Love in the Time of Revolution: Transatlantic Literary Radicalism and Historical Change, 1793-1818

8: The New Man of Feeling

239 8 The New Man of Feeling Like Charles Brockden Brown, William Godwin was struggling to survive as a man of letters in a nation suddenly overrun with speculators, bankers , lawyers, and soldiers. By the early nineteenth century, the eighteenthcentury blend of intellectual, social, and economic speculation uneasily embodied in the person of Gilbert Imlay had fractured. Commerce, which had signified, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “intercourse in the affairs of life,” became strictly economic, the business of exchanging commodities and capital. Intercourse acquired its modern meaning when Thomas Malthus linked it to sexuality; it connoted male penetration of the female body, nothing more. Society became a synonym for public life. Godwin denounced these changes, and not only because he was personally uncomfortable with them. Social commerce was as important to a healthy society as economic commerce. “The genuine wealth of man is leisure, when it meets with a disposition to improve it,” Godwin claimed. “All other riches are of petty and inconsiderable value.” In a just world, “each man’s share of labour would be light, and his portion of leisure would be ample.” Selfish individuals mistaking isolation for autonomy were suddenly the most alarming impediments to natural commerce. The worst of the lot was a “trader or merchant” obsessed with “the desire of gain” from morning to night. He deploys “all the arts of the male coquette; not that he wishes his fair visitor to fall in love with his person, but that he may induce her to take off his goods.” A “supple, fawning, cringing creature, [a] systematic , cold-hearted liar,” he “has the audacity to call himself a man.” A 240 / THE NEW MAN OF FEELING tradesman, in short, was an antisocial creature whose behavior subverted revolution.1 Godwin’s indignation reflected the depth of his alienation. All around him, the revolutionary argument that independent men and women could organize themselves through social commerce was being perverted into a dangerous definition of freedom as the ability to act as one pleased without regard to the interests of others. The problem remained: How did men and women enjoy liberty without infringing on the liberty of others? Literary radicals in the 1790s had offered the dynamic mutuality of friendship turning into love. Godwin persisted in advocating this idea, although with mixed results. The single man of letters who had married Mary Wollstonecraft and attracted attention around the Atlantic would become an awkward husband, an uncomfortable father, and an obscure novelist. His fiction reflected his sense that revolution had gone awry, especially in the emergence of new men whose inability to sustain rational affection was isolating them in prisons of their own devising. It was a fate Godwin hoped to avoid. Unfortunately, his clumsy efforts to find a new life and to be a good father suggest the enormity of the challenge. Love in its myriad forms was never easy, even for one of its most persistent advocates. William in Search of a Wife By early 1798, a few months after the death of Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin was enjoying a life similar to the one he had before meeting her. In addition to attending the theater regularly, he systematically made his way through Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa; Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie; and Ovid’s poetry. He dined with old friends, including Joseph Johnson, Henry Fuseli, George Dyson, Eliza Fenwick, Maria Reveley, and Rebecca Christie, the widow of Thomas Christie, who had died in Surinam in 1796. Godwin’s sister Hannah urged him to reflect on how Wollstonecraft “loved you” and how his love had helped heal her “wounds.” He could look forward to the pleasure of seeing his infant daughter Mary reveal “that she will be as like her poor Mamma as Fanny promises to be—or else like her father.” As was his habit, Godwin rarely referred in his diary to public events. He did not mention the outrage that greeted Memoirs, although he produced a revised version pruned of some of its more controversial statements.Then he com1 . William Godwin, The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature (1797), in Mark Philp et al., eds., Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, 7 vols. (London , 1993), V, 153, 155, 156, 172, 173, 174, 175. THE NEW MAN OF FEELING / 241 pounded the problem by publishing Wollstonecraft’s private correspondence with Imlay.2 Godwin devoted himself to acquiring a new wife. Wollstonecraft had...