A short life of the author
William Godwin (1756–1836) was born in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, the son of a Dissenting minister. He became the most radical political philosopher of the 1790s, the father of philosophical anarchism, the author of one of the first thriller novels in English, and the patriarch of a remarkable literary dynasty: he married Mary Wollstonecraft (who died giving birth to their daughter), and that daughter — Mary Godwin — married Percy Bysshe Shelley and wrote Frankenstein.
Life and Career
Godwin trained as a Dissenting minister but lost his faith under the influence of the French philosophes — d’Holbach, Helvétius, Rousseau. He moved to London, worked as a hack journalist and reviewer, and in 1793 published An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, a two-volume treatise arguing that human reason, if given free rein, would eventually eliminate the need for government, law, marriage, and all coercive institutions.
The book made him famous overnight. Published at three guineas (an enormous sum that Pitt’s government decided not to suppress, reasoning that so expensive a book could do no harm), it became the bible of English radicalism. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Hazlitt, and the young Shelley were all profoundly influenced by it.
Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) was Godwin’s attempt to dramatise the ideas of Political Justice in narrative form. It is a novel about a servant who discovers his master’s secret crime and is relentlessly persecuted for his knowledge — one of the first pursuit novels, a precursor of the detective story, and a powerful allegory of institutional injustice.
In 1797 Godwin married Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. She died eleven days after giving birth to their daughter Mary. Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798), published in his grief, was scandalously frank about Wollstonecraft’s suicide attempts and illegitimate daughter, and severely damaged both their reputations.
Godwin’s later years were marked by financial difficulty — he ran a children’s bookshop and publishing house (the Juvenile Library) that never prospered — and declining influence. Percy Bysshe Shelley, who had idolised Godwin since adolescence, became first his disciple, then his son-in-law (he eloped with sixteen-year-old Mary in 1814), and finally his reluctant financial supporter. Godwin died on 7 April 1836.
Major Works and Themes
Godwin’s central philosophical claim — that human beings are perfectible through reason and that all government is a form of tyranny — was the purest expression of Enlightenment optimism. His fiction, paradoxically, is darker: Caleb Williams is a novel about the impossibility of escape from a corrupt system, and its atmosphere of paranoia and pursuit anticipates Kafka.
Critical Reception and Legacy
Godwin was the most influential radical thinker of the 1790s and one of the first casualties of the conservative reaction that followed. His reputation collapsed under the twin assaults of anti-Jacobin sentiment and the Memoirs scandal. He was rediscovered by anarchist theorists in the nineteenth century and is now recognised as a key figure in the history of radical thought.
Key Works
- An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)
- Caleb Williams (1794)
- Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798)
- St. Leon (1799)
- Fleetwood (1805)
- Lives of the Necromancers (1834)
Collecting Godwin
An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793, G.G. and J. Robinson, London) in two quarto volumes is the most important first edition. It was published in three editions (1793, 1796, 1798), each substantially revised. First editions of the 1793 text bring $3,000–$10,000.
Caleb Williams (1794, B. Crosby, London) in three volumes is scarce and desirable — it is one of the founding texts of English crime fiction. First editions bring $2,000–$8,000.
Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798, Joseph Johnson, London) is collected both for its literary significance and its connection to Wollstonecraft and the Shelley circle. First editions bring $1,000–$5,000.
Godwin manuscript material and correspondence are held primarily by the Bodleian Library and the Pforzheimer Collection at the New York Public Library. Letters linking him to Shelley, Coleridge, or Wollstonecraft command the highest premiums.