Scepticism and Experience in the Educational Writing of William Godwin Richard Gough Thomas A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the Manchester Metropolitan University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English Manchester Metropolitan University March 2015 2 Abstract This thesis focuses on the educational thought of William Godwin (1756-1836) and how it is expressed through his essays and fiction. Attention here focuses on the Account of the Seminary (1783), The Enquirer (1797), and the preface to Bible Stories (1803). Godwin’s key argument is that the imagination must be developed through reading. In this, Godwin saw the potential for subsequent generations to live wiser and happier lives than their predecessors, with reading offering a place for young people to learn without being forced to conform to the models offered by previous generations under the authority Godwin saw as inherent to conventional pedagogy. This thesis argues that Godwin’s education writing represents the convergence of the author’s epistemology, his passion for literature, and his vision of the continuous improvement of humanity. Godwin’s ideas are rooted in a profoundly sceptical theory of knowledge, and this rejection of certainty contributes both to Godwin’s principled rejection of authority and his acknowledgement of its utility in education. The author’s search for an ethical solution to this conflict is seen in the contrast between his rejection of Rousseau’s Émile (1762) and his affection for Fénelon’s Telemachus (1699), culminating in his own novel Fleetwood (1805). Godwin’s writing for children, exemplified by his Fables Ancient and Modern (1805), shows the author attempting to create texts that teach children to think for themselves – books that reject the mantle of literary authority. 3 4 Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................... 3 Contents ............................................................................................................. 5 Acknowledgements ............................................................................................. 7 Introduction ......................................................................................................... 9 Chapter I: Godwin as Sceptic............................................................................ 27 Chapter II: Godwin as an Educational Thinker .................................................. 47 Chapter III: Reading, Interpretation and ‘Minerva Revealed’ ............................ 73 Chapter IV: The Illusion of Freedom, the Fantasy of Submission and the Exercise of Private Judgment ........................................................................... 95 Chapter V: Fleetwood: Empathy and Failure .................................................. 115 Chapter VI: Imagination and the Independent Thinker: Godwin’s Writing for Children and Young People ............................................................................ 137 Conclusion ...................................................................................................... 165 Primary Bibliography ....................................................................................... 183 Secondary Bibliography .................................................................................. 187 5 6 Acknowledgements This thesis would not have been possible without the scholarly guidance of Dr. Adam Rounce and Professor Sue Zlosnik, and the erudite wisdom and professional support of Dr. David Miller (who picked up the gauntlet when it was offered). The advice of Professors Matthew Grenby, Jon Mee and Angela Wright has been welcome and appreciated. The collegiality of Dr. Mark Towsey and Dr. Amber Regis has been similarly valued. Without the help of Deborah Bown and Beverley Thomson to navigate the administrative rocks and shoals of life as a research student, my research would have run aground some years ago. The most personal note of all is reserved for my parents (who got me started) and to Jen (who carried me over the finish line). 7 8 Introduction Criticism regarding the literature, life and thought of William Godwin has experienced a renaissance in recent years. In his influential 1984 biography of the author, Peter Marshall was able to describe the weight of commentary on Godwin as ‘uneven’, and Godwin’s deposited papers in the Abinger collection as ‘largely untapped’ (Pamela Clemit would describe them as still ‘unmapped’ two decades later).1 In contrast, the twenty-first century has seen a wealth of criticism. The contemporary discussion has been shaped by a number of seminal works that post-date Marshall’s assertion, amongst them Mark Philp’s Godwin’s Political Justice (1986) and Clemit’s The Godwinian Novel (1993) and the subsequent work of both those scholars (with other collaborators) in the organisation and publication of Godwin’s works, letters, and meticulous diaries has shed considerable new light on the field. This study is greatly indebted to those resources, but it also exists in reaction to the particular focus within Godwin criticism that the tireless work of these scholars has encouraged. On one hand, discussion of Godwin as a philosopher and political theorist has been dominated by Philp’s reading of Political Justice (across its revisions) as a text principally concerned with the morality of private judgment and the relation of this to the Dissenting culture of the period.2 On the other, consideration of Godwin as a novelist is often centred on Caleb Williams (1794) or St. Leon (1799) in relation to Political Justice (1793-8),3 or to the author’s relationship with Wollstonecraft (a thesis that is sometimes informed by the work of Mitzi Myers, in addition to the scholars already named).4 Scholarship is well-served with regard to Godwin’s 1 Peter H. Marshall, William Godwin (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1984). p.3 and Pamela Clemit, ‘William Godwin’s Papers in the Abinger Deposit: An Unmapped Country’, Bodleian Library Record, 18 (2004), 253–63. 2 We see examples of this in Robert Lamb, “Was William Godwin a Utilitarian?,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 70 (2008), 119–41; Peter Howell, “Godwin, Contractarianism, and the Political Dead End of Empiricism,” Eighteenth Century Life, 28 (2004); and Chris Jones, Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the 1790s (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). 3 Evan Radcliffe, 'Godwin from ‘Metaphysician’ to Novelist: Political Justice, Caleb Williams, and the Tension between Philosophical Argument and Narrative,' Modern Philology, 97 (2000), 528– 53; Gary Handwerk, “Of Caleb’s Guilt and Godwin's Truth: Ideology and Ethics in Caleb Williams,” ELH, 60 (1993), 939–60; and Ingrid Horrocks, “More Than A Gravestone: Caleb Williams, Udolpho, and the Politics of the Gothic,” Studies in the Novel, 39 (2007), 31–47. 4 Mitzi Myers, ‘Godwin’s Memoirs of Wollstonecraft: The Shaping of Self and Subject’, Studies in Romanticism, 20 (1981), 299–316; Mitzi Myers, ‘Unfinished Business: Wollstonecraft’s Maria’, The Wordsworth Circle, 11 (1980), 107–14. See also Louise Joy, ‘St. Leon and the Culture of the work of the 1790s, and this study was quickly shaped by a desire to explore the writing of the author’s ‘middle period’. Accounts of Godwin’s later career have historically been narratives of retreat. The author’s contemporary critics sneered at the alleged contradictions to the doctrine of Political Justice found in other works.5 Late nineteenth and early twentieth- century commentators took Godwin’s admonishment of Percy Shelley’s radical pamphleteering and break with social conformity, revealed in Charles Kegan Paul’s biography (1876), as evidence that his philosophical convictions were only weakly held.6 There is a convincing case against this. Philp persuasively argues that Godwin’s commitment to private judgment is consistent throughout his mature work, though his positions on other matters are not always consistent.7 The picture of the author as a fair-weather friend of reform, advanced by Isaac Kramnick, is at odds with the tone and content of some of Godwin’s significant later works.8 Kramnick’s position was criticised vigorously by John P. Clark who, alongside Don Locke (though Locke also sees ‘Godwin in retreat’), prompted a gradual re-evaluation of Godwin amongst political philosophers.9 Literary critics and intellectual historians of recent years have done much to address the narrative of retreat advanced in late nineteenth-century criticism. This thesis will participate in an ongoing critical discussion regarding the literary, philosophical and educational significance of The Enquirer, a debate with its origin frequently attributed to David McCracken’s essay ‘Godwin’s Literary Theory: The Alliance between Fiction and Political Philosophy’ (1970) and continuing in the work of Heart’, History of European Ideas, 33 (2007), 40–53; Ian Ward, ‘A Man of Feelings: William Godwin’s Romantic Embrace’, Law and Literature, 17 (2005), 21–46. 5 ‘…it is necessary to state that the present collection of essays [The Enquirer] are materially different from his Political Justice. The boldness and even the degree of dogmatism with which some of his schemes of innovation were advanced, are in this publication very properly avoided…’ Critical Review, S2 20 (1797), 58 in Kenneth W. Graham, William Godwin Reviewed: A Reception History, 1783-1834 (New York: AMS Press, 2001). See also the British