Vindication by Lyndall Gordon

celebrity. Wollstonecraft’s radical programme was designed to free a child’s tongue; children were invited to tell stories in their own words. Her initiatives began with education, keen to retrieve human endowments the schoolroom shuts off.
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    As she tried out these ideas, in her mid-twenties, Mary presided over a group of women who were supporting themselves entirely on their own. Lacking dowries, they were marginal to the dominant society, but as long as their school flourished they found a place in a larger marginal community of Nonconformists. Newington Green was no ordinary village. It was high-minded, politicised and literate: full of subscribers to published sermons, and supporters of America in its War of Independence. No letters survive from Mary’s first year at Newington Green, yet since this was the period when she became politicised, we must enter the experimental hothouse of ideas in which she lived.
    One person in Newington Green whom she would later recall with particular gratitude (together with Mrs Burgh) was the Revd Dr Price. Though she continued to attend Anglican services, she did also hear his political sermons. He was a thinker of many parts: a mathematician and economist, as well as political philosopher. He preached liberty as part of a programme of moral perfection, a religious utopianism stressing the divine image implanted in our nature. His humanitarian ideas were far-sighted: he dreamt of abolishing war and planned an international tribunal for settling disputes, but at the time Mary Wollstonecraft came under his influence his keenest thoughts were concentrated on the future of America. He even went so far as to declare that ‘next to the introduction of Christianity among mankind, the American Revolution may prove the most important step in the progressive course of human improvement’. The political core of what Wollstonecraft put forward after her contact with Dr Price reflects his thinking in relation to the new-formed United States.
    In August 1775, George III had declared the American colonists to be in a state of rebellion, and sent troops. When nine hundred British soldiers had fired on seventy Americans at Lexington, Thomas Rogers, a banker in Newington Green, put on mourning. Later that year Dr Price wrote a pamphlet in favour of the rebels, Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty . It sold sixty thousand copies when it was published in February 1776 (reinforcing the impact of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense which argued the case for a republic), and is said to have encouraged the American Declaration of Independence on July 4th. Britain, Price argued, could not win this war. His main point, though, was that Britain was in the wrong because political authority derives from the people, and is limited by natural rights and the common good. He held that there were no grounds for justifying imperialism.
    Anonymous letters threatened Price with death. He couldn’t have cared less for threats when it came to the cause of truth and liberty, but there was no egotism in his politics. His eyes had the keenness of intelligence, not the expressiveness of personality. He lived simply, and gave a fifth of his income to charity. A modest man, thin, in a plain black coat, with a shy bend to his back, he was never unkind or uncivil. So revered was Price by artisans and market women that when he trotted through London on his old horse he could hear orange-women calling, ‘There goes Dr Price! Make way for Dr Price!’ His objections to war and the corruption of the ruling class were shared by the artisan class in London (including the poet William Blake), by manufacturers and traders in the Midlands and North West, and also by the poor who provided the soldiers for the American war. The country lost the labour of at least a hundred and fifty thousand men for eight years. All these productive but disfranchised classes were struck by the American experiment in