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.

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

This marriage of equals occurred at Old St Pancras Church. Wollstonecraft was pregnant. 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. 

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

Tragically Wollstonecraft died of septicaemia 11 days after childbirth to her daughter Mary and was buried in the Old St Pancras Churchyard, where they had only been married the 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 her affairs with Fuseli and with Imlay, and 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 his – and her – philosophical opinions were parodied and ridiculed in novels, reviews and pamphlets.