relations with Norwegian timber merchants. Her Letters from Norway, divested of all personal details, were after- wards published. She returned to England late in 1795, and found letters awaiting her from Imlay, intimating his intention to separate from her, and offering to settle an annuity on her and her child. For herself she rejected this offer with scorn: “From you,” she wrote, “1 will not receive anything more. I am not sufficiently humbled to depend on your beneficence.” They met again, and for a short time lived together, until the discovery that he was carrying on an intrigue under her own roof drove her to dcspair, and she attempted to drown herself by leaping from Putney bridge, but she was rescued by watermen. Imlay now completely deserted her, although she continued
to hear his name.In 1796, when Mary Wollstonecraft was living in London, supporting herself and her child by working, as before, for Mr Johnson, she met William Godwin. A friendship sprang up between them,—a friendship, as he himself says, which " melted into love.” Godwin states that “ideas which he is now willing to denominate prejudices made him by no means willing to conform to the ceremony of marriage 5” but these prejudices were overcome, and they were married at St Pancras Church on March 29, 1797. And now Mary had a season of real calm in her stormy existence. Godwin, for once only in his life, was stirred by passion, and his admiration for his wife equ-dled his affection. But their happiness was of short duration. A daughter, Mary, afterwards the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, was born August 30, 1797. At first all seemed to go well, but unfavourable symptoms set in, and on September 10th, the mother, after enduring all her sufferings vith unvarying gentleness and sweetness of temper, passed away. She was buried. in the churchyard of Old St Pancras, but her remains were afterwards removed by Sir Perey Shelley to the churchyard of St Peter’s, Bournemouth.
ller principal published works are as follows:—Th0ughts on the Education of Daughters, 1787; The Female Reader (selections), 1789; Original Stories from Real Life, 1791; An Historical and More] View of the Origin a/Iul Progress of the French Resolution, and (he Efl'ects it has produced in Europe, vol. i. (no more pub- lished , 1790; Vindication of the Rights of U’oman, 1792; Vindi- cation oft/1c Rights of Jlan, 1793 ; Mary, a Fiction, 1796; Letters written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Den- mark, 1796; Posthumous IV orks, 4 vols., 1798. It is impossible to trave the many articles contributed by her to periodical literature, or to identify the translations executed for Mr Johnson. A memoir of her life was published by Godwin soon after her dceease. Alarge portion of the work, ll’i/liam Godwin, his Friends and Contempo- raries, was devoted to her, and a new edition of the Letters to Imlag, London, 1879, of which the first edition was published by Godwin, is prefaced by a somewhat fuller memoir.
GODWIN, William (1756–1836), an English political writer, historian, novelist, and dramatist, was born March 3, 1756, at Wisbeach in Cambridgeshire, at which place his father was a Nonconformist minister. His family came on both sides of worthy middle-class people, able to trace their descent in the same level of society for about 150 years; and it was probably only as a joke that Godwin, a stern political reformer and philosophical radical, attempted to trace his pedigree to a time before the Norman conquest and the great Earl Godwine. His father was a cold and dull man, his mother uneducated, but clever, shrewd, and f all of sound common sense. Both parents were Calvinists : the father strict in Observances beyond what was even then ordinary; the mother regretting in Godwin’s maturer years, and when some of her sons had turned out ill, that she had given birth to so many children, who, as she thought, were heirs of damnation. Mr Godwin, senior, died young, and never inspired love or much regret in his son ; but in spite of wide differences of opinion, the most tender affection always snbsisted between William Godwin and his mother, until her death at an advanced age.
William Godwin was educated for his father’s profession, and was at first more Calvinistic than his teachers, becom- ing a Sandemanian, of which sect he says, that they were the followers of “ a celebrated north-country apostle [Glas], 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 officiated as a minister at Ware, Stowmarket, and Beaconsfield. At the second of these places the teachings of French Reformers were brought before him by a friend, and these, while they intensified his political, undermined his religious opinions. He came to London, still nominally a clergyman, to set about the work of the regeneration of society with his pen—a real enthusiast, who, theoretically, shrank from no conclusions from the premises which he laid down. These were the principles of the Eneyclopedists, 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, like Bentham—whom, however, he does not seem to have influenced or been influenced by—a philosophic radi- cal in the strictest sense of the term.
His first published work was an anonymous Life of Lord Chat/turn; the first to which he gave his name was still nominally clerical. Under the inappropriate title Sketches of .lIistorg, he published six sermons on the characters of Aaron, Hazael, and Jesus, in which, though writing in the character of an orthodox Calvinist, he enunciates the pregnant proposition, “ God himself has no right to be a tyrant." This was published in 1782, and for the next nine years he wrote largely in the Annual Register and other periodicals, producing also three novels, which have more completely vanished from the world than even the contributions to reviews. They were probably not worth preserving, but the “Sketches of English History” written for the Annual Register from 1785 onward still deserve study. He joined a club called the Revolutionists, and associated much with Lord Stanhope, Horne Tooke, Holcroft, and others, who, from their political principles and activity, were obnoxious to men in power. It is perhaps needless to say that the title of “reverend” dropped off from him without difficulty, and with no sense of discordance be- tween the old and the new. Doubt and change never seem to have brought with them any keen sense of pain or outrooting. The equable calm of a cold temperament preserved him from much which affects warmer natures; but he also knew that he was at all times seeking after truth, and striving for what seemed right; and while such an one can scarcely be called modest, he is preserved for many qualms which affect more nervous and more self- distrustful persons.
science, The Inquiry concerning Political Justice, and its Influence on General Virtue and IIaInJiness. Although this work is little known and less read now, it was one of the epoch-making books of English thought. Godwin could never have been himself a worker on the active stage of life. But he was none the less a power behind the workers, and Political Justice takes its place with Milton’s Speech for Unlicensed Printing, with Locke’s Essay on Education, with Rousseau’s Emile, among the unseen levers which have moved the changes of the times. It is there- fore necessary to speak of this book more particularly. By the words “political justice ” the author meant “the adoption of any principle of morality and truth into the practice of a community.” and the work was therefore an inquiry into the principles of society, of government, and
of morals. For many years Godwin had been “satisfied