Godwinian Moments : From the Enlightenment to Romanticism [1 ed.] 9781442693999, 9781442642430

Citation preview

GODWINIAN MOMENTS: FROM THE ENLIGHTENMENT TO ROMANTICISM

Maniquis_3201_i_(Prelims).indd 1

1/26/2011 2:53:03 PM

Engraving by George Dawe (14 October 1802) of a portrait of William Godwin (oil on canvas, 1802), painted by James Northcote (National Portrait Gallery).

Maniquis_3201_i_(Prelims).indd 2

1/26/2011 2:53:04 PM

Godwinian moments from the enlightenment to romantIcism

Edited by Robert M. Maniquis and Victoria Myers

Published by the University of Toronto Press in association with the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

Maniquis_3201_i_(Prelims).indd 3

1/26/2011 2:53:04 PM

© The Regents of the University of California 2011 www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4426-4243-0

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Godwinian moments : from the Enlightenment to Romanticism / edited by Robert M. Maniquis and Victoria Myers. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4243-0 1. Godwin, William, 1756–1836 – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Godwin, William, 1756–1836 – Political and social views. 3. Godwin, William, 1756–1836 – Friends and associates. I. Maniquis, Robert M.  II. Myers, Victoria, 1946– PR4724.G63 2011   828′.609   C2010-907615-X This book has been published with the help of a grant from the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.

Maniquis_3201_i_(Prelims).indd 4

1/26/2011 2:53:04 PM

Contents

Acknowledgments  vii Chronology  ix Introduction  3 victoria myers PART I: GODWIN’S RADICAL MOMENT 1  Godwin’s Calvinist Ghosts: Political Justice and Caleb Williams  25 robert m. maniquis 2  Godwin, Thelwall, and the Means of Progress  59 mark philp 3  ‘The Press and Danger of the Crowd’: Godwin, Thelwall, and the Counter-Public Sphere  83 jon mee 4  ‘Awakening the Mind’: William Godwin’s Enquirer  103 gary handwerk 5  Godwin Disguised: Politics in the Juvenile Library  125 robert anderson

Maniquis_3201_i_(Prelims).indd 5

1/26/2011 2:53:04 PM

vi

Contents

PART II: GODWIN’S EXPERIMENTS WITH HISTORY 6  Oratory and History: Godwin’s History of the Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham  149 victoria myers 7  The Disfiguration of Enlightenment: War, Trauma, and the Historical Novel in Godwin’s Mandeville  172 tilottama rajan 8  ‘This is the dread hour, / That must decide the fate of England!’: Godwin’s St Dunstan  194 david o’shaughnessy 9  Heavy Drama  217 julie a. carlson PART III: GODWIN’S ACQUAINTANCES 10  The Philosopher and the Moneylender: The Relationship between William Godwin and John King  241 michael scrivener 11  Commerce of Luminaries: Eight Letters between William Godwin and Thomas Wedgwood  261 pamela clemit Contributors  283 Index  287

Maniquis_3201_i_(Prelims).indd 6

1/26/2011 2:53:04 PM

Acknowledgments

This volume began with a conference held at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library on 4–5 May 2007. That conference, entitled ‘The Godwinian Moment,’ focused on William Godwin as a key figure in the Enlightenment–Romantic era transition; the title has since changed to ‘Godwinian Moments’ in recognition of the diverse interpretations and entry points characteristic of Godwinian studies today and evident in this now augmented collection of essays. The editors are grateful to all those who joined in the productive exchange of views at the conference and to the participants and their new confreres who continued the discussion afterwards by reading, rereading, and commenting on their colleagues’ developed essays. The result has proved to be a Godwinian conversation rich in collisions and collaborations. The conference was sponsored by the UCLA Center for Seventeenthand Eighteenth-Century Studies, and we are deeply indebted to the director, Peter Reill, for his generous support, as well as to Patrick Coleman for his help as interim director of the Center during 2009–10. We also thank Bruce Whiteman, head librarian of the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, and his highly competent staff, among them Suzanne Tatian, for providing a genial and stimulating venue for this conversation. Special thanks go to the staffs of the Center, especially Candis Snoddy, Grace Liu, Alastair J. Thorne; to Jeanette Gilkison, Rick Fagin, and the staff of the UCLA Department of English; and to Lynda Tolly, director, and the staff of the Grace M. Hunt Memorial English Reading Room. These UCLA staffs provided, as usual, efficient, courteous, and skilled delivery of research materials and help in the production of our work.

Maniquis_3201_i_(Prelims).indd 7

1/26/2011 2:53:04 PM

viii

Acknowledgments

Other institutions and individuals have aided the work of scholars contributing to this volume and deserve our collective gratitude. We wish to thank the Bodleian Library, and particularly Dr Bruce Barker-Benfield, Curator, Medieval Manuscripts, for his willing assistance, and Mr Richard Ovenden, Associate Director and Keeper of Special Collections, for kindly permitting us to quote material from the Godwin diary in the Abinger collection, as well as from other manuscripts in the Bodleian. These are separately acknowledged in the individual essays. Another facilitator of our work, recognized only indirectly in the essays, is Dr Alfred Andrew Fote, who created the software enabling many individual searches of the transcribed (and at that time unpublished) Godwin diary. We are grateful to Dr Fote for generously sharing his expertise. Finally, we would like to acknowledge the editorial work of Mark Philp and Pamela Clemit, and their associated editors, whose labours on the Pickering and Chatto editions of Godwin’s writings and on current editing projects have made available a wealth of materials for understanding Godwin and the long eighteenth century. Last but not least, we wish to thank Richard Ratzlaff, our managing editor Wayne Herrington, and the University of Toronto Press for help and guidance in publishing this book.

Maniquis_3201_i_(Prelims).indd 8

2/5/2011 11:06:14 AM

Chronology

1756 1767

William Godwin born in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire. Becomes the pupil of the Reverend Samuel Newton, an Independent minister in Norwich, under whom he is influenced by Sandemanianism. 1773 Enters Hoxton Academy, a Dissenting academy in London, directed by Andrew Kippis and Samuel Rees. 1780 Installed as minister at Stowmarket, Suffolk, where he meets Frederick Norman, who introduces him to the writings of the French philosophes and begins his move towards deism. 1783 Moves to London, where he decides to become a writer. Publishes anonymously the History of the Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham and A Defence of the Rockingham Party, in their late coalition with the Right Honourable Lord North. 1784 Publishes anonymously Italian Letters, or The History of Count de St Julian; Damon and Delia, a Tale; and Imogen, a Pastoral Romance, from the Ancient British. Publishes anonymously a parody, The Herald of Literature, as a Review of the most considerable publications that will be made in the course of the ensuing Winter. Recommended to publisher George Robinson by Andrew Kippis, Godwin writes the ‘British and Foreign History’ section of the New Annual Register, 1784–90. 1785–6  Recommended by Kippis, Godwin writes a number of pieces, including letters signed ‘Mucius,’ for the Political Herald, and Review, a Whig journal. Meets Thomas Holcroft.

Maniquis_3201_i_(Prelims).indd 9

1/26/2011 2:53:04 PM

x

1788 1790 1793 1794

1795

1796 1797 1798 1799 1800 1801

1803

Chronology

Undertakes the education of Thomas Cooper. Begins to keep a diary, which he maintains until his death. Writes St Dunstan, which remains unperformed and unpublished. Publishes An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness. Writes a series of letters for the Morning Chronicle signed ‘Mucius.’ Publishes Things As They Are; or The Adventures of Caleb Williams. Publishes anonymously, first in the Morning Chronicle, then as a pamphlet, Cursory Strictures on the Charge delivered by Lord Chief Justice Eyre to the Grand Jury, to aid the accused in the London 1794 treason trials. Publishes anonymously Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr Pitt’s Bills, concerning Treasonable and Seditious Practices, and Unlawful Assemblies. By a Lover of Order. The piece offends his friend, the orator John Thelwall. Begins a relationship with Mary Wollstonecraft. Begins writing his tragedy Antonio. Publishes second edition of Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. Publishes The Enquirer, Reflections on Education, Manners and Literature. Marries Mary Wollstonecraft. Wollstonecraft dies from complications after giving birth to their daughter, Mary. Publishes Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Publishes third edition of Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. Publishes St Leon, A Tale of the Sixteenth Century. Antonio is performed at Drury Lane Theatre and subsequently published. Publishes Thoughts occasioned by the Perusal of Dr Parr’s Spital Sermon, preached at Christ Church, April 15, 1800: being a Reply to the Attacks of Dr Parr, Mr Mackintosh, the Author of an Essay on Population, and Others. Writes Abbas, King of Persia, submitted unsuccessfully to the London theatres. Marries second wife, Mary Jane Clairmont. Bible Stories. Memorable Acts of the Ancient Patriarchs, Judges, and

Maniquis_3201_i_(Prelims).indd 10

1/26/2011 2:53:04 PM





1805 1806

1807 1809 1812 1814 1815

1817 1820

Chronology

xi

Kings … for the use of children published under the name of William Scolfield. Publishes Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, the Early English Poet, including the Memoirs of his Near Friend and Kinsman, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster: With Sketches of the Manners, Opinions, Arts and Literature of England in the Fourteenth Century. Publishes Fleetwood: or The New Man of Feeling. Fables, Ancient and Modern published under the name of Edward Baldwin. Begins a publishing venture with Mary Jane Clairmont specializing in children’s literature ( Juvenile Library). The Pantheon: or Ancient History of the Gods of Greece and Rome. Intended to facilitate the Understanding of the Classical Authors, and of the Poets in General published under the name of Edward Baldwin. The History of England. For the Use of Schools and Young Persons published under the name of Edward Baldwin. The Life of Lady Jane Grey, and of Lord Guildford Dudley, her Husband published under the name of Theophilus Marcliffe, later under the name of Edward Baldwin. Faulkener, A Tragedy performed and subsequently published. Publishes Essay on Sepulchres: or, A Proposal for erecting some Memorial of the Illustrious Dead in All Ages on the Spot where their Remains have been interred. The History of Rome: From the Building of the City to the Ruin of the Republic published under the name of Edward Baldwin. Percy Bysshe Shelley writes to Godwin seeking his acquaintance. Shelley elopes to France with Godwin’s daughter Mary. Publishes Lives of Edward and John Philips. Nephews and Pupils of Milton. Including Various Particulars of the Literary and Political History of their Times. Publishes Letters of Verax, to the Editor of The Morning Chronicle, on the Question of a War to be commenced for the Purpose of putting an End to the Possession of Supreme Power in France by Napoleon Bonaparte. Publishes Mandeville, a Tale of the Seventeenth Century in England. Publishes Of Population. An Enquiry concerning the Power of Increase in the Numbers of Mankind, being an Answer to Mr Malthus’s Essay on that Subject.

Maniquis_3201_i_(Prelims).indd 11

1/26/2011 2:53:04 PM

xii

Chronology

1821

Ejected from Skinner Street residence and shop for nonpayment of rent; opens shop in the Strand. History of Greece: From the Earliest Records of that Country to the Time in which it was reduced into a Roman province published under the name of Edward Baldwin. 1822 Percy Shelley drowns. 1823 Mary Shelley returns to London. 1824–8 Publishes History of the Commonwealth of England from its commencement to the Restoration of Charles the Second. 1825 Declares bankruptcy; end of Juvenile Library. 1830 Publishes Cloudesley: a novel. 1831 Publishes Thoughts on Man, his Nature, Productions, and Discoveries. Interspersed with some particulars respecting the Author. 1832 William Godwin, Jr, Godwin’s son by his second marriage, dies. 1833 Publishes Deloraine. 1834 Publishes Lives of the Necromancers: or, An Account of the Most Eminent Persons in Successive Ages, who have claimed for themselves, or to whom has been imputed by Others, the Exercise of Magical Power. 1836 Godwin dies; is buried near his first wife, Mary Wollstonecraft. He leaves manuscript ‘The Genius of Christianity Unveiled,’ published in 1873 as Essays, never before published, by the late William Godwin.

Maniquis_3201_i_(Prelims).indd 12

1/26/2011 2:53:04 PM

GODWINIAN MOMENTS: FROM THE ENLIGHTENMENT TO ROMANTICISM

Maniquis_3201_001_(Myers).indd 1

1/26/2011 3:04:33 PM

This page intentionally left blank

Maniquis_3201_001_(Myers).indd 2

1/26/2011 3:04:34 PM

Introduction VICTORIA MYERS

Scholars like to tell the story of Percy Shelley’s jubilant discovery in 1812 that William Godwin was not yet dead. Godwin had risen to national fame in 1793 with the Enquiry Concerning Political Justice ; a year later his novel Caleb Williams had fascinated and alarmed readers of various political stripes; and his courageous interventions against the Pitt ministry’s white terror in 1795 had given further convincing proof of his active genius. But the public’s disillusionment with the French Revolution, and still more the repressive measures passed by parliament and enforced by the courts from 1795 on, discouraged radical publication and cut away Godwin’s support. Shelley, who was a mere infant when Political Justice arrived on the national stage, claimed that it wed his life to radical principles and universal benevolence. When a visit to the poets of the Lake District turned up the fact that Godwin was still very much alive, Shelley wrote to Godwin imploring his friendship. This, says Newman Ivey White, was a ‘moment’ that changed Shelley’s future life – however ambiguous that change may have proved.1 The story, with its allusions to the trajectory of individual lives intersecting and constituting cultural shifts, resonates with the complexity of multiple Godwinian moments. Hazlitt captured one such moment in 1825, when he remarked that ‘the Spirit of the Age was never more fully shown than in its treatment of this writer … Five-and-twenty years ago … no one was more talked of, more looked up to, more sought after, and wherever liberty, truth, justice was the theme, his name was not far off: – now he has sunk below the horizon.’2 Hazlitt deplored the public’s enslavement ‘to prejudice and the fashion of the day,’ but he did little to prove his own freedom from prejudice when he described Godwin’s works as having ‘raised the

Maniquis_3201_001_(Myers).indd 3

1/26/2011 3:04:34 PM

4

Victoria Myers

standard of morality above the reach of humanity’ and having served the public only by ‘enabl[ing] others to say to the towering aspirations after good, and to the over-bearing pride of human intellect – “Thus far shalt thou come, and no farther!”’3 In the nineteenth century’s rehabilitation of sentiment, Hazlitt seems to say, Godwin was to mark symbolically the boundary of reason, but not participate in or distinctively shape that rehabilitation. Hazlitt defines history in this case too narrowly. He still confined his Godwinian moment to those few brief years in the 1790s when Godwin imagined limitless intellectual progress. Scholarly studies now show how Godwin inhabited a longer duration – one that he himself described as the necessary span for gradual and diffusive change in attitudes, practices, and institutions. It is Godwin’s sense of history, rather than Hazlitt’s, that governs our understanding of him today. From our point of view, Godwin’s writings participate both in long durations of history and in the punctuating moments of dire event. Mapping moments of intellectual tension and transition, his writings show that Godwin was very much aware of this dual phenomenon of historical change. In Caleb Williams, for most readers the epitomical Godwinian novel, moments of mental transition abound and are fraught with implications for cultural change. The sentimental Falkland’s sudden murder of Tyrrell shadows Falkland’s subsequent career of benevolent works with secret crime, the habit of secrecy seeping into personal history and corrupting public institutions. Likewise, Caleb’s exhilarating instant, when he discovers Falkland’s secret, sets him on a trajectory that, in the long run of daily pain, ties him even more closely to habitual desire for Falkland’s approval. Godwin’s portrayal of authority in these terms, in which relationship and desire coalesce the intimate sphere with public life, indicates why he believed social change could proceed only gradually. A measure of that necessary gradualness is available in the equivocal finality of Godwin’s endings. Caleb announces ‘All is over,’ but immediately ‘sit[s] down to give an account’ that opens his behaviour to various readings, some of which saw Falkland as more the hero of the tale than Caleb, and in this sense protracted the transition in opinions that Godwin hoped his novel would precipitate.4 This lengthening out of narrative moments epitomizes not just Godwin’s works but his working. In Political Justice, for example, Godwin’s thinking was deliberately open-ended and permeable to the influence of discussion. His practice, inculcated by his Dissenting education, was to present each side of an issue before resolving where the preponderance of reason lay.5 At first this practice gives the impression that he

Maniquis_3201_001_(Myers).indd 4

1/26/2011 3:04:34 PM



Introduction

5

has considered everything and that his text is complete in itself. Yet as Mark Philp has shown, his composition also resonates with conversation and debate beyond the text. Godwin invited continued discussion, which would test and revise – or revoke – the argument. The three editions of Political Justice, as a result, make for a fascinating study in continuity and change that could characterize the culture as well as the man.6 Godwin’s analysis of his own character in 1798 describes his openness to influence: ‘All my life it has happened to me to overlook the most prominent points, whether in excellence or offence, of what I read, till they have been forced upon my notice by another. This is the source of my ductility, and of the revolutions that from time to time have occurred in my habits of thinking.’7 Conversely, Godwin’s analysis also recognizes his tenacious hold on ideas, his ‘firmness and vigour’ of mind. These qualities not only produce the characteristic open-endedness of his works, their ongoing dialogue with himself and his community, but also lengthen out the process of change. Textual permeability and elusive finality indicate why, in understanding Godwinian moments, we are forced to scrutinize Godwin’s turning points and conclusions, his articulation of historical events and argumentative resolutions. If temporal boundaries begin to waver, so do personal boundaries, bringing with them feelings of instability and anxiety. It is perhaps for this reason that Godwin’s later novels resonate with readers in a post-existentialist and post-deconstructionist world. Fleetwood, with its bifurcative structure, confronts the anxious and lonely defence of one’s autonomy with the sweet experience of relationship. Mandeville’s inexorable plot records the tenacious and alienating effect of early trauma that resists both truth and love. Godwin, it is clear, did not hesitate to reach into personal and cultural fears. Such Godwinian moments could be said to signify the peculiar poignancy with which Godwin captured and responded to the effects of time. We may think of St Leon’s protracted life, a record of loss both personal and historical, of depleting and derailing good intentions. Or we may think of the exhilarating work of recovery that Godwin himself engaged in when he undertook his History of the Commonwealth of England ‘to restore the just tone of historical relation on the subject, to attend to the neglected, to remember the forgotten, and to distribute an impartial award on all that was planned and achieved during this eventful period.’8 Godwin’s own not quite last words in his diary, after nearly half a century of daily recording the books he read, the many pages he wrote, the breakfasts, dinners, and teas he attended, the conversations he held with hundreds of individuals, re-

Maniquis_3201_001_(Myers).indd 5

1/26/2011 3:04:34 PM

6

Victoria Myers

flect on the elusive actuality represented by ‘ciphers’ and ‘conventional marks’ in his daily record. He perceives that he has sketched the outlines of moments that dissolve into continuities and equivocalities, but he feels that these are only the ‘imaginary boundaries’ of things themselves still ‘unimagined.’9 Since the 1950s, scholars have experienced a deeply transformative engagement with the political. The reawakening of political and historicist understanding of literature resulted first in deploring the Romantic turn from (radical) public life to (conservative) private life, the escape to nature, the supposed apostasy from early progressive principles. This reawakening also resulted in the revival of political writing as a legitimate object of literary study and (paradoxically) in the discovery of the Romantics’ covert but ongoing engagement in political topics. This in turn has aroused interest in popular orators such as John Thelwall, boisterous lower-class radicals such as William Hone and Daniel Isaac Eaton, and women radicals such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays – a crowd of new objects for research has populated the Romantic era. This political-historicist understanding has entailed a re-evaluation of such apolitical-appearing phenomena as the sentiment movement in terms both of its escape from politics and of its deep-structural engagement with politics. Such studies have shifted the focus from political to cultural history, as we find the locus of change diffused through practices in (for example) education, religion, reading, and domesticity. In this context, the fact that Godwin shifted sites for the working out of reform from political to social and private arenas makes his later writings more visible to present-day readers. The Enquirer now claims the interpretive focus that once belonged to Political Justice, and Godwin’s books for the Juvenile Library, the enterprise he ran with his second wife from 1805 to 1825, have become important texts for uncovering a transition which we ourselves recapitulate.10 This is not to diminish the continuing importance of Political Justice and Caleb Williams. Because of the groundbreaking studies of the 1980s, Political Justice has become one of the most important texts for charting transitions and continuities between the British Enlightenment and the Romantic era. These studies have clarified Godwin’s political-philosophical system, shifting emphasis from French writers to the indigenous influence of Dissent, and laying bare Godwin’s conversations with culture-makers on a variety of themes.11 Likewise, study of Caleb Williams has opened the hypothesis of a new genre of philosophical novels carrying Britons across the fin de siècle.12 We are now seeing detailed analysis

Maniquis_3201_001_(Myers).indd 6

1/26/2011 3:04:34 PM



Introduction

7

of Godwin’s entire fictional oeuvre, and new interpretations and evaluations of his work in a variety of genres have appeared. Now the object of scholars equipped with diverse theoretical, critical, and cultural interests, Godwin is emerging as a copious index to changing views of the British Enlightenment–Romantic era transition.13 A sense of something still about to be informs the essays in this volume. Not so much commemorative as generative, they are engaged in recovering and exploring Godwinian moments in their generic variety. Godwin envisioned change, but not with all the complacency we are accustomed to attribute to him. That may be why he attempted to describe it through the different durations and trajectories that could be constructed in philosophy, history, biography, memoir, novel, drama, and essay. In the process of exploring some of this variety, we may approach our notions to Godwin’s representations of change as much as we approach his notions to ours. This reciprocal movement is a perennial (and unavoidable) mode of understanding that in its turn generates variety of meaning and guarantees the longevity of his ideas. In the process of debating about the reality of Godwin’s ‘things as they are,’ we produce another reality for ourselves ‘as we are.’ The current publishing environment has been hospitable to this extension of Godwin studies. Besides bringing Godwin’s many books, essays, and dramas back into print, scholars (including contributors to this collection) are now editing his diary and his letters, both of which sources promise to create a more complex Godwin and a more fully articulated British cultural scene. These efforts continue to show how central Godwin is to understanding the transformations of Enlightenment and to handling our own experience of cultural transformation. Since Godwin’s lifelong project was to promote discussion and debate on a great variety of subjects, we have divided the essays that make up Godwinian Moments into three sections, each of which brings scholarly voices into dialogue with each other. The first section, on politics, education, and religion, considers moments in Godwin’s career when he is supposed to have departed from his radical agenda. Preoccupied with the issue of continuity, they both modify the radicalism of the earlier Godwin and question the quiescence of the later Godwin. The second section discusses Godwin’s generic experiments with history. These essays place Godwin in relationship to changes in historiography, the historical novel, and historical drama in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The third section, taking advantage of current editorial work on Godwin’s personal letters and diary, explores his acquaint-

Maniquis_3201_001_(Myers).indd 7

1/26/2011 3:04:34 PM

8

Victoria Myers

ance with two unusual men, each in his own way a nexus with cultural change. The impression of debate in these sections is hardly accidental or adventitious. Godwin, so eager to represent debate in his own texts, so interested in using his texts to provoke discussion, could hardly fail to stimulate a similar discourse in his present-day readers.

Part I: Godwin’s Radical Moment This section begins with an essay by Robert M. Maniquis that scrutinizes an early Godwinian moment, his abandonment of Sandemanian Calvinism. Maniquis considers criticism of residual Calvinism in Political Justice, beginning with Godwin’s own estimation in 1800 of how Sandemanianism had distorted, even eliminated, a proper consideration of the affections in opinions, in individual judgment, in understanding, and in reason itself. Taking this cue from Godwin, however, some critics have overemphasized the Calvinist influence in Godwin’s philosophical thinking, often to the point of seeing him imprisoned in the ‘spirit’ of Calvinist thought and even psychologically damaged by it. After discussing the problems of using ‘influence’ as an interpretative concept, Maniquis considers the Calvinist idea of true virtue, an idea invoked by Godwin, who approved of Jonathan Edwards’s paradigmatically Calvinist exposition. Virtue, Edwards said, is a rigorous idea that sets personal and familial interests aside in the ‘true’ carrying out of benevolent acts. But this disciplined virtue did not blend easily with Godwin’s hard-headed utilitarianism, the kind exhibited in the famous dilemma of whether to save one’s housemaid or save Fénelon. Calvinist influence appears in this dilemma, but is awkwardly ineffective because forcefully blended with other ideas. In the second half of his essay, Maniquis considers Calvinism in Caleb Williams, where Godwin, rather than adapting Calvinist ideas to his story, blends them with the most obvious symbols and institutions of social oppression. Building upon the psychology of uncertainty at the heart of Calvinism, Maniquis describes the transformation of that theological uncertainty into a technique for portraying political terror in Caleb Williams. He suggests how that uncertainty links the events and suspenseful cadence of the novel to a self, inherited from Calvinism, that is constructed in order to be destroyed. Finally, the essay discusses modern interpretations that use concepts of the unconscious and the self-referential text. Some of those interpretations, Maniquis argues, provide exciting intuitions that recognize modern conflicts and preoccupations in Caleb Williams, but they also obscure the actual ac-

Maniquis_3201_001_(Myers).indd 8

1/26/2011 3:04:34 PM



Introduction

9

complishment of the most psychologically radical of late-eighteenthcentury English novels. After the success of Political Justice and Caleb Williams, which made Godwin a hero to radicals as well as middle-class reformers, he suddenly alienated the former. Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr Pitt’s Bills revealed Godwin’s apprehensions about the potential violence of crowds drawn to speakers such as John Thelwall, who, though a professed believer in Godwin’s philosophical system, opposed Godwin’s gradualist schedule. Mark Philp’s ‘Godwin, Thelwall, and the Means of Progress’ justifies Godwin’s insistence on the gradualist position during the 1790s political terror. Rather than turning apostate to his earlier principles, Godwin exhibits a consistent allegiance to them. According to Philp, we have too long interpreted Godwin in the context of the French Revolution debate, defined as a simple polarization between reform and order parties. But this political polarization did not follow an ideological positioning present from pre-Revolution days, nor did it indicate an indigenous ‘fault line running through the polity.’ Put simply, Burke and Paine did not ‘divide’ the entire field of public opinion. Furthermore, Godwin’s 1793 concept of government’s purpose meshes two positions – that government cooperates in the progress of civilization and that government constrains excessive self-interest – and these were only beginning to reveal their contradictions. While availing himself of Paine’s critique of governmental constraints on individual self-interest, Godwin also ‘remained powerfully drawn to [Burke’s] more organic picture of the social and political world.’ Philp proposes that closely analysing the texts of radical sympathizers will uncover the ‘complex set of issues beneath the apparent polarization,’ and he treats Godwin’s Considerations as appropriate for such a case study. According to Philp, Godwin’s position accorded with his argument in Political Justice (1793), which favoured discussion and gradual dissemination of truth as the prelude to a reform that government then consolidates in law. Godwin allowed political action, but only in extreme situations, believing that political associations may usefully display public opposition to encroachments on liberties, but may also risk feeding public passions. While Political Justice (1796) pursues essentially the same views, it develops them more emphatically, and Considerations, even though it looks like a personal attack on Thelwall and the reform associations, really espouses the same constant principles. Godwin criticizes the reformers’ questionable means, but not the ends they pursue. Philp concedes that Godwin’s strictures on inflammatory rhetoric and public

Maniquis_3201_001_(Myers).indd 9

1/26/2011 3:04:34 PM

10

Victoria Myers

forums could ‘lapse into a form of passive obedience,’ but he defends Godwin’s belief that gradual expansion of knowledge protects social cohesion and individual security. Godwin, in short, was attempting to hold the middle ground; his approach, impartial and candid, though elitist, needs evaluation in an eighteenth-century Enlightenment context, rather than an early-nineteenth-century ‘physical force reformism’ context. The part Godwin plays in this conjuncture acquires a different slant in Jon Mee’s ‘“The Press and Danger of the Crowd”: Godwin, Thelwall, and the Counter-Public Sphere.’ For Mee, the 1790s mark the struggle to bring forth a plebeian counter-public sphere, distinct from Habermas’s bourgeois public sphere, as the source of democratic communicative action. Godwin’s opposition to addressing large crowds, Mee believes, arose amidst widespread uncertainties within British radicalism about whether (and how) a plebeian public could be formed. Like Philp, he addresses a political topic, but he situates it in relation to conversation, sociability, and social space in the eighteenth century. Godwin’s notion of conversation as rational deliberation both resembles and differs from Habermas’s concept of ‘rational-critical debate.’ The resemblance derives from Godwin’s belief, inherited from his Dissenting background, that people discover truth through vigorous exchanges of opinion in conversation, but the difference lies in the residues of puritan ‘enthusiasm’ and disputatiousness that conflict with the Shaftesbury-Addison concept of polite conversation that informs Habermas. Mee agrees with Philp that Godwin’s criticism of Thelwall represented no fundamental change in his belief in vigorous debate. But Mee maintains that Godwin did believe that Thelwall’s open venues – debating clubs, public lectures, and mass meetings – encouraged an imperious style of oratory and rendered an impatient mind susceptible to a crowd’s passions. Mee points out that Thelwall actually shared Godwin’s fear of arousing the crowd. Thelwall insists that his manner differs essentially from that of puritan fanatics and that broad dissemination of ideas is necessary for creating an effective public. He constantly stresses moderation to keep his listeners up to his notion of a plebeian public sphere, and not merely give a sop to the vigilant administration. Against Godwin’s faith in discussion and gradual private enlightenment, Thelwall argues cogently that individuals effectively learn new truths in public harangues, where the speaker’s warm style establishes sympathy with the audience. Godwin certainly became aware, after writing the first book of the 1793 Political Justice, that education and literature would prove a more accessible ground for permanently reforming opinion than would government,

Maniquis_3201_001_(Myers).indd 10

1/26/2011 3:04:34 PM



Introduction

11

but it was not until The Enquirer that he detailed his views. He would still pursue the political and moral value of private judgment that he had espoused in Political Justice, but he would consider how it was really formed in the minute-by-minute experience of learning. In his ‘“Awakening the Mind”: William Godwin’s Enquirer,’ Gary Handwerk calls Godwin an Enlightenment thinker who sees in education ‘the crucial mechanism for transforming society,’ but he also places him, in Foucauldian terms, in the ‘trajectory’ towards ‘the self-disciplining of the subject.’ At the same time that Godwin follows the classical tradition that makes happiness and virtue the aims of education, he anticipates Romantic-era views that ‘awakening the mind’ – stimulating curiosity and keeping it active – must be the fundamental task of education. Despite his dedication to this task, Godwin was aware of the persistent despotic threat in education, remarking both on the child’s sense of his enslavement, of his being always watched, and on the parent’s or preceptor’s sense of being shackled to his role. For Godwin there was no easy solution to this dilemma; the authoritarian relation certainly could not be replaced by a pretence of freedom if the value of sincerity was to be preserved. Handwerk calls Godwin’s awareness ‘psychoanalytic and thus proto-Romantic’ insofar as it focuses on the relation between ‘identification and resistance.’ In novels such as Mandeville and Caleb Williams, Godwin shows how the sympathy that often obtains between preceptor and child can ‘slide’ into unconscious adoption of the preceptor’s prejudices. In The Enquirer, Godwin himself promotes the identification of reader and author as necessary to learning, but he also promotes a hermeneutics of educated resistance, by which readers resist the text’s moral and construct its tendency against the grain. There are, then, various tensions in Godwinian pedagogy, and Handwerk explores Godwin’s possible resolutions. Godwin recommends that preceptors assume that every child possesses a special talent or potential; this would preclude imposing any one system of instruction and require the preceptor to develop skill in fostering the child’s potential. The child would initiate inquiry and choose his own reading and activities, while the preceptor helped him to unfold his imagination and feelings. Although this plan would imply opposition to systematic instruction, Godwin (ironically) embraces the very public education which his theory should lead him to oppose. The great variety of children’s characters makes anticipating and channelling the child’s identifications and resistances enormously difficult. The short-cut of despotism is an ever-present temptation. But public schools at least distribute the weight of despotism

Maniquis_3201_001_(Myers).indd 11

1/26/2011 3:04:34 PM

12

Victoria Myers

among many rather than weighing on one. Fully impressed by the unresolved tensions in Godwin’s thinking, Handwerk concludes his essay with a scene from Godwin’s novel Fleetwood that shows how the public school can beget resistance to authority – and also how such resistance can cover identification with authority – a conclusion that doubly enforces the need for independent thinking in Godwin’s readers. These 1797 reflections on education suggest that, when Godwin began to write literature for children, questions of authority and power would not be far from his mind. Peter Marshall comments that, when Godwin launched the Juvenile Library with his second wife, Mary Jane Clairmont, he ‘undertook the task with zeal … It would not only be a means of earning a living but provide an opportunity of shaping the next generation.’14 Godwin’s fables, histories, and biographies were geared specifically to stimulating children’s desire to learn. Rather than explicitly telling his readers what judgments to make, his histories would supply the information and leave it to readers to construct an interpretation. Much as his Enquirer essays did for adults, his fables frequently gave competing maxims calculated to draw out children’s thinking. Pamela Clemit points out that, in this method, Godwin followed in the footsteps of his Dissenting forebears and contemporaries, who considered books the means of reform.15 Robert Anderson, however, in his essay in this volume, ‘Godwin Disguised: Politics in the Juvenile Library,’ raises questions about the political tendency of these texts. Anderson’s essay begins with a charming recapitulation of the conversation between a mastiff and a wolf in Godwin’s Fables, Ancient and Modern. Godwin’s retelling of Aesop’s fable suggests the contrast between civilized and savage man in Enlightenment social-contract theories, where ‘humans trade freedom for security.’ But Anderson finds a somewhat different ‘political’ view in Godwin’s narration of another story of a wolf, in which the animal’s savagery implies a more terrifying view of the individual outside of law. The resulting ambiguity about Godwin’s political stance is consistent with his desire to provide readers with ‘the materials of thinking’ and leave them the freedom to judge. Yet Godwin’s aim is not always so simply resolvable. Though Godwin perceives, as Blake does, the techniques by which the oppressed assimilate the moral self-justifications of the oppressors, it is difficult to classify his notion of ‘liberty’ with Blake’s or even with Thelwall’s. Like Philp and Mee, Anderson sees a variety of radicalisms in Godwin’s horizon, and he addresses the problem of political ambiguity by admitting that Godwin’s writings for children are not aimed at particular political events, though

Maniquis_3201_001_(Myers).indd 12

1/26/2011 3:04:34 PM



Introduction

13

they encompass current issues such as liberty, obedience, hierarchy, and property. Yet Anderson is convinced that the writings for children implicitly question some of Political Justice’s key principles. Private judgment, these writings suggest, may be vitiated from the outset, since it has been formed in one’s ongoing interactions with authority. The popularity of these writings even among conservatives suggests to Anderson that the Juvenile Library can help us uncover the complexity and (above all) the instability in Godwin’s political thinking. The various pseudonyms under which Godwin wrote for the Library may have been meant to disguise his radical past, but they may also have absorbed him in his conservative mask. In some of the themes and rhetorical structures in these writings Anderson observes a tendency to repress the development of the child’s autonomy rather than encourage freedom of judgment. Anderson is willing, nonetheless, to conclude that Godwin’s opposition to authoritarianism proves ‘more pervasive’ than his participation in it. Godwin’s radical agenda is still evident in his repeated praise for various customs of alien cultures, in his criticism of the constraints and over-refinement of modern civilizations, and especially in his praise for the beauty of Greek pantheism, even while he masks as an orthodox Christian in the book as a whole. Such instances, Anderson concedes, will after all stimulate the child to independent inquiries and judgments, but like Handwerk, he perceives that Godwin’s struggle to elude the despotism implicit in Enlightenment projects of social progress may remain unresolved.

Part II: Godwin’s Experiments with History While the essays in the first section consider Godwin’s work (and working) in relation to specific moments of political and personal importance, the essays in this second section carry this project forward by considering Godwin’s work as participation in specific moments in the history of genres. Alternating between his early and late work, the essays in this section study Godwin exploring the historical conditions for positive change and the historiographical production of states of mind open to change. The first two essays consider Godwin’s experiments with history from opposite ends of his career and in genres conventionally considered opposed in their relation to impartiality and fact – namely, history and romance. Victoria Myers’s essay ‘Oratory and History: Godwin’s History of the Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham’ takes off from recent efforts to identify is-

Maniquis_3201_001_(Myers).indd 13

1/26/2011 3:04:34 PM

14

Victoria Myers

sues raised by Godwin’s historical method, placing this early work within the eighteenth century’s changing norms of history writing. The career of the elder William Pitt (later Lord Chatham), which Godwin may have narrated as a monitory political example for his Whig readers, grew into a negotiation between prevailing historiographical norms of impartiality, moral didacticism, and public character, on the one hand, and emergent biographical interests in feelings, private life, and the inward man, on the other. Myers argues that the value of the piece lies in ‘its relation to oratory,’ a controversial discursive mode in an age of conversation and sociality. While Godwin has been seen as an opponent to oratory, in Chatham he treats a political figure ‘whose medium was oratory,’ but in a way that prefigures and grounds a tension – between Godwin’s thesis of agent-centred progress and the force of contingent events – that scholars have so far located only in Godwin’s later writings. Myers shows that Godwin fulfils the historian’s responsibility for ‘morally committed impartiality’ in describing parliamentary orators’ performance as a metonymy for their civic character. By adeptly varying the metonymic relation between speaking, character, and effect, he distributes praise and blame according to principles of civic virtue and its effect on public confidence in free institutions. Giving specific attention to William Pitt, Godwin also uses his metonymic measure ‘to gain access to the inward man,’ showing how ambition at times diverts Pitt’s moral mind and turns his vibrant engaging oratory into ‘“a dry and unanimated style,”’ simultaneously ‘cut[ting] his mind off from the sustaining ideal of public service and incapacitat[ing] him for [constitutional] reform.’ The ‘personal scope’ of this analysis becomes increasingly evident as Godwin narrates the reciprocity between Chatham’s use of oratory to form the public’s aspirations and, conversely, the public’s direction of Chatham’s oratory through a stubborn and unbounded preoccupation with commercial imperialist projects. Pitt calls forth the energies of the whole nation, but senses ‘his bondage to a people less advanced in moral feeling’ than himself. According to Myers, this display of reciprocal effect destabilizes progressive history as agent-centred, as Godwin moves towards a concept of the social matrix that would ‘conflict with a civic concept of character.’ He tries to salvage this concept in Political Justice by depicting individuals involved in a network of necessity in which, nonetheless, each individual’s acts have reticulating effects, thus valorizing individual choice and responsibility. But in Chatham, Godwin already senses that a network-explanation is open to the effects of contingency and tries to avert this outcome by greater attention to (and use

Maniquis_3201_001_(Myers).indd 14

1/26/2011 3:04:34 PM



Introduction

15

of) oratorical techniques to evaluate Chatham as an individual agent. Combining historical impartiality with sympathy for Chatham, he brings in circumstances that subverted ‘“this immortal hero”’ and distinguishes ‘“the unfortunate” from “the blamable,”’ by showing that ‘within a system of social connections … we will surely “occasion” unforeseen outcomes.’ Finally, he employs narrative tropes – romance, tragedy, parody – in order to subvert the contingency he has inadvertently raised and to achieve closure, ultimately departing from eighteenth-century strictures on historiography and demonstrating, in anticipation of his essay ‘Of History and Romance,’ the necessary fictionality of the historiographical project. The ‘tendency’ that present-day readers develop in Godwin rests as much (or more) in his writings about the reading of history as in his historical writings. Thus, the term ‘tendency’ from the Enquirer essay ‘On Reading’ has crept into critical revisionism to signify the Romantic era’s self-understanding of the ongoing life of a text, the reader’s collaboration (or even hegemony) in the development of meaning, and the legitimizing of non-authorial centres of authority. Likewise, Godwin’s essay ‘Of History and Romance’ has entered the canon of canon-challenging discourse to focus scholars’ efforts to write the history of historiography. Beginning as an attempt to weigh the advantages of history’s fidelity to the particular against romance’s ability to animate generalities, Godwin’s essay shows that the two genres subtly change places as each avails itself of the techniques of the other. Our ability to recognize his deconstruction rests on the knowledge that earlier eighteenth-century novelists joyfully exposed and exploited the supposed boundaries between novel and history, while historians in his own day were attempting to complete the split of fact from fiction even in the face of a proliferation of hybrid genres.16 While Myers’s essay dwells on Godwin’s apprenticeship period, her concern with Godwin’s fictionalizing oratory looks towards this theorizing of historiographical techniques. Tilottama Rajan, who has already done much to bring these Godwinian concepts into currency, has also directed attention to his most fruitful generic experiments.17 In her essay in this volume, ‘The Disfiguration of Enlightenment: War, Trauma, and the Historical Novel in Godwin’s Mandeville,’ Rajan discovers another site for discussing Godwin’s ‘tendency’ and the problematics of history and romance. Mandeville, the story of a ‘tormented royalist’ in the Cromwellian period, exhibits a fraught relation to the historical novel, if we conceive of that genre in the manner that Lukacs conceives of Walter Scott’s Waverley, in which history becomes

Maniquis_3201_001_(Myers).indd 15

1/26/2011 3:04:35 PM

16

Victoria Myers

‘a discourse of improvement’ that puts war in England’s past. Reading Mandeville against the background of Kant’s and Rousseau’s writings on ‘perpetual peace,’ Rajan distinguishes ‘war’ from ‘conflict’: conflict (as in Godwin’s ‘collision of minds’) produces progress, war makes progress impossible. Godwin’s novel makes us realize that ‘history can’t begin until due weight is given to what impedes [progress],’ and what impedes is a psychic wound that is repressed and cannot be discussed or resolved, though it can be symbolized and repeated. While Myers finds that Godwin’s attempt in Chatham to negotiate between historiography and biography is subverted by contingency, Rajan finds in this later work that the ‘absence’ of ‘general’ from ‘individual’ history is consolidated by a contingency fundamental and essential. Scott’s attempt to ‘embody general in individual history’ is now impossible. Rajan views this situation through Slavoj Žižek’s concept of ‘sheer antagonism’: character is ‘the product of circumstances’ and if (or because) Mandeville’s experience of circumstances during the 1641 Irish rebellion is traumatic, his character is fragmented, incoherent, as is ‘the social field.’ Such antagonisms as Catholic versus Presbyterian are only symptoms of the deeper ‘occluded’ incoherence that causes Mandeville to wage ‘absolute war’ against Clifford, who is only a symbol of adverse identity, ‘a sign within a system of representation we call culture,’ a person whose ‘good[ness] is a form of normalization’ that Mandeville resists. While Myers connects Godwin’s Chatham to Political Justice’s attempt to ensure progress by turning contingency into necessity, Rajan connects Mandeville to the project of political justice through Schelling’s exploration of ‘the role of evil in the emergence of freedom from necessity.’ Mandeville’s ego emerges through ‘aversion’ – a turning from or negating of the (social) whole, to which he would belong. For Schelling in Ages of the World, this pathology explains why history does not progress but keeps ‘rotating’ between war and perpetual peace: the self as negation of the whole is still a ‘hidden’ self attempting to ‘expand’ into its own ‘positivity’ – a process that must be unconcealed. Rajan explains the novel’s lack of resolution through Melanie Klein’s dialectic, by which paranoid egoism gives way to depression at the loss of loved ones, which in turn readies one for ‘reparation.’ Schelling and Godwin also desire reparation, but find that it ‘curtails’ the ‘analytic of evil,’ which is after all a source of energy. Godwin embodies desire for reparation in the ineffectual character of Audley, who remains in depression with no ‘power of resistance,’ and depicts the idealized Henrietta as only ‘an impossible fantasy of peace’ that Mandeville ‘push[es] away rather than integrate

Maniquis_3201_001_(Myers).indd 16

1/26/2011 3:04:35 PM



Introduction

17

into his own being.’ For Godwin, Rajan says, ‘history is not ready to leave the work of the negative.’ In this sense, Mandeville subverts its own effort to be a historical novel. The next two essays introduce Godwin’s participation in a genre little discussed in studies of his work. Yet Godwin aimed to make his dramas, like his novels, the medium through which his philosophical ideas could reach a less educated audience. Although he sought to adapt his dramas to the contemporary taste for spectacle and melodrama, he was conscious that his message was often unpalatable and his plays in consequence required audiences to think across the grain of their usual sentiments and affiliations. Scholars in the present collection demonstrate his participation in the tumultuous moments of London theatre in two ways: by exhibiting his use of the dramatic medium to extend his agenda of political education and by exhibiting his participation in shifting historical drama to the domestic scene and social critique. In ‘“This is the dread hour, / That must decide the fate of England!”: Godwin’s St Dunstan,’ David O’Shaughnessy discusses Godwin’s earliest play as an intervention in the late-eighteenth-century debate over the bills to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts. Outside of parliament, participants in this debate frequently had recourse to a historiographical controversy concerning the early origins of the British constitution. According to the pro-repeal side, history exhibited no need for establishing the Church within the state to ensure the harmony of the commonweal, while the anti-repeal side saw in history proof that lack of such unity weakened the country. Dissenters claimed that they desired only citizenship, while supporters of the established Church accused them of wanting to destroy the Church and state power with it. Godwin was eager to participate in the debate. Feeling constrained by his engagements with the English Review (Tory) and the Political Herald (Whig), however, he used St Dunstan as an alternative venue for his views. As O’Shaughnessy argues, the play formed Godwin’s first attempt to bring history, education, and theatre together to address political change. The subject of this historical drama was not obscure to late-eighteenth-century educated readers, who would have known the story and seen it depicted in several paintings. But interpretation of the historical facts was disputed. Some historians constructed them into a story of a dissolute and arbitrary prince – King Edward or Edwy – opposed by a courageous and moral monk (Dunstan). Others, such as Tobias Smollett, saw in the facts a story of an amiable and moral prince standing up against a fanatical, criminal monk who was aiming ‘to impose ecclesias-

Maniquis_3201_001_(Myers).indd 17

1/26/2011 3:04:35 PM

18

Victoria Myers

tical authority over the state.’ As O’Shaughnessy observes, Godwin was ‘aware of both the power and the malleability of history.’ The crux of the story was this question: did Edwy’s fall represent the ‘end of Alfred the Great’s legacy’ of Anglo-Saxon parliamentary government and set up conditions for the Danish and Norman invasions that led to loss of civil liberties? The side favouring repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts saw Alfred as a key figure in the argument for parliamentary reform, believing that the Church gained decisive power only when the line of Alfred was interrupted. The play thus serves as a prelude to Godwin’s later reasoning on education and the communication of principles. In St Dunstan, Godwin focuses on the danger of putting education in the hands of ecclesiastical authority, especially in view of the manipulability of the populace. While O’Shaughnessy considers Godwin’s first historical play a polemical intervention in a specific moment of political reform, he also sees it as participating in long-term transformation of political culture. Julie Carlson’s ‘Heavy Drama’ treats this participation as part of a consistent project of domestic and social reform. Against critics who assert that Godwin was never ‘at home’ in the theatre, trying to write in a medium incompatible with his talents, Carlson argues that he used drama ‘to refine and publicize his reform of the home.’ Like O’Shaughnessy, she believes Godwin’s dramas were occasioned by a particular controversy, but one that arose from sharing private thoughts with the public. Godwin’s critiques of cohabitation and domestic affections in Political Justice had aroused much opposition among his readers, and his ‘unsentimental treatment’ of Mary Wollstonecraft in his Memoirs of the Author of the Rights of Woman further outraged them. Godwin turned to the theatre to regain his audience and to convey his views in a more equivocal way, registering his ‘critique of family life while voicing many positive sentiments about it.’ Antonio, for example, seems to validate domestic affections against the eponymous hero’s severe and antiquated criterion of honour, but the plot shows that his behaviour is ‘grounded in the compulsion to repeat that makes progress impossible’ and that ultimately favours death over life. Even when Godwin provides explicit exemplars of companionate marriage to counter the honour criterion, he shows a tension within the family between the conjugal and filial affections. This tension, in Abbas for example, threatens both ‘state and familial harmony’ and becomes a site for ‘manipulation by public as well as private interests.’ The rival claims of conjugal and filial love show that family is the seat of treason as well as despotism – one’s ‘first impressions’ tie one

Maniquis_3201_001_(Myers).indd 18

1/26/2011 3:04:35 PM



Introduction

19

to the natal family, setting up resistance to any transference to the conjugal family and blocking the development of Political Justice’s concept of justice. Like O’Shaughnessy, Carlson believes Godwin did not simply seek financial profit in turning to theatre, but saw theatre as an educational medium. Yet she sees Godwin’s plays less as interpretations of past history than as writing the conditions for future history. In consequence, she emphasizes the popularizing aspect of the medium he chooses, as well as the potential for dialogue to convey ‘mixed messages.’ The theatre, moreover, presents an opportunity for self-conscious exposure of ‘theatricality,’ which Godwin could fruitfully use to expose the conventional views of family affections by connecting them to illusion and social dissembling. Carlson discovers the duration of Godwin’s history-writing moment by exploring the tendency of his texts: Godwin’s critique of the family in plays such as Faulkener produces a further history, she shows, when his daughter Mary Shelley writes her own novels (among them one entitled Faulkner), in which she reconciles daughter-love with marital love by effecting a bloodless transfer of affections on the terrain Godwin most distrusted.

Part III: Godwin’s Acquaintances As Pamela Clemit has observed, the failure of a definitive biography to appear in the years following Godwin’s death left him long undefined.18 Current projects in editing Godwin’s diary and his letters teach us that Godwin’s life is as intriguing a text as his published works, particularly inasmuch as it impinged on the lives of so many other important writers, publishers, political figures, intellectuals, artists, philanthropists, and people on the fringe. Knowledge of their relation to Godwin – seeing them from his point in the social matrix – helps us to reconstruct the rich life of England and Ireland during a time of cultural change, as well as gain a more precise understanding of his place in it. The two essays in this section take up Godwin’s acquaintance with two unusual men, one exposed primarily through Godwin’s diary, the other through Godwin’s letters. In ‘The Philosopher and the Moneylender: The Relationship between William Godwin and John King,’ Michael Scrivener traces this unexpected acquaintance through Godwin’s diary from December 1793 through 1807 and after. He describes their personal relationship as grounded in more than King’s helping Godwin restructure his debts. King’s rich din-

Maniquis_3201_001_(Myers).indd 19

1/26/2011 3:04:35 PM

20

Victoria Myers

ner parties gave Godwin the opportunity to observe classes of people and behaviour not usually within his purview. King himself lived on the moral fringe. He and Godwin differed in much, but they shared a dedication to radical reform, both taking an anti-imperialist stance in 1783–4 and publicly taking moderate stances against popular figures such as Paine and Thelwall. Yet King was a clandestine supporter of the most radical elements in the London Corresponding Society and financially backed efforts (including blackmail) to pressure members of the establishment. Although Godwin probably knew of some of King’s practices, Scrivener conjectures, he did not disdain meeting King socially. Connections between King and Godwin not only offer new biographical perspectives on Godwin, they also illuminate St Leon, one of his most important novels. Godwin introduced into this novel material likely garnered at King’s dinners – facts about ‘gambling and gallantry,’ ostentation and profligacy, as well as facts about King’s own affairs, such as his fleeing England to escape a perjury charge, his bankruptcy, and his attempts to escape his (poor Jewish) identity. Scrivener finds in St Leon an unusual number of experiences of exile, confiscation, and persecution reminiscent of Jewish history, as well as allusions to Jewish stereotypes, which Godwin attempts to undercut. Godwin, says Scrivener, ‘never swayed … from viewing Judaism as a fundamentally flawed religion,’ yet there were several possible meeting grounds between him and King: both deists, both still in some respects drawn to their respective religious communities, both still carrying a sense of persecution. In ‘Commerce of Luminaries: Eight Letters between William Godwin and Thomas Wedgwood,’ Pamela Clemit presents the friendship between these two men through an exchange of letters never before published. Thomas Wedgwood and his brother Josiah, inheritors of the Wedgwood pottery fortune, became well-known philanthropists. When Godwin met him, Thomas Wedgwood had been a chemist, but now was diverted from his work because of poor health. According to Clemit, ‘their intersection brought together two complementary traditions in the English Enlightenment’: the tradition of commercial-scientific endeavour and that of rational Dissent-radicalism. The letters selected by Clemit come from the early phase of their friendship. After the death of his brother, Thomas Wedgwood engaged Godwin in epistolary (and other) conversations concerning how he might use his fortune to advance the public good. Their discussion of the ethics of gift-giving arose from Wedgwood’s offering Godwin a technologically advanced machine for copying letters. Clemit sees the collection of letters presented here not just as producing

Maniquis_3201_001_(Myers).indd 20

1/26/2011 3:04:35 PM



Introduction

21

a ‘micro-history,’ but also as ‘contribut[ing] to the grand narrative of progress in eighteenth-century England.’ Ending this volume with friendship and gift-giving has seemed to us the most appropriate way of indicating the generative intentions of this collection of essays. By foregrounding the diary and letters as new texts for reflection, we point out how ground is being laid for further work on Godwin. These concluding ‘friendly’ pieces emphasize that the volume as a whole constitutes a series of Godwinian moments of discovery, bringing to light unfamiliar texts and new critical perspectives. From the moment of its inceptive conference, moreover, this collection has proceeded in dialogic meeting points that have realized Godwin’s coveted collision of minds as a collaboration of minds. Attempting to clarify Godwin’s role in restructuring our understanding of Enlightenment and Romantic cultural turns has in turn recast our understanding of Godwin. Without eradicating differences in interpretation styles, the collaboration has aimed to open possibilities for future dialectical and collaborative Godwinian moments.

NOTES   1 Newman Ivey White, Shelley, 2 vols. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940), 1:187. Kenneth Neill Cameron places the moment earlier, when Shelley first read Godwin, but also lengthens it out, asserting that it was the reading not just of Political Justice, but also of The Enquirer, that influenced Shelley (The Young Shelley: Genesis of a Radical [London: Victor Gollancz, 1951], 26–7, 62).   2 William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age, 1825 facsimile edition, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth (Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1989), 31.   3 Hazlitt, Spirit of the Age, 32, 36, 47.   4 William Godwin, Caleb Williams, ed. Pamela Clemit, vol. 3 of Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, 8 vols., gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1992), 269.   5 Peter Marshall, William Godwin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984), 33.   6 See Mark Philp, Godwin’s Political Justice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986).   7 William Godwin, ‘Analysis of Own Character, Begun Sep 26, 1798,’ vol. 1 of Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1992), 60.   8 William Godwin, History of the Commonwealth of England: From its Commence-

Maniquis_3201_001_(Myers).indd 21

1/26/2011 3:04:35 PM

22

Victoria Myers

ment, to the Restoration of Charles the Second, 8 vols., ed. and intro. John Morrow (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2003; repr. from 1824–8 edition).   9 Godwin’s diary, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Abinger e. 45r. 10 See, for example, Jon Klancher, ‘Godwin and the Republican Romance: Genre, Politics, and Contingency in Cultural History,’ Modern Language Quarterly 56, no. 2 (1995), 145–65. 11 Besides Philp’s groundbreaking work, see Daniel E. White, Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 12 See Pamela Clemit, The Godwinian Novel: The Rational Fictions of Godwin, Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). 13 See chapters on Godwin in Tilottama Rajan, The Supplement of Reading: Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and Practice (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990); Tilottama Rajan and Julia M. Wright, eds., Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre: Re-forming Literature 1789–1837 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Thomas Pfau, Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1790–1840 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); and Julie A. Carlson, England’s First Family of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). See as well essays in special issues on William Godwin in Studies in Romanticism 39, no. 4 (Winter 2000) and 41, no. 3 (Fall 2002). 14 Peter H. Marshall, William Godwin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984), 266. 15 Pamela Clemit, ‘Philosophical Anarchism in the Schoolroom: William Godwin’s Juvenile Library, 1805–25,’ Biblion: The Bulletin of the New York Public Library 9, nos. 1–2 (fall 2000–spring 2001), 48. 16 Everett Zimmerman, The Boundaries of Fiction: History and the EighteenthCentury British Novel (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996), 11–29. 17 In an earlier essay, Rajan coined the term ‘oblique history’ to indicate Godwin’s difference from the ‘scientific history … of the Scottish historians’ (Tilottama Rajan, ‘Uncertain Futures: History and Genealogy in William Godwin’s The Lives of Edward and John Philips, Nephews and Pupils of Milton,’ in Milton Quarterly 32, no. 3 [1998], 79, 77). Godwin’s real subject in this piece is John Milton’s ‘posthumous life’ – his ‘effect’ or ‘tendency’ and through him ‘the fate of the revolutionary spirit’ (75). 18 Lives of the Great Romantics III: Godwin, Wollstonecraft & Mary Shelley by Their Contemporaries, Vol. I: Godwin, ed. Pamela Clemit (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1999), ix–x.

Maniquis_3201_001_(Myers).indd 22

1/26/2011 3:04:35 PM

PART  I GODWIN’S RADICAL MOMENT

Maniquis_3201_023_(Maniquis).indd 23

1/26/2011 4:03:22 PM

Image Not Available

Frontispiece engraving from William Godwin, The Adventures of Caleb Williams: or, Things as They Are (London: R. Bentley, 1831). Courtesy of the UCLA Library, Grace M. Hunt Memorial English Reading Room.

Maniquis_3201_023_(Maniquis).indd 24

1/26/2011 4:03:22 PM

chapter one

Godwin’s Calvinist Ghosts: Political Justice and Caleb Williams R O B E RT M . M A N I Q U I S

1  Godwin’s Calvinist Problem and Ours To insist on traces of Calvinism in Godwin is to knock on an open door. In 1800 Godwin listed among the ‘errors’ in the first edition of Political Justice ‘unqualified condemnation of the private affections’ and ‘Sandemanianism, or an inattention to the principle that feeling, not judgment, is the source of human actions.’ The ‘Calvinist system,’ he added, had been ‘so deeply wrought into my mind from early life, as to enable these errors long to survive the general system of religious opinions of which they formed a part.’1 Sandemanianism was, of course, that most severe form of Calvinist theology in which Godwin was raised and that he once rather indifferently preached. Ultimately rejecting Sandemanian coldness did not erase memories of his religious education. Its lingering effects are candidly described in The Genius of Christianity Unveiled, published posthumously in 1873. By that date, science further reinforced reason, modern geology engulfed biblical chronology, and Darwinism turned the Creation into accident. The nineteenth century had concretized the essence of Enlightenment attacks on Christianity. Yet for all the dated, eighteenth-century air of Godwin’s essay, it bristles with something like Nietzsche’s disgust in the 1880s – disgust with Christianity as a slave religion of the terrorized: Most undoubtedly the mind of him by whom this creed is embraced, must be deeply imbued with the spirit of pusillanimity, cowering beneath the almighty hand of the disposer of our fates, who, according to the scriptures, has so little remorse in awarding a tremendous and insufferable punish-

Maniquis_3201_023_(Maniquis).indd 25

1/26/2011 4:03:22 PM

26

Robert M. Maniquis

ment … We can scarcely find any assignable limits for this pusillanimity, and cannot tell in how many directions it insinuates itself to crush ‘our better part of man’ … The idea that … we are to stand naked and shivering before the throne of God, to have all our acts investigated, and every idle word brought to light by an inexorable judge, is somewhat too terrible for the firmest spirit, and may well, even in anticipation, shrink into nothing the ordinary and vulgar soul.   In reality, if we had always this conception present to our thoughts, it would perhaps be impossible for us to endure the load of life. I remember well how this creed weighed on my spirits almost in my infant days – to think that I was born for an eternity either of weal or woe, and much the more probably of the latter. 2

There are no secrets of the unconscious here. The ‘inexorable judge’ who wields ‘tremendous and insufferable punishment’ still floated in conscious memory. Unfortunately, this remembered but rejected spiritual nightmare has for some critics never allayed suspicions of deep Calvinist infection in Godwin. It is a received idea in literary history that Calvinism, once entering the mind, even if later consciously repulsed, remains indelibly there. Some writers, we are told, can simply never get over it. This notion has been applied, with more or less plausibility to many writers, such as Byron, Twain, Melville, and Faulkner. But at times critics have simply bludgeoned Godwin with his abandoned Calvinist beliefs. In this essay, I want to set bludgeons aside and trust to a few nuances. I hope the nuances will make my argument plain. The most important thing about Calvinism for Godwin, seen above all in Caleb Williams (published and revised during the revision of Political Justice) was to destroy its nightmare. Some have suggested that Calvinism so powerfully shaped Godwin’s thoughts that he could not possibly have succeeded in doing this. I suggest that he could and that he did.

2  Calvinism and Political Justice Our style and manner of thinking have undergone a revolution, more extraordinary than the revolution of the country. We see with other eyes; we hear with other ears, and we think with other thoughts, than those we formerly used. Thomas Paine, A Letter Addressed to the Abbé Raynal 3�

The term Calvinistic is, in these days, among most, a term of greater re-

Maniquis_3201_023_(Maniquis).indd 26

1/26/2011 4:03:22 PM



Political Justice and Caleb Williams

27

proach than the term Arminian, yet I should not take it at all amiss, to be called a Calvinist, for distinction’s sake, though I utterly disclaim a dependence on Calvin, or believing the doctrines which I hold, because he believed, and taught them; and cannot justly be charged with believing in everything just as he thought. Jonathan Edwards, Freedom of Will 4

During the past two centuries or so, it has been common to imagine a few too many Calvinist ghosts in Political Justice. Seeing with other eyes and thinking with other thoughts, Paine imagined a revolutionary mental change of a kind that some critics have refused to see in the once-Calvinist Godwin. Even the independence from Calvin that the orthodox Calvinist Jonathan Edwards claimed has at times been denied to Godwin. He did not turn Calvin on his head, as Marx did to Hegel; he simply shrouded, we are led to believe, Calvinist doctrine with utopian dreams. His rational necessity becomes secularized predestination, his perfectibility the perseverance of the saints, his philosophical anarchism a streak of gloomy Calvinistic imagination. Here is a version of these notions from the 1930s. C.H. Driver tried to comment fairly on Godwin, but could not resist wrapping all of Political Justice in the robes of the Genevan Saint: Godwin had dropped the specific tenets of the Calvinist creed; but his book is Calvinistic in spirit throughout, and a realization of this fact helps us the better to appraise his teaching. For a discoverable God he substituted a discoverable universe. For grace working silently in the heart of man he substituted reason. Instead of righteousness as the principle of conduct he pleaded for enlightenment, since the mind – once awakened to the sublimity of eternal truth – must of necessity act in conformity with it.5

The loose phrase ‘Calvinistic in spirit throughout’ substitutes for defining specific effects. Driver turns Calvinism into the Holy Ghost of Political Justice. Homogenizing disparate ideas was also much to the liking of John Middleton Murry, a respected essayist among some intellectuals of the 1930s. In Heaven and Earth (1938), Middleton Murry plays a variation upon Blake’s assertion that Milton was of the devil’s party without knowing it, and argues that Godwin (along with Shakespeare, Rousseau, Goethe, and even Marx) unconsciously disseminated the spirit of Christianity. Here is Godwin Christianized by Middleton Murry, who lets a mistaken idea about Sandemanianism get out of hand: ‘Godwinism is

Maniquis_3201_023_(Maniquis).indd 27

1/26/2011 4:03:23 PM

28

Robert M. Maniquis

secular Sandemanianism. And the much-derided “perfectibility of man” is no more, and no less, than the reassertion in secular terms of the possibility of regeneration.’6 Godwin, however, could not have secularized Sandemanian regeneration with perfectibility, for regeneration in Sandemanianism occurs with the gift of understanding Christ’s sacrifice, after which nothing more is needed for the progress of the mind and soul. Robert Sandeman, in his contemptuous Letters on Theron and Aspasio (1757) rejected useless, illusionary salvational ‘heart-work’ – reprobates were damned and that was that.7 Godwin, like most Enlightenment thinkers, had an elitist sense of social progress. But much like Arminians, who believed in the ‘heart-work’ of regeneration and redemption, he urged the brain-work of perfectibility upon everyone – even the untutored, who in time would be led forward by the intelligentsia. Perhaps, as many think, there are no original ideas in Political Justice and Godwin borrowed ‘perfectibility’ from somewhere, most likely from the Dissenting tradition, perhaps even from millenarianism, perhaps from the philosophes, but certainly not from Sandemanianism.8 The exaggerations and distortions in the last century of critics such as Driver and Middleton Murry are happily not as common as they once were. The last half-century has produced more detailed studies of the religion, the politics, the social life, and the literature of English Dissent. Improved understanding of Dissenting discourse in general and of the 1790s in particular has produced more exact descriptions of Calvinism in Godwin, millenarianism in Paine, Methodism in Wordsworth, and Unitarianism in Coleridge.9 Nevertheless, Calvinist influence upon Godwin continues to be portrayed in claims that range from the specific to the diffuse, from the prudent to the wildly exaggerated. It will always be the case, of course, that drawing parallels between Calvinist and Godwinian ideas raises the question of exactly what is claimed with words such as influence, presence, resemblance, or echoes. Daniel E. White, for instance, lines up Sandemanian ideas that he thinks more or less traceable in Godwin’s thought: ‘the rejection of private rights,’ a ‘critique of private property,’ and insistence on ‘independent judgment.’10 Whatever resemblances we assent to or ‘echoes’ we hear – and there are echoes and resemblances – it needs also to be said that some of these ideas were – as a good scholar such as White knows – not particularly Sandemanian. Calls to individual judgment, for instance, flourish throughout The Pilgrim’s Progress and in texts as distant from Calvinism as one could get – such as Matthew Tindal’s so-called bible of Deism, Christianity as Old as the Creation; or, the Gospel a Republication of the

Maniquis_3201_023_(Maniquis).indd 28

1/26/2011 4:03:23 PM



Political Justice and Caleb Williams

29

Religion of Nature (1730). Common sense is with White when he suggests that Godwin probably encountered the Protestant commonplace of individual judgment in his Sandemanian youth. Still, one wonders what is implied by the early imbibing of bilious Sandemanianism. One implication in arguing for a direct source of an idea may be that the source has something to do with how the idea functions in another, even alien, system of thought. This poses problems. Sandemanian conversion is quite particular. Grace for Sandeman is intellectually acquired, as if in a bolt of revelatory and exclusive understanding. Not even Paul on the road to Damascus was granted such immediacy; he had to grow out of the blindness of insight. Certainly Sandemanian intellect can be likened to, but it is also profoundly different from, the individual conscience and understanding guided by ‘reason’ in philosophical necessity. That version of reason in Political Justice is always individually accessible, but it is also progressively and socially acquired. This understanding, unlike the Sandemanian kind, is one that powerfully expands individually and communally, and, as the necessitarian hopes, universally. Individual judgment, then, functions in relation to a vast social extension obviously ignored in Sandemanian predestination. God, as Sandeman puts it, will bring ‘knowledge of the truth to all whom he intends to save, in spite of all the arts of the teachers,’ and since those to be saved will be only a tiny remnant, it is best for all others not to strain their heart and mind uselessly. Most people, even the pathetically hopeful reprobate, will eventually understand the waste of energy in all they do: ‘Who will travel an hundred miles, in the hopes of being persuaded at the journey’s end of his folly in attempting to travel at all?’11 This cruel, discouraging Calvinism is so radically different in tone and purpose from even the cold judgments of Political Justice that it is hard to believe that Godwin, besides rejecting its principles, did not begin also to despise it early in his adulthood as he eventually despised all Christian finalities. Godwin’s schoolmaster, Samuel Newton, certainly knew the difference between his former student’s piety and what is taught in Political Justice. They agreed still on private judgment and ideas of political liberty. But Newton, pleased to receive from a circulating library the three volumes of Godwin’s celebrated work, read only as far as the second before, shocked and angered, he ‘threw the book aside.’ Whatever essential Sandemanian mentality we think we see in Political Justice, Samuel Newton the Sandemanian saw none. He wrote to Godwin that comments on religion in the book filled him with ‘disgust.’12 All religious influences aside, intellectual resemblances can take us

Maniquis_3201_023_(Maniquis).indd 29

1/26/2011 4:03:23 PM

30

Robert M. Maniquis

in many directions or, tendentiously, in only one. The influential Rational Dissenter Joseph Priestley, for example, said that ‘truth has charms that require only to be seen and known in order to recommend itself to the acceptance of all mankind’; Godwin said that ‘nothing can be more worthy to be depended on, than the omnipotence of truth, or, in other words, than the connection between the judgment and the outward behaviour’ (PJ 2:120–1); and William Blake said that ‘truth can never be told so as to be understood and not be believed.’13 Priestley, Godwin, and Blake are saying quite the same thing about transparent, irresistible truth, a central tenet of Dissenting tradition. Yet we can make all three assertions, if we wish, resemble idealized transparency in Sandemanianism, enwebbed in the same tradition, if, that is, we do not wish to distinguish different contexts, tones, and purposes. Godwin is clear about the ‘error’ that Sandemanianism had left him with – ‘an inattention to the principle that feeling, not judgment, is the source of human actions.’ This error was a liability he worked at eliminating from his thought. Other ideas supposedly derived specifically from Sandemanianism are never as clearly inherited by Godwin as this. To be sure, some Calvinist, even Sandemanian ideas resemble – to use the loose word of Don Locke – ‘themes’ in Godwin. But these are common themes of the Calvinist Dissenting tradition, descended from the sixteenth century and found in hundreds of writers in Godwin’s day.14 In addition, as Philp and White have shown, effects of Dissenting ideas upon Godwin shift, depending on the social and intellectual circles that Godwin variously frequented. Local social tempering of ideas is important for most thinkers, and perhaps more so for Godwin, who said that ‘ductility’ was the ‘leading feature’ of his mind.15 White contrasts Godwin’s emphasis on individual judgment, intellectual conversation, and quiet exchange of ideas with the louder, rowdier working-class radicals of associations, meetings, and polemical pamphlets. Their differences were less of ideas than of styles and temperaments. Thomas Spence, for instance, was raised as a Glassite, the Scottish forerunner of Sandemanianism. Spence was a stubbornly rebellious, militant radical, but also an idiosyncratic solitary – Marilyn Butler calls him a ‘loner.’ When he was not in jail, he lectured, wrote, and sold agrarian communist pamphlets from first a bookstall, then a little shop.16 The militant loner Spence, the cautious radical Godwin, and the hyper-noisy revolutionary Paine – all three cherished individual judgment and private conscience. And yet the same idea often appears in different accents and colours. Paine thus typically shouts, ‘My own mind is my own church’ – a slogan really, ex-

Maniquis_3201_023_(Maniquis).indd 30

1/26/2011 4:03:23 PM



Political Justice and Caleb Williams

31

pressing defiance as much as it does mental independence.17 This style of thought Godwin pulled prudently back from, not from the thought itself. Just after the 1790s, in still another adjustment, as Rowland Weston has shown, Godwin identified in The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer (1800) the deleterious effects of over-valued private judgment and conscience harboured in an isolated rational self. Whatever the particular source for Godwin’s initial Calvinist-accented individuation, he came to see the necessity of connection to others in familial and social contexts. It was there that understanding of others could in the present, just as in the distant days of Chaucer, contribute emotionally to the progress of reason. This turn towards sociability was not enough to drive Godwin into the revolutionary circles frequented by the noisier sort of radical, but it did mark a significant stage in his maturing thought.18 The descriptions of Philp, White, and Weston show that more important than the radical ideas in and of themselves were ideas shared and discussed with others in complex, shifting relations. Influence does not explain as much as a confluence of ideas with different emphases and styles and in fertile combinations with other ideas. Mark Philp rightly says, ‘Godwin did not simply adopt a particular theory – rather, the term ‘influence,’ with its vagueness, seems the most appropriate description.’19 Philp, like all of us, is resigned to leaning on the more or less vague idea of influence, however faint the connections it sketches. Without general ideas we would go mad, and in some general ideas madness begins, but we shall of course never give them up. We may puzzle uneasily over the unproved assumptions in cause and effect pointed to by Hume, yet we gladly use cause and effect to read the world. And in order to keep a semblance of order in intellectual history we avidly seek resemblance. Influence, despite its troubling vagueness, provides the connecting threads that we look for and always find here, there, and everywhere. But if we must live with the slippery idea of influence, which is sometimes obvious, sometimes terribly vague, we should try always to concretize and to nuance influence by remembering the shifting, mixing, recombining, shedding, and repelling of ideas, especially when one author deliberately imports those of another into his text. We know, for instance, that Godwin had read various works of Jonathan Edwards when he was twenty-three years old and discussed with Joseph Fawcett Edwards’s ideas, especially the principle of virtue free of personal interests and familial affections.20 Both popular and learned Calvinism tended to exclude personal and familial interests in the exercise of virtue; we

Maniquis_3201_023_(Maniquis).indd 31

1/26/2011 4:03:23 PM

32

Robert M. Maniquis

remember Christian in The Pilgrim’s Progress leaving his family behind on his first trip to the Celestial City. In Political Justice severe and true virtue is yoked to utilitarian sacrifice in the famous, imaginary scene in which the great Fénelon, a favourite French writer of English Dissenters, is saved from a fire. He is saved in consideration of his future benefit to the human race and at the expense of a chambermaid who, Godwin says, might well be our wife or mother. This famous sacrificial scene clashed with a bubbling eighteenth-century social ideality of the family and its expanding larmoyant excesses. To sacrifice sons, daughters, or mothers might have been fine for ancient Jews and Romans, but such barbarity could only shock the English bourgeoisie. Godwin’s sacrificial gaffe was so offensive it brought ridicule upon him, and long after Political Justice had disappeared from view, this scene and mockery of it were all that many readers remembered about Godwin’s once famous book. In successive editions of Political Justice Godwin tinkered with this hermeneutic scene, but he was unable to disguise the awkward blending of utilitarian sacrifice and the Calvinist kind. It remained a clumsy attempt to graft one idea upon another.21 Yet Godwin worked hard at trying to blend the Protestant commonplace of true virtue with necessitarian reason and benevolence. This we can see in his interesting appeal to the Calvinist Jonathan Edwards, who had carefully conceptualized true virtue.22 Unlike the deadening shadow of Sandemanianism imagined by some in Godwinian utopianism, Edwards reflects an enlightened, congruous mixture of Calvinist and philosophical discourse. Within this discourse there is an ‘influence’ – indeed, an authority, to whom Godwin looks for support in making an argument – but one that comes with a general attenuation of Calvinism in secular imagination rather than a depressing memory of it. Edwards develops the tradition of rigorous individual commitment to Jesus, as in the famous words in Luke 14:26 about hating one’s father and mother, but his Calvinist explanations are less biblical than philosophical, and in words less brutal than those of Christ. Because Edwards could brilliantly sermonize in different styles and write as either philosopher or theologian, his thoughtful treatises sound far different from Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (1741). Neither the Treatise on Virtue nor The Enquiry into the Modern Prevailing Opinions on Freedom of Will need thunder or hellfire. His discussions are all philosophic calm in a procession of deliberate, repetitive, and, it must be said, tedious arguments of empiricist epistemology, logic, ethics, and psychology. Often his Calvinist voice seems simply to fade into Enlightenment ways of speaking, with the same

Maniquis_3201_023_(Maniquis).indd 32

1/26/2011 4:03:23 PM



Political Justice and Caleb Williams

33

inflections common to Hobbes, Locke, Price, and Priestley. Because Edwards so often leans on the language of secular thinkers, his Arminian critics suspected him of thinking like the enemy because he spoke like the enemy. The Arminians saw influences out of control and travelling in the wrong direction. Accused, for instance, of resembling Hobbes on free will, Edwards offers two defences. The first is the astonishingly weak claim that he had never read Hobbes. The second is that if Hobbes and he agree on any idea, so be it, for there is no shame in one’s divinely inspired ideas coinciding with those of a ‘bad man.’23 Edwards’s tolerance is like day to the dark night of hyper-Calvinist suspicion that spawned eighteenth-century Sandemanian rigidity. We need only remember those seventeenth-century Congregationalists who banned singing of metrical psalms for fear that the eternally damned would warble in tune with the Elect.24 Godwin and Edwards obviously move in different directions, Edwards always back to God, Godwin to utopian, anarchical society. But in travelling different paths they pass through the same semantic gardens of virtue and reason. It is then not incongruous that Godwin should, as we shall see, portray the horrors of Calvinistic imagination in Caleb Williams of 1794 and cite with admiration in 1796 arguments of the most brilliant Calvinist theologian of the day. Godwin could distinguish reason from Calvinist superstition, sound arguments from doctrinal absurdities. The fact that Godwin cites Edwards with admiration marks the distance he had put between himself and the cranky Sandemanianism of his youth. For it was Edwards the Calvinist who was tipping ever so gradually towards an Enlightenment mentality. He held to his Calvinist God, but he was also on many philosophical subjects an eighteenth-century reasoner among other reasoners. The Arminians’ eagle-eyed suspicion of Edwards’s language was not without cause, not unlike the suspicion of Pope Clement VII in 1715 at the language of Jesuitically converted Chinese whose Holy Mass seemed more Confucian than Christian. Surviving Calvinist ideas are not simply ropes of sand. We can see their shadows just as well as those of other sources. But by looking very closely we can also see historical reverse osmosis, a gradual overlapping by which influential ideas and language become themselves influenced until even in their survival they are significantly changed. Peter Marshall, for instance, could have tried to invoke a bit more subtlety before simply asserting that Godwin developed his thinking only by grace of a Sandemanian principle that provides the intellectual core of Political Justice :

Maniquis_3201_023_(Maniquis).indd 33

1/26/2011 4:03:23 PM

34

Robert M. Maniquis

Godwin was undoubtedly thinking of the Sandemanians when he referred in Political Justice to certain religionists who see ‘a close and indissoluble connection’ between a man’s internal sentiments and his external conduct. In fact, Godwin came to rest his whole theory of perfectibility on the belief that ‘The Voluntary Actions of Men Originate in their Opinions’: by changing their opinions, one would inevitably transform their behavior. Ironically enough, the most characteristic and extravagant of Godwin’s doctrines, the lynch pin of his entire rationalist system, finds its source in the fanatical creed of an obscure eighteenth-century divine.25

Marshall’s preference for the word ‘undoubtedly’ and the phrase ‘in fact’ is perhaps necessary because what he asserts has only the slimmest basis in fact. All one need do is read volume 1, book 2, chapter 5 of Political Justice, to which Marshall refers. Godwin does indeed quote a passage, real or invented, apparently representing the opinion of hyper-Calvinists related to Godwin’s subject. After remarking that the passage is full of ‘enormous absurdities,’ Godwin does say that what these ‘religionists’ think about opinions and volition is not far from what he thinks. But then he goes on to discuss the subject of opinions with reference to Shaftesbury’s ideas in the Characteristics, which also confirms Godwin’s assertions. Would not, then, Shaftesbury, renowned philosopher of ‘common sense,’ have a claim equal to the irrational ‘religionists’ as provider of the ‘lynch pin’ of Godwin’s thought? Choosing between sources would of course be absurd, for Godwin is only showing how the idea he is discussing is common in a variety of systems and styles. Marshall’s use of Godwin’s text here is more than tendentious – it misinforms. On the basis of his distorted reading, all of Political Justice is unimaginable for him without the intellectual leavings of the gloomy Robert Sandeman, Marshall’s ‘obscure eighteenth-century divine.’ To make this assertion he depends on a resemblance, pointed out by Godwin himself among other equally important resemblances. Apparently because we know so much about Godwin’s religious education and because he admitted to a specific, pernicious Calvinist trace in his memory, some want to see all psychological ideas of a marginal hyper-Calvinism alive in Political Justice. The grim conclusion that follows upon Marshall’s assertion is that Godwin was a doomed prisoner of Calvinism. For him, Godwin ‘was never able to free himself emotionally from his early Calvinism’ or ‘he was simply unable to escape from his Calvinist convictions.’ The critical judgment is immovable, its terms final: ‘never’ and ‘unable to escape.’ He allows that this permanent Calvinist disability had its ‘advantages,’

Maniquis_3201_023_(Maniquis).indd 34

1/26/2011 4:03:23 PM



Political Justice and Caleb Williams

35

for ‘much of the imaginative power of the novels may be traced to its impact.’ But Marshall leaves the description of the ‘impact’ ambiguous, even as he praises the psychological intensity of Caleb Williams.26 He makes no suggestion that this intensity relieved the ‘psychological damage’ done to Godwin by Calvinism. Other critics, as we shall see below, like Marshall discussing Political Justice, suggest that Godwin imprisoned himself also in the Calvinism of Caleb Williams. This is the least accurate of all assertions about influence in Godwin. It is also the least generous, for it denies to Godwin that independent judgment which, wherever and whenever he first began to value it, he tried always wilfully to use. Independent judgment is impossible of course in someone intellectually imprisoned. I have pointed to pitfalls in tracing Calvinism in Godwin because, in the second half of this essay, I want to suggest that Calvinism in Caleb Williams, the most successful of all Godwin’s texts, is more than a matter of Calvinist allusions, resemblances, reflections, and echoes, although it certainly mirrors a psyche fostered by religion. In its portrayals of social power, Caleb Williams is not really influenced by Calvinism; Godwin deliberately deploys Calvinism’s crushing of individual judgment to portray what he considered past and present British Terror and its social oppression. The religious nightmare of Calvinism migrates directly from Godwin’s memories to this novel. But is this migrating nightmare no more than the surviving Sandemanianism that Marshall and others suggest Godwin could never escape? Or does Caleb Williams instead cast off Calvinistic horrors to allow Godwin’s readers to see the power of individual judgment and a path to psychic freedom?

3  The Self Named and Negated: Calvinism and Caleb Williams … how many times have I vex’d and griev’d His Holy Spirit … – no wonder I am so afflict’d, but it is of the Lord’s mercy that I am as I am. Oh for the grace to glorify Him, though it be in the furnace. The Journal of William Thomas Swan (1786–1854)27

Caleb Williams dramatizes many ideas expounded in Political Justice, but, as all readers of this novel know, it does much more than that. How it becomes more than an illustration of social philosophy we see in the ways ideas change shape in moving from philosophy to fiction. The shapeshifting ideas I begin with concern intimations of the self within philosophical necessity.

Maniquis_3201_023_(Maniquis).indd 35

1/26/2011 4:03:24 PM

36

Robert M. Maniquis

Caleb expresses different senses of his significance as a ‘self’ according to his situation and his mood at the time he speaks.28 At one moment he speaks with a self surveying all of society. Beginning with the delight of a self feeling his freedom, he also self-consciously imagines social liberation for himself and others. At the beginning of volume 2, chapter 9, he has just freed himself – temporarily – from Falkland: I hardly felt the ground. I repeated to myself ‘I am free. What concern have I with danger and alarm? I feel that I am free; I feel that I will continue so. What power is able to hold in chains a mind ardent and determined? What power can cause that man to die, whose whole soul commands him to continue to live?’ I looked back with abhorrence to the subjection in which I had been held. I did not hate the author of my misfortunes – truth and justice acquit me of that; I rather pitied the hard destiny to which he seemed condemned. But I thought with unspeakable loathing of those errors in consequence of which every man is fated to be, more or less, the tyrant or the slave. I was astonished at the folly of my species, that they did not rise up as one man, and shake off chains so ignominious, and misery so insupportable; So far as related to myself, I resolved – and this resolution has never been entirely forgotten by me – to hold myself disengaged from this odious scene, and never fill the part either of the oppressor or the sufferer.29

This declamation arises out of two centuries of adapting the ‘willing’ self to Calvinist predestination and, in the eighteenth century, to philosophical necessity. For most thinkers of these centuries – rationalists and empiricists, deists and Catholics, Anglicans, Calvinists, and Arminians, Trinitarians and Unitarians – the will is neither simply ‘free’ nor ‘unfree,’ and there is nothing in either predestination or necessity that demands determinism or fatalism. Calvin and successive Calvinisms had in many ways accommodated the metaphysical to a conscious sense of feeling free, the feeling celebrated here by Caleb. Metaphysical denials of free will, except in mechanistic determinisms of Holbach or Helvetius, never excluded epiphenomenal notions of ‘volition,’ ‘willingness,’ ‘choice,’ ‘activity,’ and ‘doing.’ With a modified Augustinianism, Calvinists enclosed practical volition within the will of God. The two extremes in all discussions of the will were easy to portray – pure determinism or fatalism at one end and a random bouncing about of free will, always considered an insane notion, at the other. But a vast Protestant middle ground nurtured elastic ideas about the will. Here in the middle, the self as sinner and empirical perceiver enjoyed a sense of willing, a word that

Maniquis_3201_023_(Maniquis).indd 36

1/26/2011 4:03:24 PM



Political Justice and Caleb Williams

37

commonly distinguished human volition from and yet linked it to divine will in the predestination of theologians and in the metaphysical necessity of philosophers. In practical terms, for Calvin and for the necessitarian Godwin, both of whom formally denied free will, individual actions were efficiently causative, morally valued, and judged. Of more importance than the relative dose of free will in predestination or in necessity was whether or not one’s willing was diseased. Did one’s choices arise from rationality or superstition, transparence or mystery, pure self-interest or benevolence? One of the founding texts on diseased willing was Romans 7, especially verses 14–20, which appears everywhere – in the writings of the Calvinistically severe, the Wesleyan conservative, and the politically radical – and which could serve also as a verse emblem of many tortured, doubled selves in Romantic poetry and prose: I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate … I can will what is right but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.30 Paul’s lesson in Romans teaches that doing what is right is impossible without a conscience manifesting providential good in one’s willing. Brought down from metaphysical ‘predestination’ to the volitional, everything depends on the mind of the doer – whether he, for the Arminian, is  good or evil, for the Calvinist, elect or reprobate, or for the radical Dissenter, rational or superstitious. The disease of sin is often replaced in Protestant Dissent by a failure of rational transparency. But the rhetorical replacement of sin by irrationality makes all the difference in the world between necessity and hyper-Calvinist predestination. Rationality may be conditioned by personal and historical development, but it is always humanly achievable. In the passage from Caleb Williams quoted above, Caleb compresses accommodations of human will to philosophical necessity. He ‘senses’ a power that comes with the feeling of freedom. He also is touched by virtue, reason, and independent judgment as it is idealized in Political Justice. For he does not hate Falkland, he only pities the ‘hard destiny to which he seemed condemned,’ and he loathes ‘the errors in consequence of which every man is fated to be, more or less, the tyrant or the slave.’ The words ‘destiny’ and ‘fated’ are not, strictly speaking, technical Godwinian concepts. They invoke the brittle denial of will that is simultaneously counteracted by the emotional celebration of agency and volition. Nor is this a naive celebration, for Caleb translates his sense of justice and freedom into a sense of social revolution, wondering why all

Maniquis_3201_023_(Maniquis).indd 37

1/26/2011 4:03:24 PM

38

Robert M. Maniquis

of humanity does not simply throw off its chains in acts of liberation. Nothing is purely and simply fated or determined, just as there is no pure and simple free will. But there is profound cooperation of individual volition in the mentality of things as they are. Here Caleb has a dawning apprehension of agency and volition translated into the imagination of a historical process in which individuals can be busy at doing, making, changing, revolutionizing. Freedom of the will is thus not in the least denied, as is often said of predestination and of philosophical necessity. It is conditioned by the mind’s capacity to remain in a self-conscious state that sees through social fictions into transparently understandable forces that debilitate the mind. Moreover, Caleb resolves never to forget his resolution, never to ‘fill the part either of the oppressor or the sufferer.’ The feeling of freedom becomes as efficaciously important as any envisioned fact of freedom. Caleb is of sound, rational mind in this moment of self-awareness, but of course he will forget, until the very end of the story, his resolution to be neither an oppressor nor a sufferer, for Caleb will alternate between enlightened, benevolent understanding and clouded fictions. What we see here we cannot see as rapidly in Political Justice, although it is suggested even there – the wavering of the mind between a sense of its freedom and a sense of enclosure in both events and mental habits.31 Imagined within philosophical necessity, the self may act like a cog in a machine, with no more significance than that of any other cog. Such is the self in Helvetius or Holbach, versions of a determined self that Godwin knew and which appear in the novel, but which the novel, like Political Justice, works against. Caleb, for instance, near the end of the story, turns for help to old Mr Collins, who has turned against him. Collins delivers some cold remarks on determinism to explain why he neither judges nor concerns himself with Caleb’s ‘fate’: ‘I regard you as vicious, but I do not consider the vicious as proper objects of indignation and scorn. I consider you as a machine … you are just what circumstances irresistibly compelled you to be’ (CW, 321). All those moments when Caleb defends himself, dodges danger, and, when not doggedly depressed or in awe of social power, when, that is, he exemplifies his individual judgment and effective volition – all this in the novel makes Collins’s determinist speech seem pompously wrong. What works against the formulaic ideas of Collins is Caleb working upon a horizon of unknown consequences. Here the self takes on force as a consciously willing self, above all, a self willing itself to be conscious. Much of this is a matter of  tonic accents, like those in English sentences that amplify beginnings

Maniquis_3201_023_(Maniquis).indd 38

1/26/2011 4:03:24 PM



Political Justice and Caleb Williams

39

and ends or subjects and verbs. Looking to the past, one can accent randomness, coincidence, or, quite the opposite, necessary links. That is one reason why Godwin, emphasizing the links to produce a tight, connected plot, outlined the plot, as he tells us, backwards. Driving characters forward is a different matter. At one point, Godwin doubted the coherence of the novel’s action measured by the principles of Political Justice. And that is why, despite carefully plotting the story backwards, he wound up with two endings, the original, or suppressed, and the later published ending.32 I should more accurately say that it is we who wind up with two endings, for it is we and not Godwin who thrive on discussion of alternate endings in this novel and in many others.33 And the reason we enjoy alternate endings is that they allow us to philosophize with the terms of aesthetic form and theorize, as Aristotle did, the links and turns in what we accept or reject as dramatic probability, the closest thing literature has to philosophical necessity. As in philosophy, novels allow for logical accommodations of free will by using different tonic emphases, above all in plots built upon constant suspense. The past of the plot is closed, its immediate future open to imagined  probabilities, and it is always open to these probabilities. If it were not, we could never enjoy reading the same plot twice. And as every reader of Caleb Williams knows, its suspenseful plot makes for its narrative force, the one by which we are carried along with the concrete volition of Falkland and Caleb. These two characters spiral forward, towards each other and the future both as if propelled and as if free to affect their future. In that suspense, suffocating enclosure alternates with the seduction of escape. Godwin alternates and intensifies emphases in such a way, as we shall see, that the novel designs the psychic revolt that is ultimately more important than the rational revolt against God in Political Justice. H.N. Brailsford argued that the most important thing about Godwin and Calvinism is that the religion was so abominably inhuman that this was what drove him to write Political Justice. If he had been an Anglican or a Methodist, he could not have done it: ‘His revolt was not so much the readjustment of a speculative thinker who has reconsidered untenable dogmas, as the rebellion of a humane and liberal mind against a system of terrorism. To some agnostics God is an unnecessary hypothesis. To Godwin He was rather a tyrant to be deposed.’34 Brailsford was, I think, correct. This is a far cry from seeing Calvinism simply secularized by Godwin as prisoner of a way of thinking that he could not escape. Our exaggerated need for intellectual continuity obscures the deep fracture in  his Dissent. But what Brailsford says about Political Justice is all the more

Maniquis_3201_023_(Maniquis).indd 39

1/26/2011 4:03:24 PM

40

Robert M. Maniquis

true of Caleb Williams. No former Methodist or Anglican could have written this novel, only someone who had intimately known the worst terror of Calvinism, which was life lived in dreadful uncertainty. That Calvinist uncertainty Godwin, as we have seen, recalled in what ‘weighed on my spirits almost in my infant days – to think that I was born for an eternity either of weal or woe, and much the more probably of the latter.’ This uncertain psyche is socially dramatized in Caleb Williams.35 Both Caleb, dependent upon and crushed by Falkland, and Godwin, the once terrified child, can be seen shadowed in the first pages of The Institutes of the Christian Religion, where the sinner is both gathered unto and rejected by God. Nearly all the wisdom we possess … consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But, while joined by many bonds, which one precedes and brings forth the other is not easy to discern. In the first place, no one can look upon himself without immediately turning his thoughts to the contemplation of God, in whom he ‘lives and moves’ [Acts 17:28]. For quite clearly, the mighty gifts with which we are endowed are hardly from ourselves; indeed, our very being is nothing but subsistence in the one God. Then, by these benefits shed like dew from heaven upon us, we are led as by rivulets to the spring itself.

Although he tells us that we cannot ‘conceive of God without conceiving of ourselves,’ Calvin, as if leading us into a trap, then shatters our image in the divine mirror. We begin by flattering ourselves that because we come from God we share in what he is. Self-scrutiny, however, shows that we are only pathetic pantomimes of perfection. Since we only pretend at something good in us, a glance inward reveals that what masquerading earlier as righteousness was pleasing in us will soon grow filthy in its consummate wickedness. What wonderfully impressed us under the name of wisdom will stink in its very foolishness. What wore the face of power will prove itself the most miserable weakness.36

Trying to conflate our image and God’s, we only grow shocked at the difference between ineffable perfection and stinking depravity. As the Institutes proceeds, Calvin offers ins-and-outs by which this filthy, sinning self can crawl through life while glorifying God. But the most consequential result of all such survival is that the sinner, elect or damned, can never really be certain which he is.

Maniquis_3201_023_(Maniquis).indd 40

1/26/2011 4:03:24 PM



Political Justice and Caleb Williams

41

This uncertainty produced centuries of tortured psyches. Calvin did not invent the uncertainty, but he systematized it out of crucial Pauline tensions in iconic texts such as Romans 7:14–20. To be sure, despite Calvinist uncertainty, many believers speak of happiness during centuries of austere Calvinist religious life. When believers do not simply ignore predestination, as surely many did, they may bear the worst pains of life simply by assuming that they are elect.37 Rousseau, in Book VI of The Confessions, provided the eighteenth century’s most famous example of blithely, even comically, escaping Calvinist or, in its French form, Jansenist uncertainty. He simply wagered salvation on whether or not he could hit a tree with a stone. He wisely chose a big stone, stood close up, hit the tree, and, comforted, went on his way to confront, so he thought, the cruel judgments, not of God, but of society. Indeed, in the 1559  edition of the Institutes (book 3, chap. 2, part 15), Calvin emphasizes the absolute certainty without which there is no true faith of the elect. Yet even for the seemingly sincere believer, Calvin admits, certainty can alternate with the uncertainty of false faith. At times nothing can seem paradoxically more uncertain than this necessary certainty. When the uncertainty is emphasized even more in seventeenth-century Scottish and English Calvinism, the assumption of both the authenticity of one’s faith and one’s election could be extremely perilous. British Calvinists, at least the most austere kind, could never have been satisfied with Pascal’s now famous bet. They would have had to make not one but two bets. The first was easy – to believe in God because there is nothing to lose. But the second bet, in the manner of Rousseau, would have been frightening – to believe in one’s election, with perhaps everything to lose, for making such a bet could be itself a strong sign that one was damned, and so had already lost the bet. When Christian in The Pilgrim’s Progress smiles in self-satisfaction at his defeat of Apollyon, he also realizes that the smile may imply salvational danger. All Calvinists, with the help of the Psalmist, knew the fatal tricks of the wicked man who ‘sees himself with too flattering an eye to detect and detest his guilt’ (Psalm 36). For the non-gamblers among nervous and doubtful sinners, Calvinist uncertainty turned all the phenomenal world, all its events, large and small, all his spoken and hidden thoughts, and all personal experiences into signs of what lay in store for the self, and that was, in all probability, though not certainly, obliterating damnation. Free will is formally denied to the sinner and yet the sinner is seduced into wilful interpretation in reading the significance in what happens and in what the sinner chooses to do. Everything in life for this kind of Calvinist believer can become cause for

Maniquis_3201_023_(Maniquis).indd 41

1/26/2011 4:03:24 PM

42

Robert M. Maniquis

nerve-wracking anxiety. Anxiously in suspense, the self, especially suspecting itself damned, becomes the solipsistic centre of the universe, as Caleb eventually would, imagining that ‘I was the sole subject of general attention, and that the whole world was in arms to exterminate me’ (CW, 247). Everything turns into promising signs on good days, menacing signs on bad. The world is there to be read for the self, as in England’s most popular Calvinist texts, Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress and Defoe’s The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Christian and Crusoe are seeming centres of all metaphysical order, tortured Christian heroes who do fine in the end, but only after lonely, painful journeys, and by contrast with  other fractured Puritan adventurers who do not turn out so well in the end. It is into the tradition of not turning out well that Caleb Williams fits. In this literary, narrative tradition Godwin portrays a Calvinist imagination that he obviously hopes reason will erase along with what he calls the political terrorism of reactionary Britain. Godwin’s memory of this Calvinist self, as we have seen in The Genius of Christianity Unveiled, is simply defined – a terrorized victim in a crowd of other terrorized victims awaiting judgment: ‘we are to stand naked and shivering before the throne of God, to have all our acts investigated, and every idle word brought to light by an inexorable judge … [which] is somewhat too terrible for the firmest spirit, and may well, even in anticipation, shrink into nothing the ordinary and vulgar soul’ (GC, 106–7). The fear of shrinking into nothing, which stalks both Falkland and Caleb, is preceded by identifying that self about to be erased. Caleb is transformed from insignificant anonymity into a significant public name accused and already condemned. Ultimate escape for him is often, beyond mere disguise at which he grows expert, a simple return to anonymity, without a particularly defined or solipsistic self. But just as nature abhors a vacuum, Calvinism demands that each and every self be either saved or damned. This summoning of the self to judgment can turn anonymity into desirable disappearance. But if the conscious self is to be born at all, it must be born balanced on the razor’s edge of election and damnation. The sinner sensing damnation is a sinner singled out individually in order to be destroyed. For the reprobate in the Calvinist universe, this named and negated self can produce perverse certainty: je suis condamné, donc j’existe. Of course the sinner can joyously discover, or think he discovers, an elect self. But such a self is, as far as I am aware, never embodied except in hagiographic Protestantism or in those sinners who, contrary to all prudently humble Puritanism, dare to proclaim their election. There are moments when Caleb seems capable of saving himself from

Maniquis_3201_023_(Maniquis).indd 42

1/26/2011 4:03:24 PM



Political Justice and Caleb Williams

43

sheepish participation in this mental destruction, when, that is, the voice of Godwin, author of Political Justice, is heard speaking in his mind. Yet against this progression there is a social negation of Caleb over which he has no control. False accusation transforms him from an innocent victim into a thief and a calumniator. In one chilling moment he hears a story circulated about who he is, and thus one of his selves meets another. The false and unjust mirror reflects a trapped self only understood by the trapped self. At his worst, Caleb says, ‘I endeavored to sustain myself by the sense of my integrity, but the voice of no man upon earth echoed to the voice of my conscience … Sympathy, the magnetic virtue, the hidden essence of our life, was extinct’ (CW, 308). Falkland and Caleb are left with selves cut off from others or victimized by their dependence on others, what Sartre called, in Huis-clos, ‘les autres,’ the social hell of opinion that paralyses our independence. This identity among others is a fabricated image that suppresses the imagined – or perhaps illusory – ‘real’ self, much like the Calvinistically damned self that is created only to be destroyed.38 One important middle place, an oasis, appears when Caleb returns to an anonymous refuge from the named and negated self – the intellectual, warm, familial presence of Laura Denison. Falkland is a Calvinist shadow, the omnisciently terrorizing imaged father. Caleb calls Laura the sheltering mother in whose presence, for just a brief time, he knows pleasure with unaccusing human beings. As I have discussed in the previous section, Rowland Weston has pointed out that Godwin came to see the excessive price of the ‘Puritan temper’ of the mind in gloomy Calvinist isolation of the self, which forces the self to the bar of every day’s justification. With Laura the sheltering mother, the hunted Caleb retreats into the realm of a woman ‘who knew nobody, who lived as it were alone in a corner of the universe … this admirable and fascinating hermit.’ She is of course not a hermit, but the exaggerated language emphasizes a maternal, familial Laura, anonymous ‘in a corner of the universe,’ alone but not communally isolated. There Caleb sheds for a time the imposed victimized self and finds a place where he can enjoy ‘the immunities of a human being’ (303–4). When he learns that Laura knows Falkland (her Neapolitan father had known him), he senses that it is only a matter of time before withdrawal from the world of the named self will come to an end. Under the omniscient eye of Falkland, like that of the Calvinist God, there can be no withdrawal, no ‘human immunities,’ and Falkland finally breaks into the hidden circle, turns Laura against Caleb, and drives him back out into the terrors of judgment.

Maniquis_3201_023_(Maniquis).indd 43

1/26/2011 4:03:25 PM

44

Robert M. Maniquis

In the first, suppressed ending of the novel, Caleb helplessly senses his disappearance into a world that determines his destruction and in which determination he has participated. He recounts his inability to convince his judges of his innocence and then suspects that his narrative, designed to prove his innocence, may only be another trap. His text itself is unreliably one of the signs, like all ambiguous Calvinist signs, that apparently promise redeemed reputation, but that may also be so flawed as to confirm his guilt. The innocent self he has authored into existence, to be distinguished from the falsely guilty, public self, may be placed in doubt by us, readers outside the story, just as it was by his judges within it. Only a small step is needed to fall into the nightmare of himself – sacrificed to the social machine in which he will be obliterated: Am I not deceiving myself while I thus explain my defeat? Am I not applying an imaginary balm to the gaping wounds of my mind? Perhaps all men will reason upon my story as these men reasoned. Perhaps I am beguiling myself during all this time, merely for want of strength to put myself in the place of an unprepossessed auditor and to conceive how the story will impress everyone that hears it. My innocence will then die with me! The narrative I have taken pains to digest will then only perpetuate my shame and spread more widely the persuasion of my nefarious guilt! How excruciating so much as to suspect the possibility of such an issue to the scene! This is the bitterest aggravation of all my sufferings! I cannot endure to think it! (CW, 344–5)

Calvinist uncertainty about how one will be judged was never more painful than in Caleb’s fear of total injustice, imposed by us, his readers. But what Godwin knew was that such an ending could not show the promise of his principles in Political Justice. Without showing that promise the remembered religious nightmare would narratively triumph. Hence the second or published ending. Caleb brings his charge of Falkland’s guilt before the court. Falkland admits his guilt, and he and Caleb embrace. Caleb remains a victim, not only of Falkland but, as he himself sees it, of his own energetic curiosity. And Falkland in a long speech given by Caleb also becomes a victim of his being born into the patrician class of oppressors. The master and the servant are mutually enslaved, destroyed by, and sacrificed to each other both within and by a corrupt social order, of which they are emblematic mental pillars. They begin to understand who they have been. To achieve anything like a clear sense of themselves long before this sentimental scene, they would

Maniquis_3201_023_(Maniquis).indd 44

1/26/2011 4:03:25 PM



Political Justice and Caleb Williams

45

have had to escape the mentality that holds them in thrall to each other. But both Falkland and Caleb have always lived within a closed circle of consciousness dominated by threatening possible and real judgments, based on truth or falsity. These are the descendants of that degraded, sinful self that haunted Godwin in the Calvinist nightmare of the ‘self shrinking into nothing.’ Only if Caleb – and Falkland as well – were to see how they were conditioned to be murderers and victim and victims as murderers and then stepped outside ‘things as they are’ would they have escaped the Calvinist-paternalistic-Godly social machine. Neither Falkland nor Caleb can see this, at least not before the second deus ex machina published ending, where Godwin magically grants them awareness. The ending is too mechanical. Perhaps Caleb at least would have sprung out of the social trap if he had had an epiphany like that of Shelley’s Prometheus, who sees that the terrorizing Jupiter is himself. Perhaps he would have intuited the problem if he had read Blake’s ‘God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is,’39 a mental circle that produces historical contraries of mythopoeic joy or murderous Christian catastrophe. But such epiphanies and syntactical clues are not granted to Caleb, and we are left with a quite unconvincing ending. Still, it is an ending that makes clear that Godwin the author can see, and we his readers are meant to see, what needs to be seen. With this awareness Godwin hoped that his lesson taught in the transposition of a Calvinist into a social nightmare would have been complete. Despite the rushed ending, Caleb Williams is one of the best renderings of the Calvinist mind in English fiction. Surely it is a mistake to claim that Godwin did not consciously understand Calvinist infection and that his ‘unconscious’ condemned his fictional characters and himself to remain within the nightmare.

4  Out of One Nightmare and into Others I will suppose the individual who is at this moment reading these pages to be satisfied that he is one of the elect, reserved for everlasting joy, but that he is nevertheless ‘saved, yet so as by fire.’ He must in that case have strange misgivings and tinglings, must feel as if he were somewhat scorched by the fierceness of the flames, and were in the condition which I have heard that a pious nonconformist divine once petitioned might fall to the lot of Louis the Fourteenth, that ‘God would hold him over the pit of hell by the hair of his head – but, Oh Lord, do not let him fall in!’ William Godwin, The Genius of Christianity Revealed 40

Maniquis_3201_023_(Maniquis).indd 45

1/26/2011 4:03:25 PM

46

Robert M. Maniquis

One way to portray Godwin still imprisoned rather than freed by the intellectual lesson in Caleb Williams is to see him trapped in a mapped unconscious. Rudolf F. Storch, for instance, argues that Caleb Williams is essentially a ‘modern novel about the guilt and anxieties that have dominated much of Western Culture since the end of the eighteenth century.’ No matter that Godwin was looking back to guilt dominant since the sixteenth century, Storch wants the novel to be modern, as in twentieth-century modern. Its narrative power is derived not by what is revealed but by what is hidden in what Godwin thinks he reveals. In other words, the narrative power resides in neurosis. Storch kindly excuses us from any need for professional knowledge to understand the novel – ‘one does not have to understand in abstract terms the neurosis played out in the book in order to come under its sway.’ It is assumed apparently that we all have enough neuroses of our own to make the proper connections. Storch’s reading is predicated on the Freudian assumption that we cannot reveal to ourselves what is unconsciously hidden. Hence what I have portrayed as the narrative reflection of Godwin’s Calvinist nightmare can only be a nightmare that is a symbolic transfer of another quite different and very bad dream of prohibited desire. Storch gives Godwin credit for seeming to have anticipated the dark associations of the unconscious, although no writer of the eighteenth century could ever know what the Freudian theory of the unconscious really reveals. Eighteenth-century writers – and most nineteenth-century writers – had the misfortune of being born too early. So, for instance, this opinion of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art and mentality: ‘A description of Caleb’s intense relationship with Falkland would have been beyond the scope of eighteenth century character analysis. Not even the subtlety and intelligence of George Eliot’s probings could have captured it.’ It needs to be said no more clearly – Godwin could not have understood, as we do, what he was doing. He seems to have understood the presence of disease, but he could not diagnose it, and, at least in the character of Caleb, could not escape it. Since, as Storch suggests, only Wordsworth came close to understanding what was at stake, clearly Caleb and Godwin his creator could not ‘escape’ the disease. The neurosis imagined by Storch is of course a Freudian struggle with the authoritarian father, which Wordsworth turned away from to find communal love in nature. Storch’s is thus a modern Freudian reading wrapped in pieces of what we have come to call Romantic ideology. The authoritarian father can easily be associated with the Calvinist God and his imposed nightmare. But Godwin, like his fictional creation Caleb, could not have consciously

Maniquis_3201_023_(Maniquis).indd 46

1/26/2011 4:03:25 PM



Political Justice and Caleb Williams

47

set his mind free from the nightmare by the very nature of unconscious repression. Once the nightmare becomes neurosis it is inescapable.41 Another way of reading is to discover Godwin the author caught between self-referential signifiers, out of which no writer can write himself. Here we come upon – and of course cannot here do justice to – the metamorphosis of the confining unconscious into a textual space. The unconscious in post-structural, postmodernist criticism is hidden in plain sight. This web speaks and does not speak, it is a mixture of presences, absences, and aporia. In Jerrold E. Hogle’s description of the self in Caleb Williams Godwin is admitted to what, at least until recently, has been a dominant critical topos – the prison-house of language. Hogle insists that writing itself produces a circular illusion of the expressive, liberating self. Godwin’s novel demonstrates this in Caleb the writer but also in Godwin, imprisoned in his text about the imprisonment of texts. In such a reading, not only Godwin but also his interpreters are under the aegis of what Kenneth Burke called the indelible ‘god-term.’ Godwin is drawn out of the struggle against his own ‘god-term,’ to struggle also against those of his future interpreters. Ironically, Godwin, who was at least narratively freeing himself from the Calvinist nightmare in Caleb Williams, has in such modern readings, without any possibility of appeal, been textually re-imprisoned.42 Readings of Caleb Williams based on the unconscious in the psyche or in the self-referential text neglect Godwin’s revealing play of language that represents freedom from both the unconscious and from language. Consider the following passage in which Calvinist violence is invoked, then linked directly to what some consider the ‘unconscious’ struggle of son against father or of author against a textual godfather. Here Caleb’s conscious thoughts, his dream thoughts, and his thoughts about his dream thoughts seem to guide us to a sense of who is imprisoned and who is not. The passage occurs at the end of his adventures with the ‘gang of thieves,’ who are connected to the violent revolutionary spirit that Godwin everywhere rejects. The witch-like hag, a maternal hanger-on of the gang, has been offended at Caleb’s arguing against the revolutionary morality of thievery. He describes her resentment, quite amusingly turns moral value upside down, and turns her into a grotesque, laughable Calvinist witch: Robbery was a fundamental article in the creed of this hoary veteran, and she listened to my objections with the same unaffected astonishment and horror that an old woman of other habits would listen to one who objected

Maniquis_3201_023_(Maniquis).indd 47

1/26/2011 4:03:25 PM

48

Robert M. Maniquis

to the agonies and dissolution of the Creator of the world, or to the garment of imputed righteousness prepared to envelope the souls of the elect. Like the religious bigot, she was sufficiently disposed to avenge a hostility against her opinions with the weapons of sublunary warfare. (CW, 237)

This is an introduction to a nightmare of Falkland about to murder Caleb, who cowers before him, awaiting his death. And just as he is about to die by Falkland’s hand, he awakes to see the hag with her hatchet hovering above him. The Calvinist witch and Falkland blend into one at the liminal place of sleep and waking, the unconscious and the conscious. The subdued humour is all of a piece with Godwin’s amplified metaphors, wielded by both Falkland and Caleb, all of which point us to psycho-political metonymies he wants us to see. We never need wonder if Falkland is a transposed God and father figure. ‘You might as well think of escaping from the power of the omnipresent God, as from mine!’ (CW, 150). We do not have to imagine a symbolized Calvinist, terrorizing omniscience hovering over the novel and linked to Falkland, because we are told precisely that this is the case. Falkland is the Omniscient eye, like that of the Christian God (CW, 316). The very pit that Falkland says he has prepared for Caleb calls up the famous bottomless pit in thousands of sermons over which all Calvinist sinners are suspended, hanging by a thread: ‘I have dug a pit for you; and whichever way you  move, backward or forward, to the right or the left, it is ready to swallow you’ (CW, 160). And few modern readers may recognize it, but the ‘master passion’ of curiosity for which Caleb condemns himself would have been recognized by many of his readers as religious transgression commonly debated from the Reformation on and hammered at again and again in the pages of Calvin’s Institutes. Caleb most of the time frees curiosity from this theological association and turns it into a rational spirit of inquiry and escape, but finally he also often backslides from reason into the stupidity of Calvinist curiosity conceived as sin.43 In all the examples of allusion to religious memory underlying social power, a mapped unconscious seems beside the point. It is difficult to see what Godwin would be trying ‘unconsciously’ to keep secret. The linked images all through the text of God, father, magistrate, the elect, the omniscient, and the terrible are transparent. His narrator Caleb and his narrator’s adversary wear mind-forged manacles and that is what we need to see to understand both this novel and the hope of benevolent reason in Political Justice. There is, however, no compelling reason to see, behind Caleb the imprisoned narrator, Godwin the author imprisoned as well.

Maniquis_3201_023_(Maniquis).indd 48

1/26/2011 4:03:25 PM



Political Justice and Caleb Williams

49

To see it that way we must, like Hogle, have faith in the eternal mise en abyme of self-referentiality, in the I am that I am of Yahweh’s terrifying Hebrew ronde, sufficient for Yahweh, but for humans a hermeneutic circle that swallows up subject and predicate in fictional primordial utterance. The Calvinist pit becomes language itself. That metaphysical utterance is sounded in us only as a pathetic circular sentence in which a miniature God resides who cannot be ejected – Kenneth Burke’s god-term, which, when used to speak our freedom also speaks our unfreedom. Or as poor William Thomas Swan, devout Calvinist workingman put it in 1834, ‘Oh for the grace to glorify Him, though it be in the furnace.’44 Perhaps if Swan had read and understood Caleb Williams, he may have discovered how to climb out of the furnace. Hogle’s reading of the novel suggests that, even in abandoning the fiction of God, there is no way out.45 Some readers, I think, are inclined to see Godwin imprisoned in the psychic or textual unconscious because Caleb Williams is a text so fascinating that they want it to be genuinely modern in and of itself, readable alongside Kafka or Joyce or Pynchon or even Primo Levi. And why not? Reading texts of the past is always in part making them our texts, making them variously exciting to read again in new ways. But we need also to be as self-conscious as Godwin was of the literary imitation of nightmares and escapes from them. We can see our neuroses or our aporia in Godwin’s novel without denying Godwin an escape from his nightmares and conflicts. We need not become literary Mormons, baptizing disenfranchised ancestors with only our beliefs and our demons. To be sure, we must – do we have any choice? – use our critical structures to understand texts in our cultural way. But we must also remember that the unconscious and the self-referential text are hermeneutic models of the sort that, at least since the advent of Romanticism, we eventually replace with new hermeneutic models. In stark contrast to changing tastes in criticism, however, social oppressions recounted in Caleb Williams are strikingly like contemporary social oppressions in life as it is lived, not only  as it is read. Because the many mythologies that enable that oppression to thrive are not going to disappear soon, we still need the precise narrated possibilities of mental liberation in texts such as Caleb Williams. To be sure, simply knowing the God/Calvinist/Falkland figure in the mind does not magically produce mental freedom. Nor is such freedom guaranteed even in knowing that we know, as if we had the power of that figure dear to Adam Smith and Godwin, the ‘impartial spectator,’ the rational phantom who correctly measures efficacy, value, and volition and who sees through ‘things as they are.’46 Things as they are, however,

Maniquis_3201_023_(Maniquis).indd 49

1/26/2011 4:03:25 PM

50

Robert M. Maniquis

keep becoming new things as they are. We come always upon new obstacles – our very mythologies of the ‘unconscious,’ our imprisoning texts, our class origins, our race, our gender. But if Caleb Williams cannot portray all paths of escape from all imaginable prisons, neither does it tell a naive story. As we have seen, it confirms the terrible uncertainty of a self that can never act with pure free will nor in pure determination, a self seeking a sense of both mental freedom and social connection. For Godwin’s sense of freedom to be found in his time and in his place, Caleb Williams instrumentalized Calvinism to stand for a number of social brutalities. It is a novel built upon a nightmare consciously drawn out of his childhood and dramatized the more easily to imagine its dissolution. Godwin of course knew that everything does not float upon the surface of consciousness: ‘The motives of our actions are complicated, beyond the power of human skill to unravel them … Who can tell what motives’ may lead the enquirer ‘unawares to himself, wide of that unbroken direction which he sought to pursue?’ But he also makes clear in the most modest of claims that, as a former Calvinist, ‘the thought of everlasting damnation is not calculated to leave us cool in drawing impartial inferences’ (GC, 96). Caleb Williams is not a coolly impartial work, free of hauntings, nor is it about disguised unconscious violence. It is a story inhabited by Calvinist ghosts whose outlines broken open could disarm the mental cruelties of religion and society of Godwin’s day. And although knowing that we know and seeing that we see the ghosts produces no final freedom of the mind or will, it is a source of pleasure to see the ghosts of his historical moment begin to fade as they are fixed in sight. Other nightmares and their ghosts have arrived to blend with those that once terrorized Godwin, and although he is in Caleb Williams a fine artist, he could not chase away all the ghosts of past, present, and future. He did well enough simply to chase away his own.47

NOTES   1 ‘The Principal Revolutions of Opinion’ (hereafter cited as PR, with page numbers, in the text) published for the first time in Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, 8 vols., gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1992) 1:52–4, hereafter cited as CNM.   2 The Genius of Christianity Unveiled (hereafter cited as GC in the text), in Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, 7 vols., gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1993) 7:106–7, hereafter cited as PPW. For the publishing history of this essay, see pp. 77–8 in the same volume.

Maniquis_3201_023_(Maniquis).indd 50

1/26/2011 4:03:25 PM



Political Justice and Caleb Williams

51

  3 Thomas Paine, A Letter Addressed to the Abbé Raynal, On the Affairs of North America (Rockville, MD: Arc Manor, 2008 [1782]), 54.   4 Jonathan Edwards, An Enquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notions of Freedom of Will…, in The Works of President Edwards in Eight Volumes, ed. Isaiah Thomas (Worcester, MA: Isaiah Sturtevant, Printer, 1808 [1754]), 5:vii.   5 C.H. Driver, ‘William Godwin,’ in The Social and Political Ideas of Some Representative Thinkers of the Revolutionary Era, ed. F.J.C. Hearnshaw (New York: Barnes & Nobles, 1931), 153. Driver says first that Political Justice is ‘unique in doctrine’ (145), but then that it is really only ‘the old doctrine that the truth would make men free’ (153).   6 John Middleton Murry, Heaven and Earth, published in the United States as Heroes of Thought (New York: Julian Messner, 1938), 252.   7 Letters on Theron and Aspasio Addressed to the Author (New York: John S. Taylor, 1838), first published in 1757. James Hervey is the author alluded to in the title, whose Letters on Theron and Aspasio (1755) are attacked by Sandeman. On the inefficacy of working towards regeneration or salvation, see, for instance, Letter 3, 35–86.   8 See Mark Philp, Godwin’s Political Justice (London: Duckworth, 1986) on perfectibility in Godwin’s thought and revision of his theories in relation to utilitarianism, the Dissenting tradition, and the philosophes, ch. 2, 38–57 and ch. 2, 80–98. Philp makes the case for the primacy of English Dissent, for a ‘British tradition of thought,’ and influences of the British Moralists rather than French sources. His illuminating discussions should be supplemented with the arguments of F.E.L. Priestley, who insisted that ‘the eighteenth century inherited no compact homogeneous body of secular thought which can be called simply the Dissenting tradition. The one point on which the Dissenters came to practically complete agreement was the right and duty of private judgment and the hostility to state control.’ Priestley’s discriminations between different strains of Dissenting ideas are important. See the ‘Critical Introduction’ to Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness, 3 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1946) 3:78–81. This edition is hereafter referred to as PJ, with page numbers, in the text.   9 A good many older studies, some a pleasure to read, are still indispensable, even small, modest books such as Anthony Lincoln’s Some Political and Social Ideas of English Dissent 1763–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938) and of course ambitious, seminal books such as A.S.P. Woodhouse’s Puritanism and Liberty: Being the Army Debates (1647–9) from the Clarke Manuscripts (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1938). The standard bibliographies, however, now record an astonishing river of books and articles on individual Dissenters, their enemies, fellow travellers and the English Dissenting tradi-

Maniquis_3201_023_(Maniquis).indd 51

1/26/2011 4:03:26 PM

52

Robert M. Maniquis

tion from the sixteenth century forward, and on all aspects of the 1790s. Before jumping into that river of scholarship, one should gather energy on the shore with Michael R. Watts’s The Dissenters, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978–95). A more general but also absorbing and useful book is Gordon Rupp, Religion in England: 1688–1791 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). Much in the events of the 1790s can be understood by looking to local radical politics in the immediately preceding decades, admirably recounted by James E. Bradley, Religions, Revolution, and English Radicalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 10 Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), ch. 4, ‘Godwinian Scenes and Popular Politics: Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and the Legacies of Dissent,’ 92–7. 11 Letters on Theron and Aspasio, Letter 5, 331, 335. 12 See C. Kegan Paul, William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1876), 1:83–9, for the testy correspondence of early December 1793 between Godwin and Samuel Newton. Their principles of private conscience and political liberty were still similar, but by this time their religious ideas no longer had anything in common. 13 Joseph Priestley, A Free Address to Protestant Dissenters, as Such, by a Dissenter, 2nd ed. (London: J. Johnson, 1771), 30; William Blake, ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 10E,’ in The Illuminated Blake: William Blake’s Complete Illuminated Works …, ed. David V. Erdman (New York: Dover Publications, 1974), 107. The Priestley and Godwin sentences are discussed by F.E.L. Priestley, PJ 3:20, where the Joseph Priestley quotation reads ‘truth has claims,’ not ‘charms.’ 14 Don Locke, A Fantasy of Reason: The Life and Thought of William Godwin (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 17. 15 Kegan Paul, William Godwin, 1:13. 16 Marilyn Butler, Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 189–90. White, Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent, 97–106. See Jon Mee’s essay in this volume. 17 The Age of Reason, in Thomas Paine, Collected Writings, ed. Eric Foner (New York: Library of America, 1995), 666. 18 ‘Politics, Passion, and the “Puritan Temper”: Godwin’s Critique of Enlightenment Modernity,’ Studies in Romanticism 41, no. 3 (2002). For an informative, sceptical view of Godwin’s idea of familial sentiment, see the essay ‘Heavy Drama’ by Julie Carlson in this volume. 19 Philp, Godwin’s Political Justice, 159. 20 Kegan Paul, William Godwin, 1:17. 21 See William Stoddard for a useful analysis of problems in blending religious

Maniquis_3201_023_(Maniquis).indd 52

1/26/2011 4:03:26 PM



Political Justice and Caleb Williams

53

and political ideas, in ‘Dissenting Religion Translated into Politics: Godwin’s Political Justice,’ History of Political Thought 1 (1980), 279–99. I have discussed the sacrifice of Fénelon more extensively in ‘La rhétorique éclairée du sacrifice: substitution rationalistes et échanges romantiques,’ in Un siècle de deux cents ans: Actes du colloque (2001), ed. Jean Dagen and Philippe Roger (Paris: Éditions Desjonquères, 2004), 145–68. For an interesting discussion of the Fénelon scene and evaluating utility in relation to the future, see Evan Radcliffe, ‘Godwin from “Metaphysician” to Novelist: Political Justice, Caleb Williams, and the Tension between Philosophical Argument and Narrative,’ Modern Philology 97, no. 4 (2000), 528–53. 22 Godwin cites Edwards’s Essay on the Nature of True Virtue in the 1796 edition of Political Justice, PJ, vol. 1, bk 2, ch. 2, ‘Of Justice’; and his Enquiry into Freedom of Will in the same edition, vol. 1, bk 4, ch. 6, ‘Of Free Will and Necessity,’ 129, 381. For an excellent exposition of Edwards on free will, see Allen G. Guelzo, Edwards on the Will: A Century of American Theological Debate (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989). Guelzo shows how Edwards’s theological thought was continuous with the categories and the contradictions of eighteenth-century philosophy. Many serious American and British thinkers, no matter how low their opinion of Calvinism or God, had to reckon with Edwards. Hence, it is unsurprising that Godwin, who could distinguish between Edwards the thinker and Calvinist terror, discussed some of Edwards’s ideas in Political Justice. F.E.L. Priestley, discussing the resemblance of ideas on ‘free will’ in Godwin and Edwards, quite correctly points out that, in such eighteenth-century discussions, ‘freedom’ and ‘necessity’ often come to mean the same thing (PJ 3:18–19). 23 Edwards, An Enquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notions of Freedom of Will, 260. Edwards, in this matter, uses the charming expression ‘Hobbistical necessity,’ and defends himself thus: ‘As to Mr. Hobbes’s maintaining the same doctrine concerning necessity, I confess, it happens I never read Mr. Hobbes. Let his opinion be what it will, we need not reject all truth which is demonstrated by clear evidence merely because it was once held by some bad man. This great truth, that Jesus is the son of God, was not spoiled because it was once and again proclaimed by the loud voice of the devil.’ 24 On fears of promiscuously singing with the damned, see Alan P.F. Sell, ‘The Worship of English Congregationalism,’ in Lukas Vischer, Christian Worship in Reformed Churches Past and Present (Grand Rapids, MI, and Cambridge, Eng.: William B. Eerdmans, 2003), 90. 25 Peter H. Marshall, William Godwin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984). See all of chapter 2, ‘Norwich,’ on Godwin’s education under the Sandemanian Samuel Newton. For assertions of intellectual and psycho-

Maniquis_3201_023_(Maniquis).indd 53

1/26/2011 4:03:26 PM

54

Robert M. Maniquis

logical influence, see 21–8. The passage in PJ to which Marshall refers is in vol. 1, bk 1, ch. 5. 26 William Godwin, ibid., 25. As I have said, the tying of Godwin’s ideas completely to Calvinism is an old habit. Henri Roussin in 1913 does point out that the Calvinist humiliation of the human spirit has nothing to do with Godwin’s exaltation of it. Still, he considers Godwin a ‘prisoner’ of Calvin’s sense of the human. On the one hand, the individual is ‘determined’ (which is of course not quite the case), and on the other the individual has an independent conscience, the principle that leads to the idea of individual liberty. See William Godwin, 1756–1836 (Paris: Plon-Nourrie et Cie, 1913), 176–7. See also F.E.L. Priestley’s criticisms of Roussin, in Political Justice, 3:78–81. 27 The Journal of William Thomas Swan, in The Journals of Two Poor Dissenters, 1786–1880 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), 32. 28 How one uses the word ‘self’ can ultimately raise nearly all important philosophical and a good many literary critical questions that have dominated modern thought since the Renaissance. I shall, in discussing Caleb Williams, avoid all Humean questions of the self as merely a collection of sensations and any other questions as to the existence of a ‘self’ or ‘person.’ I use the word as Richard Sorabji does when he plainly and simply writes: ‘One reason why the notion of self comes in is that humans and animals could not cope with the world at all unless they saw things in terms of I.’ The I– functioning, linguistic positioning towards the world is his basis for definitions of attendant concepts such as ‘individual’ and ‘person.’ For extensive discussion of the classical questions of the definition and existence of the self, see Sorabji’s Self: Ancient and Modern Insights about Individuality, Life, and Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); on the self and the ‘I’ perspective, see especially 20–30. 29 Things as They Are, or the Adventures of Caleb Williams, ed. Maurice Hindle (London: Penguin Books, 1988), 162, hereafter cited as CW with page numbers in the text. Hindle uses the 1831 edition, the ‘fifth English–language edition of the novel to be seen through the press by William Godwin (the others appeared in 1794, 1796, 1797 and 1816) and it contains all of his final revisions,’ lxiv. I use this edition because it is easily accessible, but one should also consult the introduction to the edition edited by Pamela Clemit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) [Oxford World’s Classics] and the ‘Introductory Note’ to the edition of Caleb Williams in CNM, 3. Clemit presents the 1794 text in both these editions. See also the useful edition of Caleb Williams with supplementary materials. ed. Gary Handwerk and A.A. Markley (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2000).

Maniquis_3201_023_(Maniquis).indd 54

2/5/2011 11:08:21 AM



Political Justice and Caleb Williams

55

30 For two typical examples, the first political, the second literary, of allusions to Romans 7 in presenting contradictions in the will by which the self can be distinguished from evil or from what we might today call bad faith, see Richard Price, Additional Observations on the Nature and Value of Civil Liberty, and the War with America (1777) in Political Writings, ed. D.O. Thomas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 81 and Coleridge’s brief poem ‘The Pains of Sleep.’ Price says, ‘No one who acts wickedly acts as he likes, but is conscious of a tyranny within him overpowering his judgment and carrying him into a conduct for which he condemns and hates himself. The things that he would he does not, and the things that he would not, those he does. He is, therefore, a slave in the properest sense.’ Coleridge uses an allusion to Romans 7 to separate the speaker in his poem from the doubled selves of Paul’s sinner. See lines 43ff. of ‘The Pains of Sleep’ in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poetical Works, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 390. 31 For Godwin on free will, necessity, and the psychological subtleties of volition in relation to both, see PJ, vol. 1, bk 1, ch. 5, ‘The Voluntary Actions of Men Originate in Their Opinions,’ 52–95; bk 4, ch. 7, ‘Of Free Will and Necessity,’ and ch. 8, ‘Inferences from the Doctrine of Necessity,’ 361–97. For a useful definition of determinism, see John Earman, A Primer on Determinism (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1986), 4–22. Most of this book is directed to problems in the physical sciences, but the opening definition is helpful for those without knowledge of advanced mathematics or symbolic logic. 32 Godwin recounts at length his method of writing Caleb Williams in the preface to the 1832 Standard Novels edition of Fleetwood, published in an appendix to CW, 347–54. 33 Great Expectations and A Clockwork Orange are two other well-known examples of novels that will probably never escape the blessing and the curse of the authors’ alternate endings. But the Internet may guarantee that no significant work of literature will pass through time with only one ending. Any literary work may have its end clipped and replaced thanks to websites and bloggers who rewrite all day and night in the spirit of Nahum Tate. 34 Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle (London: Williams and Norgate, 1919), 80. Brailsford is perspicacious about Godwin’s revolt against God, but it is also amusing to see him turn his very English eye towards Calvinism. For him it was really a ‘French and not a British creed … Latin in its systematic completeness, Latin in the logical courage with which it pursues its assumptions to their last conclusion, Latin in its faith in deductive reasoning and in its disdain alike of experience and of sentiment’ (80). Some of what he describes is, to be sure, characteristically Calvinist, but English, Welsh, and

Maniquis_3201_023_(Maniquis).indd 55

1/26/2011 4:03:26 PM

56

Robert M. Maniquis

Scottish Calvinists over the centuries might not have felt as French or Latin as Brailsford thought they could have. He seems here to be thinking as much of Descartes or French revolutionaries as he is of Calvin. 35 The suspense of the novel is of course built upon constant uncertainty of what trap Caleb will fall into next, what is about to destroy him: ‘It was a part of the singularity of my fate that it hurried me from one species of anxiety and distress to another too rapidly to suffer any one of them to sink too deeply into my mind.’ But his mind is always pitched towards the uncertainty of what is to happen: ‘I had no leisure to chew the cud upon misfortunes as they befell me, but was under the necessity of forgetting them to guard against peril that the next moment seemed ready to crush me’ (CW, 258). For references to uncertainty, see CW, 128, 140, 158, 159, 196, 320, and 328. 36 This and the preceding quotations are from the 1559 edition of The Institutes of the Christian Religion [hereafter cited in the text as Institutes], in John Calvin: Selections from His Writings, ed. John Dillenberger (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1975), 320–2. Dillenberger also provides selections from the 1536 Institutes (267–317) in which we can read one of Calvin’s discussions of uncertainty, a masterpiece of hedging. The basic principle is clear. Only God knows who is elect and who is not. But since this idea, baldly stated, makes an harmonious earthly church difficult, if not impossible, to imagine, it is granted that certain signs may indicate who are elect. Yet even these signs are unreliable: ‘We may distinguish the elect and the Sons of God in so far as he wills that we should know.’ All those who at least appear to have faith ‘ought to be considered with a certain charitable consideration as elect and members of the Church.’ Thus, for ecclesiastical, that is to say, practical, reasons probable election may be assumed, but doubt can never be completely lifted. ‘Charitable consideration’ does not allow the church member to ‘discern those who are of the Church and those who are aliens to it … It does not belong to us to judge with certainty whether they are of the Church or not … He did not will to give us any external judgement which would indicate plainly to us and place before our eyes those who are bound and those who are loosed’ (298–9). 37 For some examples of those who simply ignored theology or who simply bounced along in happiness, see Keith Thomas, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 226ff. 38 This doubling is nothing new for readers ever since Rousseau’s insistence on the difference between his two selves in Rousseau, Juge de Jean-Jacques (1780–2). Forty years later, all Europe would be fascinated also by Byron’s playing upon the self, in a number of his works, countering that self which

Maniquis_3201_023_(Maniquis).indd 56

1/26/2011 4:03:26 PM



Political Justice and Caleb Williams

57

was for Byron, as it was for Rousseau, his calumniated public face. Rousseau, Byron, and Caleb – each with troubled Calvinist pasts – whatever guilt or innocence they consciously accept, feel themselves falsely condemned by imposed fictions and false judgments. 39 Blake, ‘There is No Natural Religion [seriesb]L,’ b12L in The Illuminated Blake, 32. 40 Godwin, Genius of Christianity, 104. 41 Rudolf F. Storch, ‘Metaphors of Private Guilt and Social Rebellion in Godwin’s Caleb Williams,’ ELH: A Journal of English Literary History 34 (June, 1967), 188, 189, 192, 206. 42 For a sensitive, instructive reading of the complex weaving of the textual phenomenon of the self, but a reading that does not enclose Godwin unalterably in the text, see Tillotama Rajan, ‘Wollstonecraft and Godwin: Reading the Secrets of the Political Novel,’ in The Supplement of Reading: Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and Practice (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990), 167–94. For Kenneth Burke’s ‘god-term,’ see The Rhetoric of Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961). 43 Curiosity is an important, complex subject in at least four domains: theology, natural science, education, and melodramatic theatre and fiction. It is a subject raised by Calvin nearly forty times in the Institutes, and it is discussed widely by Calvinist and Lutheran theologians all through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. See, for instance, Thomas Griffith, The evils arising from misapply’d curiosity. A sermon preached before the University of Oxford, at St. Mary’s on Sunday March 9. 1760 (London: J. Rivington, 1760) and the following pamphlet published in the 1790s, probably the year after the appearance of Caleb Williams: The sinfulness of indulging our curiosity in hearing the word of God. A circulatory letter addressed to the Associated Churches of Christ, called Independants, in the County of Kent … [1795?]. ‘Fatal curiosity’ was a commonplace in the titles and the mechanisms of melodrama and adventure. Approved curiosity was common in children’s books and those that praised rational, inquiring spirits, and the ‘cabinet of curiosities’ was the pride of the amateur natural scientist. For some of its fascinating history, at least on the continent, see Neil Kenny, The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). See also Gary Handwerk’s essay in this volume for discussion of Godwin’s educational ideals, in which all religious suppression of curiosity is rejected (109–10, 114–15). 44 The Journal of William Thomas Swan, 32. 45 See Jerrold E. Hogle, ‘The Texture of the Self in Godwin’s Things as They Are,’ boundary 2 7, no. 2 (Winter, 1979), 277. Here is how Hogle puts it:

Maniquis_3201_023_(Maniquis).indd 57

2/5/2011 11:09:06 AM

58

Robert M. Maniquis

‘Caleb discovers that the movement of signs is always toward or within other signs. Writing takes only what writing gives and so projects a world as an act of desire engendered from its own depths. When all is said and done, that world is there and not there in the writing, and thus it composes and does not compose the endless and revolving duplicity of “things as they are”’ (277). 46 One of the most concise and helpful summaries of the problems in connecting ‘knowing’ to ‘freedom’ is Isaiah Berlin’s ‘From Hope and Fear Set Free,’ in The Proper Study of Mankind (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), 91–118. 47 My thanks to Victoria Myers for discussion of an earlier version of this essay, which she helped me to shape into a better one.

Maniquis_3201_023_(Maniquis).indd 58

1/26/2011 4:03:26 PM

chapter two

Godwin, Thelwall, and the Means of Progress MARK PHILP

I On 21 November 1795 William Godwin published his Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr Pitt’s Bills, concerning Treasonable and Seditious Practices, and Unlawful Assemblies, signing it ‘by a Lover of Order.’ A week later the second edition of Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice appeared. The latter had been undergoing a process of revision for the previous twelve months; the former was written at pace between 16 and 19 November, following the introduction of the bills on 6 to 9 November. Both publications have been seen as indicating that Godwin had, to some degree, lost his radical nerve.1 The second edition of Political Justice is seen as a more generally cautious and reserved text than the first, although there are disagreements about just how much more cautious, and Considerations reveals Godwin taking a critical stance towards the activities of the reform societies in the wake of the Treason Trials and the subsequent development of the popular protest movement against the war, recruitment practices, and shortages of food. Although there were a number of incidents of food and crimp riots in the summer of 1795, the public meetings organized by the London Corresponding Society in London had been remarkably well ordered. However, at the opening of Parliament, two days after a mass meeting organized by the London Corresponding Society, the king’s coach was allegedly fired on, and when it left Parliament after depositing the king it was altogether destroyed by a mob. The government, still smarting from the failure to secure verdicts in the Treason Trials of 1794, was increasingly concerned about the prospect of popular unrest fusing with the reform societies’ attempts to

Maniquis_3201_059_(Philp).indd 59

1/26/2011 5:04:54 PM

60

Mark Philp

create a politicized, perhaps revolutionary, popular movement. Accordingly, it sought to tighten the law on treason and to restrict the activities of the reform societies through the two bills. In doing so, the government faced serious extra-parliamentary opposition, much encouraged and aided by the Foxite Whigs, who maintained that the bills prepared the way for Pitt’s own ‘reign of terror,’ although the government also received considerable support in the form of loyal addresses organized throughout the country. Godwin’s changes in Political Justice are often explained in terms of his having bent before the blast of reaction – but it is Considerations that gives rise to claims of apostasy. And the particular object of his supposed betrayal is his friend, the political activist and writer John Thelwall. This essay takes issue with this analysis and argues that part of our failure to understand Godwin’s position in these two publications derives from the tendency to read the political positions of those in the 1790s largely in terms of the highly polarized positions represented in the debate on France.

II In periods of intense political dispute people’s positions become increasingly extreme and more forcibly stated. The ‘Debate on the French Revolution,’ the ‘Burke-Paine debate,’ or the ‘Revolution controversy,’ as it has latterly and more felicitously been titled,2 provides ample evidence of an increasing polarization between the forces of order and those of reform, between those defending the constitution and its practices, as if in a last-ditch struggle to preserve immemorial things from subversion, and those accusing the government of wilful and tyrannical designs on the liberties of the ordinary person, as if to make reform still more urgent and justify more extreme methods of organization and campaigning to achieve their ends. Between 1793 and 1798 the pamphlet debate sparked by Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, and accelerated and made manifestly more popular in character by the publication and mass circulation of Paine’s Rights of Man, evolved into a practical struggle for and against the political status quo. By the last years of the decade the radical societies had been effectively suppressed by the government and by loyal associations hunting purveyors of sedition and insurrection in every corner. These actions left only minor underground outposts, largely influenced by the Irish insurrection, which now contemplated armed resistance.

Maniquis_3201_059_(Philp).indd 60

1/26/2011 5:04:54 PM



Godwin, Thelwall, and the Means of Progress

61

We should not, however, think that this polarization is a process whose path was charted from the beginning, with lines of engagement laid between reformers and reactionaries in the opening salvos of the discussion. Even if attitudes to France and the opening events of its revolution did become increasingly polarized, especially after the September Massacres of 1792, this is only one dimension of the controversy, and those who contributed to it do not line up systematically in a way that allows us to identify a fundamental fault line running through the polity. If there was a fault line by the mid-1790s, it was an artefact of the way that the controversy had been handled by those who resisted and those who sought reform. In different hands, things might have been different. This claim might seem perverse: Painite radicalism was never destined to sit easily with Burkean conservatism. Neither author left room for legitimacy in his opponent – Burke becomes a defender of the indefensible, the institutions of hereditary succession, aristocracy and monarchy; Paine becomes the purveyor of revolution and republicanism.3 Indeed, so alien is the work of each to the other that it is easy to see why commentators have often demurred at the thought that they were ever in any sense engaged with the arguments of each other.4 That position is overstated – true, Burke does not attempt to respond to Paine to any degree; but Paine does make an effort in the first part of Rights of Man to address Burke’s claims about the French and their proceedings, and he does address a series of central claims that Burke makes in his Reflections, such as those concerning the nature of rights and the capacity of one generation to contract away the rights of subsequent generations. But the overstatement has a point – the second part of Rights of Man makes only passing reference to Burke, and it moves the debate onto a terrain that Burke has no intention of addressing. The claim that other paths were possible is more appealing once we recognize that, especially with respect to the issue of reform in Britain, the two protagonists do not clearly divide the field of opinion. This is not only because there are more moderate and conciliatory loyalists than Burke – it is striking for example that Burke is not reprinted or edited for popular consumption in the tracts published by the Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers and that he is largely ignored by those developing brands of more popular loyalism – but there are also far more conciliatory and less extreme reformers than Paine. Indeed, there are few in the British context as I read it that have any clear sense of what a wholly representative form of democratic government might look like, so that most positions tend

Maniquis_3201_059_(Philp).indd 61

1/26/2011 5:04:55 PM

62

Mark Philp

to assume that a reform of the suffrage is to be undertaken within the existing frame of government.5 There is some evidence of ‘king-killing’ republicanism with the republication of civil war pamphlets and the use of stories, songs, and images such as King Chaunticlere, Bob Shave the King, and some of Lee’s cartoons in the mid-1790s, but much of this is heavily arch and rhetorical in character – cocking a snook and baiting the government with material the prosecution of which would make the government look silly and which all but the most hand-picked of juries would fail to find seditious. While aspirations for republican and democratic institutions may have been real enough for a few, there is little evidence that the more prominent radicals who remained in Britain should be understood as dyed-in-the-wool republicans, Jacobins, or democrats. This is in part because these terms themselves become so freighted that their use, both negative and positive, does not have much concrete reference: they are positions parodied and pilloried in the attack.6 And they are either exaggerated or minimized in their defence depending on whether the aim is to shock or conciliate. This makes it very difficult to say who really stood for what – a difficulty compounded by the fact that few, it seems, had a secure grasp of the varieties of republican or democratic government that the French had experimented with or advanced, and few had clear ideas of what government might look like in England if substantial inroads were to be made into hereditary privilege in Parliament and the Crown.7 People might have sensed that these institutions trespassed on their claims to competence in political matters and on the principle of equal rewards for equal talents. They may have also agreed with their French cousins that the antonym of democracy was aristocracy and therefore directed their ire towards that group, but they lacked the particular issues that gave such an animus to the French hostility to that class.8 In this sense, the 1790s witnessed a politicization of both middling and lower orders that took a more organized and articulate form than had previous incursions of popular politics onto the national political scene, but it was not yet a unified and coherent movement for democratic government as those imply who see it as the precursor to the reform organizations of Chartism and the later nineteenth century. One indication that we are in danger of misreading the polarization as having ideological, rather than political, origins can be seen in the case of William Godwin. Godwin’s foray into the public debate on France was relatively elevated and oblique. His intentionally monumental An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice of 1793 leaves no doubt that he wanted to stand above the particular details of the debate, and that he also wanted

Maniquis_3201_059_(Philp).indd 62

1/26/2011 5:04:55 PM



Godwin, Thelwall, and the Means of Progress

63

to contribute at a more abstract level to the development of political and moral principles that he saw as implicated in the debate. As a result, he paid close attention to the pamphlet controversy, read and reread the works of its principal contributors, and sought out many of them as acquaintances. He was also well aware that his own work might be received as a contribution to the discussion that Burke and Paine had largely initiated. Subsequent generations have made a similar judgment, and have sought to assess how far the radicalism of the first edition of Political Justice was subsequently toned down as a result of the ferocious reaction against the reformers and activists with whom Godwin is identified. Godwin’s later political writings, especially Cursory Strictures and Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr Pitt’s Bills are also read in this spirit – the former as an eloquent defence of his friends and associates from the charge of high treason levelled at them in 1794; the latter as signal evidence of his betrayal in 1795 of his friend Thelwall, and of the radical movement more widely, in favour of a conservative desire to prevent disorder and to place security before progress and individual liberty. Having had a sense of Godwin’s being on the side of the radicals, many readers see him, in Considerations, as a slightly pompous, self-serving renegade. That characterization, however, treats the divisions of the 1790s as altogether too polarized, and too natural and obvious. One is either for reform or not, for Paine or for Burke, and in making this judgment we echo and compound the experience of those in the decade who found the middle ground being rapidly eroded in favour of a still starker choice between insurrectionary activism and some position between quietism and loyalism. The inappropriateness of treating the Burke-Paine division as directly parallel to the loyalism-reformism division can be recognized at two distinct levels. The first, which is not my target here, involves recognizing that the rhetorical tactics of both reformers and loyalists should not be confused with substance.9 J.G.A. Pocock’s wholly apposite comment, that it is difficult to know quite what tradition of British political thought to fit Paine into, indicates how far his work was in a real sense foreign to domestic British traditions of agitation for reform.10 Paine’s work was taken up and distributed so widely partly because it was so very different, partly because its shock value was rather gleefully recognized, and partly because Paine was well connected and assiduous in promulgating his ideas. But we should not think either that loyalist rhetoric against reform fairly represented Paine’s work or that the rhetoric against Paine’s work fairly represented the positions of those who favoured parliamentary reform. Instead, loyalist rhetoric covered

Maniquis_3201_059_(Philp).indd 63

1/26/2011 5:04:55 PM

64

Mark Philp

elements of representation with a healthy layer of misrepresentation and tarred reformers with ‘French principles.’ But the second level at which we can recognize a much more complex set of issues and commitments beneath the apparent polarization comes from the careful analysis of the texts written by those sympathetic to and aligned with the radical cause. Godwin’s writings of the 1790s provide one such example, with his piece on the two acts being a particular case in point.

III Godwin is certainly linked to the debate on France. Although we do not know when he first read Burke’s Reflections, because he did not begin noting his daily reading in his diary until September 1791, we do know that he read it (probably reread it) in January 1792, and again in June 1794. He was also attentive to Paine’s work, having read the first part of his Rights of Man between the first printing of February 1791 by Joseph Johnson (who then withheld the text from publication for fear of prosecution) and the eventual ‘first’ edition published on 13 March by J.S. Jordan (as indicated by Godwin’s borrowing the book on 3 March 1791).11 But there is no evidence to suggest that Godwin ever contemplated contributing a pamphlet to the debate, despite being well informed about affairs in France from his work on the European history section of the New Annual Register.12 That he was not so minded is clear from the fact that, when he turned to the task of Political Justice, he had a much grander plan than simply to contribute to a debate that, at the time he proposed the work to his publisher Robinson, may have seemed likely to be as ephemeral as most.13 It is fair to say that Godwin had a sense of the scale of the issues raised by these events, and by their representation by Burke, Paine, and others, and he recognized that they touched on the fundamental moral and political questions that he wished to address. But, when he began the project, it seems likely that he believed he would contribute, in large part, by acting as a conduit for various aspects of French political thought that were not widely known in England. This much is evident from the way in which the first draft of Political Justice begins.14 Setting aside so-called Tory and Whig positions on the nature of government and its imperfections, Godwin aims to consider arguments of moral and political philosophy that treat government, not simply as an instrument to protect liberty, but as a powerful machine – an ‘omnipotent engine’ with the ‘human as its pliant material’ – discovering in it ‘the great desideratum for advancing mind to courage, justice,

Maniquis_3201_059_(Philp).indd 64

1/26/2011 5:04:55 PM



Godwin, Thelwall, and the Means of Progress

65

virtue and perfection.’15 His starting point was that ‘the moral character of the species is in a considerable degree the result of the institutions of their political government’ (PPW 4:376). Once started, however, Godwin clearly found it difficult to sort out his chosen path of argument. In the opening chapters of the first edition, he quickly loses confidence in the power of institutions to transform people’s experiences positively. Hints remain of that potential, but by the beginning of book 2 he seems to have adopted a largely negative view of government, and one that is very much indebted to Paine: ‘The necessity of constraint grew out of the errors and perverseness of a few. An acute writer has expressed this idea with peculiar felicity. “Society and government,” says he, “are different in themselves, and have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness. Society is in every state a blessing; government even in its best state but a necessary evil.”’16 From this point, once Godwin has decided that there is nothing immutable in people’s characters and passions, the argument increasingly turns to the ways in which the progress of knowledge and understanding can liberate individuals from the constraints of government through the increasing perfection of character and mind.17 In Political Justice Godwin at first emphasizes the impact of social and institutional structures on the formation of character, asserting that political institutions outweigh literature and education, while innate endowment, national character, luxury, and so on weigh neither as given nor as unchangeable. This perspective does not sit comfortably with the quotation from Paine regarding the wholly negative and remedial function of government, nor does it sit well with the pastoralism of Paine and Rousseau, who both influence the opening three books.18 Godwin is effectively straddling two positions: one emphasizes that the development of society and government is deeply linked to human progress, and the other sees government as an instrument solely for managing our tendency to pursue our interests beyond the point of what is fair and reasonable. The latter position emphasizes that government’s proper function is marginal and remedial and should leave people (and society) to their own, essentially natural, devices to the fullest possible extent; this position often links to the view that, once established, government often overreaches so far that it becomes a source of corruption. These positions are not essentially those of Tory and Whig, but generally derive from Enlightenment discussions of political and social principles. Both the Scottish and French Enlightenments advanced a progressive view of human and social development from relative barba-

Maniquis_3201_059_(Philp).indd 65

1/26/2011 5:04:55 PM

66

Mark Philp

rism to civilization, a view that offered a powerful and potentially optimistic alternative to arguments that rested on apparently more primitive claims about the state of nature and the original contract. It is very difficult to deduce exactly what influenced Godwin’s position, and the diary’s late start is tantalizing.19 Also, while some of the reading he lists as he writes Political Justice clearly influences the particular angle that he takes on a topic, it is evident that the architecture of the book as a whole (and the design of his reading material) had already been largely set. We do not have access directly to the influences that shaped Godwin’s conception of that task, although his report on his Dissenting education at the Hoxton Academy and on his discussions with Frederick Norman, one of his parishioners in Stowmarket, who persuaded him to read Holbach, Helvetius, and Rousseau, provides some guidance.20 Nonetheless, for the first edition of Political Justice probably the French influence is most important for him. One intriguing set of suggestions is the list of French writers given at the beginning of the diary (which opens in 1788), but while it is plausible to think that these represented either an achievement (texts read) or a set of aspirations (texts he wanted to read), it is clear that they are far from being an exhaustive catalogue on either side – at most they identify the literary and philosophical writers in French that Godwin considered important.21 We do know, however, that he failed to appreciate the economic writings of Adam Smith and that he makes no mention of the work of either Ferguson or Millar. But he read Hume reasonably consistently while writing Political Justice, working with his Essays early on and later turning to the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and the work on causation when he was nine months or so into the project. It is clear, however, that his ‘conversion’ to Hume as an epistemologist occurs only incompletely by the second and more systematically by the third edition, although his sympathy with Hume’s position on the interrelationship between government and opinion is clear from the beginning of Political Justice.22 Montesquieu and Rousseau, by contrast, feature as reading right at the beginning of his work, although in a way that suggests that Godwin was essentially revisiting texts he knew well. What is less expected, however, is the prominence of Burke in Godwin’s reading. Burke’s work turns up regularly in the diary, with Reflections being reread on a number of occasions: on 27 October 1791 Godwin begins the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs; in January 1792 he rereads Reflections; in March he is reading ‘Burke on Ireland’; April sees him return to the Reflections and ‘Nat. Society’; in June he is comparing Burke and Paine on property and reading Burke on ‘Oeconomy’;

Maniquis_3201_059_(Philp).indd 66

1/26/2011 5:04:55 PM



Godwin, Thelwall, and the Means of Progress

67

in July he looks at Burke’s speech to the electors of Bristol and the Essay on the Sublime ; in September he returns to the Reflections ; and in November he is reading Burke’s account of the march on Versailles on 6 October 1789, which forms a central (rather eroticised) passage in the Reflections.23 This attention to Burke is important because it illustrates the extent to which Godwin remained heavily influenced by him, and correspondingly suggests that his own work was never going to line up clearly on anti-Burkean lines.24 Godwin may have felt the distance politically between himself and Burke, but he remained powerfully drawn to the more organic picture of the social and political world that Burke had developed; and several of those by whom he was clearly influenced, such as Montesquieu and Hume, had also been influential on Burke. Commentators need to understand that, while Godwin was attracted to the idea of eradicating government and increasing the individual’s independence from all forms of cooperation and coercion, he was also strongly drawn to the view that progress is itself a collective enterprise. It is collective in that only under appropriate circumstances can people develop their capacities so as to be emancipated from institutions that initially nurture but can come to constrain those capacities. Rather than thinking of progress as stripping away the corruptions of government and society, Godwin conceives it as increasing rational capacities that are themselves influenced by and linked to political and social institutions and that need to be guided by those more enlightened in the pursuit of truth. This in part accounts for the uncertainties that dog the drafts and opening books of Political Justice: they are driven by the view that government does have an immensely powerful impact on the way people develop, think and behave, and by the sense that there is a way of gradually emancipating people from this tutelage so that they can stand on their own reason and judgment. The doctrine of necessity that drives the second half of book 4 also underpins the picture of progress throughout the work and is central to Godwin’s sense that positive and permanent change is possible and that emancipation is not simply a matter of throwing off chains, but must involve a progressive unpicking of them through the exercise of reason and the development of truth (as is clear from his comments about Helvetius’s despair of the situation in France).25 Truth and discussion become forces for development that drive the component parts of society forward and render increasingly superfluous the imposition of government. This is not Paine’s story that hereditary government has, by force and fraud, usurped the judgment of the people and needs to be swept away to allow them to exercise their

Maniquis_3201_059_(Philp).indd 67

1/26/2011 5:04:55 PM

68

Mark Philp

original capacities freed from arbitrary interference. It is a narrative of historical change in which truth plays a central part, but it is one that is linked to broader changes in government and society. The hesitations over the start of Political Justice need to be seen as Godwin trying to combine a story of interlinked social, political, and cultural change with an account of emancipation from force and fraud. And that combination, a common one in the second half of the eighteenth century, remains through successive revisions, generating a series of anxieties and concerns that help account for a number of apparent changes in Godwin’s position in subsequent years.

IV My concern here is with one set of changes in particular that address the role of political associations and the nature of resistance. These changes fill a section of Political Justice with three chapters largely rewritten for the 1796 edition, and they also resurface in Godwin’s pamphlet Considerations in November 1795. In both cases, we can see Godwin working away at this more profound set of issues about whether we should understand progress as simply a removal of fraud or recognize the role that political and social institutions play in determining the conditions for truth to develop. Although there is a tendency in both cases for commentators to accuse Godwin of simply bending to political pressure and turning conservative in the hostile political atmosphere of 1795, I want to suggest that it is more plausible to see him as returning to mine a vein in Political Justice that had been problematic from the start and that represents, in a fashion, both sides of the debate between Burke and Paine: Burke in his account of the fragile interconnectivity of social and political institutions and the dependence of the arts and sciences on their stability; Paine with his account of the extent to which these institutions increasingly rest on fraudulent claims to authority. The doctrine of the opening chapters of Political Justice, book 4 (1793), is clearly stated: ‘The revolutions of states, which a philanthropist would desire to witness, or in which he would willingly cooperate, consist principally in a change of sentiments and dispositions in the members of those states. The true instruments for changing the opinions of men are argument and persuasion’ (PPW 3:115). Godwin does admit the possibility that self-defence may call for action in extremis, but the thrust of his case is unmistakably that such occasions are very much the exception and that progress cannot be made by means other than the development

Maniquis_3201_059_(Philp).indd 68

1/26/2011 5:04:55 PM



Godwin, Thelwall, and the Means of Progress

69

of knowledge and understanding. His attitude to political associations is in keeping with this: revolutions derive from the progress of mind made by those with the capacity and leisure for study and reflection. The truths that issue from these sources will diffuse themselves, but not until they are fully disseminated and understood can they command universal assent and enable society to move forward. This division of labour is inevitable, even if Godwin’s longer-term aspiration is for all to partake in the same opportunities for reflection. But the process of dissemination is a slow one and ‘he that begins with an appeal to the people, may be suspected to understand little of the true character of mind. A sinister design may gain by precipitation; but true wisdom is best adapted to a slow, unvarying and incessant progress’ (PPW 3:118). Godwin has no doubt that associations can easily feed the passions rather than the intellect and that ‘there is nothing more barbarous, cruel and blood-thirsty, than the triumph of a mob’ (PPW 3:118). What he does concede is that while the progress of truth needs to be taken slowly and ‘in all possible tranquillity,’ an association might be acceptable as a means of providing the ‘early and unequivocal display of opinion’ that new encroachments on liberty may warrant. And while Godwin allows the importance of clubs for discussion, ‘they cease to be admissible, when united with the tremendous apparatus of articles of confederation and committees of correspondence … Truth disclaims the alliance of marshalled numbers’ (PPW 3:119, 122). This doctrine is substantially the same in the 1796 edition. The argument is more carefully developed, however, picking away in the opening chapter at the preconception that majorities appreciate the truths they often espouse; Godwin makes more of stoic values, so that the freedom of the wise consists not in their physical liberty but in their knowledge; and instead of praise for the American and French Revolutions (PPW 3:116), he takes the view that the philosopher has a responsibility to delay events, where he cannot entirely prevent them, until they are entirely consensual. The principles are essentially similar to those in the 1793 edition, if developed at greater length. They are, however, more explicitly tied to a view of progress that rejects the idea that change is a process of flux in which carpe diem is the watchword, and they see the invention of printing as central to the development of human intellect and the progressive advance of knowledge. That innovation has made possible the uniting of all the members of the community and has made inevitable the progress of political truth. It is easy to see Considerations as another matter entirely – a direct at-

Maniquis_3201_059_(Philp).indd 69

1/26/2011 5:04:55 PM

70

Mark Philp

tack on friends and associates for their involvement in political action in a context of government repression and intolerance. But that reading overlooks the deeper principles Godwin finds in the issue at hand. Considerations falls more or less cleanly into three parts: a critique of the activities of the radical societies; a critique of Grenville’s bill on treasonable and seditious practices; and a critique of Pitt’s proposal on unlawful assemblies. The first part is the most shocking for most readers. It can seem deeply quietist: ‘Public interest and security require from men, to a certain degree, an uniformity of action, and an uniformity of submission … Reason and expostulation here are not sufficient: there must be an arm to repress; a coercion strict, but forbearing and mild’ (PPW 2:126). And it can seem deeply disloyal. Referring to Thelwall’s lectures and their protestations of non-violence Godwin writes: ‘It is lord George Gordon preaching peace to the rioters in Westminster-Hall. “Commit no violence,” said his lordship, “but be sure you do not separate, till you have effected your purpose.” It is Iago adjuring Othello not to dishonour himself by giving harbour to a thought of jealousy’ (PPW 2:133). In contrast, the section on Grenville is a good piece of forensic work, pointing to the catch-all definition of sedition as inciting the people to hatred or ‘dislike’; to the way that even the mildest of political speculations, such as Hume’s ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’ might, in the wrong hands, give rise to a prosecution for treason; and to the tendency of the bill to give employment to an army of spies and informers who will effectively destroy the conditions for confidence between men (PPW 2:143, 145– 6). Pitt’s bill is denounced for its capacity to intimidate and to silence those who address any sort of meeting and for the draconian punishment annexed to the offence (the death penalty). In driving home his point Godwin uses an image that Benjamin West was to immortalize in his popular print A Lock’d Jaw for John Bull two days later and that Spence was to commit to coin in the following year: ‘The master clasps a padlock on his lips and he must be silent.’26 Godwin goes on, moreover, to argue that the bills are modelled on legislation that had been passed to cope with temporary difficulties in the reigns of Elizabeth and Charles II – both, significantly, before the Glorious Revolution. He suggests that Grenville, Pitt, and others – he cites Lord Macdonald, the chief prosecutor in Paine’s trial – are treating the history of Britain as if the Revolution was not a defining moment for its constitution. The precedents, then, come from a time when the liberty of the Commons was not established and when politics was disfigured by wars of succession and religion. Godwin then goes on to show, drawing

Maniquis_3201_059_(Philp).indd 70

1/26/2011 5:04:55 PM



Godwin, Thelwall, and the Means of Progress

71

on Hume’s History, that the occasion for the precedents that Grenville cites for the Treason Bill was in a Parliament so effectively intimidated by the Queen that she openly avowed her unwillingness to tolerate any questioning of her will. Far from drawing on the established constitution, these ‘precedents’ might just as well have been drawn from France and Spain – two classical despotisms. In implicit alliance with Burke, Godwin treats the 1688 settlement as the occasion for the establishment of the constitution, rendering nugatory any appeal for precedents prior to that period. What Godwin does not do in Considerations is to question the principles upon which the agitation for reform draws. The issue entirely concerns the means of progress, not the ends: ‘No infatuation can be more extraordinary than that which at present prevails among the alarmed adversaries of reform. Reform must come. It is a resistless tide; and, if we endeavour to keep it out too long, it will overwhelm us’ (PPW 2:159). But, as to means, ‘we must both accommodate ourselves to the empire of old prejudices, and to the strong and decisive influx of new opinions.’ He criticizes the London Corresponding Society for setting up a system like the Jacobin Clubs that, by collecting together large numbers, threatens to repeat the Gordon riots of 1780. Although Godwin expresses concern that the London Corresponding Society lacks the ballast of property in its membership (PPW 2:130), it is mainly its mass public meetings that he thinks warrant the attention of the government – irrespective of the intentions of those who organize the Society – on the grounds that the consequences of their actions are not wholly within their control and that the best intentions may produce deeply regrettable outcomes. He does not say, however, what attention they deserve, although clearly he thinks that they do not deserve these bills and that the existing legislation concerning assembly and riot is sufficient to handle the danger. The case against the public lectures of Thelwall, which Godwin had himself attended on 12 June 1795 (and on 17 February 1794, before the Treason Trials), is more mixed. He asks that the lecturer ‘have a mind calmed and … consecrated by the mild spirit of philosophy,’ and recommends that he ‘have a temper unyielding to the corrupt influence of a noisy and admiring audience.’27 Godwin’s strictures on Thelwall are severe, but the records that we have of the lectures suggest that his comments have some justification. According to Hazlitt, Thelwall is, in speaking, like a volcano vomiting out lava … He was the model of a flashy, powerful demagogue – a madman blessed with a fit audience … The

Maniquis_3201_059_(Philp).indd 71

1/26/2011 5:04:55 PM

72

Mark Philp

lightning of national indignation flashed from his eye; the workings of the popular mind were seen labouring in his bosom: it writhed and swelled with its rank ‘fraught of aspics’ tongues,’ and the poison frothed over at his lips. Thus qualified, he ‘wielded at will the fierce democracy, and fulmin’d over’ an arena of souls, of no mean circumference.28

And Thelwall’s response to the two acts was certainly less restrained than Godwin’s: I am not very careful, citizens, about my words tonight: for I declare no death is so terrible to me as living to see the day in which this bill is accepted. I have two infants, the joy of a father’s heart, whose innocent smiles furnish my only relaxation … But I protest sooner would I see those infants strangled before my face, sooner would I have my body pierced like a culender … than live under the reproach of suffering this bill to pass without all the opposition I have the power of making.29

But as Jon Mee’s essay in this collection shows, Thelwall in many respects also aspires to be a true disciple of Godwin, and is himself anxious about the corruption of his judgment by the applause of the crowd, and the need to avoid the inflammation of the crowd by passion and rhetoric.30 Indeed, the lecture that Godwin attends on 12 June 1795 exhibits Thelwall in a sober mood – conscious that before a crowd ‘the mind is sometimes apt to become inflamed, to lose sight of principles, and dwell too much on personalities; – to suffer passion to snatch the reins from reason and to foster prejudice and resentment when truth and justice ought to be the only objects.’31 But, for Godwin, this confession seems to have been inadequate, perhaps because it became clear from the reports of others that the lectures were resumed in a more combative spirit, and perhaps because Godwin was also anxious about Thelwall’s participation in the mass public meeting of 26 October 1795, where, for all Thelwall’s expressly pacific purposes, Godwin would have feared a pandering to the opinions of the mob. The difficulty in assessing how fairly Godwin treats Thelwall cannot be settled solely in the light of Thelwall’s proclaimed principles, since Godwin firmly believes that there is many a forum in which truth simply cannot be advanced, and he condemns the lecture theatre and the mass meeting alike on these grounds. Thelwall’s own insistence that he was concerned with the pursuit of truth and virtue would have rung hollow to Godwin, in short, would have demonstrated clearly that Thelwall failed to grasp Godwin’s

Maniquis_3201_059_(Philp).indd 72

1/26/2011 5:04:55 PM



Godwin, Thelwall, and the Means of Progress

73

point about the importance of the rational communication of truth and the sanctity of private judgment. It is also true, however, that Godwin’s insistence on rational communication as the basis for change meant that his strictures on reform condemn the vast majority of political activity on the grounds that it is not a proper vehicle for the dissemination of truth. One consequence of Godwin’s position is that he is in danger of following the loyalists in lumping together the broad range of radical groups and activities as equally dangerous, rather than recognizing the attempts made by people such as Thelwall to tread a distinctive but essentially judicious line. For Godwin, ‘reform is a delicate and an awful task … It must be carried on by slow, almost insensible steps, and by just degrees. The public mind must first be enlightened; the public sentiment must next become unequivocal; there must be a grand and magnificent harmony, expanding itself through the whole community. There must be a concert of wills, that no minister and no monopolist would be frantic enough to withstand’ (PPW 2:132). But there must be these things because, without them, the social fabric will be ripped apart, men and women’s security will be surrendered, and the development of human society will be set back. On grounds of the sanctity of private judgment, on grounds of utility, and on grounds of the intricate set of relations and causes that link together the social and political fabric and the liberty of its subjects into a seamless garment, precipitant change must be resisted. This attention to the cloth of historical inheritance and the slow nature of enlightenment and reform is central to Godwin’s world view in Political Justice, and it forms the key to understanding his mature novels, with their painstaking delineation of the causal conditions that are expressed through the acts of men and women who incompletely understand their situations and their emotions and whose capacity for reason too often leads hubristically to their downfall. Caleb Williams’s Falkland is one such flawed character – the product of his class and circumstance, capable of greatness, but subverted from within by the norms and moeurs of his caste; these make it impossible for him to treat Williams as his equal and lead him to sacrifice his virtue through a concern with the public bubble of his honour. This is not a picture that Godwin shares with Paine; it is one that he draws in part from Montesquieu and Rousseau and from Hume and Burke, and he does so from the beginning of Political Justice – indeed, from the very first draft. This account places Godwin in the centre of the debate on France, not in the sense that he is the major contributor, but in the sense that the

Maniquis_3201_059_(Philp).indd 73

1/26/2011 5:04:55 PM

74

Mark Philp

increasingly polarizing forces around him leave him occupying a position that is both sympathetic to and critical of both Burke and Paine, and that fact leaves him more and more exposed as the ‘debate’ degenerates into a broadside and propaganda war. Godwin’s response to Thelwall is a response to his sense that he is facing a dual extremism – both of the government in its panic and of the reformers who shut their eyes and ‘believe, while everything is auspicious, that everything is desperate’ (2:162). It is possible, of course, to read the pamphlet as a considerable rhetorical success: Godwin adopts the position of someone aloof from the reform societies and from the governmental panic, calmly picking off the arguments and errors of each side and demonstrating that the bills are unnecessary and the panic unfounded. That the pamphlet should have been so favourably reviewed might similarly suggest that Godwin had managed to hit the right rhetorical note – not showing enough of his hand by denouncing the government for despotism and irrationality to be deemed a radical and condemned accordingly, nor appearing uncritical of those who sought reform. But Godwin’s own views on candour would make it difficult for him to acknowledge that his position was driven wholly by polemical purposes rather than by his sincere commitments – and his reaction to Thelwall’s outrage suggests that he believed he was acting with perfect candour, not simply instrumentally.32 Moreover, while the political context really had made polemic the order of the day, Godwin must be understood as sincerely trying to rise above it, to reason in measured tones about the appropriateness of the conduct of the two sides and of the government’s remedies. That some reviews, such as those in the Monthly Review and the Monthly Mirror, were able to recognise this is, I would suggest, evidence that middle ground continued to exist and was likely occupied by many, but it was ground that was increasingly whittled away as the contest between government and its opponents intensified – and it was ground that was more secure at the level of the monthly reviews than at the level of the pamphlet and broadside controversy.33 What Godwin writes about Thelwall does look pretty close to betrayal, but only if we accept, as Godwin did not, that the process of political change involves sharp contrasts, organized struggles, and high levels of partisan conflict. That picture is not an eighteenth-century one – a century in which party was accommodated increasingly, but did not wholly dominate the political landscape (certainly not the extra-parliamentary landscape) and in which the struggle for parliamentary reform was in

Maniquis_3201_059_(Philp).indd 74

1/26/2011 5:04:55 PM



Godwin, Thelwall, and the Means of Progress

75

the process of formation, rather than already established. Paine’s powerful polemics may easily mislead us into thinking that the lines of battle (and thereby of loyalty) were clearly laid down. In practice they were not. On the contrary, there is a good deal of confusion and uncertainty about where to stand and about what is implied in practice by one’s intellectual commitments. One result is that various individual careers tack between reforming and loyalist positions. Moreover, this process is hugely complicated by the pressure increasingly put on people to declare one way or another and to face the consequences that an increasingly repressive regime, backed by local prosecutions and the intimidation of those sympathetic to reform, sought to impose. Under these conditions Godwin takes the courageous step of attacking the government’s bills – but he does so while attempting to avoid partisan polemic. His wish to stand above the fray is absolutely at one with the position he takes up in Political Justice – his concern is impartially to conduct the arguments, not to descend to the polemics of the pamphlet literature. It is true that he does not sound very courageous when he tells Thelwall that he is not entitled to make public use of the knowledge that Godwin authored the pamphlet and when he suggests that Thelwall will probably ‘contribute, as far as your power may extend, to consign me also to the lamp-post.’34 But writing the pamphlet is nonetheless evidence of his courage because he has every reason to think that he could be a target for a government concerned to root out sedition (and he does indeed soon become a target of a government-sponsored press, even if he avoids prosecution, as others did not).35 However aloof his tone, it is clear that he regards the government’s actions as little better than contemptible and as bordering on despotism. He refuses to take a stand with the reform organizations, then, not because he rejects reform, but because his conception of reform is a relatively traditional, elite-led form of enlightenment that moves forward from the order from which it springs. His more utopian hopes aspire to a progressive liberation from the different European paths and towards an increasing convergence on reason and truth, but for that process to happen private judgment and sober discussion are essential, and for these to be realized people must be secure from arbitrary rule, either by governments or by crowds.36 Godwin was on the losing side in this debate. Not only were the two acts passed, but there was also a growing recognition among those favourable to reform that the scale of the government’s backlash against the popular movement would severely damage the conditions for the development of truth and the progressive enlightenment of society. The

Maniquis_3201_059_(Philp).indd 75

1/26/2011 5:04:56 PM

76

Mark Philp

position of the enlightened intellectual came under increasing attack. Much the same indignity that Godwin inflicted on Thelwall was visited upon him in turn by James Mackintosh – to whom he responds with much the same indignation – as well as by a host of anti-Jacobin novels and squibs. Moreover, his historical reputation has always been marred by Thelwall’s assertion that Godwin’s ‘visionary peculiarities of mind,’ which ‘recommend the most extensive plan of freedom and innovation ever discussed by any writer in the English language,’ were coupled with a conviction that it was necessary ‘to reprobate every measure from which even the most moderate reform can rationally be expected.’37 Thelwall’s attack has some force: Godwin’s position threatens to lapse into a form of passive obedience, and it threatens to have nothing practical to say to any who look for positive change in the state. What makes this judgment overly harsh is that it needs to be correctly framed, but not by a view that sees the interests of the people and the political establishment wholly at odds and necessitating a practical struggle to force the powers that be to make concessions to the masses. That view is only gradually and with difficulty recognized by many who wrote in the opening phases of the debate on France, and it only becomes clearly articulated as options in the contrast drawn, from the mid-teens of the nineteenth century, between moral and physical-force reformisms. Rather, the judgment on Godwin needs framing by an eighteenth-century Enlightenment that saw in the development of science and knowledge a vehicle for the progressive emancipation of mankind from want. In this frame, those of more enlightened understandings played the key role in developing and diffusing the truths of morality and science that their researches uncovered, but they had to recognize that existing contexts had a powerful grip on people’s minds, limiting their understanding and, in consequence, requiring considerable patience on the part of those engaged in the educative process. Framed in this way, what is extraordinary is less Godwin’s position, and more that of Paine and his followers, who sought a direct and urgent emancipation from the status quo, with little sense of the potential costs of such a rupture with the cultural, social, and political context. With hindsight we might think that Paine got it right in terms of the ends to be pursued and the necessity of confrontational means. Godwin, however, does not deny those ends. He merely suggests that their pursuit is in itself a complex task of achieving intellectual emancipation from the system of dependency upon the political and social elite that European societies have inherited and which their practices continue to promote.38

Maniquis_3201_059_(Philp).indd 76

1/26/2011 5:04:56 PM



Godwin, Thelwall, and the Means of Progress

77

NOTES   1 The classic example of taking the revisions to Political Justice as indicative of recantation is de Quincy’s comment: ‘The second edition, as regards principles, is not a re-cast, but absolutely a travesty of the first, nay, it is all but a palinode’ (quoted in Don Locke, A Fantasy of Reason: The Life and Thought of William Godwin [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980], 93). Locke characterizes Godwin’s treatment of Thelwall as a ‘stab in the back and reports a rumour that Godwin had been won over by a government pension (102) – on which see Jon Mee’s essay in this volume, note 38, which reports that Amelia Alderson teases Godwin about a pension for Considerations.   2 See Alfred Cobban, The Debate on the French Revolution (London: Black, 1950); and Marilyn Butler, Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).   3 We should note, however, that their disagreements were not clear to them until relatively late in the day, since there was considerable mutual respect in 1788. In fact, Paine wrote to Burke as late as 17 January 1790, giving an optimistic account of the way in which things were proceeding in France and offering to show him, when they next met, Jefferson’s letter of 11 July 1789 describing the events of the early part of the Revolution. See T.W. Copeland, ed., The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, 10 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958–78), 6:67–75.   4 For example, R.R. Fennessy, Burke, Paine, and the Rights of Man: A Difference of Opinion (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1963).   5 A relatively extreme case is that of Thomas Cooper, whose A Reply to Mr Burke’s Invective (London, 1792) is very much influenced by Paine and Sieyes – even if the basic principle that all power is derived from the people can be found in his paper to the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester, 7 March 1787, well before the publication of Paine’s book. But many writers assume that latter principle without feeling the necessity of questioning the doctrine of mixed government that holds sway over the vast majority of the proponents of reform. Major Cartwright is certainly an important, and the predominant, example in this period, but so too is Thelwall in his Tribune, where he argues that the constitution of Britain is a democracy having ‘some mixture of aristocracy in its legislature, and adopting an hereditary chief magistrate to be responsible for the execution of the laws and who is called a King.’ But the institutions are subject to ‘the grand object, the welfare of that great body from whom all power is derived, and for whom all power ought to be exercised.’ See John Thelwall, The Tribune, a periodical publication, consisting chiefly of the political lectures of J. Thelwall.

Maniquis_3201_059_(Philp).indd 77

1/26/2011 5:04:56 PM

78

Mark Philp

Taken in short-hand by W. Ramsey, and revised …, 3 vols. (London, 1795–6), 2:213.   6 See Anne Plumptre’s clear-sighted comments on the polemical character of disputes, in A Narrative of a three years residence in France, principally in the southern departments, from the year 1802 to 1805, 3 vols. (London, 1810), 2:97; and my essay ‘The Fragmented Ideology of Reform,’ in The French Revolution and British Popular Politics, ed. Mark Philp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 50–77.   7 This is true equally for Paine, whose experience on the National Convention’s committee on the constitution in 1792–3 and whose friendship with Condorcet, the chief architect of the proposals for a new constitution in 1793, do not produce any detailed discussion of constitutional arrangements for either France or Britain.   8 See Amanda Goodrich, Debating England’s Aristocracy in the 1790s: Pamphlets, Polemics and Political Ideas (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Royal Historical Society / Boydell Press, 2005), ch. 2, for the argument that it was Paine and his followers in particular who sought to rake up hostility to aristocracy. Nonetheless, it is striking how enduring the model of mixed government was among radicals, and how far they continued to assume some degree of leadership from the political elite.   9 On this theme see my essays ‘The Fragmented Ideology of Reform,’ in The French Revolution, 50–77; and ‘Disconcerting Ideas: Explaining Popular Radicalism and Popular Loyalism in the 1790s,’ in English Radicalism 1550–1850, ed. Glenn Burgess and Matthew Festenstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 157–89. 10 J.G.A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 276. 11 The story that Holcroft and Godwin were involved in a committee to organize its publication holds little water. Holcroft’s famous note seems, on balance, to refer to the first part of Rights of Man, but there is nothing to suggest that Godwin had any involvement in the publication of the text: ‘I have got it – If this do not cure my cough it is a damned perverse mule of a cough – The pamphlet – From the row – But mum – We don’t sell it – Oh no – Ears and Eggs – Verbatim, except the addition of a short preface, which, as you have not seen, I send you my copy – Not a single castration (Laud be unto God and J.S. Jordan) can I discover – Hey for the New Jerusalem! The millennium! And peace and eternal beatitude be unto the soul of Thomas Paine’ (cited in C. Kegan Paul, William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries, 2 vols. [London, 1876], 1:69). It is clear from his diary that Godwin read both the first and second parts of Paine’s Rights of Man in

Maniquis_3201_059_(Philp).indd 78

1/26/2011 5:04:56 PM



Godwin, Thelwall, and the Means of Progress

79

advance of publication, but it is the second part that has most to fear from ‘castration,’ because of the dispute with its first printer, who was a closet loyalist (see the appendix to Rights of Man: Part the Second [London, 1792], 175–8). Nonetheless, the ‘we’ in ‘we don’t sell it’ seems to allude to Joseph Johnson, and that would imply that it refers to the first part. See Mark Philp, ‘Godwin, Holcroft and the Rights of Man,’ Enlightenment and Dissent 1 (1982), 38–42; and Jenny Graham, ‘The Publication of Part One of the Rights of Man,’ Enlightenment and Dissent 12 (1993), 70–7. 12 Godwin had written pamphlets in the 1780s and was to do so again in 1793 (‘Essay against Re-opening the War with France’), 1794 (Cursory Strictures), and 1795 (Considerations). The ‘Essay against Re-opening the War with France’ remained unpublished, probably because it was overtaken by events. It was published for the first time in Political Writings II, ed. Mark Philp with Austin Gee, vol. 2 of Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, 7 vols., gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993), 2:33–61 (hereafter PPW 2). Godwin also wrote a series of political letters between 1791 and 1794, also included in PPW 2. While this activity demonstrates his awareness of contemporary debates, it also underlines the fact that his concern was to pitch Political Justice at a level that was largely above these debates. 13 It must also be said that he had negotiated a relatively lucrative arrangement with George Robinson for Political Justice and it is unlikely a pamphlet could have paid such returns. 14 The manuscript of the first draft is at the end of the volumes of manuscripts of Political Justice in the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. A transcription of the major part of the first draft is published at the end of Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, vol. 4, ed. Mark Philp (hereafter PPW 4). 15 References are to the first edition in Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, vol. 3, ed. Mark Philp (hereafter PPW 3) and variants published in PPW 4. See PPW 4:367. 16 PPW 3:48; the quotation follows loosely the first lines of Paine’s Common Sense (1776). 17 And that turn in Godwin’s argument raises the problem of the appropriate methods of reform. Although I address a part of that issue in this paper, much more can and should be said: see, for example, Victoria Myers, ‘William Godwin and the Ars Rhetorica,’ Studies in Romanticism 41, no. 3 (2002), 415–44; Jon Mee’s essay in this volume; and the discussions in Godwin’s Enquirer (1797), in Educational and Literary Writings, ed. Pamela Clemit, vol. 5 of Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp,

Maniquis_3201_059_(Philp).indd 79

1/26/2011 5:04:56 PM

80

Mark Philp

esp. pt. 1, chaps. 1, 9, and 11, each of which points to the different ways in which Godwin successively grappled with this issue. 18 Rousseau is a difficult influence to track since the arguments for simplicity of moeurs and politics in the Social Contract are not easily reconciled to the powerful sense of historical development and the interdependence of culture and institutions in A Discourse on Arts and Sciences and A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. 19 The diary begins in 1788, and regularly lists his reading only from September 1791. Godwin’s diary is part of the Abinger Collection held by the Bodleian Library. A digital resource, including a complete scan of the diary and a searchable database has been developed in a Leverhulme-funded project, directed by myself, and has been available as part of the Oxford Digital Library since November 2010. The editorial team is Victoria Myers, David O’Shaughnessy, and Mark Philp, with the assistance of Kate Barush, James Cumming, James Grande, and Laura Kalinkewicz. See http:// godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/. 20 On Godwin’s background in Dissent and the influence of Frederick Norman, see his Autobiography, ed. Mark Philp, in vol. 1 of The Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1992), 44. 21 See Godwin’s diary, Oxford, Bodleian MS Abinger e. 1. The list is set out as follows: Malherbe, Corneille, Racine, Moliere, Boileau, Quinault, La Fontaine, Rousseau, de la Motte, Chaulieu, Gresset, Crebillon, Voltaire, Destouches, Regnard. Rollin, Vertot, Bossuet, Voltaire, Raynal, Saint Real. Malebranche, Rousseau, Helvetius, Montesquieu, Mirabaud, Pascal, Nicole. 22 See Mark Philp, Godwin’s Political Justice (London: Duckworth, 1986), chaps. 7 and 9. Hume’s pronouncement ‘It is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded,’ in Essay IV: ‘Of the first principles of government’ (in Essays: Moral Political and Literary, ed. E.F. Miller [Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987], 32), is clearly echoed in Godwin’s assertion ‘All government is founded in opinion,’ in book 2, chap. 4 of Political Justice, PPW 3:63. 23 See Godwin’s diary, Oxford, Bodleian MS Abinger e. 4, 27–30 October 1791 (followed on 2–3 November 1791 by Burke’s speech, 1774); 3, 5, 11, 12, 13, 16, 23 January 1792; 7–8 March 1792; 20 April and 10 May 1792; 10 and 30 June 1792. Also Bodleian MS Abinger e. 5, 1, 7, 8 and 11 July 1792; 18 September 1792; and 18 November 1792. 24 In his The French Revolution Debate in Britain (London: Palgrave, 2007), 130, Gregory Claeys recognizes the echoes of Burke’s work in the revisions to the second edition, and especially in The Enquirer (1797). We differ as to his in-

Maniquis_3201_059_(Philp).indd 80

1/26/2011 5:04:56 PM



Godwin, Thelwall, and the Means of Progress

81

fluence on the first edition. See Marilyn Butler, ‘Godwin, Burke, and Caleb Williams,’ Essays in Criticism 31, no. 3 (1982), 237–57. 25 See PPW 3:126–7, where Godwin reports Helvetius lamenting ‘in pathetic strains the hopeless condition of his country’ and suggesting that the moment is past when a book could turn the people to reform, when in fact (Godwin says) reform lay close at hand thanks to the work of those, Helvetius included, who were at the vanguard of French thought. 26 PPW 2:148. West’s print, published by S.W. Fores, is dated 23 November 1795 (British Museum Catalogue, 8693). For Spence’s political token see A. Franklin and M. Philp, Napoleon and the Invasion of Britain (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2003), 44 (with West’s print on p. 42). 27 Considerations, PPW 2:132. 28 ‘On the difference between writing and speaking,’ in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt in Twenty-One Volumes, ed. P.P. Howe (London: Dent, 1931), 21:264–5. Partially cited by E.P. Thompson, in ‘Hunting the Jacobin Fox,’ Past and Present 142 (1994): 96–7. 29 Cited in Thompson, ‘Jacobin Fox,’ 97. 30 Jon Mee, ‘“The Press and Danger of the Crowd”’ (in this volume), makes clear Godwin’s doubts about the extent to which it was possible for a lecturer to maintain the philosophical calm that was seen as essential to the cause of truth, given the effects on him of the reactions of the audience. 31 Thelwall, Tribune, 1:335. My thanks are owed to James Grande for drawing the details of this lecture to my attention. 32 For Godwin’s correspondence with Thelwall, see C. Cestre, John Thelwall (London, 1906), appendix 1; and Thelwall, Tribune (London, 1795–6), 2:vii–xvii and 3:101–5. In Godwin’s diary for 10 January 1793 he reports discussing his preface to Political Justice with Nicholson, who praises his ‘dissimulation’ (Oxford, Bodleian MS Abinger e. 5). The comment suggests that Godwin might not be committed to perfect candour – but we have no way of knowing how far Nicholson’s praise was welcomed or acknowledged as just. 33 The Monthly Review n.s. 18 (Dec. 1795), 451–2 praised Godwin’s ‘moderate, candid, and judicious’ opening remarks, and pointed to the way the beginning of the pamphlet might lead the reader to suppose he was in favour of the legislation, only to demonstrate that, ‘after a strict and ample scrutiny,’ the measures were ‘totally condemned as in the highest degree unjust, arbitrary, and dangerous.’ The reviewer judged the pamphlet to be written with ‘uncommon energy and animation.’ The Monthly Mirror 1 (Dec. 1795), 104, gives a very brief review that admits to taking a position widely opposed to the author’s, but nonetheless concedes, ‘We must, in justice to him, al-

Maniquis_3201_059_(Philp).indd 81

1/26/2011 5:04:56 PM

82

Mark Philp

low a considerable portion of praise for the manly manner in which he has treated the subject.’ The Analytical Review 22 (Nov. 1795), 541–3 quotes extensively from the pamphlet and refrains largely from judgment, save in its conclusion: ‘The pamphlet is written with great ability, but the author, doubtless from a “conciliating spirit,” adopts facts and inferences, that have hitherto been proved only by the bold and unqualified assertions of men, whom he loudly condemns.’ 34 See appendix to Cestre, John Thelwall, 203. The letter is dated 28 November 1795. 35 Godwin’s associate Edward Henry Iliff was less successful – his strident attack on the army, church, and political institutions was accompanied by a very Godwin-like insistence on the progress of reason and opinion and the utter repudiation of recourse to violence, but the pamphlet was prosecuted nonetheless. See A Summary of the Duties of Citizenship written expressly for the members of the London Corresponding Society … (London, 1795). We should also bear in mind that Godwin was well acquainted with many radicals who were prosecuted for their actions or publications (and visited many of them in jail) – including those involved in the Scottish Convention Trials of 1794 and the London Treason Trials of the same year, and others, such as Thomas Muir, Thomas Fysshe Palmer, and Henry Redhead Yorke (whose sentence he discusses on 29 November 1795). He was also an occasional associate of Colonel Despard, who was executed for treason in 1803. Note also that Godwin expresses his fear in relation to ‘lamp-posts’ – the gallows of the popular journée – as if his fear is of Thelwall galvanizing the crowd against him. Moreover, for all Thelwall’s accusations of quietism, Godwin seems to have been moved to some sort of political action during the campaign against the two acts: on 22 November 1795 he enters in his diary – ‘Write Petition.’ See Godwin’s diary, Oxford, Bodleian MS Abinger e. 5. Moreover, on 11 December 1795 Godwin notes, ‘Sup at Nicholson’s; talk of associations. M & Russel call, signature’ (Bodleian MS Abinger e. 7). 36 See PPW 3:467 on violence and imposition of a revolution – but see p. 468, where he appeals to the dislocated-limb analogy. Godwin sets out the responsibilities of those who are to be precursors to the rest in the discovery of truth on pp. 469–70. See also PPW 4:317. 37 Tribune, 2:vii. 38 My thanks are owed to James Grande, Robert Maniquis, Jon Mee, Victoria Myers, and David O’Shaughnessy for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Maniquis_3201_059_(Philp).indd 82

2/5/2011 11:10:59 AM

chapter three

‘The Press and Danger of the Crowd’: Godwin, Thelwall, and the Counter-Public Sphere JON MEE

Freedom of inquiry is all that I wish for; let nothing be deemed too sacred for investigation; rather than restrain the liberty of the press I would suffer the most atrocious doctrines to be recommended: let the field be open and unencumbered, and truth must be victorious. William Wordsworth1

A little after five the Meeting broke up, when the immense crowd that was present separated, and proceeded to their respective homes: the utmost harmony, regularity, and good order prevailed during the whole time; not the slightest interruption happened; and when the hour of parting arrived, and the event of separation took place, each and every individual seemed to bear in their countenance the pleasing reflection of A DAY WELL SPENT. Anonymous2

Revisionist accounts of Jürgen Habermas’s narrative of the emergence of an eighteenth-century ‘public sphere’ have repeatedly noted its idealization of ‘bourgeois’ institutions of opinion formation.3 Geoff Eley, for instance, has discussed Habermas’s omission of any account of the emergent ‘plebeian public sphere’ associated with the popular radical movement of the 1790s.4 The question of whether ‘the press and danger of the crowd’ could be accommodated within an idea of the public was very much a live one not only outside but also within radical organizations.5 Consequently, ‘the harmony, regularity, and good order’ of the crowd was a recurrent emphasis in London Corresponding Society publications. One of the main attractions at the large LCS meeting held at

Maniquis_3201_083_(Mee).indd 83

1/26/2011 5:13:23 PM

84

Jon Mee

Copenhagen Fields in October 1795 was John Thelwall, probably the organization’s most important orator at the time. Looking back on the heady 1790s, William Hazlitt cited Thelwall as his chief example of the superficiality of performance contrasted with the depth of writing: ‘a certain exaggeration and extravagance of manner covered the nakedness, and swelled out the emptiness of the matter: the sympathy of angry multitudes with an impassioned theatrical declaimer supplied the place of argument or wit.’6 At the height of Thelwall’s powers, the dubious magic identified by Hazlitt was also a source of grave concern for William Godwin. This essay uses the conflict between the two former allies William Godwin and John Thelwall over 1795–6 to explore some of the fault lines that divided British radicalism within itself, fault lines still discernible beneath the skin of Habermas’s idea of a liberal public sphere. In so far as Habermas’s ideas have entered into Romantic-period studies, they have usually been used to confirm a view that ‘the public space of Romanticism is the book and periodical,’ but more recently this assumption has been challenged.7 Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite, for instance, have insisted on the centrality to Romantic culture of spaces such as ‘the theatre, the debating club, the bookshop or the dining room.’8 Not that these spaces, as Russell and Tuite make clear, represent any kind of homogeneous sphere of sociability. Indeed, the cultural geography of Romanticism was riven by questions of access that made print seem a comparatively safe haven. Habermas’s original account identified conversation and debate in coffee houses and other places of leisure as the means by which private opinions were transformed into a public sphere beyond the traditional authority of church and state. The locus of the private in this model was subdivided between civil society and the conjugal space of the family, although he acknowledged the same household could sustain both family relations and the emergent forms of the bourgeois salon.9 What Habermas does not much consider is the contested nature of the process. Particularly in the fraught context of the 1790s, some kinds of social spaces were deemed incapable of sustaining rational conversation and their inhabitants regarded as unequal to the task of constituting themselves as a public. References to ‘conversation’ are ubiquitous in eighteenth-century historiography, but there seems to be relatively little work done on what constituted conversation as a technology and how it stood in relation to ideas of controversy and freedom of speech.10 These issues were very important for Godwin’s understanding of the role of rational discourse in human progress. They were at the very centre of his disagreements with

Maniquis_3201_083_(Mee).indd 84

1/26/2011 5:13:23 PM



Godwin, Thelwall, and the Counter-Public Sphere

85

Thelwall. What kinds of encounters between people could legitimately claim to be constitutive of a public sphere? This question has always depended for its answer on the manner of the exchange, the identities of the participants, and the space in which it took place. For both Godwin and Thelwall conversation was the alembic from which the public could be alchemically conjured. For Thelwall, however, conversational exchange could be part of a continuum with controversy and debate in crowded assembly rooms. Politics depended upon the ‘materials which conversation and debate furnish’ (my italics).11 His linking together of ‘conversation’ with ‘debate’ is significant in this regard. For Godwin too, ‘if there be such a thing as truth, it must infallibly be struck out by the collision of mind with mind,’ but in his mind philosophical conversation had little in common with what took place in the popular debating societies of the metropolis.12 ‘Godwin’s emphasis on the importance of conversation in Political Justice was an attempt to reconfigure the terms of trust inherent in the Addisonian public sphere, constructing a space that might be more secure from the attentions of government,’ write Russell and Tuite, ‘but which would also serve to monitor the dangers of conviviality’s “loose talk.”’13 Godwin was as aware as Thelwall of the use made by spies and informers ‘to catch and betray the conversation of our unguarded moments,’ but he was more concerned about the limits of conversation itself. Godwin’s ideal looks to Russell and Tuite something like what Peter Clark has called ‘private sociability.’14 Certainly much of Godwin’s sociability was distinct from older codes of politeness, on the one hand, and the new ‘open’ world of popular entertainments, on the other, often taking place at dinners and visits in the homes of friends and acquaintances. In more political terms, as Victoria Myers succinctly puts it, the idea of conversation in Political Justice looks to chart a course ‘more radical than the Whigs and less authoritarian than the revolutionaries in France.’15 By 1795–6, this course also left him at odds with his former friend John Thelwall. Godwin’s version of enlightened communicative action in Political Justice stressed the primacy of deliberative reason in the process of converting the opinions of private individuals into a public sphere. Godwinian conversation sounds much like Habermas’s ‘rational-critical debate’ in its emphasis on deliberative reason, but rather less so in its relatively restrictive version of where those conversations could take place.16 Rowland Weston has traced this aspect of Godwin’s thinking back to his education in Rational Dissent, an influence Godwin himself later depreciated in favour of Hume and the British moral-sense tradition’s empha-

Maniquis_3201_083_(Mee).indd 85

1/26/2011 5:13:23 PM

86

Jon Mee

sis on the role of the affections.17 Tempting though it may be to think of the later Enquirer (1797) essays as a turning point towards conversation as a discourse of affective sociability, care ought to be taken not to exaggerate the contrast between a puritanical Godwin of the first edition of Political Justice and a later sociable Godwin reorienting towards conversation and the private affections. For one thing, Rational Dissent itself was not entirely a discourse of puritanical intellectuality. It had for several decades been reorienting itself towards thinking of religion as a matter of taste rather than theological deliberation. Moreover, it was a tradition that gave at least as much emphasis to social discourse as to private reflection, what Daniel E. White acutely calls its ‘pedagogical ideals of discursive interchange and free discovery.’18 Take, for instance, Isaac Watts’s belief that ‘our Souls may be serene in Solitude, but not sparkling, though perhaps we are employed in reading the Works of the brightest Writers. Often has it happened, in free Discourse, that new Thoughts are strangely struck out, and the Seeds of Truth sparkle and blaze through the Company, which in calm and silent Reading would never have been excited.’ Watts wrote these remarks in a comparison of the relative merits of observation, reading, lectures, conversation, and private study as means of improving the human mind. If his emphasis on conflict in conversation seems to hark back to puritanical theological disputatiousness, Watts makes it clear that these collisions bring with them the sort of polish associated with Whig advocates of politeness such as Shaftesbury: ‘A Hermit who has been shut up in his Cell in a College, has contracted a sort of Mould and Rust upon his Soul … The Rust and the Mould are filed and brusht off by polite Conversation. The Scholar now becomes a Citizen or a Gentleman, a Neighbour and a Friend.’19 Watts himself, a close friend of Godwin’s grandfather, was in fact a key figure in the reorientation of Rational Dissent away from Puritanism towards a new emphasis on the affections. Originally published in the 1740s, his thoughts on conversation were still being included in handbooks such as Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s Female Speaker (1811).20 Through ancestry, education, and social contacts, Godwin was a beneficiary of this Dissenting ideal of vigorous conversational exchange. In the wake of the publication of Political Justice (1793), he became an energetic controversialist. Defending his book, he criss-crossed London from John Horne Tooke’s dinner table in Wimbledon to less salubrious gatherings in Joseph Gerrald’s cell on the felon’s side of Newgate.21 Godwin was a sociable animal, but within strictly defined limits. For Godwin always feared that large assemblies threatened to cloud the process

Maniquis_3201_083_(Mee).indd 86

1/26/2011 5:13:23 PM



Godwin, Thelwall, and the Counter-Public Sphere

87

of rational deliberation. Even when they were preaching Godwin’s own doctrines, popular speakers might be ‘propagating blind zeal, where we meant to propagate reason’ (PPW 3:118). He charged John Thelwall with precisely this crime at the end of 1795, even, as Mark Philp’s essay in this volume points out, going so far as to compare him to Lord George Gordon whipping up popular anti-Catholic sentiment in 1780. Yet Thelwall himself was desperate to distance the radicalism of the 1790s from the ‘enthusiasm’ of the seventeenth century (and what he saw as its avatar in the Gordon Riots). ‘Enthusiasm’ in this pejorative sense was still widely identified with the unenlightened zeal of popular religious movements. Little written by Thelwall escapes from his own ambivalence about the state of enlightenment among the people at large. Self-taught as a controversialist in the popular debating clubs of late-eighteenth-century London, Thelwall continued to hold out the possibility that the metropolitan crowd could produce from within itself a public sphere, but he was also haunted by the possibility that the enthusiasm for liberty might suffocate the nascent institutions that it was meant to be animating. Romantic criticism has tended to represent Godwin as a cold rationalist, but his Political Justice was immediately understood by some of his contemporaries in terms of its enthusiasm. The Anglican imagination, especially, often regarded the Puritan temper of mind as enthusiastic for its perceived tendency to abstract theological issues from the mediations of social relations. Godwin’s emphasis on the importance of truth above the ways of the world, including the famous depreciation of domestic affections in Political Justice, looked like a secularized version of this old phenomenon to some of his contemporaries.22 The British Critic, for instance, had no doubt that Godwin’s ideas on the ‘omnipotence of truth’ and the ‘perfectibility of man’ represented a variant of ‘enthusiasm.’23 Samuel Parr was an old friend of Godwin, associated with reform, but in 1801 he devastated the philosopher by presenting Political Justice as vitiated in much the same way. Parr built upon Burke’s view of revolutionary ideology in his general condemnation of ‘the progress of speculations, carried on with a glowing and impetuous spirit of enthusiasm.’24 He accused Godwin of sacrificing actually existing social ties to the chimera of universal benevolence. Godwin perhaps had created a hostage to fortune in those passages of Political Justice that rhapsodized over ‘generous enthusiasm, such enlightened ardour and such invincible perseverance’ (PPW 3:9). For all that its most obvious referent is to the kind of Whig-republican enthusiasm for virtue found in Shaftesbury’s writing, Godwin’s ‘generous enthusiasm’ did sometimes inflect his prose with a millenarian

Maniquis_3201_083_(Mee).indd 87

1/26/2011 5:13:23 PM

88

Jon Mee

fervour that would have smacked of the disputatiousness of the Dissenting chapel, at least to suspicious Anglican readers: ‘The restless activity of intellect will for a time be fertile in paradox and error; but these will be only diurnals, while the truths that occasionally spring up, like sturdy plants, will defy the rigour of season and climate’ (PPW 3:15).25 This passage continues with an enthusiastic call for ‘unlimited speculation’ (PPW 3:15). Godwin implied that all mediating authorities, especially the Church, were to be superseded in the interests of truth. Such eagerness could be taken by opponents to prove Burke’s charge that opinion for opinion’s sake was the guiding light of revolutionary ideology. From this perspective, the ‘collision of mind with mind’ sounded less like the polite aristocratic conversation advocated by Shaftesbury, Addison, et al. as the basis of Whig civility, and more like the acrimonious theological controversy associated with Presbyterian rancour. Even more alarming for the elite than the spectre of the uncouth chapel, however, was the politicization of London’s popular debating clubs over 1792. Here was enthusiastic speculation manifesting itself in the realm of the crowd. By 1794 the government seems to have convinced itself that such proceedings were treasonable attempts to replace Parliament with a national convention of the people. Godwin himself was equally sure that popular clubs and meetings were not the correct venues for discussion, even when the topic was his own ideas. A supplement to his journal for March 1793 records a conversation with the artist George Dyson on the road to Wimbledon (and dinner with John Horne Tooke). The topic was ‘How far is mind generated, not only in persons suitably prepared, but even in the vulgar, by energy of intellectual exhibitions?’ The question of the relationship between ‘energy’ and ‘mind’ was one that Godwin thought about a lot in the 1790s, but he was particularly sceptical about the possibility of mind being produced from the energies of what he calls ‘the vulgar.’26 Godwin had little faith in the ability of even ‘the sound of mind,’ as he put it, to survive the tumults of a popular audience: ‘[T]he sympathy of opinion catches from man to man, especially in numerous meetings, and among persons whose passions have not been used to the curb of judgment, actions may be determined on, which solitary reflection would have rejected’ (PPW 3:118). Sentiments such as these almost echo Burke’s fears about ‘electrick communication everywhere’ making print culture into a kind of vast machine without space for reflection.27 One difference is that Godwin seems to have allowed for a built-in regulatory principle when it came to reading, predicated on the notion that it was a private

Maniquis_3201_083_(Mee).indd 88

1/26/2011 5:13:23 PM



Godwin, Thelwall, and the Counter-Public Sphere

89

experience, demanding powers of reflection and some education. Literature ‘exists only as the portion of the few,’ wrote Godwin in Political Justice; ‘the multitude, at least in the present state of human society, cannot partake of its illuminations’ (PPW 3:16). Among such multitudes the universal exercise of private judgment, the freedom on which Godwin’s whole edifice rests, was likely to be overwhelmed. Human improvement is not the product of ‘the energies of the people at large,’ but of ‘persons of some degree of study and reflection’ (PPW 3:117). A location outside the crowd was essential to Godwin’s ideas of communicative competence. Between 1793 and 1796, Godwin was an active member of the Philomathian Society, meeting in London every week or so to discuss philosophical and political issues. John Thelwall had composed an anniversary ode for the society in 1791 and in Godwin’s time the society also welcomed men such as the Irish plumber John Binns (a leading LCS member from 1794).28 Yet if the Philomathians could countenance a social mix, they were far from being as integrated into the network of London debating clubs as William St Clair has suggested, nor were they what one might call an open society. Twenty-one was the maximum number allowed at the discussion, Binns reveals.29 The Philomathian Society seems closer to the ‘Select Club’ that Godwin had discussed setting up with Major Alexander Jardine to provide a forum to debate Political Justice. The Prospectus of the Select Club speaks of a meeting of ‘philosophic minds, in search of truth.’ The list of names Godwin provided is made up of doctors, lawyers, ‘intelligent artists,’ and leading Whigs such as Fox and Sheridan. There were ‘No Rules, – only to remember that truth, knowledge, mind being the chief object, no subject is to be excluded from conversation.’ The paradox of unlimited enquiry within strictly regulated social limits reappears.30 Later in the decade, Godwin’s Enquirer essays present themselves as ‘principally the result of conversations.’31 The volume invites the reader to see them as a turn towards sociability and away from dry theory (just as Hume himself had once turned from a philosophical treatise to the conversational form of the essay). Not entirely dispensing with the wars of truth, the preface to The Enquirer does sound an echo of the Dissenting idea of contention striking out the sparks of truth: ‘The author has always had a passion for colloquial discussion; and, in the various opportunities that have been afforded him in different scenes of life, the result seemed frequently to be fruitful of amusement and instruction. There is a vivacity, and, if he may be permitted to say it, a richness, in the hints struck out in conversation, that are with difficulty attained in

Maniquis_3201_083_(Mee).indd 89

1/26/2011 5:13:23 PM

90

Jon Mee

any other method’ (PPW 5:78). The essays might be read as part of the recalibration of Godwin’s interests away from ‘a cerebral and Dissenting understanding of human sociability’ towards one ‘derived from the moral sense philosophers,’ usually defined in terms of a turn towards romanticism.32 Yet within this shift conversation remained key to Godwin’s ideas on political progress. What has changed in the process is Godwin’s definition of conversation. Collision remains from Dissenting ideas of conversation as an engine of improvement, but now it operates in the context of a much greater emphasis on the affections than rational debate, now more clearly (but not totally) aligned with mainstream notions of politeness. Godwin defines the reorientation in terms of a turn towards virtues of ‘a humbler nature’ (PPW 5:231), of private life, a phrase that echoes the language of David Hume (not to mention Joseph Addison) on conversation. Domesticated free speech is marked off from the controversial debates of the earlier 1790s: ‘While the principles of Gallic republicanism were yet in their infancy, the friends of innovation were somewhat too imperious in their tone. Their minds were in a state of exaltation and ferment. They were too impatient and impetuous. There was something in their sternness that savoured of barbarism’ (PPW 5:78). ‘Barbarism’ is a word likely to spark off ideas of rough debating clubs and crowded lecture theatres. These conversations in their emphasis on the domestic virtues even seem to be distanced from the more rigorously philosophical environment of the Philomathians. Responding defensively to Parr’s attack on his political principles a few years later, Godwin fleshed out an image of the ‘barbarism’ he disavowed in The Enquirer: ‘Revolutionary lectures were publicly read here and elsewhere with tumults of applause; almost every alehouse had its artisans haranguing in favour of republicanism and equality.’33 Godwin represents the mass meetings, debating clubs, and lectures associated with the LCS as sites where good intentions had been ‘overwhelmed by the contagiousness of human passions when expressed in society’ (PPW 2:176). Thelwall had become perhaps the most celebrated public performer at these venues by 1796, ironically devoting a great deal of his time there to disseminating the tenets of Political Justice. Despite these credentials, his populism had already earned him a stinging rebuke from Godwin in Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr Pitt’s Bills (1795). Godwin was writing against the Convention Bills that the government was attempting to steer through parliament at the end of 1795, legislation widely regarded to have Thelwall’s lecturing as its target. His strategy, as Mark Philp shows in his essay in this volume, was to present the acts as

Maniquis_3201_083_(Mee).indd 90

1/26/2011 5:13:23 PM



Godwin, Thelwall, and the Counter-Public Sphere

91

unnecessary measures against a radical movement essentially concerned with philosophical inquiry, but any strategic understanding of the attack on Thelwall cannot explain away the continuity with Godwin’s opinions on assemblies from Political Justice. Godwin complains that the absence of men of ‘eminence’ from LCS meetings meant that there was no one to ‘temper’ their excesses, and he goes on to imply that Thelwall himself could not direct the storm he was raising. Granting at least that Thelwall’s career commenced with ‘uncommon purity of intentions,’ he suggests that these intentions had become tainted along the way: ‘The lecturer ought to have a mind calmed, and, if I may be allowed the expression, consecrated by the mild spirit of philosophy. He ought to come forth with no undisciplined passions, in the first instance; and he ought to have a temper unyielding to the corrupt influence of a noisy and admiring audience.’34 This passage may leave us in some doubt as to whether Godwin believed Thelwall himself was guilty of ‘undisciplined passions,’ but it goes on to suggest that, whatever state the lecturer himself is in, he is likely to become infected by the crowd he addresses. Once animated, the interest of the crowd kindles into enthusiasm, and the infection overwhelms the speaker himself. Here it is the audience, ‘persons not much in the habit of regular thinking’ (PPW 2:133), that transports the speaker out of his regulated selfhood. It seems that the speakers of the LCS – Thelwall chief among them – were either not capable of regulating their own enthusiasm, and so were unable to distinguish inflaming from educating, or were likely themselves to be overwhelmed by a sympathetic identification with their audience. Literature requires leisure to consume, and the reflection that Godwin imagines as integral to reading brings with it an in-built regulating process. Things are rather different when one addresses crowds: ‘Sober inquiry may pass well enough with a man in his closet, or in the domestic tranquility of his own fire-side: but it will not suffice in theatres and halls of assembly. Here men require a due mixture of spices and seasoning. All oratorical seasoning is an appeal to the passions’ (PPW 2:133). Although Godwin may be implicitly gendering private conversation as feminine against what he perceived to be the brash masculine homo-sociality of artisan culture here and later in the essays of The Enquirer, Thelwall’s lectures in Beaufort Buildings were in fact given to a mixed audience, including curious gentlefolk, Godwin and his friend Amelia Alderson among them. Hester Piozzi, not actually present herself, was given a report of one lecture by a clergyman friend who described Thelwall as ‘a very fluent orator … [who] among much trash produces some very good hits.’35 The commercialization of poli-

Maniquis_3201_083_(Mee).indd 91

1/26/2011 5:13:23 PM

92

Jon Mee

tics found in Thelwall’s lecturing seems to conform perfectly to Habermas’s account of the ‘process that converted culture into a commodity’ and so ‘established the public as in principle inclusive.’36 Only a decade or so before, one anti-Jacobin novelist admitted, ‘our principal senators and barristers,’ including ‘the great Mr. Burke,’ had been trained at such mixed assemblies, but they have ‘dreadfully degenerated’ since the advent of Paine’s ‘political and theological trash.’ Now ‘every dapper apprentice’ and ‘illiterate labourer’ imagines himself a politician.37 Popular debating clubs had always been objects of suspicion for some elite cultural commentators, as we shall see, but in the 1790s the suspicion turned decisively to calls for government intervention and more intensive regulation. For Godwin too, this kind of society had become dangerously close to the flammable matter of the street. Amelia Alderson had no doubt what kind of response Godwin’s attack on Thelwall would meet in radical circles: ‘I read your “Considerations” with delight, but alas I fear my admiration of them has deprived me in the opinion of many of all claims to the honourable title of Democrat – I am afraid I must never show my face at certain political lectures again, unless I chuse to run the risk of being pointed at as a spy.’38 The lectures, of course, were Thelwall’s, and he was understandably furious at Godwin’s representation of them as pandering to the passions. Even so, as Mark Philp argues in this volume, Godwin’s pamphlet continues to offer a broadly reformist agenda. He made no political recantation as such (the continuities with Political Justice I have already discussed make this much clear). Thelwall may have complained that ‘the bitterest of my enemies has never used me so ill as this friend has done,’ but his anger came not just from a sense of personal betrayal.39 For all their important differences of perspective, Godwin’s attack spoke to a fear Thelwall had expressed himself, and here we have a crucial point. Godwin’s attitudes are not just a reflection of his personality, but part of a much more widespread anxiety – present even in many of the publications of the LCS itself – about the exact formula that would conjure a public sphere from out of the metropolitan crowd. In his speeches, including the one he made at Copenhagen Fields, Thelwall constantly urged orderliness on his listeners. He conceded to Godwin that the philosopher-politician had to act with ‘a caution bordering on reserve’ in case, ‘by pouring acceptable truths too suddenly on the popular eye, instead of salutary light he should produce blindness and frenzy.’40 Thelwall had a strong if complex sense of the irrationality of the mob. Usually, he identified it with popular religious feeling or ‘enthusiasm’ in its pejorative eighteenth-

Maniquis_3201_083_(Mee).indd 92

1/26/2011 5:13:24 PM



Godwin, Thelwall, and the Counter-Public Sphere

93

century sense of the word. He believed his own deism to be a more rational form of belief. In this spirit, furious at Godwin’s comparing him with Lord George Gordon, he pointedly contrasted the principles of the French Revolution with those of seventeenth-century Puritanism, rebutting Burke’s attempt to run them together under the category of enthusiasm: the fanatics of the seventeenth century ‘had light indeed (inward light) which, though it came not through the optics of reason, produced a considerable ferment in their blood, and made them cry out for that liberty, the very meaning of which they did not comprehend. In fact, the mass of the people were quickened, not by the generous spirit of liberty, but by the active spirit of fanaticism.’41 For Burke himself, such nice distinctions between fanaticism and reason hardly mattered: ‘But there is no doctrine whatever, on which men can warm, which is not capable of the very same effect. The social nature of man impels him to propagate his kind. The passions give zeal and vehemence. The whole man moves under the discipline of his opinions.’42 Burke’s supporters frequently applied this extended logic to Thelwall. Anti-Jacobin novels used him again and again as the crazed demagogue overwhelmed by his own enthusiasm. George Walker’s The Vagabond (1799), for instance, has Thelwall appear as Citizen Ego, who promotes the Godwinian ideas of the philosopher Stupeo ‘with the energy of enthusiasm.’43 What really mattered to such critics was that Thelwall’s desire for what he called ‘extensive circulation’ led him to address audiences they considered incapable of regulating their passions into rational public discourse.44 Thelwall did believe in disseminating ideas as broadly as possible, put that belief into practice, and for the most part trusted his audience to regulate themselves: ‘The scattered million, however unanimous in feeling, is but chaff in the whirlwind. It must be pressed together to have any weight. Deny them the right of association, and a handful of powerful individuals, united by the common ties of interest, and grasping the wealth of the Nation, may easily persevere in projects hostile to the wishes, and ruinous to the interests of mankind; and in the very midst of this execrated career, exult in apparent popularity.’45 Whatever anxieties Thelwall sometimes expressed, in practice he was willing to believe that the crowd who listened to his oratory could form itself into a public. His constant stress on the need for moderation may well betray an anxiety that his audience might not live up to his faith in them, but he was not on the outside of this question. As a man who had received only a basic education, once apprenticed to a tailor, he was particularly vulnerable to accusations that he himself lacked the cultural capital necessary to curb

Maniquis_3201_083_(Mee).indd 93

1/26/2011 5:13:24 PM

94

Jon Mee

such tendencies. Godwin’s Considerations implied as much, and, even in 1801, after Thelwall was embarked on a career as a poet and teacher of elocution, Francis Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review numbered him among those ‘shoemakers and tailors [who] astonish the world with plans for reforming the constitution, and with effusions of relative and social feeling.’ For Jeffrey, Thelwall’s ‘enthusiastic virtues’ – the choice of adjective is telling – were simply ‘an impatience of honest industry.’ Thelwall was very much aware that he was a self-fashioning graduate of the London debating clubs, a man who – from Jeffrey’s perspective – had made a name for himself with nothing more than the evanescent bubbles of his own hot air.46 He may have been a member of the select circle of the Philomathians, but Thelwall’s main place of political education was the more raucous space of the Society of Free Debate at Coachmaker’s Hall in Cheapside (a dancing academy when not being used by the Society). By 1780 the Society was already among the shows of London, widely advertised in the newspapers, and often attracting mixed audiences of several hundreds and even on occasion over a thousand.47 Anticipating the terms used in Jeffrey’s attack on Thelwall, The Times regularly chided such clubs for distracting men and women who ought to be about more productive work. Coachmaker’s Hall even elicited its own satirical poem in 1780, written by one Harum Skarum, who reports, ‘Our introductory sixpences, like death and stage-coaches, had levelled all distinctions, and jostled wits, lawyers, politicians, and mechanics, into the confusion of the last day.’ The debate that follows – between stock figures such as Sam Simple and Dick Frantic – presents the main topics as anti-popery (suggesting the context of Lord Gordon’s Protestant Association in 1780) and ‘our corrupt and traiterous Administration.’48 If newspaper advertisements suggest that such political topics were far from dominant for most of the 1780s, by the early 1790s Harum Skarum’s nightmare seemed to have become real. By the 1791–2 season, by which time Thelwall had become one of the managers, all but one of the Society’s debates discussed political matters.49 Sir John Sewell was one of many who called for the suppression of ‘these clamorous theatres,’ although he admitted to being himself ‘an habitual frequenter.’ His pamphlet Critique on the French Revolution (1793) is a transcript of a speech he gave at the Society in answer to ‘a most flaming eulogium on the excellence of the new [French] constitution.’50 The eulogist may well have been Thelwall, who was at the heart of the battle to keep the Society in operation. In April 1792 the landlord of Coachmaker’s Hall ‘came to Thelwall with indications of the utmost terror and alarm, and informed him, that

Maniquis_3201_083_(Mee).indd 94

1/26/2011 5:13:24 PM



Godwin, Thelwall, and the Counter-Public Sphere

95

in consequence of the threats and remonstrances of persons in authority, he could not venture to renew his agreement with the committee unless they would covenant not to bring forward, in their discussions, any questions of a political nature.’51 The Society moved to a tavern in Cornhill before being driven out of existence during the next season. What I want to stress about this snapshot of the development of this one debating club, however, is that Thelwall had practical experience of the way opinions could form themselves in the supposedly unpromising conditions of raucous popular debate. Indeed he gave a speech at Coachmaker’s Hall on precisely this topic: So far is the vulgar objection against discussion from being true – to wit – that after all their wrangling, each party ends just where it began, that I never knew an instance of men of any principle frequently discussing any topic, without mutually correcting some opposite errors, and drawing each other towards some common standard of opinion; different perhaps in some degree from that which either had in the first instance conceived, and apparently more consistent with the truth. It is, I acknowledge, in the silence and solitude of the closet, that long rooted prejudices are finally renounced, and erroneous opinions changed: but the materials of truth are collected in conversation and debate; and the sentiments at which we most revolt, in the warmth of discussion, is frequently the source of meditations, which terminate in settled conviction. The harvest, it is true, is not instantaneous, and we must expect that the seed should lie raked over for a while, and apparently perish, before the green blade of promise can begin to make its appearance, or the crop be matured. But so sure, though slow, in their operations, are the principles of reason, that if mankind would but be persuaded to be more forward in comparing intellects, instead of measuring swords, I can find no room to doubt, that the result must be such a degree of unanimity as would annihilate all rancour and intolerance, and secure the peace and harmony of society. In short, between all violent difference of opinion, there is generally a medium of truth, to which the contending parties might be mutually reconciled. But how is this to be discovered, unless the parties freely compare their sentiments? – If discussion be shackled, how are discordant opinions to be adjusted, but by tumult and violence? If societies of free inquiry are suppressed, what power, what sagacity, in such an age as this, shall preserve a nation from the convulsions that follow the secret leagues and compact of armed conspiracy.52

Although it was almost certainly first delivered no later than 1792, there

Maniquis_3201_083_(Mee).indd 95

1/26/2011 5:13:24 PM

96

Jon Mee

is much in the printed version of Thelwall’s speech that sounds like Godwin’s Political Justice. The stress on the collision of mind with mind balanced against the final authority of the deliberations of the closet is typical of Godwin, as is the idea of the slow harvest of truth, but what is really startling about the speech is the place where it was made. Thelwall was taking Godwinian ideas well beyond the closet or the conversational circle and into the societies for popular debate. Advertisements for the debating societies suggest the most likely occasion for the speech would have been the debate of 24 May 1792, just three days after the royal proclamation against seditious writings. The topic that day, according to the Gazeteer, was ‘Are Associations for Political Purposes likely to promote the happiness of the people, by informing their minds, or to make them discontented without redressing their grievances?’53 As an answer to this question, Thelwall was promoting a debate far beyond the confines of the kind of conversation encouraged by Godwin and doing it in a place that the philosopher was to define as inappropriate to deliberative reasoning. Defensive and even chippy Thelwall may have been when facing such charges, especially later in his career (his 1801 Memoir, for instance, condescends to the debating clubs as ‘ranting seminaries’), but he was also willing to represent his warmth as a sympathetic power within himself that justified his pretensions to address the public. What he termed variously ‘popular enthusiasm,’ ‘generous sympathy,’ or ‘social ardor’ provided the basis of his connection with his audience.54 This ‘sympathy’ connected him, he claimed, ‘with the whole intellectual universe,’ including ‘our starving manufacturers’ and ‘widows and orphans.’55 Thelwall’s inclusive address to ‘us’ reflects his own rhetorical status as an autodidact, one who presumed to speak to London’s plebeian public on the basis of abilities that he assumed his audience could share, whatever its social origins. Defending himself against charges that his public lecturing was inflammatory, Thelwall argued that French philosophy had suffered from being without ‘that active energy – that collected, unembarrassed, firmness and presence of mind, which nothing but the actual enjoyment of liberty, and an unrestrained intercourse with a bold, resolute, bustling and disputatious race of men can possibly confer.’56 The Tribune defended the lecturing form against Godwin’s assault precisely because it was capable of ‘combining together the advantages of elaborate research and popular enthusiasm.’ Without what Thelwall calls ‘generous sympathy,’ ‘a nation is but a populous wilderness, and the philosopher only a walking index of obsolete laws and dead-lettered institutes.’57 What

Maniquis_3201_083_(Mee).indd 96

1/26/2011 5:13:24 PM



Godwin, Thelwall, and the Counter-Public Sphere

97

Hazlitt suspected as showy theatricality, Thelwall saw as a stage in Thomas Paine’s ‘open theatre of the world.’58 Godwin and Thelwall could look like two sides of the same coin of enthusiasm to the critic looking from a conservative perspective in the 1790s. Hence their frequent appearance together in anti-Jacobin novels as paired characters committed to ‘energetic exertion.’ The former in his solitude conjured visions of an impractical perfection, refusing received opinion in the name of truth; the latter propagated them with a missionary zeal. In practice, if to different degrees, both men looked to regulate this flow of energy within a reformist agenda. This concern with regulation would seem to confirm Isaac Kramnick’s view that in the 1790s ‘bourgeois radicalism … casts an ominous shadow of discipline, regimen, and authority.’59 Godwin certainly retained an anxiety about the multitude’s ability to control their own enthusiasm, although we shouldn’t neglect the fact that he still, even in The Enquirer, subscribed to the Dissenting ideal of conversation as ‘collision.’ Godwin was perfectly willing to converse with men and women from different classes, including Thelwall, but the external conditions had to provide a regulatory context for their unformed minds (as they did in the Philomathian Society). This position, as Mark Philp shows, was not the product of an opportunistic recantation, but part of an ongoing reflection on this issue of political modalities. Even so, whatever his attitude to individual members of the popular radical movement, Godwin could not conceive of the LCS and its associates forming themselves into the kind of counter-public described by Geoff Eley. What his anxieties about cultural geography should alert modern scholars to is subtleties sometimes missing from Habermas’s account, no doubt because they were thrown into particularly sharp relief by the political context of the 1790s. With Thelwall, the case is perhaps even more complicated, not least by the fact that he made himself a public figure through the crowded and noisy debating clubs of the metropolis. The passions of the crowd for Thelwall always, even at his most ambivalent, retained the raw materials of a ‘generous sympathy’ that even in tumultuous popular meetings could be alchemized into a public sphere. Thelwall never abandoned at least the possibility of some more positive form of social energy being transmitted from what Wordsworth feared as the ‘press and danger of the crowd.’ Such debates about the crowd and the public almost certainly contributed in their way to a Romantic withdrawal from urban social space. For all his repudiation of Godwin in The Prelude, this may have been some-

Maniquis_3201_083_(Mee).indd 97

1/26/2011 5:13:24 PM

98

Jon Mee

thing Wordsworth retained from his former master. Even at his most radical, writing to William Mathews in June 1794, Wordsworth was insisting that ‘I severely condemn all inflammatory addresses to the passions of men.’60 Wordsworth’s poetry may have created within itself a place for the passions of ordinary men and women, but these were usually figured in terms of spaces beyond or above the reach of the crowd, and increasingly were made the concern of the carefully policed space of the literary public.61

NOTES   1 William Wordsworth to William Mathews, Sunday, 8 June 1794. Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, vol. 1: The Early Years 1787–1805, 2nd ed., ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. Chester L. Shaver (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 125.   2 Anon., Account of the Proceedings of a Meeting of the LCS, held in a Field near Copenhagen House, Monday, Oct. 26, 1795 (London, 1795), 16.   3 See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). Revisionist accounts are legion, but include Geoff Eley’s ‘Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century,’ in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 289– 339 and Nancy Fraser’s critique of the way Habermas ‘treats deliberation as the privileged mode of public-sphere interaction’ in her ‘Politics, Culture, and the Public Sphere: Towards a Postmodern Conception,’ in Social Postmodernism: Beyond Identity Politics, ed. Linda Nicholson and Steven Seidman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 292.   4 Eley’s account of popular radicalism tends to perpetuate Habermas’s emphasis on deliberative reason over more affective, sociable, and performative aspects of critical discourse. See the discussion of this issue in Jon Mee, ‘Policing Enthusiasm in the Romantic Period: Literary Periodicals and the “Rational” Public Sphere,’ in Spheres of Influence: Intellectual and Cultural Publics from Shakespeare to Habermas, ed. Alex Benchimol and Willy Maley (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), 175–6.   5 The phrase ‘press and danger of the crowd’ comes from Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1805), 7.657, in The Prelude: The Four Texts (1798, 1799, 1805, 1850), ed. Jonathan Wordsworth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995).   6 William Hazlitt, ‘On Writing and Speaking,’ in The Complete Works of William

Maniquis_3201_083_(Mee).indd 98

1/26/2011 5:13:24 PM



Godwin, Thelwall, and the Counter-Public Sphere

99

Hazlitt, 21 vols., ed. P.P. Howe (London and Toronto: J.M. Dent, 1931–4), 12:265.   7 Paul Magnuson, quoted in Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite, ‘Introduction,’ in Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain 1770– 1840, ed. G. Russell and C. Tuite (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 4.   8 Ibid.   9 Habermas, 30–1 and 45–6. 10 See, for instance, John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: HarperCollins, 1997), 34–9, 100–4, 427–8. An exception is Victoria Myers’s fascinating discussion of the development of the idea of conversation in Godwin’s writing up to and including Political Justice in ‘William Godwin and the Ars Rhetorica,’ Studies in Romanticism 41, no. 3 (2002), 415–44. See also Jon Mee, ‘“The Uses of Conversation”: William Godwin’s Conversible World and Romantic Sociability,’ forthcoming in Studies in Romanticism, for further development of some of these ideas. 11 John Thelwall, The Tribune (1795–6), 2:xiv. Thelwall uses the phrase in defending himself against Godwin’s attack, implicitly denying any qualitative difference between conversation and debate. 12 William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. Mark Philp, vol. 3 of Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, 7 vols., gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: William Pickering, 1993), 15. All other references to Godwin’s prose will be to this collected edition, cited as PPW with volume and page numbers. 13 Russell and Tuite, ‘Introduction,’ in Romantic Sociability, 17. 14 See John Thelwall, Political Lectures (No. 1): On the Moral Tendency of a System of Spies and Informers, and the Conduct to be Observed by the Friends of Liberty during the continuance of such a System (London, 1794), 7, and Russell and Tuite, ‘Introduction,’ in Romantic Sociability, 17. 15 Myers, ‘William Godwin,’ 419. 16 See Habermas, Structural Transformation, 28–30. 17 Rowland Weston, ‘Politics, Passion and the “Puritan Temper”: Godwin’s Critique of Enlightened Modernity,’ Studies in Romanticism 41, no. 3 (2002), 445–70. Weston emphasizes the philosophical sources of Godwin’s thinking rather than his imagining the spaces of sociability or, indeed, Godwin’s own social practice. 18 Daniel E. White, Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 25. 19 Isaac Watts, The Improvement of the Human Mind: A Supplement to the Art of Logick (London, 1741), 43 and 44. Shaftesbury believed that ‘All Politeness

Maniquis_3201_083_(Mee).indd 99

1/26/2011 5:13:24 PM

100

Jon Mee

is owing to liberty. We polish one another, and rub off our corners and rough sides by a sort of amicable collision. To restrain this, is inevitably to bring a rust upon mens understandings’ (Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999], 31). 20 On Watts and the reorientation of Dissent towards ‘affectionate religion,’ as she puts it, see Isabel Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England 1660–1780, vol. 1: Whichcote to Wesley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), ch. 4. Rivers (175) points out that Watts ridiculed Shaftesbury and his idea of politeness in The Improvement of the Mind. On Watts’s friendship with Godwin’s grandfather, see William St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys: The Biography of a Family (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), 2. On Barbauld in relation to this process, see Jon Mee, ‘“Severe contentions of friendship”: Barbauld, Conversation, and Dispute,’ in Repossessing the Romantic Past, ed. Heather Glen and Paul Hamilton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 21–39. 21 Godwin’s diary, Oxford, Bodleian MS Abinger e. 4. I am grateful to the editors of the diary, Mark Philp, Victoria Myers, and David O’Shaughnessy, for their help. 22 See the discussion of this issue in Jon Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 23 The British Critic 1 (1793), 317. 24 Samuel Parr, A Spital Sermon, preached at Christ Church, upon Easter Tuesday, April 15, 1800 (London, 1801), 2. 25 On attempts to separate Shaftesbury’s classical enthusiasm from the association of the word with the passions, especially religious, of the crowd, see Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation, passim and, in relation to Godwin in particular, 110–13 and 115. 26 Godwin’s diary, supplement, Oxford, Bodleian MS Abinger e. 33. Godwin originally wrote ‘the vulgar’ after ‘not only,’ but crossed it out. I am grateful to David O’Shaughnessy for help with this reference. 27 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, in The French Revolution 1790–94, ed. L.G. Mitchell, textual ed. William B. Todd, vol. 8 of The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, gen. ed. Paul Langford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 97–8. 28 See St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys, 92–3, and John Thelwall, Ode to science. Recited at the anniversary meeting of the Philomathian Society, June 20, 1791 (London, 1791).

Maniquis_3201_083_(Mee).indd 100

1/26/2011 5:13:24 PM



Godwin, Thelwall, and the Counter-Public Sphere

101

29 John Binns, Recollections of the Life of John Binns: Twenty-Nine Years in Europe and Fifty-Three in the United States (Philadelphia, 1854), 45. 30 ‘Prospectus for a Select Club,’ Oxford, Bodleian MS Abinger c. 32. ‘Truth’ and ‘knowledge’ are added to ‘mind’ in the manuscript. See St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys, 91–2. 31 William Godwin, The Enquirer. Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature. In a series of essays, in Educational and Literary Writings, ed. Pamela Clemit, PPW 5:78. 32 Weston, ‘Politics, Passion and the “Puritan Temper,”’ 457. 33 William Godwin, Thoughts Occasioned by the Perusal of Dr Parr’s Spital Sermon, in Political Writings II, ed. Mark Philp, PPW 2:169. 34 William Godwin, Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr Pitt’s Bills, in Political Writings II, ed. Mark Philp, PPW 2:130 and 132. 35 The Rev. Daniel Lysons to Piozzi, 29 January 1796, in The Piozzi Letters, vol. 2: 1792–1798, ed. Edward A. Bloom and Lillian A. Bloom (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991), 306. 36 See Gillian Russell, ‘Spouters or Washerwomen: The Sociability of Romantic Lecturing,’ in Russell and Tuite, eds, Romantic Sociability, 36. 37 Thomas Harral, Scenes of Life (1805), quoted in Kevin Gilmartin, Writing against Revolution: Literary Conservatism in Britain, 1790–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 183. 38 ‘Amelia Alderson to William Godwin,’ 5 February 1796, Oxford, Bodleian MS Abinger c. 3/16–17. Later in the letter, Alderson playfully imagines Godwin being accused of accepting a government pension, a joke one doubts he enjoyed very much. 39 See John Thelwall, Sober Reflections on the Seditious and Inflammatory Letter of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, to a Noble Lord, 2nd ed. (London, 1796), 105. 40 Ibid., 16. 41 Thelwall, Tribune, 3:188. See also Michael Scrivener, ‘John Thelwall and the Revolution of 1649,’ in Radicalism in British Literary Culture: From Revolution to Revolution, ed. Nigel Smith and Timothy Morton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 119–32. 42 Edmund Burke, Second Letter on a Regicide Peace, in The Revolutionary War 1794–7, ed. R.B. McDowell, vol. 9 of Writings and Speeches, gen. ed. Paul Langford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 278–9. 43 George Walker, The Vagabond: A Novel, 2 vols. (London, 1799), 2:78. 44 John Thelwall, Peaceful discussion and not tumultuary violence the means of redressing national grievances (London, 1795), iv. 45 John Thelwall, The Natural and Constitutional Right of Britons to Annual Parliaments, Universal Suffrage, and the Freedom of Popular Association (London,

Maniquis_3201_083_(Mee).indd 101

1/26/2011 5:13:24 PM

102

Jon Mee

1795), 68. I am grateful for the help of Georgiana Green on this point. See her essay ‘John Thelwall’s Vision of Democracy,’ in John Thelwall: Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon, ed. Steve Poole (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009), 71–81. 46 See Jeffrey’s review of Thelwall’s Poems (1801) in the Edinburgh Review 2 (1803), 197 and 200 and the discussion in Mee, ‘Policing Enthusiasm,’ 187–90. 47 Russell, ‘Spouters or Washerwomen: The Sociability of Romantic Lecturing,’ in Russell and Tuite, eds., Romantic Sociability, 139, shows that Coleridge rejected the Hall as a venue for his own lectures in 1811 because of its heritage. 48 ‘Harum Skarum,’ Account of a Debate in Coachmaker’s Hall (London, 1780), 2 and 18. 49 Mary Thale, ‘London Debating Societies in the 1790s,’ The Historical Journal 32 (1989), 62. 50 Sir John Sewell, Critique on the late French Revolution, in a speech delivered at the Society for Free Debate (London, 1793), 7, 2, and 8. 51 Thelwall, On the Moral Tendency of a System of Spies and Informers, iii. 52 Life of John Thelwall, by his Widow (London, 1837), 51. 53 London Debating Societies, 1776–1799, comp. and intro. Donna Andrew (London: London Record Society, 1994), 321. 54 Thelwall, Tribune, 2:xii, xiv, and xv. 55 Thelwall, On the Moral Tendency of a System of Spies and Informers, 13 and 11. 56 Thelwall, Sober Reflections, 93. 57 Thelwall, Tribune 2:xii and xiv–xv. 58 Paine, Rights of Man, ed. Eric Foner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 182. 59 Isaac Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth-Century England and America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 97–8. 60 Wordsworth to Mathews, Sunday, 8 June 1794, in Letters, 1:125. 61 The author wishes to acknowledge the support of the Leverhulme Trust in providing the Major Research Fellowship that made the writing of this paper possible.

Maniquis_3201_083_(Mee).indd 102

1/26/2011 5:13:24 PM

chapter four

‘Awakening the Mind’: William Godwin’s Enquirer GARY HANDWERK

Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and does not cease to be more of a slave than they are. Rousseau, The Social Contract1

Parental affection is, perhaps, the blindest modification of perverse selflove … Parents often love their children in the most brutal manner, and sacrifice every relative duty to promote … the future welfare of the very beings whose present existence they imbitter by the most despotic stretch of power. Power, in fact, is ever true to its vital principle, for in every shape it would reign without controul or inquiry. Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman2

For all of his prominence as a political philosopher and a novelist, William Godwin may well have been most persistently committed to his role as educator. From his early educational prospectus of 1783, ‘Account of a Seminary,’ to his late Thoughts on Man (1831), Godwin remained concerned throughout his life with the problem of pedagogy, how children might be raised in ways that would best unfold their human potential – and concerned not simply in a theoretical sense, for he was himself the father of five children, and the publishing house that he and his wife ran for many years took as one of its primary objectives the creation of a body of instructional children’s literature. In this, he was like many thinkers of the Enlightenment, convinced that education was the crucial mechanism for transforming society and that a revolution in society could best be achieved by revolutionizing educational practices.3 Yet he

Maniquis_3201_103_(Handwerk).indd 103

1/26/2011 5:19:42 PM

104

Gary Handwerk

stands on the threshold of the nineteenth century as well, his thoughts focused consistently upon two similarly transitional figures whose pedagogical work anticipates and influences (albeit in quite different ways) Romantic-era debates about education, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Mary Wollstonecraft.4 Godwin embarks upon the topic of education, as he does many others, from a few fundamental propositions. ‘Nature,’ he tells us in Thoughts on Man, ‘never made a dunce.’5 There may be days when educators doubt this, both with respect to their pupils and with respect to themselves; duncedom seems not quite so rare as Godwin might have wished. But he holds firmly to this proposition; his lengthy essay in Thoughts on Man, ‘Of the Distribution of Talents,’ makes the strongest possible claim for the fundamental capabilities of virtually all human beings. Whence, then, do dunces arise? Godwin’s answer to this question is equally clear and very much in line with Enlightenment predecessors such as Locke or Voltaire. It is, The Enquirer argues, the ‘present order of society’ that is ‘the great slaughter-house of genius and of mind. It is the unrelenting murderer of hope and gaiety, of the love of reflection and the love of life.’6 More than anything else, it turns out to be the ordering of education, as practised in his time, that crushes the imaginative and creative potential of so many of those who are subjected to it. Among British writers (to look no further than that), Godwin was far from the last to denounce the educational practices of his age; Dickens’s Hard Times, Lawrence’s The Rainbow, and innumerable other texts come quickly to mind. Indeed, it could be doubted whether any of us anywhere in the anglophone world are much advanced beyond Godwin’s lament. We have in the United States, for instance, invented the notion of schools of education, where a social science approach to education predominates, a perspective that persists in seeing learning and intellectual development as testable and quantifiable processes.7 For them, and for ourselves, Godwin’s admonition in The Enquirer could well be kept in mind as a measure for our discussions today. ‘Let us not, in the eagerness of our haste to educate, forget all the ends of education’ (115). With regard to this still-pressing social issue, Godwin, I would contend, is of real – though doubtless also historically limited – assistance. There is no recipe for contemporary educational reform to be found in his works, no answer to our own still-urgent problems. But there is a frankness about the purposes and practices of education that might serve us well, if we could pause in our haste to educate and reflect upon its intent. Having levelled the field around him, Godwin begins his own act

Maniquis_3201_103_(Handwerk).indd 104

1/26/2011 5:19:43 PM



William Godwin’s Enquirer

105

of educational construction with a foundational premise of his own. ‘All education is despotism. It is perhaps impossible [and Godwin, I would add, tends to be most firmly convinced precisely when he uses the word ‘perhaps’] for the young to be conducted without introducing in many cases the tyranny of implicit obedience. Go there; do that; read; write; rise; lie down; will perhaps for ever be the language addressed to youth by age’ (E, 107). I, at any rate, find this assessment to be deeply comforting; there is doubtless an educational despot inside many of us, needing little more than such reinforcement to be let loose. But the force of Godwin’s commentaries upon education is really to push us in the opposite direction, to lead us to ask how much restraint we can responsibly remove from the practice of education, and what we can use to replace it. For replace it we must; even Godwin concedes that, standing as he did in the midst of the pedagogical transition replacing external with internal motivations for learning, the trajectory that Foucault has taught us to recognize as the self-disciplining of the subject.8 Though concerned with education across his entire career, Godwin at different times approached this topic in different ways and through a shifting variety of genres. He followed up his early ‘Academy’ prospectus with two large collections of essays, The Enquirer of 1797 and Thoughts on Man of 1831, both of which put educational issues at the heart of their discussions. A second strand of Godwin’s reflections occurred in the mode of fiction. All of his novels from Caleb Williams on are Bildungs­ romane, tracing the effects of early upbringing and education upon the development of character and personal destiny. Indeed, Godwin could well be called the inventor of the Bildungsroman in England – not that he was the first to write novels of education, but that he was perhaps the first to bring to the genre the same philosophical rigour and comprehensive attention across his entire career that Goethe had exhibited in his movement from Werther to the Wilhelm Meister novels, along with a hard-won political understanding that Goethe arguably lacked. Godwin, moreover, played a significant role in the emergence in England of specifically educational literature, a third way of approaching this topic. With other essays in this volume dealing more extensively with the second and third of these strands,9 I want to focus upon the first, William Godwin’s contribution to pedagogical theory.10 The first portion of Godwin’s career as a writer could be said to culminate in his magnum opus of 1793, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness. This work was a comprehensive, systematic treatise on political theory for which Godwin was widely celebrated (and

Maniquis_3201_103_(Handwerk).indd 105

1/26/2011 5:19:43 PM

106

Gary Handwerk

equally widely vilified) in his own era. There, Godwin made it clear that he saw politics and education as inseparably connected, but equally clear that he saw the prospects for widespread social reform to lie more with the former than the latter, with the former setting the conditions and solidifying the gains of the latter. ‘No task, which is not in its own nature impracticable, can easily be supposed more difficult, than that of counteracting universal error, and arming the useful mind against the contagion of general example. The strongest mind that proposed this as its object, would scarcely undertake the forming of more than one, or at most a very small number of pupils,’ a gradualist recipe for change through education, indeed.11 Four years later and deeper into the course of the French Revolution, however, Godwin is not the same man. By the time of The Enquirer, he writes in his preface, ‘With as ardent a passion for innovation as ever, he feels himself more patient and tranquil … he is persuaded that the cause of political reform, and the cause of intellectual and literary refinement, are inseparably connected’ (E, 79). The role of education (here termed ‘intellectual and literary refinement’) is to establish in human beings a capacity for both personal happiness and political justice; now education appears a more powerful means than politics, setting the conditions for political change. Yet the comment of Godwin on method that immediately follows this sentence is even more telling: ‘He ardently desires that those who shall be active in promoting the cause of reform, may be found amiable in their personal manners, and even attached to the cultivation of miscellaneous enquiries’ (E, 79). The elevation of British ‘amiability’ over an implicitly French lack thereof is doubtless not surprising in 1797. That Godwin should see it as a still further step to attach himself to cultivating ‘miscellaneous enquiries’ is, however, a transition worth noting. Godwin’s writings on education are in fact strikingly different from his early philosophical work. The Enquirer is framed by an elaborate methodological justification for this change in tack. While a systematic philosophical enquiry is ‘undoubtedly in the highest style of man,’ it is at the same time ‘liable to many disadvantages; and, though there be nothing that it involves too high for our pride, it is perhaps a method of investigation incommensurate to our powers’ (E, 77). Deduction gives way to induction, a building up from empirical observations and experience that will be the hallmark of Godwin’s method for the remainder of his life. Where Political Justice had followed in the Cartesian or Lockean pursuit of first principles, The Enquirer resulted from ‘an incessant recurrence to experiment and actual observation’ (E, 77) and displays, moreover, a

Maniquis_3201_103_(Handwerk).indd 106

1/26/2011 5:19:43 PM



William Godwin’s Enquirer

107

deep reliance upon philosophical dialogue, rather than the distillation of a solitary mind communing with itself. ‘The Essays [in The Enquirer],’ Godwin says, ‘are principally the result of conversation … There is a vivacity and … a richness, in the hints struck out in conversation, that are with difficulty attained in any other method’ (E, 78). The results, he asserts, ‘are presented to the contemplative reader, not as dicta, but as the materials of thinking’ – materials that are, moreover, ‘committed to his mercy’ (E, 78).12 This shift in Godwin’s methodological perspective is, in my judgment, one of the most intriguing features of his career as a writer. It affects the substance as much as the process of his enquiries, and is one of the traits that locates him most clearly on the borderline between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Godwin explicitly distances himself henceforth from systematic methodologies, offering an ongoing critique of them throughout his later work. His Enquirer essay ‘Of the Sources of Genius’ gives most explicit expression to this new tendency in his work. Godwin argues there that ‘there is an insanity among philosophers, that has brought philosophy itself into discredit. There is nothing in which this insanity more evidently displays itself, than in the rage of accounting for every thing’ (E, 90). ‘There is,’ he adds, ‘a regularity and system in the speculations of philosophers, exceeding any that is to be found in the operations of nature. We are too confident in our own skill, and imagine our science to be greater than it is’ (E, 90). As Godwin’s novels will go on to demonstrate, philosophers and scientists (natural and social scientists alike) often take the world to be altogether too neat, whereas life itself is perpetually messy. At the close of the preface to The Enquirer, Godwin briefly alludes to one key factor in this shift of his, the course of the French Revolution, which had the effect of intensely reinforcing an already-emerging British aversion to theory that David Simpson has analysed brilliantly in Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt against Theory.13 Method, as Simpson points out there, is intimately linked by relations of reciprocal causality to both subject matter and conclusions.14 Godwin’s tack on education is thus, as one might expect, derived from and tied to his increasing concern with literature as a specific embodiment of educational material. His essays are designed to achieve what he sees as the primary purpose of education, awakening the mind,15 and focus extensively upon the role that literature – with its appeal to imaginative completion by its readers – can play in fostering intellectual reflection. They are, in the fullest sense of the term, essayistic, intentionally experimental, provocative and incomplete, not without method, but at

Maniquis_3201_103_(Handwerk).indd 107

1/26/2011 5:19:43 PM

108

Gary Handwerk

the same time actively anti-methodical. This methodological shift helps explain, too, Godwin’s choice of the novel as the primary genre in which he worked for the rest of his life.16 In his novels, one sees an author who might be described as one of the first theorists of the role of the unconscious in education (as, in his Political Justice, he had been one of the first analysts of its role in politics), actively using the open-endedness of the novel as form to pursue this investigation. For this reason and others, we should attend to reading The Enquirer and Thoughts on Man rightly, considering the rhetorical impact of their often lapidary style (and thus, Godwin’s distinctive intent in this genre of writing) against the prolixity of both Political Justice and the novels. Alan Richardson, one of the most astute writers on Romantic-era education, has termed Godwin’s Enquirer essays ‘forceful and undervalued writings on education,’ although he, too, devotes little space to explicating and re-valuing them. He does see in them, however, an alternative to the pendulum swings of the Lake poets between libertarian and reactionary views on education, an alternative to appealing to either ‘a transcendentalized nature or [an] idealizing [of] childhood experience.’17 In historical terms, Godwin’s stance opposes two other prevalent strategies as well, both a Lockean educational system based upon a naive faith in the inherent and precocious rationality of human beings and a Rousseauvian system founded upon a duplicity deemed necessary for dealing with creatures unalterably ruled by passions. In contrast to any of these three models, Godwin’s educational theory offers a more complex account of child psychology, a more multifarious view of the child’s mind. In origin, however, Godwin’s stance may be directed first and foremost against his own educational experiences, the specific content and methods that he experienced as a pupil in the home of Reverend Samuel Newton, a Sandemanian Calvinist of the worst stripe. ‘At Newton’s house,’ William St Clair reports in his biography, ‘Godwin was conscientiously whipped for any suspicion of deviationism. He was subjected to incessant lectures about his stiff-necked arrogance, which he was to remember for the rest of his life … Newton told him that he was fortunate not to have died during one of his many childhood illnesses for he would assuredly have gone straight to hell.’18 As any reader of Godwin’s novels might readily agree, an author’s values are likely to be shaped by this sort of childhood experience, in ways that he may find himself tracing over and over again in his fiction. Richardson points out that one key to Godwin’s pedagogical understanding lies in his ‘strong sense of the continuity between the child and the adult it must eventually

Maniquis_3201_103_(Handwerk).indd 108

1/26/2011 5:19:43 PM



William Godwin’s Enquirer

109

become … what the first-generation Romantics, with their child-angels, and best Philosophers, and spectral children of the woods, habitually repress … To read the Romantics on childhood uncritically is to forget (as Godwin does not) that the child is a “being of the same nature as ourselves”’ (108). And yet not of the same nature, too, for the child possesses an unawakened mind, stemming in part from its lack of wisdom gleaned from experience of the world. Exactly how, though, should one go about ‘awakening this mind,’ in Godwin’s eyes? In terms of his sense of pedagogical purpose, Godwin can seem at first much more a child of the Enlightenment, or perhaps of the Renaissance and its Classical forebears, than akin to his Romantic contemporaries. The opening essay of The Enquirer asserts that ‘the true object of education, like that of every other moral process, is the generation of happiness’ (E, 83), happiness understood as consisting in personal contentment and social virtue, with both of these, in turn, resting upon the acquisition of wisdom. We have, in short, Plato’s ancient triad of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Yet what Godwin takes from the Classical tradition goes well beyond what Enlightenment pedagogues would comfortably have adopted; we find here, that is, hints of Plato’s doctrine of recollection near at hand, if not fully embraced by Godwin. ‘When a child is born,’ Godwin continues, ‘one of the earliest purposes of his institutor ought to be, to awaken his mind, to breathe a soul into the, as yet, unformed mass’ (E, 84). A stunning claim from a Christian perspective, this need to breathe a soul into the child’s body is one place where Godwin anticipates the aesthetic and pedagogical aspects of emergent Romantic perspectives. The crucial task for the educator thus becomes what we now tend to term ‘engagement’ of the pupil, exciting her or his desire to learn. ‘Give but sufficient motive,’ says Godwin, ‘and you have given every thing’ (E, 84). Thirty-five years later, Thoughts on Man reiterates the same principle: ‘The mass of boys in the process of their education appear [dull, and of apprehension narrow and confused], because little of what is addressed to them by their instructors, awakens their curiosity, and inspires them with the desire to excel. The concealed spark of ambition is not yet cleared from the crust that enveloped it as it first came from the hand of nature’ (TM, 61). Hence, ‘It is of less importance … that a child should acquire this or that species of knowledge, than that, through the medium of instruction he should acquire habits of intellectual activity’ (E, 85). Learning how to learn, as we might say today, and learning as well how to want to do so. Lest we get overly optimistic about all this,

Maniquis_3201_103_(Handwerk).indd 109

1/26/2011 5:19:43 PM

110

Gary Handwerk

Godwin reminds us that ‘it is the most difficult thing in the world, for the schoolmaster to inspire into his pupil the desire to do his best’ (TM, 49–50). But Godwin shifts in an interesting way from his discussion of ‘mind’ in The Enquirer’s first essay to ‘genius’ as topic for the second and third – this ‘genius,’ presumably, the outcome of a successful education. There he says that ‘genius appears to signify little more in the first instance than a spirit of prying observation and incessant curiosity’ (E, 88) – the inevitable by-products of what Godwin terms an ‘active, mobile and turbulent’ mental energy. What makes Godwin of particular interest, I think, is that he never ceases to take the despotic undertow of the pedagogical situation seriously – a lesson that he doubtless learned in part from Rousseau, whose Émile lurks as a shadowy or explicit interlocutor behind many of the essays in The Enquirer. Godwin sees education as a frightening and frightful process, arguing that we lose sight of that element at our own peril. The language of slavery pervades his educational works, as if they were essentially a gloss upon Rousseau’s opening remarks in The Social Contract (the lines used as epigraph for my essay). ‘Of all the sources of unhappiness to a young person,’ Godwin exclaims, ‘the greatest is a sense of slavery. How grievous the insult, or how contemptible the ignorance, that tells a child that youth is the true season of felicity, when he feels himself checked, controlled, and tyrannized over in a thousand ways.’ And again, ‘There is no equality, no reasoning between me and my task-master. If I attempt it, it is considered as mutiny.’ Godwin goes so far as to claim, in a way that has to take modern readers aback and that sheds some light on the limits of Godwin’s own range of experience, that ‘the condition of a negro-slave in the West Indies, is in many respects preferable to that of the youthful son of a free-born European,’ for ‘the watchful care of the parent is endless. The youth is never free from the danger of its grating interference’ (E, 110–11).19 But this condition – a fact of which Rousseau takes maximum advantage in Émile, as Godwin never tires of pointing out – is not just that of the pupil. ‘Nothing can be more pitiable than the condition of the instructor in the present modes of education. He is the worst of slaves. He is consigned to the severest of imprisonments. He is condemned to be perpetually engaged in handling and rehandling the foundations of science … He is regarded as a tyrant by those under his jurisdiction, and he is a tyrant’ (E, 117). In short, he is at best a contributor on the very lowest of scales to the well-being of society. Yet we must recognize that despite his unremitting critique of the despotism inherent in education, Godwin also believes that despotism

Maniquis_3201_103_(Handwerk).indd 110

1/26/2011 5:19:43 PM



William Godwin’s Enquirer

111

to be inevitable, perhaps regrettable, but also necessary. It is not to be conjured or wished away or, worst of all, to be replaced by some sort of pseudo-freedom. Émile attempted precisely this sugar-coating of reality, the primary reason (as I have discussed elsewhere) that Godwin in texts such as The Enquirer and Fleetwood mounts such a steady barrage of criticism against Rousseau.20 ‘The situation I deprecate,’ Godwin says in the essay ‘Of Reasoning and Contention,’ ‘is that of a slave, who is endowed with the show and appearance of freedom … Do not fill me with the sublime emotions of independence, and teach me to take up my rest among the stars of heaven, if your ultimate purpose be to draw closer my fetters, and pull me down unwilling to the surface of the earth. This is a torture more exquisite and refined than all that Sicilian tyrants ever invented’ (E, 122–3). Despotism is fundamental to the educational enterprise, fundamental, in fact, to our experience of mind. Thus, Godwin’s argument for the continued teaching of foreign languages is based upon his sense that ‘he that is acquainted with only one language, will probably always remain in some degree the slave of language’ (E, 101). He will speak without even understanding ‘the full force of words.’ As Thoughts on Man puts it, ‘The human mind is a creature of celestial origin, shut up and confined in a wall of flesh … We beat ourselves to pieces against the wires of our cage, and long to escape, to shoot through the elements, and be as free to change at any instance the place where we dwell, as to change the subject to which our thoughts are applied’ (TM, 94). Neither, alas, is possible, but Godwin never ceases to meditate upon the relative degree of freedom to which we might aspire; he remains Enlightenment to the core.21 Enlightenment in orientation, but informed by a sensibility that, from the perspective of the twentieth century, we can hardly not call psychoanalytic and thus proto-Romantic. Godwin’s essays and novels focus upon the twin poles of the psychoanalytic relation – identification and resistance – seeing both in light of the psycho-social dynamics that shape the political arena. Thus, Essay 14 of The Enquirer begins by stating, ‘There is no problem in the subject of education more difficult and delicate of solution, than that which relates to the gaining the confidence, and excit­ ing the frankness of youth’ (E, 131; my emphases). And Essay 8 adds, ‘If I desire to do much towards cultivating the mind of another, it is necessary that there should exist between us a more than common portion of cordiality and affection. There is no power that has a more extensive operation in the history of the human mind, than sympathy … Where sympathy is strong, imitation easily engrafts itself … There is, as it were,

Maniquis_3201_103_(Handwerk).indd 111

1/26/2011 5:19:43 PM

112

Gary Handwerk

a magnetical virtue that fills the space between them: the communication is palpable, the means of communication too subtle and minute to be detected’ (E, 113).22 This is, for Godwin, one of those spaces beyond science, and reaches beyond the pedagogical setting to constitute the framework for social relations as a whole. ‘The seats of contact and sympathy between any one human being and his fellows are numerous. The magnetism of sentiment propagates itself instantaneously and with great force,’ with the result that ‘it is scarcely possible for a man to adhere to an opinion or a body of opinions, which all other men agree to condemn’ (E, 197). This power of opinion (Godwin’s characteristic term for what we would more likely call ideological conditioning) is imprinted as deeply on consciousness when writ small in the pedagogical theatre as it is when writ large on the political stage. As the slide from sympathy to imitation indicates, however, there is a real risk that this indispensable sort of identification will devolve into the error of mimicry. ‘The true object of education is not to render the pupil the mere copy of his preceptor, it is rather … that various reading should lead him into new trains of thinking, open to him new mines of science and new incentives to virtue; and perhaps, by a blended and compound effect, produce in him an improvement which was out of the limits of his lessons, and raise him to heights the preceptor never knew’ (E, 143). By way of contrast, we can see in Godwin’s Mandeville a narrative account of a teacher–pupil relation gone bad, where the titular hero of that novel proves unable to dispel within himself the traces of his tutor’s instruction. Though unprepossessing in appearance, Hilkiah, the tutor, ‘had something so unequivocally zealous and affectionate in his manner, as answered all the purposes of persuasion.’23 Persuade he does, with little effort, drawing the young Mandeville deeply into his anti-Catholic biases and creating the lens through which Mandeville will henceforth see the entire world. For Hilkiah, ‘the spring and main movement of religious zeal lay in this proposition, “that the Pope is Antichrist”’ (M, 47), and he uses his influence over his pupil’s sympathies to lead Mandeville down this same path. In this process of indoctrination, Hilkiah makes particularly astute use of the power of guiding his pupil’s reading. ‘A book my preceptor particularly recommended to my attention, was Fox’s Acts and Monuments of the Church; nor did I need much persuasion to a study, to which my temper inclined me, and which occasions that sort of tingling and horror, that is particularly inviting to young persons of a serious disposition,’ aroused by ‘the representation of all imaginable cruelties, racks, pincers and red-hot irons, cruel mockings and scourg-

Maniquis_3201_103_(Handwerk).indd 112

1/26/2011 5:19:43 PM



William Godwin’s Enquirer

113

ings, flaying alive, with every other tormenting method of destruction’ (M, 52). Delight of a particularly perverse kind here goes all too closely together with instruction. Mandeville’s experiences do, however, accord in essential ways with Godwin’s typical account of the experience of reading, rightly undertaken. Unlike Rousseau, for whom reading was anathema, or even Locke, for whom it can seem inessential, reading is at the heart of Godwin’s pedagogy, a key to the transformation of consciousness. The Enquirer includes essays devoted to cultivating an early taste for reading and for guiding pupils’ choice of texts. ‘Of Choice in Reading’ lays out Godwin’s now widely known distinction between the moral and the tendency of different literary works, and the long final section of the book provides a history of English style and an account of which authors are most worth reading.24 Identification, however, gets put forward as the essence of the act of reading. ‘When I read Thomson,’ Godwin says, ‘I become Thomson; when I read Milton, I become Milton. I find myself a sort of intellectual camelion, assuming the colour of the substances on which I rest’ (E, 96). There are two things, however, that keep this process of reading from lapsing into the sort of affective fixation that infects Mandeville: the variety of the reading involved and Godwin’s hermeneutics of reading. ‘He that revels in a well-chosen library, has innumerable dishes, and all of admirable flavor. His taste is rendered so acute, as easily to distinguish the nicest shades of difference. His mind becomes ductile, susceptible to every impression, and gaining new refinement from them all. His varieties of thinking baffle calculation, and his powers, whether of reason or fancy, become eminently vigorous’ (E, 96). This description carries echoes of Hume or Burke, and thus of neo-classical debates about taste, to be sure, but is presented without the intellectual detachment that both Hume and Burke saw as a constant part of the process of cultivating taste; identification is a crucial piece of the process, an affective identification depending in turn upon a flexibility of mind that, to Godwin, only children seem to possess. What he terms the ‘late reader’ is likely always to lack the capacity to merge imaginatively with his or her chosen authors (E, 96). From the right sort of reading, cultivated at the right stage of life, talents can most readily be fostered. ‘All talent,’ says Godwin, ‘may perhaps be affirmed to consist in analysis and dissection, the turning a thing on all sides, and examining it in all its variety of views. An ordinary man sees an object just as it happens to be presented to him, and sees no more. But a man of genius takes it to pieces, enquires into its cause and effects, remarks its internal structure, and considers what

Maniquis_3201_103_(Handwerk).indd 113

1/26/2011 5:19:43 PM

114

Gary Handwerk

would have been the result, if its members had been combined in a different way, or subjected to different influences’ (E, 103). But here again, we find traces of Caleb Williams. It would be hard to imagine any figure in late-eighteenth-century fiction better characterized by ‘a spirit of prying observation and incessant curiosity’ and by an analytical propensity to examine things from all sides, or any literary character for whom the results of this process are more tragic. Falkland and Caleb offer Godwin’s earliest meditation upon the identificatory process, and perhaps his earliest examination of the tutor–pupil relation as well. Falkland is perpetually attempting to teach Caleb lessons; Caleb just as persistently refuses to learn. The discussion of identification thus leads inevitably to discussion of resistance, the other half of the psychoanalytical relationship, and a propensity that Godwin celebrates. As Thoughts on Man puts it, ‘An overwhelming majority of lads at school are in their secret hearts rebels to the discipline under which they are placed … Where this is the case, the wonder is not that [the pupil] does not make a brilliant figure. It is rather an evidence of the slavish and subservient spirit incident to the majority of human beings, that he learns any thing’ (TM, 58). There is, the same essay notes, a ‘torpedo effect of what we may call, under the circumstances, the difference of ranks. The schoolmaster is despot to his scholar … Nor is it simple terror that restrains the boy from answering his senior with the same freedom and spirit, as he would answer his equal. He does not think it worth his while to enter the lists’ (TM, 49). People are born with the potential to be free; we systematically cripple that capacity, Godwin argues, and cultivate in them, at best – and I really do mean ‘at best’ – an active resistance to learning. The result is that ‘every lesson that is prescribed, is a source of indirect warfare between the instructor and the pupil, the one professing to aim at the advancement of him that is taught, in the career of knowledge, and the other contemplating the effect that is intended to be produced upon him with aversion, and longing to be engaged in any thing else, rather than in that which is pressed upon his foremost attention’ (TM, 63).25 As the essay ‘Of the Early Indications of Character’ notes, it is precisely the most essential intellectual capacities that are the most troublesome. ‘[The young person’s] curiosity however may frequently be found to be an obstinate, self-willed principle, opening veins of its own choosing, wasting itself in oblique, unprofitable speculations, and refusing to bring its energies to bear upon a pursuit pointed out to it by another’ (E, 146). Similarly, the other traits most characteristic of genius, candour and love of distinc-

Maniquis_3201_103_(Handwerk).indd 114

1/26/2011 5:19:43 PM



William Godwin’s Enquirer

115

tion, all too readily turn into deeply rooted obstacles to education and potential pitfalls of character. As Caleb Williams makes so beautifully clear, the worst results occur when the curiosity and observation of the pupil turn back upon the preceptor himself. But how can this not fail to happen? Is there anything more predictable, more normal in the educational process than precisely this sort of scrutiny, and the re-intensification of resistance that results from it? One might in fact read Godwin’s distinction between the moral and tendency of a work in the same way, as a mark – both valuable and regrettable – of a good reader’s own tendency to resist the work placed before her.26 This distinction, one of the most fruitful points of inquiry in recent Godwin criticism, occurs in ‘Of Choice in Reading,’ where Godwin lays the ground for it by speaking first of curiosity. ‘To curiosity,’ he says, ‘it is peculiarly incident, to grow and expand itself under difficulties and opposition. The greater are the obstacles to its being gratified, the more it seems to swell, and labour to burst the mounds that confine it’ (E, 136).27 Although Godwin focuses his hermeneutic distinction upon what we might be tempted to see ultimately as matters of readerly or historical reception – ‘moral’ is defined as ‘that ethical sentence to the illustration of which the work may most aptly be applied’ and ‘tendency’ as ‘the actual effect it is calculated to produce upon the reader, [which] cannot be completely ascertained but by the experiment’ – he notes that individual temperament, specifically ‘the previous state of the mind of the reader,’ has an important impact as well. ‘Tendency,’ then, I would argue, captures the proclivity towards resistance that makes readers – and good readers in particular – resist the ‘moral’ of a given work and actually want to read it otherwise than the author intended. The transmission of knowledge or opinions is, in Godwin’s eyes, a contentious business indeed – and rightly so. My discussion thus far has focused primarily, I would concede, upon what Godwin does best: critique. Actual reform, along with specific steps in its direction, remains another matter altogether, not flowing inevitably from the preceding critique. If any of Godwin’s works can be argued to offer even hints for pedagogical procedure, the best candidate might be the longest essay in Thoughts on Man, ‘Of the Distribution of Talents.’ There Godwin speculates about intellectual capacity, working through his own version of the nature versus nurture or hard-wired versus socialconstructivist debates. Talents, he argues, are widespread and various. ‘As, in the infinite variety of human beings, there are no two faces so alike that they cannot be distinguished, nor even two leaves plucked

Maniquis_3201_103_(Handwerk).indd 115

1/26/2011 5:19:43 PM

116

Gary Handwerk

from the same tree, so there are varieties in the senses, the organs, and the internal structure of the human species, however delicate, and to the touch of the bystander evanescent, which give to each individual a predisposition to rise to excellence in one particular art or attainment, rather than in any other’ (TM, 61–2).28 There is a dash of Calvinist predestination present here, to be sure, but Godwin clearly asserts the case for social equality, even while foregrounding the immense difficulty for anyone of ascertaining which talents lie where. ‘Nature,’ he says, ‘distributes her gifts without any reference to the distinctions of artificial society,’ and, in fact, without much discernible or predictable regularity (TM, 55). ‘The talents of the mind, like the herbs of the ground, seem to distribute themselves at random. The winds disperse from one spot to another the invisible germs; they take root in many cases without a planter; and grow up without care or observation’ (E, 94), and it is, in the end, ‘comparatively a very little way that we can penetrate into the mysteries of nature’ (TM, 55), such as this distribution of talents. Nor is any particular observer likely to be especially good at accounting for this, neither teacher, nor parent, nor even the pupil herself. The pedagogy that results from this principle is necessarily opposed to any systematic mode of instruction, a theory of varied learning styles taken to the maximum possible extent. It involves, among other things, an artful skill in recognizing, balancing, and channelling the processes of identification and resistance. Very much like Rousseau’s pedagogy, it also builds in a significantly active role for the student. In The En­ quirer Godwin, in fact, goes a step beyond Rousseau, while underscoring the revolutionary import of his gesture. ‘This plan [of letting students choose what they wish to learn] is calculated entirely to change the face of education. The whole formidable apparatus which has hitherto attended it, is swept away. Strictly speaking, no such characters are left upon the scene as either preceptor or pupil’ (E, 115). The teacher should consult the pupil ‘unaffectedly, not according to any preconceived scheme, or for the purpose of persuading him that he is what he is not’ (E, 116). This principle, consistent with Godwin’s general philosophical anarchism, allows for great latitude with regard to choice in reading. If you are old enough to find it and to have wanted to find it, you are old enough to read it. ‘Trust him in a certain degree with himself … Suffer him to wander in the wilds of literature … Man is a creature that loves to act from himself; and actions performed in this way, have infinitely more of sound health and vigour in them, than the actions to which he is prompted by a will foreign to his own’ (E, 142–3).

Maniquis_3201_103_(Handwerk).indd 116

1/26/2011 5:19:44 PM



William Godwin’s Enquirer

117

We have here, of course, the conservative or neo-conservative nightmare of what the application of liberal educational principles is likely to produce, made even worse by the way in which ‘Of the Distribution of Talents’ concludes. ‘Above all,’ it says, ‘the beginnings of those studies should be encouraged, which unfold the imagination, familiarize us with the feelings, the joys and sufferings of our fellow-beings, and teach us to put ourselves in their place and eagerly fly to their assistance’ (TM, 65). We find social justice here at the end, just as one might have suspected all along from a never-cured Jacobin. Yet the more closely William Godwin looks at the prospect of educational self-regulation, the more impossible it seems to become for him as well. The general principle, articulated elsewhere, that ‘impartiality is a virtue hung too high, to be almost ever within the reach of man!’ recurs with a vengeance (E, 212). In charting a child’s most appropriate intellectual trajectory, ‘the declarations of the child himself are often of very small use’ (TM, 54). Moreover, even if we could accurately determine intellectual propensities, the mass production attendant upon public education works against nurturing them adequately. ‘The practices and modes of civilized life,’ the ‘Distribution of Talents’ notes, ‘prompt us to take the inexhaustible varieties of man, as he is given into our guardianship by the bountiful hand of nature, and train him in one uniform exercise, as the raw recruit is treated when he is brought under the direction of his drill-serjeant’ (TM, 53). Even then, one can scarcely hope to aim for and attain specified results. ‘The sower of the seed cannot foretell which seed shall fall useless to the ground, destined to wither and to perish, and which shall take root, and display the most exuberant fertility. As among the seeds of the earth, so among the perceptions of the human mind, some are reserved, as it were, for instant and entire oblivion, and some, undying and immortal, assume an importance never to be superseded’ (E, 95).29 The imprecision of our results is something that only ceaseless experiment can refine, and at best only partially; it seems evident that for Godwin you never can teach the same class twice. As any teacher knows well, last week’s trick fails miserably upon reuse; this week’s success comes out of nowhere. Yet Godwin does still insist that the present order of society magnifies these tendencies to deny liberal education to every individual, making many of them far worse than they need to be. ‘How are the majority of men trampled in the mire … long, very long, before there was an opportunity of ascertaining what it was of which they were capable! Thus almost every one is put in the place which by nature he was least fit for’ (TM, 52).

Maniquis_3201_103_(Handwerk).indd 117

1/26/2011 5:19:44 PM

118

Gary Handwerk

Somewhat surprisingly, given the evident defects of mass public education, Godwin retains a preference for public schools, the rightness of which the fates of the solitary heroes of his novels would seem to confirm. ‘Society,’ The Enquirer argues, ‘is the true awakener of man; and there can be little true society, where the disparity of disposition is so great as between a boy and his preceptor’ (E, 107).30 Second, private education tends to neglect the rudiments of learning; there, ‘the inglorious and unglittering foundations are seldom laid with sufficient care … Society [of the kind one finds in public schools] chears the rugged path, and beguiles the tediousness of the way. It renders the mechanical part of literature supportable’ (E, 107). But Godwin’s strongest reason in favour of public education derives, once again, from the principle that all education is despotism – for it turns out that public despotism is of a milder sort than private. ‘The most wretched of all slaveries is that which I endure alone; the whole weight of which falls upon my shoulders, and in which I have no fellow-sufferer to share with me a particle of my burthen … In the discipline of a public school I submit [not to the tyranny of an autocrat, but instead] to the inflexible laws of nature and necessity, in the administration of which the passions have little share.’31 Finally, Godwin adds, a public setting allows its students ‘to practise upon a smaller theatre the business of the world’ (E, 109), to learn, that is, the full gamut of human virtue and vice, enacted before their eyes. What Godwin’s writings on education provide in the end, then, is less a pedagogical prospectus than a philosophical – or perhaps more accurately, an interpersonal – tool, a compass that may help us make our way through the project of education with a somewhat better sense of direction, provided we learn how to use it. Poised between an inevitable despotism and an attractive but risky anarchism, Godwin’s ideal educator must remain as alert to the psychological and social dimensions of education as to its pedagogical and intellectual ones. The trick is not to try to reach a point of compromise or balance between them, but instead to tack back and forth, assessing in an ongoing way where each may best be employed. Rather than ending with anything as tidy as a conclusion, I would like to cite a cautionary fable, one of Godwin’s own – taken, admittedly, from the unreformed public school system that existed in Godwin’s day – a scene from Fleetwood that has long intrigued and continues to puzzle me, a parodic and painful enactment upon a thoroughly theatrical stage by the students with whom Fleetwood finds himself associating at Oxford. It is, he says, a story that he ‘feels inclined to relate’ for no obvious reason,

Maniquis_3201_103_(Handwerk).indd 118

1/26/2011 5:19:44 PM



William Godwin’s Enquirer

119

as an extreme instance of the ‘dull and unfeeling brutality’ of his peers. These students seize upon the opportunity offered by learning that a fellow student, himself something of a country bumpkin, has composed a tragedy based on the fifth labour of Hercules (the cleaning of the Augean stables). They obtain a copy of the script, praise it effusively, and urge Withers, eventually with success, to recite it at a public gathering. Godwin even goes so far as to offer his readers some sample verses from the play, relating of Hercules, ‘Here too thou must encounter odours vile, / And stand begrimed with muck: / Thy cheeks besmear’d, / Thy lineaments deform’d / Beneath the loathsome load.’32 As he reads, though Withers at moments suspects the mockery, his fellow students persuade him that the stifled hilarity stems from the inebriation that all the participants, Withers included, are experiencing. The following day, the ruse continues, as a student tells Withers that news of the raucous party has spread and that he has been called before the master of the college. They bring Withers to a room where a puppet has been made up in the image of the master, where a student skilled in ventriloquism proceeds to harangue Withers for his part in the proceedings, going so far in his abuse that Withers eventually attacks the puppet, demolishing it, and thereby realizes how far he has been victimized. Withers shuts himself up in isolation; he lapses into depression and eventually into insanity, and ends by drowning himself in the Thames. ‘The adventure which I have here recorded,’ says Fleetwood, ‘may seem foreign to my object, of painting my own story: I know not where, however, I could have found a more apt illustration to set before my reader the character of the persons by whom I was now seduced, and with whom I at present associated.’33 This story has its moral, to be sure, and Fleetwood draws it explicitly. But he pulls back from assessing its long-term consequences upon himself; he treats it with apparent detachment and resistance, as a stage through which he passes and beyond which he moves. He seems not to be identifying at all with his fellow students, and drifts apart from them as a result of this event. Yet this scene bears a striking resemblance to the climactic scene of the novel, where Fleetwood shuts himself up in a hotel room in France with wax figures of his wife and her supposed lover, conducting a mock anniversary dinner, where he plays out all of his paranoid and unjustified suspicions about his wife’s conduct – suspicions implanted in him by his Iago-like nephew, Gifford. There, Fleetwood imagines that the wax figures come alive and mock him, grinning and chattering, to which he replies with hisses and lowings and howls.

Maniquis_3201_103_(Handwerk).indd 119

1/26/2011 5:19:44 PM

120

Gary Handwerk

Like Withers, he attacks and tears apart the puppet figures, lapsing then into complete physical and mental enervation. The ‘tendency’ of this episode, to use Godwin’s term, survives long past its explicit assimilation by Fleetwood into the ethical furniture of his mind, offering an instance of repetition, born of resistance, that invites further analysis.34 These scenes may not map onto everyone’s college experiences with precisely the same vividness. But this tragic scene is where Godwin’s pedagogical writings intend to leave us, asking us to reflect upon the risks inherent in the educational process and upon a particularly unflattering portrayal of the pedagogue as a puppet in the service of unscrupulous or self-interested agents. It offers one of his most frightening examples of the identificatory processes unleashed by a misdirected educational setting. ‘All education,’ indeed, ‘is despotism.’35

NOTES   1 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. G.D.H. Cole (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1973), book 1, chap. 1, 181.   2 Mary Wollstonecraft, The Vindications, ed. D.L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1997), chap. 10, 289.   3 The most thorough study of Godwin’s ideas on education, and one still well worth reading, is Burton Pollin, Education and Enlightenment in the Works of William Godwin (Brooklyn: Las Americas, 1962). Pollin aligns Godwin emphatically with the Enlightenment (and Locke) and against the Romantics, a claim with a real measure of truth, but one that makes even Godwin’s philosophical work more one-dimensional than it is, and that leads Pollin to see a fundamental incongruence within Godwin’s work as a whole. Pollin says, for instance, ‘The ambience of the sentimental novel led Godwin into making greater concessions to the dominance of the emotions over human conduct in fiction than he was altogether willing to make in his more theoretical, reasoned works’ (46). This sort of statement replicates the same dualism of mental faculties that Godwin’s work seen as a whole critiques in fascinating ways.   4 These influences are clearly visible in Godwin’s two important treatises on education, both of them collections of shorter essays, The Enquirer (1797) and Thoughts on Man (1831). He was working on the former during the time of Mary Wollstonecraft’s pregnancy and death. See William St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys (New York: Norton, 1989), 169–78.   5 William Godwin, Thoughts on Man, in Essays, ed. Mark Philp, vol. 6 of Politi­

Maniquis_3201_103_(Handwerk).indd 120

1/26/2011 5:19:44 PM



William Godwin’s Enquirer

121

cal and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1993), 67. Hereafter cited parenthetically as TM.   6 William Godwin, The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners and Lit­ erature. In a Series of Essays, in Educational and Literary Writings, ed. Pamela Clemit, vol. 5 of Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1993), 89. Hereafter cited parenthetically as E.   7 One could cite a vast literature on this topic, but one recent piece of particular interest for university education is Gail Stygall’s ‘English Departments and the Circulation of Higher Education Policyspeak,’ ADE Bulletin 143 (Fall, 2007), 26–31.   8 Among his many writings on this topic, see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995).   9 Robert Anderson’s essay in this volume is particularly helpful in pointing out the philosophical and political juggling that Godwin felt he had to employ in his own writing for children. As Anderson notes, Godwin was acutely aware of the tension involved in producing a children’s literature that would be critical of the despotic tendencies of social existence, including those tendencies inherent in children’s literature of the same kind that Godwin himself was writing. Tilottama Rajan’s essay, also in this volume, deals astutely with some of the problems raised by Godwin’s political fiction. 10 Godwin’s own forays into practical education offer instructive evidence about how much more difficult practice can be compared to theory, even for the best-informed and best-intentioned of philosophers. At age thirtytwo, Godwin found himself serving as guardian and tutor for the orphaned son of a family friend. Thomas Cooper was twelve when he arrived at Godwin’s home. He was later described by Mary Shelley as ‘a spirited boy, extremely independent and resolute, proud, wilful, and indolent’ (C. Kegan Paul, William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries, 2 vols. [Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1876], 1:35). Kegan Paul’s narrative of Godwin’s life includes a number of letters from Cooper to Godwin, stretching across Cooper’s life and tracing his efforts to establish himself as an actor – unsuccessfully in Britain, but eventually, with considerably more success, in the United States. Those letters testify to a continuing affection and respect between the two men, yet also to the hard-won nature of this relationship for two equally proud and sensitive individuals. Kegan Paul offers a laconic summary of it in these terms, ‘It is not, however, probable that Godwin … had a gift for the drudgery of education’ (1:35), and describes the relationship of tutor and pupil as an often tumultuous one. Mary Shelley attributed the tensions in this experiment in large part to her father, noting that ‘his strictness was

Maniquis_3201_103_(Handwerk).indd 121

1/26/2011 5:19:44 PM

122

Gary Handwerk

undeviating; and this was more particularly the case early in life’ (Kegan Paul, 1:36), and adding that Godwin’s strictness and severity of manner made him unsuited to educating, probably in particular to educating a teenage boy. Shelley’s comments are instructive because Godwin later served as one of her primary instructors, an experience that clearly left her with an exceptional intellectual training and considerable ethical strength, as well as a strong affective attachment to her father (unsettlingly strong, perhaps, if one considers Mary’s novella treatment of incest, Mathilda). The difference in these situations may lie in part in what Mary perceived as Godwin’s ‘want of sympathy’ with Cooper, clearly not the case in her relationship with her father. Indeed, that interpretation fits remarkably well with the general transition in Godwin’s own career, as much personal as intellectual, towards a greater acknowledgment of the role of sympathy in all human matters. Nine years older, reshaped by his intense relationship with Mary Wollstonecraft and by his own reflections in The Enquirer, Godwin was far better prepared as a tutor for his own children than he had been for Thomas Cooper. On Mary’s education, see in particular chapter 2 of Emily W. Sunstein’s Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). Yet Godwin’s ongoing friendship with Cooper indicates that there, too, the younger Godwin may have been more successful than their struggles led him to conclude initially. 11 William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness, ed. Mark Philp, vol. 3 of Political and Philosophi­ cal Writings of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1993), 18. For a thoughtful discussion of Godwin’s stance in 1793, see the section entitled ‘The Debate on France’ in Mark Philp, Godwin’s Political Justice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 73–9. 12 Robert Anderson’s essay in this volume deals interestingly with the practical example of Godwin’s children’s literature as a place where this notion of presenting the ‘materials of thinking’ could be put into practical effect. 13 David Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt against Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). See particularly Simpson’s introduction and chapter 3, ‘The Myth of French Excess.’ 14 See Simpson’s discussion of method versus theory, introduced on pp. 7–8 and carried throughout his book. 15 ‘Awakening the mind’ is the title of the lead essay in The Enquirer. 16 As with so many of Godwin’s other decisions, financial exigencies (and thus, the potential returns from literary success in fiction) played a major role as well.

Maniquis_3201_103_(Handwerk).indd 122

1/26/2011 5:19:44 PM



William Godwin’s Enquirer

123

17 Alan Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 107. 18 St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys, 7–8. 19 Godwin’s naivety in using this comparison is obvious to a modern reader – but he clearly chooses it to underscore how horrific he felt contemporary pedagogical practices actually were. 20 I have written about this topic in ‘Mapping Misogyny: Godwin’s Fleetwood and the Staging of Rousseauvian Education,’ Studies in Romanticism 41, no. 3 (2002), 375–98. 21 This aspiration helps to explain the sometimes disconcerting moments in Enquiry Concerning Political Justice when Godwin, seemingly an arch-rationalist there, reflects upon such matters as the potential immortality of human beings, an immortality to be attained through the ‘omnipotence of mind.’ See book 8, chap. 7, ‘Of the Objection to this System from the Principle of Population.’ 22 The best account of Mary Wollstonecraft’s influence upon Godwin with regard to the topic of sympathy (with a subtle account of how this manifested itself in Godwin’s revisions of Political Justice) is in Mark Philp’s Godwin’s Po­ litical Justice. See especially chap. 8, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft and Political Justice.’ 23 William Godwin, Mandeville: A Tale of the Seventeenth Century in England, ed. Pamela Clemit, vol. 6 of Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1992), 45. Hereafter cited parenthetically as M. 24 See p. 115 below. There is now a rich scholarship on Godwin’s distinction. At the start of this discussion and still worth reading, see David McCracken, ‘Godwin’s Literary Theory: The Alliance between Fiction and Political Philosophy,’ Philological Quarterly 49 (1970), 113–33. 25 Godwin here repeats his telling phrase from The Enquirer: ‘In this sense a numerous school is, to a degree that can scarcely be adequately described, the slaughter-house of the mind. It is like the undertaking … to cut a whetstone with a razor’ (TM, 63). 26 The best treatment of this resistance with regard to Godwin’s works and its implications for the role of the reader is Tilottama Rajan, ‘Wollstonecraft and Godwin: Reading the Secrets of the Political Novel,’ Studies in Romanti­ cism 27, no. 2 (1988), 221–51. 27 I am inclined to read ‘mounds’ here as a misreading for ‘bounds.’ 28 Godwin’s epistemology is close in many ways to Nietzsche’s, especially the latter’s insistence upon the irreducible particularity of individual objects. Among Nietzsche’s many treatments of this theme, see, for instance, Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Truth and Falsity in an Ultramoral Sense,’ in Critical Theory

Maniquis_3201_103_(Handwerk).indd 123

1/26/2011 5:19:44 PM

124

Gary Handwerk

since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 634–9. ‘As certainly as no one leaf is exactly similar to any other, so certain is it that the idea “leaf” has been formed through an arbitrary omission of these individual differences’ (636). 29 By this point, readers have doubtless noticed the persistently organic nature of Godwin’s metaphors in speaking of a well-conducted education. Indeed, tracing Godwin’s ideas about education to the end would involve taking up his implicit view of nature and of the place of human beings within it – an ecocritical account of his work that remains to be written. 30 The target for this line is clearly Rousseau’s tutor in Émile. 31 Necessity was, of course, also Rousseau’s term for the ‘hidden hand’ that lies behind the actions of his governor for Émile, the only permissible source for the constraint to be laid upon Émile. 32 William Godwin, Fleetwood, Or the New Man of Feeling, ed. Gary Handwerk and A.A. Markley (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2001), 386–8. 33 Ibid., 90. 34 I have argued in my analysis of Fleetwood that the Lake Uri scene with Fleetwood and his surrogate father-figure, Ruffigny, elicits a similar sort of resistance that has equally deleterious effects. See Handwerk, ‘Mapping Misogyny,’ 391–8. 35 This essay is dedicated to Nick and to Shana, who have taught me so much about the processes and perversities of education, and second to my students in an autumn 2007 graduate seminar on Romantic theories of education, who taught me a great deal more.

Maniquis_3201_103_(Handwerk).indd 124

1/26/2011 5:19:44 PM

chapter five

Godwin Disguised: Politics in the Juvenile Library R O B E RT A N D E R S O N

1  The Mastiff’s Bargain In Fables, Ancient and Modern, William Godwin retells Aesop’s tale of the wolf and the mastiff. In the fable, a wolf happens to meet a mastiff and admires his ‘sleek coat’ and ‘full belly.’ The wolf introduces himself to the mastiff by calling attention to their close kinship, and asks the mastiff to explain the ‘sleek coat’ and ‘full belly.’ The mastiff replies that his master feeds him. All he has to do, the mastiff explains, is ‘bark, to frighten away idle people and thieves; I fawn upon my master, and behave civilly to all the family.’ Given the precarious nature of his own eating arrangements, the wolf finds this appealing. Brushing away the hints of a life of servility lurking in the requisite fawning, the wolf eagerly declares his willingness to try out the dog’s life: ‘I have no objection to all that; said the wolf; so, if you will introduce me to the farmer, and convince him how willing a servant he shall find me, you and I will be comrades for the rest of our lives.’1 The scenario is a familiar one in Godwin’s writings.2 Two travellers join together on the road and work out a relationship framed along a continuum between equality and hierarchy. The two come together as alien creatures: the wolf, a ‘savage’ living under all the uncertainties of uncivilized life, and the mastiff, enjoying the benefits – and privations – of living under what Lacan calls le nom du père. The wolf’s offer is a proposal not only to trade comfort for security, but also to strike up an egalitarian relationship. ‘You and I will be comrades for the rest of our lives,’ he says. But Godwin is careful to point out the trade-off involved in the decision. The price of the mastiff’s comfort is servility. To gain the comfort of

Maniquis_3201_125_(Anderson).indd 125

1/26/2011 6:03:23 PM

126

Robert Anderson

a ‘full belly’ and a ‘sleek coat,’ the wolf must sacrifice his independence. Although the political ramifications of the bargain begin to become clear to the reader at this point, in the story itself they remain latent. But politically charged elements energize the tale from the outset. The fable begins with a curious description of the wolf. It simultaneously presents the wolf’s predatory nature and justifies it. ‘A wolf is a beast of prey; and beasts of prey, like savage men in the woods, must endure to be very hungry and half-starved, when they happen not to meet with creatures fit for them to eat. Yet savages and beasts of prey have their pleasures; they are stronger and more dextrous in their motions, than the civilized and the tame.’3 The savage freedom here is of a piece with Enlightenment theories of the social contract in which humans trade freedom for security.4 This positive account of wolves is especially curious since the following fable begins by offering a very different image of wolves: ‘In the last fable the wolf appears to advantage, and I cannot say but that I should be disposed to be of his mind. A wolf however is a very terrible animal, and eats lambs and sheep and even little children. Thank God, there are no wolves in England.’5 This is one of the most productive moments in the collection, and, indeed, in all of Godwin’s writings for children. In the space of five short pages, the book presents two radically different accounts of a wolf. The contradiction leaves young readers with no clear guidance about the nature of a wolf. This rare moment of moral complexity and ambiguity in children’s literature (of any period) will ‘launch’ readers upon what Godwin called, in a letter to The British Critic defending Caleb Williams, a ‘sea of moral and political enquiry.’6 As Gary Handwerk shows in his contribution to this volume, this is entirely consistent with the rhetorical strategy outlined in The Enquirer, in which the materials ‘are presented to the contemplative reader, not as dicta, but as the materials of thinking.’7 So juxtaposed, the stories undermine facile judgments about wolves, and call attention to the contradictory value systems which underpin images of wolves as either ‘terrible’ killers that eat ‘lambs’ and ‘even little children’ or as creatures that prey only because they must. The contradictions counteract the authoritarian tendencies inherent in didactic children’s literature. Godwin’s writings for the juvenile library do not always resist the impulse towards moralizing simplification. Godwin justifies the wolf’s predations in the ‘The Wolf and the Mastiff’ because wolves here represent liberty, or, more concretely, people who enjoy the privileges of liberty. The bargain of freedom for security is not merely anthropological – reaching back to some imaginary pre-

Maniquis_3201_125_(Anderson).indd 126

1/26/2011 6:03:23 PM



Politics in the Juvenile Library

127

civilized freedom – but political – reaching out to broadly contemporary issues of liberty. Liberty was, of course, the political standard par excellence of liberal republican and radical opponents of the government. But liberals and radicals had no monopoly on the discourse of liberty. Edmund Burke, for example, was quite comfortable speaking about the virtues of ‘liberty.’8 What is more, even among those friends of liberty critical of the oppressive government, there was much disagreement about the nature of liberty. As Saree Makdisi has convincingly argued, ‘hegemonic radicals’ such as Tom Paine and John Thelwall operated with a limited bourgeois notion of liberty, ‘based solely on the sovereignty of the individual,’ and ‘independent of any social or historical constraints.’9 He identifies ‘No tumult! No levelling!’ as a kind of radical bourgeois refrain embodying the hegemonic radicals’ resistance to ‘the fierce rushing together’ of the multitudes agitating for change, a position Makdisi reserves for genuinely radical writers such as Blake.10 Godwin’s position among radicals (bourgeois and otherwise) is particularly vexed. Thelwall argued, for instance, that Godwin’s Political Justice ‘recommend[ed] the most extensive plan of freedom and innovation ever discussed by any writer’ at the same time that it ‘reprobate[d] every measure from which even the most moderate reform can be rationally expected.’11 Godwin’s twofold critique of political associations (collective organizations designed to agitate for reform) in Political Justice demonstrates the difficulty of classifying him. Noting their ‘tendency to disorder and tumult,’ he calls attention to ‘the ease with which the conviviality of a crowded feast may degenerate into the depredations of a riot.’12 Further, he argues that while ‘the interest of the whole requires’ ‘making each man an individual,’ a political association ‘resolves all understandings into one common mass.’13 His commitment to individualism and quiet, gradual reform appear to align him with what Makdisi calls the ‘hegemonic radicals’ (‘no tumult’ and the ‘sovereignty of the individual’). But Godwin’s stubborn commitment to a radical equality would appear to align him with the genuine radical camp. He argues, for instance, that ‘the good things of the world are a common stock, upon which one man has as valid a title as another to draw for what he wants.’14 Thus, placing Godwin within either the genuine radical or the bourgeois hegemonic radical camp oversimplifies his position, which however much it eschews ‘tumult’ certainly embraces ‘levelling,’ at least as an ideal. What is more, for Godwin, liberty is never independent of ‘social or historical constraints.’

Maniquis_3201_125_(Anderson).indd 127

1/26/2011 6:03:23 PM

128

Robert Anderson

The exchange which follows the wolf’s discovery of a ring of worn hair around the mastiff’s neck makes the political nature of the fable clearer. The mastiff conceals his shame about the ring and tries to pretend that it is of no significance. ‘I dare say it is nothing but the mark of the collar, which my master puts round my neck when he chains me up.’ When the wolf responds by repeating the mastiff’s last words, ‘Chains you up!’ the mastiff seeks again to downplay the obvious humiliation: ‘Yes, he generally chains me up in the day-time, that I may be more fierce of nights. Sometimes I am so foolish as to be tired of my chain; and then I struggle to get loose, and howl most dismally; and then my master comes with a great stick, and gives me a sound beating to make me quiet. But he gives me excellent meat every day, and as much as I can eat.’15 The mastiff’s response demonstrates the dynamics of oppression familiar to readers of liberal and radical critiques of the government: the mastiff not only chooses his chains, but sees his own resistance as the problem. The last sentence, ‘But he gives me excellent meat every day, and as much as I can eat,’ suggests the mastiff finds the trade-off acceptable – just as the wolf was willing to trade his liberty to ‘fawn upon [the] master’ as a ‘willing servant.’ It is a sign that the collar works as a technique that ‘assures’ what Foucault calls ‘the automatic functioning of power’: the mastiff has ‘inscribed in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles, he [has become] the principle of his own subjection.’16 The ring around the dog’s neck, however, is too obvious a burden for the wolf to bear, as it is a clear image of a slave’s collar: ‘Good morning, cousin! said the wolf: I have no wish to be introduced to your kind master, the farmer. It is true, I am sometimes hungry, as I happen to be just now, but hunger shall never make me so slavish and base, as to prefer chains and blows with a belly-full, to my liberty.’17 The political implications of the wolf’s statement here are underscored by its similarity to Caleb Williams’s declaration upon escaping from prison: ‘Never did man more strenuously prefer poverty with independence, to the artificial allurements of a life of slavery.’18 The fable’s construction, particularly the dramatic irony involved in the contradictions inherent in the mastiff’s bargain, makes the reader more uncomfortable with the mastiff’s willing acceptance of his enslavement. This is all the more striking when we remember that the mastiff is clearly on the reader’s side, the side of civilization and le nom du père. This skilful construction of the narrative manipulates the reader, even a young reader, into an awareness of the mastiff’s capitulation to the chains and blows of the master’s selfserving tyranny.

Maniquis_3201_125_(Anderson).indd 128

1/26/2011 6:03:23 PM



Politics in the Juvenile Library

129

2  A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing The thinly veiled critique of capitulation to tyranny, which appears in various forms throughout Godwin’s contributions to the Juvenile Library, explains the frequent description of the books – then as now – as morally and politically dangerous. Godwin’s stark articulation of the cost of ‘the slavish and base’ surrender of liberty for comfort and security is designed less, however, as a comment on particular historical events than as an attempt to train a generation of readers (including Keats) to the realities of civic and political life. The mastiff’s voluntary obedience recalls Godwin’s discussion of obedience in Political Justice. His willingness to return to the master, despite the collar, and the probability of further beatings suggests that the dog has gone from ‘obedience flowing from a consideration of a penalty’ to ‘a habit of obedience founded in confidence.’ In Political Justice, Godwin identifies three kinds of obedience: performing an act because it ‘flows from the independent conviction of our private judgment’; following someone based on ‘confidence’ in their superiority; and doing something contrary to one’s private judgment because of the ‘mischievous consequences’ imposed ‘by the arbitrary interference of some voluntary being.’19 Godwin concludes that while the first form of obedience is the only appropriate one, obedience from ‘confidence’ has the most pernicious effects because it involves the abdication of private judgment. Obedience owing to the threat of penalty can allow the unwillingly obedient to maintain the integrity of private judgment even while acting contrary to it. He argues that the best course of action when confronted with a threat is to ‘comply, where the necessity of the case demands it; but criticize while you comply.’20 The fable gives evidence that Godwin has developed his theory of obedience to suggest that his earlier idealist premise that you can ‘comply … but criticize while you comply’ is at least questionable, if not downright wrong.21 Indeed, it questions the very notion of an independent private judgment, by showing that it may have been formed by previous encounters with power. This incisive analysis of the costs of obedience and security helps explain why some contemporary critics and nineteenth-century readers find Godwin’s writings for children to be radical or dangerous. Godwin described his move from philosophy to fiction as an attempt to reach a wider audience; Pamela Clemit extends this description to the Juvenile Library, arguing that Godwin could bring ‘philosophical anarchism’ to the schoolroom.22 Sarah Trimmer, who positioned herself as the guardian

Maniquis_3201_125_(Anderson).indd 129

1/26/2011 6:03:23 PM

130

Robert Anderson

of children’s literature, protecting it from the subversive encroachments of infidels such as Godwin, seems to make the case for the radicalism of Godwin’s writings unassailable. In a review of Bible Stories, Godwin’s first children’s book, she argues that ‘this is the language of modern philosophy,’ which will ‘bring the mind into spiritual darkness.’23 Trimmer further argues that the book attempts to ‘dispose the minds of children for that liberty and equality which is the ultimatum for modern philosophy.’24 Clemit rightly sees these judgments as evidence of ‘how far Godwin’s proposals challenged the dominant educational traditions of the time.’25 But not all readers – then or now – saw Godwin’s children’s writings as radical or dangerous. In fact, many of the books he wrote for children sold quite well. Some were even purchased by members of the royal family and many were favourably reviewed by leading conservative periodicals.26 In a recent essay, Matthew Grenby argues that Godwin’s children’s books, like those of virtually all his contemporaries, avoided politics altogether. In spite of their profound ideological differences, Godwin and Trimmer shared the belief that childhood was a naturally innocent state that needed to be protected from lewdness, indecency, and politics. Grenby includes Godwin in the group of non-political writers, referring to him as not only the most surprising case (‘even Godwin’) but also a representative one.27 According to Grenby, Trimmer criticized Godwin’s Bible Stories not for its political positions but for its temerity in editing or altering the Bible in any way, as well as for its emphasis on the improving power of the imagination. Even writers such as Godwin, who were involved in the 1790s debates about Jacobinism, avoided any reference to politics ‘defined in the narrow sense.’ Although Grenby is never explicit about what that narrow sense is, he appears to mean that these writers did not raise ‘questions about current events.’28 That is a fairly ‘narrow sense’ and sure to exclude many books that most readers would consider political. I have been arguing that Godwin’s writings for the Juvenile Library are politically charged. Although they do not necessarily extend to current events, they speak to current issues of liberty, tyranny, autonomy, nationality, obedience, communality, hierarchy, equality, the distribution of property, and ethnocentrism – that is to say, Godwin’s central political and social preoccupations throughout his writings. Finally, while I argue that his writings for children are political in a very real sense, the nature of their political charge is unstable. To give Godwin’s contributions to the Juvenile Library their due, we must respect this instability and resist the temptation to fix Godwin’s ‘true’ position. There is much evidence

Maniquis_3201_125_(Anderson).indd 130

1/26/2011 6:03:23 PM



Politics in the Juvenile Library

131

to support Clemit’s claim that in writing for children Godwin ‘turned to children’s books as a continuation of his radical program of the 1790s,’ to extend even further the reach of his ‘philosophical anarchism’ by structurally and thematically encouraging the autonomy of readers.29 Clemit rightly claims that this was a distinctive, if not unique, feature of Godwin’s children’s writing. The overwhelming tendency of children’s books at the time was didactic and, to a modern reader, stultifyingly moralistic. Gary Handwerk’s discussion in this volume about Godwin’s lifelong pedagogical commitment to awakening the minds of his readers is as relevant to his writings for children as it is to his writings for adults. At the same time, however, there is also much evidence to suggest that Godwin’s practice is not always liberatory. Godwin frequently plays the role of the educator-as-tyrant. In the remainder of this essay, I highlight this instability, first, by showing his frequent assumption of a politically and morally conservative stance, and then, finally, by discussing his more dominant tendency to challenge authoritarian social structures and conventional assumptions. Over the course of about twenty years (1805–25) Godwin published under various pseudonyms all but one of his twelve children’s books through his publishing company and bookshop. Godwin began working on books for children in the years between the publication of St Leon (1799) and Fleetwood (1805). Bible Stories, which was not written as part of the Juvenile Library, was published in 1803, under the name of William Scolfield, by Benjamin Tabart.30 In 1805, the year Fleetwood was published, Godwin published Fables: Ancient and Modern and The Looking Glass. At this point, his writing and publishing efforts were increasingly directed towards the Juvenile Library. In 1806, he published The Pantheon, The History of England, The Life of Lady Jane Grey, and Rural Walks (which is listed among his notes but has not been found). In 1809 and 1810, Godwin published The History of Rome, ‘The New Guide to the English Tongue’ (a preface to Mylius’ School Dictionary), and Outlines of English Grammar. Godwin took up his own writing for children again in 1814 with Outlines of English History; three years later, turning to an adult audience, he published Mandeville. His last work for children, History of Greece, was published in 1822, two years before the History of the Commonwealth began to appear. In other words, what has been seen as a fallow period in Godwin’s writing career was actually a fairly productive one (to say nothing of his publication of the work of other writers). Perhaps even more interesting is the degree to which the work for children and the work for adults share

Maniquis_3201_125_(Anderson).indd 131

2/5/2011 11:13:17 AM

132

Robert Anderson

similar preoccupations and pursue similar projects. In general terms, this essay argues that there is a close relationship; however, much more work needs to be done to expose the many specific interconnections between the texts. Godwin’s works for the Juvenile Library are not mere ephemera designed to pay his mounting bills – although that is certainly part of their function. Studied as individual texts and situated within the context of Godwin’s long career, the Juvenile Library merits much more scholarly attention. For the bookshop associated with the Juvenile Library, Godwin used the name of his manager clerk as proprietor until he fired him for stealing from the till, after which he gave it the name of his second wife, M.J. Godwin. Brian Alderson describes the Juvenile Library, the imprint of the bookshop, as both high in quality and innovative.31 It is not clear whether Godwin chose to write under pseudonyms to more easily insinuate his radical ideas and thus ‘spread infidelity and disloyalty,’ as a government informer suggested in an 1813 report on the bookshop32 – or to facilitate sales by disassociating them from the infamous Godwin, as William St Clair seems to suggest.33 What is clear is that he wrote twelve books under three pseudonyms: William Scolfield, Theophilus Marcliffe, and Edward Baldwin. St Clair has argued that the pseudonyms have fairly distinct personalities as writers.34 In fact, Godwin even creates brief biographical sketches for the writers, some of which are projections of his own history. For Godwin to dress himself in the guise of a respectable writer is to run the risk every wolf must run when disguising itself in sheep’s clothing. For disguises are not inert objects to be put on and removed without leaving a trace. The disguise may facilitate entry into the sheepfold, but it might also make wolves into sheep. The unavoidable risks of disguises are a prominent theme throughout Godwin’s writing for children. Indeed, in Fables attempts to disguise generally cause more harm to the one wearing the disguise than to the intended victims. For the jackdaw who attempts to pass as a peacock by dressing in peacock feathers, the disguise ends in his humiliation. Apparently, the peacocks are not very sharp, because the disguise works until he asks, ‘What’s o’clock?’ This reveals his true identity, and provokes ridicule by both peacocks and daws. Baldwin, Godwin’s pseudonymous alter ego, draws a moral that would be acceptable to the most conservative of readers: ‘It would be just the same, if a ploughman dressed himself up like a lord. The moment he said, What’s o’clock: everybody would perceive he was not a nobleman; and when he began to make his congées, it would be impossible to stop laughing.’35 This fable and its moral are far

Maniquis_3201_125_(Anderson).indd 132

1/26/2011 6:03:23 PM



Politics in the Juvenile Library

133

from encouraging autonomy or spreading infidelity or disloyalty. In fact, the fable seeks to fix children firmly in their social place by warning of inevitable ridicule attendant upon social ambition. The socially and politically conservative moral cautioning against attempts to subvert class hierarchy in the fable of ‘The Daw and the Borrowed Feathers’ represents one major conservative theme of the Juvenile Library. In the fable of ‘The Ass and the Lap Dog,’ an ass, jealous of the easy life of the lap dog, tries frisking, prancing, and putting its hooves on the farmer, who calls for his helpers to beat it away. The moral encourages contentment with one’s station in life: ‘There is one thing for which every creature is more fit than any other.’36 The crow who seeks to catch a ram like the eagle that caught a lamb is caught in the ram’s fleece (we are not told whether the fleece was worn by a wolf). The shepherd frees the crow, but clips its wings so he can keep it to amuse his children.37 The unthinking cruelty of the shepherd is a powerful disincentive against aspiring to leave one’s station. There can be no doubt that some Christian defenders would have found Godwin’s writings unsettling. The government informer was clearly offended that Bible Stories presents the Bible ‘not as The Book’ but as just one of many bibles each for its own sect.38 At the same time, however, the Juvenile Library explicitly reinforces the superiority of Christianity. In The Pantheon, for example, Godwin-Baldwin apparently feels compelled to apologize for the non-Christian beliefs of the ancient Greeks. Speaking of their polytheism, he explains, ‘Every one must feel how superior this state of mind is to that of the atheist: … the Greeks were unacquainted with the Christian God, the “Father Almighty, maker of the heaven and earth,” the omniscient author of the universe.’39 It is difficult to imagine how Godwin, the committed atheist of the 1790s, who was a deist at the time,40 would have understood this attempt to write in the feathers of an orthodox Christian. Whether his explanation is an attempt to pass as a peacock so that he may more discreetly disseminate radical ideas or whether it is meant to help pay his growing bills, Godwin’s defence of traditional Christian views here opens up troubling questions, not least among which is his own relation to belief in the ‘omniscient author of the universe.’ In his Autobiographical Fragments Godwin explains: ‘In my ‘forty-fourth year,’ that is, during the period 1799–1800, or six years before The Pantheon, 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

Maniquis_3201_125_(Anderson).indd 133

1/26/2011 6:03:24 PM

134

Robert Anderson

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 everything that is beautiful, grand, or mysterious in the system of the universe, and in a certain conscious intercourse and correspondence with the principles of these attributes …

Godwin goes on to explain that ‘into this train of thinking I was first led by the conversations of S.T. Coleridge.’41 The ‘idea of an intelligent Creator,’ for which Godwin expresses so much ‘repugnance,’ is strikingly similar to the ‘omniscient author of the universe’ he praises in The Pantheon. What is more, the vague theism he describes as his own is much closer to the pantheism of the Greeks than the Christianity he praises here. By ‘replenishing nature’ with deities, the Greeks, he explained, ‘felt on all occasions surrounded with the divine nature.’42 In other words, Godwin’s praise for orthodox belief, whatever its motivations, entangles him in duplicity. His children’s writings, however, are obsessed with truth and truthfulness – so much so, in fact, that he repeatedly apologizes in Fables for resorting to the fiction of having animals speak. More explicitly, he writes as an aside in the fable in which a fox secures a raven’s cheese by deceptive flattery, ‘I would rather go without cheese all the days of my life, than gain it by such cheating and wicked speeches as the fox is said to have made.’43 Further, in The Pantheon, after criticizing Lactantius, an early Christian writer who, ‘out of zeal for his own religion,’ wilfully manufactured salacious details to defame Greek religious beliefs and make Christianity look better, Godwin-Baldwin insists that ‘no good cause requires to be supported by lies, and Christianity is not at all obliged to Lactantius for inventing so foolish a tale.’44 On some occasions, however, Godwin appears to wear sheep’s clothing not to disguise himself, but because it appears to fit. In The Pantheon, Godwin-Baldwin writes that ‘Terminus was the God of boundaries: it was the progress of civilization that gave sacredness and importance to the worship of this deity; in proportion as the limits between different states and the limits of different proprietors became matters of consequence, the policy of nations and legislators taught them to inculcate that a violation of boundaries was a crime against Heaven.’45 I have examined elsewhere the profound ambivalence that informs Godwin’s writings on the subject of the ‘limits of different proprietors’ and its role in shaping his theories of subjectivity.46 This ambivalence, a function of his conflicted

Maniquis_3201_125_(Anderson).indd 134

1/26/2011 6:03:24 PM



Politics in the Juvenile Library

135

thinking about both property and subjectivity, persists throughout the Juvenile Library. In Political Justice, Godwin imagines the self as protected by a ‘sphere of discretion.’47 He rejects the notion of individual ownership of property, yet because it protects the operation of private judgment, he argues that it is ‘the palladium of all that ought to be dear to us, and must never be approached but with awe and veneration.’48 What is important for my purposes here is that Godwin celebrates property as a ‘sacred’ protective boundary of the propre (the self and the nation). At the same time, however, he not only rejects an inequality of property (which he says is unavoidable in any system of property), but ridicules the notion of allegiance to something so arbitrary as one’s nation (or family or self). ‘What magic,’ he asks, ‘is there in the pronoun “my?”’ (PPW 1:83). In sum, for all their tendency to ‘spread infidelity and disloyalty’ and cultivate autonomy in his readers, Godwin’s writings for the Juvenile Library also repeatedly undermine that autonomy both structurally and thematically. The fable of ‘The Mouse, the Cock, and the Cat’ relates a young mouse’s confident declaration to its mother that it has found a horrible monster – which turns out to be a cock – and a great friend – which turns out to be a cat. The moral of the fable is designed not to foster autonomy, but to squelch it. It points out to readers ‘how necessary a thing experience is, how much young people should distrust their own judgments, and how foolish a creature he is who yields an implicit confidence to appearances.’ As the young mouse learns her lesson and grows ‘more attentive to what her mamma said,’ her ‘mamma in consequence love[s] her more tenderly than ever.’49 This shows how far the Juvenile Library can go in reinforcing the tyranny of the structure of education. But Godwin’s writings are rarely as straightforward as this. Perhaps the best example of the complexity of fables reinforcing authoritarian structures of education is the first fable in the volume, ‘The Dog in the Manger.’ The moral of this fable is entirely consistent with Godwin’s 1790s radical agenda. A dog prevents a horse from eating by snapping at it. When the dog finally gets hungry and approaches the boy for meat, the boy teaches him a lesson: he explains that if he were as naughty as the dog, he would refuse to feed him. He then encourages the dog to remember that only ‘naughty dogs, and naughty boys and girls, keep away from others what they cannot use themselves.’50 We can hear in this reprimand an echo of the central principles of Godwin’s philosophy of justice: individuals should exercise their private judgment to distribute their goods in the way that will promote the most good.51

Maniquis_3201_125_(Anderson).indd 135

1/26/2011 6:03:24 PM

136

Robert Anderson

The boy acts justly in feeding the dog, even though the dog does not deserve it. The boy does not coerce the dog to behave ethically, but tries to teach him the justice of doing so. The sharing of excess is represented not as an act of generosity, but as a requirement of justice. The egalitarian tendencies of the moral here, however, are undermined by the authoritarian tendency of the fable. Not only does the fable have a clearly pointed moral that leaves little room for the reader to think and develop autonomy, it doesn’t even trust readers to make the application from dogs to boys and girls, but has the boy speak over the shoulder of the dog to the children reading. Why else would the boy talk to the dog about ‘naughty boys’ and ‘naughty girls’? Indeed, the proliferation of the word ‘naughty’ (seven times in a very small page) makes this fable more an example of tyranny than of anarchy or liberty.

3  The Sea of Inquiry While there can be little doubt that a significant portion of Godwin’s contributions to the Juvenile Library reinforces moralizing and authoritarian structures – even as they clearly attempt to subvert them – the tendency to counteract those authoritarian structures is, I argue, even more pervasive. Just as a tendency to moralize can undermine even apparently liberating passages, sometimes passages which apparently play into the dominant culture can work against it as well. One of the most startling subjects covered in the Juvenile Library is the practice of classical nakedness. In this regard, Godwin is participating in a Romantic discourse celebrating nakedness as a rejection of the constraints of civilization. Burke worried that without the ‘pleasing illusions’ and ‘decent draperies’ embodied in the institutions of civilization and furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, humans will be left with only their ‘naked, shivering nature.’52 Throughout The Pantheon, The History of Rome, and The History of Greece, Godwin sings, in a Blakean vein, the praises of nakedness. For obvious reasons, nakedness is connected to frankness and confidence and, by extension, to liberty. In The Pantheon, a primer of classical mythology, Godwin notes that the Greeks practised games naked, and ‘the garments they wore had no ligatures to compress and destroy the strength and grace and free play of the muscles; while modern nations, by garters, and buckles, and waistbands, and kneebands, and wristbands, and collars, and fifty barbarous contrivances are continually spoiling the flowing active forms with which nature has endowed us.’53 The play of

Maniquis_3201_125_(Anderson).indd 136

1/26/2011 6:03:24 PM



Politics in the Juvenile Library

137

freedom and constraint recalls the wolf’s rejection of the mastiff’s collar. Godwin-Baldwin’s use of ‘barbarous’ to describe ‘modern contrivances’ of fashion is interesting here. First, it directly challenges chauvinistic assumptions of modern superiority. Indeed, as Rowland Weston has shown, Godwin argues that all of Western history since the ancient Greeks has been ‘a night of barbarism’ from which it has yet to emerge.54 Second, the word ‘barbarian’ is probably connected to the Greek term for any non-Greek, so Baldwin is etymologically correct. The passage goes on to contrast Greek nakedness to the recent practices of swaddling babies so that they could ‘scarcely move a limb or a muscle’ and of women who ‘laced for shape.’ The repetition of ‘and’ in the list of ‘modern contrivances’ emphasizes just how burdensome they are. The commonness of nakedness also improved Greek sculpture, since sculptors ‘every day beheld their countrymen naked.’ What is more, since Greeks wore clothing allowing for ‘grace and free play of the muscles,’ the sculptors had better models.55 This rhetoric of ancient freedom and modern restraint is bound up, so to speak, with the wolf and mastiff dilemma. The praise of nakedness has metaphoric elements as well. To a significant degree, Godwin attributes the fall of Roman civilization to its ‘career of conquest and empire,’ which led to its ‘freaks of wealth.’ The progress of the ‘little venerable Republic’ into ‘refinement and civilization,’ Godwin cautions, ‘did not conduce to render them [the Romans] elegant or human,’ but was actually a fall into ‘degeneracy.’56 The same metaphoric framework structures discussions of animals as well. In Fables, Godwin sets the story of ‘The Horse and the Stag’ in the period just before the domestication of the horse. The period is described as ‘happy times’ for ‘the poor horse,’ who was wholly ‘unacquainted with the saddle, the bridle, the whip, and the spur’ when horses had ‘nothing to do but prance along the plains, and neigh at their gamesome mates.’57 A horse enlists the help of a man to get revenge on a stag that had inadvertently hurt him. Once the stag is killed, the horse thanks the man for his assistance. The man’s response is a caution to all who would enlist the assistance of power to accomplish their goals: ‘You and I do not part so. Having been once upon your back, I find that you will be a very useful beast to me.’58 In this narrative of the decline and fall of republics, people, and horses into civilization, Godwin represents the advances of civilization as disguises which restrain natural human simplicity and, more importantly, liberty. I am not suggesting that, by praising the virtues of nakedness as a form of liberty, Godwin is encouraging children to strip away all the ‘pleasing

Maniquis_3201_125_(Anderson).indd 137

1/26/2011 6:03:24 PM

138

Robert Anderson

illusions’ and run naked through the streets. But this startling feature of his children’s writing deserves further consideration. I want to argue that it is ‘calculated’ (to use one of Godwin’s favourite words) to ‘launch’ his young readers onto a ‘sea of moral and political inquiry’ by describing an alien social arrangement as praiseworthy. Godwin’s practice of presenting alternative social practices so as to reveal current English practices as neither natural nor universal (and, therefore, as possibly inferior) extends to subjects even more obviously controversial than modes of dress. Robert Ryan has shown the politically charged nature of discussions in this period, when any kind of praise for Greek religion could be a critique of both Christianity and government.59 It is in this light that we should see the presentation of pagan beliefs in The Pantheon and The History of Greece: ‘It was the Greek imagination that peopled all nature, and gave to every stream and every tree its separate divinity: the Grecian mythology has been the awakener and the soul of poetical conceptions among the civilized nations of Europe, from the time in which it began to the present day.’60 This glowing praise occurs throughout The Pantheon. Intended explicitly, as the title page indicates, for the use of students ‘as a handmaid to the study of Poetry,’ The Pantheon admits, perhaps insists, that pantheism is a fiction, but calls it ‘a beautiful fiction.’61 Yet the book’s repeated praise of the poetic beauty of seeing all of nature animated by deities suggests more an emotional attachment than an aesthetic appreciation. Greek mythology, The Pantheon argues, replenished all nature with invisible beings, so that whether these ancients walked in fields or gardens, whether the object before them were a river or a wood, whether they traveled by sea or land, whether they visited the hospitable habitations of others, or continued under the protection of their own roofs, they felt on all occasions surrounded with the divine nature: and, as these Gods, whatever was their particular province or department, were represented in the Grecian pictures under the most graceful or picturesque figures and attitudes, their wo[r]shipers had continually present to them in fancy, thin, airy and elegant forms, floating upon the winds, listening to their ejaculations, diving into their thoughts, and studious of their prosperity.62

Godwin-Baldwin continues to refer to this ‘state of mind’ as obviously ‘superior’ to ‘that of the atheist.’63 This is an odd moment in the text, especially when we consider Godwin’s own complicated relation to athe-

Maniquis_3201_125_(Anderson).indd 138

1/26/2011 6:03:24 PM



Politics in the Juvenile Library

139

ism and faith. Apparently, wearing the disguise of orthodox belief tames the book – converts the wolf into a kind of mastiff, fawning upon its master. Or does it? What prevents this passage from becoming a mastiff is the sense that, even after the caveats qualifying the praise of Greek pantheism, the praise seems to overwhelm the qualification: ‘They had the happiness to regard all nature, even the most solitary scenes, as animated and alive, to see every where around them a kind and benevolent agency, and to find on every side motives for contentment, reliance and gratitude.’64 What is more, celebrating fancy and imagination, particularly in their ability to imagine different worlds, is part of what Julie Carlson notes as Godwin’s rhetorical strategy of opening ‘spaces of rational possibility’ for children.65 While not held in as high esteem as the Greeks would be in Baldwin’s 1821 History of Greece, the Druids in the 1806 History of England are also presented as noble. ‘These learned men [Druids] perhaps could neither read nor write; but they studied the stars, and the system of the heavens, commonly called astronomy; and they composed so many verses upon astronomy, and history, and morality, and religion, and other subjects, that Julius Caesar says it took their pupils twenty years to learn them all by heart: the Druids were lovers of God and good things, and taught valuable precepts to their scholars.’66 This praise is rather striking, since the history of the Druids in England was a fairly popular subject in Britain at the time, and considerable attention was being paid to their practice of human sacrifice. Indeed, throughout Jerusalem, Blake uses Druids as representative of repressive state religion because of this practice.67 The History of England does not shy away from these unsavoury facts. Godwin’s pedagogical practice involves an attempt to educate readers about unpleasant facts and to show them their relationship to what is culturally alien. Typically, Godwin forestalls easy condemnation of the aberrant practice by alerting his young readers to the historical and cultural difference of the Druids: ‘As the time when the Druids flourished in Britain was before Christ, they could not be Christians; they were very devout, said many prayers, sung many hymns, and made many sacrifices: I am sorry to say, that they sometimes sacrificed (that is, killed) men at their altars, and thought to please their Gods by it: the principal objects of their worship were the sun, moon and stars.’68 The passage clearly defines the Druids according to the standard of Christianity, which it tacitly assumes to be the norm, at the same time that it also demonstrates that that standard is not the only standard. What is

Maniquis_3201_125_(Anderson).indd 139

1/26/2011 6:03:24 PM

140

Robert Anderson

interesting here is that Godwin does not hide the unseemly practices – it is hard to imagine a twenty-first-century history text for young readers that included references to such disturbing practices among its readers’ early cultural ancestors. The practice of human sacrifice is part of a complex picture of Druid culture. But it isn’t just praying and learning that makes the Druids a noble people and warrants their description as an alternative standard. For Godwin, what justifies the Druids as an alternative standard is their love of liberty. The Romans, under Julius Caesar, Godwin explains, ‘invaded Britain, but did not conquer it.’ They ‘hated the Druids, because the Druids taught their followers the love of liberty: the Romans, before they landed here, were become slaves: so the Romans murdered the Druids wherever they found them, and destroyed their religion and learning.’69 Godwin’s praise of the Druids and Greeks and Romans and ancient Britons (and wolves) is part of his rhetorical strategy of challenging his readers’ unreflecting assumption of the superiority of what is most familiar (the magic of ‘my’). Discussing Godwin’s essay ‘Of History and Romance,’ Jonathan Sachs argues that ‘Godwin pronounces the greatness of ancient history in rapturous, emphatic tones, in contrast to which the history of post-Revolution Britain “assumes its most insipid and insufferable form.” Unlike those souls blighted by modern governments and institutions, the ancients “are men of free and undaunted spirit.”’70 This challenge is designed to provoke moral and political enquiry. Godwin’s interest in alternative forms of social arrangements leads him to offer as positive institutions practices which he had criticized in earlier books. For example, in Political Justice, Godwin argued that reciting lines others had written and eating meals in groups were violations of individuality.71 In The History of Greece, written at the end of his career, however, Godwin discusses communal meals without any hint of criticism. ‘The subjects of the commonwealth of Minos,’ he explains, ‘were brought up in military habits, and were strongly imbued with sentiments of independence: every citizen ate at the public table and his only exercises were such as tended to produce strength and agility; for example wrestling, boxing, shooting with the bow, military manoeuvres, and a military dance: the soil was cultivated for the state; the public tables were furnished at the expense of the state; and there was scarcely any such thing as private property.’72 The virtual absence of private property is bound up with the practice of communal meals. In The History of Greece, he argues that the practice of common meals and the absence of private property produced citizens who ‘were permeated with the love of their

Maniquis_3201_125_(Anderson).indd 140

1/26/2011 6:03:24 PM



Politics in the Juvenile Library

141

country.’73 He points out that ‘children of the Cretans lived in public like their parents.’ Further, ‘like their parents,’ children ‘were maintained at public expense’ and regarded as belonging to the state.’ This freed them from ‘absurd indulgences’ and ensured that ‘they were looked upon by all the citizens with kindness.’74 Similarly, Godwin-Baldwin situates the communal meals Lycurgus instituted in Sparta within a thorough socialization of the state. He explains that the communal meals were part of what he calls the second most important achievement of Ancient Greece (next only to art), ‘the wonderful institutions of Sparta’ which ‘chang[ed] as it were our nature.’75 Chief among these institutions were the laws that deprived ‘every inhabitant of the state of his landed possessions, and divided the territory of Sparta into as many equal portions as there were free citizens in the state.’76 In Political Justice, while he argued that inequality of property ‘is, absolutely speaking, wrong,’ he also argued that it was wrong to deprive anyone of any property by force or institution.77 But in The History of Greece, in embracing communal meals, Godwin is both rejecting this moderate earlier position and embracing criticisms that were misplaced when originally levied. As Evan Radcliffe has shown, in 1798 W.C. Proby linked Godwin’s writings with ‘the Sparta of Lycurgus,’ which would ‘eradicate individuality of character’ and spread a ‘dull uniformity.’78 Proby misunderstood the import of Godwin’s own critique of political associations and cooperation, including common meals.79 The celebration of Lycurgus, however, works by opposing itself to differing cultural strains: the individualist strain of Godwin’s own writings and the nationalist and conservative force of his own culture. There isn’t space here to pursue fully the way that, in his writings for children, Godwin’s positive treatment of communal meals contradicts his treatment of the subject in Political Justice (where even common meals were to be avoided because they tended to involve sacrifices of private judgment) or the way that he elaborates his re-imagining of the family to include persons not related by biology.80 But this brief discussion does point to the disorienting consequences this positive treatment of an alternative domestic arrangement must have had for one raised to see the ‘biological’ family as natural. These two moments when Godwin adopts a guise that is not his own, the apparent pandering to the conventional religious views of his readers and the adoption of more radical views than his own to challenge his readers’ deeply inculcated beliefs about property and the family, raise troubling questions for readers and scholars seeking coherent explana-

Maniquis_3201_125_(Anderson).indd 141

1/26/2011 6:03:24 PM

142

Robert Anderson

tions for Godwin’s writing. Are the disguises sheep’s clothing that allows the wolf to insinuate itself into the sheepfold and there disseminate ‘that liberty and equality which is the ultimatum for modern philosophy’ (as Trimmer put it), or are they the fawning required of the mastiff seeking a ‘sleek coat’ and ‘full belly’? Comprehensive explanations of the motives behind these contradictions prove as chimerical as simple identifications of Godwin’s writings (for children or adults) as either radical or conservative. Scholars tend to gloss over the contradictions in order to identify the political valence of the Juvenile Library. Matthew Grenby, for example, identifies the Juvenile Library as apolitical, thus passing over all of the politically charged elements of the books.81 Even Pamela Clemit, whose argument I find compelling, must ignore much of the countervailing evidence to make her claim that the Juvenile Library pursues ‘a continuation of his radical program of the 1790s.’82 These contradictions are not unique to Godwin’s writings for the Juvenile Library. Political Justice, for instance, is famously full of them. Some of the contradictions are, arguably, a function of the didactic nature of literature for children; some appear to be the result of contradictory impulses (to support the cause of liberty and to inculcate a specific position); others appear to be driven by the desire for economic survival. At his best, however, Godwin uses these contradictions to ‘disengage the minds of men [and children] from prepossession.’83 As he explained the purpose of Caleb Williams to The British Critic, this disorienting strategy strips away the pleasing illusions and ‘launch[es]’ his readers, young or old, ‘upon the sea of moral and political inquiry.’

NOTES   1 William Godwin, Fables, Ancient and Modern, 2nd ed. (London, 1805), 143.   2 This applies to his novels as well as his juvenilia. In Fleetwood, for example, young Ruffigny escapes from the silk looms and happens to meet Ambrose Fleetwood, who takes him in and informally adopts him, treating him in all things like his own son. Caleb Williams also meets many on the road, the novel often foregrounding their relative equality. In both the writing for children and the novels for adults, Godwin’s altruistic strangers evoke a world of hidden threats and a wide universal fellow-feeling. See Fleetwood: or, The New Man of Feeling, ed. Gary Handwerk and A.A. Markley (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2001), 186–202. In Caleb Williams, Caleb’s meeting of the thieves in Raymond’s gang is perhaps the best example. See Caleb

Maniquis_3201_125_(Anderson).indd 142

1/26/2011 6:03:24 PM



Politics in the Juvenile Library

143

Williams, ed. Gary Handwerk and A.A. Markley (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2000), 302–28.   3 Godwin, Fables, 2nd ed., 140–1.   4 Peter Hovell discusses at length Godwin’s criticism of social-contract theory, linking it to Godwin’s ‘doubts about empiricism’ (‘Godwin, Contractarianism, and the Political Dead End of Empiricism,’ Eighteenth-Century Life 28 [Spring, 2004], 76–7). Andrew Franta’s discussion of Caleb Williams ties Godwin’s criticisms of social-contract theory to the perceived threat that fraternité poses to individual freedom. While Franta sees the failures of handshakes in the novel as unambiguous representations of Godwin’s discomfort with the reliance of individuals on others, Godwin’s recasting of this fable clearly holds up the egalitarian relationship of strangers as an ideal, but one fraught, as the fable will reveal, with risks to individual freedom (Franta, ‘Godwin’s Handshake,’ PMLA 122, no. 3 [2007], 706).   5 Godwin, Fables, 2nd ed., 146.   6 In Godwin, Caleb Williams, 451.   7 Handwerk, ‘“Awakening the Mind”: William Godwin’s The Enquirer.’ The quotation is from Godwin, The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners and Literature, ed. Pamela Clemit, in Educational and Literary Writings, vol. 5 of The Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, 7 vols., gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1993), 78. This edition of Godwin’s writings is cited hereafter as PPW, with volume and page number.   8 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J.C.D. Clark (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 299, 303, 305, 307.   9 Saree Makdisi, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 54, 36. 10 Ibid., 58, 60. 11 Quoted in Mark Philp, Godwin’s Political Justice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 196. I develop this analysis of Godwin’s complicated relation to opposition politics at much greater length in ‘“Ruinous mixture”: Godwin, Enclosure, and the Associated Self,’ Studies in Romanticism 39, no. 4 (Winter 2000), 617–45. 12 Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness, in Political Justice Variants, ed. Mark Philp, PPW 4:145. 13 Ibid., PPW 4:144. 14 Ibid., PPW 4:307. 15 Godwin, Fables, 2nd ed., 79. 16 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977), 201, 203. 17 Godwin, Fables, 2nd ed., 144.

Maniquis_3201_125_(Anderson).indd 143

1/26/2011 6:03:24 PM

144

Robert Anderson

18 Godwin, Caleb Williams, 300. 19 Godwin, Political Justice Variants, PPW 4:111, 110. 20 Ibid., PPW 4:111. 21 Ibid. 22 Pamela Clemit, ‘Philosophical Anarchism in the Schoolroom: William Godwin’s Juvenile Library, 1805–25,’ Biblion: The Bulletin of the New York Public Library 9, nos. 1–2 (Fall 2000–Spring 2001), 48. 23 Quoted in Clemit, ibid., 61. 24 Quoted in Mathew Grenby, ‘Politicizing the Nursery: British Children’s Literature and the French Revolution,’ The Lion and the Unicorn 27 (2003), 5. 25 Clemit, ‘Philosophical Anarchism,’ 61. 26 William St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys: A Biography of a Family (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 286–7. 27 Grenby, ‘Politicizing,’ 3, 12. 28 Ibid., 12. 29 Clemit, ‘Philosophical Anarchism,’ 48, 55. 30 St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys, 521. For full details see p. 545. 31 Brian Alderson, ‘“Mister Gobwin” and His “Interesting Little Books, Adorned with Beautiful Copper Plates,”’ Princeton University Library Chronicle 59 ( January 1989), 163–6. 32 Cited in Clemit, ‘Philosophical Anarchism,’ 44–6. 33 St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys, 285. 34 Ibid. 35 Godwin, Fables, Ancient and Modern, 6th ed. (London, 1816), 71. 36 Ibid., 163. 37 Ibid., 193. 38 Quoted in Clemit, ‘Philosophical Anarchism,’ 45. 39 William Godwin, The Pantheon; or Ancient History of the Gods of Greece and Rome for the Use of Schools and Young Persons of Both Sexes, 4th ed. (London, 1814), 82. 40 St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys, 228. 41 Quoted in C. Kegan Paul, William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries, 2 vols. (London: Henry S. King, 1876), 1:357–8. 42 Godwin, Pantheon, 81–2. 43 Godwin, Fables, 6th ed., 13. 44 Godwin, Pantheon, 86. 45 Ibid., 90. 46 Anderson, ‘“Ruinous mixture,”’ 620. 47 Godwin, Political Justice Variants, PPW 4:95–6. 48 Ibid., 4:318.

Maniquis_3201_125_(Anderson).indd 144

1/26/2011 6:03:24 PM



Politics in the Juvenile Library

145

49 Godwin, Fables, 2nd ed., 155. 50 Ibid., 1. 51 Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. Mark Philp, PPW 3:52–3. 52 Burke, Reflections, 239. 53 Godwin, Pantheon, 3. 54 Rowland Weston, ‘Politics, Passion, and the “Puritan Temper”: Godwin’s Critique of Enlightened Modernity,’ Studies in Romanticism 41, no. 3 (2002), 449. 55 Pantheon, 3. 56 William Godwin, History of Rome from the Building of the City to the Ruin of the Republic. Illustrated with Maps and Other Plates for the Use of Schools and Young Persons (London, 1809), 164, 163, 165. 57 Godwin, Fables, 6th ed., 98. 58 Ibid. 59 Robert M. Ryan, The Romantic Reformation: Religious Politics in English Literature, 1789–1824 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 152–6, 177–8. 60 William Godwin, The History of Greece from the Earliest Records of that Country to the Time in which it was Reduced into a Roman Province, for the Use of Schools and Young Persons, 3rd ed. (London, 1839), 4. 61 Godwin, Pantheon, 152. 62 Ibid., 81–2. 63 Ibid., 82. 64 Ibid. 65 Julie Carlson, England’s First Family of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 217. 66 William Godwin, The History of England, for the Use of Schools and Young Persons (London, 1806), 12–13. 67 See, for example, plate 27, ‘Where … the Druids golden Knife, / Rioted in human gore,’ in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David Erdman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 172. [Cf. the online Erdman edition, at http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/ erdgensearch.xq?query=Rioted&bool=and&x=58&y=25.] 68 Godwin, History of England, 13. 69 Ibid., 14–16. 70 Jonathan Sachs, ‘From Roman to Roman: The Jacobin Novel and the Roman Legacy in the 1790s,’ Studies in the Novel 37 (Fall, 2005), 261. 71 Godwin, Political Justice, PPW 3:449. 72 Godwin, History of England, 5–6. 73 Godwin, Greece, 2nd ed., 6.

Maniquis_3201_125_(Anderson).indd 145

1/26/2011 6:03:25 PM

146

Robert Anderson

74 Ibid., 6–7. 75 Ibid., 25. 76 Ibid., 27. 77 Godwin, Political Justice Variants, PPW 4:312. 78 Evan Radcliffe, ‘Godwin from “Metaphysician” to Novelist: Political Justice, Caleb Williams, and the Tension between Philosophical Argument and Narrative,’ Modern Philology 97 (May 2000), 539. Radcliffe is quoting from W.C. Proby’s Modern Philosophy and Barbarism; or A Comparison Between the Theory of William Godwin and the Practice of Lycurgus. For the context of these quotations, see Political Writings of the 1790s, ed. Gregory Claeys, 8 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1995), 8:299, 298, 292. 79 See Godwin, Political Justice, PPW 3:450–8. Also see Weston, ‘Politics,’ 448. 80 Carlson’s England’s First Family of Writers does interesting work here. See part 1: ‘Revising Family.’ 81 Grenby, ‘Politicizing,’ 3, 12. 82 Clemit, ‘Philosophical Anarchism,’ 48. 83 Godwin, ‘To the Editor of the British Critic,’ in Handwerk and Markley, eds, Caleb Williams, 451.

Maniquis_3201_125_(Anderson).indd 146

1/26/2011 6:03:25 PM

PART  II GODWIN’S EXPERIMENTS WITH HISTORY

Maniquis_3201_147_(Myers).indd 147

1/26/2011 6:11:58 PM

This page intentionally left blank

.

Maniquis_3201_001_(Myers).indd 2

1/26/2011 3:04:34 PM

chapter six

Oratory and History: Godwin’s History of the Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham VICTORIA MYERS

1  Naming Godwinian History Little has been said about Godwin’s historical writings, least of all about his earliest venture, the 1783 History of the Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham. Although decidedly a minor work, it nonetheless participates in an important moment of cultural shift. Mark Salber Phillips’s account of eighteenth-century genre transformation does not speak of Chatham, but singles out Godwin’s 1803 Life of Geoffrey Chaucer as a triumphant example of the emergent interest in non-political histories of arts, customs, and manners – calling it ‘a kind of sentimental history of the times’ and ‘an imaginative entry into the experience of a remote past.’1 Godwin, he argues, participated in ‘reframing’ historiographical norms to accommodate, and even elevate, ‘social’ and ‘sentimental’ ‘dimensions of inquiry.’2 One aspect of this reframing was the increasing preference for biography over political history. As ‘writers … pressed the claims of common life and inwardness,’ they invoked biography’s advantages, holding that ‘the passions and sentiments lie more open to view in narratives of private life than in the public struggles and ceremonies of history.’ For Phillips, Godwin’s specific contribution to this effort was his combination of individual biography with history, indeed a deliberate and self-conscious pursuit of the ‘reciprocity of biography and history.’3 It is the thesis of this essay that Godwin became involved in this pursuit much earlier – that Chatham, easily read as party journalism, evidences a self-conscious engagement with the shifting norms of history writing and raises historiographical problems that permeate his later works.

Maniquis_3201_147_(Myers).indd 149

1/26/2011 6:11:58 PM

150

Victoria Myers

Giving Godwin’s historical writings a place in genre change has not been without its puzzles, however. Probably the most convincing testimony to Godwin’s important but problematical relation to eighteenthcentury history writing are the various names for his brand of history: ‘sentimental history,’ ‘oblique history,’ ‘fancy’s history,’ ‘recursive history,’ ‘republican romance,’ and ‘self-reflexive’ history4 should be considered efforts to hail/hale it into scholarly court, to give it an identity that can be queried among our kindred interests and issues.5 Evidence supporting these various ‘callings’ appears in the biography of Chatham, both as potential choices in a historiographic career and as problems Godwin encountered in shaping his readers’ relation to external fact and their sense of historical/political process. In the History of the Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, too, Godwin works between history and biography, wrestling with the terms of generic decorum while serving a project of political reform. What makes Chatham a particularly curious exhibition of genre transformation is its relation to oratory – simultaneously a discursive genre, with its own rules of art, and a political instrument often tantamount to politics itself. Through the political and oratorical contentions of the Chatham biography, Godwin’s interest in affect begins to take on the reticulating aspect of effect, raising the problems of private and public action that ‘oblique history’ and ‘fancy’s history’ will later address. Further, in Chatham Godwin’s preoccupation with oratory constructs historical causality as agent-centred, but his rhetorical attempts to measure out praise and blame already show signs of what Jon Klancher calls the ‘counterprinciple of contingency’ that, as Gary Handwerk says, reverses ‘progressive’ into ‘recursive’ history.6 In analysing the Chatham biography I pursue these themes, governed by an interest in ‘moments’ of cultural disappearance, the obverse side of moments of emergence. The eighteenth century presents the dramatic emergence of conversation, not just in the proliferation of coffee houses and coteries, but also in the development of conversational protocols as prototypes of social relationship. Oratory figures more ambiguously in many eighteenth-century cultural debates as a practice of demagogues, though also associated with the discursive practices of inherited institutions. Adam Potkay captures this moment of cultural transition by describing David Hume’s essay ‘Of Eloquence’ as ‘profoundly ambivalent toward both classical eloquence and the republican form of government under which the orator flourished. It exhibits a certain complacency in the politeness of modern passion and administrative politics; yet it resonates with a stirring nostalgia, at once aesthetic and political, for the

Maniquis_3201_147_(Myers).indd 150

1/26/2011 6:11:58 PM



Godwin’s History of the Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham

151

classical orator’s power to elicit moral sympathy and inflame a popular assembly.’7 As this passage hints, ‘disappearance’ is not quite the word to describe this cultural shift, since the interest in oratory does not disappear but rather takes cover. A subject of both admiration (for parliamentary speakers such as Chatham and Burke) and fear (of out-of-doors populist speakers such as Thelwall), oratory would often conceal its aims by enlisting sentiment in its repertoire, though in doing so it served (as it tried to co-opt) the rising importance of sociability in human relations.8 Godwin has been taken as unequivocally opposed to oratory, but elsewhere I have argued that in the 1793 Political Justice he was not so much rejecting oratory as a civic institution as he was attempting to absorb the civic functions of oratory, as well as some of its rhetorical practices, into conversation and thus found a private sort of public institution.9 The biography of Chatham, I believe, signifies Godwin’s earliest attempt to come to terms with the civic functions of oratory by treating it both in the subject and in the problematical style of his biography. In the process, he came up against the very problems pinpointed in scholars’ various efforts to name his history writing – and in this sense set an agenda for his later historical thinking.

2  The Subject of History and the Subject of Oratory Chatham is an explicitly political subject, and Godwin’s motive in writing the biography was largely political. William Pitt (as I shall call him before he became Lord Chatham) was a relatively recent figure in British history, an admired orator, whose skill and genius promoted British imperial hegemony in the 1750s. He had entered politics during the latter part of the Walpole era, when he participated in the Whig effort to gain control of the ministry on a ‘country’ platform of virtue in politics. He rose to eminence during the Seven Years’ War when, as minister to George II, he energetically led the country out of the moral doldrums to a series of splendid successes. Forced from power on the accession of George III, he thereafter took up a position of independence, varied by a brief return to the ministry and frequently undermined by his ambitions once again to govern. In the 1760s and 1770s, his opposition to general warrants in the Wilkes affair and his conciliatory view of the Americans made him an important figure to compare with the Whigs supporting Lord Rockingham. Rockingham uneasily allied with Pitt on these issues; though not as politically adept, he possessed a reputation for moral resolve and self-consistency that for some made him a more attractive

Maniquis_3201_147_(Myers).indd 151

1/26/2011 6:11:58 PM

152

Victoria Myers

leader. He was, moreover, supported by an orator every bit as sparkling as Pitt: Edmund Burke helped him to craft a moderate policy of reforming parliament and publicized his principles. After Rockingham’s death in 1782, his party split into a more radical Foxite wing, which weakened its principled stance when it joined the coalition ministry of Lord North, and the more circumspect Shelburne wing, which more successfully exercised influence over the sovereign. Godwin defended the Foxites’ consistency after the fall of the coalition and continued to support the party by writing essays lauding their abilities, refuting the maxim of ‘measures, not men,’ and supporting the necessity of an opposition party – issues that resonate in his biography of Chatham. The biography of such an ambiguous figure as Lord Chatham, with his record of taking positions antagonistic to the monarch yet entering into questionable coalitions, and his sometime reputation for independence while bypassing opportunities for reform, would have appeared to Godwin an appropriate subject to develop these issues of parliamentary reform and security from monarchical control. In Chatham’s career lay a story of enormous promise for constitutional reform derailed by ambition. Aimed at the Whigs supporting Fox and Shelburne, the story could prove an encouragement to action – and provide a monitory example of moral weakness. By ‘enlivening’ Chatham, Godwin could educate the ‘sensibility’ of the liberal Whigs and ‘render [them] more prompt in the service of strangers and the public.’ While choosing a figure whose medium was oratory, Godwin also attempted to claim the position of impartial historian. Taking oratory as his path to a morally committed ‘impartiality’ will seem paradoxical, however, given the evaluation of oratory’s role in historiography in the latter half of the eighteenth century. In his influential Elements of Criticism (1762), Lord Kames bars oratory from history writing when he observes that ‘the thoughts which embellish a narration ought to be chaste and solid. While the mind is intent upon facts, it is little disposed to the operations of the imagination. Poetical images in a grave history are intolerable … and they have a still worse effect, by giving an air of fiction to a genuine history.’10 Kames is not considering history in the epistemological terms that would later concentrate historical thinking on the nature of evidence and historical reasoning; he is exploring the way a psychology of affect requires rhetorical decorum. Extravagant embellishment would be inconsistent with both the mimetic and the didactic functions of history writing because the mind cannot operate upon fact and imaginary objects simultaneously, without transferring fiction to fact. But Kames makes an exception for sentiment, which he believed would

Maniquis_3201_147_(Myers).indd 152

1/26/2011 6:11:58 PM



Godwin’s History of the Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham

153

serve didactic functions, because it disposes the mind to effective moral instruction.11 Unlike the heightened rhetoric of political oratory, ‘painting’ – the appropriate technique for arousing sentiment – requires the historian to render ‘facts and objects … so accurately as to form in the mind of the reader distinct and lively images’ of virtuous actions. This mimesis will trigger readers’ propensity ‘to imitate what [they] admire, strengthening through exercise [their] disposition for virtue.’12 Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, appearing in the same year that Godwin published the Chatham biography, likewise excludes oratory from history writing. Blair demands a sharp distinction between ‘the office of an Orator to persuade’ and ‘that of an Historian to record truth for the instruction of mankind,’ arguing that ‘Impartiality, Fidelity, and Accuracy, are the fundamental qualities of an Historian.’ In handling character, the historian ‘must neither be a Panegyrist, nor a Satyrist. He must not enter into faction, nor give scope to affection [passion]: but, contemplating past events and characters with a cool and dispassionate eye, must present his Readers a faithful copy of human nature.’13 Like many moderns, Blair excludes invented speeches and set character sketches, along with other oratorical devices, because what is unnatural undermines the mimetic, and thereby the didactic, function of the history. Oratorical style belongs to the manipulative demagogue rather than the grave and dignified historian. Yet concern for this ethos also leads Blair to demand that the historiographer display ‘sentiments of respect for virtue and of indignation at flagrant vice,’ and avoid ‘appear[ing] neutral and indifferent with respect to good and bad characters’ or, to be blunt, ‘affect[ing] a crafty and political, rather than a moral turn of thought.’14 In content and aims, and in his usual style, Godwin largely complied with the historiographical decorum described by Kames and Blair. The traditional components in their views of impartiality coincide with what Philip Hicks identifies as neoclassical norms of historiography.15 Recognizing these, Godwin gave extensive attention to Chatham’s political and military decisions, maintained a framework of political and moral principles, and impartially distributed praise and blame in accord with his didactic and mimetic responsibilities. Affirming his intention to be both impartial and morally committed, Godwin nonetheless at times slips into oratorical vehemence – as in his introduction, when he personifies ‘impartiality’ as a stern but energetic judge, ‘the only vicar of the divinity upon earth; and the visible head of that illustrious church, which alone, from all nations of the world, unalterable rectitude, and immortal benevolence shall honour in a future state.’16 In line with Kames’s and

Maniquis_3201_147_(Myers).indd 153

1/26/2011 6:11:58 PM

154

Victoria Myers

Blair’s standards, the writer for the English Review criticized such a hyperbolic style, especially when applied to the characters of men: ‘The favourite of a people, or the object of their detestation, is forced above or below humanity; and every thing relating to him is exaggerated by a peculiar species of falsehood.’17 This ‘peculiar species,’ he believed, undercut Godwin’s claim to impartiality and degraded his history into faction and fiction. The claim of impartiality, admittedly, was often a conventional bow to neoclassical norms in eighteenth-century polemics. As Hicks points out, ‘Since history was the most prestigious prose genre, political partisans fought over its literary cachet, trying to appropriate it to their cause’; conversely, they denied the label ‘history’ to works they disagreed with, calling them satire or panegyric instead.18 While these reflections pinpoint the invidious reason why Godwin was criticized, they also suggest that he chose the ethos of the traditional historian in order to garner that cachet. Yet the fact that he did so for a political aim he believed consistent with his historical responsibilities argues that he viewed oratory (as the ancients ideally did) as an appropriate instrument for apportioning praise and blame. The hostility to oratory, alongside hospitality to sentiment, overlooked the ways sentiment was absorbing oratory into a form more compatible with changing tastes in history. Blair in fact directly acknowledges these tastes, by endorsing the new popularity of biographies. Though not as ‘formal and stately’ as history, they prove ‘no less instructive,’ and in some respects more so, because ‘it is from private life, from familiar, domestic, and seemingly trivial occurrences, that we often receive most light into the real character.’ Moreover, though these biographies depart from the traditional subject matter of history, Blair considers ‘the more particular attention’ now bestowed on ‘laws, customs, commerce, religion, [and] literature’ to be ‘more useful and interesting than the detail of sieges and battles.’19 While Godwin (ambiguously) accepted the norms of traditional history, he also chose the more sociable and sentimental venue of biography. Although he did not take up the emerging interest in ‘economy, custom, or opinion’ in any thorough way until his biography of Chaucer, he did probe ‘the play of the passions and sentiments in the individual mind’ and connect these with the way human beings ‘form communities.’20 Donald Stauffer cites Godwin’s Chatham to illustrate eighteenth-century biographers’ fascination with the passions, especially when ‘bound up with the idea of liberty as a political principle.’21 Although he offers no analysis of the biography, this statement points towards the ‘reciprocity of history and biography’ inasmuch as

Maniquis_3201_147_(Myers).indd 154

1/26/2011 6:11:58 PM



Godwin’s History of the Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham

155

‘political principle’ both describes what is at stake in the political history of Chatham’s era and captures the source of inward conflict in Chatham’s character. Stauffer’s extended account of Godwin’s Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft indicates the direction he thinks Godwin was taking earlier – towards ‘the contemplation of magnanimous human spirits’ and ‘delicate psychological portrayal’22 – and suggests how these were embedded in a morally committed impartial history. Critics contemporary with Godwin, however, discerned this incorporation of biographical inwardness with historical impartiality with some difficulty. Writing for the Monthly Review, Samuel Badcock regretted that ‘the Life of Lord Chatham’ lacks ‘any anecdotes relative to him as a husband, a father, or a friend … those [domestic] habits and transactions which … introduc[e] us to the hero’s acquaintance in his more relaxed and familiar hours, and which … convey a juster idea of his real disposition and character, than … the transactions of public life.’23 It is true that Godwin affords few domestic or interior views of Chatham, though lack of letters and private papers would account for this failure. Badcock, moreover, concedes that ‘Lord Chatham’s mind seems to have been so totally absorbed in political speculations, that scarcely any other passion could obtain even a transient possession of it,’ and he allows that Godwin achieves ‘justly marked and discriminated’ political characters.24 The impression of inwardness Stauffer observes arises, I would argue, primarily through Godwin’s exploration of the rhetorical relation between speaker and listener, rather than through privileged looks at Chatham’s private or emotional life. While Chatham’s motives often therefore appear through the typology of the ruling passion or general observations on human nature, it was precisely Godwin’s handling of oratory that was effecting its absorption in emergent practices. The issue, redefined, is how Godwin’s attention to the public (and oratorical) uses of sentiment and passion could maintain a morally committed impartiality and yet open on the private experience of them; and how this focus could touch the way human beings form communities – in the sense of the social interest in opinion formation, but also in combination with the ancient sense of the civic. The next section undertakes a reading of Chatham to detect this complicated use of oratory.

3  Impartiality through Rhetoric It needs to be established at the outset how Godwin pursued an impartial but morally committed account through an analysis of orators’ practices

Maniquis_3201_147_(Myers).indd 155

1/26/2011 6:11:58 PM

156

Victoria Myers

that itself employs rhetorical techniques. From the beginning of the biography Godwin gives pointed and systematic attention to the oratorical style of his parliamentary speakers. His first two chapters, narrating the patriot opposition’s overthrow of Robert Walpole, evaluate politicians and statesmen by turning their oratory into a metonymy for character.25 Walpole, the powerful first minister under George I and II, ‘had a great fluency and readiness of language; and, though what he uttered was neither nervous nor elegant, yet it had its weight with those, who … think him the best orator, who can harangue upon all occasions without hesitation’ (PPW 1:13). With remarkable brevity, Godwin describes Walpole’s style, indicates the judgment of those who value his oratory, and insinuates his own judgment not only of the orator but of his appreciative audience. The metonymy is evident when Godwin goes on to describe Walpole’s manner and disposition as directly continuous with his moral character: his verbal ‘fluency’ and ‘readiness of language’ figure ‘a certain easiness of soul, and callousness of sensation, which made him proof against all attacks’ (PPW 1:13). By emphasizing effect, Godwin also reflects upon Walpole’s appreciators, whom he considers as part of an oratorical situation in which listeners’ attitude towards the speaker’s style of oratory indicates their moral worth. When Godwin says (in a hyperbole that sounds like truth) that Walpole ‘thought self-interest the wisest principle by which a man could be actuated, and bribery the most elevated and comprehensive system, that ever entered into the human mind’ (PPW 1:13–14), he puts these listeners, with Walpole, outside the pale of civic virtue. Like Burke, whose oratory he admires, Godwin links rhetorical analysis with rhetoricized criticism and focuses both through an aesthetic lens: Walpole’s parliamentary listeners are not deluded by his oratory; their taste in oratory reflects their self-interestedness and their willingness, with Walpole, to eviscerate civic virtue and narrow the constitution.26 This style of portraiture sets up the expectation that, when Godwin treats Walpole’s opponents, he will deliver a contrary metonymy that uses their qualities of spirited speaking to predict their high-minded moral politics. In describing the opposition’s parliamentary leaders, he provides a parallel analysis, enumerating the qualities of their oratory, indicating the judgment of those who esteem them, and thereby insinuating a judgment on both them and their admirers. Observing the opposition’s ‘splendid … eloquence,’ he credits them with ‘abilities’ that make them ‘respectable’ (PPW 1:14). He does not, however, argue that they are all moral exemplars. In fact, he diminishes their abilities by

Maniquis_3201_147_(Myers).indd 156

1/26/2011 6:11:58 PM



Godwin’s History of the Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham

157

pointing out that their proposals, for ‘repealing septennial parliaments, for excluding pensioners, and limiting the number of persons, holding offices under government, that might obtain a seat in the house of commons’ all followed a reformist plan, but that the opposition also chose these measures because they afforded scope for an impressive oratory that might arouse the public to demand a change in government and bring them into office (PPW 1:14–15). Here too, the effect on the audience comes into play, but in order to make a more damning judgment. Godwin points out that making their proposals in eloquent language  induced ‘the virtuous and the unsuspecting’ listeners to give the opposition ‘credit for the principles, by which they [themselves] were actuated’ (PPW 1:15). More broadly, his argument is not that the public have very poor taste – he represents them as having very good taste, in a moral as well as an aesthetic register – but that oratory deludes them as it does not delude Walpole’s followers because they hear in the opposition’s speeches the virtue they wish to believe is possible in government. For this reason, the opposition is far more reprehensible than Walpole. By creating the impression of their integrity, they gain a foothold in the public’s horizon of constitutional expectations, but then defer their hopes. They valorize sincerity, the ground of free institutions, but then destroy the public’s belief that it can be found among politicians (PPW 1:21). In both cases, Godwin uses analysis rhetorically, deflecting his readers from the immediate sympathy that the primary audience felt, but by varying the metonymy he makes his rhetoric a discriminating instrument to measure moral worth. He thus maintains the didactic impartiality of history writing advocated by Blair and Kames, praising and blaming political characters according to their effect on public confidence and constitutional liberties. Within this framework and mode of evaluation Godwin also conducts his account of Pitt’s career. In the first phase, he assigns Pitt a lofty idealism and potential to lead constitutional reform, illustrating his character by quoting from an early speech. Attacked for ‘acting a theatrical part’ in criticizing the manning of the navy, Pitt, with impressive dignity, asserts the sincerity of his convictions – and his right to his own style (PPW 19–20). What follows concerning his conduct, moreover, appears to confirm this defence and warrant the people’s admiration. Continuing steadfast in his opposition to Walpole’s group, Pitt gains the respect of ‘the nation in general,’ which ‘began to look up to him, as almost the only man they could trust’ (PPW 1:21). This evidence of his integrity, the consistency of his oratory with his conduct, provides a touchstone for judging his subsequent career. Later, when he accepts

Maniquis_3201_147_(Myers).indd 157

1/26/2011 6:11:59 PM

158

Victoria Myers

the position of paymaster general in the Pelham administration and departs from his wonted opposition to England’s involvement in Hanoverian wars, he exposes himself to accusations of ‘versatility.’ Later still, when he refuses the usual emoluments of the paymaster position and returns to his hostility to continental wars, he regains the public’s esteem for his integrity. Godwin is close to suggesting a direct relation between oratorical style and moral integrity, a relation that would underpin an argument for ‘republican history’ and confidence in agent-centred accounting. Tracking how public esteem for politicians changes through their application of moral-political maxims raises the possibility of popular government, yet Godwin’s subsequent attention to oratory’s equivocal role in the formation of public opinion takes this political hope in a contrary direction. Before exploring this direction, let me notice how Godwin uses his rhetorical measure of moral worth to gain access to the inward man. The moral standard he imposes on every individual is ‘to do that, which we apprehend to be right without regard to consequences,’ but on the parliamentarian he imposes even greater stringency: ‘He, who is the delegated guardian of the welfare, and the liberties of the people, is bound, upon all occasions, to exert the talents he possesses, in support of every salutary, and opposition to every pernicious measure’ (PPW 1:26).27 For Godwin, this principle makes one’s moral state almost indiscernible from one’s psychological state. Correcting the common notion of ‘versatility’ as simple hypocrisy, he explains its psychological causes: ‘They know little of the human heart, who suppose, that … the judgment evidently points one way, and interest and inclination another. Perhaps there does not exist, upon the face of the earth, an hypocrisy, unmixed and pure. In order to deceive others, we first deceive ourselves. Interest and ambition not only alter our language, but our minds’ (PPW 1:28). Although he phrases this explanation as a concept of general human nature, a useful topos in oratory, Godwin understands the development of this mental state through a particular observation of changes in Pitt’s style of oratory. ‘Formerly Mr Pitt had promoted, upon all occasions, the spirit of parliamentary enquiry … Now he placed himself in the way of such discussions … Formerly he had pleaded with vehemence and energy … Now he carefully displayed the evil tendency of a dry and unanimated style’ (PPW 1:27). Pitt’s ambitious self-interest produces a desiccated style of speaking that cuts his mind off from the sustaining ideal of public service and incapacitates him for reform. Such passages form the experiential ground for the 1793 Political Justice, where the moral principle of sincer-

Maniquis_3201_147_(Myers).indd 158

1/26/2011 6:11:59 PM



Godwin’s History of the Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham

159

ity appears a guarantor of social reform that must eventually undermine all political imposture.28 In 1783 the sincerity criterion is directed more narrowly at divagation from political virtue, but its personal scope becomes visible through this attempt to explain moral divagation in terms of psychological cause and effect. This implication operates mainly in Godwin’s judgments on Pitt’s seesawing motives and on the people’s aptitude for political power. While pursuing this political issue in the second part of the biography, however, Godwin begins to connect it with a psychological-social analysis of the reciprocal effect of people on speaker. After the Newcastle government’s inept conclusion of the Seven Years’ War, Pitt comes to power again on a tide of popular support. Godwin observes that Pitt’s eloquence played a large part in gaining the people’s confidence, but he is critical of their judgment. They had earlier approved of Pitt’s ‘disinterestedness,’ finding it to be ‘singular,’ but Godwin insinuates that this impression rested upon a single fact, his refusal, under the Pelham ministry, to take the usual route of accumulating personal gains from his position as paymaster. The ‘purity’ they found in Pitt’s views Godwin deems only ‘supposed,’ referring to Pitt’s renewed (but short-lived) hostility to continental wars and the appeal this made to public prejudice in the 1750s. Conversely, Godwin’s representation of Pitt’s motives links his play of mind to the public’s. Motivated by ‘boundless ambition,’ during the Seven Years’ War Pitt chose the more popular of two alternative paths to ‘immortal honour’: though he began his career ‘renovating the … constitution,’ when  he found ‘that his country was too far advanced in imbecility,’ he deserted reform for the more immediate glory of waging war (PPW 1:35–7). This interplay suggests that the ‘slow and imperceptible’ alteration in character is mutual, brought about by the reciprocal influence statesman and people exert in forming each other’s minds (PPW 1:28). Godwin, it appears, consciously articulates this psychological-social relation upon his moral-political analysis of character, for he draws explicit attention to the issue this articulation addresses: ‘This is one of repeated instances, which the discerning eye will observe, in the course of this history, to prove, how far exalted genius is compatible with local prejudices; and how difficult it is, to be, at once, a great statesman [for Britain], and a citizen of the world’ (PPW 1:50). By sketching the operation of reciprocal influence, Godwin locates the psychological-social barriers against cosmopolitan statesmanship, which Karen O’Brien describes as detachment from the interests of one’s own nation and investment in an enlightened European civilization.29 He credits Pitt’s oratory with mar-

Maniquis_3201_147_(Myers).indd 159

1/26/2011 6:11:59 PM

160

Victoria Myers

shalling the nation’s spirit and resources towards all-out war – in America, on the European continent, and against French colonies in Africa and India. He does not underplay this achievement. Pitt changed ‘the character of Britain,’ which had been degraded by national debt and corruption, by maintaining strength, consistency, and vigour in the war from 1758 on (PPW 1:38–9). But Godwin believed that Pitt only brought out the imperialist character of Britain, victorious in the contest for commercial exploitation. What occasionally emerges is Pitt’s moral dilemma at this success. His occasional ‘remissness’ in prosecuting the war in America, Godwin conjectures, arises not only from the distractions of the European front, but also from Pitt’s sympathetic feelings of ‘humanity’ in the face of the ‘most horrid’ actions taking place in this war (PPW 1:40, 42).30 Godwin wants his readers (and especially the Rockingham group) to see Pitt’s inward dilemma as systematically connected with the mental state of the nation. The ‘local prejudices’ of the English ‘lust of dominion’ over foreign nations subverts the political leader’s potential for taking a broader view of international relations (PPW 1:59). Godwin invites readers to sympathetically imagine that Pitt – with the superior understanding that lets him know he can choose one of two paths to ‘immortal honour’ – grasps his bondage to a people less advanced in moral feeling (PPW 1:36). By centring on oratory, this account of Chatham’s career configures Godwin’s place in eighteenth-century historiographic practices: while upholding the norm of morally committed impartiality, Chatham enters new areas of social thinking, sketching the process of opinion formation as the reciprocal effect of speaker and audience, statesman and people. Through the operation of oratory, moreover, Godwin is able to enter the moral mind of political actors in a way that reveals another reciprocity – between the operation of events considered as national history and the inward dilemmas belonging to individual biography. By allotting praise and blame, the text links oratory to agent-centred history; in the process, however, it begins to raise problems for agent-centred action by showing how it diffuses through a variable and irrational populace.

4  The Triumph and Failure of Oratory Godwin’s continuing to shift responsibility back and forth between Pitt and the people betokens a problem in historical premises: does historical progress occur through individual agents taking rational and politically virtuous action or through gradual, perhaps irrational, and

Maniquis_3201_147_(Myers).indd 160

1/26/2011 6:11:59 PM



Godwin’s History of the Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham

161

collective alteration – a mode where the passions can just as well block as advance change?31 The former suggests ability to foresee and master circumstances, the latter suggests susceptibility to circumstances in what Gary Handwerk calls ‘the ways in which psychology and ideology intersect.’32 Godwin’s treatment of neither possibility is decisive, but rather plants the roots of an on-going tension in his historical assumptions. To this point Godwin has tried to write his history in terms of agents of actions, even subsuming the people to this agent pattern by suggesting how they might be enabled to judge their leaders through well-measured attention to their oratory. But by diffusing his explanation through the thesis of a reciprocal and hardly conscious operation, in which oratory may delude the orator as well as the listener, Godwin gives great prominence to the social matrix of political change that the new historiography would slowly bring into conflict with a civic concept of character. Godwin’s sense that this is happening, I shall argue, causes him to shift from oratory as tool of historical analysis to oratory as escape from the results of that analysis. At first Godwin deflects his consciousness of the conflict in his historical premises by holding his story towards a morally committed assessment of political character. In 1761 Pitt’s ministerial service was ended by the accession of George III. Like Burke, Godwin asserts that Lord Bute, the king’s favourite, aimed to take advantage of the popularity of the king to promote a crown party and, exercising ‘secret influence,’ severely reduce the power of parliament (PPW 1:61).33 Character was the target of Bute’s political machinations, as he first made George Grenville the ostensible head of government and, when Grenville turned out to have ‘firmness and inflexibility of spirit,’ tried to lure Pitt back into government – aiming either at ‘render[ing] this immortal hero, the appendage of his system’ or at ‘deluding and disgracing a character, to the general veneration of which he principally ascribed the unpopularity of his own.’ Bute’s attack on character, in this narration, affected the viability of a constitutional opposition; even though his machinations were initially ‘abortive,’ they nonetheless ‘fixed the longing eyes of all men upon the great offices under government’ and, thus ‘rendered the efforts of opposition in parliament, irregular, temporizing and timid’ (PPW 1:62). To Godwin, the Rockingham party’s maxim of ‘men, not measures,’ which  was designed to block the decline of political integrity and prevent the alteration of mental consistency brought on by ambition, also supported an agent-centred view of historical progress. In treating the failure of Pitt, Godwin attempts to maintain impartial-

Maniquis_3201_147_(Myers).indd 161

1/26/2011 6:11:59 PM

162

Victoria Myers

ity even though he approaches the period when the Rockingham party claims his greater interest. In the process he destabilizes his agent-centred accounting. Pitt, now Lord Chatham, succeeds to the short-lived Rockingham ministry, but leads a disastrous administration. Godwin, however, locates responsibility in two ‘unfavourable circumstances’: the ‘petty differences’ among members of Chatham’s government and his poor health (PPW 1:70). Chatham’s personality appears more as accident than as choice in this impersonalized account: ‘With all his abilities, and all his virtues, [he] was not of a temper, the best adapted to the milder ties of friendship. His unbounded ambition could not admit of a perfect participation of interests; and the imposing superiority of his talents was calculated to keep lesser minds at an awful distance’ (PPW 1:70–1). Ensuing altercations between Chatham and his close associate and brother-in-law, Earl Temple, ‘proceeded to the length of a paper war,’ which in turn fostered disunity in Chatham’s party. Disunity was exacerbated by the other ‘circumstance’: Chatham’s poor health, which forced him to take only a minor role in government, combined with his elevation to Lord Chatham to produce a loss of reputation and personal influence in the House of Commons. This loss left in place ‘an administration, unprincipled and disunited,’ which ‘reduced their country to the lowest abyss of poverty, contempt and dishonour’ (PPW 1:75–6). In this narrative, the arrival of contingency occurs while Godwin intends more refined methods of impartiality than he has hitherto undertaken: ‘to distinguish the blamable, from that, which is simply unfortunate in the story of our hero; and to draw the line, between what an undistinguishing vulgar may stigmatise, and what cool and disinterested philosophy must condemn’ (PPW 1:70). Godwin had already begun to exhibit the psychological-social dimension of rhetorical praise and blame by scrutinizing Chatham’s oratorical relation to the public in earlier parts of his career. The topic of ‘the unfortunate,’ which Godwin now brings into his analysis, begs to be related to this matrix. Godwin describes Chatham’s state of mind: ‘Disappointed in the inauspicious event of the administration, which he had formed with so assiduous care; and mortified, at the impolitic proceedings, of which he had been, however undesignedly, in some measure the occasion, he had, for some time, hid his head in the obscurity of retreat’ (PPW 1:81). Here Godwin absolves Chatham of deliberately intending the consequence of his acts, even though Chatham’s disposition and temper led him to those acts. In one respect, Chatham rightly blames himself as ‘the occasion’ of this result,

Maniquis_3201_147_(Myers).indd 162

1/26/2011 6:11:59 PM



Godwin’s History of the Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham

163

since the convergence of his character with the circumstances of George III’s accession and Bute’s exercise of secret influence proves detrimental to the constitution. In another respect, Chatham is wrong to blame himself, since he could have done nothing at the moment to change his character and the configuration of the political scene.34 By the process of discriminating ‘the unfortunate’ from ‘the blamable,’ Godwin produces a complicated recognition of the psychological (or psycho-physical) repercussions of our actions, within a system of social connections in which we will surely ‘occasion’ outcomes. The psychological pain Godwin alludes to in this assessment of Chatham indicates an equivocal view of agency and contingency. Personal agency appears responsible for, yet subordinate to, impersonal contingency. Contingency both exacerbates and dissipates the force of agency. The underlying thesis – that one’s acts reticulate through a social network that connects each person with every other person – is not fully articulated in the biography, but it arrives in full strength in Political Justice. There Godwin attempts a more philosophical discussion of agency in terms of a ‘great chain of causes’ in order to defeat the theological concept of free will by which one is able to act regardless of preceding events and motives. This concept, Godwin believes, would produce a chaos of contingency that undermines all morality. He proposes instead a more perfect ‘sense of contingency’ as a system of necessity turning the social matrix into a causal network.35 He argues that words and acts produce effects that operate in other individuals as motives. There is no absolute freedom of the will – every act is preceded by a sufficient motive that necessarily produces the act. This concept of necessity is an attempt to control the sense of impersonal contingency by working it into the system of reticulating effects as someone’s intended acts. The propagation of motives, through social connections that ensure our acts will have effects, also magnifies the moral importance of each act. For Godwin, while we cannot be sure the consequences that we intend will follow (nor can we control all the events that spawn our motives), we can draw probable conclusions from experience. We therefore also have a plausible moral duty to diffuse the maximum good through society.36 While Political Justice dispels the notion that one could avoid consequences determined by events that have already taken place, simply by exerting the will, Godwin does not wish to eliminate the effectualness of praise in ‘procur[ing] a repetition’ of desirable actions.37 In the Chatham biography, Godwin’s rough sense of this network leads

Maniquis_3201_147_(Myers).indd 163

1/26/2011 6:11:59 PM

164

Victoria Myers

him to refine his task of impartially distributing praise and blame, but it also leads him to anticipate contingency’s threat to history writing as a moral-political evaluation of character. Indicative of what Godwin later calls the ‘tendency’ of his text, this anticipation explains why, in narrating the final stage of Chatham’s career, Godwin shifts to a grandiose and eulogistic style.38 By reasserting oratory, he reasserts the moral concept of character that he feels is disappearing. Godwin approached this style  earlier, in his references to Chatham as ‘our hero,’ to his ‘consummate eloquence’ and ‘unconquerable abilities,’ and to his potentialities for ‘immortal honour,’ but these now become more frequent and hyperbolic (PPW 1:70, 35, 53, 36). In one respect, this style is an extension of Godwin’s metonymic treatment of character and oratory throughout the biography, and he simply magnifies the relationship to convey the transformation he perceives in Chatham’s character. But in another respect, this style marks a move from metonymy as a tool of analysis to a thorough troping of the historical narrative. In the last section, Godwin moves (downward) from apotheosis to tragedy to parody in repeated efforts to situate Chatham with respect to historical agency and contingency. By using such plot patterns, Godwin attempts to give post facto consistency to his narrative, against the see-saw of the preceding account. This attempt to forestall contingency, however, produces (just as Kames and Blair predicted) the sense that his history is fictional – and at the same time the sense that for history to have more meaning than a simple chronology (to have moral import) it must be fictional. As a prelude to this movement, Godwin reviews Chatham’s career, organizing it largely as a history of his eloquence. At the outset ‘humble and unassuming,’ Chatham begins in study and silence to prepare for eloquence and action. During his advancement to first minister guiding the war against France, his actions become eloquent, his speech becomes speech acts ‘calling forth’ the energies of the nation and ‘wither[ing] the hearts of our enemies’ (PPW 1:90–1). In his final stage, Chatham’s eloquence, unsuccessful as performative, nonetheless stands as a moral sign. ‘Dismissed from power, he became independent, and self-moved. His eloquence gave him dignity; his information fixed attention; and his character attracted love’ (PPW 1:91). Rather than her effective minister, Chatham now appears as ‘the prophetic soul of Britain,’ like the Old Testament prophets, fruitlessly warning the nation of its imminent fall from pre-eminence. After conveying history as contingent events in which, however, an individual’s acts, including oratorical acts, propagate consequences because orator and people occupy a recip-

Maniquis_3201_147_(Myers).indd 164

1/26/2011 6:11:59 PM



Godwin’s History of the Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham

165

rocal relationship, Godwin now depicts Chatham and Chatham’s oratory rising above accident. As if rejecting this facile escape from the network, Godwin suddenly shifts his narrative trajectory to a tragic telos.39 This plot at least has the advantage of recognizing contingency in the excess of effect over intention. In his 20 January 1775 speech on conciliation with the American colonies, Chatham (Cassandra-like) accuses the administration of living in imagination (PPW 1:93). But Chatham too has been the victim of selfdelusion. His ministry during the Seven Years’ War, when his eloquence had ‘touched a master passion’ for eminence and glory in the nation, now obstructs him, for ‘he had armed [the public] against himself, by the successes of the last war, and the immeasurable haughtiness they inspired’ (PPW 1:94). Godwin develops dramatic as well as historical irony here. Even Chatham’s present proposal, defeated in the Lords, reverses his intentions: ‘By this distinguished parliamentary effort, ministry were roused to bring forward their own [sanguinary] plan’ (PPW 1:94–5). The administration’s proposal too has rhetorical power, but (an echo of Chatham’s rhetorical failure) what it brings forth is a declaration of independence from the Americans. In the tragic mode, oratory does not rise above history, but sinks into history’s contingent terms. Yet Godwin, evidently disturbed by this sign of historiographical defeat, brings forward another narrative option that has been waiting in the historical wings. In the third section of the biography, Godwin has already prepared Rockingham and Burke as alternative romance heroes; now he is ready to interrupt Chatham’s tragedy by shifting the heroic  plot away from him (PPW 1:103). While Chatham makes a proposal that would have confirmed no taxation of the Americans without their consent, he still includes a declaration of America’s absolute dependency on Britain. The Duke of Richmond, Rockingham’s sometime ally, goes further, ‘mov[ing] an inquiry into the state of the nation’ in order to ‘open the eyes of the whole kingdom, and engage them to think seriously, of forming a grand compact’ with America (PPW 1:104). This is the context in which Godwin displays his final eulogy of Chatham. After describing in an affecting manner the parliamentary scene in which the ailing Chatham collapses while voicing his opposition to American independence, Godwin declares that impartiality requires him to judge Chatham’s speech by ‘the eternal immutable laws of rectitude.’ Yet he hesitates, drawn by ‘motions of pity, when I see stern, unmixed virtue, urging her victory, over the breathless hero; unknowing, that the hand of fate prepared, at that moment, to unstring his nerves, and lay his honour

Maniquis_3201_147_(Myers).indd 165

1/26/2011 6:12:00 PM

166

Victoria Myers

in the dust’ (PPW 111–12). This is sentiment hyperbolized, responsive to the public’s desire to see into the heart, but in the context of the Rockingham advent, turning Pitt’s tragedy into parody. Although all this troping could function as a partisan satire at the expense of the North administration and the residual worshippers of Chatham, completely consonant with the way Godwin’s comments on oratory have all along evaluated and explained political character and action,40 his final oratorical overlay suggests that Godwin is losing control. In the process of relating the biography of Chatham to the history of the nation, of entering into the psychology of power while maintaining his stance of impartiality, Godwin has begun to articulate the presence of ‘circumstances’ in history. These appear in the biography, however, largely because oratory, coming into focus as the public register of mental change, is revealing itself not only as an interpretive site but also as an equivocal performative power. Godwin’s final effort, to preserve the power of individual agency and yet admit contingency into a progressive moral-political pattern, is conducted in highly rhetorical language. This language brings into view the possibility that Godwin, in anticipation of his views in ‘Of History and Romance,’ is attempting himself to exercise language’s power to create fact, and not only represent it. His effort exposes the rhetorical mechanism to the reader’s view and raises the possibility that history writing is just what Godwin’s struggle has revealed – an attempt to exclude or minimize the appearance of contingency.41 In 1783, I suggest, Godwin’s exercise of oratory to create romance, tragedy, and parody gives his readers a sense of history as he is beginning to feel it – as the reticulation of a multitude of unforeseen consequences – that historians attempt, without finality, to plot.42

NOTES   1 Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 277.   2 Ibid., 16–22. The ‘social’ denotes ‘the material and moral life of humankind,’ implying that, even though politics continued important to most history writing, it was ‘shaped in a hundred different ways by the often invisible movements of economy, custom, or opinion.’ The ‘sentimental’ denotes not simply a rhetorical style, but inquiry into ‘the play of the passions and sentiments in the individual mind.’ In Phillips’s view the objects of these two types of inquiries are complementary: the passions lead human beings

Maniquis_3201_147_(Myers).indd 166

1/26/2011 6:12:00 PM



Godwin’s History of the Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham

167

‘to form communities’ and, conversely, communities may be understood as ‘shaped by the meeting of experiencing and sociable minds’ (19).   3 Ibid., 139–40, 143.   4 Tilottama Rajan calls The Lives of Edward and John Philips (1815) an ‘indirect’ biography and Milton its ‘(dis)appearing’ subject. Godwin, she argues, chooses ‘oblique history’ in order to trace a figural ‘Milton’ in his ‘effect’ on the succeeding generation, and through this effect ‘the fate of the revolutionary spirit.’ Exhibiting the proliferative quality of the ‘archive’ rather than the enclosed teleology of ‘total history,’ Godwinian history resembles his conception of reading itself, open-ended and constantly altering (‘Uncertain Futures: History and Genealogy in William Godwin’s The Lives of Edward and John Philips, Nephews and Pupils of Milton,’ Milton Quarterly 32, no. 3 [1998], 75–7). For Julie Carlson, Godwin’s working between biography and history should be called ‘fancy’s history,’ to convey his complex combination of romance with reason, private agendas with public. It properly begins in his Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft (1798), where ‘fancy’s capacity to reanimate and to maintain ongoing “intercourse” with the illustrious dead’ became both Godwin’s ‘remedy for depression’ after her death and a rational project of sharing her with a public that needed the conversation of such minds to ‘kindl[e]’ their ‘sensibility’ and ‘render [them] more prompt in the service of strangers and the public’ (England’s First Family of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007], 42, 149, 45 [quoting Godwin’s preface to St Leon]). For ‘recursive history,’ republican romance,’ and ‘self-reflexive’ history, see note 6 below. Such engagements with Godwin’s historiographical purposes affirm that we are constructing the terms for reading his complexity, but research in this direction has been devoted less to the histories and biographies than to the philosophical essays and novels, foregrounding a problem (discussed later in this essay) concerning individual agency and contingency.   5 I adapt Judith Butler’s argument (derived from Louis Althusser) that individuals are linguistic beings inasmuch as they are social beings. They attain being-in-language by being ‘called,’ as one is hailed by a policeman, and are interpellated into society with whatever (invidious) distinction may attend that calling. See Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 31–4.   6 As Gary Handwerk shows, the inability of a ‘rational subject’ to rise above ‘the circumstances that shaped him,’ and through ‘individual agency’ exert ‘his power to alter his own opinions,’ subverts the project of enlightenment and condemns individuals to repeat their errors (‘Historical Trauma: Politi-

Maniquis_3201_147_(Myers).indd 167

1/26/2011 6:12:00 PM

168

Victoria Myers

cal Theory and Novelistic Practice in William Godwin’s Fiction,’ Comparative Criticism 16 [1994], 78–9). Diminishing the power of the subject in effect renders Godwinian history ‘recursive’ rather than ‘progressive’ (Gary Handwerk, ‘History, Trauma, and the Limits of the Liberal Imagination: William Godwin’s Historical Fiction,’ in Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre: Re-forming Literature 1789–1837, ed. Tilottama Rajan and Julia M. Wright [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998], 67, 70, 77, 80–2). Jon Klancher arrives at a similar conclusion in his analysis of Godwin’s 1797 ‘Of History and Romance.’ By pitting a more circumstantial account of individual human motives against the unilinear probabilistic histories of the Scottish historians, by imaginatively reviving the knowledge of past republics and commonwealthmen, Godwin’s history as ‘republican romance’ offers a sense of ‘unrealized possible futures.’ Yet this ‘reflexively self-conscious’ move in genre reform unexpectedly turns towards ‘the counterprinciple of contingency,’ cancelling ‘possible futures’ in ‘unforeseen,’ unmanageable events (‘Godwin and the Republican Romance: Genre, Politics, and Contingency in Cultural History,’ Modern Language Quarterly 56, no. 2 [1995], 156, 160, 162–3).   7 Adam Potkay, The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Hume (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), 99; see also 86–102. Also see Jon Mee’s essay in this volume. I owe him many thanks for stimulating ideas on the subject of conversation.   8 Perhaps the best example of oratory’s enlisting sentiment is the slave-trade debates in and out of parliament.   9 Victoria Myers, ‘Godwin and the Ars Rhetorica,’ Studies in Romanticism 41, no. 3 (2002), 415–44. 10 Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, 3 vols., facsimile of the 1762 Edinburgh edition (New York: Johnson Reprint, 1970), 3:170. 11 For comparable views, see Hume’s ‘Of the Study of History,’ in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985), 563–8. 12 Kames, Elements of Criticism, 1:73–5, 3:174. 13 Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 2 vols., ed. Harold F. Harding, facsimile of 1783 edition (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965), 2:259–60. 14 Ibid., 2:281–2, 260–1. 15 In Neoclassical History and English Culture: From Clarendon to Hume (New York: St Martin’s Press; London: Macmillan Press, 1996), Philip Hicks describes these norms as follows: ‘History was a continuous, truthful story about important and public events. It was written with intelligence, in a

Maniquis_3201_147_(Myers).indd 168

1/26/2011 6:12:00 PM



Godwin’s History of the Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham

169

noble style that would be pleasing and memorable while consistent with its dignified subject. The historian was also a judge, deciding the cause of events rather than just describing occurrences, and distinguishing between good and bad events and persons rather than suspending judgment. The function of history was to instruct polite society by these judgments, and so its primary audience was the prince and other important political individuals’ (7). 16 William Godwin, History of the Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, in Political Writings I, ed. Martin Fitzpatrick, vol. 1 of Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, 8 vols., gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1993), 1:9–10; works in this edition later cited PPW by volume and page. 17 Kenneth W. Graham, William Godwin Reviewed: A Reception History 1783–1834 (New York: AMS Press, 2001), 19. 18 Hicks, Neoclassical History, 10–11. 19 Blair, Lectures, 2:287–8. 20 Phillips, Society and Sentiment, 19. See note 2 above. 21 Donald Stauffer, The Art of Biography in Eighteenth Century England (Prince­ ton: Princeton University Press, 1941), 183. 22 Ibid., 192, 194. Stauffer’s phrasing is applied to the Memoirs. 23 Graham, William Godwin Reviewed, 21–2. 24 Ibid., 22. 25 Christopher Reid discusses the use of the ethical argument and the attack on character, in the context of party oppositions, in ‘Character Construction in the Eighteenth-Century House of Commons: Evidence from the Cavendish Diary (1768–74), Rhetorica 22, no. 4 (2004), 375–99. 26 Godwin had an excellent example of Burke’s method in The Speech on American Taxation (19 April 1774), where Burke connects rhetorical error with a fault in the legislators’ character as public servants (in Party, Parliament, and the American Crisis 1766–1774, ed. Paul Langford, textual ed. William B. Todd, vol. 2 of The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, gen. ed. Paul Langford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 408–63. 27 This view extends ‘the individual’s duty to exercise his private judgment so as to determine and fulfil the will of his maker,’ a concept of duty that played an important part in Dissenting writings during the agitation for repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in the 1770s and 1780s (Mark Philp, Godwin’s Political Justice [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986], 22). 28 Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, PPW 3:135–42, 151–6. 29 Godwin’s view places him, in this respect, among historians such as Hume and Voltaire, who practised ‘cosmopolitan history’ as ‘both a rhetorical strategy and a habit of thought’ (Karen O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment:

Maniquis_3201_147_(Myers).indd 169

1/26/2011 6:12:00 PM

170

Victoria Myers

Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], 2). 30 Although this paragraph of my text does not describe precisely that inwardness that Godwin exhibits in his memoirs of Wollstonecraft, it exceeds the analysis in an earlier brief biography of Pitt’s political life, John Almon’s A Short View of the Political Life and Transactions of a late Right Honourable Commoner (London, 1766), see 5–6, 12, 19, 27, 68, and passim. Neither Almon nor Godwin had access to Pitt’s correspondence or other evidence that would sustain an extended description of his feelings, but Godwin takes the risk of speculating on how such a person would or ought to feel in such a situation. 31 The political form of the question is the dilemma whether a representative should govern in the interests of the people (the criterion advanced by Burke) or govern by the people through a widened franchise (the desideratum of the radicals). See Godwin’s discussion of the former stance in PPW 1:59. On the view of Burke, as opposed to radicals such as Christopher Wyvil, see F.P. Lock, Edmund Burke, Volume I, 1730–1784 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 394–5, 447–8, 461–7. 32 Handwerk, ‘Historical Trauma,’ 76. 33 Godwin’s view may have been influenced by Burke’s party manifesto, the Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), which (in the words of F.P. Lock) characterized the party as ‘unusually concerned with acting consistently and from principle’ and of being ‘ostentatiously indifferent to office’ (Edmund Burke, 285). As Lock points out, Burke’s pamphlet enjoyed a ‘long afterlife as a manual of wise statesmanship’ (279). He also points out that the Rockinghamite thesis that Bute had a ‘system’ of secret influence was ‘wholly imaginary’ (277). 34 This view hearkens back to the concept of involuntary acts in Aristotle’s Nicomachaean Ethics, though Godwin saw it too in Burke’s topic, the remote consequences of present acts, and in Hume’s historical theme, the convergence of character with circumstances. 35 PPW 3:155, 173. Leo Braudy sees ‘the contingency of the facts, people, and events that produced the present’ as the main problem historians such as Clarendon and Hume grapple with, as they attempt to achieve a coherence in history writing commensurate with their understanding of continuity in history (Narrative Form in History and Fiction [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970], 89). 36 Mark Philp treats this dilemma perspicuously in Godwin’s Political Justice, 24–6, 93–5. 37 Godwin, Political Justice, PPW 3:173.

Maniquis_3201_147_(Myers).indd 170

1/26/2011 6:12:00 PM



Godwin’s History of the Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham

171

38 On ‘tendency,’ see William Godwin, The Enquirer, in Educational and Literary Writings, ed. Pamela Clemit, PPW 5:137–8. 39 Godwin may be following the lead of Plutarch’s biographical treatment of Demosthenes’ life as a romance-to-tragedy trajectory. See The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, trans. John Dryden (New York: Modern Library, n.d.), 1022–40. Godwin refers to Plutarch in his ‘Essay of History and Romance,’ in Educational and Literary Writings, ed. Pamela Clemit, PPW 5:295. 40 Compare O’Brien on Hume’s movement through various genres, such as mock-epic, sentimental novel, and tragedy in his History of England (Narratives of Enlightenment, 59–69). 41 On the fictional construction of history, see Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), chap. 1 and Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973; Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), chap. 1; also see comments on White by O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, 5–11, and Phillips, Society and Sentiment, 10–12. 42 I thank Pamela Clemit, Robert Maniquis, Mark Philp, and Tilottama Rajan for comments and questions on earlier versions of this essay.

Maniquis_3201_147_(Myers).indd 171

1/26/2011 6:12:00 PM

chapter seven

The Disfiguration of Enlightenment: War, Trauma, and the Historical Novel in Godwin’s Mandeville T I L O T TA M A R A J A N

In a well-known essay ‘Why War?’ Jacqueline Rose suggests that war marks a ‘limit’ to claims of ‘absolute knowledge,’ even as such claims are ‘offered as one cause – if not the cause – of war.’1 War, literal and ideological, marks the limits of enlightenment in Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s sense. For them, in their famous Dialectic of Enlightenment, enlightenment signifies both the complacency that thinks rationality can permanently overcome superstition, and a sense that culture can dominate nature, or that man can dominate his others so as to have them at his disposal. This essay explores the relation between war, enlightenment, and a Romanticism of extreme phenomena that is (not yet) the end of the Enlightenment, by focusing on Mandeville – a novel set in the Cromwellian period against the backdrop of ongoing conflicts that were settled by the Restoration and, according to a progressive view of history, further settled by the Glorious Revolution.2 Yet Godwin’s novel is not about the Commonwealth, but is focalized – against the grain of his own politics – through the experience of a tormented royalist who never enters history because he never emerges from the closet of his psychic history: his ‘eternal war’ on his rival Clifford, the epitome of reason and goodness.3 The text, in which we identify almost totally with the pathological Mandeville, unfolds from the years before the king’s beheading to the Restoration, events present only as the shadow cast by their effects: at the beginning, the political factionalism that infects even the children at Mandeville’s school, Winchester, and at the end, on the verge of the Restoration, the marriage of the Catholic convert Clifford to Mandeville’s sister Henrietta, a Presbyterian. The novel is one of extreme events. It begins with the slaughter of Mandeville’s parents in Ire-

Maniquis_3201_172_(Rajan).indd 172

1/26/2011 6:17:19 PM



War, Trauma, and the Historical Novel in Godwin’s Mandeville

173

land, when Protestant settlers are massacred during the Ulster Rebellion of 1641. And it ends with his disfiguration when he attacks his sister’s marriage coach, in a profound resistance to the institution, emotional as well as political, of restoration. In the history that takes Godwin, an Enlightenment thinker, back to a period before enlightenment also lie the events of his own time, which, as Mary Favret points out, was equally one of war.4 These include the revolution and terror in another country from which Britain complacently distanced her own history, the resurgence of war in the Napoleonic period, and the brutalities of a colonialism whose Irish beginnings are traumatically recalled in the novel’s racially explicit last sentence. Godwin’s novel, torn apart by historical conflicts that subsist unreadably in its background and by the psychic war that usurps its foreground, can be framed against Enlightenment projects for peace by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant, the latter a thinker with whom Godwin was compared in his own time.5 Rousseau’s ‘Project for Perpetual Peace’ concedes problems only to set them aside as obstacles to a perfectibility that it enacts through exhortation. Kant is less sanguine, beginning ‘To Perpetual Peace’ with the innkeeper’s sign in which the words ‘eternal peace’ are inscribed over a graveyard: a graveyard for utopian philosophers, perhaps, but also for ‘heads of state who can never get enough of war.’ Elsewhere, Kant goes so far as to recognize the productivity of ‘antagonism,’ arguing that nature uses it ‘to bring about the development of all of man’s capacities.’6 Of course one must treat with irony his occasional advocacy of war as a stimulus to peace or a Malthusian expediency, the tone of such provocations being extraordinarily hard to pin down.7 Yet Kant, unlike Rousseau, is aware of something structurally problematic in the idea, not just the attainment, of perpetual peace. Peace is at times a euphemism for war, and the elimination of antagonism may also be ‘the end of all freedom.’8 Still, as Derrida says, the Kantian critique always wants to see as ‘solvable conflicts’ the resistances and antinomies, legal and psychic, that emerge within ideas of reason such as perpetual peace. Kant ‘distinguishes precisely between conflict and war.’ War is ‘savage; it implies no recourse to the law,’ while conflict is a ‘regulated, foreseeable, and codifiable antagonism’ subject to arbitration and the rules of the public sphere.9 Antagonism – what Kant calls an ‘unsocial sociability,’ the antagonism among people ‘in society’ – is conflict, not war.10 Godwin too has his project for perpetual peace in Political Justice, where he imagines a future in which, as human beings grow ‘immortal’

Maniquis_3201_172_(Rajan).indd 173

1/26/2011 6:17:19 PM

174

Tilottama Rajan

and more enlightened, there will be ‘no war, no crimes, … no government.’11 So why did Godwin turn to war two decades later? By war we must understand not just literal war, but the psychic turmoil of which war is at once cause, symptom, and metaphor. In St Leon (1799) Godwin had looked ironically at his quixotic fantasies of political justice by projecting himself as a character who had achieved perpetual life, and hoped to reach the end of history and a ‘perfect system of civil polity.’12 But St Leon’s aspirations are defeated by the war in Hungary and his encounter with an irrecuperable negativity in the misanthropic Bethlem Gabor. St Leon approaches Gabor externally as an intellectual problem with which he ought to deal. But Gabor has not been dealt with and returns as Mandeville: a product and symptom of war. War marks the impossibility of history as progress, of writing a historical novel that will move towards the end of history. For Mandeville is not a historical novel in the Hegelian form elaborated by Georg Lukács.13 As a case history of its protagonist’s failure to become a historical figure, it is the history of the impossibility of its writing as a historical novel. If history signifies perspective, a sense of background and foreground, Mandeville works at an archeological level (in Foucault’s sense) to unsettle the very possibility of historical representation. Not only is the history of the Commonwealth, to which Godwin will return in 1824, pushed into the background, its events become props for a psychic history that makes publicly recorded history unreadable. And not only does Godwin write against his own republican sympathies, by narrating this history from the other side, as if twisting it into the heart of its resistances. The narrative itself is brutally foreshortened, since instead of proceeding to a projected fourth volume, it breaks off with Mandeville’s disfiguration after his assault on Clifford. And not because his life is over, but because it is not over, because the past remains, even today, an open wound like the ‘deep and perilous gash’ across his face (M, 325). It would seem that Mandeville spells an end to the enlightenment of Political Justice. Yet years later Godwin still expresses his partiality for this work, whose critical reception led him to explore what Lyotard calls the ‘darkening of the universalism of the enlightenment’ through literature.14 War registers and regenerates historical and social traumas that cannot be mediated in Kant’s sphere of publicity (Öffentlichkeit), and its emergence as an issue marks the end of the Enlightenment and the beginning of a Romanticism more sensitive to what Godwin calls ‘individual’ as opposed to ‘general’ or ‘universal’ history. Godwin distinguishes these modes in ‘Of History and Romance,’ where the general

Maniquis_3201_172_(Rajan).indd 174

1/26/2011 6:17:19 PM



War, Trauma, and the Historical Novel in Godwin’s Mandeville

175

history practised by Enlightenment historians such as Hume and Robertson is the history of nations and disciplines, and looks for regularities and recurrent laws; individual history, by contrast, follows a man into ‘his closet,’ seeking those singularities and disruptive particularities that cannot be generalized into a pattern.15 Conflict (to return to Derrida’s distinction between war and conflict) has to do with what Lyotard calls ‘damages,’ which can be arbitrated in the court of Reason, and thus subsumed into a general history. But ‘wrongs,’ according to Lyotard, occur when the parties do not share a language, when their languages are incommensurable.16 Wrongs, we could say, can be discerned only in the mode of individual history. And it is these wrongs created by the subtle repressiveness of values such as the ‘good’ or ‘peace,’ and which cannot be spoken of in the sphere of publicity, that are the subject of Mandeville’s absolute war against Clifford, in the individual history that interrupts British universal history’s progress beyond war to a restored peace. This essay, then, asks how Mandeville can be about political justice, even though it ends with a barbarism that still lives on, as a spectre not confronted, but also a potential. In exploring this potential, I read Godwin’s novel in terms of a negative dialectic that his contemporary Friedrich Schelling theorized in the Freedom essay (1809) and Ages of the World (1815): texts important for Marxist Idealists such as Slavoj Žižek and Ernst Bloch.17 Schelling’s middle work, as a response to Kant’s question ‘Is the Human Race Constantly Progressing?’18 seeks to grasp antagonism as the condition for freedom. Schelling wants to understand the role evil plays in the body and the body politic, yet without renouncing the goal of enlightenment, which remains the im-possible horizon of the  movement from past to future that he projects in Ages, but never completes. In this genealogy of morals, pathology and psychopathology, as the part’s wandering away from the whole into an obstinate selfhood, are errors, which is to say tropes, twistings, of what cannot be said. In Schelling’s psychoanalytic historiography, history cannot begin until we have given due weight to what impedes its progress (of which culture, for Godwin, is the pathological symptom). ‘Idealism,’ which ‘consists in the nonacknowledgment’ of the negative, ‘is the universal system of our times.’ Yet ‘whoever does not acknowledge the priority of Realism wants evolution without the involution that preceded it.’19 For Godwin too history must become its own psychoanalysis – and not just in recognition of a realism by which Schelling means something closer to the Lacanian Real, but also because of the creative residues in the negative. In this in-

Maniquis_3201_172_(Rajan).indd 175

1/26/2011 6:17:20 PM

176

Tilottama Rajan

volution pathology, I argue, is the utopian unground of history: at once a product of and a resistance to cultural institution. By institution, moreover, Godwin means not just Althusser’s repressive and ideological state apparatuses, but anything that has been instituted, including concepts with collective authority. For as Godwin says, ‘government’ goes beyond ‘social institutions’ to ‘insinuate itself’ into the arts and even into ‘our personal dispositions.’20 Institution is thus the very activity of discursive imposition. Given this pervasiveness of institution, political justice can never be a program, since it must call in question not just specific forms of governmentality, but the very institution of the social as consensus, of the political as political economy, and of history and the historical novel as forms of modernity. In this spirit, Godwin’s archaeology of British history moves in the opposite direction from the dialectic Lukács associates with Sir Walter Scott.21 For where Waverley draws the losses of history into a discourse of improvement that puts war in England’s past, thus insulating her from the rough beast of revolution ambivalently contemplated by Kant,22 Mandeville goes back a century earlier, to England’s beheading of her own king in 1649, and to a period of dissension before the invention of Great Britain in 1707. This earlier time is then drawn back into the present through Godwin’s return to 1641 and Ireland as the infancy of his protagonist, the infancy of British history itself. For the resonance between the rebellion of 1641 and the Irish Uprising of 1798, the prelude to Britain’s constitution as a ‘United Kingdom’ in 1800, reminds us of the violence underlying all acts of union and settling of disputes, public or personal. Interestingly, for Godwin, who should favour the advent of parliamentary democracy, the Glorious Revolution was just such an accommodation, which ‘quieted’ the ‘grand contest excited under the Stuarts,’ inaugurating a ‘history of negotiations and tricks’ rather than of ‘genuine independent man.’23 Godwin differs from Scott not only in his view of British history but also in his use of what Lukács calls the ‘mediocre hero’ as the pivot of this history. Like Scott, for whom large historical movements ‘operate at a level of abstraction,’24 Godwin places Cromwell and the Stuarts offstage. He personalizes his ‘individual history’ through a minor figure, drawing back both from world history and the particular version of ‘general history’ practised in his own History of the Commonwealth, which is not about individuals but is also more amorphous and tangled than the general history he describes in critiquing the Enlightenment. Scott’s mediocre hero embodies Englishness as a ‘middle way’ between ‘extremes,’25

Maniquis_3201_172_(Rajan).indd 176

2/5/2011 11:14:53 AM



War, Trauma, and the Historical Novel in Godwin’s Mandeville

177

the very way that Mandeville describes the Presbyterians (M, 37). But for Godwin this wavering, this decentring from one side or the other, does not create a space for the dialectical resolution of positions, but in the longer term becomes the empty place of the political unconscious. And in the shorter term it simply renders the individual a blank slate, or in Foucault’s words, ‘the inscribed surface of events … totally imprinted by history and the process of history’s destruction of the body.’26 Thus Mandeville, whose family is unaligned, becomes a royalist only because he has been reviled as an anti-monarchist in the schoolboy incident of the cartoons, where he takes the rap for the pathetic Waller. In this episode a book of anti-monarchist cartoons is found in Mandeville’s apartment, left there by Waller in a desperate attempt to get rid of something he knows will get him into trouble, and Mandeville is sentenced to eat the book as a punishment: a humiliation from which Clifford actually saves him by seizing the book and throwing it into the fire. Mandeville has no reason to be a royalist simply because the school as a whole is strongly inclined that way (M, 80). Indeed his treatment, his desire to define himself by antithesis, and the fact that Clifford is a ‘royalist to the core’ (94) should logically incline him the other way. Thus, his stubborn attachment to what excludes him, despite his disaffinity for groups, marks the fundamental incoherence of a character that is not in-itself but traumatically formed by circumstance. Whereas Waverley embodies general in individual history, Mandeville is marked by a puzzling absence of each from the other. In the foreground is Charles Mandeville, the son of English parents killed in the rebellion of 1641, who is brought up by the severe and fanatical Presbyterian clergyman Hilkiah Bradford in the castle of Mandeville’s depressive uncle Audley. In the background is the confused history of the period, unreadable except to those who know it, whose knowledge can maintain itself only by disavowing the novel’s symptomatic form. For the novel throws history out of focus. Not only is this history unbalanced, in that its participants are limited to royalists, so that the other side is absent, missing from our understanding. Not only is this other side, Godwin’s side, still unavailable for the future, having missed its place in the present. But because Godwin does not follow Scott in configuring events as an epic contest of opposed sides, the antagonisms that traverse the novel also cannot be mapped, settled, in terms of the dialectically meaningful conflicts of ideology. For as Žižek argues, the ideological field is made up of a ‘multitude of “floating signifiers”’ whose ‘identity is “open”’ until they are organized

Maniquis_3201_172_(Rajan).indd 177

2/5/2011 11:15:25 AM

178

Tilottama Rajan

around a ‘nodal point.’ This point de capiton, an issue like the conflict of Cromwell and Charles, ‘“quilts” them, stops their sliding and fixes their meaning.’27 But in Mandeville this nodal point that gives shape to the novel’s animosities has disappeared. People take sides for the most arbitrary reasons, as we have seen in Mandeville’s alliance of himself with the royalist cause. If these choices point to character as a product of circumstance, at a deeper level they point to its disturbed, traumatic foundations, which means that altered circumstances would provide no more than a displacement of underlying incoherences. This is why it is so difficult to articulate the issue posed by the novel, why Godwin pushes beneath the political as a code of legibility to something more anarchic: not anarchic in the sense of the ideological credo of anarchism, with which Godwin is associated but about which he had reservations, but anarchic in the sense of being before foundation or institution. For more than any identifiable conflict, the novel manifests what Žižek calls the ‘Real of antagonism’ for which factions and differences are simply a ‘name.’ ‘Antagonism,’ Žižek writes in contrast to Kant, ‘is an impossible kernel, a certain limit which is in itself nothing; it is only to be constructed retroactively, from a series of its effects, as the traumatic point which escapes them’ and ‘prevents a closure of the social field.’ Hence, in Mandeville the specifics of conflict – what it means to be a Catholic or a Presbyterian royalist – scarcely matter. Political (or religious, or sexual) difference, rather than providing the meaning of the text, is a symptom ‘on account of which every symbolization of … difference is unstable and displaced with regard to itself.’28 Sheer antagonism, rather than ideologically legible conflicts, forms the traumatic core of this novel. It is against the background of minutely coded differences between parties that we meet Mandeville as an embodiment of this sheer antagonism, determined to wage absolute war on his rival Clifford. As Scott’s biographer Lockhart complains, there is no reason for anything Mandeville does: ‘A causeless aversion preys upon his soul.’29 Not that this is quite true. For events amply confirm Mandeville’s paranoia, from the brutal massacre of his parents, to the incident of the cartoons and the motiveless malignity of Mallison, a Winchester schoolmate and sidekick of Clifford, who returns to defame Mandeville at Oxford, and then finally exhibits more pecuniary motives in conspiring with one Holloway to insinuate himself into the confidence of Mandeville’s uncle and defraud Charles of his legacy. Indeed, this accumulation of events discloses paranoia as containing what Thomas Pfau calls an ‘emphatically analytic’ and critical quality, albeit in the form of an emotionally charged ‘inter-

Maniquis_3201_172_(Rajan).indd 178

1/26/2011 6:17:20 PM



War, Trauma, and the Historical Novel in Godwin’s Mandeville

179

pretive agitation and urgency.’30 But what makes Lockhart’s comment apt is the excessiveness of Mandeville’s reactions: his refusal to distinguish between enemies, between Clifford and Mallison. For Mandeville antagonism is a Manichean principle: just as there are elective affinities between people, so ‘there are antipathies … I had found this true opposition and inter-destructiveness in Clifford’ (M, 141; emphasis mine). Mezentius, ‘the famous tyrant of antiquity,’ he continues, ‘tied a living body to a dead one, and caused the one to take in, and gradually become a partner of, the putrescence of the other. I have read of twin children, whose bodies were so united in their birth, that they could never after be separated, while one carried with him, wherever he went, an intolerable load, and of whom, when one died, it involved the necessary destruction of the other’ (ibid.). It would seem that Mandeville wants to foreclose any understanding that might impede his absolute or ‘eternal war’ on Clifford. ‘Absolute’ war, a concept introduced by Godwin’s contemporary Carl von Clausewitz, is war without compromise: war in which there is no peace until one of the ‘parties is overthrown.’ Thus, as Mandeville says of Clifford: ‘I must kill him; or he must kill me’ (M, 106). By contrast, in ‘real’ war other considerations enter; this ‘shrivelled-up form of war,’ as Clausewitz calls it, is only ‘diplomacy’ and leads to a restoration of relations.31 Clausewitz’s word ‘absolute,’ which must be read symptomatically given its resonances with German Idealism, means something taken to its very limit, beyond good and evil, to the point of psychosis.32 This absolute or Real (in Lacan’s sense) is what Mandeville seeks in displacing war to a psychic level occluded if we focus on the real history of the period, which is one of negotiations and tricks. Real or ‘general history’ as Godwin calls it in ‘Of History and Romance,’ where he distinguishes between the history of events and that of persons, is the subject of his more Foucaultian general history of the Commonwealth period. Real history has politics as its object. But in rendering it unreal, in using actual war merely as a screen for a more profound psychic war, Godwin deconstructs the very institution of politics. And not just at the level of government, but also at a structural level where politics is the matrix from which various forms of ‘normal’ social and psychic relations are also generated. Godwin draws us into this deconstruction by conveying the text as a third-person narrative we receive in the first person. For since the narrative voice is not always Mandeville’s, the first person is better thought of as a mode of reception than a mode of narration. Using Caleb Williams as a paradigm for his later texts, Godwin tells us that he began the novel

Maniquis_3201_172_(Rajan).indd 179

1/26/2011 6:17:20 PM

180

Tilottama Rajan

‘in the third person,’ but grew dissatisfied with this form and made ‘the hero of [the] tale his own historian.’33 This rendering into the first person of what begins as foreign to our experience produces what I shall call the fantasy of a ‘perverse identification,’ with which Godwin had first experimented in Fleetwood. It is perverse because Godwin identifies against his own political convictions with a supporter of the Stuarts, and because the reader, to honour the contract of first-person narration, must identify against the grain of her more enlightened values with a character who irrationally opposes those who provide the novel’s moral centre. This perverse identification is a form of what Godwin’s contemporary Novalis calls ‘romanticization’: a process in which we elevate the lower into the higher by discerning its occluded potential.34 But it is a fantasy because we do not literally identify with Mandeville, since fantasy, as Žižek argues in analysing it as a Kantian self-critical faculty, does not ‘imagine the attainment of its object’ but rather teaches us how to desire, in this case against the grain of our own repressions.35 To speak of fantasy is to qualify the usual view of Godwin’s novels as confessions, or renderings of the truth. The truth of fantasy lies, rather, in what Žižek calls an ‘enjoyment,’ and eventually cognition, of the symptom.36 During the period of Mandeville, as Foucault argues, confession assumed a new importance as a technology of domination. By telling all, the subject renounced his former self and was normalized,37 analogically procuring the confessions and normalization of his listeners and readers. But confession, though in the first person, involves an objectification of the subject who abjects himself. And Mandeville, though it evokes the form of confession to remind us of the interpellations at work in the penitential apparatus, asks us to resist the pathology of normalization. Hence its ending, which violates the sense of an ending, as Mandeville, having struggled to become a historical figure, is left literally faceless, yet strangely empowered by this disfiguration. Hence also the generative power of the ‘visionary scenes’ of his infancy in Ireland, which stand in contrast to his ‘monotonous’ existence at his uncle’s house. These scenes of trauma, ‘tragic, and distracting, and wild,’ keep the narrative going (M, 44). That they come ‘mixed up … with incidents’ Mandeville ‘had never seen,’ but of which he had been told (ibid.) does not signify the constructedness of war neuroses, but the fact that his experience is more than just his experience, and his body not just his own body, but the archive of a body, to cite Foucault again, ‘imprinted by history and the process of history’s destruction of the body.’ This is why the scenes from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, in which Hilkiah instructs him, have such a

Maniquis_3201_172_(Rajan).indd 180

1/26/2011 6:17:20 PM



War, Trauma, and the Historical Novel in Godwin’s Mandeville

181

powerful effect. These examples, intended to fill the child with revulsion towards the papists, but by which Hilkiah is ‘singularly delighted,’ confuse and energize Mandeville much like the scenes of his flight from Ireland. Their ‘tremendous … engravings’ of ‘all imaginable cruelties’ bring to life again ‘the dead letter of the text’ (M, 50–2), which cannot become a chapter of history on which the book is closed, any more than Godwin’s novel itself, with its final engraving of the brutality of history onto its protagonist’s face. The ending seals in blood a perverse bond between Mandeville, his author, and the reader, a bond created by his communicating his history as an open wound: a ‘wound, that [has] broken and disabled the members of my soul, in such a manner as no time could ever make whole’ (M, 141). Freud discusses our identification with psychopathological characters, and argues that its ‘precondition … is that the spectator should himself be a neurotic … who can derive pleasure’ from ‘recognition of a repressed impulse.’ ‘In anyone who is not neurotic, this recognition will meet only with aversion.’ But for Freud, interestingly, this is because in the latter repression has been more successful, which is to say that normality is profoundly repressed, and neurosis closer to the truth. How then to shake up an initial repression in the reader, given that we constitute ourselves as normal? For if the character seems too removed from normality, the transference cannot operate. Thus, Freud argues that to ‘induce the same illness’ in the spectator as in the character is ‘especially necessary where the repression does not already exist in us’ and must first ‘be set up.’ It is for this reason that Godwin builds an almost airtight case for Mandeville’s paranoia, so that we are not faced, as Freud says, ‘with a fully established neurosis,’ but are ‘made to follow the development of the illness along with the sufferer.’38 Mandeville’s case, the case he pleads for the pathology his case is, does not allow itself to be dismissed on the grounds of either circumstance or aberration. If his temperament has been irrevocably formed by his traumatic rescue from the scene of his parents’ death, then Henrietta, who stands for the possibility of circumstances being different, seems to have escaped her brother’s fate only by the accident of having been sent to visit their mother’s friends the Willises some months before the massacre. Or perhaps, even worse, she has escaped this fate by a literary convention that sequesters the feminine in the pastoral and domestic. This idealization of the feminine can only be a repression. For the idealized object, as Melanie Klein suggests, is not truly ‘integrated in the ego,’ and is idealized only because it is not possessed.39 If, on the other hand, we

Maniquis_3201_172_(Rajan).indd 181

1/26/2011 6:17:20 PM

182

Tilottama Rajan

conclude that Mandeville’s pathology is endogenous, and the massacre only a trigger for an underlying paranoid melancholia, if we make of him an intrinsically deviant case, we ignore the inscriptive force of circumstance that makes character a symptom of culture. This inscription takes root as pathology, but cannot be set aside as such, pathology being the archive of a body ‘totally imprinted by history’ and the locus of the ‘articulation of the body and history.’40 Just as Mandeville’s case cannot be put in the past, so neither can it be resolved in the future through the exchanging of forgiveness projected in the revised ending of Caleb Williams. Rather, the scarring of his face disfigures the face-to-face ethical encounter that concludes Godwin’s first novel. Nor do we even wish for perpetual peace between Mandeville and Clifford. Because Clifford has not wronged him, there would be no reciprocity in such forgiveness. And this lack of reciprocity, reiterating the inequality of the men, would redouble the wrong Mandeville feels. It does not really matter that Clifford is innocent of harming Mandeville. Not only does his generosity come at no cost, earning him the approbation of others, unlike Mandeville’s decision to protect Waller; but the question of guilt or innocence, the subject of the legal proceeding in terms of which Godwin frames Caleb Williams, is not really relevant. For it is not Clifford who is guilty, but what he becomes within the system of representation that we call culture, institution. Why, for instance, is Clifford’s role in the cartoon episode ‘generous’ (M, 105), when, to be sure, he spares Mandeville the ignominy of eating the scurrilous book, but assumes like everyone else that Mandeville is guilty? And why do we not see Mandeville’s taking the rap for Waller as generous, but as tainted by the egotism of ‘not’ wanting to sacrifice someone weaker to a public opinion he disdains (103)? Why, except because Clifford accommodates a public opinion that is exposed to its own repressions by Mandeville’s aversion from the cultural and psychic incorporation embodied in school, family, and party? The period of civil war in which the novel is set produces an anarchy in which existing structures lose their foundation. Within this general unsettling, Mandeville’s absolute war against Clifford functions as a form of radical deconstruction in which Clifford himself is a mere alibi. For by forcing us to know what the ‘good’ excludes, the supreme condescension even of its attempts to be understanding, this war makes us feel the violence of the good as a form of normalization. In the Freedom essay, Schelling takes up this aversion of the part from the whole in terms of the role that evil (which Blake called the ‘active

Maniquis_3201_172_(Rajan).indd 182

1/26/2011 6:17:20 PM



War, Trauma, and the Historical Novel in Godwin’s Mandeville

183

springing from energy’) plays in the emergence of freedom from necessity. Schelling uses the analogy of a diseased body to explore freedom, commenting that ‘the individual member, such as the eye, is possible only in the whole of an organism,’ yet ‘has a life for itself,’ a ‘freedom, the … proof of which is disease, which lies within the eye’s capability.’41 Hegel, for whom the body also stands in for the psyche, similarly discusses illness as an ‘irritability’ in which a part of the body withdraws into itself. This irritability, a physiological term connoting muscular contraction, produces an ‘active maintenance of self’ against the outside, which allows it to become ‘for the self’ but only as ‘the negative of itself.’42 Interestingly, Schelling’s example of a member that will not cooperate with the whole involves a physiological condition that seems anything but freely chosen, which is to say that he wants to understand freedom as beginning in compulsion, unfreedom. Nevertheless, in Ages of the World Schelling further explores the constitutive force of this blind withdrawal as a ‘positing oneself as that which does not have being,’ a ‘wanting’ of oneself as what one is not (yet). This desire, though it is, ‘in relation to everything else, negating,’ is ‘later precisely the basis of egoity.’ For it is through this cutting of ‘itself off from other things’ in a self-concentration that resists the interpellations imposed by being a member of a body (politic) that a being ‘is exclusively itself’ (A,16). Mandeville too contracts into himself in a bitter egotism he calls ‘envy,’ resisting his sister’s attempts to care for him: ‘I dug a deep foss, and threw up an intrenchment, to cut me off from creatures wearing the human form’ (M, 93). Typically, Godwin’s characters are seen as misanthropes, because, as Schelling says, ‘humans show a predilection for the affirmative just as much as they turn away from the negative.’ ‘Everything that is outpouring’ is ‘clear’ to us, like the characters of Clifford and Henrietta. But we ‘cannot grasp that which closes itself off’ and ‘denies itself,’ the ‘obliquity that resists the straight,’ ‘the left that resists the right.’ Yet even these descriptions are only figures, as Schelling says, for something that is not ‘easy to verbalize’ (A, 6), since it can only be described negatively, as a resistance or turning away from something else. It is for this reason that the ‘obscure separation’ Blake calls Urizen cannot truly be called evil, even if its opposite seems incontrovertibly ‘good’; and it is also for this reason that Lockhart’s description of Mandeville’s causeless aversion is so appropriate, since aversion, as a turning away, is a form of trope. For this reason too we cannot simply dismiss Mandeville’s behaviour as homosocial or misanthropic. Rather these pathologies, including his incestuously possessive attachment to his sister, are the form taken by his

Maniquis_3201_172_(Rajan).indd 183

1/26/2011 6:17:20 PM

184

Tilottama Rajan

turning away from things as they are, which leaves us to imagine what this turning away cannot turn towards. It is because of this tropological structure of the negative, which is not what it is, yet more than what it is, that Schelling sees the misanthropy of the part as linked to ‘freedom.’ Or as he writes, ‘man as selfish, particular being’ is also ‘spirit’ and ‘this combination constitutes the personality’ (F, 242). Schelling initially frames his ‘investigation’ of freedom in the conventional terms of theodicy, the problem of how evil is compatible with ‘God’ as the ideal principle. But he develops this question into an affirmation of evil as freedom, through a psychoanalysis of the categories of good and evil. What Schelling develops as psychoanalysis, Godwin wants to understand as the role of pathology in the body politic. For Mandeville returns repeatedly to the figure of a wounded psychic body, the literalization of this wound in the final pages becoming an open declaration of war on the very figure of a body politic. Yet as the trope of disease suggests (in contrast to Godwin’s metaphor of the wound), Schelling’s attitude to deviance is ambivalent. On the one hand is his perverse identification of disease as a ‘capability,’ which will later lead Georges Canguilhem to describe disease as ‘a positive, innovative experience in the living being.’43 Or as Schelling himself writes, ‘If an organic being becomes sick, forces appear that previously lay concealed in it’ (A, 48). On the other hand, disease is ‘the disorder that enters nature through the abuse of freedom,’ and is ‘only a phantasm of life … hovering between being and non-being’ (F, 242, 244). Arguably, this disavowal of the negative that he wants to acknowledge is an instance of the very idealism Schelling criticizes. Yet without this romanticism, he could not see the negative as containing ‘within itself, although locked up,’ a link to ‘the ideal principle’ (F, 240, 242). If the Freedom essay is a psychoanalysis of illness that tries to understand its role in the body and body politic, in the third version of Ages of the World (1815), a text that he revised thrice but never published, Schelling transfers this war between the affirming and negating principles into a larger process, so as to understand the pathology of a history that does not progress but is caught in an endless ‘rotatory movement’ (A, 20): a war, one might say, between war itself and perpetual peace.44 In this process positive and negative drives are imbricated, the positive needing to be resisted if Idealism is to be grounded in the Real, while the negative in its very withdrawal seeks to expand into its hidden positivity. The positive and negative ‘potencies,’ Schelling says, ‘are infinitely far from each other and infinitely near. Far, because what is affirmed … in one of them, is

Maniquis_3201_172_(Rajan).indd 184

1/26/2011 6:17:20 PM



War, Trauma, and the Historical Novel in Godwin’s Mandeville

185

posited in the other as negated and in the dark. Near, because it only requires an inversion, a turning out of what was concealed’ to ‘transform, the one into the other’ (18). It seems that this turning around of positive and negative within the vicious circle of the self at first produces only sheer antagonism. How to ‘redeem’ psychic life from this ‘annular drive’ and discern the ‘freedom’ trapped in ‘necessity’ is Schelling’s challenge (A, 22, 27): a challenge made all the harder as his logic, in his middle work from the period 1809–20, is not that of a progressive dialectic. For in Schelling’s revision of the Hegelian dialectic, even though ‘the third’ or ‘unity’ must be ‘outside and above all antithesis,’ all three moments of the dialectic have ‘an equal right to be that which has being,’ which is to say that synthesis can never ‘elevate itself outside antithesis’ (36). The restoration figured in Henrietta cannot be privileged over Mandeville’s hatred, since just as ‘antithesis exclude[s] unity, unity exclude[s] antithesis’ and is its own form of intolerance (ibid.). But if Schelling’s logic is rotary, the schema of ‘ages’ is also profoundly teleological. In the im-possible teleology of this text, history is the medium in which an initially ‘blind life’ finds its way to freedom (A, 48). But history as the medium in which the negative is spiritualized cannot reach a culmination without going back to its beginnings. Or as Habermas puts it, in tracing Bloch’s utopianism to Schelling, there is a ‘hunger, [in which] the knot of the world presses toward resolution,’ and which ‘as long as it is unresolved casts life back to its beginnings.’45 For Schelling this return to a primordial crisis that must be understood before we can proceed results in history having to be its own psychoanalysis. The same archeological drive takes Godwin back to a time before the Glorious Revolution, to the sheer antagonism of sectarian violence that precedes the simulation of Britain as a united kingdom. It is for this reason that Godwin returns to the primal scene of his protagonist’s psychic birth during the massacre, which brings Mandeville into being as a corps morcelé, a paranoid-schizoid body in bits and pieces rather than an integrated subject. Yet for Schelling, who also interimplicates phylo- and ontogenetic narratives, it is by no means clear whether we can emerge from the endless deconstruction of expanding and contracting forces by each other, or whether history must remain its own interminable analysis. A ‘true beginning,’ Schelling writes in describing Hegelian history, would be ‘one that does not always begin again but persists,’ so that there is a ‘steady progression’ and not an ‘alternating advancing and retreating movement.’ A ‘veritable end’ is likewise one that ‘does not need to retreat

Maniquis_3201_172_(Rajan).indd 185

1/26/2011 6:17:20 PM

186

Tilottama Rajan

from itself back to the beginning’ (A, 20). But for this progress to occur, there must be a decisive separation between present and past: ‘no present is possible that is not founded on a decisive past,’ and ‘no past is possible that is not based on the present as something overcome’ (20, 42). And if the past cannot be past until the present too is overcome, then perpetual peace is impossible as long as we remain in the present. Given this persistence of the past, history can only be a negative dialectic. It is a dialectic because through history something not yet made good pushes its essence forward, as Habermas says in discussing Bloch.46 But in the absence of a past that is decisively over, we cannot be released from that inter-destructiveness of the good and what resists it, from the work of the negative, which requires that historical and cultural institutions be submitted to an ongoing psychoanalysis of their underlying contradictions. For Godwin too political justice cannot occur, because the past lives on and because what history must bring to light is still negated and in the dark. Throughout Mandeville there are hints of a longer view in which this bringing to enlightenment could occur. For Godwin infiltrates into Mandeville’s narrative a more historically knowledgeable voice, allowing us to be inside and outside the claustrophobia of his psyche. The favourable comments on Cromwell (M, 80, 110), the analyses of religiopolitical history, and the comment on how women are excluded from education (79) are all spoken by someone from a later time. Equally important is ‘The Seven Sleepers’ fragment, which Godwin makes part of the genealogy of his novel in his preface, describing it as ‘the germ’ of a work begun in 1809, whose resumption resulted in Mandeville. This story of a hero who has ‘the faculty of falling asleep’ for ‘twenty, or a hundred years at a time’ (7) may recall St Leon, where the protagonist’s immortality allows him a second and third chance in the future. But it is puzzlingly disconnected from Mandeville. Why would Godwin even mention this false start, unless to point to an occluded psychic origin: the origin of Mandeville’s nightmare in an idealism that the novel brutally negates, but that remains its irreducible remainder, buried in a cryptogram of the text’s genesis? For Melanie Klein, whose interest in ‘bad feelings’ provokes Rose’s essay ‘Why War?’, such feelings are part of an im-possible dialectic that moves from the paranoid-schizoid position, through depression, to reparation. Klein is notable for recognizing negative affects such as anger, envy, and paranoia, though within a deeply problematic process of ‘reparation’ that at times disavows her own questioning of idealizations. Briefly, Klein recognizes what André Green will later call the ‘work of the

Maniquis_3201_172_(Rajan).indd 186

1/26/2011 6:17:20 PM



War, Trauma, and the Historical Novel in Godwin’s Mandeville

187

negative,’ when she discerns the paranoid-schizoid position, the splitting of objects and people into good and bad, as integral to development. Paranoid aggression, however, eventually gives way to the greater introspection of the depressive position, which as part of the process of integration leads to reparation. Whereas paranoid anxiety is ‘centred on the preservation of the ego’ against what threatens it, ‘depression’ occurs when one is alone with the loss of the loved object that one now wants to preserve, and for Klein marks an advance in maturity.47 In Klein’s progression through contraries, then, guilt at the disfiguration of the good object eventually leads to reparation, in a dialectic that arguably curtails the critical force of the analytic of evil begun in the Romantic period by Schelling, Blake, and Godwin. This is not to say that Schelling in the Freedom essay,48 or Godwin in his late novel Cloudesley, do not also crave reparation. But in 1817, reparation for Godwin is associated with Audley, an ineffectual melancholic. This is to say that for Godwin reparation now is the depression of history. Wounded and misanthropic like his nephew, Audley is part of a cultural trauma inscribed as heredity in Mandeville’s personal and cultural being. Yet Audley represents a too early forgoing of the anarchic deconstructiveness of the paranoid position, as a radical unbinding of affects from their institution and foundation within morality. After his father cruelly separates him from his beloved Amelia, Audley gathers himself around the ‘one event’ that is ‘in relation to himself … the only reality,’ and forms a wounded, narcissistic self around this ‘sadness … [which] had become a part of himself’(M, 41). While his nephew has ‘hatred [as his] ruling passion’ (202), Audley is the soul of gentleness: with his passing it feels to Mandeville as if ‘an abstract principle, one of the capital articles of my creed, was destined to die’ (205). Yet Audley’s ‘melancholy’ (41) is better described as depression: a less aestheticizing term that did not emerge into the forefront until the late nineteenth century. This is to say that his ‘apathy and neutrality’ entail a complete dispersion of affect. Thus Audley, who in his death stands beyond his nephew as ‘a celestial spirit’ (202), is also ‘less than him,’ ‘unequal to contention,’ ‘sinking, as without power of resistance, under any thing that presented itself in the form of hostility’ (25). Audley is part of the archive of a private history that holds traces of the future as well as of the stubborn traumas of the past. But his irrelevance is symptomatic of the text’s irritability towards its own premature idealisms, one of which is Godwin’s plan, abandoned in midstream, to seek reparation by making Mandeville the confession of a sadder and wiser

Maniquis_3201_172_(Rajan).indd 187

1/26/2011 6:17:20 PM

188

Tilottama Rajan

man (M, 109). Such conventionalisms can only be based on a certain ressentiment. This is why Henrietta too provides only what the Kleinian analyst Joan Rivière calls a ‘fantastic “reparation,”’49 an impossible fantasy of peace. For Henrietta too is part of the good, and Mandeville’s idealization of her is just as much part of a dismembering and working through of the good as is his construction of Clifford as a hated, persecutory force. As André Green argues, pushing further Klein’s analysis of idealization as an inability to integrate the good object, idealization is part of the ‘work of the negative,’ a phrase Green borrows from Hegel. As a pushing away of the good, it is a disguised form of the negative that withdraws from integrating the idealized object not because of a deficiency in the subject but because there is something missing in the good that prevents it from being posited except as fantasy.50 Mandeville impossibly romanticizes Henrietta as part of an ‘Arcadia’ free from ‘the traces’ of history (M, 148–9). Yet he is also uneasily aware of her artlessness as a product of cultivation and institution (62). If he cannot be critical of her it is not because she is truly ‘good,’ but because he must preserve the fantasy of love, the ability to desire the good. It is because history is not ready to leave the work of the negative that Godwin ends his novel so brutally, with Mandeville confronting his mutilated face, in a mirror stage that confers on him a powerfully traumatic identity: the identity of the faceless, the unnameable. I had received a deep and perilous gash, the broad brand of which I shall not fail to carry with me to my grave. The sight of my left eye is gone; the cheek beneath is severed, with a deep trench between. My wound is of that sort, which in the French civil wars got the name of une balafre. I have pleased myself, in the fury and bitterness of my soul, with tracing the whole force of that word. It is cicatrix luculenta, a glazed or shining scar, like the effect of a streak of varnish upon a picture. Balafré I find explained by Girolamo Vittori, by the Italian word smorfiato; and this again – I mean the noun smorfia – is decided by ‘the resolute’ John Florio to signify … ‘a mocking or push with one’s mouth.’ The explanation of these lexicographers is happily suited to my case, and the mark I for ever carry about with me. The reader may recollect the descriptions I have occasionally been obliged to give, of the beauty of my person and countenance … When I first looked in my glass, and saw my face, once more stripped of its tedious dressings, I thought I never saw anything so monstrous … The sword of my enemy had given a perpetual grimace, a sort of preternatural and unvarying distorted smile, or deadly grin, to my countenance … Every time my eye accidentally

Maniquis_3201_172_(Rajan).indd 188

1/26/2011 6:17:21 PM



War, Trauma, and the Historical Novel in Godwin’s Mandeville

189

caught my mirror, I saw Clifford, and the cruel heart of Clifford, branded into me. My situation was not like what it had hitherto been. Before, to think of Clifford was an act of the mind … Now I bore Clifford and his injuries perpetually about with me. Even as certain tyrannical planters in the West Indies have set a brand with a red-hot iron upon the negroes they have purchased, to denote that they are irremediably a property, so Clifford had set his mark upon me, as a token that I was his for ever. (M, 325)

To be sure, the identity Mandeville claims here is defiantly symbolic (in a Lacanian sense), stubbornly attached to the pedantry of lexicographers and the power of the letter as inscription. Still, there is something triumphant in this claim, this face of the living dead that survives in a strange tension with empirical history: a tense(ion) we can describe as the future past. Not only has Mandeville brought the psychic violence of history into the open, shattering the mythology of Restoration figured in the marriage coach, which rolls triumphally over him like Shelley’s Car of Life in his last poem The Triumph of Life. And not only must we recognize the continuance of this psychic horror in Godwin’s own time, as suggested by the reference to the West Indies, which returns us to the colonization of Ireland at the beginning of the novel, binding past and present in a single continuum. But Clifford and Mandeville have also become equals. Because Clifford has hurt Mandeville, he is at last guilty; he will never again be ‘good.’ The figure that is Clifford has been disfigured. In what sense then can Mandeville still be about political justice? From time to time Godwin holds out a longer view that promises a future beyond the present. Yet he discards this view at the level of personal history. For despite early indications that Mandeville has achieved a sense of perspective, his claims to be ‘mellowed down by time’ sound empty (M, 109). The narrative, though written when Mandeville is in his forties, breaks off when he is just under twenty-one. And this is because he has in a sense reached the age of maturity. If the longer view opens the text forward and backward to what Jon Klancher sees as a lost republican moment,51 this moment is still negated and in the dark. For the concluding reference to slavery both points forward to the imperialism of Godwin’s own century and takes us back to the plantations in Ireland during the seventeenth century, and the republican Cromwell’s transplantation of his rebellious Irish subjects as slaves to the West Indies, about which Godwin writes in his History of the Commonwealth.52 The trauma of slavery, the slavery that is inside as well as outside the United Kingdom, inside as well as outside the self, makes it impossible to distinguish right from

Maniquis_3201_172_(Rajan).indd 189

1/26/2011 6:17:21 PM

190

Tilottama Rajan

left, republican from royalist, past from present. It absorbs any larger perspective into the close-up of Mandeville’s scarred face as the face of anonymous history. Political justice, then, cannot be posited, but is the imperative to go beyond the mere rearrangement of characters inhabiting the power structure to discern the psychic wrongs done by the very institution of politics. The possibility of this justice inheres in trauma as a form of survival, the survival not of a person – as Cathy Caruth would have it53 – but of trauma itself, as a wound that gives itself to the future, provoking us to think differently. This is to say that political justice is a form of reparation performed by the reader, but as criticism, which is not beyond, but rather is, the work of the negative.

NOTES   1 Jacqueline Rose, Why War? – Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Return to Melanie Klein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 16–18.   2 Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 31.   3 William Godwin, Mandeville: A Tale of the Seventeenth Century in England, vol. 6 of The Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, ed. Pamela Clemit (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1992), 124. Hereafter cited parenthetically as M.   4 Mary Favret, ‘Everyday War,’ ELH 72, no. 3 (2005), 605–33.   5 Henry Crabb Robinson, Crabb Robinson in Germany 1800–1805. Extracts from his correspondence, ed. Edith J. Morley (Oxford: Clarendon, 1929), 105, 113; René Wellek, Immanuel Kant in England, 1793–1838 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1931), 28.   6 Immanuel Kant, ‘To Perpetual Peace’ (1795), in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays on Politics, History and Morals, trans. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1983), 107; ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent’ (1784), in Perpetual Peace, 31.   7 Kant, ‘Idea,’ 34; ‘To Perpetual Peace,’ 121.   8 Kant, ‘Speculative Beginning of Human History’ (1786), in Perpetual Peace, 57; ‘To Perpetual Peace,’ 108.   9 Jacques Derrida, Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2, trans. Jan Plug et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 50. 10 Kant, ‘To Perpetual Peace,’ 31–2. 11 William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Morals and Happiness [1798], ed. F.E.L. Priestley, 3 vols. (Toronto: University of To-

Maniquis_3201_172_(Rajan).indd 190

1/26/2011 6:17:21 PM



War, Trauma, and the Historical Novel in Godwin’s Mandeville

191

ronto Press, 1946), 2:528. This passage comes at the end of the penultimate chapter of the 1793 edition (8.8). In the 1798 edition it is an appendix to the penultimate chapter (8.9), and is entitled ‘Of Health, and the Prolongation of Human Life.’ Given the length of this appendix (519–29) in relation to chapter 9 itself (515–19), the radical ideas in it actually assume more importance. 12 William Godwin, St Leon, ed. Pamela Clemit, vol. 4 of Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1992), 13. 13 Lukács, Historical Novel, 26–9, 57–8. 14 Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger and the ‘Jews,’ trans. Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 5. 15 William Godwin, ‘Of History and Romance,’ in Caleb Williams, ed. Gary Handwerk and A.A. Markley (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2000), 453–7. 16 Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 5. 17 Jürgen Habermas, ‘Ernst Bloch: A Marxist Schelling,’ in Philosophical-Political Profiles, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 63–80; Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 1996). 18 Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties (1798), trans. Mary J. Gregor (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 141–68. 19 Friedrich Schelling, Ages of the World (1815), trans. Jason M. Wirth (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 7, 107. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as A. 20 Godwin, Political Justice, 1:4–5. This passage, though consistent with the spirit of the whole, is not in the earlier edition, which has a different introduction. 21 Lukács, Historical Novel, 29–68. 22 Kant, Conflict, 153. 23 Godwin, ‘Of History and Romance,’ 461. 24 Lukács, Historical Novel, 34, 40. 25 Ibid., 32. 26 Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,’ in Language, CounterMemory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 148. 27 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 87. 28 Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), 216; Sublime Object, 163.

Maniquis_3201_172_(Rajan).indd 191

1/26/2011 6:17:21 PM

192

Tilottama Rajan

29 John Gibson Lockhart, review of Mandeville, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 2 (December 1817), 270. 30 Thomas Pfau, Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1790–1840 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 84. 31 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. J.J. Graham, rev. F.N. Maude (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1997), 333–5, 345. 32 On the wider provenance of the word, which is not confined to ‘absolute’ knowledge, see David Farrell Krell, who discusses three cases of the absolute: absolute inhibition, absolute separation, and absolute density (‘Three Ends of the Absolute: Schelling, Hölderlin, Novalis,’ in Idealism without Absolutes: Philosophy and Romantic Culture, ed. Tilottama Rajan and Arkady Plotnitsky [Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004], 135–60). 33 Godwin, preface to Standard Novels edition of Fleetwood, in vol. 5 of Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, ed. Pamela Clemit (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1992), 10. 34 See David Farrell Krell, Contagion: Sexuality, Disease, and Death in German Idealism and Romanticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 47. 35 Žižek, Plague, 7. 36 Žižek, Sublime Object, 72–5. 37 Foucault, ‘Technologies of the Self,’ in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley and others (New York: New Press, 1997), 244–5; The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980), 58–65. 38 Sigmund Freud, ‘Psychopathic Characters on the Stage,’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: Vol. VII (1901–5), trans. under the general editorship of James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), 7:308–10. 39 Melanie Klein, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946–1963 (New York: Vintage, 1997), 192–3. 40 Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,’ 148. 41 Friedrich Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Nature of Human Freedom and Related Matters, trans. Priscilla Hayden-Roy, in Philosophy of German Idealism, ed. Ernst Behler (New York: Continuum, 1987), 228. Hereafter cited in the text as F. 42 G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Nature, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), 359, 429. 43 Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological (1966), trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett, introduction by Michel Foucault (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 186. 44 For further discussion of Schelling’s psychoanalysis of the world-spirit or

Maniquis_3201_172_(Rajan).indd 192

1/26/2011 6:17:21 PM



War, Trauma, and the Historical Novel in Godwin’s Mandeville

193

world-soul in Ages and its ramifications for a theory of history, see my article ‘“The Abyss of the Past”: Psychoanalysis in Schelling’s Ages of the World (1815),’ special issue of Romantic Praxis on Psyche and Psychoanalysis in Romanticism, ed. Joel Faflak, at http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/psychoanalysis/ index.html. 45 Habermas, ‘Ernst Bloch,’ 70. 46 Ibid., 71. 47 Klein, Envy, 139, 265–6. 48 Thus the conclusion of the Freedom essay is strongly teleological, projecting a ‘new covenant’ in which God ‘assumes nature and integrates it into himself’ (280), and in the process forgetting the constitutive role Schelling has accorded evil. 49 Joan Rivière, ‘Hate, Greed and Aggression,’ in Melanie Klein and Joan Rivière, Love, Hate and Reparation (New York: Norton, 1964), 23. 50 André Green, The Work of the Negative, trans. Andrew Weller (London: Free Association Books, 1999), 45, 71, 261. 51 Jon Klancher, ‘Godwin and the Genre Reformers: On Necessity and Contingency in Romantic Narrative Theory,’ in Romanticism, History and the Possibilities of Genre: Re-forming Literature, 1789–1837, ed. Tilottama Rajan and Julia M. Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 31–2. 52 William Godwin, History of the Commonwealth of England From Its Commencement to the Restoration of Charles II, 4 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1824), 4:172–3. 53 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 1–9.

Maniquis_3201_172_(Rajan).indd 193

1/26/2011 6:17:21 PM

chapter eight

‘This is the dread hour, / That must decide the fate of England!’: Godwin’s St Dunstan D AV I D O ’ S H A U G H N E S S Y

I There is a weary tone evident in the following piece of parliamentary intelligence from The Times of 2 March 1790: This day comes in the House of Commons Mr. Fox’s motion for a Repeal of the Test Act, so far as that Act respects the body of Protestant Dissenters. The subject already has undergone so many discussions in Parliament, that it is impossible the arguments on either the one or the other side of the question can contain any new force of reasoning, and as every Senator’s mind is already made up on this important business, the debate of course will not be very long, although the result is of the first consequence to both the civil and religious rights of the people.

Some weariness could be forgiven. The debate over these two acts had been ongoing for most of the eighteenth century, with varying degrees of intensity, but it had regained prominence in the 1780s after parliament granted limited rights to British Catholics and repealed the acts for Protestant Dissenters in Ireland in 1778.1 Unsuccessful motions to repeal the acts were brought forward by Henry Beaufoy in March 1787 and May 1789, and by Charles James Fox in March 1790. There was growing support for repeal between the votes in 1787 and 1789, seen in the narrowing of the margin of defeat, but more vociferous demands for reform, combined with fears about the French Revolution, led to an emphatic reversal in 1790 and a landslide defeat of almost three to one against.2 G.M. Ditchfield notes, however, that leading Dissenters such as

Maniquis_3201_194_(O'Shaughnessy).indd 194

1/26/2011 7:16:25 PM



Godwin’s St Dunstan

195

A page from Godwin’s diary for the week of 7–13 February 1790. Courtesy of the Bodleian Library, MS Abinger e. 2, fol. 24r.

Maniquis_3201_194_(O'Shaughnessy).indd 195

1/26/2011 7:16:25 PM

196

David O’Shaughnessy

Joseph Priestley and Theophilus Lindsey were not unduly disheartened by the defeat in 1790 and were determined to continue the campaign.3 The debate over repeal of the acts was sustained and intense and, outside of parliament, was carried out in the press and in pamphlets. Examining a selection of tracts circulating at the height of the 1790 debate, one can sum up the major arguments of both sides.4 The pro-repeal side argued that religion should not be a political matter, that people wanted to be citizens, rather than be labelled Dissenters. They turned to history to prove that there could be no unity of church and state, pointing out that England and its constitution functioned without difficulty before the Church of England came into existence. They believed that it was ridiculous to invoke the dangers of innovation to block repeal – Where would man be without innovation? – and the education of the people was high on their agenda.5 The anti-repealers insisted that the Test and Corporation Acts were integral parts of the constitution. Darkly, they announced that Dissenters did not just want participation in civil affairs, they wanted to control the state and destroy the Anglican church. They were incredulous at the idea that the admiration of French and American values could constitute English patriotism. They held that Protestant Dissenters were no better than Catholics and the same exclusions should apply. The numerous sects of Protestantism, they argued, diluted Englishmen’s capacity to act in unison and love Christ wholeheartedly. Like their opponents, they also turned to history for evidence and deployed examples to demonstrate their case; however, they averred that, where two or more religions exist in a state, the strongest religion should have the power to promote the nation’s best interests. Finally, the links between church and state were so strong, the anti-repealers argued somewhat circularly, that only taking the Test could assure the state of an individual’s faithful service.6 The debate Godwin joined was being fought in the past, in the disputed history of the church and state. When William Godwin came to London in 1782, the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts was shortly to become one of the most pressing political issues of the day and one, evidently, of much personal interest. Indeed, Andrew Kippis, Godwin’s teacher at the Hoxton Dissenting Academy and his early mentor in London, would lead a Dissenting delegation to Pitt in early 1787.7 As well as covering the repeal debates for the Whig New Annual Register (NAR), for which Kippis suggested his services, Godwin knew and socialized with many prominent members of the Dissenting community.8 In February 1785, Godwin wrote to Priestley,

Maniquis_3201_194_(O'Shaughnessy).indd 196

1/26/2011 7:16:25 PM



Godwin’s St Dunstan

197

perhaps the most prominent member of this community. Priestley’s twovolume History of the Corruptions of Christianity (1782) had sparked a number of robust responses, on which Godwin had written for the English Review, and Godwin was keen to introduce himself to a man he admired greatly. A draft of this letter shows how much he strained to participate in this debate and how shackled he felt by working for the Tory English Review: I am myself a Socinian. Convinced of the divine origin of Christianity, and yet perfectly satisfied that it will not stand the test of philosophical examination unless stripped of its doctrinal corruptions, I should be happy by every method which providence may seem to offer to be the humble instrument of dispelling them. I am however restrained from doing this in the most explicit manner by the character of the review.9

Godwin’s eagerness to be counted among the prominent members of the intelligentsia (a strategic social climber, he kept meticulous notes of the people he had met and those he wanted to meet at this time) and his intention of ‘dispelling’ Christianity’s ‘doctrinal corruptions’ made him realize that he needed to find a forum where he could both dazzle London and express his political views.10 Constrained by the Tory English Review, Godwin eventually resigned the editorship of the Whiggish Political Herald given him by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, preferring to remain free from the taint of party, and desirous of an independent platform, one more public than the New Annual Register.11 Elsewhere I have argued that Godwin’s life-long interest in the theatre can be traced back at least to the 1780s and that, at the time he wrote St Dunstan, history, education, and theatre were closely linked in his thinking, as An Account of the Seminary (1783), the 1780s novels, and Political Justice testify when examined against the backdrop of contemporary London theatrical culture and practice.12 Although Godwin’s dramatic efforts have been dismissed by biographers and hence largely ignored by literary critics, Godwin’s diary and his correspondence reveal that he was intrigued by the theatre throughout his life and provide ample evidence that a full understanding of his political and aesthetic project must take account of this aspect of his work.13 It is no exaggeration to say that his four plays are among the most convincing examples of his continued efforts to integrate politics and education with his literary work. As Julie Carlson has written regarding the canonical Romantic poets, the ‘con-

Maniquis_3201_194_(O'Shaughnessy).indd 197

1/26/2011 7:16:25 PM

198

David O’Shaughnessy

tent and aesthetic intents’ of Godwin’s play ‘cannot be fully appreciated apart from the events of the time.’ St Dunstan also ‘reveal[s] the indispensability of theatre for [poets’] becoming acknowledged legislators in this age’ and demonstrates Godwin’s awareness of ‘theatre’s double connection to mind and politics.’14 In this essay I want to show how the historical tragedy St Dunstan, preceding the literary ‘vehicle’ of Caleb Williams, represents Godwin’s first serious attempt to marry that triumvirate of history, education, and theatre in order to bring about political change, or, at least, highlight the necessity of such change. Godwin’s first play, St Dunstan, is political in two senses. First, as straightforward polemic, it was intended to be an explicit and fresh intervention into the repeal debate. Second, as a piece of literature, it reveals the early formulation (well before he encountered Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France) of the ideas he was to develop fully in Political Justice.

II The history of St Dunstan’s composition, which can be traced from Godwin’s diary, shows that the play was written against the backdrop of events surrounding the final push to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts in 1790. The play, a five-act historical tragedy composed in blank verse, was conceived one evening over supper with his closest friend, Thomas Holcroft, at the end of January 1790.15 The first act was swiftly completed by 8 February, an indication of the urgent political climate. Five days later, Godwin attended a subscription dinner in aid of the pro-repeal movement with many leaders of the campaign, like Fox and Beaufoy (see illustration, p. 195).16 A newspaper report evokes the dynamic proceedings: ‘This animated speech [from Fox promising to keep fighting for reform] excited – not empty Bursts of applause – but the unanimous Assent of every Hearer … In order to preserve the Fire of Mr Fox’s Language, the Pen must assume the Power of an electrical Conductor. All the Assembly cried out, as with one Voice, “Let us seek Redress from an enlightened Legislature.”’17 Inspired, Godwin speedily wrote the second act of St Dunstan by 26 February. But this swift progress was abruptly halted. On 2 March 1790, the third motion of recent years to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts was defeated by a very large majority and the reform movement was in tatters. This setback seems to have paralysed Godwin’s flurry of literary activity and he returned to the relative drudgery of writing for the New Annual Register a couple of days later.18 However,

Maniquis_3201_194_(O'Shaughnessy).indd 198

1/26/2011 7:16:26 PM



Godwin’s St Dunstan

199

a combination of events in the latter half of 1790 probably helped reinvigorate the nascent dramatist. First, on a practical level, finishing his contribution to the New Annual Register at the end of July gained Godwin much free time. Second, celebrating the first anniversary of the French Revolution at the Crown and Anchor banquet,19 in the inspiring presence of Sheridan, Richard Price, and the chairman of the Revolution Society, Charles Stanhope, as well as other minor celebrities, renewed his motivation.20 The sense of intellectual community that Godwin felt from being party to this gathering of great figures from the fields of theatre, religion, and contemporary politics can be seen in his diary when he recorded the comments of an unidentified speaker: ‘We are particularly fortunate in having you among us; it is having the best cause countenanced by the man, by whom we most wished to see it supported.’21 Dining at George Robinson’s, his publisher, on 5 August, Godwin had his ego further boosted when Robinson said: ‘I do not think H[olcroft] is too great for the drudgery of translation. There is no comparison between you and him.’22 Such laudatory and personal statements (rare in the diary) show how much he valued the opinions of this Whig and Dissenting circle. He was to return to work on his play later that August.23 Finally, contemporary events too may have bolstered his resolve. On 19 June 1790, just before the seminal dinner, Godwin recorded receiving news of the French National Assembly’s abolition of titles of nobility. More important, given the subject matter of the play, he had also received word on 11 June of the dissolution of all French monasteries and convents except those which were educational institutions.24 This was followed swiftly by institutional reforms forced on the church by the new French state, which required that bishops and parish priests be elected by citizens and which rejected papal in favour of state authority.25 Godwin’s strident argument against theocratic government in St Dunstan meant that his play would be enormously topical. With all these positive portents, Godwin completed the first draft of the play on 20 September 1790, revised his manuscript in November and December, then distributed it to a select group of friends for their opinions.26

III St Dunstan is a historical tragedy detailing the story of a tenth-century English monk. The action unfolds as follows. The play opens with Queen Eltruda anxious on her wedding day at the threat that the banished Dunstan poses to England. Athelstan, her husband’s faithful courtier, tries

Maniquis_3201_194_(O'Shaughnessy).indd 199

1/26/2011 7:16:26 PM

200

David O’Shaughnessy

to reassure her, but to no avail as she recalls Dunstan’s resentment for his conviction for, we discover later, defrauding the public purse. King Edward then announces Dunstan’s return and the people’s rapturous reception of him. A messenger tells an incredulous Edward that his brother Edgar is leading Dunstan to court. When Edgar, whom Dunstan educated, enters, he insists that a repentant Dunstan has a message for the king; Edward reluctantly agrees to meet him. After he exits, Edgar confirms his love for his brother, but also reveals his secret passion for Eltruda. In the second act Dunstan encounters Edward, imperiously insisting on his pre-eminence as a messenger from God. Dunstan demands that Edward and Eltruda be divorced as they were too closely related for the church to approve the marriage. Edward, indignant with rage, determines that Dunstan will undergo the trial proper for his initial crimes, to which he agrees, having refused to answer for them before his banishment, arbitrarily imposed by Edward. Dunstan warns Eltruda of the church’s judgment against Edward. Shaken by his stern counsel, she leaves Dunstan with his subordinate Anselm, to whom Dunstan reveals that the obedient Edgar will be the means by which he regains political power. In the third act, Edward assuages Eltruda’s fears at the outset, and Dunstan’s subsequent trial confirms the monk’s sentence. However, Dunstan, livid with rage, gets Edgar alone and convinces him that his godly mission is to assassinate his brother and take the crown. Though reluctant, Edgar is finally won over by the promise of Eltruda’s hand. Edgar’s resolve is tested, however, by a tender exchange with his brother at the opening of the fourth act. Their conversation is interrupted by news that Dunstan has manipulated the citizens into rebellion. Edward refuses to let the army disperse them and he goes to meet them. Meanwhile, Edgar gathers his resolve and kills his brother on his return. The regicide immediately repents, hinting that he was under a dark spell. In the final act Eltruda is saved from a mob by Edgar, who refuses to believe that it was Dunstan who instigated her attempted execution. Eltruda is horrified to hear that she has been promised to Edgar and this completes his misery. Dunstan orders the queen seized, but Edgar countermands. Eltruda, in order to prevent further deaths, surrenders, but when Dunstan attempts to impose a new king by using the excuse of Edgar’s fratricide, she springs back into action, delivering a deeply passionate speech that confounds Dunstan’s conscience. The play ends with Eltruda leaving for Ireland and a remorseful Edgar holding the crown.

Maniquis_3201_194_(O'Shaughnessy).indd 200

1/26/2011 7:16:26 PM



Godwin’s St Dunstan

201

Godwin’s objective was no less than ‘developing the great springs of passion, and in the choice of a subject, of inculcating those principles on which [he] apprehended the welfare of the human race to depend,’ revealing that he intended much more than mere political polemic on a single issue.27 The story of a tenth-century monk may seem to us a particularly curious tale to employ for the examination of a contemporary political issue. In fact, for educated late-eighteenth-century readers at least, the story of Dunstan was far from obscure, since it was regularly portrayed in the arts. The historical artist Samuel Wale painted The Insolent Behaviour of Dunstan to King Edwy on the Day of his Coronation Feast, which was published as an engraved illustration to Thomas Mortimer’s New History of England (1764–6). William Bromley exhibited his The Insolence of Dunstan to King Edwy at the Royal Academy in 1786, while William Hamilton painted Edwig and Elgiva when commissioned by Robert Bowyer for his ‘Historic Gallery’ in 1791. Indeed, Godwin was not unique in exploiting this story for dramatic purposes. Frances Burney began Edwy and Elgiva, her play on the same topic, in 1788 and, indeed, finished the first draft by August 1790 while Godwin was still working hard on his version.28 The historical Dunstan, whose political lifetime spanned the reigns of seven English monarchs,29 was the most important ecclesiastical figure of the tenth century. However, all the works of art and the drama mentioned above focus on one particular incident with one particular king – a confrontation between Dunstan and Edwy, also known as Eadwig or Edward – the event that would also form the basis for Godwin’s plot.30 There are a number of differing accounts of this incident.31 For those who viewed Dunstan in a favourable light, the facts were as follows. Edwy had ‘the character of a dissolute Prince’ and ‘gave very great Offence to the Nobility by his inordinate Behaviour on the very Day of his Coronation.’32 According to these historians, there were a mother and daughter at court, and after his coronation Edwy went ‘into the Chamber of these Women, where he cast himself upon a Bed between them.’ At which point, ‘Dunstan sharply rebuk’d the Women, [and] gently reprehended the King’; he ‘pull’d him from them, set the Crown upon his Head, and brought him back almost by Force into the Assembly.’33 As a result of this act, Edwy banished Dunstan. By way of retaliation, Archbishop Odo excommunicated Edwy, and the people ‘so resented the Indignities offer’d to the Church’ that they rose against the king and placed his brother Edgar on the throne of Mercia and Northumbria, leaving Edwy with Wessex. After a couple of years Edwy died, Edgar recalled Dunstan, and with

Maniquis_3201_194_(O'Shaughnessy).indd 201

2/5/2011 11:17:39 AM

202

David O’Shaughnessy

his guidance proceeded to rule with justice and reverence to the church: ‘His whole Reign was a continual Calm, without Wars or Dissentions, so that he obtain’d the Sirname of Peaceable.’34 In these favourable accounts Dunstan is demure and reasonable. He is moved by concern for the state and for the well-being of the young monarch, beguiled by licentious women. Dunstan is acting selflessly on behalf of a cowed nobility, who lack the moral standing to tackle the king, and he is restoring a balance of accountability that the king owes to his nobles and, by extrapolation, his people. The version told by opposing historians such as Tobias Smollett differs considerably. In Smollett’s account, Edwy ‘was a prince of great personal beauty, and a very amiable disposition.’ Rather than partaking in an incestuous ménage à trois, Edwy withdrew from the ‘tiresome ceremony’ to ‘enjoy the conversation of a young lady named Athelgiva, of whose beauty and rare accomplishments he was deeply enamoured.’ Dunstan noticed his absence and rushed ‘furiously’ in and rebuked him publicly ‘with all the bitterness of ecclesiastical rancour.’ This affront, coupled with his embezzlement of state funds to purchase a ‘dangerous popularity,’ forced Dunstan to flee the country. In his absence the church ‘created malecontents by the most scandalous calumnies invented against Edwy, and then instigated them to open rebellion.’ The church put its weight behind Edgar, his brother, who sought alliances with the Danes and eventually usurped the throne.35 All eighteenth-century accounts of the reign of Edwy and, in particular, the coronation incident, differ from each other to some degree or other. Dunstan’s infamy, according to one side of the debate, stems from his determination to impose ecclesiastical authority over the state. Dunstan’s renown, according to the other, is the reward for his determination to rescue a degenerate monarchy from vice. Dunstan, in short, was emblematic of a battle over the past as a means of understanding and influencing the present. Godwin, well aware of both the power and the malleability of history, wrote in his essay ‘Of Posthumous Fame’ some years later: History is in reality a tissue of fables. There is no reason to believe that any one page in any one history extant, exhibits the unmixed truth. The story is disfigured by the vanity of the actors, the interested misrepresentations of spectators, and the fictions, probable or improbable, with which every historian is instigated to piece out his imperfect tale. Human affairs are so entangled, motives are so subtle and variously compounded, that the truth cannot be told.36

Maniquis_3201_194_(O'Shaughnessy).indd 202

1/26/2011 7:16:26 PM



Godwin’s St Dunstan

203

Although history could not tell truth in any absolute philosophical sense, for Godwin it operated as a powerful political tool in its capacity to weave ideology with well-told and appealing narratives. The incident between Dunstan and Edwy was a dramatic historical event that Godwin could draw upon as a compelling example of the church’s corruption of the nation. Smollett’s version is perhaps surprising, given his Tory credentials, but he was certainly unsympathetic to Dunstan. His account represents Edwy’s fall as the end of Alfred the Great’s legacy, the catalyst that allowed the Danish to retake the country and, eventually, the Normans to invade. Alfred had rescued the British from Danish barbarians, then saved them from their own barbarism and, in due course, gave the people responsibility for their own actions. Alfred was an important figure in the discourse of parliamentary reform at Godwin’s time and a man that Godwin, who had planned a work entitled ‘Character of Alfred’ in 1771, had long admired.37 John Baxter, of treason trial fame, wrote in the preface to his History of England that the function of his book was to prove that English laws and the English constitution were derived from the Saxons.38 Godwin’s friend Joseph Gerrald, a leading member of the London Corresponding Society, was to appeal to the same tradition: Precedents of conventions, folkmotes, or meetings of the people are to be found in the early periods of our history, and are coeval with the existence of our constitution itself … The Saxons convened, every year, all the free men of the kingdom who composed an assembly called Mycelgemot, Folkmote, or convention. It was their business and duty to revise the conduct of the king and wittenagemot or parliament. In the golden days of Alfred, a patriot king, if ever there was one, they met on Salisbury plain.39

In Smollett’s history, Alfred is succeeded by a series of much loved kings who lived up to the heritage of their great progenitor and continued his good work: the spread of law and education, and restraining the power of the church.40 Dunstan’s rise to power occurs when the direct line of kings from Alfred was briefly interrupted. After the events described in the play, the uneducated and naive Ethelred the Unready ascended the throne; under his reign the country underwent a series of invasions by the Danes, who violently retook control of the kingdom and retained it until the Normans invaded and the feudal model of power was imposed on the British citizen.41 Smollett implies that Dunstan’s intervention and annexation of power in the kingdom was the root cause of the invasion

Maniquis_3201_194_(O'Shaughnessy).indd 203

1/26/2011 7:16:26 PM

204

David O’Shaughnessy

of England by the Danes and the loss of the civil liberties acquired under Alfred. With the breach of his direct line, the country fell. Godwin is sympathetic to Smollett’s view of history in so far as he emphasizes Edward’s association with Alfred. Again and again, Edward’s lineage is highlighted: his wife Eltruda recollects that ‘the soul of Alfred [was] labouring in his bosom’; the loyal courtier Athelstan states that he is ‘the living image of the sainted Alfred’; his brother Edgar also notes the family connection when he wonders whether he is worthy of being ‘sprung from the stock of Alfred’; and Edward himself draws his courage to defy Dunstan from his being ‘the progeny of Alfred.’42 On his betrayal of his brother, Eltruda dismisses Edgar as ‘no more / An offset from the stock of Alfred!’ (SD, 5.259–60), pointing explicitly to the rupture in the line of noble kings and implicitly foreshadowing the dark days to come. At the close of the play Athelstan restrains the penitent Edgar from suicide by reminding him of England’s peril and providing a prescient warning of its impending fate: ‘Ah, who can tell what ruin will o’ertake her, / If now the sceptre fall to infant Ethelred’ (SD, 5.503–4).43 For someone of Godwin’s politics, then, Dunstan symbolized the dangers of theocracy, of submitting the nation’s sovereignty to the power of the Christian church. Dunstan was also, in the broader canvas of history, a degenerative influence on true English political and cultural values. On one level the play operates as a straightforward polemic against the Test and Corporation Acts. Edward declares: This is the dread hour, That must decide the fate of England! From This instant truth & liberty must vindicate Their rights, &, gathering strength, at last appear Unrivall’d, universal & supreme: Or superstition, riding on the necks Of my devoted countrymen, subdue them To abject, lasting slavery!

(SD, 4.333–40)

Dunstan personifies the threat of religious fervour and superstition against good government. In his first speech of the play, after he returns uninvited from exile to challenge the marriage of Edward and Eltruda, he expounds his role as a catalyst for change, a disruptive force on the line of Alfred:

Maniquis_3201_194_(O'Shaughnessy).indd 204

1/26/2011 7:16:26 PM



Godwin’s St Dunstan This is the scene where Dunstan’s genius towers Above all opposition! Anselm, I feel, as I advance my steps Beneath these vaulted roofs, the ancient seat Of a long pedigree of English kings, A spirit whispering in my bosom something greater, Of more sublime & elevated import. [sic] Than kings & princes! Mighty inspiration Fills all my soul, distends each artery To make me equal to the work of God!

205

(SD, 2.2–11)

Perhaps the most telling indications of the play’s politics are the persistent references to ‘craft’ and ‘priestcraft’ that litter the text. A pejorative term that was often used to indicate a Protestant disdain for Catholic practices, ‘priestcraft’ was also understood in a more general sense to refer to irrational religious practices (including those of Anglicans) and was the antithesis of rational Enlightenment thinking. For example, George Dyer referred to subscription to the Test and Corporation Acts as a ‘trick of priestcraft’; Thomas Holcroft wrote: ‘Hope and fear are the masterkeys of the human heart, the incentives to action, and the engine of priestcraft’; and Richard Price, in his famous Discourse on the Love of Our Country, spoke about the recovery of rights leading to ‘the overthrow of priestcraft and tyranny.’44 Godwin’s play contains a host of references to priestcraft. Early on, Eltruda, fearful of Dunstan and remembering how things were when he was at court, warns that ‘the priestly mitre lord[ed] it o’er the crown, / And England’s realm [was] a prey to saintly craft’ (SD, 1.50–1), and she speaks of the ‘crafty wiles / That sunk my father’ (SD, 1.150–1). Edward also refers to Dunstan’s ‘crafty wiles’ (SD, 1.420) and tells Dunstan when they meet that ‘no artful priest shall rule us’ (SD, 2.184). The king understands Edgar’s betrayal to have occurred as a result of ‘priestly craft’ (SD, 4.325), and Godwin makes an explicit connection between Dunstan’s ideological fervour and the magical arts when Edgar seems to awake from a spell after he murders his brother: ‘Where am I? In what have I been engag’d? – / What black imaginations crowd my mind? – / Can I not wake from this distracting dream?’ (SD, 4.365–7).45 The close relationship of religion with government is portrayed as a threat on a par with a foreign invasion, a motif that runs through the drama. The play opens with Eltruda recounting to Athelstan how she was captured by

Maniquis_3201_194_(O'Shaughnessy).indd 205

1/26/2011 7:16:26 PM

206

David O’Shaughnessy

‘ruffian Danes, far from their ships advanc’d / In search of plunder’ (SD, 1.70–1). Their invasion of England is paralleled with that of Dunstan’s: Rude are the Danes; their trade is arms & blood; They have no ties of policy & country, They fight not to defend their wives & children, The tender charities of human kind; But to invade the roofs of peace & virtue, And hew down all the mounds of law & justice.

(SD, 1.77–82)

The bishop is also a ‘meddling, treacherous intruder’ (SD, 3.55) who brings destruction in his wake, who brings ‘a train of priests, that whiten all the shore’ (SD, 1.283), and whose presence is continually contrasted with the peaceful state of England before his landing. It is evident, then, that the play addresses directly the central point of the debate over the Test and Corporation Acts, namely, what role the church should play in government. Godwin’s position is clear: the institutional church preys on men’s irrational fears in order to further its own ends. Hunger for power has corrupted its founding tenets to the point that it manipulates Edgar into committing both regicide and fratricide, the latter a crime with evident biblical significance. Indeed, Edgar is so deluded that he sees the imitation of Cain as being redemptive: A brother’s murder was the earliest crime That stain’d the outcast earth; & black & cursed Streams from that foul source have since o’erwhelm’d it. Who knows what heaven decrees? A brothers blood, Spill’d by a brother in the church’s cause, May be the signal of eternal justice, To work the restoration of mankind.

(SD, 4.24–30)

The fact that Dunstan convinces Edgar that, by committing this act, he would be serving the will of God implies the hypocrisy of the church’s actions and the gulf between its actions and doctrine.

IV Despite its overt critique of theocratic governance, it would be an error to think that the play can be dismissed as a simple political polemic. As Godwin wrote in 1790, ‘My mind became more and more impregnated

Maniquis_3201_194_(O'Shaughnessy).indd 206

1/26/2011 7:16:26 PM



Godwin’s St Dunstan

207

with the principles afterwards developed in my Political Justice – they were the almost constant topic of conversations between me and Holcroft.’46 St Dunstan was not just a ‘dramatic pamphlet’ or a dramatic rendering of an extract from Smollett’s history: Godwin’s play also begins to consider some of the ideas of Political Justice, particularly his thinking on education, institutions, and the public and how these principles of political justice could best be communicated to a public audience. Ceremony and self-serving mythology are key weapons of Dunstan. Edward is fully conscious of this and is determined to protect his people from their stupefying effects: But priestly domination tames the soul Unnerves its vigour, terrifies the mind With fabled horrors. Tricks of ceremony, The cowardice of penance, discipline And pilgrimage, usurp the place of charity And justice: while the timid abject slave Dares neither think nor move but as his priest Permits him.

(SD, 3.155–62)

Yet the church’s dominance cannot be attributed simply to ceremony and tradition. Godwin argues that it is the church’s control over education that allows it real power and the ability to effect real political change. On numerous occasions in the play he indicates that Dunstan has the support of the people, but he also makes clear that the cleric needs political support from the upper echelons of political society.47 Edgar, the king’s brother, supplies this support as a result of his education by Dunstan. He admits that Dunstan was able to make his initial entry to the country for this very reason: But deference to his will, The will of him from whom my earliest years Had drank instruction, & who, like a father, Had form’d my infant mind to every lesson.

(SD, 1.359–62)

Dunstan is quite conscious of this power, openly telling Anselm, his subordinate, that he will be able to use Edgar to bring down Edward despite his love for his brother, because Beneath my lessons he is strongly form’d

Maniquis_3201_194_(O'Shaughnessy).indd 207

1/26/2011 7:16:26 PM

208

David O’Shaughnessy

To all the fervour of religious zeal, And unresisting deference to the clergy. These right propensities will soon o’erpower The carnal sentiment of loyalty, And, though ambition could not tempt his mind, Religious zeal engrosses all his heart.

(SD, 2.513–19)

Both men refer to Dunstan’s ‘forming’ of Edgar, a powerful word that indicates the ingrained level of obedience that the religious orders can achieve through their control of the education system.48 Showing that the institutional power that the church wields is an intensely corrupting force, the play anticipates a point that Godwin makes in Political Justice: ‘If prejudice have usurped the seat of knowledge, if law and religion and metaphysics and government be surrounded with mystery and artifice, he [the religious person] will not know the truth and therefore cannot teach it; he will not possess the criterion, and therefore cannot furnish it to another.’49 Godwin later develops his ideas about the antithetical relationship between institutional religion and enlightened education in the chapter ‘Of Religious Establishments’ in book 6, arguing that ‘the system of religious conformity is a system of blind submission.’ The pursuit of morality and virtue by the faithful is deeply problematic, as ‘these very men are fettered in the outset by having a code of propositions put into their hands, in conformity to which all the enquiries must terminate.’50 Progressive enquiry is silenced by a ‘faith accompli.’ He continues: The natural tendency of science is to increase from age to age and proceed from the humblest beginnings to the most admirable conclusions. But care is taken in the present case to anticipate these conclusions, and to bind men by promises and penalties not to improve upon the wisdom of their ancestors. The plan is to guard against degeneracy and decline, but never to advance. It is founded in the most sovereign ignorance of the nature of mind, which never fails to do either the one or the other.51

While Godwin’s central point concerns stultified education in a broad sense, he also makes a particular point about the education of princes (for whom we can read aristocrats more generally). Edgar, like the generality of princes Godwin describes in Political Justice, has been brought up ‘not [to] hear the voice of reprimand or blame. In all things it is first of all to be remembered that he is a prince, that is, some rare and

Maniquis_3201_194_(O'Shaughnessy).indd 208

1/26/2011 7:16:26 PM



Godwin’s St Dunstan

209

precious creature, but not of human kind.’ One result of this cosseted existence is that ‘the first opposition terrifies him, the first difficulty seen and understood appears insuperable. He trembles at a shadow, and at the very semblance of adversity is dissolved into tears.’ His intellectual stasis is exacerbated by his rank. Like the theorized princes of Political Justice, Edgar is ‘superstitious beyond the rate of common mortals.’52 The result of this institutional control of education is not only examined in Edgar’s character but is made manifest in the portrayal of the public in the play. All the actions of the people are reported indirectly by other characters and not witnessed by the audience. Throughout they are represented as being little more than a mindless mob easily manipulated by the clergy. Before Dunstan even sets foot in the country Eltruda foresees the danger: Headlong & blind is superstition’s rule, And in this island has she fix’d her throne. Before the mitred delegates of Rome Yon senseless people yield entire submission; And, as the haughty priest extends his hand To bless, they bend the supple knee, & lift their eyes In holy wonder at his condescension. Darkness & ignorance, unletter’d barbarism Came forth the prelude of this bold imposture.

(SD, 1.217–25)

References to a ‘blindfold people’ (SD, 1.448), a ‘deluded people’ (SD, 5.8), and their susceptibility to Dunstan’s charisma (SD, 4.250–7) continue throughout the play. There is no mention of any positive attributes of the people at any stage other than through the words of Edward. He maintains his faith in his people throughout, but his loyalty is misplaced. This portrayal suggests that Godwin in 1790 did not consider the populace as equal partners in the advancement of knowledge and, hence, of political justice. Their absence from the action on stage indicates Godwin’s view that they are malleable, incapable of any true agency because incapable of orderly discussion. In a moment that prefigures Godwin’s concerns regarding both Thelwallian political associations and the preservation of conversation to those ‘few favoured minds’ in Political Justice, Edward relates that The multitude, urg’d by their factious leaders, Sternly require that Dunstan be releas’d.

Maniquis_3201_194_(O'Shaughnessy).indd 209

1/26/2011 7:16:26 PM

210

David O’Shaughnessy

In vain I sought to assure them of his safety, To represent his guilt – my voice was drown’d In boisterous clamours – some more furious than The rest, revil’d me – call’d me, tyrant, impious wretch, The tool of darkness, antichrist – my life They said should be their sacrifice …

(SD, 4.341–8)

Such descriptions of the ‘multitude,’ too raucous to appear on stage, evoke Godwin’s dismissal of political associations in 1793: ‘While the sympathy of opinion catches from man to man, especially in numerous meetings, and among persons whose passions have not been used to the curb of judgment, actions may be determined on, which solitary reflection would have rejected. There is nothing more barbarous, cruel and blood-thirsty, than the triumph of the mob.’53 St Dunstan offers a bleak outlook as to the capacity for reflection and sincerity on the part of the ‘multitude.’ The rational heroine of the play, Eltruda, whose ‘first guardian was sincerity’ (SD, 1.11), is forced to retire to Ireland at the play’s dénouement, such is her sorrow at ‘things as they are’ in England. St Dunstan offers no answers, but rather provides a grandiose indictment of how little, in Godwin’s view, society had advanced over the past eight hundred years. Yet it is a play that highlights a number of sustained infrastructural social problems that Godwin set out to address in Political Justice. Indeed, Political Justice may well be considered – partly at least – Godwin’s own response to the problems he identified in St Dunstan, problems so deep-rooted in British society that a philosophical treatise rather than a play was necessary to consider them properly. Although Godwin’s major work was certainly in part a response to Burke, St Dunstan demonstrates that he had been considering issues of government, education, and institutions before he ever read Burke’s pamphlet. Mary Shelley lamented that ‘St. Dunstan has many defects as a drama. A want of proper concatenation of event[s] – several leading circumstances not accounted for – abruptness – inconsistency in the sentiments & an unsatisfactory catastrophe,’ but she also said that there was ‘much strength & beauty in the drama.’54 Holcroft also found many faults with the play – the main problem being a lack of passion or energy at certain key moments – but he also found enough merit to encourage Godwin to rewrite.55 The play was never performed or published. It is uncertain whether Godwin submitted it to the London theatres in late 1790 or early 1791, but his diary records that he submitted it, unsuccessfully, to Covent Gar-

Maniquis_3201_194_(O'Shaughnessy).indd 210

1/26/2011 7:16:26 PM



Godwin’s St Dunstan

211

den in December 1795/January 1796 after some revision. Despite not making it to the boards of Drury Lane or Covent Garden, St Dunstan, still neglected almost forty years after its discovery, is worthy of attention by Godwin scholars. The play represents not only a bold attempt at political intervention, but also produces some of the nascent strands of Political Justice. From a literary perspective it marks the beginning of Godwin’s enormous effort – revealed in his diary and letters – to get his work staged in order to disseminate his politics to a broad audience over the next two decades. Notably, the revisions to St Dunstan came swiftly after the introduction of the two bills of 1795 to parliament. Immediately after writing his pamphlet Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr Pitt’s Bills, concerning treasonable and seditious practices, and unlawful assemblies, Godwin again reached for the drama as a forum for political reflection and intervention.56

NOTES   1 The Corporation Act (1661) and the Test Act (1672) meant that many nonAnglicans could not be members of town corporation councils, were excluded from civil and military office, and could not take degrees at Oxford or Cambridge. On the movement for repeal, see Richard Burgess Barlow, Citizenship and Conscience: A Study in the Theory and Practice of Religious Toleration in England during the Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1962), 221–71; G.M. Ditchfield, ‘Parliamentary Struggle over Repeal of Test and Corporation Acts, 1787–1790,’ English Historical Review 89 (1974), 551–77; and G.M. Ditchfield, ‘Debates on the Test and Corporation Acts, 1787–90: The Evidence of the Division Lists,’ Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 50 (1977), 69–81.   2 Albert Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (London: Hutchinson, 1979), 65–98. The results of the three defeated votes were as follows: 1787, 176–98; 1789, 122–102; and 1790, 294–105.   3 Ditchfield, ‘Parliamentary Struggle,’ 571. The hardening of reaction against the French Revolution meant that the repeal movement came to an abrupt end; repeal was not achieved until 1828.   4 Many of the following sentiments were repeating opinions expressed earlier in the century by Bishops Sherlock and Hoadly, whose pamphlets were reprinted at this time: [Thomas Sherlock], Bishop Sherlock’s Arguments against a Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts (London: G.G.J. and J. Robinson; T.

Maniquis_3201_194_(O'Shaughnessy).indd 211

2/5/2011 11:18:47 AM

212

David O’Shaughnessy

Payne; and R. Faulder, 1787) and [Benjamin Hoadly], Bishop Hoadly’s Refutation of Sherlock’s Arguments against a Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts (London: Charles Dilly, 1787).   5 Observations occasioned by the Late Decision in Parliament in Favour of the Test Law, being a Sermon Preached in a Country Chapel on the 7th of March 1790 (Manchester: J. Johnson, 1790); An Address to the Opposers of the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts (London: J. Johnson, 1790); George Walker, The Dissenters’ Plea or the Appeal of the Dissenters to the Justice, the Honour, and the Religion of the Kingdom against the Test Laws (Birmingham: J. Thompson, 1790).   6 William Keate, A Free Examination of Dr Price’s and Dr Priestley’s Sermons (London: J. Dodsley, 1790); J. Brand, Political Observations on the Test Act (London, 1790); and Historical Memoirs of Religious Dissension; Addressed to the Seventeenth Parliament of Great Britain (London: J. Murray, 1790).   7 Kippis also taught Henry Beaufoy at Hoxton,1765–7 (Ditchfield, ‘Parliamentary Struggle,’ 553).   8 William Godwin, ‘Autobiographical Fragments,’ in Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, 8 vols., gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1992), 1:45–7; Mark Philp, Godwin’s Political Justice (London: Duckworth, 1986), 34–7, 236–40. Godwin covered the repeal debate for the New Annual Register. See NAR … 1787 (London: G.G.J. and J. Robinson, 1788), 101–8; NAR … 1789 (London: G.G.J. and J. Robinson, 1790), 141–2; and NAR … 1790 (London: G.G.J. and J. Robinson, 1791), 87–91.   9 Oxford, Bodleian MS Abinger c. 17, fol. 11. I am grateful to the Bodleian Library for permission to consult and quote from the collection. 10 For Godwin’s list of ‘desiderati’ circa 1790, see William St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys: The Biography of a Family (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1989), 37–8. 11 Ibid., 35–6. Janowitz also comments that ‘not holding public office meant that [the Dissenters] could not be accused of corruption.’ Anne Janowitz, ‘Anna Barbauld’s “free familiar conversation,”’ in Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain 1770–1840, ed. Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 65. 12 David O’Shaughnessy, ‘“The vehicle he has chosen”: Pointing out the Theatricality of Caleb Williams,’ History of European Ideas 33, no. 1 (2007), 54–71. 13 Excluding my own work and Julie Carlson’s essay in this book, the only sustained discussions of Godwin’s drama outside of biographies are B. Sprague Allen, ‘William Godwin and the Stage,’ PMLA 35, no. 3 (1920), 358–74; Parks C. Hunter, ‘William Godwin’s Lengthy Preoccupation with Antonio,’ Keats-Shelley Journal 23 (1974), 21–4; Kenneth Johnston and Joseph Nicoles, ‘Transitory Actions, Men Betrayed: The French Revolution in the English

Maniquis_3201_194_(O'Shaughnessy).indd 212

1/26/2011 7:16:27 PM



Godwin’s St Dunstan

213

Revolution in Romantic Drama,’ The Wordsworth Circle 23, no. 2 (1992), 76–96; and Pamela Clemit, ‘Lamb and Godwin’s Antonio,’ The Charles Lamb Bulletin 85 (1994), 13–18. . The criticism is focused almost exclusively on the 1800 tragedy Antonio. 14 Julie A. Carlson, In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 2, 15. 15 Diary entry for 31 January 1790: ‘Dine at Holcroft’s. Dunstan’ (Oxford, Bodleian MS Abinger e. 2. ‘Dunstan’ is written in red ink, a practice Godwin used to indicate either an event of personal importance or one of national or international significance. 16 Diary entry for 13 February 1790: ‘Dine with the Anti-tests: Fox, Beaufoy, Hoghton, Sawbridge, Adair, Watson, Heywood, B. Hollis, Geddes, Vaughan, Fell, Stone, Wodhul, Listers’ (Oxford, Bodleian MS Abinger e. 2). 17 Supplement to the Birmingham Gazette, 22 February 1790. 18 Diary entry for 5 March 1790: ‘Read for A.R.’ (Oxford, Bodleian MS Abinger e. 2). 19 Peter Marshall, William Godwin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984), 79. 20 Diary entry for 14 July 1790: ‘French Revolution: Stanhope, Sheridan, Tooke, O’Brien, B. Hollis, Geddes, Lindsey, Price, Paradise: sup with Fawcet’ (Oxford, Bodleian MS Abinger e. 2). See also St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys, 45. 21 Diary entry for 14 July 1790 (Oxford, Bodleian MS Abinger e. 2. St Clair suggests that the speaker was Stanhope, as he was in the chair. St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys, 45. 22 Robinson’s comment is recorded in Godwin’s diary entry for 5 August 1790 (Oxford, Bodleian MS Abinger e. 2). 23 The assumption that Godwin returned to work on the play is based on his completion of act 4 on 6 September 1790 and his rate of work for the two previous acts. There is no mention of the third act in Godwin’s diary until 3 December 1790, when he is most likely referring to a revision. There are two possibilities: either Godwin forgot to enter his completion of the third act, probably in August 1790, or else he wrote acts 1, 2, 4, and 5, then revised the first two acts in November 1790 before writing the third in December 1790. The former seems more likely. See Oxford, Bodleian MS Abinger e. 3. 24 Godwin’s diary, Oxford, Bodleian MS Abinger e. 2. 25 A. Goodwin, The French Revolution (London: Hutchinson, 1970), 87–9. 26 Oxford, Bodleian MS Abinger e. 3. Godwin showed the manuscript to Thomas Holcroft, William Nicholson, and Colonel Henry Barry. Nicholson

Maniquis_3201_194_(O'Shaughnessy).indd 213

1/26/2011 7:16:27 PM

214

David O’Shaughnessy

was a chemist and Barry a soon-to-be-retired soldier. They may seem surprising choices as readers, but both had literary interests and were good friends of Godwin. 27 Godwin, ‘Autobiographical Fragments,’ in Collected Novels and Memoirs, 1:49. 28 Margaret Ann Doody, Frances Burney: The Life in the Works (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 179–83. The play was performed only once, on 21 March 1795, with Godwin in attendance. Another theatrical reference to Dunstan is in Matthew Lewis’s The Castle-Spectre (Drury Lane, 14 December 1797), one of the most successful dramas of the period, which is also set in the Anglo-Saxon period. Motley refers to Abbot Dunstan and to the noble Percy, who disguises himself as a peasant named Edwy. 29 Aethelstan (924–39), Edmund (939–46), Eadred (946–55), Edwy (955–9), Edgar (959–75), Edward the Martyr (975–9), and Ethelred the Unready (979–1016). 30 Edward in Godwin’s play. Throughout this chapter, I shall refer to the historical figure as Edwy and Godwin’s dramatic character as Edward. 31 The historical sources mentioned here in relation to Dunstan were all listed in the sale catalogue for Godwin’s library. Joseph Priestley’s An Essay on a Course of Liberal Education for Civil and Active Life (London: Joseph Johnson, 1768) nominates the following historians in his course of lectures on history, all found in Godwin’s library: Holinshed, Hall, Stow and Howes, Speed, Rapin, and Hume. 32 In some accounts, including Godwin’s play, Edwy’s wedding day rather than his coronation. 33 Laurence Echard, The History of England. From the First Entrance of Julius Caesar and the Romans, to the End of the Reign of James the First. Containing the Space of 1678 Years (London: Jacob Tonson, 1707), 87. 34 Ibid., 87–8. 35 Tobias Smollett, A Complete History of England deduced from the Descent of Julius Caesar to the Treaty of Aix la Chapelle, 1748. Containing the Transactions of One Thousand Eight Hundred and Three Years, 4 vols. (London: James Rivington and James Fletcher, 1757–8), 1:162–3. Godwin admired Smollett’s history enormously: ‘Respect for the great name of Smollet [sic], will not suffer me to pass over in silence his History of England, the most important of his compilations’ (‘Of English Style,’ from The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature, in Political Writings I, ed. Pamela Clemit, vol. 5 of Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, 7 vols., gen. ed. Mark Philp [London: Pickering & Chatto, 1993], 284). This edition of Godwin’s writings is hereafter cited as PPW, with volume and page numbers. 36 Ibid., 5:204–5.

Maniquis_3201_194_(O'Shaughnessy).indd 214

1/26/2011 7:16:27 PM



Godwin’s St Dunstan

215

37 Life of William Godwin, ed. Pamela Clemit, in Mary Shelley’s Literary Lives and Other Writings, 4 vols., ed. Nora Crook and others (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2002), 4:6. 38 John Baxter, A New and Impartial History of England, From the most Early Period of Genuine Historical Evidence To The Present Important and Alarming Crisis (London: H.D. Symonds, 1796), v–vii. E.P. Thompson comments that in Baxter’s history ‘Saxon precedent is almost indistinguishable from the state of nature’ (The Making of the English Working Class [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963], 94). 39 Joseph Gerrald, A Convention the Only Means of Saving Us from Ruin. In a Letter Addressed to the People of England (London: Daniel Eaton, 1793), 88. 40 Smollett, History of England, 148–58. 41 Ibid., 165–85. 42 William Godwin, St Dunstan, 1.97, 1.240, 1.531, and 2.111, in The Plays of William Godwin, ed. David O’Shaughnessy (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010). Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as SD with act and line numbers. 43 Godwin compresses history so that Ethelred the Unready succeeds immediately to Edgar’s reign rather than a number of monarchs later. 44 George Dyer, An Inquiry into the Nature of Subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles (London, 1790?), 35; Thomas Holcroft, The Family Picture; or, Domestic Dialogues on Amiable and Interesting Subjects (Dublin: J. Potts et al., 1783), 34; and Richard Price, A Discourse on the Love of our Country, delivered on Nov. 4, 1789, at the meeting-house in the Old Jewry, to the Society for commemorating the revolution in Great Britain (London: T. Cadell, 1789), 14. 45 Godwin later wrote that Dunstan had a ‘wonderful skill in the art of magic’ (William Godwin, Lives of the Necromancers [London: Mason, 1834], 224). There was a long tradition of associating Dunstan with alchemy and magical arts. See my article ‘St Dunstan and De Occulta Philosophia: An Inspiration for St Leon,’ Notes and Queries, 53, no. 3 (2006), 314–15. 46 Philp, ed., Collected Novels and Memoirs, 1:48. 47 These two conscious strategies of Dunstan – control of the nobility through education and control of the public through rhetoric, symbolism, and fear – are ideas that Godwin may have encountered in John Toland, a fellow Socinian and author of Socinianism ... recommended by a Pantheist to an Orthodox Friend (London, 1705), whom Priestley cites frequently in his Disquisitions relating to Matter and Spirit ..., 2 vols. (Birmingham: Joseph Johnson, 1782). Toland attacked the corruptions of Christianity, particularly the rituals of the church, and tried to look at scriptures in a rational fashion. He also believed that there have always been two types of religion throughout his-

Maniquis_3201_194_(O'Shaughnessy).indd 215

1/26/2011 7:16:27 PM

216

David O’Shaughnessy

tory. One was a public religion, designed by priests to keep the superstitious public under control through a moral code that ruled by fear and ensured deference to the established political regime. The other was a more esoteric religion directed at the enlightened and educated few. 48 See Graham Allen, ‘Godwin, Fénelon, and the Disappearing Teacher,’ History of European Ideas 33, no. 1 (2007), 9–24, for a discussion of Godwin, education, and what Allen calls ‘in-forming, that is the notion that in educating we mould, shape, impress, in-form the mind of the student’ (10). Allen highlights Godwin’s concern in Political Justice and The Enquirer that in-forming can repress private judgment, an obvious concern of the Dunstan–Edgar relationship and a principal concern of Godwin’s thought throughout the 1790s. 49 Godwin, Political Justice, PPW 3:17–18. 50 Ibid., PPW 3:324. 51 Ibid., PPW 3:325. 52 Ibid., PPW 3:212. 53 Ibid., PPW 3:118. 54 Shelley, Life of Godwin, 42, 47. 55 Oxford, Bodleian MS Abinger c. 31, fols. 2–7. In any case, Godwin was always full of confidence, even at this stage of his literary career: ‘Be not misled by Holcroft: attend impartially to his criticisms, but adopt nothing except on full conviction’ (Oxford, ibid., c. 33, fol. 12). 56 I would like to thank the editors for their very helpful comments and suggestions.

Maniquis_3201_194_(O'Shaughnessy).indd 216

1/26/2011 7:16:27 PM

chapter nine

Heavy Drama JULIE A. CARLSON

I have been a metaphysician, a political theorist – I have been a writer of fictitious histories and adventures. Enough; let these be dismissed – be now another man – turn your whole thoughts to the buskin and the scene – be that the labour of your being.’ William Godwin1

Godwin’s plays, along with his relation to drama and theatre, have hardly been a hot topic in scholarly assessment of his life/works. Biographers usually mention the plays that he composed in the relatively early stages of his career and acknowledge his frequent and life-long attendance at London theatres, but they are generally dismissive of his own plays and do not construe his active support of theatre as necessitating further enquiry. Most literary-critical assessments ignore this component of Godwin’s life/writings altogether for some good reasons, given the vast amount and impressive generic array of his writings, the failure of his two staged plays, and fairly entrenched perceptions of his personality as sober, stoic, rationalist, and highly suspicious of theatrical display. As author and personality, the critical tradition has long averred, Godwin is not at home in the theatre. Yet there is striking evidence to the contrary. For someone ostensibly so averse to theatre, Godwin spends a remarkable number of evenings at the playhouse and a large portion of his time at home reading plays. On the basis of the diaries, Victoria Myers estimates that Godwin likely attended theatre almost every month between 1795 and 1836, estimations that David O’Shaughnessy carefully confirms for the years 1795 to

Maniquis_3201_217_(Carlson).indd 217

1/26/2011 7:27:36 PM

218

Julie A. Carlson

1807.2 He reckons that, during those years, Godwin attended between thirty-three and seventy-five plays in a given year, averaging more than fifty plays each year.3 Moreover, not only does Godwin write four plays, the composition of three of which – Antonio; Abbas, King of Persia; and Faulkener – belongs roughly to the same period (around 1800) and occasions high hopes for success, but according to Charles Kegan Paul, ‘to the latest day of his life Godwin considered Antonio his best work.’4 Confirming Godwin’s investment in playwriting, O’Shaughnessy states that ‘for every five days Godwin spent writing novels between 1790 and 1807, he spent four writing plays,’ devoting a total of 296 days to Antonio, a higher number than for any novel of this period.5 Moreover, though the two staged plays belong roughly to the same period in terms of composition, their performances span seven years (13 December 1800–16 December 1807) and Godwin puts out feelers about restaging one or the other of them at least four different times over his career. Thus, thoughts about re-mounting his plays persist long after he leaves off writing them, contradicting claims that he comes to agree that he has no business writing for the stage. These intriguing facts form the backdrop to the interconnections that my essay probes between the heavy drama that is said to characterize Godwin’s plays and their failure and the heavy drama occasioned by his infamous critiques of the domestic affections that, in my view, substantially motivates his recourse to play-writing. My contention is that Godwin not only is at home in theatre but that, for a time, he uses it to refine and publicize his reform of the home after the notoriety of that critique has threatened to destroy his credibility. Recall that it is less the attacks on domestic affection in Enquiry Concerning Political Justice that cause such problems for his reputation than Godwin’s subsequent marriage to Wollstonecraft and highly unsentimental treatment of her in his Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798), in which he allegedly ‘strips his dead wife naked.’6 Public outcry over these events, circulating around twin charges of inconsistency and immorality, threatened to restrict his readership and thus his efficacy as a social-intellectual reformer. O’Shaughnessy speculates that grief over Wollstonecraft was a major cause of the spike in Godwin’s theatre attendance in 1797–8, counting ten visits to the theatre in November 1797.7 My additional claim is that the ‘solace’ that theatre provided extended to its promise to forestall Godwin’s loss of readership, occasioned in part by outrage over his indecorous treatment of Wollstonecraft. Substantiating this claim entails three lines of inquiry. One concerns how the plots of Antonio, Abbas,

Maniquis_3201_217_(Carlson).indd 218

1/26/2011 7:27:36 PM



Heavy Drama

219

and Faulkener relate to Godwin’s alleged retraction of his critiques of the domestic affections, an assertion that governs most readings of the post-Wollstonecraft novelistic productions.8 A second connects Godwin’s investments in theatre around 1800 to efforts to capitalize on the efficacy of theatre as a broadcast system. A brief concluding inquiry considers the influence of these tragedies on Mary Shelley’s eschewal of tragedy.

1  This ‘Little Circle of Our Love’ Indeed A description of the plots of Godwin’s staged plays makes clear that their primary topic involves coordinating marital and filial relations (I turn to Abbas later). Set in fifteenth-century Spain, Antonio features the return of Antonio, the embodiment of chivalric military values, who discovers that during his absence his sister Helena has married the noble Gusman instead of Rodrigo, the man to whom Helena was betrothed at the deathbed of their father. Rodrigo was that father’s best friend, is now Antonio’s, and is unjustly imprisoned in Milan; Antonio is seeking to release him through appeals to King Pedro (his boyhood friend) and to facilitate Rodrigo’s union to Helena. When Gusman and Helena refuse to abjure their marriage and King Pedro persists in his ratification of it, Antonio seizes Helena by force and attempts to lock her away in a nunnery for life. Through the agency of their younger brother, Henry, Gusman effects Helena’s release, only to have Helena choose to return to the cloister just before Antonio stabs her to death at the end of the play. Set in seventeenth-century Italy, Faulkener also features a military hero returning from combat.9 He comes in search of his long-lost mother, Arabella (now married to Count Orsini), whom he has not seen since he was four, when the family of his deceased father took him away from her after discovering that she had been one of Charles the Second’s lovers. In the process of seeking her, Faulkener kills Benedetto in a duel fought to defend her honour. Benedetto is the pawn of the villain Lauretta, who knows Arabella’s secret past and wishes to revenge herself on the countess for stealing away (through marriage) the man whom she still loves (Count Orsini). Witnessing peasants contend that Benedetto was unarmed and have Faulkener apprehended for murder. Just as Faulkener is about to be condemned in court, Countess Orsini bursts in, confesses that she is his mother, divulges her prior liaison, and produces a letter that shows Benedetto to have been in the hire of Lauretta, whose plan was to slander Countess Orsini. Faulkener is freed, and mother and son reunited, only to hear Faulkener’s friend Stanley announce that he

Maniquis_3201_217_(Carlson).indd 219

1/26/2011 7:27:36 PM

220

Julie A. Carlson

himself has killed Count Orsini in a separate duel, news of which causes Countess Orsini to drop dead under the weight of the blood in which she is steeped. The little critical commentary that exists on these plays depicts them correctly, and not surprisingly, as exploring ‘the familiar Godwinian contrast between artificial honour and real virtue.’10 My initial point is that they explore that familiar contrast through an unfamiliar exploration of marital and familial dynamics, Caleb Williams being remarkably silent on these matters. Most critics ascribe the positive descriptions of marriage and family life articulated both in the prefaces to and narratives of St Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century (1799) and Fleetwood; or the New Man of Feeling (1805) to Godwin’s own experiences of life with Wollstonecraft, experiences that cause him to soften the anti-domestic sentiments of Enquiry Concerning Political Justice.11 While not disputing the degree to which Godwin is affected by Wollstonecraft and mourns the loss of daily intercourse with her manner of thinking and being, one of my primary arguments in England’s First Family of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley is that his fictional treatments of the topic, even with their famously positive characterizations in certain episodes of St Leon’s marriage to Marguerite and Fleetwood’s to Mary McNeill, do not substantially reverse his attacks on domestic affection – they just pursue a different tactic.12 They express praise for domestic affection at the same time that other elements of the plot undermine these expressions. Situated at the beginning and end of the period that A.E. Rodway demarcates as the second phase of Godwin’s career – the period of Attack (1799–1805), flanked as it is by periods of Fame (1793–7) and Oblivion (1805–36) – these novels interpolate vignettes that also should be read as efforts by Godwin to regain credibility after his unseemly exposé of Wollstonecraft and many related accusations regarding his promotion of adultery, prostitution, and infanticide, and thus as something of a public relations campaign.13 Godwin’s plays, it turns out, are even more savvy in pursuing a critique of family life while voicing many positive sentiments about it. Moreover, Godwin appears to resort to theatre first in making such claims, for William St Clair states that writing on what becomes Antonio (then called Alonzo) predates initial stages of St Leon and that by 1799 Godwin has obtained a guarded promise from Sheridan that Drury Lane would consider staging it.14 This means that not only does Antonio focus exclusively on domestic topics in its efforts to contrast honour and virtue, whereas St Leon depicts them as one among many episodes in the eponymous hero’s (very long) life, but also Godwin considers theatre as

Maniquis_3201_217_(Carlson).indd 220

1/26/2011 7:27:36 PM



Heavy Drama

221

an advantageous platform from which to voice an apparent change of heart regarding domestic affections. As a more general claim, we can also say that what St Clair calls Godwin’s ‘discovery of poetry’ in 1799, ascribed primarily to his blossoming friendship with S.T. Coleridge and long credited with the softening of Godwin’s rationalism, is a discovery more precisely of drama, the only form of poetry that Godwin ventures and the form that is occupying many of his closest poet-friends, especially Coleridge, Charles Lamb, and Thomas Holcroft, but also Joanna Baillie.15 And this discovery not only intensifies his fellow-feeling with the poets but also allies him with their theatrics of remorse, a major theme of each of his three plays. For Coleridge’s Osorio of 1797, which Godwin is reading again on 5 January 1800 (ultimately staged in 1813 as Remorse), is discernible in the setting and aspects of the plot development of Antonio, which, as St Clair remarks, ‘may have been written in a spirit of friendly rivalry’ with Coleridge.16 Nor does Godwin turn his back on drama (as many wished) once Antonio fails.17 Immediately after the failure of the stage performance (13 December 1800), Godwin revises Antonio for publication (between 15 and 18 December), and then begins writing Abbas, King of Persia in January 1801, rallied to the attempt (again) by Coleridge. When Abbas is rejected for performance in the fall of 1801, he begins a third play, Faulkener, not staged until December 1807, but taking its form in late 1801, with writing beginning in 1803.18 That the plot of Antonio opposes domestic affections to honour and discredits the latter through its embodiment in hard-hearted Antonio suggests that the play expresses support for companionate marriage and family. The returning warrior-hero Antonio is characterized as deeming honour the groundwork of all human ties. ‘What is the world to me, if robb’d of honour? / No kindred, no affection can survive. / ’Tis the pure soul / Of love, the parent of entire devotion, / Without it man is heartless, brutish, and / A clod.’19 Consequently, Antonio considers marriage a matter, not of sentiment or mutual inclination, but of honourable form, the constituents of which, he stipulates, are (a) the ‘consent of parents,’ (b) the ‘solemn yielding of the bride,’ and (c) a ‘pledge’ that ‘our faith prescribes’ (35–6). Of all of Godwin’s texts, Antonio is the most efficient in depicting honour, and the honourable view of marriage, as literally obeisance to an empty form. As in St Leon, this view is shown to be antiquated, a mindset of ‘medieval’ times, though unlike St Leon, which stages this transition over time (St Leon living through the age of chivalry to the age of sensibility), Antonio stages it through the characterization of

Maniquis_3201_217_(Carlson).indd 221

1/26/2011 7:27:37 PM

222

Julie A. Carlson

Antonio as present but not in the same time zone. Even he declares his out-of-jointness with the times, in a speech that renders literal the stakes of honour in and with the dead. ‘Struck from the roll of living men, / The absent and the dead fill all my thoughts; / With me they wander forth, with me they sit; / I see their faces, and I entertain / Their spirits in this desolate bosom’ (43). For honour is shown to be grounded in the compulsion to repeat that makes progress impossible for the world generally and for women in particular. This is displayed in the striking number of re-embodiments of the dead father, Almanza. As Almanza’s best friend, Rodrigo is surrogate father to Antonio and Helena; Antonio, by way of seeking to force Pedro to annul Helena’s marriage to Gusman, presents himself as Almanza’s revived image; and the means that Antonio stipulates through which Pedro would show himself worthy of his kingship is repetition: that he live up to the action that ‘on this spot / Of earth has been perform’d and reperform’d’ (36). Such repeated performance ensures the death of Helena, who chooses a ‘living love.’ Strengthening the critique of honour are speeches affirming the companionate view of marriage, with its priority on friendship, shared tastes, and more egalitarian gender relations.20 This view is portrayed as literally life-affirming in characterizing Gusman and Helena’s bond as ‘a sacred, mutual, living love’ (35). Although sharing with St Leon efforts to discredit honourable marriage, Antonio represents a feminist advance in that it does not ascribe the companionate view only to a woman and her daughters or sanction the separate-sphere-ism that ostensibly cordons off domesticity from public life. In fact, Antonio ascribes the companionate view to the men who not only counter Antonio but even outstrip Helena in their enthusiastic renderings of the meeting of minds that ratifies ‘true’ marriage. King Pedro calls marital ties ‘the purest joys / That earth can boast’ and finds them realized in the ‘commingling minds of Gusman and of Helena’ – an image of such harmony that it ‘sinks into shadow’ everything that has until then ‘gained the specious name of good’ (35). Gusman is proud of ‘dishonor’ if, by violating patriarchal custom, he thereby ‘gratifies’ Helena’s wishes (6). Even Antonio in his closing speech renounces the death drive lodged in obeisance to honour, stating that the spectacle of Helena’s lifeless body, in making visible the ‘pageantry of justice,’ is ‘too much’ (73). Faulkener, too, discredits honour both in a temporal and gender-differentiated way. Doubt is cast on the honour associated with duelling, a famously ‘medieval’ court of justice, through the doubling of the motif (Faulkener and Benedetto, Stanley and Count Orsini) and in the motive

Maniquis_3201_217_(Carlson).indd 222

1/26/2011 7:27:37 PM



Heavy Drama

223

specified for both duels: revenge, whether embodied in the homicidal jealousy of the villain Lauretta or the misogynist fury of Faulkener’s loyal friend, Stanley, whose avowed aim is to ‘sweep this mother-fiend [Countess Orsini] from earth!’21 Equal doubt is cast on forms of honour that necessitate sexually chaste monogamous activity and restrict female virtue to sexual propriety. According to the Wollstonecraftian logic that the dominant plot unfolds, Countess Orsini can ‘no longer bear this living death’ of denying her past, and thus the son whom she loves, out of fear (or rather, certainty) of losing her good name – that is, her second husband’s name and his love (42). In this, Faulkener explores less the constituents of companionate marriage than one of its ancillary conditions: a softening of the virgin/whore divide, and acknowledgment of female sexual pleasure. At the end, Faulkener and the court of law learn to disarticulate ‘mother’ and ‘virtue’ from ‘chastity’ and ‘innocence.’ ‘Countess, or dearer name, Arabella! – your errors I weep for – but your virtues, radiant, exalted, and angelic, my heart acknowledges, my soul adores’ (73). Or, as the Countess instructs Stanley, ‘Learn that there are virtues in the world, more than your fearful heart allowed you to think. I have grievously erred; but all seeing Heaven can tell, never for a moment did I cease to be a mother’ (74). But other features of these plays make clear that Godwin’s severing honour from positive depictions of domestic affection does not mean that he endorses them wholesale or thereby retracts his famous diatribes against cohabitation in Political Justice. For one thing, both of these arguably worthy wives – literally argued, in that the work of the plays is to clear obstructions to perceptions of their worthiness – are killed in the end. Lest this be seen simply as tragic convention, they are shown to be killed by virtue of a fundamental tension within the domestic-affectionate mindset that they are meant to embody, a diagnosis not apparent in the novels. Marriage to the worthy wives in St Leon and Fleetwood also fails, but whereas in the novels the worthiness of these women is apparent to everyone except the eponymous protagonists, who betray them out of concern for honour (St Leon) or oversensitivity (Fleetwood), in the plays, the wives are ‘tainted’ by being sexually desirous, and thus pursue the Wollstonecraftian project of expanding what counts as virtue for women. And yet the plays do not rest content in endorsing the virtue of egalitarian marriages. Instead, they depict companionate marriage as at cross purposes not only to honour but also to filial affection. Antonio pursues one ramification in showcasing Helena’s resistance to moving into her husband’s household out of a sense of duty to her

Maniquis_3201_217_(Carlson).indd 223

1/26/2011 7:27:37 PM

224

Julie A. Carlson

father. For all her delighted commingling with Gusman, from first scene to last she resists, on the grounds of ‘homage’ to her ‘lineage,’ the husband’s customary ‘rights’ to ‘transfer … the bride’ from ‘the natal to the matron roof’ (5). If loyalty to lineage sounds plausible in the first scene, occurring before Antonio’s return, it is fully discredited by his ensuing actions and the incestuous nature of the so-called honourable marriage to Rodrigo that she abjures. Faulkener pursues a different tension by pitting a woman’s right to sexual expression against her ability to maintain open converse with her son or second husband. In the concluding scene, Faulkener affirms the virtue of the ‘fallen’ Arabella, as we have seen, but it does so at the cost of that husband’s life, since he prefers to die in a duel rather than acknowledge an errant, instead of idealized, femininity. Arabella’s virtue is restored only to have her overwhelmed by conflicting claims of blood. Both Antonio and Faulkener suggest, then, that the shift from ‘feudal’ to ‘egalitarian’ mindsets improves open-heartedness between adult partners but occasions new problems for an age of sensibility: managing the conflict between claims of companionate marriage and filial affection. This tension comes to a dramatic head in Abbas, King of Persia, the play that Godwin writes immediately after the failed performance of Antonio and that is based on John Denham’s The Sophy (1642).22 A combination of Henry IV, Part 2 and King Lear in its emphasis on tensions between kingship and fatherhood, Abbas displaces the feudalism of Antonio onto an oriental setting by way of again pitting honour against commitment to family. Abbas’s security as king of Persia, doubly under threat by virtue of wars with the Turks and an interior mutiny by a corps of disgruntled subjects, ultimately undermines not his reign but his domestic harmony. Rumours that Mirza Sefi, the much-beloved son of Abbas, is in league with both sets of enemies eventually cause Abbas to order the death of his son, an act that plunges him into remorse. The action occurs against a backdrop of praise for domestic affection as higher than honourable forms of public service. Irene (Abbas’s wife and Sefi’s mother) cordons off ‘this little circle of our love’ from the contentions ‘for glory and command’ of ‘ambitious men’ (1.4.111–13), while Abbas and Sefi repeatedly esteem their roles as ‘father’ and ‘son’ above ‘the name of soldier, or of conqueror’ – names said to prove ‘sordid’ in the comparison (1.1.158, 235; 1.4.47–8).23 Yet domestic relations lead to the ensuing tragedy because of the multiple challenges that they pose to state and familial harmony. Indeed, Abbas is a striking rehearsal of the tensions within domesticity that are available for manipulation

Maniquis_3201_217_(Carlson).indd 224

1/26/2011 7:27:37 PM



Heavy Drama

225

by public as well as private interests. The scheming Bulac can use treasonous acts against the king to incriminate Sefi because he knows the structural insecurity of father-son bonds: untimely succession, what Abbas himself calls the ‘accustom’d’ ‘story’ that ‘our fathers live too long’ (2.2.8–9, 11). Twice Sefi seeks to disarm such fears, even before they assume material form, by voicing the prayer that he precede his father in death – precisely so as not to participate in the father’s fall from power: ‘I am only proud to be the son of Abbas; / I am only sad, when I reflect, it may / Hereafter be requir’d of me, / To be to Persia, what my father is’ (1.1.235–8). Or again, ‘If I have one darling prayer to heaven, / ’Tis this, / Oh, may a tear on Abbas’s cheek / Soothe my last hour, and consecrate my grave!’ (1.4.95–8). More divisive still are the warring claims woven into the fabric of family life between heterosexual love and love between parent and child. The depth of this strife is overdetermined by the play’s having an ‘Eastern’ monarch marry a British woman who then resides in a harem, but it is not dependent on it. Antonio had already explored the split loyalties that subtend any woman’s position in marriage, a topic that Abbas pursues for its ramifications for the bond between parent and child. Speeches between the parents stress each of their claims on Sefi’s love – at best, as a love that facilitates affection for each other; at worst, as the source of total rupture. Whereas ‘a hundred beauties still count and still obtain the royal smiles,’ Irene states, as ‘the simple child of nature’s school’ trapped in a harem, that ‘Sefi is mine, and mine alone. For him I love you: … For that thou art his father, I still live / Upon thy looks, and worship all thy steps’ (1.4.19–22). Only in this ‘mine alone,’ Abbas replies, do ‘our sentiments thus harmonize.’ ‘Thou canst not love thy son with fuller heart / Than Abbas does … In him alone, of all that live, I find / Equality of interest and affection. / He is to me as a brother’ (1.4.26–31). Moreover, each not only finds a love ‘that knows no limits’ solely in the relation between parent and child, but also each competes for who has claims to have been the better mother (1.4.34). It is Abbas who reminisces about ‘pretty Sefi’ and how, ‘when first I saw his infant face, I felt a motion here, no man, no woman, / No child e’er wak’d before’ (3.2.106, 114–16). It is Sefi whose first words to his father, after having just proved himself ‘every inch’ a hero, express gratitude for how his ‘little merits’ have been ‘nurs’d and shap’d by thee’ (1.1.152). The question of split loyalties is intensified by other dimensions of the ruling family’s domestic arrangements. Unlike Helena in Antonio, Irene (apparently) consents to be transferred from the ‘natal’ to the ‘matron roof,’ but on the condition that her father be transferred too.

Maniquis_3201_217_(Carlson).indd 225

1/26/2011 7:27:37 PM

226

Julie A. Carlson

She recounts the negotiation to Sefi in language striking for its nuptial (and funereal) resonances. ‘’Twas then’ – that is, ‘when Abbas was in all the ardour / Of his first love for my once lauded beauty’ – that ‘I ask’d my father at his hands, / ’Twas then I said, I could not live remov’d / From his dear presence’ (2.1.19–23). This move ultimately threatens her father Michael’s life, when he is named as one of the treasonous corps and condemned to die – a ‘scene of blood’ for which Irene holds herself responsible. By then enlisting Sefi as ‘the guardian of the life’ of his grandfather to solicit Michael’s pardon from Abbas, Irene prepares the ground as well for Sefi’s death, a situation that she also acknowledges (2.1.36, 64). ‘Sefi must die, because Irene is his mother!’ (3.3.60). Not only is the son’s life put at risk through the mother’s love for her father, but then in pleading for her son, Irene must re-betray her natal family, members of whom ‘fell’ years ago under the king’s ‘warrant.’ ‘Give me my Sefi … / And I will confess, my [mother] and my brother / Deserv’d to perish by thy stern decree!’ (3.3.49, 70–3). Treating it as a device of plot, Abbas portrays the potential for treason as fundamental to family life. The claims of divergent blood, as experienced by a wife who is a mother and daughter, result in the shedding of family blood – usually that woman’s, but in Abbas, her mother’s, brother’s, and son’s. Abbas can claim to sidestep, by ‘orientalizing,’ the issue, as Irene does when she restricts every mother’s prayer to ‘be childless’ to ‘our Eastern Monarchs’ wives and concubines’ (1.2.33–5).24 But the location of tyranny for Godwin is never so neatly circumscribed, especially when it concerns the home front. There the despotism of parental love knows no gender, and the war between the sexes is played out over the child – not just in the sense of which parent has the greater share in the child’s affections, but also of whether the woman, in forming the mind of the child, brings him over to her side. ‘It is too plain she hates me! / … Has he not imbib’d her views, / Her thoughts, her aims?’ (3.3.63–6). Although Irene confidently asserts in the first act that ‘suspicion and mistrust’ have been excluded from ‘this little circle of our love,’ Abbas locates them at the heart of domestic affections and thus as capable of manipulation by any Iago-like schemer (1.4.111). In this, King Lear meets Othello, for true to Godwin’s proclivities, tragic mistrust is occasioned by doubts less over sexual fidelity than over the fidelity of one’s progeny. The sign by which Sefi is to indicate his assent to the plot against his father is ‘by waving a crimson handkerchief / from [his] window, an hour after sunrise’ (1.4.62–3). Godwin’s plays of this period, then, focus on dynamics of marriage

Maniquis_3201_217_(Carlson).indd 226

1/26/2011 7:27:37 PM



Heavy Drama

227

and filial affection in order to highlight the problems that the virtues associated with them pose to political justice. Besides the despotism that results from the ‘magic of my’ or what he terms in The Enquirer ‘excessive familiarity,’ part of what also concerns Godwin is an epistemological stumbling block that these plays depict as the formative nature of first impressions.25 Helena voices her resistance to being transferred from the ‘natal to the matron roof’ less on feminist grounds than on the ‘outrage’ that such transference poses to her identity: ‘Within this mansion I first saw the light; / … All that I see talks to me of my lineage, / And bears the sacred impress of religion, / Of that first, purest of all human creeds, / Homage to those, in whom we first beheld Wisdom, / Entire affection, ever-heedful love’ (5). Antonio tries to manipulate this resistance by asking, ‘Helen [sic], … Hast thou forgot the death-bed of my father?’ to which she replies, ‘Have I forgot? – Imperishable image!’ (23). Faulkener outlines the mental distortions required to keep these first impressions ideal. ‘For to my own thoughts and my heart you shall be my mother still, till the severing axe shall end my delusions for ever’ (61). Preserving these parental fantasies, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, the play suggests, results in what Faulkener falsely concludes sets him apart: ‘I never was an inhabitant of this world. I have lived among enchantments and in fairy land’ (61). This is less the strictures against gratitude, duty, and obligation familiar from Political Justice, more the fundamental identification of how attachment to family impedes that ‘going out of heart’ so central to justice. Revising the nature and power of first impressions, I argue elsewhere, underlies Godwin’s creation of the Juvenile Library and the children’s texts that he composes for it, concerned as they are to alter the fundamentals of learning.26 But that move is yet around the corner. It is from the theatre that Godwin first announces his post-marital views on domestic affections, a fact of locale that itself suggests part of what he has in mind.

2  Theatre’s Mixed Messages I regard the 13th of December last [1800] as a great era in my life, & I am not without hope that it may ultimately prove an auspicious one. William Godwin27

Critical amusement over the lengths to which Godwin goes to get his plays staged, as well as bemusement over his energetic attention to all dimensions of a particular play’s revision, staging, casting, and recep-

Maniquis_3201_217_(Carlson).indd 227

1/26/2011 7:27:37 PM

228

Julie A. Carlson

tion have had the bizarre consequence of occluding the more basic fact of his active involvement in the London theatre world and personal investment in mounting his plays. Apparently the image of a theatrical Godwin collides too deeply with customary assessments of his disposition to be entertained seriously, even by some of his best friends or critics. Granted, Godwin’s assertions, especially in badgering letters to Kemble, do not help matters: for example, when Godwin informs him in regards to acting the part of Antonio that ‘tragic writers are not the growth of every summer’ so that, in ‘exercising so awful a responsibility’ as deciding whose plays ‘make it to the stage,’ Kemble should make sure that he acts with the ‘most perfect integrity,’ or when, in seeking an impartial reading of Abbas, Godwin inquires whether it received ‘that vigilant and attentive perusal which I conceive to be due to the production of a person already in the possession of some sort of literary character.’28 Still, there is nothing out of character in the tone of such remarks; and his efforts to enlist the right actors, to solicit input regarding revisions, and to amend his initial refusal of spectacle once Antonio fails indicate a clear knowledge of stage conventions – if not always a plausible estimation of his capacity either to eschew or enlist them. O’Shaughnessy protests the view of critics, past and present, that Godwin’s interest in theatre is simply financial, suggesting that their assertion stems from an unwillingness to take his playwriting ventures seriously. Nor does he believe Godwin is selling out his pedagogical commitments by embracing theatre, but avers that Godwin instead is adopting a less dogmatic means of educating people.29 At the same time, it is important to see that part of Godwin’s attraction to theatre is the popularizing that is inherent in it and that can make playwriting such a profitable, but risky, venture. We have long complimented Godwin’s compositional habit of pairing a philosophical treatise with a novel as a means of disseminating arguments to a gender- and class-diversified readership. Theatre is triply popularizing in that it simplifies the novels that humanize the philosophy on which its plotlines are based, reaches an even less literate audience, and can garner huge profits – a point not lost when, during the composition of Antonio, Godwin is attending for the fourth time George Colman’s The Iron Chest, a popularizing of Caleb Williams. Godwin comes to prefer novels over drama for their ability to examine characters in all their complexity and to comment on their unfolding from a detached perspective, as the preface to Cloudesley (1830) spells out.30 But drama and theatre have their advantages, especially when the message being conveyed is deliberately equivocal.

Maniquis_3201_217_(Carlson).indd 228

1/26/2011 7:27:37 PM



Heavy Drama

229

As ‘one of the most hated men in the country’ by 1798, whose name (with Wollstonecraft’s) is synonymous with atheism, adultery, bigamy, licentiousness, and infanticide, Godwin needs to do some serious damage control if he is to have any hope of regaining a public.31 This is the message he conveys in the preface to St Leon, where he presents himself as ‘anxious’ to answer charges ‘of inconsistency’ regarding his initially harsh views on the ‘affections and charities of private life’ that have dogged him for four years.32 But when the real project is altering the appearance, but not essential substance, of his critique of family – an intention discernible in the preface, too – the mixed messages that constitute effective dialogue in drama prove appealing in stating new support for marriage and family life while showing how they have a tendency to destroy women, men, and children.33 At the same time, public animosity towards Godwin means that he can never be sure of getting a fair hearing for any message, especially regarding family life, that goes out under his name. This accounts for his efforts, themselves often equivocal, to submit and stage his plays without public knowledge of his authorship. Speaking of Antonio, Kegan Paul calls the author’s identity an open secret, which, in the case of Abbas, Godwin discloses when it appears that revealing his identity will get the play accepted.34 In addition, not disclosing one’s identity is a well-worn tactic for increasing interest in and public discussion of a play.35 Put a different way, we can say that in all three of these plays Godwin is playing to the crowd, that this is visible in his handling of dialogue and stage directions, and that both these components of theatre are inseparable from Godwin’s mode of expressing remorse. Certain speeches are recognizably anti-Godwinian, either in their enthusiasm for maternal ‘instinct,’ ‘purest joys’ of marriage, or ‘radiant, exalted, and angelic’ female virtues, or their adoption of statements from Osorio that have been construed correctly as voicing Coleridge’s retraction of Godwinian tenets.36 Abbas provides one such speech in its hieratic ‘trust not to reason; / Reason, the servile tool of each man’s pleasure, / Assumes new shapes, and gilds each changing passion’ (2.1.72–4); Faulkener another in the ‘transport’ it claims to find in actions that ‘trample on musty rules, and in which the mind is its own law, that the dully honest cannot ever dream of’ (56). This strategy is remarkably similar to Godwin’s ‘Thoughts Occasioned by the Perusal of Dr Parr’s Spital Sermon’ of 1800, an essay that castigates former friends for deserting him and that makes a point of broadcasting a change of position regarding the domestic affections that ends up articulating the position with renewed

Maniquis_3201_217_(Carlson).indd 229

1/26/2011 7:27:37 PM

230

Julie A. Carlson

vengeance. ‘The most ignorant parent’ will ‘scarcely ever fail to love his child,’ even though said child ‘should be an idiot, deformed and odious to the sight; or imbued with the basest and most hateful propensities. I do not regard a parent of this sort with any strong feeling of approbation. Nor do I regard a new-born child with any superstitious reverence … I had rather such a child should perish at the first hour of its existence, than that a man should spend seventy years of life in a state of misery and vice.’37 In a nutshell, theatrical media are Godwin’s mode in this period, as he struggles to go it alone with the crowd. The contrast to a highly spectacular play such as Osorio/Remorse is that Antonio downplays stage spectacle in order to highlight authorial remorse as the spectacle. Godwin’s approach to stage spectacle, often seen as the crowning evidence of his unsuitability for theatrical ventures, is usefully viewed in the context of the forms of justice that he is enlisting theatre to effect.38 As O’Shaughnessy shows, Antonio sets the benchmark for Godwin’s rejection of spectacle by promising a duel, only to have it rejected by its combatants, deliberately ‘upset[ting] the audience’s horizon of expectations’ in order to elicit more reflective, individuated responses.39 An admitted low point for theatre, this benchmark allows us to better recognize enlistments of theatre’s theatricality. Godwin’s plays frequently showcase the theatricality of outmoded and contemporary courts of appeal (duel, honour, courtroom, full disclosure) in order to re-articulate relations between justice, on the one side, and illusion, pageantry, and enchantment, on the other. The aim is no longer to oppose them, as Political Justice does in deeming illusion antithetical to reason, but to expose their shared mechanisms and outcomes. Faulkener is especially savvy on this score. It depicts one of the allegedly most natural instincts in the world (a child’s love for his mother) as propelling that child to the most theatrical settings in order to find her – masquerades, duels, courts of law – as if to make visible what Stanley affirms of this search (‘It is a fatal adventure’) and as if to remedy the cause attributed to the failure of Antonio – all talk and no action, a lesson that leads to the staging of two duels in this play. Moreover, the intervening Abbas shows Godwin to be a very quick study in this regard, for, as O’Shaughnessy notes, Abbas opens with a fanfare of military processions and heralds and, in scene 3, even treats viewers to ‘exotic dancing girls’ in the seraglio before Irene puts a stop to such ‘idle gaiety’ (1.3).40 A tantalizing image of Godwin! But the point is also meta-theatrical in connecting the affirmation of family loyalty in Faulkener to illusion and even to a form of dissembling

Maniquis_3201_217_(Carlson).indd 230

1/26/2011 7:27:37 PM



Heavy Drama

231

that is depicted as essential to social cohesion. Precisely this linkage is key to the defence of Faulkener, who kills Benedetto in a duel fought to defend his mother’s honour from charges that are technically true. ‘Ought he to have listened tamely to the cold-blooded hireling,’ his mother argues, who was paid by a villainous woman with designs on her (second) husband, to ‘revile and traduce me to my son,’ who ‘had never heard a breath of dishonour against me?’ ‘Which of you would not blush to have a son, that did not act as my son acted?’ (72). Taking a page from the prosecution in the impeachment trials of Warren Hastings, Countess Orsini’s speech portrays the violation of filial piety as a crime worse than murder not only because it ostensibly undermines the grounds of what is ‘self-evident,’ but also precisely because, in Godwin’s view here as well as elsewhere, it disregards truth, both about the beneficence of family loyalty and about evidentiary facts.41 A second extra-textual feature makes the point about public illusion even sharper. As the brief preface to Faulkener states, the play is based upon an episode taken from Daniel Defoe’s novel Roxana, or the Fortunate Mistress, a text that, in detailing the lengths to which Roxana goes to prevent her long-abandoned children from finding her and ruining her now cushy circumstances (including leaving them to starve and having them thrown into prison), could hardly be more cynical in portraying maternal instinct. Two features of the pre-history of Faulkener’s staging further emphasize the shrewdness of Godwin’s attempts to enlist theatre’s theatricality in the cause of justice. Who better to ensure the popularity of this play than the actor whom Godwin actively courts for its title role – Master Betty, the London theatre sensation of 1804–5, who so dominates the stage that the House of Commons recesses in order to attend his performance of Hamlet, newspapers claim that interest in him eclipses that in Bonaparte, and Kemble and Siddons (the leads in Antonio) withdraw for an entire season from the stage in protest?42 Indeed, the three-year delay in staging Faulkener, given its completion by mid-1804, is wholly attributed to the lengthy negotiations Godwin carries on with Master Betty who, in Kegan Paul’s account, basically toys with the venerable author. ‘He would and he would not play the part, he studied and left it off, sent for Godwin to read it to him, accepted it, then would not fix a time to play it, and a definite arrangement for its production more than once fell through, to Godwin’s great annoyance.’43 (Elliston ultimately plays the role.) Moreover, who better to embody the play’s point that the naturalness of parental and filial affection is a sacred illusion of Western society than the child actor whose appeal turns on a polymorphous

Maniquis_3201_217_(Carlson).indd 231

1/26/2011 7:27:37 PM

232

Julie A. Carlson

eroticism, whose skill as an actor was depicted as at once wholly natural and wholly contrived, and whose money-grubbing father was castigated in the press for essentially pimping his son?44 A second feature highlights the power of first impressions that constitutes a thematic crux in both plays, as daughter Helena and son Faulkener attempt to negotiate their loyalty to lineage, and the sensational appeal of theatre exhibition. ‘The incident on which my production is founded,’ Godwin’s preface to Faulkener notes, ‘made a strong impression on my fancy when a boy, and always rendered the book which contains it, though otherwise coarsely written, somewhat a favourite with me’ (vi). Coincidently, that strong impression concerns remorse. ‘The terrors of a guilty mind, haunted with mysterious fears of retribution, have seldom been more powerfully delineated’ (ibid.). Both the content of Godwin’s plays, then, and his recourse to theatre are crucial to assessing the nature of his critiques of the domestic affections. His two staged plays oppose companionate marriage and filial affection to chivalric honour to showcase the antiquation of the latter and the inherent incompatibility of marital with filial affection under a regime of sentiment. Staging such views in theatre yields a broader dissemination and better possibility for equivocation, wherein he can affirm and undermine his new affection for domestic affections by staging them as tragedy and as major illusions. Yet Godwin’s recognition of the popularizing demanded by theatre, for all his alleged sobriety, does not occasion in him anywhere near the kind of defensive splitting that his poet-playwriting peers display, who come to castigate theatre once their plays fail, either on or in their approach to the stage.45 Despite repeated failure, Godwin is right back at it, striving to improve his ability to capitalize on the sensational techniques of theatre. Moreover, his thoughts on theatre, long after the period when he has stopped writing for it, accept diversion, amusement, even spectacle, as beneficial to rational advances.46 Recognizing a more theatrical Godwin has many implications that should be pursued, particularly for rethinking what critics deem obstructions within Godwin’s writing to putting his notions of justice into practice (aversion to assemblies, antipathy to illusion). In terms of ongoing family drama, it might help to explain Godwin’s penchant for attracting such excitable people, one of whom teaches him more than he cares to process about remorse, or his habit of rereading Antonio to assembled young male protégés.47 It is also worth considering why strong female

Maniquis_3201_217_(Carlson).indd 232

1/26/2011 7:27:37 PM



Heavy Drama

233

characters make a sustained appearance only in Godwin’s plays, whether Godwin saw the stage as particularly conducive to female interests, or why he was particularly obstructive of Wollstonecraft’s and Mary Shelley’s playwriting experiments.48 More consideration is also due to the shaping influence of dramatic renditions of Godwin’s remorse regarding his treatment of family on Percy and Mary’s paired drama projects of 1819–20. For now I want to close by suggesting how Godwin’s tragedies of family lie behind the project of Mary Shelley’s final novel, entitled (yes) Falkner (1837). This entails making two sets of claims: that her two final novels, Lodore (1835) and Falkner, take up the conflict between filial and marital ties that Godwin’s plays – and only his plays, none of his novels – identify; and that their resolution of this conflict is prepared through the striking rescripting of parent-child bonds that informs Shelley’s texts for young people, those narrated from the child’s point of view: Proserpine and Maurice; or, the Fisher’s Cot, both written around 1820. It is as if these two facets of her life-writing converge to answer affirmatively the question that Godwin’s plays cast in the negative. Yes, they suggest, a daughter’s move from the ‘natal to the matron roof’ can occur without tragedy, but only through a loosening of what counts as blood or familial loyalty along the lines that all Godwin’s fictional and non-fictional writings have sought to effect. Recall that Shelley, in writing to Maria Gisborne in 1835, characterizes Falkner as a recasting of fidelity. ‘As I grow older, I look upon fidelity as the first of human virtues – & am going to write a novel to display my opinion.’49 Recall that the plot of Falkner turns on making fidelity to the dead a source of life, aliveness, and new attachments and that this reworking of loss proves the only counter to remorse. The tears of six-year-old Elizabeth Raby at the grave of her mother occasion her adoption by Falkner, the ‘father’ to whom she remains loyal throughout her life. Her eventual union with Gerard Neville, whose life to this point is devoted to finding and revenging himself on the man responsible for terminating his mother’s life and ruining her reputation (Falkner), necessitates that he agree to cohabit with this former enemy, a condition achieved through a re-evaluation of connection. As Neville comes to realize through imbibing Elizabeth’s influence, ‘There is more real sympathy between me and my mother’s childhood friend – who loved her so long and truly – whose very crime was a mad excess of love – than one who knew nothing of her – to whom her name conjures up no memories, no regret.’50 Such recon-

Maniquis_3201_217_(Carlson).indd 233

1/26/2011 7:27:37 PM

234

Julie A. Carlson

ciliation through memory, a literal re-stitching of the ties of one’s past, is a precondition for a peaceful household where the ongoing presence of a daughter’s father is not perceived by son-in-law Neville (as opposed to Abbas) as structural treason. Deeply hard won in the novel, aspects of this reconciliation are worked through in the daughter- and son-centred texts that Shelley composes for youth, both of which have as their primary plot line re-characterizing what counts as blood loyalty and casting the loss of a parent as something other than tragedy. Proserpine takes up the sexual dimension by not casting as tragedy the invasion of heterosexuality into the mother-daughter dyad, the conventional feminist reading of the Ceres-Proserpine legend. Addressing an inconsolable Ceres, Proserpine instead construes her abduction and rape by Pluto not as ‘misery’ but ‘a slight change / From our late happy lot,’ even as Proserpine continues to depict part-time residence with her abductor as hell.51 Maurice rewrites parenting by giving Maurice multiple surrogate parents (Dame Smithson, Old Barnet and his wife), none of whom are renounced once he is reunited with his natal parents, a reunion that entails time-sharing in two homes, one being the fisher Old Barnet’s cottage, now inhabited by Dame Smithson during the months when it is not inhabited by Maurice and his natal father, who reside there four months out of the year out of loyalty to the memory of Old Barnet and his wife.52 It is fitting, then, that the early scenes of Falkner are set in the same place as the fisher’s cot, the south coast of Devon, and that the final scenes involve peaceful cohabitation between generations who include the living and the dead. Falkner is often read as one of Shelley’s most Godwinian novels, not simply because she is composing it at the time of his death. Reviews attest to its similarity to The Iron Chest, George Colman’s popular theatre adaptation of Caleb Williams, for the way that the paranoid pursuit between Neville and Falkner echoes that of Caleb and Falkland.53 What is missed by making this comparison is just how deeply Falkner engages the familial conflict that structures Godwin’s plays and what Shelley’s working through of the conflict accomplishes. In detailing how to make adult family life more liveable for daughters who are caught in the middle, Falkner circumvents the tragedy for women that Godwin’s tragedies stage and that his novels address only insofar as their near-exclusive focus on aberrational men is meant to undo a major part of the problem. By showing how this circumvention requires recasting the bonds of parent-child ties, Falkner expresses a progeny’s fidelity to its parent-author and the text that he considers his ‘best work.’

Maniquis_3201_217_(Carlson).indd 234

1/26/2011 7:27:38 PM



Heavy Drama

235

NOTES   1 Cited from a manuscript ‘scrap’ (b229/6) in William St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys: A Biography of a Family (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 231.   2 Besides the invitation to participate in the conference and volume, I wish to thank Victoria Myers for information on Godwin’s diary entries regarding theatre. I also thank Pamela Clemit for facilitating my acquaintance with David O’Shaughnessy’s excellent dissertation, ‘Theatrical Discourse in the Writing of William Godwin, 1790–1807’ (Oxford, 2008), now published as William Godwin and the Theatre (Pickering & Chatto, 2010).   3 O’Shaughnessy, ‘Theatrical Discourse in Godwin,’ appendix 2: ‘William Godwin’s Theatre Attendance 1788–1807.’   4 Charles Kegan Paul, William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries, 2 vols. (London: Henry S. King, 1876), 2:37.   5 O’Shaughnessy, ‘Theatrical Discourse in Godwin,’ 6.   6 This is Robert Southey’s famous phrase, cited in Ford K. Brown, The Life of William Godwin (London: J.M. Dent and Sons; New York: E.P. Dutton, 1926), 134.   7 The first ‘upswing’ in his theatre attendance occurs in 1795–6, when he attended 39 plays; the second is 1797–8, when he attended 64 plays (O’Shaughnessy, ‘Theatrical Discourse in Godwin,’ 61, 132).   8 An early example is Burton R. Pollin, Education and Enlightenment in the Works of William Godwin (New York: Las Americas, 1962), 246.   9 Abbas, too, introduces Abbas’s son, Sefi, as fresh from battle. 10 St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys, 231. 11 See Pamela Clemit, ‘Introduction,’ in St Leon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), xv–xviii; and Gary Handwerk and A.A. Markley, ‘Introduction,’ in Fleetwood (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2001), 12–16. Godwin, of course, initiates this tradition in his preface to St Leon, where he claims to revise prior sentiments against domestic affection uttered in Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. 12 Julie A. Carlson, England’s First Family of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 40–54, 62–5. 13 A.E. Rodway, Godwin in the Age of Transition (London: G.G. Harrap, 1952), 39. 14 St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys, 230. 15 Ibid.; note that the title of St Clair’s chapter 17 is ‘The Discovery of Poetry.’ 16 Ibid., 231. St Clair also notes that the only manuscript copy of Osorio ‘lay

Maniquis_3201_217_(Carlson).indd 235

1/26/2011 7:27:38 PM

236

Julie A. Carlson

for several years in Godwin’s study until Coleridge retrieved and revised it’ (339). 17 On such wishes by friends, see Kegan Paul, William Godwin, 2:36–56. 18 Letters between Lamb and Godwin of 9 September and 17 September 1801 give a fairly faithful rendition of what becomes the plot of Faulkener (Kegan Paul, William Godwin, 2:84–8). According to O’Shaughnessy, Godwin begins writing in November 1803 (‘Theatrical Discourse in Godwin,’ 207). 19 William Godwin, Antonio: A Tragedy in Five Acts (London: G.G. and J. Robinson, 1800), 26. All subsequent references to this edition will be cited parenthetically by page number. 20 For example, ‘Love, sympathy, endearments mutual, / Community of thoughts, of wish, of sentiments, / Have drawn each day the band closer, and yet / More close’ (Antonio, 52). 21 William Godwin, Faulkener: A Tragedy. As It Is Performed at The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane (London: Richard Phillips, 1807), 57. All subsequent references to this edition will be cited parenthetically by page number. 22 O’Shaughnessy notes that Godwin reads Denham’s play on 10 January 1801 and that the bulk of the composition of Abbas, King of Persia occurs in January and February 1801. The extant manuscript contains only the first three acts, which end at the point where Abbas’s suspicions have been heightened by Irene’s passionate defence of her son, but O’Shaughnessy draws on Godwin’s plot synopsis for confirmation of the death of Sefi and Abbas’s immediate remorse. Moreover, two of the three main changes that O’Shaughnessy notes Godwin making to Denham’s play accentuate the focus on family relations. Godwin makes Abbas’s wife a British woman and describes at great length the initially harmonious relation between father and son (O’Shaughnessy, ‘Theatrical Discourse in Godwin,’ 193). 23 I thank David O’Shaughnessy and Dr Bruce Barker-Benfield for facilitating access to the manuscript of ‘Abbas, King of Persia,’ Dr Barker-Benfield for facilitating permission to quote from it, and Mr Richard Ovenden at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, for granting me non-exclusive permission to quote from it. In this essay I quote from the now accessible print edition: Abbas, King of Persia, in The Plays of William Godwin, ed. David O’Shaughnessy (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010); cited parenthetically in the text with act, scene, and line numbers. 24 The echo with Sefi’s prayer that he precede his father in death stresses the unnatural desires placed on family members by loyalty to family. 25 William Godwin, The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature in a Series of Essays (1797), in Educational and Literary Writings, ed. Pamela Clemit, vol. 5 of Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, 7

Maniquis_3201_217_(Carlson).indd 236

1/26/2011 7:27:38 PM



Heavy Drama

237

vols., gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1993), 118–20; this edition is hereafter cited as PPW, with volume and page numbers. See Carlson, England’s First Family, 85–8. 26 Carlson, England’s First Family, 232–45. 27 Letter from Godwin to John Kemble, 24 February 1801, Oxford, Bodleian MS Abinger c. 18, fol. 10r. 28 Kegan Paul, William Godwin, 2:45, 67. 29 O’Shaughnessy, ‘Theatrical Discourse in Godwin,’ 21–7. 30 Preface to Cloudesley: A Tale, ed. Maurice Hindle, vol. 7 of Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, 8 vols., gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1992), 8. For our purposes, this preface is a fascinating amalgamation of two prior writings. The bulk of it comes from the 1797 ‘Of History and Romance,’ which explores the value of both forms for understanding the ‘science of man’ but now adds drama to the consideration. On drama, he borrows from his strong critique of Mary Shelley’s attempt in 1824 to write a verse tragedy, inspired by seeing Edmund Kean perform Richard III, where he accuses her of composing ‘personages’ that ‘are mere abstractions, the lines & points of a mathematical diagram, & not men and women’ (The Journals of Mary Shelley 1814–1844, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott Kilvert [Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987], 475n). 31 St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys, 192. 32 Preface to St Leon, 11. 33 ‘Not that I see cause to make any change respecting the principle of justice, or any thing else fundamental to the system’ (ibid.). 34 See Kegan Paul, William Godwin, 2:65; also, for the use of Mr Tobin as decoy, 2:47. 35 Joanna Baillie is a good case in point. Also, I view Godwin’s approach to stage authorship as preliminary to the strategy he adopts of publishing his books for children under various pseudonyms, his reputation proving even more detrimental to authorship in this arena. 36 Faulkener, 36; Antonio, 35; Faulkener, 73. S.T. Coleridge, Osorio (1797), in The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in 2 vols., ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), 2:558–9, 568. 37 ‘Thoughts Occasioned by the Perusal of Dr Parr’s Spital Sermon,’ in Political Writings II, ed. Mark Philp with Austin Gee, PPW 2:182–3, 199. 38 Charles Lamb, ‘The Old Actors,’ cited in Kegan Paul, William Godwin, 2:51– 5. 39 O’Shaughnessy, ‘Theatrical Discourse in Godwin,’ 157. 40 Ibid., 188–90.

Maniquis_3201_217_(Carlson).indd 237

1/26/2011 7:27:38 PM

238

Julie A. Carlson

41 On the manipulation of family values in the trial, see my ‘Trying Sheridan’s Pizarro,’ Texas Studies in Literature and Language 38, nos. 3–4 (1996), 366–8 and Daniel O’Quinn, Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770–1800 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 200–21. 42 On Betty’s fame, see my ‘Forever Young: Master Betty and the Queer Stage of Youth in English Romanticism,’ South Atlantic Quarterly 95, no. 3 (1996), 7–24. H. Crabb Robinson’s diary for 19 November 1812 states that ‘Godwin speaks more civilly than most people of Betty [who had returned to the stage in 1812]; he thinks he may become a better actor than Kemble, and that he is already an excellent declaimer’; cited in B. Sprague Allen, ‘William Godwin and the Stage,’ PMLA 35, no. 3 (1920), 358–74. 43 Kegan Paul, William Godwin, 2:162. 44 Carlson, ‘Forever Young,’ 589–95. 45 See Wordsworth’s preface to The Borderers, Coleridge’s to Remorse, and Lamb’s to John Woodvil: A Tragedy. 46 William Godwin, Thoughts on Man in Essays, ed. Mark Philp with Austin Gee, PPW 6:126. In Godwin’s attitude towards playwriting and theatre, he is much closer to Joanna Baillie, whose Plays on the Passions and undefensive support of spectacle share important resonances with him. 47 See Godwin’s diary, 14 October 1812; also 13 December 1818, ‘Read Antonio to Rosser & Bevan’ (Oxford, Bodleian MS Abinger e. 17 and 21). 48 Godwin admits to burning Wollstonecraft’s draft of a comedy in Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Mark Philp, in Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, 8 vols., gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1992), 1:127. He censures Shelley’s efforts to write a tragedy in a letter of 27 February 1824 that condemns her dramatic personages for being ‘mere abstractions, the lines & points of a mathematical diagram, & not men and women’ (see note 30). 49 Mary Shelley to Maria Gisborne, [8] November 1835, in The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty T. Bennet, 3 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980–8), 2:260. 50 Mary Shelley, Falkner, a Novel, ed. Pamela Clemit, vol. 7 of The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, 8 vols., gen. ed. Nora Crook (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1996), 295.  51 Mary Shelley, Proserpine, act 2, ll. 264–7, in Matilda, Dramas, Reviews and Essays, Prefaces and Notes, ed. Pamela Clemit, vol. 2 of The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, 8 vols., gen. ed. Nora Crook (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1996), 72–91. 52 See Carlson, England’s First Family, 248–56. 53 See Pamela Clemit’s introduction to Falkner, in Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, 7:ix–x.

Maniquis_3201_217_(Carlson).indd 238

1/26/2011 7:27:38 PM

PART  III GODWIN’S ACQUAINTANCES

Maniquis_3201_239_(Scrivener).indd 239

1/26/2011 7:33:02 PM

This page intentionally left blank

Maniquis_3201_001_(Myers).indd 2

1/26/2011 3:04:34 PM

chapter ten

The Philosopher and the Moneylender: The Relationship between William Godwin and John King MICHAEL SCRIVENER

On the surface they could not have been more different: William Godwin (1756–1836), from a middle-class Dissenting background, and John King (1753–1824), from a poor Sephardic Jewish background; the one a philosophical radical who made his living from literature, as author and bookseller, and the other an ‘unrespectable’ radical who published his writing, but who made his living on the border between legal and illegal money transactions; the one wrote a decisive pamphlet critical of the treason trial proceedings (Cursory Strictures in 1794), and the other gave money to support the treason trial defendants and their families.1 Their main area of congruence was as political radicals who were both writers, Londoners, and of the same generation. Perhaps then it is not so surprising that Godwin and King knew each other very well, often dining together or having tea at King’s house or calling on one another. King makes his first appearance in Godwin’s diary on 1 December 1793: ‘sup at Jennings’s, with [Thomas Holcroft (1745–1809)] and King.’2 The first of many times that Godwin dined at King’s is recorded on 22 January 1795, and the last recorded dinner party at King’s that Godwin attended was in March 1807. Not only does King appear over one hundred and thirty times in the diary; the diary also records that Godwin meets separately with his wife, Lady Lanesborough, and her two adult children; Godwin also meets King’s son Charles and daughter Sophia, who criticizes Godwin in print. Godwin on 24 December 1812 writes to Nicholas Byrne, reactionary editor-owner of the Morning Post; Byrne was at that time the father of three children by Charlotte King, John King’s eldest daughter; Byrne and Charlotte King finally married in 1815 after the death of Byrne’s first wife.

Maniquis_3201_239_(Scrivener).indd 241

1/26/2011 7:33:02 PM

242

Michael Scrivener

The Godwin–King relationship is intriguing both for biographical reasons, showing a side of Godwin that has not received much attention, and for literary reasons. Biographically, Godwin learned through King of experiences from which his puritanical background had shielded him: gambling, prostitution, blackmail, risky financial transactions, and criminality. Additionally, one of the women in whom Godwin was interested, both before and after his wife’s death, was Mary Robinson (1758–1800), who had been intimate with John King in 1773–4 when he was a young man; they later became bitter enemies, but King’s eldest daughter, Charlotte, used Mary Robinson for a literary role model.3 Along with Francis Place (1771–1854), John King helped restructure Godwin’s woeful financial indebtedness in 1812.4 Godwin owed King a literary debt as well, and perhaps a philosophical one. The diary records Godwin reading one of King’s political essays in January 1795, and it turns out that Godwin and King were writing on political topics in the same year, 1783. King’s Thoughts on the Difficulties and Distresses in which the Peace of 1783, has involved the People of England invites comparison to writings by Godwin on Charles James Fox (1749–1806), Edmund Burke (1729–97), and the American Revolution. Another similarity is worth considering: just as King distanced himself from Thomas Paine (1737–1809) and violent revolution in a series of speeches and public letters between 1792 and 1795, so too did Godwin distance himself from the London Corresponding Society (1792–9) and John Thelwall (1764–1834). The single text that bears the most evidence of King’s influence is Godwin’s 1799 novel St Leon, but there is another useful comparison in the area of religion and theology. King’s deism inflected Jewishly is both like and unlike Godwin’s deism inflected in a Christian direction. Although King’s final publication tries to reconcile his deism with the divine origin of Scripture in a manner wholly foreign to Godwin’s secular approach, it would probably be safe to assume that the two men as deists discussed religion more than a few times in their more than one hundred meetings.

Personal Relationship The exchange of letters related in C. Kegan Paul’s biography of Godwin suggests a somewhat anxious Godwin intrigued by but wary of King. Godwin justifies attending the King dinner parties in terms of a philosopher’s duty to ‘study man,’ but he reacts angrily in 1796 when King invites him to testify in court as a character witness, as though the dinners Godwin had enjoyed were bribes. King shrugs off Godwin’s outraged

Maniquis_3201_239_(Scrivener).indd 242

1/26/2011 7:33:02 PM



The Relationship between William Godwin and John King

243

letter and invites him again to dinner.5 Godwin indeed accepted that dinner invitation and many more after that. Although Godwin himself never described those dinners, other writers have done so, including the poet and drama critic John Taylor (1757–1832), who fondly remembers those occasions. Taylor has nothing but praise for Lady Lanesborough and King, whom he knew for forty years. Despite hearing many criticisms of King’s character, Taylor insists that he ‘never observed any thing in his conduct, or ever heard him utter a sentiment, that could be injurious to his reputation. He was hospitable and attentive. He was fond of having men of talent at this table, and seemed capable of comprehending and of enjoying whatever fell from them.’ Regulars at these parties were Dr Wolcot – Peter Pindar (1738–1819), Mrs Grattan, sister of Lord Falkland (1766–96), and Charles Carey (1768–1809), the Lord’s brother. The entertainment was music and cards, but there was no excessive gambling. There were rumours that King and Lady Lanesborough were not actually married, but Taylor is convinced that they were, especially because King had legal access to the Lanesborough money. Thomas Holcroft and Godwin were also regulars, according to Taylor, who describes Holcroft as noticeably argumentative and unfriendly to any opposition to his ideas; in contrast, Godwin was quiet. King enjoyed talking to them both,6 but he apparently liked Godwin much better than he did Holcroft, because in his Letters from France (1802), which does not mention Godwin at all, he harshly criticizes for intellectual pretension Holcroft and the Helen Maria Williams (1761?–1827) circle of Parisian expatriates. Calling Godwin’s friend Holcroft intolerant, ‘dogmatic, virulent, and splenetic,’ King declares a preference for moderate monarchy to the kind of government he imagines would ensue under a Holcroftian plan: ‘that barbarism and rudeness which would revert with Holcroft’s system, to that frigid and chearless torpor that reduces life to inanity, and to that intolerable inequality which would level learning with ignorance and modesty with impudence. I dread all extremes, particularly such as would follow the innovations of visionary and frantic impostors.’7 King’s self-description as politically moderate must be taken with a grain of salt, but the irritation over the perceived self-importance of the HolcroftWilliams group sounds genuine, as we know that King’s own politics accented practical action over theorizing. King seems to be characterizing Godwin’s own political perspective when he discusses Thomas Paine’s in a moving section of Letters from France. Apologizing for his earlier public attack on Paine in the 1790s – ‘I am ashamed of my error’ – King notes how isolated Paine has become

Maniquis_3201_239_(Scrivener).indd 243

1/26/2011 7:33:02 PM

244

Michael Scrivener

and pays an emotional tribute to his integrity, protesting against his abandonment by England, France, and the United States. ‘Payne fondly hoped, and not unreasonably, that changes might be effected by conviction, by unanimous agreement, without bloodshed or coercion: but as they [Paine’s writings] exposed state impostures, and asserted the rights of nature, they excited irritation.’8 Non-violent, uncoerced consensus achieved by rational discussion sounds much more like Godwin than Paine, although it is possible that King interpreted Paine’s opposition to killing the royal family in 1793 in Godwinian terms. Intentionally or not, King has written Godwin into the text without mentioning his name. Although their paths do not seem to have crossed in the 1781–4 period, the respective publications of Godwin and King compare and contrast interestingly. Both ambitious young writers in London, both from outsider social groups, both oriented to the reformist political currents, Godwin takes the more traditional Grub Street path, while King becomes an author by trying to blackmail the famous actress and courtesan Mary Robinson by threatening to publish their correspondence of 1773. King himself had wanted to represent ‘Perdita’ Robinson in the high-stakes negotiations with her former lover, the Prince of Wales, but that role was taken by her then lover, Lord Malden – ineffectively – and by her subsequent lover, Charles James Fox, successfully. It is uncertain just how  intimate King and Robinson had been in 1773, but at the least the unhappy newlywed had been flirtatious and the letters were embarrassing enough for her and Lord Malden to suppress if a price could be negotiated. King would have preferred the blackmail payment rather than his first publication, but Letters from Perdita to a Certain Israelite made King a published author in 1781, when Godwin was still a year away from becoming a Londoner.9 Always attracted to the aristocratic and fashionable life of London, King played a notorious role in a world that accepted him only as ‘Jew’ King the moneylender. His second publication, Thoughts on the Difficulties and Distresses (1783),10 a pamphlet protesting government policies, uses boldly Wilkesite rhetoric from his self-identified position as a Jewish moneylender. As the historian Todd Endelman remarks, King’s pamphlet is ‘one of the earliest occasions that a Jew anywhere in Europe sought to participate in national political life in pursuit of goals unrelated to Jewish communal needs.’11 Godwin’s early publications, in contrast, were three novels (Imogen, Damon and Delia, and Italian Letters), a book of sermons, a biography of Pitt the elder, and several pamphlets for the Foxite Whigs. Regardless of how well or poorly Godwin executed these texts, all of them were of conventional genres that required the

Maniquis_3201_239_(Scrivener).indd 244

1/26/2011 7:33:02 PM



The Relationship between William Godwin and John King

245

submergence of the author’s personality, whereas King’s two publications were idiosyncratic and foregrounded the author’s identity as moneylender and Jew. Their early political writings provide a contrast in styles and political ideology, but there are some important similarities, notably their common anti-imperialism. Godwin’s biography of William Pitt, Lord Chatham, which ignores completely the Jew Bill controversy of 1753 that falls within the frame of Pitt’s political career, harshly criticizes the commercial motives for the colonial wars, but admires the appeals to patriotism and republican virtue by which Pitt is able to rally Britons to a less than noble cause. Godwin’s position is highly nuanced for a political biography of one of the few heroic politicians of the eighteenth century. The antithesis of the corrupt Walpole, Pitt revived a republican idealism by means of wars that were brutal, mercenary, and ultimately unjustifiable. Godwin stresses the idealism at the expense of pacifist anti-imperialism, which is nevertheless forthrightly expressed: ‘It would be absurd to institute an enquiry into which party [the French or the British] was in the right, when the object of both was certainly not right, but convenience. It would appear still more absurd, when we reflected, that the Indians were the true proprietors; and that we, on each side, were indeed no better, than robbers, fallen out about the spoil, that they had made upon the innocent and defenceless passenger.’12 His relativizing the morality of Pitt’s colonial wars and diminishing their grandeur is a bold move for a novice author such as Godwin. He will not knock Pitt off the republican pedestal, however, for the biography has many passages like the following: ‘Lately, the nation seemed to be made up of isolated individuals, where each man was left, by his uninterested neighbour, to the defence of his own person and property. Now, they were formed into an unconquerable army of brothers, and their exertions concentered by the ardent spirit of patriotism.’13 What Godwin admires in Pitt, his patriotism and republican virtue, his community building around the idea of a common good, he also criticizes as nationalistic war; nationalism is better than mere pursuit of gain – but even better would be a common good more truly virtuous. In King’s political essay Thoughts on the Difficulties and Distresses there is a similar anti-imperialism. The essay has four parts, an introductory letter to Charles James Fox, and three sections on the condition of England at the time of the 1783 peace treaty, the English in the East Indies, and what America means for the English. Thoughts harshly condemns Charles James Fox, a leader in the government coalition, for his character and

Maniquis_3201_239_(Scrivener).indd 245

1/26/2011 7:33:02 PM

246

Michael Scrivener

policies at a time when Godwin was defending Fox’s controversial India Bill, the Rockingham Whigs, and Fox himself. The rest of the essay depicts an England suffering from economic distress and depopulation, while the East India Company with government support plunders India; moreover, America has become a magnet for the English industrious middle class, which cannot find economic opportunity in the United Kingdom. According to King, Fox is a self-indulgent aristocratic gambler who cares nothing about the economic distress of the middle classes and who hypocritically scapegoats Jewish moneylenders to obfuscate his own irresponsibility. King feared that, unless government acted boldly and quickly, Britain would continue to lose population to the United States.14 He appeals to republican virtue, but his emphasis on commerce and trade suggests an un-Godwinian liberalism. King argues: ‘Perhaps if a virtuous industry was to be encouraged, such men as you would be banished from the land; but as a spirit of universal gambling has taken [the] place of industrious and virtuous merit, both in political and common life, I think you must remain conspicuous and of the highest importance.’15 Sarcasm and satire like this interlard the whole essay, whose rhetoric seems more intended to harm Fox than persuade him towards new policies. The letter to Fox, animated with a gleeful hostility and delight in doing verbal combat with a powerful statesman, also attends to material deprivations suffered by the British because of the war against American independence. King’s anti-imperialistic rhetoric is at least as pointed as Godwin’s. He laments the seizure of India: ‘When I approach this country [the East Indies], even in imagination, my cheeks feel a glowing shame at the degraded name and character of an Englishman; my fancy sees the sun-burnt coast swarming with the mournful spirits of the oppressed and famished natives, imprecating vengeance on their sordid inhuman tormentors; myriads of pale spectres, starved by artificial famine, shock my busy fancy; and the once peaceful plains, hallowed by a venerable religion and learning, seem strewed with unhappy victims.’ Praising the revolt of the natives of Hindustan against the ‘unnatural’ invasion of their land, he condemns the invading ‘peculators and criminals’ and ‘European monsters.’16 Godwin rarely allows himself the pleasures of satire, for he is committed to the stance of the disinterested philosopher. He also has little to say at any time in his career in favour of trade and commerce, as he believes both are inherently antagonistic to republican virtue. Their respective positions on Fox’s India Bill are instructive: Godwin praises the principle of replacing the arbitrary will of the East India Company with a publicly

Maniquis_3201_239_(Scrivener).indd 246

1/26/2011 7:33:03 PM



The Relationship between William Godwin and John King

247

accountable board within government, but King objects on anti-imperialist grounds to the idea of government legitimating the theft and domination of another country.17 Yet it would be naive to think that King’s sexual competitiveness over Mary Robinson had nothing to do with his zeal in attacking Fox, just as it would be naive to think that Godwin’s long deference to Fox had nothing to do with direct and indirect patronage.18 While their earliest writings are notable for their differences, King might have influenced Godwin in his dispute with Thelwall in 1795. Godwin’s diary of 1795 records that on 23 January, when he dined at King’s, he also read ‘King versus Paine,’ probably an allusion to the John King dispute with Thomas Paine that was played out in print between 1792 and 1795. Twice in January he dines at King’s, where Thelwall is also a guest.19 The next month Godwin reads ‘King on the Peace,’ probably referring to King’s 1783 Thoughts on the Difficulties and Distresses.20 The year in which King and Godwin interacted the most was 1795 – with forty-seven separate days of contact – which makes more plausible King’s influence on Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr Pitt’s Bills, which includes the controversial criticism of Thelwall and the London Corresponding Society. Complicating the matter of influence, however, King published in newspapers and a pamphlet against Paine was probably not what he was saying to friends and associates in and close to the LCS, because in fact King was clandestinely supporting the most uncompromising elements of the Society. His public declarations on revolution in relation to Paine, most recently published in the 10 March 1795 issue of the anti-Pitt Morning Post, identified himself with the political Girondins and distinguished between violent and constitutional reformism, aligning Paine with mob bloodshed, and not recanting this grotesquely unfair charge until his 1802 Letters from France. King attacked Paine to distance himself from what the government and its collaborative press represented as extreme forms of radicalism, which were targets for harsh legal repression. As co-owner of the reformist Argus (1789–92), King was a target along with his partner, the radical physician Sampson Perry.21 Perry responded to the government pressure differently: he scorned the various indictments, fled to Paris, joined the revolution, which imprisoned him for fourteen months as a ‘foreigner,’ then returned to London, where he was kept in Newgate Prison from 1795 to 1801. He died in debtor’s prison in 1823.22 Godwin’s conceptual framework in his Considerations is similarly Girondin, as the essay triangulates just as King’s does between state coercion, democratic coercion, and politically rational discourse.23 Both the government’s repressive legislation and the mass demonstra-

Maniquis_3201_239_(Scrivener).indd 247

1/26/2011 7:33:03 PM

248

Michael Scrivener

tions organized by the LCS, Godwin argues, substitute ready-made constructions of ideology for the private judgment of the individual. A member of the LCS who knew both Godwin and King had a fervent dislike of the latter. Francis Place’s outright loathing of King is an interesting contrast with Godwin’s more positive perspective. A longtime friend of Godwin and an indispensable leader of London ‘respectable’ radicalism, Place first became acquainted with King through his friend John Ashley in the LCS. To illustrate just how strongly Place detested King, he claims that in the late 1790s, when he was so poor he lacked food to eat, he would not take any assistance from ‘Jew King’ because ‘to have accepted any thing from him would have been downright baseness.’24 Invited to the King dinners with other LCS members, Place represents himself as singularly distrustful of King, who is described as purchasing and storing pikes for a future revolution, and as looking forward to a French invasion in the late 1790s. Registering his moral disapproval of King’s money transactions, Place concedes that the moneylender is intelligent and shrewd. Place becomes acquainted with George, the eldest of the three illegitimate sons King is said to have, and the son’s harsh account of his father functions as a truth-telling narrative.25 It is not surprising that Place, the ‘respectable’ radical, disliked King, who frequented the radical underground. The historian Iain McCalman disputes Place’s assertion that King’s involvement in political radicalism was exclusively mercenary and self-interested. King was genuinely attracted to a politics of enthusiasm, drawn to the violently prophetic rhetoric of Joanna Southcott (1750–1814) and Thomas Spence (1750–1814), who imagined ‘Jehovah’s vengeance’ against injustice and oppression. McCalman concludes that ‘there is no doubting [King’s] sincere belief in millenarian modes of thought.’26 In McCalman’s portrait King backs financially uncompromising muckraking newspapers like the British Guardian (c. 1811) and the Independent Whig (1812–17) – which criticized Place more than a few times – and he bankrolls successful efforts to blackmail and pressure vulnerable members of the social and political establishment. King joined with working-class radical Irish Catholics Davenport Sedley and Patrick William Duffin, angry outsiders who shared his resentment at the Protestant English elite. According to McCalman, ‘Many of King’s victims and all of Sedley’s were wealthy and influential members of the English ruling classes, especially ministers, government officials and members of the Royal Family and their courtiers. In this respect the interests of Sedley, King and Duffin as professional criminals intersected with their political radicalism.’27 King was also associated

Maniquis_3201_239_(Scrivener).indd 248

1/26/2011 7:33:03 PM



The Relationship between William Godwin and John King

249

with political causes that had respectable cachet, such as the election of Sir Francis Burdett, the first radical member of parliament, and that had broad, even if somewhat disreputable, public support, like Colonel Wardle’s campaign against the Duke of York in 1809 exposing the duke’s mistress, Mary Anne Clarke, who sold government commissions, and like the Old Price riots at the reconstructed Covent Garden Theatre, to conclude which the manager, John P. Kemble, was ignominiously forced to apologize, withdraw the new private boxes, and moderate the higher prices. There is no avoiding the fact, however, that King associated regularly with criminals who blackmailed the Prince of Wales, the Dukes of Cumberland and York, Prime Minister Spencer Percival, ‘senior law officers, government and admiralty officials, and a variety of distinguished families.’28 There is no evidence that Godwin shared Place’s revulsion against King’s morals and politics, and one assumes Godwin knew as much about the moneylender as did Place. It is risky, perhaps, to infer too much from the laconic diary entries of Godwin, but in 1795, after numerous dinners, suppers, and teas at King’s house, he also simply visits King, as on 31 August, when King is not at home, or on 16 October, when he meets King, or 20 October, when King joins him at the theatre.29 On 14 March and 4 April 1796, as well as many other times, he calls on King but dines elsewhere, clearly suggesting that they had a friendly relationship not wholly dependent on King’s ability to provide Godwin with food and guests with whom to converse.30 He also socializes with King at other people’s houses, for example with Maria Reveley – known as Maria Gisborne to Percy and Mary Shelley – on 14 May 1796.31 In 1797, when Godwin and Wollstonecraft begin their sexual relationship, Godwin still dines at King’s and socializes with him.32 King’s two daughters, Charlotte and Sophia, poets and novelists, visit Godwin in February and April of 1798. In May 1800 he is meeting ‘Miss King’ – which one Godwin does not say, but it is probably Sophia, whose anti-Godwinian Cordelia he is reading in June 1800 when they meet. They meet again in September, when he also writes to her.33 Even though the diary records the last time Godwin dined at King’s as 1807, it also notes that he met Lady Lanesborough and her two adult children in 1808 and 1820,34 and we know that King helped settle Godwin’s financial affairs in 1812. Lady Lanesborough, according to William St Clair, involved herself to some extent in the maternity hospital arrangements for both Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Jane Clairmont.35 Godwin never seems to have been at King’s house at the same time as Francis Place and the working-class radi-

Maniquis_3201_239_(Scrivener).indd 249

1/26/2011 7:33:03 PM

250

Michael Scrivener

cals from the LCS. It is impossible to infer much from the lack of social meetings in the ten years after King’s last dinner party in 1807 – King and Lady Lanesborough emigrated for good to Florence, Italy, in 1817. It is unlikely, however, that Godwin acquired a sudden moral revulsion against a man he had known well for over ten years.

John King and St Leon Second only to Caleb Williams in popularity, Godwin’s novel St Leon enjoyed four separate editions (December 1799, February 1800, 1816, and 1831).36 King’s impact on Godwin’s 1799 novel is of two kinds. Aspects of King’s life and business seem to be reflected in what happens to the eponymous hero St Leon, and the various Jewish allusions of the novel are probably linked to King as well, the only Jew Godwin knew well. The aspects of King’s life that appear to be suggested in the novel include the gambling and gallantry to which the young St Leon is drawn after the demoralizing defeat of the French aristocracy at the battle of Pavia. Godwin treats the ostentatious display of wealth and the risky, imprudent expenditure of money as a displaced heroism that has been thwarted (75). King used to lend money at high rates of interest to young aristocrats and gentry who squandered their inheritance in gambling and whoring. As a guest at numerous dinner parties at King’s house, Godwin would have become acquainted with some of these reckless young men and could have heard stories from King himself. King’s own analysis of the irresponsible gambling of Charles James Fox in 1783 linked individual failure to a general class weakness. The Prince of Wales, a notorious gambler and wasteful spender, went through thousands of pounds as quickly as it was passed to him by a generous government. St Leon’s love of the high life is suspended after he falls in love with the Wollstonecraftian Marguerite, who persuades her young husband that domesticity in provincial retirement is superior to the splendours of Paris. After a number of happy years, St Leon has to return to Paris to settle his son in the university, but he quickly falls back into his old Parisian habits, eventually gambling away the entire family fortune and bringing his family to ruin. The experience of the St Leon family, leaving France in disgrace for an exile in Switzerland, is similar to what happened to John King, who had to leave England in 1783 to avoid an indictment for perjury. He and Lady Lanesborough settled in Paris and northern Italy, not returning until the statute of limitations ran out in 1789. In 1798 King suffered the indignity of bankruptcy and the publication of parts of his diary, sensa-

Maniquis_3201_239_(Scrivener).indd 250

1/26/2011 7:33:03 PM



The Relationship between William Godwin and John King

251

tionistically mutilated in order to discredit his attempts to live the life of a gentleman. The Authentic Memoirs, as the text was entitled, portrayed King as a low criminal who could only pretend to be a gentleman; moreover, he was a Jew, and invariably whenever King is represented in public discourse he is depicted as John ‘Jew’ King.37 Similarly, St Leon tries to make all kinds of identity changes, but none of them is effective and his guilt as a gambler and an alchemist always haunts him. After St Leon accepts the dubious gift of alchemy from the nameless stranger, the abrupt rise from poverty by means of his magical powers casts public suspicion on the legitimacy of his wealth and status. Similarly, the rapid transformation of Jacob Rey, the shoeblack, into John King, the husband of the Irish aristocrat Lady Lanesborough, was challenged in ways similar to what happened to St Leon. ‘Jew’ King was not allowed to forget his origins as a poor Jew, no matter how far he had moved away from those origins, and St Leon, no matter where and how he lives, cannot evade the disgraceful origins of his wealth and longevity. The Jewish allusions in St Leon are pervasive and help frame the novel in the form of the inscription from Congreve: ‘Ferdinand Mendez Pinto was but a type of thee, thou liar of the first magnitude’ (47). The topos of Pinto (1510?–83) as a proverbial liar came from the reputation of his popular Peregrinação, translated into English as the Travels in the seventeenth century.38 Godwin’s preface explains Pinto thus: ‘Becoming a fugitive from his country at a very immature age, he travelled through many parts of Africa and Asia for twenty-one years, and, by his own account, encountered a surprising number of distressful adventures.’39 Citing the French edition, the most complete if still imperfect translation,40 Godwin evidently had given considerable thought to Pinto, whose experiences with the Jesuits, the Inquisition, and the New Christians parallel those of St Leon. ‘Marranos,’ literally ‘pigs,’ were Jews who conformed outwardly as Christians but who practised a form of Judaism in private. ‘New Christians,’ formerly Jews, were converts to Christianity who were suspected of practising Judaism out of the public eye. The Inquisition targeted New Christians, whom they would torture to test the sincerity of their conversion. Pinto himself might have been a Marrano, as the Mendes family were well known New Christians and Pinto’s departure from Portugal coincides with Inquisition attention to Marranos.41 While working on the Pinto material, Godwin could have inquired about details of Sephardic life from his friend John King, the former Jacob Rey, also famous for stretching the truth, especially in a courtroom. In chapter 8 of the novel there is a peculiar sequence of events that

Maniquis_3201_239_(Scrivener).indd 251

1/26/2011 7:33:03 PM

252

Michael Scrivener

seem to allegorize the expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. Prohibited from charging interest on coerced loans that were often not repaid, subject to exorbitant taxes, excluded from owning land and practising a trade or profession, thirteenth-century English Jews were not only economically oppressed but charged periodically with ‘blood libel’ – the ritualistic killing of Christian boys.42 After a devastating storm ruins the Swiss area where St Leon and his family live modestly, the community irrationally turns against him, scapegoating him and treating him like a hated and feared outsider. The expulsion of St Leon from Switzerland is so excessive and unmotivated it resembles the expulsion of Jews from England – and elsewhere. ‘I was forbidden, under pain of perpetual imprisonment, to return to the territories of the republic, and I had no friend to solicit in my behalf. In Constance [where he emigrated] I was utterly a stranger’ (139). His property is confiscated without compensation, a fate suffered by Jews more than a few times, including in 1290 England. Although St Leon eventually gets compensated (155), his victimization has all the appearance of a Jewish victimization, without the word ‘Jew’ manifesting itself. This is hardly the only time St Leon is linked to Jews. The nameless stranger who passes on the ‘fatal secret’ of eternal life and alchemy to St Leon suggests the Wandering Jew myth. In chapter 17, his son Charles leaves and rejects St Leon because of the public consequences of the fatal secret; the son cannot defend the father openly because the father has to conceal the scandalous details of how he has become wealthy. As William Brewer points out, the parallel evoked is Shakespeare’s Jessica leaving Shylock. St Leon says: ‘My son! my son! – wealth! wealth! – my wife! – my son!’ (213), just as Shylock cries: ‘My daughter! O my ducats! O my daughter!’ (2.8.15).43 Alchemy itself, producing gold from other elements, was associated traditionally with magical Kabbalah, as well as with Jews corrupting the currency. Creating wealth ex nihilo conforms to the cultural fantasy of usury and interest-bearing loans, money produced not from labour but from trickery and fraud. Marguerite, usually the voice of moral clarity in the novel, distinguishes between legitimate and illegitimate wealth. ‘The ordinary wealth of the world is something real and substantial, and can neither be created nor dissipated with a breath’ (225). The anxiety provoked by alchemy is the anxiety over representations and appearances; as the Constance magistrate tells St Leon, ‘The devil can assume the form of an angel’ (236). The stereotypically ‘loyal’ black servant Hector (chapters 22–7) becomes unwittingly the catalyst for mob violence against St Leon, as the

Maniquis_3201_239_(Scrivener).indd 252

1/26/2011 7:33:03 PM



The Relationship between William Godwin and John King

253

Italian peasants scapegoat Godwin’s hero in ways that call to mind a pogrom. St Leon narrates: ‘“Villain, renegado, accursed of God!” I heard from every side; “did not you bewitch my cow? did not you enchant my child? have not you killed my daughter? Down with him! exterminate him! do not suffer him to live!”’ (289). St Leon tries to use reason to persuade the mob not to attack, but his effort is fruitless, as the novel stages an allegory of inveterate prejudice resisting the power of rational discourse. St Leon’s excessive grief over the death of Hector in the fire started by the mob melodramatically illustrates the indebted master’s guilt and gratitude, but it also is the philosopher’s lament in seeing the futility of investing so much intellectual capital in the enterprise of rationalism (294). Anti-Semitic violence and prejudice operate semiotically as a synecdoche for what Godwinian reason has to overcome. The chapters that take place in sixteenth-century Spain include a zealous Inquisition that imprisons and attempts to execute St Leon, who escapes at the last minute to the home of a Jew, a New Christian. The novel draws a parallel between the Inquisition and Pitt’s repression (334), which would make the harassed English ‘Jacobins’ figurative Jews. About to be executed in an auto da fé, St Leon during a moment of confusion runs away to a Jew’s house, where he has a tense confrontation with Mordecai, who could have turned him over to the Inquisition while St Leon was sleeping, but who ultimately helps him. St Leon himself is uncertain whether Mordecai’s assistance was motivated by a sense of moral duty or by knowledge of the promised monetary reward, but the novel suggests the former rather than the latter. As St Leon holds hostage a five-yearold girl, Mordecai says to him: ‘We poor Jews, hunted on the face of the earth, the abhorrence and execration of mankind, have nothing but family affections to support us under our multiplied disgraces; and family affections are entwined with our existence, the fondest and best-loved part of ourselves. The God of Abraham bless you, my child!’ (340). The Spanish chapters reproduce and weaken the stereotype of the mercenary Jew, who is also the victim of injustice. As St Leon leaves Spain, he adopts the disguise of an oriental merchant – an Armenian – yet another identification with a Jew-like character; as persecuted Christians in the Ottoman Empire, as merchants, and as scholars – Byron himself studied at the Armenian monastery in Venice – Armenians were an ill-treated nation like the Jews (350). The concluding Hungarian chapters carry forward the Jewish motifs in several ways. St Leon’s attempts to improve society in his role as corn merchant prove ineffective, as the masses turn against him as a duplici-

Maniquis_3201_239_(Scrivener).indd 253

1/26/2011 7:33:03 PM

254

Michael Scrivener

tous middleman and profiteer. The Gothic antihero, Bethlem Gabor, a tormented soul in whom St Leon finds a mirror for his own anguish, has lost his entire family in a brutal act of political violence, a trauma that hints at pogroms – not unknown in that part of Europe – and evokes one of the famous literary episodes of family extermination, the story of Lessing’s Nathan, who lost his family to religious hatred.44 Gabor is St Leon’s double. The identification with Gabor is especially interesting because of Gabor’s strikingly un-English appearance: Gabor’s face suggests blackness – thick and large lips, ‘dun or black’ complexion; in addition to the grotesque absence of three fingers, a facial scar, and the loss of his right eye, Gabor is monstrous, scarred, marked by political violence indelibly (382). Another dimension of the Hungarian chapters is the explicitly religious themes, as the novel relativizes religious commitment in a satirical way not unlike what Grimmelshausen did with the Thirty Years War in the magnificent novel Simplicissimus (1668). St Leon starts out in Muslim territory, then finds himself in Christian, and finally in the midst of a Catholic/Protestant battle. Virtue and rationality reside in none of these religions exclusively. As the worldly-wise St Leon remarks on his son’s commitment to the Catholic cause: ‘I could not entirely enter into this sentiment of his, and indeed regarded it as an infatuation and delusion,’ and indeed he deemed the religious wars wasteful and loathsome (424). Perhaps Godwin would have allowed his imagination to make the numerous identifications with Jews in St Leon without knowing John King, but I find it probable that their close relationship and numerous discussions made those identifications powerful.

Religious Views Finally, I wish to examine briefly Godwin’s and King’s religious views, which for both men evolved towards deism. ‘I am an unbeliever,’ Godwin bluntly declares in his unpublished 1818 essay ‘Of Religion,’45 but his views were more nuanced and many-sided than a simple opposition to the Christian faith would suggest. Although from 1788 Godwin ceased reading Scripture as divinely revealed, Coleridge was later able to nudge him towards acknowledging divinity, however vaguely understood. Because a key issue for Godwin was miracles, the area of inquiry where scepticism overwhelmed faith, he turned to the famous debunker of miracles, the English deist who was imprisoned for his writings, Thomas Woolston (1670–1732). Both Political Justice (book 1, chapter 5) and The Genius of Christianity Unveiled (essay 8) cite Woolston approvingly. King’s

Maniquis_3201_239_(Scrivener).indd 254

1/26/2011 7:33:04 PM



The Relationship between William Godwin and John King

255

favourite deist, William Wollaston (1659–1724), was theologically moderate and did not invite the controversy that Woolston deliberately provoked. (The similarity of their names is simply happenstance.) King cites Wollaston, famous for The Religion of Nature Delineated (1724), for the rhetorical purpose of demonstrating that there is no absolute difference between the monotheisms, that Christianity and Judaism share a great deal. Godwin uses his Woolston to demolish the validity of miracles, though Woolston was not really a deist but an orthodox Christian committed to free speech and an allegorical approach to Scriptures. From a working-class background, he used a popular style that appealed to an urban audience,46 whereas Wollaston’s approach was highly learned and scholarly, with each page densely packed with Greek and Hebrew quotations. That Wollaston was an accomplished Hebraist might have been one of the reasons King liked him so much. In several works King gives extended quotations from Wollaston, most interestingly in his 1817 introduction to a new edition of David Levi’s Dissertations on the Prophecies of the Old Testament. King reproduces a prayer from Wollaston’s The Religion of Nature Delineated for the exemplary purpose of showing a form of devotion to God that is consistent with reason, without mention of Jesus or Moses or anything supernatural.47 If from 1788 Godwin’s deistic position was nuanced sometimes towards atheism and sometimes towards theism, King’s deism always jostled with his Judaism. Whether or not King and Lady Lanesborough actually married, there seems to be little evidence that he ever converted to Christianity, as it would have been customary for an Anglican marriage ceremony to have taken place. However, according to the historian Endelman, ‘It was not unheard-of for an Anglican clergyman to perform the marriage ceremony for a Jew and a Christian without requiring the Jew to undergo baptism.’48 Although he equivocated sometimes in court, where he once declared that ‘he had considered himself a member of the Church of England since he had been old enough to judge such matters for himself,’ King in fact never joined the Church or left Judaism.49 By 1798 he refers to Judaism as ‘my faith,’ which he defends – making use of Wollaston – while criticizing Christian complacency, hypocrisy, and anti-Semitism.50 King’s understanding of Judaism and deism perhaps reflects his knowledge of Moses Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem (1783), as it would have been summarized and discussed in journals like the Analytical Review and the Monthly Magazine. By removing entirely any supernatural agency in his progressive model of perfectibility, Godwin retained the goal of a heaven on earth – equality, peace, a long healthy life, the rule of mind over mat-

Maniquis_3201_239_(Scrivener).indd 255

1/26/2011 7:33:04 PM

256

Michael Scrivener

ter – without any of the religiously Christian narrative. King, however, did not always rule out supernatural agency, as even when he conflicted with Joanna Southcott and some of her millenarian followers, he shared some of the same points of reference in biblical prophecy.51 Moreover, in his sponsoring and introducing David Levi’s work in 1817, King assumes the credibility of some traditional notions of divinely messianic agency. The 1817 publication of David Levi’s work on the Hebrew Bible’s prophecies, however, reflects another dimension of his thinking that does not fit quite so comfortably with the deism – King’s attraction to millenarian currents in politics and religion. That the French Revolution stirred messianic and millenarian discourses is a commonplace, and neither King nor Godwin was immune to this particular aspect of the Zeitgeist. Godwin rigorously secularized his own millenarian tendencies, but King only imperfectly secularized his. A hero in the Jewish community, David Levi (1742–1801) waged a battle of the books and pamphlets with English Christians of various religious denominations, including Joseph Priestley, over the correct interpretation of ‘Old Testament’ prophecy.52 Having divorced his Jewish wife and abandoned his three young children for an Irish aristocrat, entertaining and working mostly with Christians, involved with radical politics that only indirectly affected Jews, King had drifted away from a Jewish community to which he was returning in 1817 with the Levi book and its dedication to the English chief rabbi.

Conclusion In Godwin’s writing on religion he will concede that parts of the Hebrew Bible are extraordinarily valuable as literature (preface to Bible Stories in 1802), but his years of conversing with King never swayed him from viewing Judaism as a fundamentally flawed religion. The one area in which King might have had some influence is Godwin’s sensitivity to the suffering of Jews as a persecuted minority. Caleb Williams famously disguises himself as a Jew in London, where he is hiding from Falkland’s detection, and St Leon, as I have already described, provides numerous stagings of the persecuted Jew, both explicit and symbolic. As an apostate Calvinist Christian in a strongly Protestant Christian nation, Godwin felt he had to conceal his genuine religious opinions for fear of being persecuted, perhaps forgetting he was already viewed as an infidel and a hopelessly radical Jacobin by much public opinion anyway; the care with which he ‘hid’ his irreligion was perhaps not as necessary as he thought it was.

Maniquis_3201_239_(Scrivener).indd 256

1/26/2011 7:33:04 PM



The Relationship between William Godwin and John King

257

His letter to his daughter Mary, who would edit his religious writings, alludes to his imagined victimization by a bigoted mob: ‘Yet this book will draw on me the misconstruction of multitudes. They will regard me with aversion and abhorrence. They will pursue me with execrations. Many of them would tear my poor remains from the grave, and treat them with every imaginable indignity. Many, if I were to return once more to the earth, would willingly give their suffrage that I should perish at the stake.’53 Not for the first time does Godwin’s imagination generate the auto da fé where irrational society victimizes the heretic. When John King reflected on his troubles with government, courts, and various libels, he saw himself in terms of a literary character: ‘Like Caleb Williams, I am destined a living elucidation of the author’s principle, an instance of one man’s being harassed and crushed by suspicion, while under an impervious duplicity, another like Falkland may murder with impunity.’54 William Godwin feels like a Jew and ‘Jew’ King feels like Caleb Williams: the philosopher and the moneylender have perhaps learned from one another.

NOTES

  1 The reliably informative sources on John King are Todd M. Endelman, Iain McCalman, and David B. Ruderman. Endelman’s ‘The Chequered Career of “Jew” King: A Study in Anglo-Jewish Social History,’ in From East and West: Jews in a Changing Europe, 1750–1870, ed. Frances Malino and David Sorkin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 151–81, situates King in the context of Anglo-Jewish history, while McCalman’s discussion of King in Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries, and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 35–8, 66–7, positions King in relation to the ‘unrespectable’ radicalism of the 1790s and early nineteenth century. Ruderman’s Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key: Anglo-Jewry’s Construction of Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 144–6, locates King in the specifically Anglo-Jewish context of deist and politically radical thought. On King’s giving money to the treason trial defendants, see John King, Mr King’s Apology; or a Reply to his Calumniators (London: Thomas Wilkins, 1798), 36–7.   2 Godwin’s diary, Oxford, Bodleian MS Abinger e. 6. I am quoting and making reference to the diary with the permission of The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, whose generosity in granting me permission I wish

Maniquis_3201_239_(Scrivener).indd 257

1/26/2011 7:33:04 PM

258

Michael Scrivener

to acknowledge. I also want to thank Professor Victoria Myers, Pepperdine University, for her invaluable assistance in making the transcription of the relevant diary sections available to me.   3 For the relationship between Robinson and King, as well as Robinson and Godwin, see Paula Byrne, Perdita: The Literary, Theatrical, Scandalous Life of Mary Robinson (New York: Random House, 2004), 31–7 and 253 (King); 321–3 and 390 (Godwin).   4 William St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys: The Biography of a Family (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1989), 353.   5 C. Kegan Paul, William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries, 2 vols. (London: Henry S. King, 1876), 1:146–7, 155–7.   6 John Taylor, Records of My Life (New York: Harper, 1833), 423–5. Taylor was not the only memoirist who fondly recalled the King dinners that Godwin frequented. Captain Gronow (1794–1865) recalls King as a man of wit and elegant taste, whose dinners were attended by the rich, powerful, and artistic, including Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–1816). See The Reminiscences and Recollections of Captain Gronow, Being Anecdotes of the Camp, Court, Clubs and Society, 1810–1860, ed. John Raymond (London: Bodley Head, 1964), 110–13.   7 John King, Letters from France (London: M. Jones, 1802), 161–6. Godwin and Holcroft were inseparable and passionate friends until Mary Wollstonecraft entered Godwin’s life in 1796, after which the friendship cooled. In 1802 they resumed their friendship, but in 1805 they had a bitter estrangement over Godwin’s Fleetwood; they reconciled shortly before Holcroft’s death. See St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys, 207, 275–8.   8 King, Letters from France, 174–80.   9 [John King], Letters from Perdita to a certain Israelite, and His Answers to them (London: J. Fielding and J. Stockdale and J. Sewell, 1781). On the cultural norms relating to courtesans and actresses in the eighteenth century, see Cindy McCreery, The Satirical Gaze: Prints of Women in Late Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 80–114. 10 John King, Thoughts on the Difficulties and Distresses in which the Peace of 1783, has involved the People of England, 5th ed. (London: T. Davies, J. Southern, W. Deane, 1783). 11 Endelman, ‘The Chequered Career,’ 171. 12 William Godwin, The History of the Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, in Political Writings I, ed. Martin Fitzpatrick, vol. 1 of Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, 7 vols., gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1993), 32. This edition is hereafter cited as PPW, with volume and page numbers.

Maniquis_3201_239_(Scrivener).indd 258

1/26/2011 7:33:04 PM



The Relationship between William Godwin and John King

259

13 Godwin, History of the Life of Pitt, PPW 1:52. 14 King, Thoughts, 1–28. 15 Ibid., 10. 16 Ibid., 22–4. 17 William Godwin, Critique of the Administration of Mr Pitt, in Political Writings I, ed. Martin Fitzpatrick, PPW 1:207–11; King, Thoughts, 22–8. 18 Fox’s power and influence in the political and literary circles in which Godwin travelled hardly need to be documented. 19 Godwin’s diary, Oxford, Bodleian MS Abinger e. 6. 20 Ibid., e. 7. 21 Endelman, ‘The Chequered Career,’ 172–3. 22 For Sampson Perry, see Michael T. Davis, Iain McCalman, and Christina Parolin, eds., Newgate in Revolution: An Anthology of Radical Prison Literature in the Age of Revolution (London and New York: Continuum, 2005), 116–19. 23 Godwin too is seen as a Girondin by Mark Philp in Godwin’s Political Justice (London: Duckworth, 1986), 100. 24 The Autobiography of Francis Place (1771–1854), ed. Mary Thale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 174. 25 Ibid., 236–9. 26 McCalman, Radical Underworld, 66–7. 27 Ibid., 38. 28 Ibid., 35. 29 Godwin’s diary, Oxford, Bodleian MS Abinger e. 7. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., e. 6. 32 Ibid., e. 7. 33 Ibid., e. 7, e. 10. 34 Ibid., e. 13, e. 14, and e. 22. 35 St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys, 498 and 541 n. 4. 36 William Godwin, St Leon, ed. and intro. William D. Brewer (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2006), 36. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number. 37 N.a., Authentic Memoirs, Memorandums, and Confessions. Taken from the Journal of His Predatorial Majesty, The King of the Swindlers (London: W. Hatton, n.d. [1798]). King sued the publisher John Parsons and won a judgment of   £50. See Israel Solomons, Notes and Queries 11 (5 June 1915), 437–8. Most of the material in Authentic Memoirs seems genuine, especially the diary extracts, but the summaries by the editor are hyperbolic, moralistic, and prejudiced. 38 The scholarly edition of Pinto is Fernão Mendes Pinto, The Travels of Mendes

Maniquis_3201_239_(Scrivener).indd 259

1/26/2011 7:33:04 PM

260

Michael Scrivener

Pinto, ed., intro., and trans. Rebecca D. Catz (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 39 Ibid., 52–3 n. 2. 40 Ibid., xxviii–xxix. 41 Ibid., xxii–xxiii. 42 Cecil Roth, A History of the Jews in England, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 68–90. 43 Godwin, St Leon, 213 n. 1. 44 For an account of Lessing’s Nathan der Weise, see Michael Scrivener, The Cosmopolitan Ideal in the Age of Revolution and Reaction, 1776–1832 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007), 150–4. 45 ‘Of Religion,’ 7 May 1818, in Religious Writings, ed. Mark Philp, PPW 7:63. 46 On Woolston, see James A. Herrick, The Radical Rhetoric of the English Deists: The Discourse of Skepticism, 1680–1750 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997), 77–101. See also William H. Trapnell, Thomas Woolston: Madman and Deist? (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1994). 47 The full prayer is in William Wollaston, The Religion of Nature Delineated (London: Samuel Palmer, 1724), 120–1. King’s citing of it is in David Levi, Dissertations on the Prophecies of The Old Testament, 2 vols., rev. and intro. John King (London: John King, 1817), 1:xii–xiii. 48 Endelman, ‘The Chequered Career,’ 167. 49 Ibid., 176. 50 King, Mr King’s Apology, 38–42. 51 Joanna Southcott, An Account of the Trials on Bills of Exchange, Wherein the Deceit of Mr John King and His Confederates, Under the Pretence of Lending Money, Is Exposed, and Their Arts Brought to Light (London: S. Rousseau, 1807). 52 For Levi, see Ruderman, Jewish Enlightenment, 57–88, and Michael Scrivener, ‘British-Jewish Writing of the Romantic Era and the Problem of Modernity: The Example of David Levi,’ in Sheila Spector, ed., British Romanticism and the Jews: History, Culture, Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 159–78. 53 William Godwin, The Genius of Christianity Unveiled, in Religious Writings, ed. Mark Philp, PPW 7:81. 54 King, Mr King’s Apology, 21.

Maniquis_3201_239_(Scrivener).indd 260

1/26/2011 7:33:04 PM

chapter eleven

Commerce of Luminaries: Eight Letters between William Godwin and Thomas Wedgwood PA M E L A C L E M I T

Members of the English radical intelligentsia in the decade following the French Revolution exchanged not only knowledge and ideas but also gifts and financial aid. Many writers, scientists, and artists aspired to economic independence, but few achieved it. Some remained enmeshed in the eighteenth-century patronage system.1 For example, in January 1798 Samuel Taylor Coleridge received from the chemist Thomas Wedgwood (1771–1805) and his brother Josiah II (1769–1843) an annuity of £150 to support a career devoted to ‘poetry and philosophy.’2 Coleridge was not the only literary figure to benefit from the philanthropy of the Wedgwood brothers. Their plan to advance knowledge by supporting talented individuals was formulated two years earlier by Thomas Wedgwood in correspondence with William Godwin, who became its first, uneasy beneficiary. Eight holograph letters between Godwin and Thomas Wedgwood provide new information about the reciprocities sought and achieved by both men. These letters are preserved in the Abinger papers. Although they have received brief critical notice,3 they have not been published before. They are printed here in full, for the first time, by kind permission of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. When Godwin and Thomas Wedgwood met on 10 February 1793, Wedgwood, aged twenty-two, had temporarily given up his scientific experiments, in which he used different chemicals to try to fix an image photographically, because of ill health.4 Godwin, after a decade of anonymous publications in an extraordinary diversity of genres, was about to become famous as the author of An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (published on 14 February). Their intersection brought together two

Maniquis_3201_261_(Clemit).indd 261

1/26/2011 8:59:13 PM

262

Pamela Clemit

First page of a letter from Godwin to Wedgwood, 22 September 1795. Courtesy of the Bodleian Library, MS Abinger c. 2, fol. 110r.

Maniquis_3201_261_(Clemit).indd 262

2/5/2011 11:21:00 AM



Eight Letters between William Godwin and Thomas Wedgwood

263

complementary traditions in the English Enlightenment.5 Wedgwood was the third and youngest surviving son of the Unitarian Josiah Wedgwood (1730–95), founder of the Wedgwood pottery works and model village at Etruria, Stoke-on-Trent, in Staffordshire.6 Josiah was a leading member of the Lunar Society of Birmingham, a network of scientists and manufacturers drawn together by shared interests in natural philosophy, technological development, and social change, which flourished from around 1765 to 1800.7 Josiah’s children were largely educated at home, where they came into contact with some of the most notable scientists of the time, including the physician Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), who, with their father, devised a program of studies.8 Godwin, fifteen years older than Thomas Wedgwood, had followed the path of other nonconformist intellectuals in the second half of the eighteenth century who moved from Trinitarian Dissent to Unitarianism, and shared their devotion to the ideals of candour and free enquiry.9 In 1783 he abandoned his first career as a minister and settled in London, where he joined the metropolitan community of Rational Dissenters, many of whom were actively involved in the extra-parliamentary movement for reform of the political franchise.10 During the writing of Political Justice, begun in September 1791, Godwin temporarily became an atheist,11 while his political views changed from an acceptance of Whig orthodoxies to a more radical stance favouring republicanism and philosophical anarchism. Thomas and Josiah Wedgwood II bought a copy of Political Justice as soon as it appeared.12 On 15 February, the day following publication, Godwin dined with Thomas Wedgwood and a few friends at the house of Wedgwood’s brother John (1766–1844) in Devonshire Place. They discussed ‘Burke, Fox, revolutions, property & the foundation of morals.’13 Godwin had further occasional meetings with Thomas Wedgwood throughout 1793 and 1794.14 But their friendship did not develop until 1795, the year in which the elder Josiah died and Thomas Wedgwood inherited a large fortune, which he proposed to use to advance public welfare. As Mary Shelley recounted in her fragmentary posthumous ‘Life of William Godwin’ (written 1836–40): Godwin cemented this year [1795] his acquaintance with a man known to himself & all his literary contemporaries as the most generous[,] the most amiable of men. Thomas Wedgwood of Etruria in Staffordshire[,] a name dear to all who reverence virtue & goodness. His enthusiasm in the cause of knowledge – his earnest desire to serve his fellows rank him high among good men. He was afflicted with bad health which acted on his nerves &

Maniquis_3201_261_(Clemit).indd 263

1/26/2011 8:59:14 PM

264

Pamela Clemit

frequently rendered him low spirited to a painful degree. The history of his intercourse with Godwin is so well pourtrayed in their correspondance that no further observation need be made.15

Their surviving correspondence begins with a note from Wedgwood to Godwin, dated 25 June 1795, apologizing for a missed visit,16 but they did not begin to exchange letters regularly until September. The group of letters printed here does not tell the whole story of the friendship between Godwin and Thomas Wedgwood. They have been selected because they document the first phase of interaction between the two men and highlight their efforts to put the key principles of Political Justice into practice in their daily lives. The letters record a frank debate concerning the best means of contributing to the public good and explore the ethics of the giving and receiving of presents. Two areas deserve special mention. First, the letters reveal the tensions which arose when Wedgwood offered Godwin a useful gift, and demonstrate their shared attempt to renegotiate a traditional patron–client relationship. Godwin had earlier resisted political patronage – refusing to take payment from Whig party funds for his work on the Political Herald (1785–6) – but had entered into a financial relationship with his publisher, George Robinson (1737–1801), who offered him a generous advance for Political Justice.17 Even so, Godwin was initially reluctant to accept Wedgwood’s gift. Wedgwood, mindful of Godwin’s philosophical view that justice obliges us to regard property as a trust to be employed for the benefit of humankind,18 was keen to use his wealth to advance knowledge by supporting worthy individuals. Yet Wedgwood’s plan was not entirely disinterested. He gave with the expectation of a reciprocal benefit: Godwin’s attention and conversation. Second, the letters provide evidence of a shared interest in the latest technology of the time. The gift in question was a portable version of the world’s first successful letter copying machine, patented in 1780 by the Scottish engineer and instrument-maker James Watt (1736–1819), another Lunar Society member. The lighter, portable model (with a fold-out writing desk) was developed in 1795 by Watt’s son James (1769–1848) just as the patent for the fixed machine expired.19 For the next ten years or so, Godwin used the copying machine to make wet-transfer duplicates of outgoing letters. These machine-made copies provide the sole surviving texts of many important letters.20 As well as affording insight into the exchange of benefits between Godwin and Thomas Wedgwood in 1795, these letters supply the context for our understanding of their interaction through the rest of the de-

Maniquis_3201_261_(Clemit).indd 264

1/26/2011 8:59:14 PM



Eight Letters between William Godwin and Thomas Wedgwood

265

cade. In February 1797, Godwin, wishing to settle debts incurred by Mary Wollstonecraft in advance of their marriage, sought and received his first money loan from Wedgwood, beginning a lifelong financial association with the Wedgwood family.21 In June, he paid a week-long visit to Etruria, which he described in letters to Wollstonecraft.22 The debate between Wedgwood and Godwin on ‘the most profitable mode of beneficial expenditure’ culminated in a letter from Wedgwood, dated 31 July 1797, requesting Godwin’s advice about a plan for systematic improvements in children’s education, to be superintended by Wordsworth and Coleridge (neither of whom Wedgwood had met).23 Although this plan came to nothing, it provided a catalyst for Wedgwood’s donations to other impoverished men of genius.24 Yet the significance of this group of letters is not confined to the realm of micro-history. In documenting the interplay between a leading metropolitan radical and a wealthy young man steeped in the traditions of the Midlands Enlightenment, they contribute to the grand narrative of progress in eighteenth-century England. The texts have been transcribed from the manuscripts in the Abinger papers. Editorial emendation is light. False starts and mere slips of the pen are silently omitted, but Godwin’s and Wedgwood’s original spelling, capitalization, and punctuation are retained, even where minor inconsistencies occur. Ampersands and abbreviations are retained, but raised letters are reproduced without the dots that usually appear beneath them in the manuscripts. Authorial omissions are supplied in curly brackets ({ }), and lost or obliterated words are supplied in angle brackets (< >). Three dots (…) placed at the beginning of a letter indicate that the first part is missing. The letters are presented chronologically, preceded by the name of the addressee and the date. Six of them were prepared for consecutive publication by Mary Shelley in her ‘Life of William Godwin’ (though they do not form an unbroken sequence):25 her annotations are recorded in the bibliographical notes.

Maniquis_3201_261_(Clemit).indd 265

1/26/2011 8:59:14 PM

266

Pamela Clemit

William Godwin to Thomas Wedgwood, 22 September 179526 Somers Town, Sep. 22. 1795. Dear sir I received great pleasure from the perusal of the letter which now lies before me.27 The little that I formerly saw of you, gave me a great desire to know you more fully, & I have often regretted the circumstances that seemed to render this impracticable. There is also a reserve established in the world which, by frequent exhibition, becomes infectious; &, as I have repeatedly seemed to suffer disappointment when I have indulged in those communications of the heart to which the ardour of my temper prompted me, I have in some instances given way to a criminal cautiousness. Your letter dissolves all ambiguity, & I cannot now allow myself to doubt that I understand you. You divide the questions you have thought proper to propose to me into two parts. The first relates to the cultivation of the mind. This subject you appear well to understand, & therefore, unless you were to state something specific, I do not feel it necessary to enter into its discussion. I will only remark that those who cultivate the useful in composition, are probably very erroneous if they neglect the ornamental; & that he who, to prove the goodness of his intentions, is contented to communicate truth in a slovenly form, will oftener produce contempt, than the effect it is to be supposed he principally desires. Your second enquiry is curious & difficult; & therefore, though your own remarks appear to me sound & judicious, I will put down a few things that strike me upon the subject. In the first place I would wish to caution you against that extreme vehemence upon the subject which might prognosticate the project conceived to be a short lived one. I am an utter enemy to every thing of a monastic principle. I am persuaded that the true & only rational end of human life is pleasure. A wise man would deny himself no pleasure that was not incompatible with a greater pleasure; but he would form to himself a scale of pleasures, & it is not probable that he would relish many pleasures that required much property to be sublimed into a small compass, which, diffused, would produce in the world a quantity of pleasure a thousand times greater. I believe we ought to be ready to sacrifice our own pleasure to a great advantage to be obtained for our neighbours, but I conceive that, to a man who has formed a just scale of pleasure, the occasion for this sacrifice will rarely occur.

Maniquis_3201_261_(Clemit).indd 266

1/26/2011 8:59:14 PM



Eight Letters between William Godwin and Thomas Wedgwood

267

I entirely agree with you that the increase of knowledge in the world is the greatest public good in the promotion of which we can be engaged. This mode of benefiting our fellow men has the utmost advantage over the common one, the object of which is their animal sensations, because the pleasures which a man of intellect & an independent spirit can enjoy are infinitely superior to those of a brute, & because he is made a fit instrument to diffuse benefit in his turn. It is curious to observe how futile & ill chosen are the majority of the subjects selected for charitable exertion. Pope’s description of the man of Ross furnishes a striking example.28 I am very little a friend to charitable institutions, not only for the reasons you assign, but because I conceive they are necessarily full of abuses, & seldom answer the purposes for which they were intended. I have detailed my objections in my chapter of National Education,29 more fully than it is possible to do in a letter. The distribution of books I believe to be a very inefficient mode. Beside other disadvantages, I suspect books that an individual obtains in this way seldom receive a very attentive perusal. Indiscriminate charity is liable to the same objections as charity to common beggars. It teaches a trade, & the most vicious of trades, the trade of servility & hypocrisy. Perhaps no one of these rules, if founded in itself, ought to be considered as not to objections exceptions. I am strongly persuaded that the object of beneficence in favour of which you decide, is the best of all possible objects. Yet even here we shall be liable to frequent miscarriage. We shall need a very penetrating judgment in the selection of individuals, & we shall be continually in danger of producing inaction, where we intended to produce energy. I have no doubt however that a vigilant observer will find cases frequently occurring where money may be placed with almost a certainty of producing good. You speak of the past state of your health, but say nothing of the present. Both the objects mentioned in your letter will derive the most material advantage from a sound & confirmed health. I hope you are now in possession of that advantage. It will give me the greatest pleasure to hear farther from you. I am, sir, with real esteem, W Godwin Text: Oxford, Bodleian MS Abinger c. 2, fols. 110–11. Address : Tho. Wedg-

Maniquis_3201_261_(Clemit).indd 267

1/26/2011 8:59:14 PM

268

Pamela Clemit

wood, esq | Etruria | Staffordshire |. Postmark: Tottenham Court Road |. Pages 1–3 numbered 19–21 in Mary Shelley’s hand.

Thomas Wedgwood to William Godwin, [29 September 1795] … to dogs & horses, the seeds & nourishment of human life? Another argument of perhaps equal weight must not be overlooked. Population & happiness depend in great measure on the robustness of the species: now in almost all manufacturing countries the species is observed to degenerate very rapidly, for it is a well known fact that feeble diminutive parents have an offspring proportionably imperfect. I am now writing to you in the moorlands of Derbyshire & from some days observation I have full conviction that the labourers of this country will average 6 inches more in stature than the inhabitants of Manchester & Birmingham. It is equally certain that the health* & morals of the people are as much impaired by manufactories as their bodily conformation. Will not the truly conscientious employ these destructive engines as sparingly as possible? How odious & degrading is the relation between a master & his domestic servant! Must it not in every instance nourish the most mischievous propensities in the one & can it fail to inspire the most abject sentiments in the other? You are now in possession of the principal reasons that have governed me in the formation of my humble scale of pleasures; but it is necessary that you shou’d be acquainted with some other reflections that have arisen out of the subject, more perplexing & unsatisfactory in their nature as they seem to prescribe limits to virtuous exertion. Am I to yield implicitly to the dictates of benevolence? Shall I expend every farthing beyond a bare provision for myself, in acts of philanthropy? What a complete & revolting change in the whole œconomy of my life wou’d ensue, from the unqualified affirmative! In clothing, lodging & food I must reduce myself to the level of the meanest peasant & I must form a new rule of conduct at variance in almost every particular, with my present confirmed habits of society, occupation & amusement. I certainly feel desirous, & I think I am able to shew, that so tremendous a sacrifice cannot justly be required. We have agreed that a man is likely to benefit his fellow men most, by the employment of his talents & property in the diffusion of knowledge. To discharge this function with efficiency he shoud endeavor so to live, speak & act under the government of prin-

Maniquis_3201_261_(Clemit).indd 268

1/26/2011 8:59:14 PM



Eight Letters between William Godwin and Thomas Wedgwood

269

ciple as to acquire the respect, attachment & envy of the world. The prejudices of men shou’d be gently undermined; if rudely shocked, it is their nature to increase & to fasten their hold. The agent of truth must consider the motives dispositions of the beings he has to deal with & must exhibit in himself, some semblance of the common character or he will inevitably be disregarded as an enthusiast whose views are too wild & impracticable to deserve a moments attention. Did not Cato err in this respect?30 & might he not, with less external austerity, have gained more proselytes to virtue? A man, like a book, may be considered as an organ of Truth & a certain degree of polish & decoration is as necessary31 in the one as in the other. The above reasoning however does not authorize any lavish profusion or render less desireable, a frugal œconomy in every article of personal expence. But I am inclined to beleive that a man, whose taste for pleasures has been so vitiated by education as to render considerable expenses indispensible to his enjoyment of life, may justly appropriate to that object a larger portion of his income than wou’d otherwise be allowable. It is his duty, no doubt, to correct his vitious habits, but so sacred is every mans claim to his own happiness, that I conceive he may lawfully continue indulgence & resign them only by degrees till the desireable reformation has at length taken place. For suppose a man to be peasant born to an inheritance just sufficient to supply him with comfortable food, cloths & lodging, whilst all his neighbours suffer more or less from a deficiency of those necessary articles. Can it be denied that he has a compleat right to expend the whole on himself? But what is sufficient to satisfy the wants of a peasant wou’d not be adequate to the maintenance of the vigor & comfort of a being differently educated; therefore his necessities being greater, may he not for a time enjoy a right to a more ample income, equal to that of the peasant to his scanty provision? I question, however, if mature reflection might not destroy the foundation of this selfish reasoning. The touchstone of moral argument is qty of happiness & self shou’d therefore be excluded from our consideration. The case of the peasant may stand its ground; his necessities are those of nature & he can never give happiness to his neighbours without subtracting the whole from his own stock. The pampered gentleman’s case is more unhappy & a rigid sense of duty, perhaps, may demand no little mortification of spirit & of flesh. In regard to the argument for withholding our support from manufactories, a closer investigation of the subject will tend to remove our scruples in some degree. The wages of field labourers are already too

Maniquis_3201_261_(Clemit).indd 269

1/26/2011 8:59:14 PM

270

Pamela Clemit

low to afford proper nourishment to their families, from which circumstance it may be concluded that the employment of agriculture is rather over stocked than under stocked with hands & that, till property in land be more equally divided, waste land enclosed, or some new space given to the employment, a diversion of manufacturers into this channel wou’d aggravate the distresses of the labouring poor. I am unable to decide, however, whether this evil wou’d be more than temporary & might not, eventually, be amply compensated by the increased fertility of ye earth. Though I have some doubts of the propriety of my ever expending a penny on charitable donation, yet considering the importance of being in possession of the esteem of ye world, I still feel inclined to continue the practise to a certain degree – I am known to possess wealth – am seen to indulge myself in superfluities – am heard vehemently to inculcate universal benevolence & virtuous exertion – and can yet pass by a fellow creature in distress, betraying in my countenance the most unfeeling indifference! But if you object to the insincerity of the practise, I cannot defend it – nor can I indeed entirely justify any adoption of the customs of the world, since the adoption of a conscientious being implies at the same time his approbation. Some weight, however, must be allowed to the arguments of limitation as above stated – I wish I may have made myself intelligible – This is the first time I have attempted to arrange my thoughts on paper & I have met with more difficulty than I had any idea of – My health is extremely unequal, but never such as I coud wish it – I am incessantly troubled with headach & smarting eyes & these complaints are insurmountable obstacles to that keen & assiduous pursuit of knowledge to which my inclinations so strongly prompt me. I suffer most from a feebleness of constitution which has infused into my character a timidity & nervous irritability that will prevent my ever mixing muc in ye world. – Thos Wedgwood * Workmen in the fine muslin manufactories are confined the whole day in heated rooms from which every breath of air is carefully excluded – The copper wire drawers are continually seized with palsy in the hands. House painters & glazers of earthen ware are affected in the same way – In all dusty employments the workmen are short lived & die of consumption. Chimney sweepers suffer excruciating glandular complaints. Children usually enter manufactories from 8 to 12 years old & become sickly & pale in a short time.

Maniquis_3201_261_(Clemit).indd 270

1/26/2011 8:59:14 PM



Eight Letters between William Godwin and Thomas Wedgwood

271

Text: Oxford, Bodleian MS Abinger c. 2, fols. 118–19. Address: Mr Godwin | Somers Town | London |. Postmarks: (1) DERBY |; (2) OC | A3 | 95 |. Notation: [third page, in T. Wedgwood’s hand] Direct to me as before – Etruria in Staffs. |.

Thomas Wedgwood to William Godwin, 4 November 1795 Dear Sir I am afraid it will not be in my power to wait upon you before I leave town – I have therefore sent the copying paper.32 I think you had better mix the vial-full of ink according to the directions, as no dependance can be had upon the little remnant that it now contains. It is shocking to think what the poor are likely to suffer this winter – I hear from the country that Manchester corn dealers have already given 16s per bushel for wheat.33 You see in todays paper, the Minister offers to accept the communications of any individual on the subject – Surely you cou’d give him some useful hints. Have you been able to procure a set of your work for me?34 I have since thought the request was not a proper one & if you have not made it, I beg you will not. I have subscribed for two copies of Tookes work35 – If you are not already provided I design one for you. I remain Dear Sir Yours sincerely Thos Wedgwood 22 Devonshire Place Novr 4 1795 Text: Oxford, Bodleian MS Abinger c. 2, fol. 122. Address : none. Postmark: none.

William Godwin to [Thomas Wedgwood], 5 November 1795 You suggest the idea of my offering some hints to the minister on the subject of corn. I am not inclined to do this, & I will mention my reasons, that, if you think them insufficient, you may refute them. The subject is a very intricate one; the propriety of interference in any respect on the

Maniquis_3201_261_(Clemit).indd 271

1/26/2011 8:59:14 PM

272

Pamela Clemit

part of government is doubtful; I could in no degree satisfy myself of the soundness of my speculations without a very persevering meditation. At last I should be more inclined to give my thoughts to the minister through the medium of the public, than to the public through the medium of the minister. But I have other occupations, which may perhaps promise more ultimately utility than a speculation on corn; & I know of no other road to a chance of doing well than by resigning oneself entire to the business in hand. I asked Mr Robinson relative to the procuring a set of my work, without mentioning your name. But he replied that it was contrary to the rules of business, & that the book would be published perhaps in a month. As I had other matters to adjust with him at the same time, I could not with convenience insist upon this. Your mention of a copy of Tooke’s work, leads me to suggest to you a deduction of principle relative to the affairs of common life, which has often floated in my mind, but respecting which I have never arrived at perfect satisfaction. I suspect there to be something erroneous in the ordinary commerce of giving & receiving. We are such imperfect beings at present, that retrospects of a selfish nature are at every practicable opportunity intruding themselves into the mind. There is something noble & elevated in that species of commerce where nothing is exchanged but the suggestions of the mind. It is pity perhaps that this disinterestedness should suffer the minutest taint in matters of trifling value, though I am clearly of opinion that it ought wholly to be dispensed with when great & momentous benefit is to be received or conferred. This is my leading argument. It is perhaps scarcely worth the while to add, that what one friend gives to another, is generally what the other had not sufficient inducement to procure for himself; & therefore that a commerce of presents may often be suspected to be a pampering of superfluous luxuries. I shall hope to see more of you when you return to town.36 W Godwin Nov. 5. 1795. Text: Oxford, Bodleian MS Abinger c. 2, fol. 125. Address : none. Postmark: none. Notation: [page 1, in T. Wedgwood’s hand] 1 Letter on Presents | Godwin |. Pages 1–2 numbered 22–3 in Mary Shelley’s hand.

Maniquis_3201_261_(Clemit).indd 272

1/26/2011 8:59:15 PM



Eight Letters between William Godwin and Thomas Wedgwood

273

Thomas Wedgwood to William Godwin, 6 November 1795 Dear Sir, It was not my meaning that your suggestions to Ministers shou’d be confined to a speculation on Corn. The reasons you have advanced in support of your determination are strong ones; their validity however seems to rest on three points. The urgency of the case – The probability of success – A comparison between the value of that success & the good that may result from the uninterrupted pursuit of your present studies. Of all these points you are certainly a better judge than myself & it wou’d therefore {be} fruitless for me to attempt their discussion. I shall only add, that, as in cases of imminent danger to any human being, we have agreed on the propriety of converting to his relief what was destined to an object of greater apparent utility; so, perhaps, the apprehensions of a famine may demand the prompt & strenuous exertions of talents now devoted to speculation of the greatest ultimate utility. That there is “something erroneous in the ordinary commerce of giving & receiving”, I readily concede to you; and for the reason you assign at the close of the argument viz that it is a pampering of superfluous luxuries. But I strongly suspect that the principle which floats in your mind is a thing without substance – a mere shadow that you have vainly striven to embody. I cannot comprehend in what way the action in question can give rise “to retrospects of a selfish nature”; you are engaged in an undertaking which I am convinced is a very important one; I feel it my duty to assist you to the utmost of my power, in that undertaking. I offer you what I conceive of as most likely to do so, knowing that if it were otherwise, you wou’d not fail to inform me. After the conversations we have held on these subjects, you cannot suppose that I am inclined to pamper with luxuries or bestow with any view to a return. I think I must have mistaken the drift of your argument: as you sometimes are desirous of changing the subject of your thoughts, perhaps it may not be irksome to you to give me some farther explanation – a very few words will probably suffice. I shall certainly take an early opportunity of waiting upon you when I return – I remain Yours sincerely Thos Wedgwood 22, Devonshire Place Nov. 6 – 1795 A letter will find me here anytime before Mondy

Maniquis_3201_261_(Clemit).indd 273

1/26/2011 8:59:15 PM

274

Pamela Clemit

Text: Oxford, Bodleian MS Abinger MS C. 2, fols. 123–4. Address : Mr Godwin | Charlton Street | Somers Town |. Postmarks: (1) Gt Marybone St | Unpaid |; Penny Post | (2) 7 o’Clock | 6 NO | 95 EVE |. Notations: [page 1, top, written twice in Mary Shelley’s hand, once in pencil, once in ink, with a pencilled line through the first paragraph of page 1] Wedgwood says in reply |. Pages 1–2 numbered 24–5 in Mary Shelley’s hand.

William Godwin to Thomas Wedgwood, 7 November 1795 I will attempt, as you desire it, to give additional clearness to what I said on the subject of presents. The second part of my argument, upon which I laid least stress, respecting luxuries, you appear sufficiently to understand. You mistake my meaning in the phrase “ordinary commerce” by which, if I recollect, what I intended was, every species of supply afforded by one man to another, except in those urgent cases which by their nature supersede the application of common rules. But my principal obscurity seems to have lurked in the phase “retrospects of a selfish nature:” by which I simply intended to suggest a doubt whether there were any giver or receiver at present upon the face of the earth, of so pure a disposition, but that some improper feelings, of obligation imposed in the giver, & of selfish eagerness in the receiver, would always mix themselves in the action. To speak frankly I will suppose that you & I may possibly come as near to the right feeling as almost any of our contemporaries, but I have a suspicion that we are neither of us exempt from the common frailty of our nature. I designed to suggest these ideas with scepticism & diffidence, but I cannot yet be persuaded that they are a “mere shadow which I have vainly striven to embody.” If you think otherwise, I acknowledge that I may be totally wrong, &, to substantiate my scepticism, am content to be, to a certain degree, overruled. I have perhaps done my duty in stating these hints. Do you not feel how very inadequately epistolary communication supplies the place of oral discussion? W Godwin Nov. 7. 1795. Text: Oxford, Bodleian MS Abinger c. 2, fols. 63–4. Address : Wimpole Street | [rest torn away] |. Postmark: SommersTown | Unpaid | Penny Post

Maniquis_3201_261_(Clemit).indd 274

2/5/2011 11:21:48 AM



Eight Letters between William Godwin and Thomas Wedgwood

275

|. Notation : [page 4, in T. Wedgwood’s hand] 2d Letter | on Presents |. Pages 1–2 numbered 26–7 in Mary Shelley’s hand.

Thomas Wedgwood to [William Godwin], 9 November 1795 You have now sufficiently explained your sentiments on giving & taking presents. They appear to me such as wou’d very naturally be entertained in a mind like yours unceasingly occupied in the scrutiny of the motives of human action. I am glad to see that it is with “scepticism & diffidence” you advance them, for, though my first opinion might be expressed with too much haste & presumption, I still think them liable to considerable objection. Will you allow that, in cases where it is impossible to arrive at certainty in our judgments, it is desireable that our decisions shou’d be regulated by a favourable rather than by an unfavourable view of the question? That a propensity to suspicion is an evil habit of mind I am persuaded you will not deny. Now are you not in some danger of acquiring this habit by so pressing & scrupulous an examination of the hand that offers you assistance, or rather, I shou’d say, by consenting to act upon those scruples which a practised ingenuity will never fail to suggest? Woud it not be wiser to accept or to present the benefit required, without hesitation? Is not the mind more likely to be ennobled by frequent acts of beneficence & virtuous efforts to discharge the mean sensations annexed to them, than by the exercise of a dastardly caution? Prostituted as we all are to the customs & opinions of society, the attempt to build all our actions on motives of vestal purity, is obviously impracticable. I cou’d not give nor coud another accept an invitation to my table; I durst not interchange a word or a look with my dearest friend. But what wou’d result from this total suspension of good offices? a disposition of mind unalloyed by selfishness? No. Our selfishness woud increase with our wants & our principles wou’d become every day weaker & weaker from not being brought into action. Let us beware, however, of exaggeration or of investing with undue importance, the vitious feelings whose existence it is impossible to deny. You have been accustomed to view the subject with a microscopic eye & some of its parts have probably been magnified to your view. But in declining to act from a dread of their influence, do you not betray more of a reproachable timidity than of a clear & noble spirit? Why shou’d you shrink from the encounter? Is it not better to act & strive to conquer

Maniquis_3201_261_(Clemit).indd 275

1/26/2011 8:59:15 PM

276

Pamela Clemit

the unworthy feeling than not to act & thence vainly expect its natural dissolution? I will now explain to you the precise motives of the action which gave birth to this speculation. I am particularly susceptible of the pleasure which well constructed curious mechanical inventions afford. I never feel any pleasureable sensation without a desire of communicating it to others, proportionate to its intensity. On viewing the copying machine, it struck me that you were a likely person to participate in this satisfaction. I resolved to mention it. It next occurred, that as the machine might often save you the irksome & unprofitable labour of copying & insomuch advance the great undertaking we are jointly concerned in, the presenting you with one came within the plan we had just been prescribing. I resolved to make you the offer. No “improper feeling” had as yet intruded itself; attend to what followed. I had often reflected on the great advantage I had derived from a few hours of your conversation: anxious to improve this advantage, & painfully sensible of my inferiority & slender acquirements, I became apprehensive of an indifference on your part to my society: I was glad therefore when it afterwards occurred to me, that by thus becoming useful to your pursuits & cautiously avoiding at the same time any interruption of them from unseasonable visits, it was not improbable that you might connect some agreable associations with my person & thence conceive some interest in my fellowship. I was glad, too, of an opportunity of convincing you of the sincerity of my professions & that you shou’d be the first to reap benefit of those principles which you had assisted me in establishing. The above is a perfectly ingenuous & accurate review of the ideas that determined, & grew out of an action of my life which I can never wish to retract. There may be a speck of selfishness on the face of it but it is sound & untainted at heart. If your knowledge of my character has created a confidence in my honesty & self-knowledge, the picture I have been sketching must contain some traits of instruction & amusement. May I sollicit from you an explication as unreserved, of the feelings which accompanied your passive situation? But I am afraid that I have already trespassed on your patience & that you are provoked to exclaim with Cicero, Quousque tandem &c37 – If more agreable to you, defer it to our next meeting. I confess that on some accounts I prefer writing to conversation. But this preference is owing entirely to my want of a prompt & clear expression of my thoughts, which time exercise alone can supply: Perhaps I shou’d

Maniquis_3201_261_(Clemit).indd 276

1/26/2011 8:59:15 PM



Eight Letters between William Godwin and Thomas Wedgwood

277

add also, of a slowness of conception, & of a command of a steady abstraction. Thos Wedgwood   Nov. 9 – 1795 Text: Oxford, Bodleian MS Abinger c. 2, fols. 126–7. MS copy: Wedgwood Papers, Keele University Library, W/M 36 (in T. Wedgwood’s hand). Address: none. Postmark: none. Notations: [written twice in Mary Shelley’s hand, first in semi-legible pencil across the top and down the right side of page 1, then in ink on a separate piece of paper originally pinned to page 1, with a pencilled line through the first two sentences of page 1; inked text reads] 28 | Wedgwood’s reply is so full of good sense & | ingenuous & upright feeling that I give | it entire. We have here the sincere | confession of a modest & generous nature | such as best depicts the admirable amiable writer |. Pages 2–4 numbered 29–31 in Mary Shelley’s hand.

William Godwin to Thomas Wedgwood, 10 November 1795 I am charmed with the frankness which characterises your last letter, & will endeavour to imitate it in my reply. I am afraid I am not yet perfectly understood. I have always excepted from my rule all presents that contained in them important & essential benefit to the receiver. If the loan or the gift of £100 would in any case be of eminent service to me in my pursuits, I think it probable that I ought to ask you for it without scruple, & that you ought to advance it. I am not sure however that I should act thus, or, which is the same thing, I am not sure that I should think it my duty, when the case occurred, because one of our indispensible duties is to guard against the misconstructions of our species. I am willing, upon your suggestion, to admit into the class of admissible presents, presents of the other extreme, which I did not at the time recollect, such as ordinary civilities, invitations to dinner, &c. But I am still inclined to think that presents in the middle line, things tangible, permanent, of a certain established price, & at the best of ordinary utility, include in them something of immoral. In this opinion, as I said before, I am sceptical, & can consent in some cases to the being in a certain degree overruled. I am inclined to call in question both the maxims with which your argument commences. “Ought we in doubtful cases to incline to the favourable side in our judgments?” No, we ought not specifically to pro-

Maniquis_3201_261_(Clemit).indd 277

1/26/2011 8:59:15 PM

278

Pamela Clemit

pose error to ourselves, but to come as near the truth as we can. “Is a propensity to suspicion an evil habit of the mind?” The terms of this question are very ambiguous; but, as it is applied in your argument, I answer again, No. By a propensity to suspicion, as it is ordinarily taken, is understood a propensity to look on the unfavourable side. This is wrong. But a determination to ascertain the weak, as well as the strong, sides of our own motives, & the motives of others, is commendable. I am accustomed to indulge, or rather to cultivate, this determination, & I find few men who think more favourably of the species or the individual. Your account of your own feelings relative to our commerce is a corroboration of my opinion. I believe you ought to have sought my esteem, if you desired it, by direct & not indirect means. But the whole of your reasoning as to our intercourse seems to be founded in mistake. I will suppose that my acquisitions are superior to yours. This is no reason for keeping us asunder. It would be a calamity to the man of acquisitions as well as to his neighbours, if he were compelled to hold no society but with those whose progress was equal to his own. I have always been disposed to find pleasure, as well as a presumption that my time was well spent, in your society. In answer to your question respecting my feelings in receiving your present, the true answer, as it seems to me, is, that my habits of analysis are so inveterate, that, in stating to you my analysis of the case, I have stated the ideas which in the transaction itself passed through my mind. Your preference of correspondence to conversation seems to be founded in part in suggestions of vanity. How intolerably creeping & tedious is this interchange? I am not inclined to doubt that my time is well spent in your society; but, in writing thus, I comply with my feelings, & run counter to the bias of my judgment. I believe correspondence ought scarcely in any case to be admitted, but when the parties are at a distance from each other. I should indeed have accepted of your suggestion of deferring to communicate these thoughts till our next meeting, were I not apprehensive that that meeting was at an interval inconvenient for that purpose. W Godwin Nov. 10. 1795. I intended to have mentioned that, whatever becomes of the question of presents, you have an infallible way of conferring benefits on me to which I can have no exception, & that, if the spending time in your company were not its own reward, you made me a compensation to which I

Maniquis_3201_261_(Clemit).indd 278

1/26/2011 8:59:15 PM



Eight Letters between William Godwin and Thomas Wedgwood

279

was peculiarly sensible, in your readiness to reperuse Caleb Williams,38 & furnish me with your remarks. Text: Oxford, Bodleian MS Abinger c. 2, fols. 128–9. Address : Tho. Wedgwood, esq | 22 | Devonshire Place | Wimpole Street | [last two lines crossed out and redirected in J. Wedgwood II’s hand:] Etruria | Staffordshire |. Postmarks: (1) SommersTown | Unpaid | Penny Post |; (2) N O | D 14 | 95 |. Notations: [fourth page, in T. Wedgwood’s hand] 3d letter on Presents |. Pages 1–3 numbered 32–4 in Mary Shelley’s hand.

NOTES This essay was completed during my tenure, mainly for other purposes, of a Major Research Fellowship of the Leverhulme Trust.   1 Dustin Griffin, Literary Patronage in England, 1650–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 246–85.   2 William Hazlitt, ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’ (1823), in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P.P. Howe, 21 vols. (London: J.M. Dent, 1930–4), 17:112; see Coleridge’s correspondence with Josiah Wedgwood, John Prior Estlin, Josiah Wade, and Thomas Poole, 27 Dec. 1797–[17 Jan. 1798], in Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71), 1:360–75; for commentary, see David V. Erdman, ‘Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the Wedgwood Fund: Part I,’ Bulletin of The New York Public Library 60, no. 9 (1956), 425–43.   3 Erdman, ‘Coleridge, Wordsworth,’ 428; Pamela Clemit, ‘William Godwin and James Watt’s Copying Machine: Wet-Transfer Copies in the Abinger Papers,’ Bodleian Library Record 18, no. 5 (2005), 532.   4 For commentary on Thomas Wedgwood’s scientific interests, see R.B. Litchfield, Tom Wedgwood: The First Photographer (London: Duckworth, 1903), 17–23, 185–213; Francis Doherty, ‘Tom Wedgwood, Coleridge and “Metaphysics,”’ Neophilologus 71 (1987), 305–15; Neil Vickers, ‘Coleridge’s “Abstruse Researches,”’ in Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life, ed. Nicholas Roe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 155–74; John Beer, ‘Coleridge, Mackintosh and the Wedgwoods: A Reassessment, Including Some Unpublished Records,’ Romanticism 7, no. 1 (2001), 16–40; Alan Barnes, ‘Negative and Positive Images: Erasmus Darwin, Tom Wedgwood and the Origins of Photography,’ in The Genius of Erasmus Darwin, ed. C.U.M. Smith and Robert Arnott (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 237–53; Alan

Maniquis_3201_261_(Clemit).indd 279

2/5/2011 11:22:33 AM

280

Pamela Clemit

Barnes, ‘Coleridge, Tom Wedgwood and the Relationship between Time and Space in Midlands Enlightenment Thought,’ British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 30 (2007), 243–60.   5 On the varieties of English Enlightenment, see Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London: Allen Lane, 2000).   6 Barbara and Hensleigh Wedgwood, The Wedgwood Circle, 1730–1897: Four Generations of a Family and Their Friends (London: Cassell, 1980), 42–51; Brian Dolan, Josiah Wedgwood: Entrepreneur to the Enlightenment (London: HarperCollins, 2004), 205–19.   7 Robert E. Schofield, The Lunar Society of Birmingham: A Social History of Provincial Science and Industry in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963); Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future, 1730–1810 (London: Faber and Faber, 2000).   8 Schofield, Lunar Society of Birmingham, 131–2; Uglow, The Lunar Men, 309– 22.   9 For Godwin’s upbringing and education, see Peter H. Marshall, William Godwin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984), 7–45; on candour, see D.O. Thomas, The Honest Mind: The Thought and Work of Richard Price (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 99–101, and Mark Philp, Godwin’s Political Justice (London: Duckworth, 1986), 15–37. 10 See Eugene Charlton Black, The Association: British Extra-Parliamentary Political Organization, 1769–1793 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 31–82; Albert Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: The British Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 58–60. 11 William Godwin, ‘Historical Deduction of my Creed’ (written 28 July 1801), Oxford, Bodleian MS Abinger c. 32, fols. 35–6. 12 Eliza Meteyard, A Group of Englishmen (1795 to 1815), Being Records of the Younger Wedgwoods and Their Friends (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1871), 113–14. 13 William Godwin, diary entry for 15 Feb. 1793, Oxford, Bodleian MS Abinger e. 5. 14 According to his diary, Godwin met Thomas Wedgwood socially on 21 Feb., 24, 27 May, and 2 Dec. 1793; 5, 13 Mar., and 27 Apr. 1794 (Oxford, Bodleian MS Abinger e. 5–6). 15 Mary Shelley, ‘Life of William Godwin,’ ed. Pamela Clemit, in Mary Shelley’s Literary Lives, gen. ed. Nora Crook, 4 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2002), 4:96. 16 Oxford, Bodleian MS Abinger c. 2, fols. 99–100. 17 See William Godwin, ‘Autobiographical Fragments,’ in Collected Novels and

Maniquis_3201_261_(Clemit).indd 280

1/26/2011 8:59:15 PM



Eight Letters between William Godwin and Thomas Wedgwood

281

Memoirs of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 8 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1992), 1:46–7. Robinson paid £735 for the copyright of Political Justice, of which £651 was advanced to Godwin to cover his living expenses during the writing of the work (G.E. Bentley, Jr, ‘Copyright Documents in the George Robinson Archive: William Godwin and Others,’ Studies in Bibliography 34 [1982]: 79–80). 18 William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), ed. Mark Philp, in Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 7 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1993), 3:53, 422–3. 19 For commentary, see W.B. Proudfoot, The Origin of Stencil Duplicating (London: Hutchinson, 1972), 21–2; Silvio A. Bedini, Thomas Jefferson and His Copying Machines (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1984), 10–11, 24, 26–7; Richard Hills, ‘James Watt and His Copying Machine,’ in The Oxford Papers: Proceedings of the British Association of Paper Historians Fourth Annual Conference, ed. Peter Bower (London: British Association of Paper Historians, 1996), 81–8; and Barbara Rhodes and William Walls Streeter, Before Photocopying: The Art and History of Mechanical Copying (New Castle, DE, and Northampton, MA: Oak Knoll Press, 1999), 8–12. 20 For a complete list of wet-transfer copies, see Clemit, ‘William Godwin and James Watt’s Copying Machine,’ 537–48. 21 Godwin to T. Wedgwood, 28 Feb., 4 Mar., and 19 Apr. 1797, Oxford, Bodleian MS Abinger c. 3, fols. 51–2, 53–4, 60–1; Meteyard, A Group of Englishmen, 352–6. 22 Godwin to Mary Wollstonecraft, 9–10 and 12 June 1797, Oxford, Bodleian MS Abinger c. 40, fols. 174–5, 178–9; for printed versions, see Godwin & Mary: Letters of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Ralph M. Wardle (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press and London: Constable, 1967), 89– 92, 94–8. 23 T. Wedgwood to Godwin, 31 July 1797, Oxford, Bodleian MS Abinger c. 3, fols. 73–4; for a printed version, see Erdman, ‘Coleridge, Wordsworth,’ 430–3. 24 Other beneficiaries included T. Wedgwood’s former private tutor, the mathematician and scientist John Leslie (1766–1812), on whom he settled an annuity of £150 in 1797; and the chemist and physician Thomas Beddoes (1760–1808), who received £1000 to support his Pneumatic Institution, established in 1798 to investigate the uses of gases in treatment of illness (Litchfield, Tom Wedgwood, 46–8; Meteyard, A Group of Englishmen, 84). 25 See Mary Shelley, ‘Life of Godwin,’ and Pamela Clemit, ‘Editor’s Introduction: Life of William Godwin,’ in Mary Shelley’s Literary Lives, 4:96–7 and n, and xv.

Maniquis_3201_261_(Clemit).indd 281

1/26/2011 8:59:15 PM

282

Pamela Clemit

26 Date confirmed by Godwin’s diary entry for 22 Sept. 1795: ‘Write to Wedgwood’ (Oxford, Bodleian MS Abinger e. 7). 27 Not extant. 28 The philanthropist John Kyrle (1637–1724) of Ross, Hertfordshire, was commemorated by Alexander Pope (1688–1744) in Moral Essays, epistle 3 (‘To Allen Lord Bathurst. On the Use of Riches’) (1733), ll. 250–90. Kyrle’s benevolent activities included the building of churches in needy parishes. 29 Political Justice, bk. 4, chap. 8, in Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, 3:356–9. 30 Marcus Porcius Cato, ‘the Elder’ (234–149 BC), known for his stern morality, held the office of censor in Rome with a severity which became proverbial. 31 Above ‘necessary’ (and at the top of the third page), Wedgwood wrote: ‘Newhaven – Sept. 29.’ 32 Wedgwood refers to the special copying paper and ink needed to make duplicate letters using the Watt copying machine which he had just given to Godwin (see Hills, ‘James Watt,’ 81–5, 87–8). Godwin’s first surviving machine-made duplicate letter is dated 4 Dec. 1795 (Clemit, ‘Godwin and James Watt’s Copying Machine,’ 537). 33 The high price of wheat in 1794 and 1795 led to a spate of protests, ranging from appeals to the government for help to full-blown riots. 34 The work in question was the second edition of Political Justice, published by G.G.J. and J. Robinson on 26 Nov. 1795 (Godwin, diary, Oxford, Bodleian MS Abinger e. 7). 35 Wedgwood probably refers to the second edition of volume 1 of ÒΕΠΕΑ ΠΤΕΡΟΕΝΤΑ; or, The Diversions of Purley, by the former Anglican clergyman, radical politician, and philologist John Horne Tooke (1736–1812), first published in 1786 and revised and published in quarto format in 1798, for which Tooke received a large number of subscriptions (Alexander Stephens, Memoirs of John Horne Tooke [London: J. Johnson, 1813], 2:497–8). 36 Wedgwood’s next visit to Godwin was on 30 Nov. 1795, when Godwin noted in his diary: ‘T Wedgwood & bro. call’ (Oxford, Bodleian MS Abinger e. 7). The accompanying brother was probably Josiah II. 37 Wedgwood invokes the opening sentence of Marcus Tullius Cicero’s Catilinaria I: ‘Quousque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?’ (‘How long, Catalina, will you abuse our patience?’). 38 Godwin revised his novel Things As They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) for a second edition (dated 1796) in October and November 1795 (Godwin, diary, Oxford, Bodleian MS Abinger e. 7).

Maniquis_3201_261_(Clemit).indd 282

2/5/2011 11:23:46 AM

Contributors

Robert Anderson is Associate Professor of English at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. He has published articles on Godwin, Wordsworth, Mary Shelley and Robert Owen, and Keats. He is currently working on a book relating Godwin’s representations of the family and subjectivity to other writers in the Romantic period. He is also collaborating on a book about time and labour in the poetry of Blake and Whitman. Julie A. Carlson is Professor of English at University of California, Santa Barbara, and the academic coordinator of Project Excel, an academic preparation initiative for local under-served students. She is author of In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women (Cambridge University Press, 1994) and England’s First Family of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), as well as articles on Romantic theatre, Romantic modes of relation, and the psychological and political effects of art. Currently she is co-editing (with Lisa Hajjar and Elisabeth Weber) a volume on torture, ‘Assault on Truth: Torture from the Perspective of the Humanities,’ and working on ‘Mary Shelley’s Coleridge,’ an exploration of textual relations. Pamela Clemit is Professor of English Studies at Durham University and author of The Godwinian Novel (Oxford University Press, 1993, 2001). Her critical and scholarly editions include five volumes in the Pickering Masters Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin; two volumes in the Pickering Masters Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley (1996); the Penguin Classics edition of Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story (1996); (with Gina Luria Walker) the Broadview Literary Texts edition of Godwin’s

Maniquis_3201_283_(Contributors).indd 283

1/26/2011 9:08:20 PM

284

Contributors

Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (2001); and the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Godwin’s Caleb Williams (2009). She is editing Godwin’s letters in six volumes for Oxford University Press. Gary Handwerk is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and chair of the Department of English at the University of Washington. His scholarly work focuses on modern European narrative and narrative theory, narrative ethics, and, more recently, ecocriticism. His recent publications include critical editions of William Godwin’s Caleb Williams and Fleetwood (Broadview Press, 2000) and essays on Godwin’s novels and on Rousseau’s Émile. He is the translator and editor of Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human (Stanford University Press; vol. 1, 1997; vol. 2 scheduled for 2011 publication), and author of an article on Romantic irony in the Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Robert M. Maniquis teaches in the English Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of many essays on Enlightenment and Romantic literature, as well as of Lonely Empires: Personal and Public Visions of Thomas De Quincey, the English Opium-Eater, and editor of such volumes as British Radical Culture of the 1790s, Defoe’s Footprints (with Carl Fisher), The Encyclopedie and the French Revolution (with Clorinda Donato), and The French Revolution and the Iberian Peninsula (with Oscar Marti and Joseph Perez). Jon Mee is Professor of Romanticism Studies at the University of Warwick. He currently is working on the idea of the conversible world in the long eighteenth century, supported by a Phillip J. Leverhulme Major Research Fellow grant. He is the author of many articles and books on the Romantic period, including Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1780s (Oxford, 1992), Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford, 2003), and most recently an edition of Wollstonecraft’s Letters from Sweden, co-edited with Tone Brekke (Oxford World’s Classics, 2009). Victoria Myers is Professor of English and Blanche E. Seaver Professor in Humanities at Pepperdine University. She is the author of many essays on law and drama in the Romantic era and on rhetoric, oratory, and conversation in the long eighteenth century. She served as editor of Pacific Coast Philology from 1999 to 2007. With Mark Philp and David O’Shaughnessy, she co-edited the diary of William Godwin, published in the Oxford Digital Library in 2010.

Maniquis_3201_283_(Contributors).indd 284

1/26/2011 9:08:20 PM



Contributors

285

David O’Shaughnessy is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick. Besides publishing articles on Godwin and Irish literature, he co-edited Godwin’s diary for the Oxford Digital Library. He recently published William Godwin and the Theatre (Pickering & Chatto, 2010) and an edition of The Plays of William Godwin (Pickering & Chatto, 2010). Mark Philp is Fellow and Tutor in Politics at Oriel College and a member of the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford. He is the general editor of the Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin (1992) and the Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin (1993) and is the author of Godwin’s Political Justice (1986). He is the director of the Leverhulme-funded project digitizing and editing the diary of William Godwin, which appeared in 2010 in the Oxford Digital Library. His recent books include Political Conduct (2007), Thomas Paine (2007), and Resisting Napoleon (ed., 2006). Tilottama Rajan is Distinguished University Professor and Canada Research Chair in English and Theory at the University of Western Ontario. She has published Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism (Cornell University Press, 1980), The Supplement of Reading: Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and Practice (Cornell University Press, 1990), and Deconstruction and the Remainders of Phenomenology: Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard (Stanford University Press, 2002). She has also edited or coedited five books, most recently After Poststructuralism: Writing the Intellectual History of Theory (University of Toronto Press, 2002) and Idealism without Absolutes: Philosophy and Romantic Culture (SUNY, 2004). Her book Romantic Narrative: Shelley, Hays, Godwin, Wollstonecraft appeared in 2010. She is currently working on a book on encyclopedic thought and the organization of knowledge from German Idealism to deconstruction. Michael Scrivener, Professor of English at Wayne State University in Detroit, has published five books: British Romanticism: Radical Shelley (Prince­ ton University Press, 1982), Poetry and Reform (Wayne State University Press, 1992), Seditious Allegories (Penn State University Press, 2001), Two Plays by John Thelwall (with Frank Felsenstein; Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006), and The Cosmopolitan Ideal (Pickering & Chatto, 2007). He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2007-8 to research Jewish representations in British Romanticism.

Maniquis_3201_283_(Contributors).indd 285

1/26/2011 9:08:20 PM

This page intentionally left blank

Maniquis_3201_001_(Myers).indd 2

1/26/2011 3:04:34 PM

Index

Note : All unattributed works are by William Godwin. Abbas, King of Persia, 221, 224–6, 228, 229, 230 An Account of the Seminary, 197 Adorno, Theodor, 172 The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 42 affections: conversation and, 90; in Dissenting tradition, 86; Godwin’s critiques of, 18–19, 25, 87, 218–27, 229, 231–2. See also domestic life agency, 37, 38, 159–61, 163, 164, 166. See also free will Ages of the World (Schelling), 175, 183, 184–6 Alderson, Amelia, 91, 92 Alfred the Great (king of England), 203–4. See also St Dunstan ambition, 132–3, 151–2, 158–9, 161–2 American Revolution, 69, 151, 160, 165, 242, 246 Anderson, Robert, 12–13, 125–46 antagonism, 173, 175, 178, 179, 185. See also conflict; war

Maniquis_3201_287_(Index).indd 287

Antonio, 218–24, 227–30 Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (Burke), 66 Argus (newspaper), 247 Arminianism, 28, 33 Ashley, John, 248 Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers, 61 Authentic Memoirs, Memorandums, and Confessions (anon.), 250–1 Autobiographical Fragments, 133–4 Badcock, Samuel, 155 Baillie, Joanna, 221 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia, 86 Baxter, John, 203 Beaufoy, Henry, 194 Beddoes, Thomas, 281n24 benevolence, 32; Godwin on, 272, 274, 278–9; patronage as, 261, 264, 265; Wedgwood on, 268–9, 273, 275 Betty, William Henry West (‘Master Betty’), 231–2 Bible, 37, 41 Bible Stories, 130, 131, 133, 256

2/5/2011 11:30:44 AM

288

Index

Binns, John, 89 biography, 149, 154–5 Blair, Hugh, 153, 154 Blake, William, 30, 45, 139, 183 Book of Martyrs (Foxe), 180–1 Bowyer, Robert, 201 Brailsford, H.N., 39–40 British Critic (newspaper), 87 British Guardian (newspaper), 248 Bromley, William, 201 Bunyan, John, 28, 32, 41, 42 Burdett, Francis, 249 Burke, Edmund, 93, 113, 156, 165; influence, 66–7, 73, 152; views, 127, 136. See also Revolution controversy; specific works Burke, Kenneth, 47 Burney, Frances (Fanny), 201 Bute, John Stuart, 3rd Earl of, 161 Byrne, Nicholas, 241 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 56n38 Caleb Williams, 3, 4, 6–7, 35–7, 73, 128, 256; alternative endings, 39, 44–5, 182; Calvinism in, 33, 39–40, 42, 47–8; education in, 114, 115; Godwin on, 142, 179–80; self in, 38–9, 43, 44–5, 47; stage productions, 228, 234 Calvinism: Godwin on, 42, 45–50; influence on Godwin, 26, 27–8, 31–2, 33, 34–5, 39–40; uncertainty in, 40–1, 44 Canguilhem, Georges, 184 Carey, Charles, 243 Carlson, Julie, 18–19, 197–8, 213n14, 217–38; England’s First Family of Writers, 22n13, 145n65, 146n80, 167n4, 220, 235n12, 237n26 certainty, 41, 42. See also uncertainty

Maniquis_3201_287_(Index).indd 288

change, 4, 68–9, 73, 74–5. See also history; progress charity, 267, 270. See also benevolence Charles II (king of England), 70 children, 108–9, 110, 130; Mary Shelley’s works for, 233, 234. See also domestic life; education; Juvenile Library Christianity, 25–6, 133–4. See also Arminianism; Calvinism; Congregationalists; Dissent; Glassites; Puritanism; Sandemanianism Christianity as Old as the Creation (Tindal), 28–9 church and state, 194–6, 199, 207–8. See also Test and Corporation Acts Clairmont, Mary Jane, 249 Clarke, Mary Anne, 249 Clausewitz, Carl von, 179 Clement VII (pope), 33 Clemit, Pamela, 12, 19–21, 22n12, 22n15, 22n18, 129–31, 142, 144n22, 261–82 Cloudesley: A Tale, 187, 228 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 55n30, 134, 221, 254, 261 Colman, George, 228, 234 communication, 72–3, 85–6, 89, 112. See also conversation confession, 180 Confessions (Rousseau), 41 conflict: in conversation, 86, 88, 90, 95–6, 97; in family relations, 223–6; in Mandeville, 178, 187; versus war, 173, 175. See also antagonism; war Congregationalists, 33 Considerations on Lord Grenville and Mr Pitt’s Bills, 59, 68, 74–5, 92, 247–8; attack on Thelwall, 60, 63, 69–72, 90–1, 94

2/5/2011 11:30:44 AM



Index

contingency, 162–6 conversation, 89–90, 107, 150–1; conflict in, 86, 88, 90, 95–6, 97; and progress, 84–5, 90; as superior to letter writing, 274, 278. See also communication; debate Cooper, Thomas, 77n5, 121n10 Cordelia (S. King), 249 Corporation Act. See Test and Corporation Acts Covent Garden Theatre, 210–11, 249 Critique on the French Revolution (Sewell), 94 Cumberland, Duke of, 249 Cursory Strictures, 63, 241 Darwin, Erasmus, 263 debate, 85, 95–6; clubs for, 88, 90–2, 94–5. See also conversation Defoe, Daniel, 42, 231 deism, 28–9, 242, 254–5 despotism, 75, 226; education as, 105, 110–11, 114, 131, 135–6 determinism, 36, 38, 50 dialectic, 176; Kleinian, 186, 187; negative, 175, 185, 186. See also Klein, Melanie; Schelling, Friedrich Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno and Horkheimer), 172 discourse. See conversation; debate Discourse on the Love of Our Country (Price), 205 disease, 37, 183–4 disguise, 132–3, 141–2 Dissent, 28, 32, 194–6; Godwin and, 29–30, 85–6, 89, 196–7, 263; Rational, 85–6, 263 Dissertations on the Prophecies of the Old Testament (Levi), 255, 256 Ditchfield, G.M., 194–6

Maniquis_3201_287_(Index).indd 289

289

domestic life: critiques, 87, 218–19, 220, 223, 226–7, 229–30, 232; fathers and, 46, 47, 48; of Godwin, 232–3; honour and, 221–3, 224–6; marital versus filial relations, 219– 20, 223–6, 232; positive descriptions, 220–1, 229–30; in Mary Shelley’s work, 233–4. See also children; marriage drama. See plays Driver, C.H., 27 Druids, 139–40 Duffin, Patrick William, 248 Dunstan, Saint, 201–2. See also St Dunstan Dyer, George, 205 East India Company, 246–7 Edgar (king of England), 201–2. See also St Dunstan education: desire for, 109–10; as despotism, 105, 110–11, 114, 131, 135– 6; Godwin on, 103, 104, 105–15, 118, 266, 267; and happiness, 106, 109, 111–12; methodology, 106–8, 116–18; of princes, 208–9; purpose, 106, 107; reform of, 115–18; religion and, 207, 208–9; resistance to, 114, 116; self-regulation in, 116–17; social dimensions, 112, 117, 118; teacher–pupil relations, 109–10, 114, 116. See also enlightenment; reading; teachers Edwards, Jonathan, 26–7, 31, 32–3 Edwy (king of England), 201–4. See also St Dunstan Edwy and Elgiva (Burney), 201 Elements of Criticism (Kames), 152–3 Eley, Geoff, 83 Elizabeth I, 70, 71

2/5/2011 11:30:44 AM

290

Index

‘Of Eloquence’ (Hume), 150–1 emancipation, 67 Émile (Rousseau), 110, 111 England: food shortages, 59, 271–2, 273; as imperialist, 160, 189; Pitt’s effect on, 159–60. See also government England’s First Family of Writers. See Carlson, Julie English Review (newspaper), 153–4, 197 Enlightenment: and Calvinism, 32, 33; Godwin as product of, 6–7, 10–13, 21, 28, 103, 107, 109, 111, 120n3; political/social views in, 20, 65–6, 76, 103, 104, 126; war and peace in, 172–6; Wedgwood as product of, 20, 261–3, 265 enlightenment, 10, 27, 73, 75, 87, 172–5, 186 The Enquirer, 6, 104, 126; on conversation, 89–90, 97; education in, 105, 106–9, 118; ‘Of the Awakening of the Mind,’ 109; ‘Of Choice in Reading,’ 113, 115; ‘Of the Early Indications of Character,’ 114; ‘Of the Happiness of Youth,’ 111–12; ‘Of the Obtaining of Confidence,’ 111; ‘Of Posthumous Fame,’ 202; ‘Of Reasoning and Contention,’ 111; ‘Of the Sources of Genius,’ 107, 110; ‘Of the Utility of Talents,’ 110 Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Hume), 66 An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 4–5, 25, 140, 151, 158–9, 163, 197; domestic affections critiqued, 87, 218, 220; first edition, 63, 64–6; reactions to, 3, 87; reason in, 29, 106; religious influences, 26, 29, 33–5,

Maniquis_3201_287_(Index).indd 290

39, 66, 254; and Revolution controversy, 62–3, 68, 75; second edition, 59, 60, 68–9; St Dunstan as idea source, 206–7, 208, 210, 211; uncertainties in, 67, 68, 142; Wedgwood and, 263, 264, 271, 272 Enquiry into the Modern Prevailing Opinions on Freedom of Will (Edwards), 32 enthusiasm, 87–8, 91, 93–4, 97, 248, 269 equality, 116, 117, 127, 222 Essays Moral, Political and Literary (Hume), 66 Ethelred the Unready (king of England), 203. See also St Dunstan evil, 182–3, 184 Fables, Ancient and Modern, 125–6, 131, 132–3; ‘The Ass and the Lap Dog,’ 133; ‘The Daw and the Borrowed Feathers,’ 132–3; ‘The Dog in the Manger,’ 135–6; ‘The Eagle and the Crow,’ 133; ‘The Horse and the Stag,’ 137; ‘The Mouse, the Cock, and the Cat,’ 135; ‘The Wolf and the Mastiff,’ 125–6, 128, 137 factories, 268, 269–70 Falkner (M. Shelley), 233–4 family. See children; domestic life; marriage fashion, 136–7 Faulkener, 221, 222–3, 229; marital versus filial relations in, 219–20, 224, 227, 230–2 Fawcett, Joseph, 31 The Female Speaker (Barbauld), 86 Fénelon, François, 32 fiction, 164. See also novels; plays Fleetwood, 5, 118–21, 142n2, 180, 223 Foucault, Michel, 128, 180

2/5/2011 11:30:44 AM



Index

Fox, Charles James, 194, 198, 244, 245–7, 250. See also Whigs, Foxite Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, 180–1 freedom, 125–8, 136–7, 140, 175; evil and, 182–3, 184; mental, 49–50. See also free will Freedom (Schelling), 175, 182–3, 184, 187 free will, 33, 36–8, 41, 50, 163, 183. See also determinism; judgment, independent; predestination French Revolution, 60, 64, 93, 107, 199, 256. See also Revolution controversy Freud, Sigmund, 181 Freudian interpretation, 46 gender issues, 222–3. See also women genius, 110, 113–15 The Genius of Christianity Unveiled, 25–6, 42, 45, 254 Gerrald, Joseph, 203 gifts. See benevolence Glassites, 30 Glorious Revolution, 176 god-term, 47, 49 Godwin, William: ambivalence, 134–5, 141–2; attacks on, 218, 220–1, 229, 256–7; Calvinist influence, 26, 27–8, 29–30, 33, 34–5, 39–40; classical influences, 109, 113, 133–4, 136–8, 153–4; courage, 75; as debater, 86; diary, 5–6, 64, 197, 199, 241; early writings, 147–66, 194–211, 244–5; education, 25, 66, 85–6, 108; as educator, 103–20, 121n10, 131, 135, 139–40; as historian, 149–51, 152, 160, 176–7; as moderate, 74–5; as moralist, 63, 126, 129, 131, 136, 138, 140, 152–60, 163-4, 166; open-

Maniquis_3201_287_(Index).indd 291

291

ness, 4–5; as orator, 153–4, 166; political views, 243–4, 263; as prisoner of text, 47, 49; pseudonyms, 132; as psychoanalyst, 111–12; as radical, 63, 75, 127, 241, 247–8, 263; as reader, 31, 63, 64, 66–7, 78n11, 80n19, 217, 221, 242, 247, 249; reception of works, 3, 17–18, 29, 88, 92, 129–30, 132, 201, 218, 228, 232; religious views, 133–4, 138–9, 197, 242, 254–6, 263; self-analysis, 5, 25. See also specific subjects and works Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 105 government, 65, 67–8, 75, 156–7, 199. See also Whigs; specific acts of Parliament Grattan, Mrs, 243 Greeks (ancient), 136–7, 138. See also The History of Greece ; The Pantheon Green, André, 188 Grenby, Matthew, 130, 142 Grenville, George, 161 Grenville, William Wyndham, 1st Baron, 70–1 Grimmelshausen, H.J.C. von, 254 Habermas, Jürgen, 83, 84, 97, 185, 186 Hamilton, William, 201 Handwerk, Gary, 11–12, 103–24, 167n6 happiness, 106, 109, 111–12, 269 Hastings, Warren, 231 Hazlitt, William, 3–4, 71–2, 84 Heaven and Earth (Murry), 27–8 Hegel, G.W.F., 183, 188 Helvetius, Claude-Adrien, 38 Hicks, Philip, 153, 154, 168n15 history, 174, 179, 189; as agentcentred, 159–61; biography as,

2/5/2011 11:30:44 AM

292

Index

149, 154–5; contingency in, 162–6; depression of, 186, 187; Enlightenment approach, 175; as fiction, 164; Godwin and, 4, 68–9, 149–51, 202–3; Hegelian, 185–6; impartiality in, 153–5, 157, 161–2, 163–4; neoclassical approach, 153–4; oratory and, 150, 161–2; personalization of, 176–7; psychoanalytic, 175–6; theatre and, 198. See also change; progress; specific works History of the Commonwealth of England, 5, 131, 139–40, 176, 189 History of the Corruptions of Christianity (Priestley), 197 The History of England (Baxter), 203 The History of England (Hume), 70–1 The History of Greece, 131, 136, 138, 140–1 History of the Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, 149, 150, 245; oratory in, 151–5, 157–8, 159–60, 164–5 ‘Of History and Romance,’ 166, 174– 5, 179, 237n30 The History of Rome, 131, 136 Hobbes, Thomas, 33 Hogle, Jerrold E., 47, 49 Holbach, Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’, 38 Holcroft, Thomas, 199, 205, 221, 243; and Godwin’s works, 78n11, 198, 207 honour, 22, 221–3, 224–6 Horkheimer, Max, 172 Hume, David, 66, 70–1, 73, 113, 150–1 idealism, 175, 186 idealization, 188 identification, 113, 114, 116, 180 Iliff, Edward Henry, 82n35

Maniquis_3201_287_(Index).indd 292

imitation, 112–13 imperialism, 160, 189, 245–7 Independent Whig (newspaper), 248 India Bill, 246–7 individuality, 127, 140–1. See also judgment, independent Inquisition, 251, 253 The Institutes of the Christian Religion (Calvin), 40, 41 institution, 176, 188 intellectual capacity, 104, 115–16 Ireland, 60, 173, 176, 189, 194 The Iron Chest (Colman), 228, 234 irritability, 183, 187–8 ‘Is the Human Race Constantly Progressing?’ (Kant), 175 Jardine, Alexander, 89 Jeffrey, Francis, 94 Jerusalem (Blake), 139 Jerusalem (Mendelssohn), 255 Jews, 245, 251–3, 256 Johnson, Joseph, 64 Jordan, J.S., 64 judgment, independent, 28–9, 30–1, 37–8, 73, 127. See also free will; individuality justice, 135–6, 174–6, 186, 189–90, 227, 230, 264. See also An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice Juvenile Library, 6; ambiguity in, 130–1, 141–2; autonomy in, 6, 129, 135–6; disguises in, 132–3, 141–2; liberty in, 136, 140; nakedness in, 136–8; political views, 138, 140; as radical, 129–30, 139–40; reactions to, 129–30; similarities to adult works, 131–2. See also specific works Kames, Henry Home, Lord, 152–3

2/5/2011 11:30:45 AM



Index

Kant, Immanuel, 173, 175 Kegan Paul, Charles, 231 Kemble, John Philip, 228, 249 King, Charles, 241 King, Charlotte, 241, 242, 249 King, George, 248 King, John ( Jacob Rey): attacks on, 250–1; as blackmailer, 244, 248, 249; Godwin’s visits, 241, 242–3, 247, 248, 249–50; influence on Godwin, 242, 247–8, 250–4; as moneylender, 244, 248, 249, 250; versus Paine, 242, 243–4, 247; personal relationships, 244, 255; political views, 242, 243, 245–7; as radical, 247, 248–9; religious beliefs, 242, 254–6 King, Sophia, 241, 249 Kippis, Andrew, 196 Klancher, Jon, 168n6 Klein, Melanie, 186–7 Kramnick, Isaac, 97 Kyrle, John, 282n28 Lake poets, 108. See also individual poets Lamb, Charles, 221 Lanesborough, Lady Jane, 241, 243, 249, 250, 251 language, 33, 43, 47; and ambition, 158; being-in-, 167n5; eloquent, 156, 157, 166, 198; and enslavement, 47–8, 105, 110, 111; and fact, 166; incommensurable, 175. See also oratory Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (Blair), 153 Leslie, John, 281n24 Letters from France ( J. King), 243, 247 Letters from Perdita to a Certain Israelite ( J. King), 244

Maniquis_3201_287_(Index).indd 293

293

Letters on Theron and Aspasio (Sandeman), 28 Levi, David, 255, 256 liberty. See freedom The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, 31, 149, 154 The Life of Lady Jane Grey, 131 ‘Life of William Godwin’ (M. Shelley), 263–4 Lindsey, Theophilus, 196 literature, 6, 39, 91, 107. See also reading The Lives of Edward and John Philips, 167n4 A Lock’d Jaw for John Bull (West), 70 Locke, John, 104, 106, 108, 113, 120n3 Lockhart, John Gibson, 178, 179, 183 Lodore (M. Shelley), 233 London Corresponding Society (LCS), 59, 71, 83–4, 91, 242, 247–8 The Looking Glass, 131 Lunar Society, 263, 264 Lyotard, Jean-François, 175 Macdonald, Lord, 70 Mackintosh, James, 76 Makdisi, Saree, 127 Malden, Lord, 244 Mandeville, 5, 131, 172–3; as anarchic, 178, 182; cartoon episode, 177, 178, 182; conflict in, 173, 174, 178, 179, 182, 187; ending, 174, 180, 181, 188–9; Godwin’s plans for, 174, 187–9; Henrietta, 181, 185, 188; Hilkiah Bradford, 112–13, 177, 180–1; as history, 176, 177–8; inequality in, 182; and justice, 175, 182, 189–90; paranoia in, 178–9, 181–2, 185, 186–7; plot, 172–3; res-

2/5/2011 11:30:45 AM

294

Index

toration in, 185, 186, 187; teacher– pupil relation in, 112–13; trauma/ wounding in, 178, 180–1, 184, 187, 188–9; withdrawal in, 183–4 Maniquis, Robert M., 8–9, 25–58 manufacturing, 268, 269–70 marriage, 222, 223–6, 232. See also domestic life Marshall, Peter, 12, 33–5 Maurice; or, the Fisher’s Cot (M. Shelley), 233, 234 McCalman, Iain, 248 Mee, Jon, 10, 72, 79n17, 83–102 Memoir (Thelwall), 96 Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women, 155, 167n4, 218 Mendelssohn, Moses, 255 middle classes, 62, 246 millenarianism, 256 mind: Calvinism and, 25–9, 37, 45; collision of mind with, 85, 88, 90, 96; formation of, 107–9, 113, 130–1, 158–9, 266, 275; free versus constrained, 36, 38, 48–50, 104, 111; progress of, 64, 65, 69; public, 71–3, 76, 88, 97, 159. See also intellectual capacity misanthropy, 183–4 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de la Brède et de, 66, 73 Mortimer, Thomas, 201 Murry, John Middleton, 27–8 Myers, Victoria, 13–15, 85, 99n10, 99n15, 149–71 Mylius’ School Dictionary, 131 necessity (philosophical), 27, 29, 35–9, 53nn22–3, 163, 183, 185 neurosis, 46–7, 49. See also paranoia New Annual Register, 198, 199

Maniquis_3201_287_(Index).indd 294

‘The New Guide to the English Tongue,’ 131 A New History of England (Mortimer), 201 Newton, Samuel, 29, 108 Norman, Frederick, 66 Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), 180 novels: anti-Jacobin, 76, 92, 93, 97; by Godwin, 105, 108, 179–80, 197, 228, 244. See also specific works obedience, 129 Odo, Archbishop, 201 oppression, 128 oratory: audience role, 159–60, 161; in 18th century, 150–1, 152–3; and history, 150, 161–2; impartiality through, 155–60; as metonym for character, 156–7, 164; and morality, 158; in Pitt biography, 151–60, 164–5; sentiment and, 151, 152–3, 154–5 O’Shaughnessy, David, 17–18, 194– 216, 217–18, 228, 230 Osorio/Remorse (Coleridge), 221, 229 Outlines of English Grammar, 131 Paine, Thomas, 30–1, 63, 65, 70, 76; on changes in thinking, 26, 27; on government, 67–8; King and, 242, 243–4, 247; Rights of Man, 60, 61, 64 pamphlet controversy. See Revolution controversy pantheism, 134, 138–9 The Pantheon, 133, 134, 136, 138 paranoia, 178–9, 181–2, 185, 186–7, 275, 277–8 Parr, Samuel, 87, 90 Parson, John, 259n37

2/5/2011 11:30:45 AM



Index

patronage, 261, 264, 265. See also benevolence Paul, Saint, 37, 41 peace projects, 173–4 Percival, Spencer, 249 perfectibility, 28, 34 Perry, Sampson, 247 philanthropy. See benevolence Phillips, Mark Salber, 149, 166n2 Philomathian Society, 89 philosophy, 69, 106–7 Philp, Mark, 5, 9–10, 21n6, 30, 31, 51n8, 59–82, 212n8 The Pilgrim’s Progress (Bunyan), 28, 32, 41, 42 Pinto, Ferdinand Mendes, 251 Piozzi, Hester, 91 Pitt, William (the elder; later Lord Chatham): career, 151–2, 157–8, 159–60, 161; failures, 161–3, 164–5. See also History of the Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham Pitt, William (the younger), 3, 60, 70, 253 Place, Francis, 242, 248 Plato, 109 plays (by Godwin), 197–8, 217; domestic affections critiqued, 218–19, 220, 226–7, 229–30, 232; history in, 196, 201–4, 207; plots, 199–200, 219–20; remorse in, 221, 230, 232, 233; spectacle in, 230–2; women in, 232–3. See also specific plays pleasure, 181, 266–7, 268, 269, 276, 278 Pocock, J.G.A., 63 poetry, 221 Political Herald (newspaper), 197, 264 Political Justice. See An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice

Maniquis_3201_287_(Index).indd 295

295

politics, 6, 94, 127, 179, 182; and education, 106; religion and, 194–6 Pollin, Burton, 120n3 Potkay, Adam, 150–1 poverty. See working classes predestination, 36, 37. See also free will presents. See benevolence Price, Richard, 55n30, 199, 205 priestcraft, 205, 207 Priestley, F.E.L., 51n8 Priestley, Joseph, 30, 196–7, 256 Proby, W.C., 141 progress, 22, 174; conversation and, 84–5, 90; in Godwin’s works, 67–9, 71, 73–4; of mind, 64, 65, 69. See also change; history ‘Project for Perpetual Peace’ (Rousseau), 173 property, 134–5, 140–1, 264 Proserpine (M. Shelley), 233, 234 protest, 59–60, 75–6. See also resistance psychoanalysis, 175, 184, 185, 186 public: as audience, 72, 159–60, 161; government and, 67; as mindless mob, 209–10; protest by, 59–60, 75–6. See also public sphere public sphere, 83, 84–5; anxiety about, 92–4; possibility of, 87, 92–3; rational discourse in, 85, 93–4; Romantic, 84, 97–8 Puritanism, 86, 87, 93. See also Calvinism radicals. See reform movements; specific individuals Rajan, Tilottama, 15–17, 123n26, 167n4, 172–93 reading, 49, 86, 88–9, 91, 107, 112–16; Godwin and, 64, 66–7. See also education

2/5/2011 11:30:45 AM

296

Index

realism, 175 reason, 29, 32, 37–8, 48 Reflections on the Revolution in France (Burke), 60, 61, 64, 66, 67 reform: domestic, 218–19; educational, 115–18; parliamentary, 203; social, 106, 127. See also reform movements reform movements, 59–62, 72, 76, 97; Godwin and, 69, 70, 72, 75, 127; loyalist rhetoric against, 63–4; women and, 90–2. See also individual reformers and societies religion: and education, 207, 208–9; and politics, 194–6. See also church and state ‘Of Religion,’ 254 The Religion of Nature Delineated (Wollaston), 255 remorse, 221, 230, 232, 233 A Reply to Mr Burke’s Invective (Cooper), 77n5 repression, 181 republicanism, 62, 245, 246 resistance, 68–9, 128; in domestic life, 227; identification and, 114–15; to institution, 176; to learning, 114, 116. See also protest; withdrawal Reveley, Maria (later Maria Gisborne), 249 revolution, 68–9, 176, 247, 248. See also specific revolutions Revolution controversy, 60, 62–4, 93; Godwin and, 62–3, 64, 68, 73–4, 75 Richardson, Alan, 108–9 Rights of Man (Paine), 60, 61, 64 Robinson, George, 199, 264, 272 Robinson, Mary (‘Perdita’), 242, 244, 247 Rockingham, Charles Watson-Went-

Maniquis_3201_287_(Index).indd 296

worth, 2nd Marquess of, 161–2, 165, 246 Rodway, A.E., 220 Romans (ancient), 137, 140. See also The History of Rome Romanticism, 6, 84, 90, 97–8, 109, 120n3, 136, 174, 187 Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt against Theory (Simpson), 107 Rose, Jacqueline, 172, 186 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 41, 103, 111, 173; influence on Godwin, 65, 66, 73, 110 Roussin, Henri, 54n26 Roxana (Defoe), 231 Rural Walks, 131 Russell, Gillian, 84, 85 Sachs, Jonathan, 140 sacrifice, 32 St Dunstan, 197–9, 201, 220; on dangers of theocracy, 199, 204–5, 208; plot, 199–200, 204–10; as political, 198, 204–5, 206–7; and Political Justice, 206–7, 208, 210, 211; priestcraft references in, 205–6, 207; public in, 209–10; reactions to, 210–11 St Leon, 5, 174, 220–1, 229; Jewish allusions, 250, 251–2, 253, 256; King’s influence, 242, 250–4; marriage in, 23, 222; religion in, 250, 251–2, 254 Sandeman, Robert, 28, 29, 34 Sandemanianism, 25, 27–8, 29, 30, 33–5 Schelling, Friedrich, 175, 182–3, 184–6, 187 Scott, Walter, 176 Scrivener, Michael, 19–20, 241–60 security, 125–7, 128

2/5/2011 11:30:45 AM



Index

Sedley, Davenport, 248 self, 35–6; in Calvinism, 42; and free will, 36–7, 50; in Godwin’s works, 38–9, 43, 44–5, 47, 135; and philosophical necessity, 35–6, 38 self-indulgence, 268–9 self-regulation, 116–17 sentiment, 3–4, 6; and oratory, 151, 152–3, 154–5; in Pitt biography, 165–6 ‘The Seven Sleepers,’ 186 Sewell, John, 94 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of, 34, 86 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 210, 249, 257; on Godwin, 121, 263–4; writings, 233–4, 237n30 Shelley, Percy, 3, 45, 249 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 197, 199, 220 Simplicissimus (Grimmelshausen), 254 Simpson, David, 107 sin, 37, 42, 48 sincerity, 158–9 slavery, 110, 111, 114, 128, 189–90 Smith, Adam, 66 Smollett, Tobias, 202, 203–4 sociability, 31, 85–6, 89–90 The Social Contract (Rousseau), 110 society, 65, 138, 162–4, 173, 210 Society of Free Debate, 94–5 Socinianism, 197, 215n47 Southcott, Joanna, 248, 256 Spence, Thomas, 30, 70, 248 Stanhope, Charles, 199 Stauffer, Donald, 154–5 St Clair, William, 108, 132, 220, 221, 249 Storch, Rudolf F., 46 subjectivity, 134–5

Maniquis_3201_287_(Index).indd 297

297

A Summary of the Duties of Citizenship (Iliff), 82n35 suspicion. See paranoia Swan, William Thomas, 49 sympathy, 111–12 talents, 113, 115–16 Taylor, John, 243 teachers, 109–10, 114, 116, 120. See also education tendency (of a text), 15; versus moral 113, 115 Test and Corporation Acts, 194–6, 198, 204, 205, 206 text, 47, 49. See also reading; tendency theatre: Godwin’s interest in, 197, 217–18, 227–8; as platform for ideas, 198, 220–1, 228 Thelwall, John, 84; and audience, 87, 91–2, 93–4; as debater, 85, 87; and Godwin, 89, 90, 96, 127; Godwin versus, 84–5, 90–1, 92, 242, 247; lectures by, 70, 71–2, 75, 87, 93; response to Godwin’s attack, 76, 92–3, 96–7; response to treason acts, 72–3 ‘Thoughts Occasioned by the Perusal of Dr Parr’s Spital Sermon,’ 229–30 Thoughts on Man, 104; ‘Of the Distribution of Talents,’ 104, 115–16, 117; on education, 105, 109, 111; resistance in, 114–15 Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (Burke), 170n33 Thoughts on the Difficulties and Distresses in which the Peace of 1783 has involved the People of England ( J. King), 242, 244, 245–6, 247 The Times (newspaper), 94 Tindal, Matthew, 28–9 Toland, John, 215n47

2/5/2011 11:30:45 AM

298

Index

Tooke, John Horne, 271, 272 ‘To Perpetual Peace’ (Kant), 173 transference, 181 Travels of St Leon. See St Leon treason trials (1794), 59, 203, 241. See also Cursory Strictures Treatise on Virtue (Edwards), 32 Tribune (Thelwall), 77n5, 81nn31–2, 82n37, 96, 99n11, 101n41, 102n54, 102n57 Trimmer, Sarah, 129–30 truth, 134, 136, 180; as all-important, 87, 88; Dissent and, 30, 89; rational communication of, 72–3 Tuite, Clara, 84, 85 tyranny. See despotism uncertainty, 40–1, 44, 50, 67, 68, 75 unconscious, 47, 48, 50, 108 understanding, 29, 31 United States, 104. See also American Revolution The Vagabond (Walker), 93 virtue, 31–2, 37–8, 223, 245, 246 Wale, Samuel, 201 Wales, Prince of (later George IV), 244, 249, 250 Walker, George, 93 Walpole, Robert, 156, 157 war, 174–5; absolute, 179, 182; between principles, 183–5; psychic, 173, 174, 179. See also antagonism; conflict Wardle, Gwyllym Lloyd, 249 Watt, James, 264 Watts, Isaac, 86 Waverley (Scott), 176 Wedgwood, John, 263 Wedgwood, Josiah (father), 262

Maniquis_3201_287_(Index).indd 298

Wedgwood, Josiah (son), 261 Wedgwood, Thomas, 261; correspondence with, 264, 266–79; friendship with, 261–3, 276; and letter copying machine, 264, 271, 276; letters from, 268–71, 273–4, 275–7; letters to, 266–7, 271–2, 274, 277–9; as patron, 264, 265; and Political Justice, 263, 264, 271, 272 West, Benjamin, 70 West Indies, 189 Weston, Rowland, 31, 43, 85 Whigs: Foxite, 60, 152, 246; Rockingham, 161–2, 246 White, Daniel E., 28–9, 30 White, Newman Ivey, 3 ‘Why War?’ (Rose), 172, 186 Williams, Helen Maria, 243 withdrawal, 43, 97–8, 182–4, 188. See also resistance Wolcot, John (‘Peter Pindar’), 243 Wollaston, William, 255 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 103, 233, 249; influence, 122n10, 123n22, 223, 250; memoir of, 155, 167n4, 218; relationship with Godwin, 218, 220, 249, 265 women: as audience, 91–2, 94; as daughters, 233–4; in Godwin’s works, 223, 232–3; marriage and, 225; and reform movements, 90–2; right to sexual expression, 223, 224. See also domestic life; marriage Woolston, Thomas, 254, 255 Wordsworth, William, 46, 83, 97–9 working classes, 62, 269–70, 271–2, 273. See also factories York, Duke of, 249 Žižek, Slavoj, 177–8, 180

2/5/2011 11:30:45 AM