As demonstrated in the previous chapter, Wollstonecraft’s husband seemed to have been either misinformed about his wife’s religious training and beliefs or else was narcissistic in allowing his own cynicism about religion to skew his understanding and representation of hers. One aspect that he failed to reconcile in his rendering was the steady stream of religious people with whom she forged relationships who wielded a tremendous amount of influence on her. This chapter will identify those who had a hand in crafting her religious beliefs, those that appear in her works and letters. Thusly it refutes Godwin’s allegation that Wollstonecraft “received few lessons of religion in her youth” (Memoirs 35).

The Wollstonecrafts

Godwin claimed that Wollstonecraft’s parents were lapsed members of the Church of England, that she “received few lessons of religion in her youth,” that she created her own religion, and that she did not attend church services after 1787 (Memoirs 35–36). Yet Godwin contradicted himself earlier in the same paragraph when he wrote, “Mary had been bred in the principles of the church [sic] of England” (34). When did this breeding happen if not in her youth, especially if he argued that she stopped going to services after 1787?

Wollstonecraft’s parents were members of St. Botolph Without Bishopsgate and did have Wollstonecraft christened there on May 20, 1759 (Gordon 2005, 6). If she regularly attended church until 1787 as Godwin wrote (Memoirs 36), then why would he assume that she did not have many “lessons of religion in her youth” (35), for what else is taught in church other than religion?

Perhaps he meant that her parents were not religious, but there is no evidence of this, and how would have Wollstonecraft gone to church as a child if her parents had not taken her? There is no reference in any biography of her having any relatives outside her immediate family that had any influence or involvement with her when she was a child and was attending services. She had no evangelical aunt as had George Eliot (Marian Evans). When Wollstonecraft was four, the family left Spitalfields, the home of Wollstonecraft’s grandfather. After that they lived on farms. She would have been 14 when she came to know the Ardens, who would have influenced her greatly in forming her religious and philosophical ideas.