Puppets, Waxworks, and a Wooden Dramatis Personae: Eighteenth-Century Material Culture and Philosophical History in William Godwin’s Fleetwood

William Godwin’s novel Fleetwood, or The New Man of Feeling (1805) is a philosophical history, crafted through distinctively eighteenth-century material objects. Two extraordinary episodes underpin this history of one individual’s mind and of the times that shaped it, and demonstrate how material objects contribute to the personal and political nature of narratives of the self. First, a human-sized puppet is used in a fatal prank among Oxford undergraduates; second, Fleetwood deliriously destroys a waxwork image of his wife. Where Godwin’s contemporaries found these scenes too outré for a novel that claimed verisimilitude, I argue that their materialism is crucial to Fleetwood ’s examination of eighteenth-century institutions. Because examining material culture was a typical eighteenth-century historiographical strategy, Godwin is able to write as though in the era that he describes and with the wisdom of hindsight from 1805. Foregrounding the material objects of puppet and waxwork illuminates the satirical, educational, medical, sexual, and theatrical discourses that imbue Fleetwood’s material artifacts and that shape the novel’s setting.