ABSTRACT
William Austin was one of the earliest of many American visitors to the Godwin household. He called on Godwin for the first time in December 1802 and visited him several times up to May 1803. This chapter presents an extract in which Austin presents a sympathetic portrait of the philosopher of universal benevolence in the privacy of his own home. Despite its ostensibly domestic focus, the extract invokes Godwin’s history as a figure of public controversy in the 1790s through the descriptions of the other dinner guests, Thomas Holcroft and Dr John Wolcot. Moreover, the presence at Godwin’s dinner-table of these radical friends, in company with a New England Republican, shows that Godwin’s social and intellectual circle was not dissolved or depoliticised by 1800, as is often claimed, but continued to flourish and to attract like-minded reformers in the early nineteenth century.
