Lives of the Great Romantics, Part III, Volume 1

Godwin, Wollstonecraft & Mary Shelley by their Contemporaries

Harriet Devine Jump, Pamela Clemit, Betty T Bennett, John Mullan, Pamela Clemit

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000748284
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosopher Biographies

This volume sheds light on contemporary perception of William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, a biographically and intellectually compelling literary family of the Romantic period. The writings reveal the personalities of the subjects, and the motives and agendas of the biographers.

Elizabeth Hamilton, Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah; Written Previous to, and During the Period of his Residence in England; To Which is Prefixed a Preliminary Dissertation on the History, Religion, and Manners of the Hindoos, 2 vols (London, 1796)

Elizabeth Hamilton (1758–1816) was born in Belfast and brought up by her aunt and uncle, a farmer, near Stirling in Scotland. She was educated until the age of thirteen by a master in a mixed school, though she did not receive any instruction in the classics. As she finished her formal schooling her brother Charles (?1753–92) left Britain to begin a military career in the service of the East India Company under Warren Hastings (see p. 314, note to p. 214, ll. 21–4). For the next fourteen years, Elizabeth Hamilton pursued her education through a lengthy correspondence with her brother. Under his mentorship she embarked on a literary career, and came to share his intellectual and political interests. While in India, Charles Hamilton became involved with the group of Orientalists surrounding Sir William Jones (1746–94) at the Asiatic Society in Calcutta, which was dedicated to the reform of both colonial administration and Indian society and government. In 1787 he published An Historical Relation of the Origin, Progress, and Final Dissolution of the Government of the Rohilla Afghans, which justified British intervention in India as an attack on decadent courtly society, both in India and at home. In the following year, he returned to England on leave to translate a commentary on the Islamic law code, and Elizabeth Hamilton visited him in London. In 1790 she went to live with him there, and joined his circle of liberal but anti-revolutionary friends. He was preparing to leave for India again when he died of tuberculosis in 1792.

As the title suggests, Elizabeth Hamilton’s first novel, Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, reflects the interests of Charles Hamilton and his fellow-Orientalists, who sought through their scholarship to increase knowledge of Indian culture among British politicians and administrators. Indeed, by presenting her work as a translation, and by including a long ‘Preliminary Dissertation on the History, Religion, and Manners of the Hindoos’, Elizabeth Hamilton directly allies her work with the Orientalists’ reform programme. At the same time, the novel presents a comprehensive critique of European society and culture from several different angles. Following eighteenth-century predecessors such as Montesquieu and Goldsmith, Hamilton satirises European society through the device of letters from apparently naïve Oriental visitors. Yet while her criticism of aristocratic society gives the novel a reformist edge, she also includes an attack on the middle-class radicals of Godwin’s circle and their proletarian sympathisers. Though Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah was published by the firm of G. G. & J. Robinson (see Biographical Glossary), which also published Godwin, there is no evidence that Elizabeth Hamilton and Godwin ever met.

The passage selected here belongs to the third movement of the novel. Having gathered some preliminary impressions of Europe from British soldiers in India, Zāārmilla, the Rajah of the title, visits England and describes his experiences there. On a visit to Ardent Hall, the country residence of Sir Caprice Ardent, he meets a heterogenous group of philosophers who ‘perform poojah [‘The performance of worship to the Gods’, according to Hamilton’s gloss] to different systems: and seem to have no opinion in common, except the expectation of the return of the Suttee Jogue, which they distinguish by the name of The Age of Reason’ (Hamilton, vol. 1, p. 204). Among this group are several teachers of the ‘faith of Atheism’ (ibid., p. 210), of which the foremost is Mr Vapour, whose speech presents a parody of the leading arguments of Political Justice. In the remainder of the Ardent Hall episode, Elizabeth Hamilton adumbrates what was to become the standard pattern of ‘anti-jacobin’ fiction: the precepts of Godwinian rationalism, when put into practice, are seen to lead to social breakdown and crime. Vapour advocates a rational utopia: ‘By destroying the domestic affections, what an addition will be made to human happiness! And when man is no longer corrupted by the tender and endearing ties of brother, sister, wife, and child, how greatly will his dispositions be meliorated!’ (see below). Yet when the gullible young nephew of another philosopher, Dr Sceptic, uses this argument as a plea for free love and tries to seduce his cousin, she kills herself, and so does he (Hamilton, vol. 2, pp. 267–73).

Mr. Vapour is particularly tenacious of his faith, which is, indeed, of a very extraordinary nature. Rejecting all the received opinions that have hitherto prevailed in the world, and utterly discrediting the circumstances upon which they have been founded; he reserves his whole stock of credulity for futurity. Here his faith is so strong, as to bound over the barriers of probability, to unite all that is discordant in nature, and to believe in things impossible.

The age of reason, is thought, by Mr. Vapour, to be very near at hand. Nothing, he says, is so easy, as to bring it about immediately. It is only to persuade the people in power to resign its exercise; the rich to part with their property; and with one consent, to abolish all laws, and put an end to all government: “Then,” says this credulous philosopher, “shall we fee the perfection of virtue!” Not such virtue, it is true, as has heretofore passed current in the world. Benevolence will not then be heard of; gratitude will be considered as a crime, and punished with the contempt it so justly deserves. Filial affection would, no doubt, be treated as a crime of a still deeper dye, but that, to prevent the possibility of such a breach of virtue, no man, in the age of reason, shall be able to guess who his father is; nor any woman to say to her husband, behold your son. Chastity, shall then be considered as a weakness, and the virtue of a female estimated according as she has had sufficient energy to break its mean restraints. “To what sublime heights,” exclaims this sapient philosopher, “may we not expect that virtue will then be seen to soar!—By destroying the domestric affections, what an addition will be made to human happiness! And when man is no longer corrupted by the tender and endearing ties of brother, fitter, wife, and child, how greatly will his dispositions be meliorated! The fear of punishment too, that ignoble bondage, which, at present, restrains the energies of so many great men, will no longer damp the noble ardour of the daring robber, or the midnight thief. Nor will any man then be degraded by working for another. The divine energies of the soul will not then be stifled by labouring for support. What is necessary, every individual may, without difficulty, do for himself. Every man shall then till his own field, and cultivate his own garden.”—“And pray how are the Ladies to be clothed in the age of reason?” asked Miss Ardent.—“Any Lady,” replied the philosopher, “who chooses to wear clothes, which, in this cold climate, may by some be considered as a matter of necessity, must herself pluck the wool from the back of the sheep, and spin it on a distaff, of her own making.” “But, she cannot weave it,” rejoined Miss Ardent, “without a loom; a loom cannot well be made without iron tools, and iron tools can have no existence without the aggregated labours of many individuals.” “True,” returned Mr. Vapour; “and it is therefore probable, that in the glorious sera I speak of, men will again have recourse to the skins of beasts for covering; and these will be procured according to the strength and capacity of the individual. A summer’s dress, may be made of the skins of mice, and such animals; while those of sheep, hares, horses, dogs, &c. may be worn in winter. Such things may, for a time, take place. But as the human mind advances to that perfection, at which, when deprived of religion, laws, and government, it is destined to arrive, men will, no doubt, possess sufficient energy, to refill the effects of cold; and to exist, not only without clothing, but without food also. When reason is thus far advanced, an effort of the mind will be sufficient to prevent the approach of disease, and stop the progress of decay. People will not then be so foolish as to die.” “I can believe, that in the age of reason, women won’t be troubled with the vapours,” replied Mils Ardent, “but, that they should be able to live without food and clothing, is another affair.” “Women!” repeated Mr. Vapour, with a contemptuous smile; “we shall not then be troubled with—women. In the age of reason, the world shall contain only a race of men!!”

Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney

Mary Hays (1760–1843) was born into a middle-class Dissenting family in Southwark. She educated herself through a series of epistolary exchanges with leading radical intellectuals, notably Robert Robinson (1735–90), William Frend (1757–1841), with whom she fell in love, and Godwin. Towards the end of the 1780s, she attended lectures by tutors at the newly-established Hackney Dissenting Academy. In 1791 she published a pamphlet called Cursory Remarks on an Enquiry into the Expediency and Propriety of Public or Social Worship, signed ‘Eusebia’, in which she defended the Dissenting practice of public worship against the recent attack on it by Gilbert Wakefield (1756–1801), a teacher at Hackney. Thereafter Hays became a member of the group of radical writers and intellectuals centred round the Unitarian publisher Joseph Johnson (see Biographical Glossary), an affiliation confirmed by her publication in 1793 of Letters and Essays, Moral and Miscellaneous, a work greatly influenced by the feminist arguments of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).

Hays’s friendship with Godwin began when she wrote to him on 14 October 1794 asking to borrow a copy of Political Justice, a work which Frend had recommended, and setting out her credentials as a like-minded radical:

Disgusted with the present constitutions of civil society, an observance of which the storms which have lately agitated the political hemisphere has forced upon every mind not absolutely sunk in apathy or absorbed in selfishness, the writer of this has been roused from a depression of spirits, at once melancholy and indignant, by an attention to the ‘few puissant and heavenly endowed spirits, that are capable of guiding, enlightening and leading the human race onward to felicity!’ Among these, fame has given a distinguished place to the author of ‘Political Justice.’ (Wedd, p. 227)

The pair first met for tea in the following May, after which they agreed that Hays should write to Godwin for philosophical advice, while he replied in person. In her letters she told Godwin the story of her failed relationship with Frend and asked him to explain how she could combat the excessive feelings that threatened to overwhelm her. Apparently Godwin’s advice included the suggestion that she set down her thoughts in the form of a novel (Luria, p. 229). The result was Memoirs of Emma Courtney, a frankly autobiographical account of her unrequited love, in which personal experience is generalised, in the manner of Caleb Williams, to create a new political awareness on the part of the reader. In the novel Hays included material from her correspondence with Godwin, who served as the model for Mr Francis, the philosopher who becomes Emma’s confidant and epistolary adviser.

Following the loss of her mother at birth, Emma Courtney is brought up by her indulgent uncle and aunt in their house in the country, where indiscriminate reading leads her to be ruled by excessive sensibility. After the death of her aunt and father, she is forced to live as a dependant with her paternal uncle and his family, the Mortons, though she inwardly rebels against this constraint. At their house she meets two visitors, Mr Montague, the ‘imperious’ and ‘stubborn’ son of a local doctor, and Mr Francis, who is described as ‘in his fourtieth year, his figure slender and delicate, his eye piercing, and his manner impressive’ (Hays, vol. 1, pp. 61, 60). The following passage dramatises the pedagogical relationship which develops between Emma and Mr Francis. The behaviour of Mr Francis exemplifies the Dissenting theory of education, which should aim, in Richard Price’s words, ‘to teach how to think, rather than what to think’ (Price, p. 137). As the exchange shows, Mr Francis’s aim is not simply to state directly Godwinian precepts, but by his actions to encourage the development of Emma’s rational autonomy.

Mr. Francis, on the evening preceding the day on which he purposed leaving Morton Park, passing under the open window of my chamber, in which I was fitting with a book to enjoy the refreshing breeze, invited me to come down, and accompany him in a ramble. I immediately complied with his request, and joined him in a few minutes, with a countenance clouded with regret at the idea of his quitting us.

“You are going,” said I, as I gave him my hand (which he passed under his arm), “and I lose my friend and counsellor.”

“Your concern is obliging; but you are capable of standing alone, and your mind, by so doing, will acquire strength.”

“I feel as if this would not be the cafe: the world appears to me a thorny and a pathless wilderness; I step with caution, and look around me with dread.—That I require protection and assistance, is, I confess, a proof of weakness, but it is nevertheless true.”

“Mr. Montague,” replied he, with some degree of archness in his tone and manner, “is a gallant knight, a pattern of chivalry, and appears to be particularly calculated for the defender of distressed damsels!”

“I have no inclination to trust myself to the guidance of one, who seems himself entangled in an inextricable maze of error, and whose versatile character affords little basis for confidence.”

“Tell me what it is you fear;—— are your apprehensions founded in reason?”

“Recollect my youth, my sex, and my precarious situation.”

“I thought you contemned the plea of sex, as a function for weakness!”

“Though I disallow it as a natural, I admit it as an artificial, plea.”

“Explain yourself.”

“The character, you tell me, is modified by circumstances: the customs of society, then, have enslaved, enervated, and degraded woman.”

“I understand you: there is truth in your remark, though you have given it undue force.”

I hesitated—my heart was full—I felt as if there were many things which I wished to say; but, however paradoxical, the manners of Mr. Francis repressed, while they invited, confidence. I respected his reason, but I doubled whether I could inspire him with sympathy, or make him fully comprehend my feelings. I conceived I could express myself with more freedom on paper; but I had not courage to request a correspondence, when he was silent on the subject. That it would be a source of improvement to me, I could not doubt, but prejudice with-held me from making the proposal He looked at me, and perceived my mind struggling with a suggestion, to which it dared not give utterance: he suspected the truth, but was unwilling to disturb the operations of my understanding. We walked for some time in silence:—my companion struck into a path that led towards the house—listened to the village clock as it struck nine—and observed, the hour grew late. He had distinguished me, and I was flattered by that distinction; he had supported me against the arrogance of Mrs. Morton, retorted the fly sarcasms of Sarah, and even helped to keep the impetuous Montague in awe, and obliged him to rein in his offensive spirit, every moment on the brink of outrage. My heart, formed for grateful attachment, taking, in one instant, a hasty retrospect of the past, and a rapid glance into futurity, experienced at that moment so desolating a pang, that I endeavoured in vain to repress its sensations, and burst into a flood of tears. Mr. Francis suddenly stopped, appeared moved, and, with a benevolent aspect and soothing accents, enquired into the cause of an emotion so sudden and unexpected. I wept a few minutes in silence, and my spirits seemed, in some measure, relieved.

“I weep, (said I,) because I am friendless; to be esteemed and cherished is necessary to my existence; I am an alien in the family where I at present reside, I cannot remain here much longer, and to whom, and whither, shall I go?

He took my hand—I will not, at present, say all that it might be proper to say, because I perceive your min...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note
• Introduction
• Bibliography
• Chronology
• Copy Texts
• 1. Hamilton, Elizabeth, Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah
• 2. Hays, Mary, Memoirs of Emma Courtney
• 3. [Fenwick, John], ‘Mr Godwin’, in Public Characters of 1799-1800
• 4. Austin, William, Letters from London
• 5. Dunlap, William, Memoirs of George Fred. Cooke, Esq.
• 6. Hazlitt, William, ‘On the English Novelists’, in Lectures on the English Comic Writers
• 7. [Hazlitt, William], ‘William Godwin’, in The Spirit of the Age
• 8. Hazlitt, William, Conversations of James Northcote, Esq., R.A.
• 9. Mackenzie, Sir G. S., Illustrations of Phrenology
• 10. Lamb, Charles, ‘The Old Actors’
• 11. [Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft], ‘Memoirs of William Godwin’
• 12. Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘Life of William Godwin’
• 13. [Maginn, William], ‘Gallery of Literary Portraits, No. LIII: William Godwin, Esq.’
• 14. Gerrald, Joseph, The Trial of Joseph Gerrald
• 15. De Quincey, Thomas, ‘Autobiography of an English Opium-Eater’
• 16. Lockhart, John Gibson, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart.
• 17. [Smith, Horace], ‘A Graybeard’s Gossip about his Literary Acquaintance’
• 18. Talfourd, Thomas Noon, Final Memorials of Charles Lamb
• 19. Martineau, Harriet, The History of England
• 20. Martineau, Harriet, Autobiography
• 21. Binns, John, Recollections of the Life of John Binns
• 22. Brightwell, Cecilia Lucy, Memorials of the Life of Amelia Opie
• 23. Hogg, Thomas Jefferson, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley
• 24. Lady [Jane] Shelley (ed.), Shelley Memorials
• 25. Redding, Cyrus, Yesterday and To-day
• 26. Robinson, Henry Crabb, Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence
• 27. Channing, William Ellery, Correspondence of William Ellery Channing, D. D. and Lucy Aikin
• 28. Owen, Robert Dale, Threading My Way
• 29. Kegan Paul, Charles, William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries
• 30. Ticknor, George, Life, Letters, and Journals
• 31. Trelawny, Edward John, Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author
• 32. Froude, James Anthony, Thomas Carlyle
• 33. Blakey, Robert, Memoirs of Dr Robert Blakey
• 34. Wallas, Graham, The Life of Francis Place
• 35. Burr, Aaron, The Private Journal of Aaron Burr
• 36. MacFarlane, Charles, Reminiscences of a Literary Life
• 37. Gisborne, Maria, ‘Journal’
• Editorial Notes
• Biographical Glossary