Godwin, WILLIAM, political writer and novelist, was born 3d March 1756 at Wisbeach, but passed his boyhood at Guestwick in Norfolk. He was the seventh of thirteen children. His father (1723-72) was a dissenting minister, by Godwin's showing a featureless precision; the mother, we know from her letters, was a homely, good, lovable woman. After three years at Hindolveston day-school, three more with a tutor at Norwich, and one as usher in his former school, Godwin in 1773 entered Hoxton Presbyterian College; in 1778 quitted it as pure a Sandemanian and Tory as he had gone in. But during a five years' ministry at Ware, Stowmarket, and Beaconsfield, he turned Socinian and republican, and by 1787 was a 'complete unbeliever.' Meanwhile he had taken to literature, in 1783-84 writing three novels for £42, a Life of Chatham, and Sketches of History, in Six Sermons, with a good deal of subsequent hackwork. The French revolution gave him an opening, and his Enquiry concerning Political Justice (2 vols. 4to, 1793), brought him fame and a thousand guineas. It was calmly subversive of everything (law and 'marriage, the worst of all laws'), but it preached down violence, and was deemed cavare for the multitude, so its author escaped prosecution. The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) was designed to give 'a general review of the modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism, by which man becomes the destroyer of man;' unlike most novels with a purpose, it is really a strong book, one that will not be forgotten. Holcroft, Horne Tooke, and ten others were charged at this time with high-treason; Godwin's powerful defence of them in the Morning Chronicle did much to break down the charge. Holcroft was one of his oldest and most intimate friends, whose circle at different times included (or excluded) the publisher Johnson, Dr Parr, Thomas Wedgwood, Coleridge, Wordsworth (q.v.), Mackintosh, Lamb, Hazlitt, Mrs Inchbald, Mrs Opie, Mrs Siddons, Shelley, and Bulwer Lytton. Through Johnson it was that Godwin met Mary Wollstonecraft, and it was for fear Johnson might cut off her supplies that their marriage was at first kept a secret. For Godwin was hard up, and hard up he continued almost to the last. Why, is somewhat a mystery, for his yearly expenditure in 1793-95 averaged only £120, and the man who could write that memoir of his dead wife, and publish the Letters to Inlay, should surely at least have died rich. Still, borrowing £50 from Wedgwood, and going on a driving tour; sending £20 to a young protégé, and touring two months in Ireland, but failing to repay Ritson £30; borrowing other £100 of Wedgwood, but disappointing Holcroft of £20—muddlement such as this speaks much for itself, if little for philosophy; and besides there was Godwin's family. It was a mixed one, if not very large. In 1801, after two unsuccessful courtships, he married the bustling widow, Mrs Clements or Clairmont, his next-door neighbour, who one day had accosted him from her balcony: 'Is it possible that I behold the immortal Godwin?' She had two children already, and a third was born of the marriage. So there were poor Fanny Inlay (1794-1816), who died by her own hand; Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (1797-1851), who in 1816 married Shelley; Charles Clairmont; 'Claire' Clairmont (1797-1879), the mother by Byron of Allegra; and William Godwin (1803-32), to whose posthumous novel, Transfusion, a memoir was prefixed by his father.
The last half of Godwin's long life may be briefly dismissed. A bookselling business, undertaken by him as 'Edward Baldwin' in 1805, involved him for years in difficulties, and in 1833 he was glad to accept the sinecure post of yeoman-usher of the Exchequer. His tragedy, Antonio (1800), was hopelessly damned; nor were any of his later prose works equal in either merit or success to Political Justice and Caleb Williams. The best are St Leon (1799), a 'story of the miraculous,' and an Essay on Sepulchres (1809). A Life of Chaucer (1803), an Answer to Malthus (1820), Lives of the Necromancers (1834), and the novels Fleetwood (1805), Mandeville (1817), and Cloudesley (1830) may be named. Godwin died in Palace Yard, 7th April 1836. 'Pecksniff, with a dash of Micawber,' will seem a harsh verdict on one for whom Mr Kegan Paul has little save praise in his valuable and exhaustive biography, William Godwin: his Friends and Contemporaries (2 vols. 1876). See, too, Hazlitt's Spirit of the Age (1825); Leslie Stephen's English Thought in the 18th Century (1876); and other works cited at SHELLEY.