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aim at being useful, and sincerity will render me unaffected; for, wishing rather to persuade by the force of my arguments, than dazzle by the elegance of my language, I shall not waste my time in rounding periods,7 or in fabricating the turgid bombast of artificial feelings, which, coming from the head, never reach the heart. I shall be employed about things, not words!�and, anxious to render my sex more respectable members of society, I shall try to avoid that flowery diction which has slided from essays into novels, and from novels into familiar letters and conversation.
These pretty superlatives, dropping glibly from the tongue, vitiate the taste, and create a kind of sickly delicacy that turns away from simple unadorned truth; and a deluge of false sentiments and over-stretched feelings, stifling the natural emotions of the heart, render the domestic pleasures insipid, that ought to sweeten the exercise of those severe duties, which educate a rational and immortal being for a nobler field of action.
The education of women has, of late, been more attended to than formerly; yet they are still reckoned a frivolous sex, and ridiculed or pitied by the writers who endeavour by satire or instruction to improve them. It is acknowledged that they spend many of the first years of their lives in acquiring a smattering of accomplishments;8 meanwhile strength of body and mind are sacrificed to libertine notions of beauty, to the desire of establishing themselves,�the only way women can rise in the world,�by marriage. And this desire making mere animals of them, when they marry they act as such children may be expected to act:�they dress; they paint, and nickname God's creatures.9�Surely these weak beings are only fit for a seraglio!1�Can they be expected to govern a family with judgment, or take care of the poor babes whom they bring into the world?
If then it can be fairly deduced from the present conduct of the sex, from the prevalent fondness for pleasure which takes place of ambition and those nobler passions that open and enlarge the soul; that the instruction which women have hitherto received has only tended, with the constitution of civil society, to render them insignificant objects of desire�mere propagators of fools!�if it can be proved that in aiming to accomplish them, without cultivating their understandings, they are taken out of their sphere of duties, and made ridiculous and useless when the short-lived bloom of beauty is over,2 I presume that rational men will excuse me for endeavoring to persuade them to become more masculine and respectable.
Indeed the word masculine is only a bugbear': there is little reason to fear that women will acquire too much courage or fortitude; for their apparent inferiority with respect to bodily strength, must render them, in some degree, dependent on men in the various relations of life; but why should it be increased by prejudices that give a sex to virtue, and confound simple truths with sensual reveries?
7. I.e., in rounding out elaborate sentences. "Period": a formal sentence composed of balanced clauses. 8. The lessons in music, dancing, sketching, and needlework that were central elements in the education provided for genteel young ladies and that were supposed to enhance their value on the marriage market. 9. Hamlet, charging Ophelia with the faults characteristic of women, says: "You jig, you amble, and you lisp, and / nickname God's creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance" (Shakespeare, Hamlet 3.1.143^15).
1. Harem, the women's quarters in a Muslim household. 2. A lively writer, I cannot recollect his name, asks what business women turned of forty have to do in the world? [Wollstonecraft's note], Poston, in her edition of the Vitidication, suggests that Wollstonecraft is recalling a passage in Frances Burney's novel Evelbia (1778), where the licentious Lord Merton exclaims: "I don't know what the devil a woman lives for after thirty; she is only in other folks' way."
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Women are, in fact, so much degraded by mistaken notions of female excellence, that I do not mean to add a paradox when I assert, that this artificial weakness produces a propensity to tyrannize, and gives birth to cunning, the natural opponent of strength, which leads them to playoff those contemptible infantine airs that undermine esteem even whilst they excite desire. Let men become more chaste and modest, and if women do not grow wiser in the same ratio it will be clear that they have weaker understandings. It seems scarcely necessary to say, that I now speak of the sex in general. Many individuals have more sense than their male relatives; and, as nothing preponderates where there is a constant struggle for an equilibrium, without3 it has naturally more gravity, some women govern their husbands without degrading themselves, because intellect will always govern.
Chap. 2. The Prevailing Opinion of a Sexual Character Discussed
To account for, and excuse the tyranny of man, many ingenious arguments have been brought forward to prove, that the two sexes, in the acquirement of virtue, ought to aim at attaining a very different character: or, to speak explicitly, women are not allowed to have sufficient strength of mind to acquire what really deserves the name of virtue. Yet it should seem, allowing them to have souls, that there is but one way appointed by Providence to lead mankind to either virtue or happiness.
If then women are not a swarm of ephemeron4 triflers, why should they be kept in ignorance under the specious name of innocence? Men complain, and with reason, of the follies and caprices of our sex, when they do not keenly satirize our headstrong passions and groveling vices.�Behold, I should answer, the natural effect of ignorance! The mind will ever be unstable that has only prejudices to rest on, and the current will run with destructive fury when there are no barriers to break its force. Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowledge of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper, outward obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety, will obtain for them the protection of man; and should they be beautiful, every thing else is needless, for, at least, twenty years of their lives.
Thus Milton describes our first frail mother; though when he tells us that women are formed for softness and sweet attractive grace,5 I cannot comprehend his meaning, unless, in the true Mahometan strain, he meant to deprive us of souls, and insinuate that we were beings only designed by sweet attractive grace, and docile blind obedience, to gratify the senses of man when he can no longer soar on the wing of contemplation.
How grossly do they insult us who thus advise us only to render ourselves gentle, domestic brutes! For instance, the winning softness so warmly, and frequently, recommended, that governs by obeying. What childish expressions, and how insignificant is the being�can it be an immortal one? who will condescend to govern by such sinister methods! "Certainly," says Lord Bacon, "man is of kin to the beasts by his body; and if he be not of kin to God by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature!"6 Men, indeed, appear to me to act in a very unphilosophical manner when they try to secure the good conduct
3. Unless. and valor formed, / For softness she and sweet 4. A flying insect that lives only one day. attractive grace; / He for God only, she for God in 5. Milton asserts the authority of man over him" (Paradise Lost 4.298ff.). woman, on the grounds that "for contemplation he 6. Francis Bacon's "Of Atheism" (1 597).
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of women by attempting to keep them always in a state of childhood. Rousseau7 was more consistent when he wished to stop the progress of reason in both sexes, for if men eat of the tree of knowledge, women will come in for a taste; but, from the imperfect cultivation which their understandings now receive, they only attain a knowledge of evil.
Children, I grant, should be innocent; but when the epithet is applied to men, or women, it is but a civil term for weakness. For if it be allowed that women were destined by Providence to acquire human virtues, and by the exercise of their understandings, that stability of character which is the firmest ground to rest our future hopes upon, they must be permitted to turn to the fountain of light, and not forced to shape their course by the twinkling of a mere satellite. Milton, I grant, was of a very different opinion; for he only bends to the indefeasible right of beauty, though it would be difficult to render two passages which I now mean to contrast, consistent. But into similar inconsistencies are great men often led by their senses.
To whom thus Eve with perfect beauty adorn'd. My Author and Disposer, what thou bidst Unargued I obey; So God ordains; God is thy law, thou mine: to know no more Is Woman's happiest knowledge and her praise.8
These are exactly the arguments that I have used to children; but I have added, your reason is now gaining strength, and, till it arrives at some degree of maturity, you must look up to me for advice�then you ought to think, and only rely on God.
Yet in the following lines Milton seems to coincide with me; when he makes Adam thus expostulate with his Maker.
Hast thou not made me here thy substitute,
And these inferior far beneath me set?
Among unequals what society
Can sort, what harmony or true delight?
Which must be mutual, in proportion due
Giv'n and receiv'd; but in disparity
The one intense, the other still remiss
Cannot well suit with either, but soon prove
Tedious alike: of fellowship I speak
Such as I seek, fit to participate
All rational delight9��
In treating, therefore, of the manners of women, let us, disregarding sensual arguments, trace what we should endeavor to make them in order to cooperate, if the expression be not too bold, with the supreme Being.
By individual education, I mean, for the sense of the word is not precisely defined, such an attention to a child as will slowly sharpen the senses, form the temper,1 regulate the passions as they begin to ferment, and set the understanding to work before the body arrives at maturity; so that the man may only
7. Throughout his writings Jean-Jacques Rous-Rousseau describes the education of the perfect seau (1712�1778) argued against the notion that woman, Sophie, brought up to provide Emile with civilization and rationality brought moral perfec-a perfect wife. tion, proposing that virtuous societies were instead 8. Paradise Lost 4.634-3 8 (Wollstonecraft's italthe primitive ones that remained closest to nature. ics). Rousseau's opinions about women, also alluded to 9. Paradise Lost 8.381-9 1 (Wollstonecraft's italin this chapter, are outlined in Emile (1762), a ics). blend of educational treatise and novel. In book 5 1. Temperament, character.
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have to proceed, not to begin, the important task of learning to think and reason.
To prevent any misconstruction, I must add, that I do not believe that a private education2 can work the wonders which some sanguine writers have attributed to it. Men and women must be educated, in a great degree, by the opinions and manners of the society they live in. In every age there has been a stream of popular opinion that has carried all before it, and given a family character, as it were, to the century. It may then fairly be inferred, that, till society be differently constituted, much cannot be expected from education. It is, however, sufficient for my present purpose to assert, that, whatever effect circumstances have on the abilities, every being may become virtuous by the exercise of its own reason; for if but one being was created with vicious inclinations, that is positively bad, what can save us from atheism? or if we worship a God, is not that God a devil?
Consequently, the most perfect education, in my opinion, is such an exercise of the understanding as is best calculated to strengthen the body and form the heart. Or, in other words, to enable the individual to attain such habits of virtue as will render it independent. In fact, it is a farce to call any being virtuous whose virtues do not result from the exercise of its own reason. This was Rousseau's opinion respecting men: I extend it to women, and confidently assert that they have been drawn out of their sphere by false refinement, and not by an endeavour to acquire masculine qualities. Still the regal homage which they receive is so intoxicating, that till the manners of the times are changed, and formed on more reasonable principles, it may be impossible to convince them that the illegitimate power, which they obtain, by degrading themselves, is a curse, and that they must return to nature and equality, if they wish to secure the placid satisfaction that unsophisticated affections impart. But for this epoch we must wait�wait, perhaps, till kings and nobles, enlightened by reason, and, preferring the real dignity of man to childish state,3 throw off their gaudy hereditary trappings: and if then women do not resign the arbitrary power of beauty�they will prove that they have less mind than man.
I may be accused of arrogance; still I must declare what I firmly believe, that all the writers who have written on the subject of female education and manners from Rousseau to Dr. Gregory,4 have contributed to render women more artificial, weak characters, than they would otherwise have been; and, consequently, more useless members of society. I might have expressed this conviction in a lower key; but I am afraid it would have been the whine of affectation, and not the faithful expression of my feelings, of the clear result, which experience and reflection have led me to draw. When I come to that division of the subject, I shall advert to the passages that I more particularly disapprove of, in the works of the authors I have just alluded to; but it is first necessary to observe, that my objection extends to the whole purport of those books, which tend, in my opinion, to degrade one half of the human species, and render women pleasing at the expense of every solid virtue.
Though, to reason on Rousseau's ground, if man did attain a degree of perfection of mind when his body arrived at maturity, it might be proper, in
2. Education at home. book on the education of women, A Father's Legacy 3. Pomp, costly display. to His Daughters (1774). 4. John Gregory, Scottish author of a widely read
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order to make a man and his wife one, that she should rely entirely on his understanding; and the graceful ivy, clasping the oak that supported it, would form a whole in which strength and beauty would be equally conspicuous. But, alas! husbands, as well as their helpmates, are often only overgrown children; nay, thanks to early debauchery, scarcely men in their outward form� and if the blind lead the blind, one need not come from heaven to tell us the consequence.
Many are the causes that, in the present corrupt state of society, contribute to enslave women by cramping their understandings and sharpening their senses. One, perhaps, that silently does more mischief than all the rest, is their disregard of order.
To do every thing in an orderly manner, is a most important precept, which women, who, generally speaking, receive only a disorderly kind of education, seldom attend to with that degree of exactness that men, who from their infancy are broken into method, observe. This negligent kind of guess-work, for what other epithet can be used to point out the random exertions of a sort of instinctive common sense, never brought to the test of reason? prevents their generalizing matters of fact�so they do to-day, what they did yesterday, merely because they did it yesterday.
This contempt of the understanding in early life has more baneful consequences than is commonly supposed; for the little knowledge which women of strong minds attain, is, from various circumstances, of a more desultory kind than the knowledge of men, and it is acquired more by sheer observations on real life, than from comparing what has been individually observed with the results of experience generalized by speculation. Led by their dependent situation and domestic employments more into society, what they learn is rather by snatches; and as learning is with them, in general, only a secondary thing, they do not pursue any one branch with that persevering ardour necessary to give vigor to the faculties, and clearness to the judgment. In the present state of society, a little learning is required to support the character of a gentleman; and boys are obliged to submit to a few years of discipline. But in the education of women, the cultivation of the understanding is always subordinate to the acquirement of some corporeal accomplishment; even while enervated by confinement and false notions of modesty, the body is prevented from attaining that grace and beauty which relaxed half-formed limbs never exhibit. Besides, in youth their faculties are not brought forward by emulation; and having no serious scientific study, if they have natural sagacity it is turned too soon on life and manners. They dwell on effects, and modifications, without tracing them back to causes; and complicated rules to adjust behaviour are a weak substitute for simple principles.
As a proof that education gives this appearance of weakness to females, we may instance the example of military men, who are, like them, sent into the world before their minds have been stored with knowledge or fortified by principles. The consequences are similar; soldiers acquire a little superficial knowledge, snatched from the muddy current of conversation, and, from continually mixing with society, they gain, what is termed a knowledge of the world; and this acquaintance with manners and customs has frequently been confounded with a knowledge of the human heart. But can the crude fruit of casual observation, never brought to the test of judgment, formed by comparing speculation and experience, deserve such a distinction? Soldiers, as well as women, practice the minor virtues with punctilious politeness. Where is
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then the sexual difference, when the education has been the same? All the difference that I can discern, arises from the superior advantage of liberty, which enables the former to see more of life.
It is wandering from my present subject, perhaps, to make a political remark; but, as it was produced naturally by the train of my reflections, I shall not pass it silently over.
Standing armies can never consist of resolute, robust men; they may be well disciplined machines, but they will seldom contain men under the influence of strong passions, or with very vigorous faculties. And as for any depth of understanding, I will venture to affirm, that it is as rarely to be found in the army as amongst women; and the cause, I maintain, is the same. It may be further observed, that officers are also particularly attentive to their persons, fond of dancing, crowded rooms, adventures, and ridicule.5 Like the fair sex, the business of their lives is gallantry.�They were taught to please, and they only live to please. Yet they do not lose their rank in the distinction of sexes, for they are still reckoned superior to women, though in what their superiority consists, beyond what I have just mentioned, it is difficult to discover.
The great misfortune is this, that they both acquire manners before morals, and a knowledge of life before they have, from reflection, any acquaintance with the grand ideal outline of human nature. The consequence is natural; satisfied with common nature, they become a prey to prejudices, and taking all their opinions on credit, they blindly submit to authority. So that, if they have any sense, it is a kind of instinctive glance, that catches proportions, and decides with respect to manners; but fails when arguments are to be pursued below the surface, or opinions analyzed.
May not the same remark be applied to women? Nay, the argument may be carried still further, for they are both thrown out of a useful station by the unnatural distinctions established in civilized life. Riches and hereditary honours have made cyphers of women to give consequence to the numerical fig- ure;6 and idleness has produced a mixture of gallantry and despotism into society, which leads the very men who are the slaves of their mistresses to tyrannize over their sisters, wives, and daughters. This is only keeping them in rank and file, it is true. Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience; but, as blind obedience is ever sought for by power, tyrants and sensualists are in the right when they endeavour to keep women in the dark, because the former only want slaves, and the latter a play-thing. The sensualist, indeed, has been the most dangerous of tyrants, and women have been duped by their lovers, as princes by their ministers, whilst dreaming that they reigned over them.
I now principally allude to Rousseau, for his character of Sophia is, undoubtedly, a captivating one, though it appears to me grossly unnatural; however it is not the superstructure, but the foundation of her character, the principles on which her education was built, that I mean to attack; nay, warmly as I admire the genius of that able writer, whose opinions I shall often have occasion to cite, indignation always takes place of admiration, and the rigid frown of insulted virtue effaces the smile of complacency, which his eloquent
5. Why should women be censured with petulant 6. Much as a zero added to a number multiplies acrimony, because they seem to have a passion for its value by a factor of ten, in a hierarchical society a scarlet coat? Has not education placed them women magnify the status of the men with whom more on a level with soldiers than any other class they are allied. of men? [Wollstonecraft's note].
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periods are wont to raise, when I read his voluptuous reveries. Is this the man, who, in his ardor for virtue, would banish all the soft arts of peace, and almost carry us back to Spartan discipline? Is this the man who delights to paint the useful struggles of passion, the triumphs of good dispositions, and the heroic flights which carry the glowing soul out of itself?�How are these mighty sentiments lowered when he describes the pretty foot and enticing airs of his little favorite! But, for the present, I waive the subject, and, instead of severely reprehending the transient effusions of overweening sensibility, I shall only observe, that whoever has cast a benevolent eye on society, must often have been gratified by the sight of a humble mutual love, not dignified by sentiment, or strengthened by a union in intellectual pursuits. The domestic trifles of the day have afforded matters for cheerful converse, and innocent caresses have softened toils which did not require great exercise of mind or stretch of thought: yet, has not the sight of this moderate felicity excited more tenderness than respect? An emotion similar to what we feel when children are playing, or animals sporting,7 whilst the contemplation of the noble struggles of suffering merit has raised admiration, and carried our thoughts to that world where sensation will give place to reason.
Women are, therefore, to be considered either as moral beings, or so weak that they must be entirely subjected to the superior faculties of men.
Let us examine this question. Rousseau declares that a woman should never, for a moment, feel herself independent, that she should be governed by fear to exercise her natural cunning, and made a coquetish slave in order to render her a more alluring object of desire, a sweeter companion to man, whenever he chooses to relax himself. He carries the arguments, which he pretends to draw from the indications of nature, still further, and insinuates that truth and fortitude, the corner stones of all human virtue, should be cultivated with certain restrictions, because, with respect to the female character, obedience is the grand lesson which ought to be impressed with unrelenting rigor.8
What nonsense! when will a great man arise with sufficient strength of mind to puff away the fumes which pride and sensuality have thus spread over the subject! If women are by nature inferior to men, their virtues must be the same in quality, if not in degree, or virtue is a relative idea; consequently, their conduct should be founded on the same principles, and have the same aim.
Connected with man as daughters, wives, and mothers, their moral character may be estimated by their manner of fulfilling those simple duties; but the end, the grand end of their exertions should be to unfold their own faculties and acquire the dignity of conscious virtue. They may try to render their road pleasant; but ought never to forget, in common with man, that life yields not the felicity which can satisfy an immortal soul. I do not mean to insinuate, that either sex should be so lost in abstract reflections or distant views, as to forget the affections and duties that lie before them, and are, in truth, the means appointed to produce the fruit of life; on the contrary, I would warmly
7. Similar feelings has Milton's pleasing picture of solitary recess, an outcast of fortune, rising supeparadisiacal happiness ever raised in my mind; yet, rior to passion and discontent [Wollstonecraft's instead of envying the lovely pair, I have, with con-note]. scious dignity, or Satanic pride, turned to hell for 8. Rousseau had written in Emile: "What is most sublimer objects. In the same style, when viewing wanted in a woman is gentleness; formed to obey some noble monument of human art, I have traced a creature so imperfect as man, a creature often the emanation of the Deity in the order I admired, vicious and always faulty, she should early learn to till, descending from that giddy height, I have submit to injustice and to suffer the wrongs caught myself contemplating the grandest of all inflicted on her by her husband without comhuman sights;�for fancy quickly placed, in some plaint."
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recommend them, even while I assert, that they afford most satisfaction when they are considered in their true, sober light.
Probably the prevailing opinion, that woman was created for man, may have taken its rise from Moses's poetical story;9 yet, as very few, it is presumed, who have bestowed any serious thought on the subject, ever supposed that Eve was, literally speaking, one of Adam's ribs, the deduction must be allowed to fall to the ground; or, only be so far admitted as it proves that man, from the remotest antiquity, found it convenient to exert his strength to subjugate his companion, and his invention to shew that she ought to have her neck bent under the yoke, because the whole creation was only created for his convenience or pleasure.
Let it not be concluded that I wish to invert the order of things; I have already granted, that, from the constitution of their bodies, men seem to be designed by Providence to attain a greater degree of virtue.11 speak collectively of the whole sex; but I see not the shadow of a reason to conclude that their virtues should differ in respect to their nature. In fact, how can they, if virtue has only one eternal standard? I must therefore, if I reason consequentially, as strenuously maintain that they have the same simple direction, as that there is a God.
It follows then that cunning should not be opposed to wisdom, little cares to great exertions, or insipid softness, varnished over with the name of gentleness, to that fortitude which grand views alone can inspire.
I shall be told that woman would then lose many of her peculiar graces, and the opinion of a well known poet might be quoted to refute my unqualified assertion. For Pope has said, in the name of the whole male sex,
Yet ne'er so sure our passion to create, As when she touch'd the brink of all we hate.2
In what light this sally places men and women, I shall leave to the judicious to determine; meanwhile I shall content myself with observing, that I cannot discover why, unless they are mortal, females should always be degraded by being made subservient to love or lust.
To speak disrespectfully of love is, I know, high treason against sentiment and fine feelings; but I wish to speak the simple language of truth, and rather to address the head than the heart. To endeavor to reason love out of the world, would be to out-Quixote Cervantes,3 and equally offend against common sense; but an endeavor to restrain this tumultuous passion, and prove that it should not be allowed to dethrone superior powers, or to usurp the sceptre which the understanding should ever coolly wield, appears less wild.
Youth is the season for love in both sexes; but in those days of thoughtless enjoyment provision should be made for the more important years of life, when reflection takes place of sensation. But Rousseau, and most of the male writers who have followed his steps, have warmly inculcated that the whole tendency of female education ought to be directed to one point:�to render them pleasing.
Let me reason with the supporters of this opinion who have any knowledge of human nature, do they imagine that marriage can eradicate the habitude
9. The story of the creation of Eve from the rib of are, in general, physically stronger than women. Adam (Genesis 2.21�22). Traditionally, the first 2. Alexander Pope's Moral Essays 2, "Of the Char- five books of the Old Testament were attributed to acters of Women," lines 51�52. the authorship of Moses. 3. I.e., to outdo the hero of Cervantes's Don Quix1. In the third paragraph of her Introduction ote (1605) in trying to accomplish the impossible. (p. 171 above), Wollstonecraft had said that men
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of life? The woman who has only been taught to please will soon find that her charms are oblique sunbeams, and that they cannot have much effect on her husband's heart when they are seen every day, when the summer is passed and gone. Will she then have sufficient native energy to look into herself for comfort, and cultivate her dormant faculties? or, is it not more rational to expect that she will try to please other men; and, in the emotions raised by the expectation of new conquests, endeavor to forget the mortification her love or pride has received? When the husband ceases to be a lover�and the time will inevitably come, her desire of pleasing will then grow languid, or become a spring of bitterness; and love, perhaps, the most evanescent of all passions, gives place to jealousy or vanity.
I now speak of women who are restrained by principle or prejudice; such women, though they would shrink from an intrigue with real abhorrence, yet, nevertheless, wish to be convinced by the homage of gallantry that they are cruelly neglected by their husbands; or, days and weeks are spent in dreaming of the happiness enjoyed by congenial souls till their health is undermined and their spirits broken by discontent. How then can the great art of pleasing be such a necessary study? it is only useful to a mistress; the chaste wife, and serious mother, should only consider her power to please as the polish of her virtues, and the affection of her husband as one of the comforts that render her task less difficult and her life happier.�But, whether she be loved or neglected, her first wish should be to make herself respectable,4 and not to rely for all her happiness on a being subject to like infirmities with herself.
The worthy Dr. Gregory fell into a similar error. I respect his heart; but entirely disapprove of his celebrated Legacy to his Daughters.
He advises them to cultivate a fondness for dress, because a fondness for dress, he asserts, is natural to them. I am unable to comprehend what either he or Rousseau mean, when they frequently use this indefinite term.5 If they told us that in a pre-existent state the soul was fond of dress, and brought this inclination with it into a new body, I should listen to them with a half smile, as I often do when I hear a rant about innate elegance.�But if he only meant to say that the exercise of the faculties will produce this fondness�I deny it.� It is not natural; but arises, like false ambition in men, from a love of power.
Dr. Gregory goes much further; he actually recommends dissimulation, and advises an innocent girl to give the lie to her feelings, and not dance with spirit, when gaiety of heart would make her feel eloquent without making her gestures immodest. In the name of truth and common sense, why should not one woman acknowledge that she can take more exercise than another? or, in other words, that she has a sound constitution; and why, to damp innocent vivacity, is she darkly to be told that men will draw conclusions which she little thinks of?6�Let the libertine draw what inference he pleases; but, I hope, that no sensible mother will restrain the natural frankness of youth by instilling such indecent cautions. Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speak- eth;7 and a wiser than Solomon hath said, that the heart should be made clean,8 and not trivial ceremonies observed, which is not very difficult to fulfill with scrupulous exactness when vice reigns in the heart.
4. I.e., morally worthy of respect. betray her capacity for physical pleasure. 5. I.e., "natural." 7. Matthew 12.34. 6. In A Father's Legacy1 to His Daughters, Gregory 8. Psalm 51 (attributed to David, the "wiser than had advised a girl, when she dances, not "to forget Solomon"), 10: "Create in me a clean heart, 0 the delicacy of [her] sex," lest she be "thought to God; and renew a right spirit within me." discover a spirit she little dreams of"�i.e., lest she
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Women ought to endeavor to purify their heart; but can they do so when their uncultivated understandings make them entirely dependent on their senses for employment and amusement, when no noble pursuit sets them above the little vanities of the day, or enables them to curb the wild emotions that agitate a reed over which every passing breeze has power? To gain the affections of a virtuous man is affectation necessary? Nature has given woman a weaker frame than man; but, to ensure her husband's affections, must a wife, who by the exercise of her mind and body whilst she was discharging the duties of a daughter, wife, and mother, has allowed her constitution to retain its natural strength, and her nerves a healthy tone, is she, I say, to condescend to use art and feign a sickly delicacy in order to secure her husband's affection? Weakness may excite tenderness, and gratify the arrogant pride of man; but the lordly caresses of a protector will not gratify a noble mind that pants for, and deserves to be respected. Fondness is a poor substitute for friendship!
In a seraglio, I grant, that all these arts are necessary; the epicure must have his palate tickled, or he will sink into apathy; but have women so little ambition as to be satisfied with such a condition? Can they supinely dream life away in the lap of pleasure, or the languor of weariness, rather than assert their claim to pursue reasonable pleasures and render themselves conspicuous by practising the virtues which dignify mankind? Surely she has not an immortal soul who can loiter life away merely employed to adorn her person, that she may amuse the languid hours, and soften the cares of a fellow-creature who is willing to be enlivened by her smiles and tricks, when the serious business of life is over.
Besides, the woman who strengthens her body and exercises her mind will, by managing her family and practising various virtues, become the friend, and not the humble dependent of her husband; and if she, by possessing such substantial qualities, merit his regard, she will not find it necessary to conceal her affection, nor to pretend to an unnatural coldness of constitution to excite her husband's passions. In fact, if we revert to history, we shall find that the women who have distinguished themselves have neither been the most beautiful nor the most gentle of their sex.
Nature, or, to speak with strict propriety, God, has made all things right; but man has sought him out many inventions to mar the work. I now allude to that part of Dr. Gregory's treatise, where he advises a wife never to let her husband know the extent of her sensibility or affection. Voluptuous precaution, and as ineffectual as absurd.�Love, from its very nature, must be transitory. To seek for a secret that would render it constant, would be as wild a search as for the philosopher's stone, or the grand panacea:9 and the discovery would be equally useless, or rather pernicious to mankind. The most holy band of society is friendship. It has been well said, by a shrewd satirist, "that rare as true love is, true friendship is still rarer."1
This is an obvious truth, and the cause not lying deep, will not elude a slight glance of inquiry.
Love, the common passion, in which chance and sensation take place of choice and reason, is, in some degree, felt by the mass of mankind; for it is not necessary to speak, at present, of the emotions that rise above or sink
9. A medicine reputed to cure all diseases. "The 1. Maxim 473 of La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680), philosopher's stone," in alchemy, had the power of the great French writer of epigrams, transmuting base metals into gold.
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below love. This passion, naturally increased by suspense and difficulties, draws the mind out of its accustomed state, and exalts the affections; but the security of marriage, allowing the fever of love to subside, a healthy temperature is thought insipid, only by those who have not sufficient intellect to substitute the calm tenderness of friendship, the confidence of respect, instead of blind admiration, and the sensual emotions of fondness.
This is, must be, the course of nature.�Friendship or indifference inevitably succeeds love.�And this constitution seems perfectly to harmonize with the system of government which prevails in the moral world. Passions are spurs to action, and open the mind; but they sink into mere appetites, become a personal and momentary gratification, when the object is gained, and the satisfied mind rests in enjoyment. The man who had some virtue whilst he was struggling for a crown, often becomes a voluptuous tyrant when it graces his brow; and, when the lover is not lost in the husband, the dotard, a prey to childish caprices, and fond jealousies, neglects the serious duties of life, and the caresses which should excite confidence in his children are lavished on the overgrown child, his wife.
In order to fulfil the duties of life, and to be able to pursue with vigour the various employments which form the moral character, a master and mistress of a family ought not to continue to love each other with passion. I mean to say, that they ought not to indulge those emotions which disturb the order of society, and engross the thoughts that should be otherwise employed. The mind that has never been engrossed by one object wants vigor�if it can long be so, it is weak.
A mistaken education, a narrow, uncultivated mind, and many sexual prejudices, tend to make women more constant than men; but, for the present, I shall not touch on this branch of the subject. I will go still further, and advance, without dreaming of a paradox, that an unhappy marriage is often very advantageous to a family, and that the neglected wife is, in general, the best mother.2 And this would almost always be the consequence if the female mind were more enlarged: for, it seems to be the common dispensation of Providence, that what we gain in present enjoyment should be deducted from the treasure of life, experience; and that when we are gathering the flowers of the day and revelling in pleasure, the solid fruit of toil and wisdom should not be caught at the same time. The way lies before us, we must turn to the right or left; and he who will pass life away in bounding from one pleasure to another, must not complain if he acquire neither wisdom nor respectability of character.
Supposing, for a moment, that the soul is not immortal, and that man was only created for the present scene,�I think we should have reason to complain that love, infantine fondness, ever grew insipid and palled upon the sense. Let us eat, drink, and love for to-morrow we die, would be, in fact, the language of reason, the morality of life; and who but a fool would part with a reality for a fleeting shadow? But, if awed by observing the improbable3 powers of the mind, we disdain to confine our wishes or thoughts to such a comparatively mean field of action; that only appears grand and important, as it is connected with a boundless prospect and sublime hopes, what necessity is there for false
2. Wollstonecraft's point is that a woman who is 3. Poston points out that this may be a misprint not preoccupied with her husband (and his atten-in the second edition for "improvable," which tions to her) has more time and attention for her occurs in the first edition. children.
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hood in conduct, and why must the sacred majesty of truth be violated to detain a deceitful good that saps the very foundation of virtue? Why must the female mind be tainted by coquetish arts to gratify the sensualist, and prevent love from subsiding into friendship, or compassionate tenderness, when there are not qualities on which friendship can be built? Let the honest heart shew itself, and reason teach passion to submit to necessity; or, let the dignified pursuit of virtue and knowledge raise the mind above those emotions which rather imbitter than sweeten the cup of life, when they are not restrained within due bounds.
I do not mean to allude to the romantic passion, which is the concomitant of genius.�Who can clip its wing? But that grand passion not proportioned to the puny enjoyments of life, is only true to the sentiment, and feeds on itself. The passions which have been celebrated for their durability have always been unfortunate. They have acquired strength by absence and constitutional melancholy.�The fancy has hovered around a form of beauty dimly seen� but familiarity might have turned admiration into disgust; or, at least, into indifference, and allowed the imagination leisure to start fresh game. With perfect propriety, according to his view of things, does Bousseau make the mistress of his soul, Eloisa, love St. Preux, when life was fading before her;4 but this is no proof of the immortality of the passion.
Of the same complexion is Dr. Gregory's advice respecting delicacy of sentiment, 5 which he advises a woman not to acquire, if she have determined to marry. This determination, however, perfectly consistent with his former advice, he calls indelicate, and earnestly persuades his daughters to conceal it, though it may govern their conduct;�as if it were indelicate to have the common appetites of human nature.
Noble morality! and consistent with the cautious prudence of a little soul that cannot extend its views beyond the present minute division of existence. If all the faculties of woman's mind are only to be cultivated as they respect her dependence on man; if, when a husband be obtained, she have arrived at her goal, and meanly proud rests satisfied with such a paltry crown, let her grovel contentedly, scarcely raised by her employments above the animal kingdom; but, if, struggling for the prize of her high calling,6 she look beyond the present scene, let her cultivate her understanding without stopping to consider what character the husband may have whom she is destined to marry. Let her only determine, without being too anxious about present happiness, to acquire the qualities that ennoble a rational being, and a rough inelegant husband may shock her taste without destroying her peace of mind. She will not model her soul to suit the frailties of her companion, but to bear with them: his character may be a trial, but not an impediment to virtue.
If Dr. Gregory confined his remark to romantic expectations of constant love and congenial feelings, he should have recollected that experience will banish what advice can never make us cease to wish for, when the imagination is kept alive at the expence of reason.
I own it frequently happens that women who have fostered a romantic
4. In Rousseau's Julie, ou la Nouvelle Heloise (1761), Julie, after a life of fidelity to her husband, reveals on her deathbed that she has never lost her passion for St. Preux, her lover when she was young. Wollstonecraft accepts the common opinion that Julie represents Madame d'Houdetot, with whom Rousseau was in love when he wrote the novel.
5. I.e., too elevated and refined a notion of what to expect in a man. 6. An echo of Philippians 3.14, where St. Paul writes, "I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus."
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unnatural delicacy of feeling, waste their7 lives in imagining how happy they should have been with a husband who could love them with a fervid increasing affection every day, and all day. Rut they might as well pine married as single� and would not be a jot more unhappy with a bad husband than longing for a good one. That a proper education; or, to speak with more precision, a well stored mind, would enable a woman to support a single life with dignity, I grant; but that she should avoid cultivating her taste, lest her husband should occasionally shock it, is quitting a substance for a shadow. To say the truth, I do not know of what use is an improved taste, if the individual be not rendered more independent of the casualties of life; if new sources of enjoyment, only dependent on the solitary operations of the mind, are not opened. People of taste, married or single, without distinction, will ever be disgusted by various things that touch not less observing minds. On this conclusion the argument must not be allowed to hinge; but in the whole sum of enjoyment is taste to be denominated a blessing?
The question is, whether it procures most pain or pleasure? The answer will decide the propriety of Dr. Gregory's advice, and shew how absurd and tyrannic it is thus to lay down a system of slavery; or to attempt to educate moral beings by any other rules than those deduced from pure reason, which apply to the whole species.
Gentleness of manners, forbearance, and long-suffering, are such amiable Godlike qualities, that in sublime poetic strains the Deity has been invested with them; and, perhaps, no representation of his goodness so strongly fastens on the human affections as those that represent him abundant in mercy and willing to pardon. Gentleness, considered in this point of view, bears on its front all the characteristics of grandeur, combined with the winning graces of condescension; but what a different aspect it assumes when it is the submissive demeanour of dependence, the support of weakness that loves, because it wants protection; and is forbearing, because it must silently endure injuries; smiling under the lash at which it dare not snarl. Abject as this picture appears, it is the portrait of an accomplished woman, according to the received opinion of female excellence, separated by specious reasoners from human excellence. Or, they8 kindly restore the rib, and make one moral being of a man and woman; not forgetting to give her all the "submissive charms."9 How women are to exist in that state where there is to be neither marrying nor giving in marriage,' we are not told, For though moralists have agreed that the tenor of life seems to prove that man is prepared by various circumstances for a future state, they constantly concur in advising woman only to provide for the present. Gentleness, docility, and a spaniel-like affection are, on this ground, consistently recommended as the cardinal virtues of the sex; and, disregarding the arbitrary economy of nature, one writer has declared that it is masculine for a woman to be melancholy. She was created to be the toy of man, his rattle,
7. For example, the herd of Novelists [Wollstone-married state in heaven male and female are craft 's note]. The author's reference is to women embodied in a single angelic form. who have formed their expectations of love as it is 9. Milton says of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost misrepresented in the sentimental novels of their 4.497-9 9 that "he in delight / Both of her beauty time. and submissive charms / Smiled with superior 8. Vide [see] Rousseau and Swedenborg [Woll-love." stonecraft's note]. Rousseau's view was that a wife 1. "For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor constituted an integral moral being only in concert are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God with her husband. Emanuel Swedenborg (1688� in heaven" (Matthew 22.30). 1772), the Swedish theosophist, held that in the
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and it must jingle in his ears whenever, dismissing reason, he chooses to be amused.
To recommend gentleness, indeed, on a broad basis is strictly philosophical. A frail being should labor to be gentle. But when forbearance confounds right and wrong, it ceases to be a virtue; and, however convenient it may be found in a companion�that companion will ever be considered as an inferior, and only inspire a vapid tenderness, which easily degenerates into contempt. Still, if advice could really make a being gentle, whose natural disposition admitted not of such a fine polish, something towards the advancement of order would be attained; but if, as might quickly be demonstrated, only affectation be produced by this indiscriminate counsel, which throws a stumbling-block in the way of gradual improvement, and true melioration of temper, the sex is not much benefited by sacrificing solid virtues to the attainment of superficial graces, though for a few years they may procure the individuals regal sway.
As a philosopher, I read with indignation the plausible epithets which men use to soften their insults; and, as a moralist, I ask what is meant by such heterogeneous associations, as fair defects, amiable weaknesses, &c.?2 If there be but one criterion of morals, but one archetype of man, women appear to be suspended by destiny, according to the vulgar tale of Mahomet's coffin;3 they have neither the unerring instinct of brutes, nor are allowed to fix the eye of reason on a perfect model. They were made to be loved, and must not aim at respect, lest they should be hunted out of society as masculine.
But to view the subject in another point of view. Do passive indolent women make the best wives? Confining our discussion to the present moment of existence, let us see how such weak creatures perform their part. Do the women who, by the attainment of a few superficial accomplishments, have strengthened the prevailing prejudice, merely contribute to the happiness of their husbands? Do they display their charms merely to amuse them? And have women, who have early imbibed notions of passive obedience, sufficient character to manage a family or educate children? So far from it, that, after surveying the history of woman, I cannot help, agreeing with the severest satirist, considering the sex as the weakest as well as the most oppressed half of the species. What does history disclose but marks of inferiority, and how few women have emancipated themselves from the galling yoke of sovereign man?�So few, that the exceptions remind me of an ingenious conjecture respecting Newton: that he was probably a being of a superior order, accidentally caged in a human body.4 Following the same train of thinking, I have been led to imagine that the few extraordinary women who have rushed in eccentrical directions out of the orbit prescribed to their sex, were male spirits, confined by mistake in female frames. But if it be not philosophical to think of sex when the soul is mentioned, the inferiority must depend on the organs; or the heavenly fire, which is to ferment the clay, is not given in equal portions.
But avoiding, as I have hitherto done, any direct comparison of the two sexes collectively, or frankly acknowledging the inferiority of woman, according to the present appearance of things, I shall only insist that men have increased that inferiority till women are almost sunk below the standard of
2. In Paradise Lost 10.891-92 the fallen Adam suspended in his tomb. refers to Eve as "this fair defect / Of Nature"; and 4. A possible reminiscence of Pope's An Essay on in Moral Essays 2.43 Pope describes women as Man 2.31-34 : "Superior beings [i.e., angels] . . . / "Fine by defect, and delicately weak." Admired such wisdom in an earthly shape, / And 3. A legend has it that Muhammad's coffin hovers showed a Newton as wre show an ape."
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rational creatures. Let their faculties have room to unfold, and their virtues to gain strength, and then determine where the whole sex must stand in the intellectual scale. Yet let it be remembered, that for a small number of distinguished women I do not ask a place.
It is difficult for us purblind mortals to say to what height human discoveries and improvements may arrive when the gloom of despotism subsides, which makes us stumble at every step; but, when morality shall be settled on a more solid basis, then, without being gifted with a prophetic spirit, I will venture to predict that woman will be either the friend or slave of man. We shall not, as at present, doubt whether she is a moral agent, or the link which unites man with brutes.5 But, should it then appear, that like the brutes they were principally created for the use of man, he will let them patiently bite the bridle, and not mock them with empty praise; or, should their rationality be proved, he will not impede their improvement merely to gratify his sensual appetites. He will not, with all the graces of rhetoric, advise them to submit implicitly their understanding to the guidance of man. He will not, when he treats of the education of women, assert that they ought never to have the free use of reason, nor would he recommend cunning and dissimulation to beings who are acquiring, in like manner as himself, the virtues of humanity.
Surely there can be but one rule of right, if morality has an eternal foundation, and whoever sacrifices virtue, strictly so called, to present convenience, or whose duty it is to act in such a manner, lives only for the passing day, and cannot be an accountable creature.
The poet then should have dropped his sneer when he says,
If weak women go astray, The stars are more in fault than they.6
For that they are bound by the adamantine chain of destiny is most certain, if it be proved that they are never to exercise their own reason, never to be independent, never to rise above opinion, or to feel the dignity of a rational will that only bows to God, and often forgets that the universe contains any being but itself and the model of perfection to which its ardent gaze is turned, to adore attributes that, softened into virtues, may be imitated in kind, though the degree overwhelms the enraptured mind.
If, I say, for I would not impress by declamation when Reason offers her sober light, if they be really capable of acting like rational creatures, let them not be treated like slaves; or, like the brutes who are dependent on the reason of man, when they associate with him; but cultivate their minds, give them the salutary, sublime curb of principle, and let them attain conscious dignity by feeling themselves only dependent on God. Teach them, in common with man, to submit to necessity, instead of giving, to render them more pleasing, a sex to morals.
Further, should experience prove that they cannot attain the same degree
5. Rousseau doubted that a woman, of herself, (English Dominican translation of St. Thomas, was a moral agent. There had been a long dispute edited by Anton C. Pegis, The Basic Writings of about the question of woman being part of human-Saint Thomas Aquinas [New York, 1945], I, 880) kind. In the Sumina Theologica (Question XVII, ]Poston's note]. Art. 1) St. Thomas Aquinas concedes, with Aris-6. Matthew Prior, "Hans Carvel," lines 11�12, totle, that the "production of woman comes from alluding to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar 1.2.141� a defect in the active power, or from some material 42: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / indisposition, or even from some external influ-But in ourselves." ence, such as that of a south wind, which is moist"
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of strength of mind, perseverance, and fortitude, let their virtues be the same in kind, though they may vainly struggle for the same degree; and the superiority of man will be equally clear, if not clearer; and truth, as it is a simple principle, which admits of no modification, would be common to both. Nay, the order of society as it is at present regulated would not be inverted, for woman would then only have the rank that reason assigned her, and arts could not be practised to bring the balance even, much less to turn it.
These may be termed Utopian dreams.�Thanks to that Being who impressed them on my soul, and gave me sufficient strength of mind to dare to exert my own reason, till, becoming dependent only on him for the support of my virtue, I view, with indignation, the mistaken notions that enslave my sex.
I love man as my fellow; but his scepter, real or usurped, extends not to me, unless the reason of an individual demands my homage; and even then the submission is to reason, and not to man. In fact, the conduct of an accountable being must be regulated by the operations of its own reason; or on what foundation rests the throne of God?
It appears to me necessary to dwell on these obvious truths, because females have been insulated, as it were; and, while they have been stripped of the virtues that should clothe humanity, they have been decked with artificial graces that enable them to exercise a short-lived tyranny. Love, in their bosoms, taking place of every nobler passion, their sole ambition is to be fair, to raise emotion instead of inspiring respect; and this ignoble desire, like the servility in absolute monarchies, destroys all strength of character. Liberty is the mother of virtue, and if women be, by their very constitution, slaves, and not allowed to breathe the sharp invigorating air of freedom, they must ever languish like exotics,7 and be reckoned beautiful flaws in nature.
As to the argument respecting the subjection in which the sex has ever been held, it retorts on man. The many have always been enthralled by the few; and monsters, who scarcely have shewn any discernment of human excellence, have tyrannized over thousands of their fellow-creatures. Why have men of superiour endowments submitted to such degradation? For, is it not universally acknowledged that kings, viewed collectively, have ever been inferior, in abilities and virtue, to the same number of men taken from the common mass of mankind�yet, have they not, and are they not still treated with a degree of reverence that is an insult to reason? China is not the only country where a living man has been made a God.8 Men have submitted to superior strength to enjoy with impunity the pleasure of the moment�women have only done the same, and therefore till it is proved that the courtier, who servilely resigns the birthright of a man, is not a moral agent, it cannot be demonstrated that woman is essentially inferior to man because she has always been subjugated.
Brutal force has hitherto governed the world, and that the science of politics is in its infancy, is evident from philosophers scrupling to give the knowledge most useful to man that determinate distinction.
I shall not pursue this argument any further than to establish an obvious inference, that as sound politics diffuse liberty, mankind, including woman, will become more wise and virtuous.
7. Hot-house plants, which do not thrive in the within England by declaring "the air of England English climate. There is also an echo here of the . . . too pure for slaves to breathe in." language of the Mansfield Judgment of 1772, the 8. The emperors of China were regarded as deilegal decision that effectually prohibited slavery ties.
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From Chap. 4. Observations on the State of Degradation to Which Woman Is Reduced by Various Causes
$ $ #
In the middle rank of life, to continue the comparison,9 men, in their youth, are prepared for professions, and marriage is not considered as the grand feature in their lives; whilst women, on the contrary, have no other scheme to sharpen their faculties. It is not business, extensive plans, or any of the excursive flights of ambition, that engross their attention; no, their thoughts are not employed in rearing such noble structures. To rise in the world, and have the liberty of running from pleasure to pleasure, they must marry advantageously, and to this object their time is sacrificed, and their persons often legally prostituted. A man when he enters any profession has his eye steadily fixed on some future advantage (and the mind gains great strength by having all its efforts directed to one point), and, full of his business, pleasure is considered as mere relaxation; whilst women seek for pleasure as the main purpose of existence. In fact, from the education, which they receive from society, the love of pleasure may be said to govern them all; but does this prove that there is a sex in souls? It would be just as rational to declare that the courtiers in France, when a destructive system of despotism had formed their character, were not men, because liberty, virtue, and humanity, were sacrificed to pleasure and vanity.�Fatal passions, which have ever domineered over the whole race!
The same love of pleasure, fostered by the whole tendency of their education, gives a trifling turn to the conduct of women in most circumstances: for instance, they are ever anxious about secondary things; and on the watch for adventures, instead of being occupied by duties.
A man, when he undertakes a journey, has, in general, the end in view; a woman thinks more of the incidental occurrences, the strange things that may possibly occur on the road; the impression that she may make on her fellow- travellers; and, above all, she is anxiously intent on the care of the finery that she carries with her, which is more than ever a part of herself, when going to figure on a new scene; when, to use an apt French turn of expression, she is going to produce a sensation.�Can dignity of mind exist with such trivial cares?
In short, women, in general, as well as the rich of both sexes, have acquired all the follies and vices of civilization, and missed the useful fruit. It is not necessary for me always to premise, that I speak of the condition of the whole sex, leaving exceptions out of the question. Their senses are inflamed, and their understandings neglected, consequently they become the prey of their senses, delicately termed sensibility, and are blown about by every momentary gust of feeling. Civilized women are, therefore, so weakened by false refinement, that, respecting morals, their condition is much below what it would be were they left in a state nearer to nature. Ever restless and anxious, their over exercised sensibility not only renders them uncomfortable themselves, but troublesome, to use a soft phrase, to others. All their thoughts turn on things calculated to excite emotion; and feeling, when they should reason, their conduct is unstable, and their opinions are wavering�not the wavering produced
9. I.e., her comparison between the social expectations that shape men and those that shape women and lead them to "degradation."
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by deliberation or progressive views, but by contradictory emotions. By fits and starts they are warm in many pursuits; yet this warmth, never concentrated into perseverance, soon exhausts itself; exhaled by its own heat, or meeting with some other fleeting passion, to which reason has never given any specific gravity, neutrality ensues. Miserable, indeed, must be that being whose cultivation of mind has only tended to inflame its passions! A distinction should be made between inflaming and strengthening them. The passions thus pampered, whilst the judgment is left unformed, what can be expected to ensue?� Undoubtedly, a mixture of madness and folly!
This observation should not be confined to the/air sex; however, at present, I only mean to apply it to them.
Novels, music, poetry, and gallantry, all tend to make women the creatures of sensation, and their character is thus formed in the mold of folly during the time they are acquiring accomplishments, the only improvement they are excited, by their station in society, to acquire. This overstretched sensibility naturally relaxes the other powers of the mind, and prevents intellect from attaining that sovereignty which it ought to attain to render a rational creature useful to others, and content with its own station: for the exercise of the understanding, as life advances, is the only method pointed out by nature to calm the passions.
Satiety has a very different effect, and I have often been forcibly struck by an emphatical description of damnation:�when the spirit is represented as continually hovering with abortive eagerness round the defiled body, unable to enjoy any thing without the organs of sense. Yet, to their senses, are women made slaves, because it is by their sensibility that they obtain present power.
And will moralists pretend to assert, that this is the condition in which one half of the human race should be encouraged to remain with listless inactivity and stupid acquiescence? Kind instructors! what were we created for? To remain, it may be said, innocent; they mean in a state of childhood.�We might as well never have been born, unless it were necessary that we should be created to enable man to acquire the noble privilege of reason, the power of discerning good from evil, whilst we lie down in the dust from whence we were taken, never to rise again.�
It would be an endless task to trace the variety of meannesses, cares, and sorrows, into which women are plunged by the prevailing opinion, that they were created rather to feel than reason, and that all the power they obtain, must be obtained by their charms and weakness:
Fine by defect, and amiably weak!1
And, made by this amiable weakness entirely dependent, excepting what they gain by illicit sway, on man, not only for protection, but advice, is it surprising that, neglecting the duties that reason alone points out, and shrinking from trials calculated to strengthen their minds, they only exert themselves to give their defects a graceful covering, which may serve to heighten their charms in the eye of the voluptuary, though it sink them below the scale of moral excellence?
Fragile in every sense of the word, they are obliged to look up to man for every comfort. In the most trifling dangers they cling to their support, with parasitical tenacity, piteously demanding succour; and their natural protector extends his arm, or lifts up his voice, to guard the lovely trembler�from what?
1. Pope's actual words were "Fine by defect, and delicately weak" (Moral Essays 2.43).
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Perhaps the frown of an old cow, or the jump of a mouse; a rat, would be a serious danger. In the name of reason, and even common sense, what can save such beings from contempt; even though they be soft and fair?
These fears, when not affected, may produce some pretty attitudes; but they shew a degree of imbecility which degrades a rational creature in a way women are not aware of�for love and esteem are very distinct things.
I am fully persuaded that we should hear of none of these infantine airs, if girls were allowed to take sufficient exercise, and not confined in close rooms till their muscles are relaxed, and their powers of digestion destroyed. To carry the remark still further, if fear in girls, instead of being cherished, perhaps, created, were treated in the same manner as cowardice in boys, we should quickly see women with more dignified aspects. It is true, they could not then with equal propriety be termed the sweet flowers that smile in the walk of man; but they would be more respectable members of society, and discharge the important duties of life by the light of their own reason. "Educate women like men," says Rousseau, "and the more they resemble our sex the less power will they have over us."2 This is the very point I aim at. I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves.
In the same strain have I heard men argue against instructing the poor; for many are the forms that aristocracy assumes. "Teach them to read, and write," say they, "and you take them out of the station assigned them by nature." An eloquent Frenchman has answered them, I will borrow his sentiments. But they know not, when they make man a brute, that they may expect every instant to see him transformed into a ferocious beast.3 Without knowledge there can be no morality!
Ignorance is a frail base for virtue! Yet, that it is the condition for which woman was organized, has been insisted upon by the writers who have most vehemently argued in favor of the superiority of man; a superiority not in degree, but essence; though, to soften the argument, they have labored to prove, with chivalrous generosity, that the sexes ought not to be compared; man was made to reason, woman to feel: and that together, flesh and spirit, they make the most perfect whole, by blending happily reason and sensibility into one character.
And what is sensibility? "Quickness of sensation; quickness of perception; delicacy." Thus is it defined by Dr. Johnson;4 and the definition gives me no other idea than of the most exquisitely polished instinct. I discern not a trace of the image of God in either sensation or matter. Refined seventy times seven,5 they are still material; intellect dwells not there; nor will fire ever make lead gold!
I come round to my old argument; if woman be allowed to have an immortal soul, she must have, as the employment of life, an understanding to improve. And when, to render the present state more complete, though every thing proves it to be but a fraction of a mighty sum, she is incited by present gratification to forget her grand destination, nature is counteracted, or she was born only to procreate and rot. Or, granting brutes, of every description, a
2. In Emile Rousseau means this as a warning to do you expect he is not to make use of his horns?" women that if they are brought up to be like men, 4. In his Dictionary1 of the English Language they will lose their sexual power over men. (1755). 3. Poston suggests that Wollstonecraft has in 5. Jesus replies, when asked whether a brother's mind the comment by Mirabeau, the Revolution-repeated sin should be forgiven "till seven times": ary statesman, to the Abbe Sieves, who had been "I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until rudely treated in the French Constituent Assembly seventy times seven" (Matthew 18.22). in 1790: "My dear abbe, you have loosed the bull:
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soul, though not a reasonable one, the exercise of instinct and sensibility may be the step, which they are to take, in this life, towards the attainment of reason in the next; so that through all eternity they will lag behind man, who, why we cannot tell, had the power given him of attaining reason in his first mode of existence.
When I treat of the peculiar duties of women, as I should treat of the peculiar duties of a citizen or father, it will be found that I do not mean to insinuate that they should be taken out of their families, speaking of the majority. "He that hath wife and children," says Lord Bacon, "hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief. Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men."6 I say the same of women. But, the welfare of society is not built on extraordinary exertions; and were it more reasonably organized, there would be still less need of great abilities, or heroic virtues.
In the regulation of a family, in the education of children, understanding, in an unsophisticated sense, is particularly required: strength both of body and mind; yet the men who, by their writings, have most earnestly labored to domesticate women, have endeavored, by arguments dictated by a gross appetite, which satiety had rendered fastidious, to weaken their bodies and cramp their minds. But, if even by these sinister methods they really -persuaded. women, by working on their feelings, to stay at home, and fulfil the duties of a mother and mistress of a family, I should cautiously oppose opinions that led women to right conduct, by prevailing on them to make the discharge of such important duties the main business of life, though reason were insulted. Yet, and I appeal to experience, if by neglecting the understanding they be as much, nay, more detached from these domestic employments, than they could be by the most serious intellectual pursuit, though it may be observed, that the mass of mankind will never vigorously pursue an intellectual object,71 may be allowed to infer that reason is absolutely necessary to enable a woman to perform any duty properly, and I must again repeat, that sensibility is not reason.
The comparison with the rich still occurs to me; for, when men neglect the duties of humanity, women will follow their example; a common stream hurries them both along with thoughtless celerity. Riches and honors prevent a man from enlarging his understanding, and enervate all his powers by reversing the order of nature, which has ever made true pleasure the reward of labor. Pleasure�enervating pleasure is, likewise, within women's reach without earning it. But, till hereditary possessions are spread abroad, how can we expect men to be proud of virtue? And, till they are, women will govern them by the most direct means, neglecting their dull domestic duties to catch the pleasure that sits lightly on the wing of time.
"The power of the woman," says some author, "is her sensibility";8 and men, not aware of the consequence, do all they can to make this power swallow up every other. Those who constantly employ their sensibility will have most: for
6. From Francis Bacon's essay "Of Marriage and phrase: "The beauty of women is considerably the Single Life." owing to their weakness, or delicacy . . ." (Edmund 7. The mass of mankind are rather the slaves of Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of their appetites than of their passions [Wollstone-Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful [London, craft's note]. 1759 (repr. The Scolar Press, 1970)], p. 219) [Pos8. The sentiment is a commonplace, but Woll-ton's note]. stonecraft may be referring to Edmund Burke's
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A VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN / 193
example; poets, painters, and composers.9 Yet, when the sensibility is thus increased at the expence of reason, and even the imagination, why do philosophical men complain of their fickleness? The sexual attention of man particularly acts on female sensibility, and this sympathy has been exercised from their youth up. A husband cannot long pay those attentions with the passion necessary to excite lively emotions, and the heart, accustomed to lively emotions, turns to a new lover, or pines in secret, the prey of virtue or prudence. I mean when the heart has really been rendered susceptible, and the taste formed; for I am apt to conclude, from what I have seen in fashionable life, that vanity is oftener fostered than sensibility by the mode of education, and the intercourse between the sexes, which I have reprobated; and that coquetry more frequently proceeds from vanity than from that inconstancy, which overstrained sensibility naturally produces.
Another argument that has had great weight with me, must, I think, have some force with every considerate benevolent heart. Girls who have been thus weakly educated, are often cruelly left by their parents without any provision; and, of course, are dependent on, not only the reason, but the bounty of their brothers. These brothers are, to view the fairest side of the question, good sort of men, and give as a favor, what children of the same parents had an equal right to. In this equivocal humiliating situation, a docile female may remain some time, with a tolerable degree of comfort. But, when the brother marries, a probable circumstance, from being considered as the mistress of the family, she is viewed with averted looks as an intruder, an unnecessary burden on the benevolence of the master of the house, and his new partner.
Who can recount the misery, which many unfortunate beings, whose minds and bodies are equally weak, suffer in such situations�unable to work, and ashamed to beg? The wife, a cold-hearted, narrow-minded, woman, and this is not an unfair supposition; for the present mode of education does not tend to enlarge the heart any more than the understanding, is jealous of the little kindness which her husband shews to his relations; and her sensibility not rising to humanity, she is displeased at seeing the property of her children lavished on an helpless sister.
These are matters of fact, which have come under my eye again and again. The consequence is obvious, the wife has recourse to cunning to undermine the habitual affection, which she is afraid openly to oppose; and neither tears nor caresses are spared till the spy is worked out of her home, and thrown on the world, unprepared for its difficulties; or sent, as a great effort of generosity, or from some regard to propriety, with a small stipend, and an uncultivated mind, into joyless solitude.
These two women may be much upon a par, with respect to reason and humanity; and changing situations, might have acted just the same selfish part; but had they been differently educated, the case would also have been very different. The wife would not have had that sensibility, of which self is the centre, and reason might have taught her not to expect, and not even to be flattered by, the affection of her husband, if it led him to violate prior duties. She would wish not to love him merely because he loved her, but on account
9. Men of these descriptions pour it into their body a soul; but, in woman's imagination, love compositions, to amalgamate the gross materials; alone concentrates these ethereal beams [Wolland, molding them with passion, give to the inert stonecraft's note].
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of his virtues; and the sister might have been able to struggle for herself instead of eating the bitter bread of dependence.
I am, indeed, persuaded that the heart, as well as the understanding, is opened by cultivation; and by, which may not appear so clear, strengthening the organs; I am not now talking of momentary flashes of sensibility, but of affections. And, perhaps, in the education of both sexes, the most difficult task is so to adjust instruction as not to narrow the understanding, whilst the heart is warmed by the generous juices of spring, just raised by the electric fermentation of the season; nor to dry up the feelings by employing the mind in investigations remote from life.
With respect to women, when they receive a careful education, they are either made fine ladies, brimful of sensibility, and teeming with capricious fancies; or mere notable women.1 The latter are often friendly, honest creatures, and have a shrewd kind of good sense joined with worldly prudence, that often render them more useful members of society than the fine sentimental lady, though they possess neither greatness of mind nor taste. The intellectual world is shut against them; take them out of their family or neighborhood, and they stand still; the mind finding no employment, for literature affords a fund of amusement which they have never sought to relish, but frequently to despise. The sentiments and taste of more cultivated minds appear ridiculous, even in those whom chance and family connections have led them to love; but in mere acquaintance they think it all affectation.
A man of sense can only love such a woman on account of her sex, and respect her, because she is a trusty servant. He lets her, to preserve his own peace, scold the servants, and go to church in clothes made of the very best materials. A man of her own size of understanding would, probably, not agree so well with her; for he might wish to encroach on her prerogative, and manage some domestic concerns himself. Yet women, whose minds are not enlarged by cultivation, or the natural selfishness of sensibility expanded by reflection, are very unfit to manage a family; for, by an undue stretch of power, they are always tyrannizing to support a superiority that only rests on the arbitrary distinction of fortune. The evil is sometimes more serious, and domestics are deprived of innocent indulgences, and made to work beyond their strength, in order to enable the notable woman to keep a better table, and outshine her neighbours in finery and parade. If she attend to her children, it is, in general, to dress them in a costly manner�and, whether this attention arise from vanity or fondness, it is equally pernicious.
Besides, how many women of this description pass their days; or, at least, their evenings, discontentedly. Their husbands acknowledge that they are good managers, and chaste wives; but leave home to seek for more agreeable, may I be allowed to use a significant French word, piquant2 society; and the patient drudge, who fulfils her task, like a blind horse in a mill, is defrauded of her just reward; for the wages due to her are the caresses of her husband; and women who have so few resources in themselves, do not very patiently bear this privation of a natural right.
A fine lady, on the contrary, has been taught to look down with contempt on the vulgar employments of life; though she has only been incited to acquire accomplishments that rise a degree above sense; for even corporeal accomplishments cannot be acquired with any degree of precision unless the
1. I.e., energetic in running a household. 2. Stimulating.
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understanding has been strengthened by exercise. Without a foundation of principles taste is superficial, grace must arise from something deeper than imitation. The imagination, however, is heated, and the feelings rendered fastidious, if not sophisticated; or, a counterpoise of judgment is not acquired, when the heart still remains artless, though it becomes too tender.
These women are often amiable; and their hearts are really more sensible to general benevolence, more alive to the sentiments that civilize life, than the square-elbowed family drudge; but, wanting a due proportion of reflection and self-government, they only inspire love; and are the mistresses of their husbands, whilst they have any hold on their affections; and the platonic friends of his male acquaintance. These are the fair defects in nature; the women who appear to be created not to enjoy the fellowship of man, but to save him from sinking into absolute brutality, by rubbing off the rough angles of his character; and by playful dalliance to give some dignity to the appetite that draws him to them.�Gracious Creator of the whole human race! hast thou created such a being as woman, who can trace thy wisdom in thy works, and feel that thou alone art by thy nature exalted above her,�for no better purpose?�Can she believe that she was only made to submit to man, her equal, a being, who, like her, was sent into the world to acquire virtue?�Can she consent to be occupied merely to please him; merely to adorn the earth, when her soul is capable of rising to thee?�And can she rest supinely dependent on man for reason, when she ought to mount with him the arduous steeps of knowledge?�
Yet, if love be the supreme good, let women be only educated to inspire it, and let every charm be polished to intoxicate the senses; but, if they be moral beings, let them have a chance to become intelligent; and let love to man be only a part of that glowing flame of universal love, which, after encircling humanity, mounts in grateful incense to God.
* $ *
1792
Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark Writing to a friend in March 1797, the poet Robert Southey declared himself haunted by a book of travels that the firm of Joseph Johnson had published at the start of the preceding year: Mary Wollstonecraft, Southey enthused, "has made me in love with a cold climate, and frost and snow, with a northern moonlight." Wollstonecraft had set out on her arduous and sometimes dangerous five-month journey through the Scandinavian countries in June 1795, taking with her Fanny, her year-old infant, and Marguerite, a French maid who had earlier accompanied her from Paris to London. Fanny's father, Gilbert Imlay�author, inaugurator of sometimes shady commercial deals, and inveterate philanderer�had devised this scheme of sending Wollstonecraft as his business agent to the northern countries, thus leaving himself free to pursue an affair with another woman. Upon returning to London in September 1795, Wollstonecraft prepared for publication the letters that she had written to Imlay during the trip. Contemporary readers were left to speculate about the identity of the you to whom the letters were addressed and to ponder the suggestion that the letters' unhappy author had once been romantically involved with this unnamed correspondent. For many this tantalizingly sketchy love story gave the Letters their fascination. Writing in his Memoirs of Wollstonecraft, William Godwin declared, "If ever there
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was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me the book."
By the late eighteenth century, travel writing had begun to develop into a philosophical genre�a forum for comparative inquiries into the effects various sorts of political institutions and legal systems had on people's everyday lives and a forum in which commentators assessed the costs, as well as the benefits, of social and economic progress. Wollstonecraft had reviewed travelogues for Johnson's Analytical Review, and she contributed to this development in her turn with these discussions of Europe's northern fringe, a remote, unmodernized region that until then had rarely figured on travelers' itineraries. In the letters she thus remarks insightfully on the relations between rich and poor in the communities she visits, on the people's responses to the political tumults of the era, and, especially, on the situation of women and the petty despotisms of family life. Yet she also responds ardently to the sublime natural scenery of Scandinavia, and moves easily from those aesthetic contemplations to meditations on death and the possibility of an afterlife�reveries she intersperses with her sharply realistic observations of the world around her.
Carol Poston, who has edited both Wollstonecraft's Vindications of the Rights of Woman and her Letters from Scandinavia, justly describes the latter as "her most delightful work" and remarks that, in the unsystematic freedom that it permits, "it is possible that the epistolary journal is the perfect literary mode for Wollstonecraft's strengths as a writer and thinker."
From Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark
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The writing travels, or memoirs, has ever been a pleasant employment; for vanity or sensibility always renders it interesting. In writing these desultory letters, I found I could not avoid being continually the first person�"the little hero of each tale." I tried to correct this fault, if it be one, for they were designed for publication; but in proportion as I arranged my thoughts, my letter, I found, became stiff and affected: I, therefore, determined to let my remarks and reflections flow unrestrained, as I perceived that I could not give a just description of what I saw, but by relating the effect different objects had produced on my mind and feelings, whilst the impression was still fresh.
A person has a right, I have sometimes thought, when amused by a witty or interesting egotist, to talk of himself when he can win on our attention by acquiring our affection. Whether I deserve to rank amongst this privileged number, my readers alone can judge�and I give them leave to shut the book, if they do not wish to become better acquainted with me.
My plan was simply to endeavor to give a just view of the present state of the countries I have passed through, as far as I could obtain information during so short a residence; avoiding those details which, without being very useful to travelers who follow the same route, appear very insipid to those who only accompany you in their chair.
Letter 1
Eleven days of weariness on board a vessel not intended for the accommodation of passengers have so exhausted my spirits, to say nothing of the other
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LETTERS WRITTEN IN SWEDEN, NORWAY, AND DENMARK / 197
causes, with which you are already sufficiently acquainted, that it is with some difficulty I adhere to my determination of giving you my observations, as I travel through new scenes, whilst warmed with the impression they have made on me.
The captain, as I mentioned to you, promised to put me on shore at Arendall, or Gothenburg, in his way to Elsineur;1 but contrary winds obliged us to pass both places during the night. In the morning, however, after we had lost sight of the entrance of the latter bay, the vessel was becalmed; and the captain, to oblige me, hanging out a signal for a pilot, bore down towards the shore.
My attention was particularly directed to the lighthouse; and you can scarcely imagine with what anxiety I watched two long hours for a boat to emancipate me�still no one appeared. Every cloud that flitted on the horizon was hailed as a liberator, till approaching nearer, like most of the prospects sketched by hope, it dissolved under the eye into disappointment.
Weary of expectation, I then began to converse with the captain on the subject; and, from the tenor of the information my questions drew forth, I soon concluded, that, if I waited for a boat, I had little chance of getting on shore at this place. Despotism, as is usually the case, I found had here cramped the industry of man. The pilots being paid by the king, and scantily, they will not run into any danger, or even quit their hovels, if they can possibly avoid it, only to fulfil what is termed their duty. How different is it on the English coast, where, in the most stormy weather, boats immediately hail you, brought out by the expectation of extraordinary profit.
Disliking to sail for Elsineur, and still more to lie at anchor, or cruise about the coast for several days, I exerted all my rhetoric to prevail on the captain to let me have the ship's boat; and though I added the most forcible of arguments, I for a long time addressed him in vain.
It is a kind of rule at sea, not to send out a boat. The captain was a good- natured man; but men with common minds seldom break through general rules. Prudence is ever the resort of weakness; and they rarely go as far as they may in any undertaking, who are determined not to go beyond it on any account. If, however, I had some trouble with the captain, I did not lose much time with the sailors; for they, all alacrity, hoisted out the boat, the moment I obtained permission, and promised to row me to the lighthouse.
I did not once allow myself to doubt of obtaining a conveyance from thence round the rocks�and then away for Gothenburg�confinement is so unpleasant.
The day was fine; and I enjoyed the water till, approaching the little island, poor Marguerite, whose timidity always acts as a feeler before her adventuring spirit, began to wonder at our not seeing any inhabitants. I did not listen to her. But when, on landing, the same silence prevailed, I caught the alarm, which was not lessened by the sight of two old men, whom we forced out of their wretched hut. Scarcely human in their appearance, we with difficulty obtained an intelligible reply to our questions�the result of which was, that they had no boat, and were not allowed to quit their post, on any pretense. But, they informed us, that there was at the other side, eight or ten miles over, a pilot's dwelling; two guineas2 tempted the sailors to risk the captain's displeasure, and once more embark to row me over.
1. Helsingsr, Denmark. "Arendall": in Norway 2. A British gold coin worth one pound and a shil[ Wollstonecraft's note]. "Gothenburg": Goteborg, ling. Sweden.
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198 / MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT
The weather was pleasant, and the appearance of the shore so grand, that I should have enjoyed the two hours it took to reach it, but for the fatigue which was too visible in the countenances of the sailors who, instead of uttering a complaint, were, with the thoughtless hilarity peculiar to them, joking about the possibility of the captain's taking advantage of a slight westerly breeze, which was springing up, to sail without them. Yet, in spite of their good humor, I could not help growing uneasy when the shore, receding, as it were, as we advanced, seemed to promise no end to their toil. This anxiety increased when, turning into the most picturesque bay I ever saw, my eyes sought in vain for the vestige of a human habitation. Before I could determine what step to take in such a dilemma, for I could not bear to think of returning to the ship, the sight of a barge relieved me, and we hastened towards it for information. We were immediately directed to pass some jutting rocks when we should see a pilot's hut.
There was a solemn silence in this scene, which made itself be felt. The sunbeams that played on the ocean, scarcely ruffled by the lightest breeze, contrasted with the huge, dark rocks, that looked like the rude materials of creation forming the barrier of unwrought space, forcibly struck me; but I should not have been sorry if the cottage had not appeared equally tranquil. Approaching a retreat where strangers, especially women, so seldom appeared, I wondered that curiosity did not bring the beings who inhabited it to the windows or door. I did not immediately recollect that men who remain so near the brute creation, as only to exert themselves to find the food necessary to sustain life, have little or no imagination to call forth the curiosity necessary to fructify the faint glimmerings of mind which entitles them to rank as lords of the creation.�Had they either, they could not contentedly remain rooted in the clods they so indolently cultivate.
Whilst the sailors went to seek for the sluggish inhabitants, these conclusions occurred to me; and, recollecting the extreme fondness which the Parisians ever testify for novelty, their very curiosity appeared to me a proof of the progress they had made in refinement. Yes; in the art of living�in the art of escaping from the cares which embarrass the first steps towards the attainment of the pleasures of social life.
The pilots informed the sailors that they were under the direction of a lieutenant retired from the service, who spoke English; adding, that they could do nothing without his orders; and even the offer of money could hardly conquer their laziness, and prevail on them to accompany us to his dwelling. They would not go with me alone which I wanted them to have done, because I wished to dismiss the sailors as soon as possible. Once more we rowed off, they following tardily, till, turning round another bold protuberance of the rocks, we saw a boat malting towards us, and soon learnt that it was the lieutenant himself, coming with some earnestness to see who we were.
To save the sailors any further toil, I had my baggage instantly removed into
his boat; for, as he could speak English, a previous parley was not necessary;
though Marguerite's respect for me could hardly keep her from expressing the
fear, strongly marked on her countenance, which my putting ourselves into
the power of a strange man excited. He pointed out his cottage; and, drawing
near to it, I was not sorry to see a female figure, though I had not, like Mar
guerite, been thinking of robberies, murders, or the other evil3 which instantly,
as the sailors would have said, runs foul of a woman's imagination.
3. Rape.
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On entering, I was still better pleased to find a clean house, with some degree of rural elegance. The beds were of muslin, coarse it is true, but dazzlingly white; and the floor was strewed over with little sprigs of juniper (the custom, as I afterwards found, of the country), which formed a contrast with the curtains and produced an agreeable sensation of freshness, to soften the ardor of noon. Still nothing was so pleasing as the alacrity of hospitality�all that the house afforded was quickly spread on the whitest linen.�Remember I had just left the vessel, where, without being fastidious, I had continually been disgusted. Fish, milk, butter, and cheese, and I am sorry to add, brandy, the bane of this country, were spread on the board. After we had dined, hospitality made them, with some degree of mystery, bring us some excellent coffee. I did not then know that it was prohibited.4
The good man of the house apologized for coming in continually, but declared that he was so glad to speak English, he could not stay out. He need not have apologized; I was equally glad of his company. With the wife I could only exchange smiles; and she was employed observing the make of our clothes. My hands, I found, had first led her to discover that I was the lady. I had, of course, my quantum of reverences; for the politeness of the north seems to partake of the coldness of the climate, and the rigidity of its iron sinewed rocks. Amongst the peasantry, there is, however, so much of the simplicity of the golden age in this land of flint�so much overflowing of heart, and fellow-feeling, that only benevolence, and the honest sympathy of nature, diffused smiles over my countenance when they kept me standing, regardless of my fatigue, whilst they dropt courtesy after courtesy.
The situation of this house was beautiful, though chosen for convenience. The master being the officer who commanded all the pilots on the coast, and the person appointed to guard wrecks, it was necessary for him to fix on a spot that would overlook the whole bay. As he had seen some service, he wore, not without a pride I thought becoming, a badge to prove that he had merited well of his country. It was happy, I thought, that he had been paid in honor; for the stipend he received was little more than twelve pounds a year.�I do not trouble myself or you with the calculation of Swedish ducats. Thus, my friend, you perceive the necessity of perquisites.5 This same narrow policy runs through every thing. I shall have occasion further to animadvert on it.
Though my host amused me with an account of himself, which gave me an idea of the manners of the people I was about to visit, I was eager to climb the rocks to view the country, and see whether the honest tars had regained their ship. With the help of the lieutenant's telescope I saw the vessel underway with a fair though gentle gale. The sea was calm, playful even as the most shallow stream, and on the vast bason6 I did not see a dark speck to indicate the boat. My conductors were consequently arrived.
Straying further my eye was attracted by the sight of some heart's-ease7 that peeped through the rocks. I caught at it as a good omen, and going to preserve it in a letter that had not conveyed balm to my heart, a cruel remembrance suffused my eyes; but it passed away like an April shower. If you are deep read in Shakspeare, you will recollect that this was the little western flower tinged
4. The law then prohibited the import or con-7. A small wildflower, variously colored. Wollsumption of coffee. stonecraft goes on to make the first of many veiled 5. Payments in addition to salary. The suggestion allusions to her faithless lover Gilbert Imlay, to is of income derived from bribes or smuggling. whom these letters are addressed. 6. I.e., basin.
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20 0 / MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT
by love's dart, which "maidens call love in idleness."8 The gaiety of my babe was unmixed; regardless of omens or sentiments, she found a few wild strawberries more grateful9 than flowers or fancies.
The lieutenant informed me that this was a commodious bay. Of that I could not judge, though I felt its picturesque beauty. Rocks were piled on rocks, forming a suitable bulwark to the ocean. Come no further, they emphatically said, turning their dark sides to the waves to augment the idle roar. The view was sterile: still little patches of earth, of the most exquisite verdure, enameled with the sweetest wild flowers, seemed to promise the goats and a few straggling cows luxurious herbage. How silent and peaceful was the scene. I gazed around with rapture, and felt more of that spontaneous pleasure which gives credibility to our expectation of happiness, than I had for a long, long time before. I forgot the horrors I had witnessed in France,1 which had cast a gloom over all nature, and suffering the enthusiasm of my character, too often, gracious God! damped by the tears of disappointed affection, to be lighted up afresh, care took wing while simple fellow feeling expanded my heart.
To prolong this enjoyment, I readily assented to the proposal of our host to pay a visit to a family, the master of which spoke English, who was the drollest dog in the country, he added, repeating some of his stories, with a hearty laugh.
I walked on, still delighted with the rude beauties of the scene; for the sublime often gave place imperceptibly to the beautiful, dilating the emotions which were painfully concentrated.
When we entered this abode, the largest I had yet seen, I was introduced to a numerous family; but the father, from whom I was led to expect so much entertainment, was absent. The lieutenant consequently was obliged to be the interpreter of our reciprocal compliments. The phrases were awkwardly transmitted, it is true; but looks and gestures were sufficient to make them intelligible and interesting. The girls were all vivacity, and respect for me could scarcely keep them from romping with my host, who, asking for a pinch of snuff, was presented with a box, out of which an artificial mouse, fastened to the bottom, sprung. Though this trick had doubtless been played time out of mind, yet the laughter it excited was not less genuine.
They were overflowing with civility; but to prevent their almost killing my babe with kindness, I was obliged to shorten my visit; and two or three of the girls accompanied us, bringing with them a part of whatever the house afforded to contribute towards rendering my supper more plentiful; and plentiful in fact it was, though I with difficulty did honor to some of the dishes, not relishing the quantity of sugar and spices put into every thing. At supper my host told me bluntly that I was a woman of observation, for I asked him
men's questions.
The arrangements for my journey were quickly made; I could only have a car with post-horses, as I did not choose to wait till a carriage could be sent for to Gothenburg. The expense of my journey, about one or two and twenty English miles, I found would not amount to more than eleven or twelve shillings, paying, he assured me, generously. I gave him a guinea and a half. But it was with the greatest difficulty that I could make him take so much, indeed any thing for my lodging and fare. He declared that it was next to robbing me,
8. Popular name for the pansy, whose juice 9. Pleasing. Oberon put on the sleeping Titania's eyes to make 1. Wollstonecraft had lived in France at the time her dote on the next person she saw (Shakespeare's of the Reign of Terror under Robespierre (1793� A Midsummer Night's Dream 2.1.165-72). 94).
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LETTERS WRITTEN IN SWEDEN, NORWAY, AND DENMARK / 20 1
explaining how much I ought to pay on the road. However, as I was positive, he took the guinea for himself; but, as a condition, insisted on accompanying me, to prevent my meeting with any trouble or imposition on the way.
I then retired to my apartment with regret. The night was so fine, that I would gladly have rambled about much longer; yet recollecting that I must rise very early, I reluctantly went to bed: but my senses had been so awake, and my imagination still continued so busy, that I sought for rest in vain. Rising before six, I scented the sweet morning air; I had long before heard the birds twittering to hail the dawning day, though it could scarcely have been allowed to have departed.
Nothing, in fact, can equal the beauty of the northern summer's evening and night; if night it may be called that only wants the glare of day, the full light, which frequently seems so impertinent; for I could write at midnight very well without a candle. I contemplated all nature at rest; the rocks, even grown darker in their appearance, looked as if they partook of the general repose, and reclined more heavily on their foundation.�What, I exclaimed, is this active principle which keeps me still awake?�Why fly my thoughts abroad when every thing around me appears at home? My child was sleeping with equal calmness�innocent and sweet as the closing flowers.�Some recollections, attached to the idea of home, mingled with reflections respecting the state of society I had been contemplating that evening, made a tear drop on the rosy cheek I had just kissed; and emotions that trembled on the brink of ectasy and agony gave a poignancy to my sensations, which made me feel more alive than usual.
What are these imperious sympathies? How frequently has melancholy and even misanthropy taken possession of me, when the world has disgusted me, and friends have proved unkind. I have then considered myself as a particle broken off from the grand mass of mankind;�I was alone, till some involuntary sympathetic emotion, like the attraction of adhesion,2 made me feel that I was still a part of a mighty whole, from which I could not sever myself�not, perhaps, for the reflection has been carried very far, by snapping the thread of an existence which loses its charms in proportion as the cruel experience of life stops or poisons the current of the heart. Futurity, what hast thou not to give to those who know that there is such a thing as happiness! I speak not of philosophical contentment, though pain has afforded them the strongest conviction of it.
After our coffee and milk, for the mistress of the house had been roused long before us by her hospitality, my baggage was taken forward in a boat by my host, because the car could not safely have been brought to the house.
The road at first was very rocky and troublesome; but our driver was careful, and the horses accustomed to the frequent and sudden acclivities and descents; so that not apprehending any danger, I played with my girl, whom I would not leave to Marguerite's care, on account of her timidity.
Stopping at a little inn to bait3 the horses, I saw the first countenance in Sweden that displeased me, though the man was better dressed than any one who had as yet fallen in my way. An altercation took place between him and my host, the purport of which I could not guess, excepting that I was the occasion of it, be it what it would. The sequel was his leaving the house angrily;
2. The physical attraction between two different 3. Feed. substances.
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20 2 / MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT
and I was immediately informed that he was the custom-house officer. The professional had indeed effaced the national character, for living as he did with these frank hospitable people, still only the exciseman appeared,�the counterpart of some I had met with in England and France. I was unprovided with a passport, not having entered any great town. At Gothenburg I knew I could immediately obtain one, and only the trouble made me object to the searching my trunks. He blustered for money; but the lieutenant was determined to guard me, according to promise, from imposition.
To avoid being interrogated at the town-gate, and obliged to go in the rain to give an account of myself, merely a form, before we could get the refreshment we stood in need of, he requested us to descend, I might have said step, from our car, and walk into town.
I expected to have found a tolerable inn, but was ushered into a most comfortless one; and, because it was about five o'clock, three or four hours after their dining hour, I could not prevail on them to give me any thing warm to eat.
The appearance of the accommodations obliged me to deliver one of my recommendatory letters, and the gentleman, to whom it was addressed, sent to look out for a lodging for me whilst I partook of his supper. As nothing passed at this supper to characterize the country, I shall here close my letter.
Your's truly.
Letter 4
The severity of the long Swedish winter tends to render the people sluggish; for, though this season has its peculiar pleasures, too much time is employed to guard against its inclemency. Still, as warm cloathing is absolutely necessary, the women spin, and the men weave, and by these exertions get a fence to keep out the cold. I have rarely passed a knot of cottages without seeing cloth laid out to bleach; and when I entered, always found the women spinning or knitting.
A mistaken tenderness, however, for their children, makes them, even in summer, load them with flannels; and, having a sort of natural antipathy to cold water, the squalid appearance of the poor babes, not to speak of the noxious smell which flannel and rugs retain, seems a reply to a question I had often asked�Why I did not see more children in the villages I passed through? Indeed the children appear to be nipt in the bud, having neither the graces nor charms of their age. And this, I am persuaded, is much more owing to the ignorance of the mothers than to the rudeness of the climate. Rendered feeble by the continual perspiration they are kept in, whilst every pore is absorbing unwholesome moisture, they give them, even at the breast, brandy, salt fish, and every other crude substance, which air and exercise enables the parent to digest.
The women of fortune here, as well as every where else, have nurses to suckle their children; and the total want of chastity in the lower class of women frequently renders them very unfit for the trust.4
You have sometimes remarked to me the difference of the manners of the country girls in England and in America; attributing the reserve of the former to the climate�to the absence of genial suns. But it must be their stars,5 not
4. Because of the possibility that veneral disease tory note in chapter 2 of Vindication (p. 187 might be transmitted via their breast milk. above). 5. See the quotation from Prior and the explana
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the zephyrs gently stealing on their senses, which here lead frail women astray.�Who can look at these rocks, and allow the voluptuousness6 of nature to be an excuse for gratifying the desires it inspires? We must, therefore, find some other cause beside voluptuousness, I believe, to account for the conduct of the Swedish and American country girls; for I am led to conclude, from all the observations I have made, that there is always a mixture of sentiment and imagination in voluptuousness, to which neither of them have much pretension.
The country girls of Ireland and Wales equally feel the first impulse of nature, which, restrained in England by fear or delicacy, proves that society is there in a more advanced state. Besides, as the mind is cultivated, and taste gains ground, the passions become stronger, and rest on something more stable than the casual sympathies of the moment. Health and idleness will always account for promiscuous amors; and in some degree I term every person idle, the exercise of whose mind does not bear some proportion to that of the body.
The Swedish ladies exercise neither sufficiently; of course, grow very fat at an early age; and when they have not this downy7 appearance, a comfortable idea, you will say, in a cold climate, they are not remarkable for fine forms. They have, however, mostly fine complexions; but indolence makes the lily soon displace the rose. The quantity of coffee, spices, and other things of that kind, with want of care, almost universally spoil their teeth, which contrast but ill with their ruby lips.
The manners of Stockholm are refined, I hear, by the introduction of gallantry; but in the country, romping and coarse freedoms, with coarser allusions, keep the spirits awake. In the article of cleanliness, the women, of all descriptions, seem very deficient; and their dress shews that vanity is more inherent in women than taste.
The men appear to have paid still less court to the graces. They are a robust, healthy race, distinguished for their common sense and turn for humor, rather than for wit or sentiment. I include not, as you may suppose, in this general character, some of the nobility and officers, who having traveled, are polite and well informed.
I must own to you, that the lower class of people here amuse and interest me much more than the middling, with their apish good breeding and prejudices. The sympathy and frankness of heart conspicuous in the peasantry produces even a simple gracefulness of deportment, which has frequently struck me as very picturesque; I have often also been touched by their extreme desire to oblige me, when I could not explain my wants, and by their earnest manner of expressing that desire. There is such a charm in tenderness!�It is so delightful to love our fellow-creatures, and meet the honest affections as they break forth. Still, my good friend, I begin to think that I should not like to live continually in the country, with people whose minds have such a narrow range. My heart would frequently be interested; but my mind would languish for more companionable society.
The beauties of nature appear to me now even more alluring than in my youth, because my intercourse with the world has formed, without vitiating my taste. But, with respect to the inhabitants of the country, my fancy has probably, when disgusted with artificial manners, solaced itself by joining the advantages of cultivation with the interesting sincerity of innocence, forgetting the lassitude that ignorance will naturally produce. I like to see animals sport
6. Erotic sensuality. 7. Softly plump.
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20 4 / MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT
ing, and sympathize in their pains and pleasures. Still I love sometimes to view the human face divine,8 and trace the soul, as well as the heart, in its varying lineaments.
A journey to the country, which I must shortly make, will enable me to extend my remarks.�Adieu!
Letter 8
Tonsberg9 was formerly the residence of one of the little sovereigns of Norway; and on an adjacent mountain the vestiges of a fort remain, which was battered down by the Swedes; the entrance of the bay lying close to it.
Here I have frequently strayed, sovereign of the waste, I seldom met any human creature; and sometimes, reclining on the mossy down, under the shelter of a rock, the prattling of the sea amongst the pebbles has lulled me to sleep�no fear of any rude satyr's approaching to interrupt my repose. Balmy were the slumbers, and soft the gales, that refreshed me, when I awoke to follow, with an eye vaguely curious, the white sails, as they turned the cliffs, or seemed to take shelter under the pines which covered the little islands that so gracefully rose to render the terrific ocean beautiful. The fishermen were calmly casting their nets; whilst the seagulls hovered over the unruffled deep. Every thing seemed to harmonize into tranquillity�even the mournful call of the bittern was in cadence with the tinkling bells on the necks of the cows, that, pacing slowly one after the other, along an inviting path in the vale below, were repairing to the cottages to be milked. With what ineffable pleasure have I not gazed�and gazed again, losing my breath through my eyes�my very soul diffused itself in the scene�and, seeming to become all senses, glided in the scarcely-agitated waves, melted in the freshening breeze, or, taking its flight with fairy wing, to the misty mountains which bounded the prospect, fancy tript over new lawns, more beautiful even than the lovely slopes on the winding shore before me.�I pause, again breathless, to trace, with renewed delight, sentiments which entranced me, when, turning my humid eyes from the expanse below to the vault above, my sight pierced the fleecy clouds that softened the azure brightness; and, imperceptibly recalling the reveries of childhood, I bowed before the awful throne of my Creator, whilst I rested on its footstool.
You have sometimes wondered, my dear friend, at the extreme affection of my nature�But such is the temperature of my soul�It is not the vivacity of youth, the hey-day of existence. For years have I endeavored to calm an impetuous tide�laboring to make my feelings take an orderly course.�It was striving against the stream.�I must love and admire with warmth, or I sink into sadness. Tokens of love which I have received have rapt me in elysium� purifying the heart they enchanted..�My bosom still glows.�Do not saucily ask, repeating Sterne's question, "Maria, is it still so warm?"1 Sufficiently, O my God! has it been chilled by sorrow and unkindness�still nature will pre- vail�and if I blush at recollecting past enjoyment, it is the rosy hue of pleasure
8. An echo of Milton's Paradise Lost 3.44 and bility, drenches his handkerchief with tears at possibly of William Blake's "The Divine Image" hearing of the beautiful Maria's romantic misad( p. 85 above). ventures. When Maria offers to wash the handker9. Tonsberg, Norway. chief in the stream, then dry it in her bosom, Yorick 1. In Laurence Sterne's novel A Sentimental Jour-asks flirtatiously, "And is your heart still so warm, ney (1768), Parson Yorick, a man of acute sensi-Maria?"
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heightened by modesty; for the blush of modesty and shame are as distinct as the emotions by which they are produced.
I need scarcely inform you, after telling you of my walks, that my constitution has been renovated here; and that I have recovered my activity, even whilst attaining a little embonpoint.2 My imprudence last winter, and some untoward accidents just at the time I was weaning my child, had reduced me to a state of weakness which I never before experienced.3 A slow fever preyed on me every night, during my residence in Sweden, and after I arrived at Tonsberg. By chance I found a fine rivulet filtered through the rocks, and confined in a bason for the cattle. It tasted to me like a chaly-beat;4 at any rate it was pure; and the good effect of the various waters which invalids are sent to drink, depends, I believe, more on the air, exercise and change of scene, than on their medicinal qualities. I therefore determined to turn my morning walks towards it, and seek for health from the nymph of the fountain; partaking of the beverage offered to the tenants of the shade.
Chance likewise led me to discover a new pleasure, equally beneficial to my health. I wished to avail myself of my vicinity to the sea, and bathe; but it was not possible near the town; there was no convenience. The young woman whom I mentioned to you, proposed rowing me across the water, amongst the rocks; but as she was pregnant, I insisted on taking one of the oars, and learning to row. It was not difficult; and I do not know a pleasanter exercise. I soon became expert, and my train of thinking kept time, as it were, with the oars, or I suffered the boat to be carried along by the current, indulging a pleasing forgetfulness, or fallacious hopes.�How fallacious! yet, without hope, what is to sustain life, but the fear of annihilation�the only thing of which I have ever felt a dread�I cannot bear to think of being no more�of losing myself�though existence is often but a painful consciousness of misery; nay, it appears to me impossible that I should cease to exist, or that this active, restless spirit, equally alive to joy and sorrow, should only be organized dust�ready to fly abroad the moment the spring snaps, or the spark goes out, which kept it together. Surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable�and life is more than a dream.
Sometimes, to take up my oar, once more, when the sea was calm, I was amused by disturbing the innumerable young star fish which floated just below the surface: I had never observed them before; for they have not a hard shell, like those which I have seen on the seashore. They look like thickened water, with a white edge; and four purple circles, of different forms, were in the middle, over an incredible number of fibers, or white lines. Touching them, the cloudy substance would turn or close, first on one side, then on the other, very gracefully; but when I took one of them up in the ladle with which I heaved the water out of the boat, it appeared only a colorless jelly.
I did not see any of the seals, numbers of which followed our boat when we landed in Sweden; for though I like to sport in the water, I should have had no desire to join in their gambols.
Enough, you will say, of inanimate nature, and of brutes, to use the lordly phrase of man; let me hear something of the inhabitants. The gentleman with whom I had business, is the mayor of Tonsberg; he
2. Plumpness (French). 4. Mineral water containing salts of iron, taken as 3. Wollstonecraft tells of these events in letters to a tonic. Gilbert Imlay, January 1795.
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20 6 / MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT
speaks English intelligibly; and, having a sound understanding, I was sorry that his numerous occupations prevented my gaining as much information from him as I could have drawn forth, had we frequently conversed. The people of the town, as far as I had an opportunity of knowing their sentiments, are extremely well satisfied with his manner of discharging his office. He has a degree of information and good sense which excites respect, whilst a cheerfulness, almost amounting to gaiety, enables him to reconcile differences, and keep his neighbors in good humor.�"I lost my horse," said a woman to me; "but ever since, when I want to send to the mill, or go out, the mayor lends me one.�He scolds if I do not come for it."
A criminal was branded, during my stay here, for the third offense; but the relief he received made him declare that the judge was one of the best men in the world.
I sent this wretch a trifle, at different times, to take with him into slavery. As it was more than he expected, he wished very much to see me; and this wish brought to my remembrance an anecdote I heard when I was in Lisbon.5
A wretch who had been imprisoned several years, during which period lamps had been put up, was at last condemned to a cruel death; yet, in his way to execution, he only wished for one night's respite, to see the city lighted.
Having dined in company at the mayor's, I was invited with his family to spend the day at one of the richest merchant's houses.�Though I could not speak Danish, I knew that I could see a great deal: yes; I am persuaded that I have formed a very just opinion of the character of the Norwegians, without being able to hold converse with them.
I had expected to meet some company; yet was a little disconcerted at being ushered into an apartment full of well-dressed people; and, glancing my eyes round, they rested on several very pretty faces. Rosy cheeks, sparkling eyes, and light brown or golden locks; for I never saw so much hair with a yellow cast; and, with their fine complexions, it looked very becoming.
These women seem a mixture of indolence and vivacity; they scarcely ever walk out, and were astonished that I should, for pleasure; yet they are immoderately fond of dancing. Unaffected in their manners, if they have no pretensions to elegance, simplicity often produces a gracefulness of deportment, when they are animated by a particular desire to please�which was the case at present. The solitariness of my situation, which they thought terrible, interested them very much in my favor. They gathered round me�sung to me� and one of the prettiest, to whom I gave my hand, with some degree of cordiality, to meet the glance of her eyes, kissed me very affectionately.
At dinner, which was conducted with great hospitality, though we remained at table too long, they sung several songs, and, amongst the rest, translations of some patriotic French ones.6 As the evening advanced, they became playful, and we kept up a sort of conversation of gestures. As their minds were totally uncultivated, I did not lose much, perhaps gained, by not being able to understand them; for fancy probably filled up, more to their advantage, the void in the picture. Be that as it may, they excited my sympathy; and I was very much flattered when I was told, the next day, that they said it was a pleasure to look at me, I appeared so good-natured.
The men were generally captains of ships. Several spoke English very tol
5. Wollstonecraft had gone to Lisbon in 1785, to 6. To indicate sympathy with the French Revolunurse her dying friend Fanny Blood. tion.
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erably; but they were merely matter of fact men, confined to a very narrow circle of observation. I found it difficult to obtain from them any information respecting their own country, when the fumes of tobacco did not keep me at a distance.
1 was invited to partake of some other feasts, and always had to complain of the quantity of provision, and the length of time taken to consume it; for it would not have been proper to have said devour, all went on so fair and softly. The servants wait as slowly as their mistresses carve.
The young women here, as well as in Sweden, have commonly bad teeth, which I attribute to the same causes. They are fond of finery, but do not pay the necessary attention to their persons, to render beauty less transient than a flower; and that interesting expression which sentiment and accomplishments give, seldom supplies its place.
The servants have likewise an inferior sort of food here; but their masters are not allowed to strike them with impunity. I might have added mistresses; for it was a complaint of this kind, brought before the mayor, which led me to a knowledge of the fact.
The wages are low, which is particularly unjust, because the price of clothes is much higher than provisions. A young woman, who is wet nurse to the mistress of the inn where I lodge, receives only twelve dollars7 a year, and pays ten for the nursing of her own child; the father had run away to get clear of the expense. There was something in this most painful state of widowhood which excited my compassion, and led me to reflections on the instability of the most flattering plans of happiness, that were painful in the extreme, till I was ready to ask whether this world was not created to exhibit every possible combination of wretchedness. I asked these questions of a heart writhing with anguish, whilst I listened to a melancholy ditty sung by this poor girl. It was too early for thee to be abandoned, thought I, and I hastened out of the house, to take my solitary evening's walk�And here I am again, to talk of any thing, but the pangs arising from the discovery of estranged affection, and the lonely sadness of a deserted heart.
The father and mother, if the father can be ascertained, are obliged to maintain an illegitimate child at their joint expense; but, should the father disappear, go up the country or to sea, the mother must maintain it herself. However, accidents of this kind do not prevent their marrying; and then it is not unusual to take the child or children home; and they are brought up very amicably with the marriage progeny.
I took some pains to learn what books were written originally in their language; but for any certain information respecting the state of Danish literature, I must wait till I arrive at Copenhagen.
The sound of the language is soft, a great proportion of the words ending in vowels; and there is a simplicity in the turn of some of the phrases which have been translated to me, that pleased and interested me. In the country, the farmers use the thou and thee; and they do not acquire the polite plurals of the towns by meeting at market. The not having markets established in the large towns appears to me a great inconvenience. When the farmers have any thing to sell, they bring it to the neighboring town, and take it from house to house. I am surprised that the inhabitants do not feel how very incommodious this usage is to both parties, and redress it. They indeed perceive it; for when
7. The local currency was the rixdollar, worth about one-fifth of a British pound sterling.
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20 8 / MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT
I have introduced the subject, they acknowledged that they were often in want of necessaries, there being no butchers, and they were often obliged to buy what they did not want; yet it was the custom.', and the changing of customs of a long standing requires more energy than they yet possess. I received a similar reply, when I attempted to persuade the women that they injured their children by keeping them too warm. The only way of parrying off my reasoning was, that they must do as other people did. In short, reason on any subject of change, and they stop you by saying that "the town would talk." A person of sense, with a large fortune, to insure respect, might be very useful here, by inducing them to treat their children, and manage their sick properly, and eat food dressed in a simpler manner: the example, for instance, of a count's lady.
Reflecting on these prejudices made me revert to the wisdom of those legislators who established institutions for the good of the body, under the pretext of serving heaven for the salvation of the soul. These might with strict propriety be termed pious frauds; and I admire the Peruvian pair8 for asserting that they came from the sun, when their conduct proved that they meant to enlighten a benighted country, whose obedience, or even attention, could only be secured by awe.
Thus much for conquering the inertia of reason; but, when it is once in motion, fables, once held sacred, may be ridiculed; and sacred they were, when useful to mankind.�Prometheus alone stole fire to animate the first man; his posterity need not supernatural aid to preserve the species, though love is generally termed a flame; and it may not be necessary much longer to suppose men inspired by heaven to inculcate the duties which demand special grace, when reason convinces them that they are the happiest who are the most nobly employed.
In a few days I am to set out for the western part of Norway, and then shall return by land to Gothenburg. I cannot think of leaving this place without regret. I speak of the place before the inhabitants, though there is a tenderness in their artless kindness which attaches me to them; but it is an attachment that inspires a regret very different from that I felt at leaving Hull, in my way to Sweden. The domestic happiness, and good-humored gaiety, of the amiable family where I and my Frances were so hospitably received, would have been sufficient to insure the tenderest remembrance, without the recollection of the social evenings to stimulate it, when good-breeding gave dignity to sympathy, and wit, zest to reason.
Adieu!�I am just informed that my horse has been waiting this quarter of an hour. I now venture to ride out alone. The steeple serves as a land-mark. I once or twice lost my way, walking alone, without being able to inquire after a path. I was therefore obliged to make to the steeple, or wind-mill, over hedge and ditch.
Your's truly.
Letter 19
Business having obliged me to go a few miles out of town this morning, I was surprised at meeting a crowd of people of every description; and inquiring
8. Probably a reference to the Inca of Peru and military service, requests Orazia in marriage, the his daughter Orazia in John Dryden and Robert Inca, addressing him as "Thou glorious sun," says Howard's drama The Indian Queen (1663). When that Montezuma deserves to die for wanting to mix the Aztec emperor Montezuma, as a reward for his "such base blood" with his divine blood.
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the cause, of a servant who spoke French, I was informed that a man had been executed two hours before, and the body afterwards burnt. I could not help looking with horror around�the fields lost their verdure�and I turned with disgust from the well-dressed women, who were returning with their children from this sight. What a spectacle for humanity! The seeing such a flock of idle gazers, plunged me into a train of reflections, on the pernicious effects produced by false notions of justice. And I am persuaded that till capital punishments be entirely abolished, executions ought to have every appearance of horror given to them; instead of being, as they are now, a scene of amusement for the gaping crowd, where sympathy is quickly effaced by curiosity.
I have always been of opinion that the allowing actors to die, in the presence of the audience, has an immoral tendency; but trifling when compared with the ferocity acquired by viewing the reality as a show; for it seems to me, that in all countries the common people go to executions to see how the poor wretch plays his part, rather than to commiserate his fate, much less to think of the breach of morality which has brought him to such a deplorable end. Consequently executions, far from being useful examples to the survivors, have, I am persuaded, a quite contrary effect, by hardening the heart they ought to terrify. Besides, the fear of an ignominious death, I believe, never deterred any one from the commission of a crime; because, in committing it, the mind is roused to activity about present circumstances. It is a game at hazard,9 at which all expect the turn of the die in their own favor; never reflecting on the chance of ruin, till it comes. In fact, from what I saw, in the fortresses of Norway, I am more and more convinced that the same energy of character, which renders a man a daring villain, would have rendered him useful to society, had that society been well organized. When a strong mind is not disciplined by cultivation, it is a sense of injustice that renders it unjust.
Executions, however, occur very rarely at Copenhagen; for timidity, rather than clemency, palsies all the operations of the present government. The malefactor, who died this morning, would not, probably, have been punished with death at any other period; but an incendiary excites universal execration; and as the greater part of the inhabitants are still distressed by the late conflagration, 1 an example was thought absolutely necessary; though, from what I can gather, the fire was accidental.
Not, but that I have very seriously been informed, that combustible materials were placed at proper distances, by the emissaries of Mr. Pitt;2 and, to corroborate the fact, many people insist, that the flames burst out at once in different parts of the city; not allowing the wind to have any hand in it. So much for the plot. But the fabricators of plots in all countries build their conjectures on the "baseless fabric of a vision";3 and, it seems even a sort of poetical justice, that whilst this minister is crushing at home, plots of his own conjuring up,4 that on the continent, and in the north, he should, with as little foundation, be accused of wishing to set the world on fire.
I forgot to mention, to you, that I was informed, by a man of veracity, that two persons came to the stake to drink a glass of the criminal's blood, as an
9. A game played with dice, similar to craps. 4.1.151-54: "And like the baseless fabric of this 1. Earlier in that year (179 5) a great fire in Copen-vision, . . . shall dissolve." hagen had destroyed nearly a thousand houses and 4. Pitt was prosecuting what he claimed to be Jacpublic buildings. "Incendiary": arsonist. obin plots against Great Britain, at a time of war 2. William Pitt, then prime minister of England. with revolutionary France. 3. Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest
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21 0 / MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT
infallible remedy for the apoplexy. And when I animadverted in the company, where it was mentioned, on such a horrible violation of nature, a Danish lady reproved me very severely, asking how I knew that it was not a cure for the disease? adding, that every attempt was justifiable in search of health. I did not, you may imagine, enter into an argument with a person the slave of such a gross prejudice. And I allude to it not only as a trait of the ignorance of the people, but to censure the government, for not preventing scenes that throw an odium on the human race.
Empiricism5 is not peculiar to Denmark; and I know no way of rooting it out, though it be a remnant of exploded witchcraft, till the acquiring a general knowledge of the component parts of the human frame, become a part of public education.
Since the fire, the inhabitants have been very assiduously employed in searching for property secreted during the confusion; and it is astonishing how many people, formerly termed reputable, had availed themselves of the common calamity to purloin what the flames spared. Others, expert at making a distinction without a difference, concealed what they found, not troubling themselves to enquire for the owners, though they scrupled to search for plunder any where, but amongst the ruins.
To be honester than the laws require, is by most people thought a work of supererogation;6 and to slip through the grate of the law, has ever exercised the abilities of adventurers, who wish to get rich the shortest way. Knavery, without personal danger, is an art, brought to great perfection by the statesman and swindler; and meaner knaves are not tardy in following their footsteps.
It moves my gall to discover some of the commercial frauds practiced during the present war. In short, under whatever point of view I consider society, it appears, to me, that an adoration of property is the root of all evil. Here it does not render the people enterprising, as in America, but thrifty and cautious. I never, therefore, was in a capital where there was so little appearance of active industry; and as for gaiety, I looked in vain for the sprightly gait of the Norwegians, who in every respect appear to me to have got the start of them. This difference I attribute to their having more liberty: a liberty which they think their right by inheritance, whilst the Danes, when they boast of their negative happiness, always mention it as the boon of the prince royal, under the superintending wisdom of count Bernstorff. Vassallage7 is nevertheless ceasing throughout the kingdom, and with it will pass away that sordid avarice which every modification of slavery is calculated to produce.
If the chief use of property be power, in the shape of the respect it procures, is it not among the inconsistencies of human nature most incomprehensible, that men should find a pleasure in hoarding up property which they steal from their necessities, even when they are convinced that it would be dangerous to display such an enviable superiority? Is not this the situation of serfs in every country; yet a rapacity to accumulate money seems to become stronger in proportion as it is allowed to be useless.
Wealth does not appear to be sought for, amongst the Danes, to obtain the elegant luxuries of life; for a want of taste is very conspicuous at Copenhagen; so much so, that I am not surprised to hear that poor Matilda8 offended the
5. In the old sense: medical practices without a Bernstorff was an able administrator in the Danish scientific basis. foreign service. 6. More than is required. 8. Caroline Matilda, sister of the Hanoverian 7. Social system that holds the peasantry in legal George III of Great Britain, was the young wife of bondage to their masters as serfs. Andreas Peter Christian VII of Denmark. By the plotting of
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LETTERS WRITTEN IN SWEDEN, NORWAY, AND DENMARK / 211
rigid Lutherans, by aiming to refine their pleasures. The elegance which she wished to introduce, was termed lasciviousness: yet I do not find that the absence of gallantry renders the wives more chaste, or the husbands more constant. Love here seems to corrupt the morals, without polishing the manners, by banishing confidence and truth, the charm as well as cement of domestic life. A gentleman, who has resided in this city some time, assures me that he could not find language to give me an idea of the gross debaucheries into which the lower order of people fall; and the promiscuous amors of the men of the middling class with their female servants, debases both beyond measure, weakening every species of family affection.
I have every where been struck by one characteristic difference in the conduct of the two sexes; women, in general, are seduced by their superiors, and men jilted by their inferiors; rank and manners awe the one, and cunning and wantonness subjugate the other; ambition creeping into the woman's passion, and tyranny giving force to the man's; for most men treat their mistresses as kings do their favorites: ergo is not man then the tyrant of the creation?
Still harping on the same subject, you will exclaim�How can I avoid it, when most of the struggles of an eventful life have been occasioned by the oppressed state of my sex:9 we reason deeply, when we forcibly feel.
But to return to the straight road of observation. The sensuality so prevalent appears to me to arise rather from indolence of mind, and dull senses, than from an exuberance of life, which often fructifies the whole character when the vivacity of youthful spirits begins to subside into strength of mind.
I have before mentioned that the men are domestic tyrants, considering them as fathers, brothers, or husband; but there is a kind of interregnum between the reign of the father and husband, which is the only period of freedom and pleasure that the women enjoy. Young people, who are attached to each other, with the consent of their friends, exchange rings, and are permitted to enjoy a degree of liberty together, which I have never noticed in any other country. The days of courtship are therefore prolonged, till it be perfectly convenient to marry: the intimacy often becomes very tender: and if the lover obtain the privilege of a husband, it can only be termed half by stealth, because the family is wilfully blind. It happens very rarely that these honorary engagements are dissolved or disregarded, a stigma being attached to a breach of faith, which is thought more disgraceful, if not so criminal, as the violation of the marriage vow.
Do not forget that, in my general observations, I do not pretend to sketch a national character; but merely to note the present state of morals and manners, as I trace the progress of the world's improvement. Because, during my residence in different countries, my principal object has been to take such a dispassionate view of men as will lead me to form a just idea of the nature of man. And, to deal ingenuously with you, I believe I should have been less severe in the remarks I have made on the vanity and depravity of the French,1 had I travelled towards the north before I visited France.
The interesting picture frequently drawn of the virtues of a rising people has, I fear, been fallacious, excepting the accounts of the enthusiasm which
Crown Prince Frederick, who had become regent 9. Wollstonecraft had published A Vindication of in 1784 when his father was judged mentally unfit the Rights of Woman three years earlier, in 1792. to rule, she had been ordered imprisoned, but was 1. See Historical and Moral View of the French rescued by an English ship and taken to Hanover, Revolution [Wollstonecraft's note; she had pub- Germany, where she died in 1775 at the age of lished the book in 1794], twenty-four.
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21 2 / JOANNA BAILLIE
various public struggles have produced. We talk of the depravity of the French, and lay a stress on the old age of the nation; yet where has more virtuous enthusiasm been displayed than during the two last years, by the common people of France and in their armies? I am obliged sometimes to recollect the numberless instances which I have either witnessed, or heard well authenticated, to balance the account of horrors, alas! but too true. I am, therefore, inclined to believe that the gross vices which I have always seen allied with simplicity of manners, are the concomitants of ignorance.
What, for example, has piety, under the heathen or christian system, been, but a blind faith in things contrary to the principles of reason? And could poor reason make considerable advances, when it was reckoned the highest degree of virtue to do violence to its dictates? Lutherans preaching reformation, have built a reputation for sanctity on the same foundation as the catholics; yet I do not perceive that a regular attendance on public worship, and their other observances, make them a whit more true in their affections, or honest in their private transactions. It seems, indeed, quite as easy to prevaricate2 with religious injunctions as human laws, when the exercise of their reason does not lead people to acquire principles for themselves to be the criterion of all those they receive from others.
If travelling, as the completion of a liberal education, were to be adopted on rational grounds, the northern states ought to be visited before the more polished parts of Europe, to serve as the elements even of the knowledge of manners, only to be acquired by tracing the various shades in different countries. But, when visiting distant climes, a momentary social sympathy should not be allowed to influence the conclusions of the understanding; for hospitality too frequently leads travellers, especially those who travel in search of pleasure, to make a false estimate of the virtues of a nation; which, I am now convinced, bear an exact proportion to their scientific improvements.
Adieu.
1795 1796
2. Evade or distort. JOANNA BAILLIE 1762-1851
Joanna Baillie, who was born in Lanarkshire, Scotland, but lived in London and Hampstead from her early twenties until her death at the age of eighty-eight, is known primarily as a dramatist. Her first volume of A Series of Plays: in Which It Is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind: Each Passion Being the Subject of a Tragedy and a Comedy�now generally referred to as Plays on the Passions�appeared anonymously in 1798. It was an instant literary sensation, attracting as much speculation about its authorship as there was sixteen years later concerning Walter Scott's anonymous publication of Waverley. Two other volumes in the series followed in 1802 and 1812, winning acclaim for her as Britain's most distinguished woman playwright of the time�in some evaluations, the most distinguished regardless of gender. Scott compared her to Shakespeare. In a letter of 1817, Byron, just then completing his own play Manfred, recalled that the French author Voltaire had proposed that "the
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A WINTER'S DAY / 21 3
composition of a tragedy require [d] testicles": "If this be true," Byron continued, "Lord knows what Joanna Baillie does�I suppose she borrows them." Baillie published, all told, twenty-eight plays and exerted considerable sway over the early-nineteenthcentury drama.
Her preface to the original Series of Plays, a seventy-page "introductory discourse" advocating naturalness of language and subject matter, influenced both the Advertisement to Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads, which appeared six months later, and Wordsworth's longer and more famous Preface two years later. "Those works," she wrote, "which most strongly characterize human nature in the middling and lower classes of society, where it is to be discovered by stronger and more unequivocal marks, will ever be the most popular"; the writer should forsake "the enchanted regions of simile, metaphor, allegory, and description" in favor of "the plain order of things in this every-day world." Baillie's prolonged focus on both the writer's and the reader's "sympathetick curiosity" in the essay probably also influenced William Hazlitt's concept of the sympathetic imagination and, through Hazlitt, Keats's notion of the self-effacing empathic "poetical Character."
In an 1812 preface Baillie acknowledged the gap between her theory as a dramatist and her practice, admitting that her effort to "unveil" the workings of the mind was ill suited to the practical realities of the stage. In the major London theatres of her day, which were immense spaces designed principally to house spectacular scenery and light effects, only a third of the audience, she estimated, could hear the actors' lines or see their faces. (Charles Lamb had, to similar effect, argued in 1811 that readers who loved Shakespearean tragedy in the privacy of the study would have their illusions shattered when they saw it in one of these theaters.) Indeed, even when Baillie's plays were staged by stars such as Sarah Siddons and Edmund Kean, theatergoers failed to respond as enthusiastically as reading audiences had. Today, in fact, the modern reader is more likely to agree not with Scott and Byron but with Hazlitt, who declared Baillie's plan to illustrate each passion separately a heresy in dramatic art: "the passions are . . . not so in nature, or in Shakspeare." But Baillie's interest in discovering an authentic language of feeling originated in her poetry, with a volume of 1790 titled Poems: Wherein It Is Attempted to Describe Certain Views of Nature and of Rustic Manners, and she remains of great interest as a poet. The modern reader, admiring the homely but graceful blank verse of her "A Winter's Day," can make connections with The Prelude (as in the descriptions of bird snaring, ice-skating, and the old discharged soldier), The Excursion (the character of the Wanderer), and "Michael" (Michael's thrift, Isabel's industrious spinning wheel)�works that Words- worth wrote more than ten years after Baillie's poem. Baillie's 1823 "Address to a Steamvessel" likewise anticipates by a decade Wordsworth's "Steamboats, Viaducts, and Bailways," and it parallels, in its determination to make poetry accountable to new technology and in its mixed feelings about a modern tourist industry's marketing of picturesque nature, Wordsworth's ambivalent project in his 1810 guidebook to the Lake District. Baillie also excelled as a songwriter both in standard English (as in "Up! quit thy bower") and, like her contemporary Robert Burns, in the Scottish dialect (as in "Woo'd and married").
A Winter's Day
The cock, warm roosting 'mid his feather'd mates,
Now lifts his beak and snuffs the morning air,
Stretches his neck and claps his heavy wings,
Gives three hoarse crows and, glad his task is done,
Low chuckling turns himself upon the roost,
Then nestles down again into his place.
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21 4 / JOANNA BAILLIE
The laboring hind,1 who on his bed of straw Beneath his home-made coverings, coarse but warm, Lock'd in the kindly arms of her who spun them,
10 Dreams of the gain that next year's crop should bring; Or at some fair, disposing of his wool, Or by some lucky and unlook'd-for bargain, Fills his skin purse with store of tempting gold; Now wakes from sleep at the unwelcome call,
is And finds himself but just the same poor man As when he went to rest. He hears the blast against his window beat, And wishes to himself he were a laird,� landowner, lord That he might lie a-bed. It may not be:
20 He rubs his eyes and stretches out his arms; Heigh oh! heigh oh! he drawls with gaping mouth, Then most unwillingly creeps from his lair, And without looking-glass puts on his clothes.
With rueful face he blows the smother'd fire,
25 And lights his candle at the reddening coal; First sees that all be right among his cattle, Then hies� him to the barn with heavy tread, hastens Printing his footsteps on the new-fall'n snow. From out the heap'd-up mow" he draws his sheaves, stored grain or hay
so Dislodging the poor red-breast from his shelter Where all the live-long night he slept secure; But now, affrighted, with uncertain flight, Flutters round walls and roof to find some hole Through which he may escape.
35 Then whirling o'er his head, the heavy flail Descends with force upon the jumping sheaves, While every rugged wall and neighboring cot� cottage The noise re-echoes of his sturdy strokes.
The family cares call next upon the wife
40 To quit her mean but comfortable bed. And first she stirs the fire and fans the flame, Then from her heap of sticks for winter stored An armful brings; loud crackling as they burn, Thick fly the red sparks upward to the roof,
45 While slowly mounts the smoke in wreathy clouds. On goes the seething pot with morning cheer, For which some little wistful folk await, Who, peeping from the bed-clothes, spy well pleased The cheery light that blazes on the wall,
50 And bawl for leave to rise. Their busy mother knows not where to turn,
1. Hind does not perfectly express the condition A class of men very common in the west of Scot- of the person here intended, who is somewhat land, ere political economy was thought of [Bailabove a common laborer,�the tenant of a very he's note], "Political economy" refers to the new small farm, which he cultivates with his own discipline of economics pioneered by Adam Smith hands; a few cows, perhaps a horse, and some six at the University of Glasgow, where Baillie's father or seven sheep being all the wealth he possessed. and uncle also lectured.
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A WINTER' S DAY / 21 5 Her morning's work comes now so thick upon her. One she must help to tie his little coat, Unpin another's cap, or seek his shoe 55 Or hosen� lost, confusion soon o'er-master'd! breeches When all is o'er, out to the door they run With new-comb'd sleeky hair and glistening faces, Each with some little project in his head. His new-soled shoes one on the ice must try; 60 To view his well-set trap another hies, In hopes to find some poor unwary bird (No worthless prize) entangled in his snare; While one, less active, with round rosy cheeks, Spreads out his purple fingers to the fire, 65 And peeps most wistfully into the pot. But let us leave the warm and cheerful house To view the bleak and dreary scene without, And mark the dawning of a Winter day. The morning vapor rests upon the heights, 70 Lurid and red, while growing gradual shades Of pale and sickly light spread o'er the sky. Then slowly from behind the southern hills Enlarged and ruddy comes the rising sun, Shooting athwart the hoary waste his beams 75 That gild the brow of every ridgy bank, And deepen every valley with a shade. The crusted window of each scatter'd cot, The icicles that fringe the thatched roof, The new-swept slide upon the frozen pool, so All keenly glance, new kindled with his rays; And e'en the rugged face of scowling Winter Looks somewhat gay. But only for a time He shows his glory to the brightening earth, Then hides his face behind a sullen cloud. 85 The birds now quit their holes and lurking sheds, Most mute and melancholy, where through night, All nestling close to keep each other warm, In downy sleep they had forgot their hardships; But not to chant and carol in the air, 90 Or lightly swing upon some waving bough, And merrily return each other's notes; No, silently they hop from bush to bush, Can find no seeds to stop their craving want, Then bend their flight to the low smoking cot, 95 Chirp on the roof, or at the window peck, To tell their wants to those who lodge within. The poor lank hare flies homeward to his den, But little burthen'd with his nightly meal Of wither'd coleworts2 from the farmer's garden, ioo A wretched scanty portion, snatch'd in fear; 2. Kale or another cabbagelike vegetable.
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21 6 / JOANNA BAILLIE
And fearful creatures, forced abroad by hunger, Are now to every enemy a prey.
The husbandman lays by his heavy flail, And to the house returns, where for him wait
105 His smoking breakfast and impatient children, Who, spoon in hand, and ready to begin, Toward the door cast many an eager look To see their dad come in. Then round they sit, a cheerful company;
110 All quickly set to work, and with heap'd spoons From ear to ear besmear their rosy cheeks. The faithful dog stands by his master's side Wagging his tail and looking in his face; While humble puss pays court to all around,
115 And purrs and rubs them with her furry sides; Nor goes this little flattery unrewarded. But the laborious sit not long at table; The grateful father lifts his eyes to heaven To bless his God, whose ever bounteous hand
120 Him and his little ones doth daily feed, Then rises satisfied to work again.
The varied rousing sounds of industry Are heard through all the village. The humming wheel, the thrifty housewife's tongue,
125 Who scolds to keep her maidens to their work, The wool-card's grating, most unmusical! Issue from every house. But hark! the sportsman3 from the neighboring hedge His thunder sends! loud bark the village curs;
bo Up from her cards or wheel the maiden starts And hastens to the door; the housewife chides, Yet runs herself to look, in spite of thrift, And all the little town is in a stir.
Strutting before, the cock leads forth his train,
135 And, chuckling near the barn-door 'mid the straw, Reminds the farmer of his morning's service. His grateful master throws a liberal handful; They flock about it, while the hungry sparrows, Perch'd on the roof, look down with envious eye,
140 Then, aiming well, amidst the feeders light, And seize upon the feast with greedy bill, Till angry partlets0 peck them off the field. hens But at a distance, on the leafless tree, All woe-begone, the lonely blackbird sits;
145 The cold north wind ruffles his glossy feathers; Full oft he looks, but dares not make approach, Then turns his yellow beak to peck his side
3. Since in the late 18th century only gentlemen who met certain property qualifications had the right to shoot game, this sportsman likely belongs to a higher social class than the villagers he disturbs.
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A WINTER'S DAY / 21 7
And claps his wings close to his sharpen'd breast. The wandering fowler from behind the hedge,
150 Fastens his eye upon him, points his gun, And firing wantonly, as at a mark, Of life bereaves him in the cheerful spot That oft hath echo'd to his summer's song.
The mid-day hour is near; the pent-up kine cows
155 Are driven from their stalls to take the air. How stupidly they stare! and feel how strange! They open wide their smoking mouths to low, But scarcely can their feeble sound be heard, Then turn and lick themselves and, step by step,
160 Move, dull and heavy, to their stalls again.
In scatter'd groups the little idle boys, With purple fingers molding in the snow Their icy ammunition, pant for war; And drawing up in opposite array,
165 Send forth a mighty shower of well-aim'd balls. Each tiny hero tries his growing strength, And burns to beat the foe-men off the field. Or on the well-worn ice in eager throngs, After short race, shoot rapidly along,
170 Trip up each other's heels, and on the surface With studded shoes draw many a chalky line. Untired and glowing with the healthful sport They cease not till the sun hath run his course, And threatening clouds, slow rising from the north,
175 Spread leaden darkness o'er the face of heaven; Then by degrees they scatter to their homes, Some with a broken head or bloody nose, To claim their mother's pity, who, most skillful! Cures all their troubles with a bit of bread.
180 The night comes on apace�Chill blows the blast and drives the snow in wreaths; Now every creature looks around for shelter, And whether man or beast, all move alike Towards their homes, and happy they who have
185 A house to screen them from the piercing cold! Lo, o'er the frost a reverend form advances! His hair white as the snow on which he treads, His forehead mark'd with many a care-worn furrow, Whose feeble body bending o'er a staff,
190 Shows still that once it was the seat of strength, Though now it shakes like some old ruin'd tower. Clothed indeed, but not disgraced with rags, He still maintains that decent dignity
Which well becomes those who have served their country.
195 With tottering steps he gains the cottage door; The wife within, who hears his hollow cough, And pattering of his stick upon the threshold,
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21 8 / JOANNA BAILLIE
Sends out her little boy to see who's there. The child looks up to mark the stranger's face,
200 And, seeing it enlighten'd with a smile, Holds out his tiny hand to lead him in. Round from her work the mother turns her head, And views them, not ill pleased. The stranger whines not with a piteous tale,
205 But only asks a little to relieve A poor old soldier's wants. The gentle matron brings the ready chair And bids him sit to rest his weary limbs, And warm himself before her blazing fire.
210 The children, full of curiosity, Flock round, and with their fingers in their mouths Stand staring at him, while the stranger, pleased, Takes up the youngest urchin on his knee. Proud of its seat, it wags its little feet,
215 And prates and laughs and plays with his white locks. But soon a change comes o'er the soldier's face; His thoughtful mind is turn'd on other days, When his own boys were wont to play around him, Who now lie distant from their native land
220 In honorable but untimely graves: He feels how helpless and forlorn he is, And big round tears course down his wither'd cheeks. His toilsome daily labor at an end, In comes the wearied master of the house, 225 And marks with satisfaction his old guest, In the chief seat, with all the children round him. His honest heart is fill'd with manly kindness, He bids him stay and share their homely meal, And take with them his quarters for the night. 230 The aged wanderer thankfully accepts, And by the simple hospitable board, Forgets the by-past hardships of the day.
When all are satisfied, about the fire They draw their seats and form a cheerful ring.
235 The thrifty housewife turns her spinning-wheel; The husband, useful even in his hour Of ease and rest, a stocking knits, belike, Or plaits stored rushes, which with after skill Into a basket form'd may do good service,
240 With eggs or butter fill'd at fair or market.
Some idle neighbors now come dropping in, Draw round their chairs and widen out the circle; And every one in his own native way Does what he can to cheer the social group.
245 Each tells some little story of himself, That constant subject upon which mankind, Whether in court or country, love to dwell. How at a fair he saved a simple clown0 country fellow
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A WINTER'S DAY / 219
From being trick'd in buying of a cow;
250 Or laid a bet on his own horse's head Against his neighbor's bought at twice his cost, Which fail'd not to repay his better skill; Or on a harvest day bound in an hour More sheaves of corn than any of his fellows,
255 Though e'er so stark,0 could do in twice the time; strong, powerful Or won the bridal race with savory broose4 And first kiss of the bonny bride, though all The fleetest youngsters of the parish strove In rivalry against him.
260 But chiefly the good man, by his own fire, Hath privilege of being listen'd to, Nor dares a little prattling tongue presume, Though but in play, to break upon his story. The children sit and listen with the rest;
265 And should the youngest raise its lisping voice, The careful mother, ever on the watch, And ever pleased with what her husband says, Gives it a gentle tap upon the fingers, Or stops its ill-timed prattle with a kiss.
270 The soldier next, but not unask'd, begins His tale of war and blood. They gaze upon him, And almost weep to see the man so poor, So bent and feeble, helpless and forlorn, Who has undaunted stood the battle's brunt 275 While roaring cannons shook the quaking earth, And bullets hiss'd round his defenseless head. Thus passes quickly on the evening hour, Till sober folks must needs retire to rest; Then all break up, and, by their several paths, 2so Hie homeward, with the evening pastime cheer'd Far more, belike, than those who issue forth From city theatre's gay scenic show, Or crowded ball-room's splendid moving maze. But where the song and story, joke and gibe,
285 So lately circled, what a solemn change In little time takes place! The sound of psalms, by mingled voices raised
Of young and old, upon the night air borne, Haply to some benighted traveler,
290 Or the late parted neighbors on their way, A pleasing notice gives, that those whose sires In former days on the bare mountain's side, In deserts, heaths, and caverns, praise and prayer, At peril of their lives, in their own form
295 Of covenanted worship offered up, In peace and safety in their own quiet home
4. A race, from the bride's former home to the bridegroom's house, run by the young men attending a country wedding.
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22 0 / JOANNA BAILLIE
Are�(as in quaint and modest phrase is termed)
Engaged now in evening exercise
But long accustom'd to observe the weather,
300 The farmer cannot lay him down in peace Till he has look'd to mark what bodes the night. He lifts the latch, and moves the heavy door, Sees wreaths of snow heap'd up on every side, And black and dismal all above his head.
305 Anon the northern blast begins to rise; He hears its hollow growling from afar, Which, gathering strength, rolls on with doubled might, And raves and bellows o'er his head. The trees Like pithless saplings bend. He shuts his door,
310 And, thankful for the roof that covers him, Hies him to bed.
1790
A Mother to Her Waking Infant
Now in thy dazzled half-oped eye, Thy curled nose and lip awry, Up-hoisted arms and noddling head, And little chin with crystal spread,
5 Poor helpless thing! what do I see, That I should sing of thee?
From thy poor tongue no accents come, Which can but rub thy toothless gum: Small understanding boasts thy face,
10 Thy shapeless limbs nor step nor grace: A few short words thy feats may tell, And yet I love thee well.
When wakes the sudden bitter shriek,
And redder swells thy little cheek;
15 When rattled keys thy woes beguile, And through thine eyelids gleams the smile, Still for thy weakly self is spent Thy little silly1 plaint.
But when thy friends are in distress, 20 Thou'lt laugh and chuckle ne'ertheless,
5. In the first edition of the Winter Day, nothing a later addition to the poem. They allude to the regarding family worship was mentioned: a great persecutions that, during the "Killing Times" of the omission, for which I justly take shame to myself. mid-17th century, were endured by the Covenant" The Evening exercise," as it was called, prevailed ers�Presbyterians who adhered to a Covenant in every house over the simple country parts of the contracted between their congregation and Christ West of Scotland, and I have often heard the sound and who therefore refused to acknowledge the of it passing through the twilight air, in returning Crown's authority over their forms of worship. from a late walk [Baillie's note]. Lines 281-9 8 are 1. Deserving of pity (Scots dialect).
.
U P ! QUIT THY BOWER / 22 1 Nor with kind sympathy be smitten, Though all are sad but thee and kitten; Yet puny varlet0 that thou art, Thou twitchest at the heart. rascal 2530 Thy smooth round cheek so soft and warm; Thy pinky hand and dimpled arm; Thy silken locks that scantly peep, With gold tipp'd ends, where circles deep, Around thy neck in harmless grace, So soft and sleekly hold their place, Might harder hearts with kindness fill, And gain our right goodwill. 35Each passing clown0 bestows his blessing, Thy mouth is worn with old wives' kissing; E'en lighter looks the gloomy eye Of surly sense when thou art by; And yet, I think, whoe'er they be, They love thee not like me. peasant 40Perhaps when time shall add a few Short months to thee, thou'lt love me too; And after that, through life's long way, Become my sure and cheering stay; Wilt care for me and be my hold, When I am weak and old. 4550 Thou'lt listen to my Iengthen'd tale, And pity me when I am frail2� But see, the sweepy spinning fly Upon the window takes thine eye. Go to thy little senseless play; Thou dost not heed my lay.� song 1790
Up! quit thy bower1
Up! quit thy bower, late wears the hour; Long have the rooks caw'd round thy tower; On flower and tree, loud hums the bee; The wilding kid2 sports merrily:
5 A day so bright, so fresh, so clear, Shineth when good fortune's near.
Up! lady fair, and braid thy hair, And rouse thee in the breezy air;
2. Feeble. In this sense the word is often applied A Serious Musical Drama in Two Acts (1812). in Scotland [Baillie's note], 2. Wild young goat. 1. This song opens act 1 of Baillie's The Beacon:
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22 2 / JOANNA BAILLIE
The lulling stream, that sooth'd thy dream,
10 Is dancing in the sunny beam: And hours so sweet, so bright, so gay, Will waft good fortune on its way.
Up! time will tell; the friar's bell
Its service sound hath chimed well;
15 The aged crone keeps house alone, And reapers to the fields are gone: The active day, so boon and bright, May bring good fortune ere the night.
1812
Song: Woo d and married and a'1 The bride she is winsome and bonny, Her hair it is snooded2 sae sleek, And faithfu' and kind is her Johnny, Yet fast fa' the tears on her cheek. 5 New pearlins� are cause of her sorrow, lace trimmings New pearlins and plenishing0 too, furnishings The bride that has a' to borrow, Has e'en right mickle ado, Woo'd and married and a'! 10 Woo'd and married and a'! Is na' she very weel aff To be woo'd and married at a'? Her mither then hastily spak, "The lassie is glaikit0 wi' pride; foolish 15 In my pouch I had never a plack� farthing On the day when I was a bride. E'en tak' to your wheel, and be clever, And draw out your thread in the sun; The gear0 that is gifted,0 it never goods, wealth / given 20 Will last like the gear that is won.0 earned Woo'd and married and a'! Wi' havins0 and toucher0 sae sma', possessions / dowry I think ye are very weel aff, To be woo'd and married at a'!" 25 "Toot, toot!" quo' her gray-headed faither, "She's less o' a bride than a bairn;0 child She's ta'en like a cout� frae the heather, colt Wi' sense and discretion to learn. Half husband, I trow, and half daddy, 30 As humor inconstantly leans, The chieP maun" be patient and steady, man / must 1. For a reading of "Woo'd and married and a' " properly appreciated,
consult Norton Literature Online: Baillie's writing 2. Bound up with a ribbon, in Scots needs to be heard as well as read to be
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ADDRESS TO A STEAMVESSEL / 22 3
That yokes wi' a mate in her teens. A kerchief sae douce" and sae neat, sedate, respectable O'er her locks that the winds used to blaw!
35 I'm baith like to laugh and to greet,0 weep When I think o' her married at a'!"
Then out spak' the wily bridegroom;
Weel waled0 were his wordies, I ween� chosen "I'm rich, though my coffer be toom,0 empty 40 Wi' the blinks o' your bonny blue een.� eyes
I'm prouder o' thee by my side, Though thy ruffles or ribbons be few, Than if Kate o' the Croft were my bride, Wi' purfles3 and pearlins enow. 45 Dear and dearest of ony! Ye're woo'd and buikit4 and a'!" And do ye think scorn o' your Johnny, And grieve to be married at a'?"
She turn'd, and she blush'd, and she smiled, 50 And she looket sae bashfully down; The pride o' her heart was beguiled, And she played wi' the sleeves o' her gown; She twirled the tag o' her lace, And she nippet her boddice sae blue, 55 Syne� blinket sae sweet in his face, then
And aff like a maukin0 she flew. hare Woo'd and married and a'! Wi' Johnny to roose� her and a'! praise
She thinks hersel very weel aff, 60 To be woo'd and married at a'!
1822
Address to a Steamvessel1
Freighted with passengers of every sort, A motley throng, thou leav'st the busy port: Thy long and ample deck,�where scatter'd lie Baskets and cloaks and shawls of crimson dye;
5 Where dogs and children through the crowd are straying, And on his bench apart the fiddler playing,
3. Embroidered trimmings. are similar to those informing the writings of 4. Booked, i.e., entered as betrothed in the official Wordsworth. His sonnet "Steamboats, Viaducts, registry of the session clerk. and Railways" (p. 320) acknowledges the sublime 1. Steamships and sightseers were new features in aspects of the new transportation technologies, but Scotland's landscape in Baillie's lifetime; here she he later campaigned against the construction of reckons with their presence. As she notes, new the Kendal and Windermere Railway, and worried steamship routes enabled greater numbers of tour-that the influx of visitors it would bring to the Lake ists, some from the industrial working classes, to District (visitors in some measure drawn there by visit the area's beauty spots, often the sites cele-his poetry) would "deface" the region's beauties. brated in the period's poetry of natural description. See "Tintem Abbey, Tourism, and Romantic Land- The mixed feelings she expresses about this change scape" at Norton Literature Online.
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22 4 / JOANNA BAILLIE
While matron dames to tressel'd seats repair,� Seems, on the glassy waves, a floating fair.
Its dark form on the sky's pale azure cast,
10 Towers from this clustering group thy pillar'd mast; The dense smoke, issuing from its narrow vent, Is to the air in curly volumes sent, Which coiling and uncoiling on the wind, Trail, like a writhing serpent, far behind.
15 Beneath, as each merged wheel its motion plies, On either side the white-churn'd waters rise, And newly parted from the noisy fray, Track with light ridgy foam thy recent way, Then far diverged, in many a lustrous line
20 On the still-moving distant surface shine.
Thou holdst thy course in independent pride; No leave ask'st thou of either wind or tide. To whate'er point the breeze inconstant veer, Still doth thy careless helmsman onward steer;
25 As if the stroke of some magician's wand Had lent thee power the ocean to command. What is this power which thus within thee lurks And all unseen, like a mask'd giant works? E'en that which gentle dames at morning tea,
30 From silver urn ascending, daily see With tressy wreathings borne upon the air Like loosen'd ringlets of a lady's hair; Or rising from th' enamell'd cup beneath, With the soft fragrance of an infant's breath;
35 That which within the peasant's humble cot Comes from the uncover'd mouth of savoury pot, As his kind mate prepares his noonday fare, Which cur and cat and rosy urchins share; That which, all silver'd by the moon's pale beam
40 Precedes the mighty Geyser's up-cast stream, What time, with bellowing din, exploded forth, It decks the midnight of the frozen north, While travellers from their skin-spread couches rise To gaze upon the sight with wondering eyes.
45 Thou hast to those "in populous city pent"2 Glimpses of wild and beauteous nature lent, A bright remembrance ne'er to be destroy'd, That proves to them a treasure long enjoy'd, And for this scope to beings erst confined,
so I fain would hail thee with a grateful mind. They who had nought of verdant freshness seen, But suburb orchards choked with coleworts� green, cabbage plants Now, seated at their ease, may glide along,
2. Milton's Paradise Lost 9.445, from the extended simile describing Satan's entrance into Eden.
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ADDRES S T O A STEAMVESSE L / 22 5 Loch Lomond's fair and fairy Isles3 among; 55 Where bushy promontories fondly peep At their own beauty in the nether deep, O'er drooping birch and rowan4 red that lave� wash Their fragrant branches in the glassy wave: They who on higher objects scarce have counted 60 Than church-spire with its gilded vane surmounted, May view within their near, distinctive ken The rocky summits of the lofty Ben;5 Or see his purple shoulders darkly lower Through the dim drapery of a summer shower. 65 Where, spread in broad and fair expanse, the Clyde6 Mingles his waters with the briny tide, Along the lesser Cumbray's rocky shore,7 With moss and crusted lichens flecker'd o'er, He who but warfare held with thievish cat, 70 Or from his cupboard chaced a hungry rat, The city cobbler,�scares the wild sea-mew In its mid-flight with loud and shrill halloo; Or valiantly with fearful threatening shakes His lank and greasy head at Kittywakes.8 75 The eyes that have no fairer outline seen, Than chimney'd walls with slated roofs between, Which hard and harshly edge the smoky sky, May Arran's softly-vision'd peaks9 descry, Coping with graceful state her steepy sides so O'er which the cloud's broad shadow swiftly glides, And interlacing slopes that gently merge Into the pearly mist of ocean's verge. Eyes which admired that work of sordid skill, The storied structure of a cotton mill, 85 May wondering now behold the unnumber'd host Of marshall'd pillars on fair Ireland's coast, Phalanx on phalanx ranged with sidelong bend, Or broken ranks that to the main descend, Like Pharaoh's army on the Red Sea shore, 90 Which deep and deeper sank, to rise no more.1 Yet ne'ertheless, whate'er we owe to thee, Rover at will on river, lake, and sea, As profit's bait or pleasure's lure engage, Offspring of Watt,2 that philosophic sage, 95 Who in the heraldry of science ranks With those to whom men owe high meed of thanks For genius usefully employ'd, whose fame Shall still be Iink'd with Davy's3 splendid name;
3. Loch Lomond, lake north of Glasgow and a favorite tourist destination. 4. Mountain ash trees. 5. The mountain Ben Lomond. 6. River running through Scotland's industrial center, the city of Glasgow. 7. Island in the Firth of Clyde. 8. The common or vulgar name of a water-bird frequenting that coast [Baillie's note].
9. Island off the west coast of Scotland. 1. See Exodus 14.28. 2. James Watt (1736-1819), Scottish engineer who developed the steam engine. 3. Humphrey Davy (1778-1829), English chemist.
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22 6 / MARIA EDGEWORTH
Dearer to fancy, to the eye more fair
100 Are the light skiffs,0 that to the breezy air sailboats Unfurl their swelling sails of snowy hue Upon the moving lap of ocean blue: As the proud swan on summer lake displays, With plumage brightening in the morning rays,
105 Her fair pavilion of erected wings, They change, and veer, and turn like living things.
With ample store of shrouding,0 sails, and mast, rigging To brave with manly skill the winter blast Of every clime,�in vessels rigg'd like these
no Did great Columbus cross the western seas, And to the stinted thoughts of man reveal'd What yet the course of ages had conceal'd: In such as these, on high adventure bent, Round the vast world Magellan's comrades went.4
115 To such as these are hardy seamen found As with the ties of kindred feeling bound, Boasting, while cans of cheering grog they sip, The varied fortunes of "our gallant ship"; The offspring these of bold sagacious man,
120 Ere yet the reign of letter'd lore began.
In very truth, compared to these, thou art A daily labourer, a mechanic swart,0 swarthy In working weeds array'd of homely gray, Opposed to gentle nymph or lady gay,
125 To whose free robes the graceful right is given To play and dally with the winds of heaven. Reholding thee, the great of other days And modern men with all their alter'd ways, Across my mind with hasty transit gleam,
130 Like fleeting shadows of a feverish dream: Fitful I gaze, with adverse humours teased, Half sad, half proud, half angry, and half pleased.
1823 1823
4. Ferdinand Magellan (1489�1521), Portuguese navigator whose fleet undertook the first circumnavigation of the globe. Magellan did not survive the voyage. MARIA EDGEWORTH
1768-1849
Maria Edgeworth's publishing career earned her more than .11,000�an enormous sum. It also made the novel, regularly reviled by critics in the late eighteenth century, a respectable form. After 1804, the editor Francis Jeffrey attended respectfully in the pages of his Edinburgh Review to each of Edgeworth's publications, remarking on how in her hands fiction had become an edifying medium for serious ideas.
.
MARIA EDGEWORTH / 22 7
Edgeworth was born in Oxfordshire on New Year's Day, 1768, the second child of Richard Lovell Edgeworth and Anna Maria Elers, who died when her daughter was five. (Richard Lovell Edgeworth married three more times, each new wife younger than her predecessor, and eventually fathered twenty-two children.) Maria Edgeworth spent most of her childhood in fashionable boarding schools in England, until her father, in a spirit of patriotism and optimism about social progress, decided to dedicate himself to the family estate in Ireland that had been his birthplace. In 1782 he sent for Maria to join him, his third wife, and Maria's half-brothers and half-sisters at Edgeworthstown, source of the Protestant Edgeworths' wealth since the early seventeenth century, when the property had been confiscated from a Catholic family. For the rest of her life, that manor house in rural County Longford would remain home for Edgeworth, who in 1802 rejected a marriage proposal from a Swedish diplomat.
Brimming over with children, with books, and (it was reported) with "ingenious mechanical devices" (some of them Richard Lovell Edgeworth's inventions), this home doubled as a laboratory for her father's experiments in education, up-to-theminute agricultural techniques, and enlightened landlord-tenant relations. From the age of fourteen, Edgeworth assumed a central role in those experiments. She took up the business of estate management. She taught the younger children. At her father's prompting, she began a course of reading in political and economic theory, starting with Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations.
Eventually Maria Edgeworth also began to write. Letters for Literary Ladies (1795), a novelistic defense of women's education, was followed by The Parent's Assistant (1796) and Practical Education (1798), treatises on pedagogy she coauthored with her father, and by the first of her influential collections of stories for children (Early Lessons, 1801). In 1800 she published Castle Rackrent, her masterpiece. Rackrent inaugurated Edgeworth's series of narratives memorializing the vanishing ways of life of rural Ireland, a project continued by Ennui (1809), The Absentee (1812), and Ormond (1819). Edgeworth's study of the Enlightenment social sciences is easy to trace in these regional fictions, and these concerns were a factor that helped secure their reputation among the reviewers. Not only had Edgeworth managed to associate the novel with a more intellectually prestigious discourse; by packaging her representations of Ireland's picturesque folk culture in this way, she was also able to tap the authority of a system of economic and political analysis that, in its claims to be scientifically impartial, seemed to many to offer a counterweight to the ugly prejudices that were the legacies of that nation's history of colonial conquest.
The year Richard Lovell Edgeworth settled in Ireland, 1782, seemed an auspicious moment for a reformer like him. The Parliament in Dublin had just won legislative independence, and it appeared as though penal laws targeting Catholics would soon be relaxed. But this confidence that a new era of civil harmony was dawning was quickly shattered. In 1798 armed insurrection, involving both Catholic peasants and middle-class Protestants from the North, engulfed Ireland. The rising was soon repressed, with extreme brutality. Introduced in 1800 as a security measure by a British state horrified at the news that French expeditionary forces had planned to aid the rebels, an Act of Union abolished the Dublin Parliament and incorporated Ireland into the United Kingdom. However, as Byron observed in an address to the House of Lords, to call the ensuing political situation a Union was to abuse the term: "If it must be called an Union, it is the union of the shark with his prey." The native Catholic population would long remain without civil rights. Indeed, when Edgeworth died in 1849 at the age of eighty-three, Ireland was once again a scene of violent insurrection as well as of horrendous famine.
An anecdote in Edgeworth's 1820 memoir of her father conveys a sense of the ambiguous position that the Protestant Anglo-Irish�neither English exactly, nor Irish, neither outsiders nor natives�occupied in this tense political context. Edge- worth recounts how, after their family escaped from the Catholic rebels who in 1798
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22 8 / MARIA EDGEWORTH
occupied the countryside around Edgeworthstown, Richard Lovell Edgeworth was nearly lynched by a mob from the Protestant county town where the Edgeworths had taken refuge, who were certain (such were the suspicions aroused by his nonsectarian politics) that he was a rebel sympathizer and a French spy.
The 1802 tale that we have selected as an example of Maria Edgeworth's fiction, "The Irish Incognito"�part trickster tale from the folk tradition, part philosophical meditation on the precariousness of personal identity�also captures something of this experience of living between cultures. Starting with the first disorienting sentence, which introduces a hero who sports the ultra-English name of John Bull but who is also a native son of Cork, this treatment of cultural difference is distinguished by some slippery ironies. (A town on Ireland's south coast, Cork, of course, is home to the legendary Blarney Stone, which grants Irish people their gift of the gab.) The tale might well have promoted tolerance for British diversity among its original readers: unlike many of his namesakes of the era, this "John Bull" is eminently likeable. But (as with the more biting satires that Jonathan Swift had penned in Dublin eighty years before) it would also have perplexed these readers' preconceived notions about who exactly was who within that hybrid political entity called "the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland."
The Irish Incognito1
Sir John Bull was a native of Ireland, bred and born in the city of Cork. His real name was Phelim O'Mooney, and he was by profession a stocah, or walking gentleman; that is, a person who is too proud to earn his bread, and too poor to have bread without earning it. He had always been told that none of his ancestors had ever been in trade or business of any kind, and he resolved, when a boy, never to demean himself and family, as his elder brother had done, by becoming a rich merchant. When he grew up to be a young man, he kept this spirited resolution as long as he had a relation or friend in the world who would let him hang upon them; but when he was shaken off by all, what could he do but go into business? He chose the most genteel, however; he became a wine merchant. I'm only a wine merchant, said he to himself, and that is next door to being nothing at all. His brother furnished his cellars; and Mr. Phelim O'Mooney, upon the strength of the wine that he had in his cellars, and of the money he expected to make of it, immediately married a wife, set up a gig, and gave excellent dinners to men who were ten times richer than he even ever expected to be. In return for these excellent dinners, his new friends bought all their wine from Mr. O'Mooney, and never paid for it; he lived upon credit himself, and gave all his friends credit, till he became a bankrupt. Then nobody came to dine with him, and every body found out that he had been very imprudent; and he was obliged to sell his gig, but not before it had broken his wife's neck; so that when accounts came to be finally settled, he was not much worse than when he began the world, the loss falling upon
I. Although written solely by Maria Edgeworth, volume collected Tales and Novels of 1832. That "The Irish Incognito" forms the culminating chap-edition provides the basis for the text we give here. ter of a book that was published under both her A "bull" is a verbal blunder, an expression contain- name and her father's (her Memoir of her father ing a contradiction that goes unperceived by the states that he contributed passages to a few of the speaker. To collect "Irish bulls" as the Essay does other chapters). This book was the Essay on Irish is, on the face of it, to contribute to a longstanding Bulls, which went through three, revised editions English tradition of jokes about the dim-witted between 1802 and 1808, before being included, in Irish, but the Edgeworths' relationship to that traits 1808 version, in Maria Edgeworth's eighteen-dition turned out to be quite complicated.
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