New Approaches to William Godwin: Forms, Fears, Futures (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print) [1st ed. 2021] 9783030629113, 9783030629120, 3030629112

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN THE ENLIGHTENMENT, ROMANTICISM AND CULTURES OF PRINT

New Approaches to William Godwin Forms, Fears, Futures Edited by Eliza O’Brien · Helen Stark · Beatrice Turner

Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print Series Editors Anne K. Mellor Department of English University of California Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA, USA Clifford Siskin Department of English New York University New York, NY, USA

Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print features work that does not fit comfortably within established boundaries – whether between periods or between disciplines. Uniquely, it combines efforts to engage the power and materiality of print with explorations of gender, race, and class. Mobilizing analytical, archival, and digital resources to explore the varied intersections of literature with the visual arts, medicine, law, and science, the series enables a large-scale rethinking of the origins of modernity. Editorial Board Ros Ballaster, University of Oxford, UK John Bender, Stanford University, USA Alan Bewell, University of Toronto, Canada Peter de Bolla, University of Cambridge, UK Aaron Hanlon, Colby College, USA Devoney Looser, Arizona State University, USA Saree Makdisi, UCLA, USA Andrew Piper, McGill University, Canada Felicity A Nussbaum, UCLA, USA Janet Todd, University of Cambridge, UK More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14588

Eliza O’Brien  •  Helen Stark Beatrice Turner Editors

New Approaches to William Godwin Forms, Fears, Futures

Editors Eliza O’Brien Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK Beatrice Turner University of Roehampton London, UK

Helen Stark University College London London, UK

ISSN 2634-6516     ISSN 2634-6524 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print ISBN 978-3-030-62911-3    ISBN 978-3-030-62912-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62912-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © The Picture Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo Image ID: MMKNJM This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

This book collection developed from a conference in 2017 at Newcastle University. We would like to thank the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics for funding and conference support. Special thanks to Melanie Birch for her invaluable advice and for helping to plan and run the event. We also gratefully acknowledge the funding support from the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, which enabled us to offer travel bursaries to our postgraduate delegates. At Palgrave we thank Camille Davies and Rebecca Hinsley for their assistance with the publication process and their forbearance and special thanks go to Divya Anish and the production team for their support and expertise in the final stages. We thank the editor of Nineteenth-Century Prose, Barry Tharaud, and guest editor Rowland Weston, for their permission to reprint the article ‘Godwin’s Citations, 1783–2005: Highest Renown at the Pinnacle of Disfavour’ by Pamela Clemit and Avner Offer, and the Paul Mellon Centre Photographic Archive for permission to reproduce two digital images. Eliza O’Brien would like to thank David Stewart for his sincere friendship, and all her dear family: O’Briens, Galvins, Ryans, Stewarts. She offers particular thanks to Professor Graham Allen of University College Cork for introducing her to the work of William Godwin. Helen Stark would like to thank University College London for their support of this project, Michael Rossington for introducing her to Essay on Sepulchres, and Chris Sparks for his unwavering encouragement. Beatrice Turner would like to thank her fellow editors for their heroic patience, the participants of the original conference for a stimulating and collegial day of discussion, and Philippe for everything else. v

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Lastly, but by no means least, we collectively thank our contributors for their time and intellectual effort in making the collection a reality, particularly in the final stages of editing, which took place during the Covid-19 pandemic in a period that has been very difficult for very many people.

Contents

Introduction to New Approaches to William Godwin: Forms, Fears, Futures  1 Eliza O’Brien, Helen Stark, and Beatrice Turner Part I Forms  11  Godwin, Ireland, and Historical Tragedy 13 David O’Shaughnessy  ‘My son, once my friend’: Sanguinity, Sincerity, and Friendship in St. Leon’s Confessional Narrative 37 Grace Harvey  Through the Looking-Glasses: Godwin’s Biographies for Children 57 John-Erik Hansson Part II Fears  79  Candour, Courage, and the Calculation of Consequences in Godwin’s 1790s 81 Mark Philp vii

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Contents

 Godwin’s Fear of the Private Affections103 Shawn Fraistat  Gifts, Giving, Gratitude: The Development of William Godwin’s Radical Critique of Charity in the 1790s127 Ruby Tuke  Gines, Violence, and Fear in Things as They Are; or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams155 David Fallon Part III Futures 183  Godwin’s Popular Stories for the Nursery185 M. O. Grenby  Godwin and the Love of Fame215 Eliza O’Brien  Illustrated Afterlife: William Godwin’s Essay on Sepulchres 241 An Helen Stark  Godwin’s Citations, 1783–2005: Highest Renown at the Pinnacle of Disfavour273 Pamela Clemit and Avner Offer Index297

Notes on Contributors

Pamela  Clemit  is Professor of English at Queen Mary University of London and a Supernumerary Fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. She is the author of The Godwinian Novel (Oxford, 1993) and has written many essays on William Godwin and his intellectual circle. She has written a dozen or so scholarly editions of Godwin’s and Mary Shelley’s writings, including Caleb Williams (Oxford, 2009). She is the General Editor of the Oxford University Press edition of The Letters of William Godwin, 6 vols., in progress. Volume I: 1778–1797 (2011) and Volume II: 1798–1805 (2014) were both edited by her. David Fallon  is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Roehampton. He is the author of Blake, Myth, and Enlightenment: The Politics of Apotheosis (2017) and co-editor of Romanticism and Revolution: A Reader (2011). He is working on a monograph entitled Bookshops, Authors, and Literary Sociability: 1740–1840. Shawn Fraistat  is an independent scholar who received his PhD from the Department of Political Science at Yale University and most recently served as a visiting scholar at Brown University. His work has appeared in journals such as the American Political Science Review and Political Theory, and his forthcoming book, The Liberalism of Care, addresses the concept of care in the history of political thought. M. O. Grenby  is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies in the School of English at Newcastle University. He has authored books on eighteenthcentury political novels, the history of children’s literature, and child ix

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r­ eaders from 1700 to 1840. He is the editor of Volume III of The Letters of William Godwin, covering the years 1806–1815 (forthcoming). John-Erik Hansson  teaches British history at CY Cergy Paris Université and received his PhD from the European University Institute (Florence, Italy). In his dissertation, he analysed William Godwin’s works for children and showed how they furthered the programme for radical reform he had developed in the 1790s. More generally, John-Erik is interested in radicalism and radical thought in the nineteenth century, at the intersection of history and literature. His work has appeared in journals such as History of European Ideas and Nineteenth-Century Contexts. Grace Harvey  was recently awarded her PhD in English Literature from the University of Lincoln, and her doctoral research focused on the depictions and languages of family and friendship in 1790s radical fiction. Her literary research interests include late-eighteenth century fiction, the social and familial networks of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literary communities, and the scholarly efforts to recover the works of Robert Bage. Grace works at Nottingham Trent University as a Widening Access and Outreach Officer in the Centre for Student and Community Engagement. Eliza O’Brien  is an independent scholar who received her PhD from the University of Glasgow, and whose main research interests are the Godwin-­ Wollstonecraft circle and political fiction of the 1790s. Her work has appeared in journals such as Eighteenth-Century Fiction and NineteenthCentury Prose, and she is a contributor to Mary Wollstonecraft in Context (Cambridge 2020) edited by Nancy E. Johnson and Paul Keen, and The Cambridge Guide to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, 1660–1820, edited by April London (forthcoming). Avner Offer  is Chichele Professor Emeritus of Economic History at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of All Souls College and of the British Academy. He was raised in Israel and educated in Jerusalem and Oxford. He has written many books and articles about land tenure, the political economy of war, well-being and the quality of life, and the history of economic thought. His joint work (with Gabriel Söderberg), The Nobel Factor: The Prize in Economics, Social Democracy, and the Market Turn (Princeton, 2016), developed a new method of citation counting which is applied in this article as well.

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David  O’Shaughnessy is Associate Professor for Eighteenth-Century Studies at the School of English, Trinity College Dublin. He is the author of William Godwin and the Theatre (Pickering & Chatto, 2010), editor of The Plays of William Godwin (Pickering & Chatto, 2010), and co-editor of The Diary of William Godwin, 1788–1836 (Oxford Digital Library, 2010). Most recently, he is the editor of Ireland, Enlightenment and the English Stage, 1740–1820 (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and co-­ editor of The Letters of Oliver Goldsmith (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Mark Philp  is Professor of History at the University of Warwick and an Emeritus Fellow of Oriel College. He has written widely on the history of ideas, late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European history, and political realism and ethics in public life. Recent books include Reforming Ideas in Britain, (CUP, 2013) and Radical Conduct: Politics, Sociability and Equality in London 1789–1815 (CUP, 2020). Helen Stark  gained her doctorate from Newcastle University; she now works at University College London. She has written on Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Lord Byron. Her research interests include men of feeling, national identity, memorialisation, and commemoration. Ruby Tuke  has recently completed her PhD in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary University of London. Her thesis is entitled ‘From “Right” to “Gift”: Representations of Indebtedness between 1790 and 1834’ and examines the writings of William Godwin, Thomas Robert Malthus, William Wordsworth, and Thomas De Quincey. Beatrice  Turner gained her PhD at Newcastle University. Her first monograph is Romantic Childhood, Romantic Heirs: Reproduction and Retrospection 1820–1850 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). She has also written on William Godwin Jr’s novel Transfusion (1835) and most recently on David Bowie and the Romantic child archetype. She is broadly interested in Romantic inheritances and afterlives.

List of Figures

Godwin’s Popular Stories for the Nursery Fig. 1 Stylometric analysis of Godwin-Tabart corpus (Bootstrap Consensus Tree)

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An Illustrated Afterlife: William Godwin’s Essay on Sepulchres Fig. 1 Pencil drawing attributed to Henri Fuseli illustrating William Godwin’s Essay on Sepulchres (1809), page 16, 17.2 × 10.5 cm. Private collection. Digital image courtesy of the Paul Mellon Centre Photographic Archive (PA-F06077-0007) Fig. 2 Pencil drawing attributed to Henri Fuseli illustrating William Godwin’s Essay on Sepulchres (1809), page 17, 17.2 × 10.5 cm. Private collection. Digital image courtesy of the Paul Mellon Centre Photographic Archive (PA-F06077-0067)

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Godwin’s Citations, 1783–2005: Highest Renown at the Pinnacle of Disfavour Fig. 1 Godwin Citations, 1783–2005. Sources: (a) Pollin, Godwin Criticism; (b) JSTOR Fig. 2 Typical Diffusion Patterns, Cumulative and Current Flow. Source: Bjork, Offer, and Söderberg, ‘Time-Series Citation Data’, Fig. 1, p. 188 Fig. 3 Godwin citation trajectories, 1783–2000. Sources: (a) Pollin, Godwin Criticism; (b) JSTOR. Adjustment method: Bjork, Offer, and Söderberg, ‘Time-Series Citation Data’, passim. Note: The scattergram data are from Pollin and JSTOR as indicated. The

278 278

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List of Figures

trajectory curves are ‘Bass Curves’, as described in the text, and in Bjork, Offer, and Söderberg, ‘Time-Series Citation Data’, pp. 187-8; JSTOR-adjusted are JSTOR data adjusted for a constant overall size of the JSTOR citation sample 280 Fig. 4 Godwin Total, Negative and ‘Other’ Lifetime-plus Citations, 1783–1848. Source: Pollin, Godwin Criticism282

List of Tables

Godwin’s Citations, 1783–2005: Highest Renown at the Pinnacle of Disfavour Table 1 Godwin negative and other citations 284 Table 2 Godwin citations in Google Scholar (Short titles, including modern editions and individual essays by Godwin within collections)290

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Introduction to New Approaches to William Godwin: Forms, Fears, Futures Eliza O’Brien, Helen Stark, and Beatrice Turner

Scholars of Romanticism are intimately familiar with the set pieces—the over-cited quotes, the endlessly-rehearsed biographical incidents—that come to stand, in one way or another, for the authors whose texts they study, and which overdetermine their critical afterlives. The English philosopher and writer William Godwin (1756–1836) has been particularly susceptible to this fate. A prolific and wide-ranging thinker and author, Godwin’s works run the gamut from career-defining political treatise to anonymously authored children’s stories via the novel, biography, educational guide, history, drama, and almost every other literary form besides

E. O’Brien (*) Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK H. Stark University College London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] B. Turner University of Roehampton, London, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. O’Brien et al. (eds.), New Approaches to William Godwin, Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62912-0_1

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verse. Yet discussion of Godwin and his works frequently (and the present volume has not escaped this tendency) seem to defer to one of three such ‘set pieces’: his supporting role in the Godwin-Shelley family psychodrama, the Archbishop Fénelon thought-experiment of An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), familiar to all undergraduate philosophy students, and William Hazlitt’s memorializing description in 1825 of the still-living Godwin’s slide from a ‘sultry and unwholesome popularity’ to ‘doubtful immortality’.1 Hazlitt’s assessment of Godwin is so often repeated because it is an irresistible ironic foil for Godwin’s own desire for and anxiety about posthumous fame, and because it resonates more broadly with Romantic-era anxieties about individual posterity and the afterlife of texts. But it also uncannily reflects contemporary scholarly uncertainty about whether William Godwin’s time has finally come, and how we ought to approach a writer whose reputation must still be understood through that inaugurating pair of blockbusters, Political Justice and Things as They Are; Or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794). This collection originated in a one-day conference in Newcastle in 2017, which was convened by the editors out of a desire to see what critical responses to Godwin’s work might look like when he is considered as the central focus of those contexts in which we most frequently encounter him: to primarily consider, in other words, ‘Godwin’, rather than ‘Godwin and’. We had a sense that there was sufficient scholarly interest in Godwin as central rather than supporting actor to justify the event; we also had the sense that interest in Godwin was on the rise. Godwin scholars will also, perhaps, recognize these instincts, for interest in Godwin has for at least the last decade seemed to be on the rise, without ever quite managing to escape the event horizons of those works and events that have come to stand in for him. One of the underpinning questions that informs this collection is whether we should move wholly away from Godwin’s definitive works, to focus our attention on those texts of his that have to date received less critical attention. This is the approach taken in the recent special edition of the European Romantic Review, ‘New Directions in Godwin Studies’ (2019), which explicitly aims, ‘Rather than focusing on Godwin’s best-known works, […] [to] examine his letters, Fleetwood, Life of Chaucer, and Mandeville’.2 As the edition editor observes, Godwin’s complete body of work is both formally wide-ranging and ground-­ breaking, and the collection draws our attention in particular to the sheer spread of genres across which he worked, whilst reminding us of the central importance to Godwin of individual biography and public history in

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understanding socio-political structures. The remarkable special double issue of Nineteenth-Century Prose (2014) on William Godwin showcases this generic spread.  Essays  on law, oratory, religion, mass politics, the London Corresponding Society and the Spanish Enlightenment round off a substantial collection which also includes Political Justice, novels and history writing. A similar approach informs the only other book collection to date dedicated solely to Godwin, Godwinian Moments: From the Enlightenment to Romanticism (2011), which, with the exception of Robert Maniquis’ essay on the Calvinist ghosts haunting Caleb Williams and Political Justice, focuses on his Godwin’s (then) less-well known children’s literature and educational writing, drama, and life-writing. The ‘moments’ uncovered in that collection likewise illustrate Godwin’s interest in ‘both long durations of history and the punctuating moments of dire event’; or, to put it another way, both the objective, organizing survey and the personal, subjective view from within the crowd.3 This collection takes a slightly different approach. An instructive insight gained in bringing it together is that the set pieces, the notorious quotes, and the core texts remain stubbornly resistant to displacement, regardless of the critic’s intent to mine new material. Criticism cannot be undone, and in Godwin’s case, there is good reason to keep the origins of his early fame firmly in view. Rethinking and revising attitudes to the familiar is a vital part of scholarship. It is a practice which Godwin held to: his two best-known works, Political Justice and Caleb Williams, each went through a number of substantial revisions for later editions. The Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798) was revised in the face of intense public criticism, but Godwin mainly revised for himself, not for his critics. As Pamela Clemit has recently discussed, Godwin’s politics ‘were reformist and gradualist’ and this commitment depends upon constant enquiry, evident not only in his writings but in his approach to his own thoughts and ideas.4 Critics have observed that Godwin revises his ideas across as well as within texts: The Enquirer: Reflections On Education, Manners, And Literature (1797), for example, was intended as a practical corrective to what he saw, four years after the publication of Political Justice, as a ‘danger, if we are too exclusively anxious about consistency of system, that we may forget the perpetual attention we owe to experience, the pole-star of truth’.5 Several of the contributors to this collection engage with Godwin’s revisions; David Fallon’s chapter hinges upon the significance of his decision to alter the name of Falkland’s enforcer from Jones to Gines for the

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second edition of Caleb Williams, while Grace Harvey and Shawn Fraistat both consider revisions Godwin made to the second edition of Political Justice, and the ways in which his ultra-rationalist perspectives on family affections were softened and amended by 1796. Revision is an important practice in critical studies too: we need to periodically return to old ideas and old approaches, to gain a new perspective on familiar texts and to turn over new ground. David O’Shaughnessy’s chapter in this collection exemplifies this practice. In ‘Godwin, Ireland, and Historical Tragedy’ O’Shaughnessy returns to his earlier ideas on Godwin’s dramatic writing, and finds that the texts open up productively when a shift in critical focus—in this case, a greater awareness of Godwin’s interest in Irish politics—newly illuminates Godwin’s work for the stage, in his historical tragedy Abbas, King of Persia (1801). This approach feels right for a thinker who is never content to consider a subject closed. Thus the collection puts Godwin’s established works into dialogue with those which have received less attention, and into new critical frameworks whilst retaining an awareness that Godwin has always been defined, as Hazlitt saw, by a renown based on his major work of philosophy. They are situated within a broad range of Godwin’s works and thought, including his novels, children’s literature, plays, memoirs, and essays, but they also benefit from an intense awareness of the highly charged political atmosphere of their time of composition, as shown in the chapters authored by  Fallon and Mark Philp. Reflecting the polymath nature of Godwin’s thought the collection is interdisciplinary, featuring contributions from political science, philosophy, book history, and reception studies, as well as literary criticism. New methodologies have enabled new findings, too: M. O. Grenby’s chapter applies stylometrics, a method of using computational stylometry to quantitively assess literary style, to demonstrate that Godwin is likely the author of at least three previously unattributed publications. Helen Stark’s chapter, which investigates the illustrator of a copy of Essay on Sepulchres  (1809), combines a visual analysis interpretive approach with an investigation into the item’s acquisition history that both illuminates Godwin’s potential links with early nineteenth-century artists’ circles and offers a case study of the ways in which items enter circulation, and can be lost, found, attributed, and misattributed. The chapters in this collection have been enhanced by significant recent developments in publishing and in digital scholarship, such as the ongoing publication of The Letters of William Godwin (OUP, 2011-, two volumes to date of a planned six volumes), the launch of Godwin’s digitized Diary

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(2010) and the Shelley-Godwin digital archive (2013), which have transformed scholarly interest in and understanding of Godwin’s thought. Recent criticism on Godwin embodies the significance of these developments: a new biography of Godwin by Richard Gough Thomas offers an accessible and up-to-date account of his life, work, and influence; two chapters, by Pamela Clemit and Mark Philp respectively, in recent collections on Mary Wollstonecraft manage the difficult task of presenting a fresh perspective on Godwin to the seasoned scholar, while offering an excellent introduction to those new to his work.6 Tilottama Rajan’s editorial work on Mandeville builds upon her important scholarship on Godwin and narrative, and productively explores the interplay between history, politics, and trauma, stimulating further critical work on this fascinating novel (as demonstrated in this collection).7 Other developments have had a similarly beneficial effect upon our understanding of Godwin’s work, such as the recent critical turn towards the function of material culture. To take but two examples of this: Emma Peacocke’s essay ‘Puppets, Waxworks, and a Wooden Dramatis Personae: Eighteenth-Century Material Culture and Philosophical History in William Godwin’s Fleetwood’ examines how Godwin’s anchoring of Fleetwood in eighteenth-century culture via the use of puppetry and waxworks is a counterpoint to his ‘new man of feeling’ who decisively breaks with the conventions of this type. Tom Mole reads Essay on Sepulchres and its attempt to construct a national pantheon, ostensibly through the use of white wooden crosses as grave markers, alongside the commemorative culture of Britain in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in What the Victorians Made of Romanticism.8 A future publication of interest is Volume III of The Letters of William Godwin, covering the years 1806–1815 and edited by M. O. Grenby (forthcoming). This and the subsequent volumes of the Letters will help to direct attention towards Godwin’s underdiscussed works from later in his career, such as his final two novels and the substantial four-volume History of the Commonwealth of England (1824–28), and will surely stimulate a further wave of Godwin scholarship and reappraisal. The structure of this collection closely informs the individual chapters themselves. ‘Forms’, ‘Fears’, and ‘Futures’ were the panel topics which delegates were invited to address at our conference in June 2017; each chapter therefore responds to one of the three themes. Within the collection as a whole, the chapters engage productively with one another and with those themes. ‘Forms’ was chosen in order to consider Godwin’s extraordinary formal range, whether through his use of the historical

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tragedy genre to comment on contemporary Irish politics, or his developments in the field of children’s literature. ‘Fears’ is a theme that enables consideration of Godwin’s work in his own contemporary context—the political fears of the 1790s saturate his earlier publications—as well as his personal fears and anxieties. ‘Futures’ interrogates both Godwin’s own sense of the future in his writings, and the afterlife of his thought in the nineteenth century and beyond. Imagining the future is vital to the progressivism at the heart of Godwin’s political thought, and we hope the chapters in the collection as a whole will stimulate new scholarly work on this most absorbing of writers. Part one, Forms, highlights Godwin’s formal range, and the ways in which he uses genre to develop and iterate concepts, with chapters considering drama, the novel, and children’s literature. It begins with David O’Shaughnessy’s chapter ‘Godwin, Ireland, and Historical Tragedy’. O’Shaughnessy places Godwin’s historical tragedy Abbas in the context of the Act of Union (1801) of Britain and Ireland and connects Abbas with Godwin’s earlier political journalism of the 1780s, his civil-war novel Mandeville (1817), and his History of the Commonwealth (1824–28) to draw more robust lines of critical discussion through Godwin’s career as a whole. Grace Harvey’s chapter focuses on the forms of familial relationships in St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century (1799). In ‘“My son, once my friend”: Sanguinity, Sincerity, and Friendship in St. Leon’s Confessional Narrative’, Harvey traces the ways in which the titular protagonist’s attempts to conflate disinterested friendship with the partiality of blood relations ultimately destroy any possibility of a relationship with his son founded in sincerity. The chapter thus contributes to the body of scholarship on Godwin’s complex and changing conceptions of the family. Forms concludes with John-Erik Hansson’s investigation of how Godwin combined historical and novelistic approaches to challenge the conventions of children’s life-writing and produce biographies for children that reflect his political and educational commitments. ‘Through the Looking-­ Glasses: Godwin’s Biographies for Children’, places The Looking-Glass: A true history of the early years of an artist (1805) and the Life of Lady Jane Grey (1806), both published under the pseudonym of Theophilus Marcliffe, in the context of the Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798) and the Life of Chaucer (1803). Part two, Fears, brings political philosophy into dialogue with literary criticism, exploring a broad range of Godwin’s personal and philosophical concerns, from a resistance to gift-giving to a fear of violence. In ‘Candour,

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Courage and the Calculation of Consequences in Godwin’s 1790s’ Mark Philp offers a nuanced consideration of the ways in which Godwin modified his views on candour, exploring the political and personal reasons for these changes in relation to an important element of Godwin’s philosophy. In a chapter which similarly attends closely to Political Justice, Shawn Fraistat explores ‘Godwin’s Fear of the Private Affections’ and considers first, Godwin’s opposition to the conventionalities of domestic life and marriage, before moving to an examination of Godwin’s re-envisioning of personal relationships, reaching a more positive and sympathetic theorization of them. Ruby Tuke’s chapter, too, meditates on Godwin’s treatment of personal relationships, examining his critique of the structural inequalities underpinning charitable giving in Political Justice. In ‘Gifts, Giving, Gratitude: The Development of William Godwin’s Radical Critique of Charity in the 1790s’, Tuke develops a theory of Godwin’s intersubjective ‘gift theory’ which prefigures Pierre Bourdieu’s critical ambivalence towards the gift in the twentieth century. As Tuke shows, Godwin rejected the concept of gratitude, which some contemporaries then misinterpreted as support for private vice. David Fallon’s chapter, ‘Gines, Violence, and Fear in Things as They Are; Or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams’, closes this section with a detailed examination of the resonances of aristocratic violence within the novel. Focusing upon Falkland’s hired hand, the thief-­ taker Gines, and tracking the development of this character across Godwin’s many revisions of the text, Fallon shows how the novel registers Godwin’s fears in relation to the increasing populism and polarization of the public sphere. In part three, Futures, chapters engage with and reconceive Godwin’s legacy. In ‘Godwin’s Popular Stories for the Nursery’, M. O. Grenby uses stylometrics to demonstrate that Godwin was likely the author of several children’s titles, published in 1804/05 and previously unattributed. Grenby shows that Godwin wrote at least three titles in the ground-­ breaking series Popular Stories for the Nursery published by Benjamin Tabart—The Story of Griselda; History of Robin Hood; and Richard Coeur de Lion—entitling him to a previously unacknowledged place in the development of children’s historical fiction. Eliza O’Brien’s chapter, ‘Godwin and the Love of Fame’, explores Godwin’s fascination with ideas of reputation and renown. Taking as a starting point his positive use of fame in Political Justice to promote virtue, she examines how Godwin considers his personal desire for fame in his autobiographical writings, and the ways in which his novels investigate the more destructive side of the love of

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fame. As Tuke and O’Brien remind us, Godwin’s contemporaries both vilified and forgot him at the turn of the nineteenth century although his reputation improved again from 1812, as Clemit and Offer show. Helen Stark’s chapter, ‘An Illustrated Afterlife: William Godwin’s Essay on Sepulchres’, addresses the legacy of one text in Godwin’s lifetime. Stark investigates the afterlife of the 1809 Essay on Sepulchres through the lens of drawings made post-publication by an anonymous artist on one copy of Sepulchres. Stark’s close reading of the drawings and Sepulchres illuminates the latter by demonstrating how a Romantic-era artist responded to and inscribed Sepulchres. This reading is contextualized by her drawing out of Godwin’s place in a network of artists which includes both those he worked with and those who haunt the illustrated copy of Sepulchres through the artist’s allusions. Finally, in ‘Godwin’s Citations, 1783–2005: Highest Renown at the Pinnacle of Disfavour’ Pamela Clemit and Avner Offer present substantial analysis of Godwin’s citations. Clemit and Offer examine Godwin’s citations using two sources, one from the outset of his career to 1966, the other starting in 1900. Godwin’s peak of citation renown occurs later than might have been expected, in 1801, and is mostly negative at that point. Clemit and Offer show that Godwin’s reputation fell into several different periods, not just one. As they say, his flame never went out entirely, and in the past few decades it has begun to blaze once more. It is our hope that this collection will stoke that resurgence by providing new approaches to inspire the next generation of Godwin scholars.

Notes 1. William Hazlitt, The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt, ed. Duncan Wu, 9 vols (London: Pickering, 1998), VII: Liber Amoris; The Spirit of the Age, p. 87. 2. William D.  Brewer, ‘New Directions in Godwin Studies’, European Romantic Review, 30:4 (2019), 347–351 (p. 337). 3. Victoria Myers, ‘Introduction’, Godwinian Moments: From the Enlightenment to Romanticism, eds. Robert M.  Maniquis and Victoria Myers (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), pp. 3–22 (p. 4). 4. Pamela Clemit, ‘William Godwin’ in Mary Wollstonecraft in Context, eds. Nancy E. Jackson and Paul Keen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 173–81 (p. 175). 5. William Godwin, Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 7 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993), V:

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Educational and Literary Writings, ed. Pamela Clemit, p. 77. The transformations in Godwin’s thought, particularly following the death of Mary Wollstonecraft, are remarked upon by many Godwin scholars. See ‘Mary Shelley’s Beloved Lessons’ in Beatrice Turner, Romantic Childhood, Romantic Heirs: Reproduction and Retrospection, 1820–1850 (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 135–30; ‘Making Public Love’ in Julie A. Carlson, England’s First Family of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), pp. 23–65, and David Collings, ‘The Romance of the Impossible: William Godwin in the Empty Place of Reason’, ELH, 70 (2003), 847–874. 6. Richard Gough Thomas, William Godwin: A Political Life (Pluto, 2019). Pamela Clemit, ‘William Godwin’; Mark Philp ‘William Godwin’ in The Wollstonecraftian Mind, eds. S.  Berges, E.  Hunt  Botting, and A.  Coffee (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2019), pp. 211–23. 7. Tilottama Rajan, ‘Introduction’, Mandeville, by William Godwin (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2016), pp. 11–45. 8. Emma Peacocke, ‘Puppets, Waxworks, and a Wooden Dramatis Personae: Eighteenth-Century Material Culture and Philosophical History in William Godwin’s Fleetwood’ in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 31:1 (2018), 189–212. Tom Mole, What the Victorians Made of Romanticism: Material Artefacts, Cultural Practices and Reception History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).

Bibliography Brewer, William D., ‘New Directions in Godwin Studies’, European Romantic Review, 30:4 (2019), 347–351. Clemit, Pamela, ‘William Godwin’, Mary Wollstonecraft in Context, eds. Nancy E. Johnson and Paul Keen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 173–81. Godwin, William, Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 7 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993), V: Educational and Literary Writings (ed. Pamela Clemit). Hazlitt, William, The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt, ed. Duncan Wu, 9 vols (London: Pickering, 1998), VII: Liber Amoris; The Spirit of the Age. Myers, Victoria, ‘Introduction’, Godwinian Moments: From the Enlightenment to Romanticism, eds. Robert M.  Maniquis and Victoria Myers (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), pp. 3–22. Mole, Tom, What the Victorians Made of Romanticism: Material Artefacts, Cultural Practices and Reception History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).

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Peacocke, Emma, ‘Puppets, Waxworks, and a Wooden Dramatis Personae: Eighteenth-Century Material Culture and Philosophical History in William Godwin’s Fleetwood’ in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 31:1 (2018), 189–212. Philp, Mark, ‘William Godwin’ in The Wollstonecraftian Mind, eds. S.  Berges, E. Hunt-Botting, and A. Coffee (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), pp. 211–23. Rajan, Tilottama, ‘Introduction’, Mandeville, by William Godwin (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2016), pp. 11–45. Thomas, Richard Gough, William Godwin: A Political Life (Pluto, 2019). Weston, Rowland, ed., Special Issue on William Godwin, Nineteenth-Century Prose, 41:1/2 (2014).

PART I

Forms

Godwin, Ireland, and Historical Tragedy David O’Shaughnessy

Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote to his friend William Godwin on 17 December 1800 after reading about the ill-fated Antonio, his friend’s debut on the London stage. It was a much-needed fillip. Godwin’s domestic tragedy had been some three and a half years in gestation, and he had intended it to be the work that would elevate him to even greater heights of literary glory; however, it had been utterly condemned by the London audience after its first and only performance on Saturday, 13 December.1 After the appropriate commiserations, Coleridge went on to suggest: If your Interest in the Theatre is not ruined by the fate of this, your first piece, take heart, set instantly about a new one, and if you want a glowing Subject, take the death of Myrza, as related in the Holstein Ambassador’s Travels into Pe[r]sia […] There is Crowd, Character, Passion, Incident, & Pageantry in it—and the History is so little known, that you may take what Liberties you like without Danger.2

D. O’Shaughnessy (*) Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. O’Brien et al. (eds.), New Approaches to William Godwin, Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62912-0_2

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The advice was taken up by Godwin with enthusiasm. His diary tells us that he conceived his next play Abbas, King of Persia on 24 December, only two days after the revised version of Antonio was published.3 Godwin’s writing and research was focused and determined. He spent three weeks reading Orientalist literature and consulting previous or similar literary treatments of the story. His chief historical source—based on the number of days he spent reading it—was John Chardin’s Travels of Sir John Chardin into Persia and Ye East Indies Through the Black-Sea and the Country of Colchis (1686), and John Denham’s The Sophy (1642) was his primary literary source, a play he read on 10 January 1801. After this intensive bout of reading he began writing the play on 13 January and, managing on average a couple of pages a day, he completed his first draft on 23 February. The very next day he wrote to John Kemble asking him to read it but the manager of Drury Lane Theatre declined the honour, insisting that he only looked at plays once they had been vetted by Drury Lane’s own readers. Normally, of course, Thomas Holcroft would be the person Godwin would turn to for literary advice but he was still in quasi-exile in Germany. In need of some assistance, Godwin wrote to Coleridge on 17 March to ask for his comments. Due primarily to ill health, Coleridge did not get back to Godwin on until July but when he did he offered a detailed if somewhat discouraging response. Charles Lamb, who had spent a lot of time with Godwin in February, also contributed some comments and suggestions.4 Finally, in late August Godwin sent the manuscript to Thomas Harris, manager of Covent Garden Theatre. This also proved fruitless and Godwin was obliged to submit the tragedy to Kemble as a last gasp effort (although he attempted to maximize his chances by also sending it to Richard Brinsley Sheridan, his old acquaintance and Kemble’s boss).5 All to no avail: Abbas, King of Persia was neither performed nor published in Godwin’s lifetime.6 Nor has the play received much in the way of critical attention. Julie Carlson’s analysis of Godwin’s plays characterizes Godwin’s turn to the theatre after Wollstonecraft’s death as a means of broadcasting his rehabilitation as regards the domestic affections while also maintaining his critique of their incompatibility with political justice. Carlson sees Abbas, a play ‘pitting honour against commitment to family’, as being consistent with this general dramatic tendency in the wake of Wollstonecraft’s death in 1798.7 Zaheer Kazmi identifies the play as the only occasion that Godwin writes exclusively on a non-European context and thus important evidence that Godwin’s anarchism informed his perspective on

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international relations. Liberty, argues Kazmi, is central to the play and it is an idea of liberty that is culturally determined rather than related to race.8 My own analysis of the play laid emphasis on Godwin’s turn to visual spectacle, as per Coleridge’s mention of crowds and pageantry above, as a means to ensure commercial viability. Antonio had been damned for a variety of reasons but, as recorded by Lamb, it was the unfulfilled promise of a swordfight that finally provoked the audience to hissing when all that was delivered in the end was a philosophical reflection on duelling: ‘They could not applaud, for disappointment; they would not condemn, for morality’s sake’.9 Antonio was a bid, I argued, to reform the stage in line with Godwin’s political principles and his sceptical views on the volatility of crowds; Abbas was not an absolute capitulation to the demands of contemporary theatrical fashion but it was certainly a move in that direction as was evident from the opening scene which features ‘A procession of trophies and standards: Trumpets: Enter a herald, a crowd of suttlers &c, following’.10 Certainly, Godwin had moved considerably from the rather spare dramaturgical practice of Antonio which had eschewed the scenery, crowd scenes, and other visuals of contemporary theatrical success. Reading my analysis of the play now, it seems that the interpretation was rather narrowly conceived. The focus on Godwin’s intellectual and aesthetic development in the context of the dramatic genre still seems fair enough but more attention should have been placed on the political context of the play’s composition and on Godwin’s reading and acquaintance at that time. Given the emphasis put on conversation in Godwin’s political philosophy with regard to self-improvement—and he conceived of reading as a mode of conversation—the six-week period he spent in Ireland in the summer of 1800 and the implementation of the Act of Union with Ireland seems to me now to have played a bigger part than I then acknowledged. The ready availability of Godwin’s diary in online and searchable form now allows this richer context to be more fully developed. This chapter then will seek to flesh out that Irish context in order to develop, to use James Chandler’s phrase, an ‘elevation of perspective’ on Abbas, King of Persia.11 Such a move allows us to connect the tragedy with Godwin’s later novel Mandeville (1817). Ultimately, I argue that revisiting and thickening out my reading of the play has broader implications for our understanding of Godwin. Firstly, the writing of  Abbas is proof  that, despite Antonio’s failure, Godwin remained fully committed to the form of the five-act tragedy as a means to effect political justice. Secondly, the tragedy

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is strong evidence that Ireland and its relationship with Britain represents a crucial throughline of Godwin’s literary career from the 1780s to at least the 1820s. And an important corollary to this argument is that a proper contextualization of the play helps resist traditional divisions in Godwinian scholarship which still tends towards downplaying his political ambition in the wake of Wollstonecraft’s death. The newspapers of December 1800 had more to write about than William Godwin’s Antonio; or, The Soldier’s Return, his first staged tragedy: the pending Act of Union between Ireland and Britain was dominating public discourse.12 The passage of this piece of legislation—arguably on Pitt’s mind since the early 1780s—had been convoluted but there was still one thorny issue that had to be resolved: the Catholic question.13 Pitt had committed to Catholic emancipation under pressure from the Dublin administration and was in the process of galvanizing cabinet support for the measure in January 1801 when George III discovered his machinations. Angered by Pitt’s proposal and the manner in which he had gone about the business, relations between the pair deteriorated. The strength of George III’s feelings was sincere and he declared at an emotional and agitated 28 January levee to Henry Dundas, War Secretary, that he should consider any man his ‘personal enemy’ if he should propose the Catholic question to him.14 Tension ran high among cabinet members and Pitt failed to gain consensus for the measure, scuppered in particular by Lord Loughborough, the Lord Chancellor. On 31 January Pitt wrote to the king directly. In a powerful missive—which Camden called ‘a most masterly exposition’—Pitt laid out his arguments in an impassioned and careful manner. In sum, he explained to the king that emancipation was ‘highly advisable with a point to the tranquillity and improvement of Ireland, and to the general interest of the united kingdom’.15 For Pitt, the chief danger lay not in religious differences but matters of political ideology. He expostulated: A distinct political test point against the doctrines of modern Jacobinism would be a much more just and a more effectual security than that which now exists, which may operate to the exclusion of conscientious persons well affected to the state.16

The letter concluded with Pitt hinting at resignation but, if this was a bluff, George III called it. The king’s reply on 1 February was equally resolute and Pitt tendered his resignation on 3 February 1801. He had

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been in office as first lord of the Treasury since December 1783. The Times lamented a failure of British politics in terms that might still resonate today: It is impossible to hear of these changes, without expressing the deepest regret that the Question of CATHOLIC EMANCIPATION was not more fully discussed in his MAJESTY’S Councils, and the KING’S opinion ascertained beyond a scruple or a doubt, before any promise was given to the Catholics of Ireland. The very discussion of the subject cannot fail, under the present circumstances, to produce the most serious mischiefs.17

That even the discussion of the confessional divide seemed prohibited among conservative elements of the English political executive would have been deeply problematic to Godwin whose philosophical project put the frank exchange of ideas through conversation at its centre. Although no friend of Pitt, he was likely disheartened by this failure to move on from the Test & Corporation debates of 1788–1790. Moreover, Godwin had a considerable interest in Ireland. When he established his name as a political journalist in the 1780s, he mixed in circles with patriot Irishmen such as Sheridan and Dennis O’Bryen, Fox’s chief advisor, both significant figures in the Whig party whose Foxite wing was somewhat sympathetic to Ireland.18 Through the 1790s he made further Irish friends such as John Binns and John Fenwick.19 Tim Webb has written comprehensively on his six-week trip to Dublin and its environs in the summer of 1800—his only trip away from Britain over the course of his life—and Godwin’s concern with Ireland lingers in his subsequent writings and relationships subsequent to this visit.20 He would try and talk down Percy Bysshe Shelley from exciting the Irish into violent rebellion in 1812.21 Ireland also featured in his fiction: the eponymous Mandeville’s psyche is shaped by the traumatic violence of the 1641 Ulster Rebellion. Godwin dedicated the novel to one of his closest friends, the patriot lawyer John Philpott Curran with whom he became very intimate during the course of his Irish sojourn.22 His 1820 reply to Malthus, Of Population, declared that ‘The unhappy and beautiful country of Ireland has at all times been the victim of English ascendancy, and of the unsparing rigour of English despotism’ before lamenting ‘The barbarism and ignorance in which we plunged our sister island’.23 And Ireland figured large in his History of the Commonwealth of England (1824–28).24 Godwin’s visit to Ireland and his encounters with the patriot elite such as Curran, Lady Moira, Lady Mountcashel, Henry Grattan, and George Ponsonby, among others, only strengthened his

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conviction that Ireland had fared rather poorly under the British and the visit lingered long in his subsequent intellectual imagination. His reading, particularly while he was in the country between 2 July and 12 August, also shaped his political take on Ireland. He read reports of the trials of Archibald Hamilton Rowan, a founding member of the Dublin Society of United Irishmen (9 July), and United Irishman newspaper man Peter Finnerty (17 July; Percy Shelley was much exercised by Finnerty’s 1811 conviction for seditious libel in England). He also took an interest in the union debate: he read  pamphlets by anti-union Henry Grattan (16 July) and pro-union Lord Clare (18 July), as well as numerous works on the history of Ireland. Of particular interest is his concentrated reading of John Curry’s (1702/3–1780) key works towards the end of his stay in Ireland. A medical doctor by trade, Curry was an important political agitator against the penal laws in Ireland and a close friend of Charles O’Conor (1710–91), a leading figure of the Irish Catholic Enlightenment.25 On 22 July Godwin read Curry’s A brief account from the most authentic Protestant writers of the causes, motives, and mischiefs of the Irish rebellion, on the 23rd day of October 1641 (1747, 2nd ed., 1752); on 24–25 July he read Curry’s Historical Memoirs of the Irish rebellion in 1641 (1758); and on 26 July he read his Historical Review of the Civil Wars in Ireland (1786), prepared for posthumous publication by O’Conor. A central figure in the revisionist work carried out in the eighteenth century by Irish historians, Curry’s work was critical in making the case for the right of Irish Catholics to participate in the civic sphere and in challenging some of the more vituperative claims made about Catholic barbarity in the 1641 Ulster Rebellion, notably the claim that there was an attempt to exterminate all Protestants on the island.26 The post-1745 period—with the emergence of the Scots as the more dangerous Celtic bogeyman in the English imagination—had allowed writers such as Curry and O’Conor, make the case for Catholic loyalty and civility. In Historical Memoirs of the Irish Rebellion in the year 1641, an important Catholic refutation of the worst charges of savage violence, Curry writes that a review of Irish history reveals: the calamities of the nation invariably flowing from public mis-rule, barbarous manners, private interests, and the rage of parties. He [Curry] saw this rage far from being abated in those changes of religion, which set Europe in a flame, during two successive centuries. He discovered popular phrenzy, vague principles, and the lust of dominion, mingling early with our

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e­ cclesiastical contests; and that the christian doctrine, which fatally had so little influence before those contests began, had so much less after their commencement; that Protestants and Papists, Church-men and Puritans have not scrupled, on almost every occasion, to load their adversaries with odious crimes, and still more odious principles.27

The toxicity of religious fervour and politicized priestcraft was, of course, grist to Godwin’s mill as well—whether he agreed with Curry’s take on Irish history or not—and it is worth reminding ourselves at this point that he was motivated to write his first play, St Dunstan, in response to the debate over the Test and Corporation Acts, 1788–1790, a debate which encompassed much disagreement over the civility and loyalty of Dissenting Protestants.28 That play made clear the dangers of religious fanaticism to the individual and to the state and anticipates Godwin’s warnings about the dangers of crowds that got its best known airing in An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice.29 The emergence of another play on religious fanaticism in this context then seems more deliberate than previously acknowledged and we should be less willing to accept Godwin’s taking up of Coleridge’s suggested topic as simply a question of pragmatic pecuniary expediency. Indeed, bearing our desideratum of an ‘elevation of perspective’ in mind and granting Godwin that same capacity, we might be more encouraged to offer a comparative reading of Abbas with John Denham’s The Sophy, a play first performed with success a year after the Irish Rebellion in 1641, the event that was to cast a shadow over Anglo-Irish relations for decades— even centuries—to come. Indeed, the dramatic success of Denham was admired by the poet Edmund Waller in evocative terms: ‘[Denham] broke out like the Irish Rebellion, threescore thousand strong, when no body was aware, or in the least suspected it’.30 This is not to suggest the play was directly inspired by the rebellion but it does indicate the degree to which that bloody event suffused the literary culture in its wake.31 Given Godwin’s reading and deep historical interest in Ireland, it seems highly improbable that the resonance of The Sophy’s year of composition was lost on Godwin.32 A comparative reading of the two plays helps to draw out the changes that Godwin made for the particular context of the post-union period. But a brief plot synopsis of the play might be useful to the reader at this point. Abbas, King of Persia, has won a great victory over the Ottoman empire, his Sunni enemies, largely due to the martial prowess of his son,

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Sefi. However, a domestic rebellion forces an end to the Persian expansion. At home in Ispahan (an historical spelling of Isfahan, Iran), Abbas’s wife Irene, an English Christian, laments her incarceration in the king’s harem. Nonetheless, the trio are reunited in joy when the men return home until Sefi reveals that he received a letter inviting him to rebel against his father. Despite his robust and tearful denial that he would ever consider such action, this letter—and subsequent fawning from Ottoman diplomats—causes Abbas to suspect his son’s loyalty. Observing his monarch, the devious courtier Bulac exploits this paranoia until Abbas orders Sefi’s execution. Abbas is mournful after the fact and commands Bulac to execute his own son. There are two significant differences between Denham’s and Godwin’s versions of the oriental history to which we should pay attention. In Denham’s play, the Mirza, that is, the prince and son of Abbas (Sefi in Godwin’s play), is married to the beautiful Erythea. She is a passive figure who has little agency in the play, her most notable contribution is to foretell the blinding of her husband on his first return from war: Erythea

And ‘twas so lately in a dreadful dream I saw my Lord so near destruction, Deprived of his eyes, a wretched Captive; Then shriekt my self awake, then slept again And dream’t the same; my ill presaging fancy Suggesting still ‘twas true.33

Erythea, introducing their son (the titular Sophy and grandson of Abbas) at the end of the play, plays the part of the suffering wife and mother who functions merely as a vessel to sustain the line and as a foil to confirm the nobility of the Mirza, the intense purity of their marital love serving to heighten the pathos of his death. Her final line in the play, directed to her newly crowned son, ‘my prayers / Shall wait on all your actions’, (V.i.592–93) indicates her submissiveness to the patriarchy across three generations. In Godwin’s play, Sefi, insofar as we can tell—there are only three acts extant of the five-act tragedy—is unmarried.34 Abbas, on the other hand, is married to Irene, an English Christian and a character utterly devoid of foundation in historical sources. It seems Godwin was taking Coleridge’s invitation to play around with history very much to heart by transferring the play’s marital relationship up one generation. But to what end?

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On one level, Godwin’s Irene, whom he imagined as modelled on King John’s Constance, was an explicit signal of his debt to Samuel Johnson’s 1749 tragedy of the same name.35 The tragic heroine of Irene is a Greek Christian slave with whom Mahomet, after taking Constantinople in 1453, becomes infatuated. However, his desire corrupts his ability to govern and his kingdom begins to crumble. Under pressure from his courtiers from accusations of being distracted from governance, the historical Mahomet beheaded her violently in front of them—a sort of fifteenth-­ century Keyser Soze who showed these men of will what will really was. In Johnson’s version, Irene is strangled after refusing to recant her Christianity.36 In Abbas, Irene is less of a victim. This is, as I have previously argued, typical of Godwin’s plays where strong women often figure.37 And there is more than a hint of biographical psycho-drama at play when we consider the persistent trope of a male character intellectually and morally critiqued by a strong female character in his works. But additional possibilities come into focus when we consider the context of the Act of Union. Irene complains: Irene

How wretched is my cloistered, prisoner state! I am as much closed off from all the world, As if my dwelling were a ragged rock, Amidst the Indian billows. (I.ii.23–26)

While formerly she had much influence with Abbas, now she confesses, ‘My power with Abbas is not what it has been. / These features boast no more that radiant beauty, / To which his soul was captive’ (II.i.58–60). The English Georgian values that she represents and voices, as a sort of super-ego Britannia figure, have lost their lustre to Abbas. As Emma Major has argued, this was a time when ‘Enlightenment historians developed conjectural histories that placed women at the centre of civilisation’.38 By introducing the character of Irene into the story of Abbas and aligning her with him rather than the next-generation Sefi, Godwin offers a metaphorical depiction of imperial power where the original improving and civilizing virtues of empire—or at least, those ostensible virtues of empire—become faded as empire’s inherent tendency to tyranny, domination, and subjugation take hold. Abbas, by isolating himself from Irene, and the ideals she represents, leaves himself prey to the paranoia and megalomania that destroys his family and his kingdom. Irene herself confesses a degree of

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self-awareness of the path she has gone down, acknowledging the inevitability of severe entropic consequences—demonstrated throughout history—of the glittering allure of empire: Irene

’Tis done: the thing I fear’d is come upon me. I knew what was an Eastern court, and what A harem: I knew that all I lov’d hung on A whisper, and a hair. Some busy fool, Some meddling parasite, has mark’d a breeze, And swell’d it to a whirlwind. (III.iii.25–30)

To follow this metaphor through then, Britain, after the trial of Warren Hastings in the 1780s and 1790s and the subjugation of Ireland through union, is no longer true to its putative improving colonial mission but is explicitly tyrannizing its colonies. English writers and politicians tended to use parent-child metaphors when it came to describing the relationship between Britain and Ireland—Prime Minister William Pitt on 23 January 1799, for instance, described Irish independence, as a ‘childish measure’.39 The discord between Abbas and his son is all on one side as Sefi is absolutely loyal to and admiring of his father. This is not to suggest that Godwin is presenting a straightforward political allegory in the play but rather that the tragedy is demonstrably suffused with anxieties about the corruption of British moral and political authority as represented in the schism between Abbas and Irene. Formerly, the pair had represented a unified ruling force with Abbas’s aggressive tendencies softened by the virtuous Irene, but now, Abbas was unchecked, violent, and bereft of dispassionate reason. The shift in focus given by the respective titles in Denham and Godwin’s dramatizations of the story (from heir in Denham’s The Sophy to monarch in Godwin’s Abbas, King of Persia) also indicates the change in tone from catharsis and hope for the future to melancholy stasis. Abbas ends Godwin’s play with an act of collective violence by poisoning a number of his lords, perhaps giving us some sense of Godwin’s despair at the moral state of the British polity in the wake of the forced imposition of union with Ireland and the rupture between the civilizing benevolent moral of empire with its violent and disruptive tendency.40 Of course, we should be careful not to overegg the argument. While the play was shaped by events in Ireland, Godwin’s writing was always more widely interested in questions of paternal/monarchical authority, a

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key concept for a Whiggish thinkers since Algernon Sidney, and a trope that we can trace in Godwin’s literary writings to at least St Dunstan and Caleb Williams.41 He was also long interested in questions of epistemological or pedagogical dominance.42 Moreover, as I have also previously suggested, the poor relations between George III and the Prince of Wales probably feeds into the Abbas-Mirza dynamic.43 Yet it does seem difficult to ignore the Irish perspective, particularly when we look at the question of religion, a second substantive difference between Godwin’s play and that of Denham. Denham’s play which opens with two loyal courtiers discussing the Turkish threat to Persia. Their conversation is measured, private, and turns on the bold military character of the Mirza. The Turkish invasion is presented here and throughout the play in secular terms; indeed, the issue of religion is not found in the play. Abbas, on the other hand, relegates the equivalent scene to the second of the play and opens its action rather differently. ‘Commence with an account of a battle’ scribbled Godwin in a note sketching out the direction of the play.44 Godwin’s first scene sees a herald announce the litany of imperial successes of Abbas, successes that are justified, driven, and measured in sectarian terms: Herald

Cursed be Omar! Be it known to all my faithful and wellbeloved vassals and servants; I have carried my arms to the heart of Arabia, and the shores of the Red Sea; I have purified the holy city of Medina, and purged the sepulchre of the prophet; I have taken away from before him the remembrances of Abubeker and Omar and given their ashes to the winds: whosoever henceforth shall undertake the holy pilgrimage, shall no longer have his devotions insulted with the memorials of those persecutors and assassins of this consecrated race: long live our most mighty sultan, Shah Abbas the Great! (I.i.4–14)

The bile of sectarianism fuels the violence, suspicion, and duplicity in Abbas. Godwin, long an enemy of priestcraft, places religion at the very heart of the play’s depiction of failed human relations. Such is the strain imposed and the suspicions raised by religious discord that the atmosphere of paranoia and vitriol is inescapable. Abbas’s violent exchange of invective with the Turkish ambassadors is religious in nature (‘Why has your ignorant, sacreligious sect / Cast shame and hatred on the blood of Mahomet’ (II.iii.30–31)) and it is telling that it is immediately subsequent to this

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scene that Bulac, the corrupting Iago-figure, is able to win his confidence and turn Abbas against his son: sectarian hatred diminishes both the capacity for reason and familial ties. The Turkish ambassador had previously let fly: ‘Your upstart sect pays hollow service to / Our prophet, while with contumelious scorn / You trample on the sequence of caliphs’ (II. iii.22–24), echoing the venom of an exchange between two ordinary citizens and illustrating how such hate pervades all levels of the society: 1st mob But, neighbour, what puzzles me most is that these cursed turks should chuse with their eyes open, to go thus head foremost to the devil. Does not everybody know, that whoever believes in Omar can never come to heaven? 3rd mob To be sure they do. For my share I never heard any body say otherwise: My mother and my nurse, and my Uncle Osmyn, and my grandfather Solyman, all told me so, and taught me, God bless them! before I could speak plain, to say ten times a day, Cursed be Omar! (I.i.25–34) For the first time in his dramas, Godwin places a ‘mob’ on stage. Doubtless, this was partly due to his new dramaturgical sensitivity to pageantry and spectacle but it is also a suggestive indication of Godwin’s perception that religious discord had strengthened from when he wrote St Dunstan, a play where the mob are kept safely offstage. Given the extent to which Godwin put religious strife front and centre in his rewriting of Denham’s very secular account of the same events, it is difficult not to see the influence of Catholic and Protestant tensions in the wake of the 1798 Rebellion and the 1801 Act of Union. For Shia and Sunni Muslims in the play, we can all too easily read Catholic and Protestant discord. After the 1798 Irish Rebellion, tropes and representations of savage Catholics, which had lain dormant—at least to a degree—in the British imagination since the mideighteenth century re-emerged.45 The savage Irishman once again troubled the English imagination. In William Godwin and the Theatre, I argued that literary critics needed to pay greater attention to the plays Godwin wrote in close synchronicity to his novels in order to better understand Caleb Williams, St. Leon, and Fleetwood. Now that we have sketched out a more detailed context for Abbas, one that pays proper attention to its Irish roots, we should also think through that play’s relationship with Mandeville, the novel with an explicitly Irish connection. While the thematic connection is now more

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tangible, we can also observe that form also unites the two texts as they both ‘commence with a battle’: in Mandeville’s opening description of the Ulster Rebellion of 1641, then, we see another specific example of Godwin’s engagement with the five-act tragic form informing his novelistic work. The bloody Ulster Rebellion of 1641 began with a wave of violence in October that year which was to haunt not only the Protestant settler community of that province but the English imagination more generally right through the eighteenth century. A considerable factor in the propagation of the Catholic bogeyman was the lurid account given in John Temple’s History of the Irish Rebellion (1646) which promised on its title-page to detail ‘the barbarous cruelties and bloody massacres which ensued thereupon’. As Joep Leerssen has observed, Temple’s book was a vituperative affirmation of Irish barbarism to its readership.46 It was a book which was republished during the Popish Plot of 1678–1681, and again in subsequent times of political stress in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries (e.g. 1698, 1716, 1746, 1812). Temple’s account heavily influenced David Hume whose History of England (1754–67) provoked outrage among Irish historians such as Charles O’Conor and John Curry— whom Godwin was reading while in Ireland and meeting with patriot figures such as Curran. A full discussion of this complex debate is beyond us here: let us simply note that the events of the Ulster Rebellion were sorely contested throughout the eighteenth and into the nineteenth centuries by writers on both side of the religious divide.47 As one might imagine, the colourful reporting of the 1798 Rebellion in the British press breathed fresh life into ideas of Irish savagery that had been, in Kevin Whelan’s memorable phrase, ‘frozen in the formaldehyde of seventeenth-century antagonisms’.48 Strikingly, Godwin begins his Irish novel with Mandeville’s graphic account of what happened to his parents: The skein, or Irish dagger, was an ever-ready instrument; and an uneducated and hot-blooded kern found no difficulty in consummating his invectives and his rage with a mortal wound. The first drop of blood that was shed seemed to be the signal for every kind of barbarity. Murder, when it had once unfurled its standard, did not satiate its impulse with one, but with hundreds of victims. Boys of seven and eight years of age, children at the breast, women far advanced in their pregnancy, seemed often to be made the preferred objects of destruction. He that has once dipped his hands in

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blood, appears to have no more obvious way of stifling the whispers of remorse, than by wading deeper and more deep in pitiless cruelty. Presently the dagger was found too slow and powerless an instrument, to gratify the barbarity that wantoned round. Drowning was a commodious means for wholesale destruction, and was resorted to on multiplied occasions.49

This language explicitly echoes that of the Temple and Hume tradition and thus shows Godwin’s determination to engage directly with the politics of historiography.50 Godwin is also clear that the vitriol of religious mania, encouraged by priestcraft, is the root cause of the violence. The terms Mandeville uses evoke the Islamic schism detailed in Abbas, particularly the play’s opening scene: The Catholic priests, who had been the principal instigators of the insurrection, sedulously taught their hearers, that a Protestant was a sort of being whose neighbourhood was pestilential to the true votaries of the cross, and that, wherever he dwelt, he brought down the displeasure and curse of the Almighty upon the country in which he was harboured.51

Our awareness of Godwin’s reading of Irish history allows us to challenge Tilottama Rajan’s sophisticated reading of the novel, specifically, her argument that the novel pushes general history to the background and proffers an individual psychic history in the foreground thus ‘drawing back both from world history and the particular version of “general history” practised in his own History of the Commonwealth’.52 Rather, Godwin’s novel, particularly its opening, conflates the general and individual histories that he had earlier theorized as being distinct in ‘Of History and Romance’. Informed now both by his reading of Curry and his experience of visiting Ireland, Godwin created a narrator who embodies the sectarian-driven discourse of conflict that had, over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, generated the ‘general history’ in Irish historiography. We can turn back to Temple’s Irish Rebellion to mark how this occurred. This urtext  of ‘Enlightened’ Protestant accounts of Irish history draws heavily on the depositions made by witnesses of the events of 1641 which he is careful to underline in his preface: The persons examined were of severall conditions, most of them British, some of Irish birth and extraction, very many of good quality, and such as were of inferiour rank were not rejected if they were known sufferers, and came freely in to declare what they could speak of their owne knowledge.

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Few came but such as had been in the hands of the Rebels, and could with sorrowfull hearts make the sad relation of their own miseries. And so they having been eye-witnesses, their depositions are for the most part out of their own knowledge, and what is given in by them upon hear-say, they for the most part depose, that they received it out of the Rebels own mouthes while they were in restraint among them.53

By the time we come to Hume in the mid-century, an anti-Catholic historiographical tradition had come to accept these accounts uncritically and these individual depositions had evolved into a general history scorched onto the English pysche.54 The opening of Mandeville, thus contextualized, is a vivid reflection on how the individual narrative evolves into a general historical ‘truth’, an account that would have been ruefully acknowledged by the implied reader of the book’s dedication. Godwin is at pains to underline this process as he describes the ghostly apparitions that haunt the imaginations of the perpetrators of the novel’s opening horrors. These accounts are found in Temple’s History but also in John Ferriar’s An Essay Towards a Theory of Apparitions (1813) which Godwin read on 16 April 1816, just a month before he began writing Mandeville. Ferriar cites some of the 1641 depositions towards the close of his essay and marks them as delusions: ‘When the mind is loaded with a sense of insupportable guilt, partial insanity is at hand; and warning, or reproaching voices distract the feeling of the sufferer’.55 Ferriar sums up the purpose of his essay in the final paragraph, one which must have caught Godwin’s notice: ‘Lastly, by the key which I have furnished, the reader of history is released from the embarrassment of rejecting evidence, in some of the plainest narratives, or of experiencing uneasy doubts, when the solution might be rendered perfectly simple’.56 For Ferriar then, fantastical some of the depositions regarding 1641 may have been but their essential truth can be accepted; however, Godwin’s vivid reimagination of a deposition in the voice of Mandeville exposes the troubling circularity and mutual reliance of individual and general history, rather than pushing one into the foreground and the other to the background as Rajan suggests. For an individual as troubled as Mandeville seems a shaky foundation for historical truth, a truth that had been bitterly contested—and one with marked political consequences—across Britain and Ireland for almost two centuries.57 There are some broader implications of this recontextualizing of Abbas. Firstly, my earlier reading of the play which emphasized more his

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engagement with stage spectacle rather than the political context within which he was writing does Godwin a disservice. I maintain the claim that he did try to make this drama at least a little bit more palatable to the London theatre managers and audiences—correspondence with Coleridge supports this—but I fear that I downplayed the extent of his political ambition and his dogged persistence in pursuit of political justice.58 Secondly, Godwin maintained his sense of the importance of the form of the five-act historical dramatic tragedy for serious intellectual and political engagement, whatever we might make of his execution. Abbas, King of Persia operates as a prelude of sorts to Mandeville as well as to Fleetwood— teasing out the connection to the later novel in terms of form as well as thematically illustrates better its political ambition. Godwin, like many inhabitants of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century republic of letters, found a certain dignity and loftiness of purpose in the form that helped him elevate discussion above the frenzy of political vitriol, particularly when infected by religious distrust or indeed hatred. His debt to Samuel Johnson, who also remained unaccountably—for modern critics at least— fond of Irene, reminds us that many eighteenth-century writers idealized the historical tragedy as a form that would gain them literary fame as well as intellectual credibility.59 Thirdly, Abbas, King of Persia—little known even among Godwin scholars—can help us draw a throughline in Godwin’s political thought. Ireland did not simply feature in his subsequent writings as a result of the 1800 visit: Ireland and its relationship with Britain played a significant part in Godwin’s writing from the very beginning of his professional career as an author. In a 1786 letter ‘To the People of Ireland’, written under his Mucius pseudonym and published in the Political Herald and Review, he advised the Irish people to avoid union with Britain using an image that, as Rajan has noted, he recycled in Mandeville: Perhaps there could appear to the eye of the philosopher few objects more calamitous or more unnatural, than the union of two countries circumstanced as I have described. It is like that refined piece of cruelty, scarcely to be named by the tongue, or indured by the recollection of humanity, of tying a living body to a dead one, and causing them to putrify and perish together. All your efforts and your conceptions are to be crushed in the bud. You are to be hurried at once from the feebleness of infancy to the inanition of old age.60

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We know then that even before he developed an intimacy with John Philpott Curran and made that important trip to Ireland, Godwin was well versed in Ireland’s woes and critical of the imperial machinery brought to bear on the country. His treatment of Ireland and its political issues provides a near constant through almost his entire publishing life and is therefore a useful way to map the evolution of his thinking on power, justice, and responsibility. Finally, an emphasis on Abbas, King of Persia helps us to complicate and perhaps resist the typical divisions marked in Godwin scholarship whereby he falls asunder after the death of Wollstonecraft. Godwin’s public vilification after the publication of his Memoirs is often considered a Godwinian moment when he is thought to shift from brilliant and imaginative radical thinker to downtrodden and financially pressured hack who, for Charles Lamb and others, was henpecked out of sociability. The clunky divisions chalked out by A.E.  Rodway may not be as rigid as they once were in Godwin studies but there are still residual lines lingering.61 Doubtless there were substantial changes in Godwin’s circumstances and ambitions but perhaps their impact on the consistency of his political principles and interests have been overstated. There is no doubting the failure of Abbas but this commercial failure should not lessen our sense of Godwin’s interest in using the historical tragic form and its performance in theatres to effect societal change. Picking up threads such as his views on Ireland and on imperial policy as they are weaved through less considered works like Abbas, King of Persia and connecting them with more established texts such as Mandeville, allows us to draw more robust lines of critical discussion through Godwin’s career and map his intellectual evolution holistically and with greater nuance.

Notes 1. The performance was immortalized in Charles Lamb’s hilarious account, ‘The Old Actors’ [1822] in The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E.V. Lucas, 7 vols (London: Methuen & Co., 1903–5), II, pp. 291–94. For a full account of the composition and reception of Antonio, see The Plays of William Godwin, ed. David O’Shaughnessy (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2010), pp. xxiv–xxx. 2. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 6 vols, ed. E.  Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71), I, p. 870.

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3. ‘Invent Mirza’, 24 December 1800. The Diary of William Godwin, ed. Victoria Myers, David O’Shaughnessy, and Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford Digital Library, 2010). http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk [accessed 10 April 2018]. 4. Their comments and annotations are detailed in The Plays of William Godwin, ed. O’Shaughnessy. 5. See both letters in The Letters of William Godwin Volume II: 1798–1805, ed. by Pamela Clemit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 232–34. 6. For a fuller account of the play’s composition and Godwin’s efforts to have it performed, see O’Shaughnessy, Plays of William Godwin, pp. xxx–xxxv. 7. Julie Carlson, ‘Heavy Drama’ in Godwinian Moments: From the Enlightenment to Romanticism, ed. by Robert M. Maniquis and Victoria Myers (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), pp. 217–38 (p. 224). 8. Zaheer Kazmi, Polite Anarchy in International Relations Theory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 164–69. 9. ‘The Old Actors’, pp. 329–30. 10. O’Shaughnessy, Plays of William Godwin, pp. 117–32. 11. James Chandler, ‘A Discipline in Shifting Perspective: Why we need Irish Studies’, Field Day Review 2 (2006), 19–39 (p. 21). 12. A search for ‘Ireland’ produces 651 hits in newspapers in December 1800 compared to 377 times in December 1799. Seventeenth- and Eighteenthcentury Burney Newspapers Collection [accessed 12 April 2018]. 13. For a brief and recent account of the passing of the Act of Union, see Thomas Bartlett, Ireland: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp.  206–40. For a more detailed account, see Patrick M. Geoghegan, The Irish Act of Union: A Study in High Politics 1798–1801 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999) and The Irish Act of Union, 1800 Bicentennial Essays, ed. by Michael Brown, Patrick M.  Geoghegan, and James Kelly (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2003). 14. Cited in Geoghegan, Irish Act of Union, p. 159. 15. Geoghegan, Irish Act of Union, p. 163. 16. Cited in Geoghegan, Irish Act of Union, p. 164. 17. The Times, 10 February 1801. 18. Martyn Powell, ‘Charles James Fox and Ireland’, Irish Historical Studies 33:130 (2002), 169–90. Dennis O’Bryen (1755–1832) was election agent, press manager, and advisor to Charles James Fox from the mid-1780s. 19. John Binns (1772–1860) was a member of the London Corresponding Society and the United Englishmen which brought English radicalism and Irish revolutionaries into contact. He was charged with high treason for his association with Arthur O’Connor. John Fenwick (d. 1823) carried a copy

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of An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice to Paris on its publication. He may have been a member of the Philomaths, an exclusive club to which Godwin belonged in the mid-1790s. 20. Timothy Webb, ‘William Godwin’s Irish Expedition’ in Reinterpreting Robert Emmet, ed. by Anne Dolan, Patrick M.  Geoghegan, and Darryl Jones (Dublin: UCD Press, 2007), pp. 105–37. 21. On the epistolary tensions between Godwin and Shelley during Shelley’s trip to Dublin, see David O’Shaughnessy, ‘Godwin, Shelley, and the “free communication of intellect”’, Bodleian Library Record 25:1 (2012), 61–69. On Shelley in Ireland more generally, see Paul O’Brien, Shelley and Revolutionary Ireland (London: Bookmarks, 2002). 22. Godwin first met Curran when he called to see him with John Fenwick on 3 October 1799. They became very close and they met over 450 times up to Curran’s death in 1817. Godwin wrote an obituary for his friend and described him as ‘almost the last of that brilliant phalanx, the contemporaries and fellow-labourers of Mr. Fox, in the cause of general liberty’. Morning Chronicle, 17 October 1817. 23. William Godwin, Of Population (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1820), p. 387. 24. See the introduction and appendices to Mandeville, ed. Tillotama Rajan (Ontario: Broadview, 2015) and Porscha Fermanis, ‘William Godwin’s “History of the Commonwealth” and the Psychology of Individual History’, Review of English Studies 61:252 (2010), 773–800 (pp. 794–98). 25. See Charles O’Conor of Ballinagare, ed. by Luke Gibbons and Kieran O’Conor (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2015). 26. On John Curry see Clare O’Halloran, Golden Ages and Barbarous Nations: Antiquarian Debate and Cultural Politics in Ireland, c.1750–1800 (Cork and South Bend, Indiana: Cork University Press and University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), passim, esp. pp. 144–49. 27. John Curry, Historical Memoirs of the Irish Rebellion, in the year 1641, 4th edn (London: Printed for J. Williams and T. Lewis, [1770?]), pp. v–vi. 28. See David O’Shaughnessy, ‘“This is the dread hour, / That must decide the fate of England”: Godwin’s St Dunstan’, in Godwinian Moments, pp. 194–216. 29. ‘The conviviality of a feast may led to the depredations of a riot. While 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’. William Godwin, Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, 7 vols, gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993), III: An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. Mark Philp, p. 118.

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30. The Poetical Works of Sir John Denham, ed. Theodore Howard Banks, 2nd edn ([Hamden, Conn.]: Archon Books and Yale University Press, 1969), p. 6. 31. It was also perhaps a sly dig at Denham who was born in Dublin, although Gerard Langbaine was to assert reassuringly in his English Dramatic Poets (1691) that Denham was removed from Ireland to England ‘before the Foggy Air of that Climate, could influence, or any way adulterate his Mind’. Cited in Poetical Works of Denham, p. 3. 32. One might, of course, speculate as to whether Coleridge had also been thinking of Ireland when he made his suggestion. On Coleridge and the Act of Union, see Stuart Andrews, ‘Coleridge, Gladstone, and the Irish Catholics’, The Coleridge Bulletin 32 (2008), 25–31. 33. The Sophy (I.iii.150–56) in Poetical Works of Denham. 34. Godwin did leave a synopsis of the remaining three acts so we have a fair sense of how his drama would have played out. Plays of William Godwin, ed. by O’Shaughnessy, Appendix 3. 35. ‘Irene is my Constance, possessing, like Constance in K. John, two scenes of intolerable distress’. Bodleian Library, Oxford. Abinger MSS, c.33 f.36v. Godwin’s manuscript notes on the composition of Abbas are available online here: http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/dept/scwmss/wmss/ online/1500-­1900/abinger/abinger.html#abinger.A.5.1. Johnson’s play, like Godwin’s, has had a mixed reception. Thanks to the efforts of Johnson’s old pupil, David Garrick, the play had nine performances in February 1749 and made the author £300. But biographer W. Jackson Bate writes that when reading the play’s stiff neo-classical language ‘the heart begins after a while to sink except in the most resolute Johnsonian, and sometimes even then’. W. Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), p. 264. 36. Garrick, in fact, convinced Johnson that Irene should be killed on stage but there was such an uproar and cries of ‘murder’ from the audience when this occurred, that she had to take herself offstage to be killed. This also happened to Godwin with the death of Elvira in Antonio when, as Lamb records, the audience were so outraged that they ‘would have torn the unfortunate author to pieces’. Lamb, ‘The Old Actors’, p. 293. 37. David  O’Shaughnessy, William  Godwin and the Theatre (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010), p. 123. 38. Emma Major, Madame Britannia: Women, Church, and Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 1. 39. The Speeches of the Right Honourable William Pitt, 2nd edn, 3 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1817), III, p. 25. 40. The distinction between ‘moral’ and ‘tendency’ was an important one for Godwin and had particular resonance for the theatre. See his theoretical

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reflection in ‘Of Choice in Reading’ in The Enquirer in William Godwin, Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, 7 vols, gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993), V: Educational and Literary Writings, ed. Pamela Clemit and O’Shaughnessy, William Godwin and the Theatre, pp. 17–30. 41. Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government [1698], ed. Thomas G. West (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1996). 42. See the essays in The Enquirer, esp. ‘Of an Early Taste for Reading’, ‘Of the Study of the Classics’, ‘Of Knowledge’, ‘Of Reasoning and Contention’, and ‘Of Choice in Reading’. 43. O’Shaughnessy, William Godwin and the Theatre, pp. 127–28. 44. Oxford, Bodleian Library. MS Abinger, c. 33, ff. 31–42. 45. One can see this develop clearly in political caricature in the work of Gillray and Rowlandson, for instance. See L. Perry Curtis, Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature, rev. edn (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2007), p. 30. 46. Joep Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fíor-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, its Development and Literary Expression Prior to the Nineteenth Century (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996), pp. 58–60. 47. For the most illuminating discussion of revisionist eighteenth-century Irish historiography, see Clare O’Halloran, Golden Ages and Barbarous Nations. See also David Berman, ‘David Hume on the 1641 Irish Rebellion in Ireland’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 65:258 (1976), 101–112. 48. Kevin Whelan, '‘98 after ‘98: The Politics of Memory’ in The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism, and the Construction of Irish Identity, 1760–1830 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1998), 133–175 (p. 138). 49. William Godwin, Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 8 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1992), VI: Mandeville (ed. Pamela Clemit) p. 17. All subsequent quotations are taken from this edition. 50. There is also the tantalizing possibility that Godwin is echoing Edmund Burke’s infamous speech in December 1792 when he theatrically produced a dagger and flung it to the ground as he warned the House of Commons of these weapons being produced for use in Britain by French assassins. 51. Mandeville, 16. 52. Tillotama Rajan, ‘War, Trauma, and the Historical Novel in Godwin’s Mandeville’ in Godwinian Moments, 172–93 (p. 176). 53. John Temple, The Irish Rebellion; or, An History of the Beginnings and first Progress of the Generall Rebellion raised within the Kingdom of Ireland… (London: Printed for R. White for Samuel Gellibrand, 1646), preface. 54. The 1641 Depositions, held at Trinity College Dublin, have been digitized and are available here: http://1641.tcd.ie.

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55. John Ferriar, An Essay Towards a Theory of Apparitions (London: Cadell and Davies, 1813), p. 131. 56. Ibid. p. 139. 57. In his History of the Commonwealth of England, Godwin synthesized both sides of the arguments by defending Irish civility to some degree but also underlining Irish Catholic superstition, submission to priests, and their experience of colonial violence to explain their ‘bloodshed and cruelty’. History of the Commonwealth of England, 4 vols (London: printed for Henry Colburn, 1824), I, p. 237. 58. See his letter to Coleridge, 13 July 1801 in The Letters of William Godwin, 6 vols, ed. Pamela Clemit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011–), II, p. 225. 59. Writers such as Joseph Addison, Henry Brooke, Elizabeth Griffith, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, to give just a few examples. 60. ‘To the People of Ireland’ in William Godwin, Uncollected Writings (1785–1822), ed. Jack W. Marken and Burton R. Pollin (Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1968), 57. Compare to Mandeville, p. 141. See Rajan’s (ed), Mandeville, pp. 35–36. 61. A.  E. Rodway, Godwin in the Age of Transition (London: G.G.  Harrap, 1952), p. 39, cited in Carlson, ‘Heavy Drama’.

Bibliography Primary Sources Oxford, Bodleian Library. MS Abinger, c. 33, ff. 31–42.

Secondary Sources Andrews, Stuart, ‘Coleridge, Gladstone, and the Irish Catholics’, The Coleridge Bulletin 32 (2008), 25–31. Bate, W.  Jackson, Samuel Johnson (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975). Berman, David, ‘David Hume on the 1641 Irish rebellion in Ireland’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 65:258 (1976). Carlson, Julie M., ‘Heavy Drama’ in Godwinian Moments: From the Enlightenment to Romanticism, ed. Robert M.  Maniquis and Victoria Myers (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), pp. 217–38. Chandler, James, ‘A Discipline in Shifting Perspective: Why we need Irish Studies’, Field Day Review 2 (2006), 19–39.

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Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 6 vols, ed. E. Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71). Curry, John, Historical Memoirs of the Irish Rebellion, in the year 1641, 4th edn (London: Printed for J. Williams and T. Lewis, [1770?]). Curtis, L. Perry, Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature, rev. edn (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2007). Brown, Michael, Patrick M. Geoghegan, and James Kelly (eds), The Irish Act of Union, 1800 Bicentennial Essays (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2003). Denham, John, The Poetical Works of Sir John Denham, ed. Theodore Howard Banks, 2nd edn ([Hamden, Conn.]: Archon Books and Yale University Press, 1969). Fermanis, Porscha, ‘William Godwin’s “History of the Commonwealth” and the Psychology of Individual History’, Review of English Studies 61:252 (2010), 773–800. Ferrier, John, An Essay Towards a Theory of Apparitions (London: Cadell and Davies, 1813). Gibbons, Luke and Kieran O’Conor (eds), Charles O’Conor of Ballinagare (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2015). Geoghegan, Patrick M., The Irish Act of Union: A Study in High Politics 1798–1801 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999). Godwin, William, Of Population (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1820). Godwin, William, Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, 7 vols, gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993). Godwin, William, Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 8 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1992). Godwin, William, Uncollected Writings (1785–1822), ed. Jack W.  Marken and Burton R. Pollin (Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1968). Godwin, William, The Plays of William Godwin, ed. David O’Shaughnessy (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2010a). Godwin, William, The Diary of William Godwin, ed. Victoria Myers, David O’Shaughnessy, and Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford Digital Library, 2010b). http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk. Godwin, William, History of the Commonwealth of England, 4 vols (London: printed for Henry Colburn, 1824). Godwin, William, The Letters of William Godwin, 6 vols, ed. Pamela Clemit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011–). Kazmi, Zaheer, Polite Anarchy in International Relations Theory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Lamb, Charles, The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E.V.  Lucas, 7 vols (London, Methuen & Co., 1903–5).

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Leerssen, Joep, Mere Irish and Fíor-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, Its Development and Literary Expression Prior to the Nineteenth Century (Cork, Cork University Press, 1996). Major, Emma, Madame Britannia: Women, Church, and Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). O’Halloran, Clare, Golden Ages and Barbarous Nations: Antiquarian Debate and Cultural Politics in Ireland, c.1750–1800 (Cork and South Bend, Indiana: Cork University Press and University of Notre Dame Press, 2005). O’Shaughnessy, David, ‘Godwin, Shelley, and the “free communication of intellect”’, Bodleian Library Record 25:1 (2012), 61–69. O’Shaughnessy, David, ‘“This is the dread hour, / That must decide the fate of England”: Godwin’s St Dunstan’, in Godwinian Moments: From the Enlightenment to Romanticism, ed. Robert M.  Maniquis and Victoria Myers (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), pp. 194–216. O’Shaughnessy, David, William Godwin and the Theatre (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010). Pitt, William, The Speeches of the Right Honourable William Pitt, 2nd edn, 3 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1817). Powell, Martyn, ‘Charles James Fox and Ireland’, Irish Historical Studies 33:130 (2002), 169–90. Rajan, Tillotama (ed), ‘Introduction’, Mandeville (Ontario: Broadview, 2015). Rajan, Tillotama, ‘War, Trauma, and the Historical Novel in Godwin’s Mandeville’ in Godwinian Moments: From the Enlightenment to Romanticism, ed. Robert M. Maniquis and Victoria Myers (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), pp. 172–93. Sidney, Algernon, Discourses Concerning Government [1698], ed. Thomas G. West (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1996). Temple, John, The Irish Rebellion; or, An History of the Beginnings and first Progress of the Generall Rebellion raided within the Kingdom of Ireland… (London: Printed for R. White for Samuel Gellibrand, 1646). Webb, Timothy, ‘William Godwin’s Irish Expedition’ in Reinterpreting Robert Emmet, ed. Anne Dolan, Patrick M.  Geoghegan, and Darryl Jones (Dublin: UCD Press, 2007), pp. 105–37. Whelan, Kevin, The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism, and the Construction of Irish Identity, 1760–1830 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1998), 133–175.

‘My son, once my friend’: Sanguinity, Sincerity, and Friendship in St. Leon’s Confessional Narrative Grace Harvey

St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century (1799) is not the only example in Godwin’s fiction of the complex relationship between friendship and paternity but it is, perhaps, the most intriguing in its examination of the ways in which friendship and blood relations complicate and frustrate the full expression of each other. In its depiction of a father’s attempts to befriend the son he also deceives, St. Leon sets out principles of ideal friendship, and documents St. Leon’s ultimately failed efforts to appropriately identify his son Charles as his friend. Scholars have drawn attention to issues surrounding both paternity and friendship in Godwin’s fiction. John Rodden observes that Caleb Williams refers to Mr. Collins as ‘father’ and ‘friend’ in Caleb Williams (1794); Julie Carlson examines how ‘familial and parental feelings are intensified’ in Fleetwood (1805), pointing us towards the suggestion that Godwin develops increasingly more ‘sentimental’ paternal ties in his novels; and William Brewer claims that Cloudsley (1803) complicates paternal and filial friendships.1 Given the

G. Harvey (*) Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. O’Brien et al. (eds.), New Approaches to William Godwin, Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62912-0_3

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extent to which St. Leon’s paternal and friend relationships (or lack thereof) with Charles steer the novel, it is surprising that St. Leon has not been included in these critical discussions. For the most part, scholars have been more interested in reading Godwin’s lived friendships and personal relationships through those he develops in his literary works after the publication of Caleb Williams. For example readings of St. Leon draw parallels between Mary Wollstonecraft and Marguerite Damville, St. Leon’s wife, and some scholars have identified in his romantic relationship with Wollstonecraft the origins of his re-conceptions of family in St. Leon.2 These readings belong to an established interest in the increasingly complex depictions of personal relationships in Godwin’s works after An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793). Cathy Collett and William Brewer both highlight aspects of St. Leon’s attempts to establish friendship that help frame my own reading of the relationship between friendship and fatherhood in the novel. Collett’s reading of St. Leon identifies St. Leon’s inability to secure a voluntary relationship with his son, and sets out the dangers of St. Leon’s attempts to found a relationship with Charles upon irrefutable and inherent blood ties. Collett argues that [St. Leon’s] admiration for his son is rooted not in shared principles but in a spontaneous affection unjustifiable by anything other than a knowledge of his own paternity. While there is no evidence that St. Leon is aware of the contradictions […] the blatant irrationality of St. Leon’s claims suggest that Godwin, far from endorsing these claims, constructs an exemplum for the hazards of filial partiality.3

Here, Collett reveals the ways in which St. Leon utilises his paternity as a justification for his friendship with Charles, rather than the reason and virtue which Godwin establishes as the foundation of voluntary friendship in Political Justice. My reading aligns with hers in this respect. However, rather than suggest that St. Leon exemplifies the ‘hazards of filial partiality’ as Collett does, I argue that his determined and conscious efforts to cling to his paternity instead allow Godwin to develop an ideal of friendship which he constructs by demonstrating the limitations of St. Leon’s (and Charles’) sincerity. Brewer suggests that the inherently paradoxical nature of St. Leon’s confessional narrative necessarily excludes St. Leon from friendship, and prompts the question of whether St. Leon’s paternity has any relevance to his ability to enter into a friendship.4 St. Leon’s attempts to bring together the languages of consanguinity and friendship

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neatly encapsulate the tensions that function in St. Leon: his exclusion from friendship occurs only when he is able to persuasively articulate the terms of friendship, where the reader is able to identify that St. Leon understands the terms of friendship, but chooses to ignore these principles. St. Leon has, therefore, an important (but hitherto understated) role to play in the development of Godwin’s ideas about paternity and friendship, which as Carlson and Brewer have observed, are prominent in his later fiction. Turning to Political Justice, we see that Godwin does not create a dichotomy between friendship and consanguinity, but does insist that all relationships must be anchored in virtue, reason, and ‘political justice’. Discussions of Godwin’s treatments of the affections usually centre on the infamous thought experiment involving Fénelon, Archbishop of Cambray, which does not need repeating here. However, what is less well-recalled is that in the second edition of Political Justice (1796), Godwin revises this parable to replace the wife, mother, and chambermaid, all of whom, he says, should be considered objectively less worth saving than the Archbishop, with a father, brother, and valet.5 Godwin asks the same question, and seeks the same answer; the gender of the servant, parent, or sibling is of no obvious consequence. The fact of the amendment is therefore suggestive. In St. Leon, consanguine male relationships are neither as straightforward nor as readily abandoned as the demands of ‘political justice’ might require. Godwin states in the preface that he will modify some of the earlier chapters of [Political Justice] […] Not that I see cause to make any change repeating the principles of justice, or any thing else fundamental to the system there delivered; but that I apprehend domestic and private affections inseparable from the nature of man, and from what may be styled the culture of the heart, and am fully persuaded that they are not incompatible with a profound and active sense of justice in the mind of him that cherishes them.6

At the heart of Godwin’s preface is the claim that personal relationships are more complex than he has previously acknowledged, and, as Louise Joy suggests, ‘domestic affections might play a more complicated role in dictating behaviour than [Political Justice] had suggested’.7 Godwin’s thinking on friendship developed similarly throughout the 1790s. Jon Mee draws attention to the fact that Political Justice demands that ‘if there be such a thing as truth, it must infallibly be struck out by the collision of

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mind with mind’; for him this exemplifies the rigours of Godwinian friendship.8 By 1797, Godwin writes in The Enquirer that ‘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’.9 What I want to draw attention to here is the shift from truth being struck out by a collision, a metaphor which conjures imagery of a catalyst or reaction sparked by discord or disagreement, to the suggestion that affection and cordiality are vital to the cultivation of friendship. While these are not directly opposed, there is a discernible movement from the combative to the co-operative.

St. Leon’s Confession and the Rosicrucian Brotherhood: Sincerity and Candour in Friendship About halfway through the novel, St. Leon calls out for Charles, lamenting, ‘my son, once my friend’ (p. 162). This occurs after Charles rejects St. Leon, having learned of his father’s proclivity for gambling and corruption. Nothing up to this point in the novel suggests that St. Leon and Charles can be understood as friends. It is tempting to attribute this to St. Leon’s gambling and military ambition during the Italian wars, but it is his acquisition of the secrets of immortality and infinite wealth that permanently exclude him from friendship; in fact, St. Leon’s inability to befriend his son starts when he enters the Rosicrucian Brotherhood, a secret fraternity of alchemists who first came to prominence in Europe in the early seventeenth century, claiming to have secret knowledge which could reform the world.10 Godwin introduces the reader to a potentially dishonest narrator in the very first chapter when St. Leon speaks to the reader directly: The condition by which I hold my privileges is, that they must never be imparted. I sit down purely to relate a few of those extraordinary events that have been produced, in the period of my life which is already elapsed, by the circumstances and the peculiarity to which I have just alluded. (pp. 13–14)

The narrative is fragmented and incomplete: St. Leon recounts only a few extraordinary events, and acknowledges himself to be untruthful throughout the novel, leaving the reader doubting his self-awareness and interpretation of events. Peculiar is certainly a useful term to describe St. Leon’s narrative, and secrecy is the foundation upon which it is built. St. Leon

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admits to Charles, ‘the circumstances of the story are such that they must never be disclosed; I am bound by secrecy by the most inviolable obligations, and this has led me [to] utter a forged and inconsistent tale’ (p. 162). The unreliability of St. Leon as a narrator is a recurring point of interest in discussions of the novel, many of which reiterate the implications duplicity has for St. Leon’s ability to form friendships. Pamela Clemit, amongst others, traces the relevance of St. Leon’s confession to Godwin’s interest in Rousseau’s autobiography The Confessions (1782). For example, Clemit argues that Godwin was interested in Rousseau’s use of ‘self-­ revelation in the service of a political goal’, which in St. Leon becomes the ‘interweaving of personal and historical experiences […] as a mode of individual, and hence political and social, reform’.11 Brewer too argues that St. Leon’s confession is influenced by ‘Rousseau’s claims of self-­ transparency’, and notes that St. Leon ‘will present his life honestly, revealing everything but his alchemical secrets’.12 Here, however, I argue that Godwin plays with (rather than replicates) ideas of self-transparency and self-revelation. That is, that St. Leon acknowledges that he cannot be truthful, owing to the necessary limits to his confession, but instead attempts to redefine the role of sincerity and transparency in friendship. Where St. Leon identifies the absence of unrestrained truth and candour in his narrative and concedes that he cannot be wholly transparent with the reader, he in fact reiterates the importance of sincerity in friendship; by drawing attention to the fragmented nature of his narrative he emphasises its elisions. Godwin further reveals St. Leon’s duplicity through his response to the secrecy that shrouds the philosopher’s stone. When the Stranger meets St. Leon, he offers to share the secrets of immortality and infinite wealth on condition that St. Leon does not share this with any other individual. At first St. Leon ‘[ruminates] with unceasing wonder and perturbation upon the words of the Stranger’ and appears to struggle (p. 111). However, he is quickly persuaded, and asks, ‘shall I shut upon myself the gate of knowledge and information? Is it not the part of a feeble and effeminate mind to refuse instruction, because he is not at liberty to communicate that instruction to another—to a wife?’ (pp.  111–2). Thus, St. Leon enters the Rosicrucian Brotherhood, and there is a further irony to be acknowledged in his decision to exchange one form of family for another. That said, his willingness to abandon his familial ties should not be confused with Godwin’s call to abandon familial ties in order to save Fénelon, but rather as a consequence of St. Leon’s selfishness, already established in earlier

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examples of his gambling and military ambition, although his attempt to rationalise his corrupt and self-indulgent behaviour gestures back towards, and perhaps critiques, Godwin’s notorious rationalisation. It is this final act of selfishness that permanently closes St. Leon off from family, and friendship with Charles (or indeed anyone). At the heart of St. Leon’s narrative is the more sinister suggestion that he is fundamentally secretive and insincere, and therefore permanently to be excluded from friendship. St. Leon’s narration is, for Paul Hamilton, inherently duplicitous, and as Brewer argues, it is clear that this duplicity results in St. Leon’s inherent incapacity for friendship, such that he is condemned to ‘eternal loneliness’.13 Brewer argues that, in the moral order of the novel, ‘as soon as sincerity is diluted by any admixture of reserve or falsehood, friendship, in the truest sense of the word, becomes impossible’.14 St. Leon articulates this directly when he says that Friendship is an object of a peculiar sort; the smallest reserve is deadly to it. I may indeed feel the emotions of a friend towards a man who conceals from me the thoughts of his heart; but then I must be unconscious of this concealment. The instant I perceive this limitation of confidence, he drops into the class of ordinary men: a divorce is effected between us: our hearts, which grew together, suffer amputations; the arteries are closed; the blood is no longer mutually transfused and confounded. (p. 131)

St. Leon’s image of friendship here is quite literally consanguineal, a striking revision of Godwin’s insistence on the ‘unrestrained communication of men’s thoughts and discoveries to each other’. The reader and Charles can both perceive that there is a tension between St. Leon’s acknowledgement of the absolute candour friendship demands, and his acceptance of the Stranger’s conditions, which will preclude him from being fully sincere to Charles. By his own reasoning and choice, then, St. Leon is excluded from friendship. However, he is still Charles’ father, and this relationship is increasingly drawn on by St. Leon to supplement and even to justify the terms of friendship. Returning to the previously cited example, this reveals how St. Leon identifies friendship as a sanguineous relationship through the metaphor of blood. He locates friendship in the confidence of the heart, not a collision of mind with mind, and claims that insincerity, or at least the perception of it, severs the imaginary blood tie between friends. The suggestion that deception divorces friendship from sanguinary affection,

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however, implies that a voluntary unification of two individuals has occurred; to enter this relationship, both individuals must consent voluntarily. Voluntary friendships and inherited consanguine ties are opposing forms of relationship, but St. Leon merges the two, attempting to collapse the distinctions between a willed friendship and heritable family relations. This is the first of a series of attempts on St. Leon’s part to combine the language of consanguinity and friendship in order to manipulate the terms upon which friendship can be founded and maintained. St. Leon’s paternity should be irrelevant to his inability to cultivate a friendship with Charles since he knows that friendship must be founded upon a quality that he lacks: sincerity. However, in drawing on the language of shared blood, it is clear that St. Leon’s resolution to enter in a friendship with his son objectively, based on a rational judgement of his qualities, is at odds with his suggestion that their friendship is founded in their sanguinary relationship. In utilising metaphors of consanguinity to articulate his understanding of objective friendship, St. Leon begins to reveal the contradictions in his ideals of friendship as voluntary relationships, free from the obligations of blood.

‘My Son, Once my Friend’: St. Leon’s Paternity and Friendship Near the end of the 1793 edition of Political Justice Godwin claims that individuals ‘ought to prefer no human being to another, because that being is my father, my wife or my son, but because, for reasons which equally appeal to all understandings’, a claim repeated throughout St. Leon.15 Consanguine ties do not, or should not, confer any emotional or sentimental attachment, according to Godwin. He appears to return to these ideas in St. Leon, when St. Leon proclaims of his children, ‘I am proud to be their father […] But they are endeared to me by a better principle than pride. I love them for their qualities’ (p. 84). He claims to love his children with ‘an unfeigned affection’, and that it is ‘with sincerity that [he] professed to prefer them’ (p.  88). These examples suggest that St. Leon is capable of recognising that he must objectively evaluate Charles to justify his preference for his son. Moreover, not only does St. Leon suggest that he should not cite paternal pride as the source of his preference, but that in objectively assessing Charles for his qualities, he might access a better relationship with him. St. Leon eventually articulates this ‘better

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principle than pride’ as an idea of friendship, and clearly sets out the terms in which an individual might enter into a friendship with their consanguine relations: In their early years we are attached to our offspring, merely because they are ours […] But as they grow up, the case is different. Our partiality is then confirmed or diminished by qualities visible to an impartial bystander as really as to ourselves. They then cease to be merely the objects of our solicitude, and become our companions, the partners of our sentiments, and the counsellors of our understandings. (pp. 114–5)

Here, St. Leon echoes principles of Political Justice almost verbatim. To become Charles’ friend and qualify his partiality, St. Leon must judge his son according to ‘qualities visible to an impartial bystander’, which must withstand external and rational scrutiny.16 In theory, judging Charles according to these qualities in a rational and objective way should confirm St. Leon’s partiality and, in turn, allow him to become Charles’ friend. Nevertheless, even if St. Leon is able to judge Charles rationally according to his virtue, he cannot withstand the same objective appraisal: he is a neglectful father and an inadequate and insincere friend. In a crude attempt to distract Charles from the ongoing poverty and neglect he inflicts upon his family, St. Leon takes Charles to Dresden, where they meet Gaspard de Coligny, a representative of St. Leon’s former life, who reveals to Charles that his father is a corrupt and self-indulgent gamester. After seeking out his father to verify Coligny’s accusations, Charles tells St. Leon, you were the author of your own poverty; you dissipated your paternal estate. Did I reproach you? No; you were poor, but not dishonoured! I attended your couch in sickness; I exerted my manual labour to support you in affliction […] I was convinced I should never blush to call Reginald de St. Leon my father. (p. 160)

Charles here reminds his father that he (Charles) has selflessly given his labour, attention, and affection for his poor, but as he thought, not dishonourable, father. More significantly, however, Charles acts and speaks according to the principles that underpin comments St. Leon has previously made: Charles knows that he ‘ought to prefer no human being to another, because that being is his father’. Subsequently, Charles’ scrutiny

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of his father’s qualities leads to rejection: ‘I am no longer your son! I am compelled to disclaim all affinity with you!’ (p. 162). Not only friendship, then, but family relationships are characterised by choice. St. Leon misunderstands his son’s comments as a rejection of his friendship rather than a disavowal of their familial relationship, even though Charles does not identify his father as his ‘friend’ at any point. The necessary limitations created by his insincerity and his inability to disclose the secrets of immortality and infinite wealth to others stifle any rational and virtuous friendship with Charles. St. Leon despairs: My son […] you cut me to the heart. Such is the virtue you display, that I must confess myself never to have been worthy of you. […] The circumstances of the story are such that they must never be disclosed; I am bound by secrecy by the most inviolable obligations, and this has led me utter a forged and inconsistent tale […] If then Charles, my son, once my friend, my best and dearest consolation […] if you are resolute to separate yourself from me, at least take this recollection with you wherever you may go,— whatever may be my external estimation, I am not the slave of vice, your father is not a villain! (pp. 162–3)

This example highlights the essential contradictions and tensions that underpin St. Leon’s attempts to conflate ‘father’ and ‘friend’. While acknowledging that he is unworthy of the virtuous Charles’ friendship, St. Leon insists nonetheless that he remains his son. In locating his own affection for Charles in his heart, the centre of sanguineous relations, he suggests also that his own preference for Charles is rooted in paternity rather than an objective appreciation for his virtues.

St. Leon and Charles’ Fraternal Friendship After Charles rejects his father’s paternity, St. Leon shifts to a language of fraternity to identify Charles and St. Leon’s relationship. St. Leon frequently recounts how he and Charles identify one another as ‘brother’. However, where Godwin earlier positioned Charles as a virtuous son and highlighted St. Leon’s corruption, he now develops Charles as an equally corrupt character who uses consanguine terms to articulate equally fraught and contested understandings of friendship. Following the failure of St. Leon’s attempts to establish a paternal relationship dependent on an impartial evaluation of virtue, the fraternal friendship that Charles and St.

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Leon eventually cultivate is founded upon dishonesty and performance, and is ambivalently dependent on blood ties. After St. Leon is taken prisoner by Bethlam Gabor, he is rescued by his son, a Christian crusader who has now styled himself Charles Damville (his mother’s maiden name). St. Leon has meanwhile consumed the elixir vitae—the philosopher’s stone— and now calls himself Henry D’Aubigny. This transformation suggests that St. Leon accepts his son’s rejection of him as a father, and that he too now seeks friendship on other terms. Ostensibly, then, this is a meeting between strangers: both St. Leon and Charles have, to some degree, moved away from their blood relationship, with Charles openly and symbolically rejecting his father’s heritage and St. Leon likewise hiding his identity. While it is clear that St. Leon’s confessional narrative is interested in self-revelation, in this particular example of friendship, it is unclear which self is being revealed: unable to reveal his true self, St. Leon can only ‘perform’ friendship, and it is impossible to interpret this performance as sincere. St. Leon is fully aware of his consanguine bond with Charles, and as such any relationship they have is anchored in deception. St. Leon observes that Charles identifies D’Aubigny as his ‘friend’ and ‘brother’: The friendship between me and Charles continued hourly to increase. As a Frenchman, whom chance had introduced to his acquaintance in a distant country, it was natural that he should feel a strong bias of affection toward me. But that sort of fraternal resemblance which the most inattentive spectator remarked in us, operated forcibly to the increase of Charles’s attachment. He would often, in the ingenuous opening of his soul towards me, call me his brother. (p. 353)

Charles identifies himself as D’Aubigny’s mentor and older brother and uses ‘brother’ and ‘friend’ interchangeably. Charles tells D’Aubigny, ‘suffer me, my dear friend, to […] act an elder brother’s part’ (p. 353). Here, Godwin inverts the role of father and son, and imagines a series of examples in which Charles provides his father with sharpened perspective, both in terms of how St. Leon sees and is seen. Earlier in the novel Charles, as son, offers to give St. Leon his eyes to help his father see more clearly, in an inversion of the tale of Zaleucus; now as his brother he is able to speak or act on behalf of D’Aubigny’s ‘better genius’. In both examples, Charles identifies (unknowingly) that St. Leon is unable to represent himself sincerely.17

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Charles identifies D’Aubigny as his ‘brother’ and ‘friend’ in order to replace his existing and corrupt consanguine relations. St. Leon reports that Charles tells him, I am alone in the world. I have no father, no mother, and no brethren. I am […] cut off for ever from those of my own lineage and blood. It is with inexpressible delight that I thus cheat the malice of my fate, and hold you to my bosom as if you were indeed my brother. (p. 354)

Charles repeats almost verbatim his father’s experiences of fraternal friendship and isolation, and it is clear that he no longer judges others by the standards of impartially assessed virtue. Neither Charles nor St. Leon makes any attempt to identify one another’s virtues, but instead draws attention to their ‘fraternal resemblance’ and their physical similarities as a qualification of their friendship and brotherhood; the potential consanguine resemblance is sufficient justification for Charles’ use of both ‘friend’ and ‘brother’. Returning to Godwin’s parable of Fénelon, he sets out how individuals should choose the principles of political justice over consanguine relations and asks that individuals objectively judge their consanguine relationships in order to enter friendship; again, friendship is ‘more than’ common acquaintance or consanguine relations. In St. Leon, however, Godwin imagines Charles embracing D’Aubigny as a consanguine relation, using ‘friend’ and ‘brother’ interchangeably. As such, this friendship is entered into without the objective rational judgement which St. Leon initially outlines as the only acceptable foundation for true friendship. Critical discussion of St. Leon reminds us that, despite his earlier attempts to care for his father, and his rational judgement of his father’s corruption, Charles Damville is ‘hardly an alternative moral centre’, but a violent Crusader who represents ‘the most extreme form of racism from which his family has suffered in Switzerland’, as Rajan highlights.18 Like St. Leon, Charles obtains honour and pride from his military endeavours, which are, as Rajan shows, laced with violence, tyranny, and selfish gain. This suggests that Charles cannot be identified as the virtuous ‘friend’, even if he employs the language of friendship to identify D’Aubigny. To confirm his partiality for Charles, St. Leon should identify qualities visible to an impartial bystander, yet Godwin depicts Charles as a violent individual who lacks virtue and reason. This corruption culminates in rivalry between Charles and D’Aubigny (or at least Charles’ perception of a rivalry with D’Aubigny) as a

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consequence of St. Leon’s affection for Pandora, a poor orphan whom Charles eventually marries. Charles interprets D’Aubigny’s intimacy with Pandora as romantic desire, not as St. Leon’s paternal desire to enable their marriage. As a consequence, Charles rejects his father a second time, telling him, D’Aubigny, you have acted a part in this unworthy plot. […] I took you under my protection, when you had no friend; I placed you next to myself; I conceived for you the affection of a brother […] In return for all that I have done, and all that I felt for you, you have with insidious heart and every base disguise seduced me from the woman of my choice. (p. 372)

Here, Charles’ perception of a sexual rivalry between himself and his ‘brother’ ruptures their friendship. Though Charles misinterprets D’Aubigny’s intentions, he insists that deception (or the perception of it) is deadly to friendship. His partiality for D’Aubigny is diminished by the rivalry between them, and somewhat ironically, he correctly identifies D’Aubigny as dishonest (for the wrong reasons). Nonetheless, Charles clearly outlines the terms in which consanguine relations can become friends. That is, whilst Charles identifies D’Aubigny as his friend and brother, an idea of friendship that fails to live up to Godwinian principles of friendship, the friendship he imagines with his mother, Marguerite, demonstrates how these principles could allow relations to befriend one another. When Charles recounts his heritage to D’Aubigny, he says: I loved my father; I loved him because he was my father; I had great obligations to him; he once had virtues. But my mother,—if I could have found her in the wildest desert of Africa, and have known her virtues, a stranger to my blood, descended from the remotest tribe of the human race, I should have chosen her for my friend, my preceptress, and my guide. (pp. 354–5)

The friendship that Charles imagines with his mother here clearly outlines the ideal of friendship in St. Leon. That is, whilst Charles specifies that he loved his father, he insists this love is the product of their consanguine ties. On the other hand, Charles’ imagined friendship with Marguerite positions his mother as a model not only of virtuous maternity but also of virtuous friendship. Here, Charles distances himself from his sanguinary ties to his mother, as he insists that their friendship would be inspired by

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her virtues, not by their consanguine relationship. In doing so, Charles encapsulates the essential premise of Political Justice: he observes Marguerite and her virtues as an impartial spectator and on that basis names her friend. However, it is striking that this example of ideal friendship is only imagined by Charles, and provides a stark contrast to the lived relationship with his father (in both guises) which cannot be articulated or understood as a friendship. In his imagination, ideal friendship is possible, but in reality his behaviour is corrupt and his articulations of friendship are inconsistent; much like St. Leon, what Charles says and does are two different things. The bitter irony of the relationship between Charles and D’Aubigny is that he did find D’Aubigny as ‘a stranger to [his] blood’, and was given the opportunity to identify St. Leon objectively, but their mutual lack of virtue and inability to practice complete sincerity prevents them from entering into this friendship. The novel thus concludes with the stark distinction between imagined and lived friendships, as well as the distinction between friendship and maternity. Distinctions between paternity, fraternity, and friendship are left more fraught. It is impossible to ignore the fact that St. Leon recounts the father’s failed attempts to enter into a friendship with the son, while the mother is identified by the son as the ideal model of the virtuous friend. Returning to the revisions he made to the analogy of Fénelon in the second edition Political Justice, Godwin replaces, or, perhaps, saves, the mother in the burning building, supplanting her with a father. Read against Marguerite’s maternal perfection and St. Leon’s failed attempts to conflate partial blood relations with disinterested virtue, it is suggestive that in this revised version it is a father whose value cannot be guaranteed by family ties. It is clear that domestic affections play a complicated role in dictating behaviour in the novel, as Joy argues.19 St. Leon reveals the inherent difficulties in realising Godwin’s idealised (and therefore unattainable) notions of friendship under any circumstances, but especially when set against the unreason of blood relations. This is not to suggest that Godwin is undoing claims set out in Political Justice—his continued revisions of his work illustrate a commitment to incremental revision—but rather the novel works through the difficulties in establishing and maintaining personal relationships based upon purely rational principles.

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St. Leon’s Paternal Partiality Whilst Charles identifies D’Aubigny as his ‘brother’ and ‘friend’, St. Leon still identifies Charles as his son in this dyad of fraternal friendship. St. Leon knows he cannot enter into a voluntary and virtuous friendship with Charles, and must redefine the terms of friendship in order to identify Charles as his son. After learning of Charles’ military prowess, he adds, Friendship is a necessity of our nature, the stimulating and restless want of every susceptible heart […] With boyish eyes, full of sanguine spirits and hope, we look round us for a friend […] But now, that I have drawn the unexpected prize, I grow astonished at my former blindness; I become suddenly sensible of my powers and my worth; the blood that slept in my heart circulates, and distends every vein […] This was the effect of the mutual attachment produced between me and Charles. (pp. 361–2)

He looks round with ‘boyish eyes’, not impartial judgement, and identifies friendship as a prize he has won, rather than a means of perpetuating political justice. St. Leon continues to identify Charles as his ‘son’, does not reciprocate Charles’ use of ‘brother’, and immediately (albeit discreetly) establishes an imbalance of power between the two men. More pertinent, however, is St. Leon’s use of sanguinary metaphors to identify and articulate their friendship in this example. He explicitly identifies himself as ‘full of sanguine spirits and hope’, and implicitly compares friendship to the blood that gives life to individuals. However, his use of these metaphors ultimately only serves to emphasise that Godwinian friendship is incompatible with consanguinity, and highlights St. Leon’s attempts to corrupt notions of virtuous friendship in order to identify his son as his friend. Here, St. Leon relies upon the fact that Charles cannot reject their consanguine ties. That is, whilst Charles can reject his relationship with St. Leon, whether as brother, father, or friend, he cannot deny the fact that there is an indisputable sanguinary relationship. At the same time, St. Leon is aware that he is neither the virtuous father, brother, nor friend, and, therefore, can only cite their indisputable sanguinary ties as the foundation of their relationship. Returning to Collett’s reading of St. Leon, she argues that St. Leon’s ‘admiration for his son is rooted not in shared principles but in a spontaneous affection unjustifiable by anything other than a knowledge of his own paternity’.20 Thinking back to St. Leon’s use of sanguinary metaphors to identify and articulate friendship,

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it becomes clear then that these are attempts to found friendship in paternal blood ties and partiality informed by consanguine relations. By the novel’s end, St. Leon is aware of his inability to enter into a voluntary and virtuous friendship. His inability to enter into friendship, and his unwillingness to relinquish consanguine affiliations, lead him to tighten his grip on paternity and move further away from friendship. In a conversation St. Leon imagines with Charles (he imagines himself as St. Leon, not D’Aubigny), he claims, ‘I might have said, “I am your father […] I love you with more than a father’s love”’ (p. 374). He responds to Charles’ previous claim to love his father because he is his father, protesting that his love is ‘more than’ paternal. St. Leon uses the phrase ‘more than’ throughout his narrative, and on almost every occasion, ‘more than’ is quickly followed by the realisation that St. Leon’s virtues are less than necessary to enter friendship. This persistent use of ‘more than’ signals St. Leon’s inability to balance the demands of reason, and reveals his problematic attempts to measure his emotions when identifying and articulating his relationships; that ‘more than’ eventually gives St. Leon ‘less than’ tells us that his emotional excesses eventually overrule his reason. Godwin undercuts St. Leon’s attempts to articulate his ‘friendship’ with Charles in a language of sanguinity by reminding us that St. Leon’s duplicity and insincerity preclude him from all friendships, consanguine, or otherwise. A friend writes to inform Charles that D’Aubigny is an imposter in possession of the secrets of immortality and infinite wealth, notorious throughout Europe as Chatillon. Perturbed by D’Aubigny’s dishonesty, Charles seeks him out, and asks, ‘how can I tell that the fraternal resemblance borne by your features to my own, and the sudden and ardent partiality that rose in my breast when I first saw you, have not been produced by the detested arts?’ (p. 380). He tells St. Leon that his father ‘became the dupe of these infernal secrets’, adding, I feel all the long-forgotten wounds of my heart new opened, and the blood bursting afresh from every vein. I have rested, and been at peace; and now the red and venomed plague, that tarnished the years of my opening youth, returns to blast me. Begone, infamous, thrice-damned villain! and let me never see thee more! (p. 380)

Whereas St. Leon uses sanguineous imagery to evoke life in friendship, Charles identifies sanguinary relations as a violent disease in which blood bursts from open wounds. This violent imagery works to remind us that

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blood is associated with death and wounding as well as life, and it also reminds the reader of Charles’ association with military violence and conquest. It is telling that Charles uses a bloody metaphor to sever his ties with St. Leon and D’Aubigny, rejecting D’Aubigny’s fraternity and friendship, and St. Leon’s paternity. Charles’ rejection also reminds us that the smallest reserve is deadly to friendship, and whether St. Leon cites his paternity or D’Aubigny cites his fraternity, neither can establish a virtuous friendship with Charles, as neither is sincere. St. Leon’s efforts to establish friendship as a sanguineous relationship are both fundamentally flawed and entirely pointless. In his final comments, St. Leon tells the reader directly that he is ‘not blinded by paternal partiality’ (p. 383), but paternal partiality is all that St. Leon has demonstrated to the reader, and all that can bind him to Charles. In the absence of sincerity, St. Leon can only perform an insincere representation of friendship. To return to the question as to whether or not St. Leon’s paternity is relevant to his inability to enter into friendship with Charles, it is clear that whilst the novel sets out an idea of virtuous friendship that is defined by behaviours and values, St. Leon’s status as a father impinges on his ability to enter into a friendship with Charles despite his claims to the contrary. At the same time, that paternal relationship also becomes something that can be referred to when all other claims to friendship fail. St. Leon clearly reiterates principles of virtuous and rational friendship originating from Political Justice throughout the novel, but Godwin’s specific and sustained focus on the relationship between St. Leon and Charles makes clear that consanguine ties cannot replace virtuous friendship. However, those family ties are open to manipulation by those who lack the necessary sincerity and honesty to enter into ideal friendships. St. Leon’s insincerity is a narrative fulcrum, and Godwin makes it clear that insincerity and corruption prohibits individuals from entering into friendship. What St. Leon also does, however, is to work through the difficulties in creating complex personal relationships, and the novel concludes with no successful examples of familial friendship. Charles might imagine how his mother might be his ideal friend, but this virtuous friendship exists only in imagination. In reality, the more St. Leon asserts that he is not guided by paternal partiality, the more he convinces the reader that he is guided by the irrationality of blood ties. It is only in the final sentences of the novel that St. Leon acknowledges the necessity of virtuous and rational family relations, as well as the

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difficulties in fostering these. He laments the love, friendship, and family his selfish vice has robbed him of: I was the hero’s father!—but no! I am not blinded by paternal partiality;— but no! he was indeed what I thought him […] I am happy to close my eventful and somewhat melancholy story with so pleasing a termination. Whatever may have been the result to my personal experience of human life, I can never recollect the fate of Charles and Pandora without confessing with exultation, that this busy and anxious world of ours yet contains something in its stores that is worth living for. (pp. 382–3)

Here, St. Leon is simply a forlorn and bereft father, not a friend or brother. More significant, however, is his realisation that personal relationships are both meaningful and more complex than ideals of friendship perhaps permit. In this final moment, St. Leon demonstrates the struggle of translating hypothetical notions and ideas of friendship into lived and complex relationships. Finally, and too late, he accepts his role as the ‘hero’s father’ and acknowledges that fatherhood does not guarantee love. He is not his son’s friend, yet in concluding, St. Leon seems to find a sufficiency in simply knowing that he is his father.

Notes 1. John Rodden, Between Self and Society: Inner Worlds and Outer Limits in the British Psychological Novel (Austin, University of Texas Press, 2016), pp.  33–37; Julie A.  Carlson, England’s First Family of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2007), p. 47; William Brewer, ‘Male Rivalry and Friendship in the Novels of William Godwin’, in Mapping Male Sexuality: Nineteenth-­Century England, ed. Jay Losey and William D.  Brewer (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000), pp. 49–68, p. 59. Rodden’s reading is largely interested in how non-consanguine relations employ the term ‘father’ when speaking to their friends, but Carlson and Brewer’s comments show how Godwin’s 1790s work demonstrates how his thinking changes in the nineteenth century. 2. Critical discussion of St. Leon highlights parallels between Marguerite Damville, St. Leon’s wife, and Wollstonecraft, and are often more interested in the fact that Godwin began writing his ‘opus magnum’ two months after Wollstonecraft’s death, on 10 September 1797: Godwin first mentions St. Leon in his diary on 31 December 1797. See William Brewer, The Mental Anatomies of William Godwin and Mary Shelley (London:

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Associated University Press, 2001), Andrew McInnes, Wollstonecraft’s Ghost: The Fate of the Female Philosopher in the Romantic Period (London: Routledge, 2017). 3. Cathy Collett, ‘Every Child Left Behind: St. Leon and William Godwin’s Immortal Future’, European Romantic Review, 25:3 (2014), 327–336, pp. 333–34. 4. William Brewer, The Mental Anatomies of William Godwin and Mary Shelley (London: Associated University Press, 2001), p. 44. 5. William Godwin, The Political and Philosophical Works of William Godwin, 7 vols, gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993), III: Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness, ed. Mark Philp, p. 50. See also The Political and Philosophical Works of William Godwin, IV: Political Justice Variants, ed. Mark Philp, p. 63. 6. William Godwin, Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, 8 vols, gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1992), IV: St. Leon: a Tale of the Sixteenth Century, ed. Pamela Clemit, p. 11. All subsequent references to St. Leon are given in the text. 7. Louise Joy, ‘St. Leon and the culture of the heart’, History of European Ideas, 33:1 (2007), 40–53, p. 41. 8. Jon Mee, Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, & Community 1762–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p.  152; Godwin, Political Justice p. 15. 9. William Godwin, Political and Philosophical Works of William Godwin, 7 vols, gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993), V: The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature, ed. Pamela Clemit, p. 133. 10. See Justine Crump, ‘Gambling, history, and Godwin’s St. Leon’, European Romantic Review, 11:4 (2000), 393–407; A.A. Markley, Conversion and Reform in the British Novel in the 1790s: A Revolution of Opinions (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), pp.  137–42; Tilottama Rajan, Romantic Narrative: Shelley, Hays, Godwin, Wollstonecraft (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2010), pp.  144–173. These readings remind us that Godwin’s critique of gambling in St. Leon led even anti-Jacobin reviewers to praise his treatment of vice. The Rosicrucian Brotherhood can be dated back to early seventeenth-century anonymous publications that announced the existence of a secret fraternity of alchemists. While there is little scholarly discussion of the Brotherhood, Jennifer N. Wunder accounts for these cults and cultures in the works of Keats, Hogg, Godwin, and Percy Shelley in Keats, Hermeticism, and the Secret Societies (Basingstoke: Ashgate, 2008).

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11. Pamela Clemit, ‘Self-Analysis as Social Critique: The Autobiographical Writings of Godwin and Rousseau’, Romanticism, 11:2 (2005), 161–180 (p. 161; p. 174). 12. Brewer, Mental Anatomies, p. 31. For readings of Rousseau’s influence on Godwin’s complete works, see Gary Kelly, ‘The Romance of Real Life’: Autobiography in Rousseau and William Godwin’, Man and Nature, 1 (1982), 93–101; Gary Handwerk, ‘Awakening the Mind: William Godwin’s Enquirer’, in Godwinian Moments: From the Enlightenment to Romanticism, eds. Robert M.  Maniquis and Victoria Myers (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), pp. 103–124. 13. Paul Hamilton, Metaromanticism: aesthetics, literature, theory (London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 81. Brewer, Mental Anatomies, p. 44. 14. Brewer, Mental Anatomies, p. 44. 15. Godwin, Political Justice, p. 455. 16. Godwin’s use of ‘impartial spectator’ is especially striking here, particularly as his diary shows that he read parts of Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) between 1794 and 1798. For further discussions of Godwin and Adam Smith, see Bart Schultz, The Happiness Philosophers: The Lives of and Works of the Great Utilitarians (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), p.  15; Mary Fairclough, The Romantic Crowd: Sympathy, Controversy, and Print Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp.  95–97; Maureen McNeil, Under the Banner of Science (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), pp. 111–12. 17. Zaleucus the Locrian was a Greek lawgiver, who gives one of his own eyes to his son to preserve his son’s eyesight. See St. Leon, p. 58. 18. Rajan, Romantic Narrative, p. 146. 19. Joy, ‘St. Leon and the culture of the heart’, pp. 40–53. 20. Collett, ‘Every Child Left Behind’, pp. 333–34.

Bibliography Brewer, William D., ‘Male Rivalry and Friendship in the Novels of William Godwin’, in Mapping Male Sexuality: Nineteenth-Century England, ed. Jay Losey and William D. Brewer (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000), pp. 49–68. Brewer, William D., The Mental Anatomies of William Godwin and Mary Shelley (London: Associated University Press, 2001). Carlson, Julie A., England’s First Family of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2007). Clemit, Pamela, ‘Self-Analysis as Social Critique: The Autobiographical Writings of Godwin and Rousseau’, Romanticism, 11:2 (2005), 161–180.

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Collett, Cathy, ‘Every Child Left Behind: St. Leon and William Godwin’s Immortal Future’, European Romantic Review, 25:3 (2014), 327–336. Crump, Justine, ‘Gambling, history, and Godwin’s St. Leon’, European Romantic Review, 11:4 (2000), 393–407. Fairclough, Mary, The Romantic Crowd: Sympathy, Controversy, and Print Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Godwin, William, The Political and Philosophical Works of William Godwin, 7 vols, gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993). Godwin, William, Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, 8 vols, gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1992), IV: St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century, ed. Pamela Clemit. Hamilton, Paul, Metaromanticism: aesthetics, literature, theory (London: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Handwerk, Gary, ‘Awakening the Mind: William Godwin’s Enquirer’, in Godwinian Moments: From the Enlightenment to Romanticism, eds. Robert M. Maniquis and Victoria Myers (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), pp. 103–124.  Joy, Louise, ‘St. Leon and the culture of the heart’, History of European Ideas, 33:1 (2007), 40–53. Kelly, Gary, ‘The Romance of Real Life’: Autobiography in Rousseau and William Godwin, Man and Nature, 1 (1982), 93–101. Markley, A.A., Conversion and Reform in the British Novel in the 1790s: A Revolution of Opinions (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009). McInnes, Andrew, Wollstonecraft’s Ghost: The Fate of the Female Philosopher in the Romantic Period (London: Routledge, 2017). McNeil, Maureen, Under the Banner of Science (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987). Mee, Jon, Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, & Community 1762–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Rajan, Tilottama, Romantic Narrative: Shelley, Hays, Godwin, Wollstonecraft (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2010). Rodden, John, Between Self and Society: Inner Worlds and Outer Limits in the British Psychological Novel (Austin, University of Texas Press, 2016). Schultz, Bart, The Happiness Philosophers: The Lives of and Works of the Great Utilitarians (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). Wunder, Jennifer N., Keats, Hermeticism, and the Secret Societies  (Basingstoke: Ashgate, 2008).

Through the Looking-Glasses: Godwin’s Biographies for Children John-Erik Hansson

Introduction In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, biography emerged as a popular genre of historical writing, both for adults and for children.1 It professed to offer a number of benefits, and as a form of historical writing, was sometimes presented as superior to more standard histories. Authors such as Robert Bisset and Samuel Johnson stressed the usefulness of the biographical form in its ability to combine ‘interest and instruction’ (Bisset) to a remarkable extent by creating a closer, more intimate connection between the reader and the subjects of biographies, not least because the reader is often made to enter their ‘domestick privacies’ (Johnson).2 By stressing the connection between private and public life, the value of mobilising sympathy, and emphasising the moral and exemplary components of individual lives, biography was viewed as especially suited to the education of children and for women’s reading (though in the later part of the century, biography was becoming a more acceptable genre for the adult male reader as well).3 In its educational dimension, biography was

J.-E. Hansson (*) CY Cergy Paris Université, Paris, France © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. O’Brien et al. (eds.), New Approaches to William Godwin, Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62912-0_4

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also intimately connected to the more established genre of conduct literature, although, as Julian North notes, these became increasingly distinct during the Romantic period. Claims to ‘historical authenticity’ distinguished biography from the novel and thus provided a space for it to flourish. In addition, this contributed to the development of historical education for women, as female authors in particular wrote collective biographies of ‘female worthies’ intended for use in schools for educating girls.4 These mid-to-late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century understandings of biographical writing all inform Godwin’s practice as a biographer both for children and for adults. It should perhaps then not come as a surprise that Godwin’s most famous achievements in biography, the Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1797), the Life of Geoffrey Chaucer (1803) and the Lives of Edward and John Philips, Nephews and Pupils of Milton (1815) followed his investigation of education and exemplarity in the essays of The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literatures (1797), and his discussion of the ethical, political and imaginative importance of past actors—and particularly artists—expressed for example in the Essay on Sepulchres (1809) (discussed further in Chap. 11 of this collection). Godwin’s most famous works of biography are, however, not the only biographical works he wrote in the period. In the first decade of the nineteenth century, as Godwin was building his Juvenile Library, he wrote two biographies for children under the pseudonym of Theophilus Marcliffe: The Looking-Glass: A True History of the Early Years of an Artist (1805) and the Life of Lady Jane Grey and of Lord Guildford Dudley, Her Husband (1806). While Godwin’s biographical output as a whole has received relatively little critical attention,5 his biographies for children have not been studied at all on their own as particular contributions to the genre, in the context of the children’s book-market. This chapter intends to address this lacuna. My purpose, then, is to show how these two texts, written for Godwin’s Juvenile Library, tell exemplary stories that not only embody a political, narrative and historiographical critique of the period’s biographies for children, and children’s books more generally, but also correspond more closely to Godwin’s own progressive politics. To do this, he makes use of the two different biographical models he developed—the thick contextual biography, and the more intimate biography. I therefore open this chapter with a discussion of both biographical models to show how The Looking-­ Glass and the Life of Lady Jane Grey fit in those frameworks, and more broadly in the context of the production of books for children at the time.

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I will then contend that, in the Life of Lady Jane Grey, Godwin uses the form of the thick contextual biography (1) to re-inscribe women in the history of England at a time where women were frequently left out of history books, and (2) to re-shape the exemplarity of Lady Jane Grey, following Godwin’s own educational and ethical priorities. Finally, I argue that in The Looking-Glass Godwin deploys the form of the individual biography to tell a story that, on the surface, is a rags-to-riches individualistic story but in fact is a story of Godwinian benevolence and education. Building on the different strengths of the two modes of biography he conceptualises, Godwin therefore utilises the genre to connect the public and the private, and in this way attempts to create the conditions for both personal and social change.

Godwin and the Biographical Form In order to contextualise the Life of Lady Jane Grey and The Looking-Glass both must be located within Godwin’s broader practice as a biographer at the turn of the nineteenth century. To do this, let us begin with the Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, at once a biography of Mary Wollstonecraft and an autobiographical text, published in 1798.6 This text is quite short, and remains intimately close to its subject: Mary Wollstonecraft. By writing a short and intimate text, Godwin does not provide much in terms of historical context: there are not many direct references or discussions of broader social or cultural trends to which Godwin draws the reader’s attention. This perhaps has partly to do with the contemporaneity of author, reader and subject in this case, although Godwin does spend more time discussing both national and international politics in The History of the Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham (1783), published just five years after Pitt’s death. Building on Johnson’s thoughts on biography, as Pamela Clemit and Gina Luria Walker show, however, the proximity and the domesticity of the narrative of the Memoirs serve a broader purpose linked to Godwin’s refined ideas of social change in relation to sensibility, developed in the late 1790s.7 In particular, they argue that for Godwin such proximity enables the transformative possibilities of sincerity and displays the workings of a character who was not only able to improve herself, but also was ‘an agent of change in others, including [Godwin] himself’.8 In that sense, Godwin presents Mary Wollstonecraft as a ‘female worthy’ who connects the individual and

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the social, and who is exemplary not only as an accomplished, independent woman, but also as a positive agent for social and political change. In The Looking-Glass, Godwin retraces the early years of the main illustrator of his children’s books, William Mulready (1786–1863), although this is never openly mentioned. The book takes us from Ireland to London, to the Royal Academy Schools, and eventually brings us to the point when Mulready reaches financial independence. Much like the Memoirs, The Looking-Glass is not straightforwardly historiographical insofar as it is specifically concerned with the life of an individual who, at the time of writing, was just nineteen years old and so only ten or fifteen years older than the likely intended readers of The Looking-Glass. Rather than a picture of an older period, then, it offers that of a contemporary childhood in a modest family, derived from the subject of the biography himself. In the preface that Godwin addresses to the child reader, Godwin openly says that ‘the artist related to me his history’.9 The closeness between the subject of the biography and the author-narrator of The Looking-Glass is then emphasised by turns of phrase that imply a conversation between the two. For instance, we are told that ‘the earliest particular leading’ to the artist’s love of drawing ‘which he has been able to recollect’ relates to an acquaintance of the boy’s father (TLG 3). In this sense, The Looking-Glass inscribes itself in the tradition of the conversational memoir, resembling texts such as Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791), and more immediately, Godwin’s own Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, where he stresses that ‘the facts detailed in the following pages, are principally taken from the mouth of the person to whom they relate’.10 Joined with this conversational model is a narrative that characterises the artist in much more proximate detail than was available in the case of Lady Jane Grey. Instead of describing the general context and the details of social, political and religious relations—which Godwin could have done given that he goes out of his way to mention that the artists’ parents were Catholics, and the various denominations of the schools Mulready attended—he depicts the dynamics and accidents of his family and educational life, as well as his sometimes chance encounters with specific individuals and their consequences for his future. This narrative strategy recalls the Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, where Godwin suggests that ‘the more fully we are presented with the picture and story’ of exemplary characters, ‘the more generally shall we feel in ourselves an attachment to their fate, and a sympathy in their excellencies’.11 It is in this spirit of intimate candour, as Clemit and Walker show

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concerning the Memoirs, that some of the transformative power of biography is to be found. In contrast to the proximity and intimacy of the Memoirs and The Looking-Glass, Godwin’s Life of Chaucer and the Lives of Edward and John Philips are characterised by the comprehensive and broad contextualisation of their subjects.12 In these two works, Godwin not only investigates the lives of his subjects (including their private lives) but also examines the social, political and cultural context that structured the ways in which these lives were lived. In the first volume of the Life of Chaucer, for example, six out of twenty-three chapters are dedicated to contextual discussions of various kinds. They include specific considerations on the ‘diversions of our ancestors in the fourteenth century’ (chapters V–VII), on the religious organisation of England at the time (chapter IV), on architectural history (chapter VIII) and on the history of art (chapter IX). Even in chapters where Chaucer the man has greater prominence, Godwin often pays particular attention to contextual elements. In the first three chapters of the book, for instance, the author not only relates the birth of the poet, his education and ‘school-boy amusements’ but also gives a detailed account of the city of London—and so Chaucer’s youthful surroundings—and of the literary tradition of chivalrous romance that, Godwin argues, formed the ‘visionary scenery by which his genius was awakened’.13 As April London has shown, a similarly thorough contextualisation and ‘thickly descriptive evocation’ characterises the lives of the nephews of Milton, through which Godwin foregrounds the connections between politics and literature, and testifies to his ‘interest in making the past vividly present to his readers’.14 In doing so, Godwin not only aims to mobilise his readers’ imagination in order to educate,15 but he also foregrounds the effects on individual lives of broad social structures, which Godwin called ‘external circumstances’ and found increasingly important in the later editions of the Enquiry Concerning Political Justice.16 The Life of Lady Jane Grey is constructed broadly following the model of the Life of Chaucer. In it, Godwin presents the tragic story of an unwilling queen who found herself caught in a political situation she did not envisage. In doing so, however, he explores the broader political and social context of late-sixteenth-century England, with an emphasis on the religious dimension of political conflict. Though the story told is that of Jane Grey, her assumption of the crown, and her eventual demise at the hands of Queen Mary, Godwin inscribes Jane Grey’s life in a broad set of circumstances which he delineates in the preface and describes as ‘those great

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objects’ of the history of England: ‘the Reformation, and the Revival of Learning’.17 Godwin delivers on this promise and consistently discusses issues related to the Reformation and the problematic relationship between Catholics and Protestants following the reign of Henry VIII, and until the reign of James II, after which ‘it became one of the laws of England, that no popish prince should ever sit upon our Protestant throne’ (JG 51). Indeed, the whole Life of Lady Jane Grey is framed by various discussions of the persecutions perpetrated by both Catholics and Protestants, and their social and political consequences. It is important to recognise the broader context of this choice of model and subject, for Godwin here is at once conventional and innovative. On the one hand, it was not unusual to find Jane Grey among the exemplary characters of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century collective biographies for children and adults. In works for children, she appears for example in the second edition of the Juvenile Plutarch (1806), and in Mary Pilkington’s Mirror for the Female Sex, the second edition of which was published in 1799 for John Newbery’s famous bookshop, then run by John’s son Francis. Jane Grey also appears in texts aimed at older children and adults: she is featured in both Mary Hays’ Female Biography (1805) and in Pilkington’s Memoirs of Celebrated Female Characters (1804).18 Moreover, Jane Grey was one of the few female characters that were regularly present in histories of England for both children and adults.19 In that sense, Godwin was not particularly adventurous. What was original, however, was that Godwin wrote a full-length biography for children. Though biography was an increasingly popular genre, biographers for children at the turn of the nineteenth century tended to write collective rather than individual biographies of historical characters.20 Furthermore, Godwin’s contextual model, echoing his experiment in the genre with the Life of Chaucer (1803), was even more unusual in children’s books at the time. In writing this complex, contextual biography of Jane Grey for children he was thus not simply writing the story of another ‘female worthy’, but rather placing a female-centred narrative in a broader historiographical model. In so doing, Godwin complemented his rather male-centred schoolbook, The History of England. For the Use of Schools and Young Persons (1806), as well as those of many other popular authors, by re-inscribing in a much deeper way (some) women into the history of England. In this context, Godwin’s Life of Jane Grey was at once conventional, since the subject was a well-known and well-respected historical character, and daring, as the format was unusual.

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Female Exemplarity in the Life of Lady Jane Grey Biographical works for children in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries most often had an explicitly didactic and moral aim. In this sense, Godwin’s choice of Jane Grey was justified by her perception as an exemplary ‘female worthy’. Writers usually stress three dimensions of her character, emphasised differently according to the preferences of various authors: (1) her abilities as a female scholar; (2) her female sensitivity and domestic propriety; (3) her religiosity especially insofar as it gave her strength of resolve. To take a particularly striking example, Mary Pilkington, in the table of contents of her Mirror for the Female Sex, views Jane Grey as an illustration of the virtues of ‘religion’ and the especially female qualities of ‘politeness of address and polish of manners’ and ‘forgiveness of injuries’.21 In the narrative illustrating these especially important virtues, Pilkington also refers quite positively to Jane Grey’s scholarship—especially perhaps as it refers to the learning of languages particularly associated with both the Bible and humanist education, for ‘she was completely mistress of the Latin and Greek languages, and had some proficiency in the Hebrew’ (MFS 7). Other writers, such as the author of the Juvenile Plutarch, preferred foregrounding her scholarly accomplishments, though they are appended to the fact that she was ‘accomplished in’ the more female-gendered works of ‘needle-work, fair-­ hand writing, and music’.22 Moreover, they do not fail to describe her as a ‘virtuous, amiable, and pious daughter’, who ‘received the dismal tidings [of her condemnation to death] with her accustomed mildness and religious resignation’ (JP 1:50). To a certain extent, Godwin’s text is a variation on this pattern. He does indeed find Jane Grey to be ‘the most perfect model of a meritorious young creature of the female sex, to be found in history: her example is therefore the fittest possible to be held up to the fairest half of the rising generation’ (JG iii). Unlike the Juvenile Plutarch, which only emphasises Grey’s scholarly accomplishments after her domestic virtues, however, Godwin considers the latter as the afterthought and foregrounds instead her academic aptitude. On the title page, Jane Grey is described as: this young Lady [who] at Twelve Years of Age understood Eight Languages, was for Nine Days Queen of England, and was Beheaded in the Tower in the Seventeenth Year of her Age, being at that Time the most Amiable and Accomplished Woman in Europe. (JG title page)

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Later on, in the midst of the description of Grey’s intellectual abilities, Godwin simply states that Jane did not ‘in pursuit of these extraordinary [scholarly] acquisitions, fall into neglect of those more useful and ornamental arts, which are peculiarly to be desired in the female sex’, before returning to a discussion of her scholarship (JG 9). Moreover, Godwin places less relative emphasis on Jane Grey’s feminine sensitivity than other authors. For example, in describing her refusal to take the crown, he reports an erudite speech, displaying her grasp of recent English history, and her judgement on her ‘liberty’, as an individual, which ‘is more to be desired than the chain’ of the monarchy, ‘with what precious stones soever it be adorned, or of what gold soever framed’ (JG 44–45). After quoting (or, rather, inventing) Jane Grey’s position, he goes on to underline the ‘firmness and sobriety’ of her speech, which ‘confounded’ her father-in-law, Northumberland, her parents, and her husband (JG 47). In Godwin’s version it is because of a certain kind of discursive and emotional violence, as Jane Grey was ‘assaulted’ by her family and their exhortations, that ‘she yielded’ and accepted to take the crown (JG 47). In contrast, Pilkington frames Jane’s initial refusal and eventual persuasion as indications of her ‘humility and justice’ (MFS 5; my emphasis). Lying somewhere between those two positions, the author of the Juvenile Plutarch notes that Lady Jane Grey ‘pointed out with energy’ the better claims of Mary, and ‘the danger’ of trying to usurp the crown, although her first reaction also is to ‘burst into tears’ (JP 1:48). This is not to say that Godwin does not express any admiration for Jane Grey’s humility, and sensitivity. Both Godwin and Pilkington find themselves struck by Jane Grey’s forgiveness, for example. Pilkington even elevates that ability to the status of one of her most exemplary traits (MFS 7, 233). Similarly, Godwin writes that as soon as Lady Jane learns that her father was ‘more disturbed at the thought of being the author of her death than with the expectation of his own’, […] she recollected that he was her father, and that all he had done, however mistaken (as, poor man, he had been through life), was intended in kindness; and she forgave him. She was too nobly indifferent to life, to feel the injury he had done her in all its bitterness. (JG 93–94)

There is, however, a broader critical gesture suggested by Godwin’s narrative; for in Godwin’s Life of Lady Jane Grey, female and familial sensitivity are also closely associated with the eventual demise of the young woman.

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In that context, the exemplary status of sensitivity becomes unclear, and also ties Godwin’s treatment of Jane Grey to his ongoing reflection on the problems posed by personal affections and the risk of tyranny they imply.23 For Godwin, her ‘sobriety and firmness’ of argument against assuming the crown was defeated ‘at once by the artful persuasions of Northumberland, the expostulations of her father, the intreaties of her mother, and the intercessions of her husband’, Lord Guildford Dudley (JG 47). While this can find an echo in the Juvenile Plutarch, where Jane Grey is ‘overcome by the force of parental authority, and the more endearing arguments of a beloved partner’, the emphasis in Godwin is peculiarly strong. Not only does he use a military lexicon—Jane Grey was ‘assaulted’ and eventually ‘yielded’—which increases the urgency of the matter, but Godwin also returns to the issue of personal affections towards the end of the short book. He notes that, in the end, it was because of Jane Grey’s ‘truly conjugal affection’ for her husband that she accepted a crown which she did not want, nor thought herself entitled to (JG 97). Thus, despite the ‘respect expressed […] for marriage’ in his 1805 novel Fleetwood which Mark Philp has interpreted as evidence of his taking ‘up the mature mantle of family man and loving husband’,24 the Life of Lady Jane Grey shows that Godwin remained committed to a critical view of marriage, based on the problematic relationship between individual private judgement and personal attachments.25 The final common dimension of Jane Grey’s exemplarity—her unwavering attachment to the Reformed religion—is where Godwin uses the interplay between personalised biography and broad historical context to raise questions concerning that exemplarity. Godwin undermines the usual reading not so much by criticising her Protestant zeal, but rather by contextualising it and de-centring it. One of the central points of Pilkington’s narrative in the Mirror for the Female Sex is her description of Jane Grey’s firmness in keeping true to the Protestant faith, despite her impending death—which she met with religious ‘calmness and resignation’—and in spite of Queen Mary’s attempts to convert her by sending ‘several Roman Catholic priests’ to her prison cell (MFS 6). References to Jane Grey’s zealous Protestantism and its benefits are also common in the Juvenile Plutarch. The author stresses how Jane Grey remained firmly grounded in the Protestant religion even while awaiting death. Accordingly, for the author, her ‘principles were those of truth and conviction’, which Jane Grey defended ‘with strength and firmness; yet with meekness and Christian charity’ (JP 1:51).26 This attitude is contrasted with that of Queen Mary,

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‘a blind bigot to the Romish religion, and as superstitious as she was cruel’ (JP 1:50). Godwin’s discussion of Jane Grey’s religiosity, in contrast, is fully inscribed in broader considerations on the complex relationship between Catholics and Protestants in England. Thus, while Godwin does suggest that Protestantism is doctrinally sounder than Catholicism—which he describes, for instance, as bringing ‘the empire of superstition and darkness over the world’ (JG 49)—he does not shy away from describing and condemning both Protestants and Catholics as intolerant of the other. In fact, he suggests that it was the Protestants who were responsible in the first instance, for they were the ones who initially ‘burned the crucifixes’ of the Catholics—who then ‘by way of retort, burned the Protestants alive’ (JG 29). This contextualisation colours all mentions of religion in the text, and thus, what is exemplary in Lady Jane Grey is not the fact that she ‘was a zealous Protestant’, ready to die a martyr of her faith, but rather that she wanted ‘to protect the true faith from persecution, and to prevent the superstition and idolatry, which had so long overshadowed the island, from being restored to power’ (JG 63). The point, then, is not to glorify the Protestant religion, but rather to stress firstly the problem of religious persecution, and secondly that of superstition. Godwin associates superstition with Catholicism, which reflects not only his Dissenting background but the common views of the period. Two of the crucial dimensions of the representation of Jane Grey as an exemplar of femininity—a perfect daughter and wife—and religious faith, then, are undermined in Godwin’s text. In doing this, Godwin is making broader historical and moral points. The great example ‘for the fairest half of the rising generation’ is an exemplary scholar, an enquiring reader who prefers ‘reading the Phaedon of Plato in the original Greek’ to accompanying part of the court ‘a-hunting’ (JG 12), whose quiet, free and learned life was only brought to an end as a consequence of circumstances largely outside her control.

Individualism and Benevolence On the surface, we can locate The Looking-Glass in a much broader tradition of moral tales of hard work such as Thomas Day’s ‘The History of Little Jack’ (1788), and the familiar story of Goody Two-Shoes.27 In all three texts, children with very little means conquer adversity and achieve success, be it artistic flourishing and financial independence (The

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Looking-Glass); becoming a great teacher and doing good works with one’s hard-earned money and position (The History of Goody Two-Shoes) or becoming a successful and frugal industrialist (‘The History of Little Jack’). Thus we have evidence supporting Isaac Kramnick’s claim that Godwin was a kind of ‘bourgeois radical’ whose works—and especially The Looking-Glass—embody and circulate ‘the new bourgeois ideology’ at the centre of which we find: the solitary individual responsible for his or her own fate—not the heir to a family title or the member of a guild but the self-reliant individual alone in the marketplace of merit and talent, who earned either success or failure.28

Godwin’s words in the second part of the preface, where he addresses directly his ‘young reader’, lend additional credence to this position. The author stresses that the young artist was neither ‘bombastic’ nor ‘impossible’ as a character and that his achievements are related to his ‘merit’, which, Godwin continues, ‘my young friend, is within your reach too’ (TLG ix). Pushing his readers to identify as much as possible with the central character of the narrative, Godwin generalises his point concerning the progress of the artist through his hard work. Even if the ‘young reader’ is not to be an artist, like the protagonist of The Looking-Glass, the ‘little story-book need not be of the less use’, for ‘every art is like every other art’ (TLG x–xi). What should matter for the future of the readers of The Looking-Glass is what mattered for the success of its protagonist, the fact that ‘he loved the employment and the studies to which his efforts were devoted’ (TLG xii). Yet, unlike Kramnick’s classic ‘new bourgeois models—engineers, scientists, and industrial entrepreneurs’, we have an artist, reflecting Godwin’s own bias concerning the necessity of art for social progress.29 Moreover, unlike many of the moral tales of hard work, the artist is not an orphan: on the contrary, his parents are described as ever-present and ready to support their child in his endeavours, artistic or otherwise, especially after being encouraged to do so by the child’s other mentors.30 Granted, it can be argued that Godwin could have done so out of respect for the truth of the story, while trying to bend it as close to the ideological position as he could. Thus, we see repeated emphasis of the fact that the child was supposed to be ‘under every disadvantage of a humble situation and a total absence of instruction and assistance’ (TLG ix), or was indeed ‘a self-­ taught artist, prompted by an impulse he felt within, and scarcely ever

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receiving any external advantage or encouragement’ (TLG 74–75). Yet Godwin also breaks the narrative flow of his story in order to stress the impact of the child’s parents on his success. ‘While I admire the diligence and application of the boy’, Godwin writes, I should be very sorry to forget that the merits of his parents toward him were very extraordinary: […] they redoubled their assiduity in business; mother, as well as father, found the means of turning time to profit and they sometimes sat up while nights, that they might increase their power of doing justice to his talents. (TLG 63–64)

But parents are not the only ones who encourage and push the young artist. What is truly striking in The Looking-Glass is the extent to which Godwin’s child artist is largely not a fully self-reliant individual, despite the author’s affirmations in the text. After emphasising in chapter one the influence of ‘Corny’ (a friend of the child’s father) on the father’s use of drawing to entertain the child— which proves invaluable for development of the artist’s early tastes for art (TLG 3–6)—Godwin turns to the child’s peers at Mr. Underwood’s day school in chapter two. As ‘he examined’ the drawings of those schoolmates ‘who owed to the liberality of their parents the advantage of a drawing master’, the protagonist ‘learned to correct his crude conceptions of the human form’ (TLG 19–20). In the following chapter, ‘the boy’ meets the new master at his school, a ‘Mr. Night’ (TLG 27). This Mr. Night ‘encouraged him [the young artist] to persist’ in the direction of ‘the arts of design’ and enables him to do so by giving him drawings, ‘which he advised him to copy’ (TLG 28–29). In addition to drawings, and ‘to stimulate the little lad to perseverance’ Mr. Night narrates the story of two famous London engravers named Heath and Sharp who started ‘with no greater advantages’ as the young artist did, and now lived thanks to their art (TLG 29–30).31 Stressing even more the social nature of the artist’s success, both in technical and in material terms, in that same chapter Godwin relates the artist’s acquaintance with ‘a poor working man’ thanks to whom the child ‘experienced an accidental advantage’ in the form of ‘implements, canvas, and chalk of a better sort than that to which the boy had hitherto been accustomed’ (TLG 81). As Godwin ends chapter three, and just before describing the artistic achievements of the child, he tells the reader that it was thanks to ‘the notice and encouragement he [the boy] experienced from Mr. Night, [that] he rose somewhat higher than he

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had done in the same way about a year before, under Mr. Underwood’— emphasising again the role that close personal relationships play in the artist’s education and success (TLG 33–34). The end of chapter three here marks about one-third of The Looking-­ Glass, yet the importance of encounters with teachers and mentors does not fade. On the contrary, in the following chapter the boy meets the artist Mr. Graham, who not only provides the child with the opportunity to get a more formal artistic education (TLG 43–44), but also—crucially—tells the child’s father ‘how much promise of excellence appeared to display itself in his son’ and suggest that the child ‘should receive all manner of encouragement’ (TLG 45). Haphazard encounters also continue playing an important role in leading the young artist from one mentor to the next. Thanks to ‘a boot maker, a friend of the father’s’, the child is taken under the wing of ‘Mr. Corbet’ who eventually helps the child further his formal understanding of art by studying anatomy (TLG 79–80, 87), before becoming ‘of opinion that his progress was sufficient to entitle him to an admission to draw in the Royal Academy’ (TLG 93). This leads the child to his final mentor: Mr. Thomas Banks, a sculptor and fellow of the Royal Academy, who—after a short time—accepts to instruct the child, grows fond of him and finally ‘recommended to him to repair to a drawing-­ school’ where ‘the master of the school was flattered at receiving a pupil with such a recommendation’ (TLG 100–101).32 However, due to the fact that the drawing master, ‘who was an ill economist, found it necessary to disappear’, it is Mr. Banks who, we are told in chapters eight and nine, accompanies the child with encouragement and instruction all the way to his final admission to the Royal Academy. Despite this, it could be argued that The Looking-Glass is a sophisticated version of bourgeois individualism, linked to the emergence of liberalism, and that Godwin is therefore simply providing a further example of this kind of ideological literature. After all, the child earns his way from mentor to mentor thanks to his growing talents and continuing hard work. Thus, for example, Thomas Banks initially sends the child home, to ‘make a better drawing of the Apollo’ before accepting to see him again and eventually give him instruction (TLG 100–101). In this reading, like in ‘The History of Little Jack’, characters the protagonist meets simply offer him rewards for good works. There are two further dimensions of Godwin’s text that resist this reading, however. The first is the recognition of the influence of chance in the lives of individuals. I have mentioned that the boy’s encounter with Mr. Corbet

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was the result of the fortuitous presence of a friend of the child’s father. In the case of Mr. Banks, chance also plays a role, as he was chosen by the child and Mr. Corbet as a potential sponsor only because ‘it happened’ to be ‘the first name which presented itself’ in the ‘list or catalogue’ they were consulting (TLG 94). Moreover, the emphasis on the encouragement and sympathy the child receives from those who recognise his worth is better described as the function of a social system of benevolence that demands that society recognises an individual’s worth. In that sense, it is an enactment of the general applications of the rules of justice Godwin describes in Political Justice. The child’s parents and mentors are acting in accordance with the fact that, as individuals, they are ‘bound to employ’ their ‘time for the production of the greatest quantity of general good’.33 So, rather than a bourgeois individualist story, we have something closer to a tale of Godwinian benevolence, where individuals recognise the true worth of the child artist, and enable him to flourish, and over time, to gratify society with his art. There are so many of these encounters, and they are so beneficial to the child, that Godwin seems to have felt the need to undercut claims of implausibility. He self-consciously remarked: it is one circumstance worthy of remark in this narrative, that, though it all true history, there is [not] one bad man in it. Every personage that occurs, is kind and willing to assist and forward the honest views of his neighbour, as far as it obviously and easily lies in his power to do. (TLG 83)34

Rather than the story of a virtuous and victorious individualism—like that of Goody Two-Shoes or Little Jack, we are shown a story of mutual aid, and the benefits of a society based on benevolence.

Conclusion Writing biographies for children gave Godwin a variety of opportunities to build on one of the most important of his historiographical and educational concepts: exemplarity. The Looking-Glass and the Life of Lady Jane Grey, however, show different routes Godwin could take to develop exemplary stories, making use of different forms of historical or narrative distance. With the former, he could build a sophisticated model or mirror, based on a complex character whose psychology we are able to follow. Unlike many of the moralising ‘mirrors’ of the time, or those story books such as ‘The History of Little Jack’, which The Looking-Glass superficially

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resembles, Godwin acted on a critical view of emulation that built on the reader’s ability to identify with the protagonist, both his qualities and his defects, in order to encourage emulation, but also self-criticism. In the Life of Lady Jane Grey, Godwin could at once develop a well-known exemplary female character—in slight tension or, at least, contrast with other common accounts of the period—and bring the history of England to female readers, in a context where only few history books dedicated to young girls existed. Thus, the comparatively stronger emphasis on the domestic and interpersonal in The Looking-Glass (echoing the Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman), and on the systemic in the Life of Lady Jane Grey (recalling the Life of Chaucer) indicate two complementary ways in which Godwin could fruitfully employ the genre of biography for the education of children, while also allowing him to press on social and political points that were dear to him. Lastly, I want to gesture to Godwin’s considerations on the connections between history and biography and how The Looking-Glass and the Life of Lady Jane Grey fit in that context by relating them to Godwin’s essay ‘Of History and Romance’. In both biographies he demonstrates both the proximate—even the intimate—and the more distant ‘successive circumstances’ under which ‘a character acts’ and how that ‘character increases and assimilates new substances to its own’.35 In The Looking-­ Glass (and the Memoirs) Godwin illustrates the personal and domestic situations from which a character as admirable as William Mulready can emerge. Thus, we as readers can ‘insensibly imbibe the same spirit, and burn with kindred fires’.36 With the Life of Lady Jane Grey we are made to understand better how ‘the machine of society’ functioned in the period of the Reformation and how an exemplary but also flawed young scholar, Lady Jane Grey, could emerge in that context, respond to it, and display the poetic excellence that could arise from it. In doing so, Godwin grounds his work on what Mark Salber Phillips has called ‘the reciprocity of biography and history’ and attempts to deliver on his exhortation to the historian who, as a ‘liberal and spirited benefactor of his species, must connect the two branches of history together, and regard the knowledge of the individual, as that which alone gives energy and utility to the records of our social existence’.37

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Notes 1. See the marked increase in the publication of biographical writings in Table  1.1  in Michael Suarez, ‘Towards a Bibliometric Analysis of the Surviving Record, 1701–1800’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. Volume 5: 1695–1830, ed. by Michael F. Suarez SJ and Michael L.  Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 37–65, (p. 46). 2. Robert Bisset, ‘A Biographical Sketch of the Authors of the Spectator’ in The Spectator. A New Edition in Eight Volumes with Illustrative Notes to which are Prefixed the Lives of the Authors, ed. by Robert Bisset, 8 vols (London: G. Robertson, J. Cuthell, J. Lackington, 1793), I, p. vii; Samuel Johnson, ‘The Dignity and Usefulness of Biography’ in Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, 6 vols (London: J. Payne and J. Bouquet, 1752), II, 207–215 (p. 211). 3. Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 111–33. 4. Julian North, The Domestication of Genius: Biography and the Romantic Poet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp.  15–25; Philip Hicks, ‘Female Worthies and the Genres of Women’s History’, in Historical Writing in Britain, 1688–1830: Visions of History, ed. by Ben Dew and Fiona Price (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp.  18–33; For a striking example of this, see: Mary Pilkington, A Mirror for the Female Sex. Historical Beauties for Young Ladies, 2nd edn (London: Vernor and Hood, 1799) and especially Mary Pilkington’s introduction to the work. For a broader view on women’s life writing, see: Amy Culley, British Women’s Life Writing, 1760–1840: Friendship, Community, and Collaboration (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 5. Notable exceptions include: Pamela Clemit and Gina Luria Walker, ‘Introduction’, in Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. by Pamela Clemit and Gina Luria Walker (Peterborough, Ont: Broadview Press, 2001), pp. 11–36; chapter 2 in April London, Literary History Writing, 1770–1820 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Tilottama Rajan, ‘Uncertain Futures: History and Genealogy in William Godwin’s The Lives of Edward and John Philips, Nephews and Pupils of Milton’, Milton Quarterly, 32.3 (1998), 75–86; Rowland Weston, ‘William Godwin and the Puritan Legacy’, Nineteenth-Century Prose, 39.1–2 (2012), 411–42; Paul M. Clogan, ‘Literary Criticism in William Godwin’s Life of Chaucer in Medieval Hagiography and Romance’, Medievalia et Humanistica, 1975, 189–198.

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6. William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (London: J.  Johnson and G.  G. and J.  Robinson, 1798). The Memoirs can also be found in William Godwin, Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 8 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1992), I: Autobiography, Autobiographical Fragments and Reflections, Godwin/Shelley Correspondence, Memoirs, ed. Mark Philp, pp. 85–141. Henceforth all references will be to the Philp edition of the Memoirs. 7. Clemit and Walker, pp. 14–24. 8. Clemit and Walker, p. 22. 9. Theophilus Marcliffe [William Godwin], The Looking-Glass: A True History of the Early Years of an Artist (London: Thomas Hodgkins, 1805), p. 3, hereafter referred to in text as TLG followed by the page number. 10. Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, p. 87. 11. Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, p. 87. 12. William Godwin, Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, the Early English Poet: Including 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, 2 vols (London: Richard Phillips, 1803). William Godwin, Lives of Edward and John Philips: Nephews and Pupils of Milton. Including Various Particulars of the Literary and Political History of Their Times (Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1815). 13. Godwin, Life of Chaucer, I, p. 35. 14. London, p. 45; On the Lives of Edward and John Philips see also: Rajan. 15. On this point, see also: North, pp. 108–9. 16. See the changes made to An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice in William Godwin, Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 7 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993), IV: An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice: Variants, ed. Mark Philp, pp. 16–28. On Godwin’s lives in relation to history, see also: Pamela Clemit, The Godwinian Novel: The Rational Fictions of Godwin, Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 81–4. 17. Theophilus Marcliffe [William Godwin], Life of Lady Jane Grey, and of Lord Guildford Dudley Her Husband (London: Thomas Hodgkins, 1806), p. iv (emphasis in the original). Hereafter referred to in text as JG followed by the page number. 18. Anonymous, The Juvenile Plutarch, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London: Tabart and Co., 1806); Mary Pilkington, A Mirror for the Female Sex. Historical Beauties for Young Ladies, 2nd edn (London: Vernor and Hood, 1799); Mary Hays, Female Biography: Or, Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated

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Women, of All Ages and Countries. Alphabetically Arranged, 4 vols (London: Richard Phillips, 1803); Mary Pilkington, Memoirs of Celebrated Female Characters, Who Have Distinguished Themselves by Their Talents and Virtues in Every Age and Nation; Containing the Most Extensive Collection of Illustrious Examples of Feminine Excellence Ever Published; in Which the Virtuous and the Vicious Are Painted in Their True Colours (London: Albion Press, 1804). 19. See for example: David Hume, The History of Great Britain, Under the House of Tudor, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London: A. Millar, 1759), I, pp. 342, 349; Elizabeth Helme, The History of England Related in Familiar Conversations, by a Father to His Children: Interspersed with Moral and Instructive Remarks, and Observations on the Most Leading and Interesting Subjects, 2 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1804), II, pp. 45–46, 49–52; Oliver Goldsmith, An History of England in a Series of Letters from a Nobleman to His Son, 2 vols (London: T. Carnan, 1786), I, pp.  267–69, 272. See also Godwin’s own: Edward Baldwin [William Godwin], The History of England. For the Use of Schools and Young Persons (London: Thomas Hodgkins, 1806), p. 117. 20. The 1801 catalogue of Benjamin Tabart’s popular children’s bookshop lists only one individual biography in the texts directed at readers younger than fifteen, Benjamin Tabart, A Catalogue of Books, for the Amusement and Instruction of Youth and for the Use of Schools, Systematically Arranged (London: B. Tabart, Juvenile & School Library, 1801). A search through Andrea Immel’s helpful index to Sarah Trimmer’s reviewing in the Guardian of Education shows us a similar scarcity of individual historical biographies for the use of young children, Andrea Immel and Mitzi Myers, Revolutionary Reviewing  : Sarah Trimmer’s Guardian of Education and the Cultural Politics of Juvenile Literature : An Index to the Guardian (Los Angeles: Dept. of Special Collections, University Research Library, University of California Los Angeles, 1990). 21. Mary Pilkington, A Mirror for the Female Sex. Historical Beauties for Young Ladies, 2nd edn (London: Vernor and Hood, 1799), pp. xvii, xxii, xxiv. Hereafter referred to in text as MFS followed by the page number. 22. Anonymous, The Juvenile Plutarch, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London: Tabart and Co., 1806), I, p. 45. A presentation of her scholarly accomplishments takes the better part of the next two pages. Hereafter referred to in text as JP followed by the volume and page number. 23. Susan Manly makes a similar point but takes it in a slightly different direction in ‘William Godwin’s “School of Morality”’, The Wordsworth Circle, 43.3 (2012), 135–42 (pp. 140–41). 24. Mark Philp, Godwin’s Political Justice (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), p.  175; William Godwin, Fleetwood; or, The New Man of

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Feeling, in Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 8 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993), V, Fleetwood, ed. Pamela Clemit, p. 14. 25. For Godwin’s view on marriage and the problem of private judgement, in a slightly different key to this discussion, see: William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice in Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 7 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993), III: An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. Mark Philp, p.  453 (for the 1793 edition), and IV, p.  337 (for the 1796 and 1798 variants). See also Philp, p. 182. 26. My emphasis. Note also the intersection of gendered expectations and religion here. 27. Anonymous, The History of Goody Two-Shoes; Otherwise Called Mrs. Margery Two-Shoes (London: John Newbery, 1765); Anonymous [Thomas Day], ‘The History of Little Jack’ in Anonymous, The Children’s Miscellany, pp. 1–57 (London: John Stockdale, 1788). 28. Isaac Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth-Century England and America (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 100. 29. On this, see for example: Julie Ann Carlson, England’s First Family of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), p. 244. 30. Carlson, p. 242. On the ideological use of orphans, see Kramnick, p. 113. For Godwin’s descriptions of the help Mulready’s parents gave their child, see: TLG pp. 45, 48–9, 62–4, 74–5, 117. 31. These were most likely James Heath and William Sharp, both of whom are listed in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Given the evidence in Godwin’s diary, it is quite likely that Godwin knew James Heath through their mutual connection with the bookseller George Robinson. Godwin records meeting a ‘Heath’ with Robinson on 24 March 1789. He definitely knew William Sharp and records meeting him several times from 20 October 1792 until Sharp’s death on 30 July 1824 (Godwin records his death). William Godwin, The Diary of William Godwin, ed. Victoria Myers, David O’Shaughnessy and Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford Digital Library, 2010). http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk. 32. Thomas Banks was also an acquaintance of Godwin’s. The sculptor moved in radical circles and especially John Horne Tooke’s. Godwin records meeting him at least once per year from 20 January 1793 to 27 September 1802, and he sees him again on 28 March and 23 September 1804 (Godwin, Diary). 33. Godwin, Political Justice, III, p. 53.

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34. In a twist of irony, I had to put the ‘not’ between square brackets: there was a printing mistake in the first edition of The Looking-Glass, whereby the passage said ‘there is one bad man’ instead of what I quote. Godwin indicates this at the end of the book, as he lists the errata (TLG 118). I should be thankful to the printer, R. Wilks, from Chancery Lane: the oddity of this sentence given the mistake was the reason it stood out as I was reading the text. 35. William Godwin, ‘Of History and Romance’, Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 7 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993), V: Educational and Literary Writings, ed. Pamela Clemit, pp. 290–301 (p. 301). 36. William Godwin, ‘Of History and Romance’, p. 293. 37. Phillips, p. 143; Godwin, ‘Of History and Romance’, pp. 293–4.

Bibliography Anonymous, The History of Goody Two-Shoes; Otherwise Called Mrs. Margery Two-­ Shoes (London: John Newbery, 1765). Anonymous [Thomas Day], ‘The History of Little Jack’ in The Children’s Miscellany (London: John Stockdale, 1788), pp. 1–57. Anonymous, The Juvenile Plutarch, 2nd ed, 2 vols (London: Tabart and Co., 1806). Baldwin, Edward [William Godwin], The History of England. For the Use of Schools and Young Persons (London: Thomas Hodgkins, 1806). Bisset, Robert, ‘A Biographical Sketch of the Authors of the Spectator’ in The Spectator. A New Edition in Eight Volumes with Illustrative Notes to which are Prefixed the Lives of the Authors, ed. Robert Bisset, 8 vols (London: G. Robertson, J. Cuthell, J. Lackington, 1793). Carlson, Julie A., England’s First Family of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). Clemit, Pamela, The Godwinian Novel: The Rational Fictions of Godwin, Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). Clemit, Pamela, and Gina Luria Walker, ‘Introduction’, in Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Pamela Clemit and Gina Luria Walker (Peterborough, Ont: Broadview Press, 2001). Culley, Amy, British Women’s Life Writing, 1760–1840: Friendship, Community, and Collaboration (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Clogan, Paul M., ‘Literary Criticism in William Godwin’s Life of Chaucer in Medieval Hagiography and Romance’, Medievalia et Humanistica, 1975, 189–198. Godwin, William, Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 8 Vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1992).

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Godwin, William, The Diary of William Godwin, ed. Victoria Myers, David O’Shaughnessy, and Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford Digital Library, 2010) http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk. Godwin, William, Life of Chaucer, the Early English Poet: Including 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, 2 vols (London: Richard Phillips, 1803). Godwin, William, Lives of Edward and John Philips: Nephews and Pupils of Milton. Including Various Particulars of the Literary and Political History of Their Times (Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1815). Godwin, William, ‘Of History and Romance’ in Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 7 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993) V: Educational and Literary Writings, ed. Pamela Clemit, pp. 290–301. Goldsmith, Oliver, An History of England in a Series of Letters from a Nobleman to His Son, 2 vols (London: T. Carnan, 1786). Hays, Mary, Female Biography: Or, Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women, of All Ages and Countries. Alphabetically Arranged, 4 vols (London: Richard Phillips, 1803). Hicks, Philip, ‘Female Worthies and the Genres of Women’s History’, in Historical Writing in Britain, 1688–1830: Visions of History, ed. Ben Dew and Fiona Price (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Helme, Elizabeth, The History of England Related in Familiar Conversations, by a Father to His Children: Interspersed with Moral and Instructive Remarks, and Observations on the Most Leading and Interesting Subjects, 2 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1804). Hume, David, The History of Great Britain, Under the House of Tudor, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London: A. Millar, 1759). Immel, Andrea and Mitzi Myers, Revolutionary Reviewing: Sarah Trimmer’s Guardian of Education and the Cultural Politics of Juvenile Literature: An Index to the Guardian (Los Angeles: Dept. of Special Collections, University Research Library, University of California Los Angeles, 1990). Johnson, Samuel, ‘The Dignity and Usefulness of Biography’ in The Rambler, 6 vols (London: J. Payne and J. Bouquet, 1752), II, 207–215. Kramnick, Isaac, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth-Century England and America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990). London, April, Literary History Writing, 1770–1820 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Manly, Susan, ‘William Godwin’s “School of Morality”’, The Wordsworth Circle, 43.3 (2012), 135–42. Marcliffe, Theophilus, [William Godwin], Life of Lady Jane Grey, and of Lord Guildford Dudley Her Husband (London: Thomas Hodgkins, 1806).

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Marcliffe, Theophilus [William Godwin], The Looking-Glass: A True History of the Early Years of an Artist (London: Thomas Hodgkins, 1805). North, Julian, The Domestication of Genius: Biography and the Romantic Poet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Phillips, Mark Salber, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) Philp, Mark, Godwin’s Political Justice (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986). Pilkington, Mary, Memoirs of Celebrated Female Characters, Who Have Distinguished Themselves by Their Talents and Virtues in Every Age and Nation; Containing the Most Extensive Collection of Illustrious Examples of Feminine Excellence Ever Published; in Which the Virtuous and the Vicious Are Painted in Their True Colours (London: Albion Press, 1804). Pilkington, Mary, A Mirror for the Female Sex. Historical Beauties for Young Ladies, 2nd edn. (London: Vernor and Hood, 1799). Rajan, Tilottama, ‘Uncertain Futures: History and Genealogy in William Godwin’s The Lives of Edward and John Philips, Nephews and Pupils of Milton’, Milton Quarterly, 32.3 (1998), 75–86. Suarez, Michael, ‘Towards a Bibliometric Analysis of the Surviving Record, 1701–1800’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. Volume 5: 1695–1830, ed. Michael F.  Suarez SJ and Michael L.  Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 37–65. Tabart, Benjamin, A Catalogue of Books, for the Amusement and Instruction of Youth and for The Use of Schools, Systematically Arranged (London: B. Tabart, Juvenile & School Library, 1801). Weston, Rowland, ‘William Godwin and the Puritan Legacy’, Nineteenth-Century Prose, 39.1–2.

PART II

Fears

Candour, Courage, and the Calculation of Consequences in Godwin’s 1790s Mark Philp

This chapter examines the way in which Godwin conceives of fear and its apparent opposite, ‘courage’, and how his understanding of the relationship between these two terms changes over the course of the 1790s. One critical issue is the extent to which prudential considerations are allowed weight in determining how one should act and, above all, with respect to what one says in conflicts with those in government and authority. In so far as prudence is accepted as a reasonable guiding force it seems to admit that our judgement about how to act and what we say might reasonably be influenced by factors other than the truth of the beliefs that we hold. That is, they may involve a calculation of the consequences with that leading to action being guided by prudence. Yet, in the first edition of An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), Godwin rejects the view that it is morally permissible to act or speak on the basis of ‘the bastard prudence’. This is a very demanding view of our responsibility to truth and we should try to understand why he was persuaded by it, and we then need to consider the complex question of why he moved away from it. M. Philp (*) University of Warwick, Coventry, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. O’Brien et al. (eds.), New Approaches to William Godwin, Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62912-0_5

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In his Political Justice (1793) William Godwin set out a number of fundamental claims about reason as an integral feature of our moral agency. He took the view that action should follow from the exercise of our reasoning capacities. If we believed something we should speak out and say so. If we believed a thing to be true we should act on that truth. Indeed, in this first edition of Political Justice he argued not only that we should act but that the very truth of the proposition that we had a compelling reason to act in a particular case could itself be a sufficient motive for doing so (IV.viii. 187; 191).1 To do less would be to contradict our fundamentally rational nature as humans who are capable of grasping, communicating, and acting on truth. If there was to be progress, it would grow out of the clash of mind with mind. To censor one’s beliefs and their expression, or to resist acting upon them, would be to act under the influence of lesser motives and determinants that denied our rational and perfectible nature. On this, Godwin was uncompromising: Real sincerity … compels me not to dare to utter what is false, or conceal what is true. It annihilates the bastard prudence, which would instruct me to give language to no sentiment that may be prejudicial to my interests … What I know of truth, or morals, of religion, of government it compels me to communicate. (IV, iv, sect. ii, 135)

Prudence, then, is not an acceptable motive: it attributes value to things that are extrinsic to the rational determination of truth, judgement, and action. Godwin’s commitment here grows out of three sources: he was contemptuous of those who act on anything other than the intrinsic merits of a particular case and the overriding value of truth because he held a conception of the truth influenced partly by Richard Price, but also by Plato and the Socratic dialogues. Those commitments were also reinforced by his background in Rational Dissent, which continued to frame his conception of the absolute centrality of private judgement and candour in individuals determining for themselves their sense of God’s will. That position was one that outlived the demise of Godwin’s religious faith. A third influence was Godwin’s fondness for classical (predominantly Roman) examples of courage and virtue—he signed several of his political letters to newspapers ‘Mucius’—after Mucius Scaevola, the Roman youth who had attempted to assassinate Lars Porsena (the Etruscan leader) and who plunged his hand in the fire to demonstrate his indifference to fear and his

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willingness to risk all in defence of Rome. These sources fuse together in a resolute defence of candour and in his demand that we have the courage to live and speak out in the light of our understanding of truth. That commitment is repeated throughout the first edition: If there be any meaning in courage, its first ingredient must be the daring to speak the truth at all times, to all persons, and in every possible situation. (II.ii. App ii, 58)

Moreover, the motive for action must arise from the commitments of the mind: if, not being operated upon by absolute compulsion, I be wholly prompted by something that is frequently called by that name, and act from the hope of reward or the fear of punishment, my conduct is positively wrong. (II.vi.72)

One reason that action has to arise from conviction is that, without such a commitment, we will display a mindless conformity to a current state of opinion. ‘Activity of thought is shackled by the fear that our associates should disclaim us. A fallacious uniformity of opinion is produced, which no man espouses from conviction, but which carries all men along with a resistless tide’(IV.ii. 122). And in being swept up in this tide we sacrifice our prospects for progress: Implicit faith, blind submission to authority, timid fear, a distrust of our powers, an inattention to our own importance and the good purposes we are able to effect, these are the chief obstacles to human improvement. (V.xiv. 268)

Although Godwin argues that truth has the power in and of itself to move us, he also believes that this requires a firmness of mind that itself grows from the cultivation of truth and takes the form of the virtue of courage, that is, a consistent disposition to act wholly in line with the dictates of one’s judgement, and to judge wholly on the basis of the intrinsic merits of a case: ‘Courage consists more in this circumstance than in any other, the daring to speak every thing, the uttering of which may conduce to good’ (VI.vi. 347).

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The consequences for a society in which men and women have this courage are unlimited: if there be such a thing as truth, it must infallibly be struck out by the collision of mind with mind…All that is requisite in these discussions is unlimited speculation… once we are persuaded that nothing is too sacred to be brought to the touchstone of examination, science will advance with rapid strides. (I. iv, 15)

Indeed, in his discussion of sincerity Godwin insists that it is better for the fugitive Jacobite, when he falls into the company of the English in 1745, not to lie to them about his allegiance. Despite weighing the competing claims, Godwin concludes: In the case of martyrdom there are two things to be considered. It is an evil not wantonly to be incurred, for we know not what good yet remains for us to do. It is an evil not to be avoided at the expence of principle, for we should be upon our guard against setting an inordinate value upon our own efforts, and imagining that truth would die, if we were to be destroyed. (IV.iv. 139)

Moreover, Godwin was fiercely critical of Condorcet’s prudent advice in his Life of Voltaire, not to ‘put despots on their guard’ and where he also enjoined his readers to ‘conceal from them (their rulers) the strict and eternal union that subsists between knowledge and liberty…What a cowardly distrust do reasonings like these exhibit of the omnipotence of truth’ (IV.iv. 140–1). The issue clearly gave Godwin pause for thought and he returned to it in relation to the potential reformer in Portugal under its autocratic regime in the third appendix to Book IV, chapter iv. But even here he could not defend wilful dissimulation to save one’s skin. This commitment to truth is also, then, a commitment to a particular view of courage. One view is that virtue consists in not feeling fear; another in being able to act despite it. It is the difference, for example, between the woman who unreservedly and fearlessly takes her life in her hands in defending her principles, without concern for the consequences, as against the man who manages to overcome a whole range of fears and anxieties in order to act. Ancient views of courage seem to favour the former position; modern consequentialism tends to favour the latter. In the former, prudence is banished; in the latter, it is weighed very carefully. In taking the

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former position Godwin was adopting an extremely demanding position. At the same time, we should recognise that it was a position that Godwin committed himself to in his own life in the years around the first edition of Political Justice. For example, when he found someone of ability, he did not hold back in expressing his admiration. In January 1796 he met John Stoddart, a lawyer some seventeen years his junior, who eventually became a deeply conservative editor of The Times, the butt of William Hone and Thomas Wooler’s satires in 1817, and William Hazlitt‘s brother-in-law. Godwin subsequently wrote to him as follows: ‘I do not recollect any instance of a total stranger having won so much of my esteem in a single interview, as you have done. I want to know whether in exhibiting so many excellencies you have put a deception on me; or whether, as I like to believe, I have found a treasure’.2 We might think this is a relatively costless candour on Godwin’s part, but we need to recognise the demanding character of its practice amongst Godwin and his friends. Sharon Turner, who became Britain’s first major Anglo-Saxon historian, and who was courting the daughter of the engraver William Watts, was visited by Holcroft who sought to convince him of the powers of mind and truth: “What we most wanted in order to enforce Truth was a good arrangement of our ideas. Whoever cd arrange his ideas well, might write a good and useful comedy or Tragedy as well as a philosophical work.” I stared at this,—but my doubt only roused him to a stronger assertion of the practicability. He said, as he had written some successful comedies himself, he spoke from experience. He lectured me precisely as if I were his pupil and was not very patient at my inquisitorial remarks. He speaks very dogmatically and formally, yet with considerable force of language and energy. It was interesting, as an intellectual effusion, but fatiguing to listen to him. He expected your immediate apprehension and adoption of his ideas and does not like to be put to elucidate them or to hear objections to them.3

Godwin’s intimate circles were certainly demanding for those who encountered them, both on their time and attention, and in terms of their expectations as to how people should act. That they were so suggests that their philosophical discussions were not merely speculative but were part of an ongoing attempt to live their lives in a particular way, with a commitment to the full exercise of the understanding and to acting on that understanding with candour and courage.

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In the second edition of Political Justice, and subsequently, this insistence was considerably moderated  although there was still resistance to allowing fear as a legitimate motive. We can see that the circumstances in which Godwin was writing might have brought him up sharply against the question of prudence in expressing and acting on his views. At the same time, we should recognise the accentuation of the consequentialism in his thinking, which modified his sense of the importance of acting wholly on the intrinsic merits of a case. This position is less categorical and potentially more subtle even if it also opens up some potentially treacherous ground. We are dealing, then, with both slippery philosophical terrain and an increasingly threatening political context. In this chapter I will explore both dimensions (of theory and practice) and examine the case for seeing them as interacting under the pressure of the Government’s campaign against the reformers of the 1790s without seeing this rethinking simply as a reaction to political events. It has long been claimed that the changes between the editions of Political Justice demonstrate that Godwin bent before the blast of that repression.4 Essentially, I explore that claim, against the background of an analysis of what, philosophically, Godwin might have understood to be involved in ‘bending’!

Living Under Tyranny In Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, fear (craindre) is the principle of despotisms, a debilitating, enervating dread that seeps into the pores of men and women under utterly capricious rule. ‘Dread’ would, in many respects, be a better translation, since he is concerned to capture the immobilisation of the will, as against an instinctive reaction to a local and distinct threat or problem. Godwin shared such concerns: No picture can be more disgustful, no state of mankind more depressing, than that in which a whole nation is held in obedience by the mere operation of fear, in which all that is most eminent among them, and that should give example to the rest, is prevented under the severest penalties from expressing its real sentiments, and by necessary consequence from forming any sentiments that are worthy to be expressed. (V.v. 228)

What distressed him about such a picture is that, under such circumstances, the individual cannot survive as a moral being, only as a cowed

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animal. In opposition to this, Godwin sought to call forth the agent, whose character and courage are co-dependent: The first lesson of virtue is, Fear no man; the first lesson of such a constitution (monarchy) is, Fear the king. The first lesson of virtue is, Obey no man; the first lesson of monarchy is, Obey the king. The true interest of mind demands the annihilation of all factitious and imaginary distinctions; it is inseparable from monarchy to support and render them more palpable than ever. He that cannot speak to the proudest despot with a consciousness that he is a man speaking to a man, and a determination to yield him no superiority to which his inherent qualifications do not entitle him, is wholly incapable of sublime virtue. (V.vi. 233)

Courage is then the antithesis of fear (rather than something that merely outweighs it5), and there is no sense that there may be a mean between the two, or that there are different types and degrees of fear and consequently different requirements of courage. Godwin expects courage wholly to dominate and suggests that the motives for courage lie in one’s commitments to one's  beliefs and values and to the truth; whereas fear derives from irresolution, doubt, and mistaken attachment of value to things that are insignificant in contrast to living in pursuit of truth and justice. Right conduct must, for Godwin, be fearless: ‘if, not being operated upon by absolute compulsion, I be wholly prompted by something that is frequently called by that name, and act from the hope of reward or the fear of punishment, my conduct is positively wrong’ (II. vi 72). Political Justice, then, has little room for prudence. Doing things for the right reasons matters: as an issue of integrity and of living one’s own life in the light of one’s best understanding, not merely at the behest of others; and because it is crucial to be moved by the right reasons, rather than the wrong. He considers the case in which government attaches a considerable reward to the performance of what it is my duty to do. In so far as I am moved by that extrinsic consideration, rather than the intrinsic excellence of the act, then my behaviour becomes vicious rather than virtuous.6 There is also a question as to whether, if you act to meet the expectations of others, it is authentically your act. And if your beliefs are beliefs you adopt because of fear of social reaction, then it is unclear that they are your beliefs. Moreover, once we censure ourselves for fear of the reactions of others, there is a danger that we will adapt our preferences in line with

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their expectations, so subordinating ourselves to our conception of their will.7 And alloys in motives have a corrosive effect: The man who has employed foul means, will depend partly upon them, and cannot be so fervent in the cultivation of the true. If he always escape detection, he will always fear it, and this will sully the clearness of his spirit. (IV.ix. 204)

Yet, if Godwin’s Political Justice revolves around rejecting fear and prudence, his portrayal of contemporary society in his first major novel Things as They Are, or the Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) is of a social order dominated by fear and mistrust. Moreover, as Godwin wrote the novel (between 22 April 1793 and 10 May 1794) and then started to revise Political Justice (from 27 May 1794 to 1 October 1795) he came to admit that a wider range of factors might legitimately influence how people act. Things as They Are is partly a story about how good men become corrupted by the absence of candour. But it also provides Godwin with a case study of a young man, with little experience of the world, in which everything seems stacked against him, who tries to retain some shred of integrity while remaining out of the clutches of someone whom he believes is bent on his destruction.8 Things as They Are is a novel driven by curiosity—and by fear. Williams’s curiosity reveals a truth that cannot be spoken of, and that he dare not speak of because he will face the full force of Falkland’s retribution. And Falkland will not and cannot confess and admit the truth, because he fears he will be dishonoured forever, shunned by his peers, and cast beyond the pale. The novel is a story of a secret that progressively corrupts the relations of all those implicated in the plot, by dishonesty and above all by fear of what will happen, and progressively corrupts their characters. For Williams it would have been difficult to commit to the idea in Political Justice that ‘it is the property of truth to be fearless, and to prove victorious over every adversary’ (Pref I.ii. v). But, in contrast to the rather imperious and lofty insistence on truth that Godwin adopts in Political Justice, he seems genuinely keen to explore the world of fear in which Williams is forced to live. That thought experiment was initially destined to end in Williams’s annihilation, confirming it as a story of the crushing character of despotism. Having written that ending, Godwin reflected for a few days, and then composed a second, which is the one he published.9 This conclusion points in a different direction, even if it too leaves its

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protagonists, their characters, and their hopes wholly blasted. The suggestion is that, somehow, ‘things as they are’ could have been different; that both protagonists could have acted differently. It lifts the story from a grinding tale of despotic determinism, to a human tragedy arising from preferring prudence to truth. While in one sense this was merely repeating the injunction to rely on truth, the process of experimenting with the subjective points of view of Williams and Falkland gave Godwin a chance to revisit prudential action in detail and to countenance a view of courage as a reaction to legitimate fear—opening reason not to self-serving prudence, but to a calculation of what ought on the balance of costs and gains to be done. We might best see the novel as a case study that Godwin used to begin to press the question of where and to what degree in this either/ or world of fear and courage, ‘the bastard prudence’ might have a role (IV. iv. 135).

Political Justice II In the second edition of Political Justice Godwin included an account of rights that replaced his earlier discussion. He made a point of distinguishing between what we have to submit to and what is, in itself, just. If we submit ‘to their decision in cases where we are not convinced of their rectitude, this submission is an affair of prudence only; a reasonable man will lament the emergence, while he yields to the necessity’ (II.v.167). 10 People may require us to do things that are in themselves wrong, but he is now distinguishing between keeping our judgement clear (that it is wrong), while delivering the necessary compliance. And in his revised discussion of obedience he insists: ‘Comply, where the necessity of the case demands it; but criticise while you comply. Obey the unjust mandates of your governors; for this prudence and consideration of the common safety may require; but treat them with no false lenity, regard them with no indulgence’ (III.vi. 232). In the first edition there is ‘bastard prudence’, and little interest in sympathising with the ‘necessity of the case’. These positions are eliminated and, coupled with these changes, the emphasis on truth diminishes, motives are admitted to have a degree of alloy, and Godwin no longer insists that justice can only be done from the purest and most disinterested of motives. There are a number of intellectual reasons why Godwin might have developed his case in this way, including the influence of re-reading Hume and the results of his deliberations with others less marked by a Calvinist

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conception of duty. But it is clear that in the particular instance of rethinking whether prudence can be admitted, Godwin was not merely changing the presentation—he had changed his mind. For example, in the largely unchanged chapter on private judgement in the 1796 edition, the earlier emphasis on the positive wrongness of being moved by fear of punishment or hope of reward is replaced by the more tolerant view that ‘the subjection I suffer is doubtless less aggravated, but the effect upon my moral habits may be in a still higher degree injurious’ (II.vi. 73–4; 1796, 172). Godwin‘s grounds for condemnation are now consequentialist, rather than intrinsic. Similarly, commitments to courage and speaking the truth at all times become hedged—no longer courage as ‘daring to speak the truth at all times, to all persons, and in every possible situation’ (II.ii. App. ii. 60); but conditioned by ‘in every possible situation in which a well informed sense of duty may prescribe it’ (II.ii. App.ii. 143, 1796). This may not seem like a big change, but it is essentially a shift from an insistence on candour as an imperative duty, to the view that we may rightly weigh the pros and cons in determining how to act. This is, of course, more consistent with Godwin’s more calculative, consequentialist side, but it is an insidious move from the idea that truth can and should be allowed to move us. Not least because it introduces an additional step in the process of judgement: rather than being moved to act by the truth, we now weigh whether we should be so moved; rather than being courageous, we must weigh whether it is appropriate to be courageous (compare the oddity of reflecting on whether I should be ‘modest’, which raises similar issues as reflection on being ‘honest’—if we see honesty as a virtue of character, rather than merely a description of transparency between what I believe and what I say). Of course, there are moments in the first edition where there are signs of this more calculative spirit, but the distinctive emphasis of that edition is its insistence on candour and truth. And it is this that he begins to expunge in his revisions to later editions. These shifts in philosophical doctrine might be (but I will argue should not be) seen as a case of ‘bending before the blast’. They are often quite subtle changes, deriving from a series of philosophical controversies, about the nature of truth, about motive, intention, and the tendency of an action, and about what conception of virtue we should adopt, and they have deeper issues and principles underlying them.11 At the same time, while there may well have been intellectual reasons for Godwin’s changes, they might also be seen as linked to changes in Godwin’s characteristic mode of conduct. I suggested earlier that Godwin’s circles were marked

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not just by philosophical speculation, but by a desire to live their lives in accordance with that speculation: argument was intense, formalities given little weight, candour was practised, and there was a degree of bravura and disdain involved in reacting to a government that was increasingly obsessed with sedition. In the years immediately after the publication of the first edition of Godwin’s Political Justice there were a number of factors that began to vitiate that culture. Let me indicate a number of key components to this concession to prudential reasoning. The first is essentially to emphasise that the writing of Things as They Are led Godwin to face over and over again the issue of how to act in radically sub-optimal conditions. Godwin does not portray Williams as a saint; indeed, he is the victim of his own curiosity, as well as of the lack of equality and mutual confidence in the Georgian world. But there is sympathy towards his sense of danger, his need to preserve himself, and the danger he would expose himself to by acting wholly candidly. The revised ending is the more powerful of the two because it suggests that things could have been different had those involved been able to be more open—but the crucial element for Godwin’s intellectual development is that Williams is seen as having to make choices, including choices about whom he can trust, with whom he can be candid, and with what he can say. Rather than the truth moving him, the novel portrays the struggle in his mind as to how far he should let the truth move him—introducing, again, a second step in the reasoning. The second element concerns the background to the writing of his novel, and in particular its last volume. Following the trials for sedition of Thomas Muir and Thomas Fyshe Palmer and their transportation for fourteen and seven years respectively, in October 1793, reform societies in Scotland called for a General Convention of delegates from across Britain to press for reform. The summons brought a number of leading members of the London Corresponding Society, the Society for Constitutional Information, and societies in Norwich, Leeds, and Sheffield, north to Edinburgh in November and December 1793, only for the leaders to be arrested and charged with sedition. These included Godwin’s friend Joseph Gerrald, who spent time on bail in England before his trial in Scotland before Lord Braxfield, who sentenced him to fourteen years’ transportation. At least some conversation was doubtless devoted to the question of whether Gerrald should decamp and avoid the trial, but principle won through. Gerrald was returned to London to Newgate to await his fate. As a result, Godwin was a regular visitor to Newgate, seeing

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Gerrald in prison over forty times before his very delayed transportation, with this spanning the completion of Caleb Williams and the first half of the period in which he was reworking Political Justice. A third factor concerned Godwin’s own experience of the real-life consequences of openness. Leading members of the London Corresponding Society (LCS)  and the Society for Constitutional Information were arrested in May 1794, their papers were seized, and delivered to a Commons Committee of Secrecy to investigate the case for a prosecution. A few days later habeas corpus was suspended. The Committee referred the matter for prosecution and on 6 October a Middlesex Grand Jury found grounds for a charge of High Treason to be brought against twelve of the reformers. Thomas Holcroft had not been arrested in the first round, but he was named as one of the twelve. Rumours that he might be indicted were first noised abroad at the end of September 1794, although there seems to have been real doubt as to whether he would be included. Godwin dined with Holcroft on 5 October, and then set off that evening on the Coventry stage to the Midlands for a set of visits. Within 24 hours the bill was published and Holcroft had surrendered himself. It is difficult to believe that the two men would not have discussed the wisdom of doing so and the question of whether there was any chance that the truth could emerge untarnished under the suspicious, inquisitorial gaze of the British government. Holcroft’s letter to Godwin, doubtless telling of his arrest, arrived at Hatton (where Godwin was staying with Samuel Parr) on 8 October. Godwin wrote the following day to Holcroft’s daughter Anne, to try to assess whether there was any prospect of his being able to see her father if he returned. Holcroft himself replied, rather dustily, on 10 October, that it was not altogether clear what good Godwin could do by merely being there—but if he were to see himself as assisting: By exercising your understanding, weighing the circumstances, which may be communicated to you as they occur, helping me to search for that mass of facts which motivated my conduct, aiding me in arrangement and in deeply considering a case that may be productive of so much general good; are these not sufficient to incite you or is the sacrifice that you mention in any respect adequate to the benefit that might result?12

Godwin did not leave for London until 13 October. When he arrived on 14, he called at Holcroft’s and visited Newgate.

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Godwin’s apparently timorous and rather prudent reaction might be put in the context of his correspondence with John Thelwall in the middle of September. Thelwall, who had been arrested and incarcerated in May, seems to have complained to Holcroft about Godwin not visiting him. Godwin justified his decision not to visit on the following grounds: I believe there is not an atom of pusillanimity or indifference in it. But the more critical the situation of public affairs appears to become, the more it strikes me as a duty to do nothing precipitately. The line of conduct I have chalked out to myself is as follows; it remains to be seen whether I shall have the virtue to act up to it: Upon all occasions to carry my life in my hand; not to indulge a particle of selfish retrospect to life or its pleasures, or the fears of pain or death;—but to expend this treasure, which does not belong to me but to the public, with all the wisdom I am able.13

Godwin also presumed to advise Thelwall on strategy, suggesting he avoid appeals to authorities, and instead ‘Appeal to that eternal law which the heart of every man of common sense immediately recognises’.14 Yet a month later, Godwin was hard at work on his Cursory Strictures in attacking Lord Chief Justice Eyre’s charge to the Grand Jury on the grounds of constructive treason, in which there was a good deal of careful reasoning about the nature of the charge and its statutory history that was not exactly without resort to ‘authorities’. Moreover, he published his pamphlet anonymously, without even a pseudonym. These exchanges and events suggest that Godwin was prudently and self-interestedly calculating about how and how far he should respond to his friends’ plight, rather than acting on the promptings of the principles he shared with them. Within weeks of the publication of Things as They Are, we can recognise that he too was caught in a web of prudential calculation, in a way that demonstrates neatly how the step towards calculation opens up a whole web of tangled motives, principles, and prudential considerations that could be both potentially disabling and easily misread by one’s contemporaries! A fourth factor arising from the trials for sedition and for treason concerned the growing recognition that spies were being used extensively by the government, largely in relation to the reform societies, coupled with the fact that ordinary people were being encouraged to report discussions of a ‘seditious’ character, wherever they occurred. There had been prosecutions in 1792 and 1793, but Turner captures the disquieting mood that pervaded his circles in 1794 following the activities of John Reeves’s

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Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property Against Republicans and Levellers: It was believed that this association received the information they thus invited, from all quarters without being very scrupulous as to the source and that servants, visitors and others were encouraged to disclose the private conversation and conduct of families and individuals who had strong feelings on public liberty and on the French Revolution—or who did not approve of the measures adopted by our Government. This was most probably a calumny—but it was fully credited in some of the circles I visited and by my dear Lady and her family. It was supposed and circulated that prosecutions [413] were preparing against many who in their private homes freely expressed their political opinions. This idea was never verified by any fact of the kind, but it was asserted and dreaded. The Indictment and verdict and sentence against John Frost for what he had said at the Percy Coffee house—merely words—nothing done—confirmed these suspicions and spread much alarm.15

The sense that private discussion was no longer private was one force against the free exchange of views and in favour of a more prudential approach to discussion. And that was firmly underlined as it became clear how extensively the government case for treason was reliant on the reports of spies. Godwin’s circles were hardly spy free, although the full extent of their presence remained unknown to him. In December 1794, Godwin wrote to Charles Sinclair, who had gone to the Scottish Convention, but was not subsequently prosecuted (because he turned King’s evidence). The letter sets out Godwin’s suspicions about his conduct and his reasons for thinking Sinclair had  been acting for the government. One of the grounds for Godwin’s doubts as to Sinclair’s character was that ‘There was something mysterious in the state of Mr Sinclair’s mind during his stay in London previously to his going down to take his trial: the deliberation to go or not to go, which produced great agitation in Gerald (sic), & might be expected seriously to affect any man, was attended with every appearance of apathy in Mr Sinclair’.16 Similarly compromised was Alexander Scott, who had fled from Scotland and been arrested in London, but was released on the understanding that he would act as a government spy (probably from mid-August 1794), and who appeared in November 1794 both in Newgate around Gerrald and with some of Godwin’s legal friends. Felix Macarthy was a resident of the King’s Bench but appears to be close to Gerrald and is part of a group in Newgate when Godwin visits on at

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least five occasions, but he also wrote to Evan Nepean in the Home Office expressing his friendship to the authorities. The most ‘successful’ spy in Godwin’s circles was James Powell, whom Godwin saw twenty-two times between September 1794 and April 1796. Moreover, he saw him in the company of a group of LCS members who were very likely involved in a splinter faction that resisted the idea of a constitution being required for the society on the good Godwinian grounds that: ‘as human affairs are liable to exigencies which no discernment can foresee, and which will require measures peculiar to themselves, all constitutional rules may prohibit or retard the adoption of such measures and ought to be considered as fetters on society’.17 Members included Edward Henry Iliff and Richard ‘Citizen’ Lee (who, according to Powell, after escaping from prison at the end of 1795 decamped with Powell’s wife and fled to America).18 Godwin’s depiction of Jones/Gines in Caleb Williams as Falkland’s unprincipled spy and henchman captures the capacity of tyranny to penetrate into every corner but, like many of his contemporaries, Godwin seems rather to have underestimated its presence in his own circles. He did not, however, under-estimate its significance: in the absence of confidence in others it is impossible for discussion to be free, and constrained discussion produces constrained thinking. A further element in Godwin’s accommodation with prudence was his developing relationship with Mary Wollstonecraft in 1796 and 1797. There is a great deal of complex manoeuvring between the couple about their communication with each other, and how factors other than truth, such as sentiment and emotion, might have an important role to play, but there was also the complete absence of any recognition by their friends and acquaintance that they were involved in an affair. This was complicated by the fact that she was known to all as Mrs. Imlay, although Godwin always referred to her at Wollstonecraft, save on two occasions. When Godwin put together a dinner party for her to meet his friends on 22 April 1796 he recorded in his Diary—‘Imlay calls: call on mrs Mackintosh: Dinner, 3 Parrs, 4 Mackintoshs, Inchbald, Imlay, Dealtry & Ht: sup at Smirke’s: call on A A n & Foulkes n’. This was followed by an entry on the following day: ‘23. Sa. Merry & M call: call on Imlay (adv. Hayes); Christie, w. Imlay; & H G; & Dyson: Dyson at tea’.19 There were no other uses of Imlay in the Diary. Did Godwin know things that others did not? If not, why was this so sensitive a point? Godwin’s subsequent autobiographical reflection on the event was as follows: ‘In my little deserted mansion, I received on the 22nd of April, a party of twelve persons, the most

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of whom good-humouredly invited themselves to dine with me, and for whom I ordered provisions from a neighbouring coffee-house. Among this party were Dr Parr and his two daughters, Mr and Mrs Mackintosh, Mr Holcroft, Mrs Wollstonecraft, and Mrs Inchbald’. 20 It looks as if Godwin was not being entirely straight with himself.

The ‘bastard prudence’ Godwin’s epithet in relation to prudence was attached to his criticism of those who would counsel that we avoid expressing any sentiment that might be prejudicial to our interests. (IV.iv. 135). In the first edition he tends to think that giving prudence any weight already sabotages the independence of judgement. He comes later to think that we might weigh our interests without these having overriding weight, and that they have some claim in the wider scheme of things. But he worries about how far the objectivity of judgement is undercut by the admission of prudence, and he thinks that fear is one especially pernicious way in which judgement can be undercut. When we think prudentially, therefore, we must somehow do so while detached from ourselves and our interests. During the 1790s, these initial commitments were weakened in Political Justice, although we can see them as operating as a set of tensions in his thinking. Nonetheless, even as he came to appreciate a place for prudence in deliberation and in the expression of ideas and beliefs and found grounds to modify his commitment to candour and truth irrespective of the consequences, he seems also to have thought that it could be possible to continue with the free exchange of ideas among his closest friends. That he might have distinguished between spheres in this way was possible in part because he adopted a less draconian view of the consequences of dissimulation: one that pointed to the disadvantages of a lack of candour but did not equate this with the corruption and degradation of mind. There is powerful evidence that he maintained this sphere of candour in his personal life through the middle of the 1790s. For example, his Diary laconically records the relentless critique that Samuel Parr inflicted on him at Hatton on the 5, 7 and 8 July 1795, in the midst of his revisions. Similarly, Godwin’s falling out with Thelwall over Godwin’s pamphlet Considerations… on the Gagging Acts in 1795, and their rapprochement in early 1796, seems to have been similarly robust. And Holcroft’s daughter Sophie revealed the character of her father’s discussions with Godwin in particularly vivid form

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to Turner’s intended by depicting the two men as beginning their discussions as if preparing for battle.21 Nonetheless, towards the end of the decade it seems that Godwin’s ability to tolerate such searching inquiry was itself fractured. Candour could easily hurt and there are many instances of arguments recorded in the Diary and Godwin’s papers. But something more serious was happening when Godwin wrote a stinging rebuke to Holcroft, but then censored himself by not sending it.22 And in an exchange from 1799 recorded by Holcroft, it seems that candour was no longer to be desired. Holcroft reports that when Godwin brought him his tragedy Antonio: ‘you gave a minute detail of the rules I was to observe in criticising your work, that you might properly benefit by my remarks, which rules you have not yourself in the least attended to (in criticising mine)’. One of the first of them was not to find fault in such an absolute and wholesale style as might at once kill your ardour, and make you, if not disgusted with your work, yet so doubtful as at once to damp all further progress. Yet, having read mine, you come with a sledgehammer of criticism, describe it as absolutely contemptible, tell me it must be damned, or if it should escape, that it cannot survive five nights that the characters and plot are but transcripts of myself, and that everybody will say it is the garrulity of an old man.

And he records Godwin as having replied: I thought it my duty to speak my thought plainly… My language was unqualified, but there is this distinction between my critique and yours, of which I complained. I have used no triumphing banter, which you did. …There is another difference between us. Though I certainly give myself credit for intellectual powers yet…I am so cowed and cast down by rude and unqualified assault that for a time I am unable to recover. You, on the contrary, I consider as a man of iron.23

The exchange is important because it looks very much as if Godwin is trying to regulate the terms of the conversation with his closest friend, which takes him a long way from candour. Indeed, the sense that we get from the Diary and the patterns of interaction captured in them and in the Abinger papers more widely is that the culture that had supported Godwin’s intellectual life in the early 1790s, and that he had helped fashion as a sphere of candid exchange through which truth would develop and change be brought about, was increasingly breaking apart, and that Godwin’s sense

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of the nature of philosophical exchange was under threat. He recognised his increased vulnerability, the need for friends who would be more gentle with him, and he began to lament the loss of many people from his life, who may well have been lost because of the rigour with which he pursued his philosophical critiques. In a fragment from the turn of the century he lists his lost friends or amis perdus: ‘Dyson, (B. Montague, Stoddart) Parr, Pinkerton, Inchbald, Mackintosh, M.  Gisborne, Arnot, Dibbin, H Godwin, A Opie, Bosville, Burdet, T Kearsley’. Another list notes those ‘Teneurs à distances—W Smith, C J Fox, Lord Hollands, Cosway, R Knight, Lord Oxford, Lord Stanhope, Grey, Blair, Siddons, Francis, Hoppner, R Adair, Ponsoby’.24 He was deeply hurt by Samuel Parr’s public denunciation of him in his Spital Sermon (1801), and it is difficult to believe that he was unaffected by the backlash that followed his all too candid Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798). And even had he been able to brush off the wider press indulgence in outrage, it is clear that the reactions of closer friends and acquaintances were often hurtful. We have then a complex philosophical issue about appropriate moral motivation, which is linked to a wider set of commitments about the character of truth and the means of progress, and which also informed a set of practices within areas of the literary culture of the early 1790s in which Godwin was involved. We also have a body of evidence of Godwin’s own views changing, becoming more complex, allowing more alloyed motives, reducing the direct link between restraint on expression and corruption of judgement, and allowing more consequentialist considerations to have legitimate weight. And this change is paralleled by his thought experiments (as in Things as They Are), and by experiences and changes in Godwin’s circles that point to his own behaviour becoming more prudentially guided and less open. These parallels do not seem to be a case of cause and effect. It is difficult not to see the first edition of Political Justice as already rife with tensions (creative as they may have been), which subsequent thought, discussion, and experience led him to try to address. But there is also a need to recognise that the deliberative community of which Godwin was a part in that earlier period of the 1790s was itself an attempt to perform this vision while also providing him with a context in which that set of possibilities seemed confirmed. As the 1790s wore on, with the increasing encroachment on people’s private spaces by government spies and loyalist denunciations, it became harder to sustain that culture, even within a narrowed sphere, and equally hard not to recognise that

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prudence had to be accorded more weight. Godwin worked out these implications in often quite sophisticated ways, but we can see his changes working hand in hand with the narrowing and fragmentation of his society, and with his own increasing loss of confidence. He was reacting to those changes and they informed his interpretation of events. In the process, the distinctive character of his philosophy, with its attempt to unite an absolute commitment to the primacy of private judgement to a consequentialist philosophy of moral judgement was progressively compromised, with his Platonist account of judgement falling to the calculus of utilitarianism. In the process, something that was unique in the thought and equally in the practice of the period gradually was lost as those involved faced a much less principled and more realist world. Rather than bending before the blast, it might be better to understand the changing ideas and lived experience as bearing the witness to the loss of a distinctive utopian moment.

Notes 1. References to An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) give (Book. Chapter. Page). William Godwin, Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, 7 vols., gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993), III: An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. Mark Philp. On motivation and truth compare Richard Price Review of the Principal Questions of Morals, ed. D.D. Raphael (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 60–1. 2. MS. Abinger c. 53, fol. 19, 14 Jan 1796. See P Clemit ed., The Letters of William Godwin Volume 1 1778–1797 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) pp. 147–8. 3. BL Add ms 81089 f.370-1, The Diary of Sharon Turner. 4. George Woodcock, ’Introduction’ to W. Godwin: Selections from Political Justice (London, 1943) p. 4. 5. That is, we should not give prudential considerations any weight—rather than having the courage to set some prudential considerations to one side. 6. II.vi. 73–4. 7. See Jon Elster on adaptive preference change in his Ulysses and the Sirens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) and for collective consequences see Timur Kurran, Private Truths and Public Lies (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). 8. That he (Williams) believes it, does not make it true, as I argue in Godwin’s Political Justice (London: Duckworth, 1986) ch. 5. See: William Godwin,

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Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, 8 vols., gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1992), III: Things as They Are; Or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, ed. Pamela Clemit. 9. He writes ‘fin’ in his diary on 30 April 1794. Then, from 4 to 8 May he wrote eight and a half pages more (this is ‘writing rather than merely ‘revising’). See: The Diary of William Godwin, (eds) Victoria Myers, David O’Shaughnessy, and Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford Digital Library, 2010). http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk. 10. 1796 references are to Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, revised edition (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1796). 11. Godwin himself signals some thoughts and influences in the series of notes he wrote on Political Justice that form appendix II in vol.4 of The Political and Philosophical Writings of William, Godwin ed. Mark Philp. 12. The Letters of William Godwin, vol. 1, pp. 106–7. 13. The Letters of William Godwin, vol. 1, p.  102. ‘To John Thelwall, 18 September 1794.’ 14. The Letters of William Godwin, vol. 1, p.  103. ‘To John Thelwall, 18 September 1794.’ 15. Add ms 81089 Diary of Sharon Turner f. 412–3. John Frost (1750–1842), a lawyer and reformer was prosecuted for seditious words, ‘No king, there should be no king’, uttered in an exchange in a Percy’s Coffee House in November 1792. In May 1793 he was sentenced to six months imprisonment and an hour in the pillory. He was also struck off the rolls for his radical beliefs. See John Barrell’s Spirit of Despotism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), ch. 2. 16. Letters of William Godwin, vol. 1, pp. 111–12. 17. Mark Philp, Reforming Ideas in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 300–1. 18. Jon Mee, Print, Publicity and Popular Radicalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 164; pp. 149–67. 19. http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk. 20. ‘Autobiographical Fragments’ in Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, I: Autobiography; Autobiographical Fragments and Reflections; Godwin/ Shelley Correspondence; Memoirs, ed. Mark Philp, p. 51. On his complex relationship with Wollstonecraft see my ‘William Godwin’ in Sandrine Bergès, Eileen Hunt Botting, and Alan Coffee, eds., The Wollstonecraftian Mind (London: Routledge, 2019), ch. 16. 21. Add ms 81089, f. 381. 22. MS Abinger c. 21; formerly Dep c. 511. 23. Thomas Holcroft, Memoirs of Thomas Holcroft (London, 1852), pp. 246–7. 24. MS. Abinger c. 32/Dep.b. 227/5.

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Bibliography Primary Sources Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Abinger c.21. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Abinger c.32. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Abinger c.53. London, British Library, BL Add MS. 81089, The Diary of Sharon Turner.

Secondary Sources Barrell, John, Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Elster, Jon, Ulysses and the Sirens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Godwin, William, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 2nd ed. (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1796). Godwin, William, Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, 8 vols, gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1992). Godwin, William, Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, 7 vols, gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993). Godwin, William, The Diary of William Godwin, eds. Victoria Myers, David O’Shaughnessy, and Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford Digital Library, 2010). http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk. Godwin, William, The Letters of William Godwin Volume 1 1778–1797, ed. Pamela Clemit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Holcroft, Thomas, Memoirs of Thomas Holcroft (London, 1852). Kurran, Timur, Private Truths and Public Lies (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). Mee, Jon, Print, Publicity and Popular Radicalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Philp, Mark, Godwin’s Political Justice (London: Duckworth, 1986). Philp, Mark, Reforming Ideas in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Philp, Mark, ‘William Godwin’ in Sandrine Bergès, Eileen Hunt Botting, and Alan Coffee, eds., The Wollstonecraftian Mind (London: Routledge, 2019), ch.16. Price, Richard, Review of the Principal Questions of Morals, ed. D.D.  Raphael (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974). Woodcock, George, ed. and introd., W.  Godwin: Selections from Political Justice (London, 1943).

Godwin’s Fear of the Private Affections Shawn Fraistat

Introduction In 1799, William Godwin published his second novel, St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century. The novel’s eponymous protagonist is a French aristocrat whose gambling impoverishes his family and forces them into exile. St. Leon then encounters a mysterious alchemist, who entrusts him with formulas for making an elixir of immortality and unlimited amounts of gold. The alchemist swears St. Leon to silence, leaving him unable to explain the source of his newfound wealth, as well as the preternaturally youthful appearance he acquires later in the novel. This ultimately alienates St. Leon from his wife, his children, and his friends. Only too late does he realize his mistake: A common degree of penetration might have shown me, that secrets of this character cut off their possessor from the dearest ties of human existence, and render him a solitary, cold, and self-centered individual; his bosom no

S. Fraistat (*) Brooklyn, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. O’Brien et al. (eds.), New Approaches to William Godwin, Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62912-0_6

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longer qualified to receive upon equal terms the overflowing of a kindred heart.1

St. Leon insists that the greatest human pleasures are social. Nothing, not even immortality and vast riches, can compare to the joy he derives from his intimate relationships.2 He values his family so much, he asks the reader not to condemn him for the fact that he ‘preferred a single individual, my own son, to all the world beside’.3 Such sentiments might sound commonplace, but no doubt some of Godwin’s contemporaries would have been surprised to see them flowing from his pen, given his earlier publications. Godwin’s greatest work of political theory, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, was first published in 1792, with revised second and third editions appearing in 1796 and 1798. In contrast to St. Leon, the first edition of Political Justice contains what Godwin himself later described as an ‘unqualified condemnation of the private affections’.4 By the phrase ‘private affections’, Godwin means the emotional ties and sustained caring relations we form with intimates, including close friends, romantic partners, and family members.5 Political Justice evinces a deep suspicion of these caring bonds, reflecting Godwin’s fears concerning their potential to seduce and corrupt our judgement. In the first edition, Godwin presents them as dangerous temptations that must be resisted—he argues that they incline us towards injustice and are individually, socially, and politically deleterious. Godwin’s remarks in the first edition of Political Justice could not be further from the sentiments St. Leon expresses. Of course, St. Leon is a character, and one should not assume that characters necessarily speak for their authors. But in this case, Godwin explicitly claims to have changed his mind and to have written the novel to showcase his revised opinions. As he puts it in St. Leon’s preface: Some readers of my graver productions will perhaps, in perusing these little volumes, accuse me of inconsistency; the affections and charities of private life being every where in this publication a topic of the warmest eulogium, while in the Enquiry concerning Political Justice they seemed to be treated with no great degree of indulgence and favour. In answer to this objection, all I think it necessary to say on the present occasion is, that, for more than four years, I have been anxious for opportunity and leisure to modify some of the earlier chapters of that work in conformity to the sentiments inculcated in this.6

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Godwin’s evolving attitude is already visible in the second and third editions of Political Justice, each of which moves further away from the first edition’s condemnation of the private affections towards St. Leon’s eulogium. The ‘eulogium’ view persists in Godwin’s subsequent works, both in his later novels and in the essay collection Thoughts on Man (1831). Not every scholar agrees that Godwin’s position regarding the private affections changed substantially over time. D.  H. Monro’s sympathetic treatment of Godwin’s thought downplays the degree to which he is sceptical of intimate attachments in Political Justice.7 Julie Ann Carlson argues for consistency in the opposite direction, claiming that the novels retain the critical attitude evident in the first edition of Political Justice.8 Others grant that St. Leon and other later works mark a significant departure from Political Justice, but deny that Godwin’s attitude towards the private affections altered between the different editions of Political Justice. F. E. L. Priestley, for example, describes Godwin’s revisions on this point as ‘merely superficial’ and Mark Philp takes a similar stance.9 In my view, Godwin did indeed change his position significantly. He moves from viewing the private affections as an obstacle to justice in the first edition of Political Justice to seeing them as a powerful support and a key ingredient of human happiness, a departure Godwin himself recognized in the preface to St. Leon quoted above. Furthermore, as I shall show, while the third edition of Political Justice does not yet evince a complete reversal of his earlier position, the revisions are significant and reflect his progressive movement in that direction. Critics who do acknowledge a shift have offered several explanations as to why Godwin changed his stance towards the private affections over the course of his life. One common claim, advanced by critics such as Priestley, George Woodcock, and Louise Joy, is that his short but happy marriage to Mary Wollstonecraft played a role.10 In support of this argument, she clearly shaped Godwin’s understanding of family life and rendered him more sensible to its positive dimensions. Godwin alludes to their shared ‘domestic pleasures’ in his Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and Wollstonecraft is the apparent inspiration for the wives of some of Godwin’s fictional protagonists, such as St. Leon’s wife Marguerite and Fleetwood’s wife Mary.11 But others consider Wollstonecraft’s influence less decisive. For instance, Philp suggests that Godwin’s revised views have more to do with the fragmentation and collapse of radical circles, which left him personally isolated.12 And Godwin himself ascribes the change to another cause entirely, namely, to a ‘perusal

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of Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature’, which led him to refine his opinions about the importance of the private affections and the passions generally.13 Although these other factors may have played a role, I agree with Bart Schulz’s claim that even if marriage to Wollstonecraft is not ‘the complete cause of Godwin’s altered viewpoint, there can be little doubt that it profoundly reinforced this change and gave Godwin more of a real-world understanding of the meaning of happiness’.14 In this chapter, my intention is less to explain why Godwin modified his position than to examine his original fears and show how they changed between the first edition of Political Justice and the third. Whereas the first edition views the private affections as a fundamental threat to our capacity to act as independent, impartial moral agents, the third edition takes a more qualified view, raising valid concerns about the way Godwin’s contemporaries conceptualized intimate ties while avoiding some of the theoretical excess and overstatement of the first edition. In addition to refining its critique of intimacy, the third edition also emphasizes the value of non-­ intimate bonds, urging us to pursue deeper relations with neighbours and strangers, both because impartial justice demands this and because there are opportunities for human connection that a single-minded focus on close friends and family leads us to overlook. The position Godwin arrives at in the third edition is noteworthy for several reasons. First, it strikingly repudiates the easy harmonization of parochial attachments and moral obligations advanced by contemporaneous British conservatives. Consider, for instance, Edmund Burke’s claim that ‘[t]o be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind’.15 For Burke, family, church, and local community are the foundations of moral agency; without them, we never learn to look beyond ourselves. Godwin, by contrast, sees a danger here—namely, that overemphasizing these ties precludes a generalized concern with the welfare of others, rendering us insensible to the claims of neighbours and strangers. Furthermore, the notion that we must learn from intimates how to deal with non-intimates neglects the reverse possibility—that less intimate relationships can be sites of moral learning and growth, affording lessons that inform how we treat our friends and family. Second, Godwin’s critique deserves attention because it remains highly resonant. Godwin saw that sentimentalizing ‘traditional’ family dynamics can conceal their oppressive dimensions, and he urges us to consider the

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transformative implications of bringing justice into our homes. Godwin also warns that a narrow focus on one’s intimates and a parochial ‘love of one’s own’ can lead to gross injustice. His fears here are underscored by the aggressive nationalism, ethnic chauvinism, and xenophobia presently asserting themselves across the globe. The harsh treatment of immigrants in numerous countries including the United States, the shocking indifference to the suffering of groups such as the Rohingya and Uighurs, and the threat nationalism poses to our ability to equitably resolve global problems such as the climate crisis all validate Godwin’s concerns. As I will argue in the conclusion, Godwin’s arguments are radical even by contemporary standards and serve as useful provocations for grappling with such issues today.

Godwin’s Critique of the Private Affections Godwin’s critique of the private affections in Political Justice is best understood with reference to his utilitarian moral philosophy, which recommends a set of behaviours and virtues that, according to him, are potentially undermined by intimate attachments. Godwin’s utilitarianism commits him to the proposition that morality requires us to do whatever maximizes collective happiness.16 He further maintains that our moral obligations are total: at all times, we must do everything within our power to promote the good of others.17 But although Godwin’s moral philosophy demands complete dedication to the common good, his prescriptions are highly individualistic. He argues that the best way to promote collective happiness is for each person to continuously exercise his or her own judgement. If everyone were rigorously habituated to think and act on his or her own, the result would be a society of critical thinkers and principled moralists who would work to promote the common good without the need for coercion.18 But Godwin thinks the capacity for (1) impartial moral judgement and (2) robust social and intellectual independence are threatened by the private affections. It is for this reason that he criticizes intimate relationships as an obstacle to promoting the greatest happiness of the greatest number. In Political Justice, one of Godwin’s central claims is that morality requires impartiality. We must not privilege ourselves or persons dear to us over our obligation to promote the common good. In a particularly striking and (in)famous example, Godwin asks the reader to imagine that the palace of Fénelon, Archbishop of Cambray, is on fire and that he is trapped

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there along with a chambermaid.19 If it is only possible to rescue one of the two, Godwin claims that we ought to save the Archbishop: Fénelon’s works contribute to collective enlightenment, and thus his life will be of considerably more benefit to humanity. Godwin then asserts that saving the Archbishop would be the right thing to do even if the chambermaid were your mother or sister.20 However much we might be tempted to save our family member, there is no magic ‘in the pronoun “my,” to overturn the decisions of everlasting truth’.21 This, then, is one of the dangers of the private affections: our feelings for friends and family members can lead us to attach outsized importance to their well-being at the expense of the public good. Godwin proceeds to analyse the psychological mechanisms that incline us to unjustly favour kin and kith. One of these is gratitude, which is a feeling of indebtedness towards someone who has done us a kindness. As friends and family members frequently help one another, gratitude often arises in those relationships. Hence Godwin anticipates the objection that we owe our mother a debt of gratitude for raising us and that we therefore have a duty to rescue her rather than the Archbishop. Godwin agrees that people who benefit others deserve benefits themselves. But this is because their actions testify to their virtuous character.22 It would speak well of the chambermaid’s character if she had lovingly cared for a child, but I ought to think equally well of her even if that child was not me. Regardless, she has done the same good deed and contributed the same amount to the welfare of all. Insofar as gratitude biases us towards those who have helped us specifically over those who contribute the most to the common good, it is an unjust sentiment that we ought to reject. A second source of unjust partiality is familiarity. We tend to favour individuals we know and like over people we do not know. Since we understand the merits of people we are close to far better than those of strangers, is it not reasonable to help friends and family we know to be virtuous over individuals whose character is unknown to us? Godwin denies this.23 On the contrary, we have a responsibility to impartially assess the merits of strangers and weigh them against the claims of those who are more familiar. The final psychological cause of unjust partiality is one that Godwin invokes repeatedly without assigning it a specific name—I will refer to it as ‘attachment bias’. When we grow attached to people for reasons of affection and shared history, we tend to exaggerate their good qualities and ignore their bad ones. Godwin believes this form of bias often appears in intimate relationships. He notes that intimate ties can be ‘groundless’ and

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‘obstinate’: we sometimes grow attached to people for spurious reasons, and we can persist in our attachments even when confronted with new information that should lead us to revise our impressions.24 He cites European marriage practices as an example: The habit is, for a thoughtless and romantic youth of each sex to come together, to see each other for a few times and under circumstances full of delusion, and then to vow to each other eternal attachment. What is the consequence of this? In almost every instance they find themselves deceived. They are reduced to make the best of an irretrievable mistake. They are presented with the strongest imaginable temptation to become the dupes of falshood. They are led to conceive it their wisest policy to shut their eyes upon realities, happy if by any perversion of intellect they can persuade themselves that they were right in their first crude opinion of their companion.25

Being blind to the vices of our loved ones is bad because it leads us to overestimate their worth relative to others. But it also entails a harm for our loved ones themselves. Godwin contends that one of the supreme benefits we can confer upon others is to frankly assess their character and attempt to reason them out of their vices.26 We deny our friends and family this benefit when we refuse to admit their faults. Gratitude, familiarity, and attachment bias are three powerful psychological tendencies that cause us to unjustly privilege intimates over other human beings. They also render us unjust in another way. Habituated to include these biases in our moral deliberations, we expect others to exhibit the same biases in their thinking. That is to say, we think friends and family members ought to favour us: we would be upset if they treated us impartially. Godwin considers this expectation pernicious, and he cites marriage as a harmful example of it. When we marry someone, we assert a lifelong right to that person’s companionship and affection. But if I use the law to ‘engross one woman to myself, and to prohibit my neighbour from proving his superior desert and reaping the fruits of it, I am guilty of the most odious of all monopolies’.27 The difficulty of divorce prevents my wife from reevaluating her attachment to me. I thereby wrong both her and my neighbour whose company she might prefer to mine. In addition, I do myself a disservice. Striving to retain the preference of others by force of law is a species of cowardice and springs from an unjust desire to be loved by others irrespective of one’s own merits.28 Rather than giving into that

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desire and encouraging vice in my character, I should strive to cultivate those qualities that will freely win the approval of others. But this means abandoning the idea that I am entitled to a companion for life, who owes me perpetual love and esteem simply because she is ‘mine’.29 Thus far, I have shown that Godwin was leery of the private affections because of the unjust partiality they tend to inspire by means of gratitude, familiarity, and attachment bias. But Godwin had another major worry about the private affections, which is that they compromise people’s intellectual and social independence. One of Godwin’s most insistent claims is that intellectual independence is the engine of moral and scientific progress. His premise is that if ‘an hundred men spontaneously engage the whole energy of their faculties upon the solution of a given question, the chance of success will be greater, than if only ten men were so employed’.30 He concludes that, by the same logic, ‘the chance will be also increased, in proportion as the intellectual operations of these men are individual’.31 Godwin therefore rejects anything that leads us to parrot the ideas of others.32 This includes coercion, which fatally compromises freedom of speech and thought.33 But it also includes the private affections. Godwin suggests that intimate attachments distort our thinking when ‘sympathy’34 leads us to conform our ideas to those of persons we love and trust.35 As Mary Fairclough points out, here Godwin breaks with prominent Scottish Enlightenment figures, such as David Hume and Adam Smith, who valorize benevolent sympathy.36 Godwin, by contrast, views sympathy as potentially dangerous because it is not rational and can reduce our capacity for sober, impartial judgement. The private affections also distort our thinking when they cause us to lie to ourselves, as per attachment bias and the example of the married couple struggling to ignore each other’s flaws. Godwin warns such a couple that ‘men who carefully mislead their judgments in the daily affair of their life, must always have a crippled judgment in every other concern’.37 Additionally, the private affections can compromise our intellectual independence simply by making demands on our time. Godwin claims that we often postpone the execution of our best ideas because we are obliged to consult the convenience of others, adjusting our plans to fit their preferences.38 He even goes so far as to assert that ‘every thing that is usually understood by the term cooperation, is in some degree an evil’, as it compels individuals to act according to common plans that may contravene their private judgements about the best course of action.39

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Intellectual independence, then, is crucial for creating a happy and morally just society. But Godwin is also concerned with independence in a different sense—social independence—which he considers an indispensable part of human happiness. By social independence here, I mean the capacity to meet one’s physical and emotional needs on one’s own, without excessively depending on others. Godwin praises social independence because he thinks that we can only be happy if we are able to enjoy periods of solitude. One of his objections against cohabitation and marriage is that ‘it is absurd to expect that the inclinations and wishes of two human beings should coincide through any long period of time. To oblige them to act and to live together, is to subject them to some inevitable portion of thwarting, bickering and unhappiness’.40 He also thinks that people who are overly dependent are less able to develop the faculties that will promote their own happiness and the happiness of society as a whole.41 Godwin’s ideal society presupposes individuals who do not have to bow and scrape to meet their basic needs. If we are dependent on others, then our happiness is ultimately subject to their caprices, and we will lack the fortitude we need to speak truth to power. It follows that we can be of little use to ourselves or to others unless we learn to be self-sufficient. Thus, both social and intellectual independence are central to individual and collective progress, and this is a key reason for Godwin’s scepticism of intimate ties. In the first edition of Political Justice, Godwin’s fears about the private affections’ deleterious consequences lead him to reject them with little qualification. Regarding romantic relationships, Godwin claims that cohabiting with someone is ‘an evil’ which ‘checks the independent progress of mind’ and is ‘inconsistent with the imperfections and propensities of man’.42 For similar reasons, marriage is ‘the worst of all laws’ and no ills will result from abolishing it.43 In a future society, romantic partnerships will persist only as long as both persons wish them to.44 As for sexual intercourse, he claims that ‘[r]easonable men then will propagate their species, not because a certain sensible pleasure is annexed to this action, but because it is right the species should be propagated; and the manner in which they exercise this function will be regulated by the dictates of reason and duty’.45 The parent/child relationship, too, will be transformed almost to the point of abolition. Godwin claims that in his ideal society, it may not be known who the father of each individual child is, and that regardless, such knowledge will be deemed unimportant.46 Here, Godwin is denying that

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a just society will have hereditary class distinctions; it will not accord status and privileges to children based upon their parentage. But even more radically, he is suggesting that it will not matter to me whether a given child is mine, as I will have no special duties or ties to a child I have fathered. In keeping with this, Godwin advocates a different scheme for raising and educating children. He does expect that responsibility for early childcare will still ‘probably devolve upon the mother’.47 But he includes the caveat that if a mother is unduly burdened, these early cares will be willingly taken up by others.48 As for the rest of children’s basic needs, they will be readily supplied by the community.49 Children will be freely provided with food and other goods, as well as education, which will no longer be the sole responsibility of parents or designated tutors. Rather, ‘every man, in proportion to his capacity, will be ready to furnish such general hints and comprehensive views’ as will be useful to children who want to learn.50 In addition to reconceptualizing familial relationships, Godwin criticizes friendship as it is commonly conceived. He contends that many friendships are grounded in pleasure and benefit rather than disinterested considerations of virtue. Furthermore, friendship wrongly practiced disposes us to partiality and dependence just as families do. Hence Godwin issues the blanket statement that ‘[a]ll attachments to individuals, except in proportion to their merits, are plainly unjust’ and exhorts us to ‘be the friends of man rather than of particular men’.51 We are to behave justly towards everyone we encounter without unduly favouring anyone in particular, allocating our esteem according to their virtues and our benefactions according to their needs. One could be forgiven for picturing Godwin’s ideal society as one in which individuals are estranged from one another, living apart and spending much of their time alone; in which they help one another out of rational conviction rather than emotional connection; and in which interpersonal relations are cordial but cool. Yet such a picture is not fair to Godwin, especially by the time of the third edition of Political Justice. Even in the first edition, Godwin’s perfect community is not cold, atomized, or impersonal. Godwin proposes a countermodel of interpersonal relations through his descriptions of how we ought to treat neighbours. The word ‘neighbour’ appears frequently in Political Justice.52 It carries both a literal meaning, designating someone who lives nearby, and a more expansive sense—it is not uncommon to see it used in religious discourse as a blanket term for non-intimates. Thus, the Biblical commandment to love thy neighbour is often understood to imply a universal duty towards all of humankind.

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Godwin uses the word both ways, sometimes referring to people who live nearby and sometimes as a catch-all for individuals who are not kith or kin. Godwin’s references to neighbours serve two different purposes. On the one hand, he invokes neighbourly relations to criticize more intimate ones, arguing for a kind of emotional disengagement. In such cases, Godwin employs the figure of the neighbour in a manner opposite to Christian religious discourse. Whereas Christian teaching urges us to treat neighbours the same way we treat ourselves and our intimates, Godwin tries to convince us to treat our ourselves and our loved ones more like neighbours. Hence, he objects to the familiar adage that we should ‘love our neighbour as ourselves’, which ‘is not modelled with the strictness of philosophical accuracy’.53 This remark immediately precedes Godwin’s Fénelon example, which supplies the correction. The true maxim is that we should not treat ourselves or our loved ones as worth more than a neighbour: we ought treat ourselves and our intimates with the same disinterestedness we are able to display towards non-intimates. On the other hand, however, Godwin’s account of good neighbourly behaviour demands more from us in our non-intimate relationships. We must do far more for neighbours and strangers than is typical at present and that includes engaging with them in deeper and more extensive ways. Even in the first edition, Godwin recognizes the need for social connection, which is evident in his claim that ‘[m]an is a social animal’.54 He criticizes solitary confinement as an excessively cruel punishment, perhaps the bitterest possible, on the grounds that ‘[t]he soul yearns with inexpressible longings for the society of its like’.55 Moreover, he denies that isolation can have a reformatory effect. This is because sustained interactions with others are the principal source of progress.56 Indeed, he expressly exempts conversation from his general criticisms of cooperation. He reasons that the ‘only substantial method for the propagation of truth is discussion, so that the errors of one man may be detected by the acuteness and severe disquisition of his neighbours’.57 In-person discussions are superior to books and written communications on this score, above all when carried out one-on-one or in small gatherings.58 Godwin urges us to engage in such conversations with neighbours in the spirit of mutual improvement.59 Not only is such talk important, Godwin urges us to interact with each other with greater energy and benevolence than is usual, particularly with those outside our small circle of friends and family. We should give constant thought to how we may be of service to others and how we may improve them.60 Even in moments of solitude, which an independent

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person will require from time to time, we may nonetheless ‘accumulate the materials of social benefit’.61 Redirecting our mental energy in this direction will be of supreme utility not only to others but also to ourselves because ‘[m]ind without benevolence is a barren and a cold existence. It is in seeking the good of others, in embracing a great and expansive sphere of action, in forgetting our own individual interests, that we find our true element’.62 Furthermore, Godwin bids us adopt greater frankness and sincerity in our dealings with others. We are taught to hide our true feelings and opinions from one another, for the sake of politeness.63 But considerable improvement would result ‘if every man were sure of meeting in his neighbour the ingenuous censor, who would tell to himself, and publish to the world, his virtues, his good deeds, his meannesses and his follies’.64 Godwin is so committed to the idea that greater frankness with acquaintances would expose new truths and correct hidden faults that he writes an appendix titled, ‘Of the Mode of Excluding Visitors’, arguing that people should not have their servants lie to unwanted guests and tell them they are not home when in fact they are.65 In these ways, then, the first edition’s critique of the private affections is less a call for cold isolation than for greater benevolent interaction accompanied by a more equitable redistribution of energy away from family and friends, towards neighbours, strangers, and acquaintances. While these elements are already present in the first edition, by the time of the third edition, Godwin has a deeper appreciation of the importance of emotion and human connection. This causes him to soften his objections to the private affections and to further develop his ideas about neighbourly ties. Godwin’s more favourable disposition towards the private affections in the third edition is manifest in several places. For one thing, his criticisms of marriage are now targeted specifically at ‘marriage, as now understood’,66 whereas marriage qua marriage is described as ‘a salutary and respectable institution’ (Godwin had married Mary Wollstonecraft in 1797, between the second edition and the third).67 Relatedly, while the critique of cohabitation remains in the third edition, its import appears in a somewhat different light. In the first edition, the condemnation of cohabitation forms part of an argument against marriage. But by the third, Godwin had come to regard marriage without cohabitation as a possibility. This is evident in his refusal to condemn marriage tout court and in his personal conduct. In his marriage to Wollstonecraft, Godwin maintained a separate apartment, going about his business during the day and then

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joining her in the evenings. According to Godwin, their relationship was strengthened rather than undermined by the independence this accorded both parties.68 Thus, the critique of cohabitation now seems intended as a more narrowly tailored point about avoiding the friction that comes from sharing a residence without interruption. In keeping with this, he revises his praise of solitude to make it clear that it is a complement to sociality rather than a complete substitute. We ought to be able to manage independently, but society remains a source of pleasure, a ‘luxury, innocent and enviable’, in which a benevolent person will seek ‘friendship’ and ‘love’.69 In addition to adopting a more favourable view of marriage, Godwin removes the suggestion that it will be unimportant for children to know who their father is. He also seems less sceptical of friendship, deleting the provocative claim that we should be ‘the friends of man rather than of particular men’ and his blanket condemnations of partial attachments. Also, in keeping with the general thrust of these revisions, the third edition evinces a greater overall awareness of the importance of the passions and emotional connection. For one thing, Godwin now gives them an essential role in developing moral agency, albeit largely as a stepping stone to disinterested conduct. According to him, our first acts of benevolence are not prompted by selfless considerations, but pity and sympathy, which render us disturbed by the suffering of others: The good of my neighbour could not, in the first instance, have been chosen, but as the means of agreeable sensation. His cries, or the spectacle of his distress importune me, and I am irresistibly impelled to adopt means to remove this importunity […] Thus the good of our neighbour, like the possession of money, is originally pursued for the sake of its advantage to ourselves […] But it is the nature of the passions, speedily to convert what at first were means, into ends […] If this be the case in the passion of avarice or the love of fame, it must also be true in the instance of beneficence, that, after having habituated ourselves to promote the happiness of our child, our family, our country or our species, we are at length brought to approve and desire their happiness without retrospect to ourselves.70

Note the key difference between this and the ‘little platoons’ argument. As the ‘or’ indicates, ‘our child, our family, our country or species’ are not links in a chain, whereby caring for my family teaches me how to care for my country. Rather, they are potentially distinct cases in which

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benevolence prompted by self-regarding affectual considerations can eventually become habitual and disinterested. Beyond their role in moral development, sympathy and affection serve as inducements to contemplation. Godwin claims that ‘[s]tudy is cold, if it be not enlivened with the idea of the happiness to arise from the cultivation and improvement of sciences. The sublime and pathetic are barren, unless it be the sublime of true virtue, and the pathos of true sympathy’.71 Finally, Godwin came to regard these emotions themselves as constituent ingredients of a life well lived, claiming that ‘[t]here is no true joy, but in the spectacle and contemplation of happiness. There is no delightful melancholy, but in pitying distress. The man who has once performed an act of exalted generosity, knows there is no sensation of corporeal or intellectual taste to be compared to this’.72 In finding a place for sympathy, Godwin refines the first edition’s critique into a more nuanced objection to ‘undisciplined’ sympathy not yet extended by reason and ‘ripened into virtue’: he is now criticizing selective or disproportionate sympathy, not sympathy tout court.73 At the same time that Godwin softens his objections to the private affections, he also deepens his conception of neighbourly relations. The third edition evinces an awareness that these relationships have their own affective texture, from which we might draw useful lessons. For instance, he adds to his critique of cohabitation the observation that ‘[w]hen I seek to correct the defects of a stranger, it is with urbanity and good humour. I have no idea of convincing him through the medium of surliness and invective. But something of this kind inevitably obtains, where the intercourse is too unremitted’.74 In other words, we are able to maintain a degree of kindness and equanimity towards non-intimates that we have difficulty sustaining in our close relationships. It is hard for us to live with others constantly without sometimes losing our temper, taking our frustrations out on them, reproaching them in biting terms, and so on. Godwin suggests we could bring the good humour we exhibit more consistently in our non-intimate relations into our intimate ones if we preserve some space for ourselves and take the time to be alone on occasion. In coming to appreciate the affective dimension of non-intimate relationships, Godwin also perceives the potential for deeper emotional connections with neighbours and acquaintances. Whereas the first edition emphasizes the moral and social progress that will result from neighbours frankly conversing with one another, the third also stresses the possibility of sympathetic attachment. In the third edition’s attack on insincerity, he

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claims that false politeness leads the people of his time to ‘meet together with the temper, less of friends, than enemies. Every man eyes his neighbour, as if he expected to receive from him a secret wound’.75 But if we were honest and open with one another, this would transform non-­ intimate relations: ‘I should not conceive alarm from my neighbour, because I should be conscious that I knew his genuine sentiments. I should not harbour bad passions and unsocial propensities, because the habit of expressing my thoughts, would enable me to detect and dismiss them in the outset’.76 This in turn would produce ‘good humour, kindness, and benevolence’.77 Indeed, the result would be friendship: ‘[i]f our emotions were not checked, we should be truly friends with one another […] Thus every man would be inured to the sentiment of love, and would find in his species objects worthy of his affection’.78 The third edition finds in neighbourly exchanges the promise of meaningful connection, which is precluded when we limit ourselves to a few friends and family members who alone get to hear our true thoughts and feelings. Taken together, these revisions shift the argument of the third edition significantly. It certainly is not an encomium to the private affections in the manner of St. Leon. But nor is it an unqualified condemnation. The third edition highlights problems to be mindful of as we pursue intimacy with others instead of rejecting family and friendship altogether. Furthermore, its model of ‘neighbourly’ relations shows how some of the positive qualities that we manifest in less intimate contexts might be properly carried over into our relations with friends and family. Finally, it argues we might derive greater value from less intimate relationships, urging us to expand our attention outwards to include more distant others. Godwin’s position here has real merit, and I will consider its strengths in the following section.

Conclusion I want to conclude by reflecting on Godwin’s critique of the private affections and considering what is valuable in it. While some of Godwin’s fears about the private affections are overblown, especially in the first edition, I wonder if Godwin’s embrace of a more conventional, sentimental view in St. Leon and later works does not represent something of a loss? The position he stakes out in the third edition of Political Justice is provocative and contains genuine insights, which remain worthy of attention.

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For one thing, Godwin’s fears are more reasonable when viewed in historical context: as criticisms of the eighteenth-century patriarchal family and Burkean traditionalism, Godwin’s concerns about partiality and dependence are sound. It is important to remember his objections are intended not only to subvert contemporaneous understandings of the family but also to serve as a political critique of monarchy and feudalism. These systems utilize the language of family, gratitude, intimacy, and care in order to justify themselves, and Godwin’s attack on the private affections is meant to strike at them as well. Hence his objection to gratitude is also an objection to patronage relationships, which are central to the class and property systems of Godwin’s time. It remains a live issue today, manifest in the survival of ‘old boy networks’ and the various ways that in-­ group social connections and favour-trading perpetuate the privilege of elites at the expense of the traditionally marginalized, including women and ethnic minorities.79 As far as Godwin’s concerns about partiality go, that issue is still hotly debated by moral philosophers, and the Fénelon fire example remains an important thought experiment.80 While Godwin’s claim that we do not have special moral obligations to our loved ones seems implausible, at least by the standards of our ordinary moral intuitions, the extent of those obligations and how to reconcile them with our obligations to non-intimates are significant problems, and Godwin’s argument continues to serve as a touchstone. Furthermore, Godwin’s worries about partiality have real bite in an extra-familial context, when considering the demands for love and loyalty that are sometimes made by larger groups, be they ethnic, racial, or national. The election of Donald Trump, the Brexit referendum result, and the rise of the far-right in numerous countries were driven in part by a backlash against a less partial, ‘cosmopolitan’ mindset that asks people to take into account the interests of those who are in some sense Other. Whatever the shortcomings of cosmopolitanism, the dangers of prioritizing those like ourselves at the expense of the neighbour and the stranger are evident. The cruel treatment of immigrants and the caging of children in the United States, the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya in Myanmar, the detention of millions of Uighurs in China: clearly love of one’s own frequently fails to broaden itself into an equitable attachment to the species in the manner Burke envisioned. Here Godwin supplies a powerful corrective, demanding we distribute our moral concern to include those who are different or distant.

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Importantly, Godwin is also thinking through the problem of partiality from a psychological perspective. Assuming some degree of moral impartiality is desirable, how do we cultivate it? The Burkean answer is that our intimate relationships supply the moral habits and dispositions we are then able to extend to wider circles of people. The third edition of Political Justice does come to embrace the idea that intimate relations are important and might act as sites of moral education. But Godwin does not posit a unidirectional movement whereby intimates teach us how to deal with non-intimates. On the contrary, he argues that interactions with neighbours can help us cultivate the dispositions we need to deal fairly and benevolently with friends and family. Godwin points out that while in many respects we are inclined to be partial and treat our intimates better than our neighbours, in some ways we are inclined to treat them worse. We sometimes have an easier time demonstrating a consistent level of patience, kindness, and self-control towards those we know less well than those we live with. We also have more critical distance, as close affective bonds can cloud our moral judgement.81 Thus, Godwin goes beyond the more conventional claim—that intimate relations can help model aspects of successful moral engagement with non-intimates—to point out that the reverse is true as well. As to Godwin’s worries about dependence, I think they are most compelling not as objections to intimacy tout court but as issues to remain mindful of in the way we conduct our intimate relations. Indeed, as I suggested above, I believe this is how Godwin himself understood the spirit of his critique by the third edition. Most valuable, I think, is Godwin’s willingness to push back against an overly romanticized understanding of the ‘traditional’ family and the cult of domesticity, especially his refusal to ignore that model’s stultifying treatment of women and children. He argues that some degree of physical, emotional, and intellectual space is an important ingredient of a happy and virtuous life, one that is not afforded by a patriarchal version of the family. What is more, the third edition does not try to prescribe, either legally or morally, a particular family structure or division of caring labour to which individuals are obliged to conform. Godwin believes an enlightened society will include a variety of arrangements for meeting the needs of vulnerable individuals, including children, and that these will be worked out by the parties concerned. These arrangements need not include cohabitation or strict monogamy, nor must biological parents always assume primary responsibility for childcare. Godwin thereby challenges not only the patriarchal family but also rigid, narrowly

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defined family structures. This anticipates feminist critiques of what later became known as the nuclear family and the way it is baked into many of our practices and institutions. It also complicates one prominent attack on the liberal tradition, which is that it draws boundaries between public and private life in such a way as to render male freedom in the public sphere dependent upon a private sphere of unfreedom, in which the labour of women and other vulnerable minorities is exploited for the social and biological reproduction of male citizens.82 Although Godwin shares liberal commitments to freedom and equality and emphasizes the importance of various kinds of independence, he does not commit the same mistake. Godwin shows that liberalism—at least in its most radical strains—contained currents that took private unfreedom seriously and was willing to make a radical break with the ‘traditional’ family. In this respect, Godwin was ahead of his own time and of our time as well.

Notes 1. William Godwin, Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, 8 vols, gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1992), IV: St. Leon, ed. Pamela Clemit, p. 294. 2. St. Leon, see, for example, pp. 43–51; pp. 239–40; p. 246; p. 306. 3. St. Leon, p. 351. 4. St. Leon, vol. 1, p. 54. 5. F. E. L. Priestley suggests that Godwin likely borrowed the phrase ‘private affections’ from Jonathan Edwards (Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. F. E. L. Priestley [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1946], vol. 3, p.  25). Edwards, an American Congregationalist theologian and central figure in the First Great Awakening, uses the phrase in The Nature of True Virtue to describe affections limited to a smaller circle ([Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960], p. 18 and passim). Godwin records having read this essay in his diary: The Diary of William Godwin, ed. Victoria Myers, David O’Shaughnessy, and Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford Digital Library, 2010), 14–17 April 1792. http://godwindiary.bodleian. ox.ac.uk. 6. Godwin, St. Leon, p. 11. 7. D.  H. Monro, Godwin’s Moral Philosophy: An Interpretation of William Godwin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 33 and passim. 8. Julie Ann Carlson, England’s First Family of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), pp. 44–47.

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9. F. E. L. Priestley, ed., Political Justice, vol. III, p. 87; Mark Philp, Godwin’s Political Justice (London: Duckworth, 1986), pp. 209–13. 10. See George Woodcock, William Godwin. A Biographical Study (London: Porcupine Press, 1946), p.  139; Priestley’s remarks are in his edition of Political Justice (vol. 3, p. 87); Louise Joy, ‘St. Leon and The Culture of the Heart,’ History of European Ideas, 33.1 (2007), 40–53, p.  41 and passim. 11. Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in Collected Novels and Memoirs, Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, I: Autobiography; Autobiographical Fragments and Reflections; Godwin/ Shelley Correspondence; Memoirs, ed. Mark Philp, pp. 132–33. 12. Philp, Godwin’s Political Justice, pp. 222–23. 13. Godwin, Collected Novels and Memoirs, I, p. 54. Mary Fairclough argues that despite Godwin’s emphasis on Hume here, Adam Smith seems to have been a more consistent interlocutor, in The Romantic Crowd: Sympathy, Controversy and Print Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 94. 14. Bart Schultz, The Happiness Philosophers: The Lives and Works of the Great Utilitarians (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), p. 31. 15. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Frank M. Turner (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 40. 16. Godwin, Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, 7 vols, gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993), III: An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice ed. Mark Philp. Cited page numbers for this volume refer to the original 1793 publication, which are included in the headlines of the Philp edition. All first-edition quotations from Political Justice are taken from this edition; quotations from the second and third editions will be specified as such in the endnotes where relevant. 17. Political Justice, II.2, p. 87. 18. Political Justice, II.4, pp. 127–28; also 5.24. 19. Political Justice, II.2, p. 82. In the second and third editions of Political Justice, Godwin changes the ‘chambermaid’ to a ‘valet’, who is now a father or brother rather than a mother or sister. Don Locke suggests that this may reflect Godwin’s changing attitude towards the private affections (A Fantasy of Reason: The Life and Thought of William Godwin [London; Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980], p. 170), as does Louise Joy (‘St. Leon and the Culture of the Heart’, p. 41). Other scholars argue Godwin is simply trying to make the thought experiment less shocking (e.g., D.  H. Monro, Godwin’s Moral Philosophy, p.  9; F.  E. L.  Priestley, ed., Political Justice, vol. III, pp. 87–8). 20. Godwin, Political Justice, 1st edition, II.2, p. 83. 21. Political Justice, II.2, p. 83. 22. Political Justice, II.2, p. 84.

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23. Political Justice, II.2, pp. 84–85. 24. Political Justice, VIII.6, p. 851. 25. Political Justice, VIII.6, pp. 849–50. 26. Political Justice, VIII.6, p. 848; see also IV.4. 27. Political Justice, VIII.6, p. 850. 28. Political Justice, VIII.6, p. 849. 29. Political Justice, VIII.6, p. 849. 30. Political Justice, VIII.6, p. 848. 31. Political Justice, VIII.6, p. 848. 32. Godwin goes so far as to label performances in which ‘men come forward … to repeat words and ideas not their own’, such as musical concerts and theatrical exhibitions, ‘a scheme for imprisoning for so long a time the operations of our own mind’ (Political Justice, VIII.6, pp. 846–7). 33. Political Justice, II.4, pp. 127–8; see also VIII.6, p. 857. 34. Political Justice, VIII.6, p. 848. 35. See, for instance, Godwin’s claim that ‘there is a way in which for a man to lose his own existence in that of others, that is eminently vicious and detrimental’ (Political Justice, VIII.6, p. 854). 36. Fairclough, p. 95. 37. Godwin, Political Justice, VIII.6, pp. 849–50. 38. Political Justice, VIII.6, p. 844. 39. Political Justice, VIII.6, p. 844. 40. Political Justice, VIII.6, p. 849. 41. On this point, see also Godwin’s account of the education of princes (Political Justice, V.2, pp. 394–5); see also V.2, pp. 386–87. 42. Political Justice, VIII.6, pp. 848–89. 43. Political Justice, VIII.6, p. 850. 44. Political Justice, VIII.6, p. 851. 45. Political Justice, VIII.6, p. 852. 46. Political Justice, VIII.6, p. 852. 47. Political Justice, VIII.6, p. 853. 48. Political Justice, VIII.6, p. 853. 49. Political Justice, VIII.6, p. 853. 50. Political Justice, VIII.6, p. 854. 51. Political Justice, VIII.6, p. 848. 52. By my count, the words ‘neighbour’ and ‘neighbours’ appear 128 times in the first edition. 53. Political Justice, II.2, p. 128. 54. Political Justice, VII.6, p. 753; see also VIII.6, pp. 854–55. 55. Political Justice, VII.6, p. 754. 56. Political Justice, VII.6, p. 754. 57. Political Justice, III.7, p. 186.

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58. Political Justice, IV.2, p. 214. 59. As Jon Mee shows, here Godwin draws upon broader civic-republican and Rational Dissent traditions that emphasize our social nature and valorize conversation as a means of individual and collective improvement (Jon Mee, “‘The Use of Conversation’: William Godwin’s Conversable World and Romantic Sociability,” Studies in Romanticism, 50.4 [2011], 567–590). Mee argues persuasively that Godwin owes more to Rational Dissent’s emphasis on candor and fricative conversation in pursuit of truth than to a whiggish emphasis on polite conversation intended to produce a harmony of interests. Mee points in particular to the influence of Congregationalist minister Isaac Watts and his pedagogical text The Improvement of Mind (1741) on Godwin’s thought. 60. Political Justice, IV.2, pp. 212–13. 61. Political Justice, IV.2, p. 235. 62. Political Justice, VIII.6, pp.  855–6. See also: ‘while sensual pleasure exhausts the frame, and passions often excited become frigid and callous’, an enlightened love of virtue and commitment to service ‘renders the intellect in which it resides ever new and ever young’ (Political Justice, IV.4, pp. 236). 63. Political Justice, IV.2, pp. 212–13. 64. Political Justice, IV.2, p. 241. 65. Political Justice, IV.4, Appendix, No. II, pp. 265–72. 66. Godwin, Political Justice, 3rd edition, vol. II, VIII.8, p. 507. 67. Political Justice, 3rd edition, vol. II, VIII.8, pp. 509–10. 68. Godwin, Collected Novels and Memoirs, vol. I, pp. 132–33. On this point, see also Philp, Godwin’s Political Justice, p. 190. 69. Godwin, Political Justice, 3rd edition, vol. II, VIII.8, pp. 505–6. 70. Political Justice, 3rd edition, vol. I, IV.10, pp. 425–26. 71. Political Justice, 3rd edition, vol. I, IV.11, p. 447. 72. Political Justice, 3rd edition, vol. I, IV.11, p.  447. One might accuse Godwin of contradiction here. Is Godwin claiming that we should engage in altruistic behaviour because it makes us happy? If so, doesn’t this undercut the idea that we ought to help others for disinterested reasons? I think Godwin would counter that we may derive pleasure from benefiting others without this pleasure being our motive for acting. Rather, when our moral agency is fully developed, it is because we already value others’ well-being that we take pleasure in helping them (Political Justice, 3rd edition, vol. I, IV.10, pp. 429–30). This is compatible with his claim that more primitive forms of moral agency are prompted directly by the desire for agreeable sensation, as per the discussion of pity above. 73. Political Justice, 3rd edition vol. II, V.16, p. 146. 74. Political Justice, 3rd edition vol. II, VIII.8, p. 507.

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75. Political Justice, 3rd edition vol. I, IV.6, p. 333. 76. Political Justice, 3rd edition vol. I, IV.6, p. 336. 77. Political Justice, 3rd edition vol. I, IV.6, p. 333. 78. Political Justice, 3rd edition vol. I, IV.6, pp. 335–6. 79. See, for instance, a study of the United States that finds that ‘people in white male networks receive twice as many job leads as people in female/ minority networks’ (Steve McDonald, ‘What’s in the ‘Old Boys’ Network? Accessing Social Capital in Gendered and Racialized Networks’ Social Networks, 33:4 [2011]). 80. For a recent discussion of Godwin’s Fénelon argument, see Stephen Asma, Against Fairness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 81. Godwin’s arguments anticipate some of those advanced by Paul Bloom (Against Empathy: A Case for Rational Compassion, [New York, NY: Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers], 2016), who argues at length that empathy is selective and leads to moral capriciousness, whereas a more distanced rational compassion better serves the interests of justice. 82. For several classic statements of this critique of liberalism, see Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), Susan Moller Okin, Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), and Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1988).

Bibliography Asma, Stephen, Against Fairness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Bloom, Paul, Against Empathy: A Case for Rational Compassion (New York, NY: Ecco, 2016). Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Frank M.  Turner (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003). Carlson, Julie Ann, England’s First Family of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). Edwards, Jonathan, The Nature of True Virtue (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960). Elshtain, Jean Bethke, Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Fairclough, Mary, The Romantic Crowd: Sympathy, Controversy and Print Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Godwin, William, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. F. E. L. Priestley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1946). Godwin, William, Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, 8 vols, gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1992).

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Godwin, William, Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, 7 vols, gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993). Godwin, William, The Diary of William Godwin, ed. Victoria Myers, David O’Shaughnessy, and Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford Digital Library, 2010). http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk. Joy, Louise, ‘St. Leon and The Culture of the Heart,’ History of European Ideas, 33.1 (2007), 40–53. Locke, Don, A Fantasy of Reason: The Life and Thought of William Godwin (London; Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980). McDonald, Steve, ‘What’s in the ‘Old Boys’ Network? Accessing Social Capital in Gendered and Racialized Networks’ Social Networks, 33:4 (2011). Mee, Jon, “‘The Use of Conversation’: William Godwin’s Conversable World and Romantic Sociability,” Studies in Romanticism, 50.4 (2011), 567–590. Monro, D.H., Godwin’s Moral Philosophy: An Interpretation of William Godwin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953). Okin, Susan Moller, Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). Pateman, Carole, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1988). Philp, Mark, Godwin’s Political Justice (London: Duckworth, 1986). Schultz, Bart, The Happiness Philosophers: The Lives and Works of the Great Utilitarians (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). Woodcock, George, William Godwin. A Biographical Study (London: Porcupine Press, 1946).

Gifts, Giving, Gratitude: The Development of William Godwin’s Radical Critique of Charity in the 1790s Ruby Tuke

William Godwin’s views on gratitude caused a stir in intellectual circles. In a letter to the son of an old friend, Basil Montagu recalled the buzz that surrounded Godwin’s radical political treatise, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), some four decades earlier. ‘I well remember’, Montagu writes, ‘having been introduced to Mr. Sheridan, as a gentleman, who was taught by a modern publication that “gratitude was a vice.” “I always thought,” said Sheridan, “that reading was a vice, and I am now convinced of it.”’1 Richard Brinsley Sheridan was jesting about the The research for the paper on which this chapter is based was principally undertaken during a doctoral studentship held at Queen Mary University of London, and I gratefully acknowledge this support. I also wish to thank Pamela Clemit, Matthew Ingleby, Jacob Rosen, and the editors of this collection for their invaluable feedback at various stages in the chapter’s composition. R. Tuke (*) Queen Mary University of London, London, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. O’Brien et al. (eds.), New Approaches to William Godwin, Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62912-0_7

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purportedly sinful nature of Godwin’s views on gratitude. And yet the tone of mock outrage is discernible in the words of other prominent figures. On hearing a summary of Godwin’s ‘opinion on gratitude’ but confessing to not having read Political Justice himself, Edmund Burke is also said to have remarked drily that ‘I would spare him the commission of that vice by not conferring on him any benefit!’2 The notorious Fénelon episode in Political Justice appears to explain why Godwin’s view of gratitude prompted so many responses. Godwin argued that, faced with a choice of saving Fénelon or a family member from a burning building, the truly just man would save Fénelon (50–1). Personal feelings of obligation should not cloud one’s judgement when endeavouring to do one’s duty. But shocking as such assertions may appear to a modern reader, Godwin’s apparent rejection of familial obligation is not why his criticism sparked such outrage. In some conservative quarters, as we shall see, Godwin’s rejection of gratitude in favour of universal benevolence was misinterpreted as support for private vice. Godwin was hardly the first radical figure to express criticism of the use of personal sentiments, including gratitude, in determining the most just course of action—although no one had perhaps done so publicly in England in quite such stark terms.3 Yet Godwin’s analysis of charitable giving is unique in that it acknowledges the interrelated influence of external institutions and the subjective experience of agents. The practice of charity comprises individual and collectively established habits and customs. Given that a charitable gift cannot be reciprocated in kind, the sense of indebtedness that it inevitably produces in the recipient contributes to an unequal power dynamic, which is misrecognised as generosity. Thus, inevitably acts of generosity and corresponding feelings of gratitude conceal the interest that underpins this form of exchange. Godwin’s critique of the practice of charity, what I refer to as his ‘gift theory’, anticipates the twentieth-century sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s critical ambivalence towards the gift.4 Drawing on Bourdieu’s work reveals the extent to which Godwin’s writing articulates a far more nuanced analysis of power than is generally acknowledged in critical accounts of his writing. In this chapter, I examine how Godwin’s gift theory develops across a range of literary forms between 1793 and 1797. John-Erik Hansson notes that, during this time, Godwin’s radical thinking advances across and through a variety of genres: a political treatise, a novel and even a methodologically innovative collection of essays.5 I claim that it is this generic variety that makes it possible, cumulatively, for the author to expose what the ad hoc giving process in England necessarily obfuscates: that justice is

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transformed into generosity with the effect of perpetuating inequality. Once we have established the comprehensive nature of Godwin’s critique, it becomes clear why his support for public virtue was satirised by conservative critics as support for private vice. Godwin’s gift theoretics have received little, if any, critical attention, and yet, I contend, they are of central importance in understanding the dramatic change in his reception from around 1797 onwards.

Godwin’s Gift Theory In attempting to assess the relative value of human life, the Fénelon episode of Political Justice undoubtedly strikes an odd note. But this extreme thought experiment tends to overshadow what is otherwise an inclusive vision of universal benevolence. Godwin considers justice to be the ‘general appellation for all moral duty’. This sense of moral duty determines the best course of action by considering what would ‘benefit the whole’ (49). He argues that ‘my benefactor ought to be esteemed, not because he bestowed a benefit upon me, but because he bestowed it upon a human being’ (51). Godwin is asking us not to think of ourselves grouped into little Burkean platoons, but rather as contributors to what is, ultimately, a universal project.6 We are connected, he writes, ‘with a society, a nation, and in some sense with the whole family of mankind’ (50). At no point does Godwin assert, as is later frequently claimed, that gratitude is a vice. But he does state, perhaps more troublingly for his conservative critics, that those who can yet fail to help others in need carry out a clear injustice. Godwin contends that gratitude hampers the potential for individuals  to consider the bigger picture. It makes people ‘prefer one man to another, from some other consideration than that of his superior usefulness or worth’. Personal preferences are unreliable: if this preference is different to that held by another person, then it cannot be ‘true in itself’. Not only are these preferential feelings untrue, Godwin even claims that a defence of these strong bonds of familial obligation derives ‘from the unequal distribution of property’. Gratitude becomes necessary ‘as long as providing for individuals belongs to individuals’. He is confident that this sentiment occurs in inverse proportion to equality: ‘the more unequal the state of society’, Godwin writes, ‘the greater the tendency to favour our own’ (49–52). This antipathy towards gratitude anticipates the anthropological observations of Margaret Visser who notes that ‘cultural patterns’ either ‘induce gratitude in people, or reduce its likelihood, or make it merely irrelevant […] the more obligatory giving is, the less receivers feel

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grateful’.7 Put bluntly, the presence of gratitude is not indicative of strong social bonds, but symptomatic of an unequal society. Adam Smith, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), had distinguished between legal and moral obligations.8 Smith alleges that legal obligations are matters of justice and can be ‘extorted by force’, whereas charitable duties are a matter of individual discretion.9 He speculates that the gratitude that the recipient of charity displays towards their benefactor may enhance the positive commerce of daily life—although, as Adam Potkay reminds us, we should be careful about drawing too simplistic a picture of Smith’s views on this personal sentiment in his writing.10 Smith is, however, unwavering in his opinion that some measure of justice is necessary for society to function effectively. Specifically, it is essential, he claims, that the law protect the obligation to repay financial debts. The legal requirement to pay one’s debts is thus held up by Smith as one of the pillars of a civilised nation. By contrast, the duty to help others is a desirable, though not strictly necessary, obligation.11 Whilst Smith clearly imagines commercial relations that are, to borrow Karl Polanyi’s term, ‘embedded’ in society, his theory simultaneously permits the possibility of liberty rights—the freedom not to help others in need, if one so chooses.12 Thus, Smith’s distinction between legal and voluntary duties contains at least the potential separation of the economy from other forms of exchange. Literary scholars, such as Julie McGonegal, have pointed out the importance of ‘charitable gift-giving’ as part of cultural practice in the eighteenth century.13 Configuring donations to the poor as private gifts is nothing new. Yet the notion that charitable giving operates outside of an economy proper would ossify into liberal economic orthodoxy in England in the early nineteenth century. All forms of assistance to the poor, state provisions as well as charitable donations, were increasingly presented, according to one historian, as ‘a gift to be bestowed not a right to be claimed’.14 It seems to me that, in ‘Of Property’ in Political Justice, Godwin challenges Smith’s distinction between obligatory and voluntary duties directly.15 It is unjust, Godwin argues, that one person should starve whilst another enjoys abundance (423). Significantly, he does not couch this duty of care in the cosy assumptions of paternalism, nor in the contentious language of rights.16 Instead, the importance that Godwin places on duty in the first edition derives, as Mark Philp has demonstrated, from the influence of Rational Dissenting culture on his thought.17 Regardless of Godwin’s personal faith at the time, it is evident that the political

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philosopher draws on the language and logic of Rational Dissent to discount liberty rights and advance the notion of ‘positive duty’.18 Hazlitt also emphasised the religious influence behind Godwin’s doctrines when he declared Political Justice to be a ‘commentary on some of the most beautiful and striking texts of Scripture’.19 Godwin, he adds, ‘is a mixture of the Stoic and the Christian philosopher’.20 Godwin’s notion of positive duty necessarily rejects the idea that the gratitude of the poor recipient should be given in return for assistance. Summarising Paul the Apostle’s teachings on the matter of charity, Peter Leithart notes that ‘thanks is owed, but is owed for rather than to benefactors. Recipients of gifts are not indebted to the givers; they do not owe return payment’.21 Similarly, according to Godwin, everyone has an entitlement to ‘well-being’—not just the privileged few (423). This entitlement is not a right as such but is simply, as Peter Marshall points out, the flipside to the duty to assist those in need.22 Thus, Godwin claims that his radical proposal for the redistribution of property based on need is not contrary to, but in accordance with, the central tenets of religion. He speaks in a purposely universalist language when he notes that ‘the foundation of all religious morality’ has been ‘the doctrine of the injustice of accumulated property’ (425).23 This sweeping claim to justice appears incontestable. Privileging the repayment of financial debts over social justice, which is intimated in Smith’s writing, now appears both unchristian and absurd. Godwin is clear that there is a strong religious case to be made for the redistribution of property according to the need. Yet he argues that the religious ‘teachers have been too apt to treat the practice of justice, not as a debt, which it ought to be considered, but as an affair of spontaneous generosity and bounty’ (426). In practice, religion often contributes to a state of inequality, whereby justice, a moral ‘debt’, is transformed into a ‘spontaneous’ and generous act. This spontaneous act anticipates the characteristics associated with the gift that are outlined in later anthropological scholarship: treated as if it were unexpected, voluntary, and free.24 For Godwin, the injustice is not the fault of individual agents—although there are, as he notes, plenty of religious ‘teachers’ who are motivated by interests that are contrary to basic morality (426). Rather, he writes, these religious agents are ‘apt’, disposed, in other words, to view charity as something akin to a gift. For Godwin, in the first edition of Political Justice at least, truth is objective and is thus a realisable goal.25 Yet he is also, as the final acerbic

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lines in ‘Of Property’ demonstrate, much more aware of the subtle interplay of subjective and institutional forms of coercion than that with which he is usually credited: The experience of all ages has taught us, that this system [of indirect charitable distribution] is productive only of a very precarious supply. The principal object which it seems to propose, is to place this supply in the disposal of a few, enabling them to make a show of generosity with what is not truly their own, and to purchase the gratitude of the poor by the payment of a debt. It is a system of clemency and charity instead of a system of justice. It fills the rich with unreasonable pride by the spurious denominations with which it decorates their acts, and the poor with servility, by leading them to regard the slender comforts they obtain, not as their incontrovertible due, but as the good pleasure and the grace of their opulent neighbours. (426)

Actions, says Godwin, are regarded wrongly as part of ‘a system of clemency and charity instead of a system of justice’. The ‘system’ to which Godwin refers does not simply fail to distribute the necessary resources: its objective aim is to create a limited ‘supply’.26 The debt of justice is thus ‘transformed by the spurious denominations with which it decorates their acts’ into a form of social prestige and honour. The transformation of ‘debts’ into ‘gratitude’ conceals interest, which is central to this display. Crucially, Godwin makes clear that this aim is not the result of selfish or greedy individuals. There is little doubt that the ‘the unreasonable pride’ with which the rich are filled in giving alms is genuine; so too is the relative state of ‘servility’ in the poor who gratefully accept tokens of charity. Rather, the ‘good pleasure and the grace’ that the poor accept from their ‘neighbours’ draws on familiar paternalistic expressions, which depict the reinforcing relationship between parochial charity, religion, and wealth. The paternalistic modus operandi that Godwin outlines cannot be described as a tradition. Critique of these paternalistic assumptions about wealth derive from ‘the experience of all ages’, he notes. By implication, then, the opinions and beliefs are not simply passed down either but are self-generating. Bourdieu interprets gift exchange in terms of a practice that conceals the unequal and self-generating power dynamic between giver and receiver of symbolic goods. He identifies forms of symbolic capital that are not immediately obvious, such as generosity and gratitude.27 This ‘disguised form of physical “economic” capital’, which he calls ‘symbolic capital’, obscures the fact that acts of generosity and other forms of disinterestedness derive

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from interest.28 For Bourdieu, these generous acts generate the economic advantage that makes them possible in the first place, such that inequality is sustained through the circulation of the gift. According to Bourdieu, the circulation of the gift is not exactly conscious. It takes place as part of a practice of giving, which is composed of multiple fields of influence, such as charity, the state, and the law. But neither is it objectively imposed on the agents. Charitable exchange is also structured by the subjective experience of the participants—what Bourdieu refers to as the habitus. The habitus and the various fields are semi-autonomous and influence one another. For Bourdieu, these hidden strategies of the gift are so entrenched in everyday experience that they appear as ‘self-evident’—what he defines as doxa.29 Reading this section of Political Justice alongside Bourdieu highlights the fact that Godwin is not simply criticising charity. He is also attuned to the social mechanisms that conceal the interrelated forms of capital in society. By pointing to the discrepancy between fundamental Christian ethics and elaborate displays of generosity, Godwin attempts to wrestle his religious notion of duty away from its associations with paternalism and towards a potentially radical locus within the project of social justice. However, it remains difficult to fully appreciate the tangible effects of the existing invisible social structure when it cannot be reduced to a single agent or institution but is a combination of both. Godwin turns to the novel to provide a literary space in which to explore the effects of this structure in a more striking form.

Symbolic Violence; or, Things as They Are At the beginning of Caleb Williams, the eponymous protagonist informs us that he was ‘born of humble parents’.30 He explains how he was taken into the household of the aristocratic Mr. Falkland at an early age. But, as quickly becomes clear, this is no rags to riches story. Caleb discovers that his troubled master has killed his former foe, the tyrannical landowner Mr. Tyrrel, and then planted evidence on two of Tyrrel’s innocent yet aggrieved tenants, Mr. Hawkins and his son Leonard. Falkland’s social standing ensures that he is able not just to defend his own honour in court and get the innocent pair hanged but to pursue Caleb using largely legal means throughout the rest of the tale. The story includes numerous occasions on which the rich use their power to make financially indebted any humble character who refuses to act in an appropriately servile manner. Throughout the novel, the poor are tyrannised by the rich: personal bonds lead to

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forms of bondage. Whereas in Political Justice, Godwin had described the self-generating nature of inequality, in Caleb Williams, this process is made visible. Several critics have asserted that the bonds in Caleb Williams are indicative of legal and state mechanisms of power.31 The novel certainly engages with the apparatus of legal and state control but does not confine its critique of bonds to institutions. Anna Maria Jones proposes that Caleb Williams ‘calls for a subjectivity grounded, not in individual rights, but in interpenetrating bonds between individuals’, which stresses the complexity of the individual connections that are represented in the novel.32 I want to claim that Godwin explores the ‘interpenetrating bonds’ that exist between both institutions and individuals, and this is signalled through the circulation of gifts and debts in the story. Godwin explores, as he had done in Political Justice, what Bourdieu later articulates as the capacity for the inter-transference of different forms of capital, such that generosity and indebtedness are as central to strengthening bonds as institutions. Yet Godwin’s novel additionally emphasises the violence that is concealed in these apparently benign forms of exchange. Early on in the novel, prior to their ruin at the hands of the honourable Falkland, the Hawkins family, who are tenant farmers, are forced to seek assistance from the bullish landlord Tyrrel as a result of the tyrannical actions of their previous landlord. We learn that Hawkins loves his son Leonard so much that he ‘seemed to have nothing so much at heart as the future welfare’ of his boy. When Tyrrel becomes aware of this bond, he makes it known to his tenant that he would like the boy to be ‘whipper-in to his hounds’—a role that typifies deference in a feudal hierarchy (37). Even though Tyrrel promises to pay Leonard, his intention is not to improve the boy’s situation but to reaffirm the power he wields over his subordinates. Hawkins has managed to obtain the lease of the farm and gain some independence. Thus, even though he is only of low social status, he rejects Tyrrel’s offer of a job for his boy. He feels it would do his family a dishonour to suffer one of its members going into service. After all, Hawkins adds a little too boldly, ‘we have all of us lived in a creditable way’ (40). Godwin’s language reveals the homology between honour and financial solvency. He  anticipates Bourdieu’s assertion that ‘symbolic capital is always credit’: it is used as ‘a sort of advance’, which only the powerful ‘can grant those who give it the best material and symbolic guarantees’.33 He explains how this system of credit is not open to all since ‘it is always

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expensive in economic terms’.34 Bourdieu claims that ‘the exhibition of symbolic capital’ is what keeps the mechanism functioning.35 The fact that Hawkins is independent and not indebted to anyone inadvertently threatens the position of other more powerful agents. The dominant position in the social space depends on access to different forms of capital in order to maintain inequality. Tyrrel is initially baffled to encounter a form of value to which he appears to have no access. He becomes affronted when the Hawkins family attempts to use the law to defend themselves against his subsequent assaults: It would, as Mr. Tyrrel argued, be the disgrace of a civilised country, if a gentleman, when insolently attacked in law by the scum of the earth, could not convert the cause into a question of the longest purse, and stick in the skirts of his adversary till he had reduced him to beggary. (41)

Tyrrel pompously assumes a ‘civilised country’ to be characterised by the ability of the upper echelons of society to ‘convert’ legal procedure into a question of who has the most money. Godwin refers to the unfair, though generally legal, process in England of drawing out legal cases in order to financially drain the opponent. That the process is not at this time illegal makes any debate about individual rights or the impartiality of the law largely irrelevant. Yet the language Godwin uses to describe the manner in which the impartial law can be converted into a question of wealth is important. He creatively explores the transformative capacity of wealth, which he had outlined in Political Justice and which foreshadows Bourdieu’s concept of capital. Only now, however, Godwin reveals the coercive power of the dominant agents more strikingly. The judiciary, the economy, and the English landowners do not simply exert power. They maintain asymmetric social  structures by  promoting the seamless inter-­ transferral of different forms of capital. This critique of what we see as symbolic capital occurs again in Tyrrel’s treatment of his cousin Emily Melville. Emily is dependent on him financially and, initially, Tyrrel is generous towards her. Although she is not brought up as an equal member of the family, she is at least treated slightly better than a maid. Tyrrel’s kindness ends abruptly, however, when he realises that Emily has fallen for the charms of his arch-rival, Falkland. In order to punish her for the pain and humiliation that this apparent transgression has caused him, Tyrrel decides to recall the money that Emily

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owes him in return for her upbringing. Aghast, she asks him: ‘What do I owe you?’ (61). He proceeds to calculate all the financial debts that Emily has incurred as a result of being a recipient of his generosity: ‘do not you know’ he asks her snidely ‘that every creditor has a right to stop his runaway debtor?’ (67). Even his hardened steward Barnes takes it upon himself to come to the girl’s defence: ‘Why’, he exclaims to Tyrrel in disbelief, ‘she does not owe you a brass farthing; she always lived upon your charity!’ (72). Charity or no, Emily is thrown in prison for her unpaid debt to Tyrrel (71). After being subjected to a series of violent and humiliating physical and mental assaults, Emily’s resolve is finally broken, and she dies in prison. A gift, Godwin’s novel implies, is not so different from a debt as we might have first thought. The ordeal that Emily is made to endure prompts a forceful comparison in the novel between charitable and violent forms of exchange. Mauss was certainly not unaware of the hidden violence of certain forms of benevolence. In his striking words: ‘charity wounds him who receives’.36 Bourdieu takes this suggestion of violence and extends it even further in his assessment of gift and debts. He identifies ‘the overtly economic obligations of debt and the “moral”, “affective” obligations created and maintained by exchange, in short, overt (physical or economic) violence, or symbolic violence’.37 He characterises the latter form as ‘censored, euphemized, i.e. unrecognizable, socially recognized violence’.38 For Bourdieu, these forms of violence are not at odds with one another but ‘coexist in the same social formation’ and often ‘in the same relationship […] in order to be socially recognized it must get itself misrecognized’.39 According to his analysis, the overt or symbolic violence of unequal exchange depends on whether it declares itself to be an economic relationship or whether this is euphemised in more palatable language and social conventions. Godwin similarly implies that charity is an inherently unstable form of exchange since acts of generosity can be (and frequently are) recalled according to the designs of the benefactor. This often leaves the recipient worse than if they had never received any help at all. More than that, the censored, euphemised nature of these types of bonds is, in a sense, a worse form of violence than physical attacks because they are not recognised as such. This denial makes the injustice much harder to identify and effectively overcome. Through its frequent explorations of debts and gifts, Caleb Williams emerges as a kind of proto-exploration of Bourdieu’s ‘symbolic violence’.40 Aligning himself with the views of Martha Nussbaum, Potkay notes that, ‘in grappling with the particular dilemmas, ambiguities, and slippery

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narrative contours of moral problems, literature often proves a better mode of ethical reflection than technical philosophy’.41 With this in mind, we can see how Godwin stages a number of symbolic and actual scenes of violence throughout the novel. Sometimes this violence is enacted through opposing characters such as Emily and Tyrrel, Caleb and Falkland, but it is also explored in the contradictions apparent within the characters themselves (Tyrrel and Falkland). The novel’s title implies that there is an objective reality to which the fiction refers but that this is not necessarily equivalent to the subjective experience of the titular protagonist. The tale is not simply imaginary, nor is it true, but the power structures it explores are real. The ‘slippery narrative contours of moral problems’, which Potkay outlines are, as Godwin’s novel suggests, what underpin the structure of ‘things as they are’—a complex social framework that exists yet can truly be made visible only through fiction.

Gifts Among Friends Fiction may well provide the space in which to explore structures of power, but it did not immediately solve Godwin’s practical issue of avoiding indebtedness between friends. In the autumn of 1795, a year after the publication of Caleb Williams, Godwin and his informal patron, Thomas Wedgwood, debated, in a series of extraordinary letters, the best method of promoting the general good. Discussing this topic leads Godwin to reject both ‘charitable institutions’, because ‘they are necessarily full of abuses’, and ‘indiscriminate charity’.42 He supposes that the latter form of giving ‘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’.43 Later in the series, the  pair discuss the immediate political context of the high price of corn in England and the likelihood of famine for large numbers of the poor.44 What is significant, however, is not the political commentary, but the manner in which their extended exchange descends hereafter from a lofty discussion on public policy to a more tense exchange about the nature of gifts among friends. It seems that, for Godwin, the problems that are inherent within the charitable method of distribution in England are inextricably related to the issues that underpin the personal circulation of the gift.45 Wedgwood offers to get hold of a copy of a book for Godwin in what would typically be perceived as a simple act of generosity.46 Yet, rather than interpret this and other presents he has received as part of the natural give

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and take of friendship (reciprocity), Godwin is uneasy. Bourdieu suggests that the problem with generous gifts is that they tend ‘towards overwhelming generosity; the greatest gift is at the same time the gift most likely to throw its recipient into dishonour by prohibiting any counter-­ gift’.47 Wedgwood’s offer similarly leads Godwin to suggest to his friend ‘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’.48 We have seen how Caleb Williams had explored the manner in which unequal relationships can quickly slip into very real forms of oppression.49 In his letter to Wedgwood, Godwin reiterates his suspicion that there is ‘something erroneous in the ordinary commerce of giving & receiving’.50 His economically inflected language underscores the fact that, given that ‘we are such imperfect beings at present’, we may debase social interactions simply by recognising them as a form of exchange. In a sense, Godwin is proven correct when, the following year, his friend John King, a notorious money lender, finds himself in trouble with the law over allegations of conspiring to rob a coal merchant through fake annuities. King appears to have recalled all the extravagant feasts he had provided for his friend, prompting Godwin to write that ‘you seem to insinuate that I ought to appear in court as your friend & supporter’.51 He asks: ‘did you imagine that your dinners were to be a bribe, seducing me to depart from the integrity of my judgment?’52 In explicitly alluding to the fact that his benefactor expects something in return for his hospitality, Godwin again threatens the ties that connect him to the network of sociability.53 C. A. Gregory notes that such ties ‘bind people together in a complicated web of gift-debt’.54 Following Gregory’s observations, James G. Carrier points out that anyone who does not adhere to gift obligations is effectively ‘denying that he or she is in a social relationship, and hence is rejecting amity and indicating indifference’.55 Yet these gift networks are also sometimes necessary to one’s survival. The John King and Wedgwood exchanges indicate that Godwin yearned for a form of communication where, as he put it, ‘nothing is exchanged but the suggestions of the mind’.56 He considers this to be a ‘noble and elevated’ form of communication since it is untarnished by tawdry calculations of self-interest. Yet it is an unrealistic expectation—all the more so since he is reliant, to a certain extent, on that same dubious interest to provide him with informal patronage. Clearly growing frustrated with the ‘creeping and tedious’ epistolary mode of his exchange

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with Wedgwood, Godwin is nevertheless forced to concede that he has ‘always excepted from my rule all presents that contained in them important & essential benefit to the receiver’—meaning financial loans or gifts.57 He is also happy to provide his friendship in return for Wedgwood reading and providing comments on Caleb Williams, so that the idea of a clear distinction between economic and other forms of interest disappears.58 Whilst Godwin appears to make a huge concession here in accepting certain types of gifts from his friends, he justifies this according to the principles that he had outlined relating to the distribution of property according to need in Political Justice. Nevertheless, it seems to me that Godwin is struggling with the feelings of indebtedness and obligation that arise in the process of gift exchange. He is starting to realise the impossibility of divorcing the associated feelings of gratitude from this process. Godwin experiences first-hand the limitations of a gift theory that fails to acknowledge the messiness of real social exchanges. It is precisely this understanding of the reality of these conflicting feelings, arising in the giving and receiving of gifts, which he acknowledges and utilises to good effect in his collection of essays, The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature (1797).59

The Enquirer Godwin presents The Enquirer as a clear departure from Political Justice. He declares in the preface that he has now ‘descended in his investigations into the humbler walks of private life’ (79). Several scholars have weighed up the validity of this claim by focusing on The Enquirer’s style of communication or its status as a pedagogical text.60 Certainly, its form as a collection of essays on a variety of topics indicates a less doctrinaire approach than that taken in his political treatise. A number of essays explore the practice of charitable giving, which Godwin had first examined in Political Justice. This attests to the fact that there is continuity in his central ideas surrounding the reproduction of social inequality.61 However, it is clear that Godwin now recognises the impossibility of achieving disinterestedness in all forms of exchange—economic, social, and intellectual. This recognition almost certainly derives from his epistolary communications from the previous couple of years. These written exchanges had not just provided a means through which to discuss ideas and principles broadly relating to charity and gift exchange. The medium of the letter exposed a number of misunderstandings and misaligned

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expectations between sender (giver) and recipient (receiver). The exchange of letters thus awakened in Godwin a consciousness of the fact that it is impossible to give and receive anything in a vacuum: the intrinsically social nature of giving ensures there is no pure form of exchange. It is not surprising, therefore, that The Enquirer acknowledges a greater sense of the difficult, often contradictory, emotions that are excited in the process of charitable giving. In his essay ‘Of Beggars’, Godwin states that the business of giving money to beggars is fraught with complications. One has to contend, he writes, with ‘knotty points, uncertainties, and a balance of good and evil’ (160). He is much less assured here than he had been when presenting his argument for the redistribution of property in the first edition of Political Justice. Charitable giving is no longer simply a case of determining and then following the best course of action. Instead, his wavering tone implies, there may not actually be an optimum route to social justice. This reticence continues in his assessment of begging. Godwin presents another imagined scenario (this time less calamitous than the Fénelon example), in which an ‘an angelic being’ comes down and observes the actions of the world. This spectator would be ‘ignorant of the modes of human life and the nature of human character’ (160–1). The perspective of the angel resembles Smith’s ‘impartial spectator’.62 Smith had acknowledged that the impartial spectator provided only an illusory sense of objectivity. In reality, the practice of charity was not an exact science, but more of a performative and moderated exercise on the part of the charitable recipient, and an imaginative speculation on the part of the spectator.63 Avner Offer argues convincingly that Smith’s term ‘approbation’, which relates to the desire for the approval or sympathy of others towards ourselves, bridges the seemingly contradictory concepts of ‘selfishness and sympathy’ in his writing.64 Godwin similarly stresses the influence of the desire for the approval of others in determining action. He wonders what this angel would think if they saw a ‘poor, half-naked, shivering creature’ asking for ‘the gift of the smallest coin’ at the same time as they saw another in much better circumstances, walking by and ignoring the beggar. Here, the gift does not burden the poor recipient: the angel judges only the actions of the passer-by. If this individual does not stop to give the beggar a donation, then Godwin declares that the angel ‘would pronounce this man corrupt, cruel and unfeeling, the disgrace of a rational nature’ (160–1). Like Smith, Godwin accommodates a less virtuous, more realistic, middle ground in his assessment of charitable exchange. The passer-by

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is still prompted to carry out his duty to help the beggar. Now, however, this action may be motivated less from learning the objective truth of his situation than it is from a sense of judgement by others. And yet, Godwin is not entirely satisfied with this compromise. Echoing the comments that he had made in an earlier letter to Wedgwood, he asserts that beggars are sometimes fraudsters: ‘there is no vile trick of fawning and flattery in which he is not adept’ (162). He has learned tricks to be ‘adept’ at fooling the public such that ‘you would think him the humblest creature that lives’ (162). Godwin’s criticism, couched as it is in seemingly disapproving language, is not really directed at the beggar. Nor does it derive from a fear of being duped—that is, giving to those who are not actually in need—as were a number of his contemporaries.65 The problem, for Godwin, is that the beggar has to learn these tactics, much as Bourdieu refers to agents having to pick up a ‘feel for the game’ if they are to survive in the social space.66 Learning these tacit habits and strategies may help agents survive in the short term, but, Godwin argues, does little to improve the state of society: ‘he is all a counterfeit’, he says of the beggar who treats charity as a trade (162). Whilst he thinks that most beggars do have a sad, ‘unvarnished story to tell’, he suspects that this account would not conform to the conventions of this performative form of exchange (163). As a consequence, the beggars debase themselves by participating in what is a kind of false economy. Worse than the negative individual effect, however, the success in the social space inevitably renders universal improvement impossible since that can only come through the consistent promotion of truth. But the attainment of an objective truth is no longer viable. Godwin seems to be conceding the impossibility of exercising flawless private judgement. But, in the end, the difficulty that Godwin is starting to suspect is inherent in charitable giving hardly matters. At the close of the essay, he adds ‘one further consideration’ which is ‘that the case of the man who demands my charity in the streets, is often of the most pressing nature, and is therefore no proper field for experiments’ (166). This practical and knowingly flawed view, which appears to contradict everything that he has just said about the practice of begging, is a far cry from the rather rigid ideas that were presented in Political Justice. Sometimes, Godwin says, any action is better than no action at all. Later, Bourdieu stresses something similar. Occasionally, ‘philosophers’ and others who professionally think about the world fall prey to ‘the oxymoron of epistemic doxa’.67 This deliberately verbose expression underlines the precarity of Bourdieu’s own

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position as he notes that, for all their learnedness, academics and philosophers often fail to think about ‘the presuppositions’ that govern their own thought. They are sometimes at too great a ‘distance from the world and from the urgency of necessity’ to remember that action trumps all.68

Critical Reception Reconsidered By the mid-1790s, the political climate had changed from the optimism that characterised radical circles in England at the start of the decade. Conservative opposition to radicalism now consisted of ‘a near unanimous and highly militant anti-Jacobinism’.69 William Pitt’s government took advantage of the worsening events in France to launch a counterattack on civil liberties and effectively quash public debate about rights.70 Yet Godwin’s critique of charity, as we have seen, runs much deeper than decrying the lack of rights of the poor or railing against the failure of individual agents to carry out their paternal duty. His understanding of the practice of social redistribution in England forms a total gift theory. Godwin’s critique offers a pervasive and radical challenge to the self-­ generating nature of power in England, which remains credible in spite of the failed French project. Bourdieu, as has been pointed out already, claims that the exchange of symbolic goods depends on their tacit strategies remaining hidden. Early in his career, he referred to this aspect of gift-giving as misrecognition (méconnaissance), which he interpreted as a form of symbolic violence.71 Godwin’s critique of charity, which we have observed him developing across a variety of literary modes, threatens such tacit conventions. The nature of his critical reception was shaped by fear arising from his gift theory. Godwin expresses, comprehensively, and across a range of genres, what usually went without saying. This fear, I think, accounts for why, as Godwin was developing a more flexible understanding of charity, several conservatives were launching an all-out assault on his theory. The colourful turn that Godwin’s personal life had publicly taken by 1797 provided much needed ammunition with which conservative texts could tar his argument in support of redistribution of property and universal benevolence.72 His rejection of gratitude was satirised as support for all kinds of scandalous and lascivious behaviour in anti-Jacobin novels from around 1797 onwards.73 Novels by Elizabeth Hamilton, George Walker, Jane West, and Charles Lucas, for example, all

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featured Godwin-inspired characters who spouted parodic versions of his philosophy and caused disorder and chaos in the private sphere.74 In his important work on the subgenre of anti-Jacobin novels, M.  O. Grenby has proposed that we view such attacks as criticism in ‘aggregate’.75 Grenby points out that the relationship between the anti-­ Jacobin novels and Godwin’s theories, as well as those of other figures associated with the new philosophy, ‘was stretched to say the least’.76 He contends that, although these texts may quote passages of Political Justice or feature Godwinian caricatures, they cannot be considered ‘anti-­ Godwinian’ in any meaningful sense.77 It is true that these novels do not engage carefully with the theories of any radical figure, and they do not constitute a definitive political ideology. But it is worth pausing to ask why these texts repeatedly misrepresent Godwin’s views on gratitude as support for private vice.78 Critics distorted his support for civic virtue and universal benevolence so that they could be successfully challenged. Godwin’s views of gratitude were transformed such that they were no longer in accordance with a Christian sense of duty and did not form part of a broader ambitious vision of society. Godwin’s apparent support for private vice recalls Bernard Mandeville’s paradoxical claim in  the subtitle of  The  Fable of the Bees (1714) that ‘Private Vices, [produce] Publick Benefits’.79 Mandeville’s contentious support for self-interest could not have been further from Godwin’s views. Yet in these conservative novels, the radical author’s apparent debauchery surpasses Mandeville in its effects. At least Mandeville maintains that self-interest promotes public wealth and prosperity overall, whereas the Godwinian characters in the anti-Jacobin novels threaten society as a whole. The fact that there was a delay of four years between the publication of the first edition of Godwin’s Political Justice and the belated appearance of his views in conservative novels suggests that these misreadings were opportunistic. The specificity and frequency of the attack point towards a drive to re-appropriate Godwin’s ideas on gratitude which, although not premediated, was certainly enthusiastically carried out. After all,  it is considerably easier to ridicule the rejection of gratitude when it apparently supports the relentless pursuit of self-interest through the violation of women’s chastity and the breakdown of the family unit than when it is revealed to be central to the continuation of inequality. At least until the publication of the first edition of Thomas Robert Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), Godwin’s conservative

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critics mainly satirised distorted versions of his views but were not equipped to challenge them directly.80 This form of conservative satire, which denies the existence of other forms of power and obligation, is itself a form of symbolic violence.

Conclusions Throughout the 1790s, Godwin returned almost compulsively to the problems that he regarded as inherent in the practice of charity. Economic assistance was commonly interpreted by rich and poor alike as a spontaneous act of generosity, which signalled the virtue of the benefactor and supposedly stimulated feelings of gratitude in the recipient. This interpretation was broadly paternalistic in its values, habits, and assumptions. Godwin’s own difficulties with the giving and receiving of gifts in his personal life deepened his desire for a purer form of commerce, one which could maintain the bonds of duty to care for fellow humans but were divorced from the sordid influences of self-interest and indebtedness. Godwin’s participation in a network of Romantic gift-giving—a web of patronage, loans, debts, and gifts—only complicated further his desire to reject gratitude and cultivate disinterestedness in his everyday life. Godwin writes in a range of literary modes during this time, which, I have suggested, cumulatively make visible the concealed strategies that are encoded in the economic gift. These strategies depend on paternalistic habits and customs that are so established that they are unrecognised. For Godwin, the problem of inequality could not simply be pinned on individual agents, or even a group, but was a much more complicated practice. Caleb Williams exposes the way several areas—law, the state, the British class system—are linked. Those with access to different forms of capital are able to maintain their dominant positions in society. The novel represents the violence that is latent in this unrecognised inter-transference of capital. The structural similarities between overt and covert forms of violence are signalled in the novel in the ways in which gifts transform into debts and personal bonds morph into legal bondage. As Godwin’s awareness of a tension between theory and practice developed, so too did his reflexivity in questioning the role and limitations of the philosopher. William Hazlitt’s famous account of Godwin is often cited by literary and historical scholars as evidence that his reputation blazed and then

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plummeted.81 However, the picture that Hazlitt paints of Godwin’s legacy is more complicated than this bell curve suggests.82 He says that, in Godwin’s theory, ‘gratitude, promises, friendship, family affection give way, not that they may be merged in the opposite vices or in want of principle; but that the void may be filled up by the disinterested love of good’.83 In outlining what Godwin did ‘not’ believe, Hazlitt at the same time indicates how the political philosopher’s rejection of gratitude was lumped in with the events of his personal life and taken as unequivocal support of vice. Although certainly not an unqualified defence of his views, Hazlitt stresses that the reaction in subsequent decades to Godwin’s ideas shifted too far the other way. There was a zealous return, as he saw it, ‘to restore the spirit of loyalty, of passive obedience and non-resistance’, as exemplified by the writings of Sir Walter Scott.84 From moving towards a radical economic and moral vision of society, the pendulum of public opinion had swung back to the imagined ‘good old times’.85

Notes 1. Undated letter written by Basil Montagu to R. J. Mackintosh, quoted in Peter H.  Marshall, William Godwin (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1984), p.  130. Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, 7 vols, gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993), III: An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. Mark Philp, p. 51. Godwin actually writes: ‘Gratitude [...] is no part either of justice or virtue’. Subsequent references in parentheses in the text. 2. Robert Bisset, Life of Burke. Comprehending an Impartial Account of His Literary and Political Efforts, and a Sketch of the Conduct and Character of His Most Eminent Associates, Coadjutors, and Opponents, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London: George Cawthorn, 1800), II, 249. 3. Adam Potkay argues that Mary Wollstonecraft, William Blake, and William Godwin’s rejection of pity and gratitude is demonstrative of a ‘radical extension of Stoic logic’ in the literature of the 1790s in ‘Contested Emotions: Pity and Gratitude from the Stoics to Swift and Wordsworth’, PMLA, 130 (2015), 1332–1346 (p. 1334). 4. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp.  5–6. See also Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action (Cambridge: Polity Press), p. 95. Ilana Silber emphasises ‘the gift’s special theoretical status as exemplary of and fundamental to Bourdieu’s vision of the social world.’ Silber argues that the gift calls ‘attention to inner tensions, uncertainties, and developments in Bourdieu’s own writings with regard to the pivotal topic of the

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gift’. However, Silber does not argue that this means that there is no continuity in Bourdieu’s writings on the gift. See Ilana Silber, ‘Bourdieu’s Gift to Gift Theory: An Unacknowledged Trajectory’, Sociological Theory, 27 (2009), 173–190 (p.  176). Camil Ungureanu concludes his negative assessment of what he considers to be ‘Bourdieu’s economic interpretation’ by saying that it ‘implausibly reduces the ambiguity of the gift to interest maximisation’ in ‘Bourdieu and Derrida on Gift: Beyond “Double Truth” and Paradox’, Human Studies, 36 (2013), 393–409 (p. 407). 5. John-Erik Hansson, ‘The Genre of Radical Thought and The Practices of Equality: The Trajectories of William Godwin and John Thelwall in the Mid-1790s’, History of European Ideas, 43 (2017), 776–790. 6. Edmund Burke famously referred to the fact that our affections are directed first towards ‘the little platoon’ of our family, then ‘our country’ and finally ‘to mankind’. Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), p. 41. 7. Margaret Visser, The Gift of Thanks: The Roots and Rituals of Gratitude (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), p. 27. 8. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. by D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). 9. Smith, p. 79. 10. Smith, p. 79. Adam Potkay, ‘Pity, Gratitude, and the Poor in Rousseau and Adam Smith’, Eighteenth-Century Culture, 26 (2017), 163–182 (p. 164). 11. Smith, pp. 85–6. 12. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1957, 2001), p. 60. Avner Offer convincingly proposes that, for Smith, the main ‘purpose of economic activity’ is ‘the acquisition of regard’. Offer defines regard as ‘an attitude of approbation’, which ‘needs to be communicated’. He claims that ‘the gift embodies the communication and carries the signal’. See ‘Between the Gift and the Market: The Economy of Regard’, The Economic History Review, 50 (1997), 450–476 (p. 451; p. 452). 13. Julie McGonegal, ‘The Tyranny of Gift Giving: The Politics of Generosity in Sarah Scott’s Millennium Hall and Sir George Ellison’, EighteenthCentury Fiction, 19 (2007), 291–306 (p. 291). 14. Alan Kidd, State, Society and the Poor in Nineteenth-Century England (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1999), p. 4. 15. Although Godwin first records in his diary reading The Theory of Moral Sentiments on the 19 July 1794, the editors make clear that he did not record his reading with any regularity until 1791. Given the similarity in subject matter—justice and gratitude—it is likely that Godwin had read the text either before or within three years of keeping his diary. Godwin returns

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to Smith’s text on 20 December 1797 and twice again in October the following year, which indicates the importance that he placed on the text. The Diary of William Godwin, ed. by Victoria Myers, David O’Shaughnessy, and Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford Digital Library, 2010) [accessed 5 June 2020]. 16. Critics have long since stressed the importance of Godwin’s rejection of rights. See, for example, Élie Halévy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, trans. Mary Morris (London: Faber and Faber, 1928, 1972), p. 155. 17. Mark Philp, Godwin’s Political Justice (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 10. Philp has also cautioned against drawing potentially erroneous conclusions about the nature of Godwin’s ‘atheism’ at this time, p. 34. For a discussion of the importance of Rational Dissent on Godwin’s thought, see pp. 15–34. 18. Philp, p. 18. See also Marshall, pp. 8–45. 19. The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt, ed. by Duncan Wu, 9 vols (London: Pickering, 1998), VII: Liber Amoris; The Spirit of the Age, p. 90. 20. Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age, p. 90. 21. Peter Leithart, Gratitude: An Intellectual History (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2014), p. 74. 22. Marshall, p. 101. 23. Paul Hamilton points out that ‘Godwin’s theory’ asserts for the ‘progressive movement a universal validity’, which paradoxically focuses on ‘the social identity of free-thinking Dissenters through their own scepticism regarding any socially defining institutions.’ See Metaromanticism: Aesthetics, Literature, Theory (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 70. 24. Following the seminal observations of Marcel Mauss, James Siegel notes that ‘for a gift to be a gift’, it has to seem as if it were ‘given for no reason by the giver’. See ‘False Beggars: Marcel Mauss, The Gift, and its Commentators’, Diacritics, 41 (2013), 60–79 (p. 65). 25. See Philp, p. 2; p. 15. 26. Bourdieu preferred the term ‘field’ to ‘system’ since he felt it conveyed less an omniscient controller and more a complex series of interrelated generating processes. See Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc J. D. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. 102–4. 27. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, p. 183. 28. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, p. 183. 29. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, p. 164. 30. Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 8 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1992), III, Caleb Williams, ed. Pamela Clemit, p. 5. Subsequent references in parentheses in the text.

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31. See Marilyn Butler’s ‘Godwin, Burke, and Caleb Williams’, in Essays in Criticism, 32 (1982), 237–257. See also James Thompson, ‘Surveillance in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams’, in Gothic Fictions: Prohibition/ Transgression, ed. by Kenneth W. Graham (New York: AMS Press, 1989). Quentin Bailey distinguishes his argument from Butler’s and Thompson’s by claiming that Caleb Williams is ‘as much part of an established discourse about lawlessness and public order as […] a response to the oppression of Jacobin sympathizers in the 1790s’ in ‘“Extraordinary and Dangerous Powers”: Prisons, Police and Literature in Godwin’s Caleb Williams’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 22 (2010), 525–548 (p. 529). 32. Anna Maria Jones, ‘“What should make thee inaccessible to my fury?”: Gothic Self-Possession, Revenge, and the Doctrine of Necessity in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams’, European Romantic Review, 22 (2011), 137–154 (p. 138). 33. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, p. 181. 34. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, p. 181. 35. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, p. 181. 36. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. by W. D. Halls (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 41. 37. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, p. 191. 38. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, p. 191. 39. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, p. 191. 40. See Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passerson, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, trans. Richard Nice (London: Sage, 1977), p. 4. 41. Martha C. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp.  138–42. Quoted in Potkay, p. 1335. 42. William Godwin to Thomas Wedgwood. 22 Sept. 1795, The Letters of William Godwin Volume I: 1778–1797, ed. Pamela Clemit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 126. 43. Letters, p. 126. 44. See Clemit’s note, Letters, p. 131. 45. Pamela Clemit argues that the letter is a ‘gift of attention’ for Godwin and his correspondents in ‘The Signal of Regard: William Godwin’s Correspondence Networks’, European Romantic Review, 30 (2019), 353–366. 46. See Clemit’s note 4 to Letter 70. To Thomas Wedgwood 5 November 1795, Letters, p. 131. 47. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, p. 14. 48. Letters, p.  130. Clemit notes that the ‘deduction of principle’ to which Godwin refers may have been sharpened by another expensive present he

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had just received from Wedgwood: a portable letter-copying machine, p. 131, note 4. 49. Bourdieu claims that ‘one of the few ways of “holding” someone is to keep up a lasting asymmetrical relationship such as indebtedness; and because the only recognized, legitimate form of possession is that achieved by dispossessing oneself  – i.e. obligation, gratitude, prestige, or personal loyalty’, p. 195. 50. Letters, p. 130. 51. Godwin to John King, 24 Jan. 1796, Letters, p. 149. 52. Letters, p. 149. For an analysis of Godwin’s relationship with the money lender, John King, see Pamela Clemit and Jenny McAuley, ‘Sociability in Godwin’s Diary: The Case of John King’, Bodleian Library Record, 24 (2011), 51–6. 53. Sarah Haggarty similarly argues that threatening the network of sociability ‘might indeed be the risk of the rational kind of independence’ proposed by Godwin’s radical theory, in Blake’s Gifts: Poetry and the Politics of Exchange (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 50. 54. C. A. Gregory, Gifts and Commodities, 2nd edn (Chicago: HAU Books, 2015), p. 57. 55. James G. Carrier, Gifts and Commodities: Exchange and Western Capitalism since 1700 (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 22. See Mauss, p. 13. 56. Godwin to Wedgwood, 5 Nov. 1795, Letters, p. 130. 57. Godwin to Wedgwood, 10 Nov. 1795, Letters, p. 133. 58. Godwin to Wedgwood, 10 Nov. 1795, Letters, p. 134. 59. Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 7 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993), V: Educational and Literary Writings, ed. Pamela Clemit, 77. Subsequent references in parentheses in the text. 60. See, for example, Gary Handwerk, ‘“Awakening the Mind”: William Godwin’s Enquirer’, in Godwinian Moments, pp.  103–124 (p.  105). Beatrice Turner claims that Mary Shelley’s fiction explores ‘the gap between theory and practice which haunts’ her father’s ‘pedagogies’ as exemplified in The Enquirer. See Romantic Childhood, Romantic Heirs: Reproduction and Retrospection, 1820–1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), p.  137. Jon Mee is sceptical of the manner in which Godwin positions himself in The Enquirer as a kind of ‘everyman […] one whose understanding has been matured by exposure to the particularities of difference’. See ‘“The Use of Conversation”: William Godwin’s Conversable World and Romantic Sociability’, Studies in Romanticism, 50 (2011), 567–90 (p. 583). 61. Hansson similarly claims that Caleb Williams and The Enquirer both ‘follow a significantly different model of communication’ than the first edition

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of Political Justice but perceives a continuity of thought across these texts, p. 786. 62. Smith’s impartial spectator is someone who is not in the spectator’s shoes, nor in the person’s under observation, but watches ‘from the place and with the eyes of a third person, who has no particular connection with either, and who judges with impartiality’, p. 135. 63. See also Daniel B.  Klein, Erik W.  Matson, and Colin Doran, ‘The Man within the Breast, the Supreme Impartial Spectator, and Other Impartial Spectators in Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments’, History of European Ideas, 44 (2018), 1153–1168. D. D. Raphael says that ‘throughout the development of Smith’s concept of the impartial spectator his fundamental position was unchanged’. The Impartial Spectator: Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), p. 42. 64. Avner Offer, ‘Self-Interest, Sympathy and the Invisible Hand: From Adam Smith to Market Liberalism’, Economic Thought: History, Philosophy, and Methodology 1 (2012), 1–14 (p. 1). 65. Jeremy Bentham, for example, states that ‘the beggar who by any means whatever can contrive to produce most pain will fare the best. The dole of the passenger will accordingly be the prey of the best actor […]’ in The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham: Writings on the Poor Laws, Vol. 1, 2 vols, ed. by Michael Quinn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001–), I, p. 14. 66. Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology, trans. by Matthew Adamson (Cambridge: Polity, 1990), p. 63. 67. Bourdieu, Practical Reason, p. 129. 68. Bourdieu, Practical Reason, p. 129. 69. M. O. Grenby, The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 5. 70. Kenneth R. Johnston refers to the year 1795 as the third of four phases of political development in the 1790s: he claims that the government used the attack on the King’s carriage on the 29 Oct. 1795 to introduce two restrictive bills: the ‘Gagging Acts’, which prohibited the publication of attacks against the government, and ‘public meetings of more than fifty persons’. Unusual Suspects: Pitt’s Reign of Alarm and the Lost Generation of the 1790s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 7–8. 71. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, p. 5. 72. Marshall, p. 220. 73. Marshall’s biography usefully cites several examples, including some of those mentioned below, in which Godwin’s views on gratitude are satirised. He does not explain why this sentiment specifically appears so frequently in this genre of writing. See Marshall, pp. 211–233. 74. Elizabeth Hamilton, Memoirs of Modern Philosophers in Three Volumes (London: G.G. and J. Robinson, 1800). Bridgetina rejects the gratitude

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that arises from receipt of charity by spouting Mr. Glib’s (Godwinian) philosophy. It is only when her friend Julia Delmond has been persuaded to elope by her lover following a similar logic that Miss Bridgetina recognises the error of her former views. She manages to avoid falling prey to the same misfortunes as her friend by rejecting the moral framework of the New Philosophers. In George Walker’s The Vagabond (1799), the Godwinian character Stupeo decides that the equalisation of property through gaming is fine since gratitude is bad. Jane West’s A Tale of the Times (1799) is set amid the French Revolution and the villain Fitzosborne seduces Geraldine by arguing against both gratitude and the institution of marriage. In Charles Lucas’s The Infernal Quixote. A Tale of the Day (1801), the Godwinian caricature Marauder rejects marriage and gratitude in order to seduce Emily. 75. Grenby, p. 1. 76. Grenby, p. 68. 77. Grenby, p. 76. 78. An exception is Morgan Rooney’s analysis of Jane West’s A Tale of the Times, in which he points out that Geraldine is condemned by the conservative author ‘for her lack of gratitude’, which is associated with Godwin’s theory. Rooney claims that West blends Geraldine’s ‘domestic decisions’ with dangerous radical ideas. See The French Revolution Debate and the British Novel, 1790–1814 (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2013), p. 83. 79. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, 2 vols. With a Commentary Critical, Historical, and Explanatory by F.B. Kaye (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1988). 80. The Works of Thomas Robert Malthus, ed. E. A. Wrigley and David Souden, 8 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1986), I: An Essay on the Principle of Population, ed. E. A. Wrigley and David Souden. 81. Robert Mayhew comments that ‘it became too easy to mock Godwin. The most feared critic of the establishment in the mid-1790s, he became, by the first decade of the new century, the butt of jokes, easy prey to the well-­ turned put-down’ and that Godwin ‘having been feared and then ridiculed was – in a fate more ignominious still – forgotten’. See Malthus: The Life and Legacies of an Untimely Prophet (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014), p. 44. See also Philp, Godwin’s Political Justice. Marshall also quotes the same Hazlitt quotation to explain in the opening page to this biography of Godwin to say that ‘he was at first vilified and then rapidly forgotten’ in William Godwin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 1. Hazlitt writes that Godwin ‘blazed as a sun in the firmament of reputation […] now he has sunk below the horizon and enjoys the serene twilight of a doubtful immortality’. The Spirit of the Age, p. 87.

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82. Quantitative research conducted by Pamela Clemit and Avner Offer has proven that Godwin’s influence is far more wide-reaching, and complicated, than this account gives credit for. See Chap. 12 in this collection. 83. Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age, p. 89. 84. Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age, p. 92. 85. Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age, p. 92.

Bibliography Bailey, Quentin, ‘“Extraordinary and Dangerous Powers”: Prisons, Police and Literature in Godwin’s Caleb Williams’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 22 (2010), 525–548. Bentham, Jeremy, The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham: Writings on the Poor Laws, Vol. 1, 2 vols, ed. Michael Quinn (Oxford: Clarendo Press, 2001–). Bisset, Robert, Life of Burke. Comprehending an Impartial Account of his literary and Political Efforts, and a Sketch of the Conduct and Character of his most Eminent Associates, Coadjutors, and Opponents, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London: George Cawthorn, 1800). Bourdieu, Pierre and Loïc J.  D. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Bourdieu, Pierre, In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology, trans. Matthew Adamson (Cambridge: Polity, 1990). Bourdieu, Pierre, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). Bourdieu, Pierre and Jean-Claude Passerson, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, trans. Richard Nice (London: Sage, 1977). Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J.  G. A.  Pocock (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987). Carrier, James G., Gifts and Commodities: Exchange and Western Capitalism since 1700 (London: Routledge, 1995). Clemit, Pamela, ‘The Signal of Regard: William Godwin’s Correspondence Networks’, European Romantic Review, 30 (2019), 353–366. Clemit, Pamela and Jenny McAuley, ‘Sociability in Godwin’s Diary: The Case of John King’, Bodleian Library Record, 24 (2011), 51–6. Godwin, William, Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 8 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1992). Godwin, William, The Diary of William Godwin, ed. by Victoria Myers, David O’Shaughnessy, and Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford Digital Library, 2010) . Godwin, William, Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, 7 vols, gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993). Gregory, C. A., Gifts and Commodities, 2nd edn (Chicago: HAU Books, 2015).

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Grenby, M.  O., The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Haggarty, Sarah, Blake’s Gifts: Poetry and the Politics of Exchange (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Halévy, Élie, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, trans. Mary Morris (London: Faber and Faber, 1928, 1972). Hamilton, Elizabeth, Memoirs of Modern Philosophers in Three Volumes (London: G.G. and J. Robinson, 1800). Hamilton, Paul, Metaromanticism: Aesthetics, Literature, Theory (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003). Handwerk, Gary ‘“Awakening the Mind”: William Godwin’s Enquirer’, in Godwinian Moments, pp. 103–124. Hansson, John-Erik, ‘The Genre of Radical Thought and The Practices Of Equality: The Trajectories Of William Godwin And John Thelwall In The Mid-1790s’, History of European Ideas, 43 (2017), 776–790. Hazlitt, William, The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt, ed. by Duncan Wu, 9 vols (London: Pickering, 1998). Jones, Anna Maria, ‘“What should make thee inaccessible to my fury?”: Gothic Self-Possession, Revenge, and the Doctrine of Necessity in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams’, European Romantic Review, 22 (2011), 137–154. Johnston, Kenneth R., Unusual Suspects: Pitt’s Reign of Alarm and the Lost Generation of the 1790s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Kidd, Alan, State, Society and the Poor in Nineteenth-Century England (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1999). Leithart, Peter, Gratitude: An Intellectual History (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2014). Lucas, Charles, The Infernal Quixote. A Tale of the Day (London: William Lane, 1801). Malthus, Thomas, The Works of Thomas Robert Malthus, ed. E.  A. Wrigley and David Souden, 8 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1986). Marshall, Peter H., William Godwin (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1984). Mandeville, Bernard, The Fable of the Bees, or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, 2 vols. With a Commentary Critical, Historical, and Explanatory by F.B. Kaye (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1988). Mauss, Marcel, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W.D. Halls (London: Routledge, 1990). Mayhew, Robert, Malthus: The Life and Legacies of an Untimely Prophet (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014). McGonegal, Julie, ‘The Tyranny of Gift Giving: The Politics of Generosity in Sarah Scott’s Millennium Hall and Sir George Ellison’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 19 (2007), 291–306.

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Mee, John, ‘“The Use of Conversation”: William Godwin’s Conversable World and Romantic Sociability’, Studies in Romanticism, 50 (2011), 567–90. Offer, Avner, ‘Between the Gift and the Market: The Economy of Regard’, The Economic History Review, 50 (1997), 450–476. Offer, Avner, ‘Self-Interest, Sympathy and the Invisible Hand: From Adam Smith to Market Liberalism’, Economic Thought: History, Philosophy, and Methodology 1 (2012), 1–14. Philp, Mark, Godwin’s Political Justice (Ithaca, New  York: Cornell University Press, 1986). Polanyi, Karl,The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1957, 2001). Potkay, Adam, ‘Contested Emotions: Pity and Gratitude from the Stoics to Swift and Wordsworth’, PMLA, 130 (2015), 1332–1346. Potkay, Adam, ‘Pity, Gratitude, and the Poor in Rousseau and Adam Smith’, Eighteenth-Century Culture, 26 (2017), 163–182. Raphael, D. D., The Impartial Spectator: Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007). Rooney, Morgan, The French Revolution Debate and the British Novel, 1790–1814 (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2013). Siegel, James, ‘False Beggars: Marcel Mauss, The Gift, and its Commentators’, Diacritics, 41 (2013), 60–79. Silber, Ilana, ‘Bourdieu’s Gift to Gift Theory: An Unacknowledged Trajectory’, Sociological Theory, 27 (2009), 173–190. Smith, Adam, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. by D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). Turner, Beatrice, Romantic Childhood, Romantic Heirs: Reproduction and Retrospection, 1820–1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Ungureanu, Camil, ‘Bourdieu and Derrida on Gift: Beyond “Double Truth” and Paradox’, Human Studies, 36 (2013), 393–409. Visser, Margaret, The Gift of Thanks: The Roots and Rituals of Gratitude (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009). Walker, George, The Vagabond (London: C. Walker & Hurst, 1799). West, Jane, A Tale of the Times (London: T. N. Longman & O. Rees, 1799).

Gines, Violence, and Fear in Things as They Are; or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams David Fallon

The epigraph on the title page of the first two editions of Things as They Are; or, the Adventure of Caleb Williams foregrounds the novel’s fixation on violence: Amidst the woods the leopard knows his kind; The tiger preys not on the tiger brood: Man only is the common foe of man. (1)1

To my knowledge, the source of this quotation has not been identified. It seems to be Godwin’s own loose translation from Juvenal’s Satire XV, omitting intervening lines. Juvenal relates a fierce battle between men from two Egyptian cities, Ombi and Tentyra, and denounces the Ombites for tearing apart a fallen Tentyrite and eating him raw. Senseless violence between two neighbouring bodies of people has clear resonance in the context of war between Britain and revolutionary France. Godwin may also have connected this satire with the persecution of radicals; his diary

D. Fallon (*) University of Roehampton, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. O’Brien et al. (eds.), New Approaches to William Godwin, Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62912-0_8

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for 4 October 1793 records him composing the novel and reading Juvenal’s first satire on a day when he met Joseph Gerrald and Thomas Holcroft.2 Satire is not usually invoked in considerations of Caleb Williams, but the novel shares in Juvenal’s indignation against systemic national corruption, even if it questions some of the vehemence with which it is communicated. The dark, fearful world of Caleb Williams can be helpfully illuminated using Slavoj Žižek distinction between ‘“subjective” violence, that which is performed by a clearly identifiable “agent”, and “objective” or “systemic” violence’, ‘the often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems’.3 Systemic violence comprises ‘not only direct physical violence, but also more subtle forms of coercion that sustain relations of domination and exploitation, including the threat of violence’.4 Omnipresent ‘systemic violence’ is central to a novel titled Things as They Are. Caleb Williams’s attempts to evade the consequences of his discovery that Falkland’s power secretly rests upon ‘subjective’ violence bring into view the usually invisible social diffusion of ‘systemic’ violence, dramatised in his various marginal experiences of poverty, alterity, prejudice, surveillance, and the criminal justice system. When Caleb defends his blasted character by narrating the chain of events involved in his pursuit and persecution, he retrospectively recognises the significance of his encounter with Gines after his escape from jail: Nothing could have happened more critically hostile to my future peace, than my fatal encounter with Gines upon — forest. By this means, as it now appears, I had fastened upon myself a second enemy, of that singular and dreadful sort, that is determined never to dismiss its animosity, as long as life shall endure. While Falkland was the hungry lion whose roarings astonished and appalled me, Gines was a noxious insect, scarcely less formidable and tremendous, that hovered about my goings and perpetually menaced me with the poison of his sting. (3E 3:158–59)

Godwin interpolated this paragraph into the third edition of Caleb Williams in 1797 in order to heighten Gines’s importance. The parallel syntax and comparative subclause show Caleb connecting the two figures of threat but also apprehending two distinct modes of violence represented by the fierce but noble Falkland and the coarse and ever-present Gines. Caleb imagines Falkland’s roars from afar, a lesser impact compared to the constant apprehension of Gines’s proximity and intimate invasion

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of his everyday life, while the reflexive use of ‘fastened’ also curiously implicates Caleb in his own persecution. This paragraph exemplifies Godwin’s emphasis on Gines’s significance in the revisions to the second and third editions of the novel. Caleb’s relentless pursuer is among the most thrilling and disturbing features of Caleb Williams, so it is surprising in the original 1793 text he is unobtrusively named ‘Jones’. Evidently unsatisfied, in the 1796 second edition Godwin changed this to a more sinister patronymic, Gines, which, as I will discuss, alludes to a robber in Don Quixote and evokes ‘gin’, a term current in the 1790s for a trap or mechanism. Curiously, criticism on the novel has tended not to pay much attention to this change, perhaps regarding it as largely cosmetic. In this chapter, however, I situate this alteration in relation to the novel’s economy of violence, first examining Falkland’s relationship to this economy before placing Gines in the context of Godwin’s evolving concerns over conservative and radical culture during the 1790s. I then show how Godwin uses hitherto unrecognised allusion and etymologies to amplify Gines’s symbolic significance and reveal how his and Caleb’s connection to a gang of robbers and to popular print reflect Godwin’s anxieties over violence in political and print culture in the 1790s. The novel registers Godwin’s fears that the increasing populism, polarisation, and aggressive rhetoric of loyalist and radical campaigners threatened to destabilise discussion in the public sphere, undermining the conditions that Godwin believed were necessary to generate meaningful social and political amelioration through unfettered discussion.

‘His ungovernable passion’: Falkland’s Violent Reach While the novel’s epigraph foregrounds brutality, instances of actual violence, such as Tyrrell’s assault on Falkland, Falkland’s murder of Tyrrell, or the robbers’ attack on Caleb, are relatively rare. More often, secondary agents subject Caleb to cruelty or neglect, such as when his jailors fix ‘a pair of fetters on both my legs, regardless of the ancle which was now swelled to a considerable size’ (175). The novel, however, envelops these moments of violence into a larger atmosphere of oppression and fear, within which Caleb is tormented by a continual anticipation that he will be attacked. Most often, violence in Caleb Williams is mediated in dialogue or verbal threats against Caleb and other victims. Falkland’s threats, indeed, set

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into motion the mechanism of the plot. When Caleb accidentally intrudes upon Falkland’s private anguish, he is furious: His countenance betrayed strong symptoms of confusion. With a violent effort however these symptoms suddenly vanished, and instantaneously gave place to a countenance sparkling with rage. Villain, cried he, what has brought you here? […] Do you think you shall watch my privacies with impunity? I attempted to defend myself. Begone, devil! rejoined he. Quit the room, or I will trample you into atoms. Saying this, he advanced towards me. (8)

His vulnerability revealed, Falkland threatens his servant but also directs ‘violent effort’ against himself. Soon afterwards, Falkland awkwardly tries to mollify Caleb by ‘putting five guineas into my hand’ (8). This pattern of rising and ebbing rage is repeated, reaching its highest intensity during the fire in Falkland’s house, when Caleb’s curiosity impels him to force open his master’s chest. Catching him in the act, Falkland presses a loaded pistol to Caleb’s head, before flinging it from a window into the court below (120). As with most violence directly associated with Falkland, Caleb is subjected to assault (legally, a menacing word or action) rather than physical battery. The latter violence is performed by secondary agents such as the ‘blood-hunters’, jailors, and Gines. Falkland’s reckless disposal of the loaded gun, however, foreshadows the violent unforeseen consequences of his attempts to control Caleb. When circumstances force Caleb into the guise of a criminal, the shadow of the felon’s violent end is repeatedly cast. Caleb’s jailors find him after he has unshackled himself overnight and the principal jailor, with ‘eyes sparkling with fury’, declaims against ‘showing kindness to rascals, the scum of the earth’. Godwin comically exaggerates his fantasised vengeance: He was astonished that the laws had not provided some terrible retaliation for thieves that attempted to deceive their jailors. Hanging was a thousand times too good for me! (178)

The language recalls Falkland’s earlier ‘countenance sparkling with rage’ (8) and the ‘sparks of rage’ in his eyes (120) when he discovers Caleb by the chest. The jailor’s impotent hyperbole farcically echoes Falkland’s extravagant threat to trample Caleb into atoms. Like Falkland, the jailor

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exacts his revenge piecemeal; spurred by ‘anger and alarm’, he tries to erode Caleb’s resistance through incremental cruelty and deprivation in the dank ‘strong room’, where he is fettered and left starving in solitude. A related violence is at work severing Caleb’s social connections. He encounters a former colleague, the servant Thomas, whose conversation reveals how Falkland’s fury percolates through the English social hierarchy. After Caleb’s mock trial, Thomas tells him that while yesterday he felt fraternal love, ‘To-day I love you so well, that I would go ten miles with all the pleasure in life to see you hanged’ (156). Sympathetic communal ties are swallowed up in sadistic, punitive delight. When Caleb attempts to bring Falkland to trial, Thomas’s anger projects violence onto Caleb: ‘behind that smiling face there lie robbery, and lying, and every thing that is ungrateful and murderous’ (251). With each distinct instance, the origin of a larger economy of violence in Falkland becomes evident to readers, while its source remains obscure to other characters. Control of narrative is essential to Falkland’s power: his account of Caleb gains powerful traction through his own command over networks of information and the mechanisms of ‘systemic’ violence. Falkland’s ability to contain the facts concerning his murder of Tyrrel is reflected in the novel’s narration of his earlier life. Readers encounter the earlier events via a double narrative distance, through Caleb’s first-person narration which in turn relates the account of Falkland’s steward, Mr Collins. Given Caleb’s understandably fevered imagination and his recourse to hyperbole, readers may question his insistence on Falkland’s violence. After their encounter during the fire, Caleb fears a future dominated by the ‘insatiable vengeance of a Falkland, of a man whose hands were to my apprehension red with blood and his thoughts familiar with cruelty and murder’ (120). Caleb is so agitated that he masochistically prefers actual violence to a future shadowed by terror: ‘I envied the condemned wretch upon the scaffold. I envied the victim of the inquisition in the midst of his torture. They know what they have to suffer’ (130). Over the novel’s course, Caleb agonises most in the apprehension of unspecified, imagined violence, and imprisonment. Falkland’s power is most insidious when internalised. Caleb’s fear of Falkland and his agents expands until surveillance and violence characterise his worldview. He recalls his incredulity that ‘institutions inseparable from the general good’ have left him imprisoned on trumped-up charges: ‘I regarded the whole human species as so many hangmen and torturers. I considered them as confederated to tear me to

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pieces’ (163). In London, print culture amplifies these fears: the penny handbill leaves Caleb fearing violence from all directions: ‘It was no longer Bow-Street, it was a million of men, in arms against me’ (238).5 Caleb’s narration repeatedly infers that violence is an ever-present threat only kept at bay by constant regulation. The novel is doubtful about the extent to which violence can be controlled. Falkland’s early triumph, defusing Count Malvesi’s fierce jealousy, supposedly testifies to a distinctively English chivalry’s capacity to temper violence with benevolent restraint. It has affinities with Burke’s belief that this code, ‘Without force or opposition […] subdued the fierceness of pride and power’.6 Nevertheless, Caleb’s investigations reveal violence lurking at the heart both of the aristocratic system and its chivalric manners, a violence acknowledged when Falkland warns Malvesi that ‘my temper is not less impetuous and fiery than your own’ and ‘if the challenge had been public […] it would not have been in my power’ to avoid ‘combat’ (15). Despite Collins’s explicit admiration for his employer’s conduct, Falkland’s speech resists narrative closure: chivalry’s power to restrain violence is ironically conditional on its own threat of violence. There is a general fascination with violence in the novel and from the outset Caleb’s curiosity is stirred when Falkland’s self-regulation fails. He recalls moments that punctured the ‘incessant gloom’ of his master: ‘he entirely lost his self-possession, and his behaviour was changed into frenzy’ (7). During Collins’s narrative of the Falkland-Tyrrel conflict, we are told that Tyrrel’s rage was ‘ungovernable and fierce’ (70). Falkland echoes this after Emily Melville’s death: ‘His habits urged him to ungovernable fury’ (79). Notably, the same adjective arises when Caleb and Falkland argue over Alexander the Great. Caleb loses his own self-restraint when he lets slip his suspicions: ‘You will not pretend to justify the excesses of his ungovernable passion. It is impossible sure that a word can be said for a man whom a momentary provocation can hurry into the commission of murders’ (100). The loss of self-control is contagious; Falkland uncharacteristically struggles to be eloquent and calm his temper. Caleb justifies the transparent allusions that pain Falkland by reflecting that ‘When one idea has got possession of the mind, it is scarcely possible to keep it from finding its way to the lips’. However, he damns the same error, in kind if not degree, in Falkland: ‘He killed Mr Tyrrel, for he could not control his resentment and anger’ (123). While Falkland’s loss of self-regulation betrays the violence at the heart of chivalry, despite its refined façade, the novel also shows how privilege

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and power enable him to escape the consequences of his own loss of self-­ control and evade justice. Collins’s narrative allows some sympathy towards Falkland, but Falkland’s willingness to allow the punishment of Tyrrel’s tenants the Hawkinses in his place is more typical of his arm’s length relationship to violence. Poorer characters cannot escape coercion and punishment. Unlike Falkland, when young Hawkins feels ‘uncontrollable indignation’ against Tyrrel’s ‘successive acts of despotism’ against his father and, under the influence of ‘his own impatient resentment’ (41), tears down the obstructions Tyrell has placed across their farm’s path, he feels the law’s full force.

‘Horrible mischief’: Godwin, Revolution, and Reaction in the 1790s Gines, the novel’s most overtly volatile character, represents a distinctive mode of violence in the novel, but one which overlaps with Falkland’s power. His ferocity seems barely suppressed, a natural instinct which he indulges for his own pleasure and profit. As his employer, Falkland seems able to control Gines’s aggressive inclinations. As Gines tells Caleb, when he explains why Falkland has prevented him sailing to Holland, ‘You are a prisoner at present, and I believe all your life will remain so. Thanks to the milk-and-water softness of your former master! if I had the ordering of these things, it should go with you in another fashion’ (265). Falkland’s privilege enables him to delegate violence to his proxy. Contrary to what Caleb believes, however, their close association only arises later in the novel; initially Forester, Falkland’s elder half-brother, employs Gines to track down Caleb. When Caleb narrates Gines’s intervening history between his expulsion by the robbers and his thief-hunter’s pursuit of Caleb, he highlights his intense danger: ‘I had to encounter the sagacity he possessed in the way of his profession, whetted and stimulated by a sentiment of vengeance in a mind that knew no restraint from conscience or humanity’ (231). The novel suggests that superiors ultimately may be unable to regulate Gines’s violent impulses. Philip Shaw points to this excess in describing the ‘unreality’ of Gines’s ability to track Caleb, suggesting his ‘metaphysical significance’.7 Certainly, Caleb perceives him as a predator: like the harrier, an apt emblem of a man engaged in this sanguinary occupation, [who] whenever he was at a fault, returned to the place where he had

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last perceived the scent of the animal whose death he had decreed. He spared neither pains nor time in the gratification of the passion which choice had made his ruling one. (2E 3:154)

The emphasis on pleasure and choice strikes a jarring note in a novel which usually explains the shaping of character in terms of necessity and circumstance. Gines’s character barely develops over the course of the novel; he acts like a simple personification of malevolence. When Gines trails Mrs Marney, Caleb’s London neighbour, they come face to face in a crowd gathered around a woman in a fit. Caleb recounts Mrs Marney’s visceral perception of Gines as a grotesque caricature: His visage was of the most extraordinary kind; habit had written the characters of malignant cunning and dauntless effrontery in every line of his face; and Mrs. Marney, who was neither philosopher nor physiognomist, was nevertheless struck. (254).

Whereas Falkland’s violence is masked by refinement, Gines’s is transparent. Notably, this instinctual identification of Gines’s essential viciousness occurs amidst a crowd at a scene of physical suffering; he seems attracted to social disorder and individual pain. Gines is both a robber and a thief-taker, acting in a double capacity on either side of the law, but always satisfying his ‘insatiable and restless appetite for revenge’ (232). His ambiguity, as both a fugitive from and emissary of authority, is highly suggestive given the period in which Godwin composed and revised the novel. Gines’s connection to dread and violence crystallises a major obstacle to the progress of political justice: the willingness of the government and its supporters—but also radicals and reformers—to court populist anger. Gines embodies concerns over political developments during the period in which Godwin composed Caleb Williams, recorded in his diary as between 22 April 1793 and 2 January 1794, and that in which he revised the novel, between 6 January and 10 May 1794 before publication on 26 May. Describing the genesis of Caleb Williams in the preface to the Bentley’s Standard Novels edition of Fleetwood in 1832, Godwin outlines how he ‘invented first the third volume of my tale, then the second, and last of all the first’, jotting down memoranda in this order before writing the full novel ‘from the beginning’.8 Jones/Gines features most

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prominently in Volume III and thus is a product of both the early and the late periods of the novel’s composition. Godwin’s original preface, pulled from the first edition and reinstated in 1796, foregrounds violence. It is dated to 12 May 1794 and the note beneath this preface, dated 29 October 1795, links the novel to the 1794 Treason Trials, ‘the sanguinary plot […] against the liberties of Englishmen’, when ‘Terror was the order of the day; and it was feared that even the humble novelist might be shown to be constructively a traitor’ (2E 1:vii). While the novel was certainly completed and revised during this time, Godwin’s account of its conception also links it to February and March 1793, when he addressed his ‘Letters of Mucius’ to The Morning Chronicle. Godwin adopted the nom de plume of the Roman hero Gaius Mucius Scaevola. Failing to assassinate Lars Porsena, the king of Clusium who besieged Rome in 508 BC, Mucius defied his captors’ threats by thrusting his right hand into a sacrificial fire.9 This persona was apt for a brave protest against the government’s suppression of political debate, exemplified by trials of radicals for seditious libel as part of a larger campaign of intimidation.10 Government prosecutions were complemented by the Association for Protecting Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers (APLAP), founded by the barrister and Receiver of the Public Offices, John Reeves in November 1792, which gained arm’s length government support. APLAP’s extra-parliamentary agitation and informers stifled political discussion and galvanised popular opprobrium towards reformers.11 Mucius’s first letter complained that, despite the pretence of defending the constitution, the government and APLAP’s network of surveillance was destroying English freedom of expression: ‘The reign of despotism began on the 20th of November, 1792’, the date the Association was established. Its pursuit of sedition was ultimately violent: ‘The Associators are hungry for blood’,12 a stark image echoed in Caleb’s pursuit by ‘infernal blood-hunters’ (225). Whereas the ‘most barbarous master, while he lashes his miserable slave, yet allows him to groan’, Englishmen were forbidden dissent and, like Caleb, lived ‘in perpetual fear’.13 A climate in which violence was continually anticipated was enough to destroy political liberty. Mucius’s second letter addressed Reeves directly as APLAP’s Chairman, responsible for a crude campaign of intimidation. He is ‘the assassin of the Liberties of Englishmen’ and Godwin is particularly scathing about the loyalists’ ‘machinations’. The guilty verdict at Thomas Paine’s in absentia trial for seditious libel was reached ‘by repeated proclamations, by all the

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force, and all the fears of a kingdom being artfully turned against one man’. Godwin recalls: As I came out of court, I saw hand-bills, in the most vulgar and illiberal style distributed, entitled The Confession of Thomas Paine. I had not walked three streets, before I was encountered by ballad singers, roaring in cadence rude, a miserable set of scurrilous stanzas upon his private life.14

‘Cadence rude’ ironically alludes to the Epilogue for Sheridan’s The Rivals (1775), which sentimentally describes a ‘wand’ring Tar’, movingly humming ‘the ditty which his Susan lov’d’.15 Here, though, ‘roaring’ transforms wistful love and popular culture into hate-filled propaganda. These handbills and ballads reappear in Caleb Williams, first when some of the robbers bring back a paper offering a reward for Caleb as a ‘thief’ and then when he encounters a hawker vending ‘the Most Wonderful and Surprising History, and Miraculous Adventures of Caleb Williams!’ (237). For Mucius, far from defending it, Reeves was inciting ‘the destruction of the English Constitution’. It was doomed when it ‘can only be supported by hand-bills, ballads, and misrepresentations’, existing ‘by the shouts of a mob, and the burning of an effigy’.16 Godwin’s concern is twofold: firstly, he is suspicious of the pre-existing roughness of popular culture and, secondly, he is horrified by APLAP’s exploitation of vicious populist propensities to corrode political debate and coarsen the public sphere. While the letters clearly opposed the loyalist project, Godwin was also alert to a dynamic quality in the backlash, which reacted against the perceived danger of radicalism, an impression to which some activists had thoughtlessly contributed. The mid-1790s political tumult developed through the mutual suspicion and provocations of loyalists and radicals. Godwin therefore strategically began his letter by conceding some of Reeves’s grounds for alarm: radical associations; ‘Pamphlets, tending to produce rancour and dissention’, ‘sold at a trivial price, and distributed gratis’; ‘Absurd and barbarous inscriptions’ defacing churches and other buildings.17 Godwin counts himself ‘no friend to force either on the part of the Populace or Government’, but finds it disgraceful that, having suppressed radical activities and ‘wrested these weapons’ from his opponents, Reeves ‘instead of dashing them indignantly to the earth’ had employed them ‘himself for the purpose of wounding those he had already disarmed’.18 These activities, all linked to anger and violence, are an

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important context for Godwin’s conception of Gines, who focuses but also complicates specific concerns: force, fear, and print culture. Part of Political Justice’s appeal to reformers in 1793 was its disinterested rejection of violence in the hands of both revolutionaries and established authorities. The chapter ‘Of Resistance’ is explicit. Force is ‘an odious weapon’ that ‘does not change its nature though wielded by a band of patriots’.19 Godwin repeats the theme: violent ‘instruments […] may be employed with equal prospect of success on both sides of every question’ and should be looked upon with ‘aversion’ (IV.ii, §II, 3:115). Violence is not intrinsic to revolutionary politics but a strategic device which ought to be spurned. Godwin likewise distrusts radical and loyalist political associations, whose ‘numerous meetings’ among those ‘whose passions have not been used to the curb of judgment’ (IV.ii.§III, 3:118) can lead to ‘riot’. Fierce passions have their own momentum, which can exceed the control of those who may foment them. Mark Philp notes that Caleb Williams prefigures many revisions Godwin made to the second edition of Political Justice (1796) between 24 December 1794 and 10 October 1795. While it continues to attack monarchical and aristocratic government, the revised Political Justice included even more urgent warnings against force and the agency of the mob, shaped by the violence of recent political life. The rule of Robespierre and the subsequent White Terror made Godwin increasingly critical of the French Revolution.20 Domestic disorder included popular disturbances such as the Crimp Riots of August 1794 and widespread disturbances over food shortages during 1795. Radical agitation could appear ominous. The London Corresponding Society’s mass-meeting in Copenhagen Fields on 16 October 1795 was followed three days later by an attack, believed to be gunfire, on the King’s coach, the pretext for the government’s draconian Treason and Seditious Meetings Acts (the ‘Gagging acts’) in October 1795.21 Political Justice’s new preface is emphatic, if defensive: ‘No man can more fervently deprecate scenes of commotion and tumult than the author of this book’ or would ‘more anxiously avoid the lending his assistance in the most distant manner to animosity and bloodshed’.22 Godwin is alert to unintended consequences of political activism. France showed that righteous motives alone could not guarantee freedom: ‘Revolution is engendered by an indignation with tyranny, yet is itself pregnant with tyranny’ (2E, 1:IV.ii, 245). Revolution requires force, but the masses who drive it ‘are often mere parrots, who have been taught a lesson, of the subject of which they understand little or nothing’ (2E, 1:IV.i, 257). Such

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groupthink is the enemy of the independent critical thought and discussion which Godwin believed was the basis of substantial political improvements. Godwin and his circle believed they ‘faced the spectre of restive, unenlightened and unsocialised mobs—aroused by radical demagogues only to run riot, with their leaders unable to control them’.23 As Philp notes, Godwin made significant revisions on property in the second edition of Political Justice.24 The first edition, especially Book VIII, vociferously opposes the accumulation and monopoly of property: ‘No man will dispute, that a state of equal property once established, would greatly diminish the evil propensities of man’ (2:VIII.v, 832). Property rights would be greatly simplified: ‘What would denominate any thing my property? The fact, that it was necessary to my welfare. My right would be coeval with the existence of that necessity’ (2: VIII.vi, 856). While Godwin suggests this situation is one of benevolent equality which prevents individuals amassing property, it comes close to the account of the state of nature in Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), in which each man has the ‘right of nature’ to do anything in his power which he judges necessary to preserve his own life.25 In the second edition, Godwin is more circumspect. Philp argues that his ‘conception of man’s telos as an ever expanding rational consciousness’ means that he came ‘to see violence, force and infringements of property rights as serious threats to the realisation of this telos’.26 Philp detects in the second edition an increasing emphasis on ‘a doctrine of trust which is largely absent, or, at best, undeveloped in the first edition’.27 The infringement of property rights undermines the independence and security necessary for the cultivation of intellect, itself the precondition for the successful exercise of political justice. Without guaranteed individual property, human relationships are subject at best to mutual suspicion, and at worst to violent struggle, a situation which provides neither a durable basis for social improvement, nor the peace necessary to society’s existence. As I will discuss, Godwin works through these concerns in volume three of Caleb Williams. Godwin’s increasing caution concerning the reform movement is evident in his Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr Pitt’s Bills (1795), in which he attacked the Gagging acts but also linked radical reformers with loyalists and the government in courting populist force. He voiced alarm at the proceedings of the London Corresponding Society, especially John Thelwall’s lectures, calling his erstwhile friend ‘an impatient and headlong reformer’.28 Connecting the LCS with the French Jacobins, Godwin complained that ‘Its recruits are chiefly levied from the poorer classes of the

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community’, full of unregulated ‘impetuous and ardent activity’.29 This volatile audience exerted its own populist pull on orators, with both mutually firing up violent passions. Godwin was still fervent in his opposition to the Treason Bill, which he dubbed the government ministers’ ‘consecrated engine of tyranny’.30 The noun ‘engine’ indicates that law has become a mere instrument of despotism. However, he also feared that reformers might unwittingly foment the crowd’s passions, leading to ‘horrible mischief’, ‘anarchy and tumult’, and, in consequence, the legitimising of government repression.31 Stoicism was necessary for profound reformers to maintain composure: during January 1794, Godwin wrote to Joseph Gerrald, ahead of his defence speech in his sedition trial, advising him to ‘above all […] abstain from all harsh epithets and bitter invective […] Truth can never gain by passion, violence and resentment’.32 In June 1795, Godwin also attacked irresponsible rhetoric in his response to criticism of Caleb Williams in the British Critic: ‘with the virulent and scurrilous epithets of your correspondent I have no concern’.33 Godwin perceived in Thelwall’s lectures a dangerous rival to the select rational-critical conversations from which he believed truth would progressively emerge into the public sphere. Impatient radicals risked precipitating violence. Anticipating Godwin’s strictures, however, in 1795, Thelwall was also intent not to inflame his audiences’ passions and prejudices, urging reasoned argument as the vehicle of reform, perhaps explaining why he was stung by Godwin’s rebuke in the Considerations.34 Godwin regarded violence as mobile, a danger to all political actors, which threatened to infect the public sphere. Intemperate language led political debate away from progress, towards barbarism. The protean and mobile Gines is a complex and dynamic personification of Godwin’s fears that forceful state-sponsored and radical rhetoric would overwhelm private judgement, undermine progressive rational-critical debate, and poison the public sphere so vital to his own model of gradual reform.

Gines as an Engine of Violence Marilyn Butler and Gary Kelly both highlight Godwin’s use of historical and allegorical character names in Caleb Williams.35 The change from Jones to Gines in the second edition is evidently significant, enough for Godwin to amend Volume II, Chapter ii. Here, Caleb finds a letter from Benjamin Hawkins to Falkland. In the first edition, the text refers to ‘Old

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Gines and his dame’ (102) who look after Falkland’s house in his absence. In 1796, Godwin changed this to ‘Old Warnes and his dame’ (2E, 2:25). ‘Gines’ evidently had valuable connotations for the character. One possible source for the name which has not been noted by Godwin critics is Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605–15). Godwin’s diary only begins in 1788, so it is unclear when he read the novel, although allusions appear in his History of the Life of William Pitt (1783) and Damon and Delia (1784).36 He was familiar with Cervantes’ masterpiece, if not enthused. ‘Analysis of Own Character’ from September 1798 notes ‘My pleasure is very limited and feeble in Hudibras or the burlesque of Don Quixote’.37 Caleb Williams hints that Falkland is a Quixote. Collins tells Caleb that Falkland’s favourite authors include ‘the heroic poets of Italy’, from whom he ‘imbibed the love of chivalry and romance’ (11). Although Collins qualifies Falkland’s investment (‘He had too much good sense to regret the times of Charlemagne and Arthur’), he conforms his conduct ‘to the model of heroism that his fancy suggested’. Thus, Collins reflects on Falkland’s humiliation by Gines: unable to forget the insult because he is ‘too deeply pervaded with the idle and groundless romances of chivalry’, Tyrrel’s death meant ‘the lustration which the laws of knight-errantry prescribe was rendered impossible’ (86). In volumes two and three, Falkland’s chivalry is counterpointed by Gines’s brutal pursuit of Caleb. Godwin’s choice of the name Gines can be linked to Don Quixote Part I, Chapter xxii, where Quixote and Sancho Panza encounter twelve prisoners, criminals being conducted to the king’s galleys. A guard tells Quixote that one captive ‘is a greater rogue than all the rest put together’, a ‘daring’ and famous ‘villain’.38 This is ‘Ginés de Pasamonte’, whose escapades are so celebrated he is writing his criminal autobiography, a parodic double of chivalric romance and Quixote’s own picaresque adventures.39 Quixote objects to Ginés being beaten for insolence. He believes his chivalry demands that he protect those compelled by force, and thus he and Sancho fight the guards and free the prisoners, including Ginés. Quixote orders them to present themselves to the Lady Dulcinea del Toboso in his name. Ginés speaks for the prisoners and refuses this command. Instead, the thieves shower Quixote and Panza with rocks, then beat them up, strip them of their jackets, and abscond. Ginés steals Quixote’s sword and Sancho’s donkey. He reappears in Part II, Chapter xxvi, now disguised as Master Pedro, a puppet-master who exploits gullible audiences with a fortune-telling ape. Quixote, believing the ape inspired by the devil, intervenes during the puppet show to defend its hero, Don Gayferous,

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transforming the fiction into a real battle, destroying puppets and losing Pedro his ape. These episodes find echoes in Godwin’s Gines: thieving, duplicity, resourceful and exploitative intelligence, confusion of fiction and fact, and reputation shaped through print culture. Notably, Burke referred to Cervantes’ scene in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), which Godwin knew well and read and reread in 1792, 1794, and 1795.40 Burke distinguishes between liberty as an abstraction and in relation to circumstances: ‘Am I to congratulate a highwayman and a murderer, who has broke prison, upon the recovery of his natural rights? This would be to act again the scene of the criminals, condemned to the gallies, and their heroic deliverer, the metaphysic Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance’.41 Godwin seems to echo Burke’s connection of these scenarios when Caleb escapes from prison and then encounters Gines and the robber gang in the third volume. Aside from the literary allusion, ‘Gines’ has suggestive connotations. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) identifies a ‘gin’ as an aphetic form of the Old French for ‘engine’. The OED and Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary define it generally as a mechanism, instrument, or tool. Johnson’s primary sense of the noun is ‘A trap; a snare’, additionally denoting ‘Any thing moved with screws, as an engine of torture’.42 The OED identifies the word with the rack but also with weaponry (a catapult) and constraint (a bar blocking doors or windows). Older senses include ‘skill, ingenuity’, ‘cunning, craft, artifice’, and ‘contrivance, scheme, device’. These associations connect with Gines’s relentless pursuit and entrapment of Caleb as well as his scheming character. Over the third volume, Caleb is convinced that Gines is Falkland’s instrument of tyranny, ultimate expressing his despotic will. Gines’s ambiguous thief-taker role merges violent criminality with civil society, as he directs his aggressive impulses on behalf of Forester and then Falkland. For Hannah Arendt, violence ‘is distinguished by its instrumental character’ and ‘always needs implements’.43 Gines’s echo of ‘gin’ links with the significantly repeated word: ‘engine’. When Caleb increases his intimacy with Mr Forester, an unsettled Falkland threatens Caleb: ‘You little suspect the extent of my power. At this moment you are surrounded with the engines of my vengeance, and before you are aware they will close upon you’ (130). This foreshadows Gines’s role in volume three. Ronald Paulson notes that Godwin’s shift from Jones to Gines reinforces parallels with Tyrrel’s doltish minion Grimes, who he forces on his ward Emily Melville as a prospective husband.44 ‘Engine’ links these characters: while

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sick, Emily ‘imagined she saw Mr Tyrrel and his engine Grimes, their hands and garments dropping with blood’ (75). The structural parallels between Falkland’s backstory and the main plot, plus the echoed name, suggest that Falkland once opposed tyranny but now embodies it. Despite the similarity between Grimes and Gines, however, Grimes remains a rustic simpleton, while Gines is marked with a distinctive and disturbing intelligence associated with modernity.

‘A tarnished sort of gentry’: Caleb and the Robbers Gines first appears following Caleb’s jailbreak. Caleb walks over a ‘barren heath’, exulting in ‘the sweets of liberty’ and recalls experiencing the ‘Sacred and indescribable moment, when man regains his rights!’ Giddily, he pronounces ‘Turn me a prey to the wild beasts of the desert, so I be never again the victim of man, dressed in the gore-dripping robes of authority!’ (188). This scene recasts Burke’s scepticism about celebrating natural rights abstracted from circumstances. Almost immediately, Caleb encounters the roving thieves. His pleas move some of them, but their self-appointed ‘spokesman’ Jones/Gines assaults Caleb, ‘excited either by the brutality of his temper or the love of command’. In turn, moved only by ‘the dictates of passion’, Caleb knocks down Gines and is ‘immediately assailed with sticks and bludgeons on all sides’, before Gines slashes Caleb with a cutlass (189). While some of the thieves restrain Gines from outright murder, they leave Caleb for dead, bleeding and stripped of his coat. The scene dramatizes concerns which informed Godwin’s revisions to Political Justice: scepticism towards natural rights; the vulnerability of property; fears of mob violence and demagoguery; the breakdown of trust; and violence’s tendency to proliferate. Caleb is reduced to what Burke calls human beings’ ‘naked shivering nature’ when describing a world stripped of the ‘decent drapery of life’ afforded by aristocratic chivalry.45 Mr Raymond subsequently finds Caleb, lends him his coat, and provides shelter in the gang’s den. Surprisingly, he nurses Caleb ‘with as much kindness as if he had been my father’ (191). Raymond’s claims to be a gentleman thief draw on scenes from Daniel Defoe’s novel Colonel Jack (1722) and Fielding’s ironic parallels between the robbers and Walpole’s rule in Jonathan Wild (1743), both of which Godwin read while composing the novel.46 Despite his humanity towards Caleb, Raymond holds an uneasy association with violence, exemplified by the gang’s symbolic

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mother-figure. Inside the den, a ‘loathsome’ gothic hag acts as housekeeper: ‘the feverous blood of savage ferocity seemed to flow from her heart; and her whole figure suggested an idea of unmitigable energy and an appetite gorged in malevolence’ (191). As with Falkland’s, Raymond’s superficially appealing code of honour has ferocity concealed at its heart. While the gang of thieves or banditti is a generic staple of eighteenth-­ century crime and gothic fiction, in Caleb Williams, it has an important symbolic function, illustrating Godwin’s distinction between society and government at the beginning of Book II of Political Justice (1:II.i, 79). The gang rejects the social contract and hence government. Instead, their fragile ties consist of shared antipathy to political institutions and a code of mutual loyalty, sustained under Raymond’s charismatic leadership. While he impresses Caleb, his authority is primarily rhetorical. When the gang of ‘rustics’ and a ‘tarnished sort of gentry’ (192) returns, they are astonished to see Williams. Gines admits his attack on Caleb to Raymond, whose speech quickly fashions collective pronouns into group identity: ‘With such a cause then to bear us out, shall we stain it with cruelty, malice and revenge?’ He proposes that Gines ‘be expelled from among us as a disgrace to our society’ (193). Raymond’s ‘intrepidity’ wins over the gang: Gines concedes and leaves, leading to the company’s ‘remarkable improvement’. Those ‘before inclined to humanity’ assume ‘new energy in proportion as they saw such sentiments likely to prevail’, while they tell of ‘the cruelty and brutality of Jones [Gines], both to men and animals’, describing ‘a mind of such a stretch of depravity as to many readers would appear utterly incredible’ (193–94). Raymond’s leadership and rhetoric can charm the men out of their attraction to Gines’s barbarism, but it clearly has its appeal. Raymond’s influence, however, seems tentative. When the men find the handbill about Caleb, only his persuasion prevents them claiming the reward. These victories over his band’s passions are provisional, signalled ironically when one thief asks ‘If fidelity and honour be banished from thieves, where shall they find refuge upon the face of the earth?’ (200). Caleb may characterise Raymond as benevolent and honourable, but he makes no lasting change to his men’s essential viciousness. Their vocation is violent at its core. Caleb even absorbs some of the gang’s character; as Pamela Clemit notes, during this sojourn, Caleb’s view of Falkland drastically alters: ‘Indignation and resentment seemed now for the first time to penetrate my mind’ (201).47

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Despite his departure, Gines’s violent influence lingers in the den; the housekeeper resents the loss of her ‘particular favourite’ (204). Dropping his guard, Caleb sleeps. He dreams of ‘some person, the agent of Mr Falkland, approaching to assassinate me’ (206), waking just in time to evade a knife attack by the old woman. Falkland, Gines, and the housekeeper fuse in violence. When restrained, ‘she gnashed with her teeth’, threatening to ‘thrust my fingers through your ribs, and drink your blood!’ (206). As Caleb intuits the violence that connects the seemingly distinct worlds of Falkland and the robbers, Godwin replays the Romantic trope of Adam’s dream of truth in a grisly gothic mode. Furthermore, this section dramatises elements of Godwin’s political theory and may even be read as an oblique allegory of the progress of the French Revolution. Because, as Erin Mackie puts it, the ‘band of robbers with their noble captain’ are ‘conventional figures of eighteenth-century popular literature’, it can be easy to overlook their familiar associations in contemporary political discourse.48 Banditti frequently featured in history and political theory when discussing societies prior to law, stable government, and secure property.49 In Common Sense (1776), Paine notoriously traced the British monarchy’s origins to ‘A French bastard landing with an armed banditti, and establishing himself King of England against the consent of the natives’.50 Rights of Man Part Two (1792) asserts that all ‘old governments’ originated in the disruption of a primitive pastoral state by ‘a banditti of ruffians’, who ‘overrun a country, and lay it under contributions’. Then ‘the chief of the band contrived to lose the name of Robber in that of Monarch’.51 Civil society could easily revert to this state: violent mobs were commonly compared to banditti, notably in accounts of the 1791 riots against dissenters in Birmingham.52 In the 1790s, banditti were a widespread reference point for conservative and radical polemic. The Anarchy and Horrors of France (1792) rejects France’s pretence of ‘regular Government […] founded upon law’; rather, France has ‘just such a Government […] as must necessarily exist among a numerous Banditti in a forest’.53 It quotes Brissot, who tells his constituents that the National Assembly is surrounded by ‘Banditti’, accompanied by ‘female Bacchanals, who speak of nothing but cutting off heads’, a gendered juxtaposition suggestively paralleled by Raymond’s robbers and their bloodthirsty housekeeper.54 By contrast, Charles Pigott’s Jockey Club (1792) describes the alliance of nations opposing the French Revolution as ‘an infernal banditti of Crowned Robbers’. Writers associated banditti

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with human society prior to, at odds with, or after the dissolution of formal government and law. Caleb’s prison is Bastille-like and he proclaims his natural rights on the heath, an apt image of freedom in a state of nature. Godwin’s bathetic deflation of Caleb’s enthusiastic rapture by the robbers’ attack undermines abstract natural rights with the practical problems of security that beset the revolutionary government. Given the prevalence of architectural metaphors in the British debate on the France Revolution,55 the robbers’ lair can be read as a symbol of France’s constitution in the 1790s. Their rustic cottages are ‘among the still visible foundations of a larger, ancient building’ and ‘constructed, for the most part of materials supplied from this ancient ruin’ (191). This fragile, temporary structure has been improvised out of necessity, houses the virtuous and the vicious, and seems to have an uncertain future. Control of the gang also raises questions of leadership, which overlap with the direction of France. Raymond initially seems a figure of revolution, leading his ‘patriots’ with a commitment to ‘justice’, while ‘at open war with […] men, who are thieves according to law’ (192). But his high-­ minded oratory and investment in gallantry connects him with Falkland and, as Clemit suggests, Caleb’s disappointed relationship with his master is recalled in his rejection of Raymond’s romantic fiction of genteel crime.56 Raymond’s attempts to civilise the gang seem partly to embody Burkean notions of chivalry’s historical function, but his slippery grasp on their allegiance indicates the ideal’s fragility. If the gang embody nascent revolution, the tension between Raymond’s noble and Gines’s aggressive leaderships has parallels with the power struggles between the early revolutionary nobles or the Girondins and the aggressive populism of the Jacobins. Domestic politics are also at play. Raymond’s oratorical power is suggestive in the light of Godwin’s anxiety over the forces Thelwall and the radical debating societies might unleash. Raymond’s men, while capable of reading and discussion, appear to Caleb ‘to have no intercourse with reflection or reason’. Ultimately, he rejects their ‘fluctuating’, ‘irritable and passionate’ dispositions and, worse, their ‘brutality’ (195). Just as Falkland seems to countenance and sponsor Gines’s threatening activities, Raymond has harboured and even nurtured Gines’s violence, reflecting Godwin’s fears that charismatic leadership would not be enough to restrain plebeian passions.

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The political dimensions of the interlude with the robbers were evident to conservative reviewers. The British Critic and the Monthly Review criticised Raymond’s idealistic proclamations. The latter complained that ‘artful apologies are put into mouths of professional robbers without any adequate refutation’.57 Godwin responded in the second edition by removing Raymond’s claims that the gang profess ‘justice’ (192). As well as replacing ‘Jones’, Godwin gave other robbers less neutral names: Barton becomes ‘Jeckels’ and Wilson ‘Larkins’, suggesting animals (2E, 3:26, 46). Raymond, however, remains. The name’s Germanic origins combine ragin (advice, decision) with mund (protector), suggesting chivalry, though a looser aural rendering might associate him with enlightenment (a ‘ray’ to the world).58 By the end of the novel, Caleb’s initial fears are realised and Gines seems to have become the external manifestation of Falkland’s violence. Despite the finesse of chivalry, aggression has ultimately always been intrinsic to Falkland’s power.59 While much of the novel’s tension comes from the shifting balance of power between Caleb and Falkland, with each appearance he makes in the novel Gines becomes a fuller and more forceful character, whose actions increasingly shape the plot and control narrative. When Falkland relents from prosecuting the trial and Caleb is freed, he is almost immediately abducted from the heath by ‘the diabolical Gines’ with ‘extraordinary violence’ (2E, 3:200). Caleb fears that Gines is independently pursuing ‘some new project suggested by’ his ‘brutal temper and unrelenting animosity’. Instead, Gines takes him to an inn to meet Falkland: His visage was haggard, emaciated and fleshless. His complexion was a dun and tarnished red, the colour uniform through every region of the face, and suggested the idea of its being burnt and parched by the eternal fire that burned within him. His eyes were red, quick, wandering, full of suspicion and rage. (247)

Caleb perceives Falkland’s decline in terms of Satanic qualities: he is consumed from within by rage. However, Gines, with his ‘malicious grin’, is in the ascendant, as if waxing whilst Falkland wanes. He thrives in proportion to the increasing antagonism and loss of trust between Caleb and Falkland, who by the final courtroom scene has ‘the appearance of a corpse’ (271). Towards the end of the novel, Falkland clearly needs Gines

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to pursue his vengeance on Caleb, yet Gines’s appetite for violence seems to exceed the control of his employer.

‘This engine, this little pen’: Violence and Print Culture Gines’s most menacing manifestation, however, is his infiltration of print culture, which is so important to Godwin’s model of intellectual and moral improvement. The ubiquitous handbills and narratives amplify Falkland’s and Gines’s power: hence in London, Caleb fears ‘a million of men, in arms against me’ (238). Pointedly, in the second edition Godwin added a passage in which Gines ‘claimed to himself the ingenuity of having devised the halfpenny legend, the thought of which was all his own’ (2E, 3:185). Gines’s increasing autonomy and power are reflected in print culture too. Garrett Sullivan notes Godwin’s enthusiasm in the abstract for wide dispersal of knowledge via print but also his unease with the concrete realities of proliferating popular print culture. Here, opinion and knowledge did not follow Godwin’s ideal orderly progression, first refined by an intellectual elite and then filtered down the social scale: the process was disruptive and unregulated.60 Gines’s authorship of the broadsheet reflects Godwin’s anxieties about the process by which, as Mark Philp and Kevin Gilmartin have shown, conservative counter-revolutionary activity brought previously excluded social classes into participation in the public sphere.61 As Sullivan argues, Caleb’s own production of criminal narratives suggests Godwin’s pessimism concerning current readers and popular print culture.62 Caleb’s texts mirror the scandalous narrative into which Gines fashions his life. Both writers cater to the popular taste for glamorised tales of violence and crime at the cost of the public sphere’s improvement. The infectious nature of violence also infiltrates writing. When Gines thwarts Caleb’s escape from England for Holland, Caleb’s response to the ‘fiend’ is ‘an instantaneous revolution’ in his ‘intellectual and animal system’. In the next days, his ‘blood has been in a perpetual ferment’ (266). Caleb’s agitated, aggressive prose, exemplified by the centred imperative ‘Tremble!’ and his promise to ‘speak with a voice more fearful than thunder!’ (266–67) echoes Falkland’s threatening idiom from earlier in the novel.63 Paulson notes that Caleb’s plan to be ‘Bold as a lion, yet collected!’ (267) recalls similar imagery applied to Falkland and Tyrrel.64 The

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possibility that the public sphere might foster social and political amelioration is poisoned by anger and violence. By the conclusion, Caleb’s narration anticipates the denouement, as he comports himself to the violence of ‘things as they are’. When he asserts that he will ‘crush’ his ‘foe’ and ‘With this engine, this little pen I defeat his machinations; I stab him in the very point he was most solicitous to defend!’ (267), ‘engine’ and ‘stab’ recall Gines’s, Falkland’s, and the housekeeper’s ferocity. Caleb’s pen now becomes the ruthless ‘engine’. By replacing ‘Jones’ with ‘Gines’ in 1796, Godwin underlined the character’s significance, reflecting his fears that the polarised political climate fostered by loyalists and radicals gave independent momentum to violence. This undermined the public sphere’s rational basis and jeopardised progress towards human perfectibility, underpinned by Godwin’s idealised vision of the gradual diffusion of knowledge. For both Falkland and Caleb, Gines is an engine that, once set in motion, develops its own power. His violence ensnares them both. Obscured by the clashing protagonists, he is the real enemy: a troubling, uncontainable violence ready to break out in circumstances that cut across primitive and modern, radical, and conservative political states.

Notes 1. References to the first edition, Things as They Are; or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams, 3 vols (London: B.  Crosby, 1794), will not be prefixed and page numbers refer to the Pickering Masters edition: Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, 8 vols, gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1992), III: Caleb Williams, ed. Pamela Clemit. Those to the second edition, Things as They Are; or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams, 3 vols (London: G.G. and J.  Robinson, 1794), begin with 2E. References to the third edition, Things as They Are; or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams, 3 vols (London: G.G. and J. Robinson, 1796), are prefixed with 3E. Unless stated, references are to the first edition. 2. See The Diary of William Godwin, (eds) Victoria Myers, David O’Shaughnessy, and Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford Digital Library, 2010), http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk [Accessed 1/8/2019]. Further references give dates. 3. Slavoj Žižek, Violence (London: Profile, 2008), p. 1. 4. Žižek, p. 8. 5. Caleb’s fear echoes The History of Mademoiselle De St Phale, 7th edn (London: Edmund Parker, 1738 [1691]), p.  152: ‘I presently found a

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Million of Enemies arm’d against me’. For its influence, see Godwin’s Preface to Fleetwood (London: Richard Bentley, 1832), xi–xii. 6. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: J. Dodsley, 1790), p. 114. 7. Philip Shaw, ‘William Godwin’, in Charles Rzepka and Lee Horsley, A Companion to Crime Fiction (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2010), pp. 361–68 (367). 8. Godwin, Preface to Fleetwood (London: R. Bentley, 1832), vii, ix. 9. See Livy, Ab Urbe Condita (c.27–9 BC), II.12–13, in Livy I, Books I and II, trans. by B.O.  Foster (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 255–63. 10. For details, see Albert Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 271–74. 11. For APLAP, see Eugene Charlton Black, The Association: British Extraparliamentary Political Organisation, 1769–1793 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), pp. 233–74. 12. Uncollected Writings by William Godwin (1785–1822) (Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1968), p. 114. 13. Uncollected Writings, p. 113. 14. Uncollected Writings, p. 116. 15. See Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Rivals, a Comedy (London: John Wilkie, 1775), p. 12. 16. Uncollected Writings, pp. 116–18. 17. Uncollected Writings, p. 115. 18. Uncollected Writings, p. 115. 19. William Godwin, Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, 7 vols, gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993), IV: An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. Mark Philp i, 3:111. Unless otherwise indicated, references are to the Pickering text of the first edition, with book, chapter, section (if applicable), and volume and page numbers. 20. Mark Philp, Godwin’s Political Justice (London: Duckworth, 1986), p. 138. 21. Philp, Godwin’s Political Justice, p. 106; pp. 123–25. For a detailed study of the impact of the Gagging Acts on Romantic literature, see John Bugg, Five Long Winters: The Trials of British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). 22. William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London: G.G.J. and J.  Robinson, 1796), I, xviii. Further references in text prefixed 2E. 23. Philp, Godwin’s Political Justice, p. 131; p. 139. 24. Philp, Godwin’s Political Justice, pp. 135–41.

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25. Leviathan in The Moral and Political Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury (London: [N.P.], 1750), pp. 35–37. Godwin records reading this text on 11–12 June 1797 in his diary. 26. Philp, Godwin’s Political Justice, p. 137. 27. Philp, Godwin’s Political Justice, p. 131. 28. William Godwin, Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr Pitt’s Bills Concerning Treasonable and Seditious Practices (London: J.  Johnson, [1795]), p. 17. 29. Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr Pitt’s Bills, p. 13. 30. Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr Pitt’s Bills, pp. 31–32. 31. See also David O’Shaughnessy ‘Caleb Williams and the Philomaths: Recalibrating Political Justice for the Nineteenth Century’, Nineteenth-­ Century Studies, 66 (2012), 423–48. 32. The Letters of William Godwin, Volume I, 1778–1797 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 90. 33. To the editor of the British Critic 7 June 1795, The Letters of William Godwin, Volume I, p. 118. 34. See Mark Philp, ‘Godwin, Thelwall, and the Means of Progress’, in Robert M.  Maniquis and Victoria Myers (eds), Godwinian Moments: From Enlightenment to Romanticism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), pp. 59–82, and Jon Mee, ‘“The Press and Danger of the Crowd”: Godwin, Thelwall, and the Counter-Public Sphere’, ibid., pp. 83–102. See also Thelwall’s 1795 rejection of equality of property, quoted in Philp, Godwin’s Political Justice, p. 141. 35. Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 70–72, and Gary Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel, 1780–1805 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 192–206. 36. See History of the Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham (London: G. Kearsley, 1783), p. 45, and Damon and Delia (London: T. Hookham, 1784), p.  164. Respective modern editions: Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, I: Political Writings I, ed. Martin Fitzpatrick, pp. 1–118; Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, II: Damon and Delia, Italian Letters, Imogen, ed. by Pamela Clemit, pp.  7–76. Godwin’s library sale of 1836 included Thomas Shelton’s English translation (1740) and an Italian translation (1625): see Seamus Deane (ed.), Sale Catalogues of Libraries of Eminent Persons, vol. 8, Politicians (London: Mansell, with Sotheby Parke Bernet, 1974), p.  287. The diary records Godwin reading the novel 5 June 1806, 21 February, 23 November 1811, and 19–29 November 1812. 37. ‘Analysis of Own Character, Begun Sep 26, 1798’, in Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, I: Autobiography, Autobiographical Fragments

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and Recollections, Godwin/Shelley Correspondence, Memoirs, ed. Mark Philp, pp. 55–60 (p. 57). 38. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. by Tobias Smollett, rev. by Carole Slade (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2004), p. 164. 39. Cervantes, Don Quixote, p. 165. 40. See Godwin’s diary, 3–16, 23 January 1792, 20 April and 18 September 1792, 7–18 June 1794, 20–21, 30 September and 4 October 1795. 41. Burke, Reflections, p. 8. 42. Samuel Johnson, ‘Gin’, A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols (London: J. F. and C. Rivington et al), I, s.v. 43. Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harvest, 1970), p. 46; p. 4. 44. Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution, 1789–1820 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 243. 45. Burke, Reflections, p. 114. 46. During composition of the novel, between 17 and 20 June 1793 Godwin was reading Henry Fielding’s Jonathan Wild (1754) and on 4 October 1793 narratives of Jack Sheppard and Wild, as well as Defoe’s Colonel Jack, 26–28 December 1793. See also Kelly, Jacobin Novel, pp. 191–92. 47. Pamela Clemit, The Godwinian Novel: The Rational Fictions of Godwin, Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 63. 48. Erin Mackie, Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates: The Making of the Modern Gentleman in the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), p. 183. 49. See, for example: Daniel Defoe, Jure Divino, a Satyr (London: [N.P.], 1706), pp.  20–21, and David Hume, The History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Accession of Henry VII, 2 vols (London: A. Millar, 1762), I: p. 157; p. 308, and II: p. 217; pp. 224–25. 50. Thomas Paine, Common Sense, Addressed to the Inhabitants of America (London: J. Almon, 1776), p. 11. 51. Thomas Paine, Rights of Man. Part the Second. Combining Principle and Practice (London: J.S. Jordan, 1792), p. 15. 52. See, for example, Joseph Priestley, An Appeal to the Public on the Subject of the Riots in Birmingham (Birmingham: J. Thompson, 1791), 147, and A Churchman, An Authentic Account of the Late Riots in the Town of Birmingham (Birmingham: C. Earl, 1791), pp. 12–15; p. 21. 53. The Anarchy and Horrors of France, Displayed by a Member of the Convention ([London]: [n.p.], [1792]), vii–viii. 54. The Anarchy and Horrors of France, p. 19. 55. See, for example, Burke, Reflections, p. 90; p. 130; pp. 254–55; p. 355. 56. Clemit, Godwinian Novel, p. 59. 57. The British Critic 4 (July 1794), pp. 70–71, and The Monthly Review 15 (September 1794), pp. 145–49 (p. 148).

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58. Patrick Hanks, Kate Hardcastle, and Flavia Hodges, Oxford Dictionary of First Names, 2nd ed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), s.v. 59. For the novel as psychomachia, see Kenneth W.  Graham, ‘The Gothic Unity of Godwin’s Caleb Williams’, Papers on Language and Literature, 20 (1984), 47–59. 60. Garrett A. Sullivan, ‘“A Story to be Hastily Gobbled Up”: Caleb Williams and Print Culture’, Studies in Romanticism, 32 (1993), 323–37. 61. Kevin Gilmartin, Writing Against Revolution: Literary Conservatism, 1790–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Mark Philp, ‘Vulgar Conservatism: 1792–3’, English Historical Review, 110 (1995), 42–69. 62. Sullivan, ‘“A Story”’, p. 335. 63. Clemit, Introduction to Caleb Williams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. xxiv. 64. Paulson, Representations, p. 232.

Bibliography Anon., The History of Mademoiselle De St Phale, 7th edn (London: Edmund Parker, 1738 [1691]). Anon., The Anarchy and Horrors of France, Displayed by a Member of the Convention ([London]: [n.p.], [1792]). A Churchman, An Authentic Account of the Late Riots in the Town of Birmingham (Birmingham: C. Earl, 1791). Arendt, Hannah, On Violence (New York: Harvest, 1970). Black, Eugene Charlton, The Association: British Extraparliamentary Political Organisation, 1769–1793 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963). British Critic 4 (July 1794) Bugg, John, Five Long Winters: The Trials of British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: J. Dodsley, 1790). Butler, Marilyn, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). de Cervantes, Miguel, Don Quixote, trans. by Tobias Smollett, rev. by Carole Slade (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2004). Clemit, Pamela, The Godwinian Novel: The Rational Fictions of Godwin, Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). Clemit, Pamela, introduction, Caleb Williams by William Godwin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), vii–xxvii. Defoe, Daniel, Jure Divino, a Satyr (London: [N.P.], 1706). Gilmartin, Kevin, Writing Against Revolution: Literary Conservatism, 1790–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

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Godwin, William, Things as They Are; or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams, 3 vols (London: G.G. and J. Robinson, 1794). Godwin, William, Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr Pitt’s Bills Concerning Treasonable and Seditious Practices (London: J. Johnson, [1795]). Godwin, William, Things as they Are; or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams, 3 vols (London: G.G. and J. Robinson, 1796). Godwin, William, Fleetwood (London: Richard Bentley, 1832). Godwin, William, Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, 8 vols, gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1992). Godwin, William, Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, 7 vols, gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993). Godwin, William, The Diary of William Godwin, eds. Victoria Myers, David O’Shaughnessy, and Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford Digital Library, 2010). http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk Godwin, William, The Letters of William Godwin, Volume I, 1778–1797, ed. Pamela Clemit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Goodwin, Albert, The Friends of Liberty (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). Graham, Kenneth W., ‘The Gothic Unity of Godwin’s Caleb Williams’, Papers on Language and Literature, 20 (1984), 47–59. Hanks, Patrick, Kate Hardcastle, and Flavia Hodges, Oxford Dictionary of First Names, 2nd ed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Hobbes, Thomas, The Moral and Political works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury (London: [N.P.], 1750. Hume, David, The History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Accession of Henry VII, 2 vols (London: A. Millar, 1762). Johnson, Samuel, A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols (London: J. F. and C. Rivington et al, 1785). Kelly, Gary, The English Jacobin Novel, 1780–1805 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). Livy, History of Rome Books I and II, trans. by B.O.  Foster (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1967). Mackie, Erin, Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates: The Making of the Modern Gentleman in the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). Maniquis, Robert M., and Victoria Myers, eds, Godwinian Moments: From Enlightenment to Romanticism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011). Monthly Review 15 (September 1794). O’Shaughnessy, David, ‘Caleb Williams and the Philomaths: Recalibrating Political Justice for the Nineteenth Century’, Nineteenth-Century Studies, 66 (2012), 423–48.

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Paine, Thomas, Common Sense, Addressed to the Inhabitants of America (London: J. Almon, 1776). Paine, Thomas, Rights of Man. Part the Second. Combining Principle and Practice (London: J.S. Jordan, 1792). Paulson, Ronald, Representations of Revolution, 1789–1820 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983). Philp, Mark, Godwin’s Political Justice (London: Duckworth, 1986). Philp, Mark, ‘Vulgar Conservatism: 1792–3’, English Historical Review, 110 (1995), 42–69. Priestley, Joseph, An Appeal to the Public on the Subject of the Riots in Birmingham (Birmingham: J. Thompson, 1791). Sale Catalogues of Libraries of Eminent Persons, 12 vols, gen. ed A.N.L. Munby (London: Mansell, with Sotheby Parke Bernet, 1974) Shaw, Philip, ‘William Godwin’, in Charles Rzepka and Lee Horsley, A Companion to Crime Fiction (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2010), pp. 361–68. Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, The Rivals, a Comedy (London: John Wilkie, 1775). Sullivan, Garrett A., ‘“A Story to be Hastily Gobbled Up”: Caleb Williams and Print Culture’, Studies in Romanticism, 32 (1993), 323–37. Žižek, Slavoj, Violence (London: Profile, 2008).

PART III

Futures

Godwin’s Popular Stories for the Nursery M. O. Grenby

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, William Godwin faced an uncertain future. Politically, he was at the ‘pinnacle of disfavour’, as Pamela Clemit and Avner Offer name it elsewhere in this volume, having (as Godwin himself ruefully noted in 1801) fallen ‘in one common grave with the cause and the love of liberty’.1 In personal terms, Mary Wollstonecraft was dead, and Godwin was the sole parent of two infant daughters. Following his second marriage to Mary Jane Clairmont in 1801, there would be three further small children to look after. Professionally, the optimism of 1798, when he was planning a major new philosophical work, a new novel, and ‘Five or six tragedies’, was replaced by a more anxious realism.2 In 1800 his play Antonio had a single, disastrous performance. By 1806 he was admitting that the ‘efforts of my pen’ were ‘never perfectly equal to my current expences’. Godwin, who turned fifty that year,

Thanks to Jan Rybicki of Jagiellonian University and James Cummings of Newcastle University for their help preparing the stylometry elements of this essay. M. O. Grenby (*) Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. O’Brien et al. (eds.), New Approaches to William Godwin, Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62912-0_9

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worried that ‘my income, slender as it was, might grow less; & my power of producing such works as had gained me my present character, might diminish, as years advanced’. As he recognised, ‘something more was required’.3 That ‘something’ was to set himself up as an author and publisher, and ‘the species of books I fixed on for this purpose’, he made clear in 1806, ‘was books of education’.4 The first effort of the ‘Juvenile Library’ that he and Mary Jane Godwin established was Fables Ancient and Modern. Adapted for the Use of Children from Three to Eight Years of Age, which Godwin wrote in the spring and summer of 1805 and published in October. Although he continued to write for an adult audience, until the early 1820s Godwin would devote the majority of his efforts to writing and publishing children’s books and to his tenacious attempt to keep the Juvenile Library clear of bankruptcy. This chapter focuses on the origins of that endeavour. One aim is to shed new light on Godwin’s decision to become a children’s writer and publisher. I will argue that Godwin’s engagement with children’s literature was neither impulsive nor haphazard, but rather carefully considered and perhaps systematically planned. In this chapter, using a range of evidence including stylometric analyses, I also attempt to demonstrate that Godwin was almost certainly the author of several children’s titles, published before the establishment of the Juvenile Library and previously unattributed.

‘Stress enough is not laid upon exciting the youthful imagination’ Godwin’s turn to children’s books has generally been characterised as something undertaken only reluctantly, for money, because he himself was now surrounded by children, and at the prompting of his second wife, Mary Jane.5 These were no doubt factors, but they do not tell the whole story. William St. Clair’s discovery that Godwin was the author of Bible Stories. Memorable Acts of the Ancient Patriarchs, Judges and Kings: Extracted from Their Original Historians. For the Use of Children, published by Richard Phillips in 1802 as by ‘William Scolfield’, shows that he became a children’s author three years before the publication of Fables.6 It also demonstrates that, already in 1802, Godwin was thinking hard about the theory of children’s literature, since Bible Stories included a ‘Preface’— which, years later, Godwin would still regard as an important element of

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his thinking—inveighing against the overly factual nature of contemporary children’s books, the ‘cold and arid circle of principles’ they taught, and issuing a plea for books that fostered children’s imaginative and empathetic faculties.7 But in fact, Godwin had turned his attention to children’s literature even earlier. The evidence comes from the optimistic memo already quoted, dated September 1798, in which Godwin set out those ‘literary productions which I am at present desirous to execute’. To this memo, Godwin appended a further page of notes, dated February 1800, mulling over changes required to his An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) and The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature (1797). What Godwin wrote with regard to the latter anticipates his preface to Bible Stories: A leading defect which I attribute to my collection of essays, entitled the Enquirer, is, that stress enough is not laid upon exciting the youthful imagination. In this view I should infinitely prefer the Seven Champions, the History of Fortunatus, Valentine & Orson, & the Fairy Tales, which delighted & animated my own boyish years, to the books since the period of my childhood composed for the instruction of youth. Télémaque, though otherwise a book of infinite merit, led the way to the corruption of the public taste in this respect, & has proved the prolific parent of the Salzmanns, the Days, the Genlis’s & the Berquins of a later period. I well remember with what a confirmed distaste I turned away from the grave & preceptorial discourses of the English Telemachus, while the story afforded one inexpressible delight. Nothing has a worse effect in its way, than the practice of these modern writers of suspending the incidents of their tale, for the sake of introducing a lecture. The childish reader sees through the fraud at once, & is inspired with an incurable spirit of suspicion. Abstractions & generalities are almost uniformly lost on the youthful mind. I perfectly recollect the loathing & aversion with which I regarded the introductory paragraph of moralising & speculation, that I usually found prefixed to a tale, in the magazines of my school-boy days.8

At first sight, this seems like another of the nostalgia-fuelled tirades that Romantic-period male authors were in the habit of launching against women writers for children: ‘the cursed Barbauld Crew’, as Charles Lamb famously called them in an 1802 letter to Samuel Taylor Coleridge.9 Indeed, perhaps Godwin, Lamb, and Coleridge had colluded in the formation of this opinion, for Godwin’s diary records a series of calls, teas, and dinners with them both in the days before he wrote his memo.10

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However, Godwin cannot be accused of being ill-informed. His note shows an impressive familiarity with eighteenth-century children’s literature. He contrasts romances and fairy tales which circulated widely in chapbook format in the eighteenth century with the work of several more recent (notably pan-European) children’s authors: Christian Gotthilf Salzmann, whose Moralisches Elementarbuch (1785) had been freely translated by Wollstonecraft as Elements of Morality (1790); Thomas Day, author of the Rousseauvian Sandford and Merton (1783–89); Stephanie-­ Felicité de Genlis, author of children’s moral tales including Adèle et Théodore ou lettres sur l’éducation (1782, translated into English 1783); and Arnaud Berquin, whose L’Ami des Enfans appeared in Paris in monthly instalments during 1782 and 1783, and in English in 1783–84 (as well as François Fénelon, whose Aventures de Télémaque had been published in 1699, and in English from 1701). Further, we know that Godwin was not simply invoking these names as totems. His diary shows an assiduous reading of children’s books that has not been previously remarked upon. In 1796 he re-read Fenelon’s Télémaque in nine sittings. In 1797 he read Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile; or On Education (1762) and, shortly after her death, Wollstonecraft’s most significant children’s book, Original Stories from Real Life (1788), possibly for the second time. A year later he examined Genlis’ dramas for children, returned to Emile, and read Sandford and Merton in eleven sittings. In 1800, he recorded reading ‘Salzmann’—no doubt Elements of Morality—and Emile once more.11 Then, in late 1801 and early 1802, just as he was beginning to write Bible Stories, he immersed himself in some key works of recent children’s literature: Maria Edgeworth’s volumes of short moral tales, The Parent’s Assistant (1796), in seven sittings; Sarah Trimmer’s An Introduction to the Knowledge of Nature (1780); John Newbery’s The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes (1764/5); and ‘Beauty & Beast’, probably extracted from The Young Misses’ Magazine where the tale had first appeared in English in 1757.12 Clearly, then, Godwin’s interest in children’s books was no transitory or superficial thing. When he began to write his first book for children in late 1801, he may have been swayed by Mary Jane, whom he had met on 5 May 1801 and married on 21 December, and he may have been influenced by the books he was reading within his own family (e.g. in a letter of 1800 to Fanny Imlay, then six, he talks of their shared reading of Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s Lessons for Children13). But having sedulously immersed himself in the children’s literature of the age, he could justifiably call himself an expert in the field.

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Bible Stories may also have been a response to the promptings of Godwin’s publisher. In 1801, Godwin moved away from his (and Mary Jane’s) established publisher, George Robinson, to Richard Phillips, signing a contract for what would become the Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, published in 1803. Phillips worked in close partnership with Benjamin Tabart, from whose Juvenile Library at 157 New Bond Street children’s books were published and sold. Indeed, Bible Stories was ‘printed for R. Phillips … sold by Benj. Tabart’. A prefacing note to Tabart’s first catalogue of 1801 lamented that ‘It is to be regretted, that we possess very few books, in which RELIGIOUS TRUTH is skilfully simplified to the Capacity of Children of between FIVE and EIGHT Years of Age’, and called on ‘persons of taste, piety, and literary ability’ to produce ‘books for the early imitation of the young in knowledge of their relations to a Divine Being’.14 Godwin, in his way, was answering this call with Bible Stories, agreeing that neither the Bible nor more modern attempts to impart religious education were really fit for children, but convinced that ‘There are no stories in the world so exquisitely fitted to interest the youthful imagination’ as those to be found in scripture.15 This is not to say that Godwin was writing purely at Phillips’ or Tabart’s suggestion. Perhaps it was the other way round. Or, more likely, Bible Stories came out of a collective sense of disdain for children’s books that privileged dry facts and simplistic morals over the imagination. This was an opinion openly expressed by several of the writers in the Phillips stable, such as Lucy Aikin and Jane Porter, both of whom Godwin knew personally, as indeed he did most of the children’s writers publishing with Phillips and Tabart.16

Tabart’s Popular Stories for the Nursery The opinions expressed by this Tabart-Phillips school of children’s writers in their prefaces and introductions, including Godwin, laid an intellectual foundation for what were the most notable titles to appear under Tabart’s imprint: a series of fairy tales and traditional stories published from summer 1804. As Marjorie Moon puts it, these Popular Stories can be understood as ‘a great advance in the history of children’s literature’.17 First, they represent the first time that many of these tales had appeared in any other format than chapbooks and had been printed specifically for children. Second, they refrained from explicit moralising. Third, although still relatively cheap at sixpence each, they were handsomely printed and well-­ illustrated. The series was ‘establishing new norms’, Brian Alderson and

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Felix de Marez Oyens affirm, and ‘Where Tabart led, others would follow’.18 Most of the tales were published individually, in a fairly standard format of thirty-six pages with three copperplate engravings, and then, later in the year, assembled into a compendium, in four parts, entitled Tabart’s Collection of Popular Stories for the Nursery (curiously, and defying commercial logic, the compendium used different illustrations and amended and reset texts). The Stationers’ Company Registers show that, from July 1804 to August 1805, in order to secure his copyright, Richard Phillips entered the titles, in small batches, at Stationers’ Hall. Judging by these records, the first titles to be written were fairy stories, adapted from the tales of Charles Perrault or Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy (such as Puss in Boots and Diamonds and Toads, entered on 9 July 1804, and The History of the White Cat and History of Fortunio on 27 July) or stories from the Romance tradition, including The Children in the Wood and The History of Fortunatus (both entered on 20 July 1804). Further stories in both these traditions followed, before an extension of the scheme in 1805 to incorporate abridgments of longer eighteenth-century works, including Robinson Crusoe, Nourjahad (based on a story by Frances Sheridan), a two-part Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor, and a four-part Voyages and Travels of Captain Lemuel Gulliver (1805).19 The author, or authors, or rather adaptors, of these stories are anonymous. Advertisements described the Tabart stories as ‘new and improved Translations, or Revised Editions, of the Tales, Legends, and Romances hitherto held in general Estimation in the Nursery, but debased by vulgar and often by indecent Language’.20 This was an endorsement of traditional tales, alongside an acknowledgement of their unsuitability for children in their raw state. One could imagine any of the established Tabart stable having had a hand. Godwin had expressed similar opinions, notably in the Bible Stories preface. Indeed, his note of February 1800 had specifically praised ‘the Seven Champions, the History of Fortunatus, Valentine & Orson, & the Fairy Tales’—all of which were among the first titles published by Tabart in 1804.21 We might compare an 1802 letter, responding to a request for advice respecting the books he thought ‘best adapted for the education of female children from the age of two to twelve’, in which Godwin advocated ‘Tales of Mother Goose … Beauty & the Beast, the History of Fortunatus, … Valentine & Orson, the Seven Champions of Christendom, les Contes de madame Daunou [d’Aulnoy], Robinson Crusoe if weeded of its methodism, & the Arabian Nights’.22 Essentially,

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this was a prospectus for the Tabart series! Perhaps it is no wonder then that, in some older catalogues, Godwin is credited as the editor of Tabart’s tales.23 This surmise is founded on the title page of Dramas for Children, Imitated from the French of L.F.  Jauffret, published by the Godwins’ Juvenile Library in 1808 or 1809, whose title page reads ‘By the Editor of Tabart’s Popular Stories’. But Dramas for Children was written not by William Godwin, but by Mary Jane, who was fluent in French and might thus have translated Jauffret’s text. She thus becomes the prime candidate for having been editor and perhaps author of the Tabart tales. The evidence, it must be said, is slight. But in the absence of any other indication, there is no reason to rule out her involvement. There is, however, further evidence that strongly links Godwin himself with Tabart’s Stories. Godwin’s diary records contact with Tabart’s partner Richard Phillips throughout 1804. Of course, we have no way of knowing what their correspondence and meetings were about: perhaps Godwin’s ongoing work on his novel Fleetwood which Phillips would publish in 1805. But there can be little doubt that entries such as ‘Write to Philips, on Perrault’, on 22 March 1804, or ‘Write to Philips (Giant Killer)’, on 30 July, concern the Tabart project (Phillips entered The History of Jack the Giant-Killer at Stationers’ Hall on 14 September 1804). Moreover, the diary strongly suggests that Godwin composed some of these stories. It was Godwin’s practice to note progress on whatever he was writing as the first element of each day’s diary entry, generally followed by a record of what he had been reading. The entry for 7 May 1804, for example, runs as follows: 7. M[onday]. Fleetwood, 1 page. Martial, Ep. 119: Milton, çala. Grisildis, 3½ pages.

Here Godwin records the composition of one page of Fleetwood, followed by his reading of fourteen pages of Martial’s Epigrams (continuing from page 105, as noted the day before), and then less orderly reading of Milton (‘çala’ being Godwin’s shorthand for ‘here and there’). The reference to ‘Grisildis’ is more puzzling. The Diary’s editors suggest this may be Chaucer’s ‘The Clerk’s Tale’, a version of the Griselda tale adapted from Boccaccio’s Decameron. But as work on Fleetwood stalled, Godwin returned to ‘Grisildis’, noting a further 3½ pages on 10 May and two pages more the day after. It seems highly unlikely that such slow progress can have been Godwin reading Griselda; much more likely is that he was

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writing a new version. The most plausible explanation is that this was The Story of Griselda, which Phillips entered at Stationers’ Hall on 25 July, and which was published later that year with a frontispiece and plates dated July 1804. A month later Godwin was apparently writing again for the Tabart series. In mid-June, while slowly continuing with Fleetwood, the diary contains the following entries: 11. M[onday]. Robin Hood, p. 3. 14. Th[ursday]. Robin Hood, p. 6. 16. Sa[turday]. Robin Hood, p. 9 . 2 June 17. Su[nday]. Robin Hood, p. 13. 18. M[onday]. Robin Hood, p. 17.24

Phillips duly entered The History of Robin Hood at Stationers’ Hall on 14 September 1804, and it was published sometime that year, with plates dated August 1804. There are no holograph manuscripts to confirm Godwin’s involvement; nor did he ever acknowledge authorship. There were of course good reasons not to see his name attached to children’s books. When, in 1805, he began to write for his Juvenile Library he found it ‘necessary to substitute a feigned name, on account of the clerical & Antijacobinical prejudices which are afloat against me’.25 And we should remember that Godwin had taken care to disguise his authorship of Bible Stories (succeeding so well, as St. Clair points out, that it took almost two centuries to discover the connection).26 Probably neither the nine manuscript pages of ‘Grisildis’ that the diary records him writing, nor perhaps the seventeen pages of ‘Robin Hood’, would add up to enough text to fill the thirty-six printed pages of The Story of Griselda or History of Robin Hood. Yet Godwin was not consistent in recording the composition of his works, often omitting writing sessions or even whole works from the diary, particularly the lighter works he wrote for the Juvenile Library. In short, the diary cannot tell us the exact extent of Godwin’s contribution, but there is no reason to think that Godwin cannot have written them either in full or in part. Attention to the texts themselves confirms the hypothesis. One method of verifying or assigning authorship is stylometry, that is to say, the process of computational stylistics that analyzes literary style in quantitative terms. Authorship attribution based on computational statistical analysis of style is now over fifty years old. Methods of analysis and visualisation of findings have improved significantly, and few now doubt that stylometry

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can yield significant insight.27 The fundamental method of stylometry is the identification and counting of high-frequency items in a given text (Most Frequent Words, or MFWs), sometimes excluding a number of the very most ubiquitous words in the language. Such an analysis will normally produce a textual ‘fingerprint’ for individual authors (or indeed for works from a particular period or genre, compared with those from another). For the purposes of this study ‘Stylometry with R’ has been employed, a package designed for the open source statistical computing environment ‘R’.28 The texts subjected to this analysis were a representative sample of Tabart’s stories, plus a number of works known to have been written by Godwin (both for adults and children), as well as Mary Jane Godwin’s Dramas for Children.29 The principal challenge (since most of the texts in question had not previously been digitised) was in acquiring reliable digital transcriptions of the relevant titles. Professionally made transcriptions were commissioned, manually checked against hard copies, before being prepared in UTF-8 Unicode to form a standard corpus of texts for analysis and comparison. The form of analysis applied was a Bootstrap Consensus Tree based on an analysis of MFWs within each text in the corpus. The results are shown in Fig. 1. Each label names the author (either Godwin, ‘MJG’ for Mary Jane Godwin, or ‘Anon’ for the unknown author(s) of Tabart’s stories) and the publication date of the text that was included for the corpus (not always the year of first publication). This kind of tree shows the relationships between different texts. Those on the same ‘branch’ share common textual patterns (in this case, frequently repeated words). The ‘bootstrap consensus’ process re-samples data from repeated bands within the texts, confirming that the observed branch-points are not the result of abnormal localised elements of the texts. We can be confident, then, that texts on the same branch share common textual characteristics to a high degree. It is no surprise, therefore, to see in Fig. 1 that Godwin’s novels St. Leon (1799) and Fleetwood (1805) appear together on a single branch of the tree and that Caleb Williams (1794) springs off that same branch. Indeed, this offers reassurance as to the validity of the stylometric method. Also noticeable is that Godwin’s early, didactic works for children are clustered close by: The History of England. For the Use of Schools and Young Persons (1806) and The Pantheon: or Ancient History of the Gods of Ancient Greece and Rome (1806), both published under the pseudonym Edward Baldwin, Esq. are on the same branch, with The Looking-Glass: A True History of the Early Years of an Artist (1805) and the Life of Lady Jane Grey and of Lord Guildford Dudley,

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Fig. 1  Stylometric analysis of Godwin-Tabart corpus (Bootstrap Consensus Tree)

Her Husband (1806), both published under his pseudonym Theophilus Marcliffe, very nearby. Bible Stories is adjacent too, as is a text called Richard Coeur de Lion, to which I shall return. Equally clear is the grouping of Tabart’s stories towards the bottom of Fig. 1, by and large separate

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from Godwin’s work, and divided into several pairs. This may indicate that the pairs shared an author, or perhaps that a single person wrote, or edited, all of these Tabart stories. But the tree demonstrates that it is not likely this person was Godwin. The most interesting grouping, however, is at the top of Fig. 1, comprising three titles published for the Godwins’ Juvenile Library and two of the Tabart stories. The former are Fables Ancient and Modern (1805) written by Godwin under the pseudonym Edward Baldwin, Esq.; Dramas for Children (1809), presumed to have been written by Mary Jane Godwin; and the much less well-known Colonel Jack: The History of a Boy Who Never Went to School (1809), radically abridged from Daniel Defoe’s 1722 picaresque novel The History and Remarkable Life of the Truly Honourable Col. Jacque. The abridger is unknown. It may have been Godwin himself. His diary records at least some contribution: ‘Col. Jack, çala; 4pp.’ on 22 October 1809, and ‘Col. Jack, 1 page’ the following day (just over a month before it was published). It is not the purpose of this chapter to argue for Godwin’s authorship of Colonel Jack (although its stylometric relationship to Fables is suggestive, and critics, unaware of the Juvenile Library abridgment, have pointed out parallels between Defoe’s Colonel Jack and Godwin’s Caleb Williams30). What does concern us here is the presence of two Tabart tales on the same branch as Colonel Jack and Fables, namely, Robin Hood and Griselda, the two tales that Godwin’s diary showed he had a hand in. Indeed, in this analysis, Robin Hood and Fables are as closely related stylometrically as St Leon and Fleetwood.

The Story of Griselda It will seem odd to modern readers that Godwin should have been drawn to such a story as Griselda. It tells of a marquis who acquiesces with the wishes of his subjects to marry and surprises them by choosing a local peasant girl. He obliges her to promise that she will obey him unquestioningly and then proceeds to test her. After the birth of their first child he tells her that his people are unhappy with his choice of spouse and has the baby girl taken away to be put to death. Again, after she gives birth to a boy, the baby is removed and Griselda is told he will be killed. On both occasions she consents without protest. After some years, the Marquis informs Griselda that he is going to divorce her. She is uncomplaining even when sent back to her father’s house wearing only a shift, and when summoned back as a servant to prepare the house for the Marquis’ new

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bride. Just before the wedding the Marquis reveals that he has been testing Griselda’s loyalty, that his new ‘bride’ is in fact their daughter, and their son her page. He recognises Griselda’s obedience and patience, and the family live together happily. Naturally the story has been widely seen as affirming constancy and patience as the principal, specifically female virtues, and the unconditional authority of husbands, even when they are cruel and tyrannical. Why then might Godwin choose to adapt it for children? Critical here is the likely source for Griselda, Chaucer’s ‘Clerk’s Tale’.31 Godwin was an enormous admirer of Chaucer and, in 1804, had recently been immersed in his life and work, his four-volume Life of Geoffrey Chaucer being published by Phillips in 1803. He certainly read ‘The Clerk’s Tale’ as part of his research (specifically recorded in his diary on 21 October 1800), but crucially, we also know that he admired this tale above all the others. ‘The history of Patient Grisildis is the most pathetic that ever was written’, Godwin asserted in his discussion of The Canterbury Tales.32 More than that, ‘The Clerk’s Tale’ was the crucial evidence for one of Godwin’s central (and contentious) claims in the Life that Chaucer must have met Petrarch in Padua in the 1370s, when he would have heard the story of Griselda translated into Latin by Petrarch from Boccaccio’s Italian. Godwin argued that Chaucer represented himself in the guise of the Clerk and called the ‘exquisitely pathetic story of Patient Grisildis, perhaps the happiest of all the effusions of Chaucer’s muse’.33 A second reason Godwin might have been drawn to Griselda is because of its avowal that virtue can be found in any walk of life. While the Marquis is cruel, untrusting, and hedonistic, his wife, although from the very lowest rung of the peasantry, is upright, courageous, and wise. Explicitly in the Tabart version, her exemplary self-control is matched by a fitness to govern others: when her husband is away ‘she conducted all the affairs of state in with the utmost propriety, redressed grievances, reconciled quarrels, and relieved the wants of the poor’.34 Further, Griselda’s rise from hovel to palace offers the possibility of social renewal. After all, it is a peasant’s child who will succeed the Marquis. It is perhaps no coincidence then that, in the Tabart version, the marriage of the Marquis and Griselda, from which the promise of a reformed state springs, takes place on ‘the 14th of July’, the date of the Fall of the Bastille.35 It is notable that the two versions of Griselda published by Tabart, both in 1804, begin differently. In the stand-alone edition, the first sentence plunges the reader straight into the narrative: ‘Walter, Marquis of Saluzzo,

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in Lombardy, was young, handsome, and well made’. The version published in the compendium (and used for the stylometric analysis above) amplifies the historical specificity, with this paragraph inserted at the beginning: In the time of knight-errantry Italy was divided into many sovereignties, the princes of which governed as they pleased, and were entirely independent of each other. Lombardy, the northern part of Italy, was the most frequented and populous, and of all the parts of Lombardy, the marquisate of Saluzzo was the most delicious.36

This is pure Godwin. First, Godwin had a long history of engaging with ‘knight-errantry’. His Caleb Williams (1794) had been written in part to attack the ill-effects of chivalry, a code which Falkland personifies.37 Second, in some senses, Marquis Walter is Falkland’s double. Falkland’s weakness is explained by the fact that, in his youth, he doted on ‘the heroic poets of Italy’ and became ‘deeply pervaded with the idle and groundless romances of chivalry’. It leads to a pride that renders him unable to recover from his physical humiliation at the hands of Tyrrel. ‘To Mr Falkland disgrace was worse than death. The slightest breath of dishonour … stung him to the very soul’. To have been knocked down by Tyrrel in a way that was both ‘humiliating and public’ he found unbearable, and Godwin makes it clear that it was in this moment that Falkland turned away from his early virtue and on to murder and oppression.38 Walter similarly begins as a model aristocrat, who ‘was kind to every body; granted all the petitions of his subjects; and was always upon the watch to relieve their distresses’. Yet, like Falkland, his innate virtue, and the promise it offers to society, is overturned by a single fault, stemming from an excessive attentiveness to how others see him: ‘Somebody had put it into his head, while he was a boy, that he should take care to preserve his liberty; and that, if he was not upon his guard, he would be brought into subjection before he was aware … and of all things in the world, he was most afraid of a wife’.39 As with Falkland, this single obsession propels Walter into all his tyrannical actions. The tests he sets Griselda are not so much to prove her obedience, as for Walter to prove to himself that he has not become trammelled. And as with Falkland, these actions are clearly against Walter’s own interest. As Walter steadily acquires all he desires—an obedient wife, beautiful children, subjects who love him more than ever— the narrator continually questions why he cannot be content. ‘Who now

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so happy as Lord Walter, marquis of Saluzzo’ is the narrator’s refrain; ‘but Lord Walter could not however forget the thoughts which had run in his head before he was married’ and, later, ‘still the same thoughts haunted his mind’.40 Even though Walter, unlike Falkland, ends happily, we have watched him be driven to cruelty, and to destroy his own happiness, by adherence to a malign system of false values early imbibed.

The History of Robin Hood The opening of the compendium version of Griselda also seems so highly Godwinian because of its clear historiographical slant. Whereas ‘Fortunatus’, say, which precedes it, or ‘The White Cat’ which follows, begin in more conventional fairy tale style (‘In the city of Famagosta, in the island of Cyprus, there lived a gentleman possessed of immense riches’, and ‘There was once a king who had three sons…’), Griselda starts with a succinct analysis of feudal political geography.41 The same pedagogical impulse is evident in only one other Tabart tale, The History of Robin Hood. In fact, it is much more marked. Four prefatory paragraphs precede the first mention of Robin, each of which serves simultaneously to establish a distance between past and present and to establish the context for the existence of such outlaws: The times of Richard the First, king of England, were very different from the times we live in. There are at least ten towns in England at present that are as big as London was then. The other cities were in proportion; the villages and hamlets were not half as big as they are at present, and there were not half as many of them. If you took a journey, the roads were bad, and the ways were solitary; you traversed immense heaths, and desolate plains; you journeyed perhaps twenty miles in a day, and scarcely saw a house from the rising to the setting sun. I have heard, that people when they set out for a journey of a hundred miles, were accustomed to make their wills first, conceiving that the chances were so many that they should never return alive. In these times there were many robbers: robbery is always most likely to be committed in solitary places. There were then no bank notes, and no bills upon great merchants and traders; rich travellers therefore carried a large amount of coin along with them. Thieves were so much to be feared, that men who made a journey were accustomed to inquire who travelled the same way; and to go in companies of ten, twenty, or more, as people now do in the deserts of Arabia. The poor people lived in cottages then as they do now, because they had nothing to lose; but there were no gentlemen’s

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houses. Noblemen, and rich men, lived in castles that could not be taken but by a little army of soldiers: the poorer people too, that they might be protected against the violence of their neighbours, joined in clans, and chose some rich person for their lord, whom they served for state and in war, and who was sure to protect them from all injuries but his own. There was in these times but very little trade; therefore there were a great many poor people and beggars, and a great many persons who lived in humble idleness, and crowded the halls of the great as useless servants. Those who had too much spirit for this turned robbers. There were a great many forests; the king had sixty-eight to his own share, besides above seven hundred parks in different parts of England: these were all well stocked with deer. The English at this time excelled all other nations in the use of the cross-bow: it was their chief weapon of war; and when peace came, the soldier, who had no longer any lawful use for his bow, and who loved idleness, was fond of shooting at the king’s deer. Whoever had once shot the king’s deer never dared to appear in towns again, for fear of punishment, and had no other means of subsistence but deer-stealing and robbery.42

The difference in content and tone between this introduction and the beginnings of most of the Tabart tales is striking. Here we have a surprising level of detail (the king’s sixty-eight forests) and a notably insightful historicised account of twelfth-century England (explaining the principles of feudalism, the reasons for outlawry and much else). The urge to ground Robin Hood in historical reality continues throughout the story, even to the extent that ‘the oldest historian who mentions his name’ is invoked for his characterisation of Robin as ‘the gentlest and most generous thief’.43 One cannot help notice how similar this kind of genial historiography is to Godwin’s Life of Chaucer, published the previous year. It too began with a contextualising dissertation on medieval England, focussing on the manners, customs, arts, and practices of the age, avowedly designed to retake antiquarianism from ‘men of cold tempers and sterile imaginations’ and ‘to enable [the reader] to feel for an instant as if he had lived with Chaucer’.44 Godwin was at pains to inform readers of his Life about the increasing secularisation of drama in the fourteenth century, say, and London pageants—indeed, Godwin specifically mentions the tale of Robin Hood and ‘the interesting story of Patient Grisilde’ as features of both. He wrote also about the centrality of archery to English life, observing that ‘It was the great instrument of offence employed by Robin Hood, and his celebrated associates’.45 In short, in terms of both its subject and its

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method, it is difficult not to see the opening of Tabart’s Robin Hood as a sort of continuation of the Life of Chaucer adapted for younger readers.46 Other things differentiate Robin Hood from most of the other Tabart tales. The use of a narrator using the first person singular is unusual (‘I have heard, that people when they set out for a journey…’), as is the author’s willingness to use a more sophisticated, or archaic, lexis (‘depredations’, ‘roundelay’, ‘kirtle’).47 As for the story itself, few of the now classic adventures are included. Rather, the initial focus is on establishing Robin’s historicity through his origins in Locksley, Nottinghamshire; his genteel upbringing by his uncle at Great Gamewell-Hall, near Maxwell; and then the deceitfulness of a monk from Fountain Abbey [sic], who persuades Squire Gamewell on his deathbed to disinherit Robin in favour of the Church, the act which drives Robin into outlawry. Five episodes follow. In the first, Robin impersonates a butcher, talks wildly of a huge herd of cattle available cheaply, and thus lures the exploitative Sheriff of Nottingham into Sherwood Forest, where he is robbed. In the second, Robin dresses as a minstrel to gain access to the church where a young maiden will be married to a rich old man, intervening to force her father and his ally the Bishop of Hereford to allow her instead to marry her lover, Allen-a-Dale. In the third, Robin disguises himself again, this time as a woman, so that he can escape from the Bishop’s revenge and lead him into the Forest to be humiliated and robbed. And in the fourth, motivated by pride, and his hatred of Fountain Abbey, Robin seeks out a famous brawny friar, with whom he duels with bows and staffs. Neither can prevail, and they part with mutual respect. Finally, Robin and his men attend a tournament arranged by King Richard, where the King’s mother, Queen Eleanor, takes Robin’s part and arranges for their free passage home. Impressed by the outlaws, Richard seeks them out in Sherwood, where, although rebuking them for their criminality, he offers a full pardon. An essential inspiration for the Tabart Robin Hood was Joseph Ritson’s Robin Hood: A Collection of All the Ancient Poems, Songs, and Ballads Now Extant, Relative to That Celebrated Outlaw, published in 1795. Ritson, an antiquarian and political radical, is generally credited with returning Robin Hood to literary respectability after a period of neglect and disparagement during which the tales had been seen fit only for publication in cheap anthologies of ballads called ‘garlands’. Intriguingly, Godwin and Ritson were close friends. Ritson advised Godwin on the historical aspects of Caleb Williams and Godwin wrote Ritson’s obituary for Richard Phillips’ Monthly Magazine in 1803.48 It seems unlikely that during their many

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meetings, the last few of which, in summer 1803, took place in the British Museum where Godwin was researching his Life of Chaucer, they did not discuss Robin Hood, and (unlike Griselda) it is not difficult to imagine why these tales would have appealed to Godwin. Ritson had re-endowed Robin with a specific background, among the Nottinghamshire yeomanry at Locksley, and presented him as a champion of freedom and justice against the tyrants of a corrupt church and state. The Tabart Robin Hood follows Ritson in both these regards. Tabart’s Robin gives to the poor, never suffers any woman to be oppressed, despises the corruption of the Church, and ‘when instances of unjustice and tyranny came before him, he always took the part of the weak and the injured against the strong’. His life in the Forest is happy and free, ‘so that’, as King Richard puts it, ‘the court may learn of the woods’.49 Moreover, in the Tabart story, Robin and his men are noticeably similar to the band of thieves Godwin had depicted in Caleb Williams, led by the philosophical Mr Raymond. Robin’s merry men are described as ‘a number of young gentlemen … some of the tallest and finest men in the kingdom; bold, enterprising, and fearless’ who were forced to live as robbers in Sherwood because they had been so ‘foolishly educated’ as to be useless in a society divided into only aristocracy and peasantry. Raymond’s men, likewise, are a ‘tarnished sort of gentry’, characterised by ‘benevolence and kindness’ and ‘strongly susceptible to emotions of generosity’.50 And compare Robin, forced into outlawry by the monks’ treachery, to Raymond, who admits that ‘he should certainly never have embraced his present calling, had he not been stimulated to it’ by ‘the tyranny and perfidiousness exercised by the powerful members of the community against those who were less privileged than themselves’.51 Far from being common thieves, both sets of men had been forced by a society which had no place for them to be ‘at open war with their oppressors’. But though their decision is in some ways admirable, Godwin is at pains to point out that fundamentally Raymond’s course of life was meretricious and immoral, ‘a mistaken treason against the general welfare’ and ‘the most foolish as to their own interest’. ‘I saw that in this profession were exerted uncommon energy, ingenuity, and fortitude’, Caleb observes, ‘and I could not help recollecting how admirably beneficial such qualities might be made in the great theatre of human affairs; while, in their present direction they were thrown away upon purposes that could scarcely in any sense deserve the appellation of useful’.52 Robin comes to the same realisation: ‘I am of tired of the lawless and uncertain life that I lead; I never loved it; other men may

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praise my bold enterprises and generous actions, but I loathe my employments, and every thing that belongs to them’.53 Where the only difference lies is that for Raymond it is too late for reform. As he regrets, unrelenting laws ‘leave no room for amendment’ and take no account of ‘How changed, how spotless, and how useful’ the accused might be to society.54 For Robin, on the other hand, King Richard can intervene (much like the fairy godmothers who feature in other Tabart tales): you have been robbers, and you ought not to have been such. The greatest miser in the kingdom ought not to be treated with such violence; but to be persuaded to dispose of his money, properly. But these are times of violence: hereafter, the people of England will know better their interests, and there will be no gangs of robbers as at present: but you are brave fellows, you say that you are well inclined, and you have power to do me service. I freely grant every one of you my pardon.55

Here the cynicism of Caleb Williams is transmuted into a visionary hope for the future, complete with the suggestion of perfectibility in Richard’s prophesy of the eventual obsolescence of theft.

Richard Coeur de Lion The prominence of Richard I in Robin Hood reminds us that, on the stylometry tree, the one other Tabart story shown to be closely related to Godwin’s known works was Richard Cœur de Lion, an Historical Tale, entered by Phillips at Stationers’ Hall on 9 September 1805 and published later that year. There is no mention of it in Godwin’s diary. Yet, even beyond its applause for Richard, it has much in common with Tabart’s Robin Hood. The entirety of its first half is characterised by the same kind of unfussy but precise and gentle but erudite historiography that opened Robin Hood. The opening paragraph, for example, relates that ‘At that time the kings of England were possessed of many provinces which are now under the dominion of France; and during the life of his father, Richard was invested with the government and dukedoms of Guienne and Poitere’.56 What follows is a detailed account of the Fall of Jerusalem, preparations for the Third Crusade, its faltering progress, the fragmentation of the Christian alliance, and Richard’s treaty with Saladin. The appalled fascination with chivalry that characterises so much of Godwin’s writing is present throughout. Only on page twenty (of thirty-six) does

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the more romanticised element of his story begin. This is the account of Richard’s return from the Holy Land, his imprisonment in Austria at the hands of his former ally Duke Leopold, and his rescue by the princess Matilda, his ‘beloved and affianced bride’, who, disguised as a wandering minstrel, travelled from one European castle to another until at last the strains of her song, taught to her by Richard, were answered by his voice from within his cell. Having found him, she is able to arrange his ransom, and he returns to reclaim his kingdom from the clutches of his brother John. Much of this is to be found, even using similar phraseology, in Godwin’s History of England, which he was writing at the time Richard Coeur de Lion would have been composed, in the summer of 1805.57 In his History of England, however, Godwin ascribes the rescue of Richard more conventionally to a minstrel named Blondel. Matilda, in fact, was the invention of General John Burgoyne, whose libretto to Thomas Linley’s Richard Cœur de Lion, An Historical Romance gave ‘the discovery of Richard’s confinement … to Matilda in place of Blondel’, he admitted, so as ‘to increase the interest of the situation’.58 The Linley-­ Burgoyne semi-opera had been first performed in 1786. It was successfully revived for the 1804–1805 season at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. His diary suggests that Godwin, a regular attender at Drury Lane, probably saw it a week after it opened, on 13 October 1804.59 It seems not unlikely that, having finished Robin Hood with the deus ex machina intervention of King Richard, having been writing about Richard in his History of England, and having seen Burgoyne’s romanticised treatment of the story on stage, Godwin in 1805 proposed Richard Cœur de Lion to Tabart or Phillips as new addition to the Popular Stories series, with the added advantage that it was a kind of theatrical tie-in, and was promptly offered the commission.

Conclusions The stylometric indication that Richard Cœur de Lion may have been written by Godwin is supported, then, by the story’s historicity, its themes, and its tone. But without further corroboration the evidence remains circumstantial. This is not the case for Robin Hood and Griselda, for which Godwin’s diary provides a direct connection. Whether Godwin wrote the entirety of these texts is open to conjecture. They may have been collaborations, possibly with Mary Jane (and we should note the stylometric relative proximity of Griselda to Dramas for Children, attributed to Mary Jane Godwin).

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Whatever his exact involvement, the larger point is that the Tabart stories are entirely in alignment with what we know of Godwin’s developing ideas on children’s reading, as set out in the first part of this essay. In general terms, the Tabart series provided children with the traditional tales Godwin had identified in his 1800 memo as best fitted for ‘exciting the youthful imagination’. More specifically, Robin Hood, Richard Cœur de Lion and even Griselda offered the kind of biography-based historical fiction that Godwin understood as offering the best key to a deep engagement with the past. It must always be ‘personal events’, he argued in his ‘Essay of History and Romance’ (probably written in 1797 but never published), not historical ‘abstractions’, that appeal to a reader’s taste, particularly ‘as it discovers itself in children’. ‘It is the contemplation of illustrious men’, he continued, ‘that kindles into a flame the hidden fire within us’.60 Godwin’s Life of Chaucer and later Lives of Edward and John Philips, Nephews and Pupils of Milton (1815) embodied this biographical-­historical impulse. So too, as John-Erik Hansson points out elsewhere in this volume, did early works for the Juvenile Library, such as the Life of Lady Jane Grey (1806). But what were Robin Hood, or Richard Cœur de Lion, if not also attempts to use biography to teach readers about history, or the kind of ‘exhibition of bold and masculine virtues’ that Godwin thought so crucial to support readers’ engagement with the past? Furthermore, Godwin argued in ‘History and Romance’ that compared with the typical dullness and unavoidable partiality of traditional history writing, it was historical fiction that could attain both a greater impact on readers and a higher historical truth. It was a conviction that Godwin had tested in St. Leon and elsewhere in his writing for adults. But again, it is difficult not to read these Tabart stories as other early exercises in the kind of ‘historical romance’ he was championing, albeit confined to thirty-six pages and invigorated with a strong dose of romance.61 If Godwin was indeed the author of these popular stories, he is entitled to a prominent, previously unacknowledged, place in the history of children’s historical fiction, and in the print history of Robin Hood in particular.62 Children certainly knew Robin Hood; in The Prelude Wordsworth conjoins him with Fortunatus, Jack the Giant-killer, and the Seven Champions of Christendom as part of his idealised childhood reading.63 But the first time that the Robin Hood stories were aimed directly at children has been thought to be the second edition of Ritson’s version, published as being suitable to be ‘put into the hands of young persons’ in 1820, followed by Pierce Egan the Younger’s Robin Hood and Little John,

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serialised from 1838.64 The Tabart Robin is significantly earlier, and in fact, its text circulated quite widely in the early nineteenth century, being re-used, whether by permission or piracy, for versions published in Edinburgh in 1809, then by the Dartons (the major London children’s publishers) in 1818 with handsome new copperplate engravings, and then by the Glasgow firm Lumsden probably in the 1830s.65 Other reuses of the Tabart/Godwin text may well have eluded my searches. The possibility that it influenced Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819) is beyond the scope of this essay to consider, but Scott’s carefully historicised ‘Robin of Locksley’, with his commitment to healing a broken nation through alliance with King Richard, certainly has much in common with the Tabart/Godwin telling. One critic, writing in 1807, called Scott ‘a kind of poetical Godwin’, reprimanding Scott for verse that drew its inspiration from a bardic past, and thus forcing ‘the public to submit to a state of barbarism, by way of arriving at perfection’.66 This was a rather misconceived attack, rooted in literary conservatism, but it focuses attention on what is perhaps the most important point about Godwin’s initial thinking about children’s books. In the same way that Scott, in his poetry, could be accused of preferring ‘the uncultivated roughness, discord, and redundancy of travelling harpers, to the smooth diction, regular metre, and pruned expression of authors who have treated poetical diction as a science’, so Godwin, having undertaken a systematic reading of modern children’s literature produced by those who treated writing for children ‘as a science’, came to prefer the equally ‘uncultivated roughness’ of texts appropriated from the fairy tale, ballad and romance traditions.67 Having come to this decision by the time he wrote his 1800 memo, and set out his views further in the preface to Bible Stories written for Phillips in 1802, it would be entirely unsurprising if he contributed to, and perhaps even helped to shape, the Phillips-Tabart series of Popular Stories for the Nursery. The evidence of his authorship of three of the stories has been set out here. We may never be able to know what his exact involvement was. Perhaps he wrote or edited other stories.68 Or it may be that Mary Jane Godwin, as author or editor, was more involved than the documentary record shows. What is certain is that Godwin was thinking carefully about writing for children several years in advance of the establishment of the Juvenile Library in 1805, and that his earliest writing for children was not undertaken merely for money, or only as an emanation of his new familial circumstances, nor even as an easy ‘spin-off’ from the historical research he was then undertaking. Rather, it

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was a considered materialisation of his reflections on the most socially and psychologically beneficial forms of children’s reading, and this early work for children had an extensive and lasting influence.

Notes 1. Clemit and Offer in this volume, rpt from Nineteenth-Century Prose, 41 (2014), 27–52; William Godwin, Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 7 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993), II: Political Writings II, ed. Mark Philp, 165. Referred to hereafter as Political and Philosophical Writings. 2. Bod. MS Abinger c. 38, fos. 1r, 2r, rpt. in Political and Philosophical Writings (entitled ‘Literary Productions’), IV, 416–17. Godwin noted in his diary writing this on 7 September 1798 (calling it ‘First Principles’): The Diary of William Godwin, eds. Victoria Myers, David O’Shaughnessy and Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford Digital Library, 2010): http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk. Referred to hereafter as Diary. 3. Godwin to James Maitland, eighth earl of Lauderdale, 15 November 1806, Bod. MS Abinger c. 18, fos. 79–80. 4. Ibid. 5. See, for example, Don Locke, A Fantasy of Reason: The Life and Thought of William Godwin (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 212, and Peter H. Marshall, William Godwin (London: Yale UP, 1984), p. 265. 6. William St. Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys: The Biography of a Family (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), p. 545n.1. 7. William Scolfield, Bible Stories: Memorable Acts of the Ancient Patriarchs, Judges, and Kings, Extracted from Their Original Historians, For the Use of Children (London: Richard Phillips, 1802), ‘Preface’, reprinted in Marjorie Moon, Benjamin Tabart’s Juvenile Library (Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1990), 160–63 (pp.  160–1). For Godwin’s later view of the preface, see his letter to an unnamed literary executor, 2 January 1828, Bod. Abinger MS., c. 33, fos. 57–65. 8. Bod. Abinger MS c. 38, fo.2r–v. Godwin recorded in the Diary that he wrote the note on 26 February 1800 (‘Note on P J & Enq., 1 page’). 9. Lamb to Coleridge, 23 October 1802: The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, ed. Edwin W. Marrs Jr., 3 vols. (Ithaca, NY, 1975–8), II. 82. 10. For example, Diary, 8, 16, and 24 February 1800. 11. Diary, 13, 16–18, and 20–21 June, and 2 August 1796 (‘Télémaque’); 8, 11, 12, 15 August 1797 (‘Emile’); 5 and 12 October 1797 (‘Original Stories’ and see 9 March 1792); 23 August 1798 (‘Théâtre d’Education’); 6, 11, 14, 22, and 24 September 1798 (‘Emile’); 20–23, 27–28, and 30

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September, and 1, 4, 5, and 7 October 1798 (‘Sandford’); 22–27 February 1800 (‘Salzmann’); 1 and 2 March 1800 (‘Emile’). 12. Diary, 21–23, 31 July, 2, 11 August, and 4 October 1801 (‘Parent’s Assistant’); 11 August 1801 (‘Trimmer’s Knowledge of Nature’); 1 January 1802 (‘2 Shoes’); 10 February 1802 (‘Beauty & Beast’). 13. Godwin to James Marshall, 2–3 August 1800, in The Letters of William Godwin, gen. ed. Pamela Clemit, 2 vols to date (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011–), II: 1798–1805, 159. 14. ‘Note on the Contents’, reprinted as Appendix C in Moon, Benjamin Tabart’, p. 165. 15. Moon, Benjamin Tabart, p. 161. 16. Aikin (with whom Godwin had taken tea on 28 January 1799: Diary) regretted the replacement of stories of ‘dragons and fairies, giants and witches’ with works of ‘mere prose and simple fact’, asking whether such stories do not do more injury ‘than the fairy fiction of the last generation’ (‘Preface’ to Poetry for Children [London: R.  Phillips; and sold by B.  Tabart, 1801], p. iii). Porter’s preface to The Two Princes of Persia (London: Crosby and Letterman … and J.  Tabart [sic], 1801) likewise regretted that ‘the nurse’s story of the tripping fairy, the witch riding on her broomstick, the turban’d giant, and the sheeted ghost … are passed away’ (p. x). 17. Moon, Benjamin Tabart, p. 5. 18. Alderson and de Marez Oyens, Be Merry and Wise. Origins of Children’s Book Publishing in England, 1650–1850 (New York: Pierpont Morgan Library, 2006), p. 292. 19. Robinson Crusoe was advertised but is not extant, although the text included in The Young Lady’s and Gentleman’s Library. Consisting of Voyages, Travels, Tales and Stories, Carefully Selected and Abridged for Their Amusement and Instruction (6 vols., Edinburgh: W. and J.  Deas, 1809) was probably taken from Tabart’s series. 20. Advertisement bound at the end of Scolfield’s (i.e. Godwin’s) Bible Stories, 2 vols. (new edition, London: R. Phillips, 1803), II, [195]. 21. It is worth noting that, possibly influenced by Godwin, Tabart and Phillips also published The Adventures of Telemachus, Son of Ulysses in 1805 (although outside the Popular Stories series). 22. Godwin to William Cole, 2 March 1802, in Letters of William Godwin, II, 248–50. 23. See Locke, Fantasy of Reason, p. 212. 24. Diary. These entries have been stripped of their other content. 25. Godwin to Lord Holland, Henry Vassall Fox, 3 May 1807, BL Add. MS 51824, fos. 77–9. 26. St. Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys, p. 279.

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27. See J. Rybicki, M. Eder and D Hoover, ‘Computational stylistics and text analysis’, in C. Crompton, R. L. Lane and R. Siemens (eds.), Doing Digital Humanities (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), pp. 123–144. 28. The technicalities of the program are set out in M. Eder, M. Kestemont and J. Rybicki, ‘Stylometry with R: A package for computational text analysis’, R Journal, 16.1 (2016), 107–121. 29. The corpus used for analysis comprised: (i) three novels by Godwin: Things As They Are; or, The Adventure of Caleb Williams 3 vols. (London: B. Crosby, 1794), St. Leon: a Tale of the Sixteenth Century, 4 vols. (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1799), and Fleetwood: Or, the New Man of Feeling 3 vols. (London: Printed for Richard Phillips, 1805); (ii) six children’s books known to be by Godwin (published under various pseudonyms): Bible Stories. Memorable Acts of the Ancient Patriarchs, Judges and Kings, Extracted from Their Original Historians 2 vols. (London: R.  Phillips, 1803) [only volume two], Fables Ancient and Modern. Adapted for the Use of Children from Three to Eight Years of Age 2 vols. (second edn., London: Thomas Hodgkins at the Juvenile Library, 1805), The Looking-Glass. A True History of the Early Years of an Artist (London: Thomas Hodgkins at the Juvenile Library, 1805), The Life of Lady Jane Grey, and of Lord Guildford Dudley, Her Husband (London: M. J. Godwin & Co., 1824), The Pantheon; or Ancient History of the Gods of Greece and Rome. For the Use of Schools and Young Persons of Both Sexes (London: Thomas Hodgkins at the Juvenile Library, 1806), and The History of England, for the Use of Schools and Young Persons (new edition, London: Thomas Hodgkins, 1807); (iii) two unattributed Juvenile Library publications: Colonel Jack: The History of a Boy Who Never Went to School (third edition, London: M. J. Godwin, 1813) and Dramas for Children. Imitated from the French of L.F.  Jauffret, by the Editor of Tabart’s Popular Stories (London: M. J. Godwin, 1809), though to be by Mary Jane Godwin; (iv) ten anonymous stories published by Benjamin Tabart: ‘Robin Hood’, ‘Griselda’, ‘The Children in the Wood’, ‘Peronella’, ‘Fortunatus’, and ‘The White Cat’ (all transcribed from Tabart’s Collection of Popular Stories for the Nursery: From the French, Italian, and Old English Writers, Newly Translated and Revised, Part I [London: Tabart & Co., 1804]), and ‘Jack and the Bean-Stalk’, ‘Prince Fatal Prince Fortune’, and ‘Sleeping Beauty’ (all transcribed from Popular Fairy Tales: or, A Lilliputian Library; Containing Twenty-Six Choice Pieces of Fancy and Fiction [London: Sir Richard Phillips, no date but c. 1825], plus Richard Cœur de Lion, an Historical Tale [London: B. Tabart, 1805; rpt. 1808]). 30. See ‘Introduction’ to Defoe, Colonel Jack, eds. Gabriel Cervantes and Geoffrey Sill (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2015), p. 31.

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31. An alternative source might have been Charles Perrault’s verse tale, ‘La Marquise de Salusses, ou la patience de Griseldis’, first published in 1691, but it was apparently not translated into English during the eighteenth century. 32. Godwin, Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, 4 vols. (1803; rpt. London: Richard Phillips, 1804), IV, 185–6. 33. Godwin, Life of Chaucer, II, 463. 34. The Story of Griselda. With Three Copperplates (London: Tabart and Co., 1804), p. 16. 35. Story of Griselda, p. 10. 36. Tabart’s Collection of Popular Stories for the Nursery … Part I (London: Tabart and Co., 1804), p. 87. 37. Godwin’s politicisation of knight-errantry is discussed in Frans De Bruyn, ‘Edmund Burke the Political Quixote: Romance, Chivalry, and the Political Imagination’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 16 (2004), 695–734. 38. Godwin, Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 8 vols. (Abingdon: Pickering and Chatto, 1992), III: Caleb Williams, or, Things As They Are, ed. Pamela Clemit, 11 and 84–85. 39. Story of Griselda, pp. 3–4. 40. Story of Griselda, pp. 17; 23. 41. Tabart’s Collection of Popular Stories, pp. 48; 112. 42. The History of Robin Hood. With Three Copperplates (London: Tabart and Co., 1804), pp. 3–6. 43. Robin Hood, p. 13. The historian is John Major, author of Historia majoris Britanniae, tam Angliae quam Scotiae, whose opinion on Robin was influentially quoted in William Camden’s Britannia, trans. Philemon Holland (1610), §42. 44. Godwin, Life of Chaucer, I, ix–xi. 45. Godwin, Life of Chaucer, I, 143, 170–71, and 184–86. 46. Godwin’s History of England (1806) also included a conspicuously similar, though much condensed, account of ‘the famous Robin Hood, who retired with a hundred followers into Sherwood Forest, where he lived upon the king’s deer, and the booty he took from travellers’, again citing John Major, as quoted in Camden, to call Robin ‘of all thieves … the prince and the most gentle thief’ (p. 58). 47. Robin Hood, pp. 11, 16, 23. 48. St. Clair, 533n.8; Monthly Magazine; or, British Register, XVI, ii (November 1803), 375–76. 49. Robin Hood, pp. 12 and 38. 50. Godwin, Caleb Williams, ed. Clemit, III, 192, 195. 51. Robin Hood, pp. 10–11. 52. Godwin, Caleb Williams, ed. Clemit, III, 194, 202.

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53. Robin Hood, p. 39. 54. Godwin, Caleb Williams, ed. Clemit, III, 203. 55. Robin Hood, p. 40. 56. Richard Cœur de Lion, an Historical Tale (1805; rpt. London: B. Tabart, 1808), p. 3. 57. History of England, pp. 55–58. 58. Richard Cœur de Lion, An Historical Romance. From the French of Monsr. Sedaine (London: J. Debrett, 1786), ‘Advertisement’. 59. The Linley-Burgoyne Richard Cœur de Lion opened on 6 October 1804 and was frequently repeated, including on 13 October, when it followed Susanna Centlivre’s The Wonder! A Woman Keeps a Secret (The Times, 13 October 1804, p. 2). Godwin’s diary records that he saw part of Centlivre’s 2 play that day (‘theatre, Wonder’), and although it is not recorded, it is 5 not unlikely that he stayed for Richard. Even if he did not, he would have been able to read the play, which was published by Barker and Son in 1804. 60. Godwin, Political and Philosophical Writings V, 292–93 and 295. Note that Godwin made the same point in his 1800 memo, quoted above: ‘Abstractions & generalities are almost uniformly lost on the youthful mind’. 61. Ibid., pp. 295, 300, 298. On St. Leon, see Fiona Price, Reinventing Liberty: Nation, Commerce and the Historical Novel from Walpole to Scott (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), p. 83. 62. Tabart’s stories are not mentioned in the standard work, Catherine Butler and Hallie O’Donovan’s Reading History in Children’s Books (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 63. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind (London: Edward Moxon, 1850), V, 341–44. 64. Joseph Ritson, Robin Hood: A Collection of All the Ancient Poems, Songs, and Ballads, Now Extant, Relative to That Celebrated English Outlaw (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1820), p. vii. See Bennett A.  Brockman, ‘Robin Hood and the Invention of Children’s Literature’, Children’s Literature, 10 (1982), 1–17, and ‘Children and the Audiences of Robin Hood’, South Atlantic Review, 48, no. 2 (1983): 67–83, Robin Hood: An Anthology of Criticism, ed. Stephen Knight (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999), p. 178, and Kevin Carpenter, ‘Robin Hood in Boys’ Weeklies to 1914’, in Popular Children’s Literature in Britain, eds. Julia Briggs, Dennis Butts and M.  O. Grenby (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 47–67. 65. The Young Lady’s and Gentleman’s Library; Robin Hood: Being a Complete History of All the Notable and Merry Exploits Performed by Him and His Men on Many Occasions (London: William Darton Jnr., 1818); A History of Robin Hood (Glasgow, Lumsden and Son, no date but c. 1830–40).

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66. Review of Walter Scott, Ballads and Lyrical Pieces (1806), in Beau Monde, or, Literary and Fashionable Magazine, 1, iv (February 1807), 206–212 (p. 206). 67. Ibid. 68. Diary entries for ‘Arabian Nights’ on 23 July 1804 and ‘Sinbad, çala’ on 21 May 1807 are intriguing (Phillips entered ‘Sinbad’ at Stationers’ Hall on 15 March 1805), while Tabart’s History of Tom Thumb and History of Jack the Giant-Killer (both 1804) bear certain stylometric similarities to Godwin’s writing not explored in this essay.

Bibliography Manuscript Sources Godwin, William to James Maitland, eighth earl of Lauderdale, 15 November 1806, Bod. MS Abinger c. 18, fos. 79–80. Godwin, William, to unknown, 2 January 1828, Bod. Abinger MS., c. 33, fos. 57–65. Godwin to Lord Holland, Henry Vassall Fox, 3 May 1807, BL Add. MS 51824, fos. 77–9. Bod. Abinger MS c. 38, fo.2r–v.

Printed and Online Sources Aikin, Lucy, Poetry for Children (London: R. Phillips; and sold by B. Tabart, 1801). Alderson, Brian and Felix de Marez Oyens, Be Merry and Wise: Origins of Children’s Book Publishing in England, 1650–1850 (New York: Pierpont Morgan Library, 2006). [Anon.], Review of Walter Scott, Ballads and Lyrical Pieces (1806), Beau Monde, or, Literary and Fashionable Magazine, 1, IV (February 1807), 206–212. Baldwin, Edward [William Godwin], Fables Ancient and Modern. Adapted for the Use of Children from Three to Eight Years of Age, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London: Thomas Hodgkins at the Juvenile Library, 1805). Baldwin, Edward [William Godwin], The History of England, for the use of schools and young persons (new edition, London: Thomas Hodgkins, 1807). Baldwin, Edward [William Godwin], The Life of Lady Jane Grey, and of Lord Guildford Dudley, Her Husband (London: M. J. Godwin & Co., 1824). Baldwin, Edward [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 (London: Thomas Hodgkins at the Juvenile Library, 1806).

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Brockman, Bennett A., ‘Robin Hood and the Invention of Children’s Literature’, Children’s Literature, 10 (1982), 1–17. Brockman, Bennet A., ‘Children and the Audiences of Robin Hood’, South Atlantic Review, 48, no. 2 (1983): 67–83. Carpenter, Kevin, ‘Robin Hood in Boys’ Weeklies to 1914’, in Popular Children’s Literature in Britain, eds. Julia Briggs, Dennis Butts and M.  O. Grenby (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 47–67. Cervantes, Gabriel, and Geoffrey Sill (eds), ‘Introduction’, Defoe, Daniel, Colonel Jack (Peterborough, ON.: Broadview Press, 2015). Colonel Jack: The History of a Boy who never went to School, 3rd edn (London: M. J. Godwin, 1813). De Bruyn, Frans, ‘Edmund Burke the Political Quixote: Romance, Chivalry, and the Political Imagination’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 16 (2004), 695–734. Dramas for Children. Imitated from the French of L.F.  Jauffret, by the editor of Tabart’s Popular Stories (London: M. J. Godwin, 1809). Eder, M., M. Kestemont and J. Rybicki, ‘Stylometry with R: A package for computational text analysis’, R Journal, 16.1 (2016), 107–121. Godwin, William, Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 8 vols. (Abingdon: Pickering and Chatto, 1992). Godwin, William, The Diary of William Godwin, eds. Victoria Myers, David O’Shaughnessy and Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford Digital Library, 2010). http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk Godwin, William, Fleetwood: Or, the New Man Of Feeling 3 vols. (London: Printed for Richard Phillips, 1805). Godwin, William, Letters of William Godwin, gen. ed. Pamela Clemit, 2 vols to date (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011–). Godwin, William, Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, 4 vols. (1803; rpt. London: Richard Phillips, 1804). Godwin, William, Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 7 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993). Godwin, William, St. Leon: a Tale Of the Sixteenth Century, 4 vols. (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1799). Godwin, William, Things As They Are; or, The Adventure of Caleb Williams 3 vols. (London: B. Crosby, 1794). A History of Robin Hood (Glasgow, Lumsden and Son, c. 1830–40). The History of Robin Hood. With Three Copperplates (London: Tabart and Co., 1804). Knight, Stephen (ed.), Robin Hood: An Anthology of Criticism (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999). Lamb, Charles and Mary, The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, ed. Edwin W. Marrs Jr., 3 vols. (Ithaca, NY, 1975–8).

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Locke, Don, A Fantasy of Reason: The life and thought of William Godwin (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980). Marcliffe, Theophilus [William Godwin], The Looking-Glass. A true history of the early years of an artist (London: Thomas Hodgkins at the Juvenile Library, 1805). Marshall, Peter H., William Godwin (London: Yale UP, 1984). Moon, Marjorie, Benjamin Tabart’s Juvenile Library (Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1990). Popular fairy tales: or, A Lilliputian Library; containing twenty-six choice pieces of fancy and fiction (London: Sir Richard Phillips, c. 1825). Porter, Jane, The Two Princes of Persia (London: Crosby and Letterman … and J. Tabart [sic], 1801). Price, Fiona, Reinventing Liberty: Nation, Commerce and the Historical Novel from Walpole to Scott (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016). Richard Cœur de Lion, An Historical Romance. From the French of Monsr. Sedaine (London: J. Debrett, 1786). Richard Cœur de Lion, an Historical Tale (1805; rpt. London: B. Tabart, 1808). Ritson, Joseph, Robin Hood: a Collection of all the Ancient Poems, Songs, and Ballads, Now Extant, Relative to that celebrated English Outlaw, 2nd edn. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1820). Robin Hood: Being a complete history of all the notable and merry exploits performed by him and his men on many occasions (London: William Darton Jnr., 1818). Rybicki, J., M. Eder and D Hoover, ‘Computational stylistics and text analysis’, in Doing Digital Humanities, eds. C.  Crompton, R.  L. Lane and R.  Siemens (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), pp. 123–144. Scholfield, William [William Godwin], Bible stories. Memorable acts of the Ancient Patriarchs, Judges and Kings, Extracted from their Original Historians 2 vols. (London: R. Phillips, 1803). St. Clair, William, The Godwins and the Shelleys: The Biography of a Family (London: Faber and Faber, 1989). The Story of Griselda. With Three Copperplates (London: Tabart and Co., 1804). Tabart’s Collection of Popular Stories for the Nursery: from the French, Italian, and Old English Writers, Newly Translated and Revised, Part I (London: Tabart & Co., 1804). Wordsworth, William, The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind (London: Edward Moxon, 1850).

Godwin and the Love of Fame Eliza O’Brien

This chapter considers Godwin’s philosophical and personal exploration of the desire for fame in a number of works. From An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) to Thoughts on Man (1831) via his autobiographical fragments (estimated dates 1790–1820) and throughout his novels, Godwin returns again and again to the vexing subject of this desire. Fame is a complicated subject in Godwin’s writing. It is composed of the wish to be recognised, and to receive admiration for one’s merits, but crucially, for Godwin, fame based on a public reputation for virtue may positively inspire the private behaviour and morality of others towards greater virtue, which will in turn further improve public behaviour. Examining Godwin’s steady engagement with ideas of fame across his career helps us to reframe Godwin’s thinking about the subjects of his historical and biographical writing, and reveals him as a distinctive and incisive critic of ideas of reputation, admiration, and emulation within wider Romantic culture. Godwin maintains his belief in a qualified value of fame, despite testing it repeatedly throughout his writing, and despite his culture’s dubiety about fame as newly frivolous, feminised, and fickle.1 In this chapter I consider what

E. O’Brien (*) Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. O’Brien et al. (eds.), New Approaches to William Godwin, Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62912-0_10

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fame means to Godwin, as both a philosophical idea with a social and moral force for good, and as a personal desire for acclaim in his autobiographical fragments. We will see the extent to which Godwin was interested in fame, and how it is at the heart of his theory of political justice, tightly woven into his understanding of virtue. The concept of fame exists in two main ways: first as seemingly timeless or decontextualised within his philosophy, and then as something existing in a time and place of specific social and political conditions which may warp or elevate it further. We see this testing of the idea of fame most fully in his novels, but Godwin’s family memoirs also demonstrate how Godwin grappled uneasily with his concept of fame. Looking at fame in the Romantic era provides us with a context for Godwin’s career-long investigation of the utility of public writing and public acclaim. The issue of celebrity for an author, as scholars such as Eric Eisner, David Higgins, and Ghislaine McDayter have considered, was one that underwent a noticeable transformation in the long eighteenth century, and became especially heightened in the Romantic era.2 Tom Mole identifies this celebrity culture as one consisting of ‘three pillars’ made up of ‘an individual, an industry, and an audience’, made possible by the industrial print culture of the late eighteenth century.3 It is a process, Mole writes elsewhere, which ‘functions by branding the identity of an individual to raise his or her mediated profile, allowing the celebrity to rise above the sea of other aspirants to public notice and gain widespread attention, both positive and negative’.4 Godwin does not fit into this model—he was not commodified in this way—and neither does he fit the model of writer-­ as-­spectacle, in the manner of Letitia Landon or Lord Byron. Positioning him within the wider context of sudden Romantic celebrity, however, enables us to recognise a pattern which is becoming familiar to us from recent studies of the period’s fascination with literary celebrity: increased interest in the author; increased readership, actual or perceived; elevated reputation; notoriety and or disgrace; silence; pseudonymity, and possibly a productive twilight. Because so much of Godwin’s writing deals with the idea of reputation, and because we can therefore trace his thoughts on the subject at the same time as we consider his experience of it, he becomes a tantalising subject for an analysis of fame in the Romantic period. But mainly, Godwin is an interesting case because he sees a moral value in fame. He uses the idea of fame in writing on political justice, public morality, and virtue, most notably in the two works that made him famous— Political Justice and Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb

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Williams (1794)—in unexpected and carefully worked out arguments to advance his theories about how to achieve happiness for humankind. Concerns about posterity, commerce, and cultivating an audience, such as those Andrew Bennett has examined, are not quite the issues at hand here; Godwin is not in pursuit of literary immortality in the same way as William Wordsworth is, for example.5 But his desire to cultivate his audience, in the sense of wanting to educate them into greater rationality and greater happiness, brings Godwin into the same wide realm inhabited by immortality, reputation, and posterity; for Godwin, however, this is the realm of fame, and as Eric Eisner observes, this is a much older idea than that of the Romantic celebrity culture which was beginning to build. ‘Celebrity’, Eisner writes, ‘is not necessarily equivalent to popularity or prestige, and it is distinct from classical rhetorics of fame stressing virtue and achievement through heroic action’.6 Godwin’s idea of fame rests upon this Classical ideal but he revises it in some important ways: it is democratised for his age, anti-aristocratic in its understanding of merit, and applicable to both genders. His essay ‘Of the Distribution of Talents’ in Thoughts on Man, for example, deals with personal merit rather than class-based privilege and examines the ways in which an individual from any background may be drawn out to his best via a suitable education and training, rather than by patronage, access to wealth, or an automatic entry to a grammar school.7 Similarly, Godwin’s children’s literature deals explicitly with class, as we see elsewhere in this collection in the chapters by M. O. Grenby and John-Erik Hansson. Gender proved to be far less of an issue for Godwin than it was for the readers of his memoir of Mary Wollstonecraft, for example, and neither is apparent obscurity a bar to recognition; Tilottama Rajan has written about what she calls Godwin’s ‘skew of the minor’ in his indirect approaches to celebrated figures, via his biography of Milton’s nephews, or in Mandeville, his Cromwellian novel without Cromwell.8 Godwin recognises that any given social context may make distinctions that are not simply about merit. A seemingly minor character may be possessed of great virtue, and that virtue may inspire others, if only it can be recognised and known. Merit faces a constant struggle to be rewarded with recognition and esteem against those historically specific restrictions which make it hard to see, for example, virtuous behaviour in a woman philosopher in the 1790s. Godwin’s serious ideas of merit and fame have perhaps been obscured by anecdotes about his own desire for fame. The irresistible story about Mary Jane Clairmont’s salutation of Godwin as ‘the immortal Godwin!’ as

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he sat reading on a balcony, contrasting with his ‘doubtful immortality’ in William Hazlitt’s eyes, or of being found alive while thought dead—Percy Shelley’s notorious discovery—have made the idea of Godwin’s personal fame familiar to us, but perhaps in a way that has distracted us from the role that fame plays in his work.9 The anecdotes positioning Godwin in the realm of immortality and posterity, while humorous, nonetheless signify his close contemporaries’ acute awareness of how much the idea of fame meant to him. It is not merely personal fame which is at stake here, but also the idea of how fame may be connected to social improvement by its promotion of virtue. The love of fame is fraught, because what is presented as socially benevolent in Godwin’s philosophy becomes obsessive in his novels: Falkland, St. Leon, and Fleetwood all bear testament to the disastrous personal and social effects of the love of fame. If Godwin begins this exploration of fame in a (positive) abstract context in Political Justice, he quickly arrives at its (negative) social context in Caleb Williams the next year. In that novel and the later fictions, the effects of a love of fame are misanthropic, dramatic, and catastrophic; the testing-ground of Godwin’s historical novels demonstrate the contradictions inherent in the idea of fame, of public and private, of time and place, and of desire and destruction, that Godwin and his culture could not reconcile.10

What Fame Means to Godwin Godwin believed in the efficacy of the virtuous exemplar, and in the advantages gained by the stimulating effect of that exemplar upon the behaviour of his beholders. Illustrations of virtue feature throughout Political Justice, drawn from history and the Classics, literature and proverbs, but Godwin’s understanding of virtue can be expressed succinctly: ‘Virtue demands the active employment of an ardent mind in the promotion of the general good’.11 Godwin’s ideas of fame are inherently concerned with the relation between individual virtue and the publicity gained via acting for ‘the general good’, because behaving virtuously for others becomes inseparable from achieving the admiration of others. Godwin asserts that ‘virtue not only leads to the happiness of him who practices it, but to the esteem and affection of others. Nothing can be more indisputable, than that the direct road to the esteem of mankind, is by doing things worthy of their esteem’.12 Fame is thus achieved by earning the esteem of others: ‘All the praise which a virtuous man and an honest action can merit, I am obliged to pay to the uttermost mite’.13 Praise for virtue is compelled from us by

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our duty to sincere truthfulness, as part of Godwin’s scheme for a more perfect and just society; therefore attending to the role played by fame in his philosophy helps us to understand Godwin’s thinking about the self as it relates to virtue, benevolence, and society. Before we attend to that, we need to consider what fame meant to Godwin, especially in his phrase ‘the love of fame’ as it appears in Political Justice: The truly wise man will be actuated neither by interest nor ambition, the love of honour nor the love of fame. He has no emulation. He is not made uneasy by a comparison of his own attainments with those of others, but by a comparison with the standard of right. He has a duty indeed obliging him to seek the good of the whole; but that good is his only object. If that good be effected by another hand, he feels no disappointment. All men are his fellow labourers, but he is the rival of no man. Like Pedaretus in ancient story, he exclaims: ‘I also have endeavoured to deserve; but there are three hundred citizens in Sparta better than myself, and I rejoice.’14

Fame appears here as a simple substitute for praise or renown. It is not the literary or social celebrity of Godwin’s day, or of ours. It has much more to do with Classical virtue than any contemporary phenomenon, as we may have guessed already from the reference to Pedaretus, a Spartan famous for his modesty and virtue, a man of ‘no emulation’ yet who Godwin holds up for us to emulate. Spartan virtue is a central concept in Plutarch’s retelling of the story of exemplary law-givers such as Lycurgus in his Lives, a text which has a significant influence upon Godwin in Political Justice and indeed, across the eighteenth century; because of Plutarch’s influence on the development of Rousseau’s thought, in the 1790s Spartan virtue becomes a central concept in the new French republic, grounded as it was in so many of Rousseau’s ideas of virtue.15 Rebecca Kingston describes as ‘fundamental Plutarchan themes’ the concepts of ‘education as moral education, exemplarity as a central aspect of moral thinking, and political right as the pursuit of justice and the common good’ tracing these throughout Rousseau’s work.16 In the case of Godwin, the influence of Plutarch is doubled, both via his direct encounter with the Lives and works of Latin republican history, and indirectly via Rousseau’s copious use of it in The Confessions and The Social Contract.17 As Jonathan Sachs has argued, Godwin’s understanding of virtue is based on the Classical model of male republicanism, observing that ‘Godwin’s reverence for the ancients, then, works in a

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Plutarchian mode, in which the exemplary nature of ancient individuals gives meaning and greatness to ancient history. History is understood biographically, and biography acts as a kind of moral fable’.18 Sachs extends this model to Godwin’s fiction, and indeed this idea of biographical history saturates his writing throughout his career, in his children’s literature, histories, and throughout his novels, where character is revealed through context. Godwin’s concept of fame, I suggest, is also clearly dependent on that Classical model, but one which, at least in the first edition of Political Justice, eschews the Plutarchan ambiguity towards fame and adopts it as simply positive.19 Fame, for Godwin, is not notoriety, and it is not celebrity: it is based instead upon meritorious acts by an individual which are worthy of his society’s esteem, leading to the praise of that virtuous individual who we are obliged to acknowledge and promote. In this way, we can understand how fame and virtue are positively connected for Godwin: at best, a love of virtue may be reconciled with a love of fame, because to win fame for one’s merit is the only type of fame worth having. To love fame, therefore, has the potential to lead a person towards loving merit; it may not be a pure beginning, but few of us are ‘truly wise’ to start with. But we see the limitations of this in Godwin’s discussion of ‘the truly wise man’ as quoted above. Even as Godwin celebrates the detachment and independence of his ideal wise man, ‘actuated neither by interest nor ambition, the love of honour nor the love of fame’ and therefore acting in accordance with a higher principle—truth—than the society which surrounds him, he cannot avoid locating that individual within a social and political context: ‘the whole’. That context may be flawed, erroneous, malicious, or corrupt. Godwin writes in Political Justice that it is impossible ‘to say how much good one man sufficiently rigid in his adherence to truth would effect. One such man, with genius, information and energy, might redeem a nation from vice’.20 In so doing he inadvertently reminds of us of how much harm one man, with contempt for the truth, may inflict upon a whole nation. The unstable quality of the nature of ‘the whole’, the unreliability of context and custom, the problem of when Godwin is writing for, as well as where, come to the fore. Duration is important for Godwin, and the Classical models he frequently relies upon grant him that seemingly timeless authority to assert the omnipotence of such principles as truth, justice, and virtue. Godwin’s beloved heroes of antiquity, for instance, Solon, Lycurgus, Mutius Scaevola, and the Gracchi, resonate across the centuries to him because

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their deeds and virtuous characters became famous, and such virtue, like truth itself, does not date. But there is something about the weight which Classical models have been given, and the apparent timelessness which seems inherent in their fame, which reveals a fracture in Godwin’s thinking, or perhaps, a central fault-line in the concept of fame: it is not timeless. It depends on, and it is produced by, temporality: just as Romantic celebrity is a construction of its time, place, and industrial printing process, so Godwin’s idea of fame is produced by his education, his profession, and his politics. The Romantics were newly conscious that fame cannot be predicted or secured. As Hazlitt argues in Table Talk (1821), reflecting upon ‘the troublesome effort to ensure the admiration of others’: The idea of what the public will think prevents the public from ever thinking at all […] so far then is public opinion from resting on a broad and solid basis, as the aggregate of thought and feeling in a community, that it is slight and shallow and variable to the last degree—the bubble of the moment—so that we may safely say the public is the dupe of public opinion, not its parent […] Posterity is no better (not a bit more enlightened or more liberal), except that you are no longer in their power, and that the voice of common fame saves them the trouble of deciding on your claims. The public now are the posterity of Milton and Shakespear. Our posterity will be the living public of a future generation.21

The ‘bubble of the moment’ can be seen, but not grasped: it defeats any efforts to solidify it, and the bubble of the next moment cannot be predicted either. The point Hazlitt makes about current instability becoming the posterity of the future is one which casts a shadow on Godwin’s reliance upon the public in his writing, both in the attention of the audience he writes for, and the public good he hopes to achieve by it. Political Justice needs an audience in order to achieve political justice, but that audience’s response is by no means certain. The error-strewn, imperfect world which Godwin writes for, in the hope of improving it, is the same imperfect world which may reject his ideas, or may simply not respond at all. Posterity may work to achieve recognition, and fame, for Godwin’s ideas, but equally, it may not. Relying upon fame to do some of the work for his ideas of merit, virtue, and reform is an unstable move within this temporary ‘bubble’.

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This is not the only threat posed by a reliance upon fame. Godwin returns often to the idea of the love of fame as a spur for worthwhile activity in his autobiographical fragments. He describes his character as ‘inextinguishably loving admiration and fame, yet scarcely in any case envious’ and an early description of his schooldays is presented as follows: ‘this scene of emulation was precisely calculated to interest my passions, and produced a strong and indelible effect upon my character [… ] my ardour to distinguish myself was great. I learned by rote many stories out of the bible’.22 However, the degree of self-gratification involved in the desire for and attainment of fame presents another danger, an unobtrusive threat to the virtue which elevates the self to that degree of public esteem in the first place, and which is hinted at by the mention of ‘envy’ here. While the young Godwin’s love of praise, which encouraged him to excel before his schoolmates, seems harmless enough, Godwin explores this threat further in Political Justice in relation to martyrdom. In a long discussion of truth-­ telling, and what we might term pardonable untruths (e.g., to save a life), he engages with the idea of martyrdom in the following way: ‘It is an evil not wantonly to be incurred, for we know not what good yet remains for us to do. It is an evil not to be avoided at the expense of principle, for we should be upon our guard against setting an inordinate value upon our own efforts, and imagining that truth would die, if we were to be destroyed’.23 Godwin understands the potential devastation which pride and egotism may wreak upon the duty to truth, revealed unexpectedly here, as martyrdom is so often thought of as the manifestation of an extreme duty to principle rather than the sacrifice of that duty. Martyrdom threatens useful virtue by aiming at useless fame. It is a relevant example in Godwin’s wider analysis of fame because of its connection to ambition and glory, fuelled by self-interest and posing a threat to both truth and virtue. Again, this idea of the threat posed to virtue by the love of fame is something which is securely located in the Classical exemplary lives. As Geert Roskam has observed, fame, and the love of fame, are ‘one of the recurrent leitmotifs’ of Plutarch’s Lives; the love of fame is a negative trait, however, because ambition for it tends to topple the great, as it ‘sooner or later incites them to commit injustice’.24 What Roskam describes as ‘the shady borderline between honourable and excessive ambition’ is for Godwin the same fault-line that runs between benevolence and self-love, mirroring Plutarch’s ideas rather more than Godwin would like, in his attempts to emphasise only its positive

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attributes.25 Fame in Political Justice is connected to virtue and benevolence, which is selfless and disinterested and exists in opposition to selflove, which in Thoughts on Man is dismissed disparagingly as an invented ‘creed’ of the seventeenth century, originating with La Rochefoucault.26 Self-love is therefore a more short-lived concept when compared to the disinterested, heroic model of benevolence in Political Justice illustrated with Biblical and Classical examples, but this disparagement based on temporality does not quite vanquish the threat of self-interest, which Godwin attempts to scotch again and again in his promotion of benevolence. Neither does it vanquish the tendency of the love of fame to overpower virtue; Roskam notes that one of the moral questions raised throughout Plutarch’s Lives is ‘When does an honourable motivation become excessive, and therefore blameworthy?’27 For Godwin, that moment often comes when a virtuous individual abandons the duty of truth and benevolence for other, more corrosive desires; something, as I will go on to show, he considers in greater depth in his novels. The principle in Political Justice that actions worthy of esteem are ‘the direct road to esteem’ depends upon the assumption that those estimable actions are universal and universally recognised in a world where truth is omnipotent, even while Political Justice also recognises that the world is not yet perfect. But when these ideas are put into practice, in Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman and in his novels, we see further testing of the assumption of truth’s omnipotence. The concept of fame is self-evidently connected to social intercourse. Whether arising in the self and stimulated by society, or arising in and inculcated by society, it works upon the bonds of connection between an individual and his or her society, to either strengthen or sever them. In Political Justice the speculative effects of this work are largely positive, but the idea of fame develops quite differently in Godwin’s novels when it converges with solitude and misanthropy. First, however, we will see what happens to fame when another variable element is considered in some detail: the audience.

Merit and Memoir We see a continuation of Godwin’s interest in the Classical exemplary lives in his drafts and fragments of frank autobiography in which, following the Enlightenment example of Rousseau, he seeks to ‘expose his character’, but also follows the Christian tradition of writing his life for moral

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reflection.28 His novels, too, bear the impress of Rousseau’s confessional style, in their first-person narrative structure, their deep psychological knowledge, and their exposure of painful errors committed by fallible men of fallen virtue: a succession of uneasy characters who seek both to act benevolently and to retreat from the world. Godwin’s advance into the world is similarly uneasy: Perhaps one of the sources of my love of admiration and fame has been my timidity and embarrassment: I am unfit to be alone, in a crowd, in a circle of strangers, in an inn, almost in a shop. I hate universally to speak to the man who is not previously desirous to hear me.—I carry feelers before me, and am often hindered from giving an opinion, by the man who spoke before giving one wholly adverse to mine.29

Godwin’s self-envisioning here as an insect, tentatively testing the air before he dares to venture forth, seeking a fit audience, seems almost hopelessly self-defeating when compared with his greatest desire: ‘It has been the uniform passion of my mind to associate with the intellectually great’.30 Yet perhaps this painful awareness of personal inadequacy compared with personal desire, which we see in his autobiographical writing, was what led him to think it was somehow necessary to address his son’s failings of character in a brief biographical sketch published in 1835, three years after William Godwin Jr.’s sudden death, and presented as an introduction to the younger Godwin’s novel Transfusion (1835).31 The sketch, A Memoir of the Author, by his Father, both manages to affirm Godwin’s intellectual standing, and to make a claim for what his son’s standing would eventually, surely, have been.32 A passage about Godwin Jr.’s early interest in a profession results in a handsome compliment to Godwin senior from John Nash, the eminent architect, but ‘my son betrayed an unsteady and roving disposition’ so the training offered (from Nash, with a five-hundred-guinea fee, waived out of respect for Godwin senior’s character and reputation!) comes to nothing.33 The sense of audience for the memoir is not quite clear. Discussions of young Godwin’s eventually emerging literary talents, his ‘sound estimate of his own productions’, and his success in finding publication in the Literary Examiner and Blackwood’s seem more suited to the eyes of a casual reader, interested in the promising Gothic novel Transfusion. Meanwhile, the remarks about the fretful, ‘somewhat fiery’, and restless young man seem motivated more by a desire to reclaim his son’s

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reputation in the eyes of Godwin’s acquaintances, or perhaps in the eyes of Godwin himself. Having a son who was thought to be unable ‘with any degree of taste [to] turn a sentence or construct a paragraph’ until he presented his father with his work in print, reveals a sad weight of expectation, of merit expected, and recognition thwarted.34 He ‘would infallibly have distinguished himself with honour’ had he lived, Godwin concludes (Godwin Jr. died at the age of twenty-nine), again managing to deflate his son’s existing literary and personal achievements in the face of a now-lost glorious future. The overwriting of actual virtue and achievement, however minor, by the biographer’s ghostly dreams of greatness reveal only disappointment, and contrast sharply with another of Godwin’s self-­ reflective fragments, ‘On the Length of the Life of Man, A Confession’ (1822) in which he muses that ‘had I died at thirty-three […] I should have remained to succeeding generations, and even to the whole mass of my surviving contemporaries, utterly unknown’.35 The thought of dying misunderstood, ‘as some thing ridiculous’, unrealised, and unrecognised, emerges strongly from these autobiographical fragments, and it hints at the authorial purpose, and anxiety about audience, behind an earlier family memoir: Godwin’s account of Wollstonecraft.36 As Gregory Dart has noted about the appearance of Plutarch in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), the ‘little library’ in the possession of the monster ‘offers a kind of introduction to the history of European republicanism’. It includes Plutarch’s Lives, which the monster describes as having the following effects: ‘I felt the greatest ardour for virtue rise within me, and abhorrence for vice […] Induced by these feelings, I was of course led to admire peaceable law-givers, Numa, Solon, and Lycurgus, in preference to Romulus and Theseus’.37 It turns out that the monster has paid at least as much attention to the stories of Plutarch’s destroyers as his law-­ givers, and Shelley follows the Godwinian novels in recognising that the ‘of course’ does not necessarily lead to positive effects in the world. But in his memoir of Wollstonecraft Godwin writes as if readers of virtuous lives cannot but admire and draw inspiration from those lives: It has always appeared to me, that to give the public some account of the life of a person of eminent merit deceased, is a duty incumbent on survivors. It seldom happens that such a person passes through life, without being the subject of thoughtless calumny, or malignant misrepresentation. It cannot happen that the public at large should be on a footing with their intimate acquaintance, and be the observer of those virtues which discover them-

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selves principally in personal intercourse. Every benefactor of mankind is more or less influenced by a liberal passion for fame; and survivors only pay a debt due to these benefactors, when they assert and establish on their part, the honour they loved. The justice which is thus done to the illustrious dead, converts into the fairest source of encouragement to those who would follow them in the same career. The human species at large is interested in this justice, as it teaches them to place their respect and affection, upon those qualities which best deserve to be esteemed and loved [… ] There are not many individuals with whose character the public welfare and improvement are more intimately connected, than the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.38

The terrible irony of the actual effect of Godwin’s memoir in making Wollstonecraft infamous comes into even sharper focus within the wider context of his belief in the stimulating force of exemplary lives and a general knowledge of the Plutarchan mode. We see here his faith in human interest, in the reasonableness and justice of ‘the human species’, and Godwin’s confidence that his memoir would create that ‘attachment’ to its subject and the resulting positive effect upon ‘the public welfare and improvement’. All the theory of Political Justice is played out practically, specifically, and disastrously, in the ‘intimate’ biography of Wollstonecraft. When Godwin writes that ‘survivors only pay a debt due to these benefactors, when they assert and establish on their part, the honour they loved’, we see the reflection of his sense of duty as a biographer, and perhaps gain a glimpse of what he struggled to do in writing about his son, given his standards for writing as a ‘survivor’. We also see Godwin’s seeming breach of decorum from this viewpoint, in trying to provide a perspective to ‘the observer of those virtues which discover themselves principally in personal intercourse’. Godwin intensifies the importance of such active emotions as admiration, esteem, and inspiration which he aligns with the ‘illustrious dead’ of which Wollstonecraft is now a part, and for him, this is a public duty as well as a private tribute: ‘It must be remembered that I honoured her intellectual powers and the nobleness and generosity of her propensities; mere tenderness would not have been adequate to produce the happiness we experienced’.39 As Richard Holmes reminds us, when Godwin revised the text for a second edition later in 1798, he clarified rather than withdrew the material about Wollstonecraft’s life which so shocked his readers, and in the main he expanded his account of her intellectual gifts.

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Godwin clearly retained a belief in the public value of fame, but the episode perhaps encouraged him to think again about what presenting a virtuous life to a particular audience might actually mean.40 Audience reception, and Godwin’s revisions, expose the difficulties inherent in the transition between his theory of virtue, of writing an exemplary life for his times, and of publishing that life. As Eileen Hunt Botting has recently discussed, in the period 1798–1818 ‘the Memoirs sparked public interest in [Wollstonecraft’s] life story and autobiographical writings, and, in turn, a shift in the general public’s attention from her Rights of Woman to her biography’.41 This is the inverse of Godwin’s intention, and a defeat of the Plutarchan model: what can the biographer do, if virtue cannot be recognised by its readers? The exemplary life, instead of doing ‘justice’ to the ‘illustrious dead’, instead of earning fame for Wollstonecraft, was used to destroy both life and work.42 In Godwin’s attempt to make private virtue public, to make private affection into public fame, truth and justice are found not to be omnipotent, at least not with his particular audience, in his particular time. But there are other readers, like Godwin’s friend John Fenwick, who catch Godwin’s intention and, perhaps, his attitude to fame more generally: ‘Perhaps such works as the Memoirs of Mrs. Godwin’s Life, and Rousseau’s Confessions, will ever disgrace their writers with the meaner spirits of the world; but then it is to be remembered, that this herd neither confers nor can take away fame’.43 The problem Godwin begins to explore with increasing fascination is that the process by which fame is conferred is a chancy and conflicted matter.

Fame in the Novels Within the fragmentary autobiographical sketches we can see the root of what later became the substantial flowering of Godwin’s literary imagination: justice, merit, and fame.44 Across the first three of Godwin’s mature novels, the question of fame arises consistently, but it is consistently disastrous. Roskam’s ‘shady borderline between honourable and excessive ambition’ becomes a glaring one-way street; the moral damage inflicted upon Falkland, St. Leon, and Fleetwood by their deeds in pursuit of fame is clear, and cannot be undone. Male characters whose self-love is bound up in public esteem are seen to make sacrifices and to commit crimes in the preservation of a fair name, before realising that the force of their efforts has emptied their lives of all meaning, though not of all purpose. That purpose, to preserve a fair name, ends in the destruction of social bonds,

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which is misanthropic at best and fatal at worst. It is as if these characters have been schooled in the great Classical lives, but in common with Shelley’s monster they have turned to violence not virtue. In Caleb Williams the clearest example of how the love of fame leads to destruction is Falkland’s system of chivalric honour: [Falkland] believed that nothing was so well calculated to make men delicate, gallant and humane, as a temper perpetually alive to the sentiments of birth and honour. The opinions he entertained upon these topics were illustrated in his conduct, which was assiduously conformed to the model of heroism that his fancy suggested.45

Falkland’s chivalric sense of honour and of the importance of a fair name is associated with feudalism and reinforced by the contemporary legal power of a magistrate, a power he abuses. More widely, his system is associated with Burkean values, with the Italian vendetta, with murder direct and indirect, and with the near complete destruction of Caleb Williams. Caleb tells us: ‘To his story [Falkland’s] the whole fortune of my life was linked; because he was miserable, my happiness, my name, and my existence have been irretrievably blasted’.46 Caleb’s attempts to preserve his name are dragged down by Falkland’s determination to preserve his: the ‘misery’ here is not only Falkland’s grief and shame at his crimes, but his fear that he will lose his good name. To this mania he sacrifices Caleb’s name: his persecution enforces flight, disguise, and changes of name, and memorably, the experience of seeing Caleb’s real name reflected back at him falsely as a robber and prison-breaker, his identity wholly overwritten, as David Fallon discusses elsewhere in this collection. Later Caleb reflects: I had gained fame indeed, the miserable fame to have my story bawled forth by hawkers and ballad mongers, to have my praises as an active and surprising villain celebrated among footmen and chambermaids; but I was neither an Erostratus nor an Alexander, to die contented with that species of eulogium.47

Erostratus holds a peculiar place in the canon of Classical fame; as Pamela Clemit notes in her recent edition of Caleb Williams, Erostratus was: an Ephesian [who] set fire to the famous Temple of Diana on the night that Alexander the Great was born, merely to gain eternal fame, after which the

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Ephesians made a law to forbid the mentioning of his name—and thus ensured his notoriety.48

The result of this desire for fame is destruction and infamy, revealing Erostratus as a more suitable echo for Falkland than Caleb’s tendency to merge Alexander and Falkland in his thinking. The love of fame, both in the sense of one’s reputation, and one’s lasting renown, is the novel’s most vital plot-device and it is central to Godwin’s exploration of justice, abuse of power, and the law. He constructs a potent set of images and situations in which to investigate how this love goes disastrously wrong, set in a very specific time and place: the context is a class-bound hierarchical society which means that the love of fame leads to disaster. By drawing upon chivalry and the Classics, aristocratic privilege and landowner power, English feudal structures and Continental manners, Godwin demonstrates the power a fair name has, not merely for Falkland with his obsessive devotion to fame, but for the general public held in the grip of that name. The public at large is shackled by its own prejudice and credulity, its unwillingness to enquire, and its readiness to believe, against all Caleb’s evidence, in Falkland’s name. Godwin develops the power of Falkland’s name even further in later editions of the novel, introducing the character of Laura Denison, whose veneration for Falkland is illustrated by a speech to Caleb which demonstrates the immensity of Falkland’s reputation: ‘That name has been a denomination, as far back as my memory can reach, for the most exalted of mortals, the wisest and most generous of men’.49 The later revisions intensify the critique of fame in the novel as Godwin shows us how valuable it is to Falkland, how much it is worth preserving—and how the cover of virtuous fame may permit abhorrent vice. St. Leon faces a reversal of Falkland’s dilemma, despite their similar geneses in chivalry and aristocracy, a dilemma that is closer to Caleb’s than Falkland’s, in having his name and his fame wrested from him. In St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century (1799) the strain of historically produced mania returns to Godwin’s plot, but here St. Leon is harried through history, pursued and outrun by infamy as a new version of Caleb Williams, where the fair name of St. Leon has been rewritten by his own actions. This time flight and pursuit of the protagonist are created by himself; St. Leon is his own antagonist. His use of alchemical secrets to gain, first, limitless wealth and then eternal youth (the first decision is indicative of St. Leon’s proud, hasty character; the second of the desperation which that first choice has led him to) creates a mysterious existence for him and

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his family, and this leads to St. Leon being regarded as a demon. The circumstances differ but the result is the same for St. Leon as it was for Caleb. ‘Innocent and blameless […] eager for the relief of the poor and afflicted; never was I the author of the slightest inconvenience or prejudice to any. Yet nothing merely human could be hated in the degree in which I was hated’.50 Alchemy is scented by the people of Pisa; while St. Leon deplores their pre-Enlightenment superstition, the people are instinctively right: St. Leon is no longer merely human, and presently, when he gains eternal youth, he will depart humanity completely. Godwin’s exploration of self-interest and misanthropy in this novel of war, imprisonment, religiously motivated hatred, and multiple traumatised men rests upon a similar dynamic to that of Caleb Williams. The mirroring of Caleb and Falkland is embodied in a single character, St. Leon himself: a would-be virtuous man who sees his reputation take on a life of its own and seemingly rewrite itself, terrifyingly beyond his control, but fuelled by his love of fame. The wresting away of his fame becomes the truth of his character. When Caleb concludes his narrative with the lines ‘I began these memoirs with the idea of vindicating my own character. I now have no character that I wish to vindicate’ he writes as someone who discovers his infamous reputation to be at last deserved, or at best, he sees clearly what kind of fame is worth having.51 But for St. Leon, having written himself into alchemy and immortality, but pretending a face of human virtue, the sense of responsibility here—he did this to himself—is not embraced in quite the same way as in Caleb Williams. But we know, too, that St. Leon does have infamy imposed upon him as well as earning it. His errors of pride and misreading (and having his actions misinterpreted) continue throughout the long narrative. His sympathetic attraction to Bethlem Gabor, the sublime, monstrous misanthropist, results in a long period of imprisonment; his futile attempts to relieve famine-stricken victims of war under Ottoman rule, ‘my great project for the revivisence of Hungary’ is viewed as treachery by an opposing armed force.52 Under yet another new name, St. Leon hides his identity yet cannot hide his anger at thwarted fame and ambition: What I heard however occasioned in me a profound reflection on the capriciousness of honour and fame, and the strange contrarieties with which opposite prejudices cause the same action to be viewed. I could not repress the vehemence of my emotions, while I was thus calumniated and vilified for actions, which I had firmly believed no malice could misrepresent, and

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fondly supposed that all sects and ages, as far as their record extended, would agree to admire.53

The scale of St. Leon’s ambition—‘all sects and ages, as far as their record extended’—is much greater than Falkland’s, and in turn Godwin makes St. Leon into an even more spectacular sacrifice to fame than either Falkland or Caleb. Where Falkland withdraws himself from society, St. Leon loses all his family members or is rejected by them more than once. Where Caleb is imprisoned within the bounds of Britain, St. Leon is trapped within a whole continent. Where Caleb is eventually publicly cleared and faces a release from his private culpability in death, St. Leon’s fate is to continue, exiled, infamous, unable to outlive his infamy, and unable to die. Conflicting desires for virtue and fame often lead to misanthropy in Godwin’s fiction, and this is developed in full in Fleetwood; Or, The New Man of Feeling (1805). The shining men of benevolence, Ruffigny and Macneil, contrast strongly with the misanthropy of the protagonist, Fleetwood, who bears the usual streak of madness and obsession. His misanthropy is not explicitly the result of disappointed ambition or thirst for glory; St. Leon’s pursuit of the ‘delusive meteor of fame’ is not repeated in Fleetwood’s narrative, yet he too suffers a blow to his more modest desire for fame and recognition, and over-values his reputation: ‘Such was my temper, that I could not sleep tranquilly upon my pillow, while I thought it possible that a native of Genoa or Peru should regard me as a villain’.54 Nursing a cankering disappointment at finding himself friendless and alone in the world, conscious of his merits (handsome, pleasing, eloquent) lonely yet disgusted by society, Fleetwood’s solitude leads to irrationality, domestic abuse, and eventual madness. The main test here is of Godwin’s idea in Political Justice that the recognition of merit leads to a positive fame, and its emulation by others. At its best and wisest, virtue needs no reward, not even of fame, but we see the failure of this in Fleetwood, whose protagonist cannot learn from virtuous exemplars. Further, Fleetwood does not attain positive fame, or fame of any kind as his merits are so congested by self-love, and the significance of this lack opens up a wide perspective on the way in which a submerged love of fame, unsupported by virtue, may wreak havoc in a small domestic circle. Fleetwood, the child of a benevolent father, is raised in rural seclusion and demonstrates his early virtue in rescuing drowning peasants. University life and fashionable society spoil him, ‘[having] been driven from a sort of

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necessity to live upon the applauses of others’, and he conforms to their lower standards of behaviour, until he is brought to his moral senses by a father-figure, Ruffigny.55 Fleetwood briefly relapses into dissipation, causing Ruffigny to leave him in despair with these lines: It is not seemly, that tried and hoary integrity should come into the lists, to chop logic with petulant and hot-blooded vice […] Goodness is the corner-­ stone of all true excellence. You cannot be blind enough to believe, that the course to which you are returning, is consistent with goodness.56

But Fleetwood, though he does return to Ruffigny and not to vice, cannot seem to find that corner-stone of stable goodness. In Walter Scott’s description he is ‘in his calm moments a determined egotist […] in his state of irritation, a frantic madman’ who despite the company and love of benevolent and virtuous men cannot learn from them, and persists in feeling nothing for anyone who is not himself.57 In his prolix and brooding narrative Fleetwood dimly perceives this flaw but cannot emulate his virtuous exemplars in their generosity and attachment to humanity: ‘Perhaps that is the most incorrigible species of misanthropy, which, as Swift expresses it, loves John, and Matthew, and Alexander, but hates mankind’.58 Fleetwood can neither learn from virtue, nor find contentment in his own merit without fame. Shorn of St. Leon’s alchemical powers, or Falkland’s Gothic menace, Fleetwood’s energy is focused upon his domestic sphere (he shuns a parliamentary career) where, from an ill-founded sense of superiority, he can tyrannise his modest, virtuous, penniless, and friendless wife. When Fleetwood is disappointed by his new wife’s choice of closet in his house (when he invites her to choose she takes as her own a room that he wants for himself) he veers dramatically from exaggerated self-sacrifice (‘May I perish, if ever I breathe a syllable on the subject!’) to disproportionate blame: ‘“Mary, Mary,” I said sometimes to myself, as I recurred to the circumstance, “I am afraid you are selfish! and what character can be less promising in social life, than hers who thinks of no one’s gratification but her own?”’.59 He resents his wife’s seeming faults, in an unconscious condemnation of his own errors. While the events of the third volume take on a more Gothic tone (jealousy, suspicion, forged letters, persecution, puppetry), Godwin’s focus throughout the novel remains on the sombre destruction that a man of excessive self-­ love may privately inflict upon ordinary social bonds. As Fleetwood and Mary achieve miraculous forgiveness and reformation, the narrative is

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brought nearly to its close by Scarborough, an agent of reconciliation. In his tale, his seeming virtue is uncovered to reveal a husband who did not really love his wife and whose harshness drove his son into a decline. Scarborough points to the emptiness of fame without friends, or of reputation without love: Men style me honest, and honourable, and worthy: I am alone in the world, surrounded with a magic circle, that no man oversteps, and no man is daring enough to touch me! This is called Respect—its genuine name is Misery!60

Scarborough emerges quietly from the aftermath of Fleetwood’s catastrophe, and his tale of the ‘magic circle’ of reputation without benevolence, of fame without love, the public face resting on nothing worth having in private returns us to Political Justice. Scarborough’s tale is unspectacular in contrast to Fleetwood’s tempests, but revelatory of something inseparable from the positive love of fame: benevolence, the unselfish love of others.

Godwin’s Future Fame We have seen elsewhere in this collection how central the idea of revision is to Godwin: returning to, developing, and extending his foundational concepts of private judgement, sincerity, and benevolence. In this chapter I hope to have shown how central, consistent, and integral the idea of fame is to Godwin’s character, his idea of civic society, and his development of fictional characters. He understands the importance and the danger of the love of fame in his own character; his fictional characters do not, and are instead warped and made miserable by their desire for distinction and glory. Godwin is ever alert to the allure of fame, but can see clearly the self-love which brings it into being, and the destruction it leaves in its wake. In his exploration throughout Political Justice of the public connection between private virtue and public esteem, from his investigation of the utility of admiration to the dangers of useless martyrdom, we can now appreciate Godwin as a theorist of fame. As he puts it in Political Justice: Of all the principles of justice there is none so material to the moral rectitude of mankind as this, that no man can be distinguished but by his personal merit. Why not endeavour to reduce to practice so simple and sublime a lesson? When a man has proved himself a benefactor to the public, when he has

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already by laudable perseverance cultivated in himself talents, which need only encouragement and public favour to bring them to maturity, let that man be honoured. In a state of society where fictitious distinctions are unknown, it is impossible he should not be honoured.61

Godwin shows us elsewhere in his work that this practice is not so simple, nor so easily achieved, when trying to reform a society which does know ‘fictitious distinctions’ like rank and gender. The less overt theme of fame in Political Justice, therefore, in that occasionally bloodless but boundless theoretical work, is sounded out in many different variations throughout Godwin’s life, his novels, essays, plays, children’s literature, and most affectingly in his life writing and memoirs. The love of fame retains its potential for construction or destruction, for benevolence or for misanthropy, for ironic failure, but above it all, fame itself retains its power, and its allure.

Notes 1. See, for example, Claire Brock, The Feminization of Fame, 1750–1830 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), H. J. Jackson, Those Who Write for Immortality: Romantic Reputations and the Dream of Lasting Fame (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), and David Stewart, The Form of Poetry in the 1820s and 1830s: A Period of Doubt (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 2. See Eric Eisner, Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Literary Celebrity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); David Higgins, Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine: Biography, Celebrity, Politics (London: Routledge, 2005); Ghislaine McDayter, Byromania: Byron and the Birth of Celebrity Culture (New York: SUNY Press, 2008). 3. Tom Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 3. 4. Tom Mole, ’Celebrity and Anonymity’ in The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism, ed. David Duff (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 464–77 (p. 465). 5. Andrew Bennett, Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 6. Eisner, p. 3. 7. See ‘Of the Distribution of Talents’ in Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, 7 vols, gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993), VI, Thoughts on Man, ed. Mark Philp, pp. 48–67.

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8. Tilottama Rajan, introduction, Mandeville, by William Godwin (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2016), pp. 11–45 (pp. 11–12). For more on this, see also Rajan, ‘Uncertain Futures: History and Genealogy in William Godwin’s The Lives of Edward and John Philips, Nephews and Pupils of Milton’, Milton Quarterly, 32:2 (1998), 75–86. 9. The anecdote about Mary Jane Clairmont is mentioned by Don Locke, A Fantasy of Reason: The Life and Thought of William Godwin (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), p.  205. For Hazlitt’s account of Godwin’s character, celebrity, and obscurity see ‘William Godwin’ in The Spirit of the Age: or Contemporary Portraits by William Hazlitt (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999), and for Shelley see The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 vols, ed. Frederic L.  Jones (Oxford University Press, 1964), II, p. 157. 10. It is worth noting here that much of the argument of Political Justice also depends on time, place, and context: ‘what is right under certain circumstances to-day, may by an alteration in those circumstances become wrong tomorrow. Right and wrong are the result of certain relations, and those relations are founded in the respective qualities of the beings to whom they belong’: truth may be eternal and omnipotent, but right and wrong vary depending on the stage of perfection currently achieved by individuals or their society. See Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, III: An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. Mark Philp, book 6, chapter 1, p. 322. Henceforth referred to as Political Justice, with book, chapter, and page numbers supplied for quotations. 11. Political Justice, 1.7, p. 43. 12. Political Justice, 4.9, pp. 198–9. 13. Political Justice, 4.4, p. 135. 14. Political Justice, 4.8, pp. 195–6. 15. See, for example, Gregory Dart’s Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), especially chapters one and two for his analysis of ‘neo-Spartan Jacobinism’ (p. 13). 16. Rebecca Kingston, ‘Rousseau’s debt to Plutarch’, The Rousseauian Mind, eds. Eve Grace and Christopher Kelly (London: Routledge, 2019) pp. 23–33 (p. 31). 17. In Political Justice Book 5, chapter 15, ‘Of Political Imposture’ Godwin provides an extensive footnote which addresses the principle contribution to a critique of government, for which he regards Rousseau’s work very highly; amid clear criticism of Rousseau’s ‘weakness and prejudice’ Godwin acknowledges his philosophical debt to him and his tremendous admiration for his abilities: ‘the term eloquence is perhaps more precisely descriptive of his mode of composition, than that of any other writer that has ever existed’, p. 273.

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18. Jonathan Sachs, Romantic Antiquity: Rome in the British Imagination 1789–1832 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 97. 19. Kingston observes that Plutarch’s Lives contain two types of exemplarity. In the first a virtuous character is intended to be admired and emulated, and in the second moral questions are raised, in contrast to the straightforward emulation of the first type (pp. 24–5). 20. Political Justice, 4.4, p. 136. 21. William Hazlitt, ‘On Living to ones-self’ in The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt, 9 vols, ed. Duncan Wu (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998), VI: Table Talk, pp. 78–88 (p. 78; p. 85; p. 87). 22. ‘Analysis of own character begun Sept 26, 1798’ in Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, 8 vols, gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1992), I: Autobiography; Autobiographical Fragments and Reflections; Godwin/Shelley Correspondence; Memoirs, ed. Mark Philp, henceforth Memoirs. ‘Analysis’ pp.  55–60 (p.  55); ‘Autobiography’ pp. 3–38 (p. 22). 23. Political Justice, 4.4, p. 139. 24. Geert Roskam, ‘Ambition and Love of Fame in Plutarch’s Lives of Agis, Cleomenes, and The Gracchi’, Classical Philology, 106:3 (2011), 208–225 (p. 208). 25. Roskam, p. 209. 26. ‘Of Self-Love and Benevolence’ in Thoughts on Man, pp.  151–162 (pp. 160–1). 27. Roskam, p. 212. 28. ‘Analysis of own character’, p. 55. 29. ‘Analysis of own character’, p. 56. 30. ‘Analysis of own character’, p. 59. 31. For a thorough discussion of William Godwin Jr. see Beatrice Turner, Romantic Childhood, Romantic Heirs: Reproduction and Retrospection, 1820–1850 (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), chapter 6, ‘William Godwin Jr. and the “Ties of Blood”: After the Family of Feeling’ pp. 181–217. 32. This sketch is entitled Memoir of William Godwin Junior in Memoirs, pp. 143–6. 33. Memoir of William Godwin Junior, p. 144. 34. Memoir of William Godwin Junior, p. 145; p. 144. 35. ‘Of the Length of Life of Man, A Confession’ in Memoirs, pp.  61–65 (p. 61). 36. ‘Of the Length of Life of Man, A Confession’, p. 62. 37. Dart, p.  6. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (New York: Norton, 1996), p. 86; p. 87.

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38. Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman in Memoirs, pp. 85–141 (p. 87). 39. ‘Analysis of own character’, p. 58. 40. Richard Holmes, introduction, A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, and Memoirs of the Author of ‘The Rights of Woman’ (Harmondsworth,: Penguin, 1987), pp. 9–55 (pp. 48–50). 41. Eileen Hunt Botting, ‘Nineteenth-Century Critical Reception’ in Mary Wollstonecraft in Context, eds. Nancy E.  Johnson and Paul Keen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 50–6, (p. 52). 42. Hunt Botting ultimately concludes that Wollstonecraft’s works and reputation were not entirely blotted out, once the furore had passed, and that while her personal life may have remained controversial, her works continued their influence in Brazil, the United States, and Europe. The reception of the Memoirs ‘complicated, but did not eliminate, interest in her life and work’, p. 53. 43. John Fenwick, Public Characters of 1799–1800 (London, 1799) in Lives of the Great Romantics III: Godwin, Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley by their Contemporaries, 3 vols, eds. Pamela Clemit, Harriet Jump and Betty T. Bennett (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999), I: William Godwin, ed. Pamela Clemit, p. 28. 44. See, for example, Godwin’s 1832 preface to Fleetwood in which he describes the genesis of Caleb Williams, and his ‘Autobiography’ where he mentions the impressions made in his early childhood of the idea of an innocent man punished, or of the terrible sight of the gallows, or of reading The History of Mademoiselle de St. Phale, which he directly names as influential upon Caleb Williams in the later preface. The preface is reprinted in, for example, Caleb Williams ed. Pamela Clemit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp.  347–52. In his autobiography Godwin also muses upon his childhood fear, ‘the no great improbability, as I conceived it, that I should finally perish at the gallows, under the imputation of a murder of which I was totally guiltless’. ‘Autobiography’, in Memoirs, p. 19. 45. Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, III; Caleb Williams ed. Pamela Clemit, p. 11. 46. Caleb Williams, p. 10. 47. Caleb Williams, p. 241. 48. Pamela Clemit, ed., Caleb Williams (2009), footnote p. 359. 49. See the 1832 edition of the novel for these revisions and the quotation above: Caleb Williams, eds. Gary Handwerk and A.  A. Markley (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2000), p. 405. 50. Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, IV: St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century, ed. Pamela Clemit, p. 220. 51. Caleb Williams, p. 277.

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52. St. Leon, p. 343. 53. St. Leon, p. 353. 54. St. Leon, p.  353. Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, V: Fleetwood; Or, The New Man of Feeling, ed. Pamela Clemit, p. 184. 55. Fleetwood, p. 52 56. Fleetwood, p. 134. 57. Walter Scott, review of Fleetwood in the Edinburgh Review (April 1805, 182–93, reprinted in Fleetwood, eds. Gary Handwerk and A.A.  Markley (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2001), pp. 518–522 (p. 522). 58. Fleetwood, p. 138. 59. Fleetwood, p. 196. 60. Fleetwood, p. 275. 61. Political Justice, 5.11, pp. 254–5.

Bibliography Bennett, Andrew, Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Brock, Claire, The Feminization of Fame, 1750–1830 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Clemit, Pamela, Harriet Jump, and Betty T.  Bennett, eds., Lives of the Great Romantics III: Godwin, Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley by their Contemporaries, 3 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999). Clemit, Pamela, ed., Caleb Williams by William Godwin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Dart, Gregory, Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Eisner, Eric, Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Literary Celebrity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Godwin, William, Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, 8 vols, gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1992). Godwin, William, Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, 7 vols, gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993). Godwin, William, Caleb Williams, eds. Gary Handwerk and A.  A. Markley (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2000). Hazlitt, William, The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt, 9 vols, ed. Duncan Wu (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998). Higgins, David, Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine: Biography, Celebrity, Politics (London: Routledge, 2005). Holmes, Richard, ed. and introd., A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark and Memoirs of the Author of ‘The Rights of Woman’ by Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987).

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Hunt Botting, Eileen, ‘Nineteenth-Century Critical Reception’ in Mary Wollstonecraft in Context, eds. Nancy E. Johnson and Paul Keen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 50–6. Jackson, H. J., Those Who Write for Immortality: Romantic Reputations and the Dream of Lasting Fame (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). Kingston, Rebecca, ‘Rousseau’s debt to Plutarch’, The Rousseauian Mind, eds. Eve Grace and Christopher Kelly (London: Routledge, 2019) pp. 23–33. Locke, Don, A Fantasy of Reason: The Life and Thought of William Godwin (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980). McDayter, Ghislaine, Byromania: Byron and the Birth of Celebrity Culture (New York: SUNY Press, 2008). Mole, Tom, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Mole, Tom, ’Celebrity and Anonymity’ in The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism, ed. David Duff (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 464–77. Rajan, Tilottama, Introduction, Mandeville, by William Godwin (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2016), pp. 11–45. Rajan, Tilottama, ‘Uncertain Futures: History and Genealogy in William Godwin’s The Lives of Edward and John Philips, Nephews and Pupils of Milton’, Milton Quarterly, 32:2 (1998), 75–86. Roskam, Geert, ‘Ambition and Love of Fame in Plutarch’s Lives of Agis, Cleomenes, and The Gracchi’, Classical Philology, 106:3 (2011), 208–225. Sachs, Jonathan, Romantic Antiquity: Rome in the British Imagination 1789–1832 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein (New York: Norton, 1996). Shelley, Percy, The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 vols, ed. Frederic L.  Jones (Oxford University Press, 1964). Stewart, David, The Form of Poetry in the 1820s and 1830s: A Period of Doubt (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Turner, Beatrice, Romantic Childhood, Romantic Heirs: Reproduction and Retrospection, 1820–1850 (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

An Illustrated Afterlife: William Godwin’s Essay on Sepulchres Helen Stark

On Sunday 27 November 1808, William Godwin began writing a new work he called ‘On Monuments’.1 Only a fortnight later, having received a visit from Godwin the night before, Mary Lamb, sister of Charles Lamb, was eager to tell Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt about the ‘great work which Godwin is going to publish to enlighten the world once more’.2 Describing the text we now know as 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 (1809), Lamb’s tone is admiring; she notes that the essay is written ‘remarkably well’ and includes ‘Very excellent thoughts on death, and our feelings concerning dead friends’.3 Her approval is clear but was not shared by her contemporaries. The reviewers of Sepulchres remained stubbornly unenlightened and were indeed, as Mark Philp puts it, ‘mystified as many modern readers are by Godwin’s intent’.4 As Philp I am grateful to the Institute of Advanced Studies of the Humanities at The University of Edinburgh which awarded me a Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2014–2015 to begin this work on Essay on Sepulchres and to the Paul Mellon Centre Photographic Archive for permission to reproduce two images here. H. Stark (*) University College London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. O’Brien et al. (eds.), New Approaches to William Godwin, Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62912-0_11

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suggests, not much has changed: Julie Carlson’s 2007 assessment of Essay on Sepulchres as being ‘a vastly undercelebrated work in the Godwinian canon, both in its day and ours’ remains true today.5 Scholars who do now write about the text have tended to focus on its implications for nineteenth-­ century historiography, community-building, nationalism, and tourism. Mark Salber Phillips’ 2000 account of the essay’s underpinnings in the psychological doctrine of association is an important touchstone for many of those who have written about it subsequently. Paul Westover reads the essay as a key text of what he calls ‘necromanticism: the romantic impulse to route anxieties about literature, community, and cultural heritage through the dead’.6 For Tom Mole, the essay’s significance lies in its attempt to construct a British pantheon. Many scholars reflect on its homage to friendship which they read as lightly disguised mourning for Godwin’s first wife, Mary Wollstonecraft.7 Carlson stands out in providing an account which reflects on Mary Shelley’s reading of Sepulchres and her representation of mourning and memorialisation.8 The present chapter, by contrast, places Godwin’s essay in a new context, revealing its exchange among artists in the nineteenth century—a circulation which is significant in its own right and because it belies the apparent lack of interest in Godwin’s essay during his lifetime. The focus of this chapter is a single copy of Sepulchres which is made remarkable by its embellishment with pencil drawings by an unknown artist post-publication. It examines the dialogue between the drawings and the text, using the drawings to suggest new understandings of Godwin’s essay. It contextualises this copy of the essay, plotting its history, as far as I have been able to trace it, and explores Godwin’s relationships with artists. It will indicate what this illustrated essay might mean for our understanding of Godwin and the circles in which he operates, demonstrating that these drawings speak to a much longer legacy for Sepulchres than is usually acknowledged. There is no extant manuscript of Godwin’s essay but there are a number of copies of the published text in libraries in both the United Kingdom and the United States. The copy with which this chapter is concerned was sold in 1992 by the auction house Christie’s. As far as I have been able to ascertain, the drawings are accessible to researchers now only via a set of photographs which are in the Paul Mellon Centre (PMC) Photographic Archive in London.9 The photographs, likely taken in 1992, are of the pages of the essay which have been enhanced with beguiling pencilled line

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drawings, as well as the frontispiece and an image of the inside front cover which has been signed by John Linnell (1792–1882), the landscape and portrait painter who became a patron of William Blake, suggesting he owned this copy at one time. The PMC describe their acquisition practice on their website as follows: Photographs have been actively acquired by the archive from The Courtauld Institute Photographic Survey, salerooms, museums and galleries. The files include original photography commissioned from our own in-house photographer, Douglas Smith (1964–1996) for Paul Mellon Centre publications for which we still hold the negatives.10

It seems unlikely that the photographs were taken by Smith for a publication (since there is no scholarly record of these photographs). Perhaps they were instead taken in circumstances related to the auction at Christie’s. The negatives of photographs taken for the PMC were recorded in ledgers which form part of the PMC’s Institutional Archive. The ledgers were used to record information such as the item number, what it was, who had taken the photos, what the source material was, who they had been taken for, the date they were taken, and the page number. Not all of this information was always recorded. On this occasion only the item numbers and title of the item (‘attrib. Fuseli’) were documented.11 Despite his inscription, Linnell is not thought to be the artist; the Centre’s catalogue attributes the drawings to Henry Fuseli, titling the items ‘Henry Fuseli. Illustrations for essay on Sepulchres by William Godwin’. However, when Christie’s sold the essay on 14 July 1992, they attributed the drawings not to Linnell or to Fuseli but to William Young Ottley (1771–1836), an artist, collector, and later Keeper of the Prints at the British Museum. In the sale catalogue it is put thus: the style of the majority of the drawings, with their strong influence of Michelangelo as seen through the mannerisms of Henry Fuseli, suggests the work of William Young Ottley […] friend and admirer of Fuseli, and also of John Flaxman.12

Christie’s do not definitively identify the artist as Ottley. Throughout this chapter, then, I will refer to ‘the artist’ rather than crediting the drawings to him.

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An Illustrated Essay Although their artist remains mysterious, the illustrations are on a superficial level easier to approach. Let us turn now to these drawings themselves. Thirty-one pages of the essay have been drawn on. Fourteen of these feature a line around the printed text that transforms it into a headstone. These headstones are surrounded by figures. All except one appear to be male and they are predominantly naked and muscular. When they are clothed, they appear to be wearing armour and are frequently depicted in crowns. Some of the drawings are rough sketches while others are more detailed. In some cases, the drawings on one page appear to be preparatory work for others; the sketch of an airborne figure above the text on the first page of the main body of the essay is echoed by the more worked-up figure manacled above the title of the Preface.13 The former is face down while the latter is face up so that one is an inversion of the other, but the similarity between the two is unmistakable. There are three drawings that are outliers: two male profiles which are stylistically quite dissimilar to the other drawings and each other (p. 45 and p. 47), and a small doodle of a figure in a hat, curiously located just under the end of the final sentence on page 9.14 At first glance the drawings relate to the text in what seems to be a relatively uncomplicated, if unusual, way. Initially, what strikes the reader is that the artist has interacted with this essay about memorialisation by outlining the printed text with the shape of headstones. For the reader, these illustrations transform the block of printed text on a page into lines inscribed on a headstone. Their form is consistent across the illustrations—they are rectangular and the edge of the headstone is frequently drawn so close to the text as to touch it. They are shaded to appear three-­ dimensional and the uppermost corners taper towards a flat top. The headstones are frequently drawn in isolation and without context—they appear to the reader as if suspended in mid-air. In Blakean fashion the artist frequently requires the viewer to presume the activity of the image takes place behind the text and headstone. For example, on page 35, the artist has drawn a floating or flying naked male with his back to the viewer, whose left arm and part of both legs is obscured by the text/headstone. On page 66, a tangle of legs both behind and to the left of the text/headstone suggests activity behind it and off the page. Godwin imagines communication between the living and the dead occurring at the grave, where ‘Some spirit shall escape from his ashes, and whisper to me

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things unfelt before’, so one way to read these drawings is as the manifestations of the dead at the graveside that Godwin so powerfully evokes (p. 77). Others can be interpreted as in the guise of mourning or as monumental effigies. For example, on page 7, the text is not transformed into a headstone. Instead, a horizontal line above the title extends from the edge of the page to roughly half a centimetre from the central binding where it forms a corner and extends down the page for roughly five centimetres, making a shape akin to the top of a large monument. Atop this is a figure lying on its stomach, head in hands.15 The prone full-length figure atop a structure echoes a monumental effigy though the pose and inversion of the body is unconventional. On page 88, a man stands beside the text/headstone, looking at the reader, hand to mouth in a gesture of concern or sorrow. This thematic sympathy between a text about memorialisation and illustrations depicting headstones and grieving effigies is the first and most immediately obvious level of the dialogue between Godwin’s essay and the drawings. More prolonged attention to the illustrations, however, complicates the relationship. Godwin’s essay rejects stone monuments as an appropriate method of memorialisation. Godwin spends some time relaying the deterioration and neglect of ‘monuments’ across England and Ireland, writing that ‘In almost every ordinary church yard we may see altar-­ monuments, with the upper surface and some of the sides broken to pieces, and the whole a heap of ruins, even before they are fifty years old’ (pp. 52–53). Godwin both accepts and criticises this neglect, calling it ‘a characteristic of the human species’ (p. 53) but warning ‘The person who detects himself in this apathy, should at least remember that his turn is hastening on, and that he will shortly be spurned, maltreated, and thought on with shrinking indifference, even as he spurns those that went before him’ (p. 55). As Mole and Westover have acknowledged, Godwin’s scheme seeks to reform this tendency towards disregard for one’s ancestors, rather than make stone monuments more enduring: ‘It does not seek perpetuity, as ancient Egypt, in the messiness and immovableness of the pyramid; it aims at a better security, in keeping for ever alive the spirit that first put the project into action’ (p.  57).16 Rather than combat the ephemerality of these ‘permanent’ structures, Godwin writes it into the scheme. His proposal is that ‘A very slight and cheap memorial, a white cross of wood, with a wooden slab at the foot of it (where the body has been interred in the open air), would be sufficient, if means were taken to secure its being renewed as fast as the materials decayed’ (pp.  1–2). When Godwin writes that ‘the most

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important consideration leading to the plan here suggested, is the perishableness of monuments’ (p. 35) he seems to mean not only that this was the stimulus for its conception but also that—as a response—he has built that impermanence into his proposal.17 The intention is that under the correct conditions—when the dead person was a notable figure and they are remembered by the living—the cross should be replaced as it deteriorates. Where the reasons for a person’s reputation as ‘illustrious’ are forgotten, their marker will decay and eventually disappear. To render Godwin’s text as headstones is at odds then with his proposal. Indeed, the drawings problematise and challenge Godwin’s scheme. This becomes apparent when considering the double-page composition on pages 16–17 (Figs. 1 and 2). This is one of only four such instances (the others are pp. 28–29, 66–67, and 80–81) and is clearly meant to be viewed as such; easy to forget when viewing separate photographs of individual pages.18 On page 16, the verso, the text is rendered a headstone in the manner described above. The artist has drawn a large head and the top part of a man’s torso in the left-hand margin. The head is the most prominent part of the drawing, with a pronounced nose, eye sockets (but no eyes), and a crown or helmet. It sits alongside the top half of the text. At the bottom of the page, the man’s hand is visible, holding the handle of an object, possibly a sword or staff. On the recto, the text is again rendered as a headstone, which is sitting on a plinth. Behind the headstone is a giant pair of legs, apparently broken off at the bent knees. Part of the left foot is visible, in the right-hand margin. What we are looking at, then, is a drawing of a broken statue.19 In the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century artistic sphere in London sculptures were commonly used to teach art students to draw. Students at the Royal Academy were expected to learn by drawing from plaster casts of antique figures.20 The 2019–2020 exhibition ‘William Blake’ at Tate Britain included an example of this: a sketch by Blake of the Cincinnatus’s legs and feet and the plaster cast from which he likely drew.21 Martin Myrone and Amy Concannon note that ‘the clean lines and expressive clarity of the bodies conceived by the ancient sculptors were foundational to Blake’s own art: a figure like the Cincinnatus, a favourite among students at the Academy schools, including Blake, provides a template for his expressive forms’.22 The British Museum acquired Charles Townley’s collection of marbles, terracottas, and bronzes after his death in 1805 and in 1808 opened its Townley Gallery to art students. Townley’s collection of marbles had previously been on display at his house and some

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Fig. 1  Pencil drawing attributed to Henri Fuseli illustrating William Godwin’s Essay on Sepulchres (1809), page 16, 17.2 × 10.5 cm. Private collection. Digital image courtesy of the Paul Mellon Centre Photographic Archive (PA-F06077-0007)

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Fig. 2  Pencil drawing attributed to Henri Fuseli illustrating William Godwin’s Essay on Sepulchres (1809), page 17, 17.2 × 10.5 cm. Private collection. Digital image courtesy of the Paul Mellon Centre Photographic Archive (PA-F06077-0067)

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students would have already encountered it here.23 William Young Ottley came to London in 1787 and was ‘admitted to draw from the antique plasters in the Academy’.24 A drawing of his which the British Museum describes as ‘possibly of Venus Architis’ and dates between 1771 and 1805 is of a sculpture he likely saw in Townley’s private collection.25 At the British Museum, in addition to Townley’s collection, students, including amongst them perhaps the artist who eventually illustrated the copy of Sepulchres in question, had access to the museum’s collection of Egyptian antiquities: the galleries ‘comprised a sequence of rooms within the new wing added to accommodate the growing collection of sculptural antiquities, notably the Egyptian material taken from the French at Alexandria in 1801’.26 In 1817, the Elgin Marbles were put on display in the adjacent Montagu House. The drawings on pages 16 and 17 of Godwin’s essay are consistent with, and likely informed by, both common artistic practice in the period and the increasingly accessibility of sculpture (to a certain subset of society) in this period. On the pedestal of the broken statue illustrating the recto of the double-­ page composition, the artist has written lines from Percy Shelley’s sonnet ‘Ozymandias’. ‘Ozymandias’ famously dramatises the folly of a tyrant king (one kind of illustrious man), the eponymous Ozymandias, who commissions a statue of himself emblazoned with the legend ‘Look on my Works, ye Mighty and despair!’ only for the statue to be encountered by a traveller as a broken ruin in the desert. It is worth quoting in full here. I MET a Traveller from an antique land, Who said, “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read, Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: “My name is OZYMANDIAS, King of Kings.” Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! No thing beside remains. Round the decay Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.27

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The quotation dates the Sepulchres drawings as after 11 January 1818 when Shelley’s poem was published by Leigh Hunt in The Examiner, nine years after Godwin’s essay was published. The quotation on page 17 appears as follows: ‘My Name | is | Ozymandias | King of Kings | look on my works ye Mighty | and | Despair’ (see Fig. 2); the layout, punctuation, and line breaks are rather different to their appearance in The Examiner, although it is interesting to note that, as in The Examiner, the artist has capitalised ‘King of Kings’. ‘Ozymandias’ was republished the following year in the volume Rosalind and Helen; here, and in Mary Shelley’s 1839 edition ‘king of kings’ is printed entirely in lowercase.28 The drawing recreates the ‘vast and trunkless legs of stone’ and the pedestal with Ozymandias’s epigraph on page 17, suggesting that the head on the page 16 is the ‘shattered visage’ of the poem, its eyeless face recreating the effect of a stone monument.29 Its downturned mouth evokes the ‘frown’ of the statue described in ‘Ozymandias’. The layout and size of the text suggest that the artist may have initially intended for the pedestal to read only ‘Ozymandias | King of Kings’. Indeed a quick read of The Examiner edition of ‘Ozymandias’ might suggest to a reader that this was what the pedestal described in the poem read due to the quotation marks appearing around line fourteen: ‘And on the pedestal these words appear: | “My name is OZYMANDIAS, King of Kings.”’ ‘Ozymandias | King of Kings’ is positioned in the centre of the pedestal, written larger than the other lines of text, and the letters are printed and spaced out. By contrast, the rest of the pedestal inscription is smaller and in a flowing hand, as if added afterwards. The line ‘look on my works ye Mighty’ is cramped, as if the artist feared it would not fit onto the pedestal and the dash at the start of the line slips off the side of the pedestal. Likewise, the descender stroke of the ‘p’ of Despair extends slightly below the bottom of the pedestal. The last three lines are cramped together although ‘Despair’ is emphasised by its size—it is the only word which is a similar size to ‘Ozymandias | King of Kings’. This suggests that the pedestal was drawn first, perhaps around ‘Ozymandias | King of Kings’ and the remainder of the quotation added later. It became important to the artist to include the quotation in its entirety—perhaps they checked the quotation after having begun the drawing. These possible amendments, along with the quantity of drawings, suggest that they are not merely evidence of a one-time encounter with Godwin’s essay. Instead they imply sustained engagement with Sepulchres and ‘Ozymandias’, demanding that we read the former in the light of the latter.30

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As scholars such as Kelvin Everest and Tom Mole have drawn out, the sonnet explores a series of ironies which raise complex questions about the longevity of art and therefore about literature itself as a tool of memorialisation. Ultimately, as Everest puts it, ‘it may be that the sonnet has become, with the passage of time, simply a monument to the vain aspirations of artists’; like the statue, the poem will deteriorate.31 Like ‘Ozymandias’, Sepulchres raises this question but seems to afford literature a permanence other types of art do not possess and I will show that the drawings also participate in this conversation. At the simplest and most obvious level, the artist’s drawings and quotations from ‘Ozymandias’ appear sympathetic to Godwin’s argument in Sepulchres. Shelley’s poem highlights Ozymandias’s folly in assuming his ‘works’ and the statue of him would endure, so the artist’s drawing of the broken statue of Ozymandias reinforces Godwin’s criticism of current memorial practice, in which many memorials deteriorate into ruin. In Godwin’s scheme, the degradation of Ozymandias’s monument is exactly as it should be. For Godwin, ‘The tomb, the view of which awakens no sentiment, and has no history annexed to it, must perish, and ought to perish’ (p.  98). He imagines a future where the fantastic monuments of his time have totally degraded but his simple white wooden crosses remain: ‘it may not unreasonably be supposed that while pyramids, and aqueducts, roads of the most substantial structure, and vast cities, shall perish, these simple land-marks, which any child might overthrow, shall be regarded as sacred, and remain undisturbed witnesses of the most extraordinary revolutions’ (p.  96).32 The Ozymandias statue is an example of this kind of decline which ought to occur where no living person remembers the reasons for the monument. Further, since ‘Ozymandias’ describes a statue which marks ‘works’ rather than a body, for Godwin, this might go some way to explaining its deterioration: he is adamant that what matters is the body—in his proposal, the marker marks the location of the corpse—and that the degradation of the body reminds the living of the end which awaits us all and should stave off excessive self-regard. And yet, the location of the drawings on pages 16 and 17 undermines Godwin’s argument. Pages 5–19 of Sepulchres are an extended meditation on friendship, describing the response to the death of a friend. He calls this section an ‘encomium’ and it is certainly a moving description of the value of friendship and of friendship in marriage. In a conjecture which evokes the death of his first wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, in 1797, Godwin imagines the death of a friend and a spouse: ‘If this friend were my familiar

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acquaintance, if he dwelt under the same roof with me, if (to put the strongest case) I were so fortunate that the person worthy of all this encomium were the wife of my bosom’ (pp. 12–13). ‘Death, the death of a friend’, writes Godwin, ‘is a terrible thing’ (p.  14). He describes the importance of the physical presence of the friend, which is all that remains after death: page 16 begins by exclaiming that this ‘form is all that is now left of him. But, oh, how changed!’. Godwin laments the loss of his friend and his attachment to the friend’s body—because it is ‘all that is now left of him’, going on to declare that ‘I would give all that I possess, to purchase the art of preserving the wholesome character and rosy hue of this form, that it might be my companion still’ (p. 16). Neither the writings, actions, nor memories of the dead can stand in for the body and this is why it is the sepulchre which is important to Godwin: All this consideration of hic jacet [here lies], it must be granted, is very little. But such is the system of the universe, that it is all that we have for it. It is our only reality. The solidity of the rest, the works of my friend, the words, the actions, the conclusions of reasoning and the suggestions of faith, we feel to depend, as far as they are solid to us, upon the operations of our own mind. They stand, and are the sponsors for my friend; but what the grave incloses is himself (pp. 18–19).

Arriving at pages 16 and 17 having read Godwin’s praise of his friend, or wife, the drawings sit uncomfortably with his description of mourning a loved one. To invoke Ozymandias here is to position self-­aggrandisement jarringly alongside a description of personal mourning, as if to deliberately mock or undermine what is being described. This is reinforced by Godwin’s incongruous statement, in the midst of his encomium, that: One of the silliest fancies that has been started by the rigid advocates of the equality of our nature, is, that we are wrong to pity a person of high rank under adversity, a king in exile, Louis XVI in the Temple, Marie Antoinette in the Conciergerie, more than the meanest peasant under a similar misfortune. I do not condole with a man because he never had a thing, but because, having once possessed, he has now lost it. (pp. 13–14, italics Godwin’s)

Applying this sentiment to Ozymandias, as the drawing asks us to, would seem to suggest that rather than take Ozymandias’s broken statue as a lesson of the perils of hubris and as just deserts for his tyranny, we should

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condole with him for the loss of his works, influence and fame. Godwin later states that he would not be: overnice in censorship over the illustrious dead: whoever had been truly distinguished for talent or action, I should hold worthy of a place; […] It is fit that men, the scourges of their species […] should be marked with a brand as imperishable, as the pure immortality that attends on our genuine benefactors. (pp. 33–34)

Godwin’s willingness to memorialise those who have ‘memorably dishonoured the figure of man’ is undercut by the artist’s introduction of Ozymandias, where it is the statue’s ruin and its isolation which is instructive (p. 33). Finally, the drawing on page 17 incorporates Godwin’s text into Ozymandias’s memorial. Godwin’s text sits atop the pedestal with the quote from the poem written on it and partially obscures the ‘vast and trunkless legs’. To make Godwin’s text part of Ozymandias’s statue is to implicate Godwin’s scheme in the same continuum of hubristic and self-­ aggrandising memorialisation. It raises the question of whether Godwin’s writings are of a piece with Ozymandias’s self-memorialisation, doomed to fracture and break apart. As we have seen, Shelley’s sonnet also asks this question. Everest argues that Shelley’s use of quotation marks denotes his anticipation of his sonnet being excerpted out of context: ‘the poem then in a way anticipates the time when it too will have been left standing, ravaged by time, and lying to be found by some unimaginable audience in a context changed out of all recognition from the one in which it came to exist’.33 In Everest’s reading, ‘Ozymandias’ anticipates the very moment this chapter exemplifies: the image of the poem ‘found by some unimaginable audience in a context changed out of all recognition’ is one way of characterising the twenty-first-century reader encountering a description of photographs of an artist’s 1818–1836 inscription of Shelley’s 1818 lines on Godwin’s 1809 essay via a chapter in an edited collection. One function of the artist’s drawings is to bring the possibility of decay to bear on the essay by making the text into mutable headstones and by transposing Shelley’s lines out of context. The question of the relationship between text and sepulchre is one which Godwin raises himself. The markers of the burial places of ordinary people will not be renewed because they will be remembered only by their

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immediate family: ‘Every parent or relative ought no doubt to be at liberty to mark as he pleases, and what form he pleases, the earth which covers the ashes once so loved. But this would be a sort of altar, the duration of which would scarcely exceed the life of him who worshipped at it’ (p. 97). To assist the reader in their understanding of the necessary ephemerality of the burial places of ordinary men—this is a scheme for the illustrious only—Godwin employs a literary analogy: It is with the memories of men, as it is with books. Those will always be the most numerous which are of the freshest date. But this is all accident. The books and the memories of men of the eighteenth century, at present overrun our libraries, and clog up our faculties. But the time is hastening on, when this shall no longer be the case, when they shall be reduced to their true standard, and brought down to their genuine numbers. The tomb, the view of which awakens no sentiment, and has no history annexed to it, must perish, and ought to perish. (pp. 97–98)

According to his own system, having received little attention at the time of publication, Essay on Sepulchres should have fallen into total obscurity, never to be revived. The artist invokes this possibility by incorporating Godwin’s text into Ozymandias’s monument; the drawing links Godwin’s essay with the monument and Godwin, perhaps, with Ozymandias. But the drawings also ensure the longevity of Godwin’s essay by revivifying it at least nine years after its publication and putting it into dialogue with the literary output of his son-in-law.34 Paradoxically, by drawing on it, the artist has rendered Godwin’s essay one of those texts (or tombs) which would be remembered and renewed, protecting both it and Shelley’s sonnet from obsolescence.

Godwin and Artists The artist’s illustrations have ensured the transmission of this copy of the essay far into Godwin’s future through its preservation in the PMC archives, and they also serve to locate and embed it within a network of contemporaries that has to date been little explored. John Linnell’s inside-­ front-­cover signature and the ghostly presence, via the various attributions of the drawings, of Henry Fuseli, William Blake, and William Young Ottley, locate Godwin’s essay at the centre of a tantalising web of artists. What we know of Godwin’s network, however, does not map exactly onto

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this quartet. The second half of this chapter sketches out, then, the relevant connections we can evidence with a view to providing a context for the drawings on Sepulchres. Given that Sepulchres attracted little notice when it was published, it is strange that one copy became a site of artistic production. Its apparent circulation between Ottley and Linnell (did Ottley do the drawings and present the copy to Linnell or did Linnell gift his copy of Godwin’s essay to Ottley who then sketched on it?) perhaps makes more sense when we conceive of Godwin as part of a network of artists himself. It also reveals an afterlife for the essay some significant time after its publication. Godwin both socialised and worked with artists. John Linnell gave drawing lessons to Mary Shelley and Charles Clairmont when he was about sixteen. Godwin’s Diary has four entries for ‘Linnel’, three in 1808 and one in 1810. On 24 January 1808, Linnell called but Godwin was not at home. On 4 February Godwin records ‘Linnel, 1st lesson’, presumably a reference to Linnell’s instruction of Godwin’s children, and on 24 March he again records that Linnell called. Godwin perhaps considered the lessons unworthy of further record (or they happened when he was away from home) since as the editors of Godwin’s Diary note, a May 1808 ‘letter from Charles Clairmont to Godwin indicates that [William] Mulready and Linnell were sketching together on a trip with Charles to Hampstead Heath’, indicating that the family’s contact with Linnell in the context of drawing continued after the lesson in February 1808.35 The only other (and final) reference to Linnell in the Diary is in 1810 when Godwin records that he ‘sups’ with ‘Linnel, mrs Mulready, Voycey & Turner’ on 30 March. Godwin also commissioned artists to produce illustrations for his own work and the texts he published. The frontispiece of Sepulchres depicts what appears to be a burial ground, including a ruined building with derelict gravestones and monuments in the foreground, illustrated by Hilton and engraved by Hopwood. The quotation underneath which reads ‘Life is the desert and the solitude’ paraphrases Edward Young’s play The Revenge (1721). The New  York Public Library, which holds a copy of Godwin’s essay, identifies these artists as William Hilton (1786–1839) and James Hopwood (ca. 1752–1819). The Hopwoods were a family of printers, who appear in the diary eighty-three times in the period 1808–1812. Godwin mentions a Hilton in his diary ten times, from 29 December 1808 to 7 May 1810. Five of these are between 2 January and 5 February 1809, the period during which the essay was being composed and shortly

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before it was published. Although the editors of the diary identify this ‘Hilton’ as the painter William Hilton, they seem overly cautious, advising that ‘This identification is tentative’.36 Given that at the same time as he was composing Sepulchres, the frontispiece of which was illustrated by a ‘Hilton’, he was recording meeting with a Hilton in his diary, it seems quite likely that the Hilton of the diary is William Hilton, painter, and that the two were meeting because Hilton was providing an illustration for the essay. The artist William Mulready (1786–1863) was one of Godwin’s key collaborators in this regard. In 1805 Godwin wrote and published The Looking-Glass: A True History of the Early Years of an Artist which told the story of the early years of Mulready’s life (see John-Erik Hansson’s chapter in this volume for a discussion of The Looking-Glass). As the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography has it: Between 1805 and 1806 Mulready, often in company with George Dawe (1781–1829) and John Linnell, was a frequent visitor to Godwin’s home at 41 Skinner Street. By 1807 Mulready had become the Juvenile Library’s chief (and possibly only) illustrator, claiming later to have executed 307 designs in two years at 7s. 6d. each. Some of these were engraved by William Blake. Here, alongside George Cruikshank (1792–1878), who worked in Godwin’s children’s bookshop.37

In this formulation, Godwin is at the centre of a group of artists he is employing. These contractual relationships gave him access to a broader network of artists through his employees’ existing connections; the editors of Godwin’s Diary suggest that he may have approached this network as a kind of recruiting pool for illustrators.38 It is perhaps useful, though, to conceive of Godwin as one among a larger network of creatives, rather than as a focal point at their centre, since these artists often had relationships with each other that predated their knowing Godwin. A. T. Storey suggests that Mulready introduced Linnell and Godwin.39 Linnell met Mulready when Linnell was ten and Mulready sixteen, at the house of the artist John Varley. Mulready was studying at the Royal Academy School which Linnell entered in 1805 (Henry Fuseli was at this time the Keeper of the School).40 George Cumberland Junior introduced Linnell and William Blake in 1818 and Linnell in turn introduced Blake to William Young Ottley in April 1827.41 Blake called the latter ‘an advantageous acquaintance’.42 This entry in Godwin’s diary (from 11 November 1815) is suggestive: ‘Letter to P B

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S. Call on Knowles: H White & Hayward call: dine at Knowles’s, w. Fuseli, Otley, Palmer, & Edward Knowles’. There are nine results for ‘Otley’ in Godwin’s diary, three each in 1790 and 1791, one in 1792, one in 1834, and the 1815 entry. The editors have not been able to identify any of the Otleys. William Young Ottley was in Italy from 1791 to 1799 so we can discount the four instances recorded in this period. This 1815 entry, though, concerns artists: the diary editors identify the host, Knowles, as John Knowles, a longstanding friend of Fuseli’s (who is also present and was friends with William Young Ottley) but leave the other entries un-­ coded. This is suggestive but while Godwin and William Young Ottley shared contacts, there is no conclusive evidence that they met despite these overlapping networks. By sketching out these connections, however, I have sought to provide some insight into the network within which the illustrator of Sepulchres likely operated. This chapter will end with a short discussion of one member of that network: William Blake. Exploring the relationship between Blake and these drawings gives us another perspective on them. There is no direct evidence that Blake produced these drawings yet his presence haunts them and it is Blake who has dominated the small amount of scholarship which acknowledges them. I have located three modern scholarly works which discuss the illustrations on Sepulchres; all have been in the context of William Blake studies due to the stylistic and thematic similarities between the drawings and some of Blake’s works. Thomas Wright’s 1929 The Life of William Blake makes reference to this copy of Sepulchres, then in the possession of W. T. Spencer, a bookseller. Wright claims that ‘the drawings have been attributed to Blake; and several indeed do remind of him, especially that on page 59’. He goes on to claim that a memorandum existed alongside the essay which states the drawings are Blake’s: ‘Notwithstanding the fact that a memorandum accompanying the book declares the drawings to have been Blake’s, they have been pronounced Fuseli’s’.43 Wright conjures a romantic vision of ‘Fuseli showing the drawings to Blake— while the two discuss the merits and demerits of the book; and to imagine Linnell dropping in during the conversation and expressing the hope that the work would some day be his’.44 In 1946 Mark Schorer suggested that the drawings ‘may very well be Blake’s’ and in 1993, Robert N.  Essick covered the 1992 Christie’s sale of the essay for the longstanding Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly feature ‘Blake in the Marketplace’, drily noting that ‘As Wright points out, the temptation to attribute these drawings to

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Blake should be resisted, but Wright’s own attribution to Fuseli is surely wrong. Christie’s ascription to Ottley is at least a good guess’.45 Blake had a track record of illustrating this type of text. In 1797 he illustrated Edward Young’s Night Thoughts and in the same year his friend John Flaxman commissioned him to illustrate Thomas Gray’s Poems, including his Elegy Written in a Country Graveyard. In 1805, Blake was, therefore, as Martin Myrone and Amy Concannon put it, ‘a reasoned choice to illustrate a poem about death and the afterlife’ and was commissioned by Robert Hartley Cromek to illustrate and engrave Robert Blair’s The Grave.46 When Ottley died in 1836, his collections were sold at auction by Sotheby’s and these included some of Blake’s works. His literature was sold on 21 and 22 July 1837, as the Catalogue of the valuable collection of books of prints, and works connected with literature and the fine arts, the property of the late William Young Ottley, Esq. It included antiquarian literature concerned with monuments as well as ‘Blake’s Illustrations of the grave, a Poem, in 12 etchings, by Schiavonetti’, and ‘Jerusalem: the Emanation of the Giant Albion, one hundred engravings from wood, printed by W. Blake 1804’.47 G. E. Bentley Jnr records Ottley as owning one copy of Jerusalem but has no record for Ottley’s possession of the 1808 Blair’s Grave.48 It is possible of course that Ottley’s collection was ‘salted’ (an unscrupulous sales practice of ‘falsely supplementing the contents of the library of an eminent person with slow-moving or otherwise undesirable inventory left over from previous sales or mouldering away in the bookseller’s shop’).49 Blair’s Grave surely would not fall into the category of difficult-to-shift inventory, though, which suggests that in fact as well as Jerusalem Ottley owned a copy of The Grave which was omitted from Bentley’s catalogue. If Ottley illustrated Godwin’s essay, then, he may have been influenced by these items in his collection in terms of both style and subject matter.50 Blake recycled, reused, and returned to certain images or figures in his works, some of which reappear in the Sepulchres drawings. The key illustration to Godwin’s essay, I have suggested, is the double-page Ozymandias spread on pages 16 and 17, with its ‘trunkless legs’, which stop at the knees and are rounded off, as if the figure was seated, and set atop a pedestal. Directly or indirectly we can see Blake’s influence in these drawings. Seated figures atop pedestals with prominent knees and calves and knobbly feet abound in his work and scholars have generally located these figures in the influence of Michelangelo on Blake.51 Ottley was also influenced by Michelangelo as the Christie’s catalogue for the sale of Sepulchres

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acknowledged. Jenijoy La Belle has traced the evolution of two types of these figures from Blake’s copies in the 1780s of Adamo Scultori’s (also known as Adam Ghisi) sixteenth-century engravings of Michelangelo’s lunettes in the Sistine Chapel. Blake adapted Scultori’s engraving of the Amminadab lunette into ‘The Reposing Traveller’ (who has ‘massive knees’) which, La Belle shows, Blake takes into two directions: ‘Blake’s singer-poet-visionaries’, particularly prevalent in his illustrations of Young’s Night Thoughts, and the ‘imprisoned traveller’ motif.52 Features of the ‘imprisoned traveller’ include ‘heavy legs crossed at the ankles […] the torso has been contracted out of view, and the head rests directly above the “V” formed by the legs. The upward-turned eyes are filled with anxiety’.53 In her ‘Ten Frequent Forms’ classification, Janet Warner identified ten types of figure or gesture which recur across Blake’s oeuvre. Form IX is ‘Hunched figures with knees drawn up, front view’. Warner explains that this form stands for ‘mental cowardice; it is an image of the mind-­ forg’d manacles, and chains are often also a part of the design’.54 Warner identifies the frontispiece to America (1793) and plates 41 and 51 of Jerusalem as examples of this gesture. Plate 41 of Copy A of Jerusalem (the one that was Ottley’s) depicts Albion as a clothed, seated figure with his head resting on his knees.55 His long hair falls between his slightly parted knees to the ankles. The knees, shins, feet, and hair are all that is visible. Such designs locate the viewer’s focus on the lower legs, which are bent up in front of the torso, and on the feet and the face or top of the head (depending on the precise pose). Many are atop a slab of stone. While Ozymandias’s legs are separated from his torso, the huge knees, knobbly feet, parted legs, and pedestal evoke Blake’s hunched figures. The statue of Ozymandias thus belongs to a visual lexicon which recurs across Blake’s corpus. Other Blakean types are evident in the drawings. The drawing on page 28 of Sepulchres is reminiscent of ‘Misery’ from Blake’s notebook drawing ‘Various Personifications’. The influence of what Warner calls form II ‘The flying figure, back view, springing upward, one leg bent, one arm higher, usually nude, female, and wingless’, which she notes recurs throughout Blake’s designs for Night Thoughts, is evident in the drawing on page 35 of Sepulchres.56 The final figure I want to discuss is Urizen in Blake’s plate The Ancient of Days (from Europe, A Prophecy, 1794). Page 58 of Sepulchres begins a discussion of what Godwin calls ‘New Countries and Old’ (emphasis Godwin’s). ‘Glorious and admirable emotions grow out of the contemplation’ of new countries, asserts Godwin (p. 60). ‘We may stand upon the

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surface of a new country, and observe the heavens, and penetrate into all the recesses of astronomy’ (p.  60, emphasis Godwin’s). New countries, however, lack history. In an old country, one  is able to ‘revert to the noblest of the creator’s works, and to call up the nations and men who have formerly trod the earth which I now tread!’—if that country remembers its dead and where they are buried (p. 61). The drawing on page 59 shows the head and shoulders of a muscular figure with long hair which appears to be blowing towards the left and the centrefold.57 The figure’s arms extend over and to the sides of the text as if atop a sphere. The drawing extends into the margins but is too faint to make out. At the bottom of the page is inscribed a quotation from John Milton’s Paradise Lost (which Blake illustrated a number of times): ‘Satst brooding on the vast abyss | And madst it pregnant’. Above the quotation (below the text) is a small figure floating on its back mid-air in a semi-circle.58 The figure at the top of the page, then, can be read as depicting the spirit Milton invokes who ‘from the first | Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread | Dove-like sat’st brooding on the vast abyss | And mad’st it pregnant’.59 But it also strongly recalls Urizen setting a compass in the frontispiece to Europe and Blake’s representation of Isaac Newton using a compass in ‘Newton’ (1795–c. 1805).60 Urizen kneels on one leg, one arm stretched beneath him, compass in hand, and his hair blows to the left of the image. Urizen represents reason and rationality, and similarly, Blake’s use of gesture as identified by Warner associates ‘the downturned hand’ of Newton ‘with creativity turned to rationalism and abstraction’.61 To invoke these figures, then, evokes Blake’s critique of rationalism. Sepulchres ends with a discussion of the catalogue which should accompany Godwin’s proposal ‘to present us with the last and still remaining abode of all that English honour had yet to boast’ (pp. 115–116). For Godwin, an old country’s value lies in its history and on being able to locate that history—on knowing where its dead are buried. For the artist to evoke Urizen here is to criticise Godwin’s conception of a measurable world and perhaps then, the whole scheme, which after all relies on cataloguing graves—on managing and recording this knowledge. By combining close readings of text and drawings with a history of this copy of Sepulchres, I have shown how it was interpreted, contextualised, and then reinscribed by one of its readers—an anonymous artist. The artist’s evocation of various Blakean types alongside quotations from Shelley and Milton on Godwin’s essay demonstrates the depth of their engagement with Sepulchres. The artist does not passively embellish Sepulchres but

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engages in a dialogue with it and with other creatives. For the most part, the influences on which they drew would have been unfashionable among their contemporaries. They unite texts which at the time could not have been expected to endure: Godwin’s essay, as we have seen, had received little notice when published. ‘Ozymandias’ was a curio, the result of a competition with Horace Smith.62 And it was not until later that century that Blake’s reputation would go beyond that of an eccentric artist. Reading their works in this frame created by the artist deepens our understandings of those texts and of their histories, especially of Sepulchres. The drawings ask that subsequent readers read Sepulchres, as the artist did, alongside Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ and Blake’s corpus, such as his illustrations to Blair’s Grave and Young’s Night Thoughts, and the wider body of work evoked through the influence of Blakean types. Doing so enhances our understanding of the interactions between writers and artists in the Romantic period, both on the page and in person, and forms part of the legacy of Godwin’s Sepulchres.

Notes 1. William Godwin, ‘Entry for 27 November’, The Diary of William Godwin, ed. by Victoria Myers, David O’Shaughnessy, and Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford Digital Library, 2010). http://godwindiary.bodelian.ox.ac.uk [accessed 10 July 2020]. The entry reads: ‘On Monuments, p. 3. Udolpho, p. 358’. 2. The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, 1801–1809, ed. by Edwin W. Marrs, Jr., 3 vols (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976), II, pp. 286–7. Mark Salber Phillips reads Lamb’s first comment as ‘satirical’ but goes on to note that she gives a ‘fairly detailed and, in part, sympathetic summary of Godwin’s ideas’. Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 323 (n). 3. The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, II, p. 287. Mary Lamb began the letter on Friday and finished it on Saturday (it is dated [Friday, 9 December–Saturday, 10 December 1808] by Marr). 4. Mark Philp, ‘Introductory Note’, in Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 7 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993), VI: Essays, ed. Mark Philp, p. 3. 5. Julie A.  Carlson, England’s First Family of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2007), p. 163.

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6. Salber Phillips; Paul Westover, ‘Godwin, Literary Tourism, and the Work of Necromanticism’, Studies in Romanticism, 48:2 (2009), 299–319 (p. 300). 7. Tom Mole, ‘Romantic Memorials in the Victorian City: The Inauguration of the ‘Blue Plaque’ Scheme, 1868’, in BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History, ed. by Dino Franco Felluga https:// www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=tom-­mole-­romantic-­memorials-­ in-­the-­victorian-­city-­the-­inauguration-­of-­the-­blue-­plaque-­scheme-­1868 [accessed 2 July 2020] and What the Victorians Made of Romanticism: Material Artefacts, Cultural Practices and Reception History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). See Salber Phillips and Laqueur on Sepulchres as mourning for Mary Wollstonecraft. Thomas Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). 8. Carlson, pp. 163–211. 9. Pencil drawings attributed to Henri Fuseli illustrating William Godwin’s Essay on Sepulchres (1809), 17.2  ×  10.5  cm. Private collection. Digital images courtesy of the Paul Mellon Centre Photographic Archive (PA-­ F06077). I am very grateful to the staff of the archives and library at the Paul Mellon Centre who have been extremely helpful over the course of the research underpinning this chapter and who have given permission to reproduce two photos from the Photographic Archive here. Hereafter all references to the drawings will be to the images in PA-F06077. 10. https://www.paul-­m ellon-­c entre.ac.uk/archives-­a nd-­l ibrary/photo-­ collections/artists-­a-­z [accessed 2 July 2020]. 11. London, Paul Mellon Centre Institutional Archive, PMC62/25, pp. 94–98. The ledger is dated 1992 on its binding. The photos are numbered 0066/1–0066/36. There is no 0066/11. Beginning with the inside front cover, the photographer photographed the verso pages of Sepulchres and then the recto. The numbering of each photo proceeds chronologically. The recto pages begin with the fly leaf (0066/17). The photographer must have forgotten to photograph page 17 for a photograph of this page is the final item (0066/36) which is surprising given that pages 16–17 feature the most highly worked-up drawings on the essay and include a quotation from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’. Indeed the record for 0063/36 has been added in pencil with a question mark, after the other pen entries. 12. Christie’s, British Drawings and Watercolours (London: Christie’s, 1992), Lot 37. Auction catalogue. Christie’s include an ‘Explanation of cataloguing practice’ in the catalogue whereby ‘A work catalogued with the name(s) or recognised designation of an artist, without any qualification, is, in our opinion, a work by the artist’. ‘Attributed to’, used in the case of these

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drawings, is defined as ‘In our opinion probably a work by the artist in whole or in part’. 13. Pencil drawing attributed to Henri Fuseli illustrating William Godwin’s Essay on Sepulchres (1809), [no page number], 17.2 × 10.5 cm. Private collection. Digital image Paul Mellon Centre Photographic Archive (PA-­ F06077-­0037 and PA-F06077-0039). Hereafter, page numbers from the 1809 edition of Essay on Sepulchres will be given in the text. William Godwin, Essay on Sepulchres (London: W. Miller, 1809). 14. PA-F06077-0051; PA-F06077-0053; PA-F06077-0043. 15. PA-F06077-0047 (p.  35); PA-F06077-0015 (p.  66); PA-F06077-0041 (p. 7). 16. As Mole puts it ‘Godwin’s pantheon aimed not transform the national landscape so much as to reform the national consciousness. […] The resulting pantheon would exist as much in the consciousness of the informed individual as in the physical environment’. What the Victorians Made of Romanticism, p. 136. See also Westover, p. 312. 17. In his diary, Godwin refers to the essay as ‘On Monuments’ until the entry on 3 February 1809 where it becomes ‘Sepulchres’. This change speaks to the difference between a monument and a sepulchre whereby the former can refer to a tomb or sepulchre (implying the presence of a corpse) but also (as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it) to a ‘statue, building, or other structure erected to commemorate a famous or notable person or event’. A sepulchre specifically denotes a space ‘for the interment of a human body’. The inclusion of ‘sepulchres’ in the title speaks much more clearly to the importance Godwin places on marking the location of the corpse than ‘monument’ does. ‘monument, n.’, OED Online, Oxford University Press. https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/121852 [accessed 2 July 2020]; ‘sepulchre, n.’, OED Online, Oxford University Press https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/176261 [accessed 2 July 2020]. ‘Entries on Sepulchres’, The Diary of William Godwin [accessed 10 July 2020]. 18. PA-F06077-0009, PA-F06077-0045 (pp.  28–29); PA-F06077-0015, PA-F06077-0061 (pp.  66–67); PA-F06077-0019, PA-F06077-0063 (pp. 80–81). 19. Pencil drawing attributed to Henri Fuseli illustrating William Godwin’s Essay on Sepulchres (1809), p.  16, 17.2  ×  10.5  cm. Private collection. Digital image courtesy of Paul Mellon Centre Photographic Archive (PA-­ F06077-­0007) (Fig. 1); pencil drawing attributed to Henri Fuseli illustrating William Godwin’s Essay on Sepulchres (1809), p. 17, 17.2 × 10.5 cm. Private collection. Digital image courtesy of Paul Mellon Centre Photographic Archive (PA-F06077-0067) (Fig. 2).

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20. Nicholas Turner, ‘Ottley, William Young (1771–1836), writer on art and collector’ in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004 https://www. oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/ odnb-­9780198614128-­e-­20941 [accessed 2 July 2020]. 21. Anonymous, Cincinnatus, 1700s, plaster cast from the antique, 162 × 80 × 42, Royal Academy of Arts, London; William Blake, Drawing of Legs of Cincinnatus, c. 1779–80, ink and wash over graphite on paper, 24.2 × 33, Bolton Museum and Archive. 22. Martin Myrone and Amy Concannon, William Blake (London: Tate, 2019), p. 33. 23. Martin Myrone, ‘Drawing after the Antique at the British Museum, 1809–1817: “Free” Art Education and the Advent of the Liberal State’, British Art Studies, 5 https://doi.org/10.17658/issn.2058-­5462/issue­05/mmyrone [accessed 2 July 2020]. 24. Henry Ottley, A Biographical and Critical Dictionary of Recent and Living Painters and Engravers, Forming a Supplement to Bryan’s Dictionary of Painters and Engravers as Edited by George Stanley (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1886), pp. 126–127. 25. William Young Ottley, [no title], 1771–1805, drawing, 25 × 13 cm, British Museum, London. Museum number 2010,5006.96. The British Museum acquired the statue in 1805 and record that it was previously owned by Charles Townley. See https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/ object/G_1805-­0703-­18 [accessed 16 July 2020]. The dates the British Museum ascribe to Ottley’s drawing imply that the drawing was made when the statue was part of Townley’s collection, before its acquisition by the museum in 1805. 26. Martin Myrone. 27. Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Ozymandias’, in The Examiner, A Sunday Paper, On politics, Domestic Economy, and Theatricals for the Year 1818 (London: John Hunt, 1818), p.  24. I have used this earliest published version of ‘Ozymandias’ since if Ottley is the artist he is likely to have encountered this version or the version titled ‘Sonnet’ which appeared in Shelley’s Rosalind and Helen published in 1819. The punctuation is rather different even between these two editions. See Kelvin Everest for a discussion of this: ‘“Ozymandias”: The Text in Time’, in Percy Bysshe Shelley Bicentenary Essays, ed. by Kelvin Everest (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1992), pp. 24–42. 28. Shelley’s sonnet famously arose from a competition with Horace Smith which took place around Christmas 1817. The phrase ‘King of Kings’ also appears in Smith’s sonnet where it is likewise capitalised. 29. PA-F06077-0007 (p. 16) and PA-F06077-0067 (p. 17). 30. William H. Davenport has highlighted the similarities between Sepulchres and Shelley’s ‘An Address to the People on the Death of Princess Charlotte’,

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published November 1817. Davenport also notes that Shelley’s review of Mandeville the following month (in The Examiner 28 December) referenced Sepulchres. William H. Davenport, ‘Shelley and Godwin’s “Essay on Sepulchres”’, Notes and Queries, 197:6 (1952), 124–125. 31. Everest, pp.  31–32. Mole, What the Victorians Made of Romanticism, pp. 227–228. 32. Interestingly, it is this scenario of a perished city which is imagined in Smith’s sonnet, also titled ‘Ozymandias’. Smith’s sonnet imagines a hunter encountering ‘some fragment huge’ in ‘the wilderness  |  Where London stood’. Horace Smith, ‘Ozymandias’ in The Examiner, A Sunday Paper, On politics, Domestic Economy, and Theatricals for the Year 1818 (London: John Hunt, 1818), p. 73. 33. Everest, pp. 32–33. 34. According to Mary Shelley’s reading list both she and Percy Bysshe Shelley read Godwin’s essay in 1814. The Journals of Mary Shelley 1814–1844, ed. by Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), I, p. 86. 35. ‘Entry on William Mulready’, The Diary of William Godwin [accessed 4 March 2020]. 36. ‘Entry on William Hilton’, The Diary of William Godwin [accessed 27 July 2020]. 37. Marcia Pointon, ‘Mulready, William (1786–1863), painter’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004). https://www. oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/ odnb-­9780198614128-­e-­19520 [accessed 10 July 2020]. 38. ‘One possibility is that Godwin sought out young artists with a view to securing their services for the publishing house’. ‘Entry on William Hilton’, The Diary of William Godwin [accessed 10 July 2020]. 39. A. T. Story, The Life of John Linnell http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/linnell/story/5.html [accessed 7 August 2020]. 40. David Linnell, Blake, Linnell, Palmer & Co. (Sussex: The Book Guild Ltd., 1994), pp. 9, 12. 41. G.  E. Bentley Jr, Blake in the Desolate Marketplace (Quebec: McGill-­ Queen’s University Press, 2014), p. 55. 42. Linnell, p. 108. 43. Alan Philip Keri Davies notes that ‘W. T. Spencer is the source for a number of dubious Blakes: for the spurious Blake memorabilia illustrated in Thomas Wright’s biography, and the book by Godwin with an irrelevant marginal illustration attributed to Fuseli, but probably fake’. ‘William Blake in Contexts: Family Friendships, and Some Intellectual Microcultures of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century England’ (unpublished doctoral ­thesis, University of Surrey, 2003), p. 274. The claim of an accompanying

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memorandum might well have been fictionalised but the sale of the essay by Christie’s in 1992 and their attribution to Ottley suggests the illustrations are not fake. Another copy of Sepulchres was sold by Sotheby’s in 1991–2 for £220 (significantly less than the illustrated copy which sold for £1500), suggesting that the illustrations to Godwin’s essay significantly raised its value. Book Auction Records: A Priced and Annotated Annual Record of International Book Auctions Volume 89 For the Auction Season 1991–1992, 95 vols (Folkestone: Dawson Publishing, 1992) LXXXIX, p. 236. The digital image of page 59 of Sepulchres is PA-F06077-0057. 44. Thomas Wright, The Life of William Blake in Two Volumes, 2 vols (New York: Burt Franklin, 1929), II, pp. 93–4. The assertion of an accompanying memorandum is startling but Wright has come across the essay and presumably the memorandum via the infamous forger and bookseller W. T. Spencer. Wright reproduces one of the drawings (p. 59 of Sepulchres) in The Life of Blake. 45. Mark Schorer, William Blake: The Politics of Vision (H. Holt and Company; New York, 1946), p. 153 (n): ‘A copy now in existence bears on its inside cover the name of John Linnell, the young artist who was later to be Blake’s friend and ardent disciple, and throughout the copy are marginal pencil drawings of spiritual beings that may very well be Blake’s; at the least they are Fuseli’s or some other imitator’s. Whether the book was originally Blake’s and later given to Linnell, we do not know, or whether it was after 1818, when Linnell first came to know Blake, that the drawings were made. At any rate, in his twenties Linnell was himself acquainted with Godwin and Shelley, and this is the one point in Blake’s life at which a meeting with Shelley seems likely’. Robert N.  Essick, ‘Blake in the Marketplace’, Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly, 26 (1993), 140–159 (p. 148). 46. Myrone and Concannon, p. 134. In the end, though, Louis Schiavonetti engraved Blake’s illustrations. For more on this see Robert N. Essick and Morten D. Paley, Robert Blair’s The Grave Illustrated by William Blake: A Study with Facsimile (London: Scholar Press, 1982). 47. Leigh Sotheby, Catalogue of the Valuable Collection of Books of Prints, and Works Connected with Literature and the Fine Arts, the Property of the Late William Young Ottley ([London], 1837). The reference for The Grave is on page 6 (item 84) and for Jerusalem on page 16 (item 306). 48. Bentley’s record of the history of Copy A of Jerusalem is as follows: ‘On 11 Aug. 1827 (the day before Blake died), “Mr [William Young] Ottley [gave Linnell £5. 5s.] for Mrs Blake for a copy of Jerusalem” (Blake Records [1969], 594, 341, 347), perhaps this copy’. G. E. Bentley, Jr., ‘Forgotten Years: References to William Blake, 1831–62’ in William Blake: The Critical Heritage, ed. G.  E. Bentley, Jr., (London: Routledge, 1975),

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p. 232. He is surer in Blake Records where he identifies the Ottley payment as for Copy A: ‘This is Jerusalem (A)’. G.E Bentley, Jr., Blake Records, 2nd edn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 790. Schiavonetti, who engraved Blake’s illustrations for The Grave also engraved works in Ottley’s The Italian School of Design: Being a Series of Facsimiles of Original Drawings, by the Most Eminent Painters and Sculptors of Italy; with Biographical Notices of the Artists, and Observations on their Works (London: Taylor and Hessey, 1823). 49. Davies, p. 17. 50. The influence of Blake on Ottley is known: ‘Ottley’s own Roman sketches, of draped and nude male and female figures (London, V&A), and his Twelve Designs Illustrating the Life of Christ (Rome, 1796), engraved by Tommaso Piroli (c. 1752–1824), reveal a linear Neo-classical style derived both from William Blake and from his friend John Flaxman’. David Rodgers, ‘Ottley, William Young’, Grove Art Online (Oxford University Press, 2003) https://www.oxfordartonline.com/groveart/ view/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.001.0001/oao-­9781884446054-­ e-­7000064209 [accessed 10 July 2020]. 51. Ottley’s Italian School of Design reproduced in facsimile 84 engravings of Italian drawings, including works by Michelangelo. 52. Jenijoy La Belle, ‘Blake’s Visions and Revisions of Michelangelo’, in Blake in His Time, ed. by Robert N. Essick and Donald Pearce (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), pp. 13–22 (pp. 19–20). 53. La Belle, p. 20. 54. Janet A.  Warner, ‘Blake’s Use of Gesture’ in Blake’s Visionary Forms Dramatic, ed. by David V.  Erdman and John E.  Grant (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 174–195 (p. 193). 55. William Blake, Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion Copy A: electronic edition. 1804–c.1820. Printed c. 1820. Book, 100 plates on 100 leaves. Ranging between 22.7  ×  17.1 and 20.1  ×  14.0. http://www. blakearchive.org/copy/jerusalem.a?descId=jerusalem.a.illbk.01 [accessed 13 October 2020]. 56. William Blake, drawing, ‘Various Personifications’, reproduced in Christopher Heppner, Reading Blake’s Designs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 44. Warner, p. 189. The digital image of page 28 is PA-F06077-0009 and page 35 is PA-F06077-0047. 57. PA-F06077-0057. 58. In their catalogue, Christie’s described this ‘a figure seen from above at the top of the text area, his arms extending down each side, looking down at a tiny figure spread out on the segment of a globe at the bottom’. 59. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. by Scott Elledge, 2nd edn (New York: Norton, 1993), ll. 19–22.

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60. William Blake, Europe, a Prophecy Plate 1: Frontispiece ‘The Ancient of Days’ Copy B: electronic edition, 1794, 23.4 × 16.9, Relief and white-line etching with colour printing and hand colouring, http://www.blakearchive. org/copy/europe.b?descId=europe.b.illbk.01 [accessed 13 October 2020] and ‘Newton’, 1795–c.1805 Colour print, ink and watercolour on paper. 40  ×  60 (sheet). Tate. Reproduced in Martin Myrone and Amy Concannon, William Blake (London: Tate, 2019). 61. Warner, p. 187. 62. Using a corpus of 210 anthologies published between 1822 and 1900, which he calls ‘a substantial sample’, Tom Mole shows that ‘Ozymandias’ was only anthologized three times in this period. What the Victorians Made of Romanticism, pp. 190, 200.

Bibliography Artists A-Z. https://www.paul-­mellon-­centre.ac.uk/archives-­and-­library/photo-­ collections/artists-­a-­z [accessed 2 July, 2020] Bentley Jr, G.E., Blake in the Desolate Marketplace (Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014) Bentley Jr, G.E., Blake Records, 2nd edn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004) Bentley Jr, G.E., ‘Forgotten Years: References to William Blake, 1831–62’ in William Blake: The Critical Heritage, ed. G.E.  Bentley, Jr., (London: Routledge, 1975) Blake, William, Drawing of Legs of Cincinnatus, c. 1779–80, ink and wash over graphite on paper, 24.2 × 33, Bolton Museum and Archive Blake, William, Europe, a Prophecy Plate 1: Frontispiece ‘The Ancient of Days’ Copy B: electronic edition, 1794, 23.4 × 16.9, Relief and white-line etching with colour printing and hand colouring, http://www.blakearchive.org/copy/euro pe.b?descId=europe.b.illbk.01 [Accessed 13 October 2020] Blake, William, Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion Copy A: electronic edition. 1804–c.1820. Printed c. 1820. Book, 100 plates on 100 leaves. Ranging between 22.7 × 17.1 and 20.1 × 14.0. http://www.blakearchive.org/ copy/jerusalem.a?descId=jerusalem.a.illbk.01 [Accessed 13 October 2020] Blake, William, ‘Newton’, 1795–c.1805 Colour print, ink and watercolour on paper. 40 × 60 (sheet). Tate. Reproduced in Martin Myrone and Amy Concannon, William Blake (London: Tate, 2019) Blake, William, ‘Various Personifications’, reproduced in Christopher Heppner, Reading Blake’s Designs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) Book Auction Records: A Priced and Annotated Annual Record of International Book Auctions Volume 89 For the Auction Season 1991–1992, 95 vols (Folkestone: Dawson Publishing, 1992), LXXXIX Carlson, Julie A., England’s First Family of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2007)

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Christie’s, British Drawings and Watercolours (London: Christie’s, 1992). Auction Catalogue. Cincinnatus, 1700s, plaster cast from the antique, 162 × 80 × 42, Royal Academy of Arts, London Davenport, William H., ‘Shelley and Godwin’s “Essay on Sepulchres”’, Notes and Queries, 197:6 (1952), 124–125 Davies, Alan Philip Keri, ‘William Blake in Contexts: Family Friendships, and Some Intellectual Microcultures of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century England’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Surrey, 2003) Essick, Robert N., ‘Blake in the Marketplace’, Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly, 26 (1993), 140–159 Essick, Robert N. and Morten D.  Paley, Robert Blair’s The Grave illustrated by William Blake: A Study with Facsimile (London: Scholar Press, 1982) Godwin, William, The Diary of William Godwin, ed. by Victoria Myers, David O’Shaughnessy, and Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford Digital Library, 2010). http://godwindiary.bodelian.ox.ac.uk. [accessed 10 July 2020] Godwin, William, Essay on Sepulchres (London: W. Miller, 1809) Everest, Kelvin, ‘“Ozymandias”: The Text in Time’, in Percy Bysshe Shelley Bicentenary Essays, ed. by Kelvin Everest (Cambridge: D.S.  Brewer, 1992), pp. 24–42 Feldman, Paula R. and Diana Scott-Kilvert, eds, The Journals of Mary Shelley 1814–1844, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), I La Belle, Jenijoy, ‘Blake’s Visions and Revisions of Michelangelo’, in Blake in His Time, ed. by Robert N.  Essick and Donald Pearce (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), pp. 13–22 Laqueur, Thomas, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015) Linnell, David, Blake, Linnell, Palmer & Co. (Sussex: The Book Guild Ltd., 1994) London Paul Mellon Centre Institutional Archive, London, PMC62/25 Marrs Edwin W., Jr, ed, The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, 1801–1809, 3 vols (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976), II Milton, John, Paradise Lost, ed. by Scott Elledge, 2nd edn (New York: Norton, 1993) Mole, Tom, ‘Romantic Memorials in the Victorian City: The Inauguration of the ‘Blue Plaque’ Scheme, 1868’, in BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History, ed. by Dino Franco Felluga https://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=tom-­mole-­romantic-­memorials-­in-­the-­victorian-­ city-­the-­inauguration-­of-­the-­blue-­plaque-­scheme-­1868 [accessed 2 July 2020] Mole, Tom, What the Victorians Made of Romanticism: Material Artefacts, Cultural Practices and Reception History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017)

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‘monument, n.’, OED Online, Oxford University Press. https://www.oed.com/ view/Entry/121852 [accessed 2 July 2020] Myrone, Martin and Amy Concannon, William Blake (London: Tate, 2019). Myrone, Martin, ‘Drawing after the Antique at the British Museum, 1809–1817: “Free” Art Education and the Advent of the Liberal State’, British Art Studies, 5 https://doi.org/10.17658/issn.2058-­5462/issue-­05/mmyrone [accessed 2 July 2020] Ottley, Henry, A Biographical and Critical Dictionary of Recent and Living Painters and Engravers, Forming a Supplement to Bryan’s Dictionary of Painters and Engravers as Edited by George Stanley (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1886) Ottley, William Young, [no title], 1771–1805, drawing, 25 × 13 cm, British Museum, London. Museum number 2010, 5006.96 Ottley, William Young, The Italian School of Design: Being a Series of Facsimiles of Original Drawings, by the Most Eminent Painters and Sculptors of Italy; with Biographical Notices of the Artists, and Observations on their Works (London: Taylor and Hessey, 1823) Pencil drawings attributed to Henri Fuseli illustrating William Godwin’s Essay on Sepulchres (1809), 17.2 × 10.5 cm. Private collection. Digital images courtesy of the Paul Mellon Centre Photographic Archive (PA-F06077) Philp, Mark, ‘Introductory Note’, in Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 7 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993), VI: Essays, ed. Mark Philp, p.3 Pointon, Marcia, ‘Mulready, William (1786–1863), painter’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004). https://www.oxforddnb. com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/ odnb-­9780198614128-­e-­19520 [accessed 10 July 2020] Rodgers, David, ‘Ottley, William Young’, Grove Art Online (Oxford University Press, 2003) https://www.oxfordartonline.com/groveart/view/10.1093/ gao/9781884446054.001.0001/oao-­9 781884446054-­e -­7 000064209 [accessed 10 July 2020] Salber Phillips, Mark, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) Schorer, Mark, William Blake: the politics of vision (H.  Holt and Company; New York, 1946) ‘sepulchre, n.’, OED Online, Oxford University Press https://www.oed.com/ view/Entry/176261 [accessed 2 July 2020] Shelley, Percy Bysshe, ‘Ozymandias’, in The Examiner, A Sunday Paper, On politics, Domestic Economy, and Theatricals for the Year 1818 (London: John Hunt, 1818), p. 24 Smith, Horace, ‘Ozymandias’ in The Examiner, A Sunday Paper, On politics, Domestic Economy, and Theatricals for the Year 1818 (London: John Hunt, 1818), p. 73

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Sotheby, Leigh, Catalogue of the Valuable Collection of Books of Prints, and Works Connected with Literature and the Fine Arts, the property of the late William Young Ottley, ([London], 1837) Story, A.T., The Life of John Linnell http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/linnell/story/5.html [accessed 7 August 2020] Turner, Nicholas, ‘Ottley, William Young (1771–1836), writer on art and collector’ in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004 https://www.oxforddnb. com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/ odnb-­9780198614128-­e-­20941 [accessed 2 July 2020] Untitled herm, 1st-2nd century, marble, 83.82 cm, British Museum, London. Museum number  1805,0703.18 https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/image/875190001 [Accessed 13 October 2020] Warner, Janet A., ‘Blake’s Use of Gesture’ in Blake’s Visionary Forms Dramatic, ed. by David V. Erdman and John E. Grant (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 174–195 Westover, Paul. ‘Godwin, Literary Tourism, and the Work of Necromanticism’, Studies in Romanticism, 48:2 (2009), 299–319 Wright, Thomas, The Life of William Blake in Two Volumes, 2 vols (New York: Burt Franklin, 1929), II

Godwin’s Citations, 1783–2005: Highest Renown at the Pinnacle of Disfavour Pamela Clemit and Avner Offer

Five-and-twenty years ago he was in the very zenith of a sultry and unwholesome popularity; he blazed as a sun in the firmament of reputation; 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, and enjoys the serene twilight of a doubtful immortality.1

William Hazlitt’s 1825 account of the reputation of William Godwin (1756–1836) has been widely accepted ever since. Most scholars agree that Godwin enjoyed a meteoric rise to fame in the 1790s as the author of An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) and Things As They Are;

A version of this essay was first published in Nineteenth-Century Prose, 41 (2014), 27–52. We thank the editor for permission to reprint. P. Clemit (*) Queen Mary University of London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] A. Offer University of Oxford, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. O’Brien et al. (eds.), New Approaches to William Godwin, Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62912-0_12

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or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) but sank into obscurity after 1800, and spent the last 36 years of his life in neglect and poverty. A study of Godwin’s citations tells a more complicated story. In providing numerical precision for his reception, it allows for a more nuanced view of his reputation, and holds a few surprises as well.

Citations as a Record of Reception Godwin’s reputation, as measured by citations, fell into several different periods, not just one. The first phase did not peak in the early 1790s, but in 1801 (admittedly for negative reasons—hence our title). This was followed by a precipitate loss of interest, down from a peak of 107 citations in 1801, to a mere 4 in 1811. When Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote somewhat disingenuously to Godwin on 3 January 1812 that he had ‘enrolled [his] name on the list of the honorable dead’, Godwin’s reputation was at its lowest point.2 Yet 1812 also marked the start of a slow recovery of interest in Godwin, with several peaks, the highest in 1831, and declining gradually, touching bottom a few years after his death. Godwin’s reputation was low during the mid-Victorian period, but began to revive again in the 1880s. Since then, two or three sub-trajectories can be identified, but overall his reputation has increased and continues to do so. The new Godwin was important as both an exponent of a living philosophy and an object of academic study. In the latter role he is very much alive still. The resurgence in scholarly recognition continues apace, with new Oxford World’s Classics editions of his principal works, the electronic publication of his diary, and a scholarly edition of his letters under way; but it is too early to assess the impact of these latest developments, and our study ends in 2005.3 Reception studies are well-established in intellectual and cultural history as a way of understanding the meaning and impact of authors’ work.4 Beyond the humanities, interest in reception has often been motivated by more mundane considerations. Initially in the natural sciences, and then in the social sciences, this has taken the form of citation studies.5 The main purpose has been to establish rankings of scholars and their contributions. In recent years, citation counts have been used widely to measure academic performance and to reward it. Such counts make use of large

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databases of citations, which have been compiled in the last few decades. It is not easy to apply citation analysis to the reception of writers, especially where they were active long before the starting dates of the citation databases. Nevertheless this approach is possible in the case of Godwin. This is because a pioneering count of publications referring to Godwin was undertaken in the mid-twentieth century by Burton R. Pollin.6 He takes the record up to 1966. After that date, new citation databases are available to carry the count forward. We have used one of them, JSTOR, to take the record up to 2005. Taken together, Pollin and JSTOR provide a continuous record of citations from the first published comment on Godwin’s first publication, The History of the Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham (1783), up to 2005. For a few decades, there is an overlap between the two sources, which makes it possible to get a sense of their relative quality. The quantitative precision of citation studies is to some extent spurious. This is well understood in citation studies beyond the humanities: numbers say little about quality. On the other hand, the mere fact of a printed reference indicates that a writer’s reputation is not dead, and an increase in the number of references signifies a revival of interest. Citation studies thus bring a new dimension and a new understanding to the reception of writers. In the case of Godwin, they allow us to be more precise about the timing, trends, and magnitude of his reputation.

How Citation Analysis Works In modern scholarship, priority of discovery is acknowledged in footnotes and references, and the number of citations is a measure of the impact of priority and conceptual innovations.7 Citations are also used to evaluate current academic performance, for example, by promotion committees and research evaluation exercises. This requires reliable databases of citations, which are of recent vintage. Their historical coverage is uneven, and it is often difficult to extract a time-series of citations. The oldest database in widespread use is currently known as the Thomson-Reuters ISI index. More accessible and familiar at the moment is Google Scholar, which provides citation counts to anyone with an Internet browser. These two databases (and several others) have some serious limitations of cover. For this reason, citations have not been used much to reconstruct historical trajectories of intellectual impact, even for scientists. Recently, however, another dataset has become available. This is a by-­ product of the JSTOR project to digitize scholarly journals. This database

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was started in 1995 with a core of the most highly regarded North American academic journals in humanities and social science fields; it has since expanded to include the main English language journals, and increasingly other disciplines and the peripheries of scholarship.8 Unlike other databases, JSTOR reaches back to the initial year of its journals, sometimes into the nineteenth century. Its coverage ends behind a ‘moving wall’ a few years before the present. The most important finding in citation studies is that the bulk of cited articles are published by a minority of authors in a minority of journals.9 On that basis, JSTOR’s coverage of a substantial number of the most important journals is adequate; it does not provide a population count, but a large high-quality sample. Since it collects its data in the scholarly literature, it does not count books directly. But it does count reviews of books, and a much-reviewed book is likely to have considerable impact, even if the book itself is not counted as a citation. In sum, JSTOR does not encompass everything, but is unlikely to misrepresent scholarly trends. Current total citations in Google Scholar are substantially higher, in some cases by an order of magnitude. JSTOR was recently used for the first time as a dataset for reconstructing the intellectual careers of Nobel Prize winners in economics.10 This study traced citations and publications from 1930 onwards, which provided good coverage for the population in question, and compared the citations of Nobel Prize winners with those of outstanding economists from the past, including Adam Smith and Karl Marx. It is interesting to discover that Adam Smith is currently still the most cited economist of all, while Karl Marx has been ranked number two for most years since 1930. Such findings indicate the potential of citation data to evaluate the current reputation of historical writers. Our author, William Godwin, falls chronologically almost precisely between Adam Smith and Karl Marx. Ideally, one would wish to follow a writer’s reputation over the whole of his or her career, from the first publication up to the present. In Godwin’s case, this can be done, thanks to Pollin’s painstaking work. Pollin provided a simple graph showing the number of citations (up to 1966), but this does not seem to have made any impact at all on Godwin scholarship.11 For all his hard work, Pollin has only 12 citations for his book in Google Scholar, and 10  in JSTOR.12 In our study, we splice together Pollin’s time-series of citations (up to 1966) with JSTOR, covering citations from 1900 to 2005. Thus, for several decades, we can compare citation counts from both sources, and get a sense of how accurate they might be. To enable this comparison, we have modified Pollin’s data

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by removing Godwin’s own writings and periodicals (which Pollin includes). Finally, we use Google Scholar to evaluate the relative ranking and current citation stature of Godwin’s many publications, and his relative position in the world of scholarship. All the data were collected in 2013. It is not sufficient to provide a raw count of citations. It is also necessary to take account of the size of the literature. Hence the JSTOR information is provided in two formats, the raw count of citations, and an index which reports Godwin’s citations as a fraction of total citations in the literature, which controls for the size of that literature.13 It would be desirable to do the same for Pollin’s citations, but we do not have any measure of the relevant size of the literature. Our more detailed analyses (e.g. in Fig. 3), however, cover shorter sub-periods, where this distortion is likely to be less of a problem.

Godwin’s Citation Record Figure 1 shows a complete trajectory of Godwin’s citations from the two sources described above. It provides a quantitative graphical representation of his impact in print. For JSTOR, there are two curves, one showing raw citation scores, and the other is controlled for the size of the literature. While Pollin strove for completeness, JSTOR provides only a sample. Hence the absolute level of JSTOR citations will be an underestimate. Nonetheless it should be reasonably accurate in measuring changes over time. A visual examination of the raw citation scores indicates that they are in rough agreement. The work of successful authors may be likened to an innovation. There is a good deal of research about the take-up of innovations over time. Most of this research has taken place in the field of marketing, where the purpose is to try and predict the success of innovations (e.g. of the take-up of particular household appliances). This research originally took its inspiration from epidemiology (the study of the diffusion of disease in populations). The typical patterns of diffusion are indicated in Fig. 2. This figure is taken from the study of Nobel Prize winners in economics, and shows the citation trajectories of Paul Samuelson, one of the most influential economists in the post-war period, who won the Nobel Prize in 1970. This research has uncovered a pattern: if we are interested in, for example, the total number of people who will have been affected by the disease (in epidemiology), or the total number of people who have purchased a

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Fig. 1  Godwin Citations, 1783–2005. Sources: (a) Pollin, Godwin Criticism; (b) JSTOR

Fig. 2  Typical Diffusion Patterns, Cumulative and Current Flow. Source: Bjork, Offer, and Söderberg, ‘Time-Series Citation Data’, Fig. 1, p. 188

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new model of consumer durable, the cumulative diffusion process (Fig. 2, left) can usefully be described as an s-curve. Following a shallow lead of early adoption (or infection), there is an exponential (convex) increase up to an inflection point, and then a concave section which flattens out at the peak of adoptions. At the start, a few acolytes embrace the innovation. Information and emulation spread the word, and take-up accelerates. Diffusion then slows down as the innovation approaches its maximum appeal. The flow of citations over time (Fig. 2, right) rises towards a peak at the inflection point as diffusion accelerates, and declines when most new take­up has taken place. In such models, the probability and timing of new adoptions (in our case, new citations) is determined by the quantity and pace of previous ones. Figure 2, right, describes a bell-shaped curve. Such models provide a good approximation of the diffusion of innovations, and this approach can also be applied to the citation record of authors. In the recent study of Nobel Prize winners in economics, it was shown that these models provide a good fit for the citation patterns of the economists in question. In Fig.  2, the dots represent citation levels. The vertical scale (‘Arrows’) is an index of citations as a proportion of publications listed in the whole of the JSTOR citation database. This adjusts the citation count to the size of the literature. In brief, most successful innovations are picked up gradually at the start, reach a peak of popularity, then lose their novelty value and decline. The solid curve is provided by a mathematical curve-fitting procedure, the Bass model.14 In the Nobel Prize winners set (57 people), only a few authors diverged from this pattern. Figure  3 shows Godwin’s citation record with a succession of Bass curves fitted. A visual examination of Godwin’s citation record over the very long term suggests that he has gone through four or five bell-shaped trajectories. This curve-fitting procedure is somewhat arbitrary, since the start and end point of the curves of each trajectory are selected by the analyst. Once this is done, however, the curve is calculated automatically. This is simply a plausible smoothing procedure, but it is strongly suggestive of an underlying process of innovation and decline. The first spurt of citations appears in 1783–84, in response to a flurry of anonymous works published by Godwin when he first settled in London to earn his living as a writer. In addition to his biography of the elder Pitt, he published (to largely benign reception) two political pamphlets, a prospectus for an imaginary school, three novels, a volume of sermons, and a

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Fig. 3  Godwin citation trajectories, 1783–2000. Sources: (a) Pollin, Godwin Criticism; (b) JSTOR. Adjustment method: Bjork, Offer, and Söderberg, ‘TimeSeries Citation Data’, passim. Note: The scattergram data are from Pollin and JSTOR as indicated. The trajectory curves are ‘Bass Curves’, as described in the text, and in Bjork, Offer, and Söderberg, ‘Time-Series Citation Data’, pp. 187-8; JSTOR-adjusted are JSTOR data adjusted for a constant overall size of the JSTOR citation sample

collection of literary parodies. Godwin’s career as a writer and thinker took off a decade later when he published Political Justice. The first bellshaped trajectory of his reputation lasted for about 15 years. It was sustained by two further editions of Political Justice (1796, 1798), the pamphlet Cursory Strictures (1794), and the novel Caleb Williams, which were quickly followed by a volume of essays, The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature (1797) and a further novel, St Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century (1799). Godwin’s reputation peaked in 1801, and went into steep decline over the next ten years. The next cycle started around 1812 and is much longer, lasting until the mid-1840s. Godwin’s reputation was never extinguished altogether, and after 1793

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there was never a year when he was not cited at all. From the mid-1880s there was a revival of interest, indeed a small boomlet, which lasted until the First World War, followed by a solid inter-war trajectory, and another post-war one, which dipped in the 1960s. This is where Pollin’s record ends. The JSTOR record of citations (unadjusted for the size of the database) generally follows Pollin up to the 1960s, takes off again at the end of the 1960s, and was still going strong in 2005. Godwin now appears to be on a rising trajectory again, enjoying levels of absolute citation comparable to those he had reached at the time of Political Justice. If one takes account of the much larger size of the current reputational world, however, Godwin’s most recent revival, while undeniable, is still relatively modest. It may be illuminating to consider the drivers of each of these different surges.

Positive and Negative Reception Reputation can be achieved both by popularity and by notoriety. Godwin was a controversial figure from the start. Political Justice was a late entrant into the British debate on the French Revolution.15 While Godwin was writing the book, from September 1791 to January 1793, public opinion turned sharply against the French Revolution and its British sympathizers. Political Justice appeared on 14 February 1793, a fortnight after the French National Convention had declared war on Britain and Holland, urging the British people to rise against their oppressors, and three days after Britain had declared war on France. The book was reviewed sympathetically by a number of journals,16 and became widely known and admired among the radical intelligentsia. It also attracted hostile criticism from the start. The government-funded British Critic, a new journal founded by a group of Anglican clergymen, derided Political Justice as a reductio ad absurdum of the speculations of ‘Helvetius, Rousseau, the author of Systeme de la Nature, and some English writers of equal extravagance’.17 In order to estimate the impact of Godwin’s publications in terms of approval or disapproval, we have gone through all of Pollin’s citations which appeared in Godwin’s lifetime, and set apart those we judged to be negative in tone. This is necessarily a crude division. A balanced notice, by definition, would give some weight to both positive and negative aspects of the work under consideration. However, as the political controversy over the French Revolution became increasingly polarized, balanced reviews were hard to find.18 Nonetheless, the separation of

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negative commentaries from positive or neutral ones gives us some measure of the quality of Godwin’s continued reputation. A negative commentary suggests that the reviewer, despite a low opinion of the work in question, considers it deserving of notice because of the impact it might have on other readers. The figure is plotted as a ratio of negative to other notices in Fig. 4. Figure 4 confirms the prevailing view that opinion turned sharply against Godwin in the late 1790s.19 As noted earlier, the first bell-shaped curve starts in 1793 with the publication of Political Justice and its largely sympathetic initial reception. Positive response to Godwin was swelled by Cursory Strictures (1794), a political pamphlet, and Caleb Williams—and further enhanced, in 1796, by The Iron Chest, a stage adaptation of Caleb Williams by George Colman the Younger. In 1796 and 1797 the first of many novels satirizing Godwin’s intellectual position appeared, but opinion was still predominantly positive, even when his marriage to Mary Wollstonecraft, the early advocate of women’s rights, made him the

Fig. 4  Godwin Total, Negative and ‘Other’ Lifetime-plus Citations, 1783–1848. Source: Pollin, Godwin Criticism

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subject of celebrity gossip.20 There was little serious adverse criticism before late 1797, when the Anti-Jacobin, a satirical weekly periodical supported by government funds (succeeded in 1798 by the Anti-Jacobin Review) began a popular campaign to discredit Godwin’s opinions. The balance changed from positive to negative citations in 1798. In January of that year, following the death of Mary Wollstonecraft (10 September 1797), Godwin published Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a candid and sympathetic account of her unconventional life which provoked widespread hostility from the conservative press. In the same year, Thomas Malthus published his An Essay on the Principle of Population, inverting some of Godwin’s speculations in Political Justice, and this led to further negative comment. For the next four years, Godwin’s views were attacked in newspapers and journals, in anti-Jacobin novels, and in public lectures, sermons, and pamphlets. Godwin achieved his highest renown at the pinnacle of disfavour in 1801, the year in which he provided his own account of the reaction against his work and replied to his principal critics in the pamphlet, Thoughts Occasioned by the Perusal of Dr Parr’s Spital Sermon. Table 1 shows that references to him in newspapers, periodicals, books, and pamphlets peaked in that year, reaching 108, the highest point ever (compared with 28 in the year following the publication of Political Justice, and 18 in 1795, the lowest point in between). Of these references, 90 were hostile, partly because of systematic campaigns against his ideas by Federalist periodicals in America.21 The downward trajectory of the first bell-curve reflects the collapse of Godwin’s reputation in the first decade of the nineteenth century. In 1802 and 1803 especially, there was a marked decline in the number of citations (with negatives still outweighing the others). By 1804, however, the pace of Godwin’s fall had slackened because of extensive notices of his Life of Geoffrey Chaucer (1803), an ambitious work published in two quarto volumes, and the balance of negative and other responses had levelled out. In 1805 and 1806, his overall citation levels were higher than in 1793 and 1794, with positives narrowly outweighing the negatives, a trend which continued more or less unbroken until 1810. This was largely due to the success of Godwin’s pseudonymous schoolbooks for the Juvenile Library, a bookselling and publishing firm which he established with his second wife Mary Jane Godwin in 1805. In the first two years of business alone, Fables Ancient and Modern. Adapted for the Use of Children from Three to Eight Years of Age (1805), The History of England. For the Use of Schools

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Table 1  Godwin negative and other citations Year

Negative

Other

Total

Per cent negative

1783 1784 1785 1786 1787 1788 1789 1790 1791 1792 1793 1794 1795 1796 1797 1798 1799 1800 1801 1802 1803 1804 1805 1806 1807 1808 1809 1810 1811 1812 1813 1814 1815 1816 1817 1818 1819 1820 1821 1822 1823

3 4 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 7 6 13 15 44 40 37 90 33 17 26 24 16 10 9 5 2 1 6 4 3 3 6 5 16 0 4 15 6 3

9 23 3 0 4 3 0 0 1 0 24 16 10 23 65 28 16 25 18 12 14 28 28 23 16 1 10 13 3 3 7 3 11 8 11 20 7 25 22 9 13

12 27 3 0 4 3 0 0 1 0 26 23 16 36 80 72 56 62 108 45 31 54 52 39 26 10 15 15 4 9 11 6 14 14 16 36 7 29 37 15 16

25 15 0 0 0

0 8 30 38 36 19 61 71 60 83 73 55 48 46 41 38 90 33 13 25 67 36 50 21 43 31 44 0 14 41 40 19 (continued)

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Table 1  (continued) Year 1824 1825 1826 1827 1828 1829 1830 1831 1832 1833 1834 1835 1836 1837 1838 1839 1840 1841 1842 1843 1844 1845 1846 1847 1848

Negative 5 3 6 1 3 4 6 8 3 5 4 4 4 4 1 5 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 0 3

Other 26 8 11 17 13 11 42 43 17 34 18 28 30 14 12 9 32 25 13 6 7 7 6 5 6

Total 31 11 17 18 16 15 48 51 20 39 22 32 34 18 13 14 32 26 14 6 7 8 6 5 9

Per cent negative 16 27 35 6 19 27 13 16 15 13 18 13 12 22 8 36 0 4 7 0 0 13 0 0 33

Source: Pollin, Godwin Criticism

and Young Persons (1806), and The Pantheon: or Ancient History of the Gods of Greece and Rome (1806), all by ‘Edward Baldwin, Esq.’, together with Life of Lady Jane Grey, and of Lord Guildford Dudley, Her Husband (1806), by ‘Theophilus Marcliffe’, received positive notices in the Anti-­ Jacobin Review, the British Critic, and several other journals previously critical of Godwin’s writings. The irony was not lost on the Whig aristocrat Lord Holland: ‘The good little books in which our masters and misses were taught the rudiments of profane and sacred history, under the name of Baldwin, were really the composition of Godwin, branded as an atheist by those who unwittingly purchased, recommended, and taught his elementary lessons’.22 The popularity of Godwin’s schoolbooks was not enough to arrest his descent, but it helped to create a soft landing.

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During his second, longer bell-curve of renown, from 1812 onwards, Godwin received largely even-handed and indeed respectful treatment from most journals—with one or two exceptions, notably the Quarterly Review. While he continued to be a controversial figure, the quantitative balance of opinion was not hostile. A further revival of his fortunes began in 1815, the year in which Charles Lamb wrote on Christmas Day to Thomas Manning: ‘Poor Godwin! I was passing his tomb the other day in Cripplegate churchyard. […] his systems and his theories are ten feet deep in Cripplegate mould’.23 In May of that year, Godwin had published at his own expense Lives of Edward and John Philips, Nephews and Pupils of Milton. The gamble paid off. In the Edinburgh Review (previously hostile to Godwin), his former adversary James Mackintosh reviewed the work sympathetically and reflected at length on Godwin’s reputational fortunes in the 1790s, sparking a minor revival of interest in his novels. (New editions of Caleb Williams and St Leon were published in 1816.) It was left to Hazlitt to speak up for Political Justice: in his 1816 Examiner notice of Robert Owen’s A New View of Society (1813–14), he hailed Godwin’s book as one of the originals for Owen’s ideas on the ‘doctrine of Universal Benevolence’.24 The next 15 years saw a steady increase in citations, with minor peaks in 1818 (reflecting the mixed response to Mandeville: A Tale of the Seventeenth Century in England, published 1817), 1820–1 (reflecting the extensive and largely favourable response to Of Population; An Enquiry Concerning the Power of Increase in the Numbers of Mankind, published 1820), and in 1824 (reflecting the enthusiastic reaction to the first volume of History of the Commonwealth of England, published 1824). Of Population, Godwin’s response to the fifth edition of Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population (1817), has been described as ‘the last of Godwin’s works to make a public impact’.25 It prompted an extended discussion of the Godwin/Malthus controversy lasting up to 1827 and beyond. In terms of citations, however, it was outdone in 1830, when Godwin’s total citation count soared to 48, with a remarkable 29 positive notices of Cloudesley: A Novel (as well as 4 negatives). Godwin’s second bell-curve reached its highest point in 1831, the year in which he published a second collection of essays, Thoughts on Man: His Nature, Productions, and Discoveries, and in which Caleb Williams and St Leon were given pride of place in Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley’s Standard Novels, a new monthly series of cheap one-volume reprints.26

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Thereafter the number of citations starts to tail off, but is still marked by respectful attention to the ‘tottering king’, whose last works included another novel, Deloraine: A Tale (1833), and Lives of the Necromancers (1834).27 Meanwhile Political Justice attracted new readers when extracts were published by James Watson, one of the founders of the London Working Men’s Association, in the Working Man’s Friend and Political Magazine (1833), and by his colleague Henry Hetherington in the Poor Man’s Guardian (1835).28 Godwin’s death in 1836 swelled citations in that year, with a large number of positive obituaries. Over the next few years, his reputation declined steadily, apart from a minor peak in 1840–2 caused almost exclusively by the publication of extracts from Political Justice and The Enquirer in Owenite and Chartist journals. James Watson published a ‘cheap and elegant’ fourth edition of Political Justice in 1842. This did not generate a major revival of interest, though it was favourably reviewed in the New Moral World, the paper of the Rational Society (1835–44), a communitarian organization founded by Robert Owen.29 The renewed attention to Godwin’s ideas in publications intended for working men, though short-lived, gives credence to Friedrich Engels’s declaration in 1844 that Godwin was ‘almost exclusively the property of the proletariat’.30 In the middle of the nineteenth century, Godwin’s citations flattened out. Unlike many of his fellow-authors, after his death he was not kept in the public mind by an official biography or a large edition of his writings.31 The first full-length biographical study, Charles Kegan Paul’s William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries, appeared in 1876, creating a minor peak in citations in that year. The work was commissioned by Godwin’s surviving relatives, who sought to safeguard his reputation; Kegan Paul, a former Anglican vicar and an associate of F. D. Maurice and other Christian socialist and co-operative movement leaders, was well-­ placed to write a sympathetic study.32 Thereafter interest in Godwin recovered in tandem with the recovery of progressive movements from the 1880s onwards. Political Justice in particular drew the attention of turn-­ of-­century anarchists in search of precursors. In England, the journal Freedom, founded by the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin and his colleagues in 1886, included regular articles on Political Justice as an early exemplar of anarchism; in America, the leading anarchist journal Free Society ran a series of pieces on Political Justice in 1902–3.33 In the inter-­ war years, interest in Godwin revived again. This was not just because of his new role as a founding father of modern anarchism. The rise of English

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studies as an academic discipline prompted the growth of a critical literature, often biographical in focus, exploring Godwin’s links with other literary figures of the times.34 This was a mixed blessing. Godwin became known less for his own writings than for his connections with other writers—the husband of Mary Wollstonecraft, the father-in-law of Shelley, and the friend of Coleridge, Hazlitt, and Lamb. Two books published immediately after the Second World War were especially important in generating a new phase of interest in Godwin’s writings and shaping his reception over the next few decades. The first of these was F. E. L. Priestley’s variorum edition of Political Justice (1946), originally his doctoral thesis, which made the work available for twentieth-­ century academic study. Priestley’s edition was widely praised as a scholarly contribution, though the Manchester Guardian remarked that Political Justice itself was no longer ‘social dynamite’.35 The author of the second influential book published in 1946 might not have agreed. In William Godwin: A Biographical Study, the anarchist George Woodcock set out to ‘arouse interest among English anarchists in their great predecessor’ and to rehabilitate Godwin among general readers.36 His book appeared with a foreword by the poet and critic Herbert Read (who had declared himself an anarchist in 1937): Mr Woodcock’s study of Godwin is timely. An increasing number of people, especially of the younger generation, are turning away in disillusionment from the dreary world created by authoritarian or State socialism, and being in no mood for reaction or despair, they discover that there is another and more revolutionary concept of socialism, libertarian socialism, which is still untried, and in detail largely unformulated. Godwin was the first and most eloquent prophet of this social philosophy, and in the years that lie immediately ahead of us, his name and his message will be reanimated.37

For Woodcock, Read, and their associates, the value of Political Justice was more than academic: like Godwin’s first readers in the 1790s, they believed his philosophy could provide a new model of political engagement and a guide to moral action. In the post-war years, a good deal of intellectual and cultural life became institutionalized in the expanding universities. JSTOR, which follows academic publications, records a surge of popularity during the 1950s, stimulated by David Fleisher’s William Godwin: A Study in Liberalism (1951) and D.  H. Munro’s Godwin’s Moral Philosophy: An Interpretation of William Godwin (1953); and then again during the long 1960s, the

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decade of Pollin’s major contributions. Godwin’s philosophical anarchism was to some extent in tune with the rise of the progressive and academic counterculture and the New Left, and this provided an opportunity to reprint his key works. Caleb Williams was published by Reinhardt (New York) in 1960 and as an Oxford English Novel in 1970; Political Justice was published by Penguin Books in 1976. Meanwhile, Godwin’s enigmatic personality received fresh attention. Following the rise of the Women’s Movement in the 1970s, he loomed large in publications which gave new prominence to Mary Wollstonecraft and their daughter Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein (1818); in the 1980s he was the principal subject of three full-length biographies within a decade.38 In the 1990s the majority of his works were reprinted in a large scholarly edition, and many earlier editions of his writings were made available electronically through a research project on the history and theory of anarchism.39 Godwin’s reputation has survived its initial decline, and has surged again in recent years. He has benefited substantially from the critical trend towards the rehistoricizing of texts and their authors, which currently dominates academic study of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. One consequence is the publication of authoritative editions of his diary and of his letters, which provide a whole new dimension to Godwin studies.

Conclusion Consider Godwin’s standing today. The most up-to-date and expansive current citation count available is Google Scholar. Table 2 consists of citations to Godwin’s works (five citations and over) taken in 2013. The total number of citations is 1950, which is a respectable score, comparable to that of the lifetime score of a well-cited academic in a research university today. In a sample of fifty Fellows of the British Academy in cognate subjects, Godwin would be number 26 in citations, precisely at the median, with 25 Fellows above him, and 24 below.40 Table  2 indicates that Godwin’s enduring reputation is based almost entirely on Political Justice, which achieves four-figure citation status. Caleb Williams also has a respectable score: this is to direct citations of the book itself, not to studies of it. Both of these texts are in the academic curriculum and continue to be read. Mary Wollstonecraft, by way of comparison, has more than twice as many citations, approximately 4680 citations, and likewise, her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) has about 2600 citations in Google Scholar, where it is listed twice. Of

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Table 2  Godwin citations in Google Scholar (Short titles, including modern editions and individual essays by Godwin within collections) Political Justice Caleb Williams The Enquirer Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman Of Population St Leon ‘Essay of History and Romance’ Lives of the Necromancers Essays, Never Before Published Fleetwood History of the Commonwealth Thoughts Occasioned by … Dr Parr’s Spital Sermon Life of Geoffrey Chaucer Thoughts on Man Essay on Sepulchres Lives of Edward and John Philips Anarchist Writings [anthology] Short Residence in Sweden & Memoirs of Author of ‘Rights of Woman’ ‘Of Choice in Reading’ Uncollected Writings Collected Novels and Memoirs Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr Pitt’s Bills Fables, Ancient and Modern Life of William Pitt Political and Philosophical Writings Mandeville

1138 219 68 50 45 42 34 30 23 23 22 21 20 19 19 17 13 12 11 11 10 9 7 6 6 5

Note: Scores aggregated from several different editions, using Harzing, ‘Publish or Perish’ (www.harzing. com/pop.htm). Date of access, 12 October 2013. Full references can be followed up in Google Scholar (https://scholar.google.co.uk).

Population and St Leon each has more than 40 citations. Godwin was immensely prolific, with scores of titles to his name, but his reputation lives on by virtue of one big hit, and a few minor ones. The typical author’s trajectory is the bell-shaped curve of a successful one-period innovation. Godwin is one of the few who has had a second, third, and fourth life as an author. He has made the transition from a living presence in his own time to an enduring part of our civilization.

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Notes 1. William Hazlitt, The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: Dent, 1930–4), XI: The Spirit of the Age; or, Contemporary Portraits (1825), 16. 2. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), I, 220. Shelley had first written to Godwin in spring 1811, using an assumed name (‘Jennyngs Stukeley’) and requesting an opinion of his pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism (1811), a copy of which he enclosed (Bod. MS Abinger c. 10, fol. 114; for transcription and commentary, see B.  C. Barker-Benfield, ‘A Spoof Letter to William Godwin’, Bodleian Library Record, 21 (2008), 112–15). 3. Caleb Williams (the 1794 text), ed. Pamela Clemit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (the 1793 text), ed. Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); The Diary of William Godwin, ed. Victoria Myers, David O’Shaughnessy, and Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford Digital Library, 2010), http://godwindiary. bodleian.ox.ac.uk/index2.html; The Letters of William Godwin, gen. ed. Pamela Clemit, 6 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011–). 4. E.g. The Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe, a research project directed by Elinor Shaffer and published by Bloomsbury Academic (formerly Continuum) in an open-ended, multi-volume book series edited by her (https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/series/the-­reception-­of-­british-­ and-­irish-­authors-­in-­europe/); on Godwin’s reception, see Kenneth W. Graham, William Godwin Reviewed: A Reception History, 1783–1834 (New York: AMS Press, 2001). 5. For an overview of citation studies, see Nicola De Bellis, Bibliometrics and Citation Analysis: From the Science Citation Index to Cybermetrics (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2009). 6. Burton R.  Pollin, Godwin Criticism: A Synoptic Bibliography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967). 7. De Bellis, Bibliometrics, pp. 181–242. 8. Roger C. Schonfeld, JSTOR: A History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 9. De Bellis, Bibliometrics, pp. 75–140. 10. Samuel Bjork, Avner Offer, and Gabriel Söderberg, ‘Time-Series Citation Data: The Nobel Prize in Economics’, Scientometrics, 98 (2014), 185–96. 11. Pollin, Godwin Criticism, pp. 650–54. 12. On 12 October 2013. 13. Technical details in Bjork, Offer, and Söderberg, ‘Time-Series Citation Data’, pp. 185–8.

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14. Technical details in Bjork, Offer, and Söderberg, ‘Time-Series Citation Data’, pp. 187–8. 15. Mark Philp, Godwin’s Political Justice (London: Duckworth, 1986), pp. 58–79. 16. Derek Roper, Reviewing before the ‘Edinburgh’, 1788–1802 (London: Methuen, 1978), pp. 198–203. 17. Roper, Reviewing before the ‘Edinburgh’, 180–1; British Critic, 1 (1793), reprinted in Graham, William Godwin Reviewed, p. 63. 18. On the transformation in reviewing practices in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Britain, see Roper, Reviewing before the ‘Edinburgh’; Jon P. Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), pp.  18–46; Marilyn Butler, ‘Culture’s Medium: The Role of the Review’, in The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, ed. Stuart Curran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 120–47. 19. The collapse of Godwin’s reputation during these years may be traced more fully in The Letters of William Godwin, Volume II: 1798–1805, ed. Pamela Clemit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), passim. 20. M. O. Grenby, The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), passim; True Briton, 12 Apr. 1797, 3; 14 Apr. 1797, 3; 15 Apr. 1797, 3; 18 Apr. 1797, 3. 21. For example, the Mercury and New-England Palladium published 29 articles ridiculing Godwin’s views in 1801 (Pollin, Godwin Criticism, pp.  105–09; see also Clarence S.  Brigham, History and Bibliography of American Newspapers, 1690–1820, 2 vols (Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1947), I, 317–18). 22. Henry Richard Vassall, Baron Holland, Further Memoirs of the Whig Party, 1807–1821, with Some Miscellaneous Reminiscences (1854), ed. Lord Stavordale (London: John Murray, 1905), p. 381. 23. The Letters of Charles Lamb, To Which Are Added Those of His Sister Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas, 3 vols (London: Dent, 1935), II, 183. 24. Hazlitt, Complete Works, VII: Political Essays (1819) 98. 25. Peter H.  Marshall, William Godwin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 345. 26. Michael Sadleir, XIX Century Fiction: A Bibliographical Record Based on His Own Collection (London and Los Angeles: Constable, 1951), II, 100; Richard D.  Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1957), pp. 274–75. 27. Cf. Metropolitan Magazine, 6 (Jan.–Apr. 1833), 114 (on Deloraine): ‘He who has trod like a king through the walks of feeling and affection, even when his step totters, will have an interest and a dignity about him, that

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must infallibly command respect’; reprinted in Graham, William Godwin Reviewed, p. 557. 28. Pollin, Godwin Criticism, pp. 187–88, p. 160. 29. ‘To the Socialist especially, ‘Political Justice’ opens up a storehouse of argument and illustration which may truly be pronounced invaluable’ (New Moral World, 3rd ser. 4/35 (25 Feb. 1843), 284). 30. Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, ed. Victor Kiernan, intro. Tristram Hunt (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2009), p. 245. 31. See Pamela Clemit, ‘Introduction’, Lives of the Great Romantics III: Godwin, Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley by Their Contemporaries, gen. ed. John Mullan, 3 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999), I, ix–xliv. 32. Clemit, Lives of the Great Romantics III, I, 227–28. 33. Pollin, Godwin Criticism, pp.  267–9, p.  267; see also Heiner Becker, ‘Notes on Freedom and the Freedom Press, 1886–1928’, The Raven, 1 (1987), 4–24, and Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, ed. Candace Falk et al., 2 vols (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003–) II, 551. 34. On the post-First World War rise of English studies, see Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism, 1848–1932 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), pp. 86–108. 35. Manchester Guardian, 9 Mar. 1948. 36. George Woodcock, ‘Introduction to a New Edition’, William Godwin: A Biographical Study (Montreal and New  York: Black Rose Books, 1989), p. ix. 37. Herbert Read, ‘Foreword’, Woodcock, William Godwin, p. xvii. 38. Don Locke, A Fantasy of Reason: The Life And Thought of William Godwin (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980); Marshall, William Godwin; William St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys: The Biography of a Family (London: Faber and Faber, 1989). 39. Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 8 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1992) and Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 7 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993); Anarchy Archives: An Online Research Centre on the History and Theory of Anarchism, a research project directed by Dana Ward, at: http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/ 40. The sample was taken from the British Academy Directory for 2012–13, and consisted of the first ten distinctive names (to avoid overcounting) in each of the sections H6 (Modern Languages, Literatures and other Media; this includes English), H9 (Early Modern History to c.1800), H10 (Modern History from 1800), H12 (Philosophy), S5 (Political Studies: Political Theory, Government and International Relations). The counts were made on 12 October 2013  in Google Scholar, using Anne-Wil

294 

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Harzing’s programme, Publish or Perish (www.harzing.com/pop.htm). The highest individual score was 43,139 citations, the lowest was 106, and the arithmetical mean was 4581. British Academy Fellows tend to be near the end of their scholarly careers. Different sections varied widely in citation levels from each other, perhaps because of different scholarly practices in different disciplines, and there was sometimes a large variance within sections as well.

Bibliography Altick, Richard D., The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1957) Baldick, Chris, The Social Mission of English Criticism, 1848–1932 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983) Barker-Benfield, B.  C., ‘A Spoof Letter to William Godwin’, Bodleian Library Record, 21 (2008), 112–15 Becker, Heiner, ‘Notes on Freedom and the Freedom Press, 1886–1928’, The Raven, 1 (1987), 4–24 Bjork, Samuel, Avner Offer, and Gabriel Söderberg, ‘Time-Series Citation Data: The Nobel Prize in Economics’, Scientometrics, 98 (2014), 185–96 British Academy Directory, 2012–13 Butler, Marilyn, ‘Culture’s Medium: The Role of the Review’, in The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, ed. Stuart Curran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) pp. 120–47 Brigham, Clarence S., History and Bibliography of American Newspapers, 1690–1820, 2 vols (Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1947) Clemit, Pamela, ‘Introduction’, Lives of the Great Romantics III: Godwin, Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley by Their Contemporaries, gen. ed. John Mullan, 3 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999), I, ix–xliv De Bellis, Nicola, Bibliometrics and Citation Analysis: From the Science Citation Index to Cybermetrics (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2009) Engels, Friedrich, The Condition of the Working Class in England, ed. Victor Kiernan, intro. Tristram Hunt (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2009) Godwin, William, Caleb Williams, ed. Pamela Clemit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) Godwin, William, Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 8 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1992) Godwin, William, The Diary of William Godwin, ed. Victoria Myers, David O’Shaughnessy, and Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford Digital Library, 2010), http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/index2.html

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Godwin, William, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) Godwin, William, The Letters of William Godwin, gen. ed. Pamela Clemit, 6 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011–) Godwin, William, Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 7 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993) Goldman, Emma, Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, ed. Candace Falk et  al., 2 vols (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003–) Graham, Kenneth W., William Godwin Reviewed: A Reception History, 1783–1834 (New York: AMS Press, 2001) Grenby, M.  O., The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Hazlitt, William, The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: Dent, 1930–4) Holland, Henry Richard Vassall, Baron, Further Memoirs of the Whig Party, 1807–1821, with Some Miscellaneous Reminiscences (1854), ed. Lord Stavordale (London: John Murray, 1905) Klancher, Jon P., The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987) Lamb, Charles, The Letters of Charles Lamb, To Which Are Added Those of His Sister Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas, 3 vols (London: Dent, 1935) Locke, Don, A Fantasy of Reason: The Life And Thought of William Godwin (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980) Manchester Guardian, 9 March 1948 Marshall, Peter H., William Godwin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984) New Moral World, 3rd ser. 4/35 (25 February 1843) Philp, Mark, Godwin’s Political Justice (London: Duckworth, 1986) Pollin, Burton R., Godwin Criticism: A Synoptic Bibliography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967) Read, Herbert, ‘Foreword’, George Woodcock, William Godwin: A Biographical Study (Montreal and New York: Black Rose Books, 1989), xv–xvii Roper, Derek, Reviewing before the ‘Edinburgh’, 1788–1802 (London: Methuen, 1978) Sadleir, Michael, XIX Century Fiction: A Bibliographical Record Based on His Own Collection (London and Los Angeles: Constable, 1951) Schonfeld, Roger C., JSTOR: A History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003) Shelley, Percy Bysshe, The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964)

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St Clair, William, The Godwins and the Shelleys: The Biography of a Family (London: Faber and Faber, 1989) True Briton, 12, 14, 15, 18 Apr. 1797 Ward, Dana, Anarchy Archives: An Online Research Centre on the History and Theory of Anarchism. http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/ Woodcock, George, ‘Introduction to a New Edition’, William Godwin: A Biographical Study (Montreal and New York: Black Rose Books, 1989) vii–xiv

Index1

A Act of Union, 1801, 6, 15, 16, 21, 24, 32n32 Alderson, Brian, 189 Alexander the Great, 160, 228 The Anarchy and Horrors of France, Displayed by a Member of the Convention, 172 Anti-Jacobin, 142, 143, 283 Anti-Jacobinism, 142 Anti-Jacobin Review, 283, 285 Aristocracy, 201, 229 Artist, 4, 8, 58, 60, 67–70, 242–244, 246, 249–251, 253–261, 262–263n12, 264n27, 265n38, 266n45 Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers, 94

Audience, 13, 15, 28, 32n36, 167, 168, 186, 216, 217, 221, 223–225, 227, 253 See also Readers Autobiography, 41, 168, 223, 237n44 See also Memoir B Baldwin, Edward, 193, 195, 285 See also Godwin, William; Juvenile Library Bankruptcy, 186 Barbauld, Anna Letitia, 188 Lessons for Children, 188 Bass model, 279 Bell-curve, 283, 286 Benevolence, 59, 66–70, 113–117, 128, 129, 136, 142, 143, 201, 219, 222, 223, 231, 233, 234

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. O’Brien et al. (eds.), New Approaches to William Godwin, Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62912-0

297

298 

INDEX

Bentley Jnr, G. E., 258 Berquin, Arnaud L’Ami des Enfans, 188 Bible Stories. Memorable Acts of the Ancient Patriarchs, Judges and Kings Extracted from their Original Historians. For the Use of Children, 186–190, 192, 194, 205 Binns, John, 17, 30n19 Biography, 6, 57–71, 150n73, 151n81, 204, 217, 220, 226, 227, 265n43, 279, 287, 289 See also Memoir Bisset, Robert, 57 Blair, Robert, 98, 258 The Grave, 258, 267n48 Blake, William, 145n3, 243, 246, 254, 256–261, 265n43, 266n45, 266–267n48, 267n50 Europe, 259, 260 Jerusalem, 258, 266n48 ‘Newton,’ 260 ‘Various Personifications,’ 259 Boswell, James, 60 The Life of Samuel Johnson, 60 Bourdieu, Pierre, 7, 128, 132–136, 138, 141, 142, 145–146n4, 147n26, 149n49 and gift-giving, view on, 140 and habitus, 133 Outline of a Theory of Practice, 145n4 Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action, 145n4 and symbolic capital, theory of, 132, 134, 135 and symbolic violence, theory of, 136, 142 Bourgeois individualism, 69 Brewer, William, 37–39, 41, 42, 53n1 British Critic, 167, 174, 281, 285

British Museum, 201, 243, 246, 249, 264n25 Burial places, 253, 254 See also Grave; Headstone; Memorial; Monument; Sepulchre; Statue; Wooden cross Burke, Edmund, 33n50, 106, 118, 128, 146n6, 160, 169, 170 Reflections on the Revolution in France, 146n6, 169 Butler, Marilyn, 148n31, 167 C Candour, 6, 7, 40–43, 60, 81–99 See also Frankness; Sincerity Capital, 132–135, 144 Carlson, Julie Ann, 14, 37, 39, 53n1, 105, 242 Carrier, James G., 138 Catholics ‘Catholic question,’ 16 Celebrity, 216, 217, 219–221, 235n9, 283 See also Fame; Reputation Cervantes, Miguel de, 168, 169 Don Quixote, 168 Chapbooks, 188, 189 Chardin, John, 14 Charity, 104, 127–145 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 61, 191, 196, 199 The Canterbury Tales, 196 ‘The Clerk’s Tale,’ 191, 196 Child reader, 60 See also Children’s literature; Juvenile Library The Children in the Wood, 190 Children’s literature, 3, 4, 6, 184–187, 205, 217, 220, 234 See also Child reader; Juvenile Library

 INDEX 

Chivalry, 160, 168, 170, 173, 174, 197, 202, 229 Christie’s auction house, 242 Citation, 275, 277, 279, 283, 287 Citation studies, 274–276 Clairmont, Charles, 255 Clairmont, Mary Jane, 185, 186, 188, 189, 191, 193, 195, 203, 205, 217, 235n9, 283 Dramas for Children, 191, 193, 195, 203 Class, 42, 112, 118, 144, 166, 175, 217 Classical, 222 Classics, 67, 218, 229 Clemit, Pamela, 3, 5, 8, 41, 59, 60, 148n45, 148n48, 152n82, 171, 173, 185, 228 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 13–15, 19, 20, 28, 32n32, 187, 288 Collett, Cathy, 38, 50 Colman, George, 282 Colonel Jack: The History of a Boy who Never Went to School, 195 See also Godwin, William; Children’s literature Concannon, Amy, 246, 258 Condorcet, 84 Life of Voltaire, 84 Cromek, Robert Hartley, 258 Cumberland Junior, George, 256 Curran, John Philpot, 17, 25, 29, 31n22 Curry, John, 18, 19, 25, 26 A brief account from the most authentic Protestant writers of the causes, motives, and mischiefs of the Irish rebellion, on the 23rd day of October 1641, 18 Historical Memoirs of the Irish rebellion in 1641, 18 Historical Review of the Civil Wars in Ireland, 18

299

D Dart, Gregory, 225 d’Aulnoy, Marie-Catherine, 190 Day, Thomas, 66, 188 ‘The History of Little Jack,’ 66, 67, 69, 70 Sandford and Merton, 188 Defoe, Daniel, 170, 179n46, 195 Jure Divino, A Satyr, 179n49 Robinson Crusoe, 190, 207n19 Denham, John, 14, 19, 20, 22–24, 32n31 The Sophy, 14, 19, 22 Dissent, 163 dissenters, 147n23, 172 Domesticity, 59, 119 Drama, 1, 3, 6, 24, 28, 32n34, 188, 199 Drawings, 8, 26, 41, 43, 60, 68, 69, 130, 135, 147n17, 229, 242–255, 257–261, 262n9, 262n11, 263n12, 263n13, 263n19, 264n25, 266n44, 266n45, 267n51 See also Illustrations; Sketches Duelling, 15 Dundas, Henry, 16 Duty, 87, 90, 93, 97, 111, 112, 128–131, 141, 142, 144, 219, 222, 223, 225, 226 E Edgeworth, Maria, 188 The Parent’s Assistant, 188 Edinburgh Review, 286 Education, 57–59, 61, 63, 69, 71, 112, 119, 186, 189, 190, 217, 219, 221 Eisner, Eric, 216, 217 Elgin Marbles, 249 Engels, Frederick, 287 The Condition of the Working Class in England, 293n30

300 

INDEX

Erostratus, 228, 229 Essick, Robert N., 257 Esteem, 85, 110, 112, 217, 218, 220, 222, 223, 226, 227, 233 See also Merit Everest, Kelvin, 251, 253 Examiner, The, 250, 265n30 Eyre, Lord Chief Justice, 93 F Fame, 2, 3, 7, 8, 28, 115, 215–234, 253, 273 classical notion of, 217, 228 See also Celebrity; Reputation Fénelon, François, Archbishop of Cambray, 39, 41, 47, 49, 107, 108, 113, 118, 124n80, 128, 129, 140, 188 Aventures de Télémaque, 188 Fenwick, John, 17, 30n19, 31n22, 227 Ferriar, John, 27 Fielding, Henry, 170, 179n46 Jonathan Wild, 170, 179n46 Finnerty, Peter, 18 Flaxman, John, 243, 258, 267n50 Fleisher, David, 288 Form, literary, 1 See also Genre Frankness, 114 See also Candour; Sincerity Freedom, 287 Free Society, 287 French Revolution, 281 Fuseli, Henry, 243, 247, 248, 254, 256–258, 262n9, 263n13, 263n19, 265n43, 266n45 G Genlis, Stephanie-Felicité de, 187, 188 Adèle et Théodore ou lettres sur l’éducation, 188

Genre, 2, 6, 15, 57–59, 62, 71, 142, 150n73, 193 George III (King), 16, 23 Gerrald, Joseph, 91, 92, 94, 156, 167 Gift-giving, 6, 144 Gilmartin, Kevin, 175 Godwin, Mary Jane, see Clairmont, Mary Jane Godwin, William, 1–8, 13–29, 37–43, 45–47, 49, 51, 52, 53n1, 53n2, 54n10, 55n12, 55n15, 66–70, 81–99, 103–120, 127–145, 155–158, 161–176, 179n46, 185–206, 215–234, 273–290 and anarchism, 289 and artists, 8, 60, 67, 242, 253, 254, 265n38 and beggars, 137, 140, 141 and benevolence, 142, 219, 222, 223, 233 biographies of, 2, 5, 6, 151n81, 287 and children’s literature, 4, 6, 186, 187, 205, 217, 220, 234 and courage, 7, 81–99 and debt, 108, 136, 144, 226, 235n17 and duty, 108, 129, 130, 133, 143, 219, 223, 226 and education, 57–59, 71, 189 genre, 4 and gift-giving, 6, 144 and government, 81, 82, 94, 162, 164, 166, 167, 171, 173, 235n17 and gratitude, 7, 108, 110, 118, 127–145 and illustrious dead, 226, 227, 253 and imperialism, critique of, 29 and improvement, 116, 123n59, 166, 175, 226 and independence, 96, 107, 110, 111, 115, 120, 149n53, 220 and individualism, 66–70

 INDEX 

and judgement, 64, 65, 75n25, 81–83, 90, 96, 98, 104, 107, 110, 141 and memorialisation, 245, 253 and monuments, perishableness of, 246 and private affections, 7, 39, 103–120, 227 and property, 118, 129–131, 139, 140, 142, 166, 170 and prudence, 81, 82, 86–90, 95–99 and public good, 108, 221 and publishers, 186, 189 and religion, denominations of, 60 and religious fanaticism, dangers of, 19 and truth, 27, 67, 81–84, 89, 90, 97, 108, 111, 114, 131, 167, 172, 220, 222, 223, 227 visit to Ireland, 17 works by Godwin; Abbas, King of Persia, 4, 6, 14, 15, 19, 21–24, 26–29; ‘Analysis of own character begun Sept 26, 1798,’ 168; ‘Autobiographical Fragments,’ 100n20; Antonio; or, The Soldier’s Return, 13–16, 29n1, 32n36, 97, 185; Caleb Williams (see Godwin, William, works by Godwin: Things as They Are, or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams); Cloudesley: A Novel, 286; Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr Pitt’s Bills Concerning Treasonable and Seditious Practices, 166; Cursory Strictures on the Charge delivered by Lord Chief Justice Eyre to the Grand Jury, 93, 280, 282; Damon and Delia, A Tale, 168; Deloraine: A Tale, 287; Diary (2010), 4–5; The Diary

301

of William Godwin, 30n3, 75n31, 100n9, 120n5, 147n15, 176n2, 206n2, 261n1, 263n17, 265n35, 265n36, 265n38, 291n3; The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, And Literature, 3, 58, 139, 187, 280; An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 2–4, 7, 19, 31n19, 38, 39, 43, 44, 49, 52, 61, 70, 81, 82, 85–89, 91, 92, 96, 98, 100n11, 104–107, 111, 112, 117, 119, 121n16, 121n19, 127–131, 133, 134, 139–141, 143, 150n61, 165, 166, 170, 171, 187, 215, 216, 218–223, 226, 231, 233, 234, 235n10, 273, 280–283, 286–289; ‘Essay of History and Romance,’ 204; 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, 4, 5, 8, 58, 241, 242, 247, 248, 254, 262n9, 263n13, 263n19 (see also Godwin, William, works by Godwin, ‘On Monuments’); Fables Ancient and Modern. Adapted for the Use of Children from Three to Eight Years of Age, 186, 195, 283; Fleetwood: or, The New Man of Feeling, 2, 5, 24, 28, 37, 65, 162, 191–193, 195, 231; ‘Of History and Romance,’ 26, 71; History of the Commonwealth, 6; The History of England. For the Use of Schools and Young Persons, 62, 193, 203, 209n46, 283–285; History of the

302 

INDEX

Godwin, William (cont.) Commonwealth of England, 5, 17, 34n57, 286; The History of the Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, 168, 275; ‘On the Length of Life of Man, A Confession,’ 225; ‘Letters of Mucius,’ 163; The Letters of William Godwin, 4, 5, 292n19; Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, 2, 6, 58, 189, 196, 283; Life of Lady Jane Grey and of Lord Guildford Dudley, Her Husband, 6, 58, 59, 61–66, 70, 71, 193–194, 204, 285; Lives of Edward and John Philips, Nephews and Pupils of Milton, 58, 61, 204, 286; Lives of the Necromancers, 287; The Looking-Glass: A True History of the Early Years of an Artist, 6, 58–61, 66–71, 76n34, 193, 256; Mandeville: A Tale of the Seventeenth Century in England, 2, 5, 6, 15, 24, 25, 27–29, 217, 286; A Memoir of the Author, by his Father, 224; Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 3, 6, 58–60, 71, 98, 105, 223, 283; ‘On Monuments,’ 241, 263n17 (see also Godwin, William, works by Godwin, 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 Pantheon: or Ancient History of the Gods of Greece and Rome, 193, 285; ‘To the People of Ireland,’ 28; Political Justice (see Godwin,

William, works by Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice); Of Population: An Enquiry Concerning the Power of Increase in the Numbers of Mankind, 17, 286, 289–290; St Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century, 6, 24, 37–39, 41, 43, 45, 47–50, 52, 53n2, 54n10, 103–105, 117, 193, 195, 204, 229, 280, 286, 290; Things as They Are, or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, 2–4, 7, 23, 24, 37, 38, 88, 91–93, 95, 98, 133–139, 144, 148n31, 149n61, 155–176, 193, 195, 197, 200–202, 217, 218, 228, 230, 274, 280, 282, 286, 289; Thoughts Occasioned by the Perusal of Dr Parr’s Spital Sermon, 283; Thoughts on Man: His Nature, Productions, and Discoveries, 105, 215, 217, 223, 286 Godwin, William Jr., 224 Godwin’s Memoir of, 224 Transfusion or, the Orphans of Unwalden, 224 Google Scholar, 275–277, 289, 290, 293n40 Gratitude, 7, 108–110, 118 Grattan, Henry, 17, 18 Grave, 5, 185, 245, 252, 260 See also Burial places; Headstone; Memorial; Monument; Sepulchre: Statue; Wooden cross Gray, Thomas, 258 Elegy Written in a Country Graveyard, 258 Gregory, C. A., 138 Grenby, M.O., 4, 5, 7, 143, 217 Grey, Jane (Lady), 59–66, 71, 98

 INDEX 

H Hamilton, Elizabeth, 142, 150n74 Memoirs of Modern Philosophers in Three Volumes, 150n74 Hamilton, Paul, 42, 147n23 Hansson, John-Erik, 6, 128, 149n61, 204, 217, 256 Harris, Thomas, 14 Hays, Mary, 62 Female Biography: Or, Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women, of All Ages and Countries, 62 Hazlitt, William, 2, 4, 85, 131, 144, 145, 151n81, 218, 221, 235n9, 273, 286, 288 The Spirit of the Age, 151n81 Table Talk, 221 Headstone, 244–246, 253 See also Burial places: Grave: Memorial: Monument: Sepulchre: Statue: Wooden cross Henry VIII (King), 62 Hilton, William, 255, 256 ‘The History of Fortunatus,’ 187, 190 Hobbes, Thomas, 166 Leviathan, 166 Holcroft, Thomas, 14, 85, 92, 93, 96, 97, 156 Hopwood, James, 255 Hume, David, 25–27, 89, 106, 110 The History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Accession of Henry VII, 179n49 A Treatise of Human Nature, 106 Hunt, Leigh, 248 Examiner, The, 250 Hunt Botting, Eileen, 100n20, 227, 237n42

303

I Illustrations, 63, 190, 218, 243–245, 254–259, 265–266n43, 267n48, 293n29 See also Drawings; Sketches Immortality, 2, 40, 41, 45, 51, 103, 104, 151n81, 217, 218, 230, 253, 273 Impartiality, 107, 119, 135, 150n62 Improvement, 16, 83, 113, 114, 116, 123n59, 141, 166, 171, 175, 218, 226 Irish Rebellion, 1798, 24 J Jacobins, 148n31, 166, 173 Johnson, Samuel, 21, 28, 32n35, 32n36, 57, 59, 169 A Dictionary of the English Language, 169 The Rambler, 72n2 Jones, Anna Maria, 134 JSTOR, 275–277, 279, 281, 288 Juvenal, 155, 156 satires, 156 Juvenile Library, 58, 186, 189, 191, 192, 195, 204, 205, 256, 283 Juvenile Plutarch, The, 62–65 K Kegan Paul, Charles, 287 Kemble, John, 14 Kramnick, Isaac, 67 L La Belle, Jenijoy, 259 Lamb, Charles, 14, 15, 29, 29n1, 32n36, 187, 241, 261n2, 286, 288 ‘The Old Actors,’ 29n1, 30n9, 32n36

304 

INDEX

Lamb, Mary, 241, 261n3 Laqueur, Thomas, 262n7 Leithart, Paul, 131 Leprince de Beaumont, Jeanne-Marie The Young Misses’ Magazine, 188 Linley, Thomas, 203 Richard Cœur de Lion, An Historical Romance, 7, 194, 203, 204, 210n59 Linnell, John, 243, 254–257, 266n45 Livy, 177n9 Locke, Don, 121n19, 235n9 London, April, 61 London Corresponding Society (LCS), 30n19, 91, 92, 95, 165, 166 Loughborough, Lord, 16 Lucas, Charles, 142 The Infernal Quixote: A Tale of the Day, 149n74 M Madness, 231 Malthus, Thomas, 17, 143, 283, 286 An Essay on the Principle of Population, 143, 283, 286 Mandeville, Bernard, 143 The Fable of the Bees, or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, 143 Marcliffe, Theophilus, 6, 58, 194, 285 See also Godwin, William; Juvenile Library Marshall, Peter, 131, 150n73, 151n81 Martyrdom, 84, 222, 233 Marx, Karl, 276 Mary I (Queen), 61, 65 Mauss, Marcel, 136, 147n24 McGonegal, Julie, 130 Mee, Jon, 39, 123n59, 149n60 Memoir, 4, 60, 216, 217, 223–227, 230, 234

See also Autobiography Memorial, 23, 245, 251, 253 Merit, 67, 68, 82, 83, 86, 108, 109, 112, 117, 187, 215, 217, 218, 220, 221, 223–227, 231–233, 257 See also Esteem Michelangelo, 243, 258, 259, 267n51 Milton, John, 61, 191, 217, 221, 260 Paradise Lost, 260 Mind, 16, 19, 27, 32n31, 39–42, 82–85, 87, 90, 91, 94, 96, 104, 111, 122n32, 137, 138, 160, 161, 171, 187, 198, 210n60, 218, 224, 252, 287 See also Rationality; Reason Misanthropy, 223, 230–232, 234 Moira, Lady (Elizabeth Rawson), 17 Mole, Tom, 5, 216, 242, 245, 251, 263n16, 268n62 Monro, D.H., 105 Montagu, Basil, 98, 127 Montesquieu, 86 Spirit of the Laws, 86 Monthly Review, 174 Monument, 23, 245, 250, 251, 254, 255, 258, 263n17 See also Burial places; Grave; Headstone; Memorial; Sepulchre; Statue; Wooden cross Moon, Marjorie, 189 Morality, 15, 107, 131, 215, 216 The Morning Chronicle, 163 Mountcashel, Lady, 17 Mucius, see Godwin, William Mucius, Gaius Scaevola, 28, 163, 164 Mulready, William, 60, 71, 75n30, 255, 256 Munro, D. H., 288 Myrone, Martin, 246, 258

 INDEX 

N Necessity, 50, 52, 67, 89, 142, 162, 166, 173, 232 Neighbours, 24, 70, 106, 109, 112–119, 132, 162, 199 Newbery, John, 188 The History of Little Goody Two-­ Shoes, 188 Newgate prison, 91 New Moral World, 287 North, Julian, 58, 72n4 Nourjahad, 190 O O’Bryan, Dennis, 17, 30n18 O’Conor, Charles, 18, 25 Offer, Avner, 8, 140, 146n12, 150n64, 152n82, 185, 206n1 O’Shaughnessy, David, 4, 6, 147n15 Ottley, William Young, 243, 249, 254–258, 264n27, 266n43, 266n47, 266–267n48, 267n50 Owen, Robert, 286, 287 A New View of Society, 286 Ozymandias, 264n27 P Paine, Thomas, 164, 172 Common Sense, 172 Rights of Man, 172 Parr, Samuel, 92, 96, 98 Paul Mellon Centre (PMC), 242, 243, 247, 248, 254, 262n9, 262n11 Perfectibility, 176, 202 Perrault, Charles, 191 See also Godwin, William, and publishers Philp, Mark, 7, 65, 105, 121n16, 130, 147n17, 165, 166, 175, 176n1, 241

305

Pigot, Charles Jockey Club, 172 Pilkington, Mary, 62–65, 72n4, 73–74n18 Memoirs of Celebrated Female Characters, 74n18 Mirror for the Female Sex, 62, 63, 65, 72n4 Pitt, William, 16, 17, 22, 279 Plutarch, 219, 222, 223, 225, 236n19 Lives, 219, 222, 223, 225, 236n19 Polanyi, Karl, 146n12 Pollin, Burton R., 275–277, 281 Ponsonby, George, 17 Poor Man’s Guardian, 287 Posterity, 2, 217, 218, 221 Potkay, Adam, 130, 136, 137, 145n3 Powell, James, 95 Priestley, F.E.L., 105, 120n5, 288 Print, 157, 160, 165, 169, 175–176, 204, 216, 225, 277 Privacy, 57, 158 Publishing, 29, 186, 189, 227, 265n38, 266n43, 283 Q Quarterly Review, 286 R Radical, 7, 29, 67, 75n32, 100n15, 105, 107, 120, 127–145, 149n53, 151n78, 155, 157, 162–167, 172, 173, 176, 200, 281 Radicalism, 30n19, 142, 164 Rajan, Tilottama, 27, 28, 47, 217 Rationality, 260 See also Reason; Mind Read, Herbert, 288

306 

INDEX

Readers, 19, 27, 39–42, 52, 57, 59–61, 66, 67, 71, 74n20, 84, 104, 107, 128, 159, 171, 175, 187, 195, 196, 199, 200, 204, 217, 224–227, 241, 244, 245, 250, 253, 254, 260, 282, 288 children (see Juvenile Library) See also Audience Reason, 22, 24, 38, 39, 43, 47, 48, 51, 76n34, 82, 83, 87, 89, 90, 106–109, 111, 113, 116, 123n72, 173, 191, 251, 260, 275 See also Rationality; Mind Reception studies, 4, 274 Reeves, John, 163, 164 Reform, political, 41, 165 Reformation, 62, 71, 232 Reputation, 2, 7, 8, 151n81, 169, 215–217, 224, 225, 229–231, 233, 246, 261, 273–276, 280–283, 287, 289, 290, 292n19 See also Celebrity; Fame Revolution, 161–167, 173, 175, 251 Revolution, French, 1789, 94, 151n74, 165, 172, 281 Richard Cœur de Lion, an Historical Tale, 202–203 See also Godwin, William, and children’s literature Ritson, Joseph, 200, 201, 210n64 Robin Hood: A Collection of all the Ancient Poems, Songs, and Ballads now Extant, Relative to That Celebrated Outlaw, 200, 210n64 Robinson, George, 75n31, 189 See also Godwin, William, and publishers Rodden, John, 37, 53n1 Roskam, Geert, 222, 223 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 41, 55n12, 188, 219, 223, 224, 227, 281 Confessions, 41, 219, 227

Emile, or On Education, 188 Rowan, Archibald Hamilton, 18 Royal Academy, 60, 69, 246, 256 S Sachs, Jonathan, 219, 220 Salber Phillips, Mark, 71, 242, 261n2 Salzmann, Christian Gotthilf, 188 Moralisches Elementarbuch, 188 Samuelson, Paul, 277 Scott, Alexander, 94 Scott, Walter, 145, 205 Ivanhoe, 205 Sculpture, 246, 249 Sedition, 91, 93, 163, 167 Sentiment, 44, 82, 86, 95, 96, 104, 108, 117, 128–130, 150n73, 161, 171, 228, 251, 252, 254 Sepulchre, 8, 23, 242, 243, 249–253, 255–261, 262n11, 263n17, 264–265n30, 266n43 Shaw, Philip, 161 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 225, 255, 260, 266n45, 288, 289 Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus, 225, 289 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 17, 251, 262n11, 264n27, 265n34, 274 ‘Ozymandias,’ 249, 251, 262n11, 264n27 Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 235n9, 291n2 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 14, 17, 127 The Rivals, 164 Sidney, Algernon, 23 Sincerity, 6, 37–53, 59, 82, 84, 114, 233 See also Candour; Frankness Sinclair, Charles, 94

 INDEX 

Sketches, 244, 255 See also Drawings; Illustrations Smith, Adam, 55n16, 110, 130, 140, 150n63, 276 The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 55n16, 130, 150n63 Smith, Horace, 261, 264n28 Society for Constitutional Information (SCI), 91, 92 Spencer, W. T., 257, 265n43, 266n44 Spies, 93, 94, 98 Stationers’ Hall, 190–192, 202 Statue, 249–253, 259, 264n25 See also Burial places; Grave; Headstone; Memorial; Monument Stoddart, John, 85 Stylometry, 4, 192, 193, 202 Sullivan, Garrett A., 175 Surveillance, 156, 159, 163 T Tabart, Benjamin, 189–192, 195, 196, 198–200 See also Godwin, William, and publishers Temple, John, 25–27 History of the Irish Rebellion, 25 Test & Corporation debates of 1788–1790, 17 Thelwall, John, 93, 96, 167, 173 Thomson-Reuters ISI index, 275 Townley, Charles, 246 Treason and trials, 163 Treason and Seditious Meetings Acts 1795, 165 Trimmer, Sarah, 74n20, 188 An Introduction to the Knowledge of Nature, 188 Turner, Sharon, 85, 93

307

U Ulster Rebellion, 1641, 17, 18, 25 Utilitarian, 107 V Vassell, Henry Richard (Lord Holland), 98, 285 Violence, 6, 7, 17, 18, 22, 23, 25, 26, 34n57, 47, 52, 64, 133–137, 144, 155–176, 199, 202, 228 Virtue, 7, 21, 38, 39, 44, 45, 47–49, 51, 63, 82–84, 87, 90, 93, 107, 112, 114, 116, 129, 143, 144, 196, 197, 204, 215–228, 230–233, 290 Visser, Margaret, 129 Voyages and Travels of Captain Lemuel Gulliver, 190 Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor, 190 W Walker, George, 142, 151n74 The Vagabond, 151n74 Waller, Edmund, 19 Warner, Janet, 259, 260 Watson, James, 287 West, Jane, 142 A Tale of the Times, 151n74, 151n78 Westover, Paul, 242, 245 Wedgwood, Thomas, 137–139, 141 Whig party, 17 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 5, 29, 38, 59, 95, 96, 105, 106, 114, 145n3, 185, 188, 217, 225–227, 242, 251, 261n5, 282, 283, 288, 289 death of, 9n5, 29, 105, 251, 283 depiction of (fictional) in St Leon, 38, 105 marriage to Godwin, 105, 114, 282 Original Stories from Real Life, 188 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 226

308 

INDEX

Woodcock, George, 105, 288 Wooden cross, 5, 251 See also Burial places; Grave; Headstone; Memorial; Monument; Sepulchre; Statue Wordsworth, William, 204, 217 The Prelude, 204 Working Man’s Friend and Political Magazine, 287 Wright, Thomas, 257, 258, 265n43, 266n44

Y Young, Edward, 255, 259 The Complaint: or, Night-Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality, 258, 259, 261 The Revenge, 255 Z Žižek, Slavoj, 156