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A Pastoral Romance, From the Ancient British: Godwin's Rewriting of ComuSPamela Clemit Godwin is steadily rising in reputation, both as philosopher and as novelist. Over the last few years several biographies have appeared; his ideas have been analysed; and his best-known works, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) and Caleb Williams (1794), have received considerable scholarly attention.1 Now his post-revolutionary novels are being recognized as the fictions of an intellectual who was impressive in his own right, not merely because ofhis association with Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Yet William Godwin 's early novels are still almost completely neglected. In this context Imogen (1784) is of special interest as the first of Godwin's mature novels , and as a significant addition to the intellectual fiction of the Romantic period. Imogen: A Pastoral Romance, From the Ancient British was the last of three novels produced by Godwin in the winter of 1783 and 1784 and the one over which he took the most trouble.2 The title alone signals 1 Major recent biographies are Don Locke, A Fantasy ofReason: The Life and Thought ofWilliam Godwin (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980); Peter Marshall, William Godwin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984); William St. Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1989). Mark Philp, Godwin's Political Justice (London: Duckworth, 1986), studies Godwin's thought up to 1800. Intelligent appreciations of Caleb Williams include Gary Kelly, 77ie English Jacobin Novel, 1780-1805 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 179-208; Marilyn Butler, "Godwin, Burke, and Caleb Williams," Essays in Criticism 32 (1982) 237-57; Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution (17891820 ) (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 230-39. 2 Godwin, autobiographical note for 1783, Abinger Manuscripts Dep. b. 226/2. I am grateful to EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 3, Number 3, April 1991 218 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Godwin's dissatisfaction with the eighteenth-century prose conventions exploited in the earlier Damon and Delia and Italian Letters, modelled respectively on Smollett and Richardson. Those critics who have recognized Imogen as more than hack work have discussed Godwin's interest in eighteenth-century primitivism as reflected in the Preface, but the novel's most remarkable feature, its construction out of poetic models , has gone practically unnoticed. In particular, Godwin's intriguing use of Milton's "Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle" [Cornus] has not been explored.3 Godwin's conjunction of pastoral romance, political idealism, and topical comment makes Imogen the first expression of that "new and startling" blend of philosophy and fiction to be developed in Caleb Williams* Though allusion to Milton is in itself commonplace in radical fiction and polemical treatises of the period, Godwin's interest in Comus as a model for the renovation of genre is unique. Godwin's early experiment with allegorical modes offers a displaced enactment of theoretical issues which sheds light on a relatively obscure period of his development . In particular, the technical inventiveness of Imogen suggests his independence of the polemical method of other Jacobin novelists, in which ideas are largely superimposed on conventional plots. Instead, he sought to remould literary conventions in order to dramatize his philosophical interests. Godwin's indirect manner of presenting ideas in fiction establishes Imogen as a forerunner of the non-naturalistic, mythopoeic type of intellectual fiction, which he developed in Caleb Williams, St. Leon (1799), and Fleetwood (1805), and which was taken up in the next generation by Mary Shelley and Thomas Love Peacock. The full intellectual resonance of Imogen is apparent only in the context of Godwin's early thought. After leaving Hoxton Dissenting Academy Lord Abinger for permission to quote from the Abinger Collection in the Bodleian Library. Oxford. 3 For discussions of eighteenth-century primitivism, see Jack W. Marken, introduction to William Godwin, Imogen, A Pastoral Romance from the Ancient British (New York: New York Public Library, 1963), and appended critical discussion, esp. Burton R. PoIHn, "Primitivism in Imogen," pp. 1 13-17. References to Imogen are to this edition. See also Locke, p. 26. Critics who mention Godwin's use of Comus include Marken, introduction, p. 12; I. Primer, "Some...

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