[Work-in-progress post] "An impulsive Irish spirit" in Stoke Newington N16, Ireland and France: Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft: Green plaque at Newington Green Primary School, Matthias Road, N16 8NP. Image source: Spudgun67, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Updated 22 August 2024: Just to highlight this blog post is still a work-in-progress, published early in draft form for my MA history project assessment. The post will be completed and re-published in the coming months. Thank you for your patience. Do please get in touch via the Comments section below or Contact me directly if you have any questions or comment about this topic in the meantime.

This plaque on the side of Newington Green Primary School records the presence of one of Stoke Newington’s leading intellectual dissenters – that pioneering champion of women’s rights, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797).  For two years, she tried to earn a living by running a girls’ school on this site with her sisters Eliza and Everina, and her friend Fanny Blood. But the school was not a financial success and Wollstonecraft had to close it down in 1786.

Something that came as quite a surprise to me was learning that her next role was as a governess in Ireland – an experience which influenced her groundbreaking work, A Vindication of the Rights of Women. What began as research to answer the question "Why Ireland?" became a journey of discovery into the family, political and artistic connections between Ireland, Mary Wollstonecraft and her wider family.

Click here for Blog Map

Featured locations:

• Newington Green, London N16 9PR

• Primrose Street, Spitalfields, London EC2A

Click here for a reminder of key events in the Timeline of the 18th Century

1786-1787: From school founder to governess

Portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft by Irish painter John Keenan (c. 1787?). Source: Public domain via WikiGallery.

'Thoughts on the Education of Daughters' (1787) by Mary Wollstonecraft. Image source: Public domain, via Google Books,

“There was such a solemn kind of stupidity about this place as froze my very blood. I entered the great gates with the same kind of feeling as I should have if I was going into the Bastille”.

- Letter to Everina Wollstonecraft from Mitchelstown Castle, 30 Oct 1787.

From C. Kegan Paul's William Godwin: his Friends and Contemporaries (1876), p. 185.

The home of Lord & Lady Kingsborough - Mitchelstown Castle, Co. Cork by John Neale 1924. Image source: Public domain, via WikiCommons. Image extracted from page 240 of volume 3 of Views of the Seats of Noblemen and Gentlemen in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Second Series, by John Preston Neale (1824). Original held and digitised by the British Library.

The town residence of Lord & Lady Kingsborough was at 15 Henrietta Street, Dublin D01. Image source; William Murphy, Creative Commons CC BY-SA 2.0 license, via Wikimedia Commons

Irish origins in Ballyshannon & Spitalfields

“Her father, Edward John Wollstonecraft, was the son of a prosperous Spitalfields manufacturer of Irish birth....[Her mother was] Elizabeth Dixon, the daughter of a gentleman in good position, of Ballyshannon”

[Source: The Love Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft to Gilbert Imlay, by Mary Wollstonecraft and Roger Ingpen (1917). Ingpen, Preface, p. v]

'View of Ballyshannon from the distance' by unknown artist (c.1800-1860). Image source: © The Trustees of the British Museum, via Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

18th Century silk weaver merchant houses on Fournier Street, Spitalfields (Photographed February 2024 © Breda Corish)

1793 etching of Archibald Hamilton Rowan (taller) with fellow United Irishman, Simon Butler. Image source: © The Trustees of the British Museum, via Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

1792-1795: "an impulsive Irish spirit" in revolutionary France

[Note: this is Ingpen's choice of phrase in The Love Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft to Gilbert Imlay, by Mary Wollstonecraft and Roger Ingpen (1917). Ingpen, Preface, p. xix]

Ireland and the next generation: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

From Donegal as a setting for Frankenstein....

- see Professor Claire Connolly's ‘Frankenstein’s Ireland: A ‘wretched’ place with ‘traces of civilisation’ in The Irish Times, 27 October 2018 [paywall].

....to Frankenstein's monster as a representation of Irish nationalism

- see Punch cartoon in reaction to the Phoenix Park murders of 1882

'The Irish Frankenstein' by John Tenniel, in Punch 4 May 1882. Image source: New York Public Library, free to use

'Frankenstein, or, The modern Prometheus' by Mary Shelley (second edition 1823). Image source: New York Public Library, free to use.

---

Coming soon - closing reflection on how Mary Wollstonecraft's life illustrates the deep entanglement of British and Irish society and politics. Should we think of Mary Wollstonecraft as an 18th century version of 'second-generation irish'? How did she view Ireland?

What do you think?

---

Blog sources & further resources

Click here for Blog Map

Ireland and A Vindication of the Rights of Women

The question of how Wollstonecraft's 'radical class and gender analyses' were influenced by her work as a governess in Ireland is explored by Jenny McAuley:

• Jenny McAuley,’ From the Education of daughters to the Rights of woman: Mary Wollstonecraft in Ireland, 1786–7’, History Ireland, Volume 24 (January-February 2016).

In her own words

Letters written by Mary Wollstonecraft during her time in Ireland can be read in C. Kegan Paul's William Godwin: his Friends and Contemporaries (1876), pp. 180-192.

Material culture: Portraiture

Imogen Tedbury, ‘”That hyena in petticoats”: how artists have portrayed Mary Wollstonecraft’, Apollo: The international Art magazine, 17 November 2020.

Reading Irish Gothic fiction

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is discussed by Jarlath Killeen in The Emergence of Irish Gothic Fiction: History, Origins, Theories (Edinburgh University Press, 2014), pp. 5, 14, 15, 17-18. Available as an open access title here and here.

Urban history: Henrietta Street, Dublin 1

Today, Henrietta Street is one of the best examples of the homes built in Dublin for the wealthy in the early to mid-eighteenth century.

• The still remaining period features of the Kingsborough's town house, 15 Henrietta Street, are described here

• 14 Henrietta Street / 14 Sráid Henrietta is now open to visitors for tours which trace the social history of the city as these once grand buildings became slum tenements.

More resources - coming soon