Read Online A History of Britain, Volume 3 by Simon Schama - Free Book Online Page B

England: Joseph Johnson.
    Johnson, a short, neatly wigged, Liverpudlian bachelor, held court above his business at 72 St Paul’s Churchyard, for centuries the favourite haunt of London’s book publishers. To radical London he was the Johnson who really mattered – not just publisher of the
Analytical Review
(between 1788 and 1799) but patron and good uncle to his ‘ragged regiment’ of disciples. He was someone who could find a review to assign, a job to fill (for Mary he found a position as governess in Ireland, but with mixed results), a short-term loan or even (again, for Mary) a roof. She ate with him several times a week and was a regular at Johnson’s famous Sunday dinners where the honest ‘patriot’ fare (a lot of boiled cod and peas) was spiced by interesting company: visionary artists like William Blake and Henry Fuseli; veteran stalwarts of the Society for the Promotion of Constitutional Information like the Reverend John Horne Tooke and Major John Cartwright; celebrity democrats like the black-eyed, red-faced Tom Paine; and, invariably, a group of articulate, unblushing, intelligent women like Barbauld and the actress Sarah Siddons. Accounts of Mary’s appearances at Johnson’s dinners describe an ungainly, strong-minded, immensely animated woman, her long curly hair powdered when it wasn’t crowned with a beaver hat in the style of Benjamin Franklin or Rousseau. Self-consciously careless with her dress, she was a tremendous interrupter. The social philosopher William Godwin, who came to listen to Paine, found himself irritated by Mary talking incessantly over him.
    The mix of stormy passion and tenacious argument, heart and head working like a right and left punch, which was already Mary Wollstonecraft’s trademark, would have made her especially indignant at Burke’s savage onslaught on the great and good Dr Price. But it was much more extraordinary that she should make the move from indignation to publication. Although her
Vindication of the Rights of Men
has been overshadowed by the more famous
Vindication of the Rights of Woman
(1792), published two years later, as well as by Paine’s blockbuster
Rights of Man
(1791–2), Mary’s intervention was not just the earliest counter-attack on Burke but one of the cleverest. Instead of doing what would have been expected (not least by Burke) of a woman and writing in a primly sanctimonious manner, Mary used Burke’s own weapon of venomous irony to attack his credentials as the guardian of traditional institutions. If he were so deeply exercised about the sanctity of hereditary kingship, she wondered out loud, was it not rather peculiar that when King George had gone mad Mr Burke had been in such indecent haste to replace him (with the Prince Regent, Burke’s patron’s patron)? ‘You were so eager to taste the sweets of power, that you could not wait till time had determined, whether a dreadful delirium would settle into a confirmed madness; but, prying into the secrets of Omnipotence, you thundered out that God had
hurled him from his throne
…’ Was not that the very same dissolution of the bonds of loyalty that Burke had found so shocking in the French? The goal was to make Burke look not just wrong-headed but ridiculous, mocking his pet obsessions; his comical gallantry towards Marie Antoinette (‘not an animal of the highest order’); his infatuation with the escutcheoned past; the myopia (more fun with Burke’s famous eye-glasses, even though Mary used them herself) in not seeing that the ‘perfect Liberty’ was only perfect for those who had the property to enjoy it. More seriously, if the sanctity of the ‘ancient constitution’ were never to be tampered with, were we not then doomed to ‘remain forever in frozen inactivity because a thaw that nourishes the soil spreads a temporary inundation?’
    Mary was the sniper; Tom Paine the heavy artillery. In the early days of the French Revolution Paine had assumed that Burke, as an old