ABSTRACT
Thomas Jefferson Hogg (1792–1862) was one of several young men brought into contact with Godwin through their mutual friendship with Shelley. Hogg and Shelley became close friends while they were both students at Oxford, from which they were expelled in March 1811 for collaborating on a radical pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism. In 1832 Hogg published a series of articles, entitled ‘Percy Bysshe Shelley at Oxford’, in the New Monthly Magazine. In the dispute about how Shelley should be memorialised for nineteenth-century readers, the character of Godwin, his early mentor in revolutionary politics, was also a matter of contention. In the Hogg’s unfinished biography, Godwin is depicted from the point of view of a Victorian establishment figure seeking to distance himself from the apparently extravagant political opinions of his youthful friend. Hogg’s first meeting with Godwin took place during the summer of 1813 at the house of Dr John Frank Newton, an amateur writer on vegetarianism and Zoroastrianism.
