William Godwin
William Godwin , born the March 3rd 1756 in Wisbech (Cambridgeshire) and dead the April 7th 1836 with London, is a Journaliste, economist, political philosopher and British novelist .
Godwin is regarded as one of the most important precursors of the thoughts anarchistic and utilitarian. It is also famous for the women of its life: husband of Mary Wollstonecraft, feminist writer of which it had a girl, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, more known under the name of Mary Shelley, auteure of the Frankenstein .
Wire of dissenting Pasteur, Godwin became itself, after having received a good education, minister of a congregation in the vicinity of London in 1778. Its religious faith being disappeared, it renonça honestly to teach with the others what he did not believe any more and came to London, towards 1783, to ask the trade of author his means of existence. After a few years of obscure work, it suddenly became famous for two works, a treaty of industrial relations policy and a novel.
The first, heading: Enquiry concerning Political Justice, and its Influence one General Virtue and Happiness ( Investigation into political justice and its influence on the virtue and happiness in general ), appeared in 1793. Taking as a starting point the philosophy of the Lights and the spirit of the French revolution, the author wants to reform the company according to the data of the reason; he shows the abuses the most devoted institutions eloquently, even of the marriage; but, like as well of other reformers, it is stronger in its attacks as in its attempts at rebuilding.
The same feeling of indignation against the defects of the company also breathes in the novel of Caleb Williams (1794). In this severe account, without love, without descriptive ornaments, where imagination even is only the reason burning, a man of a noble nature, Falkland, has, under the blow of the bloodiest insult, made a murder which could hardly pass for a crime, if it did not let any fall down the responsibility on two innocent which is condemned and carried out. The love of the consideration led Falkland to this second crime worse than the first; the same respect for the opinion pushes it to pitilessly persecute a young peasant, Caleb Williams, which has surprised its secrecy and finishes by all revealing. Few novels are higher than this one for the psychological analysis and also for the eloquence and the interest.
Notoriety that Godwin had just acquired as defender of the most advanced ideas failed to conceal it to include in the capital charge directed against his/her friends Holcroft, Thelwall, Horne, Tooke and others. But, in spite of its theoretical boldnesses, its reserved character diverted it to enter any plot against the government. In 1797, it married Mary Wollstonecraft whose ideas agreed with his. When she died in layers, leaving him a girl who was to be the woman of the poet Percy Shelley, Godwin wrote the life of that which he had just lost, by confessing its weaknesses and its faults with the philosophical frankness that he would have put to reveal to them his clean.
Consequently, all the life of Godwin was devoted to literary work. Its books, though written too often of order, are never without value. It keeps serious its thought and the eloquent dignity of its style until in compilations.