William Godwin and the Puritan Legacy

Abstract

Trained from a young age for the Nonconformist ministry, it is unsurprising that the magnum opus of radical philosopher William Godwin (1756-1836), Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), was indebted to the culture of Rational Dissent. The crucial moment in the formation of Rational Dissent – and that of English Protestant Nonconformity more generally – was, of course, the Civil War period of the 1640s and 1650s. Yet it was not until 1815, after a decade of mostly pseudonymous writing in works of biography, fiction, and history, that Godwin began to address directly this formative period in Dissenting history. It was to prove his central preoccupation over the next 15 years. With a special focus on the novel Mandeville: A Tale of the Seventeenth Century in England (1817) and the four volume History of the Commonwealth of England (1824-28), this essay explores Godwin’s ongoing engagement with his (and Britain’s) Puritan heritage across a period of immense political and discursive change. In bequeathing tendencies both to intellectual and moral autonomy and to emotional and social detachment, Puritanism is shown to underpin the essential tensions in Godwinian philosophy, tensions most precisely delineated, if not resolved, in the genres of fiction and history.