Vindication (6 page)

This was an indirect plea to Ned on his sisters' behalf. It failed to produce any help for a shop, though it's likely Ned did exert himself to bring about a legal separation for Bess. Divorce was out of the question: only four women had succeeded in the last two hundred years. It required an Act of Parliament costing seven to eight hundred pounds and proof of incest, sodomy, bigamy or the invalidity of the marriage. When Milton had argued for divorce on the grounds of incompatibility, he had seen it as a man's problem: there was no conception that a woman might suffer in the same way. Mr Bishop declined to maintain an absentee wife. So again the runaways faced the question–how were virtuous single women to survive?

R
escue arrived at the neediest moment in the shape of a widow called Mrs Burgh–an aged and unknown fairy godmother who suddenly appears on the scene, bearing out the truth that half the good in the world is done by those who lie in unvisited tombs. How Mrs Burgh came upon the runaways is not recorded, possibly through Mrs Clare, but in the course of 1784 she turned two homeless young women, without capital or experience, into owners of a school. She brought this off despite the fact that Mary could offer none of the usual accomplishments of genteel education: no French, no skills in music and drawing, and no fancy needlework. ‘I shall ever have the most grateful sense of this good old woman's kindness to me,' Mary said afterwards.

At first, she and Bess took lodgings in the north London village of Islington with ‘expectations' of establishing a school. It was not to be, though encouraged by Mrs Burgh's nephew Mr Church–‘Friendly Church,' Mary called him–a ‘
humane
' businessman who lived in the village. They soon discovered the number of competing schools in the area.

Mrs Burgh then stepped in and persuaded Mary to start a school further out, two miles north of London where she herself lived at Newington Green, a community of merchants and Nonconformists. The sole record comes from Everina who recalled that ‘there through her exertions they in the course of two or three weeks obtained near twenty scholars'. If each
pupil paid the current rate of £1 a quarter, it meant they would get about £20 for thirteen weeks. Since there were two of them, this was still below the minimum for survival, the half-guinea a week that, in Fanny's experience, was the most a professional woman could expect. It's likely that Mrs Burgh helped them with more than advice.

A school in a healthy spot, beyond the range of the city's noxious air, soon attracted lodgers as well: Mrs Campbell who enrolled three children in the school, Mrs Morphy, and Mrs Disney who enrolled two sons. Though Mrs Disney came from a prominent Dissenting family, she ‘daubed' her face, Mary noticed disapprovingly. As the school expanded, Mary rented a larger house; she was also able to provide a post (and home) for Everina, and take on an assistant, Miss Mason. Mary sometimes referred to her as ‘poor Mason', as though some misfortune were common knowledge–in most such cases the parents had lost their fortune, so that instead of fulfilling her destiny as a marriagable ‘lady' the daughter was compelled to work as teacher or governess. Given her own past, Mary was sympathetic to the drop in status for a girl who must work. The sturdy ‘Mason' (as the Wollstonecrafts called her) had a ‘clearness of judgement' not overburdened with sensibility. Her bluntness was wholesome, not wounding. The Wollstonecraft sisters talked of Mason long after she left the school in July 1785, but when Mary remembered her in after years it was not as an intellectual companion.

It had always been Mary's dearest plan to live with Fanny; she had invited Fanny to join them in Islington. This may have been when Fanny confided her longing to be released from her dependent family; and Mary, who promptly found and readied a new home, was then put out when Fanny had scruples about abandoning her parents. Mary recalled this episode with an edginess that might seem excessive if it weren't for the unnoted fact that, at about this time, the Bloods moved from the southern outskirts of London to Islington. Their motive can only have been to join Fanny, which meant that they joined Mary as a drain on her new life before it could secure itself. This would explain her fret. She loved the Bloods like a daughter, but for a young woman about to start a school it was not a moment to take on the perennially unemployed Mr Blood, his
troublesome daughter Caroline, and son George who was prone to skip from one job to another in a train of mishaps. The moves of Fanny and her family in 1784 look like a chessboard chase. If this is so, then one reason for leaving Islington would have been to shake off the Bloods who stayed on there when Fanny moved, once more, to join Mary in Newington Green.

It was a place of substantial Georgian houses along the Roman road that led north from London. The houses were not in the usual ribbon formation; they encircled a well on a green where sheep grazed, fenced by a low rail with scattered elms at different stages of growth. A forest with ferns and flowers divided this village from its neighbour Stoke Newington, where Mary found a friend in James (later, Sir James) Sowerby, who, like Fanny, was a botanical artist. He specialised in fungi, and provided models for the British Museum. This bachelor was Fanny's exact contemporary and two years older than Mary. She mentions his visits to her in the summer of 1785, his financial help in 1786, and a long letter from him in 1787. Many other accomplished people had gravitated to the area, amongst them Daniel Defoe a century earlier, the Jewish writer Isaac D'Israeli, and the family of Anne Stent who married James Stephen, an early activist in the fight to abolish slavery. The misty chilliness of Newington Green, its gnarled trees and fragrant shrubbery were later recalled by Edgar Allan Poe who went to school there.

At the time the Wollstonecraft sisters settled in the village it was a bastion for Dissenters, who worshipped in a small church built in 1708 on the north side of the Green (the oldest Nonconformist church still in use in London). When Mary attended services, she thought it too plain; as an Anglican she preferred architectural grandeur. Since the Civil War in the seventeenth century there had been a proliferation of dissenting sects, drawing the bulk of their numbers from the poorer classes, but there were also Dissenters whose forebears had been ennobled by Cromwell, and others who'd grown rich during the Commonwealth. These gravitated to the area of Newington Green. So Mary Wollstonecraft encountered here the well-to-do edge of radical Protestantism, and its cutting-edge intellectually in the form of Dr Richard Price, a Welsh divine who preached political doctrines of liberty and equality. Dr Price's congregation at
Newington Green included Mrs Burgh, and he had been a close friend of her late husband, the Revd James Burgh.

Mrs Burgh's husband had been a Calvinist Scot, educated at St Andrews, who had opened an academy in Stoke Newington and then moved to the Green. There he had reigned as schoolmaster from 1750, his pupils attending the sermons of Dr Price. He had published his
Thoughts on Education
, followed by an array of educational and political tomes.

This schoolmaster might have appeared a formidable personage to follow, but Mary Wollstonecraft took a line which contradicted Mr Burgh's demeaning education for girls, summed up two years later in her
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters
(her title looks back to Burgh's, as Burgh's looks back to Locke's
Thoughts Concerning Education
(1693). Burgh had held that a girl should know just enough arithmetic to do household accounts, and just enough geography to converse with her husband and his friends. Boys were generally trained to block tenderness as a form of weakness. The only emotion Burgh had encouraged was patriotism–no different, in this, from most educators. The schoolmaster writing so busily had not seen that the education he had meant to extend and refine had been skewed to feed the very materialism he deplored, that of a predatory nation moulding an elite of fighters and colonisers.

Mary Wollstonecraft refused to shape her pupils to fit predetermined forms; she asked herself what girls learnt that left them lisping like infants and parading themselves in clothes whose ‘unnatural protuberances' bore no relation to the shape of the female body. Ever since Bath and Windsor, she had deplored the triviality of female accomplishments: the tinkling on the harpsichord, and pride in landscapes touched up by a drawing master. It infuriated her to hear ladies bleating received opinions: ‘I am sick of hearing of the sublimity of Milton, the elegance and harmony of Pope, and the original, untaught genius of Shakespear.' Such bleaters knew ‘nothing of nature' and ‘could not enter into the spirit of those authors'. Her cure was simple: ‘I wish them to be taught to think.'

As a thinker herself, Wollstonecraft stressed the ungendered possibilities of the mind–the ‘mind', she repeats, wondering how it might come into its own. The answer came from her own history of self-education: agency
must be transferred from teacher to pupil. The teacher can't ‘create' a child's mind, she said, though ‘it may be cultivated and its real powers found out'. Basically, ‘it must be left to itself'. She was speaking as a disciple of Rousseau, who had enraged Burgh in the 1760s when he proposed that a child should follow nature, unwarped by formal education till the age of twelve. Mary Wollstonecraft did not put this literally into practice–it would have made her school redundant–but did grasp the crux of Rousseau's theory when she urged pupils to look into ‘the book of nature', and banned rote learning: ‘I have known children who could repeat things in the order they learnt them, that were quite at a loss when put out of the beaten track.' Instead, she taught them to combine ideas, comparing things similar in some ways and different in others. Then too, where Burgh stuffed his language with Greek and Latin tags, Wollstonecraft cut through to the heart of matter, dismissing ‘words of learned length and thund'ring sound' designed to cow the common reader: ‘A florid style mostly passes with the ignorant for fine writing; many sentences are admired that have no meaning in them.' Milton had established a verbal league table with Anglo-Saxon monosyllables at the bottom and Latinate words at the top; the graver the subject, the more sonorous the language. Though Wollstonecraft did read Milton, her own practice favoured Enlightenment ideals of simplicity and clarity.

Her primary aim as a teacher was to elicit an authentic character in place of sameness. The same things, she thought, should not be taught to all: ‘Each child requires a different mode of treatment.' Nor were pupils urged to display uniform manners. In place of affectation, she encouraged naturalness: ‘Let the manners arise from the mind, and let there be no disguise for the genuine emotions of the heart.' Other schools had a fixed code of manners, not for the good of the pupil but to promote an image of the school. Mary, on the contrary, put the weight on what she called ‘temper', extending the benefits of a home education by those who knew the child best. Boarding establishments were schools of ‘vice' and ‘tyranny'. There, vicious children were prone to ‘infect' a number of others, while love and tenderness remained undeveloped in the absence of domestic affection.

Home, then, was central to Wollstonecraft's education; she did not compete with parents for control. Burgh had laid it down that boys should be removed to boarding schools to avoid the ‘weakening' effect of maternal love; attachment to parents, he thought, should be a matter of ‘principle', not instinct. Again, Wollstonecraft opposed this: she realised that the most important education of all begins with a baby's mouth on the mother's breast, responding to ‘the warmest glow of tenderness'. This grants mothers the central role in education. Her insistence on breast-feeding went against fashionable practice in her youth when it had been customary amongst the upper classes to send infants away to be cared for–in many cases, neglected–in the country. Jane Austen's family was amongst those who followed this practice: Jane spent her first two years in a local cottage, the idea being that a child returned home when she was ready to be civilised. Mrs Austen must have had a superior arrangement, for all her infants survived. She was less well advised when, in 1783, she sent her daughter Jane, aged seven, to boarding-school. Girls in most schools of the time were poorly fed, callously treated, and in many cases succumbed to illness. It was only through the initiative of a fellow-pupil, Jane's cousin, who managed to send an alarm to the Austens, that a sick Jane was fetched away.

Mary Wollstonecraft ran her school along entirely different and what were then innovative lines: she had a maternal attentiveness to the physical as well as mental needs of a child; she was committed to wholesome food; and her methods were flexible. Godwin tells us that she ‘carefully watched symptoms as they rose, and the success of her experiments; and governed herself accordingly'. She was confident in her theories of education without pressing them too hard. She did believe in moral discipline, but not in the first place as a set of rules to be enforced, rather as a child's imitation of tender parents whose principles take root in its earliest apprehensions. So, unlike other schools, Wollstonecraft's did not disconnect the mind from domestic affections.

Was Mrs Burgh aware of Mary's deviance from her husband's regime? If so, did she mind? It's inconceivable that she would have backed Mary had she not been impressed with her ideas. Mr Burgh has his place in
The
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
; his dour voice drones on in his tomes in the manner of those too well informed to be aware of the person who listens–the occupational hazard of a schoolmaster. Marital sex, Burgh believed, should be curtailed. It is our duty, of course, to ‘support the species', but abstinence at other times is to be desired. Women are vain creatures who should not obtrude their prattle on educated men. Beauty is nothing more than a ‘mass of flesh, blood, humours, and filth, covered over with a well-coloured skin'. Men's admiration always contains a ‘filthy passion'. A wife must obey her husband because of the ‘superior dignity of the male-sex, to which nature has given greater strength of mind and body, and therefore fitted them for authority'. These were his words in 1756, three years into his childless marriage to Hannah Harding, who appears in
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
and in
The Dictionary of British Radicals
only in her capacity as Mr Burgh's wife, yet her help to Mary Wollstonecraft in the last four years of Mrs Burgh's life, from 1784 to 1788, may be now more significant than any other fact about the Burghs.