ABSTRACT
The author and publisher Charles Kegan Paul (1828–1902) was born in Somerset and educated at Eton and Exeter College, Oxford. The son of an Anglican vicar, he was ordained deacon in 1851 and accepted the curacy of Tew, near Oxford. William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries, Kegan Paul’s best-known work, appeared in 1876. This work was undertaken at the request of Sir Percy Shelley and his wife Lady Jane. Kegan Paul’s life of Godwin is modelled in part on the unfinished memoir by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, which followed the standard nineteenth-century ‘life-and-letters’ format in making extensive use of the biographical subject’s autobiographical papers, thus presenting his life largely in his own terms. This chapter presents extracts that provide archival evidence concerning key events in Godwin’s life which refutes the one-dimensional view of his intellectual character found in other nineteenth-century memoirs.
