William Godwin’s DiaryEmer Murphy MA Modernities23/01/12

William Godwin 1756 - 1836

Godwin’s Family Tree

Introducing Romanticism

Romanticism as a War of Ideas

Two Generations of Romanticism

First Generation• William Godwin

• Samuel Taylor Coleridge

• William Wordsworth

Second Generation • John Keats

• P.B. Shelley

• Lord Byron

Publications of the 1790’s

• “Above all we should not forget that government is an evil, a usurpation upon the private judgement and individual conscience of mankind…”

Wiliam Godwin

Publications of the 1790’s

• “Above all we should not forget that government is an evil, a usurpation upon the private judgement and individual conscience of mankind…”

Wiliam Godwin

Publications of the 1790’s

Publications of the 1790’s

Godwin’s Reputation

• “No work in our time gave such a blow to the philosophical mind of the country as the celebrated Enquiry Concerning Political Justice.”

• Godwin’s reputation “blazed as a sun in the firmament of reputation; no one was more talked of, more looked up to, more sought up to, more sought after, and whenever liberty, truth and justice was a theme, his name was not far off.”

William Hazlitt

• “… a man endowed with a mind as various and accomplished as it is inquiring and profound.”

Edward Lytton Bulwer

Godwin’s Reputation in Decline

Gilray’s New Morality (1798)Godwin is depicted as an ass reading from Political Justice

William Godwin’s Diary

Godwin and London

Transcribing and Coding

This entry tells us that Godwin read page 116 of Mary Wollstonecraft’s novel Mary, that the writer Ralph Fell and merchant George Dyson called on him; that Godwin dined at Reveley’s with the reformer Finwick and writer James Marshall; that he had supper at Blenkinsop’s; and finally that Mary Godwin was born at twenty minutes after 11pm at night at 7-10 Evesham Buildings.

August 30, 1797

“Reconstructing a Social and Political Culture 1768- 1836”

Painting by Henry William Pickersgill

Caricature of Godwin aged 60