Source: Wikipedia

William Godwin (3 March 1756 – 7 April 1836) was an English political and miscellaneous writer, considered one of the important precursors of both utilitarian and liberal anarchist thought. He is also famous for the women in his life: he married the early feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft in 1797 and together with her had one daughter, also named Mary, author of Frankenstein, whom he brought up on such strict principles of rational enlightenment that her only possible rebellion was to elope at sixteen with the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Born at Wisbech in Cambridgeshire, Godwin's family on both sides were middle-class people, and it was probably only as a joke that he, a stern political reformer and philosophical radical, attempted to trace his pedigree to a time before the Norman Conquest to the great earl, Godwine. Both parents (John and Anne Godwin) were strict Calvinists. His father, a Nonconformist minister, died young, and never inspired love or much regret in his son; but in spite of wide differences of opinion, tender affection always subsisted between William Godwin and his mother, until her death at an advanced age.

William Godwin was educated for his father's profession at Hoxton Academy, where he studied under Andrew Kippis the biographer and Dr Abraham Rees of the Cyclopaedia. He was at first more Calvinistic than his teachers, becoming a Sandemanian, or follower of John Glas, whom he describes as a celebrated north-country apostle who, after Calvin had "damned ninety-nine in a hundred of mankind, has contrived a scheme for damning ninety-nine in a hundred of the followers of Calvin."

He then acted as a minister at Ware, Stowmarket and Beaconsfield. At Stowmarket the teachings of the French philosophers were brought before him by a friend, Joseph Fawcet, who held strong republican opinions. He came to London in 1782, still nominally a minister, to regenerate society with his pen — a real enthusiast, who shrank theoretically from no conclusions from the premises which he laid down. He adopted the principles of the Encyclopaedists, and his own aim was the complete overthrow of all existing institutions, political, social and religious. He believed, however, that calm discussion was the only thing needful to carry every change, and from the beginning to the end of his career he deprecated every approach to violence. He was a philosophic radical in the strictest sense of the term.

His first published work was an anonymous Life of Lord Chatham (1783). Under the inappropriate title Sketches of History (1784), he published under his own name six sermons on the characters of Aaron, Hazael and Jesus, in which, though writing in the character of an orthodox Calvinist, he enunciates the proposition "God Himself has no right to be a tyrant." Introduced by Andrew Kippis, he began to write in 1785 for the Annual Register and other periodicals, producing also three novels now forgotten. The Sketches of English History written for the Annual Register from 1785 onward still deserves study. He joined a club called the "Revolutionists," and associated much with Lord Stanhope, Horne Tooke and Holcroft. His clerical character was now completely dropped.

In 1793, while the French Revolution was in full swing, Godwin published his great work on political science, The Enquiry concerning Political Justice, and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness. Although rarely read in American philosophy departments, the Enquiry was extremely influential in its time. After Burke and Paine, Godwin's was the most popular written response to the French Revolution. Despite his later reputation as a precursor of of anarchism, Godwin believed his gradualism was the middle way between Burkean stabilism and Painite immediatism. He augmented the influence of the Enquiry with his publication of an equally popular novel, Things as They Are, or The Adventures of Caleb Williams, which tells the story of a servant who finds out a horrific secret about his aristocratic master and is forced to flee because of his knowledge. Later, Godwin would write a notable letter that was pivotal in gaining the acquittal of several of his friends during a prominent sedition trial in 1795. Unfortunately, Godwin's reputation was systematically besmirched after 1798 by the conservative press, when not unlike during our Cold War, any writer who had any association with the French Revolution was in danger if they did not renounce their previous opinions. Godwin, both consistent in his theory and stubborn in his practice, was slow to renounce and practically lived in secret for 30 years because of his reputation. However, in its secret influence, on writers like Shelley, Kropotkin, and others, Political Justice takes its place with Milton's Areopagitica, with Locke's Essay on Education and with Rousseau's Emile as an anarchist and libertarian text.

The Adventures of Caleb Williams was chosen as a seminal work in detective fiction by Howard Haycraft and Ellery Queen, and included in the Haycraft-Queen cornerstones. It is available from Project Gutenberg.

Bibliography

The Adventures of Caleb Williams