupture between them.

The strain upon Eliza’s nervous system, caused by almost daily quarrels and scenes of violence, was more than she could bear. Then, to add to her misery, she found herself in that condition in which women are apt to be peculiarly susceptible and irritable. Her pregnancy so stimulated her abnormal emotional excitement that her reason gave way, and for months she was insane. Though she had her intervals of passivity she was at times very violent, and disastrous results were feared. It was necessary for some one to keep constant guard over her, and Mary was asked to undertake this task.

Relentless as Fate in pursuing the hero of Greek Tragedy to his predestined end, were the circumstances which formed Mary’s prejudice against the institution of marriage. This was the third domestic tragedy caused by the husband’s petty tyranny and the wife’s slender resources of defence, of which she was the immediate witness. Her experience was unfortunate. The bright side of the married state was hidden from her. She saw only its shadows, and these darkened until her soul rebelled against the injustice, not of life, but of man’s shaping of it. Sad as was the fate of the Bloods and much as they needed her, the Bishop household was still sadder and its appeals more urgent, and Mary hurried thither at once.

No one can read the life of Mary Wollstonecraft without loving her, or follow her first bitter struggles without feeling honor, nay reverence, for her true womanliness which bore her bravely through them. She never shrank from her duty nor lamented her clouded youth. Without a murmur she left Walham Green and established herself as nurse and keeper to the poor mad sister. There could be no greater heroism than this. With a nervous constitution not unlike that of “poor Bess,” she had to watch over the frenzied mania of the wife and to confront the almost equally insane fury of the husband. One of the letters which she wrote at this time to Everina describes forcibly enough her sister’s sad condition and her own melancholy:—

Saturday afternoon, Nov. 1783.

I expected to have seen you before this, but the extreme coldness of the weather is a sufficient apology. I cannot yet give any certain account of Bess, or form a rational conjecture with respect to the termination of her disorder. She has not had a violent fit of frenzy since I saw you, but her mind is in a most unsettled state, and attending to the constant fluctuation of it is far more harassing than the watching these raving fits that had not the least tincture of reason. Her ideas are all disjointed, and a number of wild whims float on her imagination, and fall from her unconnectedly something like strange dreams, when judgment sleeps, and fancy sports at a fine rate. Don’t smile at my language, for I am so constantly forced to observe her, lest she run into mischief, that my thoughts continually turn on the unaccountable wanderings of her mind. She seems to think she has been very ill used, and, in short, till I see some more favorable symptoms, I shall only suppose that her malady has assumed a new and more distressing appearance.

One thing, by way of comfort, I must tell you, that persons who recover from madness are generally in this way before they are perfectly restored, but whether Bess’s faculties will ever regain their former tone, time only will show. At present I am in suspense. Let me hear from you, or see you, and believe me to be yours affectionately,

M. W.

Sunday noon.—Mr. D. promised to call last night, and I intended sending this by him. We have been out in a coach, but still Bess is far from being well. Patience—patience. Farewell.

To her desire to keep Everina posted as to the progress of affairs, we are indebted, for her letters, which give a very life-like picture of herself and her surroundings while she remained in her brother-in-law’s house. They are interesting because, by showing the difficulties against which she had to contend, and the effect these had upon her, we can better appreciate the greatness of her nature by which she triumphed over them. There is another one written during this sad period which must be quoted here because it throws still more light upon Bishop’s true character and his ingenuity in tormenting those who lived with him:—

Monday morning, Jan. 1784.

I have nothing to tell you, my dear girl, that will give you pleasure. Yesterday was a dismal day, long and dreary. Bishop was very ill, etc., etc. He is much better to-day, but misery haunts this house in one shape or other. How sincerely do I join with you in saying that if a person has common sense, they cannot make one completely unhappy. But to attempt to lead or govern a weak mind is impossible; it will ever press forward to what it wishes, regardless of impediments, and, with a selfish eagerness, believe what it desires practicable though the contrary is as clear as the noon-day. My spirits are hurried with listening to pros and cons; and my head is so confused, that I sometimes say no, when I ought to say yes. My heart is almost broken with listening to B. while he reasons the case. I cannot insult him with advice, which he would never have wanted, if he was capable of attending to it. May my habitation never be fixed among the tribe that can’t look beyond the present gratification, that draw fixed conclusions from general rules, that attend to the literal meaning only, and, because a thing ought to be, expect that it will come to pass. B. has made a confidant of Skeys; and as I can never speak to him in private, I suppose his pity may cloud his judgment. If it does, I should not either wonder at it, or blame him. For I that know, and am fixed in my opinion, cannot unwaveringly adhere to it; and when I reason, I am afraid of being unfeeling. Miracles don’t occur now, and only a miracle can alter the minds of some people. They grow old, and we can only discover by their countenances that they are so. To the end of their chapter will their misery last. I expect Fanny next Thursday, and she will stay with us but a few days. Bess desires her love; she grows better and of course more sad.

Though Mary’s heart was breaking and her brain reeling, her closer acquaintance with Bishop convinced her that Eliza must not continue with him. She determined at all hazards to free her sister from a man who was slowly but surely killing her, and she knew she was right in her determination. “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist,” Emerson says. Mary, because she was a true woman, was ruled in her conduct not by conventionalities or public opinion, but by her sense of righteousness. In her own words, “The sarcasms of society and the condemnation of a mistaken world were nothing to her, compared with acting contrary to those feelings which were the foundation of her principles.” For some months Eliza’s physical and mental illness made it impossible to take a decided step or to form definite plans. But when her child was born, and she returned to a normal, though at the same time sadder, because conscious, state, Mary felt that the time for action had arrived. That she still thought it advisable for her sister to leave her husband, though this necessitated the abandonment of her child, conclusively proves the seriousness of Bishop’s faults. It was no easy matter to effect the separation. Bishop objected to it. It is never unpleasant for a man to play the tyrant, and he was averse to losing his victim. Pecuniary assistance was therefore not to be had from him, and the sisters were penniless. Mary applied to Edward, though she was not sure it was desirable for Eliza to take refuge with him. However, he does not seem to have responded warmly, for Mary’s suggestion was never acted upon. Theirs was a situation in which friends are not apt to interfere, and besides, Bishop’s plausibility had won over not a few to his side. Furthermore, the chance was that if he worked successfully upon Mr. Skeys’ sympathies, the Bloods would be influenced. There was absolutely no one to help them, but Mary knew that it was useless to wait, and that the morrow would not make easier what seemed to her the task of the present day. When there was work to be done she never could rest with “unlit lamp and ungirt loin.” What she now most wanted for her sister was liberty, and she resolved to secure this at once, and then afterwards to look about her to see how it was to be maintained.

Accordingly, one day, Bishop well out of the way, the sisters left his house forever. There was a mad, breathless drive, Bess, with her insanity half returned, biting her wedding ring to pieces, a hurried exchange of coaches to further insure escape from detection, a joyful arrival at modest lodgings in Hackney, a giving in of false names, a hasty locking of doors, and then—the reaction. Eliza, whose excitement had exhausted itself on the way, became quiet and even ready for sleep. Mary, now that immediate necessity for calmness and courage was over, grew nervous and restless. With strained ears she listened to every sound. Her heart beat time to the passing carriages, and she trembled at the lightest knock.

That night, in a wild, nervous letter to Everina, she wrote:—

I hope B. will not discover us, for I would sooner face a lion; yet the door never opens but I expect to see him, panting for breath. Ask Ned how we are to behave if he should find us out, for Bess is determined not to return. Can he force her? but I’ll not suppose it, yet I can think of nothing else. She is sleepy, and going to bed; my agitated mind will not permit me. Don’t tell Charles or any creature! Oh! let me entreat you to be careful, for Bess does not dread him now as much as I do. Again, let me request you to write, as B.’s behavior may silence my fears. You will soon hear from me again. Fanny carried many things to Lear’s, brush-maker in the Strand, next door to the White Hart.

Yours,

Mary.

Miss Johnston—Mrs. Dodds, opposite the Mermaid, Church Street, Hackney.

She looks now very wild. Heaven protect us!

I almost wish for an husband, for I want somebody to support me.

The Rubicon was crossed. But the hardships thereby incurred were but just beginning. The two sisters were obliged to keep in hiding as if they had been criminals, for they dared not risk a chance meeting with Bishop. They had barely money enough to pay their immediate expenses, and their means of making more were limited by the precautions they had to take. It had only been possible in their flight to carry off a few things, and they were without sufficient clothing. Then there came from their friends an outcry against their conduct. The general belief then was, as indeed it unfortunately continues to be, that women should accept without a murmur whatever it suits their husbands to give them, whether it be kindness or blows. Better a thousand times that one human soul should be stifled and killed than that the Philistines of society should be scandalized by its struggles for air and life. Eliza’s happiness might have been totally sacrificed had she remained with Bishop; but at least the feelings of her acquaintances, in whom respectability had destroyed the more humane qualities, would have been saved. Her scheme, Mary wrote bitterly to Everina, was contrary to all the rules of conduct that are published for the benefit of new married ladies. Many felt forced to forfeit the friendship of these two social rebels, though it grieved them to the heart to do it. Mrs. Clare, be it said to her honor, remained stanch, but even she only approved cautiously, and Mary had her misgivings that she would advise a reconciliation if she once saw Bishop. To add to the hopelessness of their case, the deserted husband restrained his rage so well, and made so much of Eliza’s heartlessness in abandoning her child, that he drew to himself the sympathy which should have been given to her. Mary feared the effect his pleadings and representations would have upon Edward, the extent of whose egotism she had not yet measured, and she commissioned Everina to keep him firm. As for Eliza, she was so shaken and weak, and so unhappy about the poor motherless infant, that she could neither think nor act. The duty of providing for their wants, immediate and still to come, fell entirely upon Mary. She felt this to be just, since it was chiefly through her influence that they had been brought to their present plight; but the responsibility was great, and it is no wonder that, brave as she was, she longed for some one to share it with her.

Her one source of consolation and strength at this time was her religion. This will seem strange to many, who, knowing but few facts of her life, conclude from her connection with Godwin and her social radicalism that she was an atheist. But the sincerest spirit of piety breathes through her letters written during her early troubles. When the desertion of her so-called friends made her most bitter, she wrote to Everina:—

“Don’t suppose I am preaching when I say uniformity of conduct cannot in any degree be expected from those whose first motive of action is not the pleasing the Supreme Being, and those who humbly rely on Providence will not only be supported in affliction but have peace imparted to them that is past describing. This state is indeed a warfare, and we learn little that we don’t smart for in the attaining. The cant of weak enthusiasts has made the consolations of religion and the assistance of the Holy Spirit appear ridiculous to the inconsiderate; but it is the only solid foundation of comfort that the weak efforts of reason will be assisted and our hearts and minds corrected and improved till the time arrives when we shall not only see perfection, but see every creature around us happy.”

The consolation she found was sufficient to make her advise her friends to seek for it from the same quarter. She wrote to George Blood at a time when he was in serious difficulties:—

“It gives me the sincerest satisfaction to find that you look for comfort where only it is to be met with, and that Being in whom you trust will not desert you. Be not cast down; while we are struggling with care life slips away, and through the assistance of Divine Grace we are obtaining habits of virtue that will enable us to relish those joys that we cannot now form any idea of. I feel myself particularly attached to those who are heirs of the promises, and travel on in the thorny path with the same Christian hopes that render my severe trials a cause of thankfulness when I can think.”

These passages, evangelical in tone, occur in private letters, meant to be read only by those to whom they were addressed, so that they must be counted as honest expressions of her convictions and not mere cant. Just as she wrote freely to her sisters and her intimate friends about her temporal matters, so without hesitation she talked to them of her spiritual affairs. Her belief became broader as she grew older. She never was an atheist like Godwin, or an unbeliever of the Voltaire school. But as the years went on, and her knowledge of the world increased, her religion concerned itself more with conduct and less with creed, until she finally gave up going to church altogether. But at the time of which we are writing she was regular in her attendance, and, though not strictly orthodox, clung to certain forms. The mere fact that she possessed definite ideas upon the subject while she was young shows the naturally serious bent of her mind. She had received the most superficial religious education. Her belief, such as it was, was wholly the result of her own desire to solve the problems of existence and of the world beyond the senses. It is this fact, and the inferences to be drawn from it, which make her piety so well worth recording.

There seem to have been several schemes for work afoot just then. One was that the two sisters and Fanny Blood, who, some time before, had expressed herself willing and anxious to leave home, should join their fortunes. Fanny could paint and draw. Mary and Eliza could take in needlework until more pleasant and profitable employment could be procured. Poverty and toil would be more than compensated for by the joy which freedom and congenial companionship would give them. There was nothing very Utopian in such a plan; but Fanny, when the time came for its accomplishment, grew frightened. Her hard apprenticeship had given her none of the self-confidence and reliance which belonged to Mary by right of birth. Her family, despite their dependence upon her, seemed like a protection against the outer world. And so she held back, pleading the small chances of success by such a partnership, her own poor health, which would make her a burden to them, and, in fact, so many good reasons that the plan was abandoned. She, then, with greater aptitude for suggestion than for action, proposed that Mary and Eliza should keep a haberdashery shop, to be stocked at the expense of the much-called-upon but sadly unsusceptible Edward. There is something grimly humorous in the idea of Mary Wollstonecraft, destined as she was from all eternity to sound an alarum call to arouse women from their lethargy, spending her days behind a counter attending to their trifling temporal wants! A Roland might as well have been asked to become cook, a Sir Galahad to turn scullion. Honest work is never disgraceful in itself. Indeed, “Better do to no end, than nothing!” But one regrets the pain and the waste when circumstances force men and women capable of great work to spend their energies in ordinary channels. A greater misery than indifference to the amusement in which one seeks to take part, which Hamerton counts as the most wearisome of all things, is positive dislike for the work one is bound to do. Fortunately, Fanny’s project was never carried out. Probably Edward, as usual, failed to meet the proposals made to him, and Mary realized that the chains by which she would thus bind herself would be unendurable.

The plan finally adopted was that dearest to Mary’s heart. She began her career as teacher. She and Eliza went to Islington, where Fanny was then living, and lodged in the same house with her. Then they announced their intention of receiving day pupils. Mary was eminently fitted to teach. Her sad experience had increased her natural sympathy and benevolence. She now made her own troubles subservient to those of her fellow-sufferers, and resolved that the welfare of others should be the principal object of her life. Before the word had passed into moral philosophy, she had become an altruist in its truest sense. The task of teacher particularly attracted her because it enabled her to prepare the young for the struggle with the world for which she had been so ill qualified. Because so little attention had been given to her in her early youth, she keenly appreciated the advantage of a good practical education. But her merits were not recognized in Islington. Like the man in the parable, she set out a banquet of which the bidden guests refused to partake. No scholars were sent to her. Therefore, at the end of a few months, she was glad to move to Newington Green, where better prospects seemed to await her. There she had relatives and influential friends, and the encouragement she received from them induced her to begin work on a large scale. She rented a house, and opened a regular school. Her efforts met with success. Twenty children became her pupils, while a Mrs. Campbell, a relative, and her son, and another lady, with three children, came to board with her. Mary was now more comfortable than she had heretofore been. She was, comparatively speaking, prosperous. She had much work to do, but by it she was supporting herself, and at the same time advancing towards her “clear-purposed goal” of self-renunciation. Then she had cause for pleasure in the fact that Eliza was now really free, Bishop having finally agreed to the separation. Mary Wollstonecraft, at the head of a house, and mistress of a school, was a very different person from Mary Wollstonecraft, simple companion to Mrs. Dawson or dependent friend of Fanny Blood. Her position was one to attract attention, and it was sufficient for her to be known, to be loved and admired. Her social sphere was enlarged. No one could care more for society than she did, when that society was congenial. At Newington Green she already began to show the preference for men and women of intellectual tastes and abilities that she manifested so strongly in her life in London. Foremost among her intimate acquaintances at this time was Dr. Richard Price, a clergyman, a Dissenter, then well known because of his political and mathematical speculations. He was an honest, upright, simple-hearted man, who commanded the respect and love of all who knew him, and whose benevolence was great enough to realize even Mary’s ideals. She became deeply attached to him personally, and was a warm admirer of his religious and moral principles. His sermons gave her great delight, and she often went to listen to them. He in return seems to have felt great interest in her, and to have recognized her extraordinary mental force. Mr. John Hewlet, also a clergyman, was another of her friends, and she retained his friendship for many years afterwards. A third friend, mentioned by Godwin in his Memoirs, was Mrs. Burgh, widow of a man now almost forgotten, but once famous as the author of “Political Disquisitions.” In sorrows soon to come, Mrs. Burgh gave practical proof of her affection. If a man can be judged by the character of his associates, then the age, professions, and serious connections of Mary’s friends at Newington Green are not a little significant.

Much as she cared for these older friends, however, they could not be so dear to her as Fanny and George Blood. She had begun by pitying the latter for his hopeless passion for Everina, and had finished by loving him for himself with true sisterly devotion. To brother and sister both, she could open her heart as she could to no one else. They were young with her, and that in itself is a strong bond of union. They, too, were but just beginning life, and they could sympathize with all her aspirations and disappointments. It was, therefore, an irreparable loss to her when they, at almost the same time, but for different reasons, left England. Fanny’s health had finally become so wretched that even her uncertain lover was moved to pity. Mr. Skeys seems to have been one of the men who only appreciate that which they think they cannot have. Not until the ill-health of the woman he loved warned him of the possibility of his losing her altogether did he make definite proposals to her. Her love for him had not been shaken by his unkindness, and in February, 1785, she married him, and went with him to Lisbon, where he was established in business. A few years earlier he might, by making her his wife, have secured her a long life’s happiness. Now, as it turned out, he succeeded but in making her path smooth for a few short months. Mary’s love for Fanny made her much more sensitive to Mr. Skeys’ shortcomings as a lover than Fanny had been. Shortly after the marriage she wrote indignantly to George:—

“Skeys has received congratulatory letters from most of his friends and relations in Ireland, and he now regrets that he did not marry sooner. All his mighty fears had no foundation, so that if he had had courage to brave the world’s opinion, he might have spared Fanny many griefs, the scars of which will never be obliterated. Nay, more, if she had gone a year or two ago, her health might have been perfectly restored, which I do not now think will ever be the case. Before true passion, I am convinced, everything but a sense of duty moves; true love is warmest when the object is absent. How Hugh could let Fanny languish in England, while he was throwing money away at Lisbon, is to me inexplicable, if he had a passion that did not require the fuel of seeing the object. I much fear he loves her not for the qualities that render her dear to my heart. Her tenderness and delicacy are not even conceived of by a man who would be satisfied with the fondness of one of the general run of women.”

George Blood’s departure was due to less pleasant circumstances than Fanny’s. One youthful escapade which had come to light was sufficient to attach to his name the blame for another, of which he was innocent. Some of his associates had become seriously compromised; and he, to avoid being implicated with them, had literally taken flight, and had made Ireland his place of refuge.

Mary’s friends left her just when she most needed them. Unfortunately, the interval of peace inaugurated by the opening of the school was but short-lived. Encouraged by the first success of her enterprise, she rented a larger house, hoping that in it she would do even better. But this step proved the Open Sesame to an inexhaustible mine of difficulties. The expense involved by the change was greater than she had expected, and her means of meeting it smaller. The population at Newington Green was not numerous or wealthy enough to support a large first-class day-school, and more pupils were not forthcoming to avail themselves of the new accommodations provided for them. It was a second edition of the story of the wedding feast, and again highways and by-ways were searched in vain. Moreover, her boarders neglected to pay their bills regularly. Instead of being a source of profit, they were an additional burden. Her life now became unspeakably sad. Her whole day was spent in teaching. This in itself would not have been hard. She always interested herself in her pupils, and the consciousness of good done for others was her most highly prized pleasure. Had the physical fatigue entailed by her work been her only hardship, she would have borne it patiently and perhaps gayly. But from morning till night, waking and sleeping, she was haunted by thoughts of unpaid bills and of increasing debts. Poverty and creditors were the two unavoidable evils which stared her in the face. Then, when she did hear from Fanny, it was to know that the chances for her recovery were diminishing rather than increasing. Reports of George Blood’s ill-conduct, repeated for her benefit, hurt and irritated her. On one occasion, her house was visited by men sent thither in his pursuit by the girl who had vilely slandered him. Mrs. Campbell, with the meanness of a small nature, reproached Mary for the encouragement which she had given his vices. She loved him so truly that this must have been gall and wormwood to her sensitive heart. Mr. and Mrs. Blood continued poor and miserable, he drinking and idling, and she faring as it must ever fare with the wives of such men. Mary saw nothing before her but a dreary pilgrimage through the wide Valley of the Shadow of Death, from which there seemed no escape to the Mount Zion beyond. If she dragged herself out of the deep pit of mental despondency, it was to fall into a still deeper one of physical prostration. The bleedings and blisters ordered by her physician could help her but little. What she needed to make her well was new pupils and honest boarders, and these the most expert physician could not give her. Is it any wonder that she came in time to hate Newington Green,—“the grave of all my comforts,” she called it,—to lose relish for life, and to feel cheered only by the prospect of death? She had nothing to reproach herself with. In sorrow and sickness alike she had toiled to the best of her abilities. That which her hand had found to do, she had done with all her might. The result of her labors and long-sufferance had hitherto been but misfortune and failure. Truly could she have called out with the Lady of Sorrows in the Lamentations: “Attend, all ye who pass by, and see if there be any sorrow like unto mine.” Because we know how great her misery was, we can more fully appreciate the extent of her heroism. Though, as she confessed to her friends in her weariest moments, her heart was broken, she never once swerved from allegiance to the heaven-given mandate, as Carlyle calls it, “Work thou in well-doing!” She never faltered in the accomplishment of the duty she had set for herself, nor forgot the troubles of others because of her own. Though her difficulties accumulated with alarming rapidity, there was no relaxation in her attentions to Mr. and Mrs. Blood, in her care for her sister, nor in the sympathy she gave to George Blood.

Perhaps the greatest joy that came to her during this year was the news that Mr. Skeys had found a position for his brother-in-law in Lisbon. But this pleasure was more than counterbalanced by the discouraging bulletins of Fanny’s health. Mr. Skeys was alarmed at his wife’s increasing weakness, and was anxious to gratify her every desire. Fanny expressed a wish to have Mary with her during her confinement. The latter, with characteristic unselfishness, consented, when Mr. Skeys asked her to go to Lisbon, though in so doing she was obliged to leave school and house. This shows the sincerity of her opinion that before true passion everything but duty moves. To her, Fanny’s need seemed greater than her own; and she thought to fulfil her duty towards her sister, and to provide for her welfare by giving her charge of her scholars and boarders while she was away from them. Mary’s decision was vigorously questioned by her friends. Indeed, there were many reasons against it. It was feared her absence from the school for a necessarily long period would be injurious to it, and this eventually proved to be the case. The journey was a long one for a woman to make alone. And last, but not least, she had not the ready money to pay her expenses. But, despite all her friends could say, she could not be moved from her original resolution. When they saw their arguments were useless, they manifested their friendship in a more practical manner. Mrs. Burgh lent her the necessary sum of money for the journey. Godwin, however, thinks that in doing this she was acting in behalf of Dr. Price, who modestly preferred to conceal his share in the transaction. All impediments having thus been removed, Mary, in the autumn of 1785, started upon the saddest, up to this date, of her many missions of charity.

The reunion of the friends was a joyless pleasure. When Mary arrived in Lisbon, she found Fanny in the last stages of her illness, and before she had time to rest from her journey she began her work as sick-nurse. Four hours after her arrival Fanny’s child was born. It had been sad enough for Mary to watch her mother’s last moments and Eliza’s insanity; but this new duty was still more painful. She loved Fanny Blood with a passion whose depth is beyond the comprehension of ordinary mortals. Her affection for her was the one romance of her youth, and she lavished upon it all the sweetness and tenderness, the enthusiasm and devotion of her nature, which make her seem to us lovable above all women. And now this friend, the best gift life had so far given her, was to be taken from her. She saw Fanny grow weaker and weaker day by day, and knew that she was powerless to avert the coming calamity. Yet whatever could be done, she did. There never has been, and there never can be, a more faithful, gentle nurse. The following letter gives a graphic description of her journey, of the sad welcome which awaited her at its termination, and the still sadder duties she fulfilled in Lisbon:—

Lisbon, Nov. or Dec. 1785.

My dear Girls,—I am beginning to awake out of a terrifying dream, for in that light do the transactions of these two or three last days appear. Before I say more, let me tell you that, when I arrived here, Fanny was in labor, and that four hours after she was delivered of a boy. The child is alive and well, and considering the very, very low state to which Fanny was reduced she is better than could be expected. I am now watching her and the child. My active spirits have not been much at rest ever since I left England. I could not write to you on shipboard, the sea was so rough; and we had such hard gales of wind, the captain was afraid we should be dismasted. I cannot write to-night or collect my scattered thoughts, my mind is so unsettled. Fanny is so worn out, her recovery would be almost a resurrection, and my reason will scarce allow me to think it possible. I labor to be resigned, and by the time I am a little so, some faint hope sets my thoughts again afloat, and for a moment I look forward to days that will, alas! never come.

I will try to-morrow to give you some little regular account of my journey, though I am almost afraid to look beyond the present moment. Was not my arrival providential? I can scarce be persuaded that I am here, and that so many things have happened in so short a time. My head grows light with thinking on it.

Friday morning.—Fanny has been so alarmingly ill since I wrote the above, I entirely gave her up, and yet I could not write and tell you so: it seemed like signing her death-warrant. Yesterday afternoon some of the most alarming symptoms a little abated, and she had a comfortable night; yet I rejoice with trembling lips, and am afraid to indulge hopes. She is very low. The stomach is so weak it will scarce bear to receive the slightest nourishment; in short, if I were to tell you all her complaints you would not wonder at my fears. The child, though a puny one, is well. I have got a wet-nurse for it. The packet does not sail till the latter end of next week, and I send this by a ship. I shall write by every opportunity. We arrived last Monday. We were only thirteen days at sea. The wind was so high and the sea so boisterous the water came in at the cabin windows; and the ship rolled about in such a manner, it was dangerous to stir. The women were sea-sick the whole time, and the poor invalid so oppressed by his complaints, I never expected he would live to see Lisbon. I have supported him for hours together gasping for breath, and at night, if I had been inclined to sleep, his dreadful cough would have kept me awake. You may suppose that I have not rested much since I came here, yet I am tolerably well, and calmer than I could expect to be. Could I not look for comfort where only ’tis to be found, I should have been mad before this, but I feel that I am supported by that Being who alone can heal a wounded spirit. May He bless you both.

Yours,

Mary.

Her state of uncertainty about poor Fanny did not last long. Shortly after the above letter was written, the invalid died. Just as life was beginning to smile upon her, she was called from it. She had worked so long that when happiness at length came, she had no strength left to bear it. The blessing her wrestling had wrought was but of short duration.

Godwin, in his Memoirs, says that Mary’s trip to Portugal probably enlarged her understanding. “She was admitted,” he writes, “to the very best company the English colony afforded. She made many profound observations on the character of the natives and the baleful effects of superstition.” But it seems doubtful whether she really saw many people in Lisbon, or gave great heed to what was going on around her. Arrived there just in time to see her friend die, she remained but a short time after all was over. There was no inducement for her to make a longer stay. Her feelings for Mr. Skeys were not friendly. She could not forget that had he but treated Fanny as she, for example, would have done had she been in his place, this early death might have been prevented. Her school, intrusted to Mrs. Bishop’s care, was a strong reason for her speedy return to England. The cause which had called her from it being gone, she was anxious to return to her post.

An incident highly characteristic of her is told of the journey home. She had nursed a poor sick man on the way to Portugal; on the way back she was instrumental in saving the lives of many men. The ship in which she sailed met at mid-sea a French vessel so dismantled and storm-beaten that it was in imminent risk of sinking, and its stock of provisions was almost exhausted. Its officers hailed the English ship, begging its captain to take them and their entire crew on board. The latter hesitated. This was no trifling request. He had his own crew and passengers to consider, and he feared to lay such a heavy tax on the provisions provided for a certain number only. This was a case which aroused Mary’s tenderest sympathy. It was impossible for her to witness it unmoved. She could not without a protest allow her fellow-creatures to be so cruelly deserted. Like another Portia come to judgment, she clinched the difficulty by representing to the captain that if he did not yield to their entreaties she would expose his inhumanity upon her return to England. Her arguments prevailed. The sufferers were saved, and the intercessor in their behalf added one more to the long list of her good deeds. Never has there been a woman, not even a Saint Rose of Lima or a Saint Catherine of Siena, who could say as truly as Mary Wollstonecraft,—

“... I sate among men
And I have loved these.”

CHAPTER III.

LIFE AS GOVERNESS.

1786-1788.

There was little pleasure for Mary in her home-coming. The school, whose difficulties had begun before her departure, had prospered still less under Mrs. Bishop’s care. Many of the pupils had been taken away. Eliza, her quick temper and excitability aggravated at that time by her late misfortunes, was not a fitting person to have the control of children. She had thoughtlessly quarrelled with their most profitable boarder, the mother of the three boys, who had in consequence given up her rooms. As yet no one else had been found to occupy them. The rent of the house was so high that these losses left the sisters without the means to pay it. They were therefore in debt, and that deeply, for people with no immediate, or even remote, prospects of an addition to their income. Then the Bloods during Mary’s absence had fallen further into the Slough of Despond, out of which, now their daughter was dead, there was no one to help them. George could not aid them, because, though they did not know it, he was just then without employment. Unable to live amicably with his brother-in-law after Fanny’s death, he had resigned his position in Lisbon and gone to Ireland, where for a long while he could find nothing to do. Mr. Skeys simply refused to satisfy the never-ceasing wants of his wife’s parents. He cannot be severely censured when their shiftlessness is borne in mind. He probably had already received many appeals from them. But Mary could not accept their troubles so passively.

To add to her distress, she was weakened by the painful task she had just completed. She was low-spirited and broken-hearted, and really ill. Her eyes gave out; and no greater inconvenience could have just then befallen her. Her mental activity was temporarily paralyzed, and yet she knew that prompt measures were necessary to avert the evils crowding upon her. She had truly been anointed to wrestle and not to reign.

There was no chance of relief from her own family. Her father had married again, but his second marriage had not improved him. He had descended to the lowest stage of drunkenness and insignificance. His home was in Laugharne, Wales, where he barely managed to exist. James, the second son, had gone to sea in search of better fortune. Charles, the youngest, was not old enough to seek his, and hence had to endure as best he could the wretchedness of the Wollstonecraft household. Instead of Mary’s receiving help from this quarter, she was called upon to give it. Kinder to her father than he had ever been to her, she never ignored his difficulties. When she had money, she shared it with him. When she had none, she did all she could to force Edward, the one prosperous member of the family, to send his father the pecuniary assistance which, it seems, he had promised.

In whatever direction she looked, she saw misery and unhappiness. The present was unendurable, the future hopeless. For a brief interval she was almost crushed by her circumstances. To George Blood, now even dearer to her than he had been before, she laid bare the weariness of her heart. Shortly after her return she wrote him this letter, pathetic in its despair:

Newington Green, Feb. 4, 1786.

I write to you, my dear George, lest my silence should make you uneasy; yet what have I to say that will not have the same effect? Things do not go well with me, and my spirits seem forever flown. I was a month on my passage, and the weather was so tempestuous we were several times in imminent danger. I did not expect ever to have reached land. If it had pleased Heaven to have called me hence, what a world of care I should have missed! I have lost all relish for pleasure, and life seems a burden almost too heavy to be endured. My head is stupid, and my heart sick and exhausted. But why should I worry you? and yet, if I do not tell you my vexations, what can I write about?

Your father and mother are tolerably well, and inquire most affectionately concerning you. They do not suspect that you have left Lisbon, and I do not intend informing them of it till you are provided for. I am very unhappy on their account, for though I am determined they shall share my last shilling, yet I have every reason to apprehend extreme distress, and of course they must be involved in it. The school dwindles to nothing, and we shall soon lose our last boarder, Mrs. Disney. She and the girls quarrelled while I was away, which contributed to make the house very disagreeable. Her sons are to be whole boarders at Mrs. Cockburn’s. Let me turn my eyes on which side I will, I can only anticipate misery. Are such prospects as these likely to heal an almost broken heart? The loss of Fanny was sufficient of itself to have thrown a cloud over my brightest days; what effect, then, must it have when I am bereft of every other comfort? I have, too, many debts. I cannot think of remaining any longer in this house, the rent is so enormous; and where to go, without money or friends, who can point out? My eyes are very bad and my memory gone. I am not fit for any situation; and as for Eliza, I don’t know what will become of her. My constitution is impaired. I hope I shan’t live long, yet I may be a tedious time dying.

Well, I am too impatient. The will of heaven be done! I will labor to be resigned. “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” I scarce know what I write, yet my writing at all when my mind is so disturbed is a proof to you that I can never be lost so entirely in misery as to forget those I love. I long to hear that you are settled. It is the only quarter from which I can reasonably expect pleasure. I have received a very short, unsatisfactory letter from Lisbon. It was written to apologize for not sending the money to your father which he promised. It would have been particularly acceptable to them at this time; but he is prudent, and will not run any hazard to serve a friend. Indeed, delicacy made me conceal from him my dismal situation, but he must know how much I am embarrassed....

I am very low-spirited, and of course my letter is very dull. I will not lengthen it out in the same strain, but conclude with what alone will be acceptable, an assurance of love and regard.

Believe me to be ever your sincere and affectionate friend,

Mary Wollstonecraft.

“There is but one true cure for suffering, and that is action,” Dr. Maudsley says. The first thing Mary did in her misery was to undertake new work, this time a literary venture, not for herself, but for the benefit of Mr. and Mrs. Blood. Their son-in-law having refused to contribute from his plenty, their daughter’s friend came forward and gave from her nothing.

At the instigation of Mr. Hewlet, one of her friends already mentioned, she wrote a small pamphlet called “Thoughts on the Education of Daughters.” This gentleman rated her powers so high that he felt sure of her success as a writer. As he was well acquainted with Mr. Johnson, a prominent bookseller in Fleet Street, he could promise that her manuscript would be dealt with fairly. Her choice of subject was, in one way, fortunate. Being a teacher she could speak on educational matters with authority. But this first work is not striking or remarkable. Indeed, it is chiefly worth notice because it was the means of introducing her to Mr. Johnson, who was a true friend to her through her darkest, as well as through her brightest, days, and whose influence was strong in shaping her career. He paid her ten guineas for her pamphlet, and these she at once gave to Mr. and Mrs. Blood, who were thereby enabled to leave England and go to Dublin. There, they thought, because they and their disgrace were not yet known, the chances of their starting in life afresh were greater.

It was now time for Mary to turn her attention to her own affairs. It was absolutely necessary to give up the school. Her presence could not recall the pupils who had left it, and her debts were pressing. The success of the sisters had been too slight to tempt them to establish a similar institution in another town. They determined to separate, and each to earn her livelihood alone. Mary was not loath to do this. Because of her superior administrative ability, too large a share of the work in the school had devolved upon her, while her sisters’ society was a hindrance rather than a comfort. She was ready to sacrifice herself for others, but she had enough common sense to realize that too great unselfishness in details would in the end destroy her power of aiding in larger matters. She could do more for Eliza and Everina away from them, than if she continued to live with them.

What she desired most earnestly was to devote all her time to literary work. Mr. Hewlet had represented to her that she would be certain to make an ample support by writing. Mr. Johnson had received her pamphlet favorably, and had asked for further contributions. But her present want was urgent, and she could not wait on a probability. She had absolutely no money to live upon while she made a second experiment. She had learned thoroughly the lesson of patience and of self-restraint, and she resolved for the present to continue to teach. By doing this, she could still find a few spare hours for literary purposes, while she could gradually save enough money to warrant her beginning the life for which she longed. One plan, abandoned, however, before she attempted to put it into execution, she describes in the following letter to George Blood. The tone in which she writes is much less hopeless than that of the letter last quoted. Already the remedy of activity was beginning to have its effect:—

Newington Green, May 22, 1787.

By this time, my dear George, I hope your father and mother have reached Dublin. I long to hear of their safe arrival. A few days after they set sail, I received a letter from Skeys. He laments his inability to assist them, and dwells on his own embarrassments. How glad I am they are gone! My affairs are hastening to a crisis.... Some of my creditors cannot afford to wait for their money; as to leaving England in debt, I am determined not to do it.... Everina and Eliza are both endeavoring to go out into the world, the one as a companion, and the other as a teacher, and I believe I shall continue some time on the Green. I intend taking a little cheap lodging, and living without a servant; and the few scholars I have will maintain me. I have done with all worldly pursuits and wishes; I only desire to submit without being dependent on the caprice of our fellow-creatures. I shall have many solitary hours, but I have not much to hope for in life, and so it would be absurd to give way to fear. Besides, I try to look on the best side, and not to despond. While I am trying to do my duty in that station in which Providence has placed me, I shall enjoy some tranquil moments, and the pleasures I have the greatest relish for are not entirely out of my reach.... I have been trying to muster up my fortitude, and laboring for patience to bear my many trials. Surely, when I could determine to survive Fanny, I can endure poverty and all the lesser ills of life. I dreaded, oh! how I dreaded this time, and now it is arrived I am calmer than I expected to be. I have been very unwell; my constitution is much impaired; the prison walls are decaying, and the prisoner will ere long get free.... Remember that I am your truly affectionate friend and sister,

Mary Wollstonecraft.

Perhaps the uncertainty of keeping her pupils, or the double work necessitated by this project, discouraged her. At all events, it was relinquished when other and seemingly better proposals were made to her. Some of her friends at Newington Green recommended her to the notice of Mr. Prior, then Assistant Master at Eton, and his wife. Through them she was offered the situation of governess to the children of Lord Kingsborough, an Irish nobleman. If she accepted it, she would be spared the anxiety which a school of her own had heretofore brought her. The salary would be forty pounds a year, out of which she calculated she could pay her debts and then assist Mrs. Bishop. But she would lose her independence, and would expose herself to the indifference or contempt then the portion of governesses. “I should be shut out from society,” she explained to George Blood, “and be debarred the pleasures of imperfect friendship, as I should on every side be surrounded by unequals. To live only on terms of civility and common benevolence, without any interchange of little acts of kindness and tenderness, would be to me extremely irksome.” The prospect, it must be admitted, was not pleasant. But still the advantages outweighed the drawbacks, and Mary agreed to Lady Kingsborough’s terms.

Mr. and Mrs. Prior intended taking a trip to Ireland, and they suggested that she should accompany them. Travelling was not easy in those days, and she decided to wait and go with them. But, for some reason, they did not start as soon as they had expected. She had already joined them in their home at Eton, in which place their delay detained her for some time. This gave her the opportunity to study the school and the principles upon which it was conducted. The entire system met with her disapprobation, and afterwards, in her “Rights of Women,” she freely and strongly expressed her unfavorable opinion. Judging from what she there saw, she concluded that schools regulated according to the same rules were hot-beds of vice. Nothing disgusted her so much in this institution as the false basis upon which religion was established. The slavery to forms, demanded of the boys, seemed to her to at once undermine their moral uprightness. What, indeed, could be expected of a boy who would take the sacrament for no other reason than to avoid the fine of half a guinea imposed upon those who would not conform to this ceremony? Her visit did much towards developing and formulating her ideas on the subject of education.

Mrs. Prior seems to have given her every chance to become acquainted not only with the school, but with the social life at Eton. But her interest in the gay world, as there represented, was lukewarm. Its shallowness provoked her. She, looking upon life as real and earnest, and not as a mere playground, could not sympathize with women who gave themselves up to dress, nor with men who expended their energies in efforts to raise a laugh. Wit of rather an affected kind was the fashion of the day. At its best it was odious, but when manufactured by the weaklings of society, it was beyond endurance. Heine says that there is no man so crazy that he may not find a crazier comrade who will understand him. And it may be said as truly, that there is no man so foolish that he will not meet still greater fools ready to admire his folly. To Mary Wollstonecraft it was doubtful which was most to be despised, the affectation itself or the applause which nourished it. The governess elect, whose heart was heavy laden, saw in the flippant gayeties of Eton naught but vanity and vexation of spirit.

She wrote to Everina on the 9th of October,—

The time I spend here appears lost. While I remained in England I would fain have been near those I love.... I could not live the life they lead at Eton; nothing but dress and ridicule going forward, and I really believe their fondness for ridicule tends to make them affected, the women in their manners and the men in their conversation; for witlings abound, and puns fly about like crackers, though you would scarcely guess they had any meaning in them, if you did not hear the noise they create. So much company without any sociability would be to me an insupportable fatigue. I am, ’tis true, quite alone in a crowd, yet cannot help reflecting on the scene around me, and my thoughts harass me. Vanity in one shape or other reigns triumphant.... My thoughts and wishes tend to that land where the God of love will wipe away all tears from our eyes, where sincerity and truth will flourish, and the imagination will not dwell on pleasing illusions which vanish like dreams when experience forces us to see things as they really are. With what delight do I anticipate the time when neither death nor accidents of any kind will interpose to separate me from those I love.... Adieu; believe me to be your affectionate friend and sister,

Mary Wollstonecraft.

Finally the time came for her departure. In October, 1787, she set out with Mr. and Mrs. Prior for Ireland, and towards the end of the month arrived at the castle of Lord Kingsborough in Mitchelstown. Her first impressions were gloomy. But, indeed, her depression and weakness were so great, that she looked at all things, as if through a glass, darkly. Her sorrows were still too fresh to be forgotten in idle curiosity about the inhabitants and customs of her new home. Even if she had been in the best of spirits, her arrival at the castle would have been a trying moment. It is never easy for one woman to face alone several of her sex, who, she knows, are waiting to criticise her. There were then staying with Lady Kingsborough her step-mother and her three unmarried step-sisters and several guests. Governesses in this household had fared much as companions in Mrs. Dawson’s. They had come and gone in rapid succession. Therefore Mary was examined by these ladies much as a new horse is [inspected] by a racer, or a new dog by a sportsman. She passed through the ordeal successfully, but it left her courage at low ebb. Her first report to her sister is not cheerful:—

The Castle, Mitchelstown, Oct. 30, 1787.

Well, my dear girl, I am at length arrived at my journey’s end. I sigh when I say so, but it matters not, I must labor for content, and try to reconcile myself to a state which is contrary to every feeling of my soul. I can scarcely persuade myself that I am awake; my whole life appears like a frightful vision, and equally disjointed. I have been so very low-spirited for some days past, I could not write. All the moments I could spend in solitude were lost in sorrow and unavailing tears. There was such a solemn kind of stupidity about this place as froze my very blood. I entered the great gates with the same kind of feeling as I should have if I was going into the Bastille. You can make allowance for the feelings which the General would term ridiculous or artificial. I found I was to encounter a host of females,—My Lady, her step-mother and three sisters, and Mrses. and Misses without number, who, of course, would examine me with the most minute attention. I cannot attempt to give you a description of the family, I am so low; I will only mention some of the things which particularly worry me. I am sure much more is expected from me than I am equal to. With respect to French, I am certain Mr. P. has misled them, and I expect in consequence of it to be very much mortified. Lady K. is a shrewd, clever woman, a great talker. I have not seen much of her, as she is confined to her room by a sore throat; but I have seen half a dozen of her companions. I mean not her children, but her dogs. To see a woman without any softness in her manners caressing animals, and using infantine expressions, is, you may conceive, very absurd and ludicrous, but a fine lady is a new species to me of animal. I am, however, treated like a gentlewoman by every part of the family, but the forms and parade of high life suit not my mind.... I hear a fiddle below, the servants are dancing, and the rest of the family are diverting themselves. I only am melancholy and alone. To tell the truth, I hope part of my misery arises from disordered nerves, for I would fain believe my mind is not so very weak. The children are, literally speaking, wild Irish, unformed and not very pleasing; but you shall have a full and true account, my dear girl, in a few days....

I am your affectionate sister and sincere friend,

Mary Wollstonecraft.

It was at least fortunate that she escaped, with Lady Kingsborough, the indignities which she had feared she, as governess, would receive. Instead of being placed on a level with the servants, as was often the fate of gentlewomen in her position, she was treated as one of the family, but she had little else to be thankful for. There was absolutely no congeniality between herself and her employers. She had no tastes or views in common with them. Lady Kingsborough was a thorough woman of the world. She was clever but cold, and her natural coldness had been increased by the restraints and exactions of her social rank. If she rouged to preserve her good looks, and talked to exhibit her cleverness, she was fulfilling all the requirements of her station in life. Her character and conduct were in every way opposed to Mary’s ideals. The latter, who was instinctively honest, and who never stooped to curry favor with any one, must have found it difficult to treat Lady Kingsborough with a deference she did not feel, but which her subordinate position obliged her to show. The struggle between impulse and duty thus caused was doubtless one of the chief factors in making her experiences in Ireland so painful. How great this struggle was can be best estimated when it is known what she thought of the mother of her pupils. She was never thrown into such intimate relations with any other woman of fashion, and therefore it is not illogical to believe that many passages in the “Rights of Women,” relating to women of this class, are descriptions of Lady Kingsborough. The allusion to pet dogs in the following seems to establish the identity beyond dispute:—

“... She who takes her dogs to bed, and nurses them with a parade of sensibility when sick, will suffer her babes to grow up crooked in a nursery. This illustration of my argument is drawn from a matter of fact. The woman whom I allude to was handsome, reckoned very handsome by those who do not miss the mind when the face is plump and fair; but her understanding had not been led from female duties by literature, nor her innocence debauched by knowledge. No, she was quite feminine according to the masculine acceptation of the word; and so far from loving these spoiled brutes that filled the place which her children ought to have occupied, she only lisped out a pretty mixture of French and English nonsense, to please the men who flocked round her. The wife, mother, and human creature were all swallowed up by the factitious character which an improper education and the selfish vanity of beauty had produced.

“I do not like to make a distinction without a difference, and I own that I have been as much disgusted by the fine lady who took her lap-dog to her bosom, instead of her child, as by the ferocity of a man, who beating his horse, declared that he knew as well when he did wrong as a Christian.”

If Lady Kingsborough was a representative lady of fashion, her husband was quite as much the typical country lord. Tom Jones was still the ideal hero of fiction, and Squire Westerns had not disappeared from real life. Lord Kingsborough was good-natured and kind, but, like the rest of the species, coarse. “His countenance does not promise more than good humor and a little fun, not refined,” Mary told Mrs. Bishop. The three step-sisters were too preoccupied with matrimonial calculations to manifest their character, if indeed they had any. Clearly, in such a household Mary Wollstonecraft was as a child of Israel among the Philistines.

The society of the children, though they were “wild Irish,” was more to her taste than that of the grown-up members of the family. Three were given into her charge. At first she thought them not very pleasing, but after a better acquaintance she grew fond of them. The eldest, Margaret, afterwards Lady Mountcashel, was then fourteen years of age. She was very talented, and a “sweet girl,” as Mary called her in a letter to Mrs. Bishop. She became deeply attached to her new governess, not with the passing fancy of a child, but with a lasting devotion. The other children also learned to love her, but being younger there was less friendship in their affection. They were afraid of their mother, who lavished her caresses upon her dogs, until she had none left for them. Therefore, when Mary treated them affectionately and sympathized with their interests and pleasures, they naturally turned to her and gave her the love which no one else seemed to want. That this was the case was entirely Lady Kingsborough’s fault, but she resented it bitterly, and it was later a cause of serious complaint against the too competent governess. The affection of her pupils, which was her principal pleasure during her residence in Ireland, thus became in the end a misfortune.

A more prolific source of trouble to her was, strangely enough, her interest in them. Lady Kingsborough had very positive ideas upon the subject of her children’s education, and by insisting upon adherence to them she made Mary’s task doubly hard. Had she not been interfered with, her position would not have been so unpleasant. She could put her whole soul into her work, whatever it might be, and find in its success one of her chief joys. She wished to do her utmost for Margaret and her sisters, but this was impossible, since she knew the system Lady Kingsborough exacted to be vicious. The latter cared more for a show of knowledge than for knowledge itself, and laid the greatest stress upon the acquirement of accomplishments. This was not in accord with Mary’s theories, who prized reality and not appearances. A less conscientious woman might have contented herself with the thought that she was carrying out the wishes of her employer. But Mary could not quiet her scruples in this way. She was tormented by the sense of duty but half fulfilled. She realized, by her own sad experience, how much depends upon the training received in childhood, and yet she was powerless to bring up her pupils in the way she knew to be best. She had, besides, constantly before her in Lady Kingsborough and her sisters a, to her, melancholy example of the result of the methods she was asked to adopt. They had been carefully taught many different languages and much history, but had been as carefully instilled with the idea that their studies were but means to social success and to a brilliant marriage. The consequence was that their education, despite its thoroughness, had made them puppets, self-interest being the wire which moved them. She did not want this to be the fate of her pupils, but she could see no escape for them.

In addition to her honest anxiety for their future, she must have been worried by the certainty that, if she remained with them, she would be held responsible for their character and conduct in after-life. Though she had charge of them only for a year, this eventually proved to be the case. Margaret’s reputation as Lady Mountcashel was not wholly unsullied, and when it was remembered that she had, at one time, been under the influence of Mary Wollstonecraft, author of the “Rights of Women,” the fault was attributed to the immoral and irreligious teaching of the latter. Never was any woman so unjustly condemned. In the first place, Mary was not her governess long enough to actually change her nature, or to influence her for life; and, in the second place, she was not allowed to have her own way with her pupils. Had she been free she would have been more apt to encourage a spirit of piety, and inculcate a fine moral sense. For she was at that period in a deeply religious frame of mind, while she did all she could to counteract what she considered the deteriorating tendencies of the children’s home training. As Kegan Paul says, “Her whole endeavor was to train them for higher pursuits and to instil into them a desire for a wider culture than fell to the lot of most girls in those days. Her sorrow was deep that her pupils’ lives were such as to render sustained study and religious habits of mind alike difficult.”

This caused her much unhappiness. Her worriment developed into positive illness. After she had been with them some months, the strain seemed more than she could bear, as she confessed to Mr. Johnson, to whom she wrote from Dublin on the 14th of April,—

I am still an invalid, and begin to believe that I ought never to expect to enjoy health. My mind preys on my body, and, when I endeavor to be useful, I grow too much interested for my own peace. Confined almost entirely to the society of children, I am anxiously solicitous for their future welfare, and mortified beyond measure when counteracted in my endeavors to improve them. I feel all a mother’s fears for the swarm of little ones which surround me, and observe disorders, without having power to apply the proper remedies. How can I be reconciled to life, when it is always a painful warfare, and when I am deprived of all the pleasures I relish? I allude to rational conversations and domestic affections. Here, alone, a poor solitary individual in a strange land, tied to one spot, and subject to the caprice of another, can I be contented? I am desirous to convince you that I have some cause for sorrow, and am not without reason detached from life. I shall hope to hear that you are well, and am yours sincerely,

Wollstonecraft.

The family troubles followed Mary to Ireland. The news which reached her from home was discouraging. Edward Wollstonecraft at this period declared he would do nothing more for his father. Prudent, and with none of his sister’s unselfishness, he grew tired of the drain upon his purse. There was also difficulty about some money which Mary and her sisters considered theirs by right, but which the eldest brother, with shameless selfishness, refused to give up. What the exact circumstances were is not certain; but it could have been no light tax upon Mary to contribute the necessary amount for her father’s support, and no small disappointment to be deprived of money which she thought to be legally hers. Money cares were to her what the Old Man of the Sea was to Sinbad. They were a burden from which she was never free. When from forty pounds a year she had to take half to pay her debts, and then give from the remainder to her father, her share of her earnings was not large. And yet she counted upon her savings to purchase her future release from a life of dependence.

Though she wrote to Mr. Johnson that she was almost entirely confined to the society of children, she really did see much of the family, often taking part in their amusements. Judging from the attractions and conversational powers which made her a favorite in London society, it is but natural to conclude that she was an addition to the household. She seems at times to have exerted herself to be agreeable. Godwin records the extreme discomfiture of a fine lady of quality, when, on one occasion, after having singled her out and treated her with marked friendliness, she discovered that she had been entertaining the children’s governess! Mary cared nothing for these people, but as they were civil to her, she returned their politeness by showing them she was well worth being polite to. Low-spirited as she was, she mustered up sufficient courage to discuss the husband-hunts of the young ladies and even to notice the dogs. This was, indeed, a concession. To Everina she sent a bulletin—not untouched with humor—of her wonderful and praiseworthy progress with the inmates of the castle:—

Mitchelstown, Nov. 17, 1787.

... Confined to the society of a set of silly females, I have no social converse, and their boisterous spirits and unmeaning laughter exhaust me, not forgetting hourly domestic bickerings. The topics of matrimony and dress take their turn, not in a very sentimental style,—alas! poor sentiment, it has no residence here. I almost wish the girls were novel-readers and romantic. I declare false refinement is better than none at all; but these girls understand several languages, and have read cartloads of history, for their mother was a prudent woman. Lady K.’s passion for animals fills up the hours which are not spent in dressing. All her children have been ill,—very disagreeable fevers. Her ladyship visited them in a formal way, though their situation called forth my tenderness, and I endeavored to amuse them, while she lavished awkward fondness on her dogs. I think now I hear her infantine lisp. She rouges, and, in short, is a fine lady, without fancy or sensibility. I am almost tormented to death by dogs. But you will perceive I am not under the influence of my darling passion—pity; it is not always so. I make allowance and adapt myself, talk of getting husbands for the ladies—and the dogs, and am wonderfully entertaining; and then I retire to my room, form figures in the fire, listen to the wind, or view the Gotties, a fine range of mountains near us, and so does time waste away in apathy or misery.... I am drinking asses’ milk, but do not find it of any service. I am very ill, and so low-spirited my tears flow in torrents almost insensibly. I struggle with myself, but I hope my Heavenly Father will not be extreme to mark my weakness, and that He will have compassion upon a poor bruised reed, and pity a miserable wretch, whose sorrows He only knows.... I almost wish my warfare was over.

The religious tone of this letter calls for special notice, since it was written at the very time she was supposed to be imparting irreligious principles to her pupils.

Mary had none of the false sentiment of a Sterne, and could not waste sympathy over brutes, when she felt that there were human beings who needed it. Her ladyship’s dogs worried her because of the contrast between the attention they received and the indifference which fell to the lot of the children. Besides, the then distressing condition of the laboring population in Ireland made the luxuries and silly affectations of the rich doubly noticeable. Mary saw for herself the poverty of the peasantry. Margaret was allowed to visit the poor, and she accompanied her on her charitable rounds. The almost bestial squalor in which these people lived was another cruel contrast to the pampered existence led by the dogs at the castle. She had none of Strap’s veneration for the epithet of gentleman. Eliza owned to a “sneaking kindness for people of quality.” But Mary cared only for a man’s intrinsic merit. His rank could not cover his faults. Therefore, with the misery and destitution of so many men and women staring her in the face, the amusements and occupations of the few within Lady Kingsborough’s household continually grated upon her finer instincts.

In the winter of 1788 the family went to Dublin, and Mary accompanied them. She liked the society of the capital no better than she had that of the country. She, however, occasionally shared in its frivolities, her relations to Lady Kingsborough obliging her to do this. She was still young enough to possess the capacity for enjoyment, though her many hardships and sorrows had made her think this impossible, and she was sometimes carried away by the gayety around her. But, as thorough a hater of shams as Carlyle, she was disgusted with herself once the passing excitement was over. From Dublin she wrote to Everina giving her a description of a mask to which she had gone, and of which she had evidently been a conspicuous feature:—

Dublin, March 14, 1788.

... I am very weak to-day, but I can account for it. The day before yesterday there was a masquerade; in the course of conversation some time before, I happened to wish to go to it. Lady K. offered me two tickets for myself and Miss Delane to accompany me. I refused them on account of the expense of dressing properly. She then, to obviate that objection, lent me a black domino. I was out of spirits, and thought of another excuse; but she proposed to take me and Betty Delane to the houses of several people of fashion who saw masks. We went to a great number, and were a tolerable, nay, a much-admired, group. Lady K. went in a domino with a smart cockade; Miss Moore dressed in the habit of one of the females of the new discovered islands; Betty D. as a forsaken shepherdess; and your sister Mary in a black domino. As it was taken for granted the stranger who had just arrived could not speak the language, I was to be her interpreter, which afforded me an ample field for satire. I happened to be very melancholy in the morning, as I am almost every morning, but at night my fever gives me false spirits; this night the lights, the novelty of the scene, and all things together contributed to make me more than half mad. I gave full scope to a satirical vein, and suppose ...

Unfortunately, the rest of the letter is lost.

In the midst of her duties and dissipations she managed to find some little time for more solid pleasures and more congenial work. In her letters she speaks of nothing with so much enthusiasm as of Rousseau, whose “Émile” she read while she was in Dublin. She wrote to Everina, on the 24th of March,—

I believe I told you before that as a nation I do not admire the Irish; and as to the great world and its frivolous ceremonies, I cannot away with them; they fatigue me. I thank Heaven I was not so unfortunate as to be born a lady of quality. I am now reading Rousseau’s “Émile,” and love his paradoxes. He chooses a common capacity to educate, and gives as a reason that a genius will educate itself. However, he rambles into that chimerical world in which I have too often wandered, and draws the usual conclusion that all is vanity and vexation of spirit. He was a strange, inconsistent, unhappy, clever creature, yet he possessed an uncommon portion of sensibility and penetration....

Adieu, yours sincerely,

Mary.

It was also during this period that she wrote a novel called “Mary.” It is a narrative of her acquaintance and friendship with Fanny Blood,—her In Memoriam of the friend she so dearly loved. In writing it she sought relief for the bitter sorrow with which her loss had filled her heart.

The Irish gayeties lasted through the winter. In the spring the family crossed over to England and went to Bristol, Hotwells, and Bath. In all these places Mary saw more of the gay world, but it was only to deepen the disgust with which it inspired her. Those were the days when men drank at dinner until they fell under the table; when young women thought of nothing but beaux, and were exhibited by their fond mothers as so much live-stock to be delivered to the highest bidder; and when dowagers, whose flirting season was over, spent all their time at the card-table. Nowhere were the absurdities and emptiness of polite society so fully exposed as at these three fashionable resorts. Even the frivolity of Dublin paled in comparison. Mary’s health improved in England. The Irish climate seems to have specially disagreed with her. But notwithstanding the much-needed improvement in her physical condition, and despite her occasional concessions to her circumstances, her life became more unbearable every day, while her sympathies and tastes grew farther apart from those of her employers.

But while even the little respect she felt for Lord and Lady Kingsborough lessened, her love for the children increased. This they returned with interest. Once, when one of them had to go into the country with her mother and without her governess, she cried so bitterly that she made herself ill. The strength of Margaret’s affection can be partly measured by the following passage from a letter written by Mary shortly after their separation:—

“I had, the other day, the satisfaction of again receiving a letter from my poor dear Margaret. With all the mother’s fondness, I could transcribe a part of it. She says, every day her affection to me, and dependence on heaven, increase, etc. I miss her innocent caresses, and sometimes indulge a pleasing hope, that she may be allowed to cheer my childless age if I am to live to be old. At any rate, I may hear of the virtues I may not contemplate.”

Lady Kingsborough made no effort to win her children’s affection, but she was unwilling that they should bestow it upon a stranger. She could not forgive the governess who had taken her place in their hearts. She and her eldest daughter had on this account frequent quarrels. Mary’s position was therefore untenable. Her surroundings were uncongenial, her duties distasteful, and she was disapproved of by her employer. Nothing was needed but a decent pretext for the latter to dismiss her. This she before long found when, Mary being temporarily separated from her pupils, Margaret showed more regret than her mother thought the occasion warranted. Lady Kingsborough seized the opportunity to give the governess her dismissal. This was in the autumn of 1788, and the family were in London. Mary had for some weeks known that this end was inevitable, but still her departure, when the time came, was sudden. It was a trial to her to leave the children, but escape from the household was a joyful emancipation. Again she was obliged to face the world, and again she emerged triumphant from her struggles. With each new change she advanced a step in her intellectual progress. After she left Lady Kingsborough she began the literary life which was to make her famous.

CHAPTER IV.

LITERARY LIFE.

1788-1791.

During her residence with the family of Lady Kingsborough in Ireland, Mary, as has been seen, corresponded with Mr. Johnson the publisher. In her hour of need she went to him for advice and assistance. He strongly recommended, as he had more than once before, that she should give up teaching altogether, and devote her time to literary work.

Mr. Johnson was a man of considerable influence and experience, and he was enterprising and progressive. He published most of the principal books of the day. The Edgeworths sent him their novels from Ireland, and Cowper his poetry from Olney. One day he gave the reading world Mrs. Barbauld’s works for the young, and the next, the speculations of reformers and social philosophers whose rationalism deterred many another publisher. It was for printing the Rev. Gilbert Wakefield’s too plain-spoken writings that he was, at a later date, fined and imprisoned. Quick to discern true merit, he was equally prompt in encouraging it. As Mary once said of him, he was a man before he was a bookseller. His kind, generous nature made him as ready to assist needy and deserving authors with his purse as he was to publish their works. From the time he had seen Mary’s pamphlet on the “Education of Daughters,” he had been deeply and honestly interested in her. It had convinced him of her power to do something greater. Her letters had sustained him in this opinion, and her novel still further confirmed it. He now, in addition to urging her to try to support herself by writing, promised her continual employment if she would settle in London.

To-day there would seem no possible reason for any one in her position to hesitate before accepting such an offer. But in her time it was an unusual occurrence for a woman to adopt literature as a profession. It is true there had been a great change since Swift declared that “not one gentleman’s daughter in a thousand has been brought to read or understand her own natural tongue.” Women had learned not only to read, but to write. Miss Burney had written her novels, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu her Letters, and Mrs. Inchbald her “Simple Story” and her plays, before Mary came to London. Though the Amelias and Lydia Melfords of fiction were still favorite types, the blue-stocking was gaining ascendency. Because she was such a rara avis she received a degree of attention and devotion which now appears extraordinary. Mrs. Inchbald and Mrs. Opie, Maria Edgeworth and Mrs. Barbauld, at the end of the last and beginning of this century, were fêted and praised as seldom falls to the lot of their successors of the present generation. But, despite this fact, they were not quite sure that they were keeping within the limits of feminine modesty by publishing their writings. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had considered it necessary to apologize for having translated Epictetus. Miss Burney shrank from publicity, and preferred the slavery of a court to the liberty of home life, which meant time for writing. Good Mrs. Barbauld feared she “stepped out of the bounds of female reserve” when she became an author. They all wrote either for amusement or as a last resource to eke out a slender income. But Mary would, by agreeing to Mr. Johnson’s proposition, deliberately throw over other chances of making a livelihood to rely entirely upon literature. She was young, unmarried, and, to all intents and purposes, alone in the world. Such a step was unprecedented in English literary annals. She would really be, as she wrote to her sister, the first of a new genus. Her conduct would unquestionably be criticised and censured. She would have to run the gauntlet of public opinion, a much more trying ordeal than that through which she had passed at the castle in Mitchelstown.

But, on the other hand, she would thereby gain freedom and independence, for which she had always yearned above all else; her work would be congenial; and, what to her was even more important, she would obtain better means to further the welfare of her sisters and brothers, and to assist her father. Compared to these inducements, the fact that people would look upon her askance was a very insignificant consideration. She believed in a woman’s right to independence; and, the first chance she had, she acted according to her lights.

But, at the same time, she knew that if her friends heard of her determination before she had carried it into effect, they would try to dissuade her from it. She was firmly resolved not to be influenced in this matter by any one; and therefore, to avoid the unpleasant discussions and disputes that might arise from a difference of opinion, she maintained strict secrecy as to her plans. From her letters it seems probable that she had made definite arrangements with Mr. Johnson before her formal dismissal by Lady Kingsborough. In September of 1788 she stayed at Henley for a short time with Mrs. Bishop; and it was doubtless this visit that caused Margaret’s unhappiness and hence her mother’s indignation. At Henley Mary enjoyed a short interval of rest. The quiet of the place and temporary idleness were the best of tonics for her disordered nerves, and an excellent preparation for her new labors. That she was at that time determined to give up teaching for literature, but that she did not take her sister into her confidence, is shown by this letter written to Mr. Johnson, containing a pleasant description of her holiday:—

Henley, Thursday, Sept. 13.

My dear Sir,—Since I saw you I have, literally speaking, enjoyed solitude. My sister could not accompany me in my rambles; I therefore wandered alone by the side of the Thames, and in the neighboring beautiful fields and pleasure grounds: the prospects were of such a placid kind, I caught tranquillity while I surveyed them; my mind was still, though active. Were I to give you an account how I have spent my time, you would smile. I found an old French Bible here, and amused myself with comparing it with our English translation; then I would listen to the falling leaves, or observe the various tints the autumn gave to them. At other times, the singing of a robin or the noise of a water-mill engaged my attention; for I was at the same time, perhaps, discussing some knotty point, or straying from this tiny world to new systems. After these excursions I returned to the family meals, told the children stories (they think me vastly agreeable), and my sister was amused. Well, will you allow me to call this way of passing my days pleasant?

I was just going to mend my pen; but I believe it will enable me to say all I have to add to this epistle. Have you yet heard of an habitation for me? I often think of my new plan of life; and lest my sister should try to prevail on me to alter it, I have avoided mentioning it to her. I am determined! Your sex generally laugh at female determinations; but let me tell you, I never yet resolved to do anything of consequence, that I did not adhere resolutely to it, till I had accomplished my purpose, improbable as it might have appeared to a more timid mind. In the course of near nine and twenty years I have gathered some experience, and felt many severe disappointments; and what is the amount? I long for a little peace and independence! Every obligation we receive from our fellow-creatures is a new shackle, takes from our native freedom, and debases the mind, makes us mere earthworms. I am not fond of grovelling!

I am, Sir, yours, etc.,

Mary Wollstonecraft.

When she parted from Lady Kingsborough, and the time arrived for beginning her new life, she thought it best to communicate her prospects to Everina; but she begged the latter not to mention them to any one else. She seems for some time to have wished that her family at least should know nothing of her whereabouts or her occupations.

She wrote from London on the 7th of November to Everina,—

I am, my dear girl, once more thrown on the world. I have left Lord K.’s, and they return next week to Mitchelstown. I long since imagined that my departure would be sudden. I have not seen Mrs. Burgh, but I have informed her of this circumstance, and at the same time mentioned to her, that I was determined not to see any of my friends till I am in a way to earn my own subsistence. And to this determination I will adhere. You can conceive how disagreeable pity and advice would be at this juncture. I have two other cogent reasons. Before I go on will you pause, and if, after deliberating, you will promise not to mention to any one what you know of my designs, though you may think my requesting you to conceal them unreasonable, I will trust to your honor, and proceed. Mr. Johnson, whose uncommon kindness, I believe, has saved me from despair and vexation I shrink back from, and fear to encounter, assures me that if I exert my talents in writing, I may support myself in a comfortable way. I am then going to be the first of a new genus. I tremble at the attempt; yet if I fail I only suffer; and should I succeed, my dear girls will ever in sickness have a home and a refuge, where for a few months in the year they may forget the cares that disturb the rest. I shall strain every nerve to obtain a situation for Eliza nearer town: in short, I am once more involved in schemes. Heaven only knows whether they will answer! Yet while they are pursued life slips away. I would not on any account inform my father or Edward of my designs. You and Eliza are the only part of the family I am interested about; I wish to be a mother to you both. My undertaking would subject me to ridicule and an inundation of friendly advice to which I cannot listen; I must be independent. I wish to introduce you to Mr. Johnson. You would respect him; and his sensible conversation would soon wear away the impression that a formality, or rather stiffness of manners, first makes to his disadvantage. I am sure you would love him, did you know with what tenderness and humanity he has behaved to me....

I cannot write more explicitly. I have indeed been very much harassed. But Providence has been very kind to me, and when I reflect on past mercies, I am not without hope with respect to the future; and freedom, even uncertain freedom, is dear.... This project has long floated in my mind. You know I am not born to tread in the beaten track; the peculiar bent of my nature pushes me on. Adieu; believe me ever your sincere friend and affectionate sister,

Mary Wollstonecraft.

Seas will not now divide us, nor years elapse before we see each other.

Thus, hopeful for herself and her sisters, she started out upon a new road, which, smoother than any she had yet trodden, was not without its many thorns and pitfalls. For a little while she stayed with Mr. Johnson, whose house was then, as ever, open to her. But as soon as possible she moved to lodgings he found for her in George Street, in the neighborhood of Blackfriars’ Bridge. Here she was near him, and this was an important consideration, as the work he proposed to give her necessitated frequent intercourse between them, and it was also an advantage for her to be within reasonable distance of the only friend she possessed in London.

Mr. Johnson made her his “reader;” that is to say, he gave her the manuscripts sent to him to read and criticise; he also required that she should translate for him foreign works, for which there was then a great demand, and that she should contribute to the “Analytical Review,” which had just been established. Her position was a good one. It is true it left her little time for original work, and Godwin thought that it contracted rather than enlarged her genius for the time being. But it gave her a certain valuable experience and much practice which she would not otherwise have obtained, and it insured her steady employment. She was to the publisher what a staff contributor is to a newspaper. Whenever anything was to be done, she was called upon to do it. Therefore, there was no danger of her dying of starvation in a garret, like Chatterton, or of her offering her manuscripts to one unwilling bookseller after another, as happened to Carlyle.

She did not disappoint Mr. Johnson’s expectations. She worked well and diligently, being thoroughly conscientious in whatever she did. The office of “reader” is no mere sinecure; it requires a keen critical sense, an impartial mind, and not a little moral courage. The first of these qualifications Mary possessed naturally, and her honesty enabled her to cultivate the two last. She was as fearless in her criticisms as she was just; she praised and found fault with equal temerity. This disagreeable duty was the indirect cause of the happiest event of her life. The circumstance in question belongs to a later date, but it may more appropriately be mentioned here in connection with this branch of her work. On one occasion she had to read a volume of Essays written by Miss Hayes. The preface displeased her, and this she told the author, stating her reasons with unhesitating frankness. Miss Hayes was a woman capable of appreciating such candor of speech; and the business transaction led to a sincere and lasting friendship. Miss Hayes was the mutual friend who succeeded in producing a better feeling between Godwin and Mary, who, as the sequel will show, were not very friendly when they first met. This fact adds a personal interest to Mary’s letter. She writes,—

“I yesterday mentioned to Mr. Johnson your request, and he assented, desiring that the titlepage might be sent to him. I therefore can say nothing more, for trifles of this kind I have always left to him to settle; and you must be aware, madam, that the honor of publishing, the phrase on which you have laid a stress, is the cant of both trade and sex; for if really equality should ever take place in society, the man who is employed and gives a just equivalent for the money he receives will not behave with the servile obsequiousness of a servant.

“I am now going to treat you with still greater frankness. I do not approve of your preface, and I will tell you why: if your work should deserve attention, it is a blur on the very face of it. Disadvantages of education, etc., ought, in my opinion, never to be pleaded with the public in excuse for defects of any importance, because if the writer has not sufficient strength of mind to overcome the common difficulties that lie in his way, nature seems to command him, with a very audible voice, to leave the task of instructing others to those who can. This kind of vain humility has ever disgusted me; and I should say to an author, who humbly sued for forbearance, If you have not a tolerably good opinion of your own production, why intrude it on the public? We have plenty of bad books already, that have just gasped for breath and died. The last paragraph I particularly object to, it is so full of vanity. Your male friends will still treat you like a woman; and many a man, for instance Dr. Johnson, Lord Littleton, and even Dr. Priestley have insensibly been led to utter warm eulogiums in private that they would be sorry openly to avow without some cooling explanatory ifs. An author, especially a woman, should be cautious, lest she too hastily swallows the crude praises which partial friend and polite acquaintance bestow thoughtlessly when the supplicating eye looks for them. In short, it requires great resolution to try rather to be useful than to please. With this remark in your head, I must beg you to pardon my freedom whilst you consider the purport of what I am going to add,—rest on yourself. If your essays have merit, they will stand alone; if not, the shouldering up of Dr. this or that will not long keep them from falling to the ground. The vulgar have a pertinent proverb, ‘Too many cooks spoil the broth;’ and let me remind you that when weakness claims indulgence, it seems to justify the despotism of strength. Indeed, the preface, and even your pamphlet, is too full of yourself. Inquiries ought to be made before they are answered; and till a work strongly interests the public, true modesty should keep the author in the background, for it is only about the character and life of a good author that curiosity is active. A blossom is but a blossom.”

It is a pity that most of Mary’s contributions to the “Analytical Review,” being unsigned, cannot be credited to her. She wrote for it many reviews and similar articles, and they probably were characterized by her uncompromising honesty and straightforwardness of speech. “If you do not like the manner in which I reviewed Dr. J——’s S—— on his wife,” she wrote in a note to Mr. Johnson, “be it known unto you, I will not do it any other way. I felt some pleasure in paying a just tribute of respect to the memory of a man, who, spite of all his faults, I have an affection for.” From this it appears, that to tell the truth in these matters was not always an uncongenial duty.

She was principally occupied in translating. Following Mr. Johnson’s advice, she had while in Ireland perfected her French. She was tolerably familiar with Italian; and she now devoted all her spare minutes, and these could not have been many, to mastering German. Her energy was unflagging, and her determination to succeed in the calling she had chosen, indomitable. By studying she was laying up the only capital she knew how to accumulate, and she feared her future loss should she not make use of present opportunities. She wrote to Mr. Johnson, who was materially interested in her progress,—

I really want a German grammar, as I intend to attempt to learn that language, and I will tell you the reason why. While I live, I am persuaded, I must exert my understanding to procure an independence and render myself useful. To make the task easier, I ought to store my mind with knowledge. The seed-time is passing away. I see the necessity of laboring now, and of that necessity I do not complain; on the contrary, I am thankful that I have more than common incentives to pursue knowledge, and draw my pleasures from the employments that are within my reach. You perceive this is not a gloomy day. I feel at this moment particularly grateful to you. Without your humane and delicate assistance, how many obstacles should I not have had to encounter! Too often should I have been out of patience with my fellow-creatures, whom I wish to love. Allow me to love you, my dear sir, and call friend a being I respect. Adieu.

Mary W.

She had indeed reason to be grateful to Mr. Johnson, and she expressed her gratitude in a more practical way than by protestations. The German grammar was not wasted. Before long Mary undertook for practice to translate Salzmann’s “Elements of Morality,” and her exercise proved so masterly that she, with a few corrections and additions, published it. This gave rise to a correspondence between the author and herself; and after several years the former returned the compliment by translating the “Rights of Women” into German. Some idea will be given of her industry when it is stated that during the five years of her London life, she, in addition to the work already mentioned, rewrote a translation from the Dutch of “Young Grandison;” translated from the French “Young Robinson,” Necker on “Religious Opinions,” and Lavater’s “Physiognomy;” wrote a volume of “Original Stories from Real Life for Children,” and compiled a “Female Reader.” As these works were undertaken for money rather than for fame, she did not through them exert any personal influence on contemporary thought, or leave any impression on posterity.

She never degenerated, however, into a mere hack writer, nor did she accept the literary tasks which came in her way, unless she felt able to accomplish them. She was too conscientious to fall into a fault unfortunately common among men and women in a similar position. She did not shrink from any work, if she knew she was capable of doing it justice. When it was beyond her powers, she frankly admitted this to be the case. Thus, she once wrote to Mr. Johnson:—

“I return you the Italian manuscript, but do not hastily imagine that I am indolent. I would not spare any labor to do my duty; that single thought would solace me more than any pleasures the senses could enjoy. I find I could not translate the manuscript well. If it were not a manuscript I should not be so easily intimidated; but the hand, and errors in orthography or abbreviations, are a stumbling-block at the first setting out. I cannot bear to do anything I cannot do well; and I should lose time in the vain attempt.”

When she settled in London, she was in no humor for social pleasures. Her sole ambition was to be useful, and she worked incessantly. She at first hid herself from almost everybody. When she expected her sisters to stay with her, she begged them beforehand, “If you pay any visits, you will comply with my whim and not mention my place of abode or mode of life.” She lived in very simple fashion; her rooms were furnished with the merest necessities. Another warning she had to give Everina and Mrs. Bishop was, “I have a room, but not furniture. J. offered you both a bed in his house, but that would not be pleasant. I believe I must try to purchase a bed, which I shall reserve for my poor girls while I have a house.” It has been recorded that Talleyrand visited her in her lodgings on George Street, and that while the two discussed social and political problems, they drank their tea and then their wine from tea-cups, wine-glasses being an elegance beyond Mary’s means. Her dress was as plain as her furniture. Her gowns were mean in material and often shabby, and her hair hung loosely on her shoulders, instead of being twisted and looped as was then fashionable. Knowles, in his “Life of Fuseli,” finds fault with her on this account. She was not, however, a philosophical sloven, with romantic ideas of benevolence, as he intimates. Either he or Fuseli strangely misjudged her. The reason she paid so little heed to the luxuries and frivolities which custom then exacted, was because other more pressing demands were made upon her limited income. Then, as usual, she was troubled by the wretched complications and misfortunes of her family. The entire care and responsibility fell upon her shoulders. None of the other members seemed to consider that she was as destitute as they were,—that what she did was literally her one source of revenue. Assistance would have been as welcome to her as it was to them. But they accepted what she had to give, and were never deterred by reflecting upon the difficulty with which she responded to their needs. This is always the way. The strong are made to bear the burdens of the weak.

The amount of practical help she gave them is almost incredible. Eliza and Everina had, when the school at Newington Green failed, become governesses, but their education had been so sadly neglected that they were not competent for their work. Mary, knowing this, sent Everina to France, that she might study to be a good French teacher. The tide of emigration caused by the Revolution had only just begun, and French governesses and tutors were not the drug on the market they became later. Everina remained two years in France at her eldest sister’s expense. Mary found a place for Eliza, first as parlor boarder, and then as assistant, in an excellent school near London. For most of the time, however, both sisters were birds of passage. Everina was for a while at Putney, and then in Ireland, where she probably learned for herself the discomforts which Mary had once endured. Eliza was now at Market Harborough and Henley, and again at Putney, and finally she obtained a situation in Pembrokeshire, Wales, which she retained longer than any she had hitherto held. During these years there were occasional intermissions when both sisters were out of work, and there were holiday seasons to be provided for. To their father’s house it was still impossible for them to go. Its wretchedness was so great, it could no longer be called a home. Eliza, soon to see it, found it unbearable. Edward, it appears, was willing to give shelter to Everina; but this brother, of whom less mention is made in the sisters’ letters, was never a favorite, and residence with him was an evil to be avoided. The one place, therefore, where they were sure of a warm welcome was the humble lodging near Blackfriars’ Bridge. Mary fulfilled her promise of being a mother to them both. She stinted herself that she might make their lot more endurable.

When Eliza went to begin her Welsh engagement at Upton Castle, she spent a night on the way with her father. Her report of this visit opened a new channel for Mary’s benevolence. Mr. Wollstonecraft was then living at Laugharne, where he had taken his family many years before, and where his daughters had made several very good friends. But Eliza, as she lamented to Everina, went sadly from one old beloved haunt to another, without meeting an eye which glistened at seeing her. Old acquaintances were dead, or had sought a home elsewhere. The few who were left would not, probably because of the father’s disgrace, come to see her. The step-mother, the second Mrs. Wollstonecraft, was helpful and economical; but her thrift availed little against the drunken follies of her husband. The latter had but just recovered from an illness. He was worn to a skeleton, he coughed and groaned all night in a way to make the listener’s blood run cold, and he could not walk ten yards without pausing to pant for breath. His poverty was so abject that his clothes were barely decent, and his habits so low that he was indifferent to personal cleanliness. For days and weeks after she had seen him, Eliza was haunted by the memory of his unkempt hair and beard, his red face and his beggarly shabbiness. Poor unfortunate Charles, the last child left at home, was half-naked, and his time was spent in quarrelling with his father. Eliza, who knew how to be independent, was irritated by her brother’s idleness. “I am very cool to Charles, and have said all I can to rouse him,” she wrote to Everina; but then immediately she added, forced to do him justice, “But where can he go in his present plight?” It scarcely seems possible that such misery should have befallen a gentleman’s family. Mr. Wollstonecraft’s one cry, through it all, was for money. He threatened to go to London in his rags, and compel the obdurate Edward to comply with his demands. When Eliza told him of the sacrifices Mary made in order to help him, he only flew into a rage.

It was not long before Mary had brought Charles to London. The first thing to be done for him was much what Mr. Dick had advised in the case of ragged David Copperfield, and her initiatory act in his behalf was to clothe him. She took him to her house, where he lived, if not elegantly and extravagantly, at least decently, a new experience for the poor lad. She then had him articled to Edward, the attorney; but this experiment, as might have been expected, proved a failure. Mary next consulted with Mr. Barlow about the chances of settling him advantageously on a farm in America; and to prepare him for this life, which seemed full of promise, she sent him to serve a sort of apprenticeship with an English farmer. About this time James, the second son, who had been at sea, came home, and for him also Mary found room in her lodgings until, through her influence, he went to Woolwich, where for a few months he was under the instruction of Mr. Bonnycastle, the mathematician, as a preparation to enter the Royal Navy. He eventually went on Lord Hood’s fleet as a midshipman, and was then promoted to the rank of lieutenant, after which he appears to have been able to shift for himself.

Mary, as if this were not enough, also undertook the care of her father’s estate, or rather of the little left of it. Mr. Wollstonecraft had long since been incapable of managing his own affairs, and had intrusted them to some relations, with whose management Mary was not satisfied. She consequently took matters into her own hands, though she could ill afford to spare the time for this new duty. She did all that was possible to disembarrass the estate so that it might produce sufficient for her father’s maintenance. She was ably assisted by Mr. Johnson. “During a part of this period,” he wrote of her residence in George Street, “which certainly was the most active part of her life, she had the care of her father’s estate, which was attended with no little trouble to both of us. She could not,” he adds, “during this time, I think, expend less than £200 on her brothers and sisters.” Their combined efforts were in vain. Mr. Wollstonecraft had succeeded too well in ruining himself; and for the remainder of her life all Mary could do for him was to help him with her money. Godwin says that, in addition to these already burdensome duties, she took charge, in her own house, of a little girl of seven years of age, a relation of Mr. Skeys.

She struggled bravely, but there were times when it required superhuman efforts to persevere. She was subject to attacks of depression which usually resulted in physical illness. She gives a graphic description of the mental and bodily weakness against which she had to fight, in a note written at this period and addressed to Mr. Johnson:—

“I am a mere animal, and instinctive emotions too often silence the suggestions of reason. Your note, I can scarcely tell why, hurt me, and produced a kind of winterly smile, which diffuses a beam of despondent tranquillity over the features. I have been very ill; Heaven knows it was more than fancy. After some sleepless, wearisome nights, towards the morning I have grown delirious. Last Thursday, in particular, I imagined —— was thrown into his great distress by his folly; and I, unable to assist him, was in an agony. My nerves were in such a painful state of irritation I suffered more than I can express. Society was necessary, and might have diverted me till I gained more strength; but I blush when I recollect how often I have teased you with childish complaints and the reveries of a disordered imagination. I even imagined that I intruded on you, because you never called on me though you perceived that I was not well. I have nourished a sickly kind of delicacy, which gave me as many unnecessary pangs. I acknowledge that life is but a jest, and often a frightful dream, yet catch myself every day searching for something serious, and feel real misery from the disappointment. I am a strange compound of weakness and resolution. However, if I must suffer, I will endeavor to suffer in silence. There is certainly a great defect in my mind; my wayward heart creates its own misery. Why I am made thus, I cannot tell; and, till I can form some idea of the whole of my existence, I must be content to weep and dance like a child,—long for a toy, and be tired of it as soon as I get it.

“We must each of us wear a fool’s cap; but mine, alas! has lost its bells and grown so heavy I find it intolerably troublesome. Good-night! I have been pursuing a number of strange thoughts since I began to write, and have actually both laughed and wept immoderately. Surely I am a fool.”

In these dark days it was always to Mr. Johnson she turned for sympathy and advice. She had never been on very confidential terms with either of her sisters, and her friendship with George Blood had grown cooler. Their paths in life had so widely diverged that this was unavoidable. The following extract from a letter Mary wrote to him in the winter of 1791 shows that the change in their intimacy had not been caused by ill-feeling on either side. He apparently had, through her, renewed his offer of marriage to Everina, as he was now able to support a wife:—

“... Now, my dear George, let me more particularly allude to your own affairs. I ought to have done so sooner, but there was an awkwardness in the business that made me shrink back. We have all, my good friend, a sisterly affection for you; and this very morning Everina declared to me that she had more affection for you than for either of her brothers; but, accustomed to view you in that light, she cannot view you in any other. Let us then be on the old footing; love us as we love you, but give your heart to some worthy girl, and do not cherish an affection which may interfere with your prospects when there is no reason to suppose that it will ever be returned. Everina does not seem to think of marriage. She has no particular attachment; yet she was anxious when I spoke explicitly to her, to speak to you in the same terms, that she might correspond with you as she has ever done, with sisterly freedom and affection.”

But good friends as they continued to be, he was far away in Dublin, with different interests; and Mary craved immediate and comprehensive sympathy. Mr. Johnson was ever ready to administer to her spiritual wants; he was a friend in very truth. He evidently understood her nature and knew how best to deal with her when she was in these moods. “During her stay in George Street,” he says in a note referring to her, “she spent many of her afternoons and most of her evenings with me. She was incapable of disguise. Whatever was the state of her mind, it appeared when she entered, and the tone of conversation might easily be guessed. When harassed, which was very often the case, she was relieved by unbosoming herself, and generally returned home calm, frequently in spirits.” Sometimes her mental condition threatened to interfere seriously with her work, and then again Mr. Johnson knew how to stimulate and encourage her. When she was writing her answer to Burke’s “Reflections on the French Revolution,” and when the first half of her paper had been sent to the printer, her interest in her subject and her power of writing suddenly deserted her. It was important to publish all that was written in the controversy while public attention was still directed to it. And yet, though Mary knew this full well, it was simply impossible for her to finish what she had eagerly begun. In this frame of mind she called upon Mr. Johnson and told him her troubles. Instead of finding fault with her, he was sympathetic and bade her not to worry, for if she could not continue her pamphlet he would throw aside the printed sheets. This roused her pride. It was a far better stimulus than abuse would have been, and it sent her home to write the second half immediately. That she at times reproached herself for taking undue advantage of Mr. Johnson’s kindness appears from the following apologetic little note:—

You made me very low-spirited last night by your manner of talking. You are my only friend, the only person I am intimate with. I never had a father or a brother; you have been both to me ever since I knew you, yet I have sometimes been very petulant. I have been thinking of those instances of ill-humor and quickness, and they appear like crimes.

Yours sincerely,

Mary.

The dry morsel and quietness which were now her portion were infinitely better than the house full of strife which she had just left. She was happier than she had ever been before, but she was only happy by comparison. Solitude was preferable to the society of Lady Kingsborough and her friends, but for any one of Mary’s temperament it could not be esteemed as a good in itself. Her unnatural isolation fortunately did not last very long. Her friendship with Mr. Johnson was sufficient in itself to break through her barrier of reserve. She was constantly at his house, and it was one of the gayest and most sociable in London. It was the rendezvous of the literati of the day. Persons of note, foreigners as well as Englishmen, frequented it. There one could meet Fuseli, impetuous, impatient, and overflowing with conversation; Paine, somewhat hard to draw out of his shell; Bonnycastle, Dr. George Fordyce, Mr. George Anderson, Dr. Geddes, and a host of other prominent artists, scientists, and literary men. Their meetings were informal. They gathered together to talk about what interested them, and not to simper and smirk, and give utterance to platitudes and affectations, as was the case with the society to which Mary had lately been introduced. The people with whom she now became acquainted were too earnest to lay undue stress on what Herbert Spencer calls the non-essentials of social intercourse. Sincerity was more valued by them than standard forms of politeness. When Dr. Geddes was indignant with Fuseli, he did not disguise his feelings, but in the face of the assembled company rushed out of the room to walk two or three times around Saint Paul’s Churchyard, and then, when his rage had diminished, to return and resume the argument. This indifference to conventionalities, which would have been held by the polite world to be a fault, must have seemed to Mary, after her late experience, an incomparable virtue. It is no wonder that Mrs. Barbauld found the evenings she spent with her publisher lively. “We protracted them sometimes till ——” she wrote to her brother in the course of one of her visits to London. “But I am not telling tales. Ask —— at what time we used to separate.” Mary was also a welcome guest at Mrs. Trimmer’s house, which, like that of Mr. Johnson, was a centre of attraction for clever people. This Mrs. Trimmer had acquired some little literary reputation, and had secured the patronage of the royal family and the clergy. She and Mary differed greatly, both in character and creed, but they became very good friends. “I spent a day at Mrs. Trimmer’s, and found her a truly respectable woman,” was the verdict the latter sent to Everina; nor had she ever reason to alter it. Her intimacy with Miss Hayes also brought her into contact with many of the same class.

As soon as she began to be known in London, she was admired. She was young,—being only twenty-nine when she came there to live—and she was handsome. Her face was very striking. She had a profusion of auburn hair; her eyes were brown and beautiful, despite a slight droop in one of them; and her complexion, as is usually the case in connection with her Titianesque coloring of hair and eyes, was rich and clear. The strength and unutterable sadness of her expression combined with her other charms to make her face one which a stranger would turn to look at a second time. She possessed to a rare degree the power of attracting people. Few could resist the influence of her personality. Added to this she talked cleverly, and even brilliantly. The tone of her conversation was at times acrid and gloomy. Long years of toil in a hard, unjust world had borne the fruit of pessimism. She was too apt to overlook the bright for the dark side of a picture. But this was a fault which was amply counterbalanced by her talents. For the first time she made friends who were competent to justly measure her merits. She was recognized to be a woman of more than ordinary talents, and she was treated accordingly. Mean clothes and shabby houses were no drawbacks to clever women in those days. Mrs. Inchbald, in gowns “always becoming, and very seldom worth so much as eight-pence,” as one of her admirers described them, was surrounded as soon as she entered a crowded room, even when powdered and elegantly attired ladies of fashion were deserted. And Mary, though she had not glasses out of which to drink her wine, and though her coiffure was unfashionable, became a person of consequence in literary circles.

Under the influence of congenial social surroundings, she gave up her habits of retirement. She began to find enjoyment in society, and her interest in life revived. She could even be gay, nor was there so much sorrow in her laughter as there had been of yore. Among the most intimate of her new acquaintances were Mr. and Mrs. Fuseli; and the account has been preserved of at least one pleasure party to which she accompanied them. This was a masked ball, and young Lavater, then in England, was with them. Masquerades were then at the height of popularity. All sorts and conditions of men went to them. Beautiful Amelia Opie, in her poorest days, spent five pounds to gain admittance to one given to the Russian ambassadors. Mrs. Inchbald, when well advanced in years, could enter so thoroughly into the spirit of another as to beg a friend to lend her a faded blue silk handkerchief or sash, that she might represent her real character of a passée blue-stocking. Mary’s gayety on the present occasion was less artificial than it had been at the Dublin mask. But Fuseli’s hot temper and fondness for a joke brought their amusement to a sudden end. They were watching the masks, when one among the latter, dressed as a devil, danced up to them, and, with howls and many mad pranks, made merry at their expense. Fuseli, when he found he could not rid himself of the tormentor, called out half angrily, half facetiously, “Go to Hell!” The devil proved to be of the dull species, and instead of answering with a lively jest, broke out into a torrent of hot abuse, and refused to be appeased. Fuseli, wishing to avoid a scene, literally turned and fled, leaving Mary and the others to save themselves as best they could.

At this period a man, whose name, luckily for himself, is now forgotten, wished to make Mary his wife. Her treatment of him was characteristic. He could not have known her very well, or else he would not have been so foolish as to represent his financial prosperity as an argument in his favor. For a woman to sell herself for money, even when the bargain was sanctioned by the marriage ceremony, was, in her opinion, the unpardonable sin. Therefore, what he probably intended as an honor, she received as an insult. She declared that it must henceforward end her acquaintance not only with him, but with the third person through whom the offer was sent, and to whom Mary gave her answer. Her letters in connection with this subject are among the most interesting in her correspondence. They bear witness to the sanctity she attached to the union of man and wife. Her views in this relation cannot be too prominently brought forward, since, by manifesting the purity of her principles, light is thrown on her subsequent conduct. In her first burst of wrath she unbosomed herself to her ever-sympathetic confidant, Mr. Johnson:—

“Mr. —— called on me just now. Pray did you know his motive for calling? I think him impertinently officious. He had left the house before it had occurred to me in the strong light it does now, or I should have told him so. My poverty makes me proud. I will not be insulted by a superficial puppy. His intimacy with Miss —— gave him a privilege which he should not have assumed with me. A proposal might be made to his cousin, a milliner’s girl, which should not have been mentioned to me. Pray tell him that I am offended, and do not wish to see him again. When I meet him at your house, I shall leave the room, since I cannot pull him by the nose. I can force my spirit to leave my body, but it shall never bend to support that body. God of heaven, save thy child from this living death! I scarcely know what I write. My hand trembles; I am very sick,—sick at heart.”

Then she wrote to the man who had undertaken in an evil moment to deliver the would-be lover’s message:

Sir,—When you left me this morning, and I reflected a moment, your officious message, which at first appeared to me a joke, looked so very like an insult, I cannot forget it. To prevent, then, the necessity of forcing a smile when I chance to meet you, I take the earliest opportunity of informing you of my sentiments.

Mary Wollstonecraft.

This brief note seems to have called forth an answer, for Mary wrote again, and this time more fully and explicitly:—

Sir,—It is inexpressibly disagreeable to me to be obliged to enter again on a subject that has already raised a tumult of indignant emotions in my bosom, which I was laboring to suppress when I received your letter. I shall now condescend to answer your epistle; but let me first tell you that, in my unprotected situation, I make a point of never forgiving a deliberate insult,—and in that light I consider your late officious conduct. It is not according to my nature to mince matters. I will tell you in plain terms what I think. I have ever considered you in the light of a civil acquaintance,—on the word friend I lay a peculiar emphasis,—and, as a mere acquaintance, you were rude and cruel to step forward to insult a woman whose conduct and misfortunes demand respect. If my friend Mr. Johnson had made the proposal, I should have been severely hurt, have thought him unkind and unfeeling, but not impertinent. The privilege of intimacy you had no claim to, and should have referred the man to myself, if you had not sufficient discernment to quash it at once. I am, sir, poor and destitute; yet I have a spirit that will never bend, or take indirect methods to obtain the consequences I despise; nay, if to support life it was necessary to act contrary to my principles, the struggle would soon be over. I can bear anything but my own contempt.

In a few words, what I call an insult is the bare supposition that I could for a moment think of prostituting my person for a maintenance; for in that point of view does such a marriage appear to me, who consider right and wrong in the abstract, and never by words and local opinions shield myself from the reproaches of my own heart and understanding.

It is needless to say more; only you must excuse me when I add that I wish never to see, but as a perfect stranger, a person who could so grossly mistake my character. An apology is not necessary, if you were inclined to make one, nor any further expostulations. I again repeat, I cannot overlook an affront; few indeed have sufficient delicacy to respect poverty, even when it gives lustre to a character; and I tell you, sir, I am poor, yet can live without your benevolent exertions.

Mary Wollstonecraft.

Her struggles with work wearied her less than her struggles with the follies of men, of which the foregoing is an example. Indeed, while she was eminently fitted to enjoy society, she was also peculiarly susceptible to the many slings and arrows from which those who live in the world cannot escape. The very tenderness of her feelings for humanity, which was a blessing in one way, was almost a curse in another. For, just as the conferring of a benefit on one in need gave her intense pleasure, so, if she was the chance cause of pain to friend or foe, she suffered acutely. Intentionally she could not have injured any man. But often a word or action, said or done in good faith, will involve others in serious difficulties. The misery she endured under such circumstances was greater than that aroused by her own individual troubles. The thought that she had added to a fellow-sufferer’s life-burden cut her to the quick, and she was unsparing in her self-reproaches. She then reached the very acme of mental torture, as is seen by this letter to Mr. Johnson:—

“I am sick with vexation, and wish I could knock my foolish head against the wall, that bodily pain might make me feel less anguish from self-reproach! To say the truth, I was never more displeased with myself, and I will tell you the cause. You may recollect that I did not mention to you the circumstance of —— having a fortune left to him; nor did a hint of it drop from me when I conversed with my sister, because I knew he had a sufficient motive for concealing it. Last Sunday, when his character was aspersed, as I thought unjustly, in the heat of vindication I informed —— that he was now independent; but, at the same time, desired him not to repeat my information to B——; yet last Tuesday he told him all, and the boy at B——’s gave Mrs. —— an account of it. As Mr. —— knew he had only made a confidant of me (I blush to think of it!) he guessed the channel of intelligence, and this morning came, not to reproach me,—I wish he had,—but to point out the injury I have done him. Let what will be the consequence, I will reimburse him, if I deny myself the necessaries of life, and even then my folly will sting me. Perhaps you can scarcely conceive the misery I at this moment endure. That I, whose power of doing good is so limited, should do harm, galls my very soul. —— may laugh at these qualms, but, supposing Mr. —— to be unworthy, I am not the less to blame. Surely it is hell to despise one’s self! I did not want this additional vexation. At this time I have many that hang heavily on my spirits. I shall not call on you this month, nor stir out. My stomach has been so suddenly and violently affected, I am unable to lean over the desk.”

The sequel of the affair is not known, but this letter, because it is so characteristic, is interesting.

The advantages social intercourse procured for her were, however, more than sufficient compensation for the heart-beats it caused her. If there is nothing so deteriorating as association with one’s intellectual inferiors, there is, on the other hand, nothing so improving as the society of one’s equals or superiors. Stimulated into mental activity by her associates in the world in which she now moved, Mary’s genius expanded, and ideas but half formed developed into fixed principles. As Swinburne says of Blake, she was born into the church of rebels. Her present experience was her baptism. The times were exciting. The effect of the work of Voltaire and the French philosophers was social upheaval in France. The rebellion of the colonies and the agitation for reform at home had encouraged the liberal party into new action. Men had fully awakened to a realization of individual rights, and in their first excitement could think and talk of nothing else. The interest then taken in politics was general and wide-spread to a degree now unknown. Every one, advocates and opponents alike, discussed the great social problems of the day.

As a rule, the most regular frequenters of Mr. Johnson’s house, and the leaders of conversation during his evenings, were Reformers. Men like Paine and Fuseli and Dr. Priestley were, each in his own fashion, seeking to discover the true nature of human rights. As the Reformation in the sixteenth century had aimed at freeing the religion of Christ from the abuses and errors of centuries, and thus restoring it to its original purity, so the political movement of the latter half of the eighteenth century had for object the destruction of arbitrary laws and the re-establishment of government on primary principles. The French Revolution and the American Rebellion were but means to the greater end. Philosophers, who systematized the dissatisfaction which the people felt without being able to trace it to its true source, preached the necessity of distinguishing between right and wrong per se, and right and wrong as defined by custom. This was the doctrine which Mary heard most frequently discussed, and it was but the embodiment of the motives which had invariably governed her actions from the time she had urged her sister to leave her husband. She had never, even in her most religious days, been orthodox in her beliefs, nor conservative in her conduct. As she said in a letter just quoted, she considered right and wrong in the abstract, and never shielded herself by words or local opinions. Hitherto, owing chiefly to her circumstances, she had been content to accept her theory as a guide for herself in her relations to the world and her fellow-beings. But now that her scope of influence was extended, she felt compelled to communicate to others her moral creed, which had assumed definite shape.

Her first public profession of her political and social faith was her answer to Burke’s “Reflections on the French Revolution,” which had summoned all the Liberals and Reformers in England to arms. Many came forward boldly and refuted his arguments in print. Mary was among the foremost, her pamphlet in reply to his being the first published. Later authorities have given precedence to Dr. Priestley’s, but this fact is asserted by Godwin in his Memoirs, and he would hardly have made the statement at a time when there were many living to deny it, had it not been true. These answers naturally were received with abuse and sneers by the Tories. Burke denounced his female opponents as “viragoes and English poissardes;” and Horace Walpole wrote of them as “Amazonian allies,” who “spit their rage at eighteen-pence a head, and will return to Fleet-ditch, more fortunate in being forgotten than their predecessors, immortalized in the ‘Dunciad.’” Peter Burke, in his “Life of Burke,” says that the replies made by Dr. Price, Mrs. Macaulay, and Mary Wollstonecraft were merely attempts and nothing more. Yet all three were writers of too much force to be ignored. They were thrown into the shade because Paine’s “Rights of Man,” written for the same purpose, was so much more startling in its wholesale condemnation of government that the principal attention of the public was drawn to it.

Mary’s pamphlet, however, added considerably to her reputation, especially among the Liberals. It was her first really important work. Her success encouraged her greatly. It increased her confidence in her powers and possibilities to influence the reading public. It therefore proved an incentive to fresh exertions in the same field. Much as she was interested in the rights of men, she was even more concerned with the rights of women. The former had obtained many able defenders, but no one had as yet thought of saying a word for the latter. Her own experience had been so bitter that she realized the disadvantages of her sex as others, whose path had been easier, never could. She saw that women were hindered and hampered in a thousand and one ways by obstacles created not by nature, but by man. And she also saw that long suffering had blinded them to their, in her estimation, humiliating and too often painful condition. A change for the better must originate with them, and yet how was this possible, if they did not see their degradation?

“Can the sower sow by night,
Or the ploughman in darkness plough?”

Clearly, since she had found the light, it was her duty to illuminate with it those who were groping in darkness. She could not with a word revolutionize womankind, but she could at least be the herald to proclaim the dawn of the day during which the good seed was to be sown. She had discovered her life’s mission, and, in her enthusiasm, she wrote the “Vindication of the Rights of Women.”

CHAPTER V.

LITERARY WORK.

1788-1791.

As has been stated, Mary Wollstonecraft began her literary career by writing a small pamphlet on the subject of education. Its title, in full, is “Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: with Reflections on Female Conduct in the more Important Duties of Life.” It is interesting as her first work. Otherwise it is of no great value. Though Mr. Johnson saw in it the marks of genius, there is really little originality in its contents or striking merit in the method of treating them. The ideas it sets forth, while eminently commendable, are remarkable only because it was unusual in the eighteenth century for women, especially the young and unmarried, to have any ideas to which to give expression.

The pamphlet consists of a number of short treatises, indicating certain laws and principles which Mary thought needed to be more generally understood and more firmly established. That a woman should not shirk the functions, either physical or moral, of maternity; that artificial manners and exterior accomplishments should not be cultivated in lieu of practical knowledge and simplicity of conduct; that matrimony is to be considered seriously and not entered into capriciously; that the individual owes certain duties to humanity as well as to his or her own family,—all these are truths which it is well to repeat frequently. But if their repetition be not accompanied by arguments which throw new light on ethical science, or else if it be not made with the vigor and power born of a thorough knowledge of humanity and its wants and shortcomings, it will not be remembered by posterity. The “Education of Daughters” certainly bears no relation to such works as the “Imitation” on the one hand, or the “Data of Ethics” on the other. It is not a book for all time.

However, much in it is significant to readers interested in the study of Mary Wollstonecraft’s life and character. Every sentence reveals the earnestness of her nature. Many passages show that as early as 1787 she had seriously considered the problems which, in 1791, she attempted to solve. She was even then perplexed by the unfortunate situation of women of the upper classes who, having received but the pretence of an education, eventually become dependent on their own exertions. Her sad experience probably led her to these thoughts. Reflection upon them made her the champion of her sex. Already in this little pamphlet she declares her belief that, by a rational training of their intellectual powers, women can be prepared at one and the same time to meet any emergencies of fortune and to fulfil the duties of wife and mother. She demonstrates that good mental discipline, instead of interfering with feminine occupations, increases a woman’s fitness for them. Thus she writes:—

“No employment of the mind is a sufficient excuse for neglecting domestic duties; and I cannot conceive that they are incompatible. A woman may fit herself to be the companion and friend of a man of sense, and yet know how to take care of his family.”

The intense love of sincerity in conduct and belief which is a leading characteristic in the “Rights of Women” is also manifested in these early essays. Mary exclaims in one place,—

“How many people are like whitened sepulchres, and careful only about appearances! Yet if we are too anxious to gain the approbation of the world, we must often forfeit our own.”

And again she says, as if in warning:—

“... Let the manners arise from the mind, and let there be no disguise for the genuine emotions of the heart.

“Things merely ornamental are soon disregarded, and disregard can scarcely be borne when there is no internal support.”

Another marked feature of the pamphlet is the extremely puritanical tendency of its sentiments. It was written at the period when Mary was sending sermon-like letters to George Blood, and breathes the same spirit of stern adherence to religious principles, though not to special dogma.

But perhaps the most noteworthy passage which occurs in the treatise is one on love, and in which, strangely enough, she establishes a belief which she was destined some years later to confirm by her actions. When the circumstances of her union with Godwin are remembered, her words seem prophetic.

“It is too universal a maxim with novelists,” she says, “that love is felt but once; though it appears to me that the heart which is capable of receiving an impression at all, and can distinguish, will turn to a new object when the first is found unworthy. I am convinced it is practicable, when a respect for goodness has the first place in the mind, and notions of perfection are not affixed to constancy.”

Though not very wonderful in itself, the “Education of Daughters” is, in its choice of subject and the standards it upholds, a worthy prelude to the riper work by which it was before very long followed.

The next work Mary published was a volume called “Original Stories from Real Life; with Conversations calculated to regulate the Affections and form the Mind to Truth and Goodness.” This was written while her experience as school-mistress and governess was still fresh in her memory. As she explains in her Preface, her object was to make up in some measure for the defective education or moral training which, as a rule, children in those days received from their parents.

“Good habits,” she writes, “are infinitely preferable to the precepts of reason; but as this task requires more judgment than generally falls to the lot of parents, substitutes must be sought for, and medicines given, when regimen would have answered the purpose much better.

“... To wish that parents would, themselves, mould the ductile passions is a chimerical wish, as the present generation have their own passions to combat with, and fastidious pleasures to pursue, neglecting those nature points out. We must then pour premature knowledge into the succeeding one; and, teaching virtue, explain the nature of vice.”

In addressing a youthful audience, Mary was as deeply inspired by her love of goodness per se, and her detestation of conventional conceptions of virtue, as she was afterwards in appealing to older readers. She represents, in her book, two little girls, aged respectively twelve and fourteen, who have been sadly neglected during their early years, but who, fortunately, have at this period fallen under the care of a Mrs. Mason, who at once undertakes to form their character and train their intellect. This good lady, in whose name Mary sermonizes, seizes upon every event of the day to teach her charges a moral lesson. The defects she attacks are those most common to childhood. Cruelty to animals, peevishness, lying, greediness, indolence, procrastination, are in turn censured, and their opposite virtues praised. Some of the definitions of the qualities commended are excellent. For example, Mrs. Mason says to the two children:—

“Do you know the meaning of the word goodness? I see you are unwilling to answer. I will tell you. It is, first, to avoid hurting anything; and then to contrive to give as much pleasure as you can.”

Again, she warns them thus:—

“Remember that idleness must always be intolerable, as it is the most irksome consciousness of existence.”

This latter definition is a little above the comprehension of children of twelve and fourteen. But then Mary is careful to explain in the Preface that she writes to assist teachers. She wishes to give them hints which they must apply to the children under their care as they think best. The religious tone of the “Stories” is even more pronounced than that of the “Education of Daughters.” The following is but one of many proofs of Mary’s honest endeavors to make children understand the importance of religious devotion. In one of her conversational sermons Mrs. Mason says:

“Recollect that from religion your chief comfort must spring, and never neglect the duty of prayer. Learn from experience the comfort that arises from making known your wants and sorrows to the wisest and best of Beings, in whose hands are the issues, not only of this life, but of that which is to come.”

To strengthen the effect of Mrs. Mason’s words, an example or story is in every chapter added to her remarks. They are all appropriate, and many of the tales are beautiful. As the book is so little known, one of these may with advantage be given here. The story selected is that of Crazy Robin. Mrs. Mason tells it to Mary and Caroline, the two little girls, to explain to them how much wretchedness can be produced by unkindness to men and beasts. It is interesting because it shows the quality of the mental food which Mary thought best fitted for the capacity of children. She was evidently an advocate for strong nourishment. Besides, the story, despite some unpleasant defects of style, is very powerful. It is full of dramatic force, and is related with great simplicity and pathos:—

“In yonder cave lived a poor man, who generally went by the name of Crazy Robin. In his youth he was very industrious, and married my father’s dairy-maid, a girl deserving of such a good husband. For some time they continued to live very comfortably; their daily labor procured their daily bread; but Robin, finding it was likely he should have a large family, borrowed a trifle to add to the small pittance they had saved in service, and took a little farm in a neighboring county. I was then a child.

“Ten or twelve years after, I heard that a crazy man, who appeared very harmless, had by the side of the brook piled a great number of stones; he would wade into the river for them, followed by a cur dog, whom he would frequently call his Jacky, and even his Nancy; and then mumble to himself, ‘Thou wilt not leave me. We will dwell with the owl in the ivy.’ A number of owls had taken shelter in it. The stones he waded for he carried to the mouth of the hole, and only left just room enough to go in. Some of the neighbors at last recollected him; and I sent to inquire what misfortune had reduced him to such a deplorable state.

“The information I received from different persons I will communicate to you in as few words as I can.

“Several of his children died in their infancy; and, two years before he came to his native place, he had been overwhelmed by a torrent of misery. Through unavoidable misfortunes he was long in arrears to his landlord; who, seeing that he was an honest man, and endeavored to bring up his family, did not distress him; but when his wife was lying-in of her last child, the landlord died, and his heir sent and seized the stock for the rent; and the person he had borrowed some money of, exasperated to see all gone, arrested him, and he was hurried to jail. The poor woman, endeavoring to assist her family before she had gained sufficient strength, found herself very ill; and the illness, through neglect and the want of proper nourishment, turned to a putrid fever, which two of the children caught from her, and died with her. The two who were left, Jacky and Nancy, went to their father, and took with them a cur dog that had long shared their frugal meals.

“The children begged in the day, and at night slept with their wretched father. Poverty and dirt soon robbed their cheeks of the roses which the country air made bloom with a peculiar freshness. Their blood had been tainted by the putrid complaint that destroyed their mother; in short, they caught the small-pox, and died. The poor father, who was now bereft of all his children, hung over their bed in speechless anguish; not a groan or a tear escaped from him while he stood, two or three hours, in the same attitude, looking at the dead bodies of his little darlings. The dog licked his hands, and strove to attract his attention; but for a while he seemed not to observe his caresses; when he did, he said mournfully, ‘Thou wilt not leave me;’ and then he began to laugh. The bodies were removed; and he remained in an unsettled state, often frantic; at length the frenzy subsided, and he grew melancholy and harmless. He was not then so closely watched; and one day he contrived to make his escape, the dog followed him, and came directly to his native village.

“After I received this account, I determined he should live in the place he had chosen, undisturbed. I sent some conveniences, all of which he rejected except a mat, on which he sometimes slept; the dog always did. I tried to induce him to eat, but he constantly gave the dog whatever I sent him, and lived on haws and blackberries and every kind of trash. I used to call frequently on him; and he sometimes followed me to the house I now live in, and in winter he would come of his own accord, and take a crust of bread. He gathered water-cresses out of the pool, and would bring them to me, with nosegays of wild thyme, which he plucked from the sides of the mountain. I mentioned before, that the dog was a cur; it had the tricks of curs, and would run after horses’ heels and bark. One day, when his master was gathering water-cresses, the dog ran after a young gentleman’s horse, and made it start, and almost throw the rider. Though he knew it was the poor madman’s dog, he levelled his gun at it, shot it, and instantly rode off. Robin came to him; he looked at his wounds, and, not sensible that he was dead, called him to follow him; but when he found that he could not, he took him to the pool, and washed off the blood before it began to clot, and then brought him home and laid him on the mat.

“I observed that I had not seen him pacing up the hills, and sent to inquire about him. He was found sitting by the dog, and no entreaties could prevail on him to quit it, or receive any refreshment. I went to him myself, hoping, as I had always been a favorite, that I should be able to persuade him. When I came to him, I found the hand of death was upon him. He was still melancholy; but there was not such a mixture of wildness in it. I pressed him to take some food; but, instead of answering me, or turning away, he burst into tears, a thing I had never seen him do before, and, in inarticulate accents, he said, ‘Will any one be kind to me? You will kill me! I saw not my wife die—no!—they dragged me from her, but I saw Jacky and Nancy die; and who pitied me, but my dog?’ He turned his eyes to the body. I wept with him. He would then have taken some nourishment, but nature was exhausted, and he expired.”

The book is, on the whole, well written, and was popular enough in its day. The first edition, published in 1788, was followed by a second in 1791, and a third in 1796. To make it still more attractive, Mr. Johnson engaged Blake, whom he was then befriending, to illustrate it. But children of the present day object to the tales with a moral which were the delight of the nursery in Mary’s time. They have lost all faith in the bad boy who invariably meets with the evil fate which is his due; and they are sceptical as to the good little girl who always receives the cakes and ale—metaphorically speaking—her virtues deserve. And so it has come to pass that the “Original Stories” are remembered chiefly on account of their illustrations.

The drawings contributed by Blake were more in number than were required, and only six were printed. A copy of one of those rejected is given in Gilchrist’s Life of the artist. None of them rank with his best work. “The designs,” his biographer says, “can hardly be pronounced a successful competition with Stothard, though traces of a higher feeling are visible in the graceful female forms,—benevolent heroine, or despairing, famishing peasant group. The artist evidently moves in constraint, and the accessories of these domestic scenes are simply generalized as if by a child: the result of an inobservant eye for such things.” But of those published there are two at least which, as Mr. Kegan Paul has already pointed out, make a deep impression on all who see them. One is the frontispiece, which illustrates this sentence of the text: “Look what a fine morning it is. Insects, birds, and animals are all enjoying existence.” The posing of the three female figures standing in reverential attitudes, and the creeping vine by the doorway, are conceived and executed in Blake’s true decorative spirit. The other represents Crazy Robin by the bedside of his two dead children, the faithful dog by his side. The grief, horror, and despair expressed in the man’s face cannot be surpassed, while the pathos and strength of the scene are heightened by the simplicity of the drawing.

Of the several translations Mary made at this period, but the briefest mention is necessary. It often happens that the book translated is in a great degree indicative of the mental calibre of its translator. Thus it is characteristic of Carlyle that he translated Goethe, of Swinburne that he selected the verses of Villon or Théophile Gautier for the same purpose. But Mary’s case was entirely different. The choice of foreign works rendered into English was not hers, but Mr. Johnson’s. By adhering to it she was simply fulfilling the contract she had entered into with him. There were times when she had but a poor opinion of the books he put into her hands. Thus of one of the principal of these, Necker on the “Importance of Religion,” she says in her “French Revolution:”—

“Not content with the fame he [Necker] acquired by writing on a subject which his turn of mind and profession enabled him to comprehend, he wished to obtain a higher degree of celebrity by forming into a large book various metaphysical shreds of arguments, which he had collected from the conversation of men fond of ingenious [subtilties]; and the style, excepting some declamatory passages, was as inflated and confused as the thoughts were far fetched and unconnected.”

But though she was so far from approving of the original, her translation, published in London in 1788, was declared by the “European Magazine” to be just and spirited, though apparently too hastily executed; and it was sufficiently appreciated by the English-speaking public to be republished in Philadelphia in 1791. There was at least one book, the translation of which must have been a pleasure to her. This was the Rev. C. G. Salzmann’s “Elements of Morality, for the Use of Children.” Its object, like that of the “Original Stories,” was to teach the young, by practical illustration, why virtue is good, why vice is evil. It was written much in the same style, and was for many years highly popular. Johnson brought out the first edition in 1790 and a second in 1793. It was published in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1811, and in Edinburgh in 1821, and a still newer edition was prepared for the present generation by Miss Yonge. The “Analytical Review” thought it upon its first appearance worthy of two notices.

Mary never pretended to produce perfectly literal translations. Her version of Lavater’s “Physiognomy,” now unknown, was but an abridgment. She purposely “naturalized” the “Elements of Morality,” she explains, in order not to “puzzle children by pointing out modifications of manners, when the grand principles of morality were to be fixed on a broad basis.” She made free with the originals that they might better suit English readers, and this she frankly confesses in her Prefaces. Her translations are, in consequence, proofs of her industry and varied talents and not demonstrations of her own mental character.

The novel “Mary,” like Godwin’s earlier stories, has disappeared. There are a few men and women of the present generation who remember having seen it, but it is now not to be found either in public libraries or in bookstores. It was the record of a happy friendship, and to write it had been a labor of love. As Mary always wrote most eloquently on subjects which were of heartfelt interest, its disappearance is to be regretted.

However, after she had been in London about two years, constant writing and translating having by that time made her readier with her pen, she undertook another task, in which her feelings were as strongly interested. This was her answer to Burke’s “Reflections on the French Revolution.” Love of humanity was an emotion which moved her quite as deeply as affection for individual friends. Burke, by his disregard for the sufferings of that portion of the human race which especially appealed to her, excited her wrath. Carried away by the intensity of her indignation, she at once set about proving to him and the world that the reasoning which led to such insensibility was, plausible as it might seem, wholly unsound. She never paused for reflection, but her chief arguments, the result of previous thought, being already prepared, she wrote before her excitement had time to cool. As she explains in the Advertisement to her “Letter” to Burke, the “Reflections” had first engaged her attention as the transient topic of the day. Commenting upon it as she read, her remarks increased to such an extent that she decided to publish them as a short “Vindication of the Rights of Man.”

A sermon preached by Dr. Richard Price was the immediate reason which moved Burke to write the “Reflections.” The Revolutionists were in the habit of meeting every 4th of November, the anniversary of the arrival of the Prince of Orange in England, to commemorate the Revolution of 1688. Dr. Price was, in 1789, the orator of the day. He, on this occasion, expressed his warm approbation of the actions of the French Republicans, in which sentiment he was warmly seconded by all the other members of the society. Burke seized upon these demonstrations as a pretext for expounding his own views upon the proceedings in France. The sermon and orations were really not of enough importance to evoke the long essay with which he favored them. But though he began by denouncing the English Revolutionists in particular, the subject so inflamed him that before he had finished, he had written without restraint his opinion of the social struggle of the French people, and given his definition of the word Liberty, then in everybody’s mouth. As he wrote, news came pouring into England of later political developments in France which increased instead of lessening his hatred and distrust of the Revolution. It was a year before he had finished his work, and it had then grown into a lengthy and elaborate treatise.

The “Reflections” gives a careful exposition of the errors of the French Republican party, and the shortcomings of the National Assembly; and, to add to this the force of antithesis, it extols the merits and virtues of the English Constitution. Furthermore, it points out the evil consequences which must follow the realization of the French attempts at reform. But the real question at issue is the nature of the rights of men. It was to gain for their countrymen the justice which they thought their due, that the revolutionary leaders curtailed the power of the king, lowered the nobility, and disgraced the clergy. If it could be proved that their conception of human justice was wholly wrong, the very foundation of their political structure would be destroyed. Burke’s arguments, therefore, are all intended to achieve this end.

In her detestation of his insensibility to the natural equality of mankind, Mary was too impatient to consider the minor points of his reasoning. She announces in her Advertisement that she intends to confine her strictures, in a great measure, to the grand principles at which he levels his ingenious arguments. Her object, therefore, as well as Burke’s, is to demonstrate what are the rights of men, but she reasons from a very different stand-point. Burke defends the claims of those who inherit rights from long generations of ancestors; Mary cries aloud in defence of men whose one inheritance is the deprivation of all rights. Burke is moved by the misery of a Marie Antoinette, shorn of her greatness; Mary, by the wretchedness of the poor peasant woman who has never possessed even its shadow. The former knows no birthright for individuals save that which results from the prescription of centuries; the latter contends that every man has a right, as a human being, to “such a degree of liberty, civil and religious, as is compatible with the liberty of the other individuals with whom he is united in social compact.” Burke asserts that the present rights of man cannot be decided by reason alone, since they are founded on laws and customs long established. But Mary asks, How far back are we to go to discover their first foundation? Is it in England to the reign of Richard II., whose incapacity rendered him a mere cipher in the hands of the Barons; or to that of Edward III., whose need for money forced him to concede certain privileges to the commons? Is social slavery to be encouraged because it was established in semi-barbarous days? Does Burke, she continues,—

“... recommend night as the fittest time to analyze a ray of light?

“Are we to seek for the rights of men in the ages when a few marks were the only penalty imposed for the life of a man, and death for death when the property of the rich was touched?—when—I blush to discover the depravity of our nature—a deer was killed! Are these the laws that it is natural to love, and sacrilegious to invade? Were the rights of men understood when the law authorized or tolerated murder?—or is power and right the same?”

Burke’s contempt for the poor, which Mary thought the most conspicuous feature of his treatise, was the chief cause of her indignation. She could not endure silently his admonitions to the laboring class to respect the property which they could not possess, and his exhortations to them to find their consolation for ill-rewarded labor in the “final proportions of eternal justice.” “It is, sir, possible,” she tells him with some dignity, “to render the poor happier in this world, without depriving them of the consolation which you gratuitously grant them in the next.” To her mind, the oppression which the lower classes had endured for ages, until they had become in the end beings scarcely above the brutes, made the losses of the French nobility and clergy seem by comparison very insignificant evils. The horrors of the 6th of October, the discomforts and degradation of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette, and the destitution to which many French refugees had been reduced, blinded Burke to the long-suffering of the multitude which now rendered the distress of the few imperative. But Mary’s feelings were all stirred in the opposite cause.

“What,” she asks in righteous indignation,—“what were the outrages of the day to these continual miseries? Let those sorrows hide their diminished heads before the tremendous mountain of woe that thus defaces our globe! Man preys on man, and you mourn for the idle tapestry that decorated a Gothic pile, and the dronish bell that summoned the fat priest to prayer. You mourn for the empty pageant of a name, when slavery flaps her wing, and the sick heart retires to die in lonely wilds, far from the abodes of man. Did the pangs you felt for insulted nobility, the anguish which rent your heart when the gorgeous robes were torn off the idol human weakness had set up, deserve to be compared with the long-drawn sigh of melancholy reflection, when misery and vice thus seem to haunt our steps, and swim on the top of every cheering prospect? Why is our fancy to be appalled by terrific perspectives of a hell beyond the grave? Hell stalks abroad: the lash resounds on a slave’s naked sides; and the sick wretch, who can no longer earn the sour bread of unremitting labor, steals to a ditch to bid the world a long good-night, or, neglected in some ostentatious hospital, breathes its last amidst the laugh of mercenary attendants.”

Occasionally Mary interrupts the main drift of her “Letter” to refute some of the incidental statements in the “Reflections.” But in doing this she is more eager to show the evils of English political and social laws, which Burke praises so unreservedly, than to prove that many existed in the old French government, a fact which he obstinately refuses to recognize. This may have been because she then knew little more than Burke of the real state of affairs in France, and would not take the time to collect her proofs. This is very likely, for the chief fault of her “Letter” is undue haste in its composition. It was written on the spur of the moment, and is without the method indispensable to such a work. There is no order in the arguments advanced, and too often reasoning gives place to exhortation and meditation. Another serious error is the personal abuse with which her “Letter” abounds. She treats Burke in the very same manner with which she reproves him for treating Dr. Price. Instead of confining herself to denunciation of his views, she attacks his character, she accuses him of vanity and susceptibility to the charms of rank, of insincerity and affectation. She calls him a slave of impulse, and tells him he is too full of himself, and even compares his love for the English Constitution to the brutal affection of weakness built on blind, indolent tenderness, rather than on rational grounds. Sometimes she grows eloquent in her sarcasm.

“... On what principle you, sir,” she observes, “can justify the Reformation, which tore up by the roots an old establishment, I cannot guess,—but I beg your pardon, perhaps you do not wish to justify it, and have some mental reservation to excuse you to yourself, for not openly avowing your reverence. Or, to go further back, had you been a Jew, you must have joined in the cry, ‘Crucify him! Crucify him!’ The promulgator of a new doctrine, and the violator of old laws and customs, that did not, like ours, melt into darkness and ignorance, but rested on Divine authority, must have been a dangerous innovator in your eyes, particularly if you had not been informed that the Carpenter’s Son was of the stock and lineage of David.”

But vituperation is not argument, and abuse proves nothing. This is a fault, however, into which youth readily falls. Mary was young when she wrote the “Vindication of the Rights of Man,” and feeling was still too strong to be forgotten in calm discussion. It was a mistake, too, to dwell, as she did, on the inconsistency between Burke’s earlier and present policy. This was a powerful weapon against him at the time, but posterity has recognized the consistency which, in reality, underlay his seemingly diverse political creeds. Besides, the demonstration that sentiments in the “Reflections” were at variance with others expressed some years previously, did not prove them to be unsound.