Over a writing life of more than fifty years William Godwin produced a huge body of work, including histories, biographies, pamphlets, treatises, memoirs, plays, children's books, essays, and novels. His reputation, however, has always rested on two...

A protean intellectual, William Godwin enjoyed a career that reflects in microcosm the changing face of literature, society, and politics in England from the onset of the French Revolution to the end of the Romantic age (1789-1832). The prophet of a...

For about a decade after the publication of his treatise on philosophical anarchism, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Political Justice, and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness (1793), William Godwin enjoyed the kind of notoriety...

William Godwin was a philosopher, an educationalist, a moralist, a biographer, a historian, a novelist, and a dramatist. His versatility led William Hazlitt to describe him in Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819) as "a sort of phenomenon in the...

It was William Godwin's fate to rise suddenly to fame as a radical philosopher at the end of the eighteenth century and then to plunge almost as rapidly into opprobrium and neglect. Brought to public attention and approval by his daring concepts of...

Regarded by some of his contemporaries as a dangerous radical and by others as a prophetic visionary, the anarchist William Godwin had a profound effect on British liberalism and, through his son-in-law, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, on the...

Although William Godwin is a significant literary figure in his own right, the following essay focuses on the literary collaboration of Godwin and his wife Mary Godwin. William Godwin and his second wife, Mary Jane Clairmont Godwin, made a lasting...

William Godwin was a controversial British thinker and philosopher whose radical and anarchistic beliefs reflected the idea that all monarchies were "unavoidably corrupt" and that no person should have power over another. He objected to most social...

The English political theorist and writer William Godwin (1756-1836) was a libertarian anarchist and utopian proponent of a natural, rational, secular society. William Godwin, son of an Independent minister, was born on March 3, 1756, at Wisbeck,...