Vindication by Lyndall Gordon Page B

with the insistent self-pity of Mary’s lamentations over one difficulty or another. From February 1784 to September 1786 there remain only six letters to George Blood, and two to her sisters, a small fraction of what she would have written over the course of two and a half years. The surviving letters never speak of the educational and ideological interests she was developing. When Mary writes to George, she’s advising a young scamp who, when he wasn’t abandoning jobs for long spells of idleness, assisted in a haberdasher’s in Cheapside. He was responsive to Mary, his eyes danced, and she was fond of him as a ‘sister’, but this was no thinker–and, not surprisingly, her bond with George does not reflect that side. He helped her in so far as he allowed her to confide her setbacks and troubles, and she must have confided also in Mrs Burgh’s nephew Friendly Church, for he told her that she would ‘never thrive in the world’. But Church was wrong. When Mary said, ‘my harassed mind will wear out my body’, she did not expect imminent death. Cries and sighs were the commonplaces of eighteenth-century sensibility, introduced in the 1740s by Richardson’s hugely successful novels Pamela and Clarissa , whose heroine pits her integrity against those who control the world (exploiters, bullies, rakes). Clarissa is forever having her laces cut when she falls in a faint. Sheexhibits the virtue of weeping. It rebukes the heartless and vindicates her honesty. Mary’s sighs signal in the same way the honest, unprotected woman at odds with the world, a position she shared with her sisters. Her letters to them too leave out the stimulus of the Dissenters’ bid for rights in the face of political exclusion, and, more immediately, the impact of the American model as it came to her through Dr Price.
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    Richard Price was sixty-one when Mary met him. A portrait of this time by Benjamin West shows a thinker beside a bookcase. His lined forehead and hollow cheeks are framed by a full-bottomed wig. His expression conveys the calm and sweetness of spirit of those whose strength comes from within. Repeatedly, Mary would be drawn to the gentleness of confident men (as unlike her father as it was possible to be). This kind of gentleness is far from weak: in Price it shows an edge in his rather formidable dark eyebrows, the right raised interrogatively, which together with the keen eyes behind the spectacles convey a quiet authority.
    He came from Llangeinor in Glamorganshire, the son of a Calvinist minister called Rice Price who was harsh and bigoted to the extent that his son rebelled. The son took up the rational faith of Unitarians who stressed the ethics of compassion, denying miracles and ‘superstitions’ in favour of Christ’s humanity. Richard Price never became fully Unitarian in so far as he retained a sense of Christ’s divinity, but a sectarian label is unimportant beside his embrace of Christ’s non-violence. He rejected religions with histories of coercive violence, Islam and Catholicism. Protestantism he thought little better, while pagans with their lewd and cruel deities sanctified the worst human traits. It was better not to believe in a deity, he thought, than to project a punitive being.
    Price moved to London in about 1740 to study for the ministry at Moorfields Academy, run by his uncle Samuel Price, with help from Isaac Watts the hymn-writer. It was a time when Dissenting academies were the real centres of education in England, while the established seats of learning, Oxford and Cambridge, dozed through the eighteenth century. In 1758 Price settled at Newington Green as preacher. After twelve years there he began to preach in the mornings to the much larger congregation ofUnitarians at the Gravel Pit Meeting House in Hackney. A wider public read his pamphlet against the American war. Congress invited Price to become a citizen in 1778, and Yale