Charles Wollstonecraft in Pennsylvania, 1792–1801: “A Man of Good Sense and Information.” (. . . or “Irritable but not Vindictive?”)

ABSTRACT This article brings Charles Wollstonecraft (Mary’s “favourite brother”) from a British state on the brink of war with France to an American republic more loosely engaged with the French Revolution. He arrives in Pennsylvania, a place still central to his identity when he died in New Orleans in 1817. We watch his efforts to grow there with more skill than he was credited with having in Britain. We see him in a land speculation bubble driven by French Revolutionary migration; a romantic quadrangle for the favor of a Philadelphia belle, as described by her warily permissive mother; and emergency military service in Philadelphia’s hinterland. He would eventually find his niche as a soldier in Louisiana, where land speculation, gendered stress, and war were entangled, but these things all began in 1790s Pennsylvania.