Free Vindication by Lyndall Gordon Page A

put the weight on what she called ‘temper’, extending the benefits of a home education by those who knew the child best. Boarding establishments were schools of ‘vice’ and ‘tyranny’. There, vicious children were prone to ‘infect’ a number of others, while love and tenderness remained undeveloped in the absence of domestic affection.
    Home, then, was central to Wollstonecraft’s education; she did not compete with parents for control. Burgh had laid it down that boys should be removed to boarding schools to avoid the ‘weakening’ effect of maternal love; attachment to parents, he thought, should be a matter of ‘principle’, not instinct. Again, Wollstonecraft opposed this: she realised that the most important education of all begins with a baby’s mouth on the mother’s breast, responding to ‘the warmest glow of tenderness’. This grants mothers the central role in education. Her insistence on breast-feeding went against fashionable practice in her youth when it had been customary amongst the upper classes to send infants away to be cared for–in many cases, neglected–in the country. Jane Austen’s family was amongst those who followed this practice: Jane spent her first two years in a local cottage, the idea being that a child returned home when she was ready to be civilised. Mrs Austen must have had a superior arrangement, for all her infants survived. She was less well advised when, in 1783, she sent her daughter Jane, aged seven, to boarding-school. Girls in most schools of the time were poorly fed, callously treated, and in many cases succumbed to illness. It was only through the initiative of a fellow-pupil, Jane’s cousin, who managed to send an alarm to the Austens, that a sick Jane was fetched away.
    Mary Wollstonecraft ran her school along entirely different and what were then innovative lines: she had a maternal attentiveness to the physical as well as mental needs of a child; she was committed to wholesome food; and her methods were flexible. Godwin tells us that she ‘carefully watched symptoms as they rose, and the success of her experiments; and governed herself accordingly’. She was confident in her theories of education without pressing them too hard. She did believe in moral discipline, but not in the first place as a set of rules to be enforced, rather as a child’s imitation of tender parents whose principles take root in its earliest apprehensions. So, unlike other schools, Wollstonecraft’s did not disconnect the mind from domestic affections.
    Was Mrs Burgh aware of Mary’s deviance from her husband’s regime? If so, did she mind? It’s inconceivable that she would have backed Mary had she not been impressed with her ideas. Mr Burgh has his place in TheOxford Dictionary of National Biography ; his dour voice drones on in his tomes in the manner of those too well informed to be aware of the person who listens–the occupational hazard of a schoolmaster. Marital sex, Burgh believed, should be curtailed. It is our duty, of course, to ‘support the species’, but abstinence at other times is to be desired. Women are vain creatures who should not obtrude their prattle on educated men. Beauty is nothing more than a ‘mass of flesh, blood, humours, and filth, covered over with a well-coloured skin’. Men’s admiration always contains a ‘filthy passion’. A wife must obey her husband because of the ‘superior dignity of the male-sex, to which nature has given greater strength of mind and body, and therefore fitted them for authority’. These were his words in 1756, three years into his childless marriage to Hannah Harding, who appears in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and in The Dictionary of British Radicals only in her capacity as Mr Burgh’s wife, yet her help to Mary Wollstonecraft in the last four years of Mrs Burgh’s life,