<i>Robert M. Maniquis and Victoria Myers</i> Godwinian Moments: From the Enlightenment to Romanticism<i>Godwinian Moments: From the Enlightenment to Romanticism</i>. Edited by Robert M. Maniquis and Victoria Myers. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. Pp. xii+298.

Previous articleNext article FreeRobert M. Maniquis and Victoria Myers Godwinian Moments: From the Enlightenment to Romanticism Godwinian Moments: From the Enlightenment to Romanticism. Edited by Robert M. Maniquis and Victoria Myers. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. Pp. xii+298.Paul KeenPaul KeenCarleton University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreFew names figure as prominently and as controversially in Romantic literary history as William Godwin. In some ways, this was always the case. As William Hazlitt memorably declared in 1825, “The Spirit of the Age was never more fully shown than in its treatment of this writer.…Four-and-twenty years ago…no man was more talked of, more looked up to, more sought after, and wherever liberty, truth, justice was the theme, his name was not far off:—now he has sunk below the horizon” (quoted on 3). Godwin was the author of one of the age’s most ambitious philosophical texts and some of its most compelling novels, an essayist, historian, pamphlet writer, dramatist, and author of children’s literature; his stature as a leading intellectual of the day was reinforced by his social position at the heart of middle-class reformist London. Novels such as Caleb Williams (1794), which appeared just a year after his momentous Philosophical Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), have been hailed as key texts in the often-debated transition from Enlightenment rationality to a more fully psychologized Romantic focus on interiority. But if “no man was more talked of,” Hazlitt’s corollary about the magnitude of Godwin’s decline as a public figure may have been equally the result of the breadth and originality of his thinking. Scourged by anti-Jacobins for the naive simplicities of his views on human nature in Political Justice but distrusted by radicals for his opposition to mass meetings and the boisterous world of tavern debating societies, Godwin was courted and then shunned by aspiring poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge for a commitment to the power of rational inquiry that he himself was already in the process of qualifying, and he was condemned by many, first, for his unorthodox relationship with Mary Wollstonecraft and, later, for the controversial revelations in his Memoirs (1798) shortly after her tragic death.Determined to interrogate social and political conventions but also inevitably constrained by the inherited force of those norms, Godwin’s inability to be easily slotted into the most obvious categories of his age ensured both his fame and his ignominy. And then for many years, as the more encompassing eighteenth-century definition of literature narrowed to the canon of great authors, it ensured his neglect: reduced to little more than a footnote in the literary histories of the poets of his day and the writers of the next generation, for whom he loomed as a distant and disapproving parent. But if Godwin’s name had “sunk below the horizon” of literary history, our own critical priorities have finally caught up with his. Our increasingly broad and socially grounded approaches have manifested themselves in a strong interdisciplinary impulse, on the one hand, and a commitment to rethinking the boundaries between the Enlightenment and the Romantic period, on the other. Both of these shifts have served Godwin’s legacy well. He may still be a controversial figure (for many of the same reasons that dogged him in that period), but now as then, few writers are more talked of.Godwinian Moments, which emerges out of a conference at the Clark Library in 2007, gathers together an impressive collection of authorities whose essays constitute a valuable reappraisal that will go a long way toward consolidating Godwin’s renewed importance. Collectively, they create a portrait of a figure who was more complex and more varied in his interests, but also more dynamic in his thinking, than has always been acknowledged, determined to confront his own blind spots and to change his thinking in ways that the caricature of Godwin as an uncompromising disciple of rationalist orthodoxies can never reflect. His contradictions emerge both as the inevitable limitations of a person trying to think against the grain of received ideas and as the equally inevitable trait of an individual who was refreshingly (if at times maddeningly) human.The lead essay, by Robert M. Maniquis, sets the tone for the volume by taking issue with those critics who would attribute all of Godwin’s apparent limitations to his failure to free himself from the oppressive grip of the Calvinist thinking—and the especially severe form of Calvinism known as Sandemanianism—in which he was raised. As Godwin himself noted, this Calvinist legacy led him into the most notorious error of his Political Justice: its “unqualified condemnation of the private affections” (quoted on 25). Maniquis does not attempt to deny the ongoing effects of this early influence, but he does make a spirited and convincing case for a far more nuanced understanding of Godwin’s struggle to correct the more crippling effects of this influence, a process that found its most dramatic expression in the nightmarish world of Caleb Williams.The two essays that follow, by Mark Philp and Jon Mee, respectively, constitute a kind of dialogue that aims at fostering a similarly nuanced understanding of Godwin’s relation to radical politics, especially in his relationship with John Thelwall, the onetime friend whom he was reviled for betraying in his pamphlet Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr. Pitt’s Bills, Concerning Treasonable Practices and Unlawful Assemblies (1795). If Philp’s account is largely redemptive, Mee’s emphasis on Thelwall’s perspective tilts more toward a critical apprisal of the tensions in Godwin’s judgment about his plebeian contemporaries. Taking aim at the common opinion that the changes in the second edition of Political Justice, which appeared just one week after his Considerations (in November 1795), amounted to political retreat, Philp argues that these revisions ought to be read as a sign of Godwin’s laudable but ultimately unsuccessful effort to find some kind of constructive middle ground amid the polarizing effects of the pamphlet war triggered by Burke and Paine. The divisions of the period were not quite as polarized as our accounts assume, Philp argues, and if we can begin to “recognize a much more complex set of issues and commitments beneath the apparent polarization” of the day, then Godwin’s effort to resuscitate a helpful broader perspective, “in large part, by acting as a conduit for various aspects of French political thought that were not widely known in England” in ways that might have given them a hearing, becomes a sign of political courage rather than a loss of nerve (64). For both Philp and Mee, Godwin’s hostile response to Thelwall is a “response to his sense that he is facing a dual extremism,” hemmed in by loyalist and radical extremism, but if Philp’s account redeems Godwin by stressing his progressive aspirations, Mee’s focus on Thelwall suggests the limitations of this view (74). As Mee points out, much of Thelwall’s oratory and writing amounted to a sustained effort to gain a wider audience for Godwin’s moral principles by disseminating them in the very mass meetings and tavern societies that Godwin distrusted.Several of the other essays in the volume add to the complexity of this emerging portrait of Godwin by highlighting his multiple literary preoccupations and by emphasizing the reformist aspirations that frequently drove them. Gary Handwerk’s chapter on Godwin’s ideas about education—which were animated, Handwerk suggests, by a refreshing frankness about the tyrannies of most approaches to education—cites this liberality as evidence of Godwin’s conscious rejection of Sandemanianism. Godwin may not have succeeded in developing any fundamental pedagogical alternative (in part because any systematic theory would only reproduce the problems he rejected), but at the very least, his essays offered a welcome insistence that “the present order of society magnifies these tendencies[,]…making of them far worse than they ought to be” (117). Picking up on the same theme, Robert Anderson’s account of Godwin’s children’s writing reminds us of the genuinely emancipatory spirit that animated many of these efforts, even if their ultimate political message was often unstable, caught between his radical sympathies and the authoritarian dangers implicit in children’s literature as a genre.Situating Godwin within long-eighteenth-century debates about the changing forms of historiography, Victoria Myers focuses on Godwin’s History of the Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham (1783) as evidence of Godwin’s long-standing “self-conscious engagement with the shifting norms of history writing” (149). Working between history and biography, Godwin’s Chatham wrestles with the civic functions of oratory in ways that confront his ongoing effort to rethink relations between public and private experience as dialectically bound elements in emergent processes of “opinion formation” (160). This interest in history, reconceived in terms that assign an increasingly civic authority to private experience, manifests itself in an equally various number of literary modes, as Tilottama Rajan’s account of Mandeville (1817) as a meditation on “war, enlightenment, and a Romanticism of extreme phenomena” (172) and David O’Shaughnessy’s essay on Godwin’s first play, St. Dunstan (1790), both suggest. O’Shaughnessy makes a convincing case that St. Dunstan must be read as an implicit political intervention, but—as is the case in Julie Carlson’s subsequent essay, also on Godwin’s theatrical pursuits—the real value of the essay may be its suggestion of the extreme sociability of Godwin’s daily life, which found expression in his frequent visits to London theaters. If St. Dunstan emerges as a response to the debates in 1790 about the Test and Corporation Acts, Carlson reads Antonio (1800) and Faulkner (1807) as attempts to “refine and publicize his reform of the home after the notoriety of that critique [had] threatened to destroy his credibility,” cannily celebrating the domestic affections even as he renewed his critique of their potential to serve as obstacles to a larger commitment to the public good (218).The final two contributions build on this reappraisal of Godwin’s sociability. Michael Scrivener’s essay illuminates a very different side of Godwin’s life by highlighting his relatively close relationship with John King, the radical activist and moneylender “who made his living on the border between legal and illegal money transactions” and who inspired such unqualified disgust in other reformers such as Francis Place (241). Not that Godwin’s relationship with King was uncomplicated. Godwin may have “learned through King of experiences from which his puritanical background had shielded him: gambling, prostitution, blackmail, risky financial transactions, and criminality” (242), but when King asked him to testify in court as a character witness in 1796, Godwin angrily balked, then resumed accepting King’s dinner invitations soon afterward. Godwin’s relationship with Thomas Wedgwood was less unorthodox but equally revealing. Pamela Clemit’s contribution, which ends the volume, is not an essay but a briefly introduced collection of eight letters between the two men from the early stage of their friendship, which casts a valuable light on their eagerness to exchange talk of liberty, truth, and justice but also on the difficulties they faced in renegotiating traditional patron-client relationships after Wedgwood offered Godwin the gift of a letter-copying machine that had been invented by Wedgwood’s Lunar Society colleague James Watt. The offer initially discomfitted Godwin, though he eventually accepted, as he would subsequently accept financial support from Wedgwood.Collectively, these letters, like the ten essays that precede them, cast Godwin in a sympathetic light not by erasing his contradictions but by recasting them as evidence of his humanity: a figure struggling against the pressure of inherited ideas and in the face of daunting political tensions and public animosity to pursue an abiding commitment to the public good in his work in a range of literary genres. Godwin’s comment to Wedgwood that “I am an utter enemy to every monastic principle. I am fully persuaded that the true & only rational end of human life is pleasure” will dramatically expose just how misguided the stereotype of Godwin as an unfeeling and unsociable philosophical loner is (266). Godwin’s vision of a public sphere animated by the collision of mind with mind was underscored by his enthusiastic pursuit of a dense network of friendships and by a vision of social change rooted in an appreciation of the importance of this lived dimension of the public sphere. These essays will not settle the debates about Godwin, and it is probably right that they shouldn’t, but they go a long way toward clarifying his real importance, both to his contemporaries and to our sense of Romantic literary history. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 111, Number 2November 2013 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/671957 Views: 224Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

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