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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