Born, at Wisbeach, Cambs., 3 March, 1756. Family removed to Debenham, Suffolk, 1758; to Guestwick, Norfolk, 1760. At school at Guestwick, 1760–64; at Hindolveston, 1764–67; with tutor, 1767–71. Master at Hindolveston School, 1771–73. To Hoxton Academy, London, 1773. Minister at Ware, Herts, 1778. In London, 1779. Minister at Stowmarket, Suffolk, 1780–82; returned to London, 1782. Minister at Beaconsfield in 1783; gave up ministry that year and took to literature. Intimacy with Mary Wollstonecraft begun, 1796; married her, 29 March 1797. Daughter Mary (afterwards Mrs. Shelley) born 30 Aug. 1797; wife died, 10 Sept. 1797. Married Mrs. Mary Jane Clairmont, Dec. 1801. Friendship with Coleridge, Lamb, Wordsworth. “Tragedy of Antonio” produced at Drury Lane, 13 Dec. 1800; “Faulkener” produced, Dec. 1807. Financial troubles. Wife started publishing business. Friendship with Shelley begun, 1811. Bankrupt, 1822. Yeoman Usher of Exchequer, 1833–36. Died, in London, 7 April 1836. Buried in Old St. Pancras Churchyard. Works: “Life of Chatham” (anon.), 1783; “Sketches of History,” 1784; “Enquiry concerning Political Justice,” 1793; “Things as they are; or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams,” 1794; “Cursory Strictures on the Charge of Chief-Justice Eyre,” 1794; “The Enquirer,” 1797; “Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Women,” 1798 (2nd edn. same year); “St. Leon,” 1799; “Antonio,” 1800; “Thoughts occasioned by … Dr. Parr’s Spital Sermon,” 1801; “Life of Geoffrey Chaucer,” 1803; “Fleetwood,” 1805 (French trans, same year); “Fables” (under pseud. “Edward Baldwin”), 1805; “The Looking-Glass” (under pseud. “Theophilus Marcliffe,” attrib. to Godwin), 1805; “Faulkener,” 1807; “Essay on Sepulchres,” 1809; “Dramas for Children” (anon.), 1809; “History of Rome” (by “E. Baldwin”), 1809; “New and improved Grammar of the English Language” (anon.), 1812; “Lives of Edward and John Philips,” 1815; “Mandeville,” 1817; “Of Population,” 1820; “Life of Lady Jane Grey” (by “E. Baldwin”), 1824; “History of the Commonwealth of England” (4 vols.), 1824–28; “The History of England for the use of Schools” (by “E. Baldwin”), 1827; “History of Greece” (by “E. Baldwin”), 1828; “Cloudesley” (anon.), 1830; “Thoughts on Man,” 1831; “Deloraine,” 1833; “Lives of the Necromancers,” 1834. Posthumous: “Essays,” 1873. He translated: Lord Lovat’s “Memoirs,” 1797; and edited: Mary Godwin’s “Posthumous Works,” 1798; his son (W. Godwin’s) “Transfusion,” 1835. Life: by C. Kegan Paul, 1876.

Personal

  You distress me, sir, extremely, by again agitating a question which ought to be considered as decided. I had full opportunity, when in Town, to hear, and attentively to weigh your opinions concerning the point on which we most differ: for perhaps I do not fully agree with you in supposing our minds at unison on many others; but that is immaterial—the matter before us is decisive…. You tell me that you are individually beloved by those who know you, and I can easily believe it, but I will tell you that even among the number of your friends, or at least well-wishers, there are to my knowledge those who much lament, and even blame the lengths to which your systems of thinking have carried you, and who recede insensibly from your opinions, while they preserve a respect for your intentions.

  I was disgusted at heart with the grossness and vulgar insanocecity of this dim-headed prig of a philosophocide, when, after supper, his ill stars impelled him to renew the contest. I begged him not to goad me, for that I feared my feelings would not long remain in my power. He (to my wonder and indignation) persisted (I had not deciphered the cause), and then, as he well said, I did “thunder and lighten at him” with a vengeance for more than an hour and a half. Every effort of self-defence only made him more ridiculous. If I had been Truth in person, I could not have spoken more accurately; but it was Truth in a war chariot, drawn by the three Furies, and the reins had slipped out of the goddess’s hands!

  The name of Godwin has been accustomed to excite in me feelings of reverence and admiration. I have been accustomed to consider him as a luminary too dazzling for the darkness which surrounds him, and from the earliest period of my knowledge of his principles, I have ardently desired to share in the footing of intimacy that intellect which I have delighted to contemplate in its emanations. Considering, then, these feelings, you will not be surprised at the inconceivable emotion with which I learned your existence and your dwelling. I had enrolled your name on the list of the honourable dead. I had felt regret that the glory of your being had passed from this earth of ours. It is not so. You still live, and I firmly believe are still planning the welfare of human kind…. When I come to London I shall seek for you. I am convinced I could represent myself to you in such terms as not to be thought wholly unworthy of your friendship. At least, if any desire for universal happiness has any claim upon your preference, that desire I can exhibit.

  Godwin is as far removed from everything feverish and exciting as if his head had never been filled with anything but geometry. He is now about sixty-five, stout, well-built, and unbroken by age, with a cool, dogged manner, exactly opposite to everything I had imagined of the author of “St. Leon” and “Caleb Williams.” He lives on Snowhill, just about where Evelina’s vulgar relations lived. His family is supported partly by the labors of his own pen and partly by those of his wife’s, but chiefly by the profits of a shop for children’s books, which she keeps and manages to considerable advantage. She is a spirited, active woman, who controls the house, I suspect, pretty well; and when I looked at Godwin, and saw with what cool obstinacy he adhered to everything he had once assumed, and what a cold selfishness lay at the bottom of his character, I felt a satisfaction in the thought that he had a wife who must sometimes give a start to his blood and a stir to his nervous system.

  The Spirit of the Age was never more fully shown than in its treatment of this writer—its love of paradox and change, its dastard submission to prejudice and to the fashion of the day. 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 supreme delight of a doubtful immortality. Mr. Godwin, during his lifetime, has secured to himself the triumphs and the mortifications of an extreme notoriety and of a sort of posthumous fame…. In size Mr. Godwin is below the common stature, nor is his deportment graceful or animated. His face is, however, fine, with an expression of placid temper and recondite thought. He is not unlike the common portraits of Locke.

  Next came Godwin. Did you not grudge me that pleasure, now? At least, mourn that you were not there with me? Grudge not, mourn not, dearest Jeannie; it was the most unutterable stupidity ever enacted on this earth…. Mrs. Godwin already sate gossiping in the dusk—an old woman of no significance…. Shortly before candles, Godwin himself (who had been drinking good green tea by his own hearth before stirring out). He is a bald, bushy-browed, thick, hoary, hale little figure, taciturn enough, and speaking when he does speak with a certain epigrammatic spirit, wherein, except a little shrewdness, there is nothing but the most commonplace character. (I should have added that he wears spectacles, has full grey eyes, a very large blunt characterless nose, and ditto chin).

  Godwin’s name seems sinking out of remembrance; and he is remembered less by the novels that succeeded, or by the philosophy that he abjured, than as the man that had Mary Wollstonecraft for his wife, Mrs. Shelley for his daughter, and the immortal Shelley as his son-in-law.

  He rose between seven and eight, and read some classic author before breakfast. From nine till twelve or one he occupied himself with his pen. He found that he could not exceed this measure of labour with any advantage to his own health, or the work in hand. While writing “Political Justice,” there was one paragraph which he wrote eight times over before he could satisfy himself with the strength and perspicuity of his expressions. On this occasion a sense of confusion of the brain came over him, and he applied to his friend Mr. Carlisle, afterwards Sir Anthony Carlisle, the celebrated surgeon, who warned him that he had exerted his intellectual faculties to their limit. In compliance with his direction, Mr. Godwin reduced his hours of composition within what many will consider narrow bounds. The rest of the morning was spent in reading and seeing his friends. When at home he dined at four, but during his bachelor life he frequently dined out. His dinner at home at this time was simple enough. He had no regular servant; an old woman came in the morning to clean and arrange his rooms, and if necessary she prepared a mutton chop, which was put in a Dutch oven.

  It was in the year 1813 that I first became acquainted with William Godwin…. I had expressed a wish to know him, and I was soon invited by a charming family, with whom he was intimate, to dine at their house, where I should find him and Bysshe. I repaired thither, to a somewhat early dinner, in accordance with the habits of the philosopher. I was not on any account to be late, for it was unpleasant to him to dine later than four o’clock. It was a fine Sunday. I set out betimes, and arrived at the appointed place at half-past three. I found a short, stout, thick-set old man, of very fair complexion, and with a bald and very large head, in the drawing-room, alone, where he had been for some time by himself, and he appeared to be rather uneasy at being alone. He made himself known to me as William Godwin; it was thus he styled himself. His dress was dark, and very plain, of an old-fashioned cut, even for an old man. His appearance, indeed, was altogether that of a dissenting minister…. William Godwin, according to my observation, always eat meat, and rather sparingly, and little else besides. He drank a glass or two of sherry, wherein I did not join him. Soon after dinner, a large cup of very strong green tea,—of gunpowder tea, intensely strong,—was brought to him; this he took with evident satisfaction, and it was the only thing that he appeared to enjoy, although our fare was excellent. Having drunken the tea, he set the cup and saucer forcibly upon the table, at a great distance from him, according to the usages of that old school of manners, to which he so plainly belonged. He presently fell into a sound sleep, sitting very forward in his chair, and leaning forward, so that at times he threatened to fall forward; but no harm came to him. Not only did the old philosopher sleep soundly, deeply, but he snored loudly.

  I remember vividly accompanying my father to the dark rooms in the New Palace Yard, where I saw an old vivacious lady and an old gentleman. My father was most anxious that I should remember them; and I do remember well that he appeared to bear a strong regard for them…. One morning he called on the Godwins, and was kept for some minutes waiting in their drawing-room. It was irresistible, he could never think of these things. Whistle in a lady’s drawing-room!… Still he did whistle,—not only pianissimo, but fortissimo, with variations enough to satisfy the most ambitious of thrushes. Suddenly good little Mrs. Godwin gently opened the door, paused still—not seen by the performer—to catch the dying notes of the air, and then, coming up to her visitor, startled him with the request, made in all seriousness, “You couldn’t whistle that again, could you?”

  William Godwin was then seventy years old; but he seemed to me older than Bentham. Feeble and bent, he had neither the bright eye nor the elastic step of the utilitarian philosopher. In person he was small and insignificant. His capacious forehead, seeming to weigh down the aged head, alone remained to indicate the talent which even his opponents confessed that he had shown, alike in his novels and in his graver works. His conversation gave me the impression of intellect without warmth of heart; it touched on great principles, but was measured and unimpulsive; as great a contrast to Bentham’s as could well be imagined.

  Was always the same; very cold, very selfish, very calculating. His philosophy, such as it was, never generated pity or gratitude. His sympathies and generosities and liberal qualities showed themselves only in print. His conduct towards Shelley was merely an endeavor to extract from him as much money as was possible. His conduct toward Mr.—, whom I have heard speak of it, in denying a pecuniary liability, because as he said, “there was no witness to the loan;” his pedantic cavilling at his wife’s unscientific expression when dying, “Oh, Godwin, I am in heaven!” (expressive of her relief from extreme pain), all indicate an unamiable character. I have known several persons who were intimate with him, none of whom ever pretended to endue him with a single good quality. He was very pragmatic, very sceptical of God and men and virtue. And yet this man has in his study compiled fine rhetorical sentences, which strangers have been ready to believe flowed warm from his heart. I have always thought him like one of those cold intellectual demons of whom we read in French and German stories, who come upon earth to do good to no one and harm to many.

  The same calm temperament which enabled him to dispense with much which is often thought of the essence of religion, seems to have kept him free also from any feeling which can be called love. Except the one great passion of his life, and even this was conducted with extreme outward and apparent phlegm, friendship stood to him in the place of passion, as morality was to him in the room of devotion. All the jealousies, misunderstandings, wounded feelings and the like, which some men experience in their love affairs, Godwin suffered in his relations with his friends. Fancied slights were exaggerated; quarrels, expostulations, reconciliations followed quickly on each other, as though they were true amantium iræ. And his relations with women were for the most part the same as those with men. His friendships were as real with the one sex as with the other, but they were no more than friendships. Marriage seemed to him a thing to be arranged, “adjusted,” as Mr. Tennyson says of the loves of vegetables.

  Godwin, though overrated in his generation, and almost ludicrously idealized by Shelley, was a man whose talents verged on genius. But he was by no means consistent. His conduct in money-matters shows that he could not live the life of a self-sufficing philosopher; while the irritation he expressed when Shelley omitted to address him as Esquire, stood in comic contradiction with his published doctrines.

  It would be difficult to find a greater contrast than that between Irving and Godwin. In persons, in manners, in features, in mind, in spirit, they were uttermost opposites. The free-thinking husband of Mary Wollstonecraft—whose union was the slender one of a love-bond, until in later life, they took upon them the bonds of wedlock—was of awkward, ungainly form; a broad, intellectual forehead redeemed a flat, coarse, inexpressive face; his dress was clumsy; his habits careless—of cleanliness at least.

  Of a cool, unemotional temperament, safe from any snares of passion or imagination, he became the very type of a town philosopher. Abstractions of the intellect and the philosophy of politics were his world. He had a true townsman’s love of the theatre, but external nature for the most part left him unaffected, as it found him. With the most exalted opinion of his own genius and merit, he was nervously susceptible to the criticism of others, yet always ready to combat any judgment unfavourable to himself. Never weary of argument, he thought that by its means, conducted on lines of reason, all questions might be finally settled, all problems satisfactorily and speedily solved. Hence the fascination he possessed for those in doubt and distress of mind. Cool rather than cold-hearted, he had a certain benignity of nature which, joined to intellectual exaltation, passed as warmth and fervour.

  Affecting the virtues of calmness and impartiality, he was yet irritable under criticism, and his friendships were interrupted by a series of quarrels. His self-respect was destroyed in later life under the pressure of debt and an unfortunate marriage; but, though his character wanted in strength and elevation, and incapable of the loftier passions, he seems to have been mildly affectionate, and, in many cases, a judicious friend to more impulsive people.

  First and last, Shelley emptied into that rapacious mendicant’s lap a sum which cost him—for he borrowed it at ruinous rates—from eighty to one hundred thousand dollars.

Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 1793

  Dr. Priestley says my book contains a vast extent of ability—Monarchy and Aristocracy, to be sure, were never so painted before—he agrees with me respecting gratitude and contracts absolutely considered, but thinks the principles too refined for practice—he felt uncommon approbation of my investigation of the first principles of government, which were never so well explained before—he admits fully my first principle of the omnipotence of instruction and that all vice is error—he admits all my principles, but cannot follow them into all my conclusions with me respecting self-love—he thinks mind will never so far get the better of matter as I suppose; he is of opinion that the book contains a great quantity of original thinking, and will be uncommonly useful. Horne Tooke tells me that my book is a bad book, and will do a great deal of harm—Holcroft and Jardine had previously informed me, the first, that he said the book was written with very good intentions, but to be sure nothing could be so foolish; the second, that Holcroft and I had our heads full of plays and novels, and then thought ourselves philosophers.

  You supped upon Godwin and oysters with Carlisle. Have you, then, read Godwin, and that with attention? Give me your thoughts upon his book; for, faulty as it is in many parts, there is a mass of truth in it that must make every man think. Godwin, as a man, is very contemptible. I am afraid that most public characters will ill endure examination in their private lives.

  While everybody was abusing and despising Mr. Godwin, and while Mr. Godwin was, among a certain description of understandings, increasing every day in popularity, Mr. Malthus took the trouble of refuting him; and we hear no more of Mr. Godwin.

  I cannot but consider the author of “Political Justice” as a philosophical reasoner of no ordinary stamp or pretensions. That work, whatever its defects may be, is distinguished by the most acute and severe logic, and by the utmost boldness of thinking, founded on a love and conviction of truth.

  He carried one single shock into the bosom of English society, fearful but momentary, like that from the electric blow of the gymnotus; or, perhaps, the intensity of the brief panic which, fifty years ago, he impressed on the pubic mind may be more adequately expressed by the case of a ship in the middle ocean suddenly scraping with her keel a ragged rock, hanging for one moment as if impaled upon the teeth of the dreadful sierra,—then, by the mere impetus of her mighty sails, grinding audibly to powder the fangs of this accursed submarine harrow, leaping into deep water again, and causing the panic of ruin to be simultaneous with the deep sense of deliverance.

  It was in the spring of this year and before I left Colchester that I read a book which gave a turn to my mind, and in effect directed the whole course of my life,—a book which, after producing a powerful effect on the youth of that generation, has now sunk into unmerited oblivion. This was Godwin’s “Political Justice.” I was in some measure prepared for it by an acquaintance with Holcroft’s novels, and it came recommended to me by the praise of Catherine Buck. I entered fully into its spirit, it left all others behind in my admiration, and I was willing even to become a martyr for it; for it soon became a reproach to be a follower of Godwin, on account of his supposed atheism. I never became an atheist, but I could not feel aversion or contempt towards G. on account of any of his views. In one respect the book had an excellent effect on my mind,—it made me feel more generously. I had never before, nor, I am afraid, have I ever since felt so strongly the duty of not living to one’s self, but of having for one’s sole object the good of the community. His idea of justice I then adopted and still retain; nor was I alarmed by the declamations so generally uttered against his opinions on the obligations of gratitude, the fulfillment of promises, and the duties arising out of the personal relations of life.

  No more abstract work on political science ever took hold of the English public mind with more tenacity than this publication. It was in everybody’s hands.

  His mind, clear, systematic, and passionless, speedily threw off the prejudices from which Price and Priestley never emancipated themselves. More than any English thinker, he resembles in intellectual temperament those French theorists who represented the early revolutionary impulse. His doctrines are developed with a logical precision which shrinks from no consequences, and which placidly ignores all inconvenient facts. The Utopia in which his imagination delights is laid out with geometrical symmetry and simplicity. Godwin believes as firmly as any early Christian in the speedy revelation of a new Jerusalem, four-square and perfect in its plan. Three editions of his “Political Justice” were published, in 1793, 1796, and 1798. Between those dates events had occurred calculated to upset the faith of may enthusiasts. Godwin’s opinions, however, were rooted too deeply in abstract speculation to be effected by any storms raging in the region of concrete phenomena…. Godwin’s intellectual genealogy may be traced to three sources. From Swift, Mandeville, and the Latin historians, he had learnt to regard the whole body of ancient institutions as corrupt; from Hume and Hartley, of whom he speaks with enthusiasm, he derived the means of assault upon the old theories; from the French writers, such as Rousseau, Helvetius, and Holbach, he caught, as he tells us, the contagion of revolutionary zeal. The “Political Justice” is an attempt to frame into a systematic whole the principles gathered from these various sources, and may be regarded as an exposition of the extremest form of revolutionary dogma. Though Godwin’s idiosyncrasy is perceptible in some of the conclusions, the book is instructive, as showing, with a clearness paralleled in no other English writing, the true nature of those principles which excited the horror of Burke and the Conservatives.

  He never could have been a worker on the active stage of life. But he was none the less a motive power behind the workers, and “Political Justice” may take its place with the “Speech for Unlicensed Printing,” the “Essay on Education,” and “Emile,” among the unseen levers which have moved the changes of the times.

  I thought of Shelley—so we all think of him—as a man of extraordinary sensitiveness and susceptibility, susceptibility above all to ideal impressions; and I further thought of him as instinctively craving something to balance his own excessive sensitiveness, something to control his mobility of feeling, something to steady his advance and give him poise. A law he needed, but a law which should steady his advance, not one which should trammel his advance or hold him in motionless equilibrium. Coming at a time when the ideas of the Revolution were in the air, he found what served him as a law in those ideas, as declared by their most eminent English spokesman, William Godwin. A lyrical nature attempting to steady its advance by the revolutionary abstractions—such was Shelley. And his work in literature represents on the one hand his own mobile temperament, his extraordinary sensitiveness and marvellous imagination, and on the other hand the zeit-geist, the spirit of 1789, as formulated by Godwin in a code of morals, rigid, passionless, and doctrinaire, yet containing a hidden fire, and glowing inwardly with ardent anticipations. The volumes of “Political Justice” were thus for Shelley at once a law and a gospel.

  Shows a great advance in lucidity and command of logical language. He has been compared, surely to his own moral advantage, with Condorcet; but there is no question that he was curiously related to the French precursors of the Revolution, and particularly to Rousseau and Helvetius, from whom he caught, with their republican ardour, not a little of the clear merit of their style.

Caleb Williams, 1794

  One word respecting the MS. itself, and I have done. The incidents are ill chosen; the characters unnatural, distorted; the phraseology intended to mark the humorous ones inappropriate; the style uncouth; everything upon stilts; the whole uninteresting; written as a man would make a chair or a table that had never handled a tool. I got through it, but it was as I get over a piece of ploughed-up ground, with labour and toil. By the way, judging from the work in question, one might suppose some minds not to be unlike a piece of ground. Having produced a rich crop, it must lie fallow for a season, that it may gain sufficient vigour for a new crop. You were speaking for a motto for this work—the best motto in my opinion would be a Hic jacet; for depend upon it, the world will suppose you to be exhausted; or rather what a few only think at present, will become a general opinion, that the Hercules you have fathered is not of your begetting.

  In the writings of Godwin, some of the strongest of our feelings are most forcibly awakened, and there are few novels which display more powerful painting, or excite higher interest, than his “Caleb Williams.” The character of Falkland, the chief actor, which is formed on visionary principles of honour, is perhaps not strictly an invention, as it closely resembles that of Shamont, in Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Nice Valour.” But the accumulated wretchedness with which he is overwhelmed, the inscrutable mystery by which he is surrounded, and the frightful persecutions to which he subjects the suspected possessor of his dreadful secret, are peculiar to the author, and are represented with a force which has not been surpassed in the finest passages and scenes of poetic or dramatic fiction.

  “Caleb Williams” is probably the finest novel produced by a man—at least since the “Vicar of Wakefield.” The sentiments, if not the opinions, from which it arose, were transient. Local usages and institutions were the subjects of its satire, exaggerated beyond the usual privilege of that species of writing. Yet it has been translated into most languages, and it has appeared in various forms, on the theatres, not only of England, but of France and Germany. There is scarcely a continental circulating library in which it is not one of the books which most quickly require to be replaced…. There is scarcely a fiction in any language which it is so difficult to lay by…. The passages which betray the metaphysician more than the novelist, ought to be weeded out with more than ordinary care.

  Few there are who do not enter into and understand the workings of the mind of Caleb Williams, where the demon of curiosity, finding a youth of an active and speculative disposition, without guide to advise, or business to occupy him, engages his thoughts and his time upon the task of prying into a mystery which no way concerned him, and which from the beginning he had a well-founded conviction might prove fatal to him, should he ever penetrate it. The chivalrous frenzy of Falkland, in the same piece, though perhaps awkwardly united with the character of an assassin, that love of fame to which he sacrifices honour and virtue, is another instance of a humour, or turn of mind, which, like stained glass, colours with its own peculiar tinge every object beheld by the party.

  “Caleb Williams” is the cream of his mind, the rest are the skimmed milk; yet in that wondrous novel all must be offended with the unnatural and improbable character of Falkland: the most accomplished, the most heroical and lofty-minded of men murders one who has affronted him, allows others to hanged for the deed, and persecutes to the brink of ruin a man whose sole sin was a desire to penetrate through the mystery in which this prodigy of vice and virtue had wrapped himself. Williams suffers, merely because it was necessary for the story that he should; a single word would have set all right, and saved him from much unnatural terror. In short, the fault is, that the actions which the dramatis personæ perform are not in keeping with their characters.

  “Caleb Williams,” the earliest, is also the most popular, of our author’s romances, not because his latter works have been less rich in sentiment and passion, but because they are, for the most part, confined to the development of single characters; while in this there is the opposition and death-grapple of two beings, each endowed with poignant sensibilities and quenchless energy. There is no work of fiction which more rivets the attention—no tragedy which exhibits a struggle more sublime or sufferings more intense than this; yet to produce the effect, no complicated machinery is employed, but the springs of action are few and simple. The motives are at once common and elevated, and are purely intellectual, without appearing for an instant inadequate to their mighty issues.

  The interest of this wonderful tale is indescribable…. This author possesses no humour, no powers of description, at least of nature—none of that magic which communicates to inanimate objects the light and glow of sentiment—very little pathos; but, on the other hand, few have possessed a more penetrating eye for that recondite causation which links together motive and action, a more watchful and determined consistency in tracing the manifestations of such characters as he has once conceived, or a more prevailing spirit of self-persuasion as to the reality of what he relates. The romance of “Caleb Williams” is indeed ideal; but it is an ideal totally destitute of all the trappings and ornaments of the ideal: it is like some grand picture painted in dead colour.

  One of the most powerful and fascinating novels in the language, the plot, and its evolution, being invested with such intense interest that the didactic purpose of the work is not noticed by an ordinary reader, and may, indeed, be entirely ignored, without any detriment.

  The novel had very great success, and was dramatized by Colman under the name of “The Iron Chest.” In spite of the amazing impossibilities of the story and its unrelieved gloom; in spite of the want of almost any character to admire—since Mr. Clare, by whom Godwin probably intended to represent his friend Fawcet, dies early in the tale; though there is no real heroine and scarcely mention of love, the story has survived and has probably been read by very many persons who, but for it, have never heard of Godwin. It is a very powerful book, and the character of Falkland the murderer is unique in literature.

  The most obvious moral is that you ought not to have half a conscience. If Falkland had been thoroughly virtuous, he would not have committed murder; if thoroughly vicious, he would not have been tortured to death by remorse. But fortunately this childish design of enforcing a political theory did not spoil Godwin’s story. The situation is impressive, and, in spite of many clumsy details, is impressively represented. The spectacle of a man of delicate sense of honour writhing under the dread of detection, and opposed by an incarnation of vulgar curiosity, moves us to forget the superfluous moral.

  The interest of “Caleb Williams” is very real and very well maintained. The character of Falkland, in which all the milder virtues have been overshadowed by the memory of his crime, the sleepless curiosity of Williams in the effort to ascertain his master’s secret, the price he pays for success in the persecution that dogs him unremittingly, together make up a story of an interest too powerful to permit it to be enslaved to a frigid scheme of Utopian politics.

  In “Caleb Williams” we have before us a revolutionary work of art, the imaginative work of a theorist, a tale which enforces a doctrine. It gains and loses by the concentration of spirit with which Godwin in it studies and works out a moral problem. To read it is to enter and explore a cavern; it is narrow; it is dark; we lose the light and air, and the clear spaces of the firmament; but the explorer’s passion seizes upon us, and we grope along the narrowing walls with an intensity of curious desire. As the work of a political thinker, the book is an indictment of society…. “Caleb Williams” is the one novel of the days of Revolution, embodying the new doctrine of the time, which can be said to survive.

St. Leon, 1799

  Men must have arrived at an uncommon degree of general wisdom, when “St. Leon” shall no longer be read. Your Marguerite is inimitable. Knowing the model after which you drew, as often as I recollected it, my heart ached while I read. Your Bethlem Gabor is wonderfully drawn. It is like the figures of Michel Angelo, any section of an outline of which taken apart would be improbable and false, but which are so combined as to form a sublime whole. Having read I could coldly come back, and point to the caricature traits of the portrait, but while reading I could feel nothing but astonishment and admiration. Through the whole work there is so much to censure, and so much to astonish, that in my opinion it is in every sense highly interesting. Its faults and its beauties are worthy the attention of the most acute critic.

  I have been reading (for the little I could read) a new novel of Godwin’s, in four vols., called “The Travels of St. Leon.” It is an odd work, like all his, and, like all his, interesting, tho’ hardly ever pleasantly so; and while one’s head often agrees with his observations, and sometimes with his reasoning, never does one’s heart thoroughly agree with his sentiments on any subject or in any character. He now allows that the social affections may be cultivated to advantage in human life, and upon this plan his present novel is formed. I should tell you, which I know from Edwards, that it was written for bread, agreed for by the book-sellers beforehand, and actually composed and written as the printers wanted it. I think you will see many marks of this throughout the work if you read it, which I should recommend to you, if, like me, you have not seen a readable novel for this age.

  The character, too, of St. Leon is ably sustained—we are charmed with his early loyalty and patriotism—his elevation of soul and tender attachment to his family; while, at the same time, his fondness for magnificence and admiration naturally prepares his acceptance of the pernicious gifts of the alchymist. Through the whole romance the dialogues are full of eloquence, and almost every scene is sketched with the strong and vivid pencil of a master. Never was escape more interesting than that of St. Leon from the Auto da Fe at Valladolid, or landscape more heart-reviving than that of his subsequent journey to the mansion of his fathers! Never did human genius portray a more frightful picture of solitude and mental desolation, than that of the mysterious stranger who arrives at the cottage of St. Leon, and leaves him the fatal bequest! At the conclusion we are left with the strongest impressions of those feelings of desertion and deadness of heart experienced by St. Leon, and which were aggravated by his constant remembrance of scenes of former happiness.

  In “St. Leon,” Mr. Godwin has sought the stores of the supernatural;—but the “metaphysical aid” which he has condescended to accept, is not adapted to carry him farther from nature, but to ensure a more intimate and wide communion with its mysteries. His hero does not acquire the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of immortality to furnish out for himself a dainty solitude, where he may dwell, soothed with the music of his own undying thoughts, and rejoicing in his severance from his frail and transitory fellows.

  Though it had a considerable reputation, and went through many editions, it never had the popularity of “Caleb Williams;” its even greater improbability removed it still more from the region of human sympathies. But the description of Marguerite, drawn from the character of Mary Wollstonecraft, and of St. Leon’s married life with her, idealized from that which Godwin had himself enjoyed, are among the most beautiful passages in English fiction, while the portrait of Charles, St. Leon’s son, stands alone. No such picture has elsewhere been drawn of a perfectly noble, self-sacrificing boy.

Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, 1803

  I may be wrong, but I think there is one considerable error runs through it, which is a conjecturing spirit, a fondness for filling out the picture by supposing what Chaucer did and how he felt where the materials are scanty.

  The perusal of this title excited no small surprise in our critical fraternity. The authenticated passages of Chaucer’s life may be comprised in half a dozen pages; and behold two voluminous quartos!… We have said that Mr. Godwin had two modes of wire-drawing and prolonging his narrative. The first is, as we have seen, by hooking in the description and history of everything that existed upon the earth at the same time with Chaucer. In this kind of composition, we usually lose sight entirely of the proposed subject of Mr. Godwin’s lucubrations, travelling to Rome or Palestine with as little remorse as if poor Chaucer had never been mentioned in the title-page. The second mode is considerably more ingenious, and consists in making old Geoffrey accompany the author upon these frisking excursions. For example, Mr. Godwin has a fancy to describe a judicial trial. Nothing can be more easily introduced; for Chaucer certainly studied at the Temple, and is supposed to have been bred to the bar.

  In his “Life of Mary Wollstonecraft” he has written little and said much; and in his account of Chaucer, he has written much and said little…. It has been said that a spoonful of truth will colour an ocean of fiction; and so it is seen in Godwin’s “Life of Chaucer:” he heaps conjecture upon conjecture—dream upon dream—theory upon theory; scatters learning all around, and shows everywhere a deep sense of the merits of the poet; yet all that he has related might have been told in a twentieth part of the space which he has taken.

  Godwin’s “Life of Chaucer,” which appeared in 1803, in two large quarto volumes, is in many ways an extraordinary specimen of biography. The perusal of the work, when for any reason that becomes an absolute necessity, is as much of the nature of a solemn literary undertaking as was its composition. It is perhaps the earliest, though unhappily not the latest or even the largest, illustration of that species of biography in which the lack of information about the man who is its alleged subject is counterbalanced by long disquisitions about anything or everything he shared in or saw, or may have shared in or seen…. Godwin was always ready to tell what he did not know, to describe what he had not seen, and to explain what he did not understand…. May indeed be declared to deserve the distinction of being the most worthless piece of biography in the English language—certainly the most worthless produced by a man of real ability.

Fleetwood, 1805

  There is, perhaps, little general sympathy with the overstrained delicacies of Fleetwood, who, like Falkland in the “School for Scandal,” is too extravagant in his peculiarities to deserve the reader’s pity.

  “Fleetwood” has less of our author’s characteristic energy than any other of his works.

  The best of his imaginative work is to be found in “Fleetwood;” not so much in the main story, with its stock villain and maligned wife, as in the early reminiscences of Fleetwood and the episodical autobiography of Ruffigny, where the author displays a sensibility to scenery and a vivid remembrance of the feelings of childhood that would be remarkable even in a less arid mind.

Mandeville, 1817

  Powerful but unnatural and bombastic novel.

  Of “Mandeville,” I shall say only one word. It appears to me to be a falling off in the subject, not in the ability. The style and declamation are even more powerful than ever. But unless an author surpasses himself, and surprises the public as much the fourth or fifth time as he did the first, he is said to fall off, because there is not the same stimulus of novelty. A great deal is here made out of nothing, or out of a very disagreeable subject. I cannot agree that the story is out of nature. The feeling is very common indeed; though carried to an unusual and improbable excess, or to one with which from the individuality and minuteness of the circumstances, we cannot readily sympathise.

  Like his other novels, it contains an important lesson, forcibly inculcated—it shows the forlornness and misery of a jealous, sullen, aspiring mind, that makes great claims on the world, without proper efforts to justify or enforce them. The author in this, as in his previous works, displays, with appalling truth, the despotic sovereignty and all searching observation of publick opinion, in so much, that one trembles with the consciousness of being subject to this tremendous power, which he cannot fly from or resist. No writer has perhaps more adequately expressed, what every body feels,—how much of the good and ill of life is involved in reputation.

  His St. Leon and his Mandeville are ten degrees darker than his Falkland: in the latter, there are many ties to connect us with truth and nature, and we go on—as the sailors keep by a sinking vessel—in the hope that all must be righted soon. Mandeville is one of those unhappy persons whose minds are never so free from the storm of passion as to be fully rational, and yet cannot, save in fits of fury, be considered wholly mad.

  “Mandeville” has all the power of its author’s earliest writings, but its main subject—the development of an engrossing and maddening hatred—is not one which can excite human sympathy. There is, however, a bright relief to the gloom of the picture, in the angelic disposition of Clifford, and the sparkling loveliness of Henrietta, who appears “full of life, and splendour and joy.”

General

  You will find much to blame in his style, and you will be surprised that he should have written a dissertation upon English style.

  Dear Sir,—I thank you for the play of “Antonio,” as I feel myself flattered by your remembrance of me: and I most sincerely wish you joy of having produced a work which will protect you from being classed with the successful dramatists of the present day, but which will hand you down to posterity among the honoured few who, during the past century, have totally failed in writing for the stage.

  You will have heard, I presume, that your friend Godwin’s tragedy of “Antonio,” which he expected to produce him 500l. was universally and completely damned.

  Indeed at this period (1798) of Mr. Brown’s life, he was an avowed admirer of Godwin’s style, and the effects of that admiration, may be discerned in many of his early compositions.

  I dissent from Mr. Godwin’s theory of politics and morality as sincerely as I admire his genius.

  Mr. Godwin was by no means turned to tragedy. He was either weak in his fable, or impure in his interest, careless about received opinions, and not so much a master of the passions as to move them in spite of all the indecorum in the world. He was not a Kotzebue.

  Godwin was a man of great powers, insufficiently balanced; and, as the European world was, in his youth, a mighty conflict of great powers insufficiently balanced, he was just the man to make an impression of vast force on the society of his day. Soon after his “Political Justice” was published, working-men were seen to club their earnings to buy it, and to meet under a tree or in an ale-house to read it. It wrought so violently that Godwin saw there must be unsoundness in it; and he modified it considerably before he reissued it. His mind was acute, and, through the generosity of his heart, profound; but it was one-sided.

  As Godwin’s was no vulgar intellect, and as his politics were of an ardent and speculative cast, so, even now, when his novels are read for their purely imaginative interest, they impress powerfully.

  The “Enquirer” was less popular than the “Political Justice.” Part of the charm of the latter undoubtedly lay in the elaborate completeness and systematic order of the whole discussion. The foundations were laid in the psychology of Locke; and then the building was raised, stone by stone, until the whole was finished. But in the “Enquirer” Godwin’s dislike of law had extended even to the form of composition. He had been wrong, he said, in trying to write a systematic treatise on Society; and he would now confine himself to detached essays, wholly experimental and not necessarily in harmony with one another. The contrast between these two styles is the contrast between a whole oratorio and a miscellaneous concert, or between a complete poem and a volume of extracts.

  I believe my father’s ride of between two and three hundred miles to London was chiefly with a view to make Godwin’s acquaintance. He was then supposed, by a large party in the country, to be a political philosopher who had achieved imperishable renown. His two large volumes sleep on my shelves, and, written in the fly-leaf, in the hand of one of my uncles, is “Hoc nescire nefas.”

  Godwin at his best far surpasses the other English revolutionary novelists in the art of fusing ethical doctrine with imaginative form; but as he grew older, and the fire burnt low, the two elements gradually disintegrated.

  Godwin was an advanced thinker and an able writer. One of his romances is still read, but his philosophical works, once so esteemed, are out of vogue now; their authority was already declining when Shelley made his acquaintance—that is, it was declining with the public, but not with Shelley. They had been his moral and political Bible, and they were that yet. Shelley the infidel would himself have claimed to be less a work of God than a work of Godwin. Godwin’s philosophies had formed his mind and interwoven themselves into it and become a part of its texture; he regarded himself as Godwin’s spiritual son. Godwin was not without self-appreciation; indeed, it may be conjectured that from his point of view the last syllable of his name was surplusage. He lived serene in his lofty world of philosophy, far above the mean interests that absorbed smaller men, and only came down to the ground at intervals to pass the hat for alms to pay his debts with, and insult the man that relieved him.

  Godwin is essentially a prose-writer, and his style, though it has been over-praised, is of considerable merit. Although his exaggerated anarchism and determination to regard everything as an open question are absurd enough in principle and lead to the most unimaginable absurdities in detail, yet they give his thought always the appearance, and sometimes the reality of freer play than had been enjoyed by any English writer since Hobbes…. It was Godwin, more than any one else, who introduced the mischievous but popular practice of bolstering out history by describing at great length the places and scenes which his heroes might have seen, the transactions in which, being contemporary, they might have taken an interest, and the persons with whom they either were, or conceivably might have been, acquainted. In this, as in other things, he belonged to the class of “germinal” writers. And his influence on the early, although impermanent, creeds and tempers of the most brilliant young men of his day was quite extraordinary.

  Godwin is partly remembered because of his great influence on Shelley, which resulted in the poet’s application to the philosopher’s own family of those principles concerning love and marriage which Godwin so coolly set forth. Really, however, the man had power enough to be remembered for himself; deeply influenced by the rationalistic philosophy of the eighteenth century, he devoted himself both in such direct writings as his “Political Justice,” and in such medicated fiction as “Caleb Williams,” to expounding deeply revolutionary ideas.