Page:Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (Pennell, 1885).djvu/25

Rh received few caresses and little tender nursing, she did not know how to play the part of mother. Her recreation led her out of doors with her brothers. That she lived much in the open air and became thoroughly acquainted with the town and the neighbourhood, seems certain from the eagerness with which she visited it years afterwards with Godwin.

Only too often the victim of her father's cruel fury, and at all times a sufferer because of her mother's theories, she had little chance for happiness during her childhood. She was, like Carlyle's hero of Sartor Resartus, one of those children whose sad fate it is to weep "in the playtime of the others." Not even to the David Copperfields and Paul Dombeys of fiction has there fallen a lot so hard to bear and so sad to record, as that of the little Mary Wollstonecraft. She was then the most deserving object of that pity which later, as a woman, she was always ready to bestow upon others. Her affections were unusually warm and deep, but they could find no outlet. She met, on the one hand, indifference and sternness; on the other, injustice and ill-usage.

To whatever town they went, the Wollstonecrafts seem to have given signs of gentility and good social standing, which won for them, if not many at least respectable friends. At Barking an intimacy sprang up between them and the family of Mr. Bamber Gascoyne, a member of Parliament. But Mary was too young to profit by this friendship. It was most ruthlessly interrupted three years later, when, in 1768, the restless head of the house, whose industry in Barking had not equalled the enterprise which brought him there, took his deparure for Beverly, in Yorkshire.