Authors: Dorothy Hoobler
William was the seventh of thirteen children, many of whom did not survive to adulthood. His father, John Godwin, was the
minister of the Wisbech Independent Chapel and took in paying pupils to supplement his meager income. Because of the large
family, William got little attention even as a young child. He was sent to a wet nurse for the first two years of his life
and later, like Mary Wollstonecraft, was to fault his parents for this neglect. His formative years were marked by poverty
and a dreary existence. They put a chill into his soul that would never leave him.
John Godwin belonged to the Sandemanian tradition, a small and joyless sect of Dissenters who embraced “primitive” Christianity.
He believed in predestination, original sin, and divine retribution. Indeed his Calvinist views were so rigid that he alienated
his congregation and had to move to Debenham in Suffolk when William was two. Here again, William’s father had difficulties
and two years later he relocated once more—this time to Guestwick, north of Norwich, where he would remain till he died. Much
of Godwin’s childhood was spent here. The local meeting house’s most treasured possession was a carved oak chair known as
Cromwell’s chair. The young William occasionally sat in it, taking the place of Oliver Cromwell, the hero of the Dissenters,
who had ruled England for five years when the Puritans had controlled the country.
William remembered his father as a man who had little love of learning or books and that he usually scribbled his sermon for
the Sunday service at tea on Saturday afternoon. By contrast William himself was a very early reader and soon went through
the Bible, books of sermons,
The Pilgrim’s Progress,
and other religious literature. As he recalled, “I remember, when I was a very little boy, saying to myself, ‘What shall
I do, when I have read through all the books that there are in the world?’” A favorite “improving” book for him was James
Janeway’s
A Token for Children, Being an Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives and Joyful Deaths of Several Young
Children
—a series of stories about children who were saved by obeying God’s will and dying at a young age. Uncle Edward Godwin, another
minister, had written a children’s book called
The Death Bed, a poem concerning the Joyful Death of a Believer and the Awful Death of an Unbeliever,
which all the young Godwins had to read. The title tells it all.
Death in its reality was not unknown to the Godwins. One brother drowned at sea and another in a pond right outside the Godwin
home. William himself was a sickly boy and was lucky to survive an attack of smallpox; his religion forbade him to be inoculated,
and he said he was “perfectly willing” to die rather than disobey.
All this piety made the young William fear that he might be damned forever for any small infraction. Even as a child, he wished
to become a preacher himself. At home, he would stand on his high chair in the legal wig that had belonged to his great-grandfather
and deliver sermons to an imaginary congregation. Rather than enjoying his son’s performances, however, John Godwin feared
that William was acting like a showoff.
When he was eight, William began attending school at a town two and a half miles away. He practiced preaching as he walked
through the woods. One day he made a friend collapse in tears when he described the damnation that awaited him for his sins.
Later he secretly borrowed the key to the meeting house and preached and prayed over his friend like an ordained minister.
(In a note that he wrote to himself, he said he allowed the boy to kiss him. The nature of the kiss was not noted.) The only
errant act of his childhood that William remembered was attending the theater in Norwich, when he was nine. Though his father’s
female cousin accompanied him, theater-going was forbidden by his religion.
His father sent him back to Norwich when he was eleven to be educated as the only pupil of the Reverend Samuel Newton. His
father chose Newton because he believed that William needed even stricter training to instill more humility in him. Newton’s
preferred method of instruction was beating for the smallest behavioral lapses. William was beaten only once, but even that
was an astonishing experience to him. As he recalled, “It had never occurred to me as possible that my person . . . could
suffer such ignominious violation.” After his schooling, William returned to Guestwick, where he worked as an assistant schoolteacher
until his father’s death in 1772.
John Godwin’s death was a liberation. William’s mother, conscious of her son’s intellectual gifts, took him to London to the
Hoxton Academy. Hoxton was a rigorous college—far more rigorous than Oxford and Cambridge at the time. (As a Dissenter, Godwin
was not able to attend those prestigious schools, which were for Anglicans only.) Lectures started at six or seven in the
morning and included classics, theology, and Greek philosophy; students learned Latin, Greek, and Hebrew along with smatterings
of French, Italian, and German. Most important, for the first time in his life, Godwin was exposed to honest, passionate debate.
Though he did well academically, he was not happy at Hoxton. He had an intense desire to be liked by others, yet had little
ability in the art of making himself popular. He later noted ruefully that the schoolmaster and other pupils thought him “the
most self-conceited, self-sufficient animal that ever lived.” Though he began what would be a lifelong friendship with a boy
named James Marshall, Godwin felt a strong sense of loneliness. It would stay with him throughout his life, be a recurrent
theme in his novels, and would be passed on to his daughter Mary.
When, after five years, Godwin left Hoxton, he still wanted to be a preacher even though he had now developed many other interests
and his religious views had broadened. Then only twenty-two, he obtained his first job as a temporary minister in the town
of Ware, near his birthplace, but problems soon developed. Though Godwin had not yet been formally ordained, he felt entitled
to perform the communion service, because he had the consent of his congregation. It sounds like a minor issue, but other
ministers in the county took umbrage and refused to use the title of Reverend in addressing him. Four congregations rejected
him in four years. Godwin tried to open a seminary, but failed to attract students. He would never become formally ordained.
As Godwin’s failures as a minister increased, he found his faith starting to waver as well. During this time, Godwin had started
to read the works of the
philosophes
—the same thinkers who influenced his future wife, Mary Wollstonecraft. Rousseau’s effect on Godwin was to make him realize
that religion and superstition could not stand the test of reason. It was a profound shock to the young man’s worldview. At
first he shifted from Calvinism to Deism, but would in time become an atheist.
Bereft of the only sure force that had guided his life, he settled in London in 1782 and began his career as a writer, joining
a part of the English literary world known as “Grub Street,” which published cheap novels, books of poetry, and nonfiction.
Godwin had to produce copy quickly and in great quantity. “In the latter part of 1783,” he recalled, “I wrote in ten days
a novel entitled
Damon and Delia,
for which Hookham gave me five guineas, and a novel in three weeks called
Italian Letters,
purchased by Robinson for twenty guineas, and in the first four months of 1784 a novel called
Imogen, A Pastoral Romance,
for which Lane gave me ten pounds.”
Imogen
was a spoof of
The Poems of Ossian,
a bestseller of the day that was supposed to be ancient Celtic lore, but was in reality a fake. Godwin’s parody was spicy,
including rape, a lecherous magician, and other highly un-Christian elements, although virtue did triumph in the end. He also
wrote reviews for John Murray’s
English Review,
a monthly that favored radical political positions. Publications called “reviews” were abundant in those days; they were
often little more than collections of puff pieces used to push the newest books. (Murray was a book publisher as well; he
would later publish Byron’s works.) Godwin also took to critical writing—he attacked hack writers with relish, but was willing
to praise writers who he thought were advancing knowledge. (Mary was equally honest; despite her feminism, she had no qualms
about giving bad reviews to female writers, as when she called one book “one of the most stupid novels we have ever impatiently
read. Pray, Miss, write no more!”)
Though Godwin wrote for a radical publication, he was himself at first not politically active. In this he followed his father’s
example; the closest John Godwin had come to a political act was to take five-year-old William to a fireworks display in Norwich
to celebrate the coronation of George III. Even so, at the time, the need for political reform was a hotly discussed topic,
and William, with his background as a Dissenter, was particularly interested in it. The Act of Toleration of 1689 had given
Dissenters only the freedom to practice their religion; English law still retained many restrictions against their conduct
or liberties. For example, Dissenters were forbidden to hold civil or military offices, and were required to pay for the upkeep
of local Church of England parishes.
The French Revolution inspired Godwin, as it had Mary Wollstonecraft. The issues being raised in France encouraged him to
look for a way to bring about political justice through rational means in England. In 1791 he began planning a book that would
“tell all that I apprehended to be truth,” and secured an advance from a publisher to give himself the time to write it. The
result,
An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice,
was published in February 1793; its appearance made Godwin famous overnight. His central premise was that humans were innately
good; cruelty and injustice have made them what they are. Given that Godwin’s original religious belief, as a boy and young
man, was that humans are
inherently
mired in evil and need God’s grace for salvation, it was clear that he was totally repudiating the faith in which he was
raised.
Like his future wife, Godwin was not a philosopher who spoke in abstract terms alone. He intended to improve humankind by
attacking the entrenched social and political institutions. Government, he wrote, was the central problem. In a time when
the ruling class of England feared the French Revolution, Godwin was heedless of the consequences when he wrote such passages
as, “With what delight must every well-informed friend of mankind look forward to the . . . dissolution of political government,
of that brute engine which has been the only perennial cause of the vices of mankind.” Considering that a man had recently
been thrown into prison for three months for drunkenly shouting “Damn the king” in a public place, it is surprising that Godwin
experienced no harassment for his views. Other critics of the government were put on trial for their lives—Horne Tooke, one
of those whom Godwin and Wollstonecraft knew from Joseph Johnson’s dinner parties, was among them. (He was acquitted.) Godwin
later claimed the authorities thought the book was too expensive to reach a large audience. For whatever reason, he escaped
prison and the noose.
This was all the more surprising since Godwin’s
Political Justice
was if anything more extreme than Wollstonecraft’s book. Godwin condemned
all
forms of coercion, including those used by the government to keep order, making him one of the founders of anarchism. Godwin
envisioned a society in which people lived harmoniously without compulsion or force. At the top of the list of coercive social
institutions that he attacked was marriage, which he called a slavery for women and “the most odious of all monopolies.” The
world of the future, in his view, would be egalitarian and people would use reason in all their relationships. Reasonable
individuals would only act after considering the general good of the society, and limits on freedom would no longer be necessary.
Godwin saw no obstacles to this ideal society, for progress was his true theme; he believed that it would inevitably appear.
It was not stoppable.
Godwin’s optimism and idealism seem excessive today, but at the time, revolutions—the American, the French, the scientific,
and the industrial—seemed to promise that anything humans could envision was possible. Godwin instantly became one of the
leading figures in the intellectual ferment of the time, and he became a hero to those who were most idealistic.
Political Justice
was both expensive and difficult for the average person to read. Even so, groups of people raised the money to buy a copy,
and then gathered to hear it read aloud. Godwin set out to reach a wider audience by writing a novel that would express his
views in simpler form. He told his new story from the first-person point of view to get the reader more involved, a technique
that his daughter would also employ. The year 1794 saw the publication of
Things as They Are; or The Adventures of Caleb Williams,
which combined psychological insight with a mystery—an unbeatable combination that produces bestsellers even today. Lower-class
Caleb Williams, a servant, discovers that his otherwise upstanding employer, the upper-class Falkland, is a murderer. To prevent
Caleb from revealing the secret, Falkland frames him for a crime. Caleb goes into hiding, and the two become locked in a pattern
of pursuit, which ultimately destroys them both. Mary Shelley, who knew her father’s novel well, would make use of the relentless
pursuit between two self-destroying individuals when she wrote about Dr. Frankenstein and his monster.
Godwin continued to write novels for the next four decades. He was perennially in need of money, and novels were easier to
write and sell than books of philosophy. Superficially—for he always used his novels as vehicles for his philosophy—his books
employ Gothic elements, such as a struggle against a tyrannical authority figure, supernatural happenings, and a mysterious
or exotic setting. (In
Caleb Williams
the narrator is warned never to open a trunk that stands in his master’s room. Of course . . .) Despite Godwin’s popular
appeal, his novels posed important questions for society, and their resolutions were often tied to Godwin’s radical proposals.
He did not totally abandon nonfiction, writing the sensational
Lives of the Necromancers
(1834) two years before his death. It described such magicians as Cornelia Agrippa and Albertus Magnus of medieval times—questing
figures who would interest both Percy Shelley and his fictional counterpart, Victor Frankenstein.