DAY 3: REVOLUTIONS, RESTORATIONS AND THE MOTHER OF THE MOTHER OF FRANKENSTEIN

Day 3: From 9:00 until 19:00 = 1660 - 1798
Introduction: From the optimistic, baroque, Shakespearian (Christopher Marlowe wouldn't approve of me saying that!) and unashamedly "art-y" Renaissance, we travel to the years of political turmoil: The Restoration Period. Sometimes called the Neoclassical Period, this stage in our language's developement was a bit more... restrained. Society in general was busy trying to repress the memories of the nasty things that had happened in the past. Writers of the time loved the sharp pen of wit, and used it with an ordered and structured style that was a deliberate turn away from the grandeur of the Golden Age. Not to say that this period was boring: this was the time of John Milton (poor devil, ha ha), Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope. Writers such as those, in the midst of all the chaos that they revelled in or hated at turn, still suffered most keenly from the wounds of life... which tragically led some to attempt to or succeed (?!) in ending their own.

Locations: 1. The life of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) Beginning the day bright and early, we will journey into the life of Mary Wollstonecraft: a writer, philosopher and feminist. Our first location will be where she was born... Spitalfileds, London. We will travel the streets she once did and visit the house she was forced to leave after her abusive, alchoholic father squandered the family savings. If time allows us (for we have so far to go, and so little time to get there!), we might visit the tavern he frequented for most of her youth. Jumping ahead in her troubled life, we will visit the school for young girls that Wollenstonecraft and a childhood friend set up in Newtington Green. She later abandoned the school, devastated by her friend's sudden death, for a job as a governess. Near that building, which still stands today and whose history books read fondly of "Mistress Mary", we will have a picnic in the flowering gardens.The next location will be even more grim: after multiple rejections and broken relationships, she attempted to poison herself with laudanum in her small apartment in London, which we will visit. Next, we will walk along the River Thames in which she had jumped and was subsequently saved by a stranger. But her soulmate, the solemn William Godwin, prevented further attempts at suicide: she died, at the age of thirty eight, a week after giving birth to a child called Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin... later Mary Shelly, authoress of Frankenstein! At the end of a very long and eventful day, we can eat supper at her memorial site at Old Saint Pancreas Churchyard, where this poem by William Roscoe can be read:

"Hard was thy fate in all scenes of life
As daughter, sister, mother, friend and wife;
But harder still, thy fate in death we own,
Thus mourn'd by Godwin whose heart seem'd of stone."


Above: Mary Wollstonecraft


Above: Woodcut by William Blake for Mary Wollstonecraft's "Original Stories From Real Life"



Above: William Godwin never recovered from his wife's death