ABSTRACT
Harriet Martineau wrote her ‘Autobiography’ in 1855, following a misdiagnosis of fatal heart disease in January of that year, but it was not published until after her death. This chapter presents a passage that describes her view of Godwin as a private man. The passage focuses on the occasion on 12 June 1834 when Harriet Martineau, her mother, and the Gaskells visited Godwin’s house at 13 New Palace Yard. In the passage, Harriet Martineau begins by expressing a sense of solidarity with Godwin as a fellow liberal, and she gives an instructive gloss on the recent Tory caricature in Frasers Magazine. Yet at the same time she is keen to distance herself from the controversial public figure of the 1790s who was intimately associated with Mary Wollstonecraft. And, like commentators of a different political persuasion, she seeks to present the older Godwin as harmless, as both personally and intellectually timid.
