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Title: William Godwin
Author: Richard Gough Thomas
Date: 2019
Language: en
Topics: William Godwin, biography
Source: Retrieved on 7th August 2021 from https://es1lib.org/book/3711404/ae8c17

Richard Gough Thomas

William Godwin

Series Preface

Revolutionary Lives is a series of short, critical biographies of

radical figures from throughout history. The books are sympathetic but

not sycophantic, and the intention is to present a balanced and, where

necessary, critical evaluation of the individual’s place in their

political field, putting their actions and achievements in context and

exploring issues raised by their lives, such as the use or rejection of

violence, nationalism, or gender in political activism. While

individuals are the subject of the books, their personal lives are dealt

with lightly except insofar as they mesh with political concerns. The

focus is on the contribution these revolutionaries made to history, an

examination of how far they achieved their aims in improving the lives

of the oppressed and exploited, and how they can continue to be an

inspiration for many today.

Series Editors:

Sarah Irving, King’s College, London

Professor Paul Le Blanc, La Roche College, Pittsburgh

Acknowledgements

My heartfelt thanks must go out to everyone involved with Newcastle

University’s William Godwin: Forms, Fears, Futures conference in 2017,

and the community of Godwin scholars across the world. I am immensely

grateful to Professor Mark Philp for his encouragement, and this book is

stronger and richer for the suggestions and advice of John-Erik Hansen.

Thanks must also go to David Castle and Robert Webb at Pluto Press for

their patience with a first-time author.

Finally, the book would never have been written without the urging of

Joshua M. Reynolds, or the support of Jen Edwards, Alex Burnett and

Angharad Thomas.

1. Introduction The Anarchist

His contemporaries believed him to be the most important radical thinker

of their age. William Godwin (1756–1836) was a political philosopher in

the purest sense – he wrote no great revolutionary speeches, nor did he

ever issue a political manifesto. As the French Revolution careened from

popular uprising to government terror, and from Directory to despotism,

across the Channel British radicals pressed for parliamentary reform,

women’s rights and greater religious freedom. Godwin went further,

questioning the most basic assumptions of government itself. Many of his

peers were tried or imprisoned for their activism but Godwin, a lifelong

critic of violence, and undeniably a theorist rather than an agitator,

endured decades of abuse in the government-backed press because no

political or criminal charges could ever be found against him.

William Godwin was an anarchist. He would not have understood the term

in the way we do. He regarded anarchy in its popular sense, as a synonym

for chaos. He recognised it as a creative chaos, however, and argued

that its principal danger was that it created the conditions that might

allow new (more brutal) authority to rise in its wake. Godwin was

critical of authority as a principle, not merely its implementation, and

believed that our ability to reason (if developed) would eventually make

laws and government unnecessary. Godwin explained his ideas in An

Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), written at the height of

the French Revolution when it seemed as if the world had been pitched

into the kind of creative chaos where anything was possible. Political

Justice came to be regarded as one of the first major texts in the

history of anarchist thought, exemplifying what is now (loosely) defined

as ‘philosophical’ anarchism – the theoretical basis for

anti-authoritarian principles and political action. Godwin himself was

not a revolutionary. A quiet man, often shy among strangers, Godwin

wanted to change the world through writing and conversation, recognising

that educating people to reason for themselves was a more certain way of

making things better than imposing better things on them.

Figure 1 Godwin described James Northcote’s 1803 portrait as ‘the

principal memorandum of my corporal existence that will remain after my

death.’

(National Portrait Gallery, London)

‘Anarchist’ is a word that conjures up images of revolutionary action,

be it via the symbolic violence of the Black Bloc or the peaceful

overthrow of the old social order in Catalonia at the beginning of the

Spanish Civil War. Yet it also describes a wide range of

anti-authoritarian political thought, on both the left and right, united

only by a common resistance to being told what to do. The word itself

has an image problem: its literal meaning is simply to be ‘without

rulers’ but we have been told for centuries that, without rulers, the

existing order of society would tear itself apart. We might cynically

observe that the existing order could do with a shake-up, but few of us

wish to do without order at all, and we have been led to believe that

order is maintained through the exercise of authority – of people giving

orders and other people following them, with consequences for stepping

too far out of line (because other people can’t be trusted). Many

anarchists would argue that order is simply something that happens when

a group of people find out how to get along, and that most of the things

that authority claims to protect us from are indirectly caused by

authority in the first place (e.g. theft – which is caused by

inequality, which usually benefits those in power). Making statements

about ‘what anarchists think’ is, of course, a quixotic endeavour.

Anarchism is a philosophy, but one that naturally defies rigid

definitions. Anarchism has ideas, and it has thinkers, and it is easier

to write about ‘anarchisms’ (or the anarchism of a particular

individual) than it is to discuss every school of thought under its

umbrella.

If his contribution to anarchism were the sum of Godwin’s achievement,

he would be an interesting figure for historians and philosophers. He

was more: a novelist, historian and children’s writer of enormous

influence in his own time. His extensive diaries reveal his direct

connection to dozens of the most important names of his time in the

fields of literature, politics, science and art (too many to do justice

to in one book). Most importantly, he was the loving husband of Mary

Wollstonecraft – in the view of history, easily the most important

feminist writer and thinker of the eighteenth century – and the father

of Mary Shelley, a novelist of immense cultural significance. Their

lives are closely interlinked, but this book is an account of Godwin’s

life and thought, and can only tackle Wollstonecraft and her daughter

where their influence is crucial to Godwin’s story. Readers are referred

to Janet Todd’s Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (2000) for the

most authoritative version of that writer’s life; biographies of Mary

Shelley are numerous but Anne K. Mellor’s Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her

Fiction, Her Monsters (1989) is a standard.

Godwin’s story is as much held in his writing as it is in his life, and

an extended discussion of his literary and philosophical works is

essential to communicating why the philosopher was such a crucial (and

controversial) figure in the culture of his time. This book attempts to

tell the story of Godwin’s life, from his rise to radical fame in the

1790s to obscurity and bankruptcy years later, and so draws extensively

on his letters and diaries (preserving his idiosyncratic spelling and

sometimes cryptic abbreviations). Yet it could not adequately do so

without explaining the theory of Political Justice or the ideas of The

Enquirer, nor could it explain the philosopher’s character without Caleb

Williams, St Leon, or his Memoir of Wollstonecraft. Godwin’s life was a

life in letters even more than it was a life in politics – his works

contributed to shaping the literary, historical and educational genres

that we take for granted today – and his ideas have influenced

generations of thinkers up to the present day.

2. The Minister (1756–93)

William Godwin was born in 1756, the son of a Dissenting minister and

the grandson of another.

‘Dissenter’ was the name given to those Protestants who had opposed the

1662 Act of Uniformity; the Presbyterians, Baptists and

Congregationalists who refused to conform with Anglican strictures on

prayer, theology and the authority of the crown over the church. Their

descendants traced their lineage back to the ‘Independents’ of the Civil

War, defended (with reservations) the memory of Cromwell, and celebrated

the 1688 revolution as the first step on the road to religious and

political freedom.

Dissenters were found in all walks of life but, for a variety of

reasons, were well-represented among artisans and merchants of the

bigger towns and cities. The Test and Corporation Acts, requiring at

least occasional Anglican religious observance from public officials,

excluded Dissenters from parliament and municipal office. Though a small

number were willing to pay lip service to the Church of England in

exchange for their own seat at the table, the majority threw whatever

weight they had behind the liberal Whigs. Godwin in later life was

conscious of quite how much Dissenting culture had shaped him, how much

it coloured his attitudes to political and cultural developments and how

it affected the way he thought.

Godwin was the seventh of thirteen children, and many of his siblings

did not live to see adulthood. The philosopher remembered his father as

a warm-hearted (but far from clever) man, with a tendency towards

austerity and ill humour that were balanced by the vivacity of Godwin’s

mother.[1] Disputes within congregations – many Dissenting groups

reserved the right to reject ministers they could not see eye to eye

with – saw the family move from Wisbech in Cambridgeshire (where Godwin

was born) to Debenham in Suffolk, before finally settling in the small

village of Guestwick in Norfolk, in 1760. Somewhere either before or

after William’s birth, the already busy household took on a cousin,

Hannah Godwin (later Sothren), as a lodger. Hannah appears to have been

the young William’s most important friend in early childhood. It was

Hannah that introduced the future novelist to books and, in defiance of

his father’s particularly strict form of Calvinism, took him to the

theatre at the age of nine.

William was the only one of the surviving children that felt the call to

the ministry. The elder Godwin did not encourage his son’s ambitions. As

a small boy, William had given sermons from atop a chair in the kitchen

and terrorised a schoolmate with descriptions of his damnation. The

young Godwin was clever, enthusiastic and precocious, signs that his

father took as symptoms of his arrogance. At the age of eleven, William

was taken from the local school at Hindolveston and sent to live as the

sole pupil of the Reverend Samuel Newton in Norwich. William’s new

teacher was far more educated, but a far stricter Calvinist (and

disciplinarian) than his father. Newton was a follower of Robert

Sandeman, who (as Godwin would later write) ‘after Calvin had damned

ninety-nine in a hundred of mankind, has contrived a scheme for damning

ninety-nine in a hundred of the followers of Calvin’.[2] The young

Godwin was whipped and berated for his pride, yet he formed a bond with

his tutor that would last until the ideas contained in Political Justice

drove a wedge between them.

Even writing forty years later, Godwin’s memories of Newton retained a

touch of anger. He was cold, ‘a very insufficient master’ and ‘a

despot’, but he shaped his pupil’s religious and political opinions for

many years to come.[3] In his unfinished autobiography, Godwin wrote:

‘Newton was certainly my friend. His sentiments towards me were

singular. He always treated me as self-conceited and arrogant: yet he

had a high opinion of my talents.’[4] The two remained in correspondence

into the 1790s.

At fourteen, he withdrew from Newton’s tutelage and returned to the

school at Hindolveston. Godwin described his time under Newton as ‘more

vexatious than I could well endure’ but within a few months he was back

with Newton again, until his teacher dismissed him at the end of

1771.[5] Godwin returned home to work as an assistant at his former

school. His father died the next year and soon William’s mother was

organising his return to study. University was probably never

considered: again, Oxford and Cambridge required adherence to the Church

of England. Instead, Godwin would enrol at one of the country’s many

Dissenting Academies – institutions that had grown up over the course of

the eighteenth century to provide an educated ministry for nonconformist

congregations (in the face of legal harassment by Anglicans and Tories)

but, in some cases, had developed a reputation for excellence that far

surpassed that of England’s ancient universities. Most students went on

to a religious calling, some even with the established church (such as

Thomas Malthus). The best of the academies taught according to the model

established by the pioneering Philip Doddridge (1702–51): teaching in

English rather than Latin and favouring critical reading and debate over

doctrinaire instruction. Godwin’s father had studied under Doddridge.

The scientist Joseph Priestley – who taught at Warrington from 1761–67 –

had been a student at Doddridge’s Daventry Academy in the years

immediately after the teacher’s death. With a bursary from the

institution’s sponsors, Godwin joined London’s Hoxton Academy in

September 1773.

Godwin spent five years at Hoxton under the direction of the Reverends

Abraham Rees and Andrew Kippis. Both were literary men, Rees an

encyclopaedist and Kippis a biographer. As teachers, they were happy to

debate with their students – Kippis too had been a student of Doddridge

– and the two men’s differing theological views suggest that the academy

embraced a variety of religious positions. We see in Godwin’s writing

his commitment to open discussion as the best means of discovering

truth, an idea that must have been born at Hoxton. It was his education

at Hoxton, Godwin wrote, that had inculcated the mode of fearless

intellectual enquiry that made him both famous and infamous in later

years: ‘from that time forward, I was indefatigable in my search for

truth – I was perpetually prompting myself with the principle, Sequar

veritatem …’ – he would follow truth, wherever it led.[6]

Godwin regarded himself as an outsider at the academy, his beliefs at

odds with those of the majority, but he nonetheless made lifelong

friends there. Kippis would later help Godwin find his feet as a

professional writer, but it was fellow student James Marshall who would

become Godwin’s colleague, confidant and even occasional scribe, until

Marshall’s death in 1832.

Godwin finished Hoxton in 1778, aged twenty-two. With a good reference

from the academy, he quickly found himself in what seems to have been a

temporary appointment as minister to a congregation in Ware,

Hertfordshire. It was here that Godwin made another friend – Joseph

Fawcett – who the philosopher would one day describe as one of his four

‘principal oral instructors’.[7] Fawcett was a younger man, but

similarly educated and destined for the Dissenting ministry. Likely

influenced by the great American theologian Jonathan Edwards, who

considered only universal love – by extension, the love of God – to be a

virtue, Fawcett dismissed the importance of personal affection. Godwin

found the idea compelling, ‘well adapted to the austerity and perfection

which Calvinism recommends’.[8] The sentiment was reinforced when he

read Edwards himself, but the idea remained with Godwin long after he

appeared to have left Calvinism behind.

Godwin left Ware for a period in London, before an appointment as

minister in Stowmarket, Suffolk at the beginning of 1780. For the first

year, he had few friends. In 1781 Godwin made the acquaintance of a new

arrival, a well-read textiles manufacturer called Frederic Norman, with

whom he was able to discuss contemporary French philosophy. The two

became fast friends and Godwin recounts that it was in this period that

he read d’Holbach’s Système de la Nature (1770) and experienced a series

of revolutions in his religious opinions. The book denies the existence

of free will and argues that belief in a higher power is merely the

product of fear and ignorance. This determinism, usually referred to in

the period as ‘the law of necessity’, was a profound influence on

Godwin. Edwards too had denied free will, albeit within the framework of

a divine plan – here Godwin must have begun to formulate his ideas of

cause and effect, eventually arriving at the idea that thoughts and

actions were usually the product of their intellectual context (thus,

caused by society) rather than the result of individual choices. These

theories would go on to have substantial influence on the philosophy

that underpinned Political Justice.

Godwin laboured on in Stowmarket for just over two years. The

circumstances of his departure suggest many things that would become

clear in his published works: since taking up the appointment, Godwin

had been in dispute with neighbouring ministers as to whether his right

to administer the sacraments derived from the congregation, or from more

established ministers. His flock had invited him to give communion and,

after discussing the matter with members of the group, Godwin agreed to

do so without asking for the approval of the other Dissenting ministers

of the county. His colleagues were scandalised by what they saw as the

young Godwin’s arrogance – there may have been some truth in this

characterisation, as the philosopher’s later account of the matter gives

the impression that he thought it easier to obtain forgiveness than

permission – but the principal at stake was a meaningful one. The

community had chosen their minister, and that was all that mattered. The

most senior minister in the area, the Reverend Thomas Harmer, wrote to

Godwin to explain that unless he acknowledged their authority, his own

would not be recognised outside the Stowmarket congregation. It seems

unlikely that this troubled Godwin. He returned to London in April 1782.

With help from Marshall, Godwin made his first foray into writing. He

planned his own periodical, a biographical series of great Englishmen,

but the first instalment quickly mushroomed into a book-length project.

The finished work, The History of the Life of William Pitt, Earl of

Chatham, was published anonymously in January 1783. The work went out

anonymously – not unusual in the period – but to later readers the marks

of Godwin’s authorship are obvious. The introduction makes impassioned

claims about impartiality and truth and of truth’s inexorable progress,

all sentiments that would colour his early work. The publisher

distributed the book to a number of major political figures, but it

seems to have made little impression. Though he continued to publish

throughout 1783, Godwin made another attempt at ministry, preaching at

Beacons-field (in Buckinghamshire) for the first half of the year.

None of Godwin’s works that year had significant impact, but all of them

contained signs of the ideas that were developing in his mind. A

pamphlet defending the perennial parliamentary rebel, Charles James Fox,

marked Godwin’s lifelong admiration for the worldly, profligate

politician who would one day prove instrumental in the abolition of the

slave trade. A collection of Godwin’s Beaconsfield sermons was

remarkable for suggesting that faith should be subordinated to reason.

Attempting to set himself up as a teacher, he convinced the publisher

Thomas Cadell to print his substantial (fifty-four-page) prospectus

outlining his approach to education. He failed to attract enough pupils

to make a start in the venture, but Godwin writes eloquently about the

power of literature as a moral teacher. Most interesting of all is a

work called The Herald of Literature. Seemingly intended to show off

Godwin’s skills as a literary reviewer, the Herald comprises of ten

reviews – each one an imaginary work by a well-known author. In each

case, Godwin provides lengthy ‘quotations’, making a fair imitation of

the more established author’s style while offering his own praise or

censure as reviewer (which, perhaps in a spirit of fairness, is based on

general trends in that author’s other works). The entire project is

audacious and speaks of Godwin’s dry (but sometimes absurd) sense of

humour.[9]

The Herald apparently led to more work in 1784. The publisher John

Murray gave Godwin work as a critic on his periodical (the English

Review) and commissioned him to translate the Jacobite Lord Lovat’s

memoirs from their original French. Godwin dashed off three novels the

same year, the shortest in only ten days. Damon and Delia, Italian

Letters and Imogen are in many ways typical romances of the period –

stories of rapacious aristocrats and virtuous damsels in peril. The

philosopher likely wrote what he thought would be quickly accepted by

publishers, as he and Marshall were often in desperate financial straits

at the time. Imogen, however, stands out as another example of Godwin’s

playfulness: like The Herald of Literature, the novel is another ‘hoax’,

discussing in its preface whether the work is a translation of an

ancient Welsh manuscript or a seventeenth century fabrication. Nobody is

likely to have been fooled by this; the ‘found manuscript’ was a

well-known device in historical novels of the time. Viewed through this

lens, the preface appears as a deliberately arch performance. Godwin

draws attention to the story’s use of Milton (Godwin rarely missed an

opportunity to write about Milton) and makes extravagant comparisons

between the beauty of the ‘translation’ and the best of Virgil, Homer

and (another literary fake) Ossian. The preface gives us a taste of the

vanity that was the philosopher’s lifelong weakness, but it equally

displays a playfulness and self-awareness that many of Godwin’s later

critics missed.

Kippis suggested to the publisher George Robinson that he employ Godwin

as his assistant in compiling the New Annual Register. The Register was

a Whig and Dissenter-aligned ‘journal of record’. For an annual fee,

Godwin became a political journalist. He researched his topics

diligently, listening to parliamentary debates from the gallery and

reporting with scrupulous fairness. His network of contacts grew. Godwin

compiled lists of people he met and people he wanted to meet. Judging by

the names presented and those underlined for emphasis, the philosopher

sought the acquaintance of writers, thinkers and legislators that he

admired rather than those that could advance him – the list he composed

between 1773 and 1794 implies that Godwin was keener to make the

acquaintance of actress Sarah Siddons and playwright Elizabeth Inchbald

than he was the great Edmund Burke. Through the English Review, Godwin

made the acquaintance of Joseph Priestley in early 1785. The Review

usually took a conservative line on religion and politics; called upon

to review Priestley’s History of the Corruptions of Christianity, Godwin

attempted to criticise from a position of strict impartiality, but wrote

to the author to express his regard for Priestley’s theological

argument. Priestley wrote back to say that he thought the original

review more than generous, and the two remained in occasional contact

until the scientist left for Philadelphia in 1794.

Godwin’s work on the Register (and another timely nod from Kippis)

blossomed into further work on a newly established Whig journal, the

Political Herald, in mid-1785. Godwin wrote letters for the Herald under

the pseudonym ‘Mucius’, after the legendary Roman patriot who thrust his

hand into the fire to defy a king. The letters were an imitation of the

controversial Letters of Junius that had attacked the Grafton government

fifteen years earlier, the identity of the author still debated to this

day. As Mucius, Godwin attacked the Tories ferociously and in anonymous

articles criticised Britain’s exploitation of India. The Herald’s

editor, Gilbert Stuart, died in August 1786. Godwin wrote to one of the

journal’s patrons, the playwright (and Foxite MP) Richard Brinsley

Sheridan, to request that he might succeed Stuart. Sheridan was

receptive but the discussion dragged on into the next year. Godwin was

offered the job but Sheridan proposed to pay the salary directly from

party funds. Perhaps concerned about the issue of editorial

independence, Godwin turned him down.

The connection with Sheridan brought the would-be editor more contacts,

but it was the publisher Robinson (who hosted parties for his book-trade

friends) who around this time introduced Godwin to another man who would

become a lifelong friend: the journalist, novelist and playwright,

Thomas Holcroft. From meagre beginnings and with little formal

education, Holcroft had toured Britain and Ireland as a travelling

player, and later visited France as a correspondent. Holcroft was

outspoken, forthright in his opinions and blunt to the point of

rudeness. An exacting memory and an appetite for learning made him a

vigorous conversationalist, delighting Godwin who valued sincerity and

intellectual honesty above all things. The two sometimes called on each

daily and could talk politics or religion into the small hours of the

morning. Holcroft was a radical and an atheist, and his arguments led

the already unorthodox Godwin to finally reject Christian faith in 1788

– the influence of others would eventually bring the philosopher back to

the idea of God, but the former minister had turned his back on

organised religion forever.

In these years, Godwin was a jobbing writer. He made a precarious living

from his journalism and pestered Robinson for an advance so that he

could write some ‘great work’ and make his name. He was occasionally a

tutor and in the summer of 1788 he took on his second cousin, the

twelve-year-old Thomas Cooper, as his resident pupil. The boy had

recently lost his father, the family broken up and parcelled out to

friends and relatives. Godwin, then living with Marshall, awkwardly

stepped into a parental role. Godwin’s relationship with Thomas was

fractious – Godwin’s tendency towards pedantry and a young boy’s

resentment at being foisted on a distant relative were an explosive

combination. Yet the tutor admired his pupil’s honesty, as surviving

notes between them show (Cooper vented his anger at Godwin on paper and

Godwin wrote back to commend him). The two remained together until

Cooper was seventeen, when he left to become an actor in Edinburgh. He

toured for some years and found success in the United States. Letters

home to Godwin indicate a lasting respect and affection between them.

Cooper would later describe Godwin as ‘much more than a common father …

he has cherished and instructed me’.[10] Their relationship provides

important insight into how Godwin’s ideas on youth and learning

developed over time. The philosopher’s notes imply that he attempted to

teach Cooper with the same strictness he had endured, only for his

charge to rebel against it. In his reflections on his experiences with

Cooper, we can see Godwin formulating the position that he would advance

in The Enquirer (1797) – that an open and honest relationship between

tutor and pupil was far more important than the specifics of what might

be taught.

Godwin was a habitual note-taker and recorder of events. He appears to

have written daily and his papers abound with pages of reflective

commentary on his own life and character. It was in 1788 that he began

keeping a regular diary (obviously a text of vast importance to his

biographers), meticulously recording what he read, what he wrote, and

who he met every day for the rest of his life.

Godwin’s diary also marks major events, both in his life and in the

world: 27 June 1789 records, prosaically, ‘Revolution in France’. The

revolution would change the course of history, but the reaction to it in

Britain would shape the rest of Godwin’s life. In the first impressions

of Godwin and his associates, the revolution was a positive development.

Radicals enthusiastically waved the tricolour and sent messages of

support across the Channel. Many mainstream Whigs drew parallels between

the French Revolution and Britain’s ‘Glorious’ revolution of 1688 –

despotic France was finally catching up with the modern world, they

said, and would soon be on its way to parliamentary democracy and

constitutional monarchy. Godwin and his friends were swept up on this

great wave of enthusiasm; the philosopher later wrote that his ‘heart

beat high with great swelling sentiments of Liberty’ and, remembering

the great French thinkers he had imbibed since leaving Hoxton, ‘could

not refrain from conceiving sanguine hopes of a revolution of which such

writings had been the precursors’.[11]

The Society for Commemorating the Glorious Revolution held an annual

dinner on the fifth of November, the anniversary of William of Orange’s

landing in England. Godwin was a member, as were Kippis, Robinson and a

raft of other notables that the philosopher knew or admired. The day

before the anniversary in 1789, the society had heard a sermon by the

mathematician, philosopher and Dissenting minister Richard Price that

would become known as A Discourse on the Love of Our Country. Godwin did

not hear the sermon, though he knew Price and attended the dinner the

next day, but Price’s address became instantly famous. Price claimed

that ‘country’ was not a spot of ground but a community of friends,

bound together by the same constitution of government and laws. To love

one’s country was not a belief in its superiority, but a desire to do

good for those closest to us. To love one’s country was to spread truth,

virtue and liberty (the chief blessings of human nature, Price said). A

country ignorant of these things deserved to be enlightened, a

government that did not respect them deserved no loyalty. Price

celebrated the principles of the Revolution Society that hosted him –

religious freedom, the right of the people to choose and dismiss

governments, and the right to resist the abuse of power. Though he

carefully defended the king as a public servant who ruled by the

people’s consent, he attacked the obvious inequalities of British

government:

When the representation is partial, a kingdom possesses liberty only

partially; and if extremely partial, it only gives a semblance of

liberty; but if not only extremely partial, but corruptly chosen, and

under corrupt influence after being chosen, it becomes a nuisance, and

produces the worst of all forms of government – a government by

corruption – a government carried on and supported by spreading venality

and profligacy through a kingdom.[12]

Price described the American and French revolutions as equally glorious

with Britain’s own and imagined kingdoms across Europe ‘starting from

sleep, breaking their fetters’ and the light of freedom kindling ‘into a

blaze that lays despotism in ashes’.[13]

The sermon rode a wave of popular enthusiasm, yet the establishment

stood firm against the reforming movement in Britain. Attitudes began to

harden. In March 1790, Fox led a parliamentary bill to repeal the Test

Acts only to see it overwhelmingly voted down. When the French Assembly

decreed an end to noble titles, the Revolution Society debated their

abolition in Britain and voted in favour. In November, Burke published

his Reflections on the Revolution in France, a book which quickly proved

a rallying point for conservatives. In the past a supporter of American

independence, the shock of the French revolution had pushed Burke into

an increasingly reactionary position. He was uncertain whether France

was ready for democracy and feared the consequences of reforming

democracy too quickly in Britain. The Reflections are a defence of

tradition and institution as a means of holding together the nation

state. They are also conspicuously an attack on Price and the enthusiasm

of British reformers. Radical writers leapt to defend Price and the

revolution, among them Mary Wollstonecraft (then a member of Price’s

congregation). A war of conservative and radical pamphlets raged for

months.

Still writing for the New Annual Register, Godwin devoted his main

effort that year to a play – St Dunstan. Verse drama was not Godwin’s

strongest suit and the piece never made it to the stage, but its themes

were clearly of the moment: St Dunstan depicts a politically powerful

church playing on the fears of the mighty to cement its own position.

The first part of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man was published in March

1791. It was long thought that Godwin and Holcroft had a hand in

steering the book to publication – close reading of Godwin’s diary

suggests otherwise, but the philosopher later included a cryptic

reference to ‘Paine’s pamphlet’ in a list of his early works. Like many

contemporary works Rights of Man begins as a reply to Burke, but it

quickly goes beyond that. Paine argues that human rights are not granted

by law, but are instead natural and universal, going so far as to argue

that the value of laws lies only in their power to protect the rights of

the individual. The author leans heavily on the French Assembly’s

Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789), but makes no

apology in applying its logic to the British situation. Paine denounces

the monarchy as illegitimate, having usurped power by force of arms in

1066 and established itself on no better principle in the intervening

years. The book outlines a programme of progressive taxation, wider

employment, provision for the elderly, the sick and widowed, and free

education for children. Godwin wrote (perhaps to Paine himself, or

Holcroft – the passage has no address or date) that, ‘the seeds of

revolution it contains are so vigorous in their stamina, that nothing

can overpower them’.[14] The first intended publisher (the usually

redoubtable Joseph Johnson) had blanched at the possible backlash from

releasing such a book into the world and the publication had been

delayed until Paine’s friends found a bookseller willing to put his name

to it. Distributed widely, the book created a stir. The author refused

substantial offers to buy the copyright, turning down a small fortune so

that he could control the work’s fate. Paine later insisted that the

book’s price be dropped to sixpence – well within the reach of any

reader – to great consternation in government circles. For a time, Paine

was the hero of radical London and the bête noire of conservatives

everywhere. The reaction began in earnest during the summer. In July,

‘Church and King’ rioters in Birmingham sacked a hotel hosting a dinner

celebrating Bastille Day as a prelude to four days of arson and violence

directed at Dissenters and critics of the government – later dubbed ‘the

Priestley riots’, as Joseph Priestley’s home was among those destroyed.

The authorities did little to quell the vandalism and the perpetrators

were selective in their attacks, leading to allegations that the affair

had been orchestrated by the government. Copycat violence occurred in

Nottingham, Manchester, Newcastle and Exeter over the next year and a

half.

The government’s organised campaign against the radicals was still some

months away and in the summer of 1791 it seemed as if Godwin’s fortunes

were changing for the better. He had proposed a great work on ‘political

principles’ to the publisher George Robinson at the end of June and

agreed a contract only a few days before the Birmingham riots. Robinson

agreed to pay Godwin’s expenses while the philosopher devoted himself

entirely to condensing the ‘best and most liberal in the science of

politics’ into a coherent system.[15] Godwin quit the New Annual

Register at the beginning of September and his diary records months of

dedicated reading, beginning with ethics and contemporary politics but

later turning to histories, works on education and literature for

insight. He wrote slowly but methodically, a few pages at a time. He

began drafting that September, but would not finish for another sixteen

months. The political debate raged around him, but Godwin’s work would

be one for the ages rather than a topical contribution. On 21 January

1793, France executed its king. The next day, Godwin put the finishing

touches to his magnum opus. France declared war on Britain a little over

a week later. Great political change was in the air. An Enquiry

Concerning Political Justice was published on 14 February 1793.

3. The Philosopher (1793)

Political Justice is both a timeless classic of political philosophy and

a work clearly born in the revolutionary atmosphere of 1790s Europe. It

asks important questions about the right to self-determination and how

opinions or judgments are formed. It further questions fundamental

assumptions about the nature of authority, ownership and the relations

between individuals, in ways that remain challenging to this day. Yet

the arguments of Godwin’s book clearly emerge from a specifically

eighteenth-century context and look out on the future with the

clean-slate optimism that characterised the revolutionary period.

Political Justice is a difficult book to summarise. Not only is it a

long, dense work that encompasses a wide range of topics, Godwin revised

the book substantially only a few years after its initial publication

and revised it again a few years after that. Any discussion of Political

Justice must address the question of whether to privilege the

philosopher’s original argument or his final position – and later works

complicate this further, some offering commentary on (or further

revision to) the ideas articulated in Godwin’s magnum opus. The book

seems to acknowledge this, even in the preface to the first edition,

arguing that ‘the best elementary treatises after a certain time are

reduced in their value by the operation of subsequent discoveries’, and

highlighting the development of the philosopher’s opinions over the

course of writing. That said, the core principles of Political Justice

remain consistent through each of its three editions and Godwin’s

revisions are more concerned with adding qualification and depth to the

argument than they are with changing anything fundamental in it. There

is one notable exception to this: the philosopher’s acceptance of a

positive role for affection in stimulating and guiding moral action (in

the later editions of Political Justice) that brought him many sneers

from his critics.

The first edition of Political Justice was a sizeable text. Weighing in

at around 800 pages over two large quarto volumes, the book sold at £1

16s – not an astronomical price, but one far outside the purchasing

power of most people. This then was a book marketed as a serious

philosophical treatise rather than a political tract (Adam Smith’s

Wealth of Nations retailed at a similar price). Godwin would later claim

that he had avoided censorship (or worse) because the government did not

believe that an expensive book could be dangerous.[16] If the state had

indeed dismissed Godwin’s book, they would in time regret it: Political

Justice sold at least three thousand copies in its first edition and

reached even greater numbers of readers. Many small political societies

sprang up across Britain in the wake of the French Revolution, and a

number of them clubbed together to buy copies of Godwin’s book to read

aloud at meetings and discuss. Radical publishers like Thomas Spence

printed excerpts in their periodicals. At least one Dublin-based

publisher produced a pirate edition. Godwin was quickly celebrated as

the intellectual powerhouse of the radical movement. Looking back from

the distance of 1825, William Hazlitt wrote:

No work in our time gave such a blow to the philosophical mind of the

country as the celebrated Enquiry concerning Political Justice. Tom

Paine was considered for the time as a Tom Fool to him; Paley an old

woman; Edmund Burke a flashy sophist. Truth, moral truth, it was

supposed, had here taken up its abode, and these were the oracles of

thought.[17]

The two volumes of Political Justice provide a division between the

abstract and detailed sides of the philosopher’s argument. The first

volume sets out the theoretical position that Godwin had arrived at,

outlining what the philosopher saw as a handful of irrefutable

intellectual and moral principles about the nature of truth, happiness

and human understanding. The second volume applies those principles to

contemporary society and identifies the institutions and assumptions

that hold people back from moral and intellectual improvement. Godwin’s

vision is optimistic and forward-looking: happiness is good and pain is

evil – the most moral course of action is the one that brings happiness

without causing suffering. Everybody wants to be happy; evil actions are

simply mistakes, caused by incomplete information or insufficient

consideration on the part of the individual. The philosopher’s position

seems naïve, but it allows him to frame moral error as something that

can be corrected through greater critical reasoning – in short, that we

can learn to be better people. In order to do this, Godwin argues, we

need to recognise that our understanding of the world is shaped by the

society we live in. Ignorance, inequality and privation may seem normal

to us but, as sources of unhappiness, they are wrongs that can be put

right if we critically evaluate (and correct) the things that cause

them. We have not yet done so, the philosopher suggests, because too few

people have been willing to look beyond the current system for answers.

The first volume of Political Justice uses a broad definition of both

‘politics’ and ‘justice’. The philosopher implies that our actions are

political insomuch as they impact on the community (most things do).

Justice, Godwin says, encompasses all moral duty. ‘Political justice’ is

then the operation of ethics within society, our moral responsibilities

towards the people around us. Central to the book is the idea of truth

as an ideal and an absolute. We should always strive to uncover the

truth. We should never practise deception. We can find the correct

answers to moral questions – perfect solutions that bring the greatest

possible happiness while causing no pain – if we are aware of all the

relevant variables and think about them hard enough (though Godwin

accepts that this rarely happens in real life). In this sense the

philosopher conflates truth with moral good. Things that we consider

morally ‘pure’ (honesty, altruism) are truths to be discovered through

deliberation and investigation. The philosopher writes about justice as

a kind of deduction, the method by which we find the fairest and most

benevolent course of action. It is important to note that, like many of

his Enlightenment predecessors, Godwin rejects the notion of innate

ideas. We are not born altruistic or selfish, but rather learn these

behaviours from the people around us. If this is so, then we all have

the potential to become happy, wise and benevolent people if we are

willing to think for ourselves and act according to our own reasoned

judgment rather than passively accepting consensus. Godwin goes further

than this, insisting that we have a moral duty to act according to our

own best judgment in all circumstances. The philosopher is clear about

the importance of discussing our ideas and issues with other people,

recognising that it can be difficult to uncover the right answers alone,

but he is adamant that we have a responsibility to make decisions as

individuals and not to take other people’s opinions as our own. The

search for truth is valuable in itself, we grow as individuals because

we reason and act on moral questions, and we diminish ourselves when we

obey without thinking.

Godwin considers the central principle of ethical decision-making to be

the responsibility of the individual to reflect upon the issue at hand

and determine whatever course of action will bring the most happiness

and the least pain. Moreover, we have a duty to take whatever action

will have the most positive long term effects (thus it is better to help

a stranger in need than it is to indulge a friend who is not – a

long-term relief from suffering is superior to a short-term

gratification). This seems to imply a certain amount of moral

arithmetic: a deliberation over the amount of discomfort we might be

willing to endure for the greater good. Godwin sees this as regrettable

and very difficult to avoid, yet the philosopher is not a relativist.

Political Justice is clear that absolute, unqualified, good exists and

that a thing cannot be considered truly good if it causes some amount of

pain (that is, evil). This distinction may seem academic – as imperfect

beings with imperfect knowledge, the best moral choice apparent to us

may be far from ideal – but because the philosopher believes that such

ideals exist, he is able to argue that we have a moral imperative to

seek out the unequivocally good course of action in any situation and

cannot claim to have done ‘the right thing’ unless we are certain that

our choices have not led to evil in any degree. Godwin also considers

the imperative to do the greatest possible good to be one that takes

priority over all other concerns. Indeed, the philosopher argues that we

have no other moral obligations: we owe no debts to those who have

helped us in the past; we have only a duty to help those who need our

help in the future. Equally, the philosopher claims that a promise

should be considered no more than a statement of intent – if I give my

word to do a thing but find another course of action will lead to

greater happiness, it is my duty to do the latter. Godwin even goes so

far as to suggest that the imperative to do the greatest good supersedes

the bonds of love and friendship. True ethical reasoning (i.e. justice)

is impartial and looks only to the overall amount of good generated by

an action. The philosopher illustrates this in an example that came to

be known as ‘the famous fire cause’ or ‘the Fénelon dilemma’. In the

example, Godwin argues that given the choice between saving the life of

the great educational thinker François Fénelon or that of his

chambermaid, we should save the former:

We are not connected with one or two percipient beings, but with a

society, a nation, and in some sense with the whole family of mankind.

Of consequence that life ought to be preferred which will be most

conducive to the general good. In saving the life of Fenelon, suppose at

the moment when he was conceiving the project of his immortal

Telemachus, I should be promoting the benefit of thousands, who have

been cured by the perusal of it of some error, vice and consequent

unhappiness. Nay, my benefit would extend farther than this, for every

individual thus cured has become a better member of society, and has

contributed in his turn to the happiness, the information and

improvement of others.[18]

Godwin goes on to specifically dismiss self-preservation or personal

ties in making such a decision – arguing that even if we ourselves were

the chambermaid, or if the servant were a family member, we should still

choose to protect the greater contribution to the general good. The

philosopher’s position was controversial, and many readers attacked its

apparent severity, but Godwin here does no more than to point out the

logical extent of his own argument. The philosopher himself raises the

objection that we might reasonably prefer to save a person of known

(good) moral character over a stranger whose achievements exist for us

in the abstract. Godwin concedes that this is understandable but is,

‘founded only in the present imperfection of human nature. It may serve

as an apology for my error, but can never turn error into truth. It will

always remain contrary to the strict and inflexible decisions of

justice.’[19] The Fénelon dilemma earned Godwin the reputation of a

clear-sighted but dispassionate philosopher, and Godwin’s language here

implies a kind of stern pragmatism that readers even today find

alienating. Yet, although Godwin here makes a stark moral judgment, his

conclusion implies that he saw the correct choice in the dilemma as an

ideal and an absolute – we can accept that it is right to save the

person who will make the greatest contribution to human happiness, but

how might we accurately (and realistically) judge which person that is?

Godwin accepts that, in the present state of human understanding, we

probably can’t. In the philosopher’s thought-experiment we are

omniscient (we know that Fénelon is just imagining his greatest work);

in real life, we must make snap judgments based on the evidence in front

of us. The first edition of Political Justice is optimistic – it

imagines that humanity might one day acquire the knowledge and wisdom

required to make ideal moral choices, but its philosopher recognises

that such a day is a long way off. We will never reach it without the

gradual improvement of critical reason; something that Godwin says

cannot happen unless we develop the habit of exercising our private

judgment.

Godwin says that we have to make decisions for ourselves, but he urges

us to discuss issues with other people before we take action. This is

not a matter of forging a consensus – quite the opposite, since

responsibility for the decision remains with the individual – rather

that other people can help us (as an individual) to think critically. In

discussion with other people we can test ideas, learn from someone

else’s experience, and benefit from an outsider’s perspective, but the

philosopher is clear that there is a right and a wrong way to go about

this. Godwin holds that the best way to uncover the truth is through

one-to-one conversation. The philosopher has many reservations about

larger groups: they are often dominated by the loudest or boldest

voices, not the wisest. Equally, public debate encourages sophistry – it

is seen as a contest to be won rather than a means to uncover truth.

Godwin sees private conversation as offering few rewards beyond

intellectual satisfaction, thus both parties can be honest and open

about their ideas, leading to a productive critical discussion.

Godwin puts honesty and openness under the general heading of

‘sincerity’. Godwin argues that sincerity is our duty to always speak

the truth and to openly volunteer what we know in order to help others.

The philosopher’s justification for this is practical: we will advance

faster as a society if everyone shares what they know. Secrets hold us

back – they essentially ration useful knowledge – but Godwin does not

completely dismiss the idea of privacy. Though the philosopher believes

we should live our lives in the open, he also argues that we are

entitled to a sphere of discretion in our activities – I should not live

my life in secret, but neither should others interfere with it.

This duty to act according to our private judgment leads Godwin to

question the fundamental nature of authority. People who have proven

themselves to be good and wise are entitled to our respect and

consideration – we should listen to them, but we should not allow them

to tell us what to do. Nor can they really make us. Unless another

individual literally forces our hand, our actions are our own. To follow

another’s instructions is as much a conscious decision as any other,

which means that the ‘power’ of even the most tyrannical authority rests

on the acquiescence of the people it purports to rule. A tyrant might

threaten dire consequences to those who refuse to comply with their

orders, but the success or failure of this hinges on a mass of

individual assessments regarding the costs and benefits of compliance. A

more benign ruler might offer more palatable incentives for cooperation,

but Godwin sees the process as the same: the individual makes a choice

whether or not to acquiesce to authority, and always has (in principle)

the freedom to choose differently.

If this is the case, then what exactly is authority? In a democracy, we

might define authority as the power delegated to leaders by the consent

of the led but Godwin is sceptical that any large group of people can

really be of one mind. ‘Leadership’ is essentially problematic: for all

a leader might be armed with the truth, swaying a crowd of strangers is

more likely to hinge upon the group’s confidence in the speaker than it

is the rightness of his or her argument. In any body of people, each

individual will have constructed their own understanding of the

proposition in question. Some will have devised their own response, a

subset of those may agree wholly with the leader but many will differ on

points of detail. Others may not agree at all but find themselves

unwilling to dispute an apparently popular resolution. A number may have

no feelings about the topic at all, but will support the leader’s

decisions out of loyalty or respect (and this is not as small-minded as

it may initially seem – we praise leaders who inspire trust and commend

those who show loyalty to people who deserve it). All of this means that

the apparent unanimity of any large group is probably an illusion. Such

a statement seems uncontroversial if we assume the group’s compliance to

be an act of consent. Regardless of the individual’s exact opinion, by

going along with the consensus they demonstrate a tacit acceptance of

another’s judgment in place of their own. Godwin, however, considers a

consensus of this kind to be precarious: if a leader derives their

authority from the people under them, that authority evaporates if those

people choose to withdraw their consent. Furthermore, Godwin says, if we

have a duty to act according to our own reasoned judgment – and

authority cannot actually prevent us from doing so – then a leader that

claims to derive their authority from consent has no right to exert

authority over those who withdraw their consent. The philosopher goes on

to argue that we simply cannot, practically or ethically, delegate our

moral reasoning to someone else. Not only is adopting another’s opinions

an evasion of our moral responsibilities, but Godwin considers it

impossible for an individual to actually give up the ability to reason

ethically – we continue to think, and to hold opinions, even if our

behaviour is outwardly obedient. If this is so, Godwin argues, then one

cannot derive power from consent. An individual might grant a leader or

government the power to tell them what to do but, if that power can be

withdrawn the first time the individual disagrees with their orders,

said ‘power’ is little more than the right to make suggestions. The true

power of government lies in its ability to use force.

‘I have deeply reflected’, suppose, ‘upon the nature of virtue, and am

convinced that a certain proceeding is incumbent on me. But the hangman,

supported by an act of parliament, assures me I am mistaken.’ If I yield

my opinion to his dictum, my action becomes modified, and my character

too.[20]

Governments exist because they have the capacity and willingness to use

force against the individual in order to impose their will. Relatively

benign governments may use this power sparingly but, though Godwin

accepts that it is reasonable to use force to defend oneself and the

community, the philosopher cannot condone the use or threat of violence

to shape the behaviour of individuals. Few of us would sanction

bullying, intimidation, or repression in support of political goals; but

Godwin casts a net wide enough to question the validity of

government-backed law and order. Governments have no power to dictate

right and wrong. Authority, whether derived from a democratic consensus

or the barrel of a gun, cannot make an immoral proposition into a moral

one. ‘Reason is the only legislator’, says Godwin: moral truths are also

intellectual truths, and governments are no more able to decree morality

than they are to declare that a triangle has four sides.[21] What

government can do is threaten (and deal out) consequences to those that

stray from the path it has laid out. The philosopher is quick to point

out that government has no moral right to do this. Since Godwin has

dismissed the idea that government derives its authority from the

peoples’ consent, the philosopher implies that the use of force against

transgressors can never be more than an assertion that might makes

right. We might consider this uncharitable (certainly, few modern

governments see themselves this way) and many would argue that

non-tyrannical governments only offer force as a means to prevent or

punish acts that are injurious to the community – it will always be

necessary to maintain order. Even were we to accept this (and Godwin

does not), it would not lend government any further legitimacy. The

philosopher is clear that one cannot substitute authority for reason;

‘because I say so’ is an almost universally inadequate justification.

Even in the case where government decrees something that is universally

held to be true (‘murder is wrong’), it lacks the moral standing by

which to make that claim. The individual must still make a judgment on

the matter for themselves. For Godwin, the interference of government

actually makes the issue more problematic. Consider the hypothetical

example of an accidental killing: I know there are no witnesses to the

accident, so out of fear of being punished for murder, I commit

deliberate crimes (disposing of the body, perjury) to efface my error.

Later, I learn that the dead person was an outlaw with a bounty on their

head, so I produce the body and take credit for the killing. Though the

situation is unrealistic, it demonstrates how the threat of punishment

(or the hope of reward) has the potential to distort the individual’s

ethical reasoning.

We can never entirely ignore the prospect of reward or punishment.

Godwin’s account of this is complex: while it would be highly virtuous

to dismiss potential rewards and punishments as factors in the ethical

process, a far-sighted cost/benefit analysis might conclude that it was

reasonable to take steps to avoid punishment if said punishment would

prevent the individual from doing good in the future (we should stand up

for our principles, but martyrdom is not something to be considered

lightly). In either case the individual has been forced to acknowledge

the power of authority, even if only to discount it. Godwin argues that,

by offering incentives to shape behaviour, authority pollutes our

intentions and corrodes our ability to make moral judgments

independently (based purely on the evidence in front of us). Over time,

because authority’s effects are ever-present, the individual becomes

used to authority’s influence on the decision-making process despite its

lack of legitimacy. Individuals who are acculturated within such a

system are likely to be brought up with an understanding of the ability

of institutions or rulers to mete out consequences to a person’s

actions, but may never consider by what right they do so. The presence

and influence of authority become normal, and with them (Godwin says)

the habits of obedience.

Godwin argues forcefully that societies develop in response to the rules

and expectations that governments place on them. A state that mandates

military service will (over a few generations) create a martial

tradition. A state that restricts the freedom of the press signals to

the people that they should be cautious in their public statements. We

might make the counter-argument that governments are equally shaped by

the people – that laws and institutions grow out of society’s needs and

wants – but this assumes a more participatory government than the

philosopher (who lived most of his life in a Britain where fewer than 5%

of the population could vote) was willing to credit. For Godwin a

government was as likely to be instituted through accident or force, as

it was by popular will. The philosopher thus begins volume two of

Political Justice with an analysis of what he sees as the main types of

government, and the cultures they create around themselves.

Godwin divides governments into three categories: monarchies,

aristocracies and democracies. Clearly we can see that many governments

include aspects of more than one type, so we must infer that each

category is meant to define the principal element of that polity. In

each case, the philosopher identifies the contradictions inherent to

each approach and the means by which each form of government works

around its flaws to maintain the status quo.

Monarchy is, in theory, the rule of one individual with absolute power,

but is in practice dependent on ministers to carry out the ruler’s

decrees. As observed in volume one, a lone individual lacks the capacity

to enforce their will beyond the personal level. In volume two the

philosopher extends this to the mechanics of leading a nation-state: how

could even the wisest and most benevolent monarch understand the wants

and needs of millions? Even with the best will in the world, a king or

queen cannot investigate the problems of every subject in sufficient

depth to be able to effectively help them. In practice, the monarch must

rely on ministers to tell them the kingdom’s problems and can only

respond to them in what Godwin sees as arbitrary ways (we see in

Political Justice an increasing scepticism about the value of ‘macro’

solutions compared with a detailed assessment of the specific case). The

health of the nation is dependent not only on the virtues of the

monarch, but on the probity of their subordinates. This, Godwin says,

creates its own problems: in a system that invests final authority in a

single person, the obvious route to success is to curry favour with that

person. Such a system encourages ministers to attend to the monarch’s

needs ahead of those of the state and encourages the monarch to reward

flatterers before more honest public servants. As ministers control the

monarch’s view of the world, it would require an unusually clear-sighted

ruler to appoint advisors who could be relied upon to tell them the

truth about the world rather than a mutually agreeable version of it.

The system gives no incentive for ministers to do otherwise, and so the

court ‘bubble’ becomes an intricate game of controlling access to the

monarch while mediating the monarch’s engagement with the kingdom. The

philosopher sees this system as self-perpetuating: those ministers that

rise to the top are those who are best at playing the game, and they in

turn promote subordinates with the same qualities. The only way for

monarchs to appoint honest ministers is to go outside the

monarchical-ministerial system entirely (assuming that from their

carefully managed perspective they know the option exists) but such

outsiders must neutralise, accommodate, or negotiate an entrenched

network of corruption and sycophancy in order to serve the public good.

Godwin discusses the monarch’s insulation from society at some length,

drawing on historical and topical examples to illustrate how the culture

that surrounds monarchy renders anyone groomed for the throne into the

worst possible candidate. Those who would seek to educate a future

monarch work in the knowledge that their pupil will one day hold the

power of life and death over them. Like royal ministers, royal tutors

are better off giving in to their charges’ wants rather than addressing

their charges’ needs. The spoilt pupil grows into a ruler who has never

known failure, never known adversity, and never been told ‘no’. They

have no basis on which they can relate to their subjects and no

experience of the world beyond the court. The philosopher argues,

however, that the trappings of monarchy facilitate its survival. Keeping

the monarchy separate from the people helps to disguise the machinery of

government, presenting the illusion that the fate of the nation rests on

the shoulders of one person. The ceremony and grandeur of the position

lend a further impression of authority – titles claim that the

instruments of state derive their power from the office of the monarch

(realistically, the positions are the reverse), while pageantry is

employed to ‘dazzle our sense and mislead our judgment’.[22] We are

encouraged to believe that one person can manage a nation, and Godwin

argues that this basic falsehood underwrites all others. Deep down we

know that monarchs are people like anyone else and, in indulging the

conceit that one person can (and should) rule millions, we dignify every

other form of dishonesty running through society. Further to this,

Godwin claims that monarchy’s culture of patronage and wealth trickles

down to pollute every level of the community. If power is transferred

through favour and authority demonstrated by ostentation, then

everything (conspicuously) has its price. The philosopher grimly quotes

Montesquieu’s adage that ‘we must not expect under a monarchy to find

the people virtuous’.[23]

Godwin dismisses various approaches to reforming monarchical government:

in what the philosopher calls ‘limited’ (implicitly, constitutional)

monarchy, the ruler is even more wedded to their ministers because they

have less power to replace them. Godwin argues that if a monarch is to

be part of a constitutional settlement, they must be accountable or else

a powerless figurehead (and the latter is dangerous because impotence

encourages either rebellion or depravity). Elective monarchy, Godwin

says, is known to be a source of political strife; the election of a

president for life has many similarities. Godwin questions the need for

a leader with executive powers at all. If a matter concerns the whole

community, the whole community deserves a say on it. If an executive is

necessary it should not have the ability to make arbitrary rulings. In

any case, the philosopher seems to regard any attempt to mitigate the

problems of monarchy as little more than an exercise in rebranding –

monarchy is synonymous with corruption and tyranny.

Aristocratic government is described by Godwin as the appointment of a

class of wise and benevolent leaders to act as moral shepherds to the

rest of community. This class is exempted from everyday work in order to

have the time to study moral questions on behalf of others, and

membership is often passed down from generation to generation. Though he

is even-handed in his explanation of aristocratic government as a model,

Godwin is scathing about the idea of hereditary distinction: ‘no

principle can present a deeper insult upon reason and justice’.[24] The

philosopher regards the idea of choosing leaders based on their ancestry

as absurd, but observes that a hereditary leadership caste is even more

problematic. If we allow the conceit that a leadership caste must have

more free time to facilitate contemplation and deliberation (Godwin does

not – arguing that a fair society would make that time available to all)

then we must consider what effect this would have on those who grow up

part of it. Godwin argues that a class that have led sheltered lives are

ill-equipped to provide moral leadership because they have little

opportunity to gain the life experience needed to be effective in that

role – we might reasonably ask if those who had never known normal work

would understand the moral dilemmas faced by those who experienced it

every day. The philosopher goes further, suggesting that a long-term

culture of ease encourages the accumulation of luxury and the associated

ability to dispense patronage:

Hence it appears, that to elect men to the rank of nobility is to elect

them to a post of moral danger and a means of depravity; but that to

constitute them hereditarily noble is to preclude them, bating a few

extraordinary accidents, from all the causes that generate ability and

virtue.[25]

Aristocracy is, in Godwin’s view, both ineffective and unjust.

Distinctions of class are arbitrary, and therefore wrong. The only

honours we should bestow are those we award for an individual’s own

merits, chiefly their contribution to the moral health of their

community. In an aristocratic system, the many support the few in return

for leadership that the system itself undermines. Godwin argues that the

dissolution of aristocracy is to everyone’s benefit – those at the

bottom are freed from injustice, while those at the top are freed from

an enforced idleness (in some countries the nobility were barred from

many professions) that works to the detriment of their character.

Godwin defines democracy as a system of government that requires only

one regulating principle: the acknowledgment that all men are equal. In

a democracy, every individual’s voice should carry equal weight. Every

individual shares the same moral duty to the people around them, and

should hold the same stake in the fortunes of the community. The

philosopher is quick to identify the problems that arise from this.

While Godwin maintains that everyone has the same capacity for reason,

he accepts that reason is a faculty that is developed through experience

and reflection. If this is the case, then it is likely that the wiser

members of any given community will be outnumbered by the unwise. A

democratic society then is likely to be inconsistent in its decisions,

easily swayed by the unscrupulous, and may struggle to recognise ideas

of merit when they are proposed – all because the majority (who are

unused to thinking critically about political questions) have the power

to overrule an enlightened minority.

Yet Godwin argues that these problems are not inevitable and, even with

these flaws, democracy would be preferable to both monarchy and

aristocracy. Monarchy and aristocracy are forms of government predicated

on the assumption that the people are not fit to govern themselves;

before Godwin authoritarian thinkers from Hobbes to Burke had claimed

that, without leaders, society would tear itself apart. Godwin, in

contrast, counsels us not to assume that the character of the people in

a democracy would be the same as under other regimes – other modes of

government undermine the virtue and understanding of the populace (they

legitimise dishonesty and repress dissent) while democracy enshrines the

value of every voice and places individual reason above authority and

tradition. The philosopher asserts that human beings, if allowed to

develop the habits of critical reason, will almost certainly improve

morally and intellectually. Godwin has reservations about elections and

representation, so we must infer that what the philosopher describes

here are the benefits of direct democracy (that is, where the people

vote on every decision that affects the community) rather than a

panegyric to any existing method of government. Indeed, while Godwin

offers the possibility that representative democracy might actually

provide the benefits claimed of aristocracy – the superintendence of the

people by a group of wiser heads – any system that expects the

individual to delegate the use of their judgment is at odds with some of

the fundamental principles of Godwin’s philosophy.

For Godwin, a true democracy is an equal society. A democratic

government that grants more power to some than others is, the

philosopher says, a democracy in name only. Elected representatives – if

they are in fact necessary – should be regarded as no more than the

deputies of those who elected them. Godwin tackles the idea of economic

inequality in a later part of the book but notes in his discussion of

democracy that an equal society is one where all have access to the same

level of subsistence. For this reason, the philosopher asserts, a true

democracy would never fight wars for gain – a nation where everyone has

‘enough’ has no need to deprive its neighbours of territory or

resources. A democratic society may still need to protect itself from

undemocratic neighbours and thus, in-keeping with Godwin’s ideas on

common moral duties, every citizen has a responsibility to stand in

defence of the community. The philosopher rejects the need for a

standing army. Separating the soldier and the citizen is to the

detriment of society – it signals that to fight (and kill) is an

acceptable profession, but one that we must keep at arm’s length in a

branch of the community with its own rules and expectations (i.e.

military discipline). In delegating responsibility for its own security,

the community invites soldiers to see themselves as the community’s

protectors. Godwin considers such a relationship unhealthy – there are

obvious parallels with the principles of aristocracy, but the

philosopher here is considerably more blunt:

[the soldier] is cut off from the rest of the community, and has

sentiments and a rule of judgment peculiar to himself. He considers his

countrymen as indebted to him for their security; and, by an unavoidable

transition of reasoning, believes that in a double sense they are at his

mercy.[26]

The philosopher claims that a true nation-in-arms would be just as

effective as a professional military. Mobilised citizens, who understand

what they are fighting for and know that their cause is just, will

out-fight enemies who lack the same confidence and motivation (and

Godwin seems certain that only a democracy could really instil such

qualities). The philosopher sees military training as a very simple

matter, and claims that a democracy – since it will only ever need to

fight defensively – could very quickly drill its army to the same

standard as the invaders ‘on the job’. Godwin dismisses generalship as

quackery, asserting that a sufficiently educated and enquiring mind is

all that is needed to excel as a military leader. Even if a lack of

experienced generals were a disadvantage in war, Godwin says, it would

be a small price to pay for the nation to be unencumbered with a

military establishment in peacetime. If democracies are worse at

fighting wars, the philosopher says, it is a point in their favour.

Godwin has deep reservations about the idea of offensive military

operations, arguing that there can be no justification for a democracy

to march outside its own borders except to render assistance to (Godwin

does not say ‘liberate’) oppressed neighbours. Democracy’s best weapon

against injustice is the printing press; the philosopher imagines

invading armies worn down and sprawling empires destabilised by

courageous (and truthful) publishing. Coming at the end of a century

where Britain had used military and naval aggression to carve out a

global empire and curb the economic expansion of its rivals, the

implications of the philosopher’s argument were radical. Put simply,

Godwin sees no justification for one community to interfere with the

affairs of another, unless for humanitarian reasons.

Godwin is critical of permanent government institutions, up to and

including parliaments or national assemblies. Though he accepts that

communities will sometimes need a forum for public deliberation, regular

meetings allow factions and cults of personality to develop –

encouraging individuals to cast their votes according to their loyalty

rather than their judgment. Godwin implies that it might be better if

assemblies were only called when they have something crucial to debate,

but it is the idea of a national assembly itself that leads the

philosopher to question the intellectual and moral basis of democratic

government itself.

Godwin regards voting as essentially problematic. Putting something to a

vote usually signals the end of debate. The philosopher considers the

purpose of discussion to be a collaborative search for truth – voting

turns discussion into a competition that can be won, diminishing the

importance of honesty and accuracy in favour of passion and rhetorical

skill. Godwin – perhaps naively – believes that the truth will always

eventually overcome persuasive flair, if the arguments are subjected to

enough scrutiny. He suggests that debates should take place in multiple

rounds, so as to allow time for reflection, and should continue until

the truth is found. Votes commit the community to a decision based on

the popularity of a measure rather than its fairness or necessity, thus

encouraging sophistry and dishonesty. Godwin’s ideal assembly seems to

be little more than a talking shop, since the philosopher resists the

most straightforward method by which the community might make decisions

final. What gradually emerges from this is that Godwin is fundamentally

uneasy with the principle of majority rule.

It seems as if it would be rare for matters put before a national

assembly to be resolved with unanimous agreement, but for Godwin this

does seem to be the only fair place for discussion to end. If a vote is

considered as the resolution of a matter, and does not result in

unanimous agreement, what is required of the minority party? In most

democratic systems the ‘losing’ side of a vote is required to abide by

the majority decision, at least until the matter can be brought before

the house again. Godwin finds this unconscionable. Majority rule is not

unity and voting does not determine truth. The philosopher cannot see

any good reason why individuals who have voted against a measure should

be obliged to carry it out. The dilemma is most easily framed as a

matter of conscience: if an individual honestly believes a measure to be

harmful or immoral then we would not be surprised to see them refuse to

participate on ethical grounds. Godwin’s insistence on the sanctity of

individual judgment takes this one step further. If the intellectual and

moral development of community requires that the individual always be

allowed to exercise their private judgment, then the community must

respect the objections of any individual on any issue. A government that

expects the individual to conform against the dictates of their own

judgment actually holds the community back, because a community that

substitutes popular authority for the individual’s critical reason

teaches its citizens that their perception of truth is secondary to the

will of the majority. The latter point seems uncontroversial in the

context of genuine consensus. If (almost) everyone agrees that a measure

is right, it may be that it has been explored sufficiently and found to

be the best solution; the minority opinion may be inefficient or even

harmful. Godwin, however, cannot imagine an erroneous minority opinion

persisting for very long. Truth is, in the long term, irresistible – if

a thing can be shown to be right, then it will eventually win unanimous

agreement if the community is only patient (and, taking the long view,

there will be occasions when the minority position is the correct one –

time will allow it to eventually convince everyone else). A community

that insists that the majority is always right inhibits the intellectual

enquiries of its people by discouraging deviation from the norm:

In numerous assemblies a thousand motives influence our judgments,

independently of reason and evidence. Every man looks forward to the

effects which the opinions he avows will produce on his success. Every

man connects himself with some sect or party. The activity of his

thought is shackled at every turn by the fear that his associates may

disclaim him.[27]

A society that insists that its consensus is truth, and is willing to

overrule individual judgment in support of that, creates a culture of

intellectual timidity that resists moral and intellectual innovation.

For a conservative government this is clearly desirable, but Godwin

considers it an inevitable consequence of all political systems that

prevent the individual from carrying out their duty to think and act

independently. This puts the philosopher at odds with the rule of law,

since even democratic legislation constitutes the imposition of

consensus-based ethical guidelines intended to regulate behaviour.

Godwin argues that if a law is not morally self-evident (outlawing a

thing that is discernibly wrong) then breaking it is no crime. The

influence of authority cannot make an action more or less wrong, so laws

are at best descriptions of moral conduct (i.e. something we could have

worked out on our own) and at worst arbitrary or immoral restrictions on

individual freedom. The philosopher dryly observes that if laws were an

effective means of making people more moral, they would have done it by

now.

We might reasonably ask what the community should do if an individual’s

independent actions bring harm to those around them. We can infer from

the way Godwin discusses wrongdoing that he imagines that it would be an

unusual occurrence in communities that respected private judgment in the

way that he outlines – the philosopher is sure that, if given the

freedom to make every decision for themselves, people would mostly

choose to live at peace with their neighbours. Godwin argues that if we

take away external pressures on the individual that constrain their

choices, what remains are some basic calculations about how to be happy.

In Godwin’s view, living peacefully and altruistically is self-evidently

a better strategy than violence and theft. Setting aside the (quite

reasonable) position that cooperation is a happier, more sustainable,

way to live than predation; Godwin takes a different route. The

self-interest hypothesis claims that all actions can be traced back to

the individual’s (perhaps unconscious) self-love. Godwin notes that this

hypothesis justifies apparently altruistic acts through relatively

complex or abstract logic (Bernard de Mandeville, the eighteenth

century’s best-known theorist of self-interest, claimed that bravery was

merely a cover for one’s shame at the idea of being thought a coward by

observers). If such complicated reasons can be used to explain

selfishness, Godwin says, then there is no reason why an individual left

to their own devices should not reason themselves into benevolent acts

instead. The ability to sympathise with others is, the philosopher

argues, one of the most basic elements of human understanding. We know

that, to be happy, we need the people around us to be happy too. If we

help others to be happy, we will be happy ourselves and others will

support our happiness in return. With sufficient reasoning, Godwin

argues, the individual will always arrive at the conclusion that the

altruistic course of action is the best one. According to this logic,

wrongdoing – anything that causes a non-trivial amount of unhappiness –

is the result of faulty reasoning, or reasoning based on inaccurate

information.

People make mistakes, and Godwin argues that it is better to have a

supportive environment to help people learn from them than it is for the

community to take retribution. The philosopher sees a need for juries to

investigate and admonish wrongdoers, but sees little point in punishing

an individual in the present for an error they made in the past. Causing

someone pain because they caused others pain will not undo what has

happened, nor is it likely to prevent it from happening again. Godwin

dismisses the idea of punishment as a deterrent – eighteenth-century

Britain dealt out harsh punishments for even minor crimes, to little

effect – and sees no role for it in reforming the individual. The

philosopher accepts that the community will sometimes need to restrain

people who are a danger to others (or themselves) but argues that

imprisoning someone to prevent them from committing crimes in the future

constitutes ‘punishment upon suspicion’ – the first step on the road

towards tyranny.[28] Far better, Godwin says, to prevent crimes through

community vigilance than to lock people up for things they haven’t done.

Punishment and restraint are both forms of coercion, which the

philosopher denounces in all its forms.

Let us reflect for a moment upon the species of argument, if argument it

is to be called, that coercion employs. It avers to its victim that he

must necessarily be in the wrong, because I am more vigorous and more

cunning than he. Will vigour and cunning be always on the side of truth?

… The thief that by main force surmounts the strength of his pursuers,

or by stratagem and ingenuity escapes from their toils, so far as this

argument is valid, proves the justice of his cause. Who can refrain from

indignation when he sees justice thus miserably prostituted?[29]

As Godwin sees it, forcing people into conformity is counterproductive.

Obedience is not belief; coercion has no power to convince someone of

the truth of a proposition, only the power to punish them if they are

seen to disagree. The philosopher’s arguments against the utility of

this have already been discussed. Fundamentally the philosopher believes

that authority has no power to reform, only to corrupt. If something is

true it can stand on its own merits; coercion can only alienate the mind

from truth, in order to put something in its place. There are situations

where coercion may be necessary to prevent a greater evil, but Godwin

considers such circumstances to be few and far between: resisting

violence, restraining someone in the midst of a crime, or defending the

community from an invader who promises to bring injustice to the

individual and their neighbours. Practicalities aside, the philosopher

insists that coercion should only ever be a temporary expedient, and an

individual responsibility. The alternative sets (for Godwin) a dangerous

precedent. Were we to look on coercion as a duty of the community, it

would impart a certain degree of legitimacy to the idea of using

coercion against the individual in order to serve the community’s goals

– a position antithetical to the philosopher’s belief in the importance

of private judgment.

In any case, Godwin holds that an equal society would have little need

for coercion. What is implicit throughout the second volume of Political

Justice is that inequality in society persists because political

authority is willing and able to use coercive force to defend it –

central to this is the division of property. Laws of property assert and

protect the individual’s right to hold and distribute resources as they

see fit, assuming they have laid claim to them without breaking the law

themselves. We might expect Godwin to endorse this, since it seems to

defend the exercise of private judgment, but the philosopher considers

the accumulation of wealth to be morally wrong:

If justice have any meaning, nothing can be more iniquitous, than for

one man to possess superfluities, while there is a human being in

existence that is not adequately supplied with these.

Justice does not stop here. Every man is entitled, so far as the general

stock will suffice, not only to the means of being, but of well being.

It is unjust, if one man labour to the destruction of his health or his

life, that another man may abound in luxuries. It is unjust, if one man

be deprived of leisure to cultivate his rational powers, while another

man contributes not a single effort to add to the common stock.[30]

We cannot ethically claim more resources than we can reasonably use,

regardless of how hard we might have worked for them. Neither does our

own success allow us to assert the right to distribute resources to

others in any greater or lesser quantity than they need (we should

support those who cannot support themselves, but we have no right to

make ourselves into patrons). We could reasonably say that we have a

duty to use our private judgment in distributing what resources we have

acquired, but equally duty denies us the right to take more than we need

or give more than is needed. A greater share of resources converts

quickly into economic power – either through an unequal subdivision of

resources (favouring allies over others), or through the hoarding of

private luxuries. Godwin argues that the desire for these things stems

from our need to be admired and respected by others – we seek an obvious

symbol of our worth to display for strangers, or the gratitude of our

clients for having favoured them over others. In a society that has no

reason to covet wealth (i.e. one where no-one needs it to purchase basic

comforts, or to participate in community decisions) then the individual

can satisfy their desire for esteem through more virtuous pursuits.

Without a constant need to acquire, individuals will only need to work

as much as is needed to for subsistence. The burden of necessary jobs

like food production will be significantly lessened thanks to an

abundance of unengaged labour, as many specialist or mercantile

professions are no longer required. The rest of one’s time can be spent

helping others, or improving oneself.

What Godwin advocates is the abolition of almost all forms of property.

We have as much right to an object as we have need for it:

What would denominate any thing my property? The fact, that it was

necessary to my welfare. My right would be coeval with the existence of

that necessity. The word property would probably remain; its

signification only would be modified. The mistake does not so properly

lie in the idea itself, as in the source from which it is traced. What I

have, if it be necessary for my use, is truly mine; what I have, though

the fruit of my own industry, if unnecessary, it is an usurpation for me

to retain.[31]

Interestingly, the author extends this logic to our relationships with

others. We cannot lay claim to another person, no matter how much we

like them, and we should not allow ourselves to become attached to other

people to any greater extent than they merit. The philosopher accepts

that we are all social creatures, but argues that we should never allow

ourselves to subsume our individual identity into concepts like family

or community (or expect others to do so either). My blood relatives are

not ‘my’ family, and I am not obliged to favour them over others because

of any notion of shared identity. Godwin reserves particular ire for the

institution of marriage, which he seems to consider the worst offender

in this regard:

marriage is an affair of property, and the worst of all properties. So

long as two human beings are forbidden by positive institution to follow

the dictates of their own mind, prejudice is alive and vigorous. So long

as I seek to engross one woman to myself, and to prohibit my neighbour

from proving his superior desert and reaping the fruits of it, I am

guilty of the most odious of all monopolies.[32]

The philosopher’s words held (for eighteenth-century readers) literal

truth. The principle of coverture recognised husband and wife as a

single legal entity, with the wife’s rights suspended for the duration

of the marriage. A married woman could not own her own property, or sign

agreements in her own name; divorce required a private act of

parliament. Godwin was certainly aware of this but, in-keeping with the

overall tone of Political Justice, chooses to criticise marriage on a

theoretical level.[33] The philosopher questions the ethical basis of

monogamy: the only ethical grounds on which to establish a preference

for one person over others is our perception of that person’s greater

merit – if that is the case, then what right do we have to deny the rest

of the world the friendship of our favourite?

The supposition that I must have a companion for life, is the result of

a complication of vices. It is the dictate of cowardice, and not of

fortitude. It flows from the desire of being loved and esteemed for

something that is not desert.[34]

Godwin, perhaps still a Dissenting minister at heart, dismisses sex as

‘a very trivial object’ and denies any meaningful link between sex and

‘the purest affection’.[35] In a society that has moved beyond

monopolising relationships, people will continue to procreate (because

it is necessary for the continuation for the species) but children will

be raised and educated by those best-suited to doing so (rather than

society assuming it to be the duty of biological parents). The

philosopher finds it hard to believe that people would cohabit on a

permanent basis, were we to do away with the laws and expectations that

accompany the current system of property. Godwin argues that the

tensions of living together will eventually make independent-minded

people unhappy, implicitly criticising the everyday compromises that we

make when living together (which may often clash with the philosopher’s

proposed duties to private judgment and impartiality).

Godwin regards all cooperation as a series of compromises. Working in

concert with a neighbour requires us to organise our time to the

convenience of both, and in doing so we curtail our own freedom of

action. The philosopher calls this an evil, though for Godwin this

simply means that it is a factor with only negative consequences (there

is no upside to being forced to plan around someone else, though another

person’s aid may be good in itself). The philosopher’s greatest concern

regards the individual compromising their independence of mind: it is

right for us to listen to others and absorb their ideas (through

conversation, reading) but we should not submit to another’s direction.

Even if our collaborator can show that their argument is correct in

every way, we must assimilate the proof ourselves and agree rather than

simply conceding to our partner’s greater wisdom. Tellingly, Godwin

describes the practice of persuading someone to abandon negative

behaviours as a form of punishment.

Godwin imagines a future where advances in technology and learning allow

the individual to accomplish almost any practical task alone, but he

accepts that cooperation remains necessary until that becomes the norm.

Notably, Godwin does not see the community of the future as a primarily

cooperative society – he dismisses the needs for resources to be held in

common, since it is obvious to anyone possessed of sound judgment that

they should simply give away their surplus to anyone in need (and fairly

exchange goods or services for the same in kind). The philosopher seems

to imagine that every individual will eventually become self-reliant.

Godwin speculates that in the future everyone will be fed through only a

small individual investment of time and effort, since the end of

commerce and specialist employment will allow everyone to take part in

food production (thus saving thousands of work-hours). Since the

philosopher is critical of cooperation, however, we must infer that he

foresees this production being an individual activity. This perhaps

provides a glimpse of the future Godwin imagined: a society of peaceful,

independent farmers that respect wisdom but not authority. It bears a

passing resemblance to the Dissenting community of the philosopher’s

East Anglian childhood, albeit in an idealised form, but Godwin’s vision

does not look back to any kind of golden age – indeed, the philosopher

is highly invested in the idea of progress, and speculates that a

society committed to moral and intellectual improvement will one day

conquer disease and old age (interestingly, Godwin sees ageing as a

psychological problem as much as a physical one; greater happiness and

wisdom will allow us to live longer). Humanity will spread out, the

philosopher suggests, since much of the world remains uncultivated there

will be room for everyone.[36] Greater longevity will obviously lead to

an increase in population, but Godwin is grandly optimistic: perhaps

without unhappiness, disease, or privation, humanity might live forever.

Debate raged in the philosopher’s lifetime as to what ‘life’ was – vital

energy powering the body, consciousness, or the soul (to list only three

common positions) – and Godwin thoughtfully quotes Benjamin Franklin’s

speculation that mind might one day become omnipotent over matter.

Without any need to procreate, population would settle at a manageable

level. More importantly, existing boundaries on human improvement would

evaporate. Death would never again deprive us of an individual’s wisdom,

nor would each successive generation need to be brought ‘up to speed’

before they could develop their own ideas. In short, the philosopher

imagines a form of intelligence explosion similar to that prophesied by

artificial intelligence evangelists centuries later.

The book’s almost rapturous conclusion was in step with the radical

culture of the time. In France, the abolition of religion in favour of

reason was seriously discussed and attempts were made to de-Christianise

public buildings and dispense with the religious trappings of state

business. Across Europe, revolution was discussed in hushed tones as

ordinary people waited to see how events would play out and monarchs

raised armies to stamp out the French fire before it could spread.

Godwin saw that British society needed drastic reform, though he

remained a sceptic of revolutionary action. Most of his peers at the

time were in favour of change, but few seriously advocated violence.

Godwin maintained that the objective should be to change people’s minds,

not to force change upon them. He believed that it was necessary to show

people the problems that existed outside their experience – he resolved

to do this through fiction. He sat down to write his next novel only six

weeks after seeing Political Justice to the press. He called it Things

as They Are.

4. The Activist (1794–95)

The government had begun to crack down on radical sentiments even before

the declaration of war against France, issuing a royal proclamation

against seditious writing in May 1792. Paine was tried in absentia on 11

December (he had fled to France months earlier). The prosecution claimed

that, in disseminating the Rights of Man so widely, Paine had

overstepped the boundaries of normal political debate – the implication

being that to address the general public (most of whom could not vote)

on political matters constituted an attempt to incite insurrection.

Thomas Erskine, speaking for the defence, argued that regardless of

whether or not one agreed with Paine, the exercise of free speech was

essential to the political health of the nation. The jury found Paine

guilty before they had even heard the prosecution’s rebuttal. In the

late summer of 1793, an Edinburgh court sentenced two men (the lawyer

Thomas Muir and a minister, Thomas Palmer) to transportation for

campaigning on behalf of universal suffrage. The convicts were taken by

sea to London at the end of the year, where they were held on prison

hulks until they could be shipped to Australia. Godwin visited them

three times while they were at Woolwich, and wrote a letter complaining

about their treatment (under the pseudonym ‘Valerius’) to the Morning

Chronicle. In December, government spies in Edinburgh arranged the

arrest of delegates to a convention on parliamentary reform, among them

Godwin’s friend Joseph Gerrald. They too were convicted and sentenced to

transportation. In May 1794, the government arrested leading members of

two reformist political groups (the Society for Constitutional

Information and the London Corresponding Society) on charges of high

treason. Among those charged was another of Godwin’s friends, the writer

and orator John Thelwall, as well as the veteran campaigner John Horne

Tooke. On 17 May, parliament voted to suspend Habeas Corpus, allowing

the authorities to make further arrests without charge.

Things as They Are; or The Adventures of Caleb Williams was completed in

the first week of the arrests. In the context of Paine’s prosecution,

the preface was confrontational:

What is now presented to the public is no refined and abstract

speculation; it is a study and delineation of things passing in the

moral world. It is but of late that the inestimable importance of

political principles has been adequately apprehended. It is now known to

philosophers that the spirit and character of the government intrudes

itself into every rank of society. But this is a truth highly worthy to

be communicated to persons whom books of philosophy and science are

never likely to reach. Accordingly it was proposed in the invention of

the following work, to comprehend, as far as the progressive nature of a

single story would allow, a general review of the modes of domestic and

unrecorded despotism, by which man becomes the destroyer of man.[37]

The publisher (B. Crosby) panicked, perhaps when the scale of the

treason arrests became clear, and the book was issued without a preface

at the end of May. Many readers have inferred from Godwin’s preface that

the novel was intended to spread the ideas of Political Justice to the

novel-reading public (‘a truth highly worthy to be communicated’), but

this reading fails to acknowledge the depth of Caleb Williams as a

literary work. The novel is unequivocally a classic of Romantic-era

literature. As well as being one of the first great psychological

narratives – the story is told in the first person, and the mental

states of both protagonist and antagonist are crucial to the story – the

novel combines mystery, tragedy and political argument with outstanding

unity. Aspects of the novel are obviously inspired by conclusions Godwin

arrived at in writing his treatise: as the preface suggests, the work

explores the application of authority in everyday life (by employers,

within families) and its abuse; the novel’s climax exemplifies the

philosopher’s conviction that truth is always ultimately triumphant. The

relationship between the ideas of Political Justice and the ideas of

Caleb Williams is, however, far more complicated than a literal reading

of the preface might suggest.

The novel is a story of detection and pursuit. Caleb is a servant,

working as a librarian and secretary for the aristocratic Falkland, who

uncovers a dark secret from his employer’s past. Though Caleb makes no

attempt to expose him, Falkland frames Caleb for a crime to destroy his

credibility. Caleb is imprisoned but makes a daring escape. Falkland

employs a man to track Caleb down but, rather than attempt to recapture

him, Caleb’s pursuer is tasked with ensuring that his quarry is unable

to flee the country but unable to settle anywhere within it –

distributing ‘papers’ (implicitly a chapbook, the usual format of

popular ‘true crime’ stories in the period) that depict him as a

notorious housebreaker and master of deception. Falkland offers Caleb

his freedom if he will sign a document exonerating his persecutor of his

secret crime, but Caleb refuses to perjure himself. Caleb eventually

forces a public confrontation and emerges victorious, yet is forever

haunted by Falkland’s destruction.

Many of the novel’s episodes qualify or question arguments found in

Political Justice. Falkland is widely held to be a wise and benevolent

landowner (the protagonist continues to respect him even after suffering

at his hands), and the case he makes in trying to persuade Caleb is that

his life is ultimately more valuable than that of his servant – society

makes a net gain if Caleb sacrifices his own honour to protect

Falkland’s. Godwin essentially complicates the Fénelon dilemma by

bringing it into conflict with an equally important principle. Most

notably, the optimism of Political Justice is undermined by the novel’s

sense that truth does not necessarily bring happiness. Caleb’s victory

is hollow because truth has destroyed a noble but misguided man. Caleb

Williams’s greatest strength as a political novel is that it rarely

lectures. There are moments of polemic when it attacks obvious

injustice, but the text offers more questions than answers. Most

challenging is the question of the novel’s almost miraculous resolution.

Godwin’s original ending allowed tyranny to (believably) reassert

itself, and left Caleb mad and dying in a prison cell. The published

ending has stronger dramatic logic – it provides a satisfying conclusion

to Falkland’s character arc – but is altogether less realistic. The

novel’s original title, Things as They Are, encourages us to question

the believability of its conclusion. Should it be read as a statement

about the potential for change (‘things as they could be’), or does it

prompt us to consider why the ending appears unrealistic despite being

morally sound? Godwin does not dictate an interpretation.

The novel was a resounding success, reviewers praised its power even

when they could not bring themselves to approve of its message. The size

of the initial print run is unknown, though as the work of a proven

author, it was probably respectable. Whatever the size, it sold quickly,

as Godwin was able to negotiate for a revised second edition (with a

braver publisher, who restored the preface) a year later.[38] The

philosopher’s fame increased further. The government had not yet turned

to arresting novelists, but Godwin began looking over his shoulder. He

declined to visit Thelwall in prison for fear of being arrested as an

associate, but sent him an (unsigned) letter of advice which the

hot-tempered Thelwall did not take well. The full indictment of those

arrested was published in October, with new names added to the list.

Among them was Holcroft, who proudly presented himself to the Lord Chief

Justice rather than waiting to be taken in. Godwin was in Warwickshire,

the guest of one his many new well-wishers (the scholar and clergyman,

Samuel Parr). As soon as the philosopher heard the news, he wrote to

Holcroft’s daughter instructing her to deliver his request to visit his

friend in Newgate prison and to alert Erskine (who was again leading the

defence) that he was the playwright’s ‘principal friend’ (presumably for

the purposes of consultation – Holcroft was, at the time, a widower).

Holcroft himself replied in his usual argumentative manner, brushing off

any need for Godwin’s company and demanding that his friend focus on

whatever he could do for the greater cause. The philosopher quickly went

to work.

The law on treason was (literally) medieval, the statute unchanged since

1351. Since political authority of the time was vested in the body of

the monarch, the charge of treason usually pertained to direct threats

to the royal family. The government’s indictment claimed that, because

they wished to see the overthrow of the current regime, the defendants

were guilty of ‘imagining the king’s death’ – drawing a direct line from

the desire to see a change in Britain’s system of government, to the

revolutionary overthrow of that system, to the killing of the monarch.

Conservative and reactionary minds projected events in France onto the

British political landscape, refusing to acknowledge the very different

political context that had caused the downfall of the French monarchy.

The government asserted that only parliament and the king had the

authority to alter the nation’s political arrangements, thus to organise

an extra-parliamentary movement in support of reform was to act in

contempt of parliament’s authority. Since this, in the minds of the

government, could only achieve its goals through revolution (and that

revolution must inevitably end in the death of the monarch), then a

popular movement for political reform must by extension be a plot to

kill the king. The indictment accepted that peaceful protest was not a

crime but asserted that the only legitimate outlet for this was to apply

to parliament for redress. By extension, any political agitation that

attempted to coerce parliament from outside (arguably this could include

mass demonstration or strike action) was a form of insurrection.

Godwin completed his response inside three days and rushed it to the

editor of the Morning Chronicle, where it was published on Monday 21

October, four days before the trial was due to begin. The publisher

James Kearsley also arranged for separate publication as a pamphlet, and

by the end of the day had been threatened with prosecution if he

continued to sell it. The radical Daniel Isaac Eaton (who had already

been prosecuted, and acquitted, for sedition that year) took over

distribution and organised another printing.

The government’s case rested on a broad, arguably elastic, definition of

treason. Godwin’s anonymous pamphlet, Cursory Strictures on the Charge

Delivered by Lord Chief Justice Eyre to the Grand Jury, October 2, 1794,

argued that the law was in fact quite specific in its definition. In

typically fair-minded language, Godwin performs a scholarly

demonstration of legal precedent – explaining how attempts to efforts by

one monarch to widen the definition of treason were invariably swept

away by their successors, thus creating no precedent for the

wide-ranging interpretation of the law the government sought to use. The

onus is on the government, Godwin argues, to show a direct relationship

between reformist activity and treasonous conspiracy – the law does not

allow one to encompass the other. Within a few days there was a

conservative reply, allegedly written by the judge Sir Francis Buller

(popularly believed to have been the origin of the term ‘rule of

thumb’). Eaton published that too, and Godwin’s rebuttal. Cursory

Strictures struck a huge blow for the defence. The first trial was that

of London Corresponding Society Chair Thomas Hardy. The prosecution’s

opening statement lasted nine hours, an hour of which was given over to

responding to Godwin’s pamphlet. Erskine for the defence argued that the

only people who had imagined the king’s death were in government, that

their suspicion had projected a malicious conspiracy onto men exercising

their political rights. Hardy was acquitted after nine days in court.

Horne Tooke and Thelwall were also tried, and acquitted, after which

every other case was dismissed. The author of Cursory Strictures was a

hero in radical circles, though only a few were aware of the author’s

identity. Horne Tooke did not learn of it until nearly a year later –

Godwin records that the politician kissed his hand in gratitude. The

philosopher was magnanimous in victory, and wrote (again, anonymously)

to Lord Chief Justice Eyre to apologise for any intemperate language he

had used in his pamphlets. It became clear that the case against the

reformers had been built from reports submitted by a spy within their

midst and the suspect, Charles Sinclair, was confronted on 24 November.

The alleged spy was ejected from their circle, but Godwin took it upon

himself a few weeks later to write to Sinclair with a list of specific

accusations against him and offering him the chance to clear his name

(though it is not clear if the letter was ever sent).

Godwin began the new year deeply engaged in revisions to Political

Justice. The philosopher frequently tinkered with his own work, but his

changes in the second edition of the text would be substantial. The

first volume of the original had gone to the printer while Godwin was

still working on the second. Despite the book’s success, the philosopher

was not happy with its argument. Godwin later wrote that a scholar did

not truly understand a subject until they had written on it and, reading

the first edition of Political Justice, we can see how the philosopher’s

ideas take shape over the course of drafting the work. The tone of the

first volume is exploratory and questioning, the second clear and

authoritative. The philosopher must have been conscious of this, because

he seems to have returned to Political Justice within a few weeks of

sending Caleb Williams to the publisher. Revision stalled during the

Treason Trials in October 1794, but by the end of December Godwin was

back on the job. Looking back at the work a few years later, the

philosopher wrote:

The Enquiry Concerning Political Justice I apprehend to be blemished by

three errors: 1) Stoicism, or an inattention to the principle that

pleasure and pain are the only bases upon which morality can rest; 2)

Sandemanianism, or an inattention to the principle that feeling, and not

judgement is the cause of human actions; 3) the unqualified condemnation

of the private affections.

It will be seen how strongly these errors are connected with the

Calvinist system, which had been so deeply wrought in my mind in early

life, as to enable these errors long to survive the general system of

religious opinions of which they formed a part.[39]

Godwin’s clear-sightedness was not entirely the product of his own

reflection, however. True to what he had argued in the book, Godwin’s

ideas were refined by conversation. He had, of course, discussed the

themes of Political Justice with his peers while writing the first

edition, but his newfound celebrity as the philosopher of the radical

movement meant that his circle of friends had greatly expanded. Godwin

had been professionally well-connected before, with many contacts in the

world of publishing and on the forward-looking edge of the Whig

political establishment. Political Justice brought him a wealth of

personal connections, substantially broadening the number of people with

whom Godwin could discuss political and philosophical matters. Godwin’s

diary records a host of new contacts: the Whig clergyman and teacher

Samuel Parr; photography pioneer and pottery heir Thomas Wedgwood;

financier John King; playwright Elizabeth Inchbald; essayist Mary Hays;

and the poet William Wordsworth (he and Wordsworth did not get on). The

philosopher, as detailed as ever, often notes the topics that were

discussed. In the past, the majority of Godwin’s friends had been

radicals and Dissenters – people with the same perspective as the

philosopher himself – and while Godwin did not forget his old friends

(Holcroft and Marshall remained regular companions), the range of his

new acquaintances meant that he was able to discuss his ideas with

people who saw things differently.

Godwin discarded whole chapters from the original text and wrote new

ones in their place. The bulk of the changes occur in the first volume,

though Godwin made substantial amendments to the language of the later

books and culled some of the most speculative ideas from the conclusion.

The language of the second (and third) edition is more philosophical

than that of the original – many minor revisions are clarifications or

qualifications of statements made in the first edition, and the

philosopher adds considerable nuance to his explanation of how the mind

makes decisions. Most significant (which, as we see above, Godwin was

conscious of) is his new account of the role of the emotions in

motivating and channelling ethical actions.

In the first edition, Godwin had been certain that moral right was

interchangeable with intellectual accuracy, that the best ethical

response to any dilemma could be logically deduced and should be carried

out because it is identifiably the correct answer to the question at

hand. This, as the philosopher wrote above, was a remnant of his

training as a Sandemanian: the sect claimed that salvation derived from

understanding the truth of the divine word. With hindsight, the

philosopher recognised his own assumption – that we intrinsically want

to do what is correct, rather than what pleases us (perhaps assuming

that those sentiments were always interchangeable). This left Godwin

with the need to explain motivation without undermining his concept of

moral and intellectual truth. His answer to this problem is twofold:

first, the second edition acknowledges that ascertaining the ‘Godwinian

truth’ of a matter (i.e. the logically and morally correct response) is

far more difficult than the philosopher had previously suggested;

second, Godwin conceded that reasoning was not enough to motivate an

action on its own – we have to care about the outcome.

In short, uncovering a perfect truth probably requires perfect

perception. To deduce the ideal response to a moral dilemma, an

individual would need to begin with an open mind, yet understand every

variable of the situation, know the minds of the participants, and have

enough time to reflect upon the possible consequences of their decision.

In the second edition of Political Justice Godwin allows that time,

experience and the limits of human cognition mean that few decisions are

ever likely to meet this standard. The philosopher’s qualification

effectively places truth beyond the reach of mundane beings, rendering

it an abstract idea that seems to have little bearing on the moral

calculus of everyday life. Godwin’s solution is to reframe truth as an

ideal – a target for us to aim at, rather than a goal to be achieved.

This constitutes a major change to the philosopher’s position, but on an

abstract level rather than a practical one. Godwin’s principal interest

remains the moral and intellectual improvement of humanity but, in the

revisions to Political Justice, the philosopher now focuses on

improvement as a process rather than an end. In every edition Godwin

argues that individuals using their own judgment become wiser and more

virtuous through the exercise of reason. In the first edition, however,

the exercise of reason leads directly to truth – implying a kind of

end-state where, without restrictions on their reason, the populace

becomes sufficiently wise to always act in ways that maximise happiness

and eventually eliminate pain. The second edition recognises this as

unlikely, if not impossible. This should not concern us, Godwin says,

because the search for truth is valuable in itself. The philosopher

claims that humanity has a limitless capacity for improvement. It may be

impossible for us to perfectly deduce perfect answers, but the use of

reason leads to better answers with every application. Reason may not

usher us into an ideal world, but it certainly has the potential to make

a better one.

The second edition’s discussion of motivation and the emotions has more

practical impact on Godwinian ethics. The first edition presents moral

actions as essentially logical calculations – they are correct, and can

be proven to be so. The philosopher’s revised understanding of truth (as

seen above) renders this problematic; without an accurate picture of the

situation, our logic will be faulty. Godwin’s revised account of

improvement means that this is not intrinsically a disaster – we do the

best we can with the information we have, and fail better next time –

but it fails to explain why we choose to act morally in the first place.

The first edition was able to argue that, the individual having deduced

the truth, only perversity would explain why they would not choose to

take the identifiably best course of action. The second edition, having

undermined the certainty of this equation, instead argues that what

motivates decisions are the feelings we have towards the outcome.

All actions ultimately derive from the desire to be happy – at the most

basic level, to experience pleasure and avoid pain. Sympathy for the

people around us means that these desires are not purely atavistic (we

enjoy the happiness of others and share their pain). Reason organises

and directs our desires; even an entirely selfish person must learn to

prioritise needs over wants, and plan how to get them. Rather than

concede ground to the self-interest hypothesis, however, Godwin argues

that we very quickly develop a desire to do benevolent things (making

other people happy makes us happy) and find that reason confirms them to

be a productive and sensible use of our efforts – more so than selfish

acts because, if we reason that other people have the same emotional

needs as ourselves, we must recognise that an act that makes two people

happy is better than something that pleases only one. In time we come to

value benevolence itself rather than just its effects, becoming

genuinely altruistic and not just a good team player.[40] In the second

edition Godwin expands upon an idea that was hinted at in the first,

developing a hierarchy of pleasures that places basic sensual desires at

the bottom and benevolence at the top, arguing that more complex

pleasures (e.g. reading) were superior to purely physical experiences

because they could stimulate the mind and the emotions. Benevolent acts

are not only personally satisfying but also propagate greater happiness

around us, thus increasing our own pleasure further.

The revisions to Political Justice provide a straightforward explanation

of why we choose to do altruistic things, and certainly a more robust

one than the first edition. The philosopher realised, however, that the

revised account of motivation was at odds with the earlier edition’s

‘unqualified condemnation of the private affections’. The first edition

has a sort of austere clarity – our respect and esteem for others is

secondary to the demands of truth and justice. In his discussion of the

Fénelon dilemma, Godwin treats affection as a distraction from our real

moral duties. Justice requires us to do whatever will bring the greatest

happiness, and to consider impartially the question of how happiness

might be increased. The philosopher argues that personal affection

encourages us to overvalue the moral worth of the people closest to us,

either because their benevolence impacts on us personally, or because we

are more familiar with their contribution than we are with that of

others. The second edition did not alter Godwin’s commitment to

impartiality – it is still better to save Fénelon over the chambermaid

(now altered to valet) – but the philosopher acknowledged that the

uncertainty of knowledge made such clear moral choices unrealistic.

While some degree of uncertainty is inescapable, the revised Political

Justice implies that we should aim to make informed moral choices over

abstract ones. In absolute terms we should always help the person of

greatest moral worth, in the greatest need. In practical terms, we can

only help the person of greatest known moral worth, in the greatest need

that we are aware of. The revisions soften Godwin’s language

considerably here and, although the philosopher retains his insistence

that it would an error (albeit forgivable) to help a friend over a more

needy stranger, the second edition displays an acceptance that favouring

those of known moral calibre is a pragmatic compromise that still

significantly contributes to general happiness. This may seem only

sensible, but some critics at the time chose to see it as the

philosopher retreating from an unworkable ethical position. To some

extent Godwin agreed (as the revisions and subsequent essays show) and

was publicly candid about having reconsidered.

The second edition’s compromise opens the door to a more obvious change,

though the philosopher did not see the immediate significance of this

(and even his later discussions suggest that he did not consider its

impact revolutionary). Conservative critics had found the first

edition’s commitment to impartiality disconcerting, since it appeared to

argue that traditional values like loyalty, familialism, and patriotism

were actually distractions from proper moral reasoning. The first

edition had argued for the abolition of marriage, and that it was right

for parents to give up their children to other people if those people

would be better carers. The book had little to say about love or

friendship, preferring to code personal relationships in terms of mutual

regard and the respect due to individuals of proven moral quality. The

second (and third) edition did not alter this to any great extent but,

following through on the logic of the revisions, Godwin was forced to

concede that personal relationships were crucial to the spread of

happiness.

The philosopher discusses this in a number of essays written (mostly)

after the revisions to Political Justice: it is implicit in his writings

on teachers and pupils in The Enquirer (1797), forms an observation in

the preface to the novel St Leon (1799), and receives a detailed

explanation in a pamphlet entitled Thoughts Occasioned by the Perusal of

Dr Parr’s Spital Sermon (1801, now often referred to as the Reply to

Parr). What Godwin concludes is that, if our duty is to create as much

happiness as we are able, and that we should try our hardest to make

informed decisions about how to do so, then it follows that the most

effective use of our time and effort is to foster happiness among the

people we know best. We understand the needs of our friends, family and

neighbours better than we do those of strangers; we have a better

understanding of how deserving our friends are of our time – how likely

they are to do good as a result of our help. This serves to justify a

number of behaviours that many would take for granted – prioritising

family over friends, and friends over strangers – and within Godwin’s

thought it demonstrates the philosopher’s journey from the abstract to

the practical.

The political atmosphere of 1795 was heated. Emboldened by the failure

of the treason trials, membership of reformist and radical political

societies surged – the best known, the London Corresponding Society

(LCS), led by trial defendants Hardy, Thelwall and Tooke, claimed around

3,000. In June the LCS held a huge public meeting at St George’s Fields

in Southwark calling for ‘liberty and bread’. Estimates as to the size

of the meeting vary dramatically: the LCS claimed as many as 300,000

attendees (a third of the population of London) while more sober

assessments placed the figure as low as 40,000.[41] The government had

assembled the militia over on Clapham Common, in any case. The society’s

address insisted on its loyalty to the king, and called upon him to

dismiss the unscrupulous ministers leading the nation to ruin. The

speech was less a petition than a warning. Another mass meeting in

October used stronger language, accusing the king’s ministers of high

treason against the nation, and reminding the king himself that he ruled

by the people’s consent (because the Hanoverians had been invited to

Britain over the Stuarts). Three days later, during the state opening of

parliament on the 29^(th), demonstrators turned violent and the king’s

coach was pelted with stones – the damage was severe enough that the

monarch believed he had been shot at and was forced to change to a

private carriage. The now empty state coach was torn apart by the

protestors.

Pitt’s government leapt on these events as evidence that the nation was

in peril, that new laws were needed to protect the person of the king

and prevent violent insurrection. The True Briton, a reactionary

newspaper founded with government funds, reported that the attack had

been led by French agents.[42] The Archbishop of Canterbury authored a

prayer for England’s congregations (at the government’s behest) that

presented the violence as an assassination attempt. There were very few

actual arrests, which radicals took as a sign that the government had

orchestrated the affair themselves. Regardless, Pitt took the

opportunity to push through a repressive legislative programme banning

‘seditious meetings’ and redefining treason in order to facilitate

prosecutions. Pitt’s laws are known to history as ‘the Gagging Acts’.

Holding a political lecture was to become a fineable offence, unless

approved by two magistrates. Other political meetings required

magistrates to be notified, and could be broken up if they were held to

be encouraging contempt for the government. Refusal to disperse was

punishable by death. The new law on treason made explicit the

interpretation used by the prosecution in the trials of the previous

year: that it was treasonous to express the intention to depose the

monarch, or to attempt to intimidate parliament.

The two acts prompted a wave of petitions and further mass meetings, in

London and across the country. Pamphlets, letters and essays flew back

and forth. Godwin’s contribution was critical of the legislation but

maintained the reservations that he had outlined against revolutionary

agitation in Political Justice. Godwin’s Considerations on Lord

Grenville’s and Mr Pitt’s Bills depicts the two acts as an attack on

both free speech and free thought. The previous year’s trials (and use

of informants) suggested that the government could use the new law to

prosecute any private discussion that did not endorse the existing

political order, in Godwin’s view essentially criminalising intellectual

enquiry. In his donnish, qualified, way the philosopher calls Pitt and

Grenville ‘enemies of science’ who threaten to plunge the country into a

new dark age.[43] Yet the philosopher is critical of both sides: while

he describes the radical movement’s complaints as justified he argues

that, even with the best of intentions, a passionate mass movement is

likely to spin violently out of control. It won him few friends. John

Thelwall took the pamphlet as a personal attack (one of Godwin’s

anonymous examples clearly refers to Thelwall, though the philosopher is

not unkind) and the two exchanged angry letters. Samuel Parr wrote to

express fulsome praise, but Godwin’s reply is a reminder of his

commitment to impartiality:

I have offended some of my democratical friends by the freedom of its

remarks, & could originally have no hope of its being acceptable to any

party. But I could not, consistently with my feelings, protest against

the tyranny of one party, without entering my caveat against the

imprudence of the other.

I should have been further gratified, if you had joined some censure to

your liberal commendation. Authors stand in need of both.[44]

Popular protest was to little avail, however, and the two bills were

passed in December. The LCS and other groups changed the way in which

they held meetings in order to sidestep the law, but memberships

dwindled rapidly. The radical movement continued, but without the energy

or public support it had enjoyed prior to the Gagging Acts. The chair of

the LCS committee fell to the gradualist Francis Place, who sought to

place the society on firm financial ground. The small number of

sympathetic MPs, led by Fox and Sheridan, continued their opposition

through conventional parliamentary means (before walking out of the

house in 1797) but distanced themselves from the popular societies. On

22 December, Godwin noted in his diary ‘explanation w/Thelwal’ and the

two sparred (with less acrimony than in their private letters) in the

pages of Thelwall’s periodical, The Tribune. Their friendship was

properly restored some months later.

The year 1796 would see Godwin make many new friends, but one of them

would change the course of his life forever.

5. The Husband (1796–99)

At the beginning of January, Mary Hays invited Godwin (with Holcroft in

tow) to take tea with her and meet her friend, Mary Wollstonecraft. The

philosopher was initially reluctant – he had met Wollstonecraft before

and they had departed ‘mutually displeased with each other’ – but the

engagement was a success.[45] Like many of Godwin’s closest friends,

Wollstonecraft was a radical author. She had been a governess, teacher,

book critic and novelist, but Godwin knew her best from her political

treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). He wrote later:

When tried by the hoary and long-established laws of literary

composition, it can scarcely maintain its claim to be placed in the

first class of human productions. But when we consider the importance of

its doctrines, and the eminence of genius it displays, it seems not very

improbable that it will be read as long as the English language

endures.[46]

The Vindication is framed as an intervention into the debate over public

education in France prompted by the report of former bishop (later

ambassador, and eventually prime minister) Charles Maurice de

Talleyrand-Périgord. Talleyrand had recommended a comprehensive system

of schools organised by a central authority but, while he had argued for

the education of both sexes, he had advocated that women and girls be

trained for a subordinate role. The French constitution of 1791 did not

recognise women as citizens (and they would not receive full equality

under the law until the late twentieth century). Wollstonecraft begins

from the position that the supposed inferiority of women is a direct

result of their infantilisation by education and culture. If women

appear too ignorant and irrational to take part in the public sphere

alongside men, it is because society has kept them ignorant and denied

them the use of reason – the many negative behaviours attributed to

women (timidity, deceitfulness, emotional fragility) are learned

responses to a culture that shames, belittles, or ignores them when they

attempt to participate in the world beyond the domestic sphere. Even

were we to insist that the domestic sphere was the correct place for

women to focus their attentions, denying wives and mothers education (or

the agency to make their own decisions) can only have negative

consequences for children and families.

Wollstonecraft picks apart the most influential texts of the period on

the subject of women’s education (she had published her own book on the

education of girls some years earlier). Rousseau comes in for particular

criticism – the Swiss philosopher argued that the ideal wife should

subordinate her entire identity to that of her husband – but

Wollstonecraft is able to show how even writers who are not hostile to

women’s learning, such as John Gregory in A Father’s Legacy to his

Daughters (1774), participate in the expectations of women’s conduct

that continue their oppression. Gregory understood an issue that

Wollstonecraft is determined to explode: that patriarchal culture values

what women appear to be, rather than what they are. Society expects a

woman to appear beautiful, deferent and chaste – teaching women to value

only the outward show of these attributes, because they are denied the

education necessary to interrogate them for whatever virtue they might

have. Wollstonecraft argues that virtue requires rational engagement;

ignorance of immoral things merely provides a trap for the unwary while

an educated understanding allows the conscious choice of good over bad.

It is not possible for women to become genuinely moral beings while they

are kept in perpetual childhood.

After the Vindication, Wollstonecraft had travelled to revolutionary

Paris. Mixing with the English-speaking circle there she met Gilbert

Imlay, an American adventurer and sometime novelist. They fell in love.

They did not marry, but Wollstonecraft assumed Imlay’s name and received

a certificate from the US ambassador (as Imlay’s ‘wife’) that freed her

from the restrictions that had been placed on British subjects in France

since the declaration of war in early 1793. In May 1794, the couple had

a child, Fanny. Imlay’s business dealings saw him travel extensively

and, in April 1795, mother and daughter moved to London to await him.

Imlay followed later, but Wollstonecraft realised that his affections

had cooled. Isolated and alone (she had only reluctantly returned to

Britain) the writer attempted suicide, possibly through an overdose of

laudanum. Upon her recovery, perhaps seeking a connection, she involved

herself in Imlay’s current venture – the American had helped to run a

shipment of French silver through the British naval blockade, but the

vessel had never arrived at its destination. The captain, Peder

Ellefsen, had resurfaced but the silver had not been recovered. Mary

travelled Scandinavia following sightings of the ship, and acted as

Imlay’s representative at Ellefsen’s trial. To this day it remains

unclear to what extent Imlay recouped his losses, but Wollstonecraft’s

journey was immortalised in her writing. Published as Letters Written

during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark in January 1796,

the work describes the atmosphere of each country with a keen political

eye while remaining alive to the great emotional resonance of the

landscape. Godwin wrote that perhaps, ‘a book of travels that so

irresistibly seizes on the heart, never, in any other instance, found

its way from the press’.[47] She returned to Britain in October to find

that Imlay had taken up with another woman in her absence. She attempted

suicide once more, soaking her clothes in the rain before throwing

herself into the Thames. She was rescued by a boatman.

The meeting with Hays, Holcroft and Godwin came only a few weeks later.

From Godwin’s account she seems to have made no secret of her

unhappiness. The philosopher wrote that from their first reacquaintance

his ‘sympathy in her anguish’ was added to his respect for her as a

writer. They met again at a dinner party a week later. He obtained a

copy of her newly published Letters soon after that. ‘If ever there was

a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to

me to be the book.’[48] The two made time to see each other:

Wollstonecraft called on the philosopher unannounced on 14 April, in

defiance of the social conventions of the time, and he visited her

weekly for the rest of the spring. They grew increasingly affectionate.

Godwin spent much of July visiting family and friends in East Anglia

(where he reconciled with Thelwall) and wrote Wollstonecraft a wryly

silly letter from Norwich:

Shall I write a love letter? May Lucifer fly away with me, if I do! No,

when I make love, it shall be with the eloquent tones of my voice, with

dying accents, with speaking glances (through the glass of my

spectacles), with all the witching of that irresistible, universal

passion. Curse on the mechanical, icy medium of pen & paper. When I make

love, it shall be in a storm, as Jupiter made love to Semele, & turned

her at once to a cinder. Do not these menaces terrify you?[49]

They became lovers in August. They met and talked, sent letters back and

forth, as they struggled to express their feelings for one another.

Godwin had clumsily courted women before, but genuine romance was a

shock to him. Wollstonecraft was more experienced, but knew the

knife’s-edge balance of female propriety. Matters came to a head on the

17^(th), in a rapid exchange of letters. Wollstonecraft wrote that

morning:

I feel that I cannot speak clearly on the subject to you, let me then

briefly explain myself now I am alone. Yet, struggling as I have been a

long time to attain peace of mind (or apathy) I am afraid to trace

emotions to their source, which border on agony. [50]

Godwin wrote a confused reply:

For six & thirty hours I could think of nothing else. I longed

inexpressibly to have you in my arms Why did not I come to you? I am a

fool. I feared still that I might be deceiving myself as to your

feelings, & that I was feeding my mind with groundless presumptions. …

Upon consideration I find in you one fault, & but one. You have the

feelings of nature, & you have the honesty to avow them. In all this you

do well. I am sure you do. But do not let them tyrannise over you.

Estimate every thing at its just value. It is best that we should be

friends in every sense of the word; but in the mean time let us be

friends.[51]

By the afternoon he had reconsidered and wrote again to beg for

forgiveness. Before the letter could be delivered, the proactive

Wollstonecraft had called on him to put her feelings directly. Godwin’s

diary records almost daily meetings from that point on. The entry for 21

August reads ‘chez moi, toute’, a note that the philosopher’s

biographers have taken as a record of the first time the two made love.

They kept their affair private, and saw their friends separately. Godwin

helped to maintain the fiction of ‘Mrs Imlay’, addressing his letters to

that name while simultaneously recording the correspondence in his diary

under her real one. As writers, they read each other’s work in draft –

Godwin did not spare his lover from the bruising criticism he gave

everyone else, but Wollstonecraft was more than willing to stand her

ground where it mattered.

In the latter part of the year, Wollstonecraft was reviewing again for

Joseph Johnson’s Analytical Review and working on the novel that would

become The Wrongs of Woman (1798). Godwin was completing a series of

essays on education and literature, which was published as The Enquirer

in February 1797. Though the philosopher presented the work as the

conceptual opposite of Political Justice – an unsystematic collection of

observations on various topics rather than a philosophical investigation

– the book provides a significant insight into the direction of Godwin’s

thought. The Enquirer’s principal themes are reading and empathy, with a

particular interest in how the two overlap. Education was not explored

in detail in Political Justice, the philosopher was principally

concerned about its power to indoctrinate and saw little scope for it as

a method of moral and intellectual improvement. This initially seems

counter-intuitive – we improve by learning – but Godwin’s concerns stem

from what he saw as (formal) education’s greater utility as a

conservative force than a progressive one. On their own terms,

authoritarian, didactic models of education are highly effective – they

impart an approved version of knowledge to a great number of learners,

without having to engage with anything outside the terms they have set.

Teaching someone to think critically is far more difficult. The Enquirer

identifies the paradox the philosopher saw at the heart of formal

education: how do we teach people to think for themselves?

Under the didactic model, teaching is relatively simple. The teacher

imparts knowledge to pupils, and the skill of teaching lies in creating

receptive learners. A more liberal version of this has the teacher

training learners how to access knowledge on their own. This would seem

to sidestep Godwin’s concerns about authority – it is not dictatorial –

but the teacher’s understanding places boundaries on what the student

can learn (I cannot guide you in learning things I know nothing about

and, without guidance on how to evaluate a subject critically, a student

doing research is merely swapping one fountain of knowledge for

another). For Godwin, this is insufficient. The philosopher’s vision of

moral and intellectual improvement requires the individual to outgrow

their predecessors, not merely to achieve the same standard. Godwin’s

ideal learner has the wisdom to respect the achievements of their

ancestors, but the spirit to challenge accepted ideas when they appear

lacking. The philosopher calls this genius – not some innate talent that

separates great minds from the herd but a capacity that lies dormant in

every individual, waiting to be awakened.

The Enquirer does not present a system of education. Godwin’s essays

offer few solutions but instead identify the philosophical issues that

accompany different methods of teaching and learning. There are

recurring themes: the relationship between teacher and student is

inherently unbalanced; human beings are social creatures and need to

share their ideas (in part, a need for esteem); our ideas and

achievements should be regarded with humility and we should not be

afraid to change our opinions when presented with better ones.

Wollstonecraft’s influence can be seen in the compromise Godwin offers

for formal education. Rejecting both individual tutoring and boarding

schools (the two most common methods in the period), the philosopher

suggests that small day schools may avoid the worst problems of either

method (Wollstonecraft had suggested the same in her own writing).

Godwin regards schooling as a necessary evil, the least worst of all the

systems tried: ‘all education is despotism’, he writes, acknowledging

that teaching is something done to young people for their own good that

inculcates habits of obedience rather than enquiry.[52] For all its

faults, however, teaching encourages an intellectual rigour and

diversity of learning that few auto-didacts ever develop. Schooling

provides young people with a community of peers, which not only

socialises them but also offers a social space away from the teacher’s

authority – space to develop the personal identity necessary to

criticise or resist authority when needed.

Teaching remains an exercise of authority, which for Godwin renders it

both morally and intellectually problematic. The philosopher suggests

that reading affords the opportunity to educate without exerting

authority over the learner. The text may dictate any number of things,

but the reader is under no obligation to accept them. Indeed, all acts

of reading are in some way acts of interpretation (at the most basic

level, agreeing the meaning of words and sentences) and the reader can

learn from a text even if they reject its message. For this reason, the

philosopher dismisses the idea that books can ever genuinely corrupt

someone – a work may celebrate odious things, but it has no power to

make the reader emulate them. The author considers all literature to be

instructive because it enables the reader to exercise their imagination,

putting themselves in the place of the literary protagonist (fictional,

historical or authorial) to experience something akin to a simulation of

the character’s experience. We feel what they feel, and learn from it.

In December 1796, Wollstonecraft began to suspect that she was pregnant

with Godwin’s child. The couple quarrelled. The notes that passed

between them afterwards show Godwin hurt by her apparent regrets, but

they patched things up quickly. Wollstonecraft was likely under pressure

to settle debts she had accrued during her separation from Imlay, and

the prospect of becoming an unmarried mother for the second time cannot

have aided her peace of mind. In the spring, Godwin borrowed money from

Thomas Wedgwood to pay Wollstonecraft’s creditors and the couple

resolved to marry. The wedding was held at St Pancras on 29 March, with

Marshall as the only witness. They moved in together at the Polygon in

Somers Town (then on the north edge of London) on 6 April, but Godwin

rented rooms a few streets away in order to have his own space to work.

They informed their friends slowly and with apparent reluctance.

Holcroft wished them the utmost happiness but was clearly saddened at

having been left out of the secret. An embarrassed letter from Godwin to

Wedgwood requested more money on Wollstonecraft’s behalf and attempted

to justify his marriage in the light of his vehement criticism of the

institution itself:

Nothing but a regard for the happiness of the individual, which I had no

right to injure, could have induced me to submit to an institution,

which I wish to see abolished, & which I would recommend to my fellow

men, never to practise, but with the greatest caution. Having done what

I thought necessary for the peace & respectability of the individual, I

hold myself no otherwise bound than I was before the ceremony took

place.[53]

Godwin’s anxiety regarding Wollstonecraft’s ‘respectability’ was

well-founded. Though the marriage may have shielded her from some of the

opprobrium reserved for unmarried mothers, the pretence of her marriage

to Imlay was entirely exploded. According to Godwin, this was not any

great revelation: Wollstonecraft was candid in explaining her

relationship with Imlay, even to casual acquaintances, and did not seem

to fear it being widely known.[54] Godwin reports that Wollstonecraft

and her friends persisted in using ‘Mrs Imlay’ out of convenience rather

than deception. Indeed, Godwin’s awkward attempt to irreverently inform

Mary Hays of their marriage refers to the wedding as the obvious way for

Wollstonecraft to drop the Imlay name, suggesting that they had

discussed the practical concerns of doing so.[55] Some of their

acquaintances took the opportunity to cut ties with the couple

regardless, which Godwin took as an adherence to the form of proper

behaviour rather than its spirit. Chief among those cutting ties was

Elizabeth Inchbald. Formerly a close friend of Godwin, rumour implied

that the playwright may have resented ‘losing’ the philosopher to

another woman. Yet Inchbald was often guarded in her social and

political engagements (an important survival trait for a woman in the

highly public world of theatre) and may have thought the loss of

Godwin’s friendship an acceptable sacrifice to minimise her association

with any potential scandal.

Godwin and Wollstonecraft both took care to maintain a degree of

independence from one another. Godwin’s rented rooms were more than just

an office, and the philosopher sometimes slept there, the couple

communicating through notes and letters in much the same way as they had

before their marriage. They saw their friends separately (radical in a

time when many considered it improper for wives to speak to men without

their husbands present). Wollstonecraft wrote to their mutual friend

Amelia Alderson, ‘in short, I still mean to be independent, even to the

cultivating sentiments and principles in my children’s minds (should I

have more), which he disavows’.[56] Yet some degree of domesticity crept

in. The couple were happy and Godwin doted on Fanny, now his

stepdaughter. The notes suggest that their relationship thrived on blunt

honesty. Though Wollstonecraft expressed reservations about her

husband’s doctrine of sincerity, she was open about her feelings.

Complaining of having missed an opportunity to walk in the country with

friends because of a prior engagement with Godwin’s sister, the couple

apparently argued. Wollstonecraft later wrote to him:

I am sorry we entered on an altercation this morning, which probably has

led us both to justify ourselves at the expence of the other. Perfect

confidence, and sincerity of action is, I am persuaded, incompatible

with the present state of reason. I am sorry for the bitterness of your

expressions when you denominated, what I think a just contempt of a

false principle of action, savage resentment, and the worst of vices,

not because I winced under the lash, but as it led me to infer that the

coquettish candour of vanity was a much less generous motive. I know

that respect is the shadow of wealth, and commonly obtained, when that

is wanted, by a criminal compliance with the prejudice of society.[57]

In June, Godwin took a trip to the Midlands to visit Wedgwood and see

his potteries. His letters home speak volumes about the sort of warm and

affectionate family the Godwins had so quickly become – most letters

feature a passage for Fanny, including an ongoing discussion about the

whereabouts of a misplaced toy. It is clear that Wollstonecraft missed

him dearly; her last letter before his return complains that the

tenderness of his letters had ‘evaporated’ the longer he had been away

(he arrived home the next day).[58]

Wollstonecraft went into labour at 5 a.m. on Wednesday 30 August 1797.

She was confident, casually writing notes to Godwin (who had been sent

to his rooms until the birth was completed) until the pains encouraged

her to retire to bed. She was attended by an experienced midwife (Mrs

Blenkinsop of the Westminster Lying-In Hospital, a place for poorer

women) but the labour continued for many hours. Mary Wollstonecraft gave

birth to Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin at 11.20 p.m. Complications

presented themselves a few hours later: the mother had not expelled the

placenta. Still a concern today, in the eighteenth century it quickly

led to infection and death. Godwin summoned Blenkinsop’s surgeon

colleague, Dr Poignand, who removed the placenta surgically in the small

hours of the Thursday, causing significant blood loss. For

Wollstonecraft the experience was agonising. Godwin sent for another

doctor, his wife’s friend George Fordyce, who pronounced ‘no particular

cause of alarm’.[59] For a few days, life seemed to return to normal.

Godwin went about some pressing business on Friday, certain that his

wife was recovering strongly. On Sunday, Wollstonecraft was overcome

with fits of shivering so violent that she later described them as a

struggle between life and death. Some of the placenta apparently

remained and had become infected. Poignand and Fordyce were both

summoned again; Poignand refused to attend because another physician had

been consulted, but Fordyce (by Tuesday) had called in another doctor –

John Clark, London’s most senior midwifery practitioner – with a view to

further surgery. The doctors presumably decided against another

procedure, advising Godwin only to give his wife wine for the pain. By

Wednesday 6 September it was clear that Wollstonecraft was not long for

this world, but she throughout bore her suffering with patience and

calm. Godwin, by contrast, was far from his usual rational self. He

begged his friend Basil Montagu to find a new doctor. Montagu turned to

Godwin’s friend Anthony Carlisle. Carlisle was that day dining some

miles outside London, but Montagu tracked him down and brought him to

Wollstonecraft’s side. Carlisle stayed with them until the end. Godwin’s

account lists all those who visited or helped in his wife’s last days.

She appeared to rally and held on until Sunday morning, twelve days

after having given birth. On her last full day she discussed with Godwin

what she wanted for her daughters, though what precisely was said we can

only infer from her writing. Godwin’s diary records her death simply

with the words ‘20 minutes before 8’, underlined twice. She was buried

at St Pancras, the church where they were married. Godwin was too

distraught to attend.

Godwin mourned Wollstonecraft as a fellow author. With the help of

Joseph Johnson and the Robinsons, he published the unfinished Wrongs of

Woman alongside some of her letters and fragments. At the same time, and

within days of the funeral, he was back at his desk writing

Wollstonecraft’s life story. He worked on it in bursts over the

subsequent weeks, finishing it in mid-November and publishing it through

Johnson in January 1798. The Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of

the Rights of Woman are deeply personal, and distinctively Godwin. The

philosopher’s love and admiration for Wollstonecraft can be seen on

every page, but the text does not shy away from the bracing honesty that

characterised their relationship. Godwin told of her father’s cruelty

and her mother’s strictness; her fervent passion for her friend Fanny

Blood; her love for the (married) painter, Henry Fuseli; her child out

of wedlock with Imlay; and her two suicide attempts. Biography in the

period was primarily a celebration of the subject’s life – no doubt

Godwin saw the work as such – but it was common to draw a veil over

episodes that might be deemed controversial. From the Memoir’s foreword

we might infer that the philosopher’s intention was to lay to rest

painful and misleading rumours about Wollstonecraft’s life by providing

the whole and unvarnished truth. Godwin hid nothing, nor did he flinch

from describing her flaws as well as the genius that he saw in her

character. For all the research that the philosopher attempted in

writing Wollstonecraft’s life (her sisters, among others, were not

forthcoming in their help) his portrait of her is subjective. The Memoir

paints Wollstonecraft as Godwin saw her, and in relation to how he saw

himself: she is a passionate, intuitive, imaginative spirit contrasted

with his rational, logical, sceptical intellect. He credits her with

teaching him the value of imagination. Godwin at times seems to

construct Wollstonecraft as a woman of sensibility – a mind, ‘almost of

too fine a texture to encounter the vicissitudes of human affairs, to

whom pleasure is transport, and disappointment is agony

indescribable’.[60] She might not have appreciated the description,

having rejected sensibility (in its negative sense, valuing the display

of emotion over reason) in the Vindication as a culture that enervated

women. In the Vindication Wollstonecraft argued that sensibility

celebrated the irrational – reinforcing existing stereotypes of women’s

abilities – instead of encouraging women to think for themselves. Yet in

the Letters from Sweden the author offers a new kind of sensibility: the

combination of emotional literacy and critical thought that would come

to mark the literature of the new century.

Godwin regards Wollstonecraft’s sensibility to have been the force

behind her sound moral intuition. Godwin’s sketch of his wife’s

character ties closely with the philosopher’s revised understanding of

ethical decision-making in Political Justice, both that we need to feel

in order to motivate moral actions, and that empathy is fundamental to

doing so. The philosopher began his revisions to Political Justice long

before he became reacquainted with Wollstonecraft in 1796, but in the

Memoir Godwin credits his wife with teaching him the meaning of feeling

and imagination.

We might observe that Godwin’s description of their contrasting but

complementary personalities falls into traditional gender roles – he

thinks, she feels – but the Memoir depicts their relationship as one of

equal respect and partnership. What is clear from the text is how much

the couple shared:

Mary rested her head upon the shoulder of her lover, hoping to find a

heart with which she might safely treasure her world of affection;

fearing to commit a mistake, yet, in spite of her melancholy experience,

fraught with that generous confidence, which, in a great soul, is never

extinguished. I had never loved till now; or, at least, had never

nourished a passion to the same growth, or met with an object so

consummately worthy.[61]

While the philosopher draws attention to the steps both took to preserve

their independence, consistent with Godwin’s views on cohabitation, his

description of their happiness strongly resembles Wollstonecraft’s views

on companionship. In the Vindication Wollstonecraft insists that men and

women are different, but morally and intellectually equal. Godwin would

come to adopt similar, but more problematic views.

The response to Godwin’s biography was hostile, sometimes violently so.

Conservative commentators revelled in what they considered the sordid

details of Wollstonecraft’s life, leaping on the details of her romantic

affairs as evidence of her flagrant immorality. A reactionary satire in

the pages of the Anti-Jacobin magazine insinuated that Godwin had

covered up further ‘crimes’, and slandered her as a traitor and a

prostitute. Less ideological critics affected shock at the candour of

Godwin’s writing. It was conventional to use biography as an apology for

an unconventional life, emphasising deathbed piety and repentance.

Nothing in the Memoir suggests that Godwin saw any need for forgiveness;

the philosopher’s pride in his wife’s achievements is palpable, and his

commentary on her mistakes is not judgmental. The Memoir does not seek

pity, denying readers their traditional prerogative to absolve the

subject’s ‘sins’ as a precursor to acknowledging their contribution. A

work that confounds expectations often alienates readers, and so it was

for Godwin’s biography. The Memoir forced readers to either admire or

condemn its subject, and to admire Wollstonecraft was to reject

society’s expectations regarding sex, marriage and gender. Few had the

courage. Some persons named in the biography threatened Godwin with

legal action, and Johnson hurriedly issued a second edition with names

excised. Godwin took the opportunity to rephrase or add a number of

passages on happiness and companionship, taking him still further away

from the austerity of the earliest Political Justice. Ironically, many

readers took the Memoir’s honesty as evidence of Godwin’s emotional

distance – imagining that some cold-hearted dedication to truth had

outweighed the ‘natural’ impulse to protect Wollstonecraft’s memory. The

abolitionist (and friend of Fuseli) William Roscoe wrote privately in

her honour:

Hard was thy fate in all the scenes of life,

As daughter, sister, parent, friend and wife

But harder still in death thy fate we own,

Mourn’d by thy Godwin – with a heart of stone.[62]

Attacks on Godwin himself began to mount, and not simply as a result of

the Memoir. He was caricatured in fiction: a slew of reactionary novels

featured unfeeling philosophers as either villains or foils.[63]

Gillray’s cartoons placed him among a rogue’s gallery of Jacobin

grotesques (his 1798 tableau ‘New Morality’ has a braying ass reading

from Political Justice; he appeared again in 1800’s ‘The Apples and the

Horse-Turds’). Magazines and newspapers satirised him in verse. A

handful of conservative thinkers attempted to engage with and combat

Godwin’s ideas. In June 1798 Johnson published a short (initially

anonymous) work on population growth by a Surrey clergyman called Thomas

Robert Malthus. An Essay on the Principle of Population argued that

unchecked populations grew geometrically (doubling every generation) but

food production could only grow arithmetically – a slow increase that

was quickly outstripped by the number of mouths it needed to feed.

Malthus theorised that famine and disease were natural checks that

prevented significant overpopulation; the misery suffered by the poor in

times of want was unavoidable, he claimed, because attempts to alleviate

it only created the conditions for more serious crises in the future.

Malthus argued that Poor Relief caused inflation, making everyone

poorer, and that the multiplication of poor families inevitably led to

mass starvation in times of bad harvest. Much of the latter part of the

Essay was written in reply to Political Justice (and to a lesser extent,

The Enquirer). Malthus’s address to Godwin is collegial and flattering,

calling the philosopher’s system of equality, ‘by far the most beautiful

and engaging of any that has yet appeared’.[64] Yet Malthus airily

rejects the majority of Godwin’s thesis, arguing that poverty and misery

are essentially natural phenomena rather than the product of social

inequality. He considers Godwin’s enlightened future to be dangerously

naïve: the abolition of marriage would lead to rampant promiscuity and

uncontrolled population growth; the equalisation of property would only

demonstrate that there was insufficient usable land to support the

population in equal levels of comfort. Central to Malthus’s argument is

the assumption that a fair and just society would fail catastrophically

without the checks that present (unjust) society provides.

Godwin read the Essay with great interest and met its author at a dinner

party held by Johnson a week later. Malthus and Godwin seem to have

found much to discuss – they met again for breakfast the next day, and

exchanged letters in the following week. The correspondence serves as a

reminder as to how little empirical data existed on the subject at the

time: Godwin believes the population to be falling, Malthus claims that

it is increasing, but both base their assertions on (inaccurate)

information gathered by Richard Price over a decade earlier. Both men

would return to the debate many times over the subsequent years. Malthus

revised and expanded the Essay five times over the next thirty years,

each time adding more data to support his theory. The second edition

(1803) shows signs of Godwin’s influence, arguing that it might be

possible to actively manage the birth rate through ‘moral restraint’

(recalling Political Justice’s speculation that people might simply

choose not to procreate if they saw no need), and their interactions

remained cordial for many years. Malthus was, however, fundamentally

conservative. He wrote to Godwin that:

Figure 2 James Gillray’s cartoon, ‘New morality; – or – the promis’d

installment of the high-priest of the Theophilanthropes, with the homage

of Leviathan and his suite’ (1798). The print depicts a host of radical

celebrities of the period – the phrygian caps are a symbol of their

supposed adherence to French revolutionary ideas.

(National Portrait Gallery, London)

I only approve of the present form of society, because I cannot myself,

according to the laws of just theory, see any other form, that can,

consistent with individual freedom, equally promote cultivation and

population. Great improvements may take place in the state of society,

but I do not see how the present form, or system, can be radically &

essentially changed, without a danger of relapsing again into

barbarism.[65]

Their disagreement was equally fundamental. Malthus saw human beings as

short-sighted and selfish creatures who ran out of control without

forces (natural or man-made) to guide them. Godwin never wavered in his

belief that humanity could better itself through reason and compassion.

Less cordial were Godwin’s letters to James Mackintosh a few months

later. Mackintosh had been a prominent radical, author of one of the

best known replies to Burke, the pamphlet Vindicae Gallicae (1791). A

lawyer, in early 1799 he was scheduled to give a series of lectures at

Lincoln’s Inn on ‘the Law of Nature and Nations’ and sent the

preliminary Discourse to Godwin. The philosopher was horrified. Godwin

was probably aware that Mackintosh had gradually walked back from the

hotly pro-revolutionary position he had occupied a few years earlier but

the vehemence of Mackintosh’s attack on radical culture in the Discourse

left him reeling. In their correspondence, Mackintosh claimed that he

was critical of doctrines, not people, yet (without naming names) the

Discourse excoriates ‘promulgators of absurd and monstrous systems’ and

‘sophists swelled with insolent conceit’.[66] Godwin demanded to know

exactly who the lawyer meant by this, suspecting that Mackintosh’s

invective was aimed at him personally. The lawyer denied that Godwin was

his target, reiterating his friendship and respect over several letters,

but also implying that he saw the whole affair as an intellectual

sparring match:

With respect to you personally I could never mean to say anything unkind

or disrespectful – I had always highly esteemed both your acuteness &

benevolence. – You published opinions which you believed to be true &

most Salutary but which I had from the first thought mistakes of a most

dangerous tendency. – You did your duty in making public your opinions.

I do mine by attempting to refute them …[67]

Godwin took the matter personally. He did not criticise Mackintosh for

his apostasy, he respected the right to change one’s mind, but he was

obviously hurt by the abusiveness of the lawyer’s rhetoric.

Nevertheless, Godwin attended some of the lectures in person. The

philosopher felt increasingly isolated. He fell out with Basil Montagu,

amidst rumours that the younger man had joined the chorus of Godwin’s

critics (a charge Montagu only evasively denied). Holcroft took his

family to the continent in July 1799, in a bid to escape the reactionary

press, and would not return for three years. A letter to an unknown

friend reveals Godwin’s state of mind:

I am on the point of losing Holcroft, whom I am not at all inclined to

compare with you; if I lose you too, I shall have no instructor, no

adviser, no pilot, but, trusted to my own devices, shall be left to make

every day blunders as egregious as I am told I made in the publication

of the Memoirs, where I consulted neither.[68]

Around the same time that Holcroft left, the husband of Godwin’s friend

of some years Maria Reveley died suddenly. Reveley was a highly

accomplished and intelligent woman, one of the few to ever impress

Godwin’s peer Jeremy Bentham (her late husband had designed Bentham’s

panopticon) and later a close friend of Godwin’s daughter Mary. She and

Godwin had a complicated relationship; Godwin believed that she was in

love with him. He proposed marriage within a month of her husband’s

death, but his series of agonised letters (two in July, another in

August, and a last-ditch attempt in November) had no effect.

Figure 3 John Opie’s 1797 portrait of Wollstonecraft watched over Godwin

as he worked at the Polygon, and later at Skinner Street.

Throughout all this, Godwin continued to write. No longer needing a

separate working space, he hung a portrait of Wollstonecraft above his

desk in the study of the home they had rented together at the Polygon.

His next project was another novel, a work of historical fantasy that

explores ideas about family and responsibility. It took almost two years

of his life: he put pen to paper a month after finishing the Memoir (on

31 December, 1797) and finished at the end of November 1799. St Leon: A

Tale of the Sixteenth Century is by far Godwin’s longest novel. No doubt

drained by the upheavals within his circle of friends, the philosopher

found the work an exhausting undertaking. He wrote to George Robinson

(the publisher) in September 1799 to explain his delays saying that he

‘might have completed it three times over by this time, had I been less

scrupulous’. [69] Famously, when asked by Byron years later why he did

not write another novel, Godwin replied that the effort would kill him.

‘“And what matter,” said Lord Byron; “we should have another St

Leon.”’[70]

The novel is perhaps best known for its preface. Much like the

introductions to his other fictional works, Godwin comments on some of

the sources that inspired him, and makes the customary author’s apology

to the reader who does not find the work to their taste. In the preface

to St Leon, however, the apology touches on Godwin’s philosophical

works:

Some readers of my graver productions will perhaps, in perusing these

little volumes, accuse me of inconsistency; the affections and charities

of private life being every where in this publication a topic of the

warmest eulogium, while in the Enquiry concerning Political Justice they

seemed to be treated with no great degree of indulgence and favour. In

answer to this objection, all I think it necessary to say on the present

occasion is, that, for more than four years, I have been anxious for

opportunity and leisure to modify some of the earlier chapters of that

work in conformity to the sentiments inculcated in this. Not that I see

cause to make any change respecting the principle of justice, or any

thing else fundamental to the system there delivered; but that I

apprehend domestic and private affections inseparable from the nature of

man, and from what may be styled the culture of the heart, and am fully

persuaded that they are not incompatible with a profound and active

sense of justice…

To philosophers who had kept up with Godwin’s work, this was only really

a strengthening of the language used in the revised Political Justice

and The Enquirer. Casual readers were somewhat more surprised. The novel

won unlikely plaudits from the Anti-Jacobin Review, who commended

Godwin’s change of heart (it did not save the philosopher from a parody

novel – St Godwin – that made a mocking apology for the absurdity of his

doctrines).

The titular St Leon is entrusted with the Philosopher’s Stone by a

mysterious traveller, on the condition that he keep its existence a

secret even from his wife and children. The stone grants its user

unlimited wealth and eternal youth, but the protagonist resolves to use

its power for philanthropy rather than merely gain. St Leon’s wealth

brings him suspicion and harassment wherever he goes, however, and the

secret alienates him from his family. The novel’s major themes are all

ideas that were likely at the forefront of Godwin’s mind at the end of

the decade: St Leon’s wife, Marguerite de Damville, is commonly taken as

a portrait of Wollstonecraft (Holcroft certainly thought so) but the

saintly Marguerite resembles Wollstonecraft only insomuch as Godwin

aimed to depict them both as exemplary women. Marguerite’s wisdom and

patience temper St Leon’s passion and recklessness, much as the

philosopher contrasts Wollstonecraft’s intuition with his own judgment,

but direct parallels between them are few. Nevertheless, companionship

and affection are explored throughout the novel with a complexity that

defies any attempt to read the text as a straightforward celebration of

the family. The novel also alludes to Godwin’s persecution by the

state-sponsored reactionary movement. For all his faults, St Leon

attempts to do good for humanity – yet his actions are misconstrued and

his motives questioned. Like the defendants of 1794, the protagonist is

imprisoned for hypothetical crimes (he cannot have arrived at his money

honestly, therefore he must be locked up while the crime is uncovered)

and his home in Italy is destroyed in an attack that deliberately

recalls the Priestley Riots of 1792. As a mob burns the family’s villa,

St Leon’s friend the Marchese exclaims:

… no innocence, and no merit, could defend a man from the unrelenting

antipathy of his fellows. He saw that there was a principle in the human

mind destined to be eternally at war with improvement and science. No

sooner did a man devote himself to the pursuit of discoveries which, if

ascertained, would prove the highest benefit to his species, than his

whole species became armed against him. … He saw, in the transactions of

that night, a pledge of the eternal triumph of ignorance over

wisdom.[71]

The philosopher himself was not so pessimistic.

6. The Educator (1800–09)

Godwin was not entirely bound to his desk in the two years he devoted to

St Leon. In 1798 he spent a few weeks in Bath, then the great tourist

resort (and marriage market) of middle- and upper-class England. He

attracted the attention of fellow novelist Harriet Lee; after Godwin

returned home the two enjoyed weeks of philosophical correspondence.

Godwin proposed marriage, but Lee congenially rejected him, citing the

differences in their religious beliefs (Lee was a pious member of the

Church of England) and Godwin’s status as a controversial figure.

Ironically, Godwin would soon have cause to revise his thoughts on

religion in the light of a new friendship.

The philosopher had first met Samuel Taylor Coleridge at a dinner held

by Holcroft in 1794. Coleridge had not been impressed, telling Thelwall

that Godwin ‘talked futile sophisms in jejune language’ and attacking

Political Justice in his philosophical lectures.[72] Coleridge wrote

many years later that he had only half-understood Godwin’s work at the

time, and that the fervour of his criticism had been more about his own

ignorance than anything found in Godwin’s ideas.[73] The two met again

at the end of 1799 while Godwin was on an extended trip through the Home

Counties visiting, among others, Charles James Fox and Sir Francis

Burdett. Their reacquaintance was evidently successful for, when Godwin

returned to London, Coleridge called at the Polygon (or otherwise

engaged him) regularly until Coleridge left London in April 1800.

Coleridge had gravitated from an orthodox Anglican upbringing to

Unitarianism in his early twenties, in part influenced by the scholar

William Frend.[74] Their discussions prompted Godwin to re-examine his

own beliefs:

I ceased to regard the name of Atheist with the same complacency I had

done for several preceding years, at the same time retaining the utmost

repugnance of understanding for the idea of an intelligent Creator and

Governor of the universe, which strikes my mind as the most irrational

and ridiculous anthropomorphism. My theism, if such I may be permitted

to call it, consists in a reverent and soothing contemplation of all

that is beautiful, grand, or mysterious in the system of the universe

…[75]

Unitarianism, at its core, is a theological movement that denies the

mainstream Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity – something that

remained an offence under English law until 1810. Unitarians consider

Jesus to have been a great prophet, but not God Incarnate. Many

Unitarians also reject ideas such as original sin or eternal damnation,

concepts that Godwin was himself critical of. The position that Godwin

describes in his thoughts above suggests a form of Pantheism, the belief

that divinity is found in all things, though the philosopher’s

discussion of this in the unfinished Genius of Christianity Unveiled

(written around 1835) describes a broader, only semi-religious, awe for

nature in its totality. Godwin sees nature as a system of mutually

supporting life underpinned by physical laws, something worthy of

admiration but beyond our ability to fully understand. We can (and

should) observe and record the operations of nature to better understand

them, but the origins of the universe are beyond human comprehension.

Godwin obviously rejects the idea of an intelligent creator, and

possibly the idea of spirit or divinity more generally, but neither is

he purely a materialist. The philosopher was gradually moving towards

this position from his first acquaintance with Coleridge to his final

years, as hinted in his subsequent writing on Greek myth (The Pantheon,

1806) and his unpublished essay ‘Of Religion’ (1818).

Coleridge’s own religious views would change further over the years,

abandoning Unitarianism around 1805 in favour of an increasingly

complicated (but theoretically Trinitarian) theology influenced by

Spinoza, Schelling and Kant. Godwin found Coleridge’s conversation

fascinating, and tolerated the younger man’s high-handedness and

inconsistency in return for their many discussions of philosophy,

religion and language. Godwin considered Coleridge the last of his four

‘oral instructors’ alongside Fawcett, Holcroft and George Dyson.

Coleridge introduced Godwin to Charles Lamb, then a young clerk for the

East India Company and occasional poet, but eventually to become one of

the most highly regarded essayists of the period. Like Coleridge, Lamb

was quickly converted from a critic of Godwin to a friend, writing to

another recent acquaintance, Thomas Manning that Godwin was ‘a

well-behaved decent man’:

… nothing very brilliant about him or imposing as you might suppose;

quite another Guess sort of Gentleman from what your Anti Jacobins

Christians imagine him–. I was well pleased to find he has neither horns

nor claws, quite a tame creature I assure you.[76]

Lamb had strong Unitarian sympathies, and some of his writing before

meeting Godwin suggests that, like many, Lamb thought that Political

Justice had put reason in God’s place.[77] There is a certain truth to

this, as the first edition discusses reasoning and truth in the same

language that Godwin’s Dissenting forbears might have used to describe

faith and revelation. Perhaps expecting a de-Christianising Robespierre,

Lamb seems to have been disarmed by Godwin’s placidity and dry humour:

Lamb and his friend Charles Lloyd had been grotesqued in Gillray’s ‘New

Morality’ cartoon alongside Godwin; when Lamb grew argumentative at

their first meeting, Godwin quietly asked him if he was the toad or the

frog. Lamb’s answer is not recorded, but since he and Godwin met again

for breakfast the next day, he might have been amused.[78]

Godwin’s third major new friend in these years was William Hazlitt.

Hazlitt was over twenty years Godwin’s junior but the two had much in

common – both the sons of Dissenting ministers (Hazlitt’s father had

preached at Wisbech after the Godwins had left in 1758), who were

educated at Dissenting Academies (by Andrew Kippis), but who ultimately

rejected Christianity in adult life. Hazlitt first met Godwin as a

student in 1794, probably through Holcroft, but the two began to meet

regularly when Hazlitt returned to London in early 1799. Though Hazlitt

was, at this time, training to become a painter under the tutelage of

his elder brother, he harboured the ambition to write. He would develop

into a formidable essayist and critic, and it was with Godwin’s help

that he would publish his first major work (An Essay on the Principles

of Human Action) in 1805.

All three of Godwin’s new friends seethed protectively at Mackintosh’s

lectures. Lamb called the lawyer Judas, though noted that at least the

Biblical betrayer had been decent enough to hang himself.[79] Perhaps

Mackintosh had felt some remorse: he had, after all, sent Godwin advance

warning of his assault and was quick to insist that he meant the

philosopher no ill will. Samuel Parr’s very public defection in April

1800 was another matter entirely.

Parr had, as an Anglican minister renowned for his learning, been asked

to give an Easter sermon before the Lord Mayor of London and the

governors of the Royal Hospital. Like Mackintosh, Parr took the

opportunity to denounce the ‘New Philosophy’ and laud the status quo.

The idea of ‘universal philanthropy’ was dangerous, Parr argued, as it

steered the efforts of virtuous people away from helping those closest

to them. ‘The community of mankind’, Parr said, was a ‘rhetorical

ornament’ and, while it was moral to help those in need regardless of

differences in culture or religion, it required too great an effort for

all but the most virtuous.[80] Parr argued that Christianity did not

confuse compassion with justice – the proper object of our benevolence

is the people that love us. Philanthropy, Parr implies, is best left to

those who have the means to help the least fortunate without diluting

what they provided to their nearest and dearest (i.e. men such as his

audience).

Godwin heard about the sermon second-hand and went in search of an

explanation. He called on 19 April, but Parr excused himself by saying

he was on his way out. When Godwin tried to call again on the 24^(th),

he was told that Parr was not in London. The philosopher wrote a proud

but wounded letter requesting some justification for Parr’s attack. Parr

had not replied to his letter about Mackintosh some months earlier, nor

to the copy of St Leon that Godwin had sent after it:

If however both my letter & my visits would have passed unnoticed, I am

entitled to conclude that you have altered your mind respecting me. In

that case, I should be glad you would answer to your own satisfaction,

what crime I am chargeable with, now in 1800, of which I had not been

guilty in 1794, when with so much kindness & zeal you sought my

acquaintance.[81]

Parr wrote a substantial answer a few days later. The letter praised

Mackintosh’s high character and called Godwin’s complaints offensive (he

claimed to have lost the philosopher’s earlier letter). He denied that

he had ever sought Godwin’s company, referring to his former politeness

as merely a dutiful respect to the philosopher’s intellect (this was

disingenuous; Parr said in a letter of September 1794 that he was

‘ambitious of [Godwin’s] friendship’).[82] He claimed to have read only

the preface of St Leon, and felt no curiosity to proceed further. Parr

wrote that he had been displeased by The Enquirer’s comments on

religion, shocked by the Memoir, and claimed that Godwin’s philosophy

had been a pernicious influence on the character of ‘two or three young

men, whose talents I esteemed, and whose virtues I loved’.[83] The

letter was clear that Parr did not wish to hear from the philosopher

again. The philosopher began a reply regardless, but does not appear to

have finished it. Godwin wrote that he felt ‘the most pungent grief in

witnessing your disgrace; but since it must be so, I am well satisfied

to possess this evidence …’[84] Parr returned his copy of St Leon in

October, with a formal – third-person – note that sought to imply that

he had not read it, though his family had. The matter might have ended

there, much as it had with Mackintosh, but Parr published his sermon in

early 1801 – including extensive notes (some five times the length of

the sermon itself) that quoted Godwin repeatedly and made it explicit

that the philosopher was the target of Parr’s criticism. The notes

reproduced a lengthy section of the preface to St Leon, commending

Godwin’s ‘maturer reflection’ and ‘contrition’ but declaring that this

concession (Parr magnanimously refuses to call it such) undermines the

entirety of Godwin’s concept of justice.[85]

Godwin hit back with his own pamphlet a few months later. The Reply to

Parr began with the complaint that its author had endured a torrent ‘of

ribaldry, invective and intolerance’ since the popular climate had

turned against the French Revolution and the cause of freedom.[86]

Stressing how widely Political Justice was praised upon its first

publication, Godwin asserts that the floodgates opened in mid-1797 – a

trickle of ‘two little skirmishing pamphlets’ quickly becoming a flood

of ‘scurrilities’ and ‘vulgar contumelies’ in the anti-Jacobin press,

with Parr’s sermon bringing up the rear.[87] The philosopher names many

of the writers and works he feels have wronged him but specifically

exempts Malthus and the Essay for what Godwin saw as that work’s

respectable, collegial spirit. The philosopher insists that he had done

nothing more than advance peaceful ideas with intellectual humility:

I wrote my Enquiry Concerning Political Justice in the innocence of my

heart. I sought no overt effects; I abhorred all tumult; I entered my

protest against revolutions. Every impartial person who knows me, or has

attentively considered my writings, will acknowledge that it is the

fault of my character, rather to be too sceptical, than to incline too

much to play the dogmatist. I was by no means assured of the truth of my

own system. I wrote indeed with ardour; but I published with diffidence.

I knew that my speculations had led me out of the beaten track; and I

waited to be instructed by the comment of others as to the degree of

value which should be stamped upon them. That comment in the first

instance was highly flattering; yet I was not satisfied. I did not cease

to revise, to reconsider, or to enquire.[88]

Godwin (quite reasonably) felt that his ideas had been misrepresented.

He accused Mackintosh of calling him bloodthirsty and alleged that the

lawyer had avoided naming him only to sidestep the boundaries of decency

in his abuse. Of Parr, the philosopher is scathing: there is a rare note

of contempt in how Godwin describes the tardiness of Parr’s attack (‘he

has condescended to join a cry, after it had already become loud and

numerous’).[89] The rest of essay seeks to clarify and defend Political

Justice, beginning with the philosopher’s revised position on the

domestic affections. Following Parr, Godwin quotes from the preface to

St Leon (‘though, from some cause, he [Parr] has not specified the book

from which the quotation is taken’).[90] The philosopher sees no reason

why acknowledging the value of domestic affection should in any way

jeopardise the rest of his treatise – if it is our duty to create as

much good as we can, then doing good for those closest to us is

frequently the most effective use of our time. Godwin argues that most

of the actual differences between his position and Parr’s are matters of

emphasis: both agree that domestic benevolence is easy and universal

benevolence is hard, but while Parr holds the position that benevolence

outside our immediate circle should not be entered into without

prudence, Godwin argues that it is domestic benevolence that stands in

need of regulation (essentially, that we should not spoil our families

while others stand in need). The philosopher goes on to clarify his use

of the term ‘perfectibility’, ‘what I would now wish to call, changing

the term, without changing a particle of the meaning, the progressive

nature of man, in knowledge, in virtuous propensities, and in social

institutions’.[91] What follows is Godwin’s most pointed statement about

his own optimism. Normally conciliatory in reference to principled

conservatism (he refers to it in The Enquirer as a reluctance to gamble

existing achievements for new ones), the philosopher recognises in his

opponents an irreconcilable difference in their understanding of basic

human nature:

I know that Dr Parr and Mr Mackintosh look with horror upon this

doctrine of the progressive nature of man. They cling with all the

fervours of affection, to the opinion that vices, the weaknesses and the

follies which have hitherto existed in our species, will continue

undiminished as long as the earth shall endure. I do not envy them their

feelings. I love to contemplate the yet unexpanded powers and

capabilities of our nature, and to believe that they will one day be

unfolded to the infinite advantage and happiness of the inhabitants of

the globe. Long habit has so trained me to bow to the manifestations of

truth wherever I recognize them, that, if arguments were presented to me

sufficient to establish the uncomfortable doctrine of my antagonists, I

would weigh, I would revolve them, and I hope I should not fail to

submit to their authority. But, if my own doctrine is an error, and if I

am fated to die in it, I cannot afflict myself greatly with the

apprehension of a mistake, which cheers my solitude, which I carry with

me into crowds, and which adds somewhat to the pleasure and peace of

every day of my existence.[92]

The Reply continues this theme in response to Malthus, observing that

the economist’s conclusions (that inequality and suffering are

inevitable consequences of population growth) are easily turned to

conservative ends; indeed, ‘the advocates of old establishments and old

abuses’ – Godwin uses this phrase to describe Parr elsewhere in the

essay – ‘could not have found a doctrine, more to their hearts content,

more effectual to shut out all reform and improvement for ever’.[93] Yet

Godwin’s answer to Malthus was good-natured, suggesting that their

conversations in person had convinced him that they were colleagues in

solving the problem of population rather than scholarly rivals. Godwin

declared himself to be in agreement with the economist’s central theory

(that population multiplied until checked by the limits of subsistence)

but argued that its conclusions could be overcome – implicitly that the

gradual improvement of private judgment included the consideration of

sustainable population growth. Unwisely, Godwin discussed how societies

had historically taken steps to actively curb population growth,

principally through exposing unwanted babies to the elements. Though the

philosopher had only described (not advocated) such practices, his usual

detractors leapt upon this as further evidence of his monstrous,

Spartan, logic and Godwin felt the need to send an appalled letter to

the Monthly Magazine to protest his misrepresentation.[94]

The Reply to Parr is learned, passionate and, at times, waspishly

amusing. Responses were mixed, though many concurred that Godwin had

been treated poorly by his critics. The reactionary press was

undeterred, the British Critic asserting that the philosopher had got

off lightly (as such controversial opinions would have seen him

guillotined in France). The pamphlet definitely made an impact with

Malthus, however. The economist called on Godwin when he was next in

London a few months later. The second edition of the Essay on Population

features a short chapter responding to Godwin’s comments in the Reply,

agreeing that it was possible for individuals to reason themselves out

of procreating (carrying out a moral duty to not increase the population

unsustainably) but declaring that ‘Mr. Godwin’s system of political

justice’ was not conducive to its wide adoption.[95]

In the midst of all these controversies Godwin continued to write. In

concert with the ever-lengthening St Leon, Godwin had been working on

another play. In one respect, the theatre represented the opportunity to

make money – a successful play offered a source of continual revenue

rather than a one-off payment (as he would usually earn for a novel). In

another, perhaps more important, fashion the stage offered a wider

audience for Godwin’s ideas. Caleb Williams (by far the philosopher’s

greatest success) was by this time on its third edition in five years,

and had no doubt reached many thousands of readers, but London’s two

patent theatres (Drury Lane and Covent Garden) sold in excess of 10,000

tickets a week between them.[96] A play could reach a wider spectrum of

society than a novel, too, from the servants and sailors in the upper

gallery to the fashionable ladies and gentlemen in the boxes – new

novels were (relatively) expensive, and many avid readers relied on

subscription libraries to feed their interests.[97]

Godwin’s new play had been through several titles and, since finishing

the initial draft, had been passed through several friends in search of

feedback. Holcroft had read the play before departing for Europe, with

Godwin providing a set of guidelines for how his friend might phrase his

usual punishing criticism (Holcroft ignored it). Godwin read Coleridge’s

verse tragedy Osorio, which bore a number of similarities to his own

play. Sheridan, who owned Drury Lane, had offered to stage Godwin’s

piece after an early glance at the manuscript in April 1799, but nothing

initially came of this. Godwin tried again, submitting it anonymously to

George Colman at the Haymarket Theatre (who had adapted Caleb Williams

for the stage as The Iron Chest, without the philosopher’s input) only

to have it rejected. Godwin spent the summer of 1800 in Ireland as the

guest of the Irish MP John Philpot Curran, where he was able to meet

Wollstonecraft’s onetime pupil, Lady Mountcashell. On his return he

tried Sheridan again, who passed him on to the great actor-manager of

the Theatre Royal, John Phillip Kemble, who accepted the play – but

quickly learned to regret it.

Antonio, or The Soldier’s Return is a verse tragedy that draws on

Elizabethan and Jacobean styles of drama. The titular protagonist

returns home from the wars to find that his sister has married against

his wishes, jilting his brave friend to whom she was betrothed. He

kidnaps her in a bid to salvage what he perceives as his family’s honour

but is foiled by his sister’s husband. The play concludes with Antonio

murdering his sister rather than allowing her to remain married. At a

time when the most successful plays leaned heavily on spectacle

(parades, costumes, action), Godwin’s piece relies on its poetry to make

the drama. The play seems constructed to make the audience listen and

think – as in any proper tragedy, each character has their own valid

complaints against the others, and the play does its best not to

distract from those arguments being heard. Antonio reflects Godwin’s

concerns about debate and rhetoric: each character is allowed to make

their case, and their opponents a rebuttal, the play does not permit any

one actor to sweep the audience along with them and dictate how the

story will be received. For all this seems intellectually sound, it

makes terrible theatre.

Kemble had reservations almost immediately but pestering from Godwin,

and implicit orders from Sheridan, persuaded Kemble both to produce and

take the lead role. The famous Sarah Siddons (who had been one of those

who dropped Wollstonecraft after her marriage to Godwin) played

Antonio’s sister, Helena. Afraid that the play would receive brickbats

just for having his name attached to it, Godwin asked the playwright

John Tobin to pose as the author. The philosopher was gratingly

confident, soliciting advice on what his share of the profits should be

and planning out how he would spend the money (on more books, according

to Lamb). Kemble twisted in an attempt to get out of the part, but to no

avail. The play’s sole performance (on 13 December 1800) was a disaster,

the night captured memorably in a later essay by Lamb:

Great expectations were formed. A philosopher’s first new play was a new

era. The night arrived. I was favoured with a seat in an advantageous

box, between the author and his friend M—. G. sate cheerful and

confident. In his friend M.’s looks, who had perused the manuscript, I

read some terror. Antonio in the person of John Philip Kemble at length

appeared, starched out in a ruff which no one could dispute, and in most

irreproachable mustachios. John always dressed most provokingly correct

on these occasions. The first act swept by, solemn and silent. It went

off, as G. assured M., exactly as the opening act of a piece – the

protasis – should do. The cue of the spectators was to be mute. … The

second act (as in duty bound) rose a little in interest; but still John

kept his forces under – in policy, as G. would have it – and the

audience were most complacently attentive. The protasis, in fact, was

scarcely unfolded. The interest would warm in the next act, against

which a special incident was provided. M. wiped his cheek, flushed with

a friendly perspiration – ’tis M.’s way of showing his zeal – ‘from

every pore of him a perfume falls –’. I honour it above Alexander’s. He

had once or twice during this act joined his palms in a feeble endeavour

to elicit a sound – they emitted a solitary noise without an echo –

there was no deep to answer to his deep. G. repeatedly begged him to be

quiet. … A challenge was held forth upon the stage, and there was

promise of a fight. The pit roused themselves on this extraordinary

occasion, and, as their manner is, seemed disposed to make a ring, –

when suddenly Antonio, who was the challenged, turning the tables on the

hot challenger, Don Gusman (who by the way should have had his sister)

baulks his humour, and the pit’s reasonable expectation at the same

time, with some speeches out of the new philosophy against duelling. The

audience were here fairly caught – their courage was up, and on the

alert – a few blows, ding dong, as R—s the dramatist afterwards

expressed it to me, might have done the business – when their most

exquisite moral sense was suddenly called in to assist in the mortifying

negation of their own pleasure. They could not applaud, for

disappointment; they would not condemn, for morality’s sake. The

interest stood stone still; and John’s manner was not at all calculated

to unpetrify it. It was Christmas time, and the atmosphere furnished

some pretext for asthmatic affections. One began to cough – his

neighbour sympathised with him – till a cough became epidemical.[98]

Reviews were universally negative. The London Chronicle, attempting some

consolation, suggested that it would make a reasonable closet drama

(i.e. a play to be read, not performed). Godwin enlisted Lamb’s help in

revising the play once more and published it on 23 December. The reviews

were no better. The philosopher was not discouraged. At the suggestion

of Coleridge, he quickly began work on a new tragedy, Abbas, King of

Persia. He finished the first draft by April 1801 and sent the

manuscript off to his friend in the Lake District. Coleridge dragged his

feet in replying. He eventually confessed that his first round of

criticism had been irreverent and hurtful, and wrote that he had held

off returning the play to Godwin until he had revised his observations.

The notes Coleridge eventually dispatched were still far from gentle,

recommending an extensive rewrite and identifying every point in the

play the poet considered clichéd, flat, or vulgar. Godwin took his

friend’s criticism seriously, returning to the play directly and

continuing to revise the play even after he had submitted it to Thomas

Harris at Covent Garden at the end of August. This proved unsuccessful

and the play was submitted anonymously to Drury Lane for consideration

in September. Abbas shows Godwin making certain concessions to the

theatre arts: the play makes use of spectacle, but also criticises it.

From his letters to Coleridge it is clear that the use of such

techniques troubled him, that he feared pandering to the audience’s

expectations would damage the play as a literary creation. The play was

potentially controversial, using the Sunni/Shi’a schism to discuss

religious conflict in a way that had obvious implications for

Protestant/Catholic strife in Ireland. In other aspects, the play

reflected the longstanding political conflict between the King (a

steadfast conservative) and the Prince of Wales (no radical, but an ally

of Fox and Sheridan). Sadly for Godwin, his concerns were academic:

Abbas was quickly rejected by both Covent Garden and Drury Lane. He

complained to Kemble. Over-stepping the mark in his assessment of his

own talent as a dramatist (‘I think it scarcely fair that I should come

before them as an unknown novice…’), he received a brusque reply. Godwin

attempted to badger Kemble into accepting the play, begging for his

input on how to improve it. He wrote to Sheridan in the hope that the MP

would lean on his employee. It had no obvious effect. Kemble’s replies

were irate rather than hostile, but his rejection was emphatic,

repeating several times that he would reappraise the work if it was

revised, but not until then. This at least gave Godwin pause, and he

would not return to dramatic writing until a few years had passed; after

the first draft of Abbas he turned to writing the Reply to Parr. Also in

the offing was a proposed biography of Chaucer, but he was unable to

attend to that seriously until the end of the year. Events that year

would lead to a change in the philosopher’s living arrangements,

however, and a new focus for his ideas.

Godwin’s diary records ‘Meet Mrs Clairmont’ on 5 May 1801. Mary Jane

Clairmont was a neighbour at the Polygon with children of a similar age

to Godwin’s own. He visited her often, sometimes with the children and

sometimes without. The diary implies that they became lovers in July (it

reads ‘tea Clairmonts X’) but kept matters confidential. Much of what we

know about Mary Jane is second hand. She did not write daily notes to

Godwin, as Wollstonecraft had, and some of the letters she did write to

him are lost. Although an author in her own right, none of her works

have the vibrantly personal touch that we see in the rest of the

family’s writing. She kept her past private. She spent some of her

childhood in France and fled to Spain during the revolution. She told

her children that their father had been a Swiss merchant known as Karl

Gaulis (which he later Anglicised to ‘Clairmont’) who had died in

Hamburg in 1798. Twentieth century research casts some doubt on this –

Gaulis appears to have died in Silesia in 1796, making it unlikely that

he was the father of Mary’s daughter Jane (born April 1798). In 2011,

genealogist Vicki Parslow Stafford was able to identify that Jane was

the illegitimate daughter of Sir John Lethbridge (a West Country

landowner), who provided occasional financial support for his daughter

until 1814.[99] Godwin knew she was not a widow, as she claimed to

others (she had been born Mary Vial, and the couple were married under

that name in 1802).[100] Many of the stories about their courtship are

apocryphal, dating from after the death of both, but legend has it that

Clairmont was the hunter: she flattered the philosopher extravagantly

and engineered opportunities for him to overhear her pining for him.

Godwin’s vanity and Clairmont’s later reputation for dishonesty give

credence to the stories, but our portrait of Clairmont owes much to

unflattering sources – Lamb found their affair ridiculous (he wrote in

September 1801, ‘the Professor is grown quite juvenile’) and rarely

missed the opportunity to mock her in his letters. Her soon-to-be

stepdaughter, the future Mary Shelley, would come to hate her.

In October 1801, Clairmont found herself pregnant with Godwin’s child.

The couple were married on 21 December – twice. Clairmont and Godwin

held a small ceremony in Shoreditch in the morning, with Marshall

(again) as witness, before proceeding to a second wedding in Whitechapel

the same day. The first records the marriage of Mary Clairmont, widow;

the second, Mary Vial, spinster. The exact reason for the second wedding

is unclear, but biographers have speculated that Clairmont sought a

degree of insurance to prevent the marriage being struck down if the

false statement of the first wedding (i.e. that she was a widow) was

ever uncovered. Godwin did not note the second occasion in his diary. It

is unclear as to when the baby was born, the philosopher does not record

it in his diary, but the child (a boy, William) did not survive long:

Godwin marks his death on 4 June. Clairmont was soon pregnant again and,

on 28 March 1803, delivered another baby boy – William Godwin Junior.

The Godwins were now an extensive clan: William, Mary Jane, Fanny (now

nine), Mary Jane’s son Charles (seven), Mary (five), Jane (later called

Claire, then aged four) and newborn William Junior.

The greatly expanded family was desperately short of money. The failure

of Antonio had already driven Godwin to write what he openly called

‘begging letters’ to his richer friends.[101] He was finding it harder

to find work. Godwin’s regular publisher George Robinson died in 1801.

Clairmont spoke excellent French and German and turned this into

translation work, while preparing children’s books for the publisher

Benjamin Tabart. Inspired by Thomas Tyrwhitt’s 1798 edition of the

Canterbury Tales, Godwin proposed a biography of Chaucer to the

up-andcoming publisher Richard Phillips. Phillips offered a contract

within days, perhaps thanks to an antiquarian interest of his own

(Phillips accompanied Godwin on a trip to visit the ‘Chaucer house’ at

Woodstock; the philosopher wrote to Clairmont of how dull the publisher

was on his own).[102]

More than simply a biography, the Life of Chaucer is a wide-ranging

cultural history of fourteenth-century England. The philosopher

researched deeply, with ‘almost daily attendance at the British Museum’

and venturing out of London to consult records in the Bodleian Library

and the Chaucer manuscripts held at Gonville and Caius College,

Cambridge.[103] Godwin sought to explore the world that had made the

poet, and throughout the work stresses the depth of feeling and

sentiment in Chaucer’s character to explain the quality and timelessness

of his poetry. The work contains a close reading of Chaucer’s

lesser-known works, searching for insight into the character of the poet

and placing him in context alongside the other greats of medieval verse.

The philosopher worked on his history doggedly for two whole years. The

Life of Chaucer is a mammoth work, and Godwin’s preface implies that the

philosopher was reined in by his publisher before he considered the book

complete. It is best known for its iconic statement about literature and

truth: commending Chaucer’s decision to abandon the legal profession,

Godwin opined that the sophistry that the law required would sit

uneasily with literary genius.

Above all, the poet, whose judgment should be clear, whose feelings

should be uniform and sound, whose sense should be alive to every

impression and hardened to none, who is the legislator of generations

and the moral instructor of the world, ought never to have been a

practising lawyer, or ought speedily to have quitted so dangerous an

engagement.[104]

The job of the literary artist was to keep a mind open to new

experiences and to grow the imagination. Godwin worked on the Life of

Chaucer alongside Bible Stories for Tabart. The preface of the latter

expands upon the hints expressed in the history – the development of the

imagination is not only the domain of literary genius, but an essential

part of the human mind.

Imagination is the ground-plot upon which the edifice of a sound

morality must be erected. Without imagination we may have a certain cold

and arid circle of principles, but we cannot have sentiments: we may

learn by rote a catalogue of rules, and repeat our lesson with the

exactness of a parrot, or play over our tricks with the docility of a

monkey; but we can neither ourselves love, nor be fitted to excite the

love of others.[105]

Godwin claimed that contemporary children’s books gave nothing to the

soul, perhaps teaching ‘practical’ lessons about the world, or simply

recommending obedience and piety, but not encouraging young people to

think about anything beyond the world immediately around them. The

intellectual and moral improvement of humanity – the central theme of

all Godwin’s philosophical works – requires that people be able to see

beyond ‘things as they are’. Implicit in all of Godwin’s writing is the

sense that a better world must be imagined before it can become

possible. More essentially, however, Godwin argues that we cannot

develop the capacity for critical moral reason without the ability to

imagine what others feel (i.e. empathy or sympathy). Godwin had been

edging towards a theory of how to develop this ever since he published

his Account of the Seminary in 1783. The answer lay in reading.

Continuing the line of thought he had advanced in The Enquirer, Godwin

argued here that reading was vital to allow people the experience of

imagining things that we cannot see, be they the thoughts of other

people or ideas that do not yet exist.

In the spring of 1804, Godwin began work on his third major novel:

Fleetwood; or, the New Man of Feeling. In Fleetwood, the philosopher

took on Rousseau. Fleetwood is a novel about education, but more

precisely it is a novel about the relationships between a learner and

his mentors and how a certain kind of education leaves an individual

ill-equipped to become a mentor themselves. Casimir Fleetwood’s early

education is one of indulgence. As a boy he is allowed to roam freely

and explore the natural world. What formal education Casimir is given

comes from a private tutor whom he finds ridiculous, and no greater

scholarship is expected from him than that which he chooses to put his

mind to. We can easily draw comparisons between this and Emile’s

semi-pastoral education, but Godwin read Rousseau closely – Fleetwood’s

narrative of his own early education is closer to the ‘received’ account

of Rousseau’s system put forward by period commentators. Fleetwood’s

real education comes at the hands of his mentors who, like Rousseau’s

preceptor, provide experiential moral lessons that shape the way he sees

the world. Albeit with the best of intentions, Fleetwood’s mentors

manipulate him emotionally (winning his confidence with illiberal means,

as The Enquirer put it) in order to make him receptive to the teachings

they wish to impart. Fleetwood grows into an adult who knows how to

feel, but not how to reason.

Fleetwood is, in style, a confession narrative. As in Godwin’s other

novels the philosopher uses the first person to convey the protagonist’s

emotional turmoil, here culminating in a bizarre and gothic nervous

breakdown. Indeed, at various points in the novel we see hints of the

philosopher’s sense of the strange or absurd. Where Fleetwood differed

from the philosopher’s previous works was in Godwin’s assertion (in the

preface) that his narrator was a normal man, and that ‘at least one half

of the Englishmen now existing, who are of the same rank of life as my

hero’, had experienced similar.[106] The philosopher goes on to imply

that his protagonist’s ultimate reaction to these mundane events is

exceptional but, predictably, Godwin’s critics took it as an attempt to

defame Englishmen everywhere. The Anti-Jacobin Review descended into an

ugly tirade against the late Wollstonecraft (though it must be said that

Godwin had mischievously named the novel’s only genuine villain after

the magazine’s editor). More seriously, the novel caused a breach with

Holcroft. Out of the blue, he sent a confused letter to Godwin:

I write to inform you that instead of seeing you at dinner tomorrow I

desire to never see you more, being determined never to have any further

intercourse with you of any kind.

T. Holcroft

Feb. 28, 1785.

P.S. I shall behave as becomes an honest and honourable man who

remembers not only what is due to others but himself. There are

indelible injuries that will not endure to be mentioned: such is the one

you have committed on the man who would have died to serve you.[107]

Godwin was mystified and had to ask Clairmont (who had seen Holcroft

that day) what offence he had given. Fleetwood’s Mr Scarborough to some

extent represents the opposite extreme to the protagonist’s Rousseauvian

upbringing: drilling his son relentlessly, and always requiring

perfection, the son falls into a spiral of depression and dies.

Holcroft’s own son had committed suicide in 1789, and he read

Scarborough as an indictment of his parenting. Ironically, the

philosopher had partly based the character on himself. He wrote to

Marshall that Scarborough recalled his own failure as a mentor to Tom

Cooper, and that there was no connection to Holcroft at all (he reported

that he had solicited the opinions of at least twenty others, of whom

none had seen any parallel with Holcroft). Godwin made some effort to

explain matters to his friend, but to no avail. He wrote to Holcroft on

3 March that he would think of him as a dear friend who had died, rather

than remember his abrupt and irrational desertion. They would not speak

as friends for four years.

The critical response to Fleetwood was relatively lukewarm, and sales

did not approach those of Caleb Williams or St Leon (Phillips printed

nearly two thousand copies in his first run – a statement of remarkable

confidence in Godwin’s ‘draw’ as a novelist – but a second printing was

not ordered until the copyright changed hands more than twenty-five

years later). It perhaps became clear that literature was not an

effective method of supporting a large family. Godwin proposed a

comprehensive history of England to Phillips and began work on it

shortly after Fleetwood was published. It was never completed. Though we

are not party to whatever discussions the couple had, Godwin’s

biographers have assumed that it was Clairmont that proposed the family

go into publishing for themselves. Mary Jane had worked on the editorial

side of children’s publishing for some years now, and probably had a

solid understanding of what the business required. Godwin borrowed more

money from the (now dying) Wedgwood, ostensibly to rectify his cash-flow

problems, and rented a house and shop on Hanway Street, allowing them to

retail books directly. Godwin would write, Clairmont would prepare the

work for printing, and an employee by the name of Thomas Hodgkins would

manage the shop. As with Bible Stories, Godwin was concerned that his

name would attract bad press, perhaps dooming the business from the

start. Their initial solution was to establish the venture in Hodgkins’s

name (as the ‘Juvenile Library’), and to publish Godwin’s writing under

a series of pseudonyms. Godwin also approached Lamb to write for them.

Children’s publishing combined Godwin’s financial needs with his

philosophical ones. The market for children’s books was not necessarily

a lucrative one, but it was consistent. Schools placed large orders and

demand was perennial, Godwin could attract investors with projected

returns rather than merely asking his friends for credit. More

importantly, children’s publishing allowed Godwin to put his educational

philosophy into practice. The philosopher could take his ideas to the

next generation of readers. He could even claim that his theories gave

the proposed Juvenile Library a distinctive place in the market – if

other children’s authors were offering mundane stories, he would provide

fantastic ones; where other children’s authors would provide role models

for children, he would encourage them to question who they wanted to be.

The books the Juvenile Library published in its first year exemplified

this. Written under the name ‘Edward Baldwin’, Fables, Ancient and

Modern was Godwin’s adaptation of Aesop – a collection of short tales,

with each offering some lesson about morality or self-knowledge. Where

Godwin’s Fables differed was in the nature of the lesson.

Eighteenth-century versions of Aesop usually featured an explicit

‘moral’; Samuel Croxall’s 1722 Fables of Aesop (which Godwin drew on for

his edition) sometimes adds a moral three or four times as long as the

fable itself. Godwin’s fables offer no explicit moral at all. While the

inference we are supposed to draw from some stories is clear, the

philosopher rarely seeks to dictate it. More often, the philosopher

engages the reader to ask what they might have done in the protagonist’s

position. Most interestingly, Godwin sometimes adjusts the details of

well-known fables so as to open them up for debate. The fable of the

farmer and the viper (in Godwin, ‘The Good-Natured Man and the Adder’)

is supposedly the origin of the phrase ‘to nurse a snake in one’s bosom’

and is commonly given the moral that some individuals are never worthy

of beneficence, or that it is in the nature of some to always do harm.

Croxall criticises the farmer in this example for showing benevolence to

an improper object. By contrast, Godwin has a neighbour (who has

previously benefitted from the farmer’s generosity) step in to save his

protagonist. The philosopher ends by seeming to impose a reading on the

fable, before undermining it with a note of scepticism about the story

as a whole:

The good-natured man learned a wise lesson from this adventure: he saw

how much mischief he had nearly brought upon himself by a kindness that

paid no attention to the different qualities of living creatures; but

then he saw that the life of his child had been saved by a person, to

whom he had once acted generously, without acting imprudently.

The only thing that puzzles me in this story is the behaviour of the

adder. It is contrary to the nature of all animals; for I have found it

almost an universal rule, that no creature will harm you, if you have

not first done that creature harm.[108]

The authorial voice in the Fables is affectionate and informal, as if

the stories were told to children at their father’s knee. Godwin’s son

Charles (then nine) is even addressed in the text. Some years earlier

Coleridge had written to Southey of the ‘cadaverous Silence of Godwin’s

children’, which some have taken to indicate that the philosopher was a

strict or distant father, but this does not seem to tally with the

obvious warmth of Godwin as a children’s author.[109]

The second publication of 1805 was even less traditional. The Looking

Glass is a biography for children, the life story of Godwin’s friend and

illustrator William Mulready (at the time, still a teenager himself).

Rather than presenting a finished life of great deeds, Godwin (writing

as ‘Theophilius Marcliffe’) tells how Mulready’s childhood shaped him

into a dedicated and hardworking artist. Although the work celebrates

its subject’s determination and self-reliance, the story does not

diminish the support Mulready received from parents and mentors on his

journey. The artist is – realistically – shown to be a product of both

nature and nurture, in contrast to fictional children’s role models who

succeeded through innate reserves of selflessness, industry, or wisdom.

The book claims no such heroic qualities for its subject, attributing

his success to a simple love for his vocation – which, as the title

implies, is a virtue that the reader can look for within themselves.

The Juvenile Library struggled from the beginning. Perhaps not fully

understanding the undertaking before him Godwin had only borrowed £100

from Wedgwood, money which quickly disappeared in the renting and

outfitting of the shop. The work they published was good, many remaining

in print long after the company went out of business and some still

regarded as classics of children’s literature: it was the Juvenile

Library that first published Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from

Shakespeare (1807), and the first translation of Johann Wyss’s Swiss

Family Robinson (by Mary Jane Clairmont, 1814). Godwin’s pseudonyms were

apparently successful, his books receiving favourable notices in

conservative journals. Wedgwood died in July 1805, leaving Godwin

without a reliable financial backer. The philosopher borrowed heavily to

keep the shop afloat, but also used his own (still good) credit to help

those in greater need – letters show that around this time Godwin

borrowed money to bail his friend, the scientist William Nicholson, who

had been imprisoned for debt. The philosopher’s finances very quickly

became a tangled mess of debts both small and large. In the summer of

1807 both family and business moved to new premises in Skinner Street,

thanks to a loan from Curran. It was not a desirable location, only a

short distance from the Smithfield meat market and a stone’s throw from

the Fleet prison, but it was a better shop front than Hanway Street and

provided more living space than the Polygon. The building had stood

empty before the Godwin’s moved in; its ownership was unclear. The

ambiguity must have amused Godwin – he had always argued that property

could only really belong to those who most needed it – and within a year

he had decided to exploit the situation by refusing to pay rent until

the ‘rightful owners’ were identified. The philosopher was taking a

gamble, but it would be nearly ten years before any putative landlord

was able to call his bluff. At some point in 1807 it became apparent

that Hodgkins was taking money directly out of the business, possibly

stealing stock or taking shop revenue for himself. Exactly what happened

is unclear, but in August Godwin’s diary records him changing the locks

at Skinner Street and calling a constable in reference to ‘3

Hodgkinses’. Hodgkins was dismissed and the business re-established in

Clairmont’s name, as ‘M. J. Godwin and Company’, though retaining the

Juvenile Library title. By the summer of 1808, however, the shop was in

serious trouble – Godwin was convinced he would soon find himself in

debtor’s prison. With the help of Johnson and Marshall, Godwin attempted

to raise money through public subscription. The appeal went out to the

Whig party grandees, championed by Lord Holland (nephew of Charles James

Fox) and the Earl of Lauderdale (then a radical peer), and receiving

contributions from both the political and publishing worlds. It was

enough to save the business, but it did not clear Godwin’s debts or

prevent him from accruing new ones.

Godwin’s work rate in these years is impressive. In 1806 alone, the

philosopher authored two substantial histories for children (The History

of England and The Life of Lady Jane Grey), a book of Classical myths

(The Pantheon), and another play (Faulkener, which would be performed

the following year). Of these, only the drama was published under the

philosopher’s real name, allowing the philosopher to retreat from the

(frequently hostile) spotlight. Political fortunes were changing too:

Pitt had died in January 1806 and Grenville, seeking to form the

strongest government possible, had formed a coalition that embraced both

reformers and conservatives. Fox was foreign secretary, Erskine Lord

Chancellor, Sheridan was Treasurer of the Navy. The Anti-Jacobin’s

patron, George Canning, sat on the backbenches. The ‘Ministry of All the

Talents’ did not last long – Fox died in September and the coalition

broke up in March 1807 – but it is remembered principally as the

government that brought about the abolition of the slave trade in the

British Empire. As the subscription had demonstrated, Godwin’s name

still carried weight in political circles. It became clear that the

philosopher’s reputation was international when former US Vice President

Aaron Burr paid a call in October 1808 and became a regular fixture at

Skinner Street for the rest of his time in London (Burr considered

himself a disciple of both Godwin and Wollstonecraft, but Godwin’s later

letters imply that the philosopher did not agree).

The failing business contributed to a decline in Godwin’s health. From

late 1807 the diary records three or four day periods of ‘deliquium’, at

least once a year, for the next five years (and three outbreaks in

1814). It is not clear what this affliction was; the term describes a

fainting fit, and Godwin described his attacks to a physician in May

1808:

… each fit (of perfect insensibility) lasted about a minute. Air was of

no service to repel at fit, but hartshorn smelled to, or a draught of

hartshorn and water, seemed to drive them off, particularly in the last

days of an attack. If seized standing, I have fallen on the ground, and

I have repeatedly had the fits in bed. … in every instance each single

fit seemed to find me and leave me in perfect health … The approach of

the fit is not painful, but is rather entitled to the name of pleasure,

a gentle fading away of the senses; nor is the recovery painful, unless

I am teased in it by persons about me.[110]

The symptoms have been described as episodes of catalepsy. The

philosopher reported that the condition had affected him since his

twenties, but the diary’s evidence makes it apparent that between 1807

and 1814 Godwin was more frequently affected than at any other point in

his life. If the ailment was in part psychological, then the sustained

stress of being both writer and publisher would have obviously

contributed to the problem.

On 19 March 1809 the philosopher was summoned to Holcroft’s bedside. His

friend was dying. When Godwin arrived, Holcroft was overcome with

emotion. He pressed his hand to his chest and said, ‘My dear, dear

friend’. Godwin visited him every day until Holcroft’s death on the

23^(rd), though the playwright was too weak to hold a conversation.[111]

Godwin and Marshall organised a subscription to help Holcroft’s wife and

children.

Hazlitt undertook a biography, beginning from the narrative Holcroft had

dictated from his deathbed. Hazlitt made extensive use of Holcroft’s

diary and letters, which he planned to publish separately, much to

Godwin’s consternation. In early 1810 he wrote a concerned letter to

Holcroft’s widow, Louisa. The controversy over the philosopher’s memoir

of Wollstonecraft had scarred him:

It is one thing for a man to write a journal, and another for that

journal to be given to the public. I am sure Mr Holcroft would never

have consented to this. I have always entertained the highest antipathy

to this violation of the confidence between man and man, that every idle

word, every thoughtless jest I make at another’s expense, shall be

carried home by the hearer, put in writing, and afterwards printed. This

part will cause fifty persons at least, who lived on friendly terms with

Mr Holcroft, to execrate his memory. It will make you many bitter

enemies, who will rejoice in your ruin, and be transported to see you

sunk in the last distress. Many parts are actionable.[112]

Many have taken this (and later letters) to indicate that Godwin had

reconsidered his views on sincerity. Relating the unvarnished truth

about the dead had proved explosive for the living. Equally, the

deceased’s achievements could be obscured by a controversial life. Yet

we should be wary of inferring such a fundamental challenge to Godwin’s

philosophical principles based on an unguarded comment, for precisely

the reasons that he identifies in the letter.

Two or three detestable stories (lies, I can swear) are told of Mrs

Siddons; and Miss Smith, the actress, is quoted as the authority; that

is, Miss Smith, as other people do, who are desirous of amusing their

company, told these stories as she heard them, borne out with a sort of

saw, ‘You have them as cheap as I.’ The first meeting of Emma Smith and

Mr Holcroft occurs, and he sets her down, and Mr Hazlitt prints her, as

a young woman of no talents; I believe Mr Holcroft altered his opinion

on that subject.[113]

We have a duty to tell the truth that we know, but also to speak the

truth responsibly. If the truth we know is incomplete (perhaps lacking

context) then we may do potentially more harm than good. The rhetoric of

Political Justice, particularly in its first edition, implied that the

philosopher was untroubled by this (universal sincerity would wipe out

falsehood and ambiguity) but even in 1793 Godwin recognised that there

were good and bad ways to deliver the truth. Political Justice uses the

example of delivering bad news to someone on their deathbed, arguing

that, ‘in reality there is a mode in which under such circumstances

truth may safely be communicated; and, if it be not thus done, there is

perpetual danger that it may be done in a blunter way’.[114] The duty to

speak the truth remains absolute, but it must be done wisely. The

revised editions of Political Justice complicate this further by

acknowledging the difficulty of identifying objective truth at all.

Arguably, Godwin saw the diary as the publication of an incomplete truth

– he raised no objections to what Hazlitt had written about Holcroft –

that could only damage the playwright’s memory. In a series of (probably

ill-tempered) meetings between Godwin, Hazlitt, Louisa Holcroft and

others, Godwin and Hazlitt seem to have hammered out which parts of the

diary were safe to include and which would only cause strife. The letter

above indicates that Godwin was most concerned by stories the diary

reported second hand. Such elements reflected more on the teller and the

subject (rather than Holcroft) which had the potential to be legally

problematic, but from a philosophical point of view their excision is

consistent with a commitment to accuracy over transparency. Godwin was

certain that some of the stories reported in the diary were untrue –

while it might have been honest to note that Holcroft had heard them,

the ethics of repeating them were questionable. Hazlitt’s Memoirs of the

Late Thomas Holcroft were not published until 1816, and raised no

memorable controversy. Perhaps Godwin’s editing had been effective, or

perhaps the intervening years made Holcroft’s opinions more a historical

curiosity than anything to sue over. Most likely, Holcroft’s notorious

outspokenness in life had left no one surprised by the details in his

memoirs. Everything that was controversial about Holcroft (his politics,

his atheism, his mercurial temper) was already common knowledge.

A few months after Holcroft’s death, Godwin’s mother passed away at the

age of 87. The son travelled to Norfolk for the funeral. After the

service, he wrote a sad and probably heartfelt letter to Clairmont:

While my mother lived, I always felt to a certain degree as if I had

somebody who was my superior, and who exercised a mysterious protection

over me. I belonged to something – I hung to something – there is

nothing that has so much reverence and religion in it as affection to

parents. The knot is now severed, and I am, for the first time, at more

than fifty years of age, alone. You shall now be my mother; you have in

many instances been my protector and my guide …[115]

Godwin and Clairmont’s relationship was volatile. She harangued him when

she was unhappy and sulked when she did not get her way. She lied to his

friends as a matter of habit, making up stories to cover his absences or

inability to take callers. He remonstrated with her patiently as often

as he could – when his anger showed she was liable to walk out until he

apologised (when he fully lost his temper with her in 1811, she moved

out of the house for several weeks). Clairmont was under the same strain

as Godwin in running the Juvenile Library and, where the philosopher put

definite boundaries on his space and time (he was usually writing

upstairs during the day, if not out paying calls), Mary Jane was usually

surrounded by children, customers, or Godwin’s friends and disciples. In

their rooms above, the philosopher’s portrait of Wollstonecraft was

mounted prominently in the study, a constant reminder that her husband’s

friends considered her a poor substitute for the author of the

Vindication. Godwin always defended her, browbeating the likes of

Holcroft or Coleridge into apologising for their rudeness to her. In the

chaos that was no doubt possible at Skinner Street, she probably

appreciated his calm. His letters acknowledge that he relied heavily on

her support. They learned how to live with each other.

7. The Father (1810–19)

The Juvenile Library was, for much of its life, a troubled business.

Since late 1809, Francis Place (the former LCS chair and future

Chartist, a self-made man with a successful tailoring company) had

worked with Godwin to put the family’s business on a sound footing. The

exact order of events is unclear but in early 1810 Godwin was calling on

Place as well as the financier John Lambert and perhaps, with their

advice, going through the Juvenile Library’s accounts in search of a

solution to the company’s woes. Place estimated that, deducting the cost

of the Library’s liabilities from the value of its assets, the business

had a net worth of £3,000. This was, relatively speaking, good news:

with a substantial injection of capital, the business could become

sustainably profitable. Place went in search of a backer and made the

acquaintance of a wealthy young man called Elton Hammond, who was eager

to use his fortune to help Godwin after having read what Political

Justice had to say about property. Through much of 1811 Godwin and Place

met weekly, perhaps trying to organise investors and guarantors for the

business. Place, Lambert and Hammond all made donations and Place

organised further monies through loans. Altogether their efforts raised

£3,000, the amount Place believed would set the business on its feet. To

the businessman’s surprise and dismay, the funds quickly evaporated.

It is most likely that the money disappeared into Godwin’s complicated

network of creditors. Both family and business had survived up to this

point through loans, borrowing money to make repayments of debts they

already owed – Godwin’s papers show nearly £1,000 of repayments due in

the first quarter of 1811 alone. The threat of debtor’s prison probably

forced Godwin to use Place, Lambert and Hammond’s money to clear

existing debts rather than invest in the business as intended. Place had

his doubts, however. An instinctively frugal man, Place had forced

himself to overcome a lifelong distaste for borrowing when he had gone

into business for himself. He could only imagine that the money had been

somehow wasted (he referred to Clairmont as an ‘infernal devil’ and

wished Godwin a more ‘prudent’ wife) and believed Godwin to have

presented him with false accounts in order to attract investment.[116]

This seems unlikely: the family lived as sparsely as seven people under

the same roof can be expected to. Another backer, Horace Smith, some

years later described them as living in ‘an almost primitive

simplicity’.[117] Godwin ate little meat, believing that it contributed

to his ill health, and drank even less (occasions when Godwin drank rum

are recorded in the diary in Latin – it was the philosopher’s habit to

use other languages to note things he found embarrassing or

distasteful). Nor was calculated deception really a part of Godwin’s

character. His pseudonyms were an open secret; he readily sent copies of

his children’s books to well-wishers, and a spy’s report from 1813

indicates that the government were fully aware – and apparently

unconcerned – that the philosopher was writing and selling books for

children. Years of abuse had made him cautious and evasive; he had

learned the hard way that ambiguity was often safer than transparency,

but he was never comfortable with outright lies. Surviving in business

had taught him to flatter, to promise more than he could deliver, and to

beg if necessary. He had come to resemble the caricature of a shopkeeper

he presented in The Enquirer, ‘so much in the habit of exhibiting a

bended body, that he scarcely knows how to stand upright’.[118] The

philosopher had long ago identified his own everyday lack of resolve,

and nearly a decade of stress and ill health saw him usually willing to

take the path of least resistance if it allowed him to preserve his

usual calm. Despite all this, there is nothing other than Place’s bad

feeling to suggest a conspiracy. Given how poorly the business was run

from the start, the fairest explanation is simply that Godwin had no

concept of how deeply in debt he was. Indeed, he wrote to Clairmont

while she was in Margate in May 1811 to confess that he had entirely

forgotten a bill for £140 that he owed to Place himself.[119] The family

had spent so many years transferring, consolidating and postponing their

debts, they may not have known everyone they owed money to. Further

details in the Margate letter suggest that he was frequently surprised

when he received demands for repayment. Place on several occasions

angrily refused to give Godwin any more help with his finances, but

through a combination of reasoned argument, excuses and pleading, the

philosopher convinced Place to persist in his efforts until the

businessman’s patience was finally exhausted in late 1814.

Godwin’s family was growing up, something that no doubt put increasing

strain on their finances. Fanny, now almost an adult, was pressed into

service at the shop. Godwin described her as quiet, sober and observing

in her manner. He was sincerely attached to her, having refused an offer

from Wollstonecraft’s sisters to take her away and educate her at

boarding school some years earlier. He noted his conversations with her

as he did his adult friends. Later events imply that she felt the stress

of running the Juvenile Library as acutely as he did. Godwin mostly

educated his daughters at home, but sent his sons to school. This is

more consistent than it seems: Godwin’s daughters followed a curriculum

similar to that of their brothers (languages, history, philosophy), an

education that few girls’ schools would have offered. Charles and

William had been sent to Charterhouse, the London public school, though

William would find it an unhappy place and eventually move to Charles

Burney’s school at Greenwich in 1814. In 1811, Charles left school to

become an apprentice at Archibald Constable’s publishing house in

Edinburgh. Mary was also bound for Scotland. She had, for some years,

experienced outbreaks of an unidentified skin condition on her right

arm. The renowned surgeon Henry Cline was consulted, but no course of

treatment proved particularly effective. The condition was probably

aggravated by the fraught atmosphere of the house; Mary was placed for a

time at a boarding school in Ramsgate, where she could bathe in the sea,

but she did not seem to enjoy the experience and returned home in

December 1811. Cline recommended more time by the sea and, in the summer

of 1812, Godwin arranged for Mary to stay with the family of William

Baxter (a well-wisher from the era of the 1794 Treason Trials) in

Dundee. Many of the future novelist’s biographers have inferred that the

real reason for Mary’s extended periods of convalescence was friction

with Clairmont: Fanny Derham in Mary’s 1835 novel Lodore spends her

childhood away from home for that reason, and the novelist’s letters as

an adult betray a profound dislike of her stepmother. Given the effects

of the family’s strife on everyone else in the house however, this may

only have been one element out of many.

The extended ‘family’ at Skinner Street included a succession of young

men that sought Godwin’s help and advice. The philosopher had always

attracted such. It usually began with an unsolicited letter, or a call

at the shop. John Arnot had arrived in this manner. Tom Turner had

turned up on 4 July 1803 (having written the same day) and been a

constant fixture for six years until Godwin had imposed strict ground

rules for when Turner was allowed to visit. The philosopher always

replied to the letters (though he sometimes took months to do so) and

offered support where he could. A young man named Patrickson had been a

promising pupil at Charterhouse but had become estranged from his family

– Godwin solicited help from richer friends to send Patrickson to

Cambridge University without his family’s support, while simultaneously

counselling the youth on how to repair his relationship with his mother.

When Godwin received a letter from another such young man at the

beginning of January 1812, it came as no great surprise. The

correspondent was an ardent admirer who had only recently learned that

Godwin was still alive. The missive was passionate, but vague:

You will be surprised at hearing from a stranger. – No introduction has,

nor in all probability ever will authorize that which common thinkers

would call a liberty; it is however a liberty which altho’ not

sanctioned by custom is so far from being reprobated by reason, that the

dearest interests of mankind imperiously demand that a certain etiquette

of fashion should no longer keep ‘man at a distance from man’ and impose

its flimsy fancies between the free communication of intellect. The name

of Godwin has been used to excite in me feelings of reverence and

admiration, I have been accustomed to consider him a luminary too

dazzling for the darkness which surrounds him, and from the earliest

period of my knowledge of his principles I have ardently desired to

share on the footing of intimacy that intellect which I have delighted

to contemplate in its emanations. … My course has been short but

eventful. I have seen much of human prejudice, suffered much from human

persecution; yet I see no reason hence inferable which should alter my

wishes for their renovation. The ill-treatment I have met with has more

than ever impressed the truth of my principles on my judgement. I am

young – I am ardent in the cause of philanthropy and truth, do not

suppose that this is vanity. I am not conscious that it influences this

portraiture. I imagine myself dispassionately describing the state of my

mind. I am young – you have gone before me, I doubt not are a veteran to

me in the years of persecution – is it strange that defying prejudice as

I have done, I should outstep the limits of custom’s prescription, and

endeavor to make my desire useful by friendship with William

Godwin?[120]

The letter writer was nineteen-year-old Percy Bysshe Shelley. Godwin

wrote back swiftly, chiding Shelley for writing an introduction that

told him little about its author. Shelley’s reply arrived a few days

later, explaining that he was ‘the Son of a man of fortune in Sussex’,

heir to £6,000 a year, whose life had been changed by reading Political

Justice. He had given up fantastic tales (he had written two gothic

romances) in favour of atheism, and was writing ‘an inquiry into the

causes of the failure of the French revolution to benefit mankind’.[121]

They exchanged more letters. Shelley explained his plan to take ‘the

benevolent and tolerant deductions of Philosophy’ to Ireland to help

those who Catholicism had kept ignorant. He had written a pamphlet,

which he sent to Godwin (its size forced Godwin to pay the substantial

excess postage). The philosopher, who had already written Shelley a

letter of introduction to present to Curran, was concerned by what he

read. An Address, to the Irish People condemned religious intolerance

and declared that a religion was only as good as it helped people

towards virtue and wisdom. It celebrated universal brotherhood and

denounced violence. It exhorted the Irish to ‘think, read and talk’, to

reform themselves (improve, in a Godwinian sense, but Shelley lays

particular emphasis on resisting the vices the Irish were

stereotypically accused of) in order to present a moral example that

could not be denied the political rights that they were owed. Godwin

wrote back to commend the pamphlet’s sentiments, but to caution against

its dissemination. The pamphlet proposed the establishment of a peaceful

association for moral and intellectual improvement (his next pamphlet

set down a programme for one). Godwin, still a critic of mass movements

and political parties, told Shelley that such an organisation was

intrinsically dangerous – even more so in the volatile context of Irish

politics.

… associations, organized societies, I firmly condemn, you may as well

tell the adder not to sting

You may as well use question with the wolf

You may as well for bid the mountain pines

To wag their high tops, and to make no noise,

When they are fretted with the gusts of heaven,

as tell organized societies of men, associated to obtain their rights,

and to extinguish oppression, prompted by a deep aversion to inequality,

luxury, enormous taxes and the evils of war, to be innocent, to employ

no violence, and calmly to await the progress of truth.[122]

Shelley replied that Godwin had given him much to think about, but the

poet continued down the same path, attending political meetings and

proudly sending a newspaper cutting to his mentor where he (Shelley) had

been mentioned. The philosopher grew increasingly alarmed, remonstrating

with Shelley to ‘save yourself and the Irish people from the calamities

with which I see your mode of proceeding to be fraught’.[123] Godwin’s

letters eventually made an impression, and Shelley wrote (on 18 March)

to say he had withdrawn his publications and was leaving Dublin. He

admitted his short-sightedness but refused to accept that his pamphlets

had been dangerous. Godwin dryly observed that Shelley was only ‘half a

convert’ to his argument, but said that time would do the rest.[124]

They continued to correspond as Shelley and his wife Harriet visited

Wales and Devon.

The episode contrasts sharply with the disingenuous, ‘heartless’ Godwin

of Place’s description. The early letters to Shelley show the

philosopher instinctively falling into the role of teacher, willing to

speak plainly and critically to a complete stranger, and in no way awed

by his correspondent’s claims of great wealth or literary talent. He

also displays an obvious concern for Shelley’s development and welfare,

something he expresses in advice that reflects both his trademark

gradualism and his experience of notoriety:

… it is highly improving for a man who is ever to write for the public,

that he should write much while he is young. It improves him equally in

the art of thinking, and of expressing his thoughts. Till we come to try

to put our own thoughts upon paper, we can have no notion how broke and

imperfect they are, or find where the imperfection lies. … But I see no

necessary connection between writing and publishing, and least of all

with one’s name. The life of a thinking man who does this, will be made

up of a series of Retractions. It is beautiful to correct our errors, to

make each day a comment on the last, and to grow perpetually wiser; but

all this need not be done before the public. … Mankind will ascribe

little weight and authority to a versatile character, that makes a show

of his imperfections. How shall I rely upon a man, they cry, who is not

himself in his public character at all times the same? I have myself,

with all my caution, felt some of the effects of this.[125]

Godwin had argued since the 1790s that a willingness to change one’s

mind was a sign of intellectual rigour but here he again acknowledges

how easily transparency can be (wilfully) misconstrued, to the detriment

of what the individual is trying to say. As in his letter to Louisa

Holcroft, Godwin endorses accuracy (or here, clarity) over the duty to

tell all the truth we know. The philosopher is happy to allow that his

correspondent may one day have some great insight to convey to the

community, but reflection and maturity will make it a better insight.

The communication of truth ultimately requires patience. Godwin almost

certainly did not see this as a retraction of his own – he never revises

his belief in sincerity as an absolute duty – but it does represent a

pragmatic compromise with the real world. He would come to make many

more in his relationship with Percy Shelley.

Shelley encouraged Godwin to visit him in Lynmouth, on the Devon coast.

For some months, Godwin declined the invitations, but finally at the end

of August he seems to have written to signal his acceptance. He set out

on 9 September. Events that week are unclear; the diary notes

cryptically ‘execution’ on the 8^(th) and records a flurry of calls to

Place, Longdill (Shelley’s lawyer, who Godwin knew socially) and others,

followed by two calls on ‘Bagley’s banker’ the following day before the

philosopher caught a coach to Slough. Godwin’s biographer William St

Clair has advanced the theory that the diary refers to an order of

execution and that one of the philosopher’s many creditors had sent

bailiffs to arrest him. While leaving London would certainly have kept

Godwin out of debtor’s prison (and perhaps allowed him to negotiate a

bail-out from Shelley), we have little evidence to suggest anything so

dramatic – Godwin probably gave Shelley advance notice of his journey

(the diary records ‘write to Shelley’ on 31 August, and again on 7

September, but the letters themselves are no longer extant) and Godwin’s

letters to Clairmont while he was on the road make no mention of any

difficulties at home. The journey was long and, at the age of 56, quite

arduous – coach travel was notoriously uncomfortable, and the sea leg of

Godwin’s journey (from Bristol to Lynmouth) was interrupted by bad

weather. The philosopher arrived in Lynmouth on the had not been there

for three weeks. Godwin experienced another attack of ‘deliquium’ that

night, his second in as many days. He arrived back in London on the

evening of the 25^(th), suffering two further attacks on the road and

spending part of the journey as an ‘outside’ coach passenger (either

sitting on the roof or riding in the luggage basket) exposed to the

elements. The Shelleys arrived in London on 4 October and dined with the

Godwins the same day.

Shelley became Godwin’s almost daily companion during his first

fortnight in town. The philosopher recorded their topics of

conversation: ‘matter & spirit; atheism’ on the 6^(th), ‘utility &

truth; party’ on the 7^(th), ‘clergy; church govt; germanism’ on the

9^(th).[126] The two dined together frequently, sometimes with their

wives and sometimes not. Godwin treated the younger man as his student,

recommending things for him to read and shooting down what he considered

to be Shelley’s wilder political or philosophical ideas. On 31 October,

Shelley presented his mentor with the manuscript of his first great

philosophical poem, Queen Mab. The work’s debt to Godwin is obvious –

describing a series of dream visions that look forward to a future where

humanity has outgrown tyranny through moral improvement, and lives at

peace with itself and nature. The philosopher read through the piece

that day, though he did not make notes until he read the published

version a year later.

The Shelleys departed London suddenly in mid-November, heading back to

Wales without telling Godwin of their plans. The philosopher took up his

pen once more, and their correspondence resumed. ‘You have what appears

to me a false taste in poetry’, Godwin wrote to Shelley on 10 December,

‘You love a perpetual sparkle and glittering, such as are to be found in

Darwin, and Southey, and Scott, and Campbell.’ The philosopher advised

the young poet to read Milton, and that poet would prove a significant

influence on both men for some time to come.

In the new year, Godwin made another influential friend, the

philanthropist (later, socialist) Robert Owen. The two met at a dinner

held by the journalist, Daniel Stuart, at which Coleridge was also

present. Godwin and Owen had much to talk about and soon Owen was a

regular visitor and dinner guest at Skinner Street. Owen had little in

common with the passionate young men that usually sought the

philosopher’s acquaintance, however. In his early forties when he first

met Godwin, Owen was a successful industrialist and a follower of Jeremy

Bentham, and he had his own ideas but an open mind. Owen was a pioneer

of the industrial community – philanthropic endeavours to improve

worker’s conditions had steadily gained purchase over the eighteenth

century, but Owen’s textile mill at New Lanark was notable for its

comprehensive support of worker’s health, education, and economic

independence. At the time working on the essays that would form the

first edition of A New View of Society (1813), Owen allowed Godwin to

steer him away from a Benthamite conception of self-interest and towards

the idea of universal benevolence. Like Godwin, Owen held that people

were shaped by the world around them and that poverty, ignorance, and

exploitation prevented the majority of humanity from accessing the means

of moral improvement. In contrast to Godwin, however, Owen argued that

this placed a duty on institutions to provide those means; that it was

the responsibility of those in power to enable the improvement of

ordinary people. Recalling the strict routines of industrial production,

Owen’s vision is benevolently authoritarian and would go on to influence

the creation of the modern welfare state. Despite their radically

different conclusions, Owen considered Godwin to be one of his major

philosophical inspirations.

Around this time, Godwin began work on another biography. It was his

first full-length work for adults since finishing Faulkener nearly six

years earlier. The Lives of Edward and John Phillips, Nephews and Pupils

of Milton (1815) took nearly two years to complete. Conceptually, the

work is fascinating: Godwin’s book is, in part, a look at Milton from

the outside – an exploration of how and why the poet’s pupils came to

reject him as a religious teacher (both became critics of Puritanism)

but not as a literary one (both were accomplished poets and literary

critics). Based on contemporary accounts, including one by Edward

himself, Godwin imagines Milton as a passionate and powerful educator.

The brothers rejected his way of life, Godwin argues, in part because it

is in the nature of pupils to rebel – to seek out truth for oneself

rather than simply to receive it. Once out on their own, the brothers

found worldly temptations too strong to go back to the Puritan life (the

philosopher cannot help but criticise this as in some degree venal). Yet

the brothers found happiness (and success) as poets because their

education had awakened their potential.

Shelley returned to London in April, but made no attempt to see Godwin.

The two ran into one another on 8 June. Harriet and Percy’s first child,

Elizabeth Ianthe Shelley, was born later that month. On 4 August,

Shelley turned twenty-one. Now legally an adult, he could enter into

contracts without parental consent. Shelley’s enthusiasm had led him to

commit to at least one expensive project already: a land-improvement

scheme where he had stayed in Wales. At the end of 1812, Place had told

Godwin that his only hope to avoid bankruptcy and prison was to convince

Shelley to provide him with a substantial sum of money. What

conversations Godwin and Shelley had over the subject are not recorded,

but the poet had frequently written of his desire to use his fortune to

support the less fortunate and (according to Place) Godwin was often

very persuasive. Regardless of whatever offers of support the poet might

have made, for a long time Shelley did nothing to actually raise

whatever money Godwin might have asked for. Shelley’s father had already

granted him an allowance of £200 a year (a comparable income to a

middle-class family of the period) but the poet would need to organise

other means if he wished to raise significant amounts of capital.

Shelley’s family did not approve of his political agitation, or his

marriage, and restricted his access to their wealth in hopes of bringing

him under control.[127] The principal method of raising money open to

the poet was the selling of post-obituary bonds, essentially obtaining a

cash loan to be repaid (with considerable interest) when the recipient

came into their inheritance. This was a high-stakes business, as the

creditors were speculating on both the debtor surviving long enough to

inherit and the value of the estate when they did so. Shelley was a good

prospect: his grandfather (the current baronet) was eighty-two and his

father nearly sixty, but his constant travelling and willingness to

publish his work at his own expense (he arranged a private printing of

Queen Mab that year) meant that he was racking up significant debts. The

couple came and went from London continually in that year, allegedly to

stay ahead of creditors. On 10 December, Shelley turned up for breakfast

at Skinner Street without warning, was a near-constant presence for

nearly a week, and then left London for Windsor.

At the suggestion of either Place or John King, Godwin convinced Shelley

to auction a post-obit in order to raise money for the Juvenile Library.

The auction took place on 3 March 1814, with an £8,000 bond offered to

the highest bidder. Godwin’s target was again in the region of £3,000 –

the diary notes the figure £3,860 around this time, without further

context – but the auction only raised £2,593, and the purchasers raised

questions about the security of their investment. The final balance was

not paid over until 6 July. Worse for Godwin, Shelley decided to keep

half the money for himself. His reasons for doing so presented a more

immediate crisis for the family.

Mary had returned home from Dundee on 30 March. She and her sisters were

entranced by the handsome, charismatic young man who had won their

father’s respect and seemed poised to deliver the family from its

constant financial woes. For his own part, Shelley took particular

interest in Mary – he had seen little of her in the two years he had

known Godwin, meeting her almost for the first time when she was

sixteen. To Shelley, she must have seemed to embody the best qualities

of both her illustrious parents: her mother’s passion and her father’s

mind (he had, perhaps, read the Memoir). He wrote a poem to her dark

eyes and trembling lips. By mid-June, Shelley was at Skinner Street

every day, taking Mary on walks to her mother’s grave in St Pancras

churchyard (usually with Jane as chaperone). On 26 June, Mary declared

her love for him. Shelley went to Godwin, perhaps to ask for his

blessing. The poet was a vehement critic of marriage, and had only been

persuaded to marry Harriet through being made to see the punishment

society handed out to ‘fallen’ women. He had grown apart from Harriet,

he had met someone new. He looked into legally separating from his wife

(he asked Basil Montagu to find out what could be done), but he hoped to

live with Harriet as his friend and Mary as his lover. He seemed sure

that Godwin would approve, recalling the philosopher’s own critique of

marriage in Political Justice. The philosopher did not.

Precisely what Godwin thought is unknown. In late middle age he had made

his peace with the institution of marriage, allowing that it was

possible for two mutually complementary individuals to be happy

together, and that its evils were primarily problems of implementation

(his old bugbear, the law) rather than principle. He was also acutely

aware that the scandal of what Shelley was proposing would fall far

harder on Mary and Harriet than it would Percy. Godwin’s account of

their discussion says that he ‘expostulated with him with all the energy

of which I was master and with so much effect that for the moment he

promised to give up his licentious love, and return to virtue’.[128] The

exact order of events is ambiguous. Shelley biographers have

traditionally claimed that Percy took his news to Godwin the day after

Mary declared her love (27 June) and that the philosopher demanded that

Shelley stay away from Skinner Street. Godwin’s version of events places

the revelation on the day the bond was paid (6 July) and the implication

is that Shelley took his own share of the money to support both Harriet

and Mary. The diary records that Shelley remained a regular visitor to

Skinner Street between the 27 June and 6 July, but that all but one of

Godwin’s meetings with Shelley after the 6^(th) took place away from the

house (the one exception is where Harriet is also present). Godwin tried

in vain to bring Percy and Harriet closer together – Percy insisted that

his affection for Harriet was that of a brother; Harriet revealed that

she was again pregnant. Mary was confined to the house. Shelley’s later

letters imply they either met or corresponded in secret. According to

Clairmont, at one point Shelley stormed the shop and pressed a bottle of

laudanum on Mary in the hope that she would join him in suicide.

Clairmont’s story presents Mary as one of the more level-headed members

of the family: while Jane shrieked upon Shelley producing a pistol, Mary

entreated the poet to calm himself and go home, promising her fidelity

on condition that he reasonable.[129]

In the small hours of 28 July, Mary and Jane crept out of the house to

meet Shelley waiting with a carriage. The trio escaped to Dover, booked

space on a small boat heading to France that night and were blown by

strong winds into Calais just before dawn. Clairmont gave chase and

caught up with them on the evening of the 29^(th). Shelley prevented her

from seeing Mary, but allowed her to talk to Jane. Clairmont

successfully convinced her daughter to come home, but in the morning

Shelley persuaded Jane that she should stay and Clairmont returned home

in defeat. Godwin recorded the elopement in his diary the way he

recorded a death in the family, simply by noting the time.

For a few weeks, it must have seemed as if one horror followed another.

Patrickson dined with them on 8 August. Cambridge was a soul-destroying

place for an outsider – without a gentleman’s income, the young man was

ostracised and abused. Godwin had done his best to support his friend,

discussing the Stoics and sending money when he could. Patrickson

returned to Cambridge the next day, wrote a letter to Godwin telling of

his despair, and shot himself on 10 August. The same day, Godwin’s son

William ran away from home, almost certainly fleeing the atmosphere of

the house, and was missing for two nights. On the business side of

things, a deal to sell half the business for (another) £3,000 stalled

over the value of the Juvenile Library’s copyrights. Godwin was forced

to write to Place to beg an extension on a loan of £300. Ironically, the

family was experiencing cash-flow problems thanks to money owed them

(they had received only a third of the money due for a substantial order

of schoolbooks), but for Place it was the last straw. The businessman

wrote an angry letter that condemned the philosopher’s ‘most selfish’

conduct and claimed that he regretted ever trying to help him.[130]

Godwin accused Place of trying to heap further miseries on him, after

the events of the past few weeks, but over the course of their letters

his tone became more indignant. Place accused him of insincerity, Godwin

sent a high-handed reply that Place did not respond to. They did not see

each other again socially for nearly two years, and Charles Clairmont

(who returned home from Edinburgh in late 1814) was employed as a

go-between. The sale of the business finally fell through at the end of

September.

Shelley, Mary and Jane returned to England on 13 September. Their

adventures had taken them through a France shattered by Russian,

Prussian and Austrian armies (peace between the allies and France had

only been declared in April), down into picturesque Switzerland, and

returning back up the Rhine through Germany and the Netherlands. Mary

was now pregnant. Godwin refused to speak to the trio, Shelley sent a

letter on 16 September (Godwin notes it in his diary) but received no

reply. The rest of the family attempted to make contact: Clairmont and

Fanny ventured out to where the party were staying, but refused to speak

to Shelley. Charles later approached under cover of darkness and stayed

until three in the morning updating Shelley and his sisters on what had

happened in their absence. Godwin finally wrote to Shelley on 22

September, stating ‘with bitter invective’, according to Shelley, that

he wanted no more communication with them.[131] The situation dragged on

for months, as friends and family attempted in vain to heal the breach.

Shelley, like Godwin, was now being hounded by creditors. The poet lay

low, keeping lodgings away from Mary and Jane (who was experimenting

with new given names around this time, eventually settling on ‘Claire’),

but writing to Mary almost daily to arrange meetings. Mary’s replies

blame Clairmont for their estrangement:

I detest Mrs. G she plagues my father out of his life & then – well no

matter – Why will not Godwin follow the obvious bent of his affections &

be reconciled to us – no his prejudices the world and she – do you not

hate her my love – all these forbid it – What am I to do trust to time

of course – for what else can I do?[132]

Mary underestimated the extent to which Godwin felt his children (and

student) had betrayed him. As he explained to his backer, John Taylor,

in a letter of 27 August, he had reposed ‘the utmost confidence’ in

Shelley, but the poet had played ‘traitor’. He had attempted to rouse,

‘a sense of honor and natural affection in the mind of Mary’, and

believed that he had succeeded. ‘They both deceived me’. He went on to

say, however:

I felt it however still to be my duty, not to desert myself, or so much

of my family as was yet left to me, and even to provide, if possible for

the hour of distress (which, I believe, is not far distant) when these

unworthy children shall seek the protection and aid of their

father.[133]

As in his angry dialogues with Mackintosh, Parr, and Place, when hurt,

the philosopher fell back on stiff-necked pride as a defence. Godwin was

perhaps waiting for his children to return chastened and penitent, but

this did not diminish his sense of duty towards them, nor perhaps his

love.

Whatever the reasons behind his long silence, Godwin was still willing

to accept Shelley’s money. In early November, Godwin failed to repay

money he owed Lambert and called in a book auctioneer to help liquidate

his stock. With Charles Clairmont still keeping him informed of events,

Shelley stepped in to offer Lambert another post-obit and save the

business. The poet exposed himself to considerable risk in helping –

alerting London’s financiers as to his whereabouts might easily have led

to his arrest, and selling further post-obits essentially mortgaged his

future in exchange for dwindling returns. Nevertheless, further bonds

were offered to Place and other creditors. It is usually suggested that

Godwin took Shelley’s aid as no more than his due, certainly the bailout

was consistent with the principles of utility and benevolence that both

men held (the Juvenile Library was a project that contributed to general

happiness, and Shelley had the means to help in its hour of need).

Equally, it could be argued that many of Godwin’s (current) financial

problems were a direct result of Shelley’s sudden change of heart

regarding the earlier post-obit, thus the poet had a responsibility to

fix the mess he had created. Yet the simplest explanation is that Godwin

had little choice in the matter: the philosopher could choose to accept

Shelley’s help, or be declared bankrupt and probably sent to gaol.

On 30 November, Harriet gave birth to a son. She named the boy Charles.

Shelley had tried repeatedly to persuade Harriet to come and live with

Mary, Claire and himself as a family. His wife refused. He offered

instead to support her financially, but at the time realistically lacked

the money to do so. Harriet told a friend that Godwin had corrupted

Shelley, and Mary believed that Harriet was involved in spreading

rumours about her father.[134] In the new year, Shelley’s grandfather

died and the poet negotiated with his father (the new baronet) for money

to clear some of his debts and to increase his income. This was at least

partially successful, though the legal wrangling took a considerable

amount of time. Shelley’s father provided his son with an annuity of

£1,000 a year and a one-off payment of over £4,000, granting him

considerable financial independence. The poet settled £200 a year on

Harriet and authorised a £300 banker’s draft for Mary. On 22 February,

Mary gave birth to a girl. The baby was premature and died in less than

two weeks. The child’s death haunted her – she suffered nightmares for

years afterwards – but she was soon pregnant again.

Godwin’s Lives of Edward and John Phillips was published in May 1815, in

a print run of only 250 copies, of which fewer than 200 sold. The book

received a handful of positive reviews, however, including one from

Mackintosh. Two weeks later he had picked up his pen once more to

protest the Declaration of the Congress of Vienna (to which Britain was

a signatory) outlawing Napoleon for his return from exile. Godwin argued

that the allied nations had no right to intervene in the internal

affairs of France – if the French people chose Bonaparte over the

Bourbons, they could do so. Napoleon had demonstrated his willingness to

accept constitutional government and offered peace with the rest of

Europe, while the allied governments had already violated the treaty

that had exiled the Emperor a year earlier. Boldly, Godwin declared that

he was ‘too much the friend of man, and too little the citizen of a

particular country’ to wish Britain victorious. His letter was published

in the Morning Chronicle on the 25^(th), but the philosopher continued

to write and authored a second letter, packaging the two together for

publication in a pamphlet. The work was printed on 22 June, the same day

that Napoleon abdicated for the second time. Godwin withdrew the

pamphlet. The moment had passed.

The Juvenile Library still lurched from one crisis to another. Finally,

desperately, he wrote to Shelley directly on 11 November. The poet wrote

back immediately, and the two conducted a terse correspondence on

finances for several months. On 24 January 1816, Mary gave birth to her

second child – a boy this time – which she named William, after her

father. Shelley told Godwin that he intended to take his new family to

Italy, sending the philosopher into a state of agitation. Godwin

summoned Tom Turner (who Shelley did not like) to advise him. The

letters thawed a little, but Godwin continued to pester Shelley for

money while refusing to see him face to face. Eventually Shelley

snapped:

My astonishment, and I will confess when I have been treated with most

harshness and cruelty by you, my indignation has been extreme, that,

knowing as you do my nature, any considerations should have prevailed on

you to have been thus harsh and cruel. I lamented also over my ruined

hopes, of all that your genius once taught me to expect from your

virtue, when I found that for yourself, your family, and your creditors,

you would submit to that communication with me which you once rejected

and abhorred, and which no pity for my poverty or sufferings, assumed

willingly for you, could avail to extort. Do not talk of forgiveness

again to me, for my blood boils in my veins, and my gall rises against

all that bears the human form, when I think of what I, their benefactor

and ardent lover, have endured of enmity and contempt from you and from

all mankind.[135]

Godwin’s response was not conciliatory, but neither did he bite back.

The next day he wrote plainly, ‘If I understand you, you will accept no

kindness without approbations; and torture cannot wring from me an

approbation of the act that separated us’. Shelley softened his tone.

Using money from Shelley, Godwin published new editions of Caleb

Williams and St Leon in the hope of generating quick profits.

In April, the philosopher travelled to Edinburgh to meet with Charles’s

old employer, the publisher Archibald Constable, and was able to

negotiate a contract for a new novel. Constable introduced him to the

city’s intellectual elite: Francis Jeffrey, editor of the Edinburgh

Review; Dugald Stewart, then Scotland’s most prominent philosopher; and

Walter Scott, then known principally as a poet, but already on his way

to becoming the most successful novelist of the nineteenth century. All

three were Godwin’s ideological opponents, Tory writers who had joined

in the abuse of the philosopher and his work decades earlier, but Godwin

appears to have enjoyed their company regardless.[136] His journey back

took him through the Lake District, where he spent an awkward day or two

with Wordsworth (both were great friends of Coleridge, but neither was

keen on the other). When he arrived back in London, he found that

Shelley had delivered on his plan to leave the country. He left a letter

and instructions to provide Godwin with more money:

I respect you, I think well of you, better perhaps than of any other

person whom England contains, you were the philosopher who first

awakened, & who still as a philosopher to a very great degree regulate

my understanding. It is unfortunate for me that the part of your

character which is least excellent should have been met by my

convictions of what was right to do. But I have been too indignant, I

have been unjust to you. – forgive me. – burn those letters which

contain the records of my violence, & believe that however what you

erroneously call fame & honour separate us, I shall always feel towards

you as the most affectionate of friends.[137]

Godwin set to work on his new novel (eventually titled Mandeville) with

enthusiasm, but events soon took a darker turn. Sheridan died on 7 July.

It was the end of an era in both politics and the theatre. Godwin noted

his visits to the playwright’s grave. He struggled to sleep at night.

Shelley, Mary and Claire returned to Britain in September. They had met

Byron in Switzerland and now Claire was pregnant with his child. They

spent a few days in London (Godwin still refused to see them, and

Claire’s letters imply she was keen for her pregnancy to remain a

secret) but the trio set up residence in Bath. Godwin began writing

letters about money again, desperately in need of £300. Shelley’s reply

was sympathetic but offered little:

I am exceedingly sorry to dissappoint you again. I cannot send you £300

because I have not £300 to send. I enclose within a few pounds the

wrecks of my late negotiation with my father.

In truth, I see no hope of my attaining speedily to such a situation of

affairs as should enable me to discharge my engagements towards you. My

fathers main design, in all the transactions which I have had with him,

has gone to tie me up from all such irregular applications of my

fortune. In this he might have failed had he not been seconded by

Longdill, & between them both I have been encompassed with such toils as

were impossible to be evaded. When I look back I do not see what else I

could have done than submit: what is called firmness would have, I

sincerely believe left me in total poverty.[138]

Fanny wrote to Mary the next day describing their father’s reaction:

‘Shelley’s letter came like a thunderclap. I watched Papa’s countenance

while he read it (not knowing the contents), and I perceived that

Shelley had written in his most desponding manner.’[139] The sum that

Shelley offered fell short of what the family needed and, against

Godwin’s instructions, the cheque was made out in his name (Godwin

insisted that his name be kept off any promissory notes that Shelley

sent him, perhaps to keep a low profile from creditors). Fanny suddenly

left home on 7 October, taking a coach due west. She wrote to Godwin and

Mary separately the next day; both letters were alarming enough that,

when they arrived on the 9^(th), both Godwin and Shelley immediately

took to the road in search of Fanny. Godwin returned home at two in the

morning without further information. On the evening of the 9^(th), in a

small room above the Mackworth Arms, Swansea, Fanny committed suicide

with laudanum. Her last note read:

I have long determined that the best thing I could do was to put an end

to the existence of a being whose birth was unfortunate, and whose life

has only been a series of pain to those persons who have hurt their

health in endeavouring to promote her welfare. Perhaps to hear of my

death will give you pain, but you will soon have the blessing of

forgetting that such a creature ever existed as[140]

The last part of the page was torn off, where there might have been a

signature. The only identification she had were the initials M.W. on her

stays (her mother’s) and a G. on her stockings. Shelley arrived in

Swansea on 11 October; Godwin had reached Bath but did not attempt to

meet his daughters. He wrote to both Mary and Shelley about the need to

keep the matter quiet, forbidding Shelley from claiming the body. The

poet agreed, and Fanny was buried anonymously. Arriving home in London,

Godwin wrote to Shelley:

I did indeed expect it.

I cannot but thank you for your strong expressions of sympathy. I do not

see, however, that that sympathy can be of any service to me; but it is

best. My advice and earnest prayer is that you would avoid anything that

leads to publicity. Go not to Swansea; disturb not the silent dead; do

nothing to destroy the obscurity she so much desired that now rests upon

the event. It was, as I said, her last wish … I said that your sympathy

could be of no service to me, but I retract the assertion; by observing

what I have just recommended to you, it may be of infinite service.

Godwin went on to write that he and Clairmont had contemplated telling

people that Fanny had gone to see her aunts in Ireland, and begged

Shelley to allow them the right to use their own discretion in the

matter. He thanked the poet for helping to keep the matter out of the

newspapers. They had not at that point told anyone what had happened.

Their son Charles, who had been travelling Europe since the spring, did

not receive the news until he returned home in the summer of 1817.

On 10 December Harriet Shelley’s body was recovered from the Serpentine.

She had been missing for three weeks. Harriet had been pregnant, though

it was not clear who the father was. Her family responded in much the

same way the Godwins had, burying her under a false name. Shelley fought

for custody of their children, but her family resisted. Harriet’s last

wish had been that her sister Eliza take care of Ianthe (Charles was not

mentioned in her final letter), but the poet’s de facto abandonment of

his children – he had not seen Ianthe since 1814 – would have been

enough for the Westbrook family to believe that Shelley was not a

suitable guardian. Longdill advised the poet that marriage to Mary would

end ‘all pretences to detain the children’ and (implicitly) grant him

his full parental rights.[141]

Shelley wrote to Godwin informing him of Harriet’s death and, on 18

December, called at Skinner Street to discuss matters with Clairmont.

Godwin wrote to Mary on Christmas Eve, the first time he had done so

since the elopement. On Boxing Day, Godwin wrote to Shelley, and the day

after that Shelley called again. This time, Godwin received him. On the

28^(th), Godwin, Clairmont, Shelley and Mary met to discuss the

situation. The only account of the conversation is Clairmont’s:

allegedly Shelley acknowledged his engagement to Mary but asked for the

customary year of mourning for Harriet. On this he seemed intractable,

until Mary put her hand on his shoulder and informed him that she would

kill herself and their unborn child if he did not marry her promptly.

Clairmont’s story does not tally with the advice Shelley received from

Longdill, but it provides a neatly ironic reversal of the suicide pact

that she claimed the poet had proposed two years earlier. The truth of

the meeting is probably more prosaic, but Clairmont’s anecdote tells us

something about her assessment of Shelley’s character: as mercurial,

prevaricating, and perhaps in need of a firm hand. Both Godwin’s and

Shelley’s biographers have always regarded Mary Jane’s version of events

with some degree of scepticism – Clairmont was considered dishonest by

many of Godwin’s circle – but this, and the earlier suicide story, and

her account of many other events, suggest someone compelled to turn

events into a story (to tell ‘tall tales’ that suited her audience)

rather than someone who misled others maliciously.[142]

Regardless of the negotiations, Mary and Percy were married on 30

December. Shelley described the wedding as ‘magical in its effects’, so

effective was it in healing the breach between the two households:

Mrs G and G were both present, and appeared to feel no little

satisfaction. Indeed Godwin throughout has shown the most polished and

cautious attentions to me and Mary. He seems to think no kindness too

great in compensation for what has past. I confess I am not entirely

deceived by this, though I cannot make my vanity wholly insensible to

certain attentions paid in a manner studiously flattering. Mrs. G.

presents herself to me in her real attributes of affectation, prejudice,

and heartless pride.[143]

The estrangement was, to all extents and purposes, over. Godwin and

Shelley would fight again in the future; Mary would at times keep her

father at arm’s length; but never again would Godwin sever contact with

his daughter and son-in-law. Claire had her baby Alba (later renamed

Allegra) in January 1817. The matter remained a secret, for some time

the Shelleys maintained the fiction that Claire was looking after the

child of a friend, and nothing indicates that the Godwins were aware of

Alba’s parentage until her christening in March. Shelley lost his

custody battle the same month – the court decided against the poet on 17

March, the Westbrooks’ case against him hinging on Shelley’s politics as

much as his actual neglect of his wife and children – but the matter was

not fully settled until a year later, when Ianthe and Charles were

placed in the care of a third party (a couple called the Humes), and

Shelley was only granted visiting rights under supervision. The Shelleys

and Claire settled in Marlow, outside London. They visited the Godwins,

and Godwin came to stay with them in the spring. Mary’s third child,

Clara, was born in September. The birth only briefly interrupted Mary’s

literary endeavours: through August to October she compiled A History of

a Six Weeks Tour (a collage of the trio’s travels in 1814), while

Shelley attempted to negotiate her a publisher for her first novel –

Frankenstein.

John Philpott Curran died in October. Godwin dedicated the

soon-to-be-finished Mandeville to his friend’s memory. The philosopher’s

dwindling circle of literary and political veterans began to overlap

with Shelley’s network of new talents. Hazlitt argued politics all night

with Shelley and the poet’s confidant, Leigh Hunt. In November, Godwin

was introduced to a young John Keats when the latter called on Shelley

during dinner (Keats’s friend, Charles Dilke, was an ardent admirer of

Political Justice; Keats himself had been greatly influenced by reading

‘Edward Baldwin’s’ The Pantheon as a boy). Around the same time, the

philosopher acquired a new ‘student’ in the form of Henry Blanch Rosser.

Rosser would go on to prove an able research assistant.

Mandeville was finally published in December 1817. The story is set

during the period of the Commonwealth (the years between the execution

of Charles I and the Restoration). It is a dark, savage, novel about a

society coping with trauma. The world of Cromwell’s Interregnum is a

haunted one; every family has a father or brother or son that died a

hero in the wars, and that hero casts a shadow over the next generation.

The protagonist’s social ties place him among the Protestant Royalists,

a faction under constant pressure to prove its loyalty to the exiled

king because of its unwillingness to embrace the more Catholic culture

of his court. A series of humiliations encourage Charles Mandeville’s

already burgeoning misanthropy. The emergence of a rival, Clifford, who

seems to be everything Charles is not, tests him further. As in all of

Godwin’s major fictional works, the novel recounts the protagonist’s

downward spiral in the first person. The narrative is self-consciously

literary: the text makes extensive use of Biblical and literary

quotation (primarily Milton’s Comus) from period sources, Godwin making

a number of historical allusions in the text that point towards a

particular date of ‘composition’ (that is, when the protagonist

supposedly authored the manuscript) and providing a sophisticated

insight into the narrator’s mental space. The protagonist’s narration

becomes stranger and more incoherent over the course of the novel,

reaching a wild and gothic peak in the third volume, as his obsession

with Clifford overcomes whatever good was left within him.

The novel is an indictment of the obsession with martyrdom that Godwin

saw within Dissenting culture. Like the philosopher himself, the

protagonist was raised on stories of men and women who died bravely (and

usually gruesomely) for God. The protagonist searches for a death that

will give meaning to his life – in direct contrast to Clifford, who

celebrates life however he finds it. It is easy to infer a certain

amount of morbidity on the part of the author too – the deaths of

Sheridan and Curran while he was writing no doubt reminded Godwin of his

own mortality, but this seems trivial next to the lonely end of both

Fanny and Harriet. One of Mandeville’s principal themes is that of

isolation; the suicides no doubt played on the philosopher’s mind.

A few weeks later, on 1 January 1818, Mary published Frankenstein with

Lackington and Co. It was a small print run, but the novel sold readily.

The work went out anonymously (not unusual at the time), but a page

before the preface dedicated the novel to Godwin, and reviewers quickly

detected the philosopher’s influence running through the text. It is

clearly a first novel. The 1818 version of Frankenstein is spiky in

places: readers often find it difficult to sympathise with the

characters, its literary references are poetic but improbable, and its

philosophical argument is highly ambiguous.[144] The debts to Godwin are

obvious: Frankenstein is a tale of persecution and pursuit (like Caleb

Williams), using alchemy as a plot device (like St Leon) and Switzerland

as its rural idyll (St Leon again, Fleetwood), and leaning heavily on

Milton for its poetic allusions (Mandeville). Many assumed that Shelley

had written the novel – he had written the preface – but the manuscript,

in Mary’s hand with Percy’s comments in the margin, displays editorial

interventions rather than a guiding hand. Few literary works spring out

of nothing, and listing Frankenstein’s influences does not detract from

its striking originality. That the novel takes a fantastic idea and uses

it to explore moral and political responsibility might reasonably place

it in Godwin’s literary ‘school’, but Mary’s use of overlapping

narrative frames (the creature tells his story to Frankenstein, who

tells his story to Walton, who tells his story to us) show her

developing rather than simply imitating those literary techniques. The

story’s lack of moral clarity – its principal characters are, at best,

antiheroes – also illustrates Mary’s independence from both her father

and husband philosophically. In Godwin’s novels, characters espouse

moral principles that they fail to live up to; in Frankenstein, the

principles themselves are open to question – high-mindedness is

indistinguishable from ambition, domestic values carry the suggestion of

incest, and it is the fate of a man and his creator to be locked into a

cycle of reciprocal suffering. Whereas Caleb Williams ended with a

victory for truth (however poignant), Frankenstein ends with mutual

annihilation.

Godwin continued to ask Shelley for money. The poet had his own

problems. Still hounded by his own creditors, Shelley was arrested for

debt at the beginning of October 1817 (how the situation was resolved is

unknown). Nevertheless, the poet replied to Godwin’s requests with

admirable patience. Perhaps Shelley understood the extent to which the

philosopher’s other sources of borrowing had dried up: Wedgwood, Johnson

and Curran were all dead; Place was adamant in his refusal to spend

money to help the Godwins (and not simply Godwin himself – Place had

turned down a business proposal from Charles in 1815); Lambert and other

creditors had gradually turned hostile in recent years. Shelley

continued to funnel money to Godwin – he also raised money for Leigh

Hunt – but his relationship with the philosopher gradually soured once

more. The letters that survive from this period veer between sympathy,

hostility, entitlement and distrust; but what is apparent in all of

Godwin’s letters about money is that the philosopher begs money to

support others rather than himself. His letters to Place stress the

difficulty of supporting a large family – Place dismissed this, implying

that Godwin had been under no obligation to adopt other men’s children –

but the businessman had earlier observed that Godwin sometimes borrowed

money in order to help people in greater need than himself, pushing

himself deeper into debt so that he could repay loans owed to friends

who urgently needed the money returned.[145] Godwin’s borrowing was

obviously financially unsound, but Place’s comment suggests both a

tendency to respond short-sightedly to crisis and a willingness to take

great personal risks on behalf of others. At the end of 1817, it was

Marshall who was in need. Godwin immediately organised a subscription to

help him. While Shelley begged poverty, Godwin contributed £13 to the

fund – an amount the philosopher almost certainly did not have to spare.

It was Place who settled the majority of Marshall’s debts, at Godwin’s

urging. When Place learned that the philosopher had also made a monetary

contribution it reignited all of their old arguments, compounding the

ill will he already felt towards Godwin.

In January, encouraged by Percy’s poor health and a determination to

present baby Allegra to her father, the Shelleys finally resolved on a

permanent move to Italy. Shelley had himself insured against the

possibility of dying before his father, a move that allowed him to sell

another post-obit. How much this raised is not clear (estimates range

from £2,000 to £4,500) but the sum liable is known to have been £9,000.

Some of this money went to Godwin (again, how much is unknown), but

their surviving letters make it apparent that Shelley kept most of the

money for himself. Godwin was dismayed – the tone of their

correspondence implies that the philosopher did not trust Shelley’s

reasons for holding on to the money he had borrowed, and proposed that

the money be held in a joint account that required their mutual

agreement to access. Ultimately, however, Godwin attempted to move past

the dispute:

Now to the main point. I will never again discuss with you any question

of this sort upon paper; but I do not desire the presence of any third

person.

Since our last conversation at Marlow, I have reflected much on the

subject. I am ashamed of the tone I have taken with you in all our late

conversations. I have played the part of a supplicant, and deserted that

of a philosopher. It was not thus I talked with you when I first knew

you. I will talk so no more. I will talk principles; I will talk

Political Justice; whether it makes for me or against me, no matter. I

am fully capable of this. I desire not to dictate. I know that every

man’s conduct ought to be regulated by his own judgement, such as it may

happen to be. But I hold it to be my duty once to state to you the

principles which belong to the case. Having done that, it is my duty to

forbear.[146]

Shelley did not reply. Godwin continued to write (the diary records

writing letters to Shelley throughout February), but there is no

evidence of any reply from the poet. The two did not see each other

again until 6 March, when Godwin dropped in to visit Mary and stayed

until Percy returned. Poet and philosopher were reconciled to some

extent; Godwin’s diary records Shelley’s calls for several days after.

Godwin does not seem to have attended the christening of his

grandchildren on 9 March (ostensibly conducted to cement a formal record

of the children’s parentage, particularly relevant for Byron’s daughter

Allegra). The diary notes a call from Shelley with others, but not any

event – Godwin recorded weddings and funerals with the name of the

church, and we might expect to find that here if that were the case. It

is not possible to tell whether this indicates some continuing distance

between the two households, or if Godwin merely saw no need to attend.

The Shelleys left Britain on 12 March. Writing from Dover that day, the

poet authorised his banker to pay Godwin another £150.

Skinner Street was now mostly empty. Of the children, only William

remained. William was intermittently at school – he had left the Burney

school at the end of 1817, and flitted from business school in Essex to

an apprenticeship under the architect Peter Nicholson the year after (he

would later try his hand at engineering before settling into journalism

in his early twenties). For a time, the Godwins hosted Clairmont’s

nephew Marc Valette (while he attended school in London) but the house

and shop were no longer the intellectual hub they had been during

Shelley’s visits, or the early years of the Juvenile Library. On 23 June

1818 they received an eviction notice. Godwin’s refusal to pay rent had

finally prompted legal intervention, but the philosopher continued to

ignore the issue, allegedly closing the door on callers representing the

landlords. The tactic worked, and Godwin succeeded in dragging the

matter out for several more years.

Little Clara died in Venice in September. The family had travelled

around northern Italy at breakneck pace, the heat and the disruption

taxing the health of the whole party. Claire became ill, as did Shelley

(though he was convinced he had been poisoned), but Clara was

dangerously sick for weeks. The various illnesses may have been

unrelated to each other, but Mary blamed the fatigue of travel for the

dysentery and fever that eventually claimed the child’s life. Godwin

wrote to offer comfort, but his condolences were typically stoic:

I sincerely sympathise with you in the affliction which forms the

subject of your letter, and which I may consider as the first severe

trial of your constancy and the firmness of your temper that has

occurred to you in the course of your life. You should, however,

recollect that it is only persons of a very ordinary sort, and of a

pusillanimous disposition, that sink long under a calamity of this

nature.[147]

Godwin liked to imagine himself a purely rational creature. He knew that

he was not, but distress often prompted him to retreat into a protective

stoicism – he read Seneca when he was ill – that allowed him to pretend

that physical and emotional demands were merely a storm to be weathered

by those with greater things to address. It should come as no surprise

that he recommended the same outlook to his daughter, though his

autobiographical notes make it obvious that such fortitude was more

aspiration than reality. William Shelley, still only three years old,

died in Rome in June 1819, possibly a victim of the malaria epidemic

that swept the city that summer. Mary fell into a period of serious

depression. Shelley, perhaps struggling with grief himself but certainly

at a loss as to how to help his wife, asked Godwin to write to Mary. The

news struck the philosopher hard too, the diary noting ‘depression’ the

day after he received Shelley’s letter. Yet Godwin did not understand

the depth of his daughter’s unhappiness: she had lost three children and

was pregnant with a fourth; Byron had taken his daughter Allegra and

refused Claire access; rumours regarding Claire’s intimacy with Shelley

still plagued them. The philosopher, coming from a family where at least

four of the children had died in infancy, tried tough love:

… allow me the privilege of a father, and a philosopher, in

expostulating with you on this depression. I cannot but consider it as

lowering your character in a memorable degree, and putting you quite

among the commonality and mob of your sex, when I thought I saw in you

symptoms entitling you to be ranked among those noble spirits that do

honour to our nature.[148]

Chiding her to remember that she had ‘all the goods of fortune’ and

great potential of her own, Godwin argued forcefully that his daughter

not give up on life simply because she had lost an infant child. The

philosopher’s tone was strict but not, as Shelley later wrote,

hard-hearted (a hard-hearted father would not have written at all).

Exactly how Mary received her father’s admonition is unclear, but a

letter to her friend Amelia Curran shows that she derived no consolation

from it. Shelley himself was appalled at Godwin’s letters, not least

because they included side-swipes at the poet’s failings (the

philosopher was again in desperate need of money he believed Shelley had

promised to pay) and, after their next child was born (Percy Florence,

on 12 November 1819), he took to withholding Godwin’s letters from Mary

to preserve her peace of mind.[149]

Mary’s feelings of being torn between father and husband seem to find

their expression in her novel Mathilda, begun a few months after

William’s death. The novel reverses the dynamics of Mary’s own

relationships: the poet Woodville is the heroine’s platonic friend and

listener, her father the wild and impassioned suitor – a man who

confesses to an incestuous love for his daughter because he cannot bear

to lose the last image of her departed mother to another man. We should

naturally be wary of reading too much biographical insight into

Mathilda, though all of the author’s novels draw on elements of her own

life. Mary sent the manuscript to Godwin to arrange its publication, but

the philosopher was so shocked by the work that he refused to pass the

manuscript on, or return it. The reactionary press had circulated

rumours for years that Mary, Claire and Percy’s relationship was somehow

incestuous; Shelley himself had needed to be discouraged from placing an

incestuous (brother–sister) relationship at the centre of the poem Laon

and Cythna (later retitled The Revolt of Islam). Godwin wrote that he

found much to admire in Mathilda, but regarded the incest as

‘detestable’. While it would be fair to criticise the philosopher’s

decision to suppress his daughter’s most challenging novel (it remained

unpublished until the late twentieth century), we might also sympathise

with Godwin’s refusal to give their enemies the ammunition for a fresh

round of assaults. Whether the philosopher acted out of cowardice or

protectiveness is a matter of perspective, but the decision illustrates

the man that Godwin had become.

The contrast between Godwin’s pragmatism in 1820 and the principled

stand of the 1790s encourages us to see a philosopher who had been

beaten down by the consequences of his earlier bravery and who was

quietly abandoning his principles to stay afloat. A key difference

between the 1790s and the 1810s, however, is the addition of a large

family and business to Godwin’s concerns. What so much of Godwin’s

relationship with Percy and Mary Shelley demonstrates is the

philosopher’s willingness to compromise in order to protect the people

around him. Godwin, as an individual, had lived the principles he

espoused to the best of his ability (he outlined his own failings in

writing on more than one occasion, and those shortcomings connect neatly

with things he was criticised for throughout his life). As a father,

husband and employer, he accepted a responsibility to accommodate

‘things as they are’ while still clinging on to the ideas that had made

him hero or villain to the reading public.

8. The Pensioner (1819–36)

In an 1819 letter to Lady Caroline Lamb, Godwin declared himself retired

from practical politics. Seeking the philosopher’s endorsement for her

brother-in-law’s parliamentary campaign, Lady Caroline wrote Godwin a

courtly letter that betrayed the assumption that his apparent

disengagement was a matter of principle:

My dear madam, – You have mistaken me. Mr G. Lamb has my sincere good

wishes. My creed is a short one. I am in principle a Republican, but in

practice a Whig.

But I am a philosopher: that is, a person desirous to become wise, and I

aim at that object by reading, by writing, and a little by conversation.

But I do not mix in the business of the world, and I am too old to alter

my course, even at the flattering invitation of Lady Caroline Lamb.[150]

A few months later, mounted troops killed over a dozen people at St

Peter’s Fields in Manchester as they attempted to arrest the leaders of

a mass meeting in support of parliamentary reform. The event quickly

became known as the Peterloo Massacre, and provoked horror among

reformers and radicals of every stripe (Godwin’s diary records ‘outrage

at Manchester’). The atmosphere of the country became increasingly

hostile. Outbreaks of anti-government violence occurred in Huddersfield

and Burnley in the autumn, and the government responded with the Six

Acts – a series of bills restricting the right of the people to assemble

and extending taxes on publications to curtail printing by working-class

radicals. In February 1820, revolutionaries attempted to assassinate the

cabinet – the Cato Street Conspiracy – but were lured into a trap by

government spies. Godwin noted many of these events but did not, as he

had done in the 1790s or in 1815, reach for his pen to make public

comment. He may have suffered a stroke in November 1818 (the diary

merely notes ‘paralysis’) and in December 1819 seems to have lost the

use of his left hand (‘torpor’). His health had deteriorated steadily

for over a decade; he recorded regular headaches and dizziness. Though

always a believer in quiet reform over revolutionary action, the

philosopher was finally too sick to join the (metaphorical) barricades.

Yet Godwin had always been more comfortable, and more confident, in the

realm of theory. The philosopher may have considered himself ‘retired’

but he was still a man of interest for parliamentarians and radical

thinkers, still sought after for his conversation on learned topics.

Godwin still believed in the power of conversation to effect change – in

late 1819 he wrote to and called on James Scarlett, the barrister tasked

with prosecuting the Peterloo demonstrators. The details of what they

might have discussed are lost, but Godwin might have been trying to

steer Scarlett to a position similar to the one the philosopher

expressed in the 1795 Considerations: critical of mass demonstration but

emphatically rejecting government repression.[151] His exchange of

letters with Lady Caroline Lamb began some years of friendship between

them; Godwin spent a few days as the family’s guest in 1822. Lady

Caroline’s husband, the future Lord Melbourne, would eventually serve as

prime minister (and close confidant) to Queen Victoria. At the other end

of the spectrum, the philosopher had in recent years become a friend of

the satirist William Hone – a man whose deliberate provocation of the

establishment had seen him tried for blasphemy, and acquitted, in what

is now seen as a landmark case for British freedom of speech. Godwin

felt that he had one last philosophical contribution to make: the

comprehensive reply to Malthus that friends had urged him to write for

nearly two decades. As he wrote to Clairmont, on one of her trips to

Southend:

What matters what becomes of this miserable carcass, if I can live for

ever in true usefulness? And this must be the case in the present

instance: for whatever becomes of my individual book if I am right the

system of Malthus can never rise again, and the world is delivered for

ever from this accursed apology in favour of vice and misery, of

hard-heartedness and oppression.[152]

His old rival had not been idle in that time, and now enjoyed a position

as professor at the East India Company’s training college at Haileybury.

Malthus had continued to revise and expand the Essay every few years

(1817 saw the publication of the fifth edition), and the mathematician’s

language had hardened. The collegial discussion of the original essay

had gradually given way to a tone of authority, the debate with Godwin

was pushed into the background, and the Essay read more and more like a

justification of the status quo – in general, advocating the elimination

of all forms of welfare support outside private charity (Malthus quotes

the biblical ‘he who does not work, neither shall he eat’, with

approval). Most appallingly for Godwin, Malthus consciously did not

exempt children or the disabled from his rhetoric, arguing that

communities had no moral obligation to care for abandoned children

(indeed, that doing so only added to the underclass of the future) and

proposing legal penalties for children born out of wedlock.

With the help of his disciple, Rosser, Godwin spent two years

researching and writing his answer, publishing Of Population in November

1820. Time had given Godwin the space to question Malthus’s breezy

formula. No longer accepting an inevitable disparity between population

growth and food production, Godwin now sought to prove that society’s

inequality was not a natural consequence of overpopulation. For all the

mathematician dressed his theory up as a law of nature, it rested on

patchy data. Now armed with two surveys worth of British census figures

(1801 and 1811) and writing to obtain comparable information from the

United States, Godwin was willing to argue that Britain was not, in

fact, overpopulated – its inequality was the direct result of political

and moral errors that Malthus’s theory apparently sought to absolve.

Since the Reply to Parr, Godwin and Malthus’s relationship had cooled.

It had been some years since the two had exchanged even coldly polite

letters, and the book betrays a certain anger at seeing Malthus’s theory

lauded for essentially telling the political and economic establishment

what it wanted to hear. Though Godwin’s argument carries considerable

moral force, two-thirds of the book is given over to the philosopher’s

own demographic research. Of Population uses census data from Sweden and

Paraguay to provide examples of places where good living conditions have

occurred alongside negligible population growth, while using information

gathered from sources in Massachusetts to argue that the doubling of

population Malthus observed in the US was the result of immigration

rather than an unrestricted birth rate.

Godwin’s argument can be described as counter-reactionary: the most

recent editions of Malthus’s Essay endorsed ‘things as they are’,

allowing Godwin to emphasise its distance from more traditional moral

values. Throughout the book Godwin co-opts conservative rhetoric,

describing the Essay as unchristian and reminding readers that, for all

it served to rationalise away criticism of contemporary society, it was

a work of philosophical ‘innovation’ that true conservatives should

regard with suspicion. The philosopher’s argument is not entirely

successful – his appeals to religious values are hollow, though they do

expose the hypocrisy of those among Malthus’s defenders who were keen to

denounce heterodoxy when it did not benefit them. Godwin is on stronger

ground when he returns to progressive arguments; Malthus’s Essay

validates passivity and intellectual cowardice, asserting that attempts

to improve humanity’s lot are (at best) futile or (at worst)

counterproductive. What Godwin attempts to show is that such a

conclusion flies in the face of everything we know about ourselves as a

culture. Historical data suggests that we adapt ourselves (and our

communities) to the environment and the available resources,

advancements in knowledge suggest that we can rise to the challenge of

providing for larger populations in the future. Underlying Godwin’s

argument is the position that inequality is not a symptom of human

misery, but its principal cause.

Of Population did not strike the death blow that Godwin apparently hoped

it would. Malthus’s existing critics welcomed the addition of figures

that offered a different picture to those found in the Essay, and

commended Godwin’s challenge to the Essay’s principle argument regarding

the United States. Malthus’s supporters condemned the tone of Godwin’s

book, implied jealousy, and accused the philosopher of making personal

attacks on his opponent. The reasonable criticism was made that Godwin’s

Swedish data was open to interpretation, but there was little common

ground that would have allowed a more productive discussion. One

influential reader who remained unconvinced was US President James

Madison, who was forwarded a copy of Godwin’s book by ambassador Richard

Rush. Madison denounced Godwin’s argument on US immigration as a slight

on American fertility, though the President held his own complex

opinions on the subject of population that ran contrary to those of

Malthus.[153] The most abusive response came from Malthus himself,

however. Offered the chance to review the book (anonymously) in the

Edinburgh Review, Malthus denounced Of Population as ‘the poorest and

most old-womanish performance that has fallen from the pen of any writer

of name, since we first commenced our critical career’. The

mathematician used his platform to accuse Godwin of misrepresentation,

and asserted that the philosopher’s research only served to make his own

thesis incontrovertible.[154] Godwin had never been impressed with

authors who wrote from the cover of anonymity to praise their own work

(he had briefly fallen out with Coleridge on the subject, fifteen years

earlier) and, on learning of the review, he complained of the abuse in a

letter to Mary. He did not see Malthus again until 12 December 1822, a

meeting the diary records as ‘silent’.

Poverty and misery became very real considerations for the Godwins when

they were finally evicted from Skinner Street in May 1822. After a

series of legal battles, spanning several years, a man called Read was

recognised as the lawful owner of the property. Court rulings also

established Read’s right to both evict his tenants and charge them for

years of backdated rent. Shelley had refused the Godwins his assistance

as far back as the summer of 1820, bitterly complaining of how little

difference his money had ever made. Read sent bailiffs to prevent them

from absconding with the Juvenile Library’s stock. William Junior

organised an immediate sale that allowed the family to salvage what was

left of the business and reopen the shop at 195 Strand at the beginning

of July.

On 4 August, news reached London that Shelley had drowned while sailing

on the Ligurian Sea. Godwin was hurt to have received the news

second-hand (from an agent of Leigh Hunt), not realising that Mary had

herself been close to death only a few weeks earlier after a miscarriage

left her bleeding uncontrollably. As she recovered, Mary wrote to her

father regularly (the letters have since been lost).

After months of negotiation, the courts ordered Godwin to pay just short

of £400 in rent arrears. The ever-dependable Marshall stepped in to

persuade the publisher John Murray to organise a private subscription

fund to pay the philosopher’s debt. The amount raised fell short of what

was needed but the list of subscribers records a host of distinguished

names from Godwin’s career, both of friends and adversaries from the

literary and political world. Basil Montagu and Anthony Carlisle

contributed, as did Byron. Walter Scott sent £10, on the understanding

that his gift would remain private. Charles Lamb and Tom Turner had

already given money to help the Juvenile Library escape Skinner Street.

Mackintosh helped the subscription fund go public with the aim of

raising more money. Mary volunteered the proceeds from her latest novel,

Valperga, which Godwin edited for her and was published in February

1823. The Edinburgh publisher John Anderson sent word of his interest in

publishing a new edition of The Enquirer. Read took what money had been

raised by subscription and agreed to receive the rest in instalments.

For a brief period, it seemed as if the storm had passed. Godwin was

busy at work writing another history (of the Civil War and the

Commonwealth), and Mary was finally on her way home.

Mary arrived back in London on 25 August, her father and brother waiting

for her on the wharf as she arrived. She described the new house to

Leigh Hunt as ‘dismal’ but ‘infinitely better than the Skinner St.

one’.[155] The first of many stage adaptations of Frankenstein (Richard

Brinsley Peake’s Presumption) was playing at the English Opera House

when she returned – Mary could expect no money from it, but Godwin

cannily arranged for the novel to be reprinted in order to capitalise on

the play’s success.[156] The play was a hit, spawning a host of

imitators and parodies, and cementing Frankenstein’s image in the

popular consciousness (many elements familiar to modern audiences from

James Whale’s 1931 film originally derive from Peake’s adaptation).

Peake’s script dispenses with much of the novel’s complexity – the

creature is mute, and so unable to speak in its own defence – and

delivers an unambiguous warning against hubris, along with comic and

musical interludes. Mary, Godwin and William Junior saw the play a few

days after her return; Mary’s letter to Leigh Hunt records her

amusement.

The first volume of Godwin’s History of the Commonwealth appeared in

1824. Originally contracted by Henry Colburn to write two volumes, the

philosopher allowed his enthusiasm to get the better of him once again.

The final work spanned four volumes, the last mostly a study of Cromwell

as a statesman, that Colburn was forced to publish in stages (as each

volume was finished) until 1828. Godwin’s work is noteworthy for being

one of the earliest histories of the Civil War era to favour the

parliamentarian cause. For over a century, the standard text on the

period had been Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion – as a royalist

insider, the author had been present at many of the defining moments of

the struggle, but his bias was clear. The only work of similar authority

on the parliament side were the memoirs of Bulstrode Whitelock, but that

was an altogether less accessible and less comprehensive text, known

only to serious scholars of the period. Godwin’s history is a conscious

attempt to reset the balance. The philosopher was openly critical of

Charles I – previous histories, relying on Clarendon’s assessment of the

monarch’s intentions and motivations had erred on the side of sympathy –

but avoided partisanship by condemning the intolerance of the religious

independents on the other side. Godwin presented Cromwell as a complex

character: a spiritual man who wielded power ruthlessly, a man who had

fought to curtail the power of monarchy who found himself taking

dictatorial powers when he found parliament wanting. The philosopher’s

admiration for Cromwell is clear, but he does not shy away from

denouncing the Lord Protector’s sometimes arbitrary use of authority.

The History was well-received but, as a large and expensive work, was

never destined to become a popular success. The Juvenile Library

struggled on until the nationwide financial crash of 1825, as

out-of-control speculation caused the collapse of many small or regional

banks – leaving businesses that ran on credit (as much of publishing

industry did) in dire straits. Bankruptcy came as a relief for Godwin.

The years of begging, arguing and dodging were finally over, and the

fall had come at a time when even the most respected publishers were in

danger of collapse. The Edinburgh publishers Archibald Constable and

James Ballantyne were both bankrupted, and Walter Scott was almost

ruined as a result. The family – now just really Godwin and Clairmont –

moved from the Strand to a house in Gower Place. William was now a

reporter for the Morning Chronicle, Mary engaged in a drawn-out battle

with her in-laws over her right to publish her husband’s work and

custody of Percy Florence. Charles and Claire spent most of these years

in Europe (Charles mostly in Vienna; Claire working as a governess in

Moscow, and later Dresden) but made the time to return home and share

their experiences. Through Mary and William, Godwin was introduced to

another generation of writers: the American novelist James Fenimore

Cooper, novelist and future MP Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the adventurer (and

friend of Shelley) Edward Trelawny. Frances Wright (the abolitionist and

US social reformer) introduced herself, writing to Godwin about the

community she had built in Tennessee before she called at Gower Place

with Robert Dale Owen in tow. The philosopher was not always the centre

of attention, however, Robert Dale later confessed that he had become

smitten with Mary, and Mary herself joked at the suggestion of a romance

between herself and Godwin’s old friend Washington Irving.

Release from the stress of the Juvenile Library sparked a renaissance in

Godwin’s writing. Less than a week after he sent the final volume of the

History to his publisher, he had begun work on a new novel. Cloudesley,

published in March 1830, is a rambling story that meanders from

political intrigue in Russia to personal intrigue in Greece on its way

to another exploration of Godwin’s favourite theme – education, or

rather the relationship between mentor and student. The story was

inspired by the then famous Annesley case, where it was alleged that the

sixth Earl of Anglesey had stolen his title by arranging the kidnap of

the true heir. Though the titular Cloudesley participates in such a

crime, he seeks to atone by raising the heir himself, and the boy

undoubtedly grows into a better man under Cloudesley’s guidance than he

would have done as an earl. The novel’s conclusion argues that love is a

more significant force than either blood or wealth. All the novel’s

conflicts stem from the pursuit of status poisoning the wellspring of

human affection, but love (familial love, respect and fraternity) is

ultimately triumphant. It is arguably the weakest of Godwin’s mature

novels. The work contains passages of great eloquence, but the narrative

itself wanders almost aimlessly (there are three stories within

Cloudesley, but only two of them are connected) before resolving itself

with relatively little excitement. Reviewers found it philosophically

interesting, but dramatically inert, and even Bulwer-Lytton (writing in

the New Monthly) was forced to concede that much of the first volume was

superfluous. Before Cloudesley had even been published, however, Godwin

was writing another collection of essays. Thoughts on Man (1831) is in

some ways a philosophical memoir, revisiting topics covered in Political

Justice and The Enquirer from nearly forty years distance. The

philosopher considered it ‘the most faultless book I ever printed’,

though perhaps few agreed – it was rejected by eleven publishers before

finding a home with Effingham Wilson.[157]

Little of what Godwin had to say was new to those who had kept current

with his work. At a time when parliamentary reform finally looked like a

real possibility, reviewers found Godwin’s criticism of secret ballots

quixotic – but it was a position he had held for decades. Philosophical

critics have leapt upon Godwin’s reconsideration of equality at birth

(i.e. the position espoused in earlier works – originally derived from

Helvétius – that all human beings were born with the same potential, and

that their environment made them different), but Godwin expresses this

so vaguely that it appears more an idle musing than a developed

position. In short, Godwin argues in Thoughts on Man that young people

do appear to be born better disposed towards some things than others

(say, languages, or mathematics, or making things) but that the details

of this do not become apparent until they are more developed. Crucially,

however, Godwin is firm that all young people have equal potential – it

is simply a matter of allowing them to find the field in which they can

excel. This obviously has political and philosophical implications, but

these are fully in tune with Godwin’s other positions. Thoughts on Man

does offer the philosopher’s longest discussion of gender and

relationships. Godwin regards men and women as naturally equal, but

argues that loving relationships (of all kinds) are based on inequality.

The philosopher begins from the love of parents for their children:

parents protect, teach and sacrifice for young people though there is no

real benefit to the parents themselves (Godwin considers biological ties

irrelevant). We love those who need us. Love between adults arises from

(complementary) difference. Godwin discusses adult relationships in

terms of superiors and inferiors, but also stresses that the gap between

partners must not be too great (they must be on the same level to

appreciate each other) encouraging us to read Godwin’s idea of love as

more about give and take than dominance and submission. Each partner

gives of themselves to supply what the other is lacking. The

philosopher’s principal example of this is the relationship between

Achilles and Patroclus – the famously wrathful hero in love with his

companion’s kindness and humanity. Godwin asserts that equals cannot

fully be at peace with one another, forever uneasy at exposing their

shortcomings to someone so much like themselves. The philosopher argues

that the inequality of loving relationships explains the development of

romantic chivalry. Where the ancients simply excluded women from the

public sphere, Godwin claims that medieval culture developed mutually

supportive roles for men and women (women holding moral authority, men

physical) that enshrined mutual deference and respect. The philosopher

strikes a Burkean note here, offering no judgment on how often medieval

(or contemporary) culture failed to reach this ideal. We should not,

however, read this as a simple endorsement of gender roles. Godwin

concludes that the purest love is based on mutual submission – and it is

clear from his letters to both Wollstonecraft and Clairmont that he

regarded them as his protectors as much as he was theirs.

What is most interesting about Thoughts on Man is its candour. Godwin’s

discussion of failure provides us with an insight into his thinking

process – the philosopher describes enlightenment as an attempt to take

control of one’s own confusion, bringing what we think we know to the

test again and again until it becomes clear. In a later essay, Godwin

attempts to confront his own shyness and discusses the difficulty of

remaining true to one’s own beliefs in the face of criticism.

Thoughts on Man may not have represented many new ideas, but Godwin’s

old ones were still in demand. In 1830 both Godwin and Mary were

approached by a breakaway publisher, Richard Bentley, looking to buy the

copyrights to their most successful novels. Bentley was one of the first

British publishers to make extensive use of stereotyping, allowing him

to commission large print runs for minimal cost and quickly reprint if

there was further demand.[158] The publisher bought the rights to Caleb

Williams, St Leon, Fleetwood and Frankenstein, printing new editions of

each work (Mary took the opportunity to significantly revise the text)

as part of his Standard Novels series alongside the works of Jane

Austen, James Fenimore Cooper and Victor Hugo. Dispensing with the wide

margins and large type used by other publishers, the Standard Novels

were small and affordable – Caleb Williams initially retailed at six

shillings, a third of what it cost in 1794 – allowing Godwin’s novels to

reach a far larger audience than had hitherto been possible.[159]

William died in September 1832, a victim of the cholera epidemic that

swept Britain that year. Godwin wrote that his son had spiralled from

perfect health to death in less than four days; his parents attended him

around the clock for the last two days of his life. He was twenty-nine

years old. William had led a short but troubled life; Godwin’s memoir

describes his fiery disposition and difficulties in settling down on a

career. He spent some time in prison (probably for debt) and apparently

married without telling the rest of his family. He left behind a novel,

Transfusion, which a grieving Godwin published (in 1835) with a preface

describing his son’s character, and which speaks to the great pride the

philosopher took in the achievements of his often wayward son. The novel

itself feels unfinished; the story takes a turn for the fantastic in its

final chapters but ends with its best idea almost unused. Nonetheless,

the work speaks to the potential that Godwin’s preface describes – and

is notably closer in spirit to one of Mary’s novels than one of

Godwin’s.

Bentley published Godwin’s next novel, Deloraine, in 1833 (though using

the premium three-volume format, rather than as part of the Standard

Novels series). Deloraine combines themes from the philosopher’s most

successful novels – a man on the run, an exalted first wife and a

protagonist tragically consumed by jealousy regarding his second.

Poignantly, the narrator of Deloraine is eventually saved by the efforts

of his dutiful daughter. Godwin’s letters imply that, when writing of

the novel stalled, it was Mary’s input that provided the spark to get

the story moving again.[160] Father and daughter often worked in

partnership in these years, proposing ideas to each other and making use

of each other’s publishing contacts. It was Godwin that introduced Mary

to Henry Colburn, who would publish her novels The Last Man (1826),

Perkin Warbeck (1830) and Lodore (1835).[161] Mary tried several times

(unsuccessfully) to leverage her closer relationship with John Murray to

her father’s benefit. Mary had less need than her father to make a

living by her pen, an agreement with Sir Timothy Shelley provided an

allowance to support Percy Florence on condition that she published

nothing controversial. This arrangement was a frequent source of grief

for Mary, as Shelley’s father was more than willing to see his son’s

literary works forgotten. Godwin and Clairmont were worse off, but they

struggled along as they always had. The political climate had changed,

however, and now Godwin had friends in high places.

In November 1830, the Duke of Wellington’s government had been unseated

by a vote of no confidence and replaced with a Whig administration led

by Earl Grey. Godwin had known Grey since the politician had been a

junior MP. William Lamb (Lord Melbourne) was home secretary, and Lord

Brougham (who had helped Shelley with his custody battle) was Lord

Chancellor. Godwin wrote regularly to them in the first few months of

their government, and frequently attempted to call on them – knowing the

philosopher, probably hoping to advise them on political matters. Grey’s

(later, Melbourne’s) government stood for four years, successfully

extending the right to vote with the Great Reform Act of 1832 and

finally outlawing slavery across the empire in 1833. Once the government

was well-established in 1832, Godwin wrote to Brougham to request a

sinecure (any of the largely honorary but still salaried positions that

was within the purview of an administration to grant to its supporters).

Perhaps to the philosopher’s surprise, his request was granted, and in

1833 Godwin was appointed to the role of office keeper and yeoman usher

of the receipt of the exchequer – a job that came with £200 a year and a

house in New Palace Yard. Though the position entailed little actual

work, Godwin attempted to make himself useful, the sociologist Harriet

Martineau wrote of him taking her on a tour of parliament and providing

anecdotes from his decades of political and historical research. Asking

for and accepting a sinecure was obviously a compromise – he had railed

against the practice in Political Justice – but he probably felt the

need to provide for Clairmont and knew that, in his advanced age, the

government had little to gain from buying his support. The job was given

out of charity, and offered the chance for Godwin to live out his last

years in peace. The philosopher was at the theatre during the great fire

that destroyed the Palace of Westminster in October 1834, he returned to

find that Clairmont had single-handedly moved all of their books and

papers to a safe location. It would be amusing to claim that the great

philosophical anarchist was responsible for the destruction of

parliament (the fire started from the burning of tally sticks in his

department, the Exchequer) but such was Godwin’s affection for the

institution, he might not have seen the funny side. A few days before

the fire, the position of yeoman usher had officially been abolished.

Godwin had originally been told the job was for life, and he wrote

nervous letters to Lord Melbourne asking him to confirm this. In the

end, Melbourne was dismissed by the king before he came to decision. In

the end it was the new prime minister, the Conservative Sir Robert Peel,

that agreed that Godwin could stay. Peel’s letter is of particular

interest:

I will not defer the assurance, that whatever I can do consistently with

my public duty, to prevent a measure of Official Retrenchment from

bearing hardly upon one so far advanced in years, and so distinguished

by his literary character, I will do as well from a sense of Justice, as

from a grateful recollection of the pleasure I have derived from those

Works to which, with a just Pride, you have referred.[162]

The last work Godwin published in his lifetime was a piece of cultural

history. Lives of the Necromancers (1834) was an investigation into

people’s belief in magic before the modern era. Unlike the philosopher’s

other histories, Lives of the Necromancers is well-contained, discussing

a series of isolated episodes, cases and literary texts and drawing

conclusions from them. It is probably the most accessible of his

historical works. The work that Godwin left unfinished at the time of

his death was a collection of essays on religion under the title The

Genius of Christianity Unveiled. He left it to Mary to publish, as his

literary executor, but it was not printed until 1873. The essays form

the philosopher’s last statement on spirituality: he declares ‘a

religious sense’ to be essential to a healthy mind, the ability to be

awed and to accept that we as individuals are not the centre of the

universe. Religion itself, however, encroaches too far, playing on our

sense of awe (in the power of a creator) to justify a suspension of

reason (i.e. faith). Godwin argues that Christianity is an essentially

incoherent doctrine: an infinitely loving god that nevertheless

threatens eternal punishment, an omniscient god that demands formal

worship in addition to a pure heart. Yet Godwin concludes that religions

are human creations that only touch on true spirituality, our

understanding of our insignificance in the totality of nature. If there

is a purpose to life, Godwin says, it is to live – ‘for there is no

work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the grave’.[163]

Godwin recorded his meetings, reading and health until the last two

weeks of his life. The philosopher died on the evening of 7 April 1836;

his wife and daughter were by his side. He was buried alongside

Wollstonecraft in St Pancras Churchyard.

9. The Legacy

The notes that accompanied Godwin’s will asked Mary to publish The

Genius of Christianity Unveiled, but expressed a certain ambivalence

about the rest of his unpublished work. His wishes were pragmatic: ‘Let

all that are not presently printed be consigned to the flames. But for

the consideration of profit to be made, I should pass sentence of

condemnation on nearly the whole …’[164] Mary did the reverse, sitting

on the religious essays while gathering her father’s notes, manuscripts

and letters about her in preparation to write Godwin’s biography. She

and Clairmont signed a contract with Henry Colburn within weeks of the

philosopher’s death, but the work was never completed (a rough draft of

Godwin’s life up to 1800 still survives). Mary turned her attentions to

editing an official edition of Shelley’s poems in 1838, having finally

received Sir Timothy’s consent. With help from her friend Caroline

Norton and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Mary helped to negotiate a pension from

the Royal Bounty Fund for Clairmont until the latter’s death in 1841.

Percy Florence inherited the Shelley title in 1844, forever freeing Mary

from financial concerns. In 1848 Percy Florence married Jane Gibson, who

would go on to play an enthusiastic role in protecting the family’s

literary legacy.

In some ways the legacy was already well in hand. The 1832 Reform Act

had done away with many of parliament’s worst abuses but had not

significantly extended the right to vote. The Chartist movement

campaigned, much as the radicals of the 1790s had, for wider suffrage

and a more democratic system of government. They appropriated Godwin’s

work for their own purposes: William Thomson’s Chartist Circular

(1839–42) used selective quotations from Caleb Williams, focusing on the

protagonist’s fortitude and willingness to resist. The Chartist leader

Henry Vincent read Political Justice while imprisoned for sedition – he

was tutored on it by Godwin’s former ally, Francis Place – and upon

leaving prison renounced direct action in favour of ‘moral force’ and

reform through education. The same year (1841) Caleb Williams was

serialised in John Cunningham’s Novel Newspaper, effectively bringing

the price of the novel to four pence and reaching tens of thousands of

readers. A year later, the radical publisher James Watson issued a

fourth edition of Political Justice, priced at only five shillings and

made available in numbers (i.e. as a partwork) at six pence.[165]

The nascent Communist movement also took an interest in Godwin. In The

Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) Engels declared Bentham

and Godwin to be ‘the two great practical philosophers of latest date’

and that Godwin in particular was ‘almost exclusively the property of

the proletariat’ – implicitly, that he believed Godwin’s readers were

exclusively Chartists and other working-class radicals, in contrast to

Bentham’s following among the ‘Radical bourgeoisie’.[166] Engels

privately confessed to Marx that he found Bentham tedious. In a letter

regarding a planned ‘library of political theory’ for German activists,

Engels considered the work of Charles Fourier, Henri de Saint-Simon and

Robert Owen to be indispensable. Godwin failed to make the cut,

principally because Engels could not support the strongly individualist

conclusions of Political Justice (he says that Godwin regards society as

‘a luxury article’) but also because he saw an overlap between the

arguments of Political Justice and Marx’s (never finished) Kritik der

Politik und National-Okonomie.[167]

Mary died in 1851, and Lady Jane Shelley exercised tight control over

the Shelley-Godwin papers after her mother-in-law’s death. Her own book

on Shelley, Shelley Memorials from Authentic Sources (1859), portrays

Godwin as a calming influence on the poet’s wild genius, but largely

omits any ideas or events that might appear controversial (thus mostly

skipping the years 1814–16). The critic W. M. Rossetti alleged that Lady

Jane had burned many Shelley documents that showed the poet in a bad

light, and it seems apparent that (on the advice of the British

Library’s Richard Garnett) she trimmed or destroyed a number of letters.

It seems clear that Lady Jane wanted the family to be remembered,

however, and she sponsored detailed biographies of Godwin (by Charles

Kegan Paul in 1876) and Shelley (by Edward Dowden in 1886) – the latter

almost certainly to provide an accurate but sympathetic antidote to the

many sensationalist memoirs of the poet that had emerged since his

death. Kegan Paul’s biography makes extensive use of Godwin’s

correspondence and is still a useful resource today, though it is often

unclear or inaccurate on points of fact. The work displays great

sympathy for Wollstonecraft, casts Clairmont in the role of wicked

stepmother, and depicts the philosopher as an awkward, humourless man

who attempted to live by high-minded but impractical ideals. Kegan

Paul’s portrait was highly influential. Dowden, however, was far less

sympathetic in his assessment of Godwin. Shelley’s biographer was

dismissive about Godwin’s ideas and considered the poet’s interest in

Political Justice ‘unlucky’. Dowden’s original manuscript had taken a

cruelly irreverent line in discussing Godwin as a philosopher, until the

family expressed their displeasure and he was encouraged to revise.[168]

Dowden’s guide to Godwin seems to have been the intellectual historian

Sir Leslie Stephen – Stephen was nakedly hostile to Godwin’s ideas, and

preferred to belittle rather than engage with them. Stephen’s account of

the philosopher in his History of English Thought (1876) makes only a

superficial reading of Political Justice before descending into ad

hominem. Stephen would, however, provide the article on Godwin for the

first Dictionary of National Biography (he was its editor from 1885 to

1891). The essay leans heavily on Kegan Paul but introduces new

inaccuracies (presenting Stephen’s sneering conjectures as fact) while

it moralises about Godwin’s dishonesty and hubris. Stephen’s writing on

Godwin would not have been out of place in the Anti-Jacobin or the

British Critic, yet it was treated as the mainstream scholarly position.

Godwin had a new champion outside the mainstream, however. 1886 also saw

the foundation of the anarchist newspaper, Freedom, under the editorship

of Charlotte Wilson. Pyotr Alekseievich Kropotkin, Wilson’s co-founder

and lead writer, opened the first issue with a statement that Godwin

would have approved of:

We are socialists, disbelievers in property, advocates of the equal

claims of all to work for the community as seems good – calling no-one

master, and of the equal claim to each to satisfy as seems good to them,

their natural needs from the stock of social wealth they have laboured

to produce … We are anarchists, disbelievers in the government of the

many by the few in any shape and under any pretext.[169]

The newspaper made frequent use of Godwin in its early years. Kropotkin

firmly claimed Godwin for anarchism in his 1910 essay for the

Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘even though he did not give that name to the

ideas developed in his remarkable work’.[170] For Kropotkin, as for

subsequent intellectual historians such as George Woodcock, Godwin stood

at the head of a long anti-authoritarian tradition. The philosopher was,

however, more readily embraced by (left-wing) anarchists than

(right-wing) libertarians. Kropotkin saw anarcho-communism as the

natural continuation of Godwin’s ideas, and identified Max Stirner as

the philosopher’s parallel for the individualist-anarchist school

favoured by the right. Affection for Godwin’s work among the

anti-authoritarian left continued throughout the twentieth century: H.

N. Brailsford’s study Shelley, Godwin and their Circle (1913) is far

more interested in Political Justice than it is the circle of Romantic

poets (and may be the first critical work to stress the influence of

Protestant Dissent on Godwin’s early thought); Herbert Read urged a

revival of Godwin’s ideas in the wake of the Second World War as a

counterbalance to the ever-expanding statism of its victors (Read would

later influence the Green Anarchism of Murray Bookchin).[171] The

philosopher’s thoughts on education were a profound influence on the

anarchist social historian Colin Ward, and his lectures collected as

Talking Schools (1995) called for educationists to take note of Godwin’s

ideas.

Assessing Godwin’s impact on (right) libertarianism is rather more

difficult. Murray Rothbard, the central thinker of twentieth-century

anarcho-capitalism, dismissed Godwin as a proto-Communist, yet

mainstream US libertarianism commonly traces its intellectual heritage

back to Thomas Jefferson – who certainly read Godwin and who, during his

presidency, was satirised as the philosopher’s disciple.[172] Less

tenuously, Josiah Warren’s concept of individual sovereignty (and

rejection of ‘communism’) emerged from his first-hand experience of

Owen’s ‘Community of Equality’ at New Harmony, Indiana. The pivotal

Benjamin Tucker (editor of the periodical Liberty, which published the

work of individualist thinkers from both sides of the left/right divide)

cited both Jefferson and Warren as key influences on his own ideas. The

uniquely American individualism that originates in the transcendentalism

of Henry David Thoreau (and which defies simple political

categorisation) can be traced partially to Coleridge.

Godwin would probably have been gratified to see the revival of academic

interest in his work in the mid-twentieth century. F. E. L. Priestley’s

scholarly edition of Political Justice (1946) made the full text readily

available for the first time in nearly a century, creating the

conditions for greater and greater critical attention from the 1940s up

to the present day. John P. Clark was the first to write a comprehensive

summary of Godwin’s thought (The Philosophical Anarchism of William

Godwin, 1977), clarifying the philosopher’s positions on a variety of

issues through reference to the entire body of his work. Mark Philp, in

Godwin’s Political Justice (1986), drilled down into all three editions

of the treatise to identify what are now accepted as the work’s core

principles (the ideas that remain consistent across all versions of the

text) and attempting to explain the thinking behind Godwin’s revisions.

Philp also led the project that digitised Godwin’s diary, making it

possible to cross reference nearly forty years of his social

engagements, reading, writing, and private events. In the twenty-first

century the reappraisal of Godwin’s novels and his influence on period

fiction has been led by Pamela Clemit and Tilottama Rajan, resulting in

a new generation of critics looking closely at novels other than Caleb

Williams (Clemit has also been instrumental in publishing the

philosopher’s correspondence). Godwin has been the subject of three

comprehensive biographies: by Don Locke (1980), Peter Marshall (1984,

revised 2017) and William St Clair (1989); each has its own merits.

The philosopher has, for a century or more, been overshadowed by the

rest of his family. Without wishing to diminish the vital contribution

of Wollstonecraft to feminism, or of the Shelleys to literature, this

imbalance has done Godwin a disservice and (until recent years) ignored

his place at the centre of English Romanticism. Not only should we take

note of Godwin as a novelist and political thinker, but also consider

his pioneering work as a historian and children’s publisher. In both

fields, Godwin’s work was ahead of its time. The philosopher’s ideas on

education, long neglected, were arrived at independently by progressive

educationists in the mid-twentieth century; his theory of reading

appears to be borne out by modern cognitive psychology. Godwin’s ideas

remain challenging, however. The philosopher envisions the eventual

demise of authority, not through its revolutionary overthrow, but

because of its ultimate irrelevance to a post-scarcity society. Godwin

argues that a society that values individual judgment has unlimited

scope for progress. By contrast, the more a community seeks to manage

its people the more it gradually diminishes them. The philosopher’s

ideas would be demanding even if they did not question some of the basic

principles the states we live in are founded upon, but we should take

heart from Godwin’s own continual return to his own works in search of

clarity and accuracy.

As we have seen, Godwin revised many of his major works, not only to

better express his thoughts, but because those thoughts had been

reconsidered and themselves revised. The philosopher considered this

essential to serious intellectual endeavour, though it brought him

criticism from contemporaries (both friend and foe). Godwin’s detractors

have frequently leapt on his revisions as if the philosopher had in some

way surrendered, sometimes ignoring that his new position was as much a

challenge to convention as his old one. Critical friends (Shelley among

them) sometimes lamented the qualification of his most challenging or

controversial ideas – Godwin was always the first to recognise that big

ideas were usually also complex ones, and he refused to sacrifice

accuracy for the sake of rhetoric. The philosopher might have been

amused at how much ink has been spilled over the search for consistency

in his work, arguing that ‘the active and independent mind, the genuine

lover of and enquirer after truth, will inevitably pass through certain

revolutions of opinion’.[173] Some core principles remain consistent

throughout his work however: the duty to act according to private

judgment, the value of conversation as both a critical tool and source

of education, and the importance of empathy to moral action. The

philosopher subjected his own work to rigorous examination – the threads

that remain consistent are the most robust.

It is not uncommon to read in Godwin scholarship the opinion that such

and such a revision causes the collapse of his whole system. This

assumes that the philosopher was an architect of systems. Few, if any,

of Godwin’s works seek to offer a comprehensive account of their subject

– Political Justice is his most systematic, but it remains an enquiry

(an investigation) rather than a manifesto, focused on exploding the

intellectual and moral contradictions of political society while only

speculating on the possible gains of doing differently. Other works make

suggestions, but further works question them. Some have regarded

Godwin’s career as a steady retreat from the boldness of the arguments

he advanced in the 1790s, Godwin himself saw his revisions as

improvements. For all his occasional pomposity, the philosopher could

acknowledge his own shortcomings and was receptive to honest criticism.

In The Enquirer, Godwin wrote that for an adult to (ethically) gain the

confidence of a child was difficult and that one should expect to fail.

The sentiment could be extended to describe the philosopher’s approach

to any worthwhile venture: we should attempt to do the right thing and

expect to get it wrong. Even when we think we are successful, we must

examine our conclusions – discuss those conclusions with others – and

expect to find holes and mistakes in our work. But we must persevere:

It is the characteristic of ordinary minds to fly from one scheme to the

other. It is the characteristic of genius, though it fall, to rise

again, though it suffer defeats to persist, and though obliged to alter

and modify many of its judgments, never to part with that clearness of

spirit which attended their formation.[174]

Such is the progressive nature of humanity. Godwin did not subscribe to

notions of inexorable improvement, the betterment of humanity was in his

view contingent on our ability to foster critical reason and empathy in

future generations. His writing stands as testament to that, both his

great works and his little ones. His life was full of failures too,

mistakes and compromises that we might fairly criticise him for. Yet

after every failure, the philosopher was back at his desk writing

something new – rising again, hoping to awaken genius.

Notes

The following abbreviations are used in the notes that follow for

brevity:

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[1] CNMG, vol. 1, p. 10.

[2] Ibid., p. 30.

[3] Ibid., p. 37.

[4] Ibid., p. 31.

[5] Ibid., p. 36.

[6] Ibid., p. 42.

[7] Autobiographical note, Abinger Collection, c.32, folio 34. The

Abinger Collection, held at the Bodleian Library, comprises the

correspondence and papers of three generations of the Godwin/Shelley

family (hereafter referred to as ‘MS Abinger’).

[8] CNMG, vol. 1, p. 53.

[9] Godwin liked to depict himself as a man of logic and reason, a

description that critics and biographers took at face value and later

amplified. Godwin’s first twentieth-century biographer, Ford K. Brown,

insisted that Godwin was ‘painfully devoid of humour and of taste’ (The

Life of William Godwin, London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1926, p. 33). In

contrast, his writing regularly displays notes of whimsy that do not

chime with the later caricature.

[10] To the theatre historian William Dunlap, quoted in Dunlap, A

History of the American Theatre (New York: J & J Harper, 1832), p. 182.

[11] Charles Kegan Paul, William Godwin, His Friends and Contemporaries

(London: Henry S. King & Co., 1876), vol. 1, p. 61.

[12] Price, Discourse on the Love of Our Country (London: T. Cadell,

1789), p. 40.

[13] Ibid., p. 50.

[14] Letter, n.d., MS Abinger, c.17, folio 29.

[15] William Godwin, Of Population (London: Longman, Hurst, Bees, Orme

and Brown, 1820), p. iv.

[16] Mary Shelley reported her father’s account of (then prime minister)

Pitt the Younger’s opinion that, ‘a three guinea book could never do

much harm among those who had not three shillings to spare’. Pamela

Clemit and A. A. Markley (eds), Mary Shelley’s Literary Lives and Other

Writings (London: Routledge, 2002), vol. 4, p. 86.

[17] William Hazlitt, Spirit of the Age in Complete Works of William

Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1930–4), vol. 11,

p. 17.

[18] PPWG, vol. 3, p. 50.

[19] Ibid., p. 51.

[20] Ibid., p. 75.

[21] Ibid., p. 95.

[22] Ibid., p. 231.

[23] Ibid., p. 240.

[24] Ibid., p. 250.

[25] Ibid., p. 253.

[26] Ibid., p. 289.

[27] Ibid., p. 307.

[28] Ibid., p. 377.

[29] Ibid., pp. 374–5.

[30] Ibid., p. 423.

[31] Ibid., p. 457.

[32] Ibid., p. 453.

[33] Though present in English common law for centuries, the widespread

recognition of coverture as a legal principle is thought to stem from

William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–9).

Godwin’s diary records his use of Blackstone throughout his research for

Political Justice.

[34] PPWG, vol. 3, p. 453.

[35] Ibid., p. 454.

[36] The philosopher is pulling ideas out of the air, at this point.

Godwin is, to some extent, right: estimates today place the world

population at under one billion for much of his life – but demography

was poorly understood at the time, and reliable data largely absent. The

first modern census of Britain was conducted in 1801.

[37] CNMG, vol. 3, p. 4.

[38] For a novel, a conservative first printing in the period was

usually 500 copies. An established author with a recent success behind

him may have warranted an initial print run twice that size. Caleb

Williams went to a second and third edition before the end of the decade

(we lack numbers for either of them), so it seems likely that the novel

sold several thousand copies in only a few years. To put these numbers

in context, Sir Walter Scott’s novel Waverley (1814), one of the

best-selling novels of the period, sold around 40,000 copies in Scott’s

lifetime.

[39] MS Abinger, c.38, folio 2.

[40] Godwin does not directly address why this should be, but we can

infer his position from his theory of knowledge as it appears in the

revised Political Justice. Proper intellectual rigour insists that we

consider every situation as a case in itself, without allowing our prior

experiences (perhaps, prejudices) to cloud our judgment. Yet we are

unlikely to ever have the full picture of a situation, and past

experience can fill in many of the gaps (X has always been true in the

past, and it explains Y). We are inclined to look for heuristics to help

us make quick judgments: acting with benevolence seems likely to

increase happiness, so it supplies a ‘good’ answer, if not necessarily

the ‘correct’ one (which, all other things being uncertain, may be

impossible to ascertain). Experience may come to reinforce this. We

ultimately come to value benevolence as good, rather than the effects of

benevolence.

[41] John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason,

Fantasies of Regicide 1793–1796 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000),

p. 553.

[42] The True Briton was one of a number of periodicals founded or

supported by government money around this time. The Sun and The True

Briton were daily newspapers operated by the government pamphleteer John

Heriot. The British Critic and William Gifford’s Anti-Jacobin were

literary journals that published reactionary satire and hostile reviews

of books that strayed from the conservative line of church, king, and

family values. For more on this, see John Barrell, Imagining the King’s

Death and Kevin Gilmartin, Writing Against Revolution: Literary

Conservatism in Britain 1790–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 2007).

[43] PPWG, vol. 2, p. 149.

[44] Letters, vol. 1, p. 138.

[45] CNMG, vol. 1, p. 112.

[46] Ibid., p. 110.

[47] Ibid., p. 122.

[48] Ibid.

[49] Godwin to Mary Wollstonecraft, 13 July 1796, in Letters, vol. 1, p.

171.

[50] Wollstonecraft to William Godwin, 17 August 1796, in Mary

Wollstonecraft, Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, edited by

Ralph M. Wardle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), pp. 336–7

(hereafter referred to as ‘Letters of Wollstonecraft’).

[51] Godwin to Mary Wollstonecraft, 17 August 1796, in Letters, vol. 1,

pp. 173–4.

[52] PPWG, vol. 5, p. 107.

[53] Godwin to Thomas Wedgwood, 19 April 1797, in Letters, vol. 1, p.

199.

[54] CNMG, vol. 1, p. 130.

[55] Godwin to Mary Hays, 10 April 1797, in Letters, vol. 1, p. 197.

[56] She may have principally meant religion. Wollstonecraft was a

believer – she had been a member of Richard Price’s congregation at

Newington Green – while Godwin at the time still regarded himself as an

atheist. Wollstonecraft to Amelia Alderson, 11 April 1797, in Letters of

Wollstonecraft, p. 389.

[57] Wollstonecraft to Godwin, 21 May 1797, in Letters of

Wollstonecraft, p. 394.

[58] Wollstonecraft to Godwin, 19 June 1797, ibid., pp. 398–9.

[59] CNMG, vol. 1. p. 135.

[60] Ibid., p. 117.

[61] Ibid., p. 129.

[62] Roscoe papers MS 3958A.

[63] The most successful of these, Isaac D’Israeli’s Vaurien (1797), may

have amused Wollstonecraft with its depiction – she wrote a note to

Godwin that read, ‘There is a good boy write me a review …’ (17 March

1797). Caricatures of Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and many of their friends,

appeared in conservative and reactionary fiction throughout the period.

The book historian M. O. Grenby attempts to align some of these

characters with real-life personages in The Anti-Jacobin Novel

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 226–7.

[64] Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Population, 1^(st) edition, in

E. A. Wrigley and David Souden (eds), The Works of Thomas Robert

Malthus, vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 1986), ch. 10.

[65] Malthus to Godwin, 20 August 1798, quoted in Letters, vol. 2.

[66] Godwin to James Mackintosh, January 1799, ibid.

[67] Mackintosh to Godwin, January 1799, quoted in ibid., p. 71.

[68] Unaddressed letter, June or July 1799, ibid., pp. 83–4.

[69] Godwin to George Robinson, 14 September 1799, ibid.

[70] William Maginn, ‘William Godwin’, in ‘A Gallery of Illustrious

Literary Characters’, no. 53, Fraser’s Magazine, 10 (October 1834), p.

463.

[71] CNMG, vol. 4, p. 270.

[72] Coleridge to John Thelwall, 13 May 1796, in Earl Leslie Griggs

(ed.), Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 6 volumes (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1956), vol. 1, p. 215. See also The Friend in

Barbara E. Rooke (ed.), The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,

16 volumes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), vol. 4, p.

334–8.

[73] Coleridge to Godwin, 29 March 1811, ibid., vol. 3, p. 315.

[74] Godwin knew Frend well, the two were both frequently dinner guests

of Horne Tooke. Frend had been connected romantically with Mary Hays,

and her novel Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) draws on the experience –

Godwin appears in the novel as Emma’s mentor, Mr Francis.

[75] CNMG, vol. 1, p. 53.

[76] Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, vol. 1, p. 185.

[77] In the poem ‘Living without God in the World’ (in Robert Southey’s

Annual Anthology the previous year) the poet wrote that, ‘Some braver

spirits of a modern stamp/Affect a Godhead nearer …’. This is discussed

in detail in Felicity James, Charles Lamb, Coleridge and Wordsworth:

Reading Friendship in the 1790s (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008),

pp. 134–6.

[78] Reported by Robert Southey in C. C. Southey (ed.), The Life and

Correspondence of Robert Southey (New York: Harper, 1851), p. 536–7.

[79] Charles Lamb to Thomas Manning, August 1801, in Edwin W. Marrs

(ed.), Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University

Press, 1976), vol. 1, p. 230.

[80] Samuel Parr, A Spital Sermon, preached at Christ Church, upon

Easter Tuesday, April 15, 1800, to Which are Added Notes (London: J.

Mawman, 1801), p. 4.

[81] Godwin to Samuel Parr, 24 April 1800, in Letters, vol. 2, p. 201.

[82] ‘Pray come & see me – I admire your Talents – I love your

Philanthropy – I am ambitious of your friendship’. Parr to Godwin, 4

September 1794, MS Abinger, c.2, folio 47.

[83] Parr to Godwin, 29 April 1800, MS Abinger, c.5, folios 113–18.

[84] MS Abinger, c.21, folio 61.

[85] Parr, Spital Sermon, p. 52.

[86] PPWG, vol. 2, p. 165.

[87] Ibid., pp. 170–1.

[88] Ibid., p. 171.

[89] Ibid., p. 177.

[90] Ibid., p. 178.

[91] Ibid., p. 190.

[92] Ibid., pp. 190–1.

[93] Ibid., p. 198.

[94] Reproduced in ibid., pp. 211–3.

[95] This addition remained part of Malthus’s Essay even in its final,

definitive edition in 1826. See Wrigley and Souden, Works of Thomas

Robert Malthus, vol. 3, p. 55.

[96] Exact publication figures for Caleb Williams are unclear, though it

was obviously a resounding success for its first two publishers. For

context, St Leon’s initial print run of a thousand copies sold out in

less than two months but the novel did not reach a third printing until

1816.

[97] For more on theatre audiences, see W. Van Lennep et al. (eds) The

London Stage 1660–1800 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University

Press, 1968). Novel buying and circulating libraries are discussed at

length in William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), which also contains

significant information on the early publication history of both Godwin

and Mary Shelley’s work.

[98] Charles Lamb, ‘The Old Actors’, London Magazine, April 1822, in E.

V. Lucas (ed.), The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, vol. 2 (New York:

AMS Press, 1968), pp. 292–3.

[99] See Vicki Parslow Stafford, ‘Claire Clairmont, Mary Jane’s

Daughter: New Correspondence with Claire’s Father’, retrieved from

https://sites.google.com/site/maryjanesdaughter

.

[100] For more on this, see Hubert Huscher, ‘The Clairmont Enigma’ in

Keats– Shelley Memorial Bulletin, XI (1960), pp. 10–16; and William St

Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys: The Biography of a Family (London:

Faber & Faber, 1989), pp. 248–54.

[101] Godwin to unknown addressee, February or March 1801, in Letters,

vol. 2, p. 209–10.

[102] The ‘Chaucer house’ had been owned by the poet’s son, Sir Thomas

Chaucer in the fifteenth century. Godwin’s letter tells us that the

author believed his subject had resided there at some point, but there

is no evidence of this. Godwin to Mary Jane Godwin, 9 October 1801, in

Letters, vol. 2, pp. 241–4.

[103] Godwin, Life of Chaucer (London: Richard Phillips, 1803), vol. 1,

p. xix.

[104] Ibid., p. 370.

[105] PPWG, vol. 5, pp. 313–4.

[106] CNMG, vol. 5, p. 13.

[107] Quoted in a letter by Godwin explaining the situation to Marshall

the same day (the year appears to have been wrong in Holcroft’s

original), 28 February 1805, in Letters, vol. 2, p. 338.

[108] Godwin, Fables Ancient and Modern, Volume 1, ed. Suzanne L.

Barnett and Katherine Bennett Gustafson (College Park, MD: Romantic

Circles, University of Maryland, 2014; retrieved from

www.rc.umd.edu/editions/godwin_fables/index.html

), vol. 1, paras 292–3.

[109] Coleridge to Southey, 1799, in Coleridge, Collected Letters, vol.

1, p. 553.

[110] Godwin to Dr Edward Ash, 21 May 1808, MS Abinger, c.10, folios

64–5.

[111] The account of Holcroft’s final days comes from Hazlitt’s Life of

Thomas Holcroft, ed. Elbridge Colby (New York: Benjamin Bloom, 1968),

vol. 2, p. 310.

[112] Godwin to Louisa Holcroft, undated, MS Abinger, c.19, folio 17b.

[113] MS Abinger, c.19, folio 17b.

[114] PPWG, vol. 3, p. 137.

[115] Godwin to Mary Jane Godwin, 21 August 1809, MS Abinger, c.42,

folio 40.

[116] From an account of Godwin and Shelley by Place (B. M. Add. MSS. 3,

145, 30–36) quoted in Walter Peck, Shelley: His Life and Work, vol. 2

(London: Ernest Benn, 1927), p. 416. In the manuscript, the criticism of

Clairmont is crossed out in pencil, probably by Place’s son, who edited

his father’s papers for publication.

[117] ‘A Greybeard’s Gossip about a Literary Acquaintance’ in New

Monthly Magazine (1848).

[118] PPWG, vol. 5, p. 174.

[119] Godwin to Mary Jane Godwin, 18 May 1811, quoted in Kegan Paul,

vol. 2, p. 182.

[120] Percy Shelley to Godwin, 3 January 1812, in Frederick L. Jones

(ed.), The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Vol. 1: Shelley in England

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. 220–1 (hereafter referred

to as ‘Letters of Shelley’).

[121] Percy Shelley to Godwin, 10 January 1812, ibid., pp. 227–9.

[122] The quotation is from the Merchant of Venice, IV.i., ll. 73–7.

Letter, Godwin to Percy Shelley, 4 March 1812, CNMG, vol. 1, p. 70.

[123] Godwin to Percy Shelley, 14 March 1812, ibid., p. 74.

[124] Godwin to Percy Shelley, 30 March 1812, ibid., p. 77.

[125] Godwin to Percy Shelley, 4 March 1812, ibid., p. 72.

[126] We can infer further details of these conversations based on

Godwin’s philosophical interests. Matter and spirit probably refers to a

discussion of Berkeley and scepticism, as an unpublished essay of

Godwin’s shows the philosopher to be in tune with his predecessor’s

position on our perception of the physical world. Shelley’s ‘atheism’ is

principally a rejection of organised religion and, like Godwin,

expressed religious views that could be described as pantheist. Utility

and truth probably relate to the ethics of Political Justice, which in

turn implies that ‘party’ refers to Godwin’s critique of political

factionalism in the same work. Their discussion of the church may be a

topical conversation, or relate to the episcopal conflicts of the

seventeenth century (including the English Civil War) which later became

one of Godwin’s major historical interests. ‘Germanism’ is a reference

to gothic fiction – the most lurid works of the period often traded on

some German connection, imitating the Schauerromane (shudder novels) of

central Europe, and the phrase became synonymous with the genre as a

whole. Godwin read one of Shelley’s gothic romances (St Irvyne; or, The

Rosicrucian) in June that year.

[127] The Shelley family had only come by their baronetcy in 1806 and

the poet’s father was keen to maintain a respectable front. Harriet was

a lower-middle-class school friend of Shelley’s sister; the couple had

eloped together in 1811.

[128] Godwin to John Taylor, 27 August 1814, Letters of Shelley, vol. 1,

p. 390, n. 3.

[129] Mary Jane Godwin to Lady Mountcashell, 20 August 1814, quoted in

Edward Dowden, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London: Kegan Paul,

Trench, 1886), vol. 2, appendix A, p. 544.

[130] Quoted in Don Locke, A Fantasy of Reason (London: Routledge &

Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 138.

[131] Percy Shelley to Harriet Shelley, 27 September 1814, Letters of

Shelley, vol. 1, p. 398.

[132] Mary Godwin to Percy Shelley, 28 October 1814, ibid., p. 414, n.

4.

[133] Godwin to John Taylor, 27 August 1814, held in the Huntington

Library in San Marino, California. The first section is quoted in

Letters of Shelley, vol. 1, p. 390, n. 3; the second, in William St

Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys, p. 367.

[134] Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (née Godwin) in Paula R. Feldman and

Diana Scott-Kilvert (eds), The Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814–1844,

Journal Book I, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).

[135] Percy Shelley to William Godwin, 6 March 1816, in Letters of

Shelley, vol. 1, p. 459.

[136] Scott, who had written irreverent and dismissive reviews of so

many of Godwin’s books, later contributed money to a public subscription

for Godwin (though he asked his name not be recorded) out of respect for

his talents, though he said he could not condone his opinions.

[137] Percy Shelley to William Godwin, 3 May 1816, in Letters of

Shelley, vol. 1, pp. 472–3.

[138] Percy Shelley to William Godwin, 2 October 1816, ibid., p. 509.

[139] Fanny Godwin to Mary Godwin, 3 October 1816, ibid., p. 509, n. 2.

[140] Quoted in Kegan Paul, vol. 2, p. 242.

[141] Percy Shelley to Mary Godwin, 16 December 1816, in Letters of

Shelley, vol. 1, p. 520.

[142] Scholars have argued that Clairmont was prone to distort the truth

as an exercise in damage limitation, attempting to deflect criticism of

the family by offering more palatable versions of events to lessen the

scandal. Not all of her accounts make sense in this light, however, as

Mary Jane frequently gave inaccurate dates, or attributed actions to

different people, for no readily apparent reason. Mostly famously,

Clairmont told Lady Mountcashell that it was Marshall that pursued the

trio to Calais in 1814, rather than herself. It is usually asserted that

she did this to evade blame for failing to recover them, but since the

story she gave did not flatter her either, this seems a curious piece of

deception.

[143] Percy Shelley to Claire Clairmont, 30 December 1816, in Letters of

Shelley, vol. 1, p. 525.

[144] Mary published a substantially revised edition in 1831, and the

later text is the version more familiar to modern readers. The 1831

novel irons out some of the original’s ambiguities; Walton is seen to

learn from Victor’s hubris, and the author removes any reference to

Elizabeth and Victor being blood relatives.

[145] Place, quoted in Locke, A Fantasy of Reason, p. 238.

[146] Godwin to Percy Shelley, 31 January 1818, quoted in Letters of

Shelley, vol. 1, p. 597.

[147] Godwin to Mary Shelley, 27 October 1818, MS Abinger, c.52, folio

13.

[148] Godwin to Mary Shelley, 9 September 1819, MS Abinger, c.45, folio

18.

[149] Shelley asserted that he did this with Mary’s consent, but the

poet’s letters are not always a complete account.

[150] Godwin to Caroline Lamb, 25 February 1819, MS Abinger, c.12, folio

43.

[151] If this was the case, then Godwin was unsuccessful – Scarlett

became increasingly conservative in later years, becoming an ally of the

Duke of Wellington against parliamentary reform. He became Baron Abinger

in 1835. Ironically, Percy Florence Shelley’s adopted daughter, Bessie,

married Scarlett’s grandson and the Abinger family eventually inherited

the combined Shelley–Godwin papers (now held at the Bodleian Library).

[152] Godwin to Clairmont, 31 August 1819, MS Abinger, c.43, folios 4–5.

[153] See Drew R. McCoy, ‘Jefferson and Madison on Malthus: Population

Growth in Jeffersonian Political Economy’ in The Virginia Magazine of

History and Biography, 88(3) (July 1980), pp. 259–76.

[154] Thomas Robert Malthus, Edinburgh Review, 35 (1821), quoted in

Kenneth W. Graham (ed.), William Godwin Reviewed: A Reception History

1783–1834 (New York: AMS Press, 2001), p. 392.

[155] Mary Shelley to Leigh Hunt, 11 September 1823, in Betty T. Bennett

(ed.), Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, vol. 1 (Baltimore, MD:

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), p. 378.

[156] It was common practice for theatres to ‘steal’ popular novels by

making enough changes to claim that copyright had not been violated.

George Colman had done exactly this with Caleb Williams, though he did

compensate Godwin with free entry to the Haymarket for years afterwards.

[157] The quotation comes from his notes for Mary on what to do with his

notes and unpublished writing (written 1834). MS Abinger, c.38, folio

13.

[158] Stereotyping is the process of casting whole pages as printing

plates, rather than using moveable type to assemble pages one at a time.

Stereotyping required a significant initial investment (making the

plates) but became more profitable the more copies were sold – British

publishers had previously only used the technology to produce books for

which there was perennial demand (Bibles, textbooks) – so Bentley’s

offer displayed confidence in Godwin’s sales potential.

[159] The impact of this wider readership would become apparent after

the author’s death. Both Caleb Williams and Frankenstein remained in

print until the end of the series in the mid-1850s, indicating

consistent sales as Bentley gradually cut prices (by the time it went

out of print, Frankenstein sold at 2s 6d), but the publisher never cut

to the level that would have facilitated the enormous popularity of

Scott or Byron (the works of both were readily available in sixpenny

editions by the Victorian era).

[160] Godwin to Mary Shelley, 13 April 1832, in Jane Shelley (ed.),

Shelley and Mary (privately printed, c. 1882; a copy is held at the

Bodleian Library), vol. 4, pp. 1161–2.

[161] Godwin helped to research Perkin Warbeck at the British Museum, as

we can see in his letters of the 13 August 1828, 29 May 1829 and 30 May

1829; Shelley and Mary, iv, pp. 1106C–D, 1122A–B.

[162] Sir Robert Peel to Godwin, 9 February 1835, quoted in Locke, A

Fantasy of Reason, p. 338.

[163] PPWG, vol. 7, p. 233.

[164] Note dated 30 June 1834, MS Abinger, c.38, folio 13.

[165] The impact of Watson’s edition is hard to measure. No information

has been found regarding its sales or the size of its print run, nor is

there an identifiable surge in the public discussion of Political

Justice (references in newspapers, for example) that might suggest a

significantly expanded readership.

[166] Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England,

in Marx/Engels Collected Works, vol. 4 (London: Lawrence and Wishart,

1975), p. 528.

[167] Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, 17 March 1845, in Marx/Engels

Collected Works, vol. 38 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1982), p. 27.

[168] Edward Dowden to Richard Garnett, 25 May 1885, in R. S. Garnett

(ed.), Letters About Shelley: Interchanged by Three Friends – Edward

Dowden, Richard Garnett and Wm. Michael Rossetti (London: Hodder and

Stoughton, 1917), pp. 113–14.

[169] Kropotkin, Freedom, 1(1) (October 1886). The journal continues to

this day as an online publication (

http://freedomnews.org.uk

) and carries this passage as a strapline at the bottom of the page.

[170] Kropotkin, ‘Anarchism’, in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11^(th)

edition (New York: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1910), vol. 1, p. 915.

[171] Herbert Read, preface to George Woodcock’s William Godwin: A

Biographical Study (London: Porcupine Press, 1946), p. xi.

[172] See Charles O. Lerche, Jr. ‘Jefferson and the Election of 1800: A

Case Study in the Political Smear’, in The William and Mary Quarterly,

5(4) (October 1948), pp. 467–91; and Burton R. Pollin, ‘Godwin’s Letter

to Ogilvie, Friend of Jefferson, and the Federalist Propaganda’, in

Journal of the History of Ideas, 28(3) (July–September 1967), pp.

432–44.

[173] PPWG, vol. 5, p. 295.

[174] Godwin to James Ogilvie, n.d. 1797, published in the Washington

National Intelligencer (16 April 1802).