ABSTRACT
William Godwin was the central English public intellectual during the unprecedented crisis in political discourse caused by the French Revolution and by British reaction to events in France. His career as a critic of the established political order began at the time of the War of American Independence and ended in the period of the first Reform Act, spanning the whole of the revolutionary era. The length and diversity of Godwin’s career, combined with the absence of an official posthumous record, meant that multiple and competing views of his life and works flourished throughout the nineteenth century. This book presents a collective biographical portrait of Godwin, made up of a series of different viewpoints, many of which come from outside the political and literary establishment. It provides a larger story concerning the struggle by nineteenth-century writers to assimilate Godwin’s revolutionary social and political vision.
