Vindication (63 page)

‘of subtiler essence
…'
: MW quotes from Edward Young,
The Complaint
:
or
,
Night-Thoughts
, ‘Night the First', line 100. Cited in Gary Kelly's note to
Mary
, 213.

‘polished manners'
: Ogle's fictionalisation in
Mary
, ch. 24.

distant connection
: Assumed to be distant because it's not traceable from the family records in Ogle
, Ogle and Bothall
. Dame Isabell Ogle had married, first, her cousin, an English admiral called Sir Challoner Ogle. The history of the Ogle line shows many different branches of the family.

visit to the Baillies
:
MWL
, 135;
MWletters
, 101.

MW to JJ
:
MWL
, 129–30;
MWletters
, 94–6.

‘into a consumption'
:
MWL
, 139;
MWletters
, 108. This was in March 1787, three months after the fever.

advocates the study of ‘physic'
:
Education
, 34–5.

‘a GREAT favourite':
To BW
, MWL,
131;
MWletters
, 97.

6
THE TRIALS OF HIGH LIFE

court case
:
SC
, i, 85–6, has details of the suit.

‘disappointment'
: To EW (15 May ([1787]),
MWL
, 153;
MWletters
, 126. Quotations about MW's experience in Dublin, Feb.–May 1787, are from letters to her sisters,
MWL
, 134–54;
MWletters
, 101–27, unless otherwise indicated.

without liberty
,
she would die
:
MWL
, 130;
MWletters
, 97.

‘neglected in the education of women'
: de Montolière,
Caroline de Lichtfield
, iii, 5.

the house in Merrion Square
: I have been unable to verify where MW stayed in Dublin. No address is given in her letters. In accepting Merrion Square I have followed Claire Tomalin. Biographers Janet Todd and Diane Jacobs follow
SC
, i, in assuming that MW and her employers stayed with the Earl of Kingston in Henrietta Street. Todd notes (
MWletters
, 82) that Henrietta Street is listed as the residence of Lady Kingsborough in
A List of the Proprietors of Licences on Private Sedan Chairs
,
25th March
,
1787
. It was the more prestigious of two possible addresses. Yet given Lady Kingsborough's hatred of her mother-in-law and refusal to continue to live with her some years back, I think it likely that she would have insisted on living, for the most part, in a Dublin home of her own, i.e. the alternative address in Merrion Square. What seems to weigh the balance towards Merrion Square is the fact that the Earl comes to dine with his daughter-in-law. ‘Her father-in-law had dined with her, and she repeatedly requested me to come down to the drawing-room to see him,' MW wrote to EW on 25 Mar.: there would be no point in saying this unless the Earl came from another house.

The Rotunda
: Its profits helped Mosse's Lying-In Hospital next door. The maternity hospital is still there, itself now called the Rotunda. The old Rotunda became a movie-house which is now closed and looks rather derelict.

the most hospitable city
:
Travels
, letter 2.

Robert Home
: Worked in Dublin in the 1780s, and went later to India where he made his fortune as painter to the Maharajah of Oude.

a gift from George Blood
: In
MWL
, 139, Wardle notes that the publisher, Bell, was bringing out two editions of Shakespeare in 1787: one in twelve volumes, ed. by Samuel Johnson and George Steevens, and another in sixteen volumes with Johnson's and Steevens's additional notes. I don't agree with Wardle's view that Blood's gift would have been ‘more modest', a single-volume edition of 1784 (a view repeated in Todd's notes). It was in Blood's nature to be extravagant; MW had long supported him and his parents in innumerable ways, and he'd finally settled into a position where he had a steady income; and finally, MW says clearly that it was a ‘new' edition.

Blair on genius and his influence on MW
:
Lectures
, i, 52–4; ii, 36–7, 40–3, 47; iii, 19–21.

‘l'exercice…': Epigraph to
Mary
–‘The exercise of the most sublime virtues raises and nourishes genius'.

‘a genius will educate itself'
:
Émile
, book ii, cited in a letter to EW (24 Mar. [1787]),
MWL
, 145;
MWletters
, 114–15.

eighteenth-century Henrietta Street
: Information from the ‘Conservation Recommendations for Individual Building Elements for Henrietta Street, Researched for Dublin Corporation Historic Area Rejuvenation Project (Harp) by Dublin Civic Trust', kindly photocopied in Sept. 2000 by Liam McNulty of the Society of Pipers at no. 15. Henrietta Street flourished 1720–1820. It began to decline when Leinster House (the Irish Parliament) was built, and fashion moved from north to south of the Liffey. What remains–now inhabited by the Society of Pipers–is half of the double-fronted house which the Kings inhabited. No. 16 was knocked down about fifty years ago.

only ‘Miss King's governess'
:
Memoirs
, ch. 4.

MW's manners and conversation
:
Gentleman's Magazine
(Oct. 1797).

received registers of…pronunciation
: Roy Foster tells me that a Cockney accent would have jarred in Dublin society, but that it would not have recognised much difference between middle- and upper-class accents. Aristocratic accents in England were often regional until about the 1920s, as evidenced by Victoria Sackville-West's
The Edwardians
. (In conversation, Oxford, 28 Sept. 2000.)

He urged her
: This letter has not survived, but its content can be deduced from MW's reply, quoted in full here.
MWL
, 148;
MWletters
, 118–19.

Mary's ingratitude
: To suggest too strongly that MW was behaving badly implies that she should have known her place. As for the bleakness of a governess's position, we have only to read Jane Austen on the just fears of Jane Fairfax (in
Emma
) or Charlotte Brontë on Jane Eyre. Ch. 17 below relates the wretched experiences of CC as a gifted and spirited governess in the Wollstonecraft mode.

St Werburgh's Church
: I'm grateful to the Revd Canon David Pierpont, Vicar of the Christ Church group of parishes, for opening the church on Saturday 9 Sept. 2000, and providing helpful information. That day, there was another visitor from County Wexford, to see the tomb (beneath the church) of his hero Lord Edward Fitzgerald, one of the leaders of the 1798 Rising.

Handel in St Werburgh's
: Handel may have played on the original organ, as he lived in the area for eight years. He brought the half-finished
Messiah
with him to Dublin, but his programme at the church did not include that work, which had its first public performance in 1742 in a hall only fifty yards away in Fishamble Street. (It could not take place in a church because Protestants thought it improper to put the Word to music.)

Caroline Stuart Dawson
: Known as Lady Portarlington. She was an artist as well as a singer.

In London she had ridiculed
:
Education
, 46–7.

Calista
: In Nicholas Rowe's
The Fair Penitent
.

‘really great merit'
;
events of 23–25 Mar. 1787
: MW to EW (25 Mar. [1787]),
MWL
, 146–8;
MWletters
, 116–9.

‘Is it not…Alas!!!!!!!!'
: The final PS of a letter to EW, written late at night after her evening with the Ogles (24 Mar. [1787]),
MWL
, 145;
MWletters
, 116. She alludes to Gray's
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
: ‘Full many a flower is born to blush
unseen/ And waste its sweetness on the desert air'; and to
Hamlet
, II, ii, 97f.: ‘That he is mad, 'tis true 'tis pity/ And pity 'tis 'tis true.'

Solitary reading for women
: Todd,
Wollstonecraft
, 416, interestingly, compares rabbis' disapproval of reading the Torah alone, canto 5 of Dante's
Inferno
, and Dutch paintings of women reading love-letters which can be associated with the libidinal dangers of novel-reading.

Émile
and the new status of the child
: I'm indebted to an illuminating lecture on this subject by Angelica Goodden (Fellow in French at St Hilda's College, Oxford), given at the university on 3 Nov. 2000.

‘I long to go to sleep'
: MW to George Blood (c
.
Jan 1787),
MWL
, 134;
MWletters
, 100.

‘to make any great advance…'
: To EW,
MWL
, 140;
MWletters
, 109.

‘
adventitious' rights
: Paley,
Principles
, in a chapter on ‘The Division of Rights', 75–6.

‘Nature may have made'
: Ibid., 279.

biographic basis of the novel
Mary: The form may provide a missing link between Dr Johnson's
Lives of the Poets
(completed in 1781) and the autobiographical schema of Wordsworth's
Prelude
:
or, Growth of a Poet's Mind
(1805). Earlier fictions like
Tom Jones
or
Tristram Shandy
do include scenes from childhood, but these are more snippets of anecdote than measured biography.

‘carefully attended'
:
Mary
, ch. 1.

the fictional Ann
: Ibid., ch. 11. It's suggested that MW demeaned Fanny by having a fashionable English family in Lisbon call Ann a ‘beggar'. It hardly needs to be said that, far from endorsing this, MW is making a point about the worldly.

‘
neither marrying
': Matthew 22: 30: ‘For in the resurrection, they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels in heaven'. Repeated
RW
, ch. 2.

restless
–
with no institutional habitation
: As such, ‘Mary' is a precursor to Catherine Earnshaw in
Wuthering Heights
.

‘darted into futurity'
:
Mary
, ch. 4.

answer to Sophie
: Taylor, ‘Wild Wish', 216.

flash of contempt: Mary
, ch. 3.

‘knowledge of physic'; ‘medicine of life'
: Ibid., ch. 23. ‘Mary' also studies ‘physic' in chs 6 and 17.

‘men past the meridian'
: Ibid., ch. 8.

the nature of ‘Mary's' mind
: Ibid., chs 10 and 23.

the novel
Mary
indebted to Dr Price
: Gary Kelly, Notes to
Mary
, 211. MW asks after ‘LeSage' in a letter to EW (24 Mar. 1787).

‘witching time'
:
Hamlet
, III, ii, 406.

‘I think and think'
: To EW (24 Mar. [1787]),
MWL
, 144;
MWletters
, 113.

‘Still does my panting soul…'
:
Mary
, ch. 20.

‘lost in stupidity': MWL
, 156;
MWletters
, 130.

‘the only Rt Honourable…'
: MW to BW (27 June [1787]),
MWL
, 155;
MWletters
, 129.

governess was away
: There is no evidence of where MW went, but it seems likely she would have paid a visit to her father at Laugharne on the south coast of Wales, not far from Bristol but not close enough for a day-trip.

7
VINDICATION

eighteenth-century drawing of the north side of St Paul's Churchyard
: Etching by T. Horner in the British Library, reproduced in
MWL
, 180.

‘
Bufo
': ‘Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot', line 233.

Vathek
as a private cult
: Noel Annan's recollections of
The Dons
, largely at Trinity and King's in Cambridge during the early years of the twentieth century, tell us that the Fellows sometimes chose students and colleagues on the basis of their responses to questions about their taste for
Vathek
. Before homosexuality was legalised in the 1960s the novel served as a private code.

early Wordsworth and Coleridge
: Wordsworth's
Descriptive Sketches
and
An Evening Walk
, and Coleridge's
Frost at Midnight
.

JJ's ‘
tenderness': BW to EW (7 July 1794). Abinger: Dep. b. 210.

JJ's sympathies
: Tomalin, Woof and Hebron,
Hyenas
, 4.

compassionate conduct
: Godwin's obituary for JJ (1809).

new ‘plan of life'
: To JJ (13 Sept. [1787]),
MWL
, 159;
MWletters
, 134.

‘The Cave of Fancy'
:
MWCW
, i, 191-206

‘determined'
: (13 Sept. [1787]),
MWL
, 159;
MWletters
, 134. WG heard that MW was depressed in this transition period, and ascribes it to renewed grief for Fanny in the wake of writing
Mary
. This must have been hearsay. I don't see evidence of depression in the letters of this period.