Vindication (22 page)

No answer came. In September, she wrote again to ‘my still dear George'. At length, a letter with protestations and excuses arrived seven months after her first plea. She replied:

Mary now tried in vain to find Charles a post in the East India Company; then one through William Roscoe. When Roscoe saw an opening in the autumn of 1791, Mary thought her brother would not be up to it. By this time, aged twenty-one, he was loitering with his father at Laugharne. Bess had found him almost naked, frustrated with his father's unconcern, and talking of enlistment in the army. Bess advised Charles not to call on Mary when he left for London at the close of the year. Mary was puzzled and hurt, but when they met he found her affectionate and ready once more with help.

The help came in the shape of Joel Barlow, a young American with a steady gaze whose wife looked after Ann. Barlow was fresh from four years in Paris where he had promoted the dream of the moment: post-revolutionary America as a utopian possibility for emigration. He was handsome, with loose, wavy locks about his cheeks; the rest tied back in a tight queue. Even in youth his hair receded slightly at the temples. A square jaw countermanded the delicacy of his upper lip, warmed in Barlow by the charm of the light-hearted. When he laughed, his mouth curled and long lines ran down the sides of his face from cheek to chin. ‘He has a sound understanding with great mildness of temper,' Mary observed. His humour was deliberate–‘regulated'–to an English ear.

This was her first American. Here, at Johnson's, she encountered the New World model which Dr Price had upheld in Newington Green in the aftermath of the war. Barlow was immediately congenial; his revisionist view of ‘nature' as the basis for social revolution beat pulse for pulse with
the central vein of Mary's
Vindication
. Both beat off Rousseau: Mary, his subjection of women to a false construct of their ‘nature'; Barlow, his fantasy of a state of nature antecedent to society.

‘The only state of nature is a state of society,' Barlow liked to declare, ‘the perfect state of society is a perfect state of nature.' Men who acquiesce in a society based on privilege and exclusion, he went on, are in an ‘unnatural' state. This ‘unnatural' state has shaped our definitions, our very language. The word ‘liberty', he argued, would not have been known in any language, had people not felt deprived of it; and some are ‘free men' because ‘men are not all free'.

Johnson published Barlow's
Advice to the Privileged Orders
in February 1792, a month after
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
. Its author struck Barlow as ‘a woman of great original genius'. She befriended his wife, Ruth, in their lodgings at 18 Great Titchfield Street, off Oxford Street, and Ruth took Mary to meet a fellow-American, a Mrs Leavenworth. Mary warmed to ‘the easy, unreserved behaviour' of American women, and their readiness to discuss subjects of interest to both sexes instead of the usual froth. Ruth described herself as ‘incapable of disguise'. ‘What I feel, I say,' she declared. She shared Mary's trust in private integrity as the basis of public and patriotic virtues. When Mary confided her anxieties over Charles, the Barlows offered to take the boy with them when they returned to America that spring. There was even a sign that they might make him part of their family. Barlow had clapped him on the knee, and said in his dry way that as he and his wife ‘could never contrive to make any boys they must try what they could do with one ready brought up to our hands'.

Parented by the Barlows, Charles was to farm. Mary arranged to sell some of their father's Primrose Street property to buy land in Ohio, most likely through Barlow himself who had recently controlled a huge tract. Tom Paine assured Mary that Charles could not go with a better man, and Fuseli gave him £10. Hopes now rose: if a brother prospered, his sisters might prosper too. Mary busied herself with preparations. She sent Charles, at ‘heavy expence', to study farming in Leatherhead in Surrey; backed a letter from Charles to Everina (by now, a governess in Ireland), begging £20 (about half her year's salary); consulted lawyer Roscoe on how to
ensure that Ned could not ‘snap at the last morsel' by means of some quirk of law (that is, wrest Charles's inheritance from his sisters should their father die, and should Charles too happen to die abroad before he received news of their father's death); and, finally, she kitted Charles out for emigration. It worried her, though, to see him wearing out these clothes as he waited for Barlow to return from a visit to Paris.

One day, while Barlow was away, Ruth laid out a private treasure: her husband's love-letters. Mary was taken aback by the passion of this couple who had been married ten years. Though she thought this the ardour of the exploiter, there's a tinge of envy. She confided to Everina: ‘Mrs. B. has a very benevolent, affectionate heart, and a tolerable understanding, a little warped it is true by romance; but she is not the less friendly on that account.' When Mary spoke of her sisters' troubles, Ruth went so far as to suggest that Bess and Everina, too, should migrate to America. Bess could keep house for Charles, and Everina was invited to live with the Barlows until she found a husband–she and Bess were sure to find a welcome in good society. Mary passed this on to Everina, urging her to correspond with Ruth.

The Barlows entered Mary's life through her family problems, but their continued significance remains to be explored. Of all the people Mary knew, Joel Barlow has to be the likeliest to lead us into what we might call the American mystery in her life: the nature and mysterious activities of Barlow's friend Gilbert Imlay whom Mary was soon to meet. Vast collections of Barlow Papers in American archives offer a new approach to Imlay and the networks in Europe that connect him with Barlow. American historian John Seelye has described Imlay as ‘in so many ways Barlow's shadow…for a time the two operated almost as one'.

Their similarities have to do with character in the formative period of national identity. As Barlow and Imlay plant themselves in corrupt old Europe, they appear as new-grown specimens from the New World. Barlow's appeal for Mary Wollstonecraft prepares her for Imlay, whom Barlow resembles: they are well-read Americans of the revolutionary generation; they come from the officer class in the War of Independence; and like many after the war they are opportunists. They turn their hand
to writing, but it's not what they want from life, which is to make their fortune. At this stage, both are at a loose end–possibly, stranded in Europe without money–yet they remain keen-eyed, storing information for future use, as they rove from Paris to London, and London to Paris. With women, they offer a new breed of virile respect. Their manners are attractively transparent, though not quite as readable as they appear. The Barlows' friendship with Mary Wollstonecraft has appeared peripheral, but new findings will prove Joel Barlow to have had a larger impact on her future than any other London attachment. His history–his habits of business and ways with Ruth–foreshadows a drama that was to rock Mary Wollstonecraft's life.

 

Joel Barlow came from a family long settled in Connecticut. At Yale, his teacher Abraham Baldwin introduced his plainly dressed sister Ruth. She had a delicate oval face; light, curly hair; and steady eyes under finely arched brows. During the Revolutionary War, Barlow served as chaplain, the reward of a crash course in divinity; he showed no further interest in faith once the army disbanded. Optimistic, good-tempered, ready to please, he was ambitious to distinguish himself without too clear an idea how this was to be effected. His youthful moment of glory came when he dined with General Washington. ‘How do you think I felt when the greatest man on earth placed me at his right hand,' he wrote from camp to Ruth Baldwin.

Ruth agreed to elope, for Barlow was ‘destitute'–not the suitor her family approved. Their marriage took place while the troops were in winter quarters in January 1781. ‘You are the tenderest & best of
Lovers
,' Ruth told him.

When the war ended, Barlow settled in Hartford, Connecticut, as a journalist and one of ‘the Hartford Wits', a conservative set of Yale poets. In 1787 he published an American epic,
The Vision of Columbus
, foretelling God's plan to make ‘the spirit of commerce' the refining agent of the world. It's a heavy poem–Barlow was better at light verse (as in his nostalgia for ‘Hasty Pudding')–but an epic was timely, and famous names subscribed to it, amongst them Washington, Lafayette (commander of America's French allies)
and King Louis XVI. This encouraged Barlow's selection as European agent of the Scioto Land Company, organised under an act of Congress to purchase a large tract of public land in the wilderness of Ohio and sell plots to prospective settlers. Leaders of the scheme, William Duer (Secretary of the Treasury) and Major Winthrop Sargent, gave an indenture for one-sixtieth of the entire Ohio tract to Barlow, who undertook sales in France. He sailed for Europe in the spring of 1788.

In London that summer Barlow visited Dr Price (with an introduction from Jefferson). He had sent Price a copy of his epic, hoping it would pay. Price saw that it fell sadly below Milton, who had earned all of £10 for
Paradise Lost
. He had to advise Barlow that an anti-English poem would not be welcome. Barlow, nothing daunted, was thrilled with London, and particularly, as a keen reader, the ‘prodigious' library (fifty thousand volumes) of the late Prime Minister Lord Shelburne, whose house in Berkeley Square was thought the best in Town. One thing shocked him: the blatant fiddle of a British election, when the Whig leader, Fox, replaced Pitt. Barlow's diary notes that one duke sent sixteen members to Parliament and that a merchant bought a borough for £10,000, which gave him a seat in Parliament and the right to sell another seat for £300 at each election.

All through 1789 Barlow worked at selling the Scioto scheme. He was in Paris to see the fall of the Bastille; the early days of the French Revolution convinced him of an inexorable march of human rights issuing from the American Revolution. But upheavals were not good for business, as Barlow tried to alert Winthrop Sargent on 25 August: ‘Since I wrote last in July the Revolution in Paris & through France has intervened & somewhat retarded my operations.' He had to conceal ‘a total destitution of money…from those with whom I was negotiating…Nobody knows it here who should not know it.'

It was characteristic to buoy himself up with hope, in the face of the separation Ruth was enduring. After a year he wondered if she might join him, but though dribbles of money came in, there was not enough to pay her passage. When he thought to borrow from the takings of the company, Ruth refused. She stopped writing in the second half of 1789, speaking to her husband through a silence he was not disposed to hear. His incurious
reproaches take for granted a way of life where enterprise took precedence over home ties. In this way the gender gap widened even as respect for womankind appeared to close it. He was busy, Barlow wrote, and ‘in the highest train of success, but it is not yet in my power to say the thing is finished'. He signs himself ‘your constant & unchangeable lover friend adorer & husband'–it does show a sure touch to put ‘husband' last.

When news came of further separation, Ruth could bear it no longer, and agreed to sail. Barlow was teasingly relieved to hear from her in March 1790: ‘I thot [
sic
] you were dead, and wished myself so,' he replied. ‘I am charmed & astonished & restored to happiness to find you well & fat.'

After the charms of persuasion, followed by thirty-seven days at sea, it was disconcerting for Ruth to arrive in London and find that she must wait day by day for her husband to appear. ‘Can you forgive your old cruel Husband for playing such tricks with you?' he demanded from Paris. ‘To run away from you–then to make you come after him, & still to hide himself from you.' To keep Ruth company, he dispatched the Connecticut wife of Colonel Samuel Blackden from South Carolina, an associate in Paris who was selling Kentucky land–gossip had it that Barlow was enamoured of Mrs Blackden. Meanwhile, he addressed the French National Assembly on 10 July to ‘thunderclaps of applause'. This triumph he presents to Ruth in lieu of his person. Ruth suspected a mistress in Paris, for Barlow asked Mrs Blackden to convince his wife, ‘I have not slept with any body but God since I slept with her–.' The same day, he urges Ruth once more: ‘Be a sweet patient girl. I know your patience is exhausted, but it shall be the business of my life to reward you for all your goodness.'

Ruth's confidence was shaken. She stopped eating and sleeping–so Barlow was advised by Mrs Blackden. And still, he delayed. In the end it took him five weeks to appear.

During this and the following year Barlow failed to raise the necessary loan for the Scioto scheme to proceed, yet glowing promotions continued to circulate. Fellow-agents in America made no provision for receiving the first six hundred immigrants, who were mostly from the cities–professional men, tailors, wig-makers, clock-makers, dancing masters–not exactly the stuff of pioneers. Barlow made two efforts to avert disaster.
One was to ask a Virginia merchant to welcome the arrivals, but this merchant had nothing to gain beyond Barlow's vague hint of future commerce. To write to a stranger, be it never so civilly, was to grasp at a straw.