1 SND, p.343.

2 See R. M. Janes, ‘On the Reception of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’, Journal of the History of Ideas 39:2 (1978), 293–302 (p.294).

3 Sylvana Tomaselli, ‘Political Economy: The Desire and Needs of Present and Future Generations’, in Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth-Century Domains eds. Christopher Fox, Roy Porter, and Robert Wokler (University of California Press, 1995), pp.292–322 (pp.295–96).

4 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (Routledge, 1970), pp.166–67.

5 See Donald Winch, ‘Political Economy’, in Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age, ed. Iain McCalman (Oxford University Press, 2001), pp.311–19 (p.312).

6 Richard Whatmore claims that eighteenth-century political economy ‘was the archetypal science of reform, premised on the unavoidability of commercial society as an element of human progress’: see ‘Burke on Political Economy’, in The Cambridge Companion to Edmund Burke, eds. David Dwan and David Dwan (Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp.80–91 (p.81).

7 Turgot, Letter to Price, 22 March 1778. Published with Mirabeau’s Considerations on the Cinncinati, English translation 1785, p.156. See Chapter 4 below.

8 Tomaselli, ‘Political Economy’, p.310.

9 WN, vol. 1, p.312. I prefer to use contemporaneous terminology: so ‘commercial society’ rather than ‘capitalism’ or ‘liberal society’. For the difference of commercial society from capitalism, see Michael Sonenscher, Capitalism: The Story Behind the Word (Princeton University Press, 2022); for liberalism as a later development, see Winch, ‘Political Economy’, p.319.

10 Saree Makdisi, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (University of Chicago Press, 2003), p.85; Clifford Siskin, System: The Shaping of Modern Knowledge (MIT Press, 2016), p.163; James Thompson, Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel (Duke University Press, 1996), p.27.

11 Quoted in Nicholas Phillipson, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life (Allen Lane, 2010), p.1.

12 See Stedman Jones, An End to Poverty, p.226. For an illuminating account of key markers of disciplinarity, see Robin Valenza, Literature, Language and the Rise of the Intellectual Disciplines in Britain 1680–1820 (Cambridge University Press, 2009) pp.5–7.

13 Dugald Stewart, ‘Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith, L.L.D’, in EPS, p.309. See also Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments (Harvard University Press, 2001).

14 Matthew Sangster, Living as an Author in the Romantic Period (Palgrave, 2021), p.14, pp.42–3.

15 For the engagement of Romantic thinkers with the ‘spirit of commerce’ from Malthus onwards, see Philip Connell’s Romanticism, Economics and the Question of ‘Culture’ (Oxford University Press, 2001).

16 HMV, p.183, p.231.

17 On the difference of political economy from economics see Richard Bronk, The Romantic Economist (Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp.9–10. For a history of the bifurcation of eighteenth-century moral philosophy into a political economic discourse oriented around use-value, and an alternative discourse oriented to aesthetics and affect, see John Guillory, Cultural Capital (University of Chicago Press, 1995).

18 Wollstonecraft’s relation to Smith has received relatively little commentary, but see Carol Kay, ‘Canon, Ideology and Gender: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Critique of Adam Smith’ New Political Science 7:1 (1986), 63–76, and Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p.158, p.161 and p.172.

19 VRW, pp.127–28, p.205.

20 Ibid., p.205.

21 HMV, p.233.

22 Ibid., p.234.

23 Ibid., pp.233–34.

24 WN, vol. 2, p.782.

25 WN, vol. 1, p.145; HMV, p.233. See also WN, vol. 1, p.84.

26 Rothschild, Economic Sentiments, pp.67–8.

27 WW, p.181.

28 Thomas Carlyle, ‘Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question’, Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, 40 (February 1849), 527–39 (536). Often taken to be Carlyle’s response to Malthus, the phrase ‘Dismal Science’ was in fact coined in the context of the debate on the reintroduction of slavery, to depict a world governed by the rule of supply and demand.

29 HMV, p.235. For a discussion of Smith’s use of the self-healing, self-preserving language of nature, see my ‘System and Subject in Adam Smith’s Political Economy: Nature, Vitalism, and Bioeconomic Life’, in Systems of Life: Biopolitics, Economics and Literature on the Cusp of Modernity eds. Richard A. Barney and Warren Montag (Fordham University Press, 2019), 93–114. For Smith’s discussion of the philosophical eye, see ‘The Principles which Lead and Direct Philosophical Enquiries’, in EPS.

30 Makdisi, William Blake, p.83.

31 William Godwin proposed ‘romance’ as the best means to understand ‘the machine of society’ and direct it ‘to its best purpose’ in his essay ‘On History and Romance’ (1797). See Miranda Burgess, British Fiction and the Production of Social Order 1740–1830 (Cambridge University Press, 2000), p.8.

32 Letter to Everina Wollstonecraft, 1787. The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft ed. Janet Todd (Columbia University Press, 2003), p.139.

33 Janet Todd ‘Prefatory Note’, Works, vol. 7, p.14.

34 For a full account of Johnson and his circle, see Daisy Hay, Dinner with Joseph Johnson (Chatto and Windus, 2022).

35 Wollstonecraft, Collected Letters ed. Todd, p.314; Mary A. Favret, Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters (Cambridge University Press, 2008), p.128.

36 Favret, Romantic Correspondence, p.97, quoting Ralph Wardle, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Critical Biography (University of Nebraska Press, 1951), p.256.

37 SND, p.296.

38 ‘On Poetry’, Works, vol. 7, pp.7–11 (p.7).

39 For Smith’s claim that the labour of ‘men of letters’, even if noble, valuable, and ‘useful’, but ‘produces nothing which could afterwards purchase or procure an equal quantity of labour’, see WN, vol. 1, p.331. For an alternative account of the social role of the writer, see the discussion of David Williams on ‘genius’ in Sangster, Living as an Author, p.190.

40 Stephen C. Behrendt, British Women Poets and the Romantic Writing Community (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), p.5.

41 In many ways, Wollstonecraft doesn’t ‘fit’ Sangster’s model of a Romantic author, for instance, see Living as an Author, pp.13–49.

42 See Burgess, British Fiction, p.131. For anxiety about women in the public intellectual sphere and efforts to displace them, see Sangster, Living as an Author, p.32.

43 For the relative low status and low remuneration of such forms of writing, compared with poetry and fiction, see Sangster, Living as an Author, p.29.

44 Sangster, Living as an Author, p.19.

45 On systems in this period, see David Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism and the Revolt against Theory (University of Chicago Press, 1993).

46 On the conjectural history of women, see Tomaselli, ‘Political Economy’, p.293.

47 Wollstonecraft’s admiration of Montesquieu is evident in a reference to his Persian Letters in the Analytical Review: see Works, vol.7, p.341.

48 Taylor’s Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination devotes one chapter to a consideration of Wollstonecraft and commerce, many observations from which are taken up and pursed more fully in this book. The chapter on Wollstonecraft in Karen O’Brien’s Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2009) discusses her engagement with Scottish Enlightenment thought on the history of manners. Jane Rendall’s work on Wollstonecraft’s history writing also valuably emphasises the Scottish philosophical context: see ‘“The grand causes which combine to carry mankind forward”: Wollstonecraft, History and Revolution’, Women’s Writing 4.2 (1997): 155–72. Carol Kay’s discussion of Wollstonecraft’s response to Smith in ‘Canon, Ideology and Gender’ focuses on Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments and makes little reference to his political economy. Susan Ferguson’s account of Wollstonecraft references Smith but approaches her work via the anachronistic terms ‘liberalism’ and ‘socialism’: see ‘The Radical Ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft’, Canadian Journal of Political Science 32:3 (Sept 1999), 427–50. Nancy E. Johnson and Paul Keen’s recent valuable collection, Mary Wollstonecraft in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2020), offers insightful essays on many of Wollstonecraft’s historical and cultural contexts, including philosophical frameworks, legal contexts, and political theory, but nothing specifically on her engagement with political economy.

49 Kay, ‘Canon, Ideology, and Gender’, p.63. Following the recovery of her work by feminist literary critics from the 1970s, there is now a substantial body of analysis exploring Wollstonecraft in the context of eighteenth-century gender, sensibility and the imagination, and the ideology and cultures of gender. Two examples of the best work in this vast field are Mary Poovey’s The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (University of Chicago Press, 1984), which explores Wollstonecraft’s negotiation of contemporary gender ideologies, and Claudia L. Johnson’s Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s (University of Chicago Press, 1995), which situates Wollstonecraft in the politics of sensibility of the 1790s. Wollstonecraft has also received renewed attention recently from political theorists and philosophers: see Virginia Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue (University of Chicago Press, 1992); Eileen Hunt Botting, Family Feuds: Wollstonecraft, Burke, and Rousseau on the Transformation of the Family (State University of New York Press, 2006) and Wollstonecraft, Mill and Women’s Human Rights (Yale University Press, 2016); and The Social and Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft eds. Sandrine Bergès and Alan Coffee (Oxford University Press, 2016).

50 At the same time, my understanding of the nature of political economic discourse, and its relationship to other areas of philosophical inquiry in the eighteenth century, is greatly indebted to work in this area by intellectual historians, including: Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff’s edited collection, Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 1983); Donald Winch’s Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–1834 (Cambridge University Press, 1996); Gareth Stedman Jones’s An End to Poverty? (Profile, 2004); Michael Sonenscher’s Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton University Press, 2007); and Richard Whatmore’s Against War and Empire Geneva, Britain and France in the Eighteenth Century (Yale University Press, 2012). Wollstonecraft, however, whilst gaining an occasion mention, rarely makes more than a cameo appearance in these writings, despite often being a member of the circle of thinkers discussed.

51 For the period’s understanding of digression as a ‘legitimate expository mode’, see Johnson, Equivocal Beings, p.26. On copia or elaboration in classical rhetoric, see Mary Poovey, The Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, 2008), p.98. On conversation, see Jon Mee, Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention and Community 1762–1830 (Oxford, 2011).

52 See Clifford Siskin, System: The Shaping of Modern Knowledge (MIT Press, 2016); David Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism and the Revolt against Theory (University of Chicago Press, 1993).

53 For Babeuf, see Taylor, Feminist Imagination, p.173.

54 For a study of Wollstonecraft as philosopher and novelist, see Deborah Weiss, The Female Philosopher and Her Afterlives (Palgrave Macmillan, 2107), pp.51–85.

55 Ralph Cohen, ‘History and Genre’, New Literary History 17:2 (1986), 203–18; Transformations of a Genre (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

56 Elizabeth Wingrove, ‘Getting Intimate with Wollstonecraft in the Republic of Letters’, Political Theory 33:3 (June 2005) 344–69 (p.356); VRW p.76. Examples of innovation in print culture in this period include, for instance, the literary culture of dissent; experimental life-writing; and the periodical project of the Analytical Review itself. See, respectively: Daniel E. White, Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent (Cambridge University Press, 2006); Julie Murray, ‘Mary Hays and the Forms of Life’, Studies in Romanticism 52 (2013), 61–84; and Wingrove, ‘Getting Intimate’.

57 Poovey highlights early Wollstonecraft’s compulsive abstraction away from feeling in Proper Lady; Cora Kaplan, in a classic essay, indites her for importing into feminism Rousseau’s model of excess female feeling: see ‘Wild Nights’ in Sea Changes: Essays on Culture and Feminism (Verso, 1986). Simon Swift considers the opposition of reason and feeling, in ‘Mary Wollstonecraft and the “Reserve of Reason”’, Studies in Romanticism 45:1 (2006), 3–24.

58 VRM, p.53, and compare Hint no. 30 in Wollstonecraft’s notes for a second, unwritten, part of VRW: Works, vol. 5, p.276.

59 See White, Early Romanticism, p.114.

60 White, Early Romanticism, p.110.

61 SND, p.343.

62 Ibid., p.309.

1 See AR 27:6 (June 1798), 655; AR 13:1 (May 1792), 119–20; AR 22:2 (Aug 1795), 224 and AR 22:3 (Sept 1795), 332–33.

2 For Johnson and his circle, see Daisy Hay, Dinner with Joseph Johnson (Chatto & Windus, 2022).

3 See Janet Todd ‘Prefatory Note’, Works, vol. 7 pp.14–8; Gerald P. Tyson, Joseph Johnson: A Liberal Publisher (University of Iowa Press, 1979), pp.103–4.

4 See AR 22:3 (Sept 1795), 324.

5 WN, vol. 1, p.428.

6 See Donald Winch, Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–1834 (Cambridge University Press, 1996), p.21.

7 WN, vol. 1, p.428; Winch, Riches, p.21. For a full account of Smith’s philosophical project, see Nicholas Philipson, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life (Penguin, 2011).

8 Winch, Riches, p.164.

9 Ibid., p.165, p.163.

10 James Thompson, Models of Value: Eighteenth-century Political Economy and the Novel (Duke University Press, 1996), p.27.

11 The classic essay collection, Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment eds. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge University Press, 1983), marks the origin of much of this phase of important work.

12 For one study that shows how economic thinking was embedded in other discourses, including literary ones, see Joanna Rostek, Women’s Economic Thought in the Romantic Age (Routledge, 2021).

13 Gareth Stedman Jones, An End to Poverty? A Historical Debate (Profile, 2004), p.226.

14 Stedman Jones, End to Poverty? p.9.

15 For Burke and Paine’s contrasting use of Smith, see Winch, Riches, pp.127–36. Godwin and Coleridge were among the radical voices rejecting a society founded on private property.

16 See Winch, Riches, pp.169–70, and Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet and the Enlightenment (Harvard University Press, 2001), pp.57–61. For an extended study of Smith’s sceptical and ‘speculative’ epistemology, see Richard Adelman, Doubtful Knowledge: Scepticism and the Birth of Political Economy (forthcoming).

17 Winch, Riches, p.326, n.9, and pp.326–27.

18 Greg Claeys, ‘The French Revolution Debate and British Political Thought’, History of Political Thought 11:1 (Spring 1990), 59–80.

19 See John Bugg, ‘How Radical Was Joseph Johnson and Why Does Radicalism Matter’, Studies in Romanticism 57:2 (2018) 173–343. For different strands of progressive thought in this period, from rational dissent to ‘artisan radicalism’, see Jon Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Clarendon Press, 1992), pp.220–23. Tyson’s biography of Johnson describes him as a ‘liberal’ publisher.

20 Helen Braithwaite, Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent: Joseph Johnson and the Cause of Liberty (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp.168–69.

21 Braithwaite, Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent, p.158, p.160; Tyson, Joseph Johnson p.162. On Johnson’s trial, see also Susan Oliver, ‘Silencing Joseph Johnson and the Analytical Review’, The Wordsworth Circle, 40: 2–3 (2009), 96–102. On Johnson and the Analytical Review, see also special issues of The Wordsworth Circle, 40: 2–3 (2009) and The Wordsworth Circle, 33:3 (Summer 2002). Johnson’s circle included William Blake, Henry Fuseli, William Godwin, and many others: see Hays, Dinner with Joseph Johnson.

22 Tyson, Joseph Johnson, pp.93–6; Braithwaite, Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent, pp.87–90. Daniel E. White describes Johnson as the ‘London agent’ for the Warrington dissenting academy: see Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent (Cambridge University Press, 2006), p.24.

23 See White, Early Romanticism, esp. p.14.

24 White, Early Romanticism, p.11, p.17. Gregory Claeys, ‘Virtuous Commerce and Free Theology: Political Economy and the Dissenting Academies 1750–1800’, History of Political Thought, 20:1 (Spring 1999) 141–72.

25 Christie, letter to John Nichols, quoted in Tyson, Joseph Johnson, p.97. See also ‘To the Public’, AR 1:1 (May 1788), i.

26 Many of the Analytical Review’s liberal, educated middle-class readers were indeed dissenters: Braithwaite, Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent, p.86. For a full account of the literary and political public spheres in the late eighteenth century, including the role of the Analytical Review, see Paul Keen, The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s (Cambridge University Press, 1999), esp. chap 1.

27 Little scholarly attention has been paid to the Analytical Review’s coverage of commerce or political economy – concerns absent in Braithwaite’s description of its politics, quoted above – despite the journal’s recognised links to the commercial interests of the professional middle classes. Bugg’s reassessment of the politics of Johnson’s publishing practice also omits mention of any political economic work published by Johnson, other than Malthus’s 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population.

28 Listed subjects are: theology and morality; philosophy; mathematics; medicine and related; natural history and agriculture; trade and politics; law, history, and topography; biography; poetry and criticism; drama and romances; and miscellaneous. See Tyson, Joseph Johnson, pp.101–2.

29 AR 23:6 (June 1796), 594–99.

30 AR 25:1 (Jan 1797), 97–8 and AR 23: 3 (March 1796), 297–99.

31 AR 9:3 (March 1791), 257–76. Percival was a leading dissenter; his work appeared in the Memoirs of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester, an organisation instituted at Percival’s house which had founded the Manchester New College in 1783 after the closure of the Warrington dissenting academy. See White, Early Romanticism, pp.28–9.

32 AR 17:2 (Oct 1793), 210–13 (210).

33 WN, p.428.

34 AR 21:2 (Feb 1795), 155–65.

35 Ibid., 146–55 (153).

36 Present, for instance, in the review of Sir Frederic Morton Eden’s State of the Poor, AR 25:4 (April 1797) 353–62 (354–55).

37 AR 21:2 (Feb 1795), 156.

38 AR 26:6 (Dec 1797), 623; review of Essays Political, Economical and Philosophical by Benjamin, Count of Rumford, AR 26:1 (July 1797) 11–26.

39 AR 23:6 (June 1796) 594–99 (595).

40 Ibid., 595, 596–97.

41 SND, p.343.

42 HMV, p.183.

43 AR 26:3 (Sept 1797), 302–3 (302).

44 AR 25:6 (June 1799), 635–36.

45 Winch, Riches, p.23. Malthus’s was admittedly an iconoclastic work, offering a riposte to Ricardo and other political economic thinkers. Political economy’s closeness to morality was asserted too by Adam Smith’s leading follower in France, Jean-Baptiste Say, for whom a ‘good treatise on political economy must be the first book of morality’: see Stedman Jones, End to Poverty?, p.128.

46 See Oliver, ‘Silencing Joseph Johnson’, p.96.

47 Cox and Galperin, 95.

48 Bugg, ‘How Radical Was Joseph Johnson?’, p.188.

49 AR 27:3 (March 1798), 304–6; AR 26:1 (July 1797), 78–9 and AR 25:6 (June 1797), 584–90 (587).

50 See John Brewer: Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State 1688–1783 (1989).

51 VRW, p.216. On anxieties about national debt, see Richard Whatmore, Against War and Empire: Geneva, Britain and France in the Eighteenth Century (Yale University Press, 2012) and Peter de Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject (Basil Blackwell, 1989), Chapter 4 ‘The Discourse of Debt’. For anxieties about debt in pre-revolutionary France, see Michael Sonenscher, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton University Press, 2007).

52 Rousseau was the ‘clearest expositor of a jeremiad view of the prospects for commercial states small and large’: see Whatmore, Against Empire, p.54. David Hume, ‘Of public credit’, in Essays: Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Liberty Fund, 1987), pp.349–65 (pp.360–61). For Hume’s concerns about national bankruptcy, see J. G. A. Pocock ‘Hume and the American Revolution: The Dying Thoughts of a North Briton’, in Virtue, Commerce, History: Essays on Political Thought and History (Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp.125–42. Smith argued that growth would help address the debt burden, but nevertheless suggested that Britain should adapt itself to the ‘real mediocrity’ of her circumstances: see Winch, Riches, pp.116–17, p.132.

53 The full title of the work is: The Political Progress of Britain; or, an impartial History of Abuses in the Government of the British Empire, in Europe, Asia and America. From 1688 to the present. No author is given, although a postscript is signed by James Thomason Callender. See AR 22:2 (Aug 1795), 203–5.

54 AR 27:3 (March 1798), 304.

55 AR 23:2 (February 1796), 193–97 (193). Morgan, a Unitarian, shared his uncle’s politics and socialised with Horne Tooke and Thomas Paine.

56 Ibid., 196. On the Imperial loans, see Karl F. Helleiner, The Imperial Loans: A Study in Financial and Diplomatic History (Clarendon Press, 1965).

57 Ibid., 193–94.

58 AR 23: 3 (March 1796), 297–99 (299).

59 AR 26:1 (July 1797), 78–9. Patje thought that only the interest, not the principal, of the loan might be repaid in this way. VRM, p.57.

60 AR 26:1 (July 1797), 79. Italics in original.

61 AR 22:3 (Sept 1795), 289–92. For a review of Part 1, see AR 12:4 (April 1792), 452–60. Barlow was also a friend of Paine. In 1790, Barlow had promised to take Wollstonecraft’s brother to America to gain farming experience and acquire land, a plan which Paine agreed would meet with success, but which was derailed by the Barlows’ instead visiting France. See Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2000), pp.190–91, p.210, p.213.

62 AR 22:3 (Sept 1795), 289.

63 Ibid., 292.

64 AR 28:1 (July 1798), 107–12 (109).

65 Ibid., 135.

66 Ibid., 109.

67 Ibid., 110.

68 Ibid., 112, 110.

69 See Winch, Riches, pp.129–31.

70 See Richard Whatmore, Against Empire, esp. pp.182–89; see also Commerce and Peace in the Enlightenment, eds. Béla Kapossy, Isaac Nakhimovsky, and Richard Whatmore (Cambridge, 2018) and Isaac Nakhimovsky, ‘The “Ignominious Fall of the European Commonwealth”: Gentz, Hauterive, and the Armed Neutrality of 1800’ in Trade and War: The Neutrality of Commerce in the Interstate System, ed. Koen Stapelbroek (Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, 2011), pp.177–90. I am also grateful to Christopher Brooke for sight of his unpublished manuscript, ‘The Idea of a European Union’.

71 See Winch, Riches, pp.102–3, p.130.

72 AR 25:4 (April 1797), 353–62 (353). Italics in the original.

73 The review of Eden’s work begins in AR 25:3 (March 1797) 229–38 and continues in AR 25:6 (June 1797), 584–90.

74 See Stedman Jones, End to Poverty? p.44.

75 AR 26:3 (Sept 1797), 302–3.

76 Ibid., 328–47.

77 Ibid., 244; AR 25:6 (June 1797), 584–90 (587–88); VRM, p.57.

78 AR 16:4 (Aug 1793), 388–404 (402).

79 Winch, Riches, p.258; for Godwin on property, see also Stedman Jones, End to Poverty? p.96.

80 AR 21:4 (April 1795), 374–82 (375–76).

81 AR, 26:3 (Sept 1797), 239, 240–41.

82 AR 26:3 (Sept 1797), 302–3.

83 See Winch, Riches, pp.57–89 for a discussion of WN as the ‘culmination’ of the eighteenth-century debate on luxury, and for the claim of a broader switch from a discourse on luxury and the moral corruptions of commerce, to one on wealth and virtue.

84 AR 26:3 (Sept 1797), 239–40. Italics in the original.

85 SND, p.269.

86 White, Early Romanticism, pp.124–25, pp.80–2. Barbauld’s piece appears in J. and A. L. Aikins’ Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose (London, 1773). Aikin’s Description of the Country from Thirty to Forty Miles round Manchester is warmly reviewed in AR 22:5 (November 1795), 449–57.

87 AR 23:6 (June 1796), 594–99. Canals and channels are also figures deployed in Smith’s WN.

88 SND, pp.316–17.

89 For Parliamentary debates on the poor, see Winch, Riches, pp.198–220. Pitt’s Poor Law Bill was debated in 1796 but not passed. For a discussion of the use of statistics, including by Burke and Young, in relation to other forms of representation, see Frans de Bruyn, ‘From Georgic Poetry to Statistics and Graphs: Eighteenth-Century Representations and the “State” of British Society’, Yale Journal of Criticism 17: 1 (2004), 107–39.

90 AR 26:3 (Sept 1797), 243.

91 AR 23:6 (June 1796), 594; AR 25:4 (April 1797), 353–62 (353–56).

92 Ibid., 594–95; AR 26:3 (Sept 1797), 303.

93 AR 14:4 (Dec 1792), 366–76.

94 Ibid., 376.

95 WN, vol. 1, p.380. See Winch, Riches, p.114.

96 Richard Price, Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution (1785) in Political Writings ed. D. O. Thomas (Cambridge University Press), pp.116–51 (p.148). See also Winch, Riches, pp.152–54.

97 Price, Observations on the American Revolution, p.145.

98 AR 1:1 (May 1788), v, vi.

99 Jon Mee, Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention and Community 1762–1830 (Oxford, 2011). On the importance of conversation and sociability for Johnson himself and as the context for AR, see p.145.

100 See Tyson, Joseph Johnson, p.97.

101 For a discussion of the problems identifying Wollstonecraft’s reviews, see Todd, ‘Prefatory Note’.

102 See Works, vol. 7, ‘Index of Books Reviewed’, pp.487–502. For Wollstonecraft’s curt review of the biography of Paine, see pp.395–96; for its author’s attack on Paine and correspondence with Smith, see Winch, Riches, p.155; for Wollstonecraft’s review of Brissot, see Works, vol. 7, pp.390–93.

103 Works, vol. 7, pp.441–42 (p.442).

104 For more on Wollstonecraft’s reviews, see the editors’ ‘Prefatory Note’ in Works, vol.7, pp.14–8.

105 For ‘trash’, see ‘Prefactory Note’, Works, vol.7, p.15.

106 Miranda Burgess, British Fiction and the Production of Social Order 1740–1830 (Cambridge, 2000), p.1.

107 William Godwin, ‘On History and Romance’ (1797): see Burgess, British Fiction, p.8.

108 For a discussion of McCulloch, see Mary Poovey, A History of The Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago, 1998), pp.295–306.

1 VRM, p.37.

2 Ibid., p.5.

3 Phrase coined in Marilyn Butler, Burke, Paine, Godwin and the Revolution Controversy (Cambridge University Press, 1984), and repeated, for instance, by Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2003) p.145, p.149.

4 See Wollstonecraft’s review of Price’s sermon, in Works, vol. 7, pp.185–87 (p.187).

5 See Frederick Dreyer, ‘The Genesis of Burke’s Reflections’, The Journal of Modern History 50:1 (1978), 462–79 (463), and, for instance, Greg Claeys, in ‘Utopianism, Property, and the French Revolution Debate in Britain’ in Utopias and the Millennium eds. Krishan Kumar and Stephen Bann (Reaktion Books, 1993) pp.46–62 (p.51) and Claudia Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender and Sentimentality in the 1790s (University of Chicago Press, 1995), p.25. On the origins of Burke’s Reflections, see also F. P. Lock, Burke’s Reflection on the Revolution in France (George Allen & Unwin, 1985), pp.31–61.

6 Taylor, Feminist Imagination, p.147.

7 Burke, Letter to Calonne, 25 October 1790, Correspondence of Burke vol. 6, p.141.

8 Donald Winch, Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–1834 (Cambridge University Press, 1996), p.134. See also Richard Whatmore, ‘Burke on Political Economy’ in The Cambridge Companion to Edmund Burke, eds. David Dwan and Christopher J. Insole (Cambridge University Press, 2021), pp.80–91.

9 Edmund Burke, Letter to Philip Francis, 20 February 1790, in The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. Thomas W. Copeland, 10 vols, vol. 6, eds. Alfred Cobban and Robert A. Smith (Cambridge University Press and University of Chicago Press, 1967), pp.91–2. On attempts by the Shelburne circle to develop free trade as an alternative to British foreign policy caught in the grip of mercantilism and war, see Richard Whatmore, Against War and Empire: Geneva, Britain and France in the Eighteenth Century (Yale University Press, 2012) esp. pp.182–89; see also Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (Harvard University Press, 1961), p.346. Price himself by no means an uncritical proponent of commerce however, warning the new American republic of its moral dangers. J. G. A. Pocock suggests Shelburne’s patronage of radical intellectuals caused him to be associated with reform, hence ‘one of the most powerful motives’ behind the Reflections. See Pocock, introduction to Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Hackett, 1987), pp.vii–xlviii (p.xxiv).

10 Burke, ‘Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol’ (1777), quoted in Dreyer, ‘Genesis’, 467. See also Richard Price, Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty (1776) in Price, Political Writings, ed. D. O. Thomas (Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp.20–75 (p.26). For a discussion of Price’s Observations and Burke’s longstanding enmity with Price, see Robbins, Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, pp.336–41, p.345.

11 Barbauld, ‘Against Inconsistency in our Expectations’ (1773), quoted in Harriet Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810 (University of Chicago Press, 2000), p.285. Wollstonecraft praises this as ‘an excellent essay’ in VRW, p.184.

12 For Mary Poovey’s description of VRM as a ‘political disquisition’ see her The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (Chicago University Press, 1984), pp.56–7.

13 For a full account of Macaulay and her influence on Wollstonecraft, see Karen O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp.173–80. See also Guest, Small Change, p.196, p.271.

14 Catharine Macaulay, Letters on Education: With Observations on Religious and Metaphysical Subjects (Cambridge University Press, 2014) p.271. For Wollstonecraft’s review, see Works, vol. 7, 309–22 (315).

15 J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The Political Economy of Burke’s Analysis of the French Revolution’, in his Virtue, Commerce, History (Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp.193–212.

16 Pocock, ‘Political Economy of Burke’, p.194.

17 For earlier struggles to defend and extend British liberties in this period, see Linda Colley, ‘Radical Patriotism in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, vol.1: History and Politics, ed. Raphael Samuel (Routledge, 1989), pp.169–87 and Robbins, Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, pp.356–77.

18 VRM, p.37.

19 Reflections, p.140.

20 Ibid., p.372, p.271.

21 AR 25:4 (April 1797), pp.353–62 (p.353).

22 VRW p.76; Paul Hamilton, Metaromanticism (University of Chicago Press, 2003) p.157.

23 Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: An Annotated Bibliography (Garland, 1976, repr. Routledge, 2013) p.2. For other critical deprecations of the Vindication, as well as its gradual reassessment, see Claudia Johnson, Equivocal Beings, p.26, who also discusses the period’s understanding of digression as a ‘legitimate expository mode’. On the use of copia or elaboration in classical rhetoric, see Mary Poovey, The Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain (University of Chicago Press, 2008), p.98. Burke explicitly valued the looseness of his writing mode: ‘I beg leave to throw out my thoughts, and express my feelings, just as they arise in my mind, with very little attention to formal method’, Reflections, p.92. For further comment on the generic looseness of these texts, see Catherine Packham, ‘Genre and the Mediation of Political Economy in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men’, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 60:3 (Autumn 2019), 249–68.

24 Burke, Observations on a Late Publication Intituled The Present State of the Nation (1769), quoted in Correspondence of Burke, vol. 6, p.10, note 2. For the context of this remark, see Whatmore, ‘Burke on Political Economy’.

25 Reflections, p.232.

26 Reflections, p.234.

27 Ibid., pp.235–36.

28 WN, vol. 1 pp.22–3.

29 See Adam Smith, ‘The Principles which Lead and Direct Philosophical Enquiries; Illustrated by the History of Astronomy’, in EPS, pp.31–105. For a discussion, see my ‘Feigning Fictions: Imagination, Hypothesis and Philosophical Writing in the Scottish Enlightenment’, Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 48:2 (2007), 149–71.

30 Burke, Letter to Philip Francis, 20 February 1790, Correspondence of Edmund Burke, vol. 6, p.89.

31 John Barrell, ‘The Public Prospect and the Private View: The Politics of Taste in Eighteenth-century Britain’ in Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts, eds. S. Kemal and I. Gaskell (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp.81–102.

32 Horace Walpole, Letter to Mary Berry, December 1790. Quoted in Susan Wiseman, ‘Catharine Macaulay: History, Republicanism and the Public Sphere’, in Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700–1830, eds. Elizabeth Eger, Charlotte Grant, ClÍona Ó Gallchoir and Penny Warburton (Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp.181–99 (p.181). Macaulay, one of the ‘Amazonians’ named by Walpole, was known as a so-called ‘city Whig’, named for a supposedly metropolitan radicalism. See Guest, Small Change, p.265.

33 WN, vol. 1, p.428.

34 VRM, p.57.

35 Ibid., p.58. The fate of the poor who are ‘shamefully left a prey to the ignorant and the interested’ in public hospitals are the focus of a long footnote in Wollstonecraft’s review of Macaulay’s Letters on Education, in the AR in November 1790. The note draws on the observations of ‘a friend of the writer’ who has frequently visited the hospitals; it responds to Macaulay’s remarks on the abuse of public charities. See Wollstonecraft, Works, vol. 7, p.316.

36 VRM, pp.57–8.

37 Ibid., p.58. For a discussion of the ‘enormous ingenuity’ with which Wollstonecraft capitalises on the rhetorical and affective models of late-eighteenth century print culture, and this passage in particular, see Elizabeth Wingrove, ‘Getting Intimate with Wollstonecraft in the Republic of Letters’, Political Theory 33:3 (June 2005) 344–69 (357–58).

38 Althusser, ‘Contradiction and Over-determination’, in For Marx, quoted in James Thompson, Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel (Durham, 1996), pp.6–7, emphasis as in original.

39 Thompson, Models of Value, p.7.

40 For more on description and knowledge in the late eighteenth century, see Regimes of Description: In the Archive of the Eighteenth Century eds. John Bender and Michael Marrinan (Stanford University Press, 2005).

41 VRM, p.18.

42 VRW, p.256, and see the ‘Advertisement’ to Mary, p.5 and ‘Author’s Preface’, WW, p.83.

43 VRM, p.56. Emphasis as in the original.

44 VRM, p.57.

45 Interestingly, Macaulay also highlights ‘mendicants’ in her response to Burke: those in Paris are ‘even more numerous, if possible, than those who infest and disgrace our capital’. See Catharine Macaulay, Observations on the Reflections of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, on the Revolution in France, in a Letter to the Right Hon. the Earl of Stanhope (1790), p.35. As we will see in Chapter 4, Wollstonecraft would return to the political significance of monks: see HMV, p.51.

46 Dreyer, ‘Genesis’, p.462.

47 Reflections, p.170, p.126.

48 Macaulay, Observations on the Reflections of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, pp.32–3.

49 Reflections, p.234: ‘I believe the difference in the form of the two governments to be among the causes of this advantage of the side of England’.

50 My argument is this and the next section draws in part from my article ‘Genre and the Mediation of Political Economy in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men’, Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 60:3 (Autumn 2019), 249–68.

51 Jane Burke to William Burke, 21 March 1791, in Correspondence of Edmund Burke, vol. 6, p.239; see also Pocock, Introduction to Burke’s Reflections, p.xl.

52 Reflections, p.372.

53 Vindication, p.55.

54 See Macaulay, Observations on the Reflections of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, p.44.

55 Reflections, p.270.

56 Ibid., p.271. There is a fascinating echo of this passage in Victor Frankenstein’s description of himself, whilst labouring on the body of his creature prior to its animation, as ‘like on doomed by slavery to toil in the mines, or any other unwholesome trade’. See Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (Oxford University Press, 2008), p.38.

57 Howard Caygill, The Art of Judgement (Oxford, 1989), p.101, quoted in John Guillory, Capital Culture: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago University Press, 1993), p.312.

58 This unpreserved manuscript is quoted in Dugald Stewart’s ‘Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith, L.L.D’, in EPS, p.322.

59 WN, vol. 1, p.289, p.291.

60 Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence ed. R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael and Peter Stein (Oxford University Press, 1978) p.341. This passage is discussed in Corey Robin, ‘Edmund Burke and the Problem of Value’, Raritan 36:1 (Summer 2016), 82–106 (98).

61 Robin, ‘Burke and Value’, 99 (quoting Burke).

62 Gary Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (Macmillan, 1992).

63 VRM, p.52.

64 Macaulay, Letters on Education (1790), quoted in Wollstonecraft review, Analytical Review November 1790, in Works, vol.7 p.315. Macaulay’s words here would seem to counter Harriet Guest’s reading of Macaulay as a ‘female Brutus’, the founder of Rome who sacrificed his two sons who had conspired against the republic, and therefore as one who ‘values liberty more than natural affection’. See Guest, Small Change, p.250, and for Macaulay’s rejection of the ‘stoicism of the first Brutus’, see Wiseman, ‘Catharine Macaulay’, pp.185–86.

65 VRM, p.53, emphasis in the original.

66 VRM, p.60. Wollstonecraft later commented, in relation to Louis XIV’s reported delight in torturing animals, that ‘death seems to be the sport’ not of gods but ‘kings’. See HMV, p.74.

67 Frans de Bruyn, The Literary Genres of Edmund Burke (Oxford University Press, 1996), p.192. Wollstonecraft also references Hamlet three times in VRM, alongside quotations too from Richard III and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. See VRM, p.37, p.45, p.55, p.43 and p.29, respectively.

68 Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution, 1789–1820 (Yale University Press, 1983), p.48.

69 Guillory, Cultural Capital, p.302

70 Robin, ‘Burke and Value’ p.84.

71 Thompson, Models of Value, pp.17–8.

72 Reflections, p.136, p.274, p.120.

73 Ibid., p.169.

74 VRM, p.15. In a related vein, Wollstonecraft later condemned the French for the theatricality of their character: see HMV, p.25.

75 Don Dismallo Running the Literary Gantlet, 1790, last in a series of three attacking Burke as the Quixotic knight Don Dismallo, is discussed briefly by Harriet Guest in Small Change, p.225.

76 VRM, p.45.

77 ‘On Poetry’, Works, vol. 7, pp.7–11.

78 Macaulay, Observations on the Reflections of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, p.7.

79 VRM, ‘Advertisement’, p.5.

80 Ibid., p.5.

81 VRM, p.53. Wollstonecraft was still considering these matters when compiling her ‘Hints’ for the second, unwritten, part of VRW: see Hint no. 30 in ‘Hints’, Works, vol. 5, p.276.

82 VRM, p.16.

83 Ibid., p.53.

1 VRM, p.5.

2 William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Richard Holmes (Penguin, 1987) p.229.

3 See Frederick Dreyer, ‘The Genesis of Burke’s Reflections’, Journal of Modern History 50:3 (1978), 462–79.

4 For ‘first of a new genus’, see Wollstonecraft’s letter to her sister Everina, 7 November 1787, in The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd (Columbia University Press, 2003), p.139. That the Vindication was written by a woman was only evident from the second edition. For the republic of letters in the 1790s, see Paul Keen, The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s (Cambridge University Press, 1999).

5 See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. T. Burger and F. Lawrence (MIT Press, 1989). For a modification of Habermas’s thesis to suggest ‘multiple’ and ‘overlapping’ public spheres, see Craig Calhoun, ed. Habermas and the Public Sphere (MIT Press, 1992), p.37; for a discussion of women and the public sphere, see Women, Writing and the Public Sphere 1700–1830, eds. Elizabeth Eger, Charlotte Grant, ClÍona Ó Gallchoir and Penny Warburton (Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp.7–9.

6 Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism: From The Spectator to Post-Structuralism (Verso, 1984), p.26, pp.16–7; see also Daniel E. White, Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent (Cambridge University Press, 2006), p.123.

7 For the transformation of the public sphere in 1790s, see White, Early Romanticism, and Keen, Crisis of Literature.

8 Keen describes the considerable suspicion by conservatives of literary and political public spheres which they suspected as being used to promote the particular interests of the reformist and professional middle classes. For discussion of Burke’s opposition to ‘political men of Letters’, see Keen, Crisis of Literature, pp.43–4.

9 VRM, p.40.

10 I draw here on Clifford Siskin’s account of professionalism in his The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700–1830 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), pp.103–29. For Wollstonecraft’s claim that her knowledge of human nature enables her to discover ‘extenuating circumstances’ in Burke, see VRM, pp.7–8.

11 VRM, p.9.

12 Ibid., p.49, p.39, p.47.

13 VRW, p.105.

14 VRM, pp.14–5.

15 Ibid., p.10.

16 Ibid., p.17.

17 Catharine Macaulay, Observations on the reflections of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, on the Revolution in France (London, 1790), p.19.

18 VRM, p.19, p.58, p.57.

19 Ibid., p.9, p.59, p.58, p.21, p.40.

20 Ibid., p.17, p.22, p.58.

21 Ibid., p.51, p.57, p.56.

22 Ibid., p.9.

23 Ibid., pp.47–8.

24 Ibid., p.49, pp.45–6.

25 As Lena Halldenius notes, the phrase the ‘demon of property’ is borrowed from Rousseau. See ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s Feminist Critique of Property: On Becoming a Thief from Principle’, Hypatia 29:4 (2014), 942–57 (943).

26 VRM, pp.22–3.

27 Mary, p.20.

28 VRM, p.24, p.23.

29 Ibid., p.24, p.10.

30 Ibid., p.23.

31 Ibid., p.48.

32 Ibid., p.48. Smith uses a language of ‘channels’ throughout WN, as well as in the early (1755) manuscript which set out his arguments in brief. See Adam Smith, unpreserved manuscript, quoted in Dugald Stewart, ‘Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith, LL.D’, in EPS, p.322.

33 VRM, pp.19–20.

34 Ibid., p.16.

35 See, inter alia, Miranda Burgess, British Fiction and the Production of the Social Order 1740–1830 (Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp.130–35; Claudia L. Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s (University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp.26–9; Mitzi Myers, ‘Politics from the Outside: Mary Wollstonecraft’s First Vindication’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 6 (1977), 113–32; Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p.64ff; and Sylvana Tomaselli, ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Men’, in The Wollstonecraftian Mind ed. Sandrine Bergès, Eileen Hunt Botting, and Alan Coffee (Routledge, 2019).

36 See Elizabeth Wingrove, ‘Getting Intimate with Wollstonecraft in the Republic of Letters’, Political Theory 33:3 (2005), 344–69.

37 For a discussion of another kind of idleness, contemplative meditation, in Wollstonecraft, see Richard Adelman, Idleness, Contemplation, and the Aesthetic, 1750–1830 (Cambridge University Press, 2011).

38 Reflections, p.270.

39 David Hume, ‘Of Public Credit’ in Essays: Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Liberty Fund, 1985), pp.349–65 (p.355, pp.357–58). See also J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The Political Economy of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France’ in Virtue, Commerce, History (Cambridge University Press, 1985) pp.193–212.

40 Corey Robin, ‘Edmund Burke and the Problem of Value’, Raritan 36:1 (2016), 82–106 (104).

41 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature ed. P. H. Nidditch (Clarendon Press, 1978), p.413.

42 David Hume, Essays Moral, Political and Literary ed. Eugene Millar (Liberty Fund, 1985), p.146. Italics in original.

43 Smith, TMS, p.180. This paragraph draws on an argument made in my article, ‘Domesticity, Objects and Idleness: Mary Wollstonecraft and Political Economy’, Women’s Writing 19:4 (2012), 544–62 (550–51).

44 TMS, p.180.

45 See Smith, WN, pp.673–74, p.343; see also pp.466–67, p.473, p.496, p.604. For a full discussion of Smith’s theorisation of the economic subject, see my ‘System and Subject in Adam Smith’s Political Economy: Nature, Vitalism, and Bioeconomic Life’, in Systems of Life: Biopolitics, Economics and Literature on the Cusp of Modernity, eds. Richard A. Barney and Warren Montag (Fordham University Press, 2019), pp.93–113.

46 VRW, p.93.

47 VRM, p.42.

48 VRW p.93. See also Chapter 9 for more on the social effects of rank.

49 Mary, p.7; VRW, p.112.

50 VRM, p.42. For Wollstonecraft as advocate of bourgeois meritocracy, see Gary Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (Macmillan, 1992). For Wollstonecraft’s sense of the moral value of labour, see Lena Halldenius ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s Feminist Critique of Property: On Becoming a Thief from Principle’, Hypatia 29:4 (2014), 942–57 (948).

51 VRM, p.24. For a discussion of Smith’s account of value as rooted in labour, see Robin, ‘Burke and Value’, 97–8. According to Robin, for Smith labour is as much a ‘universal measure of value’ as it is ‘a marker of our common humanity’ (98).

52 VRM, p.57.

53 VRW, p.8. For a comparable argument about a ‘meritocracy of mental energy’, see Jon P. Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), p.41.

54 Reflections, p.271.

55 VRM, p.16.

56 Wollstonecraft’s recognition of the importance of the passions is contrary to what Saree Makdisi argues is an ‘Orientialist hostility’ to the passions. See Saree Makdisi, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp.44–5.

57 VRM, p.16.

58 Ibid., p.19.

59 Ibid., pp.19–20.

60 Ibid., p.33. ‘Phlogiston’ was thought to be present in all combustible materials; its existence was soon to be disproved through Lavoisier’s discovery of oxygen.

61 VRM, p.19, p.53.

62 This is a recurring theme in VRW.

63 VRM, p.53.

64 Ibid., p.31.

65 Ibid., p.33. Italics in the original.

66 Ibid., p.46.

67 Ibid., pp.16–17.

68 Ibid., p.82.

69 Reflections, Pocock, ‘Political economy of Burke’, p.206.

70 Quote is from Pocock, ‘Political Economy’, p.203.

71 Sylvana Tomaselli correctly notes that the first Vindication is often eclipsed by a focus on the gender analysis offered by the second: see Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion, and Politics (Princeton University Press, 2021), pp.2–3, p.9. In Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Karen O’Brien offers only a very brief account of VRM. Whilst she suggests that its ‘diagnosis of modern manners’ is more fully developed in VRW, her argument that Wollstonecraft’s reading of Macaulay’s Letters of Education (1790) was a key event informing the second text tends to de-emphasise any continuity between the two Vindications (pp.181–83).

72 VRW, p.73.

73 VRM p.10. The particular analytic significance of manners in this context is to be distinguished from the broader movement for a moral reform of manners of the 1780s, as described by Joanna Innes: see ‘Politics and Morals: The Reformation of Manners Movement in Later Eighteenth-Century England’, in The Transformation of Political Culture: England and Germany in the Late Eighteenth Century ed. Eckhart Hellmuth (Oxford University Press, 1990), pp.57–118.

74 VRW, p.265. For an account of Burke’s use of the phrase ‘revolution in manners’ in Reflections, see Pocock, ‘Political economy of Burke’.

75 Conjectural history offered a stadial view of the development and progress of human society, which it traced through four successive stages of development, culminating in the commercial stage. See O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment, pp.31–2.

76 VRW, p.73.

77 For discussion of this tradition, see Sylvana Tomaselli, ‘The Enlightenment Debate on Women’, History Workshop Journal 20:1 (1985), 101–24.

78 Wollstonecraft’s mobilisation of virtue for its larger reformative effects is thus distinct from what Dana Harrington describes as the emergence of a separate domestic moral sphere to compensate for the corruptions of commerce: see her ‘Gender, Commerce, and the Transformation of Virtue in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 31:3 (2001), 33–52 (45).

79 It is notable that Wollstonecraft refers to other writers for and about women, including conduct writers, as specifically addressing ‘female education and manners’: VRW, p.91.

80 The problem gives its name to a classic collection of essays on eighteenth-century political economy: Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, eds. Istvan Hont and Michael Igantieff (Cambridge University Press 1986). See also Pocock, ‘Political economy of Burke’, pp.195–96.

81 See O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment, p.182.

82 See, for example, VRW, p.210; WN, pp.673–74.

83 ‘Against Inconsistency in Our Expectations’, in Anna Letitia Barbauld: Selected Poetry and Prose ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Ontario: Broadview, 2002), pp.186–94; VRW, p.184.

84 VRW, p.82.

85 VRM, p.87.

86 VRW, p.216.

87 Ibid., p.82.

88 Ibid., p.212.

89 See O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment, p.182. Relatedly, Harriet Guest discusses the problem of the lack of both a moral and professional language to ‘articulate female virtue’ in commercial society, in Small Change: Women, Learning and Patriotism, 1750–1810 (University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp.286–87.

90 VRW, p.83.

91 Ibid., p.212.

92 Ibid., p.99, p.84.

93 Ibid., p.84.

94 Ibid., p.178.

95 Ibid., pp.177–78. The reference is to Ecclesiasticus 1:14: ‘all the works that are done under the sun … [are] vanity and vexation of spirit’.

96 TMS, pp.181–83.

97 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, trans. Franklin Philip (Oxford University Press, 1994), pp.83–4. This passage, which Smith quoted at length, is one of three which Smith included in his discussion of the Discourse in his letter to the Edinburgh Review of 1756. See EPS, pp.242–54 (pp.253–54).

98 TMS, p.183.

99 Ibid., p.181, p.183; VRW, p.82.

100 VRW, p.99, p.83.

101 TMS, pp.181–82.

102 VRW, p.180.

103 Ibid., p.180. A similar image recurs in Wollstonecraft’s next work, her Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, where Louis XVI’s purported taste for torturing animals causes her to comment that ‘death seems to be the sport of kings’. See HMV, p.74.

104 VRW, p.84.

105 Ibid., p.179. This is discussed further in Chapter 6 below.

106 VRW, p.178.

107 Ibid., p.179.

108 Ibid., pp.179.

109 Ibid., p.181.

110 For a discussion of how the political economy of Smith and Hume originates in their accounts of human nature, character, and behaviour, see Miranda Burgess, British Fiction and the Production of Social Order 1740–1830 (Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp.14–21.

111 VRW, p.215; similarly, ‘Public spirit must be nurtured by private virtue’, p.210. Wollstonecraft’s address to the ‘legislator’ recalls Smith’s definition of political economy as a ‘branch of the science of the legislator’, WN 1, p.428.

112 VRW, p.215.

113 Ibid., p.125.

114 Ibid., p.90.

115 Ibid., p.120.

116 Ibid., p.217.

117 Ibid., p.109.

118 Joseph Addison, [Allegory of Public Credit], The Spectator 3, 3 March 1711. Defoe’s allegory of Credit, daughter of Prudence, appears in his Review of 1710. See Paula R. Backscheider ‘Defoe’s Lady Credit’, Huntington Library Quarterly 44:2 (Spring 1981), 89–100.

119 Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Roxana, early eighteenth-century reincarnations of the mythical figure of ‘Fortuna’, are just two examples; for more, see Edward Copeland, Women Writing about Money (Cambridge University Press, 1995).

120 See ‘Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Science’, in David Hume, Essays: Moral, Political and Literary ed. Eugene F. Miller (Liberty Fund, 1985), pp.111–37.

121 Guest, Small Change, p.279.

122 For anxiety about gender in the 1790s, see Claudia Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s (University of Chicago Press, 1995).

123 Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford University Press, 1996), p.22.

124 Pinch, Strange Fits, p.24.

125 VRW, p.112–13, p.218.

126 Ibid., p.215.

127 Ibid., p.215.

128 Ibid., p.104, p.266.

129 Ibid., p.211.

130 Ibid., p.218.

131 Ibid., p.215, 211.

132 Ibid., p.211.

133 Ibid., p.214.

134 Ibid., p.216.

135 Ibid., p.124.

136 Ibid., p.155.

137 Ibid., p.205.

138 Ibid., p.212.

139 Ibid., pp.123–24, p.211.

140 Ibid., p.207, 215, p.112.

141 Ibid., p.199.

142 Ibid., pp.211–12.

143 Ibid., p.225.

144 Ibid., pp.112–13.

145 Ibid., p.225.

146 Ibid., p.249.

147 Ibid., p.217.

148 Ibid., p.218.

149 Ibid., pp.218–19.

150 Ibid., p.212.

151 Ibid., p.219.

152 Pocock, ‘Political economy of Burke’, p.195.

153 VRW, p.120

154 Ibid., p.126.

155 VRW, p.123. For a discussion of the differences between modern feminism and late eighteenth-century ‘rights of women’ debates, see Karen Offen, ‘Was Mary Wollstonecraft a feminist? A Contextual Re-reading of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman 1792–1992’ in Quilting a New Canon: Stitching Women’s Words, ed. Uma Parameswaran (Black Women and Women of Colour Press, Sept 1996), pp.3–24.

156 VRW, p.90.

157 For a full account of the role of Wollstonecraft’s faith in her thinking, see Taylor, Feminist Imagination.

158 VRW, p.105.

159 Ibid., p.106, p.124, p.91.

160 Ibid., p.90, p.114.

161 Ibid., p.68.

162 Ibid., p.68.

163 Ibid., p.215.

164 Ibid., p.210.

165 VRW, p.106.

1 Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2000), p.155.

2 Karen Offen, ‘Was Mary Wollstonecraft A Feminist? A Contextual Re-reading of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman 1792–1992’, pp.3–24 in Quilting a New Canon: Stitching Women’s Words, ed. Uma Parameswaran (Black Women and Women of Colour Press, 1996), p.6.

3 Offen, ‘Contexual Re-reading’, p.7.

4 For an account of arguments from Tallyrand and others for establishing the assignats, see Florin Aftalion, The French Revolution: An Economic Interpretation (Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp.61–5.

5 See Richard Whatmore, Against War and Empire: Geneva, Britain and France in the Eighteenth Century (Yale University Press, 2012), pp.202–3; pp.245–46, p.248. For the crisis of the assignats from October 1791 onwards, see Aftalion, French Revolution, p.109.

6 See Aftalion, French Revolution, p.39, p.37.

7 For discussion of HMV, see Harriet Devine Jump, ‘“The cool eye of observation”: Mary Wollstonecraft and the French Revolution’ in Revolution in Writing: British literary responses to the French Revolution, ed. Kelvin Everest (Open University Press, 1991) pp.101–20, and Vivien Jones, ‘Women Writing Revolution: Narratives of History and Sexuality in Wollstonecraft and Williams’, in Beyond Romanticism eds. John Whale and Stephen Copley (Routledge, 1992), pp.178–99.

8 Todd, Life, p.240.

9 Christie was often in Paris on business between October 1789 and August 1793: see Helen Braithwaite, Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent: Joseph Johnson and the Cause of Liberty (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) p.94. For Turnbull Forbes, see Todd, Life, p.210.

10 For Christie’s connection with Turnbull, Forbes and Co, which lasted at least until autumn 1793, see the letter of Thomas Paine’s in Clio Rickman, Life of Paine (London 1819), pp.238–49. For Wollstonecraft drawing bills through the firm, see Shelley and His Circle 1773–1822 (1961) pp.121–23, pp.128–30.

11 HMV, p.217.

12 See Savi Munjal, ‘He Drinks the Knowledge in Greedy Haste’: Tasting History Through James Gillray’s Political Prints. AIC 11 (1: 2013), pp.39–64 (p.39, p.48).

13 For debates over the grain trade from the 1740s on, see Michael Sonenscher, ‘Property, Community and Citizenship’, in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought eds. Mark Goldie and Robert Wokler (Cambridge, 2006), pp.465–94 (p.466).

14 HMV, p.132.

15 Ibid., p.19.

16 On the history of physiocracy, see T. J. Hochstrasser, ‘Physiocracy and the Politics of Laissez-faire’, in Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought ed. Mark Goldie and Robert Wokler (Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp.419–42.

17 In a classic essay, Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff locate The Wealth of Nations precisely within this debate about subsistence, community, and justice, and suggest that political economy’s founding text was a ‘scandal’ in its suggestion that the market mechanism could best provide for all. See ‘Needs and Justice in the Wealth of Nations’, in Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment eds. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp.1–44.

18 Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (Harvard University Press, 2001), p.72.

19 Turgot is also praised as excelling in the science of political economy in AR 21:2 (February 1795), pp.153–55.

20 See Rothschild, Economic Sentiments, pp.72–86.

21 HMV, p.19.

22 Ibid., p.225. Wollstonecraft’s praise runs exactly counter to Burke’s characterisation of the Encyclopédie as a ‘literary cabal’ of ‘political Men of Letters’ formed for the ‘destruction of the Christian religion’, which deliberately cultivated ‘the monied interest’ of ‘Turgot and almost all the people of the finance’. See Edmund Burke, Reflections, p.211, p.213.

23 HMV, p.226.

24 Ibid., p.226. Earlier in her discussion, Wollstonecraft had attacked the ‘vexatious impediments thrown in the way of trade, by barriers and monopolies’, and the ‘clogs on husbandry’ which means that agriculture is ‘continually dampened by … various restrictions’ and ‘an invincible impediment was thrown in the way of agricultural improvement’: see HMV, p.54, p.50. And a footnote contrasting the open commerce of London with the intrigues dogging the provisioning of Paris, she notes that the ‘wealth of the nation’ depends on London’s relatively unconstrained ‘intercourse’: HMV, pp.92–3.

25 For a detailed account of the various measures and reforms taken in relation to the grain trade over the period 1789–1799, see Aftalion, French Revolution.

26 Rothschild, Economic Sentiments, p.60.

27 See Rothschild, Economic Sentiments, pp.57–9.

28 Morrellet’s translation of Smith was not published: see Whatmore, Against Empire, p.186, p.341 n.50.

29 Mémoires de L’Abbé Morellet, quoted in Rothschild, Economic Sentiments pp.60–1.

30 Robert Darnton, Gens de lettres, Gens du Livre, quoted in Rothschild, Economic Sentiments, n.59, p.274.

31 HMV, p.225.

32 William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of ‘The Rights of Woman’, in Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, A Short Residence in Sweden and Memoirs of the Author of ‘The Rights of Woman’ ed. Richard Holmes (Penguin, 1987), p.244.

33 Whatmore, Against Empire, p.182–89. I am indebted to this work throughout this and the next section.

34 For Dugald Stewart’s account of Smith and Turgot’s shared opinions on ‘the most essential points of political economy’, see ‘Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith’, in EPS, p.304.

35 Whatmore, Against Empire, p.186. For an account of Smith’s conversations with Shelburne, see Ian Simpson Ross, The Life of Adam Smith (Oxford, 2010), p.188.

36 Whatmore, Against Empire, p.181, p.13.

37 Ibid., p.187, p.181.

38 Ibid., p.340 n.32, p.185

39 Ibid., p.185.

40 Discourse on the Love of Our Country in Richard Price: Political Writings ed. D. O. Thomas (Cambridge, 1991) pp.176–96 (p.181–82).

41 HMV, p.183.

42 Béla Kapossy, Isaac Nakhimovsky, and Richard Whatmore, ‘Introduction: Power, Prosperity and Peace in Enlightenment Thought’, in Commerce and Peace in the Enlightenment eds. Béla Kapossy, Isaac Nakhimovsky, and Richard Whatmore (Cambridge University Press, 2017), p.1; Whatmore, Against Empire, p.192.

43 Whatmore, Against Empire, p.195.

44 Ibid.

45 Turgot, Letter to Price, 22 March 1778. Published with Mirabeau’s Considerations on the Cinncinati, English translation 1785, p.162, p.164.

46 Turgot, Letter to Price, p.155, p.156.

47 See Gilbert Imlay: Citizen of the World, by Wil Verhoeven (Pickering & Chatto, 2008), p.200.

48 SND, p.342. Todd is mistaken in identifying Wollstonecraft’s dinner companion as John Dickenson, an error also made in Richard Holmes’ Penguin edition of this work.

49 Review of Brissot’s Nouveau Voyage Dans Les Etats-Unies de L’Amerique Septentrionale, fait en 1788. Travels in the United States of North America, in Works, vol. 7, pp.390–93 (p.391).

50 Stedman Jones, End to Poverty, p.123.

51 Whatmore, Against Empire; Stedman Jones, End of Poverty, p.121.

52 Brissot, Life of J. P. Brissot, Written by Himself (1794), quoted in AR 18:4 (April 1794), 374–78 (p.374). In fact, Brissot’s father was a restauranteur in Chartres. See Frederick A. de Luna, ‘The Dean Street Style of Revolution: J.-P. Brissot, Jeune Philosophe’, French Historical Studies 17:1 (Spring 1991), 159–90 (162). Wollstonecraft also reviewed David Williams’s Lectures on Education for the Analytical too; Brissot, who met Williams in London whilst trying to establish a Lycée and Assembly in 1783–1784, described Williams’s plans for educational reform as a manifesto for teaching of republican manners: see Whatmore, Against Empire, p.232. For Brissot’s activities in London, see Simon Burrows, ‘The Innocence of Jacques-Pierre Brissot’, The Historical Journal 46:4 (2003), 843–71.

53 Brissot confessed that his ideas had, before meeting Clavière, been ‘rather French’: see Whatmore, Against Empire, p.14.

54 Whatmore, Against Empire, p.212.

55 Ibid., p.225.

56 The second edition of 1791, translated as ‘Considerations on the Relative Situation of France and the United States: shewing the importance of the American Revolution to the welfare of France: giving also an account of their productions, and the reciprocal advantages which may be drawn from their commercial connexions’, attributed authorship to both Brissot and Clavière.

57 See Richard Whatmore, ‘Commerce, Constitutions, and the Manners of a Nation: Etienne Clavière’s Revolutionary Political Economy, 1788–93’, History of European Ideas (22: 5–6), 351–68 (p.353).

58 Whatmore, Against Empire, pp.242–43. As Verhoeven reports, silver melted into bars was later used as payment for goods imported into France by Barlow and Imlay; Wollstonecraft oversaw its loading onto the Maria and Margarethe, the ship which later went missing with its precious cargo, and whose pursuit later took her to Scandinavia. See Verhoeven, pp.191–94.

59 For a discussion of De La France, see Whatmore, Against Empire, pp.212–13.

60 Whatmore, Against Empire, p.214.

61 Ibid., p.349 n.172.

62 HMV, p.6.

63 Wollstonecraft, ‘Letter on the Present Character of the French Nation’, in Works, Vol. 6, pp.443–46.

64 I draw here on the account offered in Todd, Life, pp.210–15.

65 Todd, Life, p.215.

66 Helen Braithwaite, Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent: Joseph Johnson and the Cause of Liberty (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) p.94; Verhoeven, Imlay, p.150–51.

67 Todd, Life, p.210, p.215.

68 Gary Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism (Macmillan, 1992), p.166.

69 Arthur Young describes the prevalence of discussions on such topics, prompted by newspaper reports and political debates, in his Travels in France During the Years 1787, 1788 and 1789, 2 vols (London, 1794). See, for instance, vol. 1, p.625.

70 Todd, Life, p.215.

71 Wollstonecraft, Letters to Imlay, in Works, vol. 6, p.388, p.373. Wollstonecraft’s complaint in July 1794, in relation to Imlay’s trading activity, that ‘the government is perpetually throwing impediments in the way of business’ is less well known. The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft ed. Janet Todd (Columbia University Press, 2003), p.255.

72 For a detailed account of Imlay’s involvement in the Louisiana scheme, see Verhoeven, Imlay, pp.151–57. For Barlow and Louisiana, see p.159 and p.155.

73 See Verhoeven, Imlay, pp.160–61; pp.170–75. See also Mary A. Favret, Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters (Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp.97–8.

74 Verhoeven, Imlay, p.166–67.

75 Ibid., p.169.

76 AR, 18:2 (February 1794), p.220; 18:4 (April 1794), pp.374–78 (p.374), review of the Life of J. P. Brissot Written by himself (1794); AR 22:2 (Aug 1795), pp.137–45 (p.142, p.144). Williams is referring to Algernon Sidney, William Russell, and John Hampden.

77 Verhoeven, Imlay, p.96. For full discussion of Imlay’s publications, see Chapters 5 and 6 in the same valuable study. Although alert to Imlay’s ‘geopolitical vision’, Verhoeven’s broad characterisation of Imlay’s texts and the contemporaneous literature on America as either Jacobin or anti-Jacobin does not capture the specific nature of the Girondin political ideology with which I am concerned here. Thus, whilst noting the influence of Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, Verhoeven characterises that influence as a ‘European cultural heritage of transatlantic pastoralism and agrarian primitivism’ (p.96) without addressing the political discourse and projects with which that vision, and as mentioned above, Crèvecoeur himself, was associated.

78 See Verhoeven, Imlay, pp.162–65.

79 Verhoeven notes that Barlow was worth $120,000 by 1796, having been virtually destitute a few years earlier. See Imlay, p.169.

80 HMV, p.184.

81 Ibid., p.7.

82 Ibid., p.144.

83 Ibid., p.181.

84 Ibid., p.180, 181.

85 Ibid., p.183.

86 Ibid., p.183.

87 Ibid., p.113. A similar historical narrative is offered in the first chapter of VRW.

88 See Burrows, ‘Innocence of Brissot’, p.870. Wollstonecraft is undecided as to the rumours of court manipulation of bread supplies: at times such shortages are dismissed as manifesting the ‘inventive mistrust of the nation’, but she also accuses the Duke of Orleans of involvement in such plots: see HMV, pp.128–30, p.199.

89 HMV, p.196. The remainder of this section and the next draw in part on discussion previously published in my article, ‘“The common grievance of the revolution”: Bread, the Grain Trade, and Political Economy in Wollstonecraft’s View of the French Revolution’, European Romantic Review 25:6 (2014), 705–22.

90 HMV, p.210.

91 Ibid., p.196.

92 Ibid., p.196.

93 Ibid., p.181.

94 Ibid., p.213. For Wollstonecraft’s participation in a Scottish tradition of philosophical history, including her knowledge of progressive histories of improvement by John Millar and William Robertson, see Jane Rendell, ‘“The grand causes which combine to carry mankind forward”: Wollstonecraft, History and Revolution’, Women’s Writing 4.2 (1997): 155–72.

95 See J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Edmund Burke and the Redefinition of Enthusiasm: The Context as Counter-Revolution’, in The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture eds. François Furet and Mona Ozouf (Pergamon, 1989), pp.19–36 (p.20).

96 ‘British and Foreign History; for the Year 1790. Chapter 1. France’, The New Annual Register, or General Repository of History, Politics, and Literature, for the Year 1790. (London, 1791), pp.3–32 (p.49). This account also offers a much less dignified account of Maillard’s speech, as well as one less focused on provision of subsistence: Maillard is interrupted by the women, ‘inveighs’ against aristocrats for causing bread shortages, and complains of insults to the national cockade. For a discussion of the difference of Wollstonecraft’s history from the New Annual Register’s ‘constitutional Whiggism’, see Karen O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp.192–93.

97 See ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’ and ‘The Moral Economy Reviewed’, in E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (Merlin, 1991), pp.185–351.

98 See for instance, Gary Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism, p.165, and Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Cornell University Press, 1988), pp.148–51.

99 For a full account of popular protest in eighteenth-century Britain, including food riots, see Adrian Randall, Riotous Assemblies: Popular Protest in Hanoverian England (Oxford University Press, 2006).

100 The free domestic circulation of grain was halted in May 1793, under mob pressure, and with the fall of the Girondins. A uniform ‘maximum’ price for grain was established across all France in September 1793. A free grain trade was re-established in June 1797. See Aftalion, French Revolution, p.134, p.149, p.171.

101 HMV, p.202; ‘British and Foreign History; for the Year 1791. Chapter 2. State of Paris after the Capture of the Bastille’, The New Annual Register, or General Repository of History, Politics, and Literature, for the Year 1791 (London 1792), pp.25–61 (p.49).

102 On this, see Donald Winch, Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–1834 (Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp.198–220.

103 See Sandra Sherman, ‘The Wealth of Nations in the 1790s’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 34 (2005), 81–96, and Rothschild, Economic Sentiments, pp.52–71.

104 HMV, p.183.

105 WN, vol. 2, p.782.

106 HMV, p.234.

107 Ibid., p.230.

108 Ibid., pp.233–34.

109 Ibid., p.233.

110 Ibid., p.233.

111 Gilbert Imlay, A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America (London, 1797), p.216.

112 Wollstonecraft does observe that ‘notes … which are issued by a state before it’s (sic) government is well established, will certainly be depreciated’, gold and silver will ‘vanish’ and prices will rise. But this is phrased as a general truth, not a particular comment on the assignats. HMV, p.182.

113 HMV, p.231.

114 Ibid., p.231.

115 Ibid., p.234. ‘Lazy friars’ is, for Wollstonecraft, an unusually mild description; elsewhere she refers to monks as ‘canker-worms’, ‘leeches of the kingdom’, and the ‘idols of the ignorant’. See HMV, p.51 and Reflections, p.271.

116 HMV, p.6.

1 HMV, p.84.

2 Ibid., pp.84–5.

3 WW, p.149. For women as property and as slaves, see Lena Halldenius, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s Feminist Critique of Property: On Becoming a Thief from Principle’, Hypatia 29:4 (2014), 942–57 and Alan Coffee, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft, Freedom and the Enduring Power of Social Domination’, European Journal of Political Theory 12:2 (2013), 116–35; for property and slavery, see Laura Brace, The Politics of Slavery (Edinburgh University Press, 2018). For a survey of the theme of property in Wollstonecraft, see Virginia Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft (University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp.89–100.

4 For a valuable collection of perspective on property in this period, see Early Modern Conceptions of Property eds. John Brewer and Susan Staves (Routledge, 1995).

5 WN, vol.1, pp.22–4.

6 For an alternative account of Wollstonecraft’s thinking on property, which attends to her difference from a Lockean rights tradition, see Halldenius, ‘Feminist Critique of Property’.

7 HMV, p.229.

8 Ibid., pp.84–5.

9 WN, p.24.

10 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality trans. Frankin Philip (Oxford University Press, 1994) p.32, p.31.

11 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘Discourse on Political Economy’ in The Social Contract, trans. Christopher Betts (Oxford University Press 1994), p.3.

12 Céline Spector, Rousseau (Polity, 2019), pp.153–54. For a discussion of Clarens, see also Jimena Hurtado, ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau: économie politique, philosophie économique et justice’, Revue de philosophie économique 11:2 (2010), 69–101.

13 Spector, Rousseau, p.154.

14 Other examples of the letter form being used for reflections on political and socioeconomic matters include Rousseau’s Letters Written from the Mountain (1764), a response to Jean-Robert’s Tronchin’s Letters Written from the Country (1763) and their fellow Genevan Jean-Andre Deluc’s Lettres physiques et morales, sur les montagnes et sur l’histoire de la terre et de l’homme (published in one volume in 1778, and later in six volumes in 1779–1780), which Richard Whatmore describes as reading like a sentimental novel. See Whatmore, Against War and Empire: Geneva, Britain and France in the Eighteenth Century (Yale University Press, 2012) p.138.

15 For Wollstonecraft’s praise of the wit, sagacity, and profundity of Montesquieu’s Letters, see Works, vol. 7, p.341.

16 Alexander Pope, ‘Epistle to Burlington’ l.172, in Alexander Pope: The Major Works, ed. Pat Rogers (Oxford University Press, 2008), p.249. For a discussion, see Jonathan Sheehan and Dror Wahrmann, Invisible Hands: Self-Organization and the Eighteenth Century (Chicago University Press, 2015), pp.8–9.

17 Quoted in Donald Winch, Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–1834 (Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp.65–6.

18 WN, Vol. 1, p.330. On frugality in Smith, see Winch, Riches and Poverty, pp.76–80.

19 Winch, Riches and Poverty, p.216. For discussion of Burke on the monasteries, see Richard Bourke, Empire & Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke (Princeton University Press, 2015), pp.734–35.

20 Rousseau, Inequality, p.38, pp.58–9; Spector, Rousseau, p.33.

21 Ibid., p.80.

22 Ibid., p.65, p.84.

23 Ibid., p.84, p.66.

24 Ibid., p.85.

25 Spector, Rousseau, p.30.

26 For more discussion of gender in commercial society, especially with regard to object relations, see my article ‘“Domesticity, Object and Idleness”: Mary Wollstonecraft and Political Economy’, Women’s Writing 19:4 (2012), pp.544–62, which offers an earlier exposition of some of the argument in this section.

27 TMS, p.181.

28 Rousseau, Inequality, pp.83–4. This is one of three passages which Smith quotes in his rather disparaging discussion of the Discourse on Inequality in his ‘Letter to the Edinburgh Review’ of 1756. See EPS, p.242–54.

29 TMS, p.183.

30 Ibid., p.179.

31 Ibid., p.179.

32 Ibid., p.180.

33 Ibid., p.186.

34 Ibid., p.179.

35 See Winch, Riches and Poverty, p.74, and TMS, pp.61–6, added to the final edition. For a discussion of TMS in terms of geometry, see Matthew Wickman, Literature After Euclid: The Geometric Imagination in the Long Scottish Enlightenment (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

36 Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Divisions of Knowledge (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), p.377; TMS, p.107.

37 TMS, p.112.

38 McKeon, Secret History, p.380, p.794 n.115.

39 Ibid., p.380.

40 Mary, p.7, p.20.

41 TMS, p.85.

42 HMV, p.227. Wollstonecraft’s editors suggest that she may have had works by Kant (including the Critique of Pure Reason, 1781), Goethe and Schiller in mind.

43 WN, p.347; see also Winch, Riches and Poverty, p.79. Smith also notes that expenditure on such ‘durable commodities’ represents a stock which will retain some value in contrast to expenditure on food, servants and animals.

44 TMS, p.179.

45 Wollstonecraft, ‘Hints. [Chiefly designed to have been incorporated in the Second Part of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman.]’, in Works vol. 5, pp.275–76. Compare TMS, p.179.

46 SND, pp.256–57. The editors note that the second property is Gunnebo House, owned by Scottish merchant John Hall.

47 SND, p.307.

48 TMS, p.186.

49 SND, pp.307–9.

50 HMV, p.5.

51 Ibid., p.121.

52 VRW, p.217.

53 HMV, p.75, p.122.

54 Ibid., p.213.

55 Ibid., p.121.

56 Ibid., pp.147–48.

57 Ibid., p.147.

58 Ibid., p.61.

59 Ibid., p.231, p.20, p.182.

60 Ibid., p.154, p.45.

61 Ibid., p.21, p.223.

62 Ibid., p.183.

63 Ibid., p.180, p.182.

64 Ibid., p.50.

65 Ibid. p.46.

66 Ibid., pp.230–31.

67 Ibid., p.233.

68 See WN, pp.686–87; Michael Igantieff, The Needs of Strangers (Hogarth Press, 1984), p.118; Winch, Riches and Poverty p.72.

69 HMV, p.231.

70 Ibid., p.235.

71 WN, p.783.

72 SND, p.309, p.296.

73 Ibid., p.326, p.346. My discussion in this paragraph draws on an argument already published in ‘Mary Wollstoncraft’s Cottage Economics: Property, Political Economy, and the European Future’, ELH 84 (2017), 453–74 (p.461, p.469). Among many other critical discussions of SND, see Mary A. Favret, ‘Travelling with Mary Wollstonecraft’ in The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft ed. Claudia L. Johnson (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 214–17 and Ingrid Horrocks, Women Wanderers and the Writing of Mobility, 1784–1814 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp.140–68.

74 SND, p.248, p.244, p.257, p.285, pp.328–29.

75 Ibid., p.307–9.

76 Ibid., p.315.

77 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘Ninth Walk’, Reveries of the Solitary Walker trans. Russell Goulbourne (Oxford, 2011), p.104. For discussion of another resonant cottage scene, in Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, see Packham, ‘Cottage Economics’, pp.462–63.

78 For a full discussion, see Packham, ‘Cottage Economics’.

79 Richard Price, ‘Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution’ in Richard Price: Political Writings, ed. D. O. Thomas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p.145; J. Hector St John de Crèvecœur, Letters from an American Farmer, ed. Susan Manning (Oxford University Press, 1997) p.41.

80 For Wollstonecraft’s reviews, see Works, vol. 7 p.174, p.92, p.225; p.392. John Barrell discusses the representation of the cottage in the 1790s in his chapter ‘Cottage Politics’ in The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s (Oxford, 2006) pp.210–46. His examples include Charlotte Smith’s Marchmont (1794), in which the hero is caught between desire for a cottage retreat and anticipation of its undesirable ‘stagnation’, and John Thelwall’s short essay on cottages in his The Peripatetic (1793). For Wollstonecraft’s review of Marchmont, see Works vol.7, pp.485–86.

81 See Gregory Claeys, ‘Virtuous Commerce and Free Theology: Political Economy and the Dissenting Academies 1750–1800’, History of Political Thought 20:1 (1999), 141–72 (167). Claeys is referring here particularly to Godwin and his circle.

82 WN, p.782. Smith also noted that ignorance was a problem for the landlord class too: see p.265.

83 SND, p.288; WW, p.102.

84 Ibid., p.284 (italics in original). See also pp.256–57.

85 For Montesquieu’s influence in the Scottish Enlightenment, see Richard B. Sher, ‘From Troglodytes to Americans: Montesquieu and the Scottish Enlightenment on Liberty, Virtue, and Commerce’, in David Wootton ed. Republicanism, Liberty and Commercial Society 1649–1776 (Stanford University Press, 1994) pp.368–402.

86 See WN, p.378, and Winch, Riches and Poverty, p.84.

87 SND, p.284, p.256.

88 Ibid., p.245, p.262, p.244.

89 Ibid., pp.316–17, pp.294–95.

90 Rousseau, Reveries, p.24. W. G. Sebald considers this passage in his essay on Rousseau in his A Place in the Country trans. Jo Catling (Hamish Hamilton, 2013).

91 Rousseau, Reveries, p.79.

92 SND, p.248.

93 Ibid., p.326, p.338; p.241.

94 McKeon, Secret History, pp.376–78.

95 Ibid., p.378.

96 TMS, p.137; McKeon, Secret History, p.379.

97 Rousseau, Inequality, p.14.

98 Rousseau, Reveries, p.8.

99 SND, pp.248–49.

100 Rousseau, Reveries, p.8.

101 Ibid., p.52, p.56.

102 SND, p.281.

103 Ibid., p.342.

104 Michael Igantieff, Needs of Strangers, p.119; WN, p.27.

105 SND, p.340.

106 Ibid., p.246.

107 McKeon, Secret History, p.378.

108 Ignatieff, Needs of Strangers, p.119.

109 SND, p.344.

110 Ibid., p.345.

111 Ibid., p.344.

112 William Godwin famously described the text as able to ‘make a man in love with its author’: see his Memoirs of the Author of a ‘Vindication of the Rights of Woman’, in Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, A Short Residence in Sweden and Memoirs, ed. Richard Holmes (Penguin, 1987), p.249.

113 Rousseau, Inequality, p.55.

114 John Brewer, ‘Introduction’, Early Modern Property, p.9.

115 Brewer, Early Modern Property, p.10.

116 Montesquieu, ‘Some Reflections on The Persian Letters’, in Persian Letters trans. C. J. Betts (Penguin, 1993) p.283. For a discussion, see Sheehan and Wahrman, Invisible Hands, pp.3–4.

117 The Adventurer, 67, 26 June 1753; see Donald Winch, Riches and Poverty, p.57.

118 Ignatieff, Needs of Strangers, p.119.

119 Smith, ‘The Principles which Lead and Direct Philosophical Enquiries; Illustrated by the History of Astronomy’, in EPS, pp.33–105.

120 Rousseau, Reveries, p.8.

121 Ibid., p.9.

122 SND, p.311.

123 Ibid., p.279.

124 Ibid., p.311.

125 Ibid., p.311.

126 WN, pp.29–30.

127 Ibid., p.783.

128 TMS, p.186.

129 Ignatieff, Needs of Strangers, p.120.

130 Montesquieu, ‘Some Reflections’, p.283.

131 Catherine Gallagher discusses fiction’s ‘character-effect’ and the ‘relief of knowability’ it offers readers in ‘The Rise of Fictionality’, in The Novel ed. Franco Moretti [2 vols], Vol. 1 (Princeton UP 2006), pp.336–63 (pp.356–57).

132 Ignatieff, Needs of Strangers, p.111.

133 Montesquieu, ‘Some Reflections’, p.283.

1 Author’s Preface, WW, p.83.

2 Preface, WW, p.81.

3 Author’s Preface, WW, pp.83–4.

4 Clifford Siskin, System: The Shaping of Modern Knowledge (MIT Press, 2016), p.163.

5 Other discussions of the Bank Restriction Act by literary critics include Matthew Rowlinson, Real Money and Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp.50–3 and Mary Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy (University of Chicago Press, 2008) for whom it provides an approach to the broken promises in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (pp.369–72); for a response, see Alexander Dick, Romanticism and the Gold Standard (Palgrave, 2013), pp.154–55.

6 On the history of bills and paper money, which originated in the bills used by merchants and traders to conduct business overseas without carrying bulky and insecure amounts of coin with them, see Poovey, Credit Economy. On the widespread use of credit by businessmen in eighteenth-century England, see Julian Hoppit, ‘The Use and Abuse of Credit in Eighteenth-century England’, in Business Life and Public Policy eds. Neil McKendrick and R. B. Outhwaite (Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp.64–78. Those least used to paper money were hardest hit by the Restriction: see Rowlinson, Real Money, pp.51–2.

7 Robert Mitchell, Sympathy and the State in the Romantic Era: Systems, State Finance, and the Shadows of Futurity (Routledge, 2007), p.5.

8 Writings on credit included: Daniel Defoe’s An Essay upon Publick Credit (1710) and his essays on credit in his review (1706–1711); essays by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in The Spectator; and Charles Davenant, who warned that ‘Of all beings that have existence only in the minds of men, nothing is more fantastical and nice than Credit; it is never to be forced; it hangs upon opinion; it depends upon our passions of hope and fear; it comes many times unsought for, and often goes away without reason, and when once lost, is hardly to be recovered’: Discourses on the Public Revenue, and on the Trade of England (1698), quoted in Hoppitt, ‘Use and Abuse of Credit’, p.78. Extensive commentary on the cultural representation of credit includes: Paula Backscheider, ‘Defoe’s Lady Credit’. Huntingdon Library Quarterly 44 (1981), 89–100; Terry Mulcaire, ‘Public Credit, or the Feminization of Virtue in the Marketplace’, PMLA 114:5 (1999), 1029–42; John F. O’Brien, ‘The Character of Credit: Defoe’s Lady Credit, The Fortunate Mistress, and the Resources of Inconsistency in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain’, ELH 63: 3 (1996), 603–31; and Simon Schaffer, ‘Defoe’s Natural Philosophy and the Worlds of Credit’ in Nature Transfigured: Science and Literature 1700–1900 eds. John Christie and Sally Shuttleworth (Manchester University Press, 1989) pp.13–44.

9 Parliamentary History (Hansard) February 1797, vol. 32, 1564.

10 Ibid., vol. 33, 57 and vol. 32, 1564.

11 Ibid., vol. 33, 549.

12 For a discussion of the relation between credit and liberal governmentality from the early eighteenth century, see Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact (University of Chicago Press, 1998), p.147, pp.157–69.

13 See Patrick Brantlinger’s claim, in Fictions of State: Culture and Credit in Britain, 1694–1994 (Cornell University Press, 1996) that the 1797 banking crisis and its aftermath contributed to emergence of ‘political economy’ as a widely acknowledged social science (p.111).

14 Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2000), p.426.

15 WW, p.105.

16 The Oxford English Dictionary lists ‘venable’ as a rare usage for ‘vendible’, or ‘capable of being vended or sold’.

17 For a variation on the theme of credit’s vulnerability, in which the precariousness is attributed not to a feminised credit but to the merchant, see Richard Steele, ‘Glory, Reputation and Credit in the World of Fame’, The Spectator no. 218 (9 November 1711).

18 WW, p.85; VRW, p.129.

19 Gillian Russell ‘Faro’s Daughters’, Eighteenth Century Studies 33:4 (2000), 497; Jon Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm and Regulation (Oxford University Press, 2005).

20 Russell, ‘Faro’s Daughters’, p.500.

21 TMS, p.40. See Harriet Guest, Unbounded Attachment (Oxford University Press, 2013), pp.4–5.

22 For a related but slightly different argument, see Miranda Burgess’s claim that sensibility is a ‘shared regulatory standard uniting social and economic exchange’: see British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, 1740–1830, p.23.

23 WW, p.101.

24 TMS, p.167; pp.54–6.

25 Ibid., p.189.

26 WN vol. 2, p.697. The valoration of prudence as an economic virtue goes back at least to the early eighteenth century: see Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact, p.144 for a discussion of Steele’s account, in The Spectator for 19 September 1711, of Sir Andrew Freeport’s defence of merchants’ accounting practices as ‘prudent’. Anna Letitia Barbauld describes prudence as ‘jealous and worldly-minded’ and associates it with the acquisition of wealth in her essay ‘Against Inconsistency in our Expectations’, (1773), which Wollstonecraft praised in VRW. See Anna Letitia Barbauld: Selected Poetry and Prose ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Ontario: Broadview, 2002), pp.186–94 (p.188).

27 WN vol. 1, p.292.

28 HMV, p.182.

29 TMS, pp.335–36.

30 WN, vol. 2. p.791. This sole instance however hints towards the widespread fear of ‘enthusiasm’ in many Enlightenment thinkers. Hume commented that ‘quacks and projectors’ are more readily believed when they offer ‘magnificent pretentions’ than more moderate ones. See David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Clarendon Press, 1978), p.120.

31 TMS, p.336.

32 William Godwin, Caleb Williams (Oxford University Press, 1970), p.305.

33 WN, vol. 1. p.321.

34 Ibid., vol. 1. p.315. Examples discussed by Smith include the then recent failure of Ayr bank and John Law’s infamous Mississippi scheme. Hume had been much more sceptical about possibilities of paper money (See his essays ‘Of Money’ and on ‘Balance of Trade’).

35 VRW, p.179.

36 Ibid., p.175, p.178.

37 Ibid., p.176.

38 Ibid., p.176.

39 Ibid., p.175. ‘How quickly is the so much vaunted milkiness of nature turned into gall, by an intercourse with the world, if more generous juices do not sustain the vital source of virtue’ Maria notes in WW, p.137.

40 VRW, pp.175–76.

41 Ibid., pp.176–77.

42 Ibid., p.177.

43 Ibid., p.177.

44 Ibid., p.178.

45 Ibid., p.182.

46 Ibid., pp.178–79.

47 Ibid., p.181.

48 Ibid., p.181

49 Ibid., p.183.

50 William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Richard Holmes (Penguin, 1987), p.242.

51 WW, p.116.

52 Ibid., p.101.

53 HMV, p.233. She also attacks commercial speculation in her SND.

54 WW, p.127.

55 Ibid., p 127.

56 Ibid., p.134.

57 Ibid., p.134.

58 Hume, Treatise, p.123. This is the section where Hume calls poets ‘liars by profession’ and attempts to maintain a difference between dangerous beliefs of the imagination (chimeras) and others.

59 As Hoppit notes, Smith (in WN) also feared a lack of prudence in young men, whose economic dealings were marked by too much hope and not enough fear. See Hoppit, ‘Use and Abuse of Credit’, p.72.

60 WW, p.138.

61 Ibid., p.151, p.175. The OED defines an accommodation bill as ‘a bill not representing or originating in an actual commercial transaction, but for the purpose of raising money on credit’. See also Mary Poovey’s discussion of accommodation bills, and bills of exchange generally, in Genres of the Credit Economy, p.36ff.

62 WN, p.316, p.315.

63 See Hoppit, ‘Uses and Abuses of Credit’. The issue of AR for December 1796 also describes the process of conmen setting up as merchants, getting goods on credit, and exploiting bills of credit to defraud others.

64 WW, p.173.

65 According to the economic historian Hannah Barker, it was unusual for a woman to act as sole trustee for a child’s inheritance: is Wollstonecraft attempting to imagine a new operation of the law here? See Barker, Family and Business during the Industrial Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2017), p.69.

66 WW, p.130.

67 Ibid., pp.176–77. The development from erotic love to a more universal benevolence recurs elsewhere in Wollstonecraft and is influenced by Rousseau: see, for instance, Laura Kirkley’s illuminating reading of Mary in Mary Wollstonecraft: Cosmopolitan (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), pp.44–7.

68 Mary, p.5.

69 Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (Oxford University Press, 1988), p.1.

70 Samuel Johnson, Rambler no 4 (31 March 1750), pp.27–36. This requirement for fiction to be creditable is at odds with Johnson’s view that the purpose of that fiction is to shape the beliefs of unformed youth: his readers are thus at once deemed capable of determining what can be credited, and in need of the very tutelage in belief that fiction provides.

71 Cave of Fancy, in Works vol. 1, p.191.

72 Rasselas, p.122; Cave of Fancy, p.206.

73 Cave of Fancy, p.191.

74 Karen O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2009), p.200.

75 In one of her reviews, Wollstonecraft notes that ‘pleasures arising from taste and feeling’ as well as being ‘complex and accidental’ are ‘almost incommunicable’; in another, on Gilpin, she notes that ideas which are merely ‘excited’ rather than ‘represented’ are more ‘acceptable’ to the ‘mind in which they are raised’. See Works vol. 7, p.161, p.387.

76 For the instability of sensibility, see Markman Ellis, Politics of Sensibility (Cambridge University Press, 1996), p.7; for the ‘extraordinary volatility of notions of sensibility’, see Harriet Guest, Small Change (University of Chicago Press, 2000), p.291.

77 TMS, p.190, p.40, p.191. See Guest, Unbounded Attachment, pp.4–5.

78 TMS, pp.191–92.

79 ‘Unbounded attachment’ is Godwin’s description of Wollstonecraft: see Guest, Unbounded Attachment, p.5, and see p.7 in the same work for the observation that ‘Godwin suggests Wollstonecraft’s Short Residence enacts on its readers by “dissolv[ing] us in tenderness”; VRW, p.129.

80 On this, see Guest, Small Change, pp.1–13. See Guest, Unbounded Attachment, p.3, for the claim that sensibility enabled women’s writing to accomplish the ‘transition from the private or intimate to the general or social’.

81 Pamela Clemit, Introduction, in William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’ (Broadview, 2001), p.23.

82 Jon Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm (Clarendon Press, 1992), p.25.

83 See Hume ‘On the Delicacy of Taste and Passion’, in Essays Moral, Political, Literary ed. Eugene F. Miller (Liberty Fund, 1985); see also Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion (Stanford University Press, 1996), pp.51–3.

84 WW, p.86.

85 Similarly, Sylvana Tomaselli points out that Wollstonecraft located the origins of society and sociability in the ‘long stories’ told by elders to their ‘listening progeny’. See Tomaselli, Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion and Politics (Princeton University Press, 2021), p.131–32; HMV, p.146.

86 Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism: From the Spectator to Post-Structuralism (Verso, 1984), p.26, pp.16–7. See Guest, Small Change pp.5–6 for a subtle and suggestive discussion of women’s relation to rational exchanges of civil society.

87 Daniel E. White, Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent (Cambridge University Press, 2006); see also Gregory Claeys, ‘Virtuous Commerce and Free Theology: Political Economy and the Dissenting Academies 1750–1800’, History of Political Thought 20:1 (Spring 1999), 141–72.

88 White, Early Romanticism, p.110; Preface, WW, p.81.

89 For his discussion of Wollstonecraft’s ‘affective spontaneity’, see White, Early Romanticism, p.114.

90 Johnson, Rasselas, p.15.

91 Ibid., p.16.

92 Ibid., p.1.

93 Cave of Fancy in Works vol. 1, p.199, p.195.

94 On ‘fictionality’ as a historically and culturally specific capacity for belief which enabled the rise of the novel, see Catherine Gallagher, ‘The Rise of Fictionality’, in The Novel ed. Franco Moretti [2 vols], Vol. 1 (Princeton University Press, 2006), pp.336–63.

95 WW, p.131.

96 Ibid., p.137.

97 TMS, p.190.

98 VRM, p.29.

99 ‘On Poetry’, in Works, vol. 7, p.9, p.11.

100 Daniel White, Early Romanticism, p.116–18. As Sylvana Tomaselli has noted, remarks on history painting given tangentially in VRM also turn on the relation between imitation and inspiration: see Tomaselli, Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion, and Politics (Princeton University Press, 2021), p.26.

101 ‘On Poetry’, p.10.

102 VRW, p.181.

103 WW, p.181.

104 Ibid., p.83, p.81.

1 SND, pp.294–95, p.311, p.249.

2 Ibid., p.311.

3 Anahid Nersessian, The Calamity Form: On Poetry and Social Life (University of Chicago Press, 2020), p.135.

4 SND, p.311, pp.248–49.

5 Sylvana Tomaselli, Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion, and Politics (Princeton University Press, 2021), p.210. Sometimes this reinvention takes surprising forms, as in Virginia Woolf’s celebration of Wollstonecraft: her ‘face, at once so resolute and so dreamy, so sensual and so intelligent, and beautiful into the bargain with its great coils of hair and … large bright eyes … the most expressive [Southey] had ever seen’. From Nation and Athenaeum, 5 October 1929; see Virginia Woolf: Women and Writing ed. Michèle Barrett (The Women’s Press, 1979), pp.99.

6 For one survey, whose title conveys much, see Helen Thompson, Disorder: Hard Times for the Twenty-First Century (Oxford University Press, 2022).

7 Sylvana Tomaselli, ‘Political Economy: The Desire and Needs of Present and Future Generations’ in Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth-Century Domains, eds. Christopher Fox, Roy Porter, and Robert Wokler (University of California Press, 1995), pp.292–322 (p.313).

8 For calls for alternative economic models, whether green growth, post-growth, or steady-state, as well as the need to realign our economic system with social and planetary good, see, for instance, Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital (Verso, 2015), Tim Jackson Post Growth: Life after Capitalism (Polity, 2021), and Ann Pettifor, The Case for the Green New Deal (Verso, 2019).

9 Geoffrey West, Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2017), p.238; Richard Bronk, The Romantic Economist (Cambridge University Press, 2009), p.24, drawing on Philip Mirowski, More Heat than Light (Cambridge University Press, 1989).

10 Tim Rogan, The Moral Economists: R. H. Tawney, Karl Polanyi, E. P. Thompson (Princeton University Press, 2017), p.57.

11 Rogan, Moral Economists, p.88.

12 Ibid., p.88, p.91.

13 Quoted in Rogan, Moral Economists, p.79; John Stuart Mill, Autobiography (Penguin, 1989), p.178; quoted in Bronk, Romantic Economist, p.54.

14 Bronk, Romantic Economist, p.10, p.24; Hunter Heyck, Age of System: Understanding the Development of Modern Social Science (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), p.12.

15 Heyck, System, p.6, pp.3–6.

16 Ibid., pp.5–6; Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics (Penguin, 2017), pp.35–40; Amit Kapoor and Bibek Debroy, ‘GDP Is Not a Measure of Human Well-Being’, Harvard Business Review (4 October 2019), https://hbr.org/2019/10/gdp-is-not-a-measure-of-human-well-being. The critique of GDP is hardly new, being a feature of Robert Kennedy’s 1968 campaign for the US Presidency: see Jackson, Post Growth, pp.1–16.

17 Joanna Rostek, Women’s Economic Thought in the Romantic Age (Routledge, 2021), p.58.

18 Julie Nelson, ‘How Did “the Moral” Get Split from “the Economic”?’ in Toward a Feminist Philosophy of Economics eds. Drucilla Barker and Edith Kuiper (Routledge, 2003), pp.134–41 (p.135); Mariana Mazzucato, ‘What If Our Economy Valued What Matters?’, www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/valuing-health-for-all-new-metrics-for-economic-policy-and-progress-by-mariana-mazzucato-2022-03, accessed 9 March 2022.

19 From a potentially vast literature of economists critical of economics, see Diane Coyle, Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be (Princeton University Press, 2021); Robert Skidelsky, What’s Wrong With Economics (Yale University Press, 2020); Rethinking Capitalism eds. Michael Jacobs and Mariana Mazzucato (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016) collects essays by leading economists on the need to rethink current economic orthodoxies; Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist (Random House, 2018) argues for a new economics to respond to the challenges of our time. For pressure to reform economics as it is taught in universities, see Economics, Education and Unlearning: Economics Education at the University of Manchester, Post-Crash Economics Society (PCES), April 2014, accessed 28 September 2020, www.post-crasheconomics.com/download/778r. See also Richard Adelman and Catherine Packham, ‘The Formation of Political Economy as a Knowledge Practice’ in Political Economy, Literature & the Formation of Knowledge, 1720–1850 eds. Adelman and Packham (Routledge, 2018), pp.1–21.

20 Nitasha Kaul, ‘The Anxious Identities we inhabit: Post’isms and Economic Understanding’, in Toward a Feminist Philosophy of Economics, pp.194–210 (p.203).

21 Iain Hampsher-Monk, ‘Edmund Burke, Political Economy, and the Market’, Cosmos + Taxis (2021), 9: 9–10, 10–8 (p.11).

22 Bronk, Romantic Economist, pp.xiii–xv; see pp.7–8 for his account of responses to such criticisms from within the discipline.

23 Nicholas Maxwell, ‘From Knowledge to Wisdom: The Need for an Academic Revolution’, in Ronald Barnett and Nicholas Maxwell eds. Wisdom in the University (Routledge, 2008), pp.1–20 (p.14). For a measured defence of economics as a collection of models, see Dani Rodrik, Economics Rules (Oxford University Press, 2015).

24 Mariana Mazzucato, Mission Economy (Penguin, 2021), p.211.

25 Mazzucato, Mission Economy, p.211.

26 Rogan, Moral Economists, p.87.

27 For ‘economism’, see Richard Norgaard, ‘The Church of Economism and Its Discontents’, December 2015, https://greattransition.org/publication/the-church-of-economism-and-its-discontents, accessed 20 February 2022.

28 SND, pp.248–49.

29 Ibid., pp.310–11.

30 Ibid., pp.294–95.

31 TMS, pp.12–3.

32 Judith Butler, The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind (Verso, 2020), p.59.

33 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Justice (Verso, 2004), p.28.

34 Nersessian, Calamity Form, p.54.

35 John Whale, Imagination Under Pressure (Cambridge University Press, 2000) p.187.

36 WN, vol. 1, p.428.

37 Elizabeth A. Bohls, Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716–1818 (Cambridge University Press, 1995), p.151.

38 Nersessian, Calamity Form, p.142, and see Jonathan Kramnick, Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness (University of Chicago Press, 2018), p.83.

39 Barbara K. Seeber, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft: “Systemiz[ing] Oppression”: Feminism, Nature and Animals’, in Peter F. Cannavo, J. H. H, Lane et al. eds., Engaging Nature: Environmentalism and the Political Theory Canon (MIT Press, 2014), pp.173–88 (p.174). See also Enit Karafili Steiner, ‘Mood, Provisionality, and Planetarity in Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark’, Criticism 61:1 (2019), 27–50.

40 Seeber, ‘Systemiz[ing] Oppression’, p.175, pp.182–83.

41 West, Scale, p.238.

42 SND, p.304.

43 Works, vol. 6, p.445.

44 Rogan, Moral Economists, p.200, p.85.

45 Tomaselli, Wollstonecraft, p.128.

46 HMV, p.228.

47 Ibid., p.227.

48 Ibid., p.235.