Godwin's Response to Rousseau's Autobiography: Self-Analysis and Social Critique Study, Summaries of Autobiography Writing

Download Godwin's Response to Rousseau's Autobiography: Self-Analysis and Social Critique Study and more Summaries Autobiography Writing in PDF only on Docsity! PAMELA CLEMIT Self-Analysis as Social Critique: The Autobiographical Writings of Godwin and Rousseau I In the preamble to The Confessions (1782–9), Jean-Jacques Rousseau starts by envisaging a scene of judgement at which he will appear before ‘the Sovereign Judge’, book in hand; but he ends by imagining a scene of reciprocal confession amongst his fellow-men: Eternal Being, assemble around me the countless host of my fellows: let them listen to my confessions, let them shudder at my unworthi- ness, let them blush at my woes. Let each of them in his turn uncover his heart at the foot of Thy throne with the same sincerity; and then let a single one say to Thee, if he dares, ‘I was better than that man.’ 1 Here Rousseau challenges his readers to scrutinize their own lives and characters before condemning him. Similarly, in recounting the numerous instances in which his natural development was constrained by an unjust political and social order, he invites readers to reflect on their own experiences of alienation and self-division. As Robert Darnton and others showed, Rousseau’s use of self-revelation in the service of a political goal had a powerful effect on readers of all classes in France.2 Intellectuals of the French revolutionary era, such as Jacques-Pierre Brissot, Manon Roland, and Jean-Baptiste Louvet, pub- lished frank, self-justifying memoirs of their conversion to the principles of liberty and equality, modelled on Rousseau’s Confessions.3 However, until recently, historians and literary critics have been less attuned to the impact of Rousseau on the autobiographical writings of the English radical intelligentsia of the 1790s.4 In particular, William Godwin’s response to Rousseau’s use of self-analysis as a mode of social critique is still to be explored. Although Godwin never published an autobiography, between 1795 and 1801 he wrote many private autobiographical pieces – confessional essays, meditative reflections, and fragments – in which he took up Rousseau’s challenge to engage in comparative self-evaluation.5 An examination of these manuscripts reveals that Godwin, like Rousseau, turned to autobiographical writing not only to try to understand his own development, but also to craft an identity as a writer dedicated to ‘the cause and the love of liberty’.6 In keeping with the dual focus of the Confessions, where Rousseau presents himself as the embodiment of the theoretical principles contained in his writings, Godwin emphasized the particularity of his early experiences whilst presenting his life-story as a case study that illustrates general principles of human nature. In analyzing his own emotional and intellectual development, through his Calvinist upbringing and his education in Rational Dissent to the writing of An Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793), he simultaneously traced the growth of a personality peculiarly receptive to radical theories of social change. A study of Godwin’s appropriation of the ‘autobiographical’ Rousseau, as well as increasing our understanding of his own career, contributes to wider critical debate on the links between eighteenth- century English Protestant Dissent and the historical phenomenon of European Romanticism. II Before examining Godwin’s critical engagement with Rousseau, it is neces- sary to establish the intellectual contexts for his project of philosophical autobiography. Godwin turned to autobiographical writing in the after- math of the French Revolution as a means of reaffirming his progressive social and political ideals. By the mid-1790s, many English intellectuals who had initially welcomed the French Revolution had become dis- illusioned by the atrocities which culminated in the Terror.7 The govern- ment campaign to stop the spread of radicalism, which had begun in 1792 and culminated in the outlawing of the reform societies in 1799, led to the increasing fragmentation of the democratic reform movement. At the same time, there developed a flourishing counter-radical culture, in which educated radicals were subjected to a campaign of popular abuse orches- trated by members of their own class. These changes in public mood prompted Godwin to a revaluation of his reforming aims and methods. In The Enquirer (1797), a collection of essays on education, manners, and literature, he announced a programme of aesthetic education designed to appeal to those who, like himself, were committed to individual reform rather than collective action. Whilst maintaining ‘as ardent a passion for 162 ROMANTICISM human mind, there remain the feelings, & the imagination considered as the instrument of feeling.’14 This intellectual reassessment gained further impetus from Godwin’s relationship with Mary Wollstonecraft. Although some critics have argued that she was the main cause of his philosophical revisions,15 there is little evidence to support this view: when Godwin became reacquainted with Wollstonecraft in January 1796, he had already published the second edition of Political Justice. Yet he was partly attracted to her because her latest book, Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796), seemed to him to embody the synthesis of reason and sympathy for which he was searching.16 As he wrote in Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798), ‘If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book. She speaks of her sorrows, in a way that fills us with melancholy, and dissolves us in tenderness, at the same time that she displays a genius which commands all our admiration.’17 Here Godwin recognized that Wollstonecraft’s use of a Rousseauvian language of sen- sibility created a new kind of autobiographical ‘truth’, which encouraged the reader’s sympathetic identification. His relationship with Wollstone- craft provided him with a practical education in Rousseauvian senti- ment.18 Under her tutelage, Godwin re-read Rousseau’s epistolary novel, Julie; or, The New Eloise (1761) and Emile, or On Education (1762), his novelistic account of the education of a representative young man, together with the Confessions.19 This programme of instruction prompted him to develop a heightened appreciation of the relations between private affections and public virtue. Godwin’s revaluation of his philosophical position also led him to examine his own development. Like younger members of the revolution- ary generation who were prompted by the course of recent events to take stock of their lives – Coleridge and Southey, for example, each began a series of autobiographical letters in 1797 20 – he began to scrutinize his own pre-philosophical development. Stimulated by a reading of the newly-published English translation of Manon Roland’s An Appeal to Impartial Posterity, he made notes for a chronological account of his early life in September 1795, whilst completing the revisions to the second edition of Political Justice.21 However, he did not begin writing in earnest until August 1797, three days after finishing the revisions to the third edition of Political Justice. Work on the memoir of his childhood was inter- rupted by Wollstonecraft’s death on 10 September 1797, following the birth of their daughter Mary eleven days earlier, but, after completing Wollstonecraft’s Memoirs, a work in which biographical and autobio- Self-Analysis as Social Critique 165 graphical concerns are blended, he resumed work on ‘Life (moi-même)’.22 After writing seven more pages, he laid the project aside, but returned to it at intervals up to the summer of 1801. (He wrote no more until he added a new opening section in 1808 and a final section in 1820.23) Between 1795 and 1801, Godwin also composed several short pieces analyzing his emotional, intellectual, and spiritual development. On 26 September 1798, shortly after finishing the revisions for the second edition of Memoirs, he noted in his diary, ‘Write Hints of Character’, and from 10 to 12 March 1801 he wrote ‘Mems.’, in which he recorded ‘the principal revol- utions of opinion to which my mind has been subjected’ (CNMG, I, p. 52).24 On 28 July 1801, he noted, ‘Write creed, pp. 3’, and it is likely that a number of undated autobiographical reflections were also written around this time.25 III Self-analysis was never purely inward-looking or private for Godwin. His autobiographical project should be read in the context of the association between life-writing and radical politics in the 1790s. Such an association had a particular resonance for Godwin. His upbringing and education in the traditions of English Protestant Dissent meant that he was familiar with a body of nonconformist writing which linked sincere self-scrutiny with resistance to the established political and social order. In the after- math of the penal legislation of the 1660s, many nonconformist divines who had been ejected from their livings turned to writing memoirs, diaries, and autobiographical reflections.26 As Neil Keeble argued, these writings did not signal an abandonment of the political and religious ideals of the Commonwealth period, but were designed to re-establish links with a community of believers which had been broken by persecu- tion.27 Nonconformist divines, in the wake of the defeat of their political hopes, directed attention to ‘the reconstruction of individuals as a neces- sary preliminary to the transformation of institutions’.28 Following the injunction of II Corinthians 13:5 – ‘Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith: prove your own selves’ – they urged their readers to monitor all aspects of their daily lives for their moral and spiritual significance. Readers were encouraged not only to analyze their own spiritual growth, but also to record their findings in what Richard Baxter, a major influence on the moderate Calvinist tradition in which Godwin was raised, called a ‘Book of Heart accounts’.29 Such a tradition of vigilant introspection, shorn of its religious content, provided an important precedent for Godwin’s project of secular self- scrutiny. Although by the 1790s he had temporarily become a non- 166 ROMANTICISM believer, many of his values and structures of ordering experience remained indebted to the literature of nonconformity. For example, in Political Justice he emphasized the need for the individual to scrutinize his or her daily experience for its contribution to progress of mind: ‘Every incident that befals us is the parent of a sentiment, and either confirms or counteracts the preconceptions of the mind’ (PPWG, III, p. 216). Again, Godwin structured his autobiographical writings in terms of ‘revolutions of opinion’, or secular conversion-experiences, highlighting the protean character of his own development: ‘Every four or five years I gain some new perception, or become intimately sensible to some valuable circum- stance, that introduces an essential change of many of my preconceived notions and determinations’ (CNMG, I, pp. 52, 59). A philosophical justi- fication for such intellectual mobility, or ‘ductility’, can be found in the nonconformist belief in the fearless pursuit of truth, ‘whithersoever thou leadest’ (PPWG, VI, pp. 173, 219), which had been extended to the secular sphere in the writings of the Rational Dissenters.30 In cases where further enlightenment reveals the inadequacies of one’s belief, changing one’s opinion becomes a moral duty. Godwin found a further model for politically subversive self-analysis in the autobiographical writings of Rousseau, another former Calvinist, who also presented his life-story as a series of mental ‘revolutions’ and who seemed to offer a secular version of the ‘Paradise within’ constructed in nonconformist literature.31 As several critics observed, to readers in the late eighteenth century there were two Rousseaus: the political and moral philosopher, and the mythical figure of persecuted virtue embodied in his autobiographical writings.32 Although his political writings were later held responsible for the French Revolution, it was his literary self-represen- tation as a ‘new man’ of virtue that led to Rousseau being pantheonized by the French revolutionaries in 1794. Godwin’s engagement with Rousseau’s writings spanned his entire career. In the 1780s, he had responded affirmatively to Rousseau’s distinctive view of man as naturally good but socially depraved, and he re-read the works of the man he regarded as ‘the greatest of all philosophers’ whilst writing Political Justice.33 From 1789 to 1804 he worked intermittently on a translation of the Confessions, although this was never completed or published.34 In the mid-1790s, as already noted, he re-read Rousseau’s autobiographical writings and fiction under Wollstonecraft’s guidance, and in July 1798 he re-read Emile.35 During his most intense phase of autobiographical writing, from 1797 to 1801, he re-read the Confessions three times, together with its sequel, The Reveries of the Solitary Walker (1782).36 Not surprisingly, it was the Confessions that influenced Godwin most Self-Analysis as Social Critique 167 Here Godwin’s own remembered instances of the pleasures of sense- impressions, notably his student visits to Drury Lane Theatre,44 provide a corrective to Rousseau’s invocation of an imaginary world, remote from social and historical experience. For Godwin the main appeal of the Confessions lay not in similarities or contrasts between the two writers’ characters, but in the way that Rousseau traced the origin of his adult mind and personality to his early experiences of social and cultural alienation. Just as Rousseau used auto- biography to demonstrate how he became a philosopher, Godwin constructed his personal history so as to elucidate the foundations of his adult identity as social critic. Thus, in his fragmentary memoir of his early life, he organized his past experiences into a pattern, which reflects his own understanding of human nature. This autobiographical fragment, like Book One of the Confessions, tells the story of the education of a young boy up to his fifteenth year. Godwin rewrites Rousseau’s narrative of natural virtue overlaid by social corruption to examine his own Calvinist upbringing. He presents himself as another recipient of a defi- cient education, which encourages withdrawal into an imaginary world, as in the Confessions, and fosters premature insights into the social and political inequalities he later sought to challenge. Whilst Rousseau’s narrative of flawed education is divided into four different phases, Godwin’s is divided into three: his education at home as the son of an Independent (Congregationalist) minister who held several different posts in East Anglia; his attendance at Robert Akers’s day school in Hindolveston; and his residence as a private pupil in the household of Samuel Newton, Independent minister at the Old Meeting in Norwich.45 Godwin begins his account of family life with a short description of the circumstances of his own birth and first few days, in which, like the sickly Jean-Jacques, he was not expected to survive.46 As in the Confessions, William’s imagination was first awakened by the experience of reading, which encouraged him to identify with non-existent people and events. Just as Jean-Jacques read Plutarch’s Lives and placed his hand on a hot chafing-dish in imitation of Mucius Scaevola’s action in the Etruscan camp, William read Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress and set out to find the narrow wicket through which Christian passed on his journey to salva- tion.47 Godwin also traces to his Calvinist upbringing a developing sense of singularity – rooted in an early preoccupation with whether or not he was destined for salvation – which recalls Jean-Jacques’s numerous claims to uniqueness.48 William’s sense of being special was reinforced when he was chosen to be the sole companion of his father’s cousin, Hannah Godwin (later, Mrs Sothren), just as Jean-Jacques was nurtured by a 170 ROMANTICISM favourite aunt. Whilst Jean-Jacques owed to his aunt a taste for music, which further stimulated his precocious imagination,49 William derived from Hannah Godwin a heightened sense of detachment from life: she instructed him to prepare for bed each night, ‘with a temper as if I were never to wake again in this sublunary world’ (CNMG, I, p. 12). These early anti-social feelings were strengthened, in Godwin’s account, by the next phase of his education at the school of Robert Akers, a former journeyman tailor and an autodidact, which he attended from the ages of eight to eleven. Akers’s method of teaching, based on ranking the students in terms of ability, encouraged William to compete rather than co-operate with his peers. Excelling at school and surrounded by admirers at home, he, like Jean-Jacques, developed ‘an overweening vanity and conceit’ and indulged in fantasies of omnipotence, ‘ascribing to myself in imagination various corporeal faculties or attainments that I had not, particularly the power of flying’ (CNMG, I, pp. 22, 25).50 Yet this sense of youthful in- vincibility could also give rise to feelings of injustice when other people failed to share it. For example, after being reprimanded by his father for excessive pride, William’s flights of imagination reflect a new sense of himself as a victim of an unjust political system: ‘Nothing could exceed my aversion for this sort of contention and expostulation of the master with the slave. … I regretted that I had not the power of becoming invisible and intangible, and by this means flying from the injustice of others’ (CNMG, I, pp. 25, 26). The phase of his development to which Godwin retrospectively accords the greatest significance was that of his residence, from the ages of twelve to fifteen, at Norwich as Newton’s solitary pupil. Just as Jean-Jacques’s experiences at Bossey under the tutelage of M. Lambercier and his sister build on the denaturing process begun in Geneva, so the events which occur during William’s stay at Norwich heighten the sense of social dis- location induced by his family life. Yet whilst both authors locate the origin of political passions in a formative experience of unjust punish- ment, meted out by adults, Godwin’s account diverges from Rousseau’s in crucial respects. When Newton threatens William with an apparently motiveless beating, the child’s reaction is likened to a fall from innocence into adult social corruption: ‘It had never occurred to me as possible, that my person, which had hitherto been treated … as something extra- ordinary and sacred, could suffer such ignominious violation. The idea had something in it as abrupt, as a fall from heaven to earth’ (CNMG, I, p. 33). This heightened language recalls Jean-Jacques’s moral outrage at being unjustly beaten for supposedly breaking Mlle Lambercier’s comb. Yet Rousseau uses this incident to demonstrate the origins of revolution- Self-Analysis as Social Critique 171 ary feelings, as Jean-Jacques reacts to his ‘first injustice’ with anger and defiant words: he and his fellow-victim, his cousin Bernard, shout from their beds, ‘Carnifex, Carnifex, Carnifex’ (CWR, V, p. 17) – the Latin name for a public executioner. By contrast, William, a future advocate of non- violent change, is content inwardly to reproach Newton for his ‘want of candour and justice’ (CNMG, I, p. 34). Moreover, Rousseau’s association of punishment with the discovery of masochistic pleasures, as in Jean- Jacques’s sexual submissiveness to Mlle Lambercier’s playful beatings,51 is almost entirely absent from Godwin’s account – apart from a passing reference to Hannah Godwin’s gentleness, which ‘caused the corporal pain of the scene to be as trivial as the intellectual’ (CNMG, I, p. 13). Instead Godwin emphasizes the political passivity induced by the experience of injustice, recalling how his youthful sense of shame at being beaten made him keep it ‘a profound secret from every human being’ (CNMG, I, p. 34). Deprived of ‘that friendship and confidence … that grows up among equals’, he became ‘reserved, insulated and timid’: ‘The social spirit within me was rusted and decaying, for want of exercise’ (CNMG, I, p. 35). Having traced his discovery of the origins of political tyranny and subservience to his Norwich years, Godwin in the last section of his narra- tive, added in 1820,52 reworks other aspects of Rousseau’s self-represen- tation to highlight his youthful capacity to overcome social and political constraints. For example, Godwin describes how his enforced solitude at Norwich led him to engage in periods of mental abstraction or ‘rever- ies’. As in the Confessions, these reveries often occur whilst walking, an activity which brings the imagination into play, and foster a sense of separateness from others.53 Although William’s reveries, too, are partly associated with anti-social feelings, they also provide an imaginative space in which adult social insights are prefigured: ‘I made whole books as I walked … books of imaginary institutions in education, and government, where all was to be faultless’ (CNMG, I, p. 37). Again, William’s private reading in Newton’s library does not lead to withdrawal into a fantasy world, but gives access to a set of alternative civic values: The books I read here with the greatest transport were the early volumes of the English translation of the Ancient History of Rollin. Few bosoms ever beat with greater ardour than mine did, while perusing the story of the grand struggle of the Greeks for indepen- dence against the assaults of the Persian despot: and this scene awakened a passion in my soul, which will never cease but with life. (CNMG, I, p. 37) The inspirational power of this historical narrative is reinforced by the 172 ROMANTICISM who presides over a patriarchal idyll modelled on The New Eloise, with the selfish, misanthropic ‘new man of feeling’ of his subtitle, who resembles Rousseau’s autobiographical persona in the Confessions. Macneil, a former friend of Rousseau, volunteers an analysis of his character, in which he admits that Rousseau, towards the end of his life, was obsessed by feelings of persecution and lived ‘in a world of his own’. Yet, Macneil declares, ‘he had such resources in his own mind! … his vein of enthusiasm was so sublime … It was difficult for me to persuade myself that the person I saw at such times, was the same as at others was beset with such horrible visions’ (CNMG, V, p. 159).61 This divided view of Rousseau reflects Godwin’s mixture of admiration of his exceptional talents, condemnation of his social withdrawal, and regret at his temperamental inability to fulfil his potential as an agent of social change. That Godwin came to regard the ‘autobiographical’ Rousseau as abandoning the civic responsibilities of authorship is further suggested by his remarks in a letter to Percy Bysshe Shelley, dated 4 March 1812. In reply to Shelley’s justification of his early publication of political pamphlets in terms that recall Rousseau’s claims for the philosophical significance of autobiographical writing, the older man urged caution: It is beautiful to correct our errors, to make each day a comment on the last, and to grow perpetually wiser; but all this need not be done before the public. … A man may resolve, as you say, to present to the moralist and the metaphysician a picture of all the successive turns and revolutions of his mind, and it is fit there should be some men that should do this. But such a man must be contented to sacrifice general usefulness, and confine himself to this. Such a man was Rousseau; but not such a man was Bacon, or Milton.62 As well as warning Shelley of the dangers of Rousseauvian frankness, Godwin here seeks to reaffirm his own position in an older tradition of ‘speak[ing]’ truth to power’,63 that of English Protestant Dissent. Godwin’s later wish to affiliate himself with Milton rather than Rousseau is con- firmed by a draft letter to an unidentified correspondent, dated 3 August 1811, in which he appropriates Milton’s testimony to his sense of personal calling in Book Two of The Reason of Church-Government: ‘“I have long taken it,” as Milton says, “by an inward prompting which daily grew upon me, to be my portion in this life,” to be a communicator of truth.’ 64 Yet to focus on Godwin’s project of autobiographical self-scrutiny in relation to his own career is to register only one aspect of its significance. In addition, an understanding of this politically subversive mode of self- analysis adds a new dimension to the wider critical debate on the Self-Analysis as Social Critique 175 public/private dimensions of autobiographical writing in the Romantic era. The post-revolutionary interest in rewriting their lives amongst younger members of the English radical intelligentsia – notably Wordsworth and Coleridge – has traditionally been seen as emblematic of a broader literary movement away from radical politics towards the work- ings of the isolated individual sensibility. Godwin, however, presents an alternative model of Romantic self-scrutiny, which highlights the inter- dependence of personal and historical experience. Like nonconformist writers forced out of public life after 1660, and like that self-styled victim of social injustice, the ‘autobiographical’ Rousseau, Godwin, in the decades following the French Revolution, found in autobiography a means for the commemoration and vindication of his social and political ideals. Despite his caution about the publication of autobiographical writing, his lessons in the use of self-analysis as a political weapon were not lost on the next generation of radical writers in search of a public role, notably his daughter and intellectual heir, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, together with her husband Shelley. R Pamela Clemit University of Durham NOTES I am grateful to the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, for permission to quote from Godwin’s manuscripts in the Abinger Papers. I should like to thank Bruce Barker-Benfield for sharing his codicological expertise, and David Duff, Doucet Devin Fischer, and Michael Rossington for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this essay. 1. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, ed. by Christopher Kelly, Roger D. Masters, and Peter G. Stillman, in vol. V of The Collected Writings of Rousseau (Hanover, NH, and London: University Press of New England, 1995), p. 5. (Hereafter CWR, followed by volume number.) 2. Robert Darnton, ‘Readers Respond to Rousseau: The Fabrication of Romantic Sensitivity’, in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984), pp. 215–56; Carol Blum, Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue: The Language of Politics in the French Revolution (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1986), passim. 3. Blum, pp. 138–43; see also Robert Darnton, ‘A Spy in Grub Street’, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 68–9. E.g. The Life of Jacques-Pierre Brissot … Written by Himself (London: J. Debrett, 1794); An Appeal to Impartial Posterity, by Citizenness Roland (London: J. Johnson, 1795); Narrative of the Dangers to which I have been Exposed, since the 31st of May 1793 … By John-Baptiste Louvet (London: J. Johnson, 1795). 4. An exception is Gregory Dart, Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), which includes excellent discussions of autobiographical works by Wollstonecraft and Wordsworth (pp. 130–8, 178–208). 5. For useful overviews, see Jean de Palacio, ‘Godwin et la tentation de l’autobiographie 176 ROMANTICISM (William Godwin and J.J. Rousseau)’, Études Anglaises, 27 (1974), pp. 43–57; and Gary Kelly, ‘“The Romance of Real Life”: Autobiography in Rousseau and William Godwin’, Man and Nature / L’Homme et La Nature, 1 (1982), pp. 93–101. 6. William Godwin, Thoughts Occasioned by the Perusal of Dr. Parr’s Spital Sermon, ed. by Mark Philp, in vol. II of Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993), p. 165. (Hereafter PPWG, followed by volume number.) 7. For a fuller account, see Clive Emsley, British Society and the French Wars, 1793–1815 (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1979), pp. 41–64; Albert Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (London: Hutchinson, 1979), pp. 171–415, 451–99. 8. ‘Of History and Romance’ is one of two autograph manuscript essays annotated by Godwin, ‘These Essays were written while the Enquirer was in the press, under the impression that the favour of the public might have demanded another volume’ (PPWG, V, p. 290), but not published during his lifetime. For an incisive account of Godwin’s philo- sophical speculations on biography, see Timothy Clark, Embodying Revolution: The Figure of the Poet in Shelley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 18–19, 23–4. 9. The Rambler, No. 60, 13 Oct. 1750, in The Rambler, ed. by W.J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss, vol. III of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1969), pp. 318–23. 10. James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. by G.B. Hill, rev’d. by L.F. Powell, 6 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934–50), I, p. 33. 11. D.O. Thomas, The Honest Mind: The Thought and Work of Richard Price (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), pp. 99–101; Mark Philp, Godwin’s Political Justice (London: Duckworth, 1986), pp. 15–37. 12. Pamela Clemit, The Godwinian Novel: The Rational Fictions of Godwin, Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1993, rpt. 2001), pp. 66–9. 13. Philp, pp. 142–59, 202–9. 14. Godwin, undated autograph note, Bodleian Library, [Abinger] Dep. b. 227/5. This note can now be identified from Godwin’s unpublished diary as ‘Notes of Essays’, written 18 July 1801 (Dep. e. 205). 15. E.g. Don Locke, A Fantasy of Reason: The Life and Thought of William Godwin (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 139. 16. For a helpful reading of Wollstonecraft’s text, see Peter Swaab, ‘Romantic Self- Representation: The Example of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters in Sweden’, in Mortal Pages, Literary Lives: Studies in Nineteenth-Century Autobiography, ed. by Vincent Newey and Philip Shaw (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), pp. 13–30. 17. Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. by Mark Philp, in vol. I of Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1992), p. 122. (Hereafter CNMG, followed by volume number.) 18. For Wollstonecraft’s changing responses to Rousseau, see, e.g. her letter to Everina Wollstonecraft, 24 Mar. [1785], Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. by Ralph M. Wardle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 145; Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria, in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. by Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, 7 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1989), V, pp. 147–61, I, p. 96. 19. According to his diary, Godwin read all three of these works in August 1797 ([Abinger] Dep. e. 202). 20. See Coleridge to Thomas Poole, 6 Feb. 1797, in Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Self-Analysis as Social Critique 177