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“... and so liable to insult, which she got, and fended off for herself. Her father, the Micawberish William Godwin, was unlikely to be able to assist her once she reached London; he had grown accustomed to the bounty of his son-in-law without any prospect of repaying it. (In one of her letters Mary loyally urges a correspondent to remember to inscribe ...”

“... Revolution in France, and Hitchens tells us that among others who wrote replies to Burke … was William Godwin, which he wasn’t. He says that, unlike Paine, Wollstonecraft advocated votes for women, which she didn’t. Paine himself, Hitchens says, was not discouraged from writing Part One of Rights of Man by the rough treatment he received at the ...”

“... about Mansfield Park’s view of its own heroine. If we did not know that industrial imagery in William Blake’s work generally carries a negative charge, it would be harder to argue that the speaker of the ‘Tyger’ poem is not Blake himself, a point highly relevant to the work’s meaning. On the other hand, if we discovered that ...”

“... though also personally loyal to Harriet, he advised Shelley, on Harriet’s suicide, to marry Mary Godwin without delay. Shelley made him his business agent in the same period, and the annual pension of £120 this brought him, along with the creative energy he drew from the Shelley circle, allowed him to find his feet, in particular as a satirist. Two of ...”

“... Crime is largely an activity of the poor, partly because the rich usually decide what crime is – William Godwin defined crime as ‘those offences which the wealthier part of the community have no temptation to commit’ – and partly because of the social conditions under which they live. In the 18th century those conditions were so bad that the ...”

“... the reasons they gave for their alarm. It was pretended that the LCS was armed, and comprised, as William Pitt expressed it, a ‘Jacobin army’, but its members taken together seem to have owned fewer weapons than decorated the walls of an average country house. At the treason trials, the law officers claimed that the LCS was leading a plot to depose the ...”

“... the Utilitarians, when we think of the period as an era of freedom. There is the great anarchist William Godwin, whose treasured insight it was that our impulses are the artefacts of society and who didn’t hesitate to carry that insight into the sexual domain. His feminist partner Mary Wollstonecraft applied the same thought to women’s sexual ...”

“... productions written for the occasion in a distinctly Pickwickian manner. Its members included William Godwin junior, son of the political philosopher by his second wife, whose account of the origins of Shakespeare’s genius, a poem called ‘Olympian Mulberry Leaves; or, The Offerings of the Gods to Shakespear’, is every bit as Gothic as anything ...”

“... John Fenwick, an Irish patriot and member of the London Corresponding Society, became friends with William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft around the time of the French Revolution. One of the few – haunting – pieces of biographical information we have about Fenwick, indeed, is that she was present at the birth of Wollstonecraft’s daughter – the ...”

“... in the hollow of His hand’. But to make him popular and influential in the England of William III, the Ludlow of the memoirs was largely stripped of his religion and made a secular figure. The memoirs, Worden points out, transformed Ludlow from a saint into a patriot. Algernon Sidney was another Roundhead pressed into service as a radical Whig ...”

“... by the 19th-century forgers were more sophisticated, though less celebrated, than those with which William Henry Ireland in the previous century had deceived James Boswell and many others, though not the great Shakespearean Edmond Malone (himself guilty of tampering with manuscripts). The men of this new age were scholars, working in a tradition often said to ...”

“... the surplus population’. But Malthus was not what Wilson supposes: he criticised utopians like William Godwin for ignoring the risks of untrammelled population growth, but rather than advocating acquiescence in death by famine, he insisted that ‘sufficient yet remains to be done … to animate us to the most unremitted exertion.’ Wilson is ...”

“... high’ (there were five, and for the others you’ll have to read her piece) was that of William Godwin’s Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, published in 1794. Hazlitt would have agreed. ‘We conceive no one ever began Caleb Williams that did not read it through,’ he declared in 1825. Here, as a test, are the opening ...”

“... and always a domineering presence in the dining room. One friend of Johnson’s from Liverpool, William Roscoe, enjoyed the conversational rough and tumble more than his wife, Jane, who resented having to tiptoe round Fuseli’s vanity and did not think that his ‘merit as an artist’ was enough to justify his behaviour. For Johnson, who was often ...”

“... while at Cambridge and consequently gave up his original plan of a career in the Church, also knew William Godwin and Coleridge. George, the only one of the brothers whose portrait survives, has a look of the latter about him with his long hair and slightly abstracted gaze. All the brothers travelled widely and spoke and read several languages. When they ...”