Between Individual and General History: Godwin’s Seventeenth-Century Texts

Abstract

From early in his career Godwin was involved in writing a world-history in bits and pieces, unconcluded rather than totalized, because he viewed it through the optics of genres as different as novels, children’s books, and histories. But he was particularly interested in the period of the Stuarts and the English Revolution as one that opened up, in ways parallel to his own time, “the unavailability” to Britain of “its own revolutionary moment.” This essay argues that if Political Justice and Caleb Williams form a textual pair in which the latter complicates the former’s utopianism, a similarly doubled and doubled-back relationship exists between Mandeville (1817) and The History of the Commonwealth (1824-1828). I begin by sketching Godwin’s various forays into history, and explore the critical-dialectical apparatus he constructs in his essay “Of History and Romance.” Godwin’s multi-genre historical corpus forms what Deleuze and Guattari call a “burrow” or “rhizome” with “multiple entrances” that have “rules of usage” and connect in different ways, thus allowing the “map of the rhizome” to be “modified” by the point at which one enters it. “Of History and Romance, I suggest, is also just such a burrow whose overlapping and mutually deconstructing binaries give us a variety of terms through which to consider history. Most significantly, though the essay begins by privileging individual over “general” history, it ends by seeing a value in a history that is not total but general history as Foucault uses the word to describe a “grey and meticulous” traversal of differences and contingencies. Building on the terms of “Of History and Romance,” the remainder of the essay looks at how Mandeville and The History of the Commonwealth stage this traumatic and promissory period in England’s past in two different series: general and individual history, prose and literature. On the one hand, The History of the Commonwealth opens the story of a minor character who never emerges from the closet of his psyche into a series of events with a wider and longer horizon. On the other hand, in the background of Mandeville’s story is another minor history: what Christopher Hill calls the “third culture” of religious sectarianism, which brings to light a body of ideas and an emotional register missed by progressive histories like Thelwall’s or even Godwin’s History of the Commonwealth. It is through this minor history that the unfinished project of political justice also emerges, warped and dis-figured by fanaticism, yet for that reason persisting beyond its normalization and betrayal by the more straightforward conflict of King and Parliament co-opted by the career of Cromwell. As he moved between Enlightenment prose and Romantic literature, Godwin became increasingly interested in fanaticism but in the secular form of misanthropy as something not yet made good that pushes its essence forward. It is this fanaticism of character in Mandeville which, despite the failure of the English Revolution and his maladroit uprising against the union of Clifford and Henrietta as a figure for the Restoration, gives a particular urgency to the unfinished project of deconstruction with which the novel’s ending leaves us.