Mary Wollstonecraft's grandfather had amassed a fortune as a master weaver and property speculator, and he sought to pass on his property and his business to his son, Edward. The family was religious and, by eighteenth-century standards, an example of solid middle-class citizenry. Edward was apprenticed to his father at fourteen and spent his adolescence in Spitalfields learning the business. In the year of Mary Wollstonecraft's birth, Edward had taken over the family silk-weaving business, and he and his wife of three years already had one child, a male heir, Ned. He was the center of his parents' attention and affection. Doted on by his mother, he was to be the sole inheritor of his grandfather's property.
In 1763 Mary Wollstonecraft's father left London, the silk business, and the life of a middleclass merchant for the more socially prestigious life of a gentleman farmer. When his father died two years later, Edward, Sr., inherited ten thousand pounds and control over his son's inheritance. He purchased a sizable house and holdings in Barking, about eight miles from London. In the first year of his career as a farmer, Mary's father appeared to prosper, but over the next ten years the family moved seven times because of his repeated business failures.
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