Almighty Godwin

Letters

Vol. 11 No. 20 · 26 October 1989

From Brian Stone

Paul Foot reiterates the tiresome left-wing myth ‘that England declared war on Revolutionary France’ (LRB, 28 September) when writing on The Godwins and the Shelleys. Revolutionary France declared war on Great Britain on 1 February 1793; she declared war on the Dutch Republic at the same time.

Brian Stone
London W8

Vol. 11 No. 21 · 9 November 1989

From Maurice Hindle

Paul Foot is an excellent investigative reporter, but the numerous factual errors contained in his review of William St Clair’s The Godwins and the Shelleys (LRB, 28 September) shows that a rigorous approach deserts him when it comes to tackling literary criticism and history.

Godwin was not writing Political Justice ‘by 1789’ as Mr Foot says, for he only began it in September 1791. It was in the autumn of this year too that he met Mary Wollstonecraft for the first time and not, as Mr Foot states, in 1792. It is understandable how Godwin could have misspelt her unusual name when recording it in his diary along with those of others he had met at Joseph Johnson’s table that November evening. But one wonders what Godwin’s friend Thomas Holcraft has done to deserve having his name misspelt (twice) as Holcraft. We are then told that when another friend of Godwin’s, the leading LCS theorist Joseph Gerrald, was convicted for sedition, he was ‘promptly despatched to Botany Bay, where he died within a year’. Gerrald certainly was transported and did die within a year of his arrival at Botany Bay, but his ‘despatch’ from England was hardly ‘prompt’. Convicted in March 1794, he spent over a year in Newgate prison being visited by and giving dinners for visitors such as Godwin, Horne Tooke, Amelia Alderson and Thelwall, before being finally transported in May 1795. Mr Foot says that from 1797 onwards Godwin found himself ‘deserted by former allies and benefactors, James Mackintosh, Thomas Wedgewood, Samuel Parr’. Two out of three correct, here. If Foot cares to consult page 271 of St Clair’s book, he will find that, far from deserting him, Tom Wedgewood was still gladly lending Godwin money in 1804, indeed, asking him to consider him as his friend ‘in every honourable sense of the word’. To conclude this list of factual errors, it is interesting to note how when he comes to Godwin’s novel Caleb Williams, we find Mr Foot promoting the character of Falkland from the status of squire to that of ‘Lord’. One wonders whether this has its source in the ultraleftist tendency to lump all ‘tyrants’ together.

This tendency certainly comes to dominate the second half of the review, which is devoted to defending the redness of Paul Foot’s beloved Red Shelley against what he conceives to be St Clair’s ‘Whiggish’ disapproval of his hero. Unfortunately, such defensiveness brings with it blunders that complement only too well the solecisms of the first half. To take just two of these, which occur when Mr Foot seeks to defend Shelley against St Clair’s assertions that the poet was a ‘spoilt young man’, and that he ‘never liked history’. We are told that he was not spoilt because he was ‘cut off from his family’s fortune as soon as he was expelled from Oxford’. Yet a few sentences further on Mr Foot informs us that Shelley was generous, especially to Godwin, ‘to whom he gave thousands of pounds for nothing’. How can a man without a fortune give away thousands of pounds? But it is with Mr Foot’s riposte to the charge concerning Shelley’s alleged dislike of history where I believe we find the effects of his ideological stance most neatly encapsulated. Shelley’s pamphlet ‘A Philosophical View of Reform’, Mr Foot’s argument runs, ‘starts with a brilliant short history of the world and its culture which could hardly have come from a history-hater’. Really? It seems to me like pretty good confirmation of St Clair’s point.

Maurice Hindle
London N1

From Editors, ‘London Review’

We are bound to note that Mr Hindle misspells the name Wedgwood (twice).

Editors, ‘London Review’