William Godwin : The novel , philosophy , and history

In 1825, Hazlitt described some of the fluctuations which the reputation of William Godwin had already experienced: ‘during his lifetime,’ he had ‘secured to himself the triumphs and the mortifications of an extreme notoriety and of a sort of posthumous fame.’ Godwin’s inspirational role to younger writers and radicals, combined with the vilification of many, after the emergence of An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice in 1793, had placed him in the peculiar category of being regarded in the past tense, even whilst he carried on the seemingly endless production of writings of all sorts that would continue to appear until his death in 1836. ‘He is thought of now’, says Hazlitt, ‘like any eminent writer of a hundred-and-fifty years ago, or just as he will be a hundred-and-fifty years hence.’ It would seem unlikely that Godwin has maintained the level of eminence that Hazlitt accords him, but it is undoubtedly the case that the sheer range of Godwin’s work has guaranteed sustained modern critical attention, even if such attention shows a focus on his more familiar productions. Parts of his huge oeuvre (particularly the works of history and biography) are little read, yet the works that Hazlitt so admired, Political Justice and the novels Caleb Williams and (to a lesser extent) St. Leon, continue to play their part in discussions of the literary history and politics of the Romantic period. Along with the presence of Political Justice in the formations of modern anarchist thought, critical work on Godwin’s different types of fiction has continued, rather than dwindled, in recent decades. Godwin was born a few weeks after Mozart in 1756, and although he will not receive anything like the same attention, it seems fitting to mark the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his birth with a collection of articles. These seek, in different ways, to illustrate the variety of Godwin’s work, the many different intellectual currents that can be found in it, and the manner in which it sustains interest for readers long after its apparent topicality has passed (unlike so many works of philosophy, history or literature which have a palpable design upon us). It is my present purpose to introduce the essays, via a brief account of the characteristic concerns of Godwin’s work which they will take up. Not the least of the reasons for Godwin’s enormous impact in the tremendously politically-charged atmosphere of the 1790s was his accessibility as a writer and thinker; few philosophers have ever expressed their tenets through the form of the novel, but Godwin is the sort of stylist who could bring the clarity and openness of his fictional work to philosophy—indeed, unkind readers maintained that his whole philosophy was rooted