Vindication Read Online Free Page B

Marmaduke Hewitt who had been mayor of Beverley. At this point Henry vanishes from record, and a sustained family silence suggests that something went wrong–something unmentionable, like madness or crime. It was out of character for the Wollstonecrafts never to mention him (accustomed as they were to exchange family news and troubles). He slides into one reply from Mary to Everina in the mid-1780s–some news of Henry had the effect of ‘hurrying’ Mary’s heart–but the sentence shuts the door on whatever it was. In the last years of her life she did confide in Godwin, who kept the secret, avoiding Henry’s name in his memoir.
    When Mr Wollstonecraft reached London he took a house in Queen’s Row, Hoxton, a village to the north of the city. Janet Todd speculates that if Henry Wollstonecraft had become mentally disturbed, he could have been placed in one of Hoxton’s three major lunatic asylums, which could possibly have been the reason the family settled there for a year and a half. It was during this spell in Hoxton, when Mary was sixteen to seventeen, that she formed a strange friendship.
    Next door to the Wollstonecrafts in Queen’s Row lived a clergyman called Mr Clare who had a taste for poetry. It was said that he looked rather like the frail, disabled poet Alexander Pope, who had died in 1744 and was therefore, thirty years later, still within living memory. Mr Clare seldom went out, and boasted a pair of shoes which had served him for fourteen years. Little is known of Mary’s connection with this recluse, but it seems that he and his wife took to her as surrogate parents. She stayed with them for days, sometimes weeks, and said, ‘I should have lived very happily with them if it had not been for my domestic troubles, and some other painful circumstances, that I wished to bury in oblivion.’ It was impossible to turn her back on her mother’s abuse, but she did benefit in another way. This ‘amiable Couple’, as she called them, ‘took some pains to cultivate my understanding (which had been too much neglected) [;] they not only recommended proper books to me, but made me read to them’. The Revd Mr Clare became a kind of private tutor, and it may have been now that Mary, warmed by his affection and benevolence, learnt a vital lesson for her future: how to teach. At some point along the way shecame to understand that thoughts ripen best in a climate of individual care that she later called ‘tenderness’.
    Â 
    One day, Mrs Clare took Mary to Newington Butts, a village just south of London. They came to the door of a house that was small but carefully furnished, neat and fresh. A young woman of eighteen, slender, elegant, was dishing out food to the younger members of the household–the youngest, a boy called George, was fifteen. Mary had never seen such delicacy as the way the young woman took charge of her sisters and brothers. Godwin tells us that the ‘impression Mary received from this spectacle was indelible; and, before the interview was concluded, she had taken, in her heart, the vows of eternal friendship’.
    This was Frances Blood, known as Fanny, who combined domestic responsibility with a remarkable gift for drawing. Like Mrs Wollstonecraft, the Bloods were Irish: they came from Cragonboy, County Clare. There were Bloods who owned land, some given by Charles II to an ancestor, Colonel Thomas Blood, who had served his king as a spy. The London Bloods were well bred and hospitable, but dreadfully poor. Matthew Blood, Fanny’s father, like Mary’s, had been an idle drinker who had squandered the sums he’d gained through no effort of his own–in his case, the substantial dowry of his wife, Caroline Roe. He had fled his creditors, first to Limerick, later to Dublin and London.
    The present mainstay of these parents and their seven children was Fanny’s professional work as an artist: her meticulous