Godwin’s Political Justice

REVIEWS 101 GODWIN'S POLITICAL JUSTICE* NEWMAN I. WHITE Few English writers of real influence and intellectual greatness have ever been so completely smeared with neglect and contempt as has William Godwin, the great philosopher in England of the tide of revolutionary thought which found its most active expression in the French Revolution. In his lifetime he was so forgotten during the counter-revolutionary reaction of the early nineteenth century that William Hazlitt could write of him in The Spirit of the Age as if he belonged already to another age, and the youthful Shelley, before becoming his most ardent disciple, could for some time suppose him already dead. Yet he was an important influence on the thought of both Coleridge and Shelley and upon many lesser writers and ardent young men of his time. The "love of approbation and esteem" which Godwin remembered as one of his earliest guiding passions was singularly ill rewarded. His apparently harsh and inconsistent treatment of Shelley brought upon his personal behaviour a contempt shared by Shelley's authorized biographer, Professor Dowden. Mark Twain held him up to boisterous ridicule, and a clever but cruelly unfair article by A. Edward Newton in the Atlantic Monthly helped to confirm the tradition of William Godwin as a shabby and ridiculous philosopher. Scholars who have written of him with less prejudice have too often adopted the superficial assumption that he was a wholly eclectic philosopher who merely synthesized the revolutionary philosophy of eighteenth-century France. Recently there has been a tendency to revalue Godwin more respectfully , as shown in the work of H. N. Brailsford, Middleton Murry, and George Woodcock. This tendency should be greatly strengthened by the present thorough and soundly based volumes of Professor Priestley. The inaccessibility of Godwin's Political Justice has been one of the main reasons why the book has so long been misrepresented. The first service performed by Professor Priestley is to provide a text. Some scholars might have preferred a facsimile reproduction of the first rather than the third edition, on the ground that it was probably more influential, but Professor Priestley follows a sound general practice in representing Godwin by his latest revision. Moreover, the textual notes are so complete that a reader may easily reproduce for himseH any one of Godwin's three editions. He has the complete information for tracing in detail every alteration in Godwin 's text from 1793 through 1798, in case he wishes to supplement the excellent general discussion of these points provided by Professor Priestley. Aside from the detailed annotation and collation, Professor Priestley's elucidation of Political Justice is limited to an introduction of 114 pages in *Enquiry concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness, by WILLIAM GoDWIN; Photographic Facsimile of the Third Edition Corrected, Edited with Variant Reaclings of the First and Second Editions and with a Critical Introduction and Notes, by F. E. L. PRIEsTLEY. 3 vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 1946. Pp. lvi, 463, x, 554, viii, 346 pp. ($12.50} 102 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY Volume III, the purpose of which is "to present a systematic account of Godwin's thought, and to show its significance in relation to his sources and to the main currents of thought of his time." It is a thoroughly organized, hard-packed, and judicious discussion, made much more effective by an objective attitude which eschews all partisan tone. Though he makes it abundantly clear that Godwin has been scandalously misunderstood and misrepresented even by reputable historians of thought, this comes almost as a quiet by-product of developing thoroughly just what Godwin did say. Professor Priestley labours under the same theoretical handicap as all scholars in that for manuscript basis he has had to rely almost entir~ly upon the letters and diary-extracts printed in 1876 in C. Kegan Paul's biography. No collection of Godwin's letters has been published, and his lengthy manuscript journal has been unavailable for over half a century. But the journal contains very little discussion, and so would have been of only slight value to the present work. Otherwise there is virtually no Godwinian literature which Professor Priestley has not...