Product Code Database
William Godwin (3 March 1756 – 7 April 1836) was an English journalist, political philosopher and novelist. He is considered one of the first exponents of utilitarianism and the first modern proponent of anarchism. Godwin is most famous for two books that he published within the space of a year: An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, an attack on political institutions, and Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, an early mystery novel that criticizes aristocratic privilege. Based on the success of both works, Godwin featured prominently in the radical circles of London in the 1790s. He wrote prolifically in the genres of novels, history and demography throughout his life.
In the conservative reaction to British radicalism, Godwin was attacked, in part because of his marriage to the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft in 1797 and his candid biography of her after her death from childbirth. Their daughter, later known as Mary Shelley, would go on to write Frankenstein and marry the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. With his second wife, Mary Jane Clairmont, Godwin established The Juvenile Library, which allowed the family to write their own works for children (sometimes under noms de plume) as well as translate and publish many other books, some of enduring significance. Godwin has had considerable influence on British literature and literary culture.
William Godwin came from a long line of English Dissenters, who faced religious discrimination by the British government, and was inspired by his grandfather and father to take up the dissenting tradition and become a minister himself. At eleven years old, he became the sole pupil of Samuel Newton, a Hyper-Calvinism and a Glasite of Robert Sandeman. Although Newton's strict method of discipline left Godwin with a lasting anti-authoritarianism, Godwin internalized the Sandemanian creed, which emphasised rationalism, egalitarianism and consensus decision-making. Despite Godwin's later renunciation of Christianity, he maintained his Sandemanian roots, which he held responsible for his commitment to rationalism, as well as his stoicism. Godwin later characterised Newton as, "... a celebrated north country apostle, who, after Calvin damned ninety-nine in a hundred of mankind, has contrived a scheme for damning ninety-nine in a hundred of the followers of Calvin." In 1771, Godwin was finally dismissed by Newton and returned home, but his father died the following year, which prompted his mother to urge him to continue his education.
At seventeen years old, Godwin began higher education at the Dissenting Academy in Hoxton, where he studied under Andrew Kippis, the biographer, and Abraham Rees, who was responsible for the Cyclopaedia, or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences. A hotspot for liberalism, at the Academy, Godwin familiarized himself with John Locke's associationism, Isaac Newton's Newtonianism and Francis Hutcheson's ethical system, which all informed Godwin's philosophies of determinism and immaterialism. Although Godwin had joined the Academy as a committed Tory, the outbreak of the American Revolution led him to support the Whig opposition and, after reading the works of Jonathan Swift, he became a staunch republican. He soon familiarised himself with the French philosophes, learning of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's belief in the inherent goodness of human nature and opposition to private property, as well as Claude Adrien Helvétius's utilitarianism and Paul-Henri Thiry's materialism.
In 1778, Godwin graduated from the academy and was quickly appointed as a minister in Ware, where he met Joseph Fawcett, one of his main direct influences. By 1780, he had been reassigned to Stowmarket, where he first read Paul-Henri Thiry's System of Nature, adopting his philosophies of determinism and materialism. But after a conflict with other dissenting ministers of Suffolk over the administration of the eucharist, he stepped down and left for London in April 1782, resigning his career as a minister to become a writer.
His work on the Herald secured him further work as a critic for John Murray's English Review and a commission to translate Simon Fraser's memoirs. In 1784, he published the romantic novels Damon and Delia and Imogen, the latter of which was Frame story as a translation of a found manuscript from ancient Wales. That same year, he also published Sketches of History, which compiled six of his sermons about the characters of Aaron, Hazael and Jesus. Drawing from John Milton's Paradise Lost, which depicted Satan as a rebel against his creator, Godwin denounced the Christian God as a theocracy and a tyrant that had no right to rule.
As his early works were financially unsuccessful, in 1784, William Godwin hoped John Collins, a wealthy owner of a sugar plantation in St. Vincent would fund his writing. He did not succeed but the close connection between Godwin and members of the Collins family continued for fifty years.Marion Kingston Stocking, ed. The Clairmont Correspondence: Letters of Claire Clairmont, Charles Clairmont, and Fanny Imlay Godwin, 1808–1834 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), vol. 1, p. 6, note 1. John Collin's eldest daughter Harriet de Boinville and William met seventy-two times between 1809 and 1827, and she championed Godwin's An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness (1793) at her salons during that time period.Thomas Jefferson Hogg, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, in Humbert Wolfe, ed., The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London: Dent, 1933), vol. II, p. 107.
In further attempts to earn money, Godwin started writing for well-paying Whig journals on Grub Street, starting work as a political journalist for the New Annual Register after being introduced to Georgie Robinson by Andrew Kippis. Godwin's work was then picked up by the Political Herald, where he wrote under the pseudonym of "Mucius" in order to attack the Tories. He subsequently reported on the Pitt ministry's colonial rule in Ireland and India; penned a history of the Dutch Revolt and predicted the outbreak of a revolutionary wave in Europe.
After the death of the Political Herald's editor, Godwin turned down Richard Brinsley Sheridan's offer of succeeding to the editorship, out of concern that his editorial independence would be compromised by a direct financial connection to the Whig Party. But it was through Sheridan that Godwin became acquainted with a life-long friend Thomas Holcroft, whose arguments convinced Godwin to finally reject Christianity and embrace atheism. At the same time, Godwin took up a side job as a Tutoring for the young Thomas Abthorpe Cooper. After a fractious relationship between the two, Godwin eventually became the orphaned boy's adoptive father, which altered his style of pedagogy to one that emphasised "an open and honest relationship between tutor and pupil."
With the outbreak of the French Revolution, Godwin was among the Radicals that enthusiastically welcomed the events as the spiritual successor to Britain's own Glorious Revolution of 1688. As a member of the Revolution Society, Godwin met the political activist Richard Price, whose Discourse on the Love of Our Country espoused a radical form of patriotism that controversially upheld freedom of religion, representative democracy and the right of revolution. Price's Discourse ignited a pamphlet war, beginning with Edmund Burke's publication of his Reflections on the Revolution in France, which defended traditionalist conservatism and opposed revolution. In response to Burke, Thomas Paine published his Rights of Man with the help of Godwin, who declared that "the seeds of revolution it contains are so vigorous in their stamina, that nothing can overpower them."
But Godwin's voice remained largely absent from the Revolution Controversy, as he had started writing a work of political philosophy that developed on his radical principles. With George Robinson's financial support, Godwin quit his work at the New Annual Register and committed himself wholly to his magnum opus, which he hoped would condense the "best and most liberal in the science of politics into a coherent system". After sixteen months' work, while the revolution in France had culminated with the execution of Louis XVI and the outbreak of war, Godwin published his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice in February 1793.
When Godwin and Wollstonecraft were reintroduced in 1796, their respect for each other soon grew into friendship, sexual attraction, and love. Once Wollstonecraft became pregnant, they decided to marry so that their child would be considered legitimate by society. Their marriage revealed the fact that Wollstonecraft had never been married to Imlay, and as a result she and Godwin lost many friends. Godwin received further criticism because he had advocated the abolition of marriage in Political Justice. After their marriage at St. Pancras on 29 March 1797, they moved into two adjoining houses in Somers Town so that they could both still retain their independence; they often communicated by notes delivered by servants.Sunstein has printed several of these letters in order so that the reader can follow Wollstonecraft and Godwin's conversation (321ff.)
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born in Somers Town on 30 August 1797, the couple's only child.Marshall, Julian. The Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. London: R. Bentley and Son, 1889. PDF. Godwin had hoped for a son and had been planning on naming the child "William".Godwin, William The Letters of William Godwin. Ed. Pamela Clemit. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. PDF. On 10 September 1797 Wollstonecraft died of complications following the birth. By all accounts, it had been a happy and stable, though brief, relationship. Now Godwin, who had been a bachelor until a few months before, was distraught at the loss of the love of his life. Simultaneously, he became responsible for the care of these two young girls, the new-born Mary and toddler Fanny.
When Mary was three years old, Godwin left his daughters in the care of James Marshall while he travelled to Ireland. Godwin's tone in his letters demonstrates how much he cared about them. His letters show the stress he placed on giving his two daughters a sense of security. "And now what shall I say for my poor little girls? I hope they have not forgot me. I think of them every day, and should be glad, if the wind was more favourable, to blow them a kiss a-piece from Dublin to the Polygon.. but I have seen none that I love so well or think half so good as my own."
In December 1800 his play Antonio, or the Soldier's Return was put on at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane without success.
In 1805, the Godwins set up a shop and publishing house called the Juvenile Library, significant in the history of children's literature. Through this, Godwin wrote children's primers on Biblical and classical history, and using the pseudonym Edward Baldwin, he wrote a variety of books for children, including a version of Jack and the Beanstalk, and a biography of the Irish artist William Mulready, who illustrated works for them. They kept alive family ties, publishing the first book by Margaret King (then Lady Mount Cashell), who had been a favoured pupil of Mary Wollstonecraft. They published works never since out of print, such as Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare. The Juvenile Library also translated European authors. The first English edition of Swiss Family Robinson was translated (from the French, not the German) and edited by them.Blamires, David. 6. The Swiss Family Robinson In: Telling Tales: The Impact of Germany on English Children's Books 1780–1918 online. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2009 (generated 16 October 2017). Available on the Internet:
In 1807 his tragedy Faulkener was performed at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane without more success than his earlier play.
The eldest of Godwin's stepchildren was Fanny Imlay (1794–1816), who committed suicide as a young woman. Charles Gaulis Clairmont ended up as Chair of English literature at Vienna University and taught sons of the royal family; news of his sudden death in 1849 distressed Maximilian. Claire Clairmont was Mary Jane's only daughter, to whom she showed favouritism.
All of Godwin's children who lived into adulthood worked as writers or educators, carrying on his legacy and that of his wives. Only two of them had children who in turn survived: Percy Florence Shelley, and the son and daughter of Charles. Godwin did not welcome the birth of Allegra Byron, but Claire's only child died aged five.
Godwin had high hopes for Mary, giving her a more rigorous intellectual experience than most women of her period, and describing her as "very intelligent". He wished to give his daughter a more "masculine education" and prepared her to be a writer. However, Godwin withdrew his support as Mary became a woman and pursued her relationship with Percy Bysshe Shelley.Carlson, Julie Ann. England's First Family of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2007. Print. Mary's first two novels, Frankenstein and Mathilda, may be seen as a reaction to her childhood. Both explore the role of the father in the child's socialisation and the control the father has on the child's future.Hill-Miller, Katherine. "My Hideous Progeny": Mary Shelley, William Godwin, and the Father-daughter Relationship. Newark: U of Delaware, 1995. Print. Shelley's last two novels, Lodore and Falkner, re-evaluate the father-daughter relationship. They were written at a time when Shelley was raising her only surviving child alone and supporting her ageing father. In both novels, the daughter eludes the father's control by giving him the traditional maternal figure he asks for. This relationship gives the daughter control of the father.
In later years, Godwin came to expect support and consolation from his daughter. Two of the five children he had raised had pre-deceased him, and two more lived abroad. Mary responded to his expectations and she cared for him until he died in 1836.
In 1836, Harriet de Boinville described Godwin's death, in a letter to his daughter Mary, as "the extinction of a mastermind. ... Everything is interesting which relates to such a man, one of the gifted few under whose moral influences society is now vibrating."Harriet de Boinville, letter to Mary Shelley, June 11, 1836, preserved in the University of Oxford Bodleian Libraries Abinger Collection. The letter is quoted in full in Barbara de Boinville, The Center of the Circle: Harriet de Boinville and the Writers She Influenced During Europe's Revolutionary Era (New Academia Publishing, 2023), pp. 243–246.
The surviving manuscripts for many of Godwin's best-known works are held in the Forster Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The V&A's manuscripts for Political Justice and Caleb Williams were both digitised in 2017 and are now included in the Shelley-Godwin Archive.
His birthplace, Wisbech, has two memorials to him. A cul-de-sac was named in his honour Godwin Close, and a blue plaque adorns a building adjacent to the Angles Theatre in Alexandra Road.
Godwin augmented the influence of Political Justice with the publication of a novel that proved equally popular, Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams. This tells the story of a servant who finds out a dark secret about Falkland, his aristocratic master, and is forced to flee because of his knowledge. Caleb Williams is essentially the first thriller: Godwin wryly remarked that some readers were consuming in a night what took him over a year to write. Not the least of its merits is a portrait of the justice system of England and Wales at the time and a prescient picture of domestic espionage. His literary method, as he described it in the introduction to the novel, also proved influential: Godwin began with the conclusion of Caleb being chased through Britain, and developed the plot backwards. Dickens and Poe both commented on Godwin's ingenuity in doing this.
However, Godwin's own reputation was eventually besmirched after 1798 by the conservative press, in part because he chose to write a candid biography of his late wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, entitled Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, including accounts of her two suicide attempts and her affair (before her relationship with Godwin) with the American adventurer Gilbert Imlay, which resulted in the birth of Fanny Imlay.
Godwin, stubborn in his practice, practically lived in secret for 30 years because of his reputation. However, in its influence on writers such as Shelley, who read the work on multiple occasions between 1810 and 1820, and Kropotkin, Political Justice takes its place with John Milton's Areopagitica and Rousseau's as a defining anarchist and libertarian text.
Believing in the perfectibility of the human race, that there are no innate principles, and therefore no original propensity to evil, he considered that "our virtues and our vices may be traced to the incidents which make the history of our lives, and if these incidents could be divested of every improper tendency, vice would be extirpated from the world." All control of man by man was more or less intolerable, and the day would come when each man, doing what seems right in his own eyes, would also be doing what is in fact best for the community, because all will be guided by principles of pure reason.
Such optimism was combined with a strong empiricism to support Godwin's belief that the evil actions of men are solely reliant on the corrupting influence of social conditions, and that changing these conditions could remove the evil in man. This is similar to the ideas of his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, concerning the shortcomings of women as due to discouragement during their upbringing.
Peter Kropotkin remarked of Godwin that when "speaking of property, he stated that the rights of every one 'to every substance capable of contributing to the benefit of a human being' must be regulated by justice alone: the substance must go 'to him who most wants it'. His conclusion was communism." "Anarchism" from the Encyclopædia Britannica by Peter Kropotkin
Let us imagine for a moment Mr. Godwin's beautiful system of equality realized in its utmost purity, and see how soon this difficulty might be expected to press under so perfect a form of society.... Let us suppose all the causes of misery and vice in this island removed. War and contention cease. Unwholesome trades and manufactories do not exist. Crowds no longer collect together in great and pestilent cities.... Every house is clean, airy, sufficiently roomy, and in a healthy situation.... And the necessary labours of agriculture are shared amicably among all. The number of persons, and the produce of the island, we suppose to be the same as at present. The spirit of benevolence, guided by impartial justice, will divide this produce among all the members of the society according to their wants....With these extraordinary encouragements to population, and every cause of depopulation, as we have supposed, removed, the numbers would necessarily increase faster than in any society that has ever yet been known.... An essay on the principle of population, (1798) Chap. 10.
Malthus went on to argue that under such ideal conditions, the population could conceivably double every 25 years. However, the food supply could not continue doubling at this rate for even 50 years. The food supply would become inadequate for the growing population, and then:
...the mighty law of self-preservation expels all the softer and more exalted emotions of the soul.... The corn is plucked before it is ripe, or secreted in unfair proportions; and the whole black train of vices that belong to falsehood are immediately generated. Provisions no longer flow in for the support of the mother with a large family. The children are sickly from insufficient food.... No human institutions here existed, to the perverseness of which Mr. Godwin ascribes the original sin of the worst men. No opposition had been produced by them between public and private good. No monopoly had been created of those advantages which reason directs to be left in common. No man had been goaded to the breach of order by unjust laws. Benevolence had established her reign in all hearts: and yet in so short a period as within fifty years, violence, oppression, falsehood, misery, every hateful vice, and every form of distress, which degrade and sadden the present state of society, seem to have been generated by the most imperious circumstances, by laws inherent in the nature of man, and absolutely independent of it human regulations.
In Political Justice Godwin had acknowledged that an increase in the standard of living as he envisioned could cause population pressures, but he saw an obvious solution to avoiding distress: "project a change in the structure of human action, if not of human nature, specifically the eclipsing of the desire for sex by the development of intellectual pleasures".Medema, Steven G., and Warren J. Samuels. 2003. The History of Economic Thought: A Reader. New York: Routledge. In the 1798 version of his essay, Malthus specifically rejected this possible change in human nature. In the second and subsequent editions, however, he wrote that widespread moral restraint, i.e., postponement of marriage and pre-nuptial celibacy (sexual abstinence), could reduce the tendency of a population to grow until distress was felt. Geoffrey Gilbert, introduction to Malthus T.R. 1798. An essay on the principle of population. Oxford World's Classics reprint. xviii Godwin also saw new technology as being partly responsible for the future change in human nature into more intellectually developed beings. He reasoned that increasing technological advances would lead to a decrease in the amount of time individuals spent on production and labour, and thereby, to more time spent on developing "their intellectual and moral faculties". Instead of population growing exponentially, Godwin believed that this moral improvement would outrun the growth of population. Godwin pictured a social utopia where society would reach a level of sustainability and engage in "voluntary communism".
In July 1820, Godwin published Of Population: An Enquiry Concerning the Power of Increase in the Numbers of Mankind as a rebuttal to Malthus' essays. Godwin's main argument was against Malthus' notion that population tends to grow exponentially. Godwin believed that for population to double every twenty-five years (as Malthus had asserted had occurred in the United States, due to the expanse of resources available there), every married couple would have to have at least eight children, given the rate of childhood deaths. Godwin himself was one of thirteen children, but he did not observe the majority of couples in his day having eight children. He therefore concluded:
In reality, if I had not taken up the pen with the express purpose of confuting all the errors of Mr Malthus's book, and of endeavouring to introduce other principles, more cheering, more favourable to the best interests of mankind, and better prepared to resist the inroads of vice and misery, I might close my argument here, and lay down the pen with this brief remark, that, when this author shall have produced from any country, the United States of North America not excepted, a register of marriages and births, from which it shall appear that there are on an average eight births to a marriage, then, and not till then, can I have any just reason to admit his doctrine of the geometrical ratio.
|
|
