When she set up her school in Newington Green in 1784, Wollstonecraft joined a circle rich in adversarial political experience. As religious Dissenters, they were opposed to the established Church of England. Dissenters could not take the oaths necessary to secure offices under the Crown or even to take degrees at English Universities. Politically they debated the terms of the Whig triumph of 1688 when parliament had seemingly affirmed its paramount power by dismissing James II and calling a Protestant monarch, William of Orange, to the throne. “Real,” or “true,” Whigs complained that Parliament, instead of extending its power and becoming more representative of the people, had used the influence of the throne to establish a monopoly of power in the hands of great landowners. James Burgh, whose widow was Wollstonecraft’s personal friend, had compiled a damning dossier on the oligarchy of “borough-mongers,” its manipulation of elections, its system of patronage and nepotism. Republican ideas, from a tradition including Greece, Rome, and Renaissance Italy as well as the seventeenth-century English Commonwealth, were frequently used to attack courtly corruption and democratic arguments were voiced, especially after the American Revolution. Many saw a remedy for corruption in extending parliamentary representation to newly populous towns and widening the franchise to make bribery and intimidation less common. However radical their ideas, few ventured to actually propose dismantling rather than reforming a constitution that purported to balance monarchical, republican, and democratic principles and had brought peace and prosperity to Britain. Richard Price, another close friend and Wollstonecraft’s mentor in moral philosophy, was a member of the Real Whig club and a correspondent of Tom Paine, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson. He had opposed the American War and joined with Catharine Macaulay in the battles for “Wilkes and Liberty” against the power of the Crown, keeping alive the republican traditions of the Commonwealth. He attempted to pilot bills through Parliament to free Dissenters from the Tests which barred them from civic offices and worked with members of the renowned Warrington Dissenting Academy, Joseph Priestley, William Enfield, John Aikin, and Aikin’s sister Anna Barbauld. Wollstonecraft maintained these connections when she moved to London to write for Joseph Johnson, the Liverpool-bred publisher. The overlapping circles of Price and Johnson included liberal Churchmen, Dissenters of many sectarian persuasions, educators, scientists, entrepreneurs, provincial and metropolitan radicals, some of whom, like John Horne Tooke and Thomas Brand Hollis, were continuators of mid-century groupings. Later in France Wollstonecraft met American radicals and entrepreneurs, representatives of the revolutionary United Irishmen, and the circle of Madame Roland, Brissot, Condorcet, and Helen Maria Williams, a group concerned initially with developing ideas drawn from English and American republican traditions and then with surviving the reign of Robespierre.
In politics Mary Wollstonecraft must be accounted a republican.1 She hoped for the disappearance of monarchy and inherited distinctions, but she went further than Price and Macaulay in supporting “democratists” like Paine, looking towards the extension of the franchise to working men and women. She did not produce a specifically political program, however, and her political criticism is couched predominantly in terms of morality. Like most republicans she was concerned about virtue as the quality most needed to uphold the state, but her definitions of virtue are more moralistic and individualistic than the public virtues of traditional republicanism. While sharing the republican preference for a citizen militia, her criticism of a standing army concentrates less on its use as an instrument of despotism than on the way in which a soldier is fashioned into a stunted, ceremonious automaton and becomes a victim, like woman, of the inequalities of present society. She does not adopt the principle associated with the Commonwealth writer James Harrington and his eighteenth-century followers that political power should follow property and thus be attainable by the gentry and rising commercial classes. Possession of an economic “independency” did not guarantee political independence in these corrupt times. The goal of Wollstonecraft’s political morality is the happinesss and self-determined advancement of each individual, not the good of the propertied, the majority, or the imaginary whole of society, a position that distinguishes her also from the utilitarianism of Priestley.
What Wollstonecraft gained from her radical friends was not just a set of doctrines but a way of life in which feeling and intellect gained social expression. Individuals such as Price, Johnson, Thomas Christie, her editor on Johnson’s Analytical Review, and William Godwin gave her much-needed personal support and the close-knit groups of Dissenters and radicals provided a sort of extended family. Often collaborating in literary projects, they maintained a fiercely guarded intellectual independence. In defending Price against Burke’s attacks in his Reflections on the French Revolution (1790) Wollstonecraft was praising the man who had done most to form her views, but though her portrait of Price in A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) is of a reverend patriarch she does not adopt a stance of uncritical reverence. His utopian speculations are admitted to be provocatively extreme, and the picture of the Dissenters as sharing “feminine” weaknesses in the conclusion of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) might be seen as critical of his political efforts to unify Dissenting opinion and by multiplied compromises bring some slight alleviation of their civic disabilities. Her milieu gave her the liveliest evidence of the progressiveness of what the eighteenth century called the “social passions,” feelings that Blake celebrated in Songs of Innocence (1789) as the basis of social harmony in mercy, pity, peace, and love. Rousseau, the Prometheus of the passions, was a strong and early influence on Wollstonecraft’s thinking. She was particularly drawn to his pictures of the republican Swiss canton with its patriarchal families, evoking a “Golden Age” in human society. In her travels in Scandinavia she was persuaded that it might exist, but always further north in inaccessible valleys. In her writings the term “patriarchal” has none of the pejorative implications of later feminist criticism; it is associated with a Rousseauistic vision of “independence and virtue; affluence without vice; cultivation of mind, without depravity of heart; with ‘ever-smiling liberty;’ the nymph of the mountain” (SR 6:308).
Wollstonecraft was scathing about some versions of Sensibility, but in that deeply rifted tradition of thought she definitely belonged to the radical wing. A common general term that united discourses dealing with feeling in medicine, religion, and the arts, Sensibility also came to signify the school of philosophy that saw human society as deriving from and sustained by bonds of feeling and sympathy. Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, and Adam Smith originated many of the leading ideas of the tradition, which were developed by philosophical historians, critics, and general essayists. In its more radical aspect Sensibility cut across distinctions of rank and wealth to elevate the subjectivity of the virtuous and cultured individual, broadening the idea of politeness and establishing an emulative culture of sociability. It purported to put the individual in touch with a more authentic “natural” self that also connected with authentic national traditions rather than classical models. Its humanitarianism and benevolism were considered distinctive of modern society. Wollstonecraft educated herself in authors of this tradition and was convinced of its progressive tendency. Classical societies had denigrated woman, found entertainment in slaughter, glorified war, and justified slavery; they had not cultivated the humanizing warmth of fellow-feeling, the essentially democratic acknowledgment of a common nature. Slavery, the topic and the analogy she returns to in all her works, was the prime example of an evil which flourished by precedent and authority, the laws of property and trade, but which the enlightened heart of the age condemned. Many radicals in the republican tradition saw political progress as the key feature of the age and Price, Macaulay, Barbauld, Coleridge, and the Godwin circle welcomed the French Revolution with millenarian enthusiasm. Wollstonecraft, while not denying that it promised the greatest advance yet made on this globe, was more concerned with a broader concept of civilization, one which included the development of imagination and the feelings as well as intellectual and political improvement. Her work is not so much an extension of republican principles to domestic life as an effort to bring republican thought into line with the best aspects of domestic relations. Much as she reveres Catharine Macaulay, she finds her work deficient in “sagacity” and “fancy” and praises its “sympathy and benevolence” more than its argumentative closeness (VRW 5:175). Her own entry into political controversy emphasizes qualities of feeling rather than arguments of political theory.
In her Vindication of the Rights of Men Wollstonecraft maintains that “if the heart beat true to nature” vast estates would be divided into small farms, cottagers would be allowed to make enclosures from the commons and, instead of alms being given to the poor, they would be given the means to independence and self-advancement (VRM 5:56–7). Her condemnation of charity, like that of Godwin, sees it as sustaining an unequal society while giving the appearance of virtue to the rich. Wollstonecraft’s emphasis on independence for the lower classes is moral as much as political. She praises the “civilizing relations of husband, father, and brother” just as Wordsworth was to elevate the domestic feelings characteristic of the independent farmers of the Lake District. For Wollstonecraft as well as Burke the political virtue of patriotism is an extension of domestic feelings, but interpreted very differently. Burke’s version of domestic feelings is the product of history and association, cementing the bonds of a society of dependence by the family values of loyalty and heredity.2 For him they act like instincts, having no need of reason. Wollstonecraft’s version owes much to the egalitarian, experimental, but no less emotional relationships of progressive groups. Though it is from the heart that all that is great and good comes, it must be an educated heart. Wollstonecraft rejected the automatism of Burke’s view of the passions. The gut-reactions he appealed to were not a mysterious wisdom of nature or of the body but habits of a superseded stage of society that could be analyzed and criticized: “Affection for parents, reverence for superiors or antiquity, notions of honour, or that worldly self-interest that shrewdly shews them that honesty is the best policy? all proceed from the reason for which they serve as substitutes; – but it is reason at second hand” (VRM 5:31).
Civilization was marked for Wollstonecraft by the “cultivation of the understanding, and refinement of the affections” (VRM 5:39). The passions may be involuntary but they can be subjected to analysis; in fact the strong reactions of passion are for her the stimulus of thought. There is no contradiction for her in holding the domestic affections sacred while applying to the relations of husband and wife or parents and children the Lockean doctrine of a contract with reciprocal duties. Family affections are civilizing because they impel reflection on the basis of the affections developed (or thwarted) in such relationships and so “refine” the affections. Her husband and wife must be equal and independent because true, refined affection can only subsist among equals. “Natural” (or should it be “refined”?) love of children makes no distinction among them but that of virtue (VRM 5:22) and does not favor sons above daughters or the first son above all. Burke’s model of the family embodied the ideology – or “reason at second hand” – of the barbarous, aristocratic stage of society, and primogeniture, with its object of maintaining an illustrious name by passing an entire estate to the first son, was, she thought, mere “brutal” selfishness. Even the restriction of benevolence and patronage within the family circle was a defect, a lack of civilized refinement. Friendship ought to have the weight of relationship – and she defines friendship in terms of sympathy with virtue (VRM 5:24). Wollstonecraft may be distinguished from a republican line of moralists, including Hutcheson and Godwin, whose idea of benevolence is directed primarily towards the state and mankind in general, and who tend to denigrate the “partial” affections of family. Wollstonecraft’s idea of family affections, however, makes the family the breeding ground of a republican or universal benevolence, a position shared by Coleridge and later by Godwin himself.
In the theory of Burke and Paine, the social contract is entered into for motives of fear, to protect oneself from the encroachment of others, and to add their strength to your own. For Wollstonecraft it is natural fellow-feeling, the imagination, and the social passions that initiate and sustain the social enterprise. In the age of the French Revolution, when human nature seemed to be born again, she looked to origins and Nature as well as to the progress of the Enlightenment for confirmation of the capacities of human nature. The myths of a golden age, of a state of nature, and an original contract of society were part of an eighteenth-century movement which often seems to see progress as recovering the past, a “natural” life that had taken a wrong turning. Dissenters like Priestley hoped to clear away the corruptions of Christianity; Major Cartwright and radical Whigs like Catharine Macaulay appealed to an original Anglo-Saxon constitution of liberty before the imposition of the “Norman Yoke.” Coleridge investigated institutions to recover not their historical forms but an idea of their ultimate aim. Images of the past are often more or less consciously mythologized in obvious efforts to make them meet the urgent demands of the present. In the Rights of Man (Part One, 1791) Paine cites the Bible as his precedent for the equality of man, yet in his Age of Reason (1794) he can discard revelation and rely on the wondrous organization of nature for his belief in a God who talks the language of Newton and Locke. Burke extolled the pomp of monarchy and the grandeur of chivalry, outmoded fictions both, but in acknowledging that they were to a large extent the creation of his own rhetoric he insisted on the present need for such a moral “drapery” of the imagination. In response to the American and French Revolutions, events that were widely hailed as unprecedented, many, like Macaulay and Wollstonecraft, took their stand on inalienable natural rights, of which constitutional precedents such as Magna Carta or the Bill of Rights were only a compromised expression, rights granted rather than declared.
Price popularized the idea of natural rights when criticizing British policy towards America in his Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, published in the same year as Paine’s Common Sense (1776). Applied to America, his theory was democratic in expression. He outlined a system of representative government and the term “civil liberty,” liberty under the law, gave way in subsequent editions to “political liberty,” the ability to make the laws that guaranteed freedom. In the established state of Britain his practical demands were usually limited to establishing the predominance of the “people” as represented in the House of Commons, eradicating corruption, and moderately extending representation. His sermon to the Revolution society in 1789 which roused Burke’s ire asserted the right of the “people” to elect their governors and to “cashier” them for misconduct, rights that Price had maintained in most of his writings as the achievements of the Revolution of 1688. For him this showed an evolving understanding of the natural rights of man that should be extended to religious freedom and more equal representation. Price, though not as popular in his style as Paine, enunciated principles in a similarly pithy, often tabular, form that emphasized their simplicity, a mode also favored by Wollstonecraft. Complication, sophistication, and obfuscation in political and legal matters inhibited wide discussion and gave opportunites for corruption. Her own statements of principle, versions of the golden rule of doing as you would be done by, assertions of equality and of freedom limited only by prohibiting encroachment upon others’ freedom, echoed the language of political pronouncements such as the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Men and of Citizens. Though such principles were the product of historical experience and progressive political science – she traces them particularly to Locke – they appear the spontaneous products of “natural” morality or common sense. She regarded them as “eternal,” requiring “only to be made known, to be generally acknowledged . . .” (HMV 6:221).
Wollstonecraft could be accused of not confronting Burke on his own ground, the ground of political precedent and historical fact, but her attack on his emotional sincerity in A Vindication of the Rights of Men is a valid approach for one who values precedents only as they enlighten present responses. She finds his rhetoric cold and artificial, its professed basis in domestic feeling absurdly confined to primogeniture, and its aggressive masculinity outmoded bombast. Even her digs at his pension and motives for ingratiating himself with established power are legitimate in exposing the emotional malpractice he seemed to be perpetrating. In exhibiting her own emotional reactions with Rousseau-like openness, she is claiming a true contemporary sensibility, emotion confirmed by reflection, to contrast with Burke’s hackneyed theatrical gestures and parade of prejudice. “Nature” and “natural” are words that she distrusts but cannot do without. They indicate the spontaneous reactions of a cultivated mind that is not afraid to re-examine its own possible prejudices and is prepared to root out those in others’ thought.
For Price the affections and passions, although basically healthy and God-given, do not become morally admirable until transformed by the reason into a universal benevolence that strives to imitate that of God, and only such progress in virtue is a true preparation for the afterlife.3 These rational passions seek to improve the world, not to justify its present state. Price’s theory enabled Wollstonecraft to interpret Rousseau more positively. Rousseau’s sensibility had seemed an isolating grandeur, all too easy to identify with in rejecting a society whose goals had become detached from real satisfactions. Much of her early work echoes Rousseau’s sermons to himself to limit his desires to ends achievable within the given sphere of existence. When she gained the support of communities that embodied the mind and heart of a progressive culture Wollstonecraft recognized that Rousseau’s sensibility had its heroic aspect as a rational passion urging him to progressive social ideals. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman he becomes a “respectable visionary” whose passionate struggles with adversity prepare him better for the hereafter than for a comfortable life (VRW 5:143, 161). The sensibility with which he endowed his “noble savage” was improbable for that stage of human progress, but it embodied the basic feelings of sociability that underpinned human society, feelings that would be both developed by the progress of society and contribute to it.
Civilization in the individual and the collective is the result of strenuous effort. Self-development entails not merely absorbing doctrines but often painfully struggling toward new formulations. It is knowledge proved on the pulses and reacting with experience in order to work on society in activities such as Wollstonecraft’s own journalistic activity and proposals for educational institutions. The emphasis on work, on earned distinctions rather than those of inherited wealth and rank, and the stress on duty and morality, links Wollstonecraft with the long middle-class cultural revolution against aristocratic values. The virtues of diligence, economic probity, foresight, and self-discipline, are not, however, ends in themselves. If her books for children encourage an “investment mentality” of self-denial, it is not directed toward the delayed gratification of accumulated wealth but toward amassing the means to personal independence and benevolence. Such virtues fit a man or woman to play a full part in the state, the wider sphere of benevolence. In her letter to Talleyrand prefacing A Vindication of the Rights of Woman she complains against the French exclusion of women from the ranks of “active citizens,” empowered to take part in the political decisions of the nation. This complaint underlines the importance of political rights to Wollstonecraft since the new French constitution gave women far more independence in other ways, including the power to inherit an equal share of property, a provision to which even the republican Thomas Christie objected.4 Wollstonecraft deviates from middle-class reformers not only in her feminism but also in her more general democratic sympathies.
A Vindication of the Rights of Men breathes fiery indignation at Burke’s contempt for what he calls “the dregs of the people” (VRM 5:21) and adulation of the dissolute French queen. It defends the “respectable” market-women whom he reviled as monstrous when they marched on Versailles to demand bread. Attacking Burke’s idea of property as the inherited wealth of the aristocracy, Wollstonecraft defends a Lockean notion of property as the product of personal labor and extends this idea to labor itself. The property of the rich is secure in England but not that of the mechanic, whose “property is in his nervous arms” (VRM 5:15). The press-gang is her key example of how the liberty and property of the poor are sacrificed to protect that of the rich. She comments on the idleness and vices of beggars and the urban poor but these moral failings are the result of their conditions, not their cause. They are the victims of the city’s boasted commerce, thrown out of work by a “flux of trade or fashion,” and also victims of false emulation as they copy the vices of the rich. A particularly concentrated passage yields a pregnant analysis of the relationship of the classes: “Envy built a wall of separation, that made the poor hate, whilst they bent to their superiors; who, on their part, stepped aside to avoid the loathsome sight of human misery.” The mixed envy and hatred of ressentiment stifles the social passions of the poor, while the passions of the rich are not refined by the reflection that their wealth involves the poverty of others, turning them into loathsome creatures from which a fastidious taste revolts. They are rendered deaf to the appeal to fellow-feeling evoked by the allusion to the parable of the Good Samaritan. The remedy is a “more enlarged plan of society” in which man “did not seek to bury the sympathies of humanity in the servile appellation of master” (VRM 5:57–8). The poor, she asserts, “have a right to more comfort than they at present enjoy . . .” (VRM 5:55). With Price, she criticizes approaches to poverty like that of Burke, who held out hopes of heavenly compensation and preached Stoic resignation.
Heavenly justice promises a recompense, but only to those who improve their own natures. Both Price and Wollstonecraft expound a duty to ourselves that consists in training up virtue to perfection in this life of trial and adversity, and virtue demands benevolence directed towards the similar improvement of every individual. Beside breaking up large estates by abolishing primogeniture, Price wished to see property, happiness, and independence even more equally dispersed. He speculated that ideas of holding goods in common could be extended, but he favored schemes of self-help. His importance in the history of insurance stems from his efforts to introduce schemes whereby laborers might insure against old age and unemployment. A similar emphasis on self-help led Wollstonecraft to support the Evangelical Sarah Trimmer’s involvement with the Charity School movement and the enterprises of the unitarian George Dyer in the 1790s, who proposed models of charitable institutions like miniature states run by simple, agreed, and well-publicized rules. Dyer and Wollstonecraft shared a dilemma in the 1790s, whether to emphasize the separate identity and interests of a group or to urge a communal response. Dyer stated bluntly that the poor were slaves, since they had no part in the social contract of society, yet he looked for a sharing of responsibility between rich and poor.5 He described it as a kind of patronage, yet without the stigma attached to the term, just as Godwin and Coleridge urged similar ideas of stewardship of property. Wollstonecraft identified women as a group, and urged self-advancement, but she recognized the necessity for society as a whole to change. She criticized French society particularly for the barriers that it set up between classes. Paine’s plans in the second part of his Rights of Man (1792) for redistributing wealth from the landed class in grants to the needy exacerbated the sense of a conflict of classes as aid was seen to be demanded, possibly to be extorted. Wollstonecraft’s faith in the social passions could still, in the early 1790s, envisage social amelioration as a joint enterprise.
Wollstonecraft’s vision of social progress owed much to the school of Scottish philosophical historians who chronicled social advancement through distinct cultural stages from savagery to the present “commercial” age, characterized by a weakening of the distinction of ranks, growing equality and sociability, and the cultivation of the arts and sciences. One of the later exponents of this view was John Millar who contributed to the Analytical Review. Though predominantly optimistic, his reservations about the blessings of progress and commercial society were similar to traditional republican fears that luxury, selfishness, and impatience of subordination would lead to its dissolution.6 Burke too, seeing the English Constitution as the historical outcome of Providential wisdom, warned of the danger of “feminine” relaxation in the articles of subordination, property, and masculine military virtues. Wollstonecraft uses the idea of stages of growth, though she denies any “hidden hand” or historical determinism directing the process. While taking sociability and the cultivation of arts and sciences as the main motors of civilization, she is also aware of the possibilities of degeneration.
Her method of social criticism is very similar to that of Rousseau, and directed against aspects of “commercial society” that had engaged the ambivalence of historians such as Adam Ferguson and John Millar. Scattered throughout the two Vindications are jaundiced references to the commercial nature of present civilization, a civilization far from that she celebrated as the progressive unfolding of man’s social and benevolent nature. In A Vindication of the Rights of Men they culminate in a Rousseauistic diatribe against “the polished vices of the rich, their insincerity, want of natural affections, with all the specious train that luxury introduces” (VRM 5:58). The “specious” social and sexual virtues upheld by this society are, again in Rousseauistic fashion, regarded as “substitutes” for the virtues themselves: regulations instead of principles, reputation in place of integrity, commercial treaties instead of friendship, legal prostitution instead of marriage. Luxury, a term particularly rich in connotations of sexual and materialistic indulgence, exploitation of labor and of colonial possessions, carries for her also the intimations of nemesis. The great empires of the past fell because of such faults, and Wollstonecraft prophesies the fall of London and of Paris.
When she undertakes to write on the French Revolution she has the ambition to contribute to the “history of man” in the same way as social historians, estimating the stage of civilization of the French and confronting the questions which the violence of 1793 posed to her own idea of progress (PCFN 6:444). Was the development of sociability and equality, the progress of arts and sciences, really an aspect of “feminine” luxury, responsible for the anarchy into which France had descended? In A Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (1794) she concedes that the “effeminacy” of the French was responsible for anarchy, but maintains that this subverted a Revolution that had been motivated by nobler motives. The influence of the courtly, feudal system of society had vitiated the national character and temporarily overpowered emergent forces which would eventually triumph. She uses the idea of stages of society to see old institutions as necessary and in part beneficial stepping-stones to more advanced values. Like Godwin and Coleridge, she views past constitutional battles of property and power between king, lords, and people as beneficial in establishing a certain level of personal freedom, but, as the passion for empire diminishes, more refined feelings for justice, intellectual progress, and sociability require new institutions. Similarly courtly society and the culture of politeness were a necessary stage in developing more comprehensive social virtues.
The Historical and Moral View directly contradicts criticism of “the luxury introduced with the arts and sciences; when it is obviously the cultivation of these alone, emphatically termed the arts of peace, that can turn the sword into a ploughshare” (HMV 6:23). In the gradual advance of civilization in ancient and modern cultures the arts, including the arts of politeness and sociability, are seen as deriving from courtly life. Under this “partial civilization” a certain amount of civil liberty is possible but not political liberty. True civilization, as in A Vindication of the Rights of Men, consists of the widest diffusion of happiness and power among all citizens. Ancient societies, like the Greek and Roman, and modern cultures, like those of Florence and Holland, may have advanced in the arts, yet remained regressive in their treatment of colonies and of those without the rights of citizenship: they “trampled with a ferocious affectation of patriotism on the most sacred rights of humanity.” Her scheme of progress, however, “makes the perfection of the arts the dawn of science . . .” (HMV 6:15). In a similar stage of progress the French court, frivolous, vain, and sensual as it was, cultivated a sociability that gave rise to intellectual curiosity and a patronage of ideas that were eventually to destroy it. The improvement of manners is “the harbinger of reason” (HMV 6:225). Paris, which had been the disseminator of courtly culture, gained a tone distinct from that of the court and spread the new ideas through enterprises such as the Encyclopedia. The capital itself, the creation of the courtly system and its luxury, became a “bulwark to oppose the despotism of the court,” and the author of the revolution. Yet Paris also nurtured the Terror, and Wollstonecraft’s attitude towards the metropolis is mixed: “the focus of information, the reservoir of genius, the school of arts, the seat of voluptuous gratification, and the hot-bed of vice and immorality” (HMV 6:223).
Just as Wollstonecraft’s view of the capital is ambivalent as it displays aspects of old courtly corruption and new enlightenment so her view of commerce is divided. She can be quoted as the inveterate foe of commerce in its fraudulent, antisocial pursuit of profit and again as one of its great champions. Commerce was seen as the characteristic element of modern society and linked with the “douce commerce” of sociability. Wollstonecraft values commerce and industry for the same reasons as Adam Smith: they encourage independence and equality, broadening the basis of “polite” society. The command of a wage for his labor or a market for his goods emancipates man from slavish dependence on a feudal lord or the servile receipt of alms from the rich. The benevolent heroine of her novel Mary (1789) establishes “manufactories” as well as small farms, but they are not the industrial workhouses that Wollstonecraft condemned in the Analytical Review as the products of a “mistaken” theory of commerce (AR 7: 442). In the Historical and Moral View she voices the same criticism as Godwin of a system that turns men into unthinking, unprogressive automatons to make fortunes for individuals. From her early Original Stories for Children, where Mrs. Mason resists bargains and pays the right price for goods, to her insistence on fair mercantile profits in the Historical and Moral View (HMV 6:233) and her idea of a just proportion between profit and wages in the Letters Written During a Short Residence (SR 6:287), Wollstonecraft upholds a commerce regulated by ideas of justice and fairness and directed toward the ideals of independence and benevolence. This evolution too must come with an improvement of culture. In Scandinavia the smoke-filled rooms of profiteering merchants gave scant indication of sociability, and she felt that acquaintance with the arts and sciences would enlarge their minds to more benevolent prospects. Brissot, in his Travels to America, had similarly commented optimistically on the rage for commerce as a phase that the growth of civilization would moderate.7 Price had warned the Americans of the dangers of commercialism, and Paine himself seemed to show an undiscriminating reliance on its power. For Paine, kings make war, republics make trade, and the most effectual way of improving the condition of man is by means of his interest.8 Wollstonecraft’s faith was that man would improve beyond the pursuit of narrow self-interest. In hoping that her lover, Gilbert Imlay, might be cured of his commercial greed by the refinement of cultured domestic life on an American farm, Wollstonecraft was applying the analogy of the progress of civilization to the growth of the individual that she uses throughout the Historical and Moral View.
Wollstonecraft used the “body politic” image to deal with corruption and luxury as sicknesses subject to cure. The work is full of medical terminology drawing analogies between the mental and physical state of France. Frustrated by artificial restrictions the imagination becomes a “wen” of “romantic,” sensual fancies just as the capital is the seat of sensual, courtly corruption. Her optimistic viewpoint produces metaphors of antidotes and purgings, beside the more commonly used images of tempests, fermenting liquors or muddy water that will ultimately produce calm, clear progress. The work actually ends on an image of defecation.
Like many radical commentators Wollstonecraft blamed the excesses of the French Revolution on the corruptions of the old regime. She describes the brutalizing effect of feudal slavery and lessons of tyranny received by the lower classes, but her main focus is on the corruption of the aristocracy and, through them, of the national character. Most of the violence, she maintains, was due to the provocative intransigence of the nobility. The corruptions of the French are characteristic of their state of civilization, a polished, courtly society, in which morals have been sacrificed to manners. After her analysis of the influence of established inequalities on woman in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she could readily ascribe the notorious “effeminacy” of the French character to the same political causes. She reviews the components of the French public sphere with distaste. Their pleasure-gardens and grand galas minister to frivolity and the desire to cut a figure, while their theater is a place of declamation and rhetoric, a school of vanity. Accustomed to codes of politeness, the French, like women, think only of how to please and be pleased. In such a society the progressive ideas of modern philosophy become mere counters of fashionable intercourse, the weapons of self-glorifying wits and rhetoricians. The sincerity, the deeply pondered conviction necessary to make opinion a passion, is as foreign to their feminized natures as to Burke’s. Imagination, nourished only by the senses, gives rise to sensual reveries or ambitions of personal glory, and even bursts of exalted sympathy are not sustained by the rational passion of humanity. Her account of the session of the Assembly in which the nobles and clergy renounced their privileges is of an orgy of competitive bids for the nation’s praise. The same spirit, she maintains, led them to ignore the lessons of history and assert their unique leadership of the world. It is, she implies, a small step from the pre-Revolutionary situation in which each man considered himself the center of the world to the Terror when, having executed their king, every petty functionary considers himself a monarch.
Wollstonecraft shared the view of Helen Maria Williams that the French were advancing not too far but too fast.9 They lacked the self-knowledge that might have brought success to more temperate reform. The abolition of the monarchy and of titles did not suit the state of public feeling, even though the progress of knowledge was tending toward such a goal. Their refusal of a second deliberative chamber spurned the wise American example of a senate and left the country open to the manipulation of the ruling faction of the day. Wollstonecraft, perhaps with the benefit of hindsight, is here departing from the more sanguine welcome given by Macaulay and Christie to the French experiment and from the simplicity of Paine’s scheme.
The motives of the French Revolutionary legislature, their wish for popularity and prominence, their liablity to faction and demagoguery, leads to the deformation of the basis of the Revolution itself, the Declaration of the Rights of Men and of Citizens. She viewed this as a blueprint for a constitution that should have been promulgated with the same speed as the American. In its absence the rhetoric of the rights of man, always sure to gain popularity, gained precedence over the rights of security of person and property. The historical limits of her survey do not allow Wollstonecraft to use one of the most common explanations of the failure of Revolutionary ideals, the threat of invasion from hostile powers. She has to ascribe it to strictly internal moral and social causes. Wollstonecraft ends her volume by making the march on Versailles an example of the descent into factionalism and anarchy, a foretaste of the Terror to come. Instead of insisting on the respectability of the market-women, as in A Vindication of the Rights of Men, she emphasizes their monstrosity. Adopting a rumor current at the time, Wollstonecraft maintains that the market-women were corrupted by the vicious Duke of Orleans and made tools in his schemes. While seeming to capitulate to Burke’s widely accepted version of this event as a demonstration of monstrous revolutionary violence, she is actually using it to isolate the insurgents from the “people.” Her main criticism is that the Assembly did not investigate the violence effectively.
In absolving the people as a whole from the guilt of the Versailles marauders Wollstonecraft demonstrates her faith in the diffusion of knowledge and the ultimate progress of true civilization. Political causes have vitiated manners but politics will change when the French change their amusements and manners (HMV 6:213). The world of metropolitan society is far from representing French society as a whole and she often looks to the provinces for a civilization benefiting more solidly from the centrifugal rays of intellect radiating from the capital. Such a gradualistic hope sustained many reformers like Godwin and Helen Maria Williams and was in tune with the doctrine of stages of progress. Nevertheless, Wollstonecraft’s sense of possibilities inherent in every point of history where “natural” relationships obtain and her refusal to see precedent as dictating the present often conflict with a linear model. She concedes that long ages might be necessary for the development of political and moral science and that it is “morally impossible” for the French people suddenly to throw off the influence of the old regime, but such a possibility is perpetually held out. The brutalized serf, enlightened by self-evident truths, experiences a “noble regeneration” of dignity and humanity (HMV 6:51). Even as she dismisses the superficial culture of the playhouse, pleasure-garden, and gala, she finds examples of the cultured domestic virtues making part of the public sphere in the capital. She praises couples living with the affection of the “civilest friends,” attentive to the education of their children, and entertaining relations and acquaintances with cultural activities in the evening, perhaps a reference to the salons of Mme. Roland and Helen Maria Williams. Returning to their manors in the summer, they mingle with the peasants in their amusements and benevolences. In this “virtuous and useful life” French women are freer, and therefore less subject to unrealistic “romantic” obsessions than the more confined English (HMV 6:147–8). The public acts of the “people” and the National Guard are seen as exemplary in the early days of 1789. It is the court which shows the disunity and covert guile of faction as they oppose a movement of the nation itself. Yet the imposing spectacle of a nation united in improvement gives way to apparently congenital vice. The Palais Royale is described as a school of patriotism in the days of the Bastille, a spacious square where crowds flock to proclaim the sense of the nation (HMV 6:76), but within three months it has become a “den of iniquity . . .” (HMV 6:207).
The unlikely swiftness of this transformation questions both the prospect of speedy reform and the necessity of a tardy gradualism. Improvements in printing, the quick global communication of knowledge, the very fact of the Revolution itself, make reform a more immediate prospect to her in her Scandinavian journeys. Though she proclaims her philosophical orthodoxy in considering particular national historical conditions when estimating stages of progress, anomalies still intrude. In Norway, a country subject to Denmark, she finds, instead of an enslaved province, the freest community in her experience. It seems to answer to her own criteria with its small farms, independent yeomen, mild laws, and local government responsive to democratic pressure: one district had “cashiered” a man who abused his power (SR 6:273). In Sweden the middle class, obsessed with etiquette and rank, are not in the improving, “natural” state she describes in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; here it is the benevolence of the lower ranks that raises thoughts of a Golden Age.
Wollstonecraft played a part in making the independent agriculturalist a subject of ideological debate, a topic taken up particularly by Wordsworth and Cobbett. Her high valuation of economic independence was echoed in efforts to open more occupations to women later in the century but her concern for the independence and welfare of town workers as a whole and her criticism of large factories tended to be absorbed into a general Romantic antagonism to modern industrial systems which encouraged communitarian experiments, usually under the reforming banner of Robert Owen’s efforts to ensure a fair proportion between profit and labor.
Wollstonecraft’s influence on the political thought of Romantic writers is still being explored and this chapter has indicated some of the areas where it may be found. Her exceptional vitality of thought impressed all who knew her and Coleridge regarded her as a genius. Wordsworth might have followed her in looking for progress in recovering ways of thought and feeling deformed by modern, commercial society yet preserved in rural communities. Her development of republican and democratic principles in domestic and affective terms provided a powerful critique of Burke’s use of domestic feelings to support the conservative model of community. In asserting the relative autonomy of the domestic sphere she indicated an alternative to totalitarian theories that subordinated all aspects of an age to its political or economic base. By maintaining the priority of lived social experience in transforming thought she influenced the Shelleyan attitude to political institutions as attempts, always outrun, to embody the spirit of progressive society. In seeing political institutions as responsive to the progressive civilization of social relationships she anticipated the “Cockney” culture of the later Romantics, whose “coterie” politics and utopian, pastoral art forms correspond to the domestic and imaginative values that Wollstonecraft hoped would reform the public sphere.10
1. G. J. Barker-Benfield, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft: Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthwoman’, Journal of the History of Ideas 50 (1989), 95–115.
2. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. L. G. Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 33–5.
3. Richard Price, A Review of the Principal Questions in Morals, ed. D. D. Raphael (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 74, 191, 260. See also Sermons on the Christian Doctrine (London: Cadell, 1787), 249.
4. Thomas Christie, Letters on the Revolution in France (London: Johnson, 1791), 268.
5. George Dyer, The Complaints of the Poor People of England, 2nd edn. (London: Johnson, 1793), 7, and A Dissertation on the Theory and Practice of Benevolence (London: Johnson, 1795), 31.
6. John Millar, The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks, 4th edn. (Edinburgh and London: John Murray, 1806), 101, 138.
7. J. P. Brissot de Warville, New Travels to the United States of America Performed in 1788, trans. Joel Barlow (London: J. S. Jordan, 1792), 110.
8. Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man, ed. H. Collins (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 234.
9. Helen Maria Williams, Letters from France (New York: Garland, 1975), First Series, 3:223.
10. Jeffrey Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 11–12.