Godwin, William 1756-1836
English political writer and novelist

Born in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, he spent his childhood in Guestwick, Norfolk, and then attended Hoxton Presbyterian College (1773-78). During a five years' ministry at Ware, Stowmarket and Beaconsfield, he turned Socinian and republican, and by 1787 was a 'complete unbeliever'. His Enquiry Concerning Political Justice brought him fame, and captivated Coleridge, Wordsworth, Robert Southey, and later and above all Shelley, who became his disciple, son-in-law and subsidizer. It was calmly subversive of everything (law and 'marriage, the worst of all laws'), but it deprecated violence, and its author escaped prosecution. His masterpiece, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), was designed to give 'a general review of the modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism'. In 1797 he married Mary Wollstonecraft, who was pregnant by him, but she died soon after their daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born. Four years later he married Mrs Clairemont. A bookselling business long involved Godwin in difficulties, and in 1833 he was glad to accept the sinecure post of yeoman-usher of the Exchequer. His tragedy, Antonio (1800), was widely criticized. The best of his later prose works are The Enquirer (1797) and St Leon (1799).

Bibliography: F K Brown, The Life of William Godwin (1926)