Author: Godwin, William
Biography:
Godwin, William (1756-1836: ODNB)
One of the thirteen children of John Godwin, a provincial dissenting minister, and his wife Anne (Hull) Godwin, William Godwin graduated from the Hoxton dissenting academy in London in 1778. His early pastoral career was not very successful, partly because his views were increasingly hostile to organized religion. He soon decided to leave the church and try to live by his pen in London. He wrote political essays, fiction, biography, and history, and supplemented his earnings by taking in pupils. The breakthrough came with his inspiring and seminal work of political philosophy, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793), closely followed by a powerful psychological novel, Caleb Williams (1794). Poetic drama, as represented by Antonio (1800), was the least successful of the genres he attempted. His first marriage, to Mary Wollstonecraft, was happy but short-lived: she died a few days after the birth of their daughter Mary (later Mary Shelley). Godwin wrote an honest, tender, but characteristically incendiary memoir of her (1798). With his second wife, the widow Mary Jane Clairmont, he established a bookshop and juvenile library that they kept going until 1825. After 1815 his literary output increased and he eventually earned recognition from the government in the form of a sinecure post and a stable income. He was buried near Mary Wollstonecraft in St Pancras Old Church churchyard, but their remains were moved to the Shelley family tomb at St Peter's in Bournemouth in the 1850s. (ODNB 7 Jan. 2019)
Other Names:
- Godwin