Nine errors of fact in half-a-page of light print by a gentleman who has put himself before the world as an authority on matters of Shelleyan story, and who in doing so has done not a little for the obscuration of the record. Mr. Kegan Paul is one of those accurate writers, from whom Mr. Froude has warned me not to differ. In due course something more will be said of Mr. Kegan Paul’s services to Shelleyan research, but for the moment readers are invited to give their attention to a more notable man of letters.
Born at Wisbech, Co. Cambridge, on 3rd March, 1756, William Godwin was in his fifty-sixth year when he received Shelley’s letter of entreaty for sympathy and guidance. The son of a Dissenting minister, who never rose to any eminence or a higher stipend than 60l. a-year in his vocation, William Godwin was reared amongst people of lowly fortune and rude manners, in the eastern counties, receiving in his boyhood, from teachers of no singular efficiency, an education neither greatly better nor greatly worse than the training ordinarily given to English boys of his social degree in the later half of the last century. On escaping from these schoolmasters, one of whom he had served in the capacity of an usher, the future man of letters went to the Hoxton College in order to qualify himself for his father’s calling; and on leaving that seminary he officiated for a few years as a Non-conforming minister, preaching and otherwise labouring in a way of life for which he soon discovered his unfitness, first at Ware in Hertfordshire, then at Stowmarket in Suffolk, and then at Beaconsfield, Co. Bucks. A volume of sermons, published some while after their delivery to rural congregations, still remains in evidence that if Godwin in his days of irregular reverence was as good a preacher as the average Non-conforming pulpiteers of his period, Dissenters were edified in George the Third’s earlier time with worse sermons than is generally supposed.
Ere long the young minister discovered that he could not believe what he was bound to teach. That from manhood’s threshold he was more than slightly disposed to religious scepticism is shown by the curious disputation he held on paper, during his last year at Hoxton, with a fellow-student, the question of the strictly private and confidential controversy being the existence of the Deity. Could he have proved to his satisfaction the existence of the Almighty, Godwin conceived he would be troubled by no doubt of the truth of Christianity, nor by any disposition to quarrel with the refinements of Calvinistic doctrine. Under these circumstances Godwin took the negative side in the secret controversy, hoping that his arguments would be demolished and his faith settled by his fellow-collegian. The result of the conflict does not appear. Possibly the paper war satisfied the doubter that he could conscientiously enter the ministry. If so, it only suppressed for a period the doubts that determined Godwin a few years later to seek another means of livelihood. At Beaconsfield (1783) he was converted to Socinianism by Priestley’s Institutes. Five years later he had passed through Socinianism into Deism.
On becoming a Unitarian he took the ordinary course of a young man who, too poor to live in idleness, and too honest to live by daily falsehood, possesses studious tastes and literary aptitude. Coming to London he sought employment of the publishers, and contrived to live hardly, painfully, temperately, as a book-maker and publisher’s hack, whilst he persisted in the labours of a student. Producing in his twenty-eighth year a Life of Lord Chatham, for which he got nothing, and the Defence of the Rockingham Party, for which Stockdale paid him five guineas, he went on reading strenuously and writing as he best could,—throwing off articles for the English Review at two guineas a-sheet, turning out forgotten novels for which he was paid from five to twenty guineas, translating for Murray the French MS. Memoirs of Simon Lord Lovat; doing whatever work came to hand, till he was appointed at sixty guineas per annum to write the historical part of Robinson’s New Annual Register, and to contribute articles to the Political Herald,—two engagements that, coming to him in his thirtieth year, gave him at the same time a sense of success and a sense of financial security.
The poverty and hardship, in which he had been trained from childhood till he dropt the title of ‘Reverend’ and determined to live honestly by the pen instead of living dishonestly by the pulpit, were serviceable to the booksellers’ hack, whom they had taught how to live with comfort and contentment on a precarious number of weekly shillings. The young man, who dined sufficiently well on a chop and potato, and conceived himself to have dined luxuriously after consuming a large beefsteak and a pint of porter, had in some respects the advantage of literary competitors, who together with higher culture had acquired at Oxford or Cambridge a taste for higher living. On approaching middle life he could, however, have afforded to relinquish the frugal habits formed during his early struggles. The persevering hack, who steadily prosecuted various studies whilst toiling for the publishers; the religious inquirer, who passed through Socinianism on his way from Calvinism to Deism; the resolute Radical, who sought the justification of his political sentiments in philosophical principles, whilst living in close friendship with Thomas Holcroft, and cordial good fellowship with Thomas Paine, was a man, certain to achieve eminence sooner or later in the republic of letters. If it came to him less than soon, celebrity came to Godwin none too late for its perfect enjoyment. He was still in his thirty-eighth year, when he published Political Justice,—the work for which Robinson is said to have paid him, at different times, sums amounting to a thousand guineas; the work that made him famous as a teacher of philosophical Radicalism. If it made him the best-abused man of the three kingdoms, this daring and in some respects superlatively unsound book rendered him the idol of political enthusiasts in every quarter of the country. Unalluring in design, repellent in style, usually guarded in expression, sold at a price that kept it from the hands of the multitude whom it was intended chiefly to benefit, the frigid and passionless work, whose principles could not fail to make it regarded with disfavour by the majority of the wealthier class, possessed no feature or quality, apart from its attractive title, its aims and its general audacity, to humour the popular taste and win popular applause. For such a work shrewd judges of the book-market might well have predicted commercial failure. It was, however, successful from every point of view. Successful for its immediate and later effect on the readers it was especially intended to influence, it was fortunate in a sale that exceeded the anticipations of author and publisher, and fortunate in the determination of the Government to take no measures to check its circulation.
Published in 1793, Political Justice was still rising in public esteem, when Godwin produced (in May 1794) Caleb Williams; a novel that was largely indebted for its singular popularity to the influence of the political treatise. The books may be said to have run together, and united in placing their author amongst the most famous writers of his generation,—the success of the novel stimulating the success of the scientific study, whilst admiration of the philosopher’s reasonings quickened the interest in his work of fancy. Whilst readers hastened eagerly from the tale of terror to the work of unemotional demonstration, others passed with curiosity from the volumes of the political philosopher to the pages of the enthralling story. In the annals of English letters there is no other case of an author, achieving almost at the same moment so sensational a celebrity in two such different departments of literary enterprise.
In the days when Political Justice and Caleb Williams were new literature, eminently successful authors derived less emolument from their most popular writings, than comes now-a-days to authors of inferior merit from works of only average popularity. But putting him in pecuniary ease for the moment, Godwin’s double triumph (though he sold the novel for a curiously small sum) placed him in a position that, to a man of his industry and frugal habits, was a promise of security from financial discomfort, so long as he retained his power of working, and persisted in the ways of prudence. That he was not likely to fall into poverty through self-indulgence appeared from his way of living when fortune smiled upon him. Remaining in the little house in Somers Town, where his yearly expenditure never exceeded 130l., he showed no disposition either for the pleasures of luxury or the pleasures of ostentation.
How came it that the man of letters, so averse to every kind of prodigality, dropt in a few years into the very troubles from which his industry and temperance seemed certain to preserve him, and, after falling into poverty in life’s middle term, whilst the productions of his pen were still fairly remunerative, passed the long remainder of his laborious years in one, vain humiliating conflict with financial embarrassment? The answer is that, with every good reason for persisting in celibacy, and no single sound excuse for surrendering the advantages of singleness, he made two imprudent marriages,—the second of which was only a few degrees less imprudent and unfortunate than the earlier alliance with Mary Wollstonecraft. In other than financial respects Godwin suffered severely from these unions. It might almost be thought that the divine powers, who have been assumed to concern themselves especially with the affairs of lovers, determined to punish the arch-maligner of lawful matrimony, by luring him into the estate he had decried, and then rendering him a signal example of some of the evils that may ensue from wedlock. It is strange that the man, who in celibatic freedom spoke so hardly of marriage, endured in later time so much from the honourable estate he had warned others to avoid. Strange also that, instead of being confirmed in his philosophic disapproval of wedlock by what he endured in his own person from marriage, he survived his repugnance to the whilom detestable institution, and towards the close of his career stoutly maintained he had never regretted either of the marriages for which he paid so dearly.
Though it is impossible for a sane biographer to write of William Godwin with enthusiasm, or any kind of cordial admiration, no fair one can deny that, if he was deficient in the graces requisite for a hero of biographical romance, the author of Political Justice possessed several admirable qualities. To take a fair view of the man, who suffered severely for kindness shown to Shelley, readers should toss aside as a mere humorous fabrication Miss Mitford’s story of the way in which the bookseller of Skinner Street used to go ‘down on his knees, flourishing a drawn dagger’ at Shelley’s feet, and ‘threaten to stab himself if his dutiful son-in-law would not accept his bills.’ They must also throw away as vile tattle all the stories of William Godwin’s delight at finding himself the father-in-law of a young gentleman who might some day be a baronet. Whatever his failings, William Godwin was no such creature as these anecdotes imply,—no such snob as snobs have declared him. In the financial difficulties of his later time, and in the moral debasement that almost invariably results in some degree from long exposure to such difficulties, he was capable of begging for gifts from exalted persons, and getting up a pecuniary testimonial in acknowledgment of his own public services. But these were the acts of his declining age, when his brain was losing its alertness and his pen its cunning; when publishers treated him coldly as a man ‘no longer what he was,’ and children (not his own) hung about him, asking him, not only for bread, but for costly education. They were also acts done in a period when men of letters were taught by social usage to be something less than self-dependent. At his worst, Godwin never (like Leigh Hunt) sought the gifts of rich people in order that he might enjoy indolence and luxuries. Ever industrious to the utmost of his ability, and ever glad to be so, Godwin at the worst sought help only that he might be more helpful to those who were dependent on him. Moreover, Godwin was one of the men who have so strong a title to the world’s tenderness and even to its reverence, that whilst gratitude enjoins us to judge them at their best, justice forbids us to judge them at their worst.
Flattered on Northcote’s canvas, and flattered still more in Mr. Kegan Paul’s photograph of Northcote’s picture, William Godwin’s presence was on the whole by no means agreeably impressive; but for the badness of the worst feature of his more remarkable than pleasing countenance he was almost compensated by the goodness of his eyes. ‘He has,’ Southey wrote in 1797, ‘large noble eyes, and a nose,—oh, most abominable nose! Language is not vituperatious enough to describe the effect of its downward elongation.’ Interfering with the effect of a shapely mouth, this grotesquely elongated nose seemed set on moving down to the chin of corresponding prominence. From the portrait to which reference has been made, Godwin seems in his earlier middle age to have had a visage remarkable rather for tenuity than massiveness; but Hogg’s account of the philosopher’s appearance affords evidence that delicacy was no characteristic of the Skinner-Street bookseller’s personal aspect. It would have been well if, on dropping his title to reverence, the young littérateur had also dropt the garb and manner that long afterwards reminded beholders of his original calling. When he dined tête-à-tête, and for the first time with William Godwin, Hogg observed that the ‘short, stout, thickset old man, of very fair complexion,’ and a head no less remarkable for baldness than magnitude, had altogether the ‘appearance of a Dissenting minister;’—a statement to be regarded as sufficient testimony that the author of Caleb Williams had not altogether the appearance of a gentleman, at least in the opinion of Mr. Hogg, ever disdainful of Dissenters.