William St Clair
William St Clair welcomes the publication of William Godwin’s Letters and Diary
The Letters of William Godwin, Volume 1: 1778–1797
By Pamela Clemit (ed)
Oxford University Press 306pp £100 order from our bookshop
William Godwin’s Diary: Reconstructing a Social and Political Culture 1788–1836
By David O’Shaughnessy, Mark Philp, Victoria Myers, James Cummings (eds)
Claire Clairmont, Mary Jane’s Daughter: New Correspondence with Claire’s Father
By Vicki Parslow
Without exception, it is fair to say, every one of William Godwin’s many books was intended not only to impart information but to engage the reader in a debate. Godwin also wrote many letters, often in answer to strangers, with the purpose of sharing experiences in what his age could regard unapologetically as an ongoing search for truth. As Godwin wrote to Shelley (one of the many readers of An Enquiry into Political Justice who had asked to meet him), the life of a thinking man ‘is a series of Retractations’. Since Godwin kept drafts of some letters as he was composing them and made copies of others before he sent them, and given that he and his family later retrieved many from the recipients, the corpus is extraordinarily full, with around 1,200 known to survive.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
This 'jaunty narrative raises fundamental questions about the role of popular history. Should this just be a matter of telling tales, as the general public often seems to think?'
@DrLRoach weighs up Charles Spencer's account of the White Ship Disaster.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/wholl-take-the-helm
'Amis clearly belongs to the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do school of pedagogy. More or less everything he says is demonstrably contradicted by elements of his own work, be they here or elsewhere.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/never-without-a-hitch
'The bar is set high at the outset, and readers are primed to wonder if Mikhail can make his case.'
Does Alan Mikhail's new life of the Sultan Selim I really overturn 'shibboleths that have held sway for a millennium'? Caroline Finkel investigates.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/master-of-the-universe-3