“Ambition! And the Desire to become a Millionaire!” Mary Wollstonecraft, John Parish, and Hamburg Capitalism

Fair Trade: The Language of Love and Commerce in Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark CYNTHIA RICHARDS If we know Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, we know it largely through reputation. It is the book that won William Godwin's heart. Godwin himself endows it with this status: "If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author," he writes in the Memoirs, "this appears to be the book."1 And apparently, Godwin was not alone in succumbing to its charms. As Marilyn Butler and Janet Todd note in the introduction to The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, the book "moved and haunted the leading men writers of her generation.... and several of the women too."2 Thomas Holcroft purportedly proposes after reading the Letters Written in Sweden, and although Robert Southey does not go that far, the language of his praise suggests an equally strong response: upon reading the Letters he proclaims no woman her equal and professes: "She has made me in love with a cold climate, and frost and snow with a northern moonlight."3 Thus, through reputation, this book has become a "conquest narrative," of the amorous sort, famous not so much for what it says, but for how it was received. We can't help but read the letters looking for some clue as to why Godwin fell in love (and did so, after finding Wollstonecraft rather unpleasant company upon their first meeting) and how Wollstonecraft, with apparently no calculation, managed to accomplish this considerable end. In other words, we read it looking for some power, aesthetic or perhaps 71 72 / RICHARDS purely sentimental, that transcends the particularities of its composition and which models an ideal union between writer and reader or subject and object of address. For when the reader falls in love, the text's power is figured as absolute yet non-coercive, the writer remains exposed, vulnerable even in this feat of total persuasion. The critical reception of the Letters Written in Sweden has, by and large, continued in this romantic vein. Ralph Wardle calls the Letters "Mary's most mature and most delightful book," showing "how truly charming she could be when relaxed."4 Indeed, her biographers are uniform in their praise, finding in this text the most appealing, and not incidentally the most true, representation of Wollstonecraft, "the whole person."5 Gary Kelly, in his intellectual biography Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft, speaks of this work's merits in less "intimate" terms than Wardle, but still distinguishes it for its effective synthesis of objective] and subjective] knowledge: for Kelly, the Letters bring the "arguments and experience together in one text," offering up a portrait of the "female philosopher" in her most compelling pose.6 Yet the Letters are persuasive, Mary Poovey argues, precisely because they are so seemingly without design : her plot remains largely unrevealed in the work itself, her emotional development instead taking precedence.7 As Syndy Conger succinctly explains , "There is a sense of the narrator's mind—emotion and intellection —wholly shared."8 Thus, in our expressions of admiration for this last and most successful of Wollstonecraft's "authorized" texts, we remain indebted to a language of romantic correspondence. In the Letters, we find Wollstonecraft most affecting because most unaffected, our own reactions paying implicit homage to Godwin's personal feelings about the book. Yet any discussion of this book's public reception necessarily evokes its private (and far more tragic) one. For, of course, the text has become almost as famous for being a failed conquest narrative, of the amorous sort. The letters written during this short residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (both those which remained "private" and those which assumed this curious semi-personal form) we now know to have had little or no effect on their intended reader—Gilbert Imlay, Wollstonecraft's lover and the father of her illegitimate child, Fanny. Once again, it appears we have Godwin to thank for the public perception of the text's ultimate "failure." Upon its publication, readers would certainly have...

Christoph Bode offers a fresh reading of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), one of the most celebrated and best-known British romantic-period engagements with Scandinavia. Bode focuses on the generic tension in Letters between an attempt to provide credible witness to Scandinavia and the attempt to forge a ‘romantic’ persona. Wollstonecraft’s narrative, Bode concludes, involves less a description than an aesthetics of appropriation, an aesthetics which marks Wollstonecraft’s Letters as surprisingly and distinctly unrepresentative of the larger cultural patterns of exchange which we discern in this volume.

This article examines Mary Wollstonecraft’s epistolary travelogue Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) in the context of conjectural history. By illustrating how she borrows the methodology of conjectural history to trace the improvement of manners in Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, the article analyzes the utopia (or dys -topia) Wollstonecraft imagines based on the social progress she observes during her northern travels. It demonstrates that despite her initial faith in human industry and economic prosperity as the driving forces behind civ ilization, Wollstonecraft later expresses grave reservations about the “future improvement of the world” by drawing attention to the harmful effects that commerce can bring to societies. It suggests that such con cerns largely derive from her status as a female traveler who does not enjoy the privileges of the leisured male traveler and is therefore in a more favorable position to reflect on the conditions of the socially disen franchised such as women and the laboring poor. By exploring how Wollstonecraft’s unstable status leads her to critically examine stadial the ory and use various criteria in assessing a nation’s state of civilization, the article examines how she ultimately envisions the world as a “vast pris on” in her travel narrative, thereby anticipating the pessimistic turn in her political vision and later writings.

Previous articleNext article No AccessA Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Carol H. Poston, ed. and Mary Wollstonecraft. Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Carol H. Poston, ed. and Mary Wollstonecraft. Mary and The Wrongs of Woman. Gary Kelly, ed. and Mary Wollstonecraft.Janet ToddJanet Todd Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 8, Number 3Summer 1977 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24039876 Views: 4Total views on this site © 1977 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

I perceive, but too forcibly, that happiness, literally speaking, dwells not here. And that we wander to and fro in a vale of darkness as well as tears.(VRM 5:76)

The article presents a reading of Mary Wollstonecraft's “Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark”, dated 1796, in which the concept of the Picturesque is used as an analytical framework. The Picturesque is a contemporary British aesthetics concerned with how we look at landscape, and with the aestheticism of viewing. It is suggested that the Picturesque offers a new way of understanding Mary Wollstonecraft's position in‐between Enlightenment and Romanticism, Revolution and Restoration, authorship and journalism.

How few authors or artists have arrived at eminence who have not lived by their employment? --Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark 1. Things Shall be Valued in Proportion as They are Rare THE OCTOBER 1796 EDITION OF THE GENTLEMAN'S MAGAZINE INCLUDED an alleged letter entitled Affecting Address of a poor Student. In its own way, it was an elaborate job application. Appealing Gentleman's Magazine's concern for the distressed of various descriptions, correspondent wrote in order to procure a situation in life which is not of common kind, and, therefore, not likely be obtained by common means. The source of his problems, but also basis of a potential solution, he explained, was his enthusiasm for a literary life: From a boy ... I have particularly fond of study, and love of books increases with increasing years. Unfortunately for me, my finances are too narrow enable me enjoy that learned leisure, which is peculiarly adapted my inclinations.... With a mind not uncultivated, and inclination thus ardent in pursuit of knowledge, I find myself ill-calculated undertake any servile employment in order live. His fondness for study had made him reluctant and even unable perform less elevated work, but unfortunately, it had not led any meaningful work either. Well trained but unemployed, and with his expectations raised by high cultural standards of literary domain that he had grown used inhabiting, he had become overqualified. Having [a]rrived a time of life when most men consider their destination in world as fixed, he lacked things that most adults took for granted--a home, friends, money--and remained 'little acquainted with any of various ways of procuring a subsistence. Worse than any of these hardships was indignity of his position. Had he been fairly used, there would have no necessity for me seek a maintenance by medium I now do. Neglected by a world that seemed unwilling accommodate his career in a way that reflected his well-developed sense of cultural elevation, he had reduced doing what no gentleman should ever have to--appealing in a very public way readers of Gentleman's because, being in literary department, it seems me, that one of most probable means obtain completion of my wish is make it known through medium of that Magazine which is most read by literary men. Forced by poor financial prospects, he had driven degrading point of looking for sort of work that would convert his patiently acquired cultural capital into financial capital, preferably by acting as a and secretary some nobleman, private tutor children of some gentleman of fortune, or amanuensis some literary man, who, from whatever cause, may wish for such an assistant. (1) He was, in other words, an impoverished gentleman writing more prosperous gentlemen in pages of a magazine whose very name testified inherent connection between literary taste and gentility. His sense of grievance about having denied support that would enable him continue lead a literary life did not make his intervention in Gentleman's any less conservative though. He was not denouncing hierarchical nature of a world where higher learning and upper classes had a naturally harmonious relationship, he just wanted be a part of it. Nor, he implied, was this anything more than what his years of scholarly training had led him expect. His decision publicize his concerns did not generate any solutions his problems. He finished his letter by suggesting that any potential employers--those noblemen wanting a librarian and secretary, gentlemen of fortune searching for a private tutor for their children, or literary men in need of an assistant--write Gentleman's, which could then publish a notice him in next month's edition, but none appeared. …

<p>In the summer of 1795, when Mary Wollstonecraft journeyed to Scandinavia, she was disillusioned with human society and the possibility of meaningful relation with others. She had recently been in Paris, where she had seen many of her moderate revolutionary friends executed under Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, and by the time of her arrival in Scandinavia her unsatisfactory relationship with Gilbert Imlay was coming to an end. The book that resulted from this journey, A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, is remarkable for its critique of sovereignty and the reification of difference inherent to the construction of national borders and the drives of commercial exchange. The article argues that Wollstonecraft insists upon openness to the people and cultures she encounters through configuring epistemology as a twin process of experiential contact and sceptical inquiry. This a process that remains inherently and necessarily ethical because it resists the structures of tyranny, domination, and control, which Wollstonecraft perceives to be afflicting late-eighteenth-century Europe, whilst simultaneously allowing for a re-conception of politics and justice according to the demands both of the present and the not-yet-formalised future.</p>

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) is well known for her feminist pamphlet A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792). Wollstonecraft was also an experienced traveller. She travelled to Portugal, and she lived and worked in Ireland, London and Paris. Her travel account about her stay in Scandinavia, Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, was published in 1796. Her life and works have fascinated many artists, writers and scholars over time, starting with her husband, the philosopher William Godwin (1756–1836), who published the Memoirs of the Author of ‘The Rights of Woman’ in 1798. More recently, Nigel Leask (2019), Anca-Raluca Radu (2020), Elizabeth Zold (2023), Michael Meyer (2023) and Luisa Simonutti (2024), amongst others, discussed the Letters in different contexts. I will begin this chapter by giving a brief overview of the outlines in this remarkable renaissance of ‘Mary Wollstonecraft studies’. I will continue by positioning Wollstonecraft’s Letters within the genre of travel writing. In my analysis I will focus on two concepts that determine Wollstonecraft as a traveller-cultural transmitter: performativity and persona. This chapter demonstrates that the combination of persona (the self) and performativity (as writer, observer and scholar) with the approach of cultural transfer expands our understanding of the Letters.

Chronology Introduction Claudia L. Johnson 1. Mary Wollstonecraft's letters Janet Todd 2. Mary Wollstonecraft on education Alan Richardson 3. Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindications and their political tradition Chris Jones 4. Mary Wollstonecraft's French Revolution Tom Furniss 5. Mary Wollstonecraft's literary reviews Mitzi Myers 6. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and the religious foundations of Mary Wollstonecraft's feminism Barbara Taylor 7. Mary Wollstonecraft and the literature of advice and instruction Vivien Jones 8. Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman and the woman writers of her day Anne K. Mellor 9. Mary Wollstonecraft and the poets Susan J. Wolfson 10. Mary Wollstonecraft's novels Claudia L. Johnson 11. The art of travelling in Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark Mary A. Favret 12. Mary Wollstonecraft and the sexuality of genius Andrew Elfenbein 13. Mary Wollstonecraft's reception and legacies Cora Kaplan.

ROXANNE EBERLE Amelia andJohn Opie: Conjugal Sociability and Romanticism’s Professional Arts t('T'O-7-HAT DIFFERENCE DOES GENDER MAKE TO OUR UNDERSTANDING OF W British literary Romanticism?”1 In posing that question, Anne Mellor added her voice to other feminist scholars interested in exploring not only the work of women writers but also the significance of gender to Romanticism’s long-standing characterizations of the imagination, literary endeavor, and the natural world. Twenty years later, Mellor prompts us to go further, asking, “So what comes next?” She calls for “editions of letters and journals, as well as modern editions, densely annotated. . . . We also need full-scale biographies [and] good single-author studies of the entire literary careers of almost all the leading women writers of the Romantic period.”2 The question for biographers working within the field, and one I pose here, rephrases Mellor’s query to: “What difference did gender make to the ways in which authors lived their lives and constructed their careers during the British Romantic period?” My work contributes to sociability studies by detailing an important aspect of Romanticism that is urban, public, and deliberately engaged with the marketplace.3 In the essay that follows, I ex­ plore Amelia and John Opie’s negotiation of courtship and married life during the vexed mid 1790s, when it still seemed possible to imagine alter­ native social conventions in literature and to enact them within the public 1. Romanticism & Gender, i. 2. “Romanticism, History, Historicism: A Conversation,” 156. See also Roxanne Eberle, ed., “Interview with Anne Mellor,” Romantic Circles: Praxis Series, January 2014, http://www .rc.umd.edu/praxis/mcllor_mterview/index.html. 3. See Jon Mee, Conversable Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) and Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite, eds. Romantic Sociability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). SiR, 53 (Fall 2014) 319 320 ROXANNE EBERLE and private spaces ofLondon. Although historical hindsight has led scholars and historians to chart the falling fortunes of progressive politics after the beginning of hostilities with France in 1793 and the Treason Trials of 1794, the rest of the decade saw the publication of texts willing to challenge both social and narrative conventions, including William Godwin’s PoliticalJus­ tice (1793) and Caleb Williams (1794), Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796), and Mary Hays’s Memoirs oj Emma Courtney (1796). A poet, novelist, and essayist, Amelia Alderson Opie was born in 1769 and lived long enough to visit the Crystal Palace when she was in her eighties.4 Throughout that long life, she consistently sought out the most exciting conversations of her day. Her childhood and young adulthood was spent in Norwich, among rational dissenters, Warrington Academy tu­ tors, and political radicals. Amelia began corresponding with Godwin in 1794, and whenever in London she was an active member of progressive sociable circles. In 1796 Godwin introduced her to Hays and Wollstonecraft and she cultivated a friendship with the latter, who quite possibly in­ troduced her to the portrait painter John Opie. John had first painted Wollstonecraft in 1790/91, and quickly become one of Godwin’s friends in the mid 1790s. Any consideration of the courtship and marriage of the Opies necessarily engages with these intersecting circles of professional arts sociability, encompassing the Godwin-Wollstonecraft circle, the theater world of Thomas Holcroft, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Sarah Siddons, and the Royal Academy Exhibition Halls frequented by John. In marrying John, Amelia found new opportunities within London’s professional arts community, even as many of her former associates strug­ gled to sustain careers, and their marriage has sometimes been characterized as symptomatic of the failure of 1790s political idealism.5 6 Kenneth Johnston invites biographers to reconsider the narrative of progressive retreat so dominant in Romantic studies, which for a long time led to an exclusive focus on those writers who successfully negotiated literary careers despite harboring radical sympathies in the 1790s, William Wordsworth and Sam­ uel Taylor Coleridge most notably/’ Johnston redirects attention to the “almost famous,” including Amelia. But she was actually quite “famous” 4. Throughout the rest ofthe essay I refer to Amelia andjohn Opie by their first names in order to avoid...

Wollstonecraft’s Scandinavian Letters is a fascinating mixture of autobiography and travel writing, often leaving readers with the impression that the places Wollstonecraft visits and the people she encounters are only secondary in importance to the traveller’s own experiences, and that her journey is one of personal progress rather than one of geographical and social exploration. This chapter situates Wollstonecraft’s Letters in the context of eighteenth-century travel and epistolary writing, sentimental fiction and conventional representations of landscape. It also identifies some of the debts Letters owes to established generic conventions and some of the ways in which it detaches itself from its predecessors and contemporaries. In terms of critical traditions, this analysis owes a great deal to feminism, but it also reads the text against its grain, especially by including its non-Anglo-American reception in which scholars often borrow from the vocabulary of postcolonial studies, noting how Wollstonecraft’s Britishness as well as her class influence her perceptions of the Scandinavians and Scandinavian landscapes.

The Power of the Unnamed <i>You</i> in Mary Wollstonecraft’s <i>Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark</i>

ABSTRACTIn her 1796 travelogue, Wollstonecraft combines the main elements of many different genres, blending together the physical-geographical account of the countries she was visiting with her own feelings, producing a Romantic conception of the human being overwhelmed by and subsumed into the natural elements. The journey through the Scandinavian countries turns out to be more than a business travel. It takes the shape of an inner route, a rediscovery of herself and of her experiences, including motherhood. The ability to dismantle the boundaries of the travel writing genre in such an innovative way is the same ability she shows when subverting the literary gender stereotypes that saw women marginalized inside the domestic sphere. What emerges from this extraordinary epistolary collection is a woman capable of the greatest sentimentality and, at the same time, of the smartest rationality, an active woman who does not deny her femininity but who strongly refuses the passivity society has always attributed to the female.

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97) and Elizabeth Simcoe (1762–1850) composed narratives of their travels: accounts influenced by picturesque theory, especially as articulated by William Gilpin. Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark appeared in 1796; Simcoe, a gifted artist, kept a written and visual diary of her 1791–96 sojourn in Lower and Upper Canada, as spouse of the first Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada, John Graves Simcoe (1752–1806). Wollstonecraft and Simcoe took small children with them—Wollstonecraft, her daughter Frances (born May 14 1794); Simcoe, her daughter Sophia (born October 25 1789) and her son Francis (born June 6 1791). Gilpin’s aesthetic program favours the irregular, the varied, the marginal; Wollstonecraft and Simcoe, divergent in avowed political convictions, adapt Gilpin’s practice and improvise modes of a specifically maternal picturesque. Domestically, the presence of children is expected; to situate them in the wilds and on frontiers changes their role—and the role of their mothers. Wollstonecraft’s account of a visit to Sarp Falls in Norway and Simcoe’s visions of Niagara (as well as of the Don River) reveal, respectively, Wollstonecraft’s apocalyptic, and Simcoe’s gradualist, sensibility. Wollstonecraft projects the presence of her daughter into the Scandinavian landscape, drawing on Shakespeare’s fairyland to introduce preternatural dimensions into an empirical-minded narrative; Simcoe figures her son Francis as a mediator between the empire in which she believes, and Indigenous peoples whom she acknowledges as central to the defence, the consolidation, and the future of the province over which her husband presides.