Abstract

Following the publication of An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice in 1793 and his most successful novel, Caleb Williams, in 1794, William Godwin was briefly celebrated as the most influential English thinker of the age. At the time of his marriage to the writer Mary Wollstonecraft in 1797, the achievements and influence of both writers, as well as their personal happiness together, seemed likely to extend into the new century. It was not to be. The war with revolutionary France and the rise of a new spirit of patriotic fervour turned opinion against reformers, and it targeted Godwin. Following Wollstonecraft’s death in September 1797 a few days after the birth of their daughter Mary, Godwin published a candid memoir of Wollstonecraft, igniting a propaganda campaign against them both that became increasingly strident. He published a third edition of Political Justice and a second major novel, St. Leon, but the tide was clearly turning. And while he continued writing into old age, he never again achieved the success, nor the financial security, he had enjoyed in the 1790s. Today he is most often referenced as the husband of Mary Wollstonecraft, as the father of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (she wrote Frankenstein and The Last Man), and as the founding father of philosophical anarchism. He also deserves to be remembered as a significant philosopher of education.