The Monsters

by Dorothy Hoobler

  John Godwin belonged to the Sandemanian tradition, a small and joyless sect of Dissenters who embraced “primitive” Christianity. He believed in predestination, original sin, and divine retribution. Indeed his Calvinist views were so rigid that he alienated his congregation and had to move to Debenham in Suffolk when William was two. Here again, William’s father had difficulties and two years later he relocated once more—this time to Guestwick, north of Norwich, where he would remain till he died. Much of Godwin’s childhood was spent here. The local meeting house’s most treasured possession was a carved oak chair known as Cromwell’s chair. The young William occasionally sat in it, taking the place of Oliver Cromwell, the hero of the Dissenters, who had ruled England for five years when the Puritans had controlled the country.

  William remembered his father as a man who had little love of learning or books and that he usually scribbled his sermon for the Sunday service at tea on Saturday afternoon. By contrast William himself was a very early reader and soon went through the Bible, books of sermons, The Pilgrim’s Progress, and other religious literature. As he recalled, “I remember, when I was a very little boy, saying to myself, ‘What shall I do, when I have read through all the books that there are in the world?’” A favorite “improving” book for him was James Janeway’s A Token for Children, Being an Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives and Joyful Deaths of Several Young Children—a series of stories about children who were saved by obeying God’s will and dying at a young age. Uncle Edward Godwin, another minister, had written a children’s book called The Death Bed, a poem concerning the Joyful Death of a Believer and the Awful Death of an Unbeliever, which all the young Godwins had to read. The title tells it all.

  Death in its reality was not unknown to the Godwins. One brother drowned at sea and another in a pond right outside the Godwin home. William himself was a sickly boy and was lucky to survive an attack of smallpox; his religion forbade him to be inoculated, and he said he was “perfectly willing” to die rather than disobey.

  All this piety made the young William fear that he might be damned forever for any small infraction. Even as a child, he wished to become a preacher himself. At home, he would stand on his high chair in the legal wig that had belonged to his great-grandfather and deliver sermons to an imaginary congregation. Rather than enjoying his son’s performances, however, John Godwin feared that William was acting like a showoff.

  When he was eight, William began attending school at a town two and a half miles away. He practiced preaching as he walked through the woods. One day he made a friend collapse in tears when he described the damnation that awaited him for his sins. Later he secretly borrowed the key to the meeting house and preached and prayed over his friend like an ordained minister. (In a note that he wrote to himself, he said he allowed the boy to kiss him. The nature of the kiss was not noted.) The only errant act of his childhood that William remembered was attending the theater in Norwich, when he was nine. Though his father’s female cousin accompanied him, theater-going was forbidden by his religion.

  His father sent him back to Norwich when he was eleven to be educated as the only pupil of the Reverend Samuel Newton. His father chose Newton because he believed that William needed even stricter training to instill more humility in him. Newton’s preferred method of instruction was beating for the smallest behavioral lapses. William was beaten only once, but even that was an astonishing experience to him. As he recalled, “It had never occurred to me as possible that my person . . . could suffer such ignominious violation.” After his schooling, William returned to Guestwick, where he worked as an assistant schoolteacher until his father’s death in 1772.

  John Godwin’s death was a liberation. William’s mother, conscious of her son’s intellectual gifts, took him to London to the Hoxton Academy. Hoxton was a rigorous college—far more rigorous than Oxford and Cambridge at the time. (As a Dissenter, Godwin was not able to attend those prestigious schools, which were for Anglicans only.) Lectures started at six or seven in the morning and included classics, theology, and Greek philosophy; students learned Latin, Greek, and Hebrew along with smatterings of French, Italian, and German. Most important, for the first time in his life, Godwin was exposed to honest, passionate debate.

  Though he did well academically, he was not happy at Hoxton. He had an intense desire to be liked by others, yet had little ability in the art of making himself popular. He later noted ruefully that the schoolmaster and other pupils thought him “the most self-conceited, self-sufficient animal that ever lived.” Though he began what would be a lifelong friendship with a boy named James Marshall, Godwin felt a strong sense of loneliness. It would stay with him throughout his life, be a recurrent theme in his novels, and would be passed on to his daughter Mary.

  When, after five years, Godwin left Hoxton, he still wanted to be a preacher even though he had now developed many other interests and his religious views had broadened. Then only twenty-two, he obtained his first job as a temporary minister in the town of Ware, near his birthplace, but problems soon developed. Though Godwin had not yet been formally ordained, he felt entitled to perform the communion service, because he had the consent of his congregation. It sounds like a minor issue, but other ministers in the county took umbrage and refused to use the title of Reverend in addressing him. Four congregations rejected him in four years. Godwin tried to open a seminary, but failed to attract students. He would never become formally ordained.

  As Godwin’s failures as a minister increased, he found his faith starting to waver as well. During this time, Godwin had started to read the works of the philosophes—the same thinkers who influenced his future wife, Mary Wollstonecraft. Rousseau’s effect on Godwin was to make him realize that religion and superstition could not stand the test of reason. It was a profound shock to the young man’s worldview. At first he shifted from Calvinism to Deism, but would in time become an atheist.

  Bereft of the only sure force that had guided his life, he settled in London in 1782 and began his career as a writer, joining a part of the English literary world known as “Grub Street,” which published cheap novels, books of poetry, and nonfiction. Godwin had to produce copy quickly and in great quantity. “In the latter part of 1783,” he recalled, “I wrote in ten days a novel entitled Damon and Delia, for which Hookham gave me five guineas, and a novel in three weeks called Italian Letters, purchased by Robinson for twenty guineas, and in the first four months of 1784 a novel called Imogen, A Pastoral Romance, for which Lane gave me ten pounds.” Imogen was a spoof of The Poems of Ossian, a bestseller of the day that was supposed to be ancient Celtic lore, but was in reality a fake. Godwin’s parody was spicy, including rape, a lecherous magician, and other highly un-Christian elements, although virtue did triumph in the end. He also wrote reviews for John Murray’s English Review, a monthly that favored radical political positions. Publications called “reviews” were abundant in those days; they were often little more than collections of puff pieces used to push the newest books. (Murray was a book publisher as well; he would later publish Byron’s works.) Godwin also took to critical writing—he attacked hack writers with relish, but was willing to praise writers who he thought were advancing knowledge. (Mary was equally honest; despite her feminism, she had no qualms about giving bad reviews to female writers, as when she called one book “one of the most stupid novels we have ever impatiently read. Pray, Miss, write no more!”)

  Though Godwin wrote for a radical publication, he was himself at first not politically active. In this he followed his father’s example; the closest John Godwin had come to a political act was to take five-year-old William to a fireworks display in Norwich to celebrate the coronation of George III. Even so, at the time, the need for political reform was a hotly discussed topic, and William, with his background as a Dissenter, was particularly interested in it. The Act of Toleration of 1689 had given Dissenters only the freedom to practice their religion; English law still retained many restricti
ons against their conduct or liberties. For example, Dissenters were forbidden to hold civil or military offices, and were required to pay for the upkeep of local Church of England parishes.

  The French Revolution inspired Godwin, as it had Mary Wollstonecraft. The issues being raised in France encouraged him to look for a way to bring about political justice through rational means in England. In 1791 he began planning a book that would “tell all that I apprehended to be truth,” and secured an advance from a publisher to give himself the time to write it. The result, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, was published in February 1793; its appearance made Godwin famous overnight. His central premise was that humans were innately good; cruelty and injustice have made them what they are. Given that Godwin’s original religious belief, as a boy and young man, was that humans are inherently mired in evil and need God’s grace for salvation, it was clear that he was totally repudiating the faith in which he was raised.

  Like his future wife, Godwin was not a philosopher who spoke in abstract terms alone. He intended to improve humankind by attacking the entrenched social and political institutions. Government, he wrote, was the central problem. In a time when the ruling class of England feared the French Revolution, Godwin was heedless of the consequences when he wrote such passages as, “With what delight must every well-informed friend of mankind look forward to the . . . dissolution of political government, of that brute engine which has been the only perennial cause of the vices of mankind.” Considering that a man had recently been thrown into prison for three months for drunkenly shouting “Damn the king” in a public place, it is surprising that Godwin experienced no harassment for his views. Other critics of the government were put on trial for their lives—Horne Tooke, one of those whom Godwin and Wollstonecraft knew from Joseph Johnson’s dinner parties, was among them. (He was acquitted.) Godwin later claimed the authorities thought the book was too expensive to reach a large audience. For whatever reason, he escaped prison and the noose.

  This was all the more surprising since Godwin’s Political Justice was if anything more extreme than Wollstonecraft’s book. Godwin condemned all forms of coercion, including those used by the government to keep order, making him one of the founders of anarchism. Godwin envisioned a society in which people lived harmoniously without compulsion or force. At the top of the list of coercive social institutions that he attacked was marriage, which he called a slavery for women and “the most odious of all monopolies.” The world of the future, in his view, would be egalitarian and people would use reason in all their relationships. Reasonable individuals would only act after considering the general good of the society, and limits on freedom would no longer be necessary. Godwin saw no obstacles to this ideal society, for progress was his true theme; he believed that it would inevitably appear. It was not stoppable.

  Godwin’s optimism and idealism seem excessive today, but at the time, revolutions—the American, the French, the scientific, and the industrial—seemed to promise that anything humans could envision was possible. Godwin instantly became one of the leading figures in the intellectual ferment of the time, and he became a hero to those who were most idealistic.

  Political Justice was both expensive and difficult for the average person to read. Even so, groups of people raised the money to buy a copy, and then gathered to hear it read aloud. Godwin set out to reach a wider audience by writing a novel that would express his views in simpler form. He told his new story from the first-person point of view to get the reader more involved, a technique that his daughter would also employ. The year 1794 saw the publication of Things as They Are; or The Adventures of Caleb Williams, which combined psychological insight with a mystery—an unbeatable combination that produces bestsellers even today. Lower-class Caleb Williams, a servant, discovers that his otherwise upstanding employer, the upper-class Falkland, is a murderer. To prevent Caleb from revealing the secret, Falkland frames him for a crime. Caleb goes into hiding, and the two become locked in a pattern of pursuit, which ultimately destroys them both. Mary Shelley, who knew her father’s novel well, would make use of the relentless pursuit between two self-destroying individuals when she wrote about Dr. Frankenstein and his monster.

  Godwin continued to write novels for the next four decades. He was perennially in need of money, and novels were easier to write and sell than books of philosophy. Superficially—for he always used his novels as vehicles for his philosophy—his books employ Gothic elements, such as a struggle against a tyrannical authority figure, supernatural happenings, and a mysterious or exotic setting. (In Caleb Williams the narrator is warned never to open a trunk that stands in his master’s room. Of course . . .) Despite Godwin’s popular appeal, his novels posed important questions for society, and their resolutions were often tied to Godwin’s radical proposals. He did not totally abandon nonfiction, writing the sensational Lives of the Necromancers (1834) two years before his death. It described such magicians as Cornelia Agrippa and Albertus Magnus of medieval times—questing figures who would interest both Percy Shelley and his fictional counterpart, Victor Frankenstein.

  In 1796, William Godwin, at forty, was at the height of his fame. William Hazlitt, a contemporary essayist and critic, wrote that “he blazed as a sun in the firmament of reputation.” But he had little experience with women, although recently he had shown some interest in two female writers, Elizabeth Inchbald and Amelia Alderson. Godwin feared that romantic involvement would take away energy from his intellectual activity. In his mind, as expressed in his works, sexual relationships ranked well below friendship, and of course marriage was actually “evil.” These ideas would be severely tested when he encountered Mary Wollstonecraft in January 1796. The two were reacquainted at a dinner at the house of Mary Hays, another writer and a great admirer of Wollstonecraft. Godwin expected, but did not find, the woman who had annoyed him in 1791, but Wollstonecraft was now a mother and had gone through considerable emotional trauma since then. She did not dominate the conversation.

  Godwin’s interest increased after he read Mary’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark. He later wrote, “If ever there was a book calculated to make a man fall in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book. She speaks of her sorrows, in a way that fills us with melancholy, and dissolves us in tenderness, at the same time that she displays a genius which commands all our admiration.” Godwin went to call on Mary but she was away. When she returned, seeing his card, she paid a visit to him—a bold move, but one that was necessary to overcome Godwin’s shyness. A romance blossomed that led to a love affair.

  Godwin described his attachment to Mary in terms that were about as emotional as he ever got: “When we met again, we met with new pleasure, and I may add, with a more decisive preference for each other. It was however three weeks longer, before the sentiment which trembled upon the tongue, burst from the lips of either. There was . . . no period of throes. . . . It was friendship melting into love. Previous to our mutual declaration, each felt half-assured, yet each felt a certain trembling anxiety to have assurance complete.” Nobody wanted to make the first move.

  For Mary, this would be the first time she had been able to enter a relationship that satisfied both her intellect and her heart. She wrote to Godwin in September 1796, “When the heart and reason accord there is no flying from voluptuous sensations, I . . . do what a woman can—Can a philosopher do more?”

  It was a particularly modern relationship. They wrote countless notes to each other, sometimes several times a day, developing a code to signal when it was a good time for sex. Godwin plotted Mary’s menstrual cycle, which they used as a form of birth control. Mary assured William that he was free to see his other “Fairs”—there was to be no monopoly of affections. (Although in Mary’s notes to him she referred to Elizabeth Inchbald as “Mrs. Perfection.”) Indeed, it appears that Godwin proposed to Amelia Alderson in July 1796, but was turned down.

  Wollstonecraft was more sexually exp
erienced than Godwin but she was also emotionally fragile, and with the memory of Imlay still fresh, she feared her own vulnerability. Shortly after they began having sexual relations, she wrote Godwin about her doubts: “My imagination is for ever betraying me into fresh misery, and I perceive that I shall be a child to the end of the chapter. You talk of the roses which grow profusely in every path of life—I catch at them; but only encounter the thorns . . . Consider what has passed as a fever of your imagination; one of the slight mortal shakes to which you are liable—and I—will become again a Solitary Walker.” (The italicized phrase, underlined in her letter, was from one of Rousseau’s autobiographical writings.)

  Godwin responded: “Do not cast me off. Do not become again a solitary walker. . . . Be happy. Resolve to be happy. You deserve to be so. Every thing that interferes with it, is weakness & wandering: & a woman, like you, can, must, shall, shake it off.” It was the first time that Mary had a lover who was emotionally supportive. As the relationship deepened, Wollstonecraft felt secure enough to show Godwin her frank, honest, true self and to question intimately his interest. “Can you solve this problem?” she asked in one letter. “I was endeavouring to discover last night, in bed, what it is in me, of which you are afraid. I was hurt at perceiving that you were.” In November, she wrote, “You tell me that ‘I spoil little attentions, by anticipation.’ Yet to have attention, I find, that it is necessary to demand it. My faults are very inveterate—for I did expect you last night—But, never mind it. You coming would not have been worth any thing, if it must be requested.”

  What Mary called Godwin’s “chance medley system” of birth control did not work, and in December 1796 she realized that she was pregnant. Both she and Godwin were philosophically against marriage, but Mary worried about having a second illegitimate baby. Godwin agreed to marry her for the sake of their child. With Godwin’s school friend James Marshall as witness, the couple wed at St. Pancras Church on March 29, 1797. For Fanny’s sake, Mary had been calling herself Mary Imlay, but she signed the marriage certificate “Mary Wollstonecraft, spinster.” It was to be a fresh start.