CHAPTER II.

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT.

The new Settler in George Street, Blackfriars--Mary’s earlier

Story--Woman of Letters--Her Five Years’ Work--Her Attachment to Mr.

Johnson--Coteries of Philosophical Radicalism--_Anti-Jacobin_ on the

Free Contract--Godwin’s Apostasy--From Blackfriars to Store

Street--The Slut becomes a modish Woman--Her Passion for Fuseli--Her

Appeal to Mrs. Fuseli--Mr. Kegan Paul’s strange Treatment of Mr.

Knowles--_Rights of Woman_--Plain Speech and Coarseness--Mary goes to

Paris--She makes Imlay’s Acquaintance--Her Assignations with him at

the Barrier--Their Association in Free Love--Mr. Kegan Paul speaks

deliberately--His Apology for Mary’s Action--He falls between Two

Stools--Wife in the eyes of God and Man--Letters to Imlay--Badness of

Mary’s Temper--Her consequent Quarrels with Imlay--Her Sense of Shame

at her Position--Birth of her illegitimate Child--Her Withdrawal from

France--Her Norwegian Trip--Her Wretchedness and Rage--Dissolution of

the Free Love Partnership--Mary’s Attempt to commit Suicide--Was she

out of her Mind?--Her Union with Godwin in Free Love--Their subsequent

Marriage--Their Squabbles and Differences--Their Daughter’s

Birth--Mary Wollstonecraft’s Death--Mrs. Shelley’s biographical

Inaccuracies.

On or about St. Michael’s Day of 1787, a woman, whose dress betrayed an

unfeminine indifference to the refinements of costume, and whose

intelligent countenance possessed no beauty superior to ordinary

comeliness, took possession of her new quarters in a small house in George

Street, Blackfriars, which had been hired for her occupation, and provided

with a few needful articles of furniture, by Mr. Joseph Johnson, the

bookseller and publisher of St. Paul’s Churchyard. No longer young, though

courtesy would still style her so, this woman,--whose abundant

brown-auburn tresses showed no threads of grey, whose clear and clever

brown eyes would have been more effective had not one of them suffered

from a slight paralytic drooping of the lid, whose complexion preserved a

girlish freshness, and whose countenance would have been more agreeable

had it not been for certain indications of sadness and asperity,--was in

the middle of her twenty-ninth year, when she crossed the threshold of

her new home for the first time. At that season of her history, no casual

observer of her face was likely to regard it with admiration; but few

attentive scrutinizers of its lineaments failed to discover in them the

signs of intellectual force. To take a fair view of this woman’s future

behaviour, and see how far she has been misrepresented by censors and

flatterers, it is needful to glance at her earlier story.

The granddaughter, on her father’s side, of a Spitalfields manufacturer,

the daughter of a man rich enough to live in idleness, Mary Wollstonecraft

began her life’s battle with a miserably slender education and an

embittering sense of having been defrauded of her birthright to gentility

by her father’s vicious weakness. Regarding herself as a gentlewoman by

reason of her grandfather’s opulence and the respectability of her

mother’s ancestors, this daughter of a drunken father (with several

children,--three sons and three daughters) found herself in a position

that, denying her the enjoyments to which she had once thought herself

entitled, required her to shift and provide for herself in default of a

father capable of providing for her. It is not surprising that the girl,

with a fervid and far from amiable temper, thought contemptuously of a

sire, so careless for his wife’s happiness and the interests of his

offspring. Other matters quickened her sense of life’s hardship. At the

threshold of her twenty-second year she lost her mother (whom her

self-indulgent father speedily replaced with a second wife), and became

the indignant witness of the domestic troubles of her favourite sister,

Eliza, who was married to a dissolute and brutal man, named Bishop. Under

these circumstances, she could think her father and brother-in-law

exceptionally bad men; or, rating them as average examples of masculine

nature, she could form an equally unfavourable and unjust estimate of the

sex they discredited. For a while Mary Wollstonecraft took the latter

course. Had she possessed an admirer in the ranks of the hateful sex, she

would no doubt have taken the other view of her sire and her sister’s

husband. But in those days the woman, who became almost handsome in middle

age, missed little of downright ugliness, and from personal experience

knew nothing of masculine homage. The woman of quick temper and vehement

emotionality may be presumed to have felt acutely the neglect coming to

her from her want of girlish attractiveness.

Going out into the world, when fortunate girls are choosing their

bridesmaids, Mary fought poverty in various ways,--now in the company of

her friend Fanny Blood and Fanny’s mother (who took in needlework), now in

the company of her sisters, and now in the dwellings of strangers. For a

while she earned her livelihood with the needle. Then the sisters kept a

school at Stoke Newington, one of London’s northern suburbs,--a school

that declined to return the compliment and keep the enterprising sisters.

Newington Green is memorable in Mary’s annals for other matters, besides

this ungrateful seminary for young ladies. It was there that she wrote her

first book, _Thoughts on the Education of Daughters_, for which she

received ten guineas; and it was from the same Green that she started for

her run to Lisbon, at the entreaty of her vehemently beloved Fanny Skey

(_née_ Blood), who lived just long enough to die in her friend’s arms. On

Mary’s return from Portugal to the north London suburb, the unremunerative

school was given up; and parting from her sisters, Mary went off to

Ireland to serve a dame of fashion and high quality (Lady Kingsborough) in

the capacity of governess to her ladyship’s daughters, with a yearly

salary of 40_l._,--a situation procured for her by the Rev. Mr. Prior (an

Assistant-Master at Eton, and one of the several clergymen who befriended

her at the outset of her career); the situation in which she found time to

go forward with her French studies, and write some stories for her

publisher; the situation in which, though treated with abundant kindness,

Mary was more than slightly miserable (as a young woman of her quick and

querulous temper was bound to be anywhere). Thus she had spent her time

from the middle of her twenty-second to the middle of her twenty-ninth

year. She had worked by turns with her needle and her pen; she had failed

at school-keeping, and been miserable as a governess, in a great family;

and now she has just settled herself in the little house in George Street,

Blackfriars, with the intention of earning her livelihood as a

bookseller’s hack and author by profession.

Johnson, the bookseller and publisher, showed himself a shrewd man of

business in engaging the young woman, who had been introduced to him by

the scholarly and benevolent Rev. John Hewlett. Seeing from the little

books he had already taken of her that she possessed the ‘literary knack,’

seeing also, from personal intercourse with her, that she was industrious

and resolutely set on winning a position amongst women of letters, the

publisher came to the conclusion that she would prove a more serviceable

instrument in his hands than any of the tippling scholars he was in the

habit of employing to write essays, translate French pamphlets, and dress

manuscripts for the press. The woman, who, in her delight at finding

herself in regular literary employment, regarded her publisher as her

benefactor,--the woman, who seldom ate meat and rarely drank anything but

water or tea, was a more intelligent, punctual, and manageable scribe,

than any hack Mr. Johnson could have picked from the taverns, frequented

by indigent men of letters. Temperate, sedulous, quick with her pen, and

especially desirous to please her employer, the clever woman was glad to

work twelve hours a-day in her tiny tenement, and deemed herself well

rewarded by fair payment and the almost parental interest the publisher

took in her proceedings. Working strenuously six days of the week, she

usually dined on Sunday at Mr. Johnson’s table, where she met some of the

most notable scholars, artists, and writers of the period.

For five years she led this laborious and upon the whole not unhappy life,

re-writing the English translation (from the Dutch) of _Young Grandison_;

translating _Necker on Religious Opinions_ and _Lavater’s Physiognomy_

from the French; compiling the _French Reader_; producing _Elements of

Morality from the German_; working at a novel, entitled _The Cave of

Fancy_; throwing off countless articles and critical notices for _The

Analytical Review_; putting into English numerous French political

pamphlets, that, keeping her _au courant_ in the public affairs of France,

quickened her sympathy with the revolutionary movement, and her admiration

of the revolutionary leaders of that country; and together, with other

original essays, sending through the press the _Answer to Burke_, and the

_Vindication of the Rights of Woman_, written during the first outcry

against the first part of _The Rights of Man_, by Thomas Paine, whose

acquaintance she had made before she was so imprudent as to christen her

comparatively inoffensive essay after his notorious book, and thereby to

associate herself in the popular imagination with the man of evil fame,

and with the work that only a few months later was declared by the King’s

Bench jury ‘a false, scandalous, malicious, and seditious libel.’ In the

five years, during which she was thus busily employed, Mary

Wollstonecraft helped her brother and sisters largely with her earnings,

whilst in order to do so she denied herself comforts to which she cannot

have been wholly indifferent, and pleasures which so lively and emotional

a woman must have desired. Mr. Johnson, in his later time, was of opinion

that she could not have spent in this period less than 200_l._ on her

needy relatives; and there is no reason to think the publisher’s rough

estimate excessive. The woman, who, whilst subsisting chiefly on

vegetables and exercising a severe economy in every department of her

strictly personal expenditure, used in this manner so large a proportion

of her slender and toilsome earnings was, at least, a woman to be honoured

on certain grounds and from certain points of view.

During the first four of these five years, Mary Wollstonecraft remained in

the modest quarters, in George Street, taken and furnished for her in 1787

by Mr. Johnson, of whose tender and humane treatment of her she wrote with

gratitude and affection. Writing and speaking in this strain of his

goodness and tenderness, she was at no pains to conceal from the

bookseller the feelings with which she regarded him. But though she

sometimes styled it ‘love,’ there is no reason to think her liking for the

staid and rather formal publisher resembled in any way or degree the

idolatrous admiration she soon displayed for Fuseli the painter, or the

passionate tenderness she somewhat later lavished on Imlay, the American

man of letters. It was the affection a woman, of Mary’s essentially

generous nature and peculiar circumstances, would necessarily feel for the

man, greatly her senior, who had befriended her with equal delicacy and

kindliness; had instructed her without assuming any air of authority over

her; and had helped her out of difficulties, and introduced her to

remunerative employment and congenial friends, without letting her feel

herself patronized. At the end of her fourth year in the little house in

George Street (Michaelmas, 1791), Mary Wollstonecraft moved to Store

Street, where she resided till her departure for France in December, 1792,

seeing probably something less of the Radical bookseller, but feeling no

less affectionately towards him, working no less sedulously for him.

During these five years Lady Kingsborough’s whilom governess changed

considerably in her views of life and society, her mental characteristics,

and her appearance. Partly due to time and natural development, these

changes were in a greater degree due to the influence of her professional

pursuits, of the books she read, of the circles in which she found

recreation, and of the friendships she formed in those circles. Strongly

disposed to liberalism before she settled in George Street, she would

probably, under any circumstances, have developed into an ultra-liberal.

It was therefore a matter of course, that the publisher’s hack, who in the

way of her profession became a translator of revolutionary pamphlets,

quickly adopted the views and conclusions of the revolutionists and

republicans. It was also a matter of course that the emotional and

sympathetic woman, who affected powerfully the sensibilities of those she

encountered, was in like manner affected by them. Nor is it surprising

that the woman who, after entering her thirtieth year, became better

looking every year she lived, was in the earlier term of middle life more

thoughtful of her appearance, and more anxious to exhibit it to the best

advantage, than she had been when she was a plain and unattractive young

person. In this last respect the change in Mary Wollstonecraft was almost

comically striking to those who, on greeting her as a former acquaintance

in Store Street, had not seen her since the opening of her second year in

George Street. During her residence in Blackfriars, dressing with severe

economy (partly in order that she might have more money to give to her

brothers and sisters, and partly because personal vanity was still foreign

to her nature), she was the veriest caricature of a philosophical sloven.

Her costume in the streets consisted of an ill-fitting habit of such

coarse cloth, as was generally worn by London milk-women of the succeeding

generation, a badly kept beaver hat, black stockings and clumsy shoes.

Indoors she wore the same coarse habit when the weather was cold. In

summer she sate at her desk in a cotton dressing-gown, or with no garment

over her stays. On changing the place of her abode she changed her

dressmaker and consulted a milliner. A slut in Blackfriars, she dressed

like a woman of fashion in Store Street. Though he was not the sole cause

of it, Fuseli was largely accountable for this in Miss Wollstonecraft’s

outward style.

Of all the numerous acquaintances she made in the coteries of Philosophic

Radicalism, the three persons to influence Mary Wollstonecraft most

powerfully and enduringly were Thomas Paine, Henry Fuseli, and William

Godwin. Long before William Godwin loved her, so far as it was possible

for a man of his cold nature to love any woman; long before it ever

occurred to her that she would live to be his wife, or even to have a

liking for him, William Godwin’s declarations against marriage converted

her to an open approval of the doctrines of Free Love, making her a Free

Lover in principle, some while sooner than the time when she became a Free

Lover in practice.

Of all this philosopher’s doctrines on social questions, none were more

acceptable to his admirers than those that aimed at discrediting lawful

wedlock, as an arrangement fruitful of misery and moral disease; fruitful

of no kind of felicity, that would not flow in clearer and more liberal

streams from a system of virtuous concubinage, under which spouses would

be drawn together by love and a sense of mutual affinity, and remain at

liberty to part from one another, as soon as they should cease to love,

and should discover their unfitness for, one another. Whilst vicious

libertines applauded the doctrines that seemed to justify, or at least to

palliate, their immorality, and extolled the arrangement with which it was

proposed to replace the old-fashioned wedlock, because it seemed to them

an arrangement under which a profligate might have half-a-hundred

mistresses in succession, without incurring the annoyances of social

obloquy, virtuous libertines--enthusiasts of both sexes, wholly pure of

wicked passion, with no fire of lust in their veins, no taint of

lasciviousness in their blood--saw in Free Love the one wholesome remedy

for certain of the worst ills of civilization. An entire bookcase might be

filled with the literature that streamed from the press in commendation of

Free Love (as a righteous substitute for debasing matrimony), during the

last twenty years of the last century. The _Anti-Jacobin_ made good fun of

this literature on 18th December, 1797, in the letter written to the

_Anti-Jacobin’s_ editor, by Miss Lætitia Sourby, about certain deplorable

changes for the worse in her papa’s temper, principles, and demeanour.

‘But’ (says Miss Lætitia) ‘to return to my father--who is now always

reading Books and Pamphlets that seem quite wicked and immoral to my

mind and my poor Mother’s, whom it vexes sadly to, hear my Father talk

before company, that Marriage is good for nothing, and ought to be

free to be broken by either party at will. It was but the other day

that he told her, that if he were to choose again, by the New Law in

the only Free Country in the world, he would prefer Concubinage--so he

said in my hearing.’

Thus it was that the _Anti-Jacobin_ ridiculed the Free Lovers and their

literature at the close of the very year in which they were thrown into

lively commotion by William Godwin’s shameful act of apostasy from his own

lovely doctrines, in making Mary Wollstonecraft his lawful wife at St.

Pancras Church:--a commotion curiously comparable with the stir of

surprise and indignation, that greatly agitated the favourers of the Free

Contract only a few years since, when Marian Evans (after living in free

promise with George Henry Lewes till his death) gave herself to an

excellent gentleman, and took him for better and worse _not_ in Free

Contract, but in holy matrimony, duly solemnized in a place of public

worship, in accordance with the ordinances and requirements of the Church

of England. The favourers of the Free Contract (who had for many years

talked of Marian Evans and her genius as though they had a peculiar

property in them, and of her _nom-de-plume_ as though it were sheer

profanity to hint that George Eliot could be wrong about anything) were

comically moved and troubled by the incident, which told them how little

(with all their fussy talkativeness) they had known of the great

novelist’s reverence for the sanctity of marriage, and for every usage

tending to hallow it in the minds of men and women. In like manner were

the enemies of Marriage disturbed some ninety years since on hearing that,

after all he had written and said against lawful wedlock, and after living

with her for months in Free Love, William Godwin had taken Mary

Wollstonecraft to St. Pancras Church.

Having accepted Godwin’s doctrines touching Marriage, and become a Free

Lover in principle, during her residence in George Street, Mary

Wollstonecraft conceived a strong sentiment of affectionate admiration for

Henry Fuseli; a sentiment so fervid that, instead of being able to nurse

it secretly in her breast, she was constrained to reveal it to him, and

entreat him to give her place in his heart. Born in 1741, Fuseli was

eighteen years her senior, and about fifty years of age, when he was thus

entreated for affection by a woman, who at the time of making the prayer

knew he was a happily married man. In justice to Miss Wollstonecraft it

must be clearly put on the record, that Fuseli could have complied with

the precise terms of her entreaty, without doing aught that would have

rendered him guilty of conjugal infidelity, in the legal sense of the

term. Averring to her friends (for beside worrying Fuseli with

love-letters, she spoke freely of her passion for him to divers of her

friends) that she fully recognized Mrs. Fuseli’s right to the person of

her husband, Mary Wollstonecraft only desired that she and he should live

together in sentimental union; that he should admit her to his confidence

as a spiritual partner, and she be suffered to worship him as her

spiritual mate; that they should cherish one another with mutual platonic

fondness. It is not surprising, or much to her discredit, that she admired

thus dangerously a man of Fuseli’s genius, personal attractiveness, and

conversational brilliance; though it certainly does not speak much for her

delicacy that she was so communicative to him and others respecting her

passion and his cruelty in declining to respond, to it. What might have

happened, had Fuseli been less resolute in the right way, may be left to

the reader’s imagination. Enough for the present writer to speak of what

actually took place. Touched by love, piqued by the coldness of the man

she adored, Mary strove to lure him into regarding her case more tenderly

and mercifully. Taking blame to herself for the ill-success of her suit,

it occurred to her that she would fare better if she were more careful of

her personal appearance. Hence the choice of a new dressmaker and the

conference with a fashionable milliner.

Moving to a brighter quarter of the town, Mary arrayed herself elegantly.

At the same time she rained down letters on the man who, neglecting to

answer them, sometimes kept them for days together in his pocket without

opening them. More than once Fuseli expostulated with her on her unworthy

behaviour, and begged her to act more reasonably. ‘If I thought my passion

criminal,’ she answered, ‘I would conquer it, or die in the attempt; for

immodesty, in my eyes, is ugliness, and my soul turns with disgust from

pleasure tricked out in charms which shun the light of heaven.’ Mary’s

last attempt to achieve her purpose may surely be taken as evidence that

she spoke sincerely of the purity of her passion. Going straight to Mrs.

Fuseli, she implored the lady to receive her into her family, adding, ‘As

I am above deceit, it is right to say that this proposal arises from the

sincere affection I have for your husband; for I find that I cannot live

without the satisfaction of seeing and conversing with him daily.’

Naturally Mrs. Fuseli declined to accede to the proposal, and thought it

best for her and her husband to withdraw from an engagement to accompany

Mary on a six weeks’ trip to Paris.

This is the outline of John Knowles’s account of an affair that, known to

many people through Mary’s extravagantly indiscreet communicativeness, was

of course told in various ways, more hurtful than the true way to her

character. The evidence of the story, so true to Mary Wollstonecraft’s

human nature, is unimpeachable. Who was the narrator of the story?

Fuseli’s intimate friend, executor, and biographer, John Knowles, Fellow

of the Royal Society, was also Mrs. Fuseli’s intimate friend, after her

husband’s death. A gentleman of high place in the Navy Office, of good

social position, of known integrity, Mr. Knowles gives his account of

Fuseli’s relations with Mary Wollstonecraft in the biography of the

artist, which he wrote at Mrs. Fuseli’s request and with her assistance,

from the great painter’s papers. The account, thus given to the world, and

given (be it observed) in Mary Wollstonecraft’s interest, even more than

for the sake of the painter’s reputation, is introduced to the readers of

the biography with these words: ‘Several publications having gone so far

as totally to misrepresent the nature of his intercourse with this highly

gifted lady, it becomes the duty of his biographer to give a plain

statement of facts.’ Written to clear Fuseli and his fair friend of

imputations, more discreditable to her than to him, this plain statement

is supported in several of its principal assertions by quotations from

Mary’s letters to Fuseli; for the accuracy of which passages the historian

of unimpeachable credit, and conscientious carefulness, pledges his honour

in these words, ‘This and subsequent quotations respecting Mrs.

Wollstonecraft are taken from her letters to Fuseli.’ One of these

quotations (already given in this work) is the passage from one of her

letters in which she avows her passion for the painter, whilst declaring

that, were it criminal, she would conquer it, or die in the attempt. In

another of the quotations she declares her hope of uniting herself to the

painter’s mind. In a third quotation, after the failure of her application

to Mrs. Fuseli, Mary begs the painter’s pardon ‘for having disturbed the

quiet tenour of his life.’ A fourth quotation gives the whole of the angry

letter (signed ‘Mary’) in which, after her return from France to England

(and long after the death of her passion for the painter), she scolds

Fuseli for not returning a visit she paid him;--a letter curiously in

harmony with Mr. Knowles’s narrative. Thus the character of the narrative

is supported by the high character of the narrator; by his singularly good

opportunities for ascertaining the truth; by the fact that he was Fuseli’s

most confidential friend; by his intimacy with Mrs. Fuseli; and by the

conclusive quality of his superabundant documentary evidence. The

statement is in perfect harmony with Mary Wollstonecraft’s career. It is a

statement in which Fuseli, his wife, John Knowles, and Mary Wollstonecraft

herself, may be said to stand forth as witnesses to its truth. Yet

further, the statement is supported in its most important assertion by

Godwin himself, who speaking, in his memoir of his first wife, of her

intimacy with Fuseli, expresses a strong opinion that, had he been

unmarried, she would have wished to become the painter’s wife.

How are this statement and the superabundant evidence of its accuracy

dealt with by one of the several gentlemen who, not content with

white-washing and painting Shelley into a respectable member of a

respectable county family, and white-washing Mary Godwin into a suitable

wife for so respectable a member of so respectable a county family, must

needs whitewash Shelley’s second mother-in-law into a suitable mother for

so suitable a wife for so respectable a member of so highly respectable a

county family? In his _Life of William Godwin_, Mr. Kegan Paul ventures to

say that ‘Mr. Knowles is so extremely inaccurate in regard to all else

that he says of her, that his testimony,’ respecting Mary Wollstonecraft’s

intimacy with Fuseli, ‘may be wholly set aside.’ This astounding statement

is made by a gentleman who does not give a single fact in support of the

baseless charge of inaccuracy. It is directly the reverse of fact that Mr.

Knowles is extremely inaccurate in what he says about Mary Wollstonecraft.

In the memoir of Mary, forming the preface of his edition of her _Letters

to Imlay_, Mr. Kegan Paul calls Knowles’s careful and accurate statement a

‘preposterous story,’ _i.e._ a story contrary to nature and reason; a

wrong, foolish, monstrous, absurd story. Fortunately Mr. Kegan Paul gives

his reasons for thus stigmatizing a truthful story and conscientious

writer. (1) Mr. Kegan Paul says, ‘I have failed to find any confirmation

whatever of this preposterous story.’ (2) He says, ‘I find much which

makes directly against it, the strongest fact being that Mary remained to

the end the correspondent and close friend of Mrs. Fuseli.’ What reasons

for declaring the story ‘preposterous’! It is proved completely, proved

(as the phrase goes) up to the very hilt; but it must be false because Mr.

Kegan Paul has failed to discover any additional confirmatory evidence of

its truth,--evidence needed by no discreet reader. It must be false,

because Mrs. Fuseli corresponded with Mary to the last! This is Mr. Kegan

Paul’s _strongest fact, making directly against_ the statement.

This strongest fact is quite accordant with Knowles’s statement, that Mary

wanted from Fuseli nothing but such affection as he might have given her

without breaking his marriage vow;--the statement made for the demolition

of the stories that she had been guilty of criminal intercourse with him.

Had the statement countenanced and confirmed these scandalous stories, the

fact of Mrs. Fuseli’s intimacy with Mary would no doubt have made against

Knowles. But according to the statement, there was no reason why Mrs.

Fuseli should have ceased to be friendly with Mary, though at the close of

1792 she thought Mary had better keep away from Fuseli’s house and

presence for a short time. On the other hand according to the statement,

there were several reasons why Mrs. Fuseli should think generously and

tenderly of Mary, who in the heat of her wild and fantastic passion had

not wronged her, or wished to wrong her; had dealt frankly and fairly with

her, and thrown herself upon her with entreaties for sympathy. As he

admits this fact is his _strongest fact_ against the story, Mr. Kegan Paul

admits he has no facts whatever wherewith to discredit the story which he

ventures to call ‘preposterous.’ The explanation of the matter is this.

Published in 1831, the statement was offensive to Mrs. Shelley, who was

just then writing a lot of fantastic, and inaccurate, and romantic

nonsense about her mother, declaring her ‘one of those beings who appear

once, perhaps, in a generation, to gild humanity with a ray,’ &c., &c. In

a pet Mrs. Shelley condemned the truthful story as preposterous. Hence, it

became an article of the Field Place creed and duty to think and declare

the story preposterous. It follows that, writing in the interest and for

the pleasure of Field Place, Mr. Kegan Paul took Mrs. Shelley’s view of

the story and thought it preposterous. Thinking the story preposterous, it

was natural for Mr. Kegan Paul to discover egregious inaccuracy in one of

the most conscientious and careful biographers of English literature.

Before they cross the Channel in the company of Mary Wollstonecraft, and

take a look at revolutionary Paris, readers of this work should be told

something more of her _Vindication of the Rights of Woman, with Strictures

on Political and Moral Subjects_. In christening this book after Thomas

Paine’s notorious work, and thereby rendering him the sincerest kind of

flattery, Mary Wollstonecraft did herself a serious injury; for the

inappropriate title caused her to be associated in public sentiment with

her friend’s evil repute and evil principles,--an association from which

she suffers to this hour. So named, the treatise on feminine

disqualifications and grievances was naturally assailed with excessive

virulence by all persons, who held Paine in abhorrence. Appearing under an

inoffensive title, the treatise would have displeased the majority of

educated Englishwomen, and been severely handled by reviewers; but it

would not have sent its author down to posterity hand in hand with the

scurrilous politician and flippant freethinker.

The _Rights of Woman_ is a statement of woman’s need for a higher and

healthier education; a demand that women should have equal educational

advantages with the other sex; should be raised by education as nearly as

possible to intellectual equality with men, and for this end should from

earliest childhood be taught from the same books and trained in the same

schools as persons of the male gender. The proposal that girls should be

educated in the same schools with boys; that young women should pursue

their higher studies in the same classrooms and colleges with young men;

that from infancy to adult age, the young of both sexes should be reared

and trained side by side, was a proposal certain ninety years since to

provoke angry disapproval;--certain, even in these days of liberality and

innovation, to cause fierce disputes, should it be put forward, as a

serious suggestion to be acted upon by people of all classes throughout

the country. But this bold and startling proposal was not the chief cause

of the outcry against the _Rights of Woman_. To show their urgent need of

a better education, the author gave a picture of the women of her period

and country that stung them to fury, and in so doing, caused their

fathers, and sons, and brothers, to rise in wrath against so merciless an

assailant of the gentler sex. Mary Wollstonecraft’s charge against

Englishwomen was that they were frivolous, silly, deceitful, mean-natured,

violent in their tempers, querulous, peevish, indolent, immodest,

uncleanly in their habits, wanting in delicacy; so wanting in common

decency as to be in the habit of exposing their persons shamelessly to one

another, although they affected to be unutterably shocked if by any

accident they let a man get a view of their ankles. All this Mary

Wollstonecraft said of Englishwomen of her own social degree; and she said

it coarsely. No wonder there was an outcry against the author of the

_Rights of Woman_! No wonder that simple English ladies spoke of her

bitterly, as the arch-libeller of their sex; spoke of her with mingled

terror, disgust, and indignation! No wonder that honest English gentlemen

sided cordially with these simple English ladies.

Some of the coarseness of this censor of her sex may, no doubt, be

regarded as a mere affair of superficial style, and was referable to the

tone of the coteries in which she had been living for several years:--the

coteries of Philosophic Radicalism, where speech was even more free than

thought. But some of Mary Wollstonecraft’s coarseness was due to natural

want of refinement and a vein of vulgarity that, instead of playing only

on the surface of her life, had its source in the depths of her soul. Her

view of men and their feelings was as sordid as her view of women and

their failings. Her conception of love as a force in human affairs would

have discredited a chambermaid. Having its source in sensation, the

tenderest and most delicate passion rose and fell with the variations of

bodily desire. The result of purely physical causes, it waxed and waned

with increase and decrease of nervous excitement. According to Miss

Wollstonecraft’s view of the relations of the sexes, wives were so many

toys preserved for the diversion of the men who had appropriated them for

their enjoyment, in compliance with a nervous disposition that, always

more or less transient, was certain to perish in no long time. From its

nature the sexual affection was the most inconstant and fickle of human

forces. On marrying, every woman is admonished to anticipate the

inevitable moment when her husband’s tenderness will cease, her power of

pleasing come to end,--the time when, on discovering her inability to

charm her proprietor any longer, she will, most likely, survive her desire

and desist from her efforts to please him. ‘When the husband,’ says Mary

Wollstonecraft, ‘ceases to be a lover--and the time will inevitably

come--her desire’ (_i.e._ the young wife’s desire) ‘will grow languid, or

become a spring of bitterness; and love, perhaps, the most evanescent of

all passions, will give place to jealousy or vanity,’ On a later page of

her treatise, she says in the same hopeless strain, ‘Love, from its very

nature, must be transitory.... The most holy band of society is

friendship. It has been well said, by a shrewd satirist, that “rare as

love is, true friendship is still rarer.”’ Provided with the higher

knowledge, brighter cleverness, finer tact, coming to her from higher

education, a woman would be able to hold her husband’s love for the

longest possible period, and in some cases be able to retain his

friendship after he has ceased to love her. In all cases, where the former

lover declines to sink in the sober friend, the woman of higher education

would be able to make herself fairly comfortable, without either his love

or his friendship. It was mainly on these grounds, and for these

considerations, that Mary Wollstonecraft insisted on woman’s right to

better training.

What doctrine,--what a teacher for Englishwomen! It was by such doctrine

that Mary Wollstonecraft hoped to raise her sex from slavery and

debasement to freedom and dignity. Such was the teacher of whom Mrs.

Shelley wrote, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft was one of those beings who appear

once, perhaps, in a generation, to gild humanity with a ray which no

difference of opinion nor chance of circumstances can cloud.’ It must be

remembered that _The Rights of Woman_ is the only important original work

by her pen that deserves serious consideration,--the solitary work in

which she made a strenuous effort to influence the life and future of

humanity. The busy woman of letters produced translations, compilations,

slight essays, brief tales, critical notices by the score. A clever

letter-writer, she produced during her life a charming volume of letters

touching Sweden and Norway; and left behind her, for posthumous

publication, other _Letters to Imlay_,--letters curiously and dismally in

harmony with the sentiments and feeling of the essay on English womankind.

But _The Rights of Woman_ was her sole _important_ original work. The one

work, to be studied for information respecting her social theories, it is

the one work by which she must be judged as a social teacher. Whatever

their merits (and the works are by no means meritless), her other writings

afford nothing to justify her younger daughter’s estimate of her services

to humanity. From what has been said of _The Rights of Woman_, readers may

judge whether it was a work ‘to gild humanity with a ray’ of moral

sunshine, or a work to darken and depress humanity with dismal notions.

Unobservant of his heroine’s deep-seated and ingrained coarseness of

sentiment, Mr. Kegan Paul cannot shut his eyes to what I term her

superficial coarseness,--the coarseness of diction that is in some degree,

though by no means altogether, referable to the tone of the coteries in

which she had lived chiefly for some five years.

‘It may, however,’ he says of her book, ‘be admitted that her

frankness on some subjects is little less than astounding, and that

matters are discussed which are rarely named even among members of the

same sex, far less printed for both.... Yet for extreme plain

speaking, there was much reason and excuse. The times were coarser

than ours, the days were not so far distant when the scenes were

possible and the dangers real which Richardson’s novels portray.’

Readers may infer from these admissions (by a biographer who would fain

have us think Mary Wollstonecraft an angel) that the plain speaking to

which Kegan Paul refers is _extremely_ plain. Mr. Kegan Paul’s admissions

on these points are significant of much more than he says, to the

disadvantage of the angelic Mary. Significant also are the commonplaces

with which he palliates what he is constrained to acknowledge. From these

commonplaces one might imagine gentlewomen of George the Third’s time were

so tainted with prevailing coarseness, as to be incapable of thinking and

writing like gentlewomen. Sufficient evidence to the contrary may be found

in the writings of Catharine Macaulay, Hester Chapone, Sophia Lee, Harriet

Lee, Ann Radcliffe, Sarah Trimmer, Hannah More, Frances Burney, Lætitia

Barbauld. Madame D’Arblay could exhibit the want of refinement, noticeable

in the vulgar of her time, without ceasing to write like a woman of

refinement. Though Elizabeth Inchbald lived in the same cliques as Mary

Wollstonecraft, her pages are innocent of the ‘plain speaking’ that

revolts the reader of _The Rights of Woman_ and the _Letters to Imlay_.

The simple fact is that, though her worst failing was aggravated by the

society she kept, Mary Wollstonecraft sometimes wrote coarsely because she

sometimes thought coarsely.

It is not surprising that at the close of 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft went

to Paris, the capital to which all Englishmen and Englishwomen of

revolutionary sentiment had for some time been looking with keen interest

and enthusiastic hopefulness. ‘Well up’ in contemporary French politics,

the woman, who had translated the pamphlets of French politicians into

English, and was known in Paris as their translator, naturally wished to

see the people who had engaged so much of her thought, and to pass a few

weeks in the capital where, without having seen it, she was no stranger.

_The Rights of Woman_ had been translated into French and praised by

Parisian reviewers. It was sold on the boulevards and at the bookstalls on

the quays, as a companion-book to _The Rights of Man_. At Paris she would

be welcomed as a celebrity, honoured as one of the very few Englishwomen,

clever and brave enough to be revolutionary,--the only Englishwoman who

had at present rendered the Revolution good service with her pen. In the

reception accorded so recently to Thomas Paine, by the garrison and

municipality of Calais, and by the National Convention at Paris, she saw

the honour and enthusiasm with which she would be welcomed at the port and

the capital. Even though they forbore to plant the tricolour in her

bonnet, the people of the department of Calais would hail her on landing

as the friend and fellow-worker of Tom Paine, whom they had so lately

chosen to represent them in the National Convention. At Paris she would

receive the homage due to her literary success, and be welcomed as a

daughter of ‘the Revolution.’

In the spring of ’92 she and the Fuselis had planned a six weeks’ trip to

Paris. Through incidents, of which enough has been already said, this plan

for a summer’s trip came to nothing. It remained for Mary Wollstonecraft

to relinquish her scheme of going to Paris, to make it with other

companions, or to go to France by herself. To relinquish the scheme she

could not; for the course of events made her more and more desirous to go

to Paris. Possibly she tried and failed to find other companions of the

voyage. Anyhow she started for France alone on the 8th of December, 1792,

going thither alone, and arriving at the capital, in the midst of the

series of exciting incidents that closed with the King’s execution.

Going thither openly and in her own name (a name of notoriety in Paris),

she made her abode first under the roof of Madame Fillietaz, _née_

Bregantz, a lady in whose school at Putney, Eliza Wollstonecraft (Mrs.

Bishop), and Everina Wollstonecraft, had been assistant-governesses. Thus

suitably placed in the house of her sisters’ former employer, she remained

there for awhile, working hard at the language in whose accent she was

greatly deficient. On getting a sufficient command of the French tongue,

she went into Parisian society, and was so engrossed by its excitements

that, instead of staying for only a few weeks, she remained at Paris for

months, staying over February, though she had received ample warning that,

if she would return to England, she should leave France promptly, before

the declaration of war. Safe for the moment alike from danger, and the

dread of it, Mary stayed on, congratulating herself on being the

eye-witness of events of which she meant to be the historian. Entering

France for a brief stay she remained in the country for two years and four

months.

Going much into the world, she made the acquaintance (during the spring of

1793, if not earlier) of Captain Gilbert Imlay, citizen of the United

States of America,--a handsome, clever gentleman of war, letters, and

commerce; a soldier who had led his company in the struggle for American

Independence; an author who had produced in a series of excellent letters

a _Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America_; a

smart adventurer, who had come to Europe to act for the sale of land in

America, and push his way to fortune in commercial enterprise. With a

smooth and plausible tongue, Captain Imlay made a favourable impression on

Mary, who (now grown into an almost handsome woman) found no difficulty in

making a similar impression on him. In the course of their sentimental

conversations on love and marriage, it struck both of them that it would

be well for them to enjoy the former without assuming the fetters of the

latter. It was enough for the handsome American that Mary returned his

passion. As she consented to love him, and give him all he required, it

was not for him to dictate the terms on which he would accept her

kindness. As she had conscientious and philosophic objections to marriage,

he was too gallant to draw her into an estate so repugnant to her sense of

right. They loved one another. Mutual love was a sufficient sanction for

the fulfilment of its own desire. As they loved one another, it was better

for them to do so on terms, that would leave them at liberty to retire

from one another when their mutual love, ‘the most evanescent of all human

passions’ (_vide_ _Rights of Woman_) should have perished. They agreed to

dote on one another, not in lawful wedlock, but in Free Love.

Mr. Kegan Paul takes two different and quite irreconcilable views of

Mary’s action in this business. _In the first place_, he insists that she

determined to associate herself with handsome Gilbert Imlay, because she

disapproved of lawful marriage. ‘She ran counter,’ Mr. Kegan Paul says, in

the _Memoir_, p. v., ‘to the customs of society, yet not wantonly or

lightly, but with forethought, in order to carry out a moral theory

gravely and religiously adopted.’ Further on, p. xxxviii., Mr. Kegan Paul

says, ‘Her view was that a common affection was marriage, and that the

marriage-tie should not bind after the death of love, if love should die.’

Hence Mr. Kegan Paul’s readers are in the first place required to believe

that Mary acted on and from religious principle in this business, and to

honour her for so acting on and from principle, although ‘she yet made the

grand mistake of supposing that it is possible for one woman to undo the

consecrated custom of ages; to set herself in opposition to the course of

society, and not be crushed by it.’ _In the second place_, and almost in

the same breath, Mr. Kegan Paul declares that religious principle was not

Mary’s motive in this affair; but that she went into Free Love with Imlay,

because a legal marriage could not have been readily effected between him

and her, as she was the subject of a sovereign with whom France was at

war; and that she would probably have insisted on being lawfully

married--_i.e._ would have acted against her principles--if that course

had at the same time been practicable and safe. It is obvious that if she

acted on and from principle, Mary Wollstonecraft did not go to Imlay’s

arms in Free Love, merely because the way by lawful marriage was for the

moment blocked; and that if she would have married him if she could, she

is not to be commended for sacrificing herself in this matter on the

shrine of religious principle. It is too much to require us at the same

moment to admire her for acting courageously from principle, and at the

same moment to believe she would have acted against her principle, had

there been no legal impediment to the latter course. Mr. Kegan Paul should

have seated himself on one stool or the other. He is undergoing the

proverbial punishment of the man who tries to sit between two stools.

What are Mr. Kegan Paul’s grounds for saying that a legal marriage with

Imlay was certainly difficult, apparently impossible, to Mary

Wollstonecraft in Paris, in the spring of 1793? His grounds for this quite

erroneous opinion are (1) that she was a British subject; (2) that

England and France were at war; (3) that her position as a British subject

was full of danger; (4) that even if a marriage with Imlay was possible to

her, she could not have made it without declaring her nationality to the

civil officer; (5) that in Madame de Stael’s novel of _Corinne_, Lord

Nelvil could not marry Madame d’Arbigny, because to marry her he would

have had to declare himself to the civil officer. In answer to these

considerations, it is enough to say (1) that, though she was a British

subject, Mary Wollstonecraft, as the child and favourer of revolution, and

a famous writer, enjoying the friendship of Thomas Paine, and other

powerful members of the National Convention, was in the spring of 1793

exempt from the perils and inconveniences pertaining to ordinary British

subjects living at that time in Paris; (2) that, even had her position

been perilous, it would not have been rendered more so by the declarations

requisite for a marriage, as so celebrated an Englishwoman, living openly

in Paris, was already well known to the civil functionaries; (3) that the

case of the English noble_man_ in Madame de Stael’s novel does not apply

to circumstances of the English_woman_ in Paris,--Mary being a woman

already known to the civil officer, and a woman, whose nationality would,

on the moment of marriage, merge in the nationality of her husband, and

remain therein during coverture. Mr. Kegan Paul is wrong alike in his

facts and his law. Though she was at war with England, France was in

cordial alliance with the United States of America; and the citizen of

those States could have married Mary Wollstonecraft almost as easily in

Paris as he could have married her in New York. Mr. Kegan Paul’s

hypothesis that Mary might have found it difficult and perilous to marry

Imlay is a mere fancy, arising from misconceptions.

Further, Mr. Kegan Paul would have us believe that one of Mary

Wollstonecraft’s reasons for making a contract of Free Love with Gilbert

Imlay was that she might have the security that would pertain to her from

_appearing_ to be the American gentleman’s wife. The answer to this is,

that instead of giving her the position and appearance of being his wife,

the contract of Free Love (on its becoming known to her friends in France)

only gave her the position and appearance of being his mistress; that her

friends in France never regarded her as Imlay’s wife; and that no security

(in the sense suggested by Mr. Kegan Paul) either came, or could be

expected to come, to her from her notorious position, though, to palliate

her action to her sisters, she used language in some letters that would

countenance a different opinion. Events moved rapidly in France. Before

the end of the year Thomas Paine had been turned out of the Convention and

was in prison, whence he had reason for thinking he would be sent to the

guillotine. Secure enough for the moment in the spring of 1793, Mary

Wollstonecraft’s position became perilous some months later; and there is

abundant evidence that when her position became uneasy, and even

hazardous, her relations with Imlay neither gave her security, nor

diminished her sense of insecurity.

Mr. Kegan Paul assures the gentle matrons and the young gentlewomen of

England that from the commencement of her association in Free Love with

Imlay, Mary Wollstonecraft was his _wife_! In his biography of William

Godwin, Mr. Kegan Paul says of her position towards Imlay, and her letters

to him:--

‘She believed that his love, which was to her sacred, would endure. No

one can read her letters without seeing that she was a pure,

high-minded, and refined woman, and that she considered herself, in

the eyes of God and man, his wife.... But they are the letters of a

tender and devoted _wife_, who feels no doubt of her position.’

In the _Memoir_ of the heroine, whom he thus exhibits to the admiration of

our wives, and sisters, and daughters, Mr. Kegan Paul says:--

‘The kindness he’ (_i.e._ Imlay) ‘showed Mary Wollstonecraft disposed

her to look on him favourably; _she soon gave him a very sincere

affection, and consented to become his wife_. _I use this word

deliberately, although no legal ceremony ever passed between them._’

In these passages Mr. Kegan Paul states much that is the reverse of fact;

much also that is disproved by the letters which he so strangely

misrepresents.

Containing many passages that are winningly piquant and innocently

charming; affording abundant evidence that their writer’s affections were

strongly concerned in this wretched _liaison_; betraying no few

indications of a spirit almost to be styled high-mindedness; yielding

superabundant evidence of the writer’s cleverness and brilliancy, these

letters are not the letters of a refined woman, or the letters of a woman

who considers herself the wife of the man to whom they are addressed.

Still less are they the letters of a woman who feels herself secure of her

position. Had she been a woman of nice refinement, she could not have

written so lightly and copiously as she does of matters that a gentlewoman

of refinement tells only to her physician, her nurse, her closest female

friends, and shrinks from naming to her husband. Had she been the woman of

singular refinement we are asked to believe her, she would have been less

communicative to her correspondent about her health. Regard for the

feelings of my readers forbids me to speak, even in the most guarded

terms, of the more disagreeable details of these too circumstantial

communications. In this respect, the letters are just such letters as, in

the absence of positive testimony, the author of the _Rights of Woman_

might be imagined to have written to the man, with whom she was living in

Free Love. Instead of being the letters of a woman who considers herself a

wife, she does not venture, even in her confidential communications to

Imlay, to style herself his wife, whilst hinting how strongly she wished

to be privileged to do so. Instead of being the letters of a woman

‘feeling herself secure of her position,’ nothing in them is more striking

and pathetic than the evidence how painfully aware she was, that she held

her admirer by only the slenderest thread.

Mr. Kegan Paul says that she believed Gilbert Imlay’s love would endure.

What a strange belief for a woman who thought no man’s love capable of

endurance; who wrote in the _Rights of Woman_ that ‘love, from its nature,

must be transitory,’ and was ‘perhaps the most evanescent of all

passions;’ who had taught in the same book that every woman should

anticipate the _inevitable_ death of her husband’s love for her! Anyhow,

ere the first four of the seventy-seven letters to Imlay had been written,

she knew him to have been a fickle lover:--

‘I have found out,’ she wrote from Paris to Imlay at Havre, in

September, 1793, in the fourth of the long series of letters, ‘that I

have more mind than you, in one respect: because I can, without any

violent effort of reason, find food for love in the same object, much

longer than you can. The way to my senses is through my heart; but,

forgive me! I think there is sometimes a short cut to yours.’

Surely, this is good evidence that, from an early date of their

acquaintance, she knew he was a fickle worshiper of womankind and a

libertine. Moreover, what a confession to be made by Mr. Kegan Paul’s

bright example of feminine purity and delicacy,--the woman who is said by

Mr. Kegan Paul to have come to Paris without having had any affair of the

heart! She had learnt in September, 1793, that the way to her _senses_ was

through her _heart_, and that she could ‘find food for love in the same

object’ longer than her correspondent could. A great deal for a woman to

learn between the end of December and the middle of the following

September! It must, however, be admitted that Paris, at the end of the

last century, was a school where a woman picked up such knowledge fast.

Mr. Kegan Paul is sure that, from the commencement of her association with

Imlay in Free Love, Mary Wollstonecraft considered herself as his _wife_

‘in the eyes of God and man;’ and Mr. Kegan Paul, ‘using this word

deliberately,’ styles her the _wife_ of Gilbert Imlay. Let us look into

this matter. At the commencement of this virtuous association, Gilbert and

Mary were not living under the same roof; but having separate places of

abode, they met secretly by assignation for the enjoyment of their

conjugal privileges. One of their places, perhaps their only place, of

assignation, was a certain ‘barrier’ of the French capital, near which

barrier the act occurred, that resulted in the birth of Mary

Wollstonecraft’s illegitimate daughter in April, 1794. The pleasure of

these meetings at the barrier was referred to by Mary, when, in the

twenty-third of the famous series of letters, she wrote on 22nd September,

1794, from Paris to Imlay:--‘Bring me, then, back your barrier-face, or

you shall have nothing to say to my barrier-girl.’ On the following day,

she wrote in the same vein:--

‘I desired you, in one of my other letters, to bring back to me your

barrier-face--or that you should not be loved by my barrier-girl. I

know that you will love her more and more, for she is a little

affectionate, intelligent creature, with as much vivacity, I should

think, as you could wish for.’

When writing thus to her already cold and remiss partner in Free Love,

Mary pined to see once again the radiant face of the lover, whose

‘barrier-girl’ was with her at Paris,--a five-months’ infant, delighting

in three things, ‘to ride in a coach, to look at a scarlet waistcoat, and

hear loud music.’

Mary and Gilbert were still living apart and meeting one another by

assignation, when she wrote to him on some unknown day of August, 1793:--

‘You can scarcely imagine with what pleasure I anticipate the day,

when we are to begin almost to live together; and you would smile to

hear how many plans of employment I have in my head, now that I am

confident my heart has found peace in your bosom.... I will be at the

barrier a little after ten o’clock to-morrow.’

By this time they had arranged ‘almost to live together,’ but they had not

begun to do so. Mary’s disagreeable communicativeness about her attacks of

faintness and the movements of her little ‘twitcher’ leaves no room for

question that her child, born at Havre in April, 1794, was not born

prematurely. It is therefore a matter of certainty that Mary was on the

way to become a mother, before the lovers ceased to have separate places

of abode and to meet by assignation. Even by Mr. Kegan Paul it must be

admitted that this was a curious way of living for the woman, who already

considered herself the wife of Imlay in the eyes of God and _man_. Anyhow

at first Mary did her best to escape the eyes of man.

After living under the same roof with her for some six weeks, Captain

Imlay (for the prosecution of affairs of business, and possibly also in

pursuit of pleasure) went off to Havre, where he had commercial concerns,

and to other places requiring his presence; Mary being left to her own

devices for several months in Paris, whence she wrote to her partner in

Free Love some of the most interesting of the letters, of which Mr. Kegan

Paul speaks so highly. Misrepresenting matters so as to adapt them to his

fanciful conception of Mary’s life and character, Mr. Kegan Paul also

commits errors without any apparent object for doing so. For instance, he

says, ‘Towards the close of 1793 Mary joined Imlay at Havre, and there in

the spring of 1794 gave birth to a girl, who received the name of Fanny,

in memory of the dear friend of her youth;’ saying this in spite of the

evidence afforded by the letters he is editing, that Mary remained at

Paris well into February, 1794. From Paris she wrote Imlay _one_ published

letter in September, 1793; one published letter in November, 1793; _four_

published letters in December, 1793; _four_ published letters in January,

1794; _four_ published letters in February, 1794. All these fourteen

letters were written by her at Paris; the last of them (penned at the

moment of her departure from the capital for Havre) ending with these

words:--

‘I am well, and have no apprehension that I shall find the journey too

fatiguing, when I follow the lead of my heart. With my face turned to

Havre my spirits will not sink; and my mind has always hitherto

enabled my body to do whatever I wished--Yours affectionately, MARY.’

In an editorial note Mr. Kegan Paul admits that all these letters were

written during Mary’s ‘separation of several months from Imlay;’ and yet

in the _Memoir_ he represents that the separation ended in December, and

that she joined Imlay at Havre ‘towards the close of 1793.’ This is the

way in which the writers, whose _care_ has been commended so

enthusiastically by Mr. Froude, deal with their evidences. Doubtless they

are accurate enough for Mr. Froude, and quite as accurate as he is

himself.

The letter she wrote to Imlay from Paris on 30th December, 1793 (Monday

night) contains this remarkable passage, to which the reader should give

his best attention:--

‘A melancholy letter from my sister Eliza has also harassed my

mind--that from my brother would have given me sincere pleasure; but

for.... There is a spirit of independence in his letter, that will

please you; and you shall see it, when we are once more over the fire

together. I think that you would hail him as a brother, with one of

your tender looks, when your heart not only gives a lustre to your

eye, but a dance of playfulness, that he would meet with a glow half

made up of bashfulness, and a desire to please the ----; where shall I

find a word to express the relationship which subsists between us?

Shall I ask the little twitcher? But I have dropt half the sentence

that was to tell you how much he would be inclined to love the man

loved by his sister. I have been fancying myself sitting between you,

ever since I began to write, and my heart has leapt at the thought!

You see how I chat to you.’

Written in her brightest, tenderest, most womanly vein, this exquisite

piece of writing shows not only the affectionateness of Mary’s nature, but

also how far she was from considering herself a wife in the eyes of God

and man, and how acutely she felt the shame and inconveniences of her

position towards Imlay. One would like to see the words omitted from the

passage,--probably the words of a declaration that she could not enjoy her

younger brother’s letter from the sense of humiliation coming to her from

thinking, how she could nerve herself to tell him of the relation, in

which she and Imlay stood to one another. ‘Where,’ she writes with pathos

and tact, ‘shall I find a word to express the relationship which subsists

between us?’ She wants a word she could give her brother, without fearing

it would drive all care for her from his heart. Had she considered herself

a wife in the eyes of man, she would not have wanted the word. ‘Shall I

ask the little twitcher?’ asks the woman, within four months of her

accouchement. Could a woman ask more touchingly and winningly for the

lawful marriage, that would make her what she wanted to be in the eyes of

the world; would save her child from the ignominy of shameful birth; would

give her the name she could utter to her brother, without burning blush

and scalding tears? ‘Considered herself a wife in the eyes of God and

man!’ Did she so consider herself? Then why this touching prayer to the

man whom she dared not call her husband, even in the privacy of a letter,

beginning with ‘My Best Love?’

There is another passage in the letters, to be remembered in connexion

with the foregoing evidence that, instead of considering herself a wife in

the world’s eyes, she could not even consider herself a wife in Imlay’s

eyes. ‘Finding,’ she wrote to him from Paris on 1st January, 1794, ‘that I

was observed, I told the good women, the two Mrs. ----s, simply that I was

with child: and let them stare! and ----, and ----, nay, all the world may

know it for aught I care! Yet I wish to avoid ----’s coarse jokes.’ Had

she been a wife in the eyes of society (as Mr. Kegan Paul insists she

was), the ladies would not have stared, would have seen no cause to stare,

on the announcement of the matter, with which Mary caused them to open

their eyes with astonishment. Had she been regarded as a wife by her

Parisian friends, she would have had no cause to fear coarse jests about

her health. It is clear the woman, who could not venture to style herself

‘his wife’ even to Imlay, had not ventured to style herself his wife to

her Parisian friends.

Now-a-days the less scrupulous of our Free Lovers make so free with the

queen’s English as to style themselves husband or wife, and declare

themselves married people, without having gone through any form of

marriage. Speaking deliberately, Mr. Kegan Paul says they have a right to

do so, the word wife being in his opinion strictly applicable to a female

Free Lover. Speaking deliberately, I say they have no right to apply to a

woman, who is not lawfully married, a familiar title assigned by social

rule and law of language, as a description of their legal estate, to women

who are lawfully married; or, on the other hand, to apply the correlative

title to men who are not lawfully married. I say they have no right to

change at their will the signification of familiar English words, so as to

bring them into accordance with their notions touching the relations of

the sexes.

In the dictionaries of the English language ‘husband’ is defined as ‘a man

contracted or joined to a woman by marriage;’ ‘wife’ is defined as ‘a

woman who is united to a man in the lawful bonds of wedlock;’ and

‘marriage’ is defined as ‘the legal union of a man and woman for life.’

The world accepts these definitions, acts upon them, and will, I trust,

continue to act upon them. Speaking deliberately, I say (Mr. Kegan Paul

notwithstanding) that persons who use these words for the misdescription

of Free Lovers, with an intention to deceive their hearers, are guilty of

falsehood. I say this deliberately, though Marian Evans (noble creature

though she was, and exemplary in all matters, apart from her miserable

association with George Henry Lewes) used to speak and write of him as her

‘husband.’ Possibly Marian Evans did not so misdescribe her relation to

George Lewes _with an intention to deceive_. I have no evidence that she

ever so misdescribed herself and Lewes to any person, without having

reason to think the person cognizant of the facts of the case. And _I do

know_ that to certain gentlewomen, she was honourably communicative on the

matter, so that they might not associate with her, under a misapprehension

respecting her domestic position. But her conduct cannot affect the

obligation of Free Lovers to be truthful. Having the courage of their

opinions, they should tell the world openly what they are. They might

style themselves ‘bosom-friends,’ or call themselves ‘free husbands and

free wives.’ But they have no right to call themselves ‘husbands’ and

‘wives.’ Out of respect for themselves and their principles they should

refrain from the ordinary untruthful practice of ‘kept mistresses’ and

their keepers.

Ninety years since the woman (who according to Mr. Kegan Paul considered

herself a wife in the eyes of God and _man_) did not presume to style

herself Imlay’s wife even to her own sisters. All she could do was to

speak of herself truthfully as living in France under his ‘protection,’

when on 10th March, 1794, she wrote from Havre to her sister Everina, ‘If

any of the many letters I have written have come to your hands or Eliza’s,

you know I am safe, through the protection of an American, a most worthy

man, &c.;’--words committed to paper, when she was within a few weeks of

giving birth to her illegitimate child. To her own sister Mary

Wollstonecraft described herself as a woman living under ‘protection.’ Mr.

Kegan Paul published the letter in which she thus describes herself; and

yet he says she considered herself as wife in the eyes of her

fellow-creatures.

It has been already remarked that Mary Wollstonecraft had an unhappy

temper. Even by Mr. Kegan Paul it is admitted that his angelical Mary was

‘excitable and hasty-tempered, apt to exaggerate trifles, sensitive to

magnify inattention into slights, and slights into studied insults.’ Put

into plain terms this is an admission that she was a violent-tempered and

bad-tempered woman. She was no woman to live happily with a man, either as

wife or Free Lover. Even before their first brief term of cohabitation,

she had tried Imlay by her caprice and pettishness. In the letter (of

August, 1793), in which she anticipates the delight of ‘beginning almost

to live together’ with him, she says:--

‘Cherish me with that dignified tenderness, which I have only found in

you; and your own dear girl will try to keep under a quickness of

feeling, that has sometimes given you pain. Yes, I will be _good_,

that I may deserve to be happy; and whilst you love me, I cannot again

fall into the miserable state which rendered life a burden almost too

heavy to be borne.’

Let the reader consider these words. In Letter vi. (a genuine

love-letter), dated from Paris to Imlay at Havre, she writes: ‘No; I have

thy honest countenance before me--Pop--relaxed by tenderness; a

little--little wounded by my whims.’ In Letter xi., of January, 1794, she

entreats, ‘with eyes overflowing with tears and in the humblest attitude,’

to be pardoned for worrying her admirer with unreasonable epistles to

which he has replied in a ‘kind and rational letter;’--adding, ‘It is time

for me to grow more reasonable, a few more of these caprices of

sensibility would destroy me.’ In the same month she writes to him:--

‘Yesterday, my love, I could not open your letter for some time; and,

though it was not half as severe as I merited, it threw me into such

a fit of trembling, as seriously alarmed me.... One thing you mistake

in my character, and imagine that to be coldness which is just the

contrary. For, when I am hurt by the person most dear to me, I must

let out a whole torrent of emotions, in which tenderness would be

uppermost, or stifle them altogether; and it appears to me almost a

duty to stifle them when I imagine _that I am treated with coldness_.’

The letters abound with similar evidence that, quarrelling from an early

date of their association, they went on quarrelling and making it up, till

they grew heartily sick of one another, and saw little of one another. At

the most, be it observed, the whole period of their association (from

their first introduction to one another till their final parting) did not

exceed two years and ten months, and at the fullest computation they did

not spend more than twelve months of this time in one another’s society.

Whilst Mary was at Paris, Imlay was for months together at Havre, or other

places, away from her. For the greater part of her stay at Havre, he was

at Paris. Soon after her return to Paris, he went off to London. Running

from England to France to see her for a short time, he returned by himself

to England. Soon after her return to England, she went off with her child

and nurse in the summer of 1795, for her trip to Sweden, Norway, and

Denmark.

I am no apologist for Imlay. In a memoir I wrote of Mary Wollstonecraft

twenty-eight years since, I called him ‘a pitiful scamp;’ and though I may

doubt whether I should have spoken of him quite so disdainfully, I am

still disposed to think him a mean-spirited, though clever, creature. The

evidence respecting his character and ways of life is far from complete.

Hitherto only one side has been told of the story of his relations with

Mary Wollstonecraft; _her_ side of the story, dressed and redressed by her

friends and admirers. From the insufficient evidence, he appears to have

differed morally in no important respect or degree from the ordinary run

of the men, who used to be styled men of the world, men of pleasure, and

men of gallantry. Whilst it is certain that Mary Wollstonecraft entered

the association with no confidence that it would last ‘for ever,’ there is

no reason to suppose that he entered it with any desire for its

permanence. Whilst it is certain that the faults of her temper were

largely accountable for the unhappiness of the association, it is fair to

assume there were corresponding faults of temper on his side. If he was

not qualified to make any woman happy for long, Mary Wollstonecraft was

not a woman to live happily with any man for any long time. There can be

no question they were an ill-assorted couple; but with any man Mary would

have been unhappily matched. It is not wonderful that Imlay had not been

associated for many months with the woman, who worried him incessantly

with her temper, before he began to think of withdrawing from the

association.

In leaving Mary Wollstonecraft, Imlay took a step that, from the

commencement of their association, must have been foreseen as a probable

contingency by the woman, who regarded love as the most evanescent of the

human passions. In leaving her he merely exercised the right of

retirement, which had been reserved alike to him and her by the conditions

of their lawless contract. Yet his disposition to leave her was no sooner

known to the Free Lovers of her English acquaintance, than they began to

think very ill of him. On being assured of his purpose to quit her,

because he could not live harmoniously with her, they were quick in

declaring him a prodigy of conjugal faithlessness. It is not manifest at

the first glance why these enthusiastic advocates of the Free Contract

were so indignant with him for retiring from the partnership in accordance

with the terms on which he had entered it,--_i.e._ on the understanding

that he should be at liberty to get out of it when he pleased, and that

Mary should be at liberty to retire from it when she pleased. The

advantage claimed by the Free Lovers for their conjugal arrangement over

marriage is, that spouses have this liberty of withdrawing from one

another on the death of their mutual affection. Why, then, was Imlay so

severely blamed for using the liberty especially reserved to him by the

contract he formed with Mary,--by the terms that may be fairly called her

own terms? The Free Lovers spoke of him as though, instead of entering

into a contract of Free Love with a middle-aged (thirty-four years old)

woman, who was a Free Lover in principle before she knew him, he had

engaged the affections of a young girl, and lured her into lawful wedlock.

They stigmatized him as the heartless betrayer of virginal simplicity and

innocence. They charged him with monstrous wickedness in retiring from the

contract, which by their own rule he was free to withdraw from as soon as

he liked.

The fact is the Free Lovers of ninety years since were angry with Imlay

for leaving Mary, _not_ because he acted in violation of their principles

or broke the terms of his contract with Mary, but because his rupture with

the woman of letters afforded a strong example of the badness of their

conjugal method, and tended to discredit their substitute for lawful

marriage. The opponents of Free Love were and are in the habit of

insisting that libertines would use its freedom, to desert their conjugal

mates for slight causes. Imlay’s secession from Mary countenanced this

view of Free Love. The opponents of Free Love opposed it on the ground

that, if conjugal partnerships could be withdrawn from at pleasure, they

would be entered into lightly and without due preliminary inquiry and

forethought. The levity with which Mary entered into a contract of Free

Love with Imlay, soon after making his acquaintance, and before she learnt

his real character (as her friends insist), countenanced this view. Hence

the rage of the Free Lovers against Imlay, who retired from the

partnership, whilst Mary wished to retain him in it.

Though it seems to have revived some months later, and after its temporary

extinction to have regained all its original passionateness, it is not to

be imagined that Mary Wollstonecraft’s love of Gilbert Imlay continued to

burn steadily after the death of his affection for her. All the more

instructive and pathetic are the efforts she made, for her child’s sake,

and her own honour’s sake, to hold him to herself, for months after his

first manifestation of a desire to be quit of her. Striving to make

herself useful to him, in the hope that a care for his selfish interests

would retain him in the partnership from which he wished to retreat, she

took an interest in his commercial concerns, and went on the voyage to

Denmark and Norway, not more for the sake of her own health, than for the

advantage of his affairs in those countries. This she did (as Mr. Kegan

Paul says) after ‘Imlay’s affection had ceased, and his desertion’

(retirement would be a better word) ‘had practically begun.’ Striving to

be useful to him, she tried to please him, even feigned still to love him,

though strong affection for him had perished from her heart. To qualify

her to do business for him in the foreign lands for which she was bound,

Imlay gave her a power-of-attorney, in which he styled her ‘Mary Imlay, my

best friend and wife,’--‘a document,’ says Mr. Kegan Paul, ‘which in many

cases and countries would be considered as constituting marriage:’ as

though it gave the poor woman a colour of matronly honour in history, and

were somehow or other a proof that she had, from the commencement of the

Free Love contract, ‘considered herself his wife in the eyes of God and

man.’ No doubt the document would have been proof of marriage in Scotland

to this century, and in other countries previous to the Council of Trent.

But Imlay and Mary were not living in Scotland. Nor were they living in

times prior to the Council of Trent. The power-of-attorney was signed by

Imlay when he had made up his mind never to make her his wife; and she

took it abroad with her, when she knew he had ceased to love her and had

_not_ made her his wife. For those who peruse them, by the light of the

hints given in these and previous pages, there is pathetic instruction in

the letters Mary sent her no-longer-loving ‘protector’ from abroad. They

are the letters of a woman alternately hoping against hope to revive in

Imlay’s breast his old love of her, and despairing to hold him much longer

as a friend or even as an acquaintance. From pity, kindness or

self-interest (possibly from all three) he wrote to her sometimes in the

language of a lover,--letters animating her with hopes, to be dashed by

the next post. Returning to England (not in late autumn, as Mr. Kegan Paul

asserts, but) on 4th October, 1795, she soon found the vanity of all her

hopes and efforts to retain him. By this time Imlay had formed another

attachment, had entered into another contract of Free Love,--a fact all

the more galling to Mary, because he called his new passion a sacred

passion, and justified it with the familiar arguments of the Free Lovers.

Resolute to exercise his Free-Love right to retire from the association

that had become distasteful to him, he was set on fulfilling the moral

engagements of the new partnership in mutual tenderness. His language and

tone on these matters were the more exasperating to Mary, because of their

conformity to the doctrines of her own philosophic school. In justice to

him it must be admitted, even by Mary’s partisans, that he showed no wish

to shirk the pecuniary sacrifices, expected from a man of honour, when he

transfers his affections from an old to a new mistress. Offering her,

pressing upon her, money for her necessities, he undertook to make proper

settlements on Mary and her child. With proper spirit she rejected

indignantly these offers for herself, though she consented to his proposal

to make a settlement on their child. But the bond he gave for this

purpose was of no advantage to the child, as neither the principal nor

interest of the promised sum was paid; probably because the man of divers

financial speculations fell into poverty.

There are passages in the concluding Letters to Imlay fit to be given in

evidence that, as the hour of their final separation drew nearer, Mary’s

love for him revived and regained all its former force; and it is

conceivable that, under the influence of jealousy of the object of Imlay’s

new attachment, Mary loved him again in a wild, tempestuous way, as all

hope of recovering him to herself and her child died in her breast.

Certainly she acted like a woman driven to distraction by the anguish of

despised and disappointed love. On the other hand, she did nothing more

than many a violent woman has done under the goadings and torture of

wounded vanity and injured pride. In her rage and misery, Gilbert Imlay’s

whilom mate in Free-Love went one cold and dismal winter’s day to the

river’s side near Putney Bridge. On coming to the scene, where she

intended to escape from life, she either walked into the river and stood

in it, or walked on the Bridge in the pouring rain, until the skirts of

her clothing were saturated and heavily charged with water. This having

been done, so that a few minutes later her garments should operate as a

dead weight in drawing her beneath the tide’s surface, and, at the same

time, deprive her limbs of the power to struggle against the cold current,

she climbed the parapet of the Bridge,[1] and threw herself into the deep

stream. This deliberate attempt at self-murder was, however, unsuccessful,

Mary being picked up and saved by the watermen of a passing boat.

Self-murder being a form of wickedness denied by the moral and social

proprieties to all persons in their minds, not belonging to the lower

orders, and being, therefore, a departure from righteousness that would

disqualify Mary for her place of honour in the annals of a respectable

county family, it has been decreed by Mary Wollstonecraft’s admirers that

she was out of her right mind, to the extent of not knowing what she was

doing when she thus attempted to kill herself. Is it not written in Mr.

Kegan Paul’s book that Mary’s attempt to drown herself was made when she

was ‘driven to despair and was for a time quite out of her mind?’ In

connexion with this verdict, it is well to remember that, some time before

going down to Putney, Mary wrote a very powerfully worded letter to Imlay,

saying therein, ‘I go to find comfort, and my only fear is, that my poor

body will be insulted by an endeavour to recall my hated existence. But I

shall plunge into the Thames, where there is the least chance of my being

snatched from the death I seek.’ After writing this quite lucid and

well-worded letter, Mary went down to Putney; and, after providing in the

most deliberate manner for the achievement of her purpose, she climbed

over the side of the Bridge and threw herself into the deep water. When

she did all this she was so completely out of her mind, that she should

not be deemed accountable for her actions, and cognizant of what she was

doing. This is Mr. Kegan Paul’s view of the matter.

It is impossible to trace precisely the course of Mary Wollstonecraft’s

life in the last three months of 1795 and the first month of 1796 (from

the stormy, hysterical, changeful epistles, that conclude the series of

published _Letters_ to Imlay, and other letters of the same period, which

I have examined for the illustration of her story); but in December she

was still writing to him with a faint, flickering hope of recalling him to

her side. On some day of December, subsequent to the 8th of that month,

she wrote to him in these words:--

‘Imlay, believe me, it is not romance, you have acknowledged to me

feelings of this kind. You could restore me to life and hope, and the

satisfaction you would feel would amply repay you. In tearing myself

from you, it is my own heart I pierce; and the time will come, when

you will lament that you have thrown away a heart that, even in the

moment of passion, you cannot despise. I would owe everything to your

generosity, but, for God’s sake, keep me no longer in suspense! Let me

see you once more.’

This letter is followed by another, written in the same month, ending

with ‘I part with you in peace.’ But the final parting was still later.

Even so late as 26th January, 1796, she is writing to Mr. A. Hamilton

Rowan in terms which indicate a faint, lingering hope that even yet Imlay

would at some time of the future, change and return to her. ‘Mr. Imlay,’

she says, ‘would be glad to supply all my pecuniary wants; but unless he

returns to himself, I would perish first;’--words showing that, even so

late as the last week of January, 1796, she could think of what she would

do if Imlay should return to himself, _i.e._ to her.

Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter by William Godwin, the daughter who lived

to be Mrs. Shelley and mother of the present Sir Percy Florence Shelley,

was born on 30th August, 1797, just five calendar months after the

marriage (celebrated at old St. Pancras Church, on 29th March, 1797), that

united the author of _The Rights of Woman_ and the author of _Political

Justice_ in lawful wedlock, when they had already been living several

months together in Free Love. The date of the commencement of their

association in Free Love is unknown; but whilst it must have been as far

back as December, 1796, there is reason for thinking the free-contract was

entered into some weeks earlier. It follows, therefore, that the woman who

leapt from Putney Bridge in the winter of 1795-6, and had not absolutely

despaired, on 26th January, 1796, of seeing her Free Lover Imlay return to

himself and her, in something much less than a year, probably in so short

a time as nine months, possibly in a much shorter time than nine months,

was living in Free Love with her old friend William Godwin,--who was in

his forty-first year when he thus took Mary Wollstonecraft Imlay, _ætat._

thirty-seven, under his protection.

An extant note shows that Godwin met Mary Wollstonecraft, or, at least,

accepted an invitation to meet her, at the residence of their common

friend, Miss Hayes, in January, 1796; and there is reason to believe that

the appointment agreed to by this note of acceptance was the first

occasion on which Godwin met Mary Wollstonecraft since her return from

Norway. That their acquaintance was of much older standing, and had been

much more fruitful of intercourse, than Mr. Kegan Paul represents, and

Mrs. Shelley imagined, is certain. That Godwin now renewed his

acquaintance with her under circumstances, disposing him to think far more

favourably of her than he had heretofore done, is also certain. On

meeting her again in 1796, the philosopher, who had made her a Free Lover,

recognized a martyr to his anti-matrimonial doctrines in the woman, whom

he had some four years earlier regarded as too talkative and eager for

admiration. Bound, by his principles, to approve the terms of her

association with Imlay, he could not withhold his sympathy from a woman

who had suffered so severely from her devotion to Free Love doctrine.

Approaching her as a fair disciple, who had suffered for the truth’s sake,

and for the cause of which he was the chief living representative and

vindicator, he desired to show his respect for her, and to comfort her. ‘I

found a wounded heart; as that heart cast itself upon me, it was my

ambition to heal it,’ he wrote to her soon after their lawful marriage, in

reference to the renewal of their acquaintance. They are notable words:

indicating, as they do, who made the first advances to the state of mutual

regard, that resulted in their marriage. He found in her what he was

prepared to find--a wounded heart. The owner of the wounded heart cast

herself on the philosopher, who desired to soothe its sorrow.

Recalling their course from friendship to love, Godwin wrote after her

death:--

‘The partiality we conceived for each other was in that mode which I

have always considered as the purest and most refined style of love.

It grew with equal advances in the mind of each. It would have been

impossible for the most minute observer to have said who was before

and who was after. One sex did not take the priority which

long-established custom has awarded it, nor the other overstep that

delicacy which is so severely imposed. I am not conscious that either

party can assume to have been the agent or the patient, the toil

spreader or the prey, in this affair. When, in the course of things,

the disclosure came, there was nothing, in a manner, for either party

to disclose to the other.... There was no period of throes and

resolute explanation attendant on the tale. It was friendship melting

into love.’

Though in the privacy of the domestic circle a husband may sometimes

jocularly charge his wife with having made the first advances to the

offer, or even the offer itself, that resulted in their marriage, no man

of common self-respect, or with the slightest care for his wife’s

reputation, could seriously assure the public, she so far ‘overstept the

delicacy which is so severely imposed’ on her sex, as to have pursued him

and dragged him into marriage, or even to have given him any kind of

intimation that she required an offer of marriage from him. The more

remarkable, therefore, is it, that in words, written with a view to

publication, whilst expressly guarding his former wife from the imputation

of any such indelicacy, Godwin states so positively that the first

advances from their friendship to love were not made by him alone; that

his suit for affection in no degree preceded hers; that in the progress to

warmer feeling they moved together step by step. This historic statement,

made for the world’s consideration, must be read in conjunction with the

serious statement put on paper for her eye alone:--‘I found a wounded

heart. As that heart cast itself upon me, it was my ambition to heal it.’

Here is the statement of the whole case. Godwin’s expressions of sympathy

caused the ever-impetuous, and often too demonstrative woman to throw

herself on his sympathy; his ambition to heal her wounded heart was

preceded by her display of feeling. Few readers of the two statements will

question that, notwithstanding what Godwin says to the contrary, the first

advances were made with unmistakable significance by the lady.

Passing in this manner from Imlay to Godwin, in less than a year from her

final separation from the former, Mary Wollstonecraft was living with the

latter in Free Love at his house in The Polygon, Somers Town, in the last

month of 1796. So living with him, was she (to use Mr. Kegan Paul’s words)

a wife in the eyes of God and man? She certainly was not so in the eyes of

man. She and Godwin had lived in this manner for weeks, for months, before

any clear announcement of the nature of their intimacy was made to their

most intimate friends. People who had the _entrée_ of the little house in

Somers Town, gossiped together,--asking one another what it meant. Had

Godwin, in his compassion for Mary’s forlorn condition, merely brought her

to his house as a guest for a long visit, or as a housekeeper, or in a

closer and more affectionate relation? What the various gossips said, and

how they said it, may be left to the reader’s imagination. In February,

1797, Mary Wollstonecraft, living as the somehow or other mistress of

Godwin’s house in The Polygon, entertained her sister Everina for some

time; but so far was she from considering herself a wife in the eyes of

man, she did not venture to reveal the nature of her position in the house

even to her own sister. Throughout her visit in ‘The Polygon,’ Everina

was kept in the dark, and she went off to her place of governess in the

Wedgwood family, at Etruria, without having learnt that her sister and

Godwin were living in Free Love. In the following month (March, 1797),

Southey, whilst in London, saw Mary Wollstonecraft, and on the 13th of

that month wrote of her to Cottle:--

‘Of all the lions or _literati_ I have seen here, Mary Imlay’s

countenance is the best, infinitely the best; the only fault in it is

an expression somewhat similar to what the prints of Horne Tooke

display,--an expression indicating superiority; not haughtiness, not

sarcasm, in Mary Imlay, but still it is unpleasant. Her eyes are light

brown, and although the lid of one of them is affected by a little

paralysis, _they_ are the most meaning I ever saw.’

Speaking of the Free Love association as marriage, Mr. Kegan Paul says

that its existence was ‘understood’ in Godwin’s circle at the date of

Southey’s letter to Cottle. Doubtless Godwin’s circle ‘understood’ what

was going on in his house; but the understanding was in no way due to

Godwin’s communicativeness. The understanding was the result of vigilant

observation, surmise, inference, conjecture, gossip, tattle. The

association was a sly, furtive, secret, deceptive business till the legal

but secret marriage in old St. Pancras Church on 29th March, 1797, and for

some days afterwards. How uncertain the ‘understanding’ was, how far some

of Godwin’s closest friends felt that after all they might be mistaken in

the ‘understanding,’ appears from the fact, that, in his reply to the

letter in which Godwin briefly announced his recent marriage in St.

Pancras Church without mentioning the lady’s name, so intimate a friend as

Holcroft wrote, ‘I cannot be mistaken concerning the woman you have

married. It is Mrs. W. Your secrecy a little pains me.’

How did the marriage, into which Godwin sneaked in this fashion, turn out?

Was it, during its short course, a happy marriage? Was its tenour such as

to justify an opinion that it would, on the whole, have been a happy

union, had Mary’s life been prolonged for another ten or twenty years? Mr.

Kegan Paul answers these questions confidently in the affirmative. Gushing

over Mary’s untimeous end, he speaks of Godwin’s life as blighted by her

death. It is therefore needful to state clearly, that brief though it was,

the marriage was by no means a happy union, and that it was fruitful of

incidents which at least make it certain that Godwin would have found

Mary Wollstonecraft a very difficult woman to live with, had her days been

so prolonged. This stands out clearly on the record.

No sooner had Mary Wollstonecraft carried the point, for which she may be

assumed to have played steadily from the moment of her discovery that she

was likely to have another child; no sooner had she induced Godwin, at a

great sacrifice of his doctrine against matrimony, to take her to old St.

Pancras Church, than she gave the reins to her unhappy temper, and began

to worry him precisely as she had in former time worried Imlay. No more

than three weeks had passed since that marriage, when she spoke to Godwin

(certainly no inconsiderate and unkindly man; certainly a husband who had

given proof of his wish to render her a happy woman) in such a strain,

that he retired in acute distress from his house in The Polygon to his

quite needful retreat in Evesham Buildings (or Place; it is described in

both ways). From the study, with which he had fortunately provided

himself, he wrote his wife a brief and pathetic note,--averring that he

had studied her happiness in everything; imploring her to act so that he

should not be wholly disappointed in her; and reminding her that he had

not undertaken to heal her wounded heart until she had cast herself upon

him.

Admitting that during their brief married life Godwin and Mary

Wollstonecraft had several lively quarrels; and admitting that they arose

from her ‘extreme sensitiveness and eager quickness of temper,’ Mr. Kegan

Paul requires us to consider the outbreaks of her passionate querulousness

as nothing more serious than ‘slight clouds,’ How differently the

biographer speaks of the second Mrs. Godwin’s similar exhibitions of

ill-temper! Slight clouds! What a pretty phrase for an ugly fact. Anyhow

they were clouds no less significant than slight. It must have been a

dismally significant cloud that caused Godwin to write her such a letter!

Let the reader consider the particulars of one of this angelical Mary’s

exhibitions of ill-temper; an affair mentioned lightly by Mr. Kegan Paul

as a ‘little outburst.’ In the June of 1797, Godwin (a man with a right to

a short summer’s holiday, if ever a hard-working man had a right to one)

went for a driving tour of just two weeks and three days in the company of

his particular friend Mr. Basil Montagu. Hiring a horse and gig, they

drove through parts of Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, and Warwickshire,

into Staffordshire, visiting Beaconsfield, Oxford, Birmingham, and

Stafford, in the earlier days of the excursion; and in the closing days of

the brief vacation taking peeps at Derby, Coventry, and Cambridge. Let it

be borne in mind that the tour was made in times long before the country

was covered with telegraph wires, and when country towns had not three or

four postal departures and deliveries a-day. Also, be it remembered, that

Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft had mated on the understanding, that they

should not have too much of one another’s company, or pester one another

with incessant attentiveness. It had been arranged that Godwin, an early

riser, should go from his bed in The Polygon to his study in Evesham

Buildings at an early hour, and in the ordinary way of his life should not

after leaving bed see Mary before their four-o’clock dinner. It had been

arranged between them that each should be free to go into society without

the other, going by themselves to different parties, going apart on the

same evenings to different theatres, or to different parts of the same

theatre. Settled even to minute particulars had it been that they should

show their superiority to ordinary husbands and wives, by doing what they

liked, and exacting no petty services from one another. Free in their love

they would be free in their lives.

Driving out of London for this tour on Saturday, 3rd June, Godwin returned

to London on Tuesday, 20th June, having in the interval written his wife

six long letters. He wrote to his wife on the 5th, 7th, 10th, 12th, 15th,

and 17th of June. The letters were no brief and hasty notes; they were

long letters of bright, cheery chat, and affectionate gossip; letters

showing he thought much of her during his absence from her, and wished to

make her by means of his pen the sharer of his enjoyments. All these long

letters came to Mary’s hands; and she knew he was not a rapid writer,

capable of dashing off a long epistle in twenty minutes. There had been no

hour or day fixed upon precisely for his return, though the tour had been

spoken of beforehand as a fortnight’s ‘outing.’ Time having been lost by

unforeseen accidents and _contretemps_, as time is apt to be lost in such

trips, Godwin (the husband who, by special agreement, was to retain as

much as possible of his bachelor freedom after marriage) stayed out three

days longer than his wife expected. He did not return to The Polygon on

Saturday night; Mary fretted all Sunday. He did not return on Sunday

night; Mary went to bed to fret and fume over his cruel neglect of her.

Rising on Monday with a clouded brow, she spent the day musing over her

wrongs, and resolving on measures to preserve herself from such inhuman

treatment in the future. On Monday night (whilst the cup of Godwin’s

iniquity was only two-thirds full) she wrote her husband a piece of her

mind in a letter to catch his eye and conscience either on his arrival at

his own door, or at his last resting-place on his homeward way. To see the

angelic Mary in one of her tantrums, readers should refer to Mr. Kegan

Paul’s book, and peruse this letter, dated ‘June 19th, Monday, almost 12

o’clock.’ Though absence had, for a while, quickened her affection for

him, coldness and neglect had diminished it. The letters he had sent her

might serve to remind him where he had been, but they were no mementos of

love for her to value. If tenderness for her had animated him on his

departure from town, it had evaporated during his trip. Though she had

requested him to let her know beforehand the time of his return, he had

tormented her by keeping her in suspense. Godwin having written to her

copiously about the people he had seen in his brief tour, it seemed well

to the amiable Mary to charge him with being influenced by ‘the homage of

vulgar minds.’ In waiting to see a show at Coventry, instead of hastening

back to Somers Town, he had offered her an affront. What had happened on

the way that it took him from Saturday to Sunday night to make the journey

from Coventry to Cambridge? And now he was still away, though it was near

midnight. What want of consideration for her feelings! ‘Unless,’ wrote the

angry woman, ‘you suppose me to be a stick or stone, you must have forgot

to think as well as to feel, since you have been on the wing.’

This ‘little outburst’ did not, we are assured by Mr. Kegan Paul, affect

the cordial affection of the husband and wife. One would like to hear

Godwin on that point. What a letter for him to receive from the woman he

had so recently married! What a selfish, exacting, unendurable virago! Yet

the Shelleyan zealots commend her for her womanly goodness and sweetness;

insisting that she appeared on earth to ‘gild humanity with a ray,’ &c.,

and that Godwin’s life was darkened and lowered to its last hour by her

death.

Before we pass on to pay our respects to the second Mrs. Godwin, it is

well to notice what is said of the marriage of the first Mrs. Godwin by

her daughter (Mrs. Shelley), whose statements respecting her mother and

husband are too generally accepted as authoritative in the Shelleyan

coteries. In Mrs. Shelley’s fanciful account of her mother’s virtues,

which are declared ‘to gild humanity with a ray, &c.,’ it is thus

written:--

‘Godwin met her at a moment when she was deeply depressed by the

ingratitude of one utterly incapable of appreciating her excellence;

who had stolen her heart, and availed himself of her excessive and

thoughtless generosity, and lofty independence of character, to plunge

her in difficulties and then desert her. Difficulties, worldly

difficulties, indeed, she set at nought.... It was at this time that

Godwin again met her at the house of her friend Miss Hayes, having

done so occasionally before she went to Norway.’

Further, in a note on the marriage of her parents, Mrs. Shelley says--

‘At the beginning of this year (1797) Mr. Godwin married Mary

Wollstonecraft. The precise date is not known; he does not mention it

in his journal, and the ceremony had taken place some time before the

marriage was declared. This secrecy partly arose from a slight

shrinking on Mr. Godwin’s part from avowing that he had acted in

contradiction to his theories.... They both however looked on this

sort of struggle, in which they had been born, and had always lived,

as a very secondary matter, and after a short period of deliberation

they, in the month of April, declared the marriage which had before

been solemnized.’

(1.) By difficulties, worldly difficulties, Mrs. Shelley obviously means

‘pecuniary difficulties.’ However ill people may think of Imlay’s

treatment of Mary Wollstonecraft, it must be admitted that Imlay did not

leave her without wishing and seeking to free her from immediate pecuniary

difficulties and to put her in easy circumstances for the moment. She

showed proper spirit in refusing to take money of him under the

circumstances; but as he offered it, he cannot be fairly charged with

selfish indifference to the difficulties.

(2.) Mrs. Shelley does not say how long it was before her mother’s

departure for Norway, when Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft had occasional

meetings at Miss Hayes’s house. Nor does she actually say that Godwin saw

Mary Wollstonecraft for the first time at one of those meetings. But her

words are calculated to give, and have given, the impression that Godwin

met Mary Wollstonecraft for the first time shortly before her departure

from London for Norway, in the summer of 1795. But this impression is

erroneous. Thomas Paine escaped from England to France in September, 1792,

and never revisited his native country. He was present on the occasion

when Godwin, in London, met Mary Wollstonecraft for the first time, and

was displeased with her loquaciousness and apparent desire to engross

Paine’s attention. This meeting, therefore, must have taken place before

September, 1792. There is also other evidence that Mary Wollstonecraft

knew William Godwin before she went to France.

(3.) As he was not ‘acting in contradiction to his theories,’ whilst

living in Free Love with Mary Wollstonecraft, it is obvious that Mrs.

Shelley’s words, touching the marriage of her parents, refer to their

lawful marriage. Mrs. Shelley says this marriage was solemnized at the

beginning of 1797. She is wrong; for the marriage was solemnized at Old

St. Pancras Church on 29th March, 1797.

(4.) Mrs. Shelley says of this marriage, ‘the precise date is not known.’

She is wrong. The precise date may not have been known to Mrs. Shelley,

but it was known to other people,--to all people who had taken sufficient

trouble to inquire about the matter. There never could have been any

uncertainty respecting the place of the wedding; for both Godwin and Mary

were well known to be inhabitants of St. Pancras parish at the time of the

event. To ascertain the precise date it was, therefore, only needful to

search the parish register.

(5.) Mrs. Shelley says of this marriage, ‘the ceremony had taken place

some time before the marriage was declared’ in April; leaving the reader

to infer that three months elapsed between the performance and the

publication of the ceremony. She is wrong. The marriage was announced to

Godwin’s most intimate friends within a few days of the performance of the

ceremony. Holcroft acknowledged on 6th April, 1797, the announcement made

to him by Godwin of what had taken place at Old St. Pancras Church on 29th

March, 1797.

(6.) Speaking of the secrecy of the marriage, Mrs. Shelley says, ‘This

secrecy partly arose from a slight shrinking on Mr. Godwin’s part from

avowing that he had acted in contradiction to his theories;’ readers being

thereby led to infer that Godwin kept the marriage a secret from the

beginning of the year till April, from reluctance to avow an act so

inconsistent with his theories. Mrs. Shelley is wrong. Instead of

postponing the announcement for three months from such a cause, her father

announced the marriage within a few days of its solemnization.

(7.) Still writing as though what occurred on 29th March had taken place

at the beginning of the year, Mrs. Shelley says,--

‘Another cause for the secrecy at first maintained was the stern law

of poverty and necessity. My father narrowly circumscribed both his

receipts and disbursements. The maintenance of a family had never been

contemplated, and could not at once be provided for. My mother,

accustomed to a life of struggle and poverty, was so beloved by her

friends, that several, and Mr. Johnson in particular, had stood

between her and any of the annoyances and mortifications of debt. But

this must cease when she married.’

In other words, according to Mrs. Shelley, her father kept his marriage a

secret from the beginning of the year till April, in order that he might

derive advantage from money, given to Mary Wollstonecraft by Mr. Johnson

and other friends, under the impression that she was a single woman with

no husband to maintain her; which money they would not have given her, had

they known of her marriage. This is what Mrs. Shelley says of William

Godwin. What baseness for a daughter to attribute to her own father, and

put on record against him! I wish I could say that nothing in Godwin’s

life, till his powers languished under increasing embarrassments,

countenances the opinion that he was capable of such baseness.

Unfortunately, however, there is evidence that, whilst Mary Wollstonecraft

was living in secret Free Love with him in The Polygon, he prevailed on

Mr. T. Wedgewood to lend him a considerable sum of money, saying, when he

asked for the loan, that he did not want it for himself, but for the use

of another person. As this other person was Mary Wollstonecraft, and as a

contract of Free Love was marriage in Godwin’s opinion, the money he

wanted for her use was money borrowed for his own use. Why did he not tell

Mr. Wedgewood outright that he wanted it for Mary Wollstonecraft? Because

he thought it possible that some rumour of his arrangement with Mary had

come to Mr. Wedgewood, in which case the benevolent manufacturer, instead

of lending the money, would say, ‘No, you must support your own

“bosom-friend.”’ Why did he not tell Mr. Wedgewood that he was living in

Free Love with Mary? For much the same reason; from a fear that, instead

of lending the money, Mr. Wedgewood would say, ‘No; for I see why you want

the money, and I think you ought to keep your own wife.’ Wedgewood lent

the money in ignorance of the purpose for which it was needed.

After the declaration of his marriage Godwin confessed that he had wanted

the money for Mary Wollstonecraft, and at the same time begged for a

further loan of 50_l._; saying, as he made this confession and prayer for

further help, ‘I trust you will not accuse me of duplicity in having told

you that it was not for myself that I wanted your assistance.’ Though he

complied with the petition for another 50_l._, Mr. Wedgewood cannot have

acquitted his friend of duplicity in the former application. Hence it is

certain that Godwin kept the Free Love contract a secret to one particular

friend, lest by revealing it he should lessen his power to draw money from

his own friend. It is, therefore, only too probable that he was guilty of

the meanness attributed to him by his daughter, and also refrained from

publishing the Free Love contract, lest the publication should lessen the

readiness of Mary’s friends to give her money. But though he was

influenced by pecuniary considerations in keeping his relations with Mary

Wollstonecraft a secret, it none the less remains that Mrs. Shelley was

wrong in representing that he was moved by such considerations to keep his

lawful marriage secret from the beginning of the year till April. As we

have said more than once the marriage of 29th March, 1797, was declared in

the first week of April.

How are these inaccuracies to be regarded?--as mistakes arising wholly or

chiefly from misconception? or as deliberate untruths? Let us fix our

attention on the two first misstatements; the assertion that the marriage

was solemnized at the beginning of the year and the assertion that the

date of the marriage was unknown. Did Mrs. Shelley make these

misstatements innocently? in ignorance of the truth, or with a knowledge

of the truth? It is not easy to believe that Mrs. Shelley, a woman of

letters, curious about her mother’s history, and in her later time engaged

in biographical inquiries for the illustration of her husband’s life, her

own career, her father’s life, and her mother’s story, omitted to

ascertain a fact so easily discovered, as the date of her father’s

marriage. If she knew the date, she had obvious motives for putting the

ugly fact out of sight, under specious and delusive verbiage. In her later

time the woman, who in girlhood had been strangely lawless and defiant of

the world’s opinion, was chiefly desirous of clothing herself with

respectability, of toning and colouring her story into accordance with the

social condition of the family into which she had married. The woman who

would fain have justified her husband’s life to the world, was only a few

degrees less desirous of rendering her own story the same service. What

more natural than for such a woman to wish to cover up the ugly fact, that

she was born only five calendar months after her mother’s marriage? She

could not tamper with the evidences of the date of her own birth. They

were too numerous and too well known. But by pushing the date of her

mother’s marriage some two or three months back, she would cause the world

to think her the child of a premature birth, who had entered the world

none too soon for her mother’s credit. By doing so, she may well have

conceived herself discharging a filial duty, as well as a duty to herself

and her husband’s respectable family. She must have wished to think of

herself as differing, in this respect, altogether from her base-born

sister Fanny, who committed suicide whilst still young. She must have

shrunk from the thought that, had it not been for so late a marriage as

the one which preceded her own birth by only five months, she would have

resembled her sister Fanny in being a bastard. Hence, whilst it is not

easy to think her ignorant of the real date of her mother’s marriage, her

motive for wilfully misstating the case is obvious. Thus much on the

assumption that the main inaccuracy was a deliberate untruth.

It is, however, just conceivable that she did not know the date of her

mother’s marriage, and had a sincere belief that it occurred somewhere

about the beginning of 1797. This belief may have been due to words spoken

to her by Mrs. Gisborne, who, her friend in Italy, had been her mother’s

friend in the previous century. She may even have gone to the St. Pancras

registry, and paid fees to the registrar for searching for evidence of the

marriage amongst the records of marriages, solemnized in the parish in the

later months of 1796 and the first month of 1797. She may have taken some,

though insufficient, pains to arrive at the evidence of the marriage, and

imagined herself to have taken all possible pains, and come to the

conclusion that she might honestly write of her mother’s marriage, ‘the

precise date is unknown.’

Even so, though she would be innocent of wilful falsehood, she would

remain guilty of writing positively on a mere assumption (a serious fault

in an historian), and offering her readers as sure facts a series of

inferences from a mere assumption, or a belief unsustained by positive

testimony. Her narrative of her parents’ marriage, if not a tissue of

untruths, would remain a thing made up of inaccuracies. It is important

for readers to bear this in mind, whilst and _after_ reading this book.

Mrs. Shelley did not die without leaving much biographical material behind

her in the shape of printed notes to her husband’s works, and also in the

shape of MS. notes and memoranda for the use of future historians;--stuff

that would have appeared in her justificatory _Memoir_ of her husband, had

not Sir Timothy checked her biographical zeal by the stern order,

‘Silence, or no allowance!’ But on being brought under critical scrutiny,

all the passages, and bits, and scraps of her biographical sketches, at

present before the world, are found so curiously inaccurate, that every

one of her biographical statements should be read with nervous caution,

lively suspicion, and watchful distrust, by those who would avoid error on

matters of Shelleyan story.

I do not say she was an untruthful woman, though on some occasions she

unquestionably rouses serious suspicion of her veracity. Like Lady Byron

she enjoyed in her girlhood a reputation for sincerity of speech. But

people often say things that are untrue without intending to be

untruthful. It was often so with Mrs. Shelley, in some degree before her

husband’s death, and in a greater degree after that event. An imaginative

and highly emotional woman, she sometimes saw things in a wrong light. Not

seldom, her mental vision was affected by the delusive media of

sentimentality or anger, through which it regarded matters that stirred

her feelings. In speaking of herself she was sometimes strongly influenced

by romantic egotism. Affection and combativeness combined to render her an

unreliable witness about matters touching her husband’s honour. Resembling

Lady Byron in being a vehement and steady hater, she from her girlhood

cordially disliked her step-mother and after loving her sister Claire with

the romantic fervour described in the _Real Lord Byron_, came to detest

her almost as cordially as Lady Byron, long after Byron’s death, detested

her sister-in-law. All that she said or wrote to the discredit of her

step-mother and sister-by-affinity should be received with extreme

caution, and large allowance for her animosity against them.