Vindication (39 page)

Godwin was stirred to his depths by politics. From 1780 he had been a republican, and when the French Revolution came nine years later, his heart, he said, ‘beat high with great swelling sentiments of Liberty'. Yet, from the start, he could not condone mob government and violence.

Overnight, it seemed, Godwin became a cult figure with the publication of his
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice
in February 1793. At this time, the poor, who were victims of the Industrial Revolution, were perceived as dangerous rabble. Godwin exposed the self-interest of the ruling class in its deployment of labour, property, law and punishment, and advanced in their place the voluntary redistribution of property and the free exercise of private judgement, especially in condemning the use of force. ‘Who shall say how far the whole species might be improved, were they accustomed to despise force in others, and did they refuse to employ it for themselves.' War was justifiable only to repel invasion, not to prevent it, and he believed there would be less talk about a ‘justifiable' cause for war if we trained our imaginations to call up the unfeeling carnage which ‘justifiable' intended. It's a fallacy, he warned, that our war may be ended by making it more and more terrible: ‘a most mistaken way of teaching men to feel that they are brothers by imbuing their minds with perpetual hatred.'

Mary Wollstonecraft's feminist friend Mary Hays was an early convert. Godwin suffered Hays to turn him into a confidant, and she deluged him with letters in which she analysed her unrequited feelings for a Dissenting minister called Frend. ‘I am sorry…that the nature of my avocations restrain me from entering into regular discussions,' Godwin at length protested. He advised fiction as a consolation, with the result that she used their correspondence when she wrote
The Memoirs of Emma Courtney
(1796), an autobiographical novel in which Godwin appears as the ‘understanding' Mr Francis.

Three weeks after he completed
Political Justice
, Godwin began a novel.
Things as They Are; or the Adventures of Caleb Williams
remains a classic, dramatising the miscarriage of justice in a society where moral and psychological issues are too complex for the law, which in any case is the instrument of the squires and the nobility. Williams stumbles on the fact that his refined master has committed a murder. To get Williams out of the way, the master uses his power to trump up a false charge. When Williams is on the run, he finds refuge with thieves, who justify their lives in this way: ‘We who are thieves without a licence, are at open war with another set of men, who are thieves according to law.' Godwin was the first to use courtroom drama in fiction.

In the same month as this novel was published, May 1794, twelve leading members of the Society for Constitutional Information and the artisan-based London Corresponding Society were arrested for high treason. If convicted, the punishment was death. Amongst the accused was Godwin's best friend, the dramatist Thomas Holcroft. The government believed that the men on trial presented a republican threat, whereas in fact their aim was the electoral reform that began in the course of the next century. Since Parliament was grossly unrepresentative of the population (including the accused), they were indeed questioning its legitimacy, but there was no infringement of the Treason Act of 1353, which limited high treason to an intent to kill the King or the use of armed force against him. Judge Eyre's opening address to the jury went beyond this in attempting to construct a ‘conspiracy to subvert the Monarchy', in effect a new crime for which there was no known statute or precedent. It was, then, an arbitrary attempt on the part of the judiciary to establish a law without recourse to the proper procedures of Parliament.

During the Treason Trials that October, Godwin published–anonymously, for his own safety–a long piece in the
Morning Chronicle
. ‘Cursory Strictures on the Charge Delivered by Lord Chief Justice Eyre to the Grand Jury' argued that a wish to reform institutions could not be classed as a crime, for this could not be construed a conspiracy to kill George III. Godwin's method is to invoke the conservatism of law on its
own turf, praising the Treason Act as a ‘wise and moderate law' that had stood the test of four centuries. Repeatedly attacked by the encroachments of ‘tyrannical princes' and the decisions of ‘profligate judges', Englishmen had always found it necessary to restore the statute to its original simplicity. Godwin accordingly nails Judge Eyre for exploiting the ambiguity of the word ‘force' to imply an armed force, and underpins legal conservatism with Judge Blackstone's commentary on the law of treason as ‘a great security to the public' that ‘leaves a weighty
momento
to judges to be careful, and not overhasty in letting in treasons by construction or interpretation'.

‘Did these [men] plan the murder of the King, and the assassination of the royal family?' Godwin demands. ‘ Where are the proofs of it?'

Like a lawyer for the defence, he switches from logical rigour to withering eloquence: ‘It may be doubted whether, in the whole records of the legal proceedings of England, another instance is to be found, of such wild conjecture…and dreams so full of sanguinary and tremendous prophecy.' What he means by sanguinary dreams is reserved for the end, where he turns to address ‘you', the accused, in the name of the Lord Chief Justice, were he to speak plainly: You had no warning that your attempts at reform were treason; you went to your beds in the happy conviction that you had acted in accordance with your country's legal code. And for this, ‘the Sentence of the Court [but not of the law] is “
That you
,
and each of you
,
shall be
…
hanged by the neck
,
but not until you are dead; you shall be taken down alive
,
your privy members shall be cut off
,
and your bowels shall be taken out and burnt before your faces
…”.' It was largely due to the power of Godwin's pen that the case collapsed.

Afterwards, at a dinner in London, the acquitted philologist Horne Tooke pressed Godwin repeatedly whether it was he who had written ‘Cursory Strictures'.

Godwin at last said carelessly, ‘I believe it was.'

‘Give me your hand,' Tooke said, and when Godwin rose from the table to do so, Tooke put that hand to his lips, saying, ‘I can do no less for the hand that saved my life.'

 

A week after Godwin had tea with ‘Wolstencraft', his diary notes that ‘Imlay calls' on Friday 22 April 1796 and that the following day he, in turn, called on ‘Imlay'. It's always assumed that ‘Imlay' meant Mary, but since this is the only occasion Godwin uses the name in his diary, it's worth considering whether this visitor could be Gilbert Imlay. It would mean that within a week of Mary's approach to him, Godwin saw Imlay on her behalf, with the support of her friends Mary Hays and Rebecca Christie. Over consecutive days there was intensive contact between these four. Godwin also includes ‘Imlay' amongst twelve friends at a dinner at his lodgings, with food brought in from a nearby coffee-house. He later remarked that Mary had come to him in trouble, and that he had not hesitated to help her. Mary's final discussion with Imlay had to do with the practical matter of maintenance for Fanny. She had been too proud to go back on her word and become his dependant, even if, as ‘Mrs Imlay', she was entitled to support. On 22 and 23 April 1796 her friends, representing social opinion, may have taken it upon themselves to press Imlay to help her after all. If they did act in this way, it would have been a step towards easing her mind.

Amongst those present at Godwin's dinner-party was the actress, novelist and dramatist Mrs Inchbald, remembered now for
Lovers
'
Vows
, the play that rouses the wrong heartbeats in
Mansfield Park
. Mrs Inchbald had been a widow from the age of twenty-six. A speech impediment had been a bar to stardom on the stage. She had lived in mean lodgings, worn a shabby gown in the midst of finery, and controlled her attraction to worldly men who would not take an actress for a wife. She did want to marry again, and in the meantime made her way with a combination of charm and prudence, cultivating the innocent air of a milkmaid–the modish form of femininity in the 1780s. She was a beauty skilled at wars of words who chose to smile on Godwin. He liked clever women, and was incapable of consorting with anyone he could not respect.
*
Godwin did not blame Mary for her unmarried plight. He believed (as she did) that
marriage is ‘law and the worst of all laws…Marriage is an affair of property, and the worst of all properties.'

To Mary, returning to her country in the repressive aftermath of the Treason Trials, the English seemed ‘to have lost the common sense which used to distinguish them'. This was a country at war, cut off from travel, filled with soldiers, and draining the poor who were near starvation. When George III rode through London after opening Parliament on 29 October 1795, watchers hissed and threw stones at his coach with cries of ‘Bread!' and ‘No war! No war!' An Act of Parliament suspended the law of habeas corpus, and Pitt's Combination Acts outlawed trade unionism. Two Whigs, the playwright Sheridan and Lord Holland, were the only important politicians to oppose these Acts. Fox and fellow-Whigs did move motions in Parliament for the reform of rotten boroughs, but were voted down by great majorities who looked on them as eccentric seditionists in sympathy with France–saved only by the respect the English feel for the well-connected. Spies were rife, men against whom there was no evidence were kept in prison for years, and public meetings were not allowed.

Though Mary tried to bestir herself with thoughts of a return to France or a fresh start in Italy or Switzerland, she remained still locked in depression. Disillusion with Imlay infected her with misanthropy: ‘ceasing to esteem him', she realised, ‘I have almost learned to hate mankind'. She gives out this dark thought as late as 13 May 1796.

The minister in Godwin responded with measured counsel. Injustice had set Mary, as she put it, ‘adrift into an ocean of painful conjectures. I ask impatiently what–and where is truth?' It seemed to her that she had ‘ceased to expect kindness or affection' and wished to tear from her heart ‘its treacherous sympathies'. Godwin talked directly to the soul without fudging: here are your strengths; here your flaws. There was more to this eloquent creature than to any of the lovelier women in his milieu. Hers was no transient feminine beauty; she carried the permanent stamp of nature. As he drew nearer to this nature he was coming to know, he wanted to know it better. Reason ensured that anything could be communicated so long as it was perfectly true–both lived by the Enlightenment ideal. When Godwin admonished, he did so without
rancour–that absence of rancour is extraordinary, above the smiting gods, because the feeling's pure. He told Mary later, ‘I found a wounded heart, &, as that heart cast itself upon me, it was my ambition to heal it.' We can't know what else he said, but a letter survives where he counsels another woman in a similar state, waking her to the damage she does herself by trying to break through to a man as dense as rock. He pointed to the ‘morbid madness' of the persistently lovelorn Hays when Mary's infection returned–as it did in her low times.

She had meant to slough off women's weakness, and had been confounded by her failure. For all her resilience, she could not recover a sense of purpose that had been undermined by the very person she had chosen to promote it. Godwin was sure that no one, especially the great of soul, finds it easy to evade castle-builders of the Imlay sort. ‘The whole scene of human life may at least be pronounced a delusion!' he said philosophically. Mary must accept that she had made the mistake of ‘imputing to [Imlay] qualities which, in the trial, proved to be imaginary'. In this clarifying way, he addressed that part of her that still clung to delusion, hoping against hope that Imlay might be restored to the man she had believed him to be.

Godwin took an altogether tougher line on suicide: he wanted her to see how ‘by insensible degrees' she could come to stake her life upon the consequences of her error. Error, he said. Not love. If love can be recategorised as ‘error', it will shrink to nonentity ‘when touched by the wand of truth'. It was irrational, Godwin argued, to consign herself ‘to premature destruction' for the sake of a man ‘so foreign to the true end' of her cultivation–a cultivation ‘so pregnant…with pleasure' to herself ‘and gratification to others'. She was ‘formed to adorn society' and, through her books, ‘to delight, instruct, and reform mankind'. Godwin's respect reflected her able self, while his cool (though not cynical) acceptance of human nature relieved her of the self-hatred that is the most intractable part of depression. He said that no one would kill herself if she could believe, as it often proved, that years of enjoyment lay ahead. A disappointed woman should try to construct happiness ‘out of a set of materials within your reach'.

Over the next few months their friendship grew, in Godwin's words, ‘by
almost imperceptible degrees'. At first, they met about once a fortnight. ‘Dined at H[olcroft]'s with Wolstencraft,' Godwin's diary records on 15 May, and again, ‘sup at Wolstencraft's' on the 28th. He was ready to offer a response that could meet the risk she took in being true, and so restore her trust in mankind. ‘Nor was she deceived,' he said with justifiable pride. She was not the only one to gain his help, but with Mary alone Godwin did something utterly uncharacteristic. This matter-of-fact man wrote a poem.

Her tart reply is the first sign of release from depression: it marks a return of the humour that had failed since she began to suspect Imlay's infidelities. The poem, which does not survive, must have been a set-piece, for it reminded Mary of a couplet from Samuel Butler: ‘Shee that with
Poetry
is won/ Is but a
Desk
to write upon.' In such love poems a woman serves as a prop for rhetorical extravagance. Mary had a cure of her own to propose: Godwin should sensitise himself to the play of character in genuine passion, as in Rousseau's novel
Julie
,
ou La Nouvelle Héloïse
(1761):