The Mary Wollstonecraft Centre

The brass plaque on the door said

The Mary Wollstonecraft 

and Richard Price Centre 

for Women's Leadership 

and Financial Literacy

I woke from a dream a few weeks ago with this image in my head. Yesterday I shared this vision with sensible people who did not laugh at me. Something is about to happen.

Touch Mary, virtually

The Shelley-Godwin Archive, which we looked at six months ago when they won $300 000 from the US National Endowment for the Humanities, is now hiring two part-time text encoders to get to grips with all that lovely raw text, some of it presumably Mary Wollstonecraft's. The money has been channelled via the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities ("an applied think tank for the digital humanities"), and the work can be done virtually, according to the job description:

The Text Encoders will be responsible for producing XML-encoded transcription of materials from The New York Public Library (NYPL), the Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford, the Houghton Library of Harvard University, the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, and the British Library according to the widely-adopted Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standard.

David Brookshire writes on the MITH blog:

As we continue to think through the kinds of features we want to incorporate into the Archive, we would welcome your thoughts about what you would find most useful when working with manuscript sources in a digital environment.

(Thanks to Marjorie Burghart for bringing this to my attention; she is up to her paleographic elbows in the TEI: more here.)

The heights of amateurism

This title is meant as high praise, for there is high excitement at Wollstonecraft Towers. A Vicki Parslow Stafford has stumbled upon the secret to the paternity of the elder daughter of Mary Jane Vial! She is the one who quickly married widower Godwin, when he decided he needed a mother to his children -- though no one could fill the place of Mary Wollstonecraft:

Claire Clairmont was a central, if minor, figure in the Romantic Era intellectual and literary circle of the Godwins, Shelleys and Byron:  stepdaughter of William Godwin, stepsister and confidante of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, close friend and inspiration to poet Percy Shelley, paramour of Lord Byron and mother of his infant daughter Allegra.  Although her life has been closely studied, her true paternity seemed to be a secret that died with her mother -- until now.

Where the professionals had failed, the amateur triumphs! Psychologist and disability specialist by day, VPS turns into a masked crusader of genealogy by night! Remember my working definition of the amateur: someone doing it for love, not money. 


Not only has VPS discovered the hidden truth, she has also tied up the package by creating a very tidy little website explaining it all.  Mary Jane's Daughter is a model of its kind, everything it needs to be and nothing extra. She modestly presents it to the world thus:

I would like to bring to the attention of Romantic scholars, historians and biographers a collection of letters held by the Somerset Record Office which establishes the identity of the father of Mary Jane ‘Claire’ Clairmont...

Imagine that email landing --THWAP -- in your inbox, amidst the departmental memos and students' excuses. Really, one could not ask for a better present. 


Whoever gets their PhD out of this discovery ought to offer her proper homage: a stonking fee to be keynote speaker at top conferences. An honorary degree. Naming an asteroid after her. I believe the eldest son used to be deemed a suitable sacrifice, but of course we can't have that these days; far too sexist.


For the record, I have never been in touch with VPS, nor to the best of my knowledge with anyone who knows her, but I intend to set right that omission. Three thousand cheers for her.


(Of course, the entire thing could be a fraud, and the letters made up out of whole cloth. Short of traipsing down to Somerset Record Office, how am I ever to know? If I merely phone or email, what does that prove -- they could be in on the joke too.  Ha ha. Not that I am bitter about being taken in by Gay Girl in Damascus or anything.)

Portrait by Amelia Curran (1775-1849) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Wikipedia: a passion for education & freedom

I gave a quote in yesterday's post on Romanticism for the rational, saying I would provide the source today.

Wikipedia.

"The free encyclopedia anyone can edit" has its detractors. I won't argue the merits of the model in general, nor will I hypothesise that Mary Wollstonecraft would have been fascinated by the project, and possibly a passionate supporter of it, bringing together as it does freedom and education. Suffice it for today to point out that, among the three and a half million articles on the English Wikipedia to date, just under three and a half thousand have been vetted to a very high standard indeed:

Featured articles are considered to be the best articles in Wikipedia, as determined by Wikipedia's editors. [These] articles are reviewed ... for accuracy, neutrality, completeness, and style according to our featured article criteria. 

(There are another 12 000+ that are deemed to fall just short of this excellence. I expected these to warrant a phrase of American hyperbole, but no, they are soberly called good articles.)

Mary Wollstonecraft has (or is, if you prefer) a Featured Article. That in and of itself is a wonderful resource. But better yet, all of her works have also had the same detailed, critical attention. (Again we come back to the concept of the amateur, someone working for love not money.)

Thoughts on the Education of Daughters

Mary: A Fiction

Analytical Review

Original Stories from Real Life

A Vindication of the Rights of Men

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark

Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman

And the people connected to her have also been well treated by Wikipedia; these three are FAs:

Joseph Johnson

Fanny Imlay

Mary Shelley

Not quite up to hallowed "featured" status, but still quite respectable, are articles on other people in her life, such as:

Henry Fuseli

Gilbert Imlay

William Godwin

Margaret King (aka Mrs Mason, aka Lady Mountcashell)

There's an article on Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.  [Addendum: There's a family tree for Godwins and Shelleys.] There is even a timeline of MW's life; it too has achieved the deceptively modest-looking bronze star of FAdom. The central article, on MW herself, has been translated into 54 languages; seven of those have been awarded Featured Article status on their own Wikipedias. What an absolute wealth of resources, freely available to anyone with an internet connection and the curiosity to find out.

A life in #38days (and 140 characters)

Twitter, anyone?

I've been intrigued by Mary Wollstonecraft since I was a teenager. This phase of my enthusiasm really kicked off two years ago, when I discovered that Newington Green Unitarian Church (under its briefer C21 name of New Unity) was the only group in the whole world putting on a series of public events to celebrate Mary's 250th anniversary. More on that another time. Suffice it to say that I took this as a personal challenge, and decided to undertake some of the publicity for these events, which proved a useful excuse for getting to grips with Twitter. One of the first things I set up, under the handle of @1759MaryWol1797, was the telling of the last few years of her life, in thrice daily bites. I must see if that trail still exists. This year, I thought I'd re-invent the idea, and am doing her whole life in a line a day, each message representing one year. So far we have:

• 1759. Waaah! I’m cold. ‘Tis rational to be cold; they have not cloathed me yet. O brave new world, that has such people in't!
• 1760. Brother Ned cannot forgive me for ousting him from the breast. I assert my rights: he may be greediest, but I am neediest.
• 1761. And now I in turn am thrust from my place at the centre of Mother’s universe by the arrival of brother Henry.
• 1762. Under my grandfather’s loom, I see the cat toying with a mouse. How the tyrant abuses his power!
• 1763. We move to Epping Forest, as Father wishes to be a gentleman farmer. Unfortunately, he is neither gentleman nor farmer.
• 1764. Mother is teaching me to read. She says I am quite the little scholar! I love the stories she tells of growing up in Ireland.
• 1765. We move to Barking Creek. I dig for treasure in the briny mud, finding shards of Roman pottery. Nature, wide skies, divinity. 

And they will continue, one a day at 15:00 GMT, with -- if I have counted correctly -- the final one, 1797, going out on Wednesday 27 April, the 252nd anniversary of her birth. I'll leave you to guess the last line: the comments below are for you, dear reader.

It took ages to write the whole cycle, but it was rather fun. It is a lesson in economy, almost like haiku, and in inter-relationships. Some years have so much going on; others, especially childhood ones, have little. How then can themes be introduced, allusions placed, hints dropped, that may come back later on? At the age of zero, I have Mary preaching reason; at one, she extolls breastfeeding, using the language of rights; at three, she anticipates political philosophy.

I already have an idea for next year. For 2011, the hashtag is #38days. Join me on Twitter!

Plaque is well and truly unveiled

The Islington Tribune came through with a good article here entitled "Mary Wollstonecraft gets a green plaque at Newington Green Primary... will statue be next?" The plaque was commissioned by Islington Council, whose page on it is here.

A plaque is all very well and good, but there must be a reason why I Freudianly slip-type it as "plague" instead. A plaque is a sort of holding point. Wollstonecraft deserves a proper statue, hence the committee to make it happen, Mary on the Green. Beyond that, what about an institution in her name -- a girls' school in Afghanistan, a women's leadership institute, a museum, possibly in Richard Price's house on Newington Green. (There is an inspiring example of a cluster of modern initiatives around an early feminist: in Rochester, New York, where Susan B. Anthony lived and worked. More on them another time.) And beyond a statue and institution: a full-monty biopic -- Mary, the Movie.

There are several plaques to Mary in London. None are Blue Plaques; English Heritage is very strict about their criteria, and there are no buildings still standing in which Mary lived or worked. In 2004, biographer Claire Tomalin unveiled a plaque in Southwark near Blackfriars Bridge (warning: it appears blue to the casual viewer, but this may be an illusion). Why there? Because from 1787 Mary lived on George Street (now Dolben Street), and the plaque is on number 45, "a 20th-century building but Thompson House next door would have been known" to her. While there, she wrote Original Stories, with William Blake as its illustrator. Shelley lived nearby in Nelson Square some years later, where he has his own plaque. 


There is a plaque on the site of the Polygon in Camden, her final home, and thus the birthplace of Mary Shelley. There are those odd gates at Spitalfields. There is the Mary Wollstonecraft Lecture Theatre at Bournemouth University and the Mary Wollstonecraft Memorial Lecture at the University of Hull. Any more examples would be gratefully received, but I'm not expecting a flood.