Download Godwin's Response to Rousseau's Autobiography: Self-Analysis and Social Critique Study and more Summaries Autobiography Writing in PDF only on Docsity!
PAMELA CLEMIT
Self-Analysis as Social Critique:
The Autobiographical Writings of
Godwin and Rousseau
I
In the preamble to The Confessions (1782–9), Jean-Jacques Rousseau starts by envisaging a scene of judgement at which he will appear before ‘the Sovereign Judge’, book in hand; but he ends by imagining a scene of reciprocal confession amongst his fellow-men:
Eternal Being, assemble around me the countless host of my fellows: let them listen to my confessions, let them shudder at my unworthi- ness, let them blush at my woes. Let each of them in his turn uncover his heart at the foot of Thy throne with the same sincerity; and then let a single one say to Thee, if he dares, ‘ I was better than that man .’ 1
Here Rousseau challenges his readers to scrutinize their own lives and characters before condemning him. Similarly, in recounting the numerous instances in which his natural development was constrained by an unjust political and social order, he invites readers to reflect on their own experiences of alienation and self-division. As Robert Darnton and others showed, Rousseau’s use of self-revelation in the service of a political goal had a powerful effect on readers of all classes in France.^2 Intellectuals of the French revolutionary era, such as Jacques-Pierre Brissot, Manon Roland, and Jean-Baptiste Louvet, pub- lished frank, self-justifying memoirs of their conversion to the principles of liberty and equality, modelled on Rousseau’s Confessions.^3 However, until recently, historians and literary critics have been less attuned to the impact of Rousseau on the autobiographical writings of the English radical intelligentsia of the 1790s. 4 In particular, William Godwin’s response to Rousseau’s use of self-analysis as a mode of social critique is still to be explored.
Although Godwin never published an autobiography, between 1795 and 1801 he wrote many private autobiographical pieces – confessional essays, meditative reflections, and fragments – in which he took up Rousseau’s challenge to engage in comparative self-evaluation.^5 An examination of these manuscripts reveals that Godwin, like Rousseau, turned to autobiographical writing not only to try to understand his own development, but also to craft an identity as a writer dedicated to ‘the cause and the love of liberty’. 6 In keeping with the dual focus of the Confessions , where Rousseau presents himself as the embodiment of the theoretical principles contained in his writings, Godwin emphasized the particularity of his early experiences whilst presenting his life-story as a case study that illustrates general principles of human nature. In analyzing his own emotional and intellectual development, through his Calvinist upbringing and his education in Rational Dissent to the writing of An Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793), he simultaneously traced the growth of a personality peculiarly receptive to radical theories of social change. A study of Godwin’s appropriation of the ‘autobiographical’ Rousseau, as well as increasing our understanding of his own career, contributes to wider critical debate on the links between eighteenth- century English Protestant Dissent and the historical phenomenon of European Romanticism.
II
Before examining Godwin’s critical engagement with Rousseau, it is neces- sary to establish the intellectual contexts for his project of philosophical autobiography. Godwin turned to autobiographical writing in the after- math of the French Revolution as a means of reaffirming his progressive social and political ideals. By the mid-1790s, many English intellectuals who had initially welcomed the French Revolution had become dis- illusioned by the atrocities which culminated in the Terror.^7 The govern- ment campaign to stop the spread of radicalism, which had begun in 1792 and culminated in the outlawing of the reform societies in 1799, led to the increasing fragmentation of the democratic reform movement. At the same time, there developed a flourishing counter-radical culture, in which educated radicals were subjected to a campaign of popular abuse orches- trated by members of their own class. These changes in public mood prompted Godwin to a revaluation of his reforming aims and methods. In The Enquirer (1797), a collection of essays on education, manners, and literature, he announced a programme of aesthetic education designed to appeal to those who, like himself, were committed to individual reform rather than collective action. Whilst maintaining ‘as ardent a passion for
162 R OMANTICISM
a political purpose. In the first edition of Political Justice , he emphasized the liberating power of total sincerity:
It has been justly observed that the popish practice of auricular confession has been attended with some salutary effects. How much better would it be, if, instead of a practice thus ambiguous … every man would make the world his confessional, and the human species the keeper of his conscience? … If every man to-day would tell all the truth he knows, three years hence there would be scarcely a falshood of any magnitude remaining in the civilised world. ( PPWG , III, p. 137)
Whilst this passage may reflect Rousseau’s emphasis on reciprocal con- fession, it also reveals Godwin’s allegiance to an older Protestant tradition of public confession. His belief in the duty of truth-telling was based on the Dissenting principle of ‘candour’, which might best be described as the disposition to form impartial judgements in all affairs.^11 Such a principle was central to Godwin’s theory of anarchism. In Political Justice , he argued that individuals, by the exercise of rational judgement, have the power to emancipate themselves from the false opinion on which govern- ment is based, leading to the gradual dissolution of all legislative restraints. As he wrote in a chapter called ‘Mode of Effecting Revolutions’: ‘The revolutions of states … consist principally in a change of sentiments and dispositions in the members of those states. The true instruments for changing the opinions of men are argument and persuasion’ ( PPWG , III, p. 115). Moreover, sincere delineation of character has a particular role to play in effecting gradual political change. ‘If truth were universally told of men’s dispositions and actions’, Godwin declared, ‘gibbets and wheels might be dismissed from the face of the earth’ ( PPWG , III, p. 345). Candid truth-telling, in this view, not only transforms the moral consciousness of its hearers but also points the way to institutional reform. Godwin’s increased emphasis on the reform of individuals was accom- panied by significant changes in his ethical views. In the first edition of Political Justice , his anarchism is premissed on the belief that reason can become the sole determinant of human action. Yet the central role accorded to feeling in the final chapters of Caleb Williams (1794) indicates that he recognized the inadequacy of this account almost at once, even though he did not formulate it until he revised Political Justice in 1795.^12 In this second edition (November 1795, dated 1796), as in the third (November 1797, dated 1798), he placed increased emphasis on the role of sympathy and feeling in moral judgements.^13 As he noted privately in 1801: ‘My writings hitherto … have exhibited a view of half only of the
164 R OMANTICISM
human mind, there remain the feelings, & the imagination considered as the instrument of feeling.’ 14 This intellectual reassessment gained further impetus from Godwin’s relationship with Mary Wollstonecraft. Although some critics have argued that she was the main cause of his philosophical revisions,^15 there is little evidence to support this view: when Godwin became reacquainted with Wollstonecraft in January 1796, he had already published the second edition of Political Justice. Yet he was partly attracted to her because her latest book, Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796), seemed to him to embody the synthesis of reason and sympathy for which he was searching.^16 As he wrote in Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798), ‘If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book. She speaks of her sorrows, in a way that fills us with melancholy, and dissolves us in tenderness, at the same time that she displays a genius which commands all our admiration.’ 17 Here Godwin recognized that Wollstonecraft’s use of a Rousseauvian language of sen- sibility created a new kind of autobiographical ‘truth’, which encouraged the reader’s sympathetic identification. His relationship with Wollstone- craft provided him with a practical education in Rousseauvian senti- ment.^18 Under her tutelage, Godwin re-read Rousseau’s epistolary novel, Julie; or, The New Eloise (1761) and Emile, or On Education (1762), his novelistic account of the education of a representative young man, together with the Confessions.^19 This programme of instruction prompted him to develop a heightened appreciation of the relations between private affections and public virtue. Godwin’s revaluation of his philosophical position also led him to examine his own development. Like younger members of the revolution- ary generation who were prompted by the course of recent events to take stock of their lives – Coleridge and Southey, for example, each began a series of autobiographical letters in 1797 20 – he began to scrutinize his own pre-philosophical development. Stimulated by a reading of the newly-published English translation of Manon Roland’s An Appeal to Impartial Posterity , he made notes for a chronological account of his early life in September 1795, whilst completing the revisions to the second edition of Political Justice.^21 However, he did not begin writing in earnest until August 1797, three days after finishing the revisions to the third edition of Political Justice. Work on the memoir of his childhood was inter- rupted by Wollstonecraft’s death on 10 September 1797, following the birth of their daughter Mary eleven days earlier, but, after completing Wollstonecraft’s Memoirs , a work in which biographical and autobio-
Self-Analysis as Social Critique 165
believer, many of his values and structures of ordering experience remained indebted to the literature of nonconformity. For example, in Political Justice he emphasized the need for the individual to scrutinize his or her daily experience for its contribution to progress of mind: ‘Every incident that befals us is the parent of a sentiment, and either confirms or counteracts the preconceptions of the mind’ ( PPWG , III, p. 216). Again, Godwin structured his autobiographical writings in terms of ‘revolutions of opinion’, or secular conversion-experiences, highlighting the protean character of his own development: ‘Every four or five years I gain some new perception, or become intimately sensible to some valuable circum- stance, that introduces an essential change of many of my preconceived notions and determinations’ ( CNMG , I, pp. 52, 59). A philosophical justi- fication for such intellectual mobility, or ‘ductility’, can be found in the nonconformist belief in the fearless pursuit of truth, ‘whithersoever thou leadest’ ( PPWG , VI, pp. 173, 219), which had been extended to the secular sphere in the writings of the Rational Dissenters.^30 In cases where further enlightenment reveals the inadequacies of one’s belief, changing one’s opinion becomes a moral duty. Godwin found a further model for politically subversive self-analysis in the autobiographical writings of Rousseau, another former Calvinist, who also presented his life-story as a series of mental ‘revolutions’ and who seemed to offer a secular version of the ‘Paradise within’ constructed in nonconformist literature. 31 As several critics observed, to readers in the late eighteenth century there were two Rousseaus: the political and moral philosopher, and the mythical figure of persecuted virtue embodied in his autobiographical writings.^32 Although his political writings were later held responsible for the French Revolution, it was his literary self-represen- tation as a ‘new man’ of virtue that led to Rousseau being pantheonized by the French revolutionaries in 1794. Godwin’s engagement with Rousseau’s writings spanned his entire career. In the 1780s, he had responded affirmatively to Rousseau’s distinctive view of man as naturally good but socially depraved, and he re-read the works of the man he regarded as ‘the greatest of all philosophers’ whilst writing Political Justice.^33 From 1789 to 1804 he worked intermittently on a translation of the Confessions , although this was never completed or published.^34 In the mid-1790s, as already noted, he re-read Rousseau’s autobiographical writings and fiction under Wollstonecraft’s guidance, and in July 1798 he re-read Emile.^35 During his most intense phase of autobiographical writing, from 1797 to 1801, he re-read the Confessions three times, together with its sequel, The Reveries of the Solitary Walker (1782). 36 Not surprisingly, it was the Confessions that influenced Godwin most
Self-Analysis as Social Critique 167
directly, since this work, in Gregory Dart’s words, ‘redefined the traditional narrative of sin and salvation in entirely secular terms, describing the struggles of the self to combat the accretions of modern corruption’.^37 Rousseau presents sincere self-examination as the key to his vision of humanity freed from the corruptions of modern civilization. In order to restore a harmonious relationship with the physical and social world, Rousseau argues, the individual must look for it within himself. However, such an investigation faces an epistemological problem, as he noted in the preface to the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (1755): ‘And how will man manage to see himself as nature formed him, though all the changes that the sequence of time and things must have produced in his original constitution, and to separate what he gets from his own stock from what circumstances and his progress have added to or changed in his primitive state?’ ( CWR , III, p. 585). The potential role of autobiographical writing in solving this dilemma is indicated in the preface to the Neuchâtel edition of the Confessions. Here Rousseau claimed that only autobiography gives the access to inner feelings which makes possible an accurate investiga- tion of human nature, and that his unprecedentedly frank account of his own feelings was intended to lay the foundations for such a study:
I have resolved to cause my readers to make an additional step in the knowledge of men by pulling them away, if possible, from that unique and faulty rule of always judging someone else’s heart by means of their own; whereas, on the contrary, even to know one’s own it would often be necessary to begin by reading in someone else’s. In order for one to learn to evaluate oneself, I want to attempt to provide at least one item for comparison, so that each can know himself and one other, and this other will be myself. ( CWR , V, p. 585)
By seeing how carefully Rousseau analyzes his own experiences of alien- ation, and how he eventually overcomes them, readers may be encouraged to scrutinize the defective political and social relations which have shaped their own lives and to undergo a comparable moral transformation. Rousseau’s presentation of the Confessions as ‘a precious book for philosophers’ ( CWR , V, p. 589) had a special appeal for Godwin, who, as seen in ‘Of History and Romance’, also sought to invest the study of individual character with a philosophical significance. Godwin’s desire to assign a similar importance to the study of his own character is suggested by the opening paragraph of his 1798 self-analysis, added to the manu- script draft in a different ink,^38 in which he echoed Rousseau’s claim to be a practitioner of a developing science of human nature:
168 R OMANTICISM
Here Godwin’s own remembered instances of the pleasures of sense- impressions, notably his student visits to Drury Lane Theatre,^44 provide a corrective to Rousseau’s invocation of an imaginary world, remote from social and historical experience. For Godwin the main appeal of the Confessions lay not in similarities or contrasts between the two writers’ characters, but in the way that Rousseau traced the origin of his adult mind and personality to his early experiences of social and cultural alienation. Just as Rousseau used auto- biography to demonstrate how he became a philosopher, Godwin constructed his personal history so as to elucidate the foundations of his adult identity as social critic. Thus, in his fragmentary memoir of his early life, he organized his past experiences into a pattern, which reflects his own understanding of human nature. This autobiographical fragment, like Book One of the Confessions , tells the story of the education of a young boy up to his fifteenth year. Godwin rewrites Rousseau’s narrative of natural virtue overlaid by social corruption to examine his own Calvinist upbringing. He presents himself as another recipient of a defi- cient education, which encourages withdrawal into an imaginary world, as in the Confessions , and fosters premature insights into the social and political inequalities he later sought to challenge. Whilst Rousseau’s narrative of flawed education is divided into four different phases, Godwin’s is divided into three: his education at home as the son of an Independent (Congregationalist) minister who held several different posts in East Anglia; his attendance at Robert Akers’s day school in Hindolveston; and his residence as a private pupil in the household of Samuel Newton, Independent minister at the Old Meeting in Norwich.^45 Godwin begins his account of family life with a short description of the circumstances of his own birth and first few days, in which, like the sickly Jean-Jacques, he was not expected to survive. 46 As in the Confessions , William’s imagination was first awakened by the experience of reading, which encouraged him to identify with non-existent people and events. Just as Jean-Jacques read Plutarch’s Lives and placed his hand on a hot chafing-dish in imitation of Mucius Scaevola’s action in the Etruscan camp, William read Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress and set out to find the narrow wicket through which Christian passed on his journey to salva- tion.^47 Godwin also traces to his Calvinist upbringing a developing sense of singularity – rooted in an early preoccupation with whether or not he was destined for salvation – which recalls Jean-Jacques’s numerous claims to uniqueness.^48 William’s sense of being special was reinforced when he was chosen to be the sole companion of his father’s cousin, Hannah Godwin (later, Mrs Sothren), just as Jean-Jacques was nurtured by a
170 R OMANTICISM
favourite aunt. Whilst Jean-Jacques owed to his aunt a taste for music, which further stimulated his precocious imagination,^49 William derived from Hannah Godwin a heightened sense of detachment from life: she instructed him to prepare for bed each night, ‘with a temper as if I were never to wake again in this sublunary world’ ( CNMG , I, p. 12). These early anti-social feelings were strengthened, in Godwin’s account, by the next phase of his education at the school of Robert Akers, a former journeyman tailor and an autodidact, which he attended from the ages of eight to eleven. Akers’s method of teaching, based on ranking the students in terms of ability, encouraged William to compete rather than co-operate with his peers. Excelling at school and surrounded by admirers at home, he, like Jean-Jacques, developed ‘an overweening vanity and conceit’ and indulged in fantasies of omnipotence, ‘ascribing to myself in imagination various corporeal faculties or attainments that I had not, particularly the power of flying’ ( CNMG , I, pp. 22, 25). 50 Yet this sense of youthful in- vincibility could also give rise to feelings of injustice when other people failed to share it. For example, after being reprimanded by his father for excessive pride, William’s flights of imagination reflect a new sense of himself as a victim of an unjust political system: ‘Nothing could exceed my aversion for this sort of contention and expostulation of the master with the slave. … I regretted that I had not the power of becoming invisible and intangible, and by this means flying from the injustice of others’ ( CNMG , I, pp. 25, 26). The phase of his development to which Godwin retrospectively accords the greatest significance was that of his residence, from the ages of twelve to fifteen, at Norwich as Newton’s solitary pupil. Just as Jean-Jacques’s experiences at Bossey under the tutelage of M. Lambercier and his sister build on the denaturing process begun in Geneva, so the events which occur during William’s stay at Norwich heighten the sense of social dis- location induced by his family life. Yet whilst both authors locate the origin of political passions in a formative experience of unjust punish- ment, meted out by adults, Godwin’s account diverges from Rousseau’s in crucial respects. When Newton threatens William with an apparently motiveless beating, the child’s reaction is likened to a fall from innocence into adult social corruption: ‘It had never occurred to me as possible, that my person, which had hitherto been treated … as something extra- ordinary and sacred, could suffer such ignominious violation. The idea had something in it as abrupt, as a fall from heaven to earth’ ( CNMG , I, p. 33). This heightened language recalls Jean-Jacques’s moral outrage at being unjustly beaten for supposedly breaking Mlle Lambercier’s comb. Yet Rousseau uses this incident to demonstrate the origins of revolution-
Self-Analysis as Social Critique 171
situation in which it was read: William’s practice of stealing down to Newton’s library to read his books when his tutor was out is presented as a parallel assertion of independence in the face of tyranny. Finally, Godwin highlights the resilience of his youthful belief in his own self-worth. His narrative breaks off with an anecdote describing his solitary visit, at the age of thirteen or fourteen, to Norwich assizes, where he sat next to the bench and placed his elbows on the judge’s cushion. When the judge gently moves him away, William silently observes, ‘If his lordship knew what the lad beside him will perhaps one day become, I am not sure that he would have removed my elbow’ ( CNMG , I, p. 38). William’s momen- tary assertion of equality with the judge is at once a comic illustration of his youthful vanity and a serious foreshadowing of his adult ability to overcome the alienating effects of his education.
V
In a manuscript note of 1806 concerning John Fenwick’s biographical memoir, which appeared in the Monthly Mirror for 1805, Godwin reflected on his autobiographical project of the late 1790s: ‘I once conceived the design of composing the narrative of my own life … But I shall probably never complete it. My feelings on the subject are not what they were. I was always an infinite lover of ingenuousness. I sat down with the intention of being nearly as explicit as Rousseau in the composition of his Con- fessions.’ 54 There were perhaps two main reasons why Godwin’s feelings on the subject had changed by 1806. First, it appears that his earlier auto- biographical pieces had served their purpose of demonstrating meaning- ful connections between his past and present experience. In highlighting his childhood experiences of separateness from others, he established the foundations of his adult role: his depiction of his upbringing as a cultural outsider foreshadows his development of the ‘detached’ or ‘objective’ stance necessary to the social critic. According to Edward Said in his Reith Lectures of 1993, the modern intellectual is an ‘outsider’ and a ‘disturber of the status quo’, an individual with ‘a sense of being someone whose role it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma’. 55 In a manuscript fragment of 1824, Godwin constructs himself in just such a public role:
When I first took up my pen in 1791 to write my Enquiry concern- ing Political Justice, one of my leading principles was, to tell the truth & the whole truth, as far as I could discern it, & to shrink from no obloquy or persecution in the pursuit of that purpose. No man perhaps has at any time been animated with a more earnest spirit of philanthropy, than I was in the composition of that work.^56
Self-Analysis as Social Critique 173
Whatever its similarities with modern concepts of the public role of the intellectual, this statement suggests that Godwin in later reviews of his own motivations continued to make selective use of the Confessions , in which Rousseau presented himself as ‘an example to anyone who, inspired only by the love of the public good and justice, dares … to tell the truth openly to men’ ( CWR , V, p. 187). Second, by the turn of the century Godwin had modified his early belief in the liberating power of total sincerity. Although Godwin did not experience the persecution for his views that Rousseau endured when he was proscribed in Paris and Geneva, and stoned at Môtiers, public opinion began to turn against the author of Political Justice in 1796 and
- 57 His publication in January 1798 of Wollstonecraft’s Memoirs , a work of unprecedented biographical frankness, led to a concerted campaign to discredit his ideas. Such evidence of public misunderstand- ing of his theoretical principles made Godwin sceptical about the political efficacy of universal truth-telling. ‘Truth, practically speaking’, he wrote privately in 1806, resuming the arguments concerning unrestricted choice in reading proposed in The Enquirer , ‘arises from the relative character & disposition of two persons or things, the speaker & the hearer, the words uttered, & the temper of him by whom the words are received.’ 58 Since, by the end of the 1790s, the sympathetic disposition of the hearer could no longer be guaranteed, Godwin temporarily abandoned the idea of publish- ing the story of the growth of his own revolutionary consciousness as a contribution to general progress of mind. Thereafter it was first and fore- most as a public writer, not as a private individual, that Godwin presented himself to the world: ‘I am an author. By my works I am content to be judged.’ 59 In later life his autobiographical impulse found cautious, in- direct expression in biographies, essays, and, above all, novels. The inter- weaving of personal and historical experience in St Leon (1799), Fleetwood (1805), and Mandeville (1817) testifies to his continued interest in auto- biographical writing as a mode of individual, and hence political and social, reform. Moreover, these later public writings reveal a growing ambivalence towards Rousseau’s autobiographical persona, which may reflect the earlier writer’s admission, in the Fourth Walk of the Reveries , that his project of self-knowledge in the Confessions proved to be even more diffi- cult than he had thought.^60 In his novels, Godwin employs a Rousseauvian confessional form to demonstrate that candid self-revelation may lead not to increased self-knowledge or social improvement, but to self-delusion. Such misgivings concerning Rousseauvian frankness are especially evi- dent in Fleetwood , where Godwin contrasts the philanthropist Macneil,
174 R OMANTICISM
public/private dimensions of autobiographical writing in the Romantic era. The post-revolutionary interest in rewriting their lives amongst younger members of the English radical intelligentsia – notably Wordsworth and Coleridge – has traditionally been seen as emblematic of a broader literary movement away from radical politics towards the work- ings of the isolated individual sensibility. Godwin, however, presents an alternative model of Romantic self-scrutiny, which highlights the inter- dependence of personal and historical experience. Like nonconformist writers forced out of public life after 1660, and like that self-styled victim of social injustice, the ‘autobiographical’ Rousseau, Godwin, in the decades following the French Revolution, found in autobiography a means for the commemoration and vindication of his social and political ideals. Despite his caution about the publication of autobiographical writing, his lessons in the use of self-analysis as a political weapon were not lost on the next generation of radical writers in search of a public role, notably his daughter and intellectual heir, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, together with her husband Shelley. R Pamela Clemit University of Durham
N OTES I am grateful to the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, for permission to quote from Godwin’s manuscripts in the Abinger Papers. I should like to thank Bruce Barker-Benfield for sharing his codicological expertise, and David Duff, Doucet Devin Fischer, and Michael Rossington for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this essay.
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions , ed. by Christopher Kelly, Roger D. Masters, and Peter G. Stillman, in vol. V of The Collected Writings of Rousseau (Hanover, NH, and London: University Press of New England, 1995), p. 5. (Hereafter CWR , followed by volume number.)
- Robert Darnton, ‘Readers Respond to Rousseau: The Fabrication of Romantic Sensitivity’, in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984), pp. 215–56; Carol Blum, Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue: The Language of Politics in the French Revolution (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1986), passim.
- Blum, pp. 138–43; see also Robert Darnton, ‘A Spy in Grub Street’, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 68–9. E.g. The Life of Jacques-Pierre Brissot … Written by Himself (London: J. Debrett, 1794); An Appeal to Impartial Posterity, by Citizenness Roland (London: J. Johnson, 1795); Narrative of the Dangers to which I have been Exposed, since the 31st of May 1793 … By John-Baptiste Louvet (London: J. Johnson, 1795).
- An exception is Gregory Dart, Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), which includes excellent discussions of autobiographical works by Wollstonecraft and Wordsworth (pp. 130–8, 178–208).
- For useful overviews, see Jean de Palacio, ‘Godwin et la tentation de l’autobiographie
176 R OMANTICISM
(William Godwin and J.J. Rousseau)’, Études Anglaises , 27 (1974), pp. 43–57; and Gary Kelly, ‘“The Romance of Real Life”: Autobiography in Rousseau and William Godwin’, Man and Nature / L’Homme et La Nature , 1 (1982), pp. 93–101.
- William Godwin, Thoughts Occasioned by the Perusal of Dr. Parr’s Spital Sermon , ed. by Mark Philp, in vol. II of Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993), p. 165. (Hereafter PPWG , followed by volume number.)
- For a fuller account, see Clive Emsley, British Society and the French Wars, 1793– (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1979), pp. 41–64; Albert Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (London: Hutchinson, 1979), pp. 171–415, 451–99.
- ‘Of History and Romance’ is one of two autograph manuscript essays annotated by Godwin, ‘These Essays were written while the Enquirer was in the press, under the impression that the favour of the public might have demanded another volume’ ( PPWG , V, p. 290), but not published during his lifetime. For an incisive account of Godwin’s philo- sophical speculations on biography, see Timothy Clark, Embodying Revolution: The Figure of the Poet in Shelley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 18–19, 23–4. 9. The Rambler , No. 60, 13 Oct. 1750, in The Rambler , ed. by W.J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss, vol. III of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1969), pp. 318–23.
- James Boswell, Life of Johnson , ed. by G.B. Hill, rev’d. by L.F. Powell, 6 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934–50), I, p. 33.
- D.O. Thomas, The Honest Mind: The Thought and Work of Richard Price (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), pp. 99–101; Mark Philp, Godwin’s Political Justice (London: Duckworth, 1986), pp. 15–37.
- Pamela Clemit, The Godwinian Novel: The Rational Fictions of Godwin, Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1993, rpt. 2001), pp. 66–9.
- Philp, pp. 142–59, 202–9.
- Godwin, undated autograph note, Bodleian Library, [Abinger] Dep. b. 227/5. This note can now be identified from Godwin’s unpublished diary as ‘Notes of Essays’, written 18 July 1801 (Dep. e. 205).
- E.g. Don Locke, A Fantasy of Reason: The Life and Thought of William Godwin (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 139.
- For a helpful reading of Wollstonecraft’s text, see Peter Swaab, ‘Romantic Self- Representation: The Example of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters in Sweden ’, in Mortal Pages, Literary Lives: Studies in Nineteenth-Century Autobiography , ed. by Vincent Newey and Philip Shaw (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), pp. 13–30.
- Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman , ed. by Mark Philp, in vol. I of Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1992), p. 122. (Hereafter CNMG , followed by volume number.)
- For Wollstonecraft’s changing responses to Rousseau, see, e.g. her letter to Everina Wollstonecraft, 24 Mar. [1785], Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft , ed. by Ralph M. Wardle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 145; Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman , and The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria , in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft , ed. by Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, 7 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1989), V, pp. 147–61, I, p. 96.
- According to his diary, Godwin read all three of these works in August 1797 ([Abinger] Dep. e. 202).
- See Coleridge to Thomas Poole, 6 Feb. 1797, in Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor
Self-Analysis as Social Critique 177
- Godwin, diary, [Abinger] Dep. e. 204; Godwin’s undated autograph notes on Emile are preserved in Dep. b. 229/9.
- According to his diary, Godwin re-read the Confessions in Aug. 1797, July 1801 and Aug. 1801, and the Reveries from July to Aug. 1801 ([Abinger] Dep. e. 203, e. 205).
- Dart, p. 50; my account is also indebted to Christopher Kelly, Rousseau’s Exemplary Life: The ‘Confessions’ as Political Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), passim.
- See note 24.
- Godwin, ‘Analysis of Own Character’, CNMG , I, pp. 55, 56, 58; cf. Rousseau, Confessions , CWR, V, pp. 10–11, 30, 95–6.
- See note 25.
- Godwin, undated autograph notes, [Abinger] Dep. b. 227/5; cf. Rousseau, Confessions , CWR , V, pp. 96, 332, 448.
- Maurice Cranston, The Solitary Self: Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Exile and Adversity (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 133–40; cf. Rousseau, Confessions , CWR , V, pp. 536–7, and Reveries of the Solitary Walker , in CWR , VIII, pp. 41–8.
- Cf. Rousseau, Confessions , CWR , V, p. 134.
- For further evidence of Godwin’s early enthusiasm for the theatre, see Mary Shelley, ‘Life of William Godwin’, ed. Pamela Clemit, in vol. IV of Mary Shelley’s Literary Lives and Other Writings (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2002), pp. 9–10.
- My reading of Book One of the Confessions is indebted to C. Kelly, Rousseau’s Exemplary Life , pp. 76–115; for the biographical events upon which Godwin’s account is based, see Peter H. Marshall, William Godwin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984), pp. 8–31.
- Godwin, ‘Autobiography’, CNMG , I, p. 11; Rousseau, Confessions , CWR , V, p. 7.
- Rousseau, Confessions , CWR , V, p. 8; Godwin, ‘Autobiography’, CNMG , I, p. 12.
- Godwin, ‘Autobiography’, CNMG , I, pp. 30, 34–5; e.g. Rousseau, Confessions , CWR , V, pp. 5, 12, 46.
- Rousseau, Confessions , CWR , V, pp. 9–10.
- Ibid ., pp. 21, 38.
- Ibid ., pp. 13–15.
- See note 23.
- On the nuances of Rousseauvian reverie, see Huntington Williams, Rousseau and Romantic Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 9–34.
- [John Fenwick], ‘Biographical Sketch of William Godwin, Esq.’, Monthly Mirror , 19 ( Jan. and Feb. 1805), 5–7, 85–93, was a revised version of his ‘Mr. Godwin’, in Public Characters of 1799–1800 (London: R. Phillips, 1799), pp. 368–86. Godwin, ‘Notes on the Biographical Sketch of WG inserted in the Monthly Mirror for Jan. & Feb. 1805’, written 14 April 1806, according to his diary ([Abinger] Dep. e. 208) (Dep. c. 601, Dep. b. 227/5, Dep. b. 227/6(c) [i.e. 3 leaves in separate files]).
- Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (London: Vintage, 1994), pp. x, 9.
- Godwin, autograph notes, dated ‘Oct. 10, 1824’, [Abinger] Dep. c. 537.
- Maurice Cranston, The Noble Savage: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1754–1762 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 323–62; Cranston, The Solitary Self , pp. 110–40; Marshall, pp. 211–33.
- Godwin, ‘Notes on the Biographical Sketch of WG’, [Abinger] Dep. c. 601; cf. PPWG , V, pp. 135–43.
Self-Analysis as Social Critique 179
- Godwin, ‘Notes on the Biographical Sketch of WG’, [Abinger] Dep. c. 601.
- Roussseau, Reveries , CWR , VIII, pp. 28–9.
- Godwin, Fleetwood; or, The New Man of Feeling , ed. by Pamela Clemit, vol. V of CNMG , p. 159; see also Duffy, pp. 50–1.
- Godwin to Percy Bysshe Shelley, 4 Mar. 1812, CNMG , I, p. 72. For the letter to which this forms a reply, see Shelley to Godwin, 24 Feb. 1812, in The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley , ed. by Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), I, pp. 258–60.
- Said, p. xiv.
- Autograph draft of letter from Godwin to an unidentified correspondent, 3 Aug. 1811, [Abinger] Dep. b. 228/7; cf. Milton, The Reason of Church-Government Urg’d against Prelaty , in Complete Prose Works of John Milton , gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols (New Haven and London, Yale University Press), I, p. 810.
180 R OMANTICISM
