Читать книгу This Shining Woman - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 7

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Edward John Wollstonecraft was the son of a Spitalfields silk weaver who had earned a considerable fortune by supplying those glistening silks and stiff brocades considered necessary for the adornment of the persons of all but the very poorest; even the maidservant or the shopgirl contrived one silk gown or one silk kerchief for her Sunday wardrobe. This prudent and hardworking merchant left to his only son, Edward John, a flourishing business and a capital of over ten thousand pounds securely invested.

The young man despised his father's trade, and soon began to squander his father's fortune. The business was left to others, and the profits from it speedily diminished, while the carefully-garnered capital was, portion by portion, wasted in foolish speculation.

Edward Wollstonecraft had been brought up in an atmosphere of gentility; he was used to servants to wait on him, comfortable houses, good clothes and loose change in his braided pockets. He was, however, as without culture as he was without business acumen. His vices were those of a stupid man, and he wasted his money in mean company.

Before his fortune was wholly ruined, he married "for love," as he termed it, Margaret Dixon, of a good Irish family, who brought him a small dowry which, passing into his absolute control, was soon squandered together with his own fortune.

Mrs. Wollstonecraft had been educated on narrow, rigid lines. She believed implicitly in the right of a man to domineer in his own household, and in the unquestionable obedience of children to their parents. She became at once a submissive slave of the brutal bully whom she had married, and quickly sunk into a household drudge, permitting her husband unreasonable tyranny, and in her turn tyrannising over her family. She found, indeed, a certain relief from her own bitter disillusionment in exercising over her children an unreasonable authority that caused vexation and restraint to enter into the most trivial matters. She exacted the most unconditional submission to her orders, which were often inconsistent and contradictory, and her feeble and shrewish scolding added to the misery that the father inflicted upon the household.

The family consisted of six children. The eldest, Edward, was the mother's favourite. She contrived to give him some education out of the money on which she could lay her hands, and he early left to be articled to a lawyer. His escape from the detestable home life was facilitated by his own disposition, which was selfish and heartless, and by his ability to submit, when he knew it was for his own good, to training and discipline.

Mary was the next child, and on her fell the full force of the mother's theories. Mrs. Wollstonecraft considered it only natural that her eldest daughter should be nurse and servant to the other children and drudge at the most menial tasks, not only without reward or thanks, but under the continual goad of reproach and criticism.

Soon after his marriage the basic faults of Edward Wollstonecraft were increased by his intemperate habits. He developed that capricious restlessness so characteristic of the drunkard, and was forever evolving fresh schemes, only to abandon them. Quite incapable of perseverance or sustained effort, he nevertheless was constantly undertaking enterprises that only patient, hard work on his part could have rendered successful.

Until she was five years of age, Mary resided between rooms in London, when the whim took her father to act the part of the gentleman of leisure, and the small house in Epping Forest, where he sometimes and for no known reason sent his family. He made several spasmodic and unsuccessful experiments in business. His father's manufactory was sold at a disadvantage, and his own income began to be miserably restricted.

Mrs. Wollstonecraft found herself obliged to part with servants, with furniture, with all the luxuries, and gradually with all the comforts of life. Still, she kept up a semblance of gentility. She insisted that her children should be trained to be genteel and well-bred—in other words, idle—and she was accepted as an equal by the upper middle-class families who resided in the various neighbourhoods to which she moved.

For some while the whim seized Mr. Wollstonecraft to try his hand at farming. He rented a small estate at Barking, and afterwards at other places in Essex, where the supplies of fruit and vegetables for the capital were largely grown. Some intelligence and industry could easily have made a success of this venture, but, as it was, it only increased the poverty and disrepute of the Wollstonecraft family.

They moved, again, to Beverley, in Yorkshire. The farm they had there was poorer and their circumstances more wretched than they had been in Essex. There the family remained for six years, and in the northern market town the three little girls received their only education. The mistresses of the local school taught them the accomplishments that were considered necessary for the daughters of gentlemen. Mary and Eliza excelled in French, and were quick in picking up from every possible source odd scraps of miscellaneous knowledge.

Mary found Beverley much more imposing than the Essex villages to which she had been used. It seemed to her a large, fine town, and she thought the northern squires and their ladies who gathered there on market day the height of fashionable elegance.

The Yorkshire farm was not profitable, but it had afforded a living to the family, given the children wholesome if rough food, and allowed them a healthy, open-air life. The remnants of the Wollstonecraft fortune paid for the modest school fees of the children and for Mr. Wollstonecraft's vices. He was seldom sober. His financial difficulties increased year by year, and he vented his sour disappointment in outbursts of fury against his wife, his children, his animals. Whip, cane and boot were frequently used against all of these, and the sullen furies or violent outbursts of the tyrant were the only excitements that varied the lonely monotony of life on the half-derelict farm.

Mrs. Wollstonecraft was obliged to dispense altogether with domestic help. She herself cooked and scrubbed, knitted and darned, cut and sewed her own garments and those of the children. She had little intelligence, less culture and education, and, when her animal spirits had fled with her health and her happiness, she had nothing left with which to sustain her through the dreary labour of the drab days.

Mary watched her mother shrewdly, helped her all she could, and bore her nagging reproaches in silence. She had a better head and more self-control than the other two girls. Eliza in particular was inclined to be hysterical, and her father's brutalities would often evoke in her a passion of sobs, tears or trances of insensibility. The two boys were rough and wild, though handsome and robust. Charles, though bold, was sly and insolent, and cringed before his father's face, only to revile him behind his back.

Mary had to find her interests and pleasure in her lessons, in her free ramblings with her brothers and sisters over the moors and in reading the few books, relics of better times, the residue of the silk merchant's library, that she found discarded in boxes in the farmhouse attic. She read these diligently, not to obtain any escape into a dream world, for she was without fancy, but in order to acquire knowledge.

When the affairs of the Yorkshire farm became too hopelessly involved for even Edward Wollstonecraft's apathy to endure, the family were moved to Hoxton, where Mr. Wollstonecraft hoped to engage in business. He was now tired of farming, and turned his befuddled attention to commerce. Part of his capital had been tied up by his prudent father, and it was only with considerable difficulty that he could obtain it. Nevertheless, he had squandered piecemeal by far the greater portion of the money that he had inherited. Still, enough remained for the family to keep body and soul together, and there was a small property in Wales that it was impossible to touch and that brought in a meagre income. The fortunes of the Wollstonecrafts had sunk considerably since they had last lived in London, and it was in an establishment modest even for a small tradesman that Mr. Wollstonecraft placed his wife and children in the pretty little village of Hoxton. They had sunk, too, in their social position. At Barking they had been intimate with the family of Mr. Bamber Gascoyne, a Member of Parliament, as in Yorkshire they had had the friendship of a well-placed and substantial family, the Allens; but in Hoxton they were obliged to associate with the hosier, the grocer, the chandler and the other little tradespeople who supplied the village necessaries.

Their surroundings now were exceedingly humble; their furniture was of the roughest description, their clothes of the commonest material, their food of the cheapest kind. To purchase books or even the newspapers was not to be thought of; no further schooling for any of the children was to be contemplated, nor might a visit to any place of amusement—such as the theatre, Ranelagh or Vauxhall—be for a second entertained. Yet the unhappy couple, in disagreement on every other point but this, continued to insist that the six children whom they had brought so recklessly into the world should be considered too well-born to be trained for any profession or trade, though not too good to act as slaves in their parents' home. There was no suggestion of finding work for the two growing lads, who became with every month more difficult to manage, nor any attempt to train for useful ends the obviously exceptional intelligence of Mary and Everina.