Godwin's later novels--
St. Leon (1799),
Fleetwood (1805),
Mandeville (1817),
Cloudesley (1830), and
Deloraine (1833)--do not repeat the achievement of
Caleb Williams, but they bear witness to the humanizing effect on Godwin's thought of his brief marriage to Mary Wollstonecraft, and they bring his theoretical principles to the test of fictional circumstances--often with pessimistic implications.
William Godwin was born on 3 March 1756 in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, the seventh of thirteen children of John Godwin, a Dissenting minister, and Ann (or Anna) Hull Godwin, daughter of a shipowner of King's Lynn, Norfolk. His upbringing was narrowly Calvinistic (he would later recall being reproved by his father for holding a cat in his arms on a Sunday). He was physically weak but intellectually precocious. "What shall I do," he remembered asking as a little boy, "when I have read through all the books that have been written"" He grew up in the midst of the theological disputes that separated Dissenting sects at the period. In 1758 his father took his ministry to Debenham in Suffolk, but when opposed by an Arian minority in his congregation, moved in 1760 to Guestwick near Norwich.
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