Vindication Read Online Free

Charles. When he was born Mary was eleven, old enough to help with a baby. She would continue to love and help Charles. During the years in Beverley her eldest brother, destined for the law, was sent to a grammar school while Mary went to local day schools until she was fifteen and a half. She wrote later: ‘I cannot recollect without indignation thejokes and hoiden tricks, which knots of young women indulge themselves in, when in my youth accident threw me, an awkward rustic, in their way.’
    It was not only that she felt a rustic in town. A victim of domestic violence, especially a child, is isolated, an isolation enforced by the bully in order to preserve secrecy and control. His victims have to keep up appearances, so that the semblance of social life feels inauthentic. Set apart and awkward as Mary felt, there was a certain dignity and a longing to improve herself when, soon after she turned fourteen, she invited the friendship of a serious girl of fifteen called Jane Arden. The two girls took walks together on Westwood Common–Mary’s ‘darling Westwood’–where she felt at ease with the woods and windmills. Jane’s movements were quick and active; her commands came forth as polite requests. She was the leader of a set who addressed one another with self-conscious civility.
    Through Jane, Mary passed messages to other girls, suggesting they too might correspond with her. She laboured over a letter, tossing off quotations like the best-educated girl in the world, and then, with a child’s frankness, ends abruptly: ‘I wish you may not be as tired with reading as I am with writing.–’ She spouted quotations whenever she got a chance, eager to prove herself literate to a friend of superior education: ‘you know, my dear, I have not the advantage of a Master as you have,’ she wrote. Jane’s father John Arden, then in his mid-fifties, had been disinherited by his Catholic family for turning Protestant. As a man of education and wide intellectual interests, including astronomy and geography, he exerted himself as an itinerant lecturer demonstrating electricity, gravitation, magnetism, optics and the expansion of metals. Arden’s civility showed up the furies of Mary’s own father. She said, ‘I shall always think myself under an obligation for his politeness to me.’ When he invited Mary to join his lessons, Jane was first with the answers, but Mary led the way with questions. Arden had educated his daughter himself, and Mary was suitably impressed with Jane’s understanding–but not too impressed to give way.
    â€˜Pray tell the worthy Philosopher, the next time he is so obliging as to give me a lesson on the globes [planets], I hope I shall convince him I am quicker than his daughter at finding out a puzzle, tho’ I can’t equal her at solving a problem.’
    At fifteen, this girl already has a voice of her own. Her phrasing is ‘spontaneous’ (as she claimed), following an ideal of language based on the run of the speaking voice. A century earlier, Dryden had created a language that was clear and apparently artless, while John Locke had dismissed the affectation of unintelligible words as ‘the covers of ignorance, and hindrance of true knowledge’. The Enlightenment, which they promoted, offered more direct modes of communication than the learned flourishes of an expensive education or the languid drawl of the pampered; it’s a polished and playful manner with the offhand informality of a modern voice. Mary took to the ‘downright’ Yorkshire idiom: happiness was to feel ‘so lightsome’, sure ‘it will not go badly with me’–phrases that she used long after she lived there.
    In the course of her contact with the Ardens, her reading shifted from trite moralists to literature: Dryden’s Conquest of Granada (1671–2) and Goldsmith’s Letters from a Citizen of the World