ABSTRACT
Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859) first met Godwin in March 1808 when they both went for tea at Coleridge’s, along with Wordsworth and Lamb. As this occasion demonstrates, the two men had several literary friends in common, but they themselves never became friends. This chapter presents a passage from De Quincey’s series of autobiographical pieces contributed, perhaps surprisingly, to the radical Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine from 1834 to 1841, under the general title of ‘Sketches of Life and Manners: From the Autobiography of an English Opium-Eater’. The passage provides a glimpse of Godwin during his years of apparent obscurity as a dignified and tranquil private man, seen from the point of view of one who did not understand or share either his political beliefs or his aesthetic values. De Quincey’s description of Godwin as ‘the monster created by Frankenstein’, alluding to the plot of Mary Shelley’s celebrated novel, establishes an image which was to recur in nineteenth-century Tory vilifications of Godwin.
