Vindication by Lyndall Gordon

Author:Lyndall Gordon
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins

A week after Godwin had tea with ‘Wolstencraft’, his diary notes that ‘Imlay calls’ on Friday 22 April 1796 and that the following day he, in turn, called on ‘Imlay’. It’s always assumed that ‘Imlay’ meant Mary, but since this is the only occasion Godwin uses the name in his diary, it’s worth considering whether this visitor could be Gilbert Imlay. It would mean that within a week of Mary’s approach to him, Godwin saw Imlay on her behalf, with the support of her friends Mary Hays and Rebecca Christie. Over consecutive days there was intensive contact between these four. Godwin also includes ‘Imlay’ amongst twelve friends at a dinner at his lodgings, with food brought in from a nearby coffee-house. He later remarked that Mary had come to him in trouble, and that he had not hesitated to help her. Mary’s final discussion with Imlay had to do with the practical matter of maintenance for Fanny. She had been too proud to go back on her word and become his dependant, even if, as ‘Mrs Imlay’, she was entitled to support. On 22 and 23 April 1796 her friends, representing social opinion, may have taken it upon themselves to press Imlay to help her after all. If they did act in this way, it would have been a step towards easing her mind.

Amongst those present at Godwin’s dinner-party was the actress, novelist and dramatist Mrs Inchbald, remembered now for Lovers’ Vows, the play that rouses the wrong heartbeats in Mansfield Park. Mrs Inchbald had been a widow from the age of twenty-six. A speech impediment had been a bar to stardom on the stage. She had lived in mean lodgings, worn a shabby gown in the midst of finery, and controlled her attraction to worldly men who would not take an actress for a wife. She did want to marry again, and in the meantime made her way with a combination of charm and prudence, cultivating the innocent air of a milkmaid–the modish form of femininity in the 1780s. She was a beauty skilled at wars of words who chose to smile on Godwin. He liked clever women, and was incapable of consorting with anyone he could not respect. * Godwin did not blame Mary for her unmarried plight. He believed (as she did) that marriage is ‘law and the worst of all laws…Marriage is an affair of property, and the worst of all properties.’

To Mary, returning to her country in the repressive aftermath of the Treason Trials, the English seemed ‘to have lost the common sense which used to distinguish them’. This was a country at war, cut off from travel, filled with soldiers, and draining the poor who were near starvation. When George III rode through London after opening Parliament on 29 October 1795, watchers hissed and threw stones at his coach with cries of ‘Bread!’ and ‘No war! No war!’ An Act of Parliament suspended the law of habeas corpus, and Pitt’s Combination Acts outlawed trade unionism.

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