Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley Read online

  CHAPTER 4

  MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: HOXTON AND BATH

  [ 1774–1782 ]

  each passing week in her family’s new home in Hoxton, the fifteen-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft grew increasingly gloomy. Home with her mother while her younger siblings were in school, she tried to shore herself up, writing to her friend Jane Arden, “My philosophy, as well as my religion will ever teach me to look on misfortunes as blessings.” Despite her best efforts, her darkness deepened. Her father’s drunken rages were becoming more frequent and her mother grew steadily weaker both physically and emotionally. Frustrated and angry, Mary lost her temper and then tortured herself for it, worrying that she was becoming like her father. She turned to prayer and “began to consider the Great First Cause, formed just notions of his attributes, and in particular dwelt on his wisdom and goodness.”

  Her mother, meanwhile, spent hours draped on the daybed, complaining about her ailments, reading romances, and napping. Although Mary felt contempt for Elizabeth’s helplessness, she could not help continuing to yearn for her attention. Not much had changed since Mary was younger. Although Ned had left home, he was still his mother’s favorite, still the only child she ever thought about. Mary tried to confide in her mother, as she had when she was younger, but Elizabeth laughed at her. Without the Ardens and without the opportunity to read and study, Mary could not shake her melancholy. Unless she got married, an idea she was strongly opposed to after witnessing her father’s abuse, she would have to live with her mother for the rest of her life. In a classic case of eighteenth-century injustice, Ned, now eighteen, worked at a London law firm, and Henry, age thirteen, was serving as an apprentice to a surgeon back in Beverley. They were both independent from their family and earning their own way, while she, who yearned to be in the world, was forced to remain within the confines of their home.

  By the turn of the year, Mary was on the brink of a breakdown: she had stopped eating and washing her hair, and she suffered headaches, fevers, and nervous fits. She stayed up most of the night brooding, and during the day she was exhausted. Fortunately, Mrs. Clare, one of the Wollstonecrafts’ neighbors, had taken note of the morose teenager and invited her for tea. This initial visit went so well that others ensued, and before long Mrs. Clare and her husband, the Reverend Henry Clare, asked Mary to stay with them for weeks at a time. Mary’s mother, who would have preferred her daughter to be at home running the household, did not have the backbone to say no. Nor did she have the capacity to envision where these visits might lead. If she had, she might have put up a stronger fight, or brought Mary’s father, Edward, into the fray.

  Henry Clare was a strange man. Even in Hoxton, a village of lunatics, he stood out as odd. He had worn the same pair of shoes for fourteen years, because he almost never went outdoors. Alarmingly thin, stooped, and the color of paper, he had long ago devoted himself exclusively to the study of poetry and philosophy and was incapable of small talk. His cheerful, hardworking wife kept up relationships with their friends and neighbors and conducted the household business, allowing him to stay up at night writing, wrestling with sentences few people would ever read. Purposeless though the clergyman’s activities may have seemed to someone like Elizabeth, it was his apostolic intensity, his high-minded dismissal of pedestrian concerns, that drew the fifteen-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft. In fact, Reverend Clare was precisely what she needed.

  To the Clares, it was immediately clear that Mary was not like other girls her age, concerned with fashion and marriage. Frustrated at how the move to Hoxton had interrupted her education, she asked Mr. Clare for advice about what books to read and what philosophers to study. Clare allowed her into his study, which was an honor, as he rarely let anyone into his inner sanctum. Here, she attached herself to him with a devotion that would have pleased a saint, and that the otherworldly Clare treated as a sacred responsibility. He introduced Mary to the ideas of John Locke, whose writing had been banned by Oxford University in 1701, spurring dissenting liberals like Clare to study him with the kind of analytic fervor they had hitherto reserved for scripture.

  The great political philosopher’s principles—“creatures of the same species and rank…should…be equal,” and a husband should have “no more power over [his wife’s life] than she has over his life”—revitalized Mary. She had always felt that her father had no right to tyrannize her family and that the preferential treatment he and her mother bestowed on Ned was unjust. Now, after reading Locke, she had an ethical foundation for her feelings. Not only was it her right to shape her own future; it was everyone’s right. In fact, Locke’s social contract made protest seem the only rational response to injustice; it was humanity’s obligation to overthrow tyranny; a government that does not protect the people’s freedom is illegitimate. A father who abuses his wife and children forfeits his power.

  Seventeen seventy-five was a revolutionary year. The firebrands of the era—Thomas Paine, Patrick Henry, and John and Samuel Adams, to name just a few—were all racing toward the same conclusions. While the teenage Mary Wollstonecraft was reading Locke, Adam Smith was writing The Wealth of Nations and Edward Gibbon was finishing the first volume of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, radical for its critique of Christianity and its praise of pagan Rome. In March, the statesman Edmund Burke, arguing on behalf of the American colonists, told Parliament that the United States should be a “sanctuary of liberty.” Dr. Richard Price, a Unitarian minister, also advocated for American liberty in his wildly successful Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, a pamphlet that sold sixty thousand copies. The week before Mary’s sixteenth birthday, Paul Revere made his famous ride, the musket shot fired on Lexington Green was heard round the world, and a thirty-one-year-old Virginian named Thomas Jefferson scoured Locke’s Second Treatise on Government for the ideas that would, a year later, inform his claims for American independence.

  One day that spring, Mrs. Clare took Mary to visit the Bloods, friends who lived in the village of Newington Butts, south of the Thames. It was an unimpressive town; the houses were small, the gardens simple. But when Mary and Mrs. Clare arrived at the Bloods’ cottage and were welcomed inside by the eighteen-year-old Fanny Blood, Mary was overcome by admiration. The eldest daughter of the family had a gentle grace that thrilled Mary. While Mrs. Clare chatted with Mrs. Blood, Mary watched the delicate Fanny, busily employed in feeding and managing her younger siblings. When Fanny and Mary had the chance to talk, Mary was enchanted by the older girl’s intelligence, tact, and patience. By the time the visit was over, she had promised herself that she and Fanny would be friends.

  Like Mary, Fanny Blood was the oldest sister of a large brood of children. Also like Mary, her father was an alcoholic and a gambler, and although he was not violent, he could not earn a living. Mrs. Blood took in small sewing jobs, but it was really Fanny’s income that supported the family. A talented artist, she had been hired by William Curtis, a botanist, to draw wildflower specimens for his two-volume series Flora Londinensis, or The Flowers of London. Fanny’s employment was Mary’s first true example of the power of female resourcefulness. Fanny, with the help of her mother, put food on the table and enabled the family to maintain a genteel lifestyle without the assistance of any man.

  Since the girls lived too far apart to see each other frequently, Mary asked Fanny’s permission to begin a correspondence. None of these missives survive, but Mary regarded her friend’s writing as far superior to her own. Fanny’s intelligence was “masculine,” Mary said, an adjective she reserved for women of “sound judgment.” When Mary confessed she wanted to learn to write as well as Fanny, Fanny agreed to teach her. Mary declared that she had never loved anyone as much as she loved Fanny. “I could dwell for ever on [Fanny’s] praises,” she wrote Jane Arden, with no apparent contrition that she was treating Jane precisely as she had accused Jane of treating her, abandoning her for a new friend. Fortunately, the generous Jane expressed no hurt over her friend’s mercurial l
oyalties.

  Before long, Mary began to dream of a new future, one that would allow her to break away from her family without getting married: she and Fanny would set up a household together, where they would be able to read and study without interruption and live as equals. She wrote Jane that she would rather share life with her new friend than marry any man, declaring, “I know this resolution may appear a little extraordinary, but in forming it I follow the dictates of reason as well as the bent of my inclination.”

  In the eighteenth century, it was fashionable for women to write extravagant letters to their friends, hold hands, dance together, and express feverish longing for one another without thinking of themselves as lovers. Even Mary, who was often caught up in passions for other women, thought it was important for close female friends to observe “decent personal reserve.” She considered moving in together “the most rational” next step in her friendship with Fanny, because Fanny’s erudition and sophistication would help Mary improve herself, and Mary’s strength and bravery would protect them from the harshness of the world. Together, they could free themselves from the tyranny of the men in their families.

  But Mary had chosen to overlook an important fact: Fanny was engaged. Her suitor was a portly self-satisfied man named Hugh Skeys, who had courted her for more than a year, then handed her a small portrait of himself and sailed off to supervise his business concerns in Portugal, promising to return and marry her once he was certain of his financial future. To Mary, his leaving was evidence that Hugh did not truly love Fanny. Fanny, though, clung to the idea that he would return. She had affection for Hugh, and marriage to him would provide her and her family with financial stability. Mary could not offer Fanny this kind of economic support. The only employment possibilities for middle-class women who did not have a talent like Fanny’s were low-paying positions as teachers, governesses, or lady’s companions. But unpleasant as these options were, Mary was determined to start a life with her friend—and so she decided to secure a job. This was a difficult proposition, as it was considered unseemly for a properly brought up young woman to approach strangers for employment. Fortunately, probably through Mr. Clare, Mary learned of an opportunity to become the paid companion of an older widow who lived in Bath. She would have preferred to be a teacher, or even a governess, but what really mattered was earning money. Certainly there would be no financial assistance from her family. Although Ned had recently come of age and received a generous inheritance from their grandfather—one third of the estate, or approximately £5,000—he was not about to offer any help. Even when he got married—a time when brothers traditionally gave their unwed sisters a small dowry or invited them to live with them—he kept the Wollstonecraft fortune, such as it was, for himself. The injustice of this infuriated Mary. Without a dowry, it would be difficult for her younger sisters to find husbands, and although Mary herself did not want to get married, she felt Eliza and Everina deserved the opportunity. As for herself, just a small nest egg, a fraction of her brother’s wealth, would have helped her start a new life and freed her from the necessity of working.

  In the spring of 1778, nineteen-year-old Mary took the public coach to the home of her new employer, the ill-tempered and arrogant Sarah Dawson, who had already driven away a succession of companions. But Mary was made of stronger stuff than her predecessors. She disliked Mrs. Dawson but saw this job as a necessary evil, pouring out her sufferings to Jane Arden in a long letter: “Pain and disappointment have constantly attended me.…I am among Strangers, far from all my former connexions.…I am quite a piece of still life.…[I] have not spirit sufficient to bustle about.”

  To the rest of the world, however, Bath, at the height of its popularity, was the place to be. The rich and famous came to take the spa waters, which were supposed to heal most ills, and strolled through the assembly rooms to see and be seen.

  Thrown into fashionable society for the first time, Mary complained about the insincerity of people’s manners and sneered at “the unmeaning civilities that I see every day.” She accompanied Mrs. Dawson wherever she went but was forced to remain on the sidelines, watching, not speaking unless spoken to, an enforced marginalization that infuriated her; it was all too reminiscent of her mother’s punishments.

  The South Parade, Bath by James Gandon (1784), after a painting by Thomas Malton the Younger. (illustration ill.7)

  Some of her scorn for high society may have been rooted in Mary’s relative poverty. She could not afford to dress fashionably even if she had wanted to. Young women bought luxurious striped taffeta for underskirts and fainted from lacing their expensive corsets too tightly. They wore stiff silk panniers around their hips that cost a fortune and were at least five feet wide, making it difficult to navigate the dance floor, pass through narrow doorways, or even curtsy without tipping over.

  Society ladies coated themselves in a costly white powder made of lead, although everyone knew that “white” had caused the death of fashionable women, most notably the Gunning sisters. Maids painted rounds of rouge on their mistresses’ cheeks and sometimes penciled a dark “birthmark” near their lips. Hair was worn in steep towers at least two feet tall, a costly engineering feat that required highly trained servants to attach a wire cone to the top of the head, comb the hair into vertical swatches to cover the structure beneath, and then “teaze” it so that it appeared “frizzled.” If a woman did not have enough hair to accommodate the style, she could buy artificial curls made of horses’ tails or hair from a wig shop to supplement her own. The entire structure was often topped with rare (and pricey) ostrich feathers or ribbons, and then powdered with flour.

  The key to eighteenth-century beauty was demonstrating how rich one was. Like the formal gardens of this period, with their emphasis on the gardener’s ability to control and shape Nature—the evergreens pruned into tight conical shapes, the tidily shaped geometrical paths, the perfectly symmetric Greek temple—a woman’s appearance was meant to demonstrate how many maids she could afford and how many jewels she owned. Every lady worked diligently to disguise or augment her natural attributes—no dress was too grand, no skirt too wide, no hairstyle too outrageous. Artificiality was a virtue—evidence of exquisite craftsmanship and distinguished taste. To commemorate a victory at sea, one woman topped her head with an outrageously expensive model ship. Others sported miniature trees, birds, and fruit. People bought and studied books that taught refinement and manners. Complicated dance steps were the rage. Marie Antoinette, who had become the queen of France only four years earlier, was held up as an ideal, her dresses copied by dressmakers, her taste celebrated. That she would one day become one of the most hated symbols of aristocratic wealth was unthinkable, as was the idea that anyone would want to appear spontaneous rather than elegant, natural rather than refined.

  The Lady’s Maid or Toilet Head Dress, caricature of eighteenth-century hair fashions. (illustration ill.8)

  Mired in the extravagances of aristocratic Bath society, Mary felt decidedly out of her element. True to form, she made a virtue out of her alienation, writing Jane Arden, “I wish to retire as much from [the world] as possible. I am particularly sick of genteel life. I am only a spectator.” But this was an inaccurate description if ever there was one. Even as a hired companion, Mary attracted attention. She had loops of reddish-gold hair that she only reluctantly powdered at Mrs. Dawson’s insistence. She had a perfectly shaped mouth and a womanly figure; her skin was creamy and her cheeks pink. When she laughed or smiled, her face glowed with warmth. She loved to talk, as long as the topic was philosophy or literature, and she struck people as dramatic and acutely intelligent. Men were drawn to her, and she seems to have enjoyed a flirtation during her tenure with Mrs. Dawson, as some of her letters were found in the possession of a distinguished older clergyman, Joshua Waterhouse, after he died. For a single man and woman to correspond during this time period was unusual enough to mark the relationship as at least potentially romantic.

  Mary would have
known, however, that a man like Waterhouse was out of her league. Her family was too poor and he too highly placed in society. Instead of being cast down by this, she wore her poverty like a badge, declaring herself superior, a woman of principle, capable of self-discipline, unlike those with whom she lived. She owned only simple dresses and used no makeup. She did not yearn for a life of luxury. Instead she went to church, worried about the poor and the sick, and wished she could alleviate their suffering. She read Milton’s Paradise Lost and James Thompson’s long contemplative poem The Seasons. Whenever she could, she took long walks, seeking comfort in “the various dispositions of light and shade” and “the beautiful tints the gleams of sunshine gave to the distant hills.” While Mrs. Dawson and her friends devoured pastries and succulent roasts and poured cream into their hot chocolate, Mary adhered to a monkish diet. “I am just going to sup solus on a bunch of grapes, and a bread crust,” she wrote Jane. “I’ll drink your health in pure water.”

  Unlike previous companions who had fawned over her, complimenting her beauty, elegance, refinement, and wit, Mrs. Dawson soon found that this new young woman seemed to have contempt for everyone and everything; even royalty was not exempt from Mary’s sharp tongue. In fact, when she heard that the king had driven his horses until the poor creatures dropped dead, she expressed righteous outrage: “I think it murder to put an end to any living thing unless it be necessary for food or hurtful to us.”