Godwin, William

Godwin, William (1756-1836), English political philosopher and novelist, who, as a person and as a writer, exerted a profound influence on the younger authors of his time.

Godwin was born on March 3, 1756, in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire. From 1777 to 1783 Godwin served as a minister of a dissenting religious sect. By 1785, however, he had become an atheist. In 1793 he wrote his best-known work, The Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness, which expounded his theories of philosophical anarchism. Convinced of the individual perfection of human beings and their ability to reason, and therefore live in harmony without laws and institutions, the author found all forms and degrees of control from without intolerable. His contempt for restrictions placed on one person by another or by a government also characterized one of his novels, Things as They Are, or the Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794).

In 1797 Godwin married the feminist author Mary Wollstonecraft, who died after giving birth to their daughter, also named Mary Wollstonecraft, later the wife of the British poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and an author in her own right. His life of Mary Wollstonecraft, Memoirs of the author of a Vindication of the Rights of Women, was published in 1798. In 1801 Godwin married the widow Mary Jane Clairmont (died 1841), whose daughter from her first marriage, Claire Clairmont, bore a daughter, Allegra, to Lord Byron. Establishing himself as a bookseller and publisher, he wrote several works for children and published others, notably Tales from Shakespeare (1807) by the British authors Mary Ann Lamb and her brother Charles Lamb. Godwin's business failed in 1822, at which time he devoted himself to writing The History of the Commonwealth of England (1824). His other writings include two series of essays, The Enquirer, Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature (1797) and Thoughts on Man, His Nature, Productions, and Discoveries (1831). He died in London on April 7, 1836.