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182 6 Modern Philosophers The publication of Memoirs of the Author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” ignited a firestorm of controversy throughout the English-speaking world. Mocked as “Modern Philosophers,” William Godwin, Gilbert Imlay, and Mary Wollstonecraft were derided as ineffectual egoists inhabiting a dream world disconnected from the laws of God and nature. They were all three speculators who imagined that they could find happiness by turning the world upside down. A poem entitled “A Vision of Liberty” satirized the outcome of Godwin’s and Wollstonecraft’s fondness for revolutionary enthusiasm . William and Mary were “mounted on a braying ass.” The “husband , sans-culottes, was melancholy” because the wife “would wear the breeches— / God help poor silly men from such usurping b——s.” Then he, “thinking her whoredoms were not known enough,” reported “with huge delight, / How oft she cuckolded the silly clown, / And lent, O lovely piece! herself to half the town.” No wonder a young woman in Maine, certain that Wollstonecraft’s life was “the best comment on her writings,” concluded that “her sentiments . . . will not bear analyzing.” Wollstonecraft and Godwin , it would seem, had been hoist on their own petard.1 1. C. K[irkpatrick Sharpe], “The Vision of Liberty,” Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine; or, Monthly Political and Literary Censor, from April to August (Inclusive) 1801 . . . , IX (London, 1801), 518; Eliza Southgate to Moses Porter, June 1, 1801, in “Letters of Eliza Southgate to Her Cousin Moses Porter,” in Gordon S. Wood, ed., The Rising Glory of America, 1760–1820, rev. ed. (Boston, 1990), 188. See Emerson Robert Loomis, “The New Philosophy Satirized in American Fiction,” American Quarterly, XIV (1962), 490–495; Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley, Calif., 1995); and Clark, Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (Princeton, N.J., 2004), 113–136. MODERN PHILOSOPHERS / 183 It is easy to see the outrage that greeted Memoirs as an episode in a general reaction against radicalism. In the late 1790s, at war with France or contemplating war with France, political leaders in Great Britain and the United States passed legislation equating criticism of governments with sedition. In both countries, writers and publishers, including Joseph Johnson , went to jail. Renowned avatars of revolution such as Thomas Paine were suddenly pariahs fated to die scorned and forgotten. Revulsion against the excesses of the French Revolution fueled a defense of the standing order and a backlash against the revolutionary possibilities of the late eighteenth century. This interpretation has considerable merit. Many citizens in the early nineteenth century were preoccupied with security, stability, and the regulation of political and cultural borders. But it does not follow that conversations initiated in the eighteenth century ceased. Not even ridicule guaranteed obscurity.2 Serious reservations about the choices Wollstonecraft, Imlay, and Godwin made often co-existed with admiration for their willingness to make choices. After all, Mary Hays argued, revolution was a long-term affair that depended on exceptional individuals risking everything to promote reform. “Vigorous minds” were animated by “a liberal curiosity” that “urges them to quit beaten paths, to explore untried ways, to burst the fetters of prescription , and to acquire wisdom by an individual experience.” In the end, Hays argued, “all great changes and improvements in society” originated with “speculative and enterprising spirits.” Wollstonecraft’s ambition had been “the emancipation of her own sex,” and that cause would not die because she had violated social convention. If “the sensibility of this extraordinary woman” had settled on “the duties of a wife and mother” earlier she might have enjoyed a quiet life. But Mary Wollstonecraft had chosen a different path, and that had made all the difference. However she might have erred and however critics maligned her, she had not “laboured in vain: the spirit of reform is silently pursuing its course. Who can mark its limits?”3 Hays was right.Wollstonecraft and Godwin remained influential writers. If anything, Memoirs and its popular reception increased their visibility. Despite , or because of, the public denunciation of Modern Philosophy, many 2. See Seth Cotlar,Tom Paine’s America: The Rise and Fall of Transatlantic Radicalism in the Early Republic (Charlottesville, Va., 2011); Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia, 2008); John Barrell,The Spirit of Despotism : Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s (Oxford, 2006); Clark,The Struggle for the Breeches; and Clark, Scandal, 113–136. 3. [Mary Hays], “Memoirs of...

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