Featured Publication: New Approaches to William Godwin

Eliza O’Brien, Helen Stark, and Beatrice Turner have edited a collection of essays, New Approaches to William Godwin: Forms, Fears, Futures, which has just been published by Palgrave Macmillan (2021). The volume comprises eleven chapters, with an introduction by the editors, and explores texts from across the whole of Godwin’s career.

Thanks to Eliza, Helen, and Beatrice for providing this summary of the volume’s contents:

This new collection of essays brings together the work of established scholars and early-career researchers across a range of disciplines. The eleven chapters are grouped according to three main themes: forms (the variety of literary modes and genres with which Godwin engaged), fears (political and personal), and futures (fame, legacies, afterlives).

David O’Shaughnessy, in ‘Godwin, Ireland and Historical Tragedy’, reads Godwin’s fragmentary tragedy Abbas, King of Persia (1801) as an allegorical treatment of the relationship between Ireland and Britain at the time of the Act of Union (1801). He considers Abbas alongside other works in which Godwin engaged with Irish affairs: his political journalism of the 1780s; the novel Mandeville; A Tale of the Seventeenth Century in England (1817); and History of the Commonwealth (1824-8). In tracing Godwin’s longstanding interest in Irish history, O’Shaughnessy highlights a neglected but consistent thread in his career.

Grace Harvey, in ‘“My son, once my friend”: Sanguinity, Sincerity and Friendship in St. Leon’s Confessional Narrative’, explores Godwin’s treatment of friendship and paternity in St Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century (1799). She concentrates on Godwin’s depiction of sincerity in the relationship between St Leon and his son Charles. Godwin affirms the necessity of sincerity in friendship by exposing its absence in St Leon’s relationship with Charles. St Leon fails to identify Charles as a friend and equal to whom candour is owed.

John-Erik Hansson, in ‘Through the Looking-Glasses: Godwin’s Biographies for Children’, shows how Godwin challenged the conventions of children’s life-writing by writing biographies for young people that reflected his own political and educational commitments. He considers The Looking Glass (1805) and the Life of Lady Jane Grey (1806), both published under the pseudonym of Theophilus Marcliffe, in relation to Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798) and the Life of Chaucer (1803). The children’s biographies exemplify Godwin’s attempt to create a youth culture of radical reform to further the political agendas of his life-writing for adults.

Mark Philp, in ‘Candour, Courage and the Calculation of Consequences in Godwin’s 1790s’, reminds us that Godwin, in An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), gives ‘the bastard prudence’ short shrift. He examines the shifts in Godwin’s concepts of candour and courage during the 1790s – partly as a result of writing Caleb Williams (1794), and partly in response to changing political conditions and personal experiences. Godwin’s concern with the intrinsic character of an act gives way to a new emphasis on consequences, and he admits prudence as a motive. The result is a much less optimistic doctrine.

Shawn Fraistat, in ‘Godwin’s Fear of the Private Affections’, re-examines Godwin’s treatment of the private affections across the three editions of An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793, 1796, 1798). At first Godwin feared that cohabitation and marriage were vehicles for partiality, dependence, and prejudice, but he later envisaged a more positive role for domestic ties. Fraistat considers why Godwin’s views shifted and how he attempted to re-envisage human relationships in a manner consistent with justice and progress. Godwin’s position remains instructive for theorizing the role the private affections ought to play in a just society.

Ruby Tuke, in ‘Gifts, Giving, Gratitude: The Development of William Godwin’s Radical Critique of Charity in the 1790s’, argues that Godwin’s writings in different genres reveal the tacit strategies that underpin charitable giving. For Godwin, the gratitude of the (poor) recipient maintains a system of inequality. His intersubjective ‘gift theory’ prefigures Pierre Bourdieu’s critical ambivalence towards the gift in the twentieth century. The comprehensive nature of Godwin’s critique threatens to undermine the gift’s effectiveness. This explains why his rejection of gratitude was misinterpreted as support for private vice by conservative critics towards the end of the 1790s.

David Fallon, in ‘Gines, Violence, and Fear in Things as They Are; Or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams’, investigates the economy of violence in Caleb Williams (1794). He focuses on the thief-taker Gines who hunts Caleb down. The character of Gines is placed in the context of Godwin’s growing concern about violent actions and words on both sides of the political divide. Gines and Caleb each become involved with the same gang of robbers; Gines persecutes Caleb through defamatory broadsheets. The novel dramatizes Godwin’s fears over the increasing populism and polarization of the public sphere in the 1790s.

M. O. Grenby, in ‘Godwin’s Popular Stories for the Nursery’, explores the origins of Godwin’s career as a children’s writer and publisher. Godwin’s engagement with children’s literature was carefully considered and dated from as early as 1798. Evidence from his diary and archival sources, close readings, and computational stylistic analysis combine to reveal Godwin as the author of three anonymously published books (1804-5) in Benjamin Tabart’s groundbreaking series, Popular Stories for the Nursery: The Story of Griselda; History of Robin Hood; and Richard Coeur de Lion. This discovery entitles Godwin to a previously unacknowledged place in the development of children’s historical fiction.

Eliza O’Brien, in ‘Godwin and the Love of Fame’, explores Godwin’s treatment of fame, virtue, and benevolence in several of his works. As the author of An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), Godwin experienced the positive effects of fame; but his celebration of Mary Wollstonecraft’s life and work in Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798) misfired. He addressed the threat posed by the love of fame in three novels: Caleb Williams (1794), St Leon (1799) and Fleetwood (1805). While Godwin recognized the allure of fame, he was keenly aware of its potential for destruction.

Helen Stark, in ‘An Illustrated Afterlife: William Godwin’s Essay on Sepulchres’, analyzes an extra-illustrated copy of Essay on Sepulchres (1809). The inside front cover is signed by the landscape artist, John Linnell (1792-1882), but when the book was sold at auction in 1992, the drawings were attributed to the collector William Young Ottley (1771-1836). Stark plots the history of this unique copy and explores Godwin’s social contacts with artists. The relationship between drawings and text indicates a longer afterlife for Godwin’s Essay on Sepulchres than is usually acknowledged.

Pamela Clemit and Avner Offer, in ‘Godwin’s Citations, 1783-2005: Highest Renown at the Pinnacle of Disfavour’, challenge the received view that Godwin enjoyed a meteoric rise to fame as the author of An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) and Caleb Williams (1794) but sank into obscurity after 1800. They 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. When in deep disfavour, he was highly visible. Godwin’s reputation fell into several different periods, not just one. His flame never went out entirely, and has surged again in recent decades.

New Approaches to William Godwin is now available for purchase in print, or in electronic form as a whole or in individual chapters. To view the contents, click here.

A graph showing William Godwin’s reputation measured by citations, 1783-2005 (Clemit and Offer, p. 278).

Featured Publication: Nineteenth-Century Prose Special Issue on William Godwin

Rowland Weston, Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Waikato, has guest-edited a special double issue of Nineteenth-Century Prose (41: 1/2, Spring/Fall 2014). The volume devotes 424 pages to new Godwin scholarship, and includes a stimulating and provocative introduction by the editor.

Thanks to Rowland for providing this summary of the volume’s contents:

This special issue of Nineteenth-Century Prose brings together the latest writing on Godwin from emerging and established scholars. It comprises twelve essays analysing texts from across the whole of Godwin’s career, and beyond (including a posthumous publication of 1873). Pamela Clemit and Avner Offer, in ‘Godwin’s Citations, 1783-2005: Highest Renown at the Pinnacle of Disfavor’, provide some surprising and significant data concerning Godwin’s reception. Their work is certain to establish important new directions in Godwin studies. While Godwin’s reception across time has been misunderstood, even less is known about his reception outside the Anglophone world. Begoña Lasa Álvarez, in ‘William Godwin and the Spanish Enlightenment’, provides a timely addition to this subject, exploring Godwin’s reputation as a pedagogue as well as a philosopher.

One recent development in Godwin studies is a long overdue focus on his voluminous historiographical outputs. The topic receives further attention in this collection. Eliza O’Brien, in ‘“The most inconsistent of men”: William Godwin and the “Apology” of Sir Thomas More’, provides the first critical analysis of Godwin’s manuscript essay, ‘On the Composition of History, An Occasional Reflection’. Tilottama Rajan, in ‘Between Individual and General History: Godwin’s Seventeenth-Century Texts’, addresses Godwin’s extensive forays into one of the most volatile and consequential periods of English and Irish history. Both essays demonstrate Godwin’s inventive and often radical departures from contemporary historical interpretations and historiographical orientations.

A point of perplexity shared by radicals from Godwin’s day to ours is the philosopher’s rejection of mass politics. Godwin’s position derived from his belief that sympathy tended to undermine the personal intellectual independence which, in his early writings, he regarded as the sine qua non of fully developed humanity. At times, in An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), Godwin appears to suggest that any form of human cooperation is detrimental to this independence.  Michael Edson, in ‘Godwin’s Anti-Mass Politics Revisited: Sympathy, Retirement, and Epistemic Diversity’, expands our understanding of this central issue in Godwin’s thought. Edson shows that while Godwin remained suspicious of mass politics, he retained a commitment to the Rational Dissenting ideal of group discussion and that this entailed an acceptance and celebration of intellectual diversity.

The tension between unreflective sympathy and rational independence is evident throughout Godwin’s writing, and is complicated by his adoption of moral sense philosophy from the second edition of Political Justice (1796) onwards. Suzie Asha Park, in ‘Caleb Williams and the Smithian Spectator: Reading the “Reasonable Demand”’, explores the difficulties Godwin experienced in accommodating the notions of sympathy and impartial spectatorship posited by Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). If unreflective sympathy was always carefully to be scrutinized, excesses of feeling or sensibility were to be unequivocally condemned. One of Godwin’s starkest depictions of the latter occurred in his novel Fleetwood: or, The New Man of Feeling (1805). Colin Carman, in ‘Godwin’s Fleetwood: Shame and the Sexuality of Feeling’, reveals the full extent of the protagonist’s excessive emotionalism. Godwin’s writings are invariably designed to provoke thought, discussion, and gradual social change. These objectives are often explicitly stated in his prefaces. Eric Leuschner, in ‘The Prefaces of William Godwin and the Literary Public Sphere’, shows how Godwin’s prefaces engage rapidly changing audiences in debates about, for example, the nature of fiction and its capacity to represent psychological truth and inculcate virtue.

Caleb Williams (1794), Godwin’s most popular novel, has received the lion’s share of scholarly attention in recent years. A spirited indictment of late eighteenth-century Britain’s political, social, and legal corruptions, the novel continues to attract critical interest. Sophie Coulombeau, in ‘“Men whose glory it is to be known”: Godwin, Bentham, and the London Corresponding Society’, uncovers the cultural, societal, and existential anxieties played out in celebrated legal cases of the day. Godwin’s engagement with the law and the legal profession is further analysed by Mark Crosby in ‘“Till all law is annihilated”: Godwin versus the Bar’. Crosby particularly addresses Godwin’s rhetorical skills, a topic further examined by Victoria Myers (Emerita Professor of English at Pepperdine University) in her exploration of Godwin’s pedagogy, ‘William Godwin’s Enquirer: Between Oratory and Conversation’.

The volume concludes with Gary Handwerk’s study of Godwin’s last work (posthumously published in 1873). In ‘Unspeakable Truths, Unutterable Sincerity: Godwin’s The Genius of Christianity Unveiled’, Handwerk reads the Genius of Christianity in terms of a characteristic Godwinian concern, evident as early as Caleb Williams, that sincerity of intention might not always guarantee the discovery of truth, or its recognition by the public.

An emphasis on the sceptical, complex, and conjectural nature of much Godwinian thought provides an appropriate conclusion to this volume. We have come a long way from the early scholarly caricature of Godwin as a dogmatic and naïve fantasist of reason, and critical analysis is no longer limited to his two best-known works. More than two hundred years after Political Justice took the intellectual world of the 1790s by storm, Godwin remains fascinating company.