Mary Wollstonecraft
By the late 1790s, Spitalfields, which had been first a rural retreat without the City walls, then a fertile market garden, and latterly a borough of impressive Georgian houses raised on the proceeds of the silk trade, had become synonomous with poverty.
The weavers were getting richer, but their workers were not. The Spitalfields workhouses were full to bursting and, to the disquiet of the rich men of the City, the working class was getting restless. It was in this atmosphere of social change and unrest that one of the most radical thinkers of the 18th century was born.
Mary Wollstonecraft, born in Spitalfields in 1759, was intimately woven into the business of silk, as her family had grown rich on it. Her grandfather had been a craftsman handkerchief weaver, and her father had invested in looms to boost production, also making his money as a landlord.
But as quickly as her bullying father made his cash, he lost it. He blew his fortune in various unsuccessful ventures at farming. By the time Mary’s mother Elizabeth died in 1782, wearied by years of Edward Wollstonecraft’s bullying, the family had tried their hand at six different farms, mainly in Essex.
Mary quickly showed an extraordinary independence for a woman of her era. At 19 she set out to earn her own living. And in 1783 she helped her sister Eliza escape from her violent husband, hiding her until a legal separation could be negotiated.
The two sisters set up a school at Newington Green, but in 1785 another pivotal event was to occur and shape Mary’s life and future work. Her friend Fanny Blood had married and settled in Lisbon. Mary went to nurse her friend through a difficult pregnancy, but both mother and child died in childbirth.
Returning to England, Mary found that the school had suffered in her absence. She closed the establishment and took a job as governess to the daughters of Lord Viscount Kingsborough, in Ireland. And it was with the Kingsboroughs that Mary first began to write.
Her first work was a pamphlet, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters – at the time, the conventional wisdom was that daughters shouldn’t be educated. In 1788 her first book followed: Mary, A Fiction.
But her keynote work was to come in 1792. That date saw the beginning of the French Revolution, and Mary drew on all her earlier experiences, as well as the growing demands Europe-wide for ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’, to pen A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. The book controversially demanded that men and women be educated equally.
In 1792 she set out for Paris. There, as a witness of Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, she collected material for An Historical and Moral View of the Origins and Progress of the French Revolution: and the effect it has Produced in Europe, a book which was sharply critical of the violence of the Revolution.
She spent her time in Paris living with an American, Captain Gilbert Imlay, and in 1794 gave birth to a daughter – named Fanny after her friend. The relationship broke down, though, as the unfaithful Imlay continually deserted his lover and daughter, and Wollstonecraft made the first of several suicide attempts in 1795, on one occasion jumping into the Thames from Putney Bridge..
She survived and returned to working for the London publisher, James Johnson, who had published Mary years before. She soon became an enthusiastic member of the group of radical thinkers which gathered at Johnson’s home, including William Blake, Thomas Paine and William Wordsworth. One of their number was the political philosopher William Godwin, and before long she was pregnant with his child.
On 29 March 1797 the pair married. The ceremony was kept private due to Mary’s pregnancy and only announced the following month.
And in August Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born. But the future Mary Shelley, who would find fame of her own as the author of Frankenstein, never knew her mother. In a tragic echo of her friend Fanny Blood, Mary died of “childbed fever” just 11 days later.