The Life and Times of Wollstonecraft
and Her Family, 1688 –1818
MADELINE CRONIN AND EILEEN HUNT BOTTING
Dates in italics are for events in Wollstonecraft’s life.
1688 –1689 The English Bill of Rights establishes the constitutional
supremacy of the Parliament over the monarchy, as a
response to the Glorious Revolution and the other
seventeenth-century European wars of religion.
The Toleration Act expands religious toleration in En-
gland and its colonies for non-Anglican Christian Dissent-
ers except for Roman Catholics and non-trinitarians.
1707 England and Scotland are united as the Kingdom of Great
Britain.
Religious toleration is guaranteed for Presbyterians in
England due to the unifi cation with Scotland.
1708 The Dissenter church at Newington Green, in north Lon-
don, is established in the Presbyterian tradition.
1754 –1763 Britain and France engage in the French and Indian
War and the Seven Years’ War in Europe, the Ameri-
cas, coastal Africa, and the South Pacifi c — dangerously
escalating their national debts alongside their imperial
ambitions.
1759 On April 27, Mary Wollstonecraft is born in Spitalfi elds,
east London, to middle-class Anglican parents: the En-
glishman John Edward Wollstonecraft and the Irishwoman
Elizabeth Dickson Wollstonecraft.
1762 Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract and Emile, or On
Education are published.
1768 Wollstonecraft’s family moves to Yorkshire where she
befriends her peer Jane Arden, and benefi ts from informal