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

Epilogue: “The Subject Was of Love,”

329 E P I L O G U E ❦ “The Subject Was of Love” In 1825, forty-seven-year-old William Hazlitt published a collection of character sketches intended to reveal The Spirit of the Age.The names of several of his subjects—Jeremy Bentham, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Walter Scott, Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, and Thomas Malthus—remain familiar to us. Most, however, have grown dim in memory, or vanished altogether. Some were disappearing while they still breathed. Preeminent in this regard was William Godwin. In the 1790s, Hazlitt claimed, “No one was more talked of, more looked up to, more sought after”than Godwin. His worksPolitical Justice and CalebWilliams provoked discussion all over the North Atlantic world; his wife was the author of several controversial books, including, most famously, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; and his “New Philosophy” had inspired admiration and outrage in equal measure. Now Godwin was “to all ordinary intents and purposes dead and buried.” Hazlitt did not mention that Godwin’s daughter and his recently deceased son-in-law were eclipsing him in reputation . In any case, the diffident radical had become “as easy as an old glove,” a sentimental old man whose apparent preference for romancing the past over engaging the present had made him complicit in his own obscurity. Having “survived most of the celebrated persons with whom he [had] lived in habits of intimacy,” Godwin dwelt “with peculiar delight on a day passed at John Kemble’s in company with Mr Sheridan, Mr Curran, Mrs Wolstonecraft and Mrs Inchbald, when the conversation took a most animated turn and the subject was of Love.” The world Godwin remembered was a world lost forever.1 1. William Hazlitt, “William Godwin,” in Hazlitt,The Spirit of the Age; or, Contemporary Portraits (1825), in DuncanWu, ed.,The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt, 9 vols. (London, 1998), 330 / EPILOGUE What had happened to Godwin and, by extension, to the radical cause he represented? In part, Hazlitt blamed an unreasonable idealism.Godwin had conceived too nobly of his fellows (the most unpardonable crime against them, for there is nothing that annoys our self-love so much as being complimented on imaginary achievements, to which we are VII, 87, 97. See, among others, Kevin Gilmartin, “Hazlitt’s Visionary London,” in Heather Glen and Paul Hamilton, eds., Repossessing the Romantic Past (Cambridge, 2006), 40–62. See Duncan Wu, William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man (Oxford, 2008). Figure 14. William Godwin. By Henry William Pickersgill. Oil on canvas, feigned oval, 1830. © National Portrait Gallery, London “THE SUBJECT WAS OF LOVE” / 331 wholly unequal)—he raised the standard of morality above the reach of humanity, and by directing virtue to the most airy and romantic heights, made her path dangerous, solitary, and impracticable. Human nature, it seemed, had defeated Godwin and company’s dreams, just as it had undone the romance of Wollstonecraft and Imlay. The outcome was predictable because the enterprise was doomed from the start. Yet, Hazlitt insisted, Godwin’s eclipse also reflected a major cultural transformation that accompanied a reaction against the French Revolution and the impact of two decades of global war. The British no longer recognized , let alone honored, the radical dimension of Godwin’s philosophy. The habits of intimacy, the animated conversations, and the subject of love that had constituted a revolutionary agenda in the 1790s were becoming the markers of domesticity in the 1820s. A growing middle class ensconced in private homes, energized by evangelical Christianity, and bound together by affection normalized radical concepts of friendship between women and men and domesticated romantic love.2 Hazlitt’s interest in “the subject of love” was profoundly personal. Born in Maidstone, Kent, in 1788 to a Unitarian minister and his wife, he had dabbled in religion, art, poetry, and philosophy before he found his vocation as an essayist in the 1810s. He had known many of the radical figures of the late eighteenth century and had traveled widely in Europe. He had also found dealing with women difficult, preferring the company of prostitutes and working women. In 1808, he married a middle-class woman with whom he had three sons, two of whom died in childbirth; but the couple was never really in love, and they drifted apart. While living alone in London in 1820, Hazlitt became obsessed with Sarah Walker, the nineteen-year-old daughter of his landlord. It was an all...