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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 works published in the early years of the French Revolution: An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Political Justice (1793) and Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794). Nothing in his later moral and political writing--neither the essays in his Enquirer of 1797 nor his long-studied answer to Malthus, Of Population, in 1820--equaled the impact of Political Justice. Referring to it in The Spirit of the Age (1825), William Hazlitt wrote that "no work in our time gave such a blow to the philosophical mind of the country.... Truth, moral truth, it was supposed, had here taken up its abode." Caleb Williams turned the social criticism and philosophical anarchism of Political Justice into novelistic form, producing perhaps the most intriguing blend of ethico-political theory and narrative plotting in English fiction.
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