Abstract
William Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice was published in February 1793, the same month in which France and England declared war on each other, and only a matter of weeks after Louis XVI was beheaded. Three years after its commencement the French Revolution had demonstrated to the English ruling classes the precariousness of their privilege, and the need to police attempts within Britain to mobilize non-propertied classes in support of an extended franchise and parliamentary reform. By this time Edmund Burke’s histrionic representation of the Revolution and of the British reformers sympathetic to it seemed vindicated in the eyes of the Pitt administration, which saw organizations like the London Corresponding Society (LCS) as potentially violent threats to property and domestic stability.1 In a climate marked by increasing violence in France, and official repression of so-called Jacobin political culture in Britain, Godwin’s Enquiry maintains a faith in the possibility of political enlightenment that seems at odds with the realities of its day. This faith, moreover, sits oddly with Godwin’s own pessimism in the midst of forces on both sides of the political spectrum that seemed to portend growing class polarization and escalating conflict.
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Notes
See E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Random House, 1964), pp. 17–185, and Albert Goodwin’s The Friends of Liberty: the English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979) for detailed accounts of the political climate of the 1790s.
Kristen Leaver, ‘Pursuing Conversations: Caleb Williams and the Romantic Construction of the Reader’, Studies in Romanticism, vol. 33 (Winter 1994) p. 592. My argument in the following chapter takes up many of the issues already discussed by Leaver. Whereas Leaver, however, argues that Godwin ultimately retreats into a ‘vision of literature as a private, inner world’, I want to suggest that his work, by examining the always-already mediated nature of this retreat, can be read back another way as explication of the impediments to structurally differentiated forms of political life.
John Reeve’s Association for Preserving Liberty and Property Against Republicans and Levellers, for example.
Godwin’s s critique of Thelwall and the LCS is made explicit in his Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr. Pitt’s Bills (see discussion below). See Don Locke, A Fantasy of Reason: The Life and Thought of William Godwin (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980) pp. 100–104, for a discussion of Godwin’s turbulent relationship with Thelwall. Critical literature on Godwin naturally enough situates the tensions I’m discussing here in the broader context of political radicalism in the 1790s, though often failing to grasp that what is at stake in Godwin’s relationship to radical activism is not a doctrinaire political difference. As Locke points out, Godwin and radical activists like Thelwall basically shared the same political beliefs. See Locke, p. 65. Godwin questioned not the doctrines, but the forms of interactive discursive praxis he saw embodied in corresponding societies, popular political meetings and radical journalism. Garrett A. Sullivan’s essay “‘A Story to be Hastily Gobbled Up”: Caleb Williams and Print Culture’, Studies in Romanticism, vol. 32, no. 3 (Fall 1993) pp. 323–37, makes this very point, focusing on the forms of discursive production embodied in radical culture, and Godwin’s anxiety regarding these. Sullivan argues that Godwin’s s rejection of Jacobin print-culture and public oration was the result of an elitism that pitted established forms of public interaction, embodied by Addison and Steele’s writing and located in the coffee house, against forms of interaction linked to, on the one hand, the mass circulation of textual commodities, and, on the other, to polyphonous forms of public discourse embodied in popular journals.
It is worth pointing out that such explicit critiques ot Thelwall and the LCS may have also been strategic attempts by Godwin to exempt himself from official censure while still being critical of the government.
Godwin, Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr. Pitt’s Bills, Concerning Treasonable and Seditious Practices and Unlawful Assemblies (London, 1795) p. 19.
See, for example, ‘The Rise, Progress and Effects of Jacobinism’, in The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, which argued that the efficacy and popularity of Paine’s Rights of Man resided in its solicitation of ‘vulgar
and undistinguishing minds’, and its appeals to the vanity of labouring classes which were thus flattered into political affiliations with the prospect of their own empowerment. See The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, or, Monthly Political and Literary Censor, 3 vol. (London, 1798–99) vol. 3, pp. 95–6. See also T. J. Mathias’s The Pursuits of Literature (London, 1797), which similarly links Jacobin political philosophy to print-capitalism.
Godwin, Considerations, p. 75.
Claudia L. Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender and Sentimentality in the 1790s: Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) pp. 1–14.
Eric Rothstein gives a detailed account of the allusions to Richardson in Godwin’s novel. See Rothstein, Systems of Order and Inquiry in Later Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Berkeley: University California Press, 1975) pp. 211–12. For an elaboration on Falkland as a representation of Burke, see James T. Boulton, The Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963) pp. 226–32.
We see this reversal, archetypally, in the image of the captive that Yorick conjures in Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986) pp. 97–8. For examples of radical textual production that sentimentalize the scene of incarceration, see John Thelwall’s Poems Written in Close Confinement in the Tower and Newgate, Under a Charge of High Treason (London, 1795) and Charles Piggott’s preface to his A Political Dictionary (London, 1795).
See James Thompson, ‘Surveillance in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams’, in Gothic Fictions: Prohibition/Transgression, ed. Kenneth Graham (New York: AMS, 1989) pp. 173–98.
Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 213.
John Fielding, ‘Circular of October 19, 1772’, reprinted in Leon Radzinowicz, A History of English Criminal Law and its Administration from 1750, vol. 3 (New York: Macmillan, 1957) p. 482.
The same opposition between private space, presided over by a maternal figure, and hostile public structures will organize Godwiri s next novel, St Leon, in which the pathologies of the public sphere will be in part identified with the accumulation of capital, represented allegorically in the philosopher’s stone.
See John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), chapters 1, 2 and 6 especially.
Gary Handwerk, ‘Of Caleb’s Guilt and Godwin’s Truth: Ideology and Ethics in Caleb Williams’, ELH, vol. 60, no. 4 (Winter 1993) pp. 949–50.
Godwin, The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature (London, 1797) p. 136. The significance of this essay and the terms it sets out have been discussed initially by David McCracken in ‘Godwin’s Literary Theory: the Alliance Between Fiction and Political Philosophy’, Philological Quarterly, vol. 49, no. 1 (1970) pp. 113–33, and more recently as the basis of Tilottama Rajan’s metafictional reading of Godwin’s work. Rajan describes the moral as ‘the authoritarian intention’ of a work, while the tendency is ‘an intersubjective and historically developing significance, generated by the productive interaction of intention and its representation and subsequently of the text and its reading’. See ‘Wollstonecraft and Godwin: Reading the Secrets of the Political Novel’, Studies in Romanticism, vol. 27, no. 2 (Summer 1988) p. 224.
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© 1999 Andrew McCann
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McCann, A. (1999). William Godwin and the Pathological Public Sphere: Theorizing Communicative Action in the 1790s. In: Cultural Politics in the 1790s. Romanticism In Perspective: Texts, Cultures, Histories. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230376977_3
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