Wollstonecraft and the Burghs of Newington Green

This essay investigates the importance of Mr and Mrs James and Hannah Burgh of Newington Green for Mary Wollstonecraft’s life and career during the 1780s. Newington Green was a hugely productive environment for Wollstonecraft, but the Burghs offered a particular combination of support and provocation. Hannah Burgh was Wollstonecraft’s mentor and financial supporter from 1784, during her residence in Newington Green, and until she became the protégée of Joseph Johnson in 1787. Through Hannah Burgh, Wollstonecraft accessed the works of the late James Burgh, who had died in 1775. Burgh’s pedagogical writings were important intertexts for Wollstonecraft’s early works, especially in their account of female education, their “rational” treatments of scripture, and their responses to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Wollstonecraft builds on Burgh’s writings in her pedagogical works, and he continues to be an important interlocutor even after Wollstonecraft’s departure from Newington Green. Burgh’s anthology The Art of Speaking (1761) is a model and probable source for one of Wollstonecraft’s first publications for Johnson, The Female Reader (1789). In her own anthology, however, Wollstonecraft offers a distinct account of reading as a tool of improvement, and builds a new canon of reading texts for women and girls.