In Somers Town we find a plaque to the world’s first feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter, author of Frankenstein in the old St Pancras Church.

Mary Wollstonecraft wrote The Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792, a book that is held as the first feminist tract at a time when women had no rights to their children and were their husband’s property.

Born of Irish descent in Spitalfields, London, to an abusive, violent father, as a child she would stand in front of her mother to protect her from her father’s blows.  She was bright, curious, fearless and ahead of her time.

She opened a school for girls in Stoke Newington, funded by the Dissenters, so that they may be better educated. As she noted in her Vindication:

“Taught from infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.”

When Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin first met at a party in honour of Thomas Paine and his Rights of Man (1791) at Joseph Johnson’s, the radical publisher, they were not particularly impressed with each other.

Wollstonecraft made a journey to witness the French Revolution. 

In France, witnessing the aftermath of the French Revolution, she had an affair, which resulted in a child. Her lover abandoned her with this child in the midst of a war between France and Britain. Things went badly and she tried to kill herself, by leaping off Putney Bridge. 

Years later, Wollstonecraft would unconventionally call on Godwin in Somers Town and a true meeting of minds would begin. 

Wollstonecraft was pregnant, so as protection for their coming child -and knowing the brutality of society’s moral code against unmarried women and illegitimate children- they married, though it was against their beliefs. This marriage of equals occurred at Old St Pancras Church.

They lived in separate flats, next door to each other, at the Polygon in old Somers Town, so that she could be independent. Their union held all the principles and ideals of the Romantic movement: freedom, justice, reason, sensibility and the imagination. 

On 30 August 1797: Wollstonecraft’s second daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (later Mary Shelley), was born and lived at the Polygon for the first 10 years of her life. She left her mark on the world through her novel Frankenstein.

Tragically, Wollstonecraft died of septicaemia 11 days after childbirth to her daughter, Mary and was buried in the Old St Pancras Churchyard, where Wollstonecraft and Godwin had been married that same year.

The bereaved widower wrote:

“This light was lent to me for a very short period, and is now extinguished for ever!”

It was left up to Godwin to bring up Mary and Fanny. Wollstonecraft’s reputation suffered. Godwin was laid into by the Conservative press because of a rather frank memoir, revealing details about Wollstonecraft’s affairs with Fuseli and with Imlay, the child born out of wedlock, and her suicide attempts. He hoped to expose the truth of a woman’s life in his society, but such honesty offended some and implicated others. Several of Godwin’s past acquaintances spurned him: he found himself increasingly the subject of attack by loyalist newspapers, and their philosophical opinions were parodied and ridiculed in novels, reviews and pamphlets. 

Wollstonecraft have left few traces on the local landscape, apart from the tombstone here – there is Godwin and Crowndale Court is over there. And at 99 Chalton Street there is Mary Wollstonecraft House. There is a plaque at Werrington Street, on the housing development of Oakeshott Court – which is on the site of the house where Wollstonecraft lived: The address at that time was 29 Polygon Square. 

“‘Mary Who?’ is still the common form of her name, outside a small circle of specialists and enthusiasts. People stumble over the three simple syllables; its awkwardness has stood in the way of her fame. Pankhurst has an easy ring to it, and Mrs Pankhurst got a statue. When I set about organising a modest plaque on the site of the house in which Mary Wollstonecraft died in Somers Town, there was talk of naming flats or even a street after her: but again, those three syllables defeated too many people.”

-Biographer Claire Tomalin

Well, now we might be happy to know there is a new Wollstonecraft Street at the new Kings X, in NC1 4BT. 

DETAIL 

In 1792, in A Vindication of the Rights of Women: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects, in which she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men, but made so socially and by themselves, by being what she calls ‘spaniels’ and ‘toys’, over-emotional or frivolous, too cunning, either slavish or tyrannical. She attacks those writers, including Rousseau, who would deny women an education. In a just world, women would exercise their capacity to be equals to men – and is this not a rational way to proceed, for women educate children and are companions for men. What good is it for these roles if they are weak and ignorant – and, as Wollstonecraft insists, the ‘truth must be common to all’? Wollstonecraft considered that women were connected to the home, though she also foresaw professional lives for them. She argued, though, that the home, the personal sphere, was not distinct from the public sphere or work and the state. It was its foundation, just as the public sphere affected what occurred within the home. 

Plaque to Mary Wollstonecraft at Somers Town Oakshott Court.

William Blake illustration of Mary Wollstonecraft imagining her with her daughters.