The Letters of William Godwin: Volume 3

William Godwin (1756-1836) was one of the leading public intellectuals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: among many other things, a prominent philosopher, novelist, dramatist, historian, educationalist, biographer and publisher. His most famous works - 'An Enquiry concerning Political Justice' (1793) and the novel 'Caleb Williams' (1794) - had a transformative effect on social and political thought and on the development of English fiction. Later and less celebrated writings - and indeed his conversation and correspondence - were enormously influential in a number of other spheres too. He was a pioneering author, publisher and theorist of children's literature; and he engaged in creative dialogue with many of the principal literary figures of his age, notably Coleridge, Hazlitt and the man who would become his son-in-law, Percy Shelley.
Godwin's collected letters are for the first time now being published, by Oxford University Press, in a prestigious and authoritative six-volume edition. Volume III will include all the letters Godwin wrote between 1806 and 1815: approximately 338. In biographical terms, the volume will cover the early years of Godwin's marriage to Mary Jane Clairmont, his second wife and business partner. This was a period of financial difficulty, especially since Godwin had a family of five young children to support (including the two daughters of his first wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, and two of Mary Jane's children from previous relationships), and in 1805 Godwin and his wife founded the 'Juvenile Library', a ground-breaking venture in children's publishing. The earliest children's book that has remained continuously in print was published there - Charles and Mary Lamb's 'Tales from Shakespear' (1807). So too were other landmarks of children's literature, including an experimental comic picture-book 'The Queen of Hearts' (1805), and 'The Swiss Family Robinson' (1814). Godwin himself wrote 'Fables Ancient and Modern' (1805) and 'The Pantheon, or Ancient History of the Gods of Greece and Rome' (1806). Taken together with his 'Bible Stories' (1802), these represent a complete repackaging of children's traditional reading materials, revised according to Godwin's rational but strikingly modern pedagogical ideas. His letters document the development of Godwin's educational thinking, but also shed rare light on the logistics of publishing in the period. Revealing the minutiae of the business, the letters will be hugely important for scholars of publishing history, and most especially for those interested in the development of children's literature as an independent sector of print culture.
Letters towards the end of Volume III trace the implosion of Godwin's family. Godwin began corresponding with his would-be disciple Shelley in 1812, further expounding his political ideas and seeking to moderate Shelley's radicalism. In 1814, Shelley eloped with Godwin's daughter Mary (later author of 'Frankenstein'). Godwin's stepdaughter Jane (Claire) Clairmont, later to be Lord Byron's lover, went with them. By 1816, another stepdaughter, Fanny, had committed suicide, as had Shelley's first wife, allowing Shelley and Mary to marry, and thus Godwin's reconciliation with him.
Godwin's letters will show us many things: about publishing, education, sociability, patronage, intellectual and cultural life and personal relationships in the Romantic-era. They demonstrate that he remained at the centre of a complex and ever-changing network of many of the most important writers, artists and thinkers working both in Britain and abroad. His letters engage with new ideas and are often the site of intellectual argument, as well as personal controversies. They demonstrate that Godwin's commitment to political and social reform was by no means extinguished after the widespread attacks on him in the 1790s. The letters will be a remarkable source for a great many researchers working on a huge range of subjects.

The major beneficiaries of 'The Letters of William Godwin' will be scholars working within but also outside universities on Romantic-era history, politics, literature, culture and biography. This edition will become the standard reference work, and, as such, will inform the many new works which will doubtless continue to investigate the events and lives covered by Volume III. New works, often written for a general audience, appears every year about the 'tangled lives' of Godwin, his daughter Mary, her husband Percy Shelley and others associated figures (most recently Daisy Hay's Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives, 2010). The edition will therefore be of benefit to the UK's publishing and cultural heritage industries - and not only Oxford University Press who will be publishing it.
Those setting up exhibitions, and even cultural events, dedicated to members of the Godwin circle will certainly benefit from this new edition of the letters. Again, such events are frequent: in 2010 an exhibition called 'Shelley's Ghost: Reshaping the Image of a Literary Family' opened at the Bodleian Library, Oxford while Bournemouth held a Mary Shelley Festival. In 2011 a new adaptation of her Frankenstein will be produced at the National Theatre in London. Very directly, the research behind the edition will be of specific benefit to those institutions which hold Godwin's letters and other manuscript material, notably the Bodleian Library in Oxford, the National Library of Scotland, the British Library and the New York Public Library.
Given the subjects Godwin touches on in his 1806-1815 letters, the constituency of individual users is vast. Many will be particularly fascinated by the Juvenile Library, established by Godwin and his wife Mary Jane in 1805. Godwin's letters have the potential to reveal an enormous amount about how children's literature came to be established as a separate and commercially viable commodity, something of enormous interest to the many individual and institutional collectors of early children's books. In the latter category is Seven Stories: the Centre for the Children's Book, recognised as the national archive for children's literature. The research conducted for this project will help to establish best practice for the cataloguing, presentation and study of their own substantial archives of publishers' records. Seven Stories will be hosting an event associated with this AHRC Fellowship.
As set out in the 'Pathways to Impact' document, some of the results of the research conducted for this project will be made available using the new 'Turning Pages' technology being designed by the Wordsworth Trust at Dove Cottage. Using Godwin's letters as a test case will help the Trust to develop the technology, and will assist in establishing a new partnership between the charity and the university sector. The same can be said for the links that the Fellowship will establish between Newcastle University's School of English and two other charities based in the north of England, Newcastle's Literary and Philosophical Society and Seven Stories. One further group of users of the research will be the A-level students invited to hear about the Godwin letters project, and to use the Turning Pages technology, at an event designed to introduce school children to what research in literature can involve.