The Godwins and the Shelleys:

...Clair, plunges into the complexities of the London publishing world, the debating societies, radical clubs, and the symbiotic relations between debtors and creditors with the passion for detail befitting an official in her Majesty's Treasury...

...Like many others before him, he saw his ideas destroyed by distortion and misappropriation...

...His biographer, William St...

...Like many critics, Godwin was more effective in describing societies' faults than in his prescriptions...

...Clair's bravura treatment as a giant of a man-a hero indeed...

...With the zeal of the Evangelical preacher, which he had once been, he lashed out at Byron, the father of his illegitimate grandchild...

...Through raising five highly individual children, three of whom were not related by blood, he found no evidence for a tabula rasa...

...During a period of dissension in her immediate family, she killed herself...

...the Wollstonecraft aunts were reluctant to take her in...

...License was passed off as freedom...

...The freedom of one generation could inflict pain and sometimes fatal damage on the next...

...His analysis of Godwin's handwriting and idiosyncratic spelling enables him to add twelve new works to the known Godwin corpus and to identify Godwin's editorial hand in his daughter's novel, Frankenstein...

...Freed from these, the new men and women would recover their natural virtue based on reason and with every generation would move closer to perfectionism...

...Clair's sympathy and shrewd intelligence present a subtle and powerful portrait of his complex subject...

...Fanny, Mary Wollstonecraft's illegitimate daughter whom Godwin adopted when she was three years old, had not found a husband...

...yet he emerges from St...

...He saw the errors of his own views spelled out in the sufferings of his children...

...Encouraging talents, reconciling conflicts, he offered advice, much of which was not taken...

...He recommended kindness as the developer of the imagination...

...Published a month after the execution of Louis XIV, it became the talk of the coffee houses...

...Devious, honest, self-centered, naive, highly intelligent, stubborn, quixotic-Godwin lacks, the lucidity, the single flaw of the hero of Greek tragedy...

...As a publisher, he rejected the hellfire sermons and moralizing tales that were popular, offering his child readers myths, Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare, and Old Mother Hubbard, as well as several histories that emphasized republican virtues...

...the human mind as tabula rasa), Godwin's thesis-in spite of the excitement it created in the decade after its publication-was not entirely satisfactory, even to the author himself...

...Nancy Boyd This monumental work presents William Godwin as the moving force in British intellectual history during a pivotal epoch, the transition from the Enlightenment to Romanticism...

...He played a major familial role while fending off creditors, courting potential sponsors, struggling against a neurological disorder that brought on attacks of unconsciousness...

...To Shelley, Godwin would admit that his life had been "a series of retractions...

...Corruption, an economic system that supports the rich "pensioners" and exploiters of the poor, a hereditary monopoly of power reinforced by the self-serving laws of church and state, institutions that treated women as property-all came under attack...

...He had envisioned a world in which seduction had no meaning since relationships between the sexes would be determined by free inclination and choice, yet he found himself chasing Shelley and his daughters, a scandalous menage a trois, in their flight across Europe...

...Here the book suffers from its single focus...

...Clumsily attached to outdated images (nature as cause and effect, Aeolian harps, the clash of billiard balls...

...In addition Godwin was forced to acknowledge his own culpability...

...His theory had failed to recognize the devastating power of convention...

...While Godwin's life as publisher, novelist, and political activist is given its due, his contribution to social theory, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, appears as the centerfold...

...Through his relationships with his first wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, and later, in his somewhat troubled second marriage, he came to recognize the primacy of the emotions...

...Steadfast in his feminism, his condemnation of violence, and his advocacy of the rights of individuals guaranteed by representative government, he abandoned his faith in reason...

...While his attentions may have been intrusive, there is no question of his love...

...One longs to hear the children's point of view...