An Uneasy Affair: William Godwin and English Radicalism, 1793-1797Chapter 1: Godwin and Dissent In 1788, at the age of thirty-two, William Godwin shook off his lethargy, renounced all ties with the Christian faith, and began to lead the life of a self-proclaimed atheist. A series of discussions with thinkers such as the philosopher and chemist Joseph Priestley and Thomas Holcroft, the dramatist and close friend of Godwin's had precipitated this development.[1] His religious faith was further shaken by reading Thomas Campbell's Answer to Hume on Miracles, d'Holbach's Systeme de la Nature, Helvetius' De 1'Esprit and Priestley's Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion. As we shall see, the philosophy of Political Justice is, strictly speaking, atheistic. The anti-Jacobins who bothered to read the two volumes of cool logic which Godwin had penned between September 1791 and January 1793, were not at all surprised to find a general absence of religion and religious thinking. In fact, what they did find was Godwin claiming that organized religion had duped men into believing all was well, when in actual fact, it was quite the obverse. For if Godwin was an avowed atheist, by 1788 he nevertheless retained and assimilated most of his Dissenting heritage, albeit under a different guise.
Thus it is necessary to assess Godwin's religious Dissent, for this is arguably the most important key to an understanding of his philosophy as a whole. Indeed, it is difficult to understand Godwin and his notions of human perfectibility, government, and philosophic anarchism without a general account of both English Dissent, and in particular, the Dissent of Robert Sandeman.[3] The origins of eighteenth century English Dissent are to be found in the Puritan theology of the seventeenth century. Dissent had as its fundamental feature a willingness to demystify the Christian faith, to consider its tenets in accordance with human reason alone. As such, Dissent signifies the shift from a reliance upon external authority in moral matters, to the internal authority of the self informed by reason. This shift was in part traditional, and in part inspired by the seventeenth century Newtonian world outlook. For those individuals who followed the tradition laid down by John Locke, the Cambridge Platonists and the later deists, an appeal was made to experience and conscious knowledge of the world of material nature. While the mysteries of Christianity were to be located and expelled, there was a simultaneous effort to preserve the virtues of Christianity while adjusting them to the new rationalistic and scientific temper. As Roland Stromberg has pointed out, "men were willing to submit to 'reason' because there was on all hands a sublime confidence that reason and religion were in harmony."[4] The Dissenters felt that their advocacy of the reign of reason was directed by God alone. Hence, to go against the dictates of reason was to violate God's will. It was this confidence in reason which forced the Dissenters to distance themselves from the religious controversy within English Protestantism. They no longer believed in the central idea of Christianity-man as a weak and wretched creature in a doleful world, in dire need of being saved and solaced by the belief in a better world to come. The Dissenters faced a crisis. How could one come to terms with Christian faith in a world become increasingly secularized? This question was part of the broader movement of liberalism within Christian culture which succeeded in eliminating the prophetic, other-worldly element in Christianity and adapting religion to the purposes of an otherwise optimistic secularism.
The "Dissenting Interest," with their increasing absorption in purely secular matters such as politics and business, coalesced with other interests -- landed, commercial, monied and laboring--to produce “a sort of cross-section of public opinion influencing party politics obliquely and indirectly.?a href="#n6">[6] Nonetheless, the Dissenters did not completely divorce themselves from theological thinking. For the Dissenter, Christ was the sole head of the Church and Scripture was the only rule of faith and practice. Faith was left to the individual to encounter in his own way and by the power of reason invested in his own private judgment. The Dissenters thus objected to the Creeds as well as the offices of the Church of England. They were, on the whole, utilitarian calculators who made moralistic arguments on the relative merits of the Christian faith. The only true criterion of religion, they found, was its ability to produce virtue, as virtue was necessary for the society. Yet this society was not about to accept them upon an equitable basis. The Dissenters were throughout the eighteenth century denied specific civil and political rights as were Roman Catholics and Jews. Whereas the Anglican Church was comfortable with eighteenth century political stability, the Dissenters protested. “Their philosophy was,?according to Anthony Lincoln, “an active preparation for a new age. The Dissenters had hardened their hearts against a state that had rejected them. Deeply and firmly established in the society of England, they formed a great, permanent undercurrent of dissatisfied criticism of the state of England.?a href="#n7">[7] In general, the Dissenters pressed the Church of England for recognition and involvement in the affairs of the country. Their social and political aims can be briefly stated as follows: they requested from the state the toleration to worship God in accordance with their own beliefs; they desired to be considered upon an equal legal basis with Anglicans; they desired equality in marriage, education, the ability to hold office and ultimately to sit in Parliament. They also fought to win toleration for both Roman Catholics and Jews because it was their desire to place all men upon an equal footing. The Dissenters were imbued with the recent scientific discoveries of Newton as well as a spirit of inquiry. This predisposition to inquiry flowed quite naturally from their desire to demystify Christianity through human reason. They devoted a great deal of time, energy and money to the spread of education amongst all their members. "For if men are to be freed from reliance on external authority they must be educated to be independent in judgment, and if men are to be responsible citizens they must be given knowledge."[8] The state was in no way to be allowed to interfere with the education of children; this was to be left to the discretion of the parents, and often their children were sent to one of the many Dissenting academies such as Daventry, Warrington, Hoxton, Hackney or Northampton. The heterodox views of the Dissenters, and the political radicalism that frequently accompanied them, were nurtured in these Dissenting academies. Being business oriented, energetic and God-fearing worldly people, they sought to improve their condition morally as well as intellectually. They held a belief in human progress and were not afraid of social change. They were from the solid middle ranks of English society, usually from the cities and the great towns. According to Isaac Kramnick, "they were the secular prophets, the vanguard, of a new social order and played the decisive role in transforming England into the first bourgeois civilization."[9] The Dissenters' connections with business and commerce brought them into contact with the elite of the aristocracy, especially in matters of education. The curricula at the Dissenting academies included the study of science, English literature and belles lettres, modern languages, history, political theory and economics. In this manner, they maintained a "cultural unity" at home while they "kept in close touch with the development of knowledge and thought abroad, with the result that much which was neglected at Cambridge, and which never reached Oxford, had a sympathetic reception in the dissenting academies."[10] These institutions trained a remarkable generation of significant theologians, scientists and scholars, headed by Joseph Priestley and Richard Price, and who were collectively known as Rational Dissenters. The efforts of the Rational Dissenters helped to clear the minds of their own followers and aided in efforts to for a habit of political discussion, inquiry and criticism. It was during the reign of George III that the political radicalism of the Dissenters assumed a more active role in the affairs of national politics. Up to 1760 they had, in general, been acquiescent in political affairs. But from then on their increasing awareness of their unequal status became unbearable.[11] This was partly due to a changing economic situation in which the Dissenters prospered and a growing alienation from both the Hanoverian dynasty and the system of government of George III. They joined forces in the Wilkite agitation of 1769 and attempted to abolish compulsory subscription to the Articles of Religion in the 1770s. They also championed the cause of the American colonists in their bid for independence. Price and Priestley were also in close contact with Shelburne's "Bowood Circle" of reformers between 1769 and 1779 where they were brought into close contact with French liberal thought.[12] These connections with political radicalism "formed part of the changed climate of opinion in which the Dissenters felt that action to relieve, rather than acquiescence in, their political disabilities would itself become a practical necessity, if toleration had failed, perhaps participation might succeed."[13] The Rational Dissenters' political radicalism culminated with their efforts to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts on three successive occasions -- March 1787, May 1789, and March 1790.[14] By the Corporation Act of 1661, no one could enter a civic or municipal office unless he had taken the sacrament according to the rites of the Church of England. Under the Test Act of 1673, all who held offices under the Crown were required to take the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, sign a declaration repudiating the doctrine of transubstantiation and to receive the sacrament according to the Church of England.[15] Both Acts potentially restricted the activities of the Dissenters, but the more ambitious Dissenters obtained what they had vainly sought through agitation by seceding to the Anglican Church and often achieved success in business and commerce. Others fought for the repeal of the Acts on the grounds of political equality and civic freedom until 1790, when their concerns became decidedly different. To be sure, the Rational Dissenters became increasingly political by the time the French Revolution broke out in 1789. Richard Price's use of the pulpit at the Old Jewry, on the occasion of the commemorative gathering of the London Revolution Society on November 4, 1789, celebrated not so much the English as the French Revolution. Price even went so far as to send a message of congratulation to the French National Assembly. Price's sermon, entitled A Discourse on the Love of Our Country, asked that the London Revolution Society disdain "national partialities" and expressed
The Dissenters, frustrated by their failures to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts and their abortive pleas for civic equality, renewed their support for parliamentary reform and responded to the new challenge of "Church and King" clubs by organizing new radical societies. These societies were open to all working men and their objectives were exclusively political, "In this way," writes Albert Goodwin,
Godwin, though himself a Dissenter, never actively involved himself with such political activities as the campaign for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. Nothing was further from Godwin's habit of mind then this type of political solution to what was essentially a human problem. His life up to the early years of the 1790s was one of quiet study and reflection. As was typical through- out his life, he remained indifferent to conventional politics. But according to Ford K. Brown, "he was to become the most thorough dissenter and, if measured by his pupils, the greatest inculcator of the day; his teaching almost invariably better than his practice.?a href="#n18">[18] William Godwin, preacher, teacher, journalist, novelist, philosopher and literary hack was born on March 3, 1756, at Wisbech, in Cambridgeshire. His early childhood was remarkably austere, undaunting and drab. His father, John Godwin, like his father before him, was a Calvinist minister, convivial with friends but stern and unrelenting toward his children, and as far as Godwin was concerned, unlikable and unapproachable.
Godwin’s mother Ann was more lively and openly affectionate, relatively uneducated as she was. But as a boy Godwin felt no closer to her. As the seventh of thirteen children, he was put out to a wet-nurse in the village and did not return until he was two years of age. Upon his return he became the responsibility of his father’s cousin, a female schoolteacher, who was to be partly responsible for his education as well. Hiss Godwin was strict, rigorously pious and devoted herself to promoting Godwin’s education while at the same time discouraging any sign of childishness or playfulness. Her lessons were reinforced by Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and James Janeway's A Token for Children, "An Account of the Deaths of Many Pious Children," which relates the exemplary lives of children so God-fearing that they are constantly crying when they are not dying. He grew up, inevitably, a shy, serious and pompous child, finding his only pleasure in the books with which he hid himself from his altogether cheerless world. "I remember" he wrote in Thoughts on Man, "when I was a boy, looking forward with terror to the ample field of human life, and saying, when I have read through all the books that have been written, what shall I do afterwards?"[20] It is hardly surprising that Godwin, in his later life, should earn the reputation for being cold and remote. Nor is it any wonder that he placed so small a premium upon emotion, regarding domestic affections as so many obstacles in the way of rational deliberation. A cursory reading of Political Justice reveals a cool, dispassionate, logical mind at work, unemotional yet extremely perceptive of man's folly. The child, reared with firmness rather than love, distanced from both parents, nurtured in a severe and unrelenting Calvinism, his attention directed always toward what was good and true rather than what might be enjoyable, seems the true father of the man. Behind this facade of pure reason lay a tangle of repressed doubts and fears, a desperate need of affection, an obsession with the good opinion of others, a pervasive desire to be admired. The philosopher of self-sufficiency in all things nevertheless depended for his own peace of mind on the companionship of others. His novels, to which he devoted his attention after 1794, seethed with suppressed emotions -- anxiety, despair, and above all, loneliness. He was thinking of himself when he maintained that the love of distinction is one of the certain marks of a child of talent.
Pride, ambition, the need for friendship, the desire for approval, sensitivity to criticism, awkwardness and shyness all combined to make Godwin morbidly anxious about what others thought of him. But of equal significance and crucial to any understanding of Political Justice is the Dissent which he had also absorbed. Doctrinal disagreement between preacher and congregation was a typical occupational hazard amongst members of the Dissenting clergy, and twice Godwin's father was obliged to leave his post. Thus when Godwin was four his family was living in Norfolk where his father became the minister of the Guestwick meeting house.[22] The young Godwin went to his first formal school under the tutelage of Mrs. Gedge and Robert Akers. There he was taught the rudiments of knowledge until the age of eleven when by way of preparing him to continue the work of his father and grandfather, his parents sent him to Norwich as the private pupil of a prominent Dissenting minister, Samuel Newton. Newton was a stern and contemptuous man, "the most wretched of pedants" and an enthusiastic disciplinarian who was fond of the whip. "The infliction of stripes upon my body can throw no new light upon the question between us," Godwin would complain in the first edition of Political Justice:
Yet Godwin was to learn from him the essentials of logical argument. Here too he became imbued with the Dissenting principles of candor, sincerity and rational discourse and above all he was persuaded to accept Newton's tenets of faith. For if Newton, like Godwin, was reared a Calvinist, his Calvinism was informed by something quite different -- he was a follower of Robert Sandeman. Godwin himself described Sandeman as a "celebrated north country apostle, who, after Calvin had damned ninety-nine in a hundred of mankind, had contrived a scheme for damning ninety-nine in a hundred of the followers of Calvin."[24] He was actually a Scotsman and chief disciple of John Glas who had been expelled from the established Church of Scotland in 1728.[25] The Sandemanian faith was nothing more nor less than a purely intellectual assent to the idea that Christ lived and died for the justification of sinful men. To suggest that anything in the nature of the movement of the heart (as distinct from the mind) can be necessary or useful to salvation was the greatest of errors.
The Sandemanian belief was a far cry from the Antinomian tenet that true believers are under no obligation of duty or obedience to the Church. The privileges of Christ were extended to those who necessarily kept to the commandments of Christ. The
Sandemanians set various rules for Church government to which no member could deviate, and it was the key feature of their religious doctrine that all members of the Church were to be unanimous in both policy and doctrine. Complete unanimity was
enforced by the kiss of charity which was the seal of admission. Majority opinion was enforced at the Church meeting for all decisions were to be made according to the precepts of rational discourse. Those who violated Sandemanian doctrine were turned away thus leaving a unanimous Church body.
"Diversity of opinion often happens,
but when the discussion of the affair fails of bringing all to one mind, the minority is
excommunicated."[27] It is this striking principle which Godwin assimilated
while at Norwich which is thus a key to Political Justice. The Sandemanians disapproved of private wealth, holding that private property should always be subject to the needs and purposes, and always at the call, of the Church. Their doctrine was animated by the conviction of living the life of the New Testament and restoring the communism of primitive Christianity. In this way, all property was to belong to the Church in order to relieve the poverty of the poor. Every tenet of the Scriptures was taken literally.
Likewise, Godwin's strictures, aimed as they were at private property and accumulation, were animated by his desire to inculcate benevolence, and not competition between all men. His hostility towards institutionalized private property and his faith in the power of benevolence to produce both happiness and virtue were the direct results of his Sandemanian training at Norwich. As a Dissenter, Godwin was barred from the established universities, but this was really to his advantage, since he could go instead to one of the celebrated Dissenting academies. He applied to the most prestigious academy at Homerton, but was denied admission due to his Sandemanianism. Instead, he went to Hoxton Academy where his education was to continue. While at Hoxton he was to be the pupil of the prominent radical intellectual. Dr. Andrew Kippis. Though Godwin attended Hoxton for five years, he insisted that he was its only Sandemanian and only Tory.[30] The Wilkesite agitation and movements for parliamentary reform had little effect on his conscience, his curiosity was directed more toward the opposition's intemperance and their claim that if reform were instituted, English liberties were gone. The distinctive feature of the Sandemanians was their effort to restore the communism of primitive Christianity. As a natural corollary, it taught the impiousness of a State Church, and the use of secular power for religious compulsion. Their Church was a new society within an old one. This breach of continuity between the new society and the old explains the paradox that when Godwin left Hoxton, a more confirmed Sandemanian than when he entered it, he was a political Tory. In other words, the Sandemanian heresy was so revolutionary that it had no immediate implication for politics. The regeneration of society, for Godwin, was to be the result of a revolution in public opinion, aided by the Sandemanian dictates of sincerity, benevolence and rational discourse. This may possibly explain why Godwin remained isolated from the movement for parliamentary reform. His intellectual training before his break with the Christian faith ten years later became complete with his acceptance of a post at Ware. There he gave uninspired sermons, fervently evangelical, but not notably Calvinist.[31] It was at Ware that he met Joseph Fawcett, another young preacher, who introduced him to the writings of Jonathan Edwards, Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox. In 1779, he moved to Stowmarket in Suffolk where he read Swift and became in consequence a republican.[32] It was also at Stowmarket that Godwin was introduced to the writings of d'Holbach, Rousseau and Helvetius, by a local tradesman, Frederick Norman. Under their influence his religious opinions began to falter. But Godwin was still enough of a Sandemanian to believe that you did not have to be an ordained minister, as he as yet was not, to administer the sacraments. When finally he was ordained, the ministers of the neighborhood refused to attend his ceremony and in April of 1782 he was expelled from his post. It was while waiting in London for another post that he turned to writing for publication under the encouragement of Fawcett and Kippis. The result was his Life of William Pitt. Earl of Chatham, who died in 1778 and was for Godwin "the great commoner." Meanwhile the religious doubts that had begun with d'Holbach's Systeme de la Nature increased with reading Joseph Priestley. D'Holbach led him to question orthodox Christianity, and especially the Church, but not, as yet, God himself. Priestley, with whom he corresponded made him instead a Socinian, who denied the divinity of Christ, and once and for all he renounced Calvinism, "a gloomy doctrine . . . equally condemned by the understanding, and revolting to the heart."[33] Godwin could remain in the Church no longer and in June of 1783 he resigned his ministry. He had lost his calling, but it would be another five years before he lost his faith. [1] For an interesting discussion of the relationship between Holcroft and Godwin see Virgil R. Stallbaumer, "Holcroft's Influence on Political Justice," Modern Language Quarterly 14 (March 1953):21-30. [2] Smith and Smith, William Godwin, p. 20. [3] David Fleisher offers an extremely useful survey of those shifts in religious opinions which Godwin underwent in the course of his lifetime in William Godwin: A Study in Liberalism (New York, 1951), pp. 136-45. [4] Roland Stromberg, Religious Liberalism in Eighteenth Century England (London, 1954), p. 10. [6] Anthony Lincoln, Some Political and Social Ideas of English Dissent, 1763-1800 (Cambridge, 1938), p. 12. [8] Raymond Holt, The Unitarian Contribution to Social Progress in England (London,1938), p. 20. [9] Isaac Kramnick, The Rage of Edmund Burke: Portrait of an Ambivalent Conservative (New York. 1977), p. 13. [10] Lincoln, Political and Social Ideas of English Dissent, p. 67. [11] Albert Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1979), pp. 71-72; see also R. C. F. Richey, "The Origins of British Radicalism: The Changing Rationale for Dissent," 18th Century Studies 7 (1973-4): 179-92. [12] For the Bowood Circle see Derek Jarrett, The Begetters of Revolution: England's Involvement with France, 1759-1789 (Totowa, NJ, 1973). pp. 130-5; Goodwin, Friends of Liberty, pp. 101-4. [14] The fullest treatment of the efforts to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts is to be found in G M Ditchfield, "The Parliamentary Struggle Over the Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, 1787-1790," English Historical Review 89 (1974): 551-77. [15] C. G. Robertson, ed., Select Statutes Cases and Documents, 4th ed. (London, 1923), pp. 37, 81-4, quoted in Goodwin, Friends of Liberty, p. 77. [16] Richard Price, A Discourse on the Love of Our Country (London, 1789), quoted in Carl B. Cone, The English Jacobins: Reformers in Late 18th Century England (New York, 1968), p. 83. [17] Goodwin, Friends of Liberty, p. 97. [18] Brown, Life of Godwin, p. 3. [19] All autobiographical quotations and references, unless otherwise indicated, are from the Abinger MSS and are quoted throughout C. Kegan Paul, William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries, 2 vols (Boston, 1876), 1:1-23. [20] William Godwin, Thoughts on Man: His Nature, Production and Discoveries (London, 1831), p. 143. [21] William Godwin, The Enquirer: Reflections on
Education. Manners and Literature in a Series Essays (London, [22] Don Locke, A Fantasy of Reason: The Life and Thought of William Godwin (London, 1980), p. 15. [23] Godwin, Political Justice, 1st ed (1793), cited in variant readings in Priestley ed., 3:206. [24] Quoted in Paul, William Godwin, 1:11-2. [25] Thanks to Sandeman's voluminous writings, those known in Scotland as Glassites were known in England as Sandemanians. [26] David Bogue and James Bennet, The History of the Dissenters, from the Revolution to the Year 1808. 2 vols, 2nd ed. (London,1833), 2:436. [28] Michael Scrivener, "Godwin's Philosophy Revaluated," Journal of the History of Ideas 39 (October 1978): 621. John Middleton Murry writes that "Godwinism is secular Sandemanism, and the much derided 'perfectibility of man' is no more, and no less than the re-assertion in secular terms of the possibility of regeneration." Heaven -- and Earth (London, 1938), p. 261. [29] Bogue and Bennet, History of the Dissenters, 2:439. [30] Paul, William Godwin, 1:41. [31] Locke, Fantasy of Reason, p. 18. [32] For Godwin's relation to Swift see James Preu, "Swift's Influence on Godwin's Doctrine of Anarchism," Journal of the History of Ideas 15 (June 1954): 371-83, and, The Dean and the Anarchist (Tallahassee, 1959). [33] William Godwin, Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, the early English poet, including Memoirs of his near friend and kinsman, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster: with sketches of the manners, opinions, arts and literature of England in the fourteenth century. 2 vols (London. 1803), 2:216, quoted in Locke, Fantasy of Reason, pp. 19-20. | The History Guide | | copyright ?1984 Steven Kreis |