‘Jacobin Morality’: the Wollstonecraft Memoirs

Abstract

In Gillray’s ‘New Morality’ cartoon of 1 August 1798, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft are yoked in obloquy. Among the supposedly seditious publications littering the ground, are Godwin’s Political Justice and Wollstonecraft’s Maria or the Wrongs of Woman. Godwin included this unfinished novel among his wife’s Posthumous Works, which he published in January 1798, alongside his edited version of her Memoirs. Canning’s ‘New Morality’ verses chose to catalogue Godwin with Paine, Holcroft and Helen Maria Williams among ‘all creeping creatures, venomous and low’. The Anti-Jacobin’s charge was that the ‘new’ morality was an insidious method of undermining the state. Gillray’s cartoon and Canning’s verses sought to trace the contagion to French revolutionary principles. In the full version of his verses (published in the last issue of the weekly Anti-Jacobin) Canning wrote:

How do we ape thee, France — nor claim alone

Thy arts, thy tastes, thy morals for our own,

But to thy WORTHIES tender homage due,

Their ‘hair-breadth ‘scapes’ with anxious interest view;

Statesmen and Heroines whom this age adores,

Though plainer times would call them Rogues and Whores.¹