William Godwin (1756-1836), born into a strong Dissenting tradition, abandoned both his Calvinist theology and his Congregationalist ministry in 1783 and assumed the alternative career of journalist and pamphleteer. His interest in both the dissidence of Dissent and contemporary political developments led to his active participation in the debates of the Constitutional Society. In 1789 he formed part of the congregation that heard Richard Price's 'Discourse on the Love of Our Country' and he was sufficiently provoked by Burke's response to it to begin work on what became his own treatise, the Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793). The Enquiry is Godwin's most systematic theoretical work. He views human happiness and social well-being as the sole purpose of existence, but unlike Rousseau (whose influence pervades the work) he looks forward to a gradual melting away of all government to be replaced by a new system of radical anarchy. A rigid adherence to the leading principle of reason is substituted for Rousseau's cult of sensibility and his innate religiosity. Law, government, property, inequality, and marriage would be abolished as part of a gradual process by which human perfectibility, conditioned by human reason, would transcend existing limitations and impediments to fulfilled happiness.
Godwin's revolutionary hatred of all forms of injustice, privilege, and political or religious despotism also informs his novel, Things as They Are or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), a narrative centred on the problems of class perception and the nature of oppression. Godwin is less concerned with the authority of the state and more with the relatively petty, but no less damaging, exercise of power by a privileged class. 'It is now known to philosophers', he remarks in his Preface to the novel, 'that the spirit and the character of government intrudes itself into every rank of society', a factor exemplified in the story by the pervasive tyranny of a landowner, the once well-meaning Falkland. Falkland's tentacles are observed catching at the novel's hero, Caleb Williams, at every turn. Imprisoned by one of his persecutor's many contrivances, Caleb exclaims against the fale assumption that England has no Bastille: 'Is that a country of liberty where thousands languish in dungeons and fetters? Go, go, ignorant fool! and visit the scenes of our prisons! Witness their unwholesomeness, their filth, the tyranny of their governors, the misery of their inmates!' Such rhetoric forms part of a series of counterblasts to the complacent upholders of the idea of the free-born Englishman. If Caleb fails finally to confront his persecutor in public, a failure which he regrets, he is no passive victim. His escapes from confinement, his disguises,, wanderings, and abortive attempts to flee from England, give the novel something of the quality of an adventure story, but his understanding of his predicament, and his articulation of this understanding is a critique of the existing ills of society, give his narrative a truly radical bite. At the opening of his story the narrator identifies Falkland's attraction to the principles of chivalry. In concluding his memoirs, Caleb returns to the issue. Chivalry has, he claims, served to corrupt a noble mind and perverted 'the poorest and most laudable intentions'. The survival, or worse, the revival of aristocratic codes, it is suggested, works both as a disguise to, and a justification of class oppression.
Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Man (1790) also forms a protest against Burke's nostalgia for the age of chivalry by ridiculing defunct, upper-class codes of behaviour. But her treatise goes beyond a mere attack on system of aristocratic values which keep the greater proportion of humankind in subservience. for Wollstonecraft (1759-97), that greater part of humankind embraced the thraldom of women of all classes. Wollstonecraft was the most articulate of a small group of writers, all of them associated with Godwin's circle, who used fiction to propagate certain aspects of the new revolutionary ideology. This group included two other women writers, Mary Hays (1760-1843), the author of Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), and Elizabeth Inchbald (1753-1821) whose novel A Simple Story appeared in 1791. Hays's Emma Courtney is 'a human being, loving virtue', but one 'enslaved by passion, liable to the mistaken weaknesses of our fragile nature', and hers is a story of unhappy and unrequited love and of a suffereing accentuated by a character insufficiently disciplined by education. Hays's later work includes the six volumes of Female Biography, or Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women of All Ages and Countries (1803). Inchbald's A Simple Story scarcely reveals itself now as a work of political or sexual radicalism, concerned as it is with a quiescent English Roman Catholic family, but it does mannage to assert the pressing need for women's education in order to respond to a stifling lack of fulfilment. Inchbald's later literary career included the novel Nature and Art (1796), two unperformed dramas set in revolutionary France, and a string of comedies, one of which, a version of Kotzebue's Lover's Vows of 1798, is the play disastrously rehearsed in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park.
The modest fiction of Hays and Inchbald shows a concern with the inconsistencies, limitations, and shortcomings of a contemporary society, but neither writer possessed the fire and the outspoken feminist zeal apparent in Wolltonecraft's flawed, rancorous, polemical, and radically original novels. Both Mary (1788) and the unfinished The Wrongs of Woman (1798) deal with the evidence of a universal oppression of women by men. Mary is told in an unadorned, laconic, matter-of-fact way, a style which, despite its periodic recourse to irony, might almost be described as perfunctory. The narrative touches on a variety of issues which figure prominently in 'Romantic' literature , notably on the significance of the imagination, the nature of religious feeling, and the soul-expanding effects of travel, and it interestingly opposes the emotional security of female friendship to a loveless marriage and an unfulfilled love-affair, but it is ultimately a tragedy without real substance. The Wrongs of Woman is a far more persuasive polemic concerning the need for a public recognition of women's rights. It is also a more impressive, if equally restless, work of fiction. Its heroine, Maria, is in many ways a development from the suffering Mary. She is acutely sensitive to landscape and ambience, but her Rousseauistic musings are balanced by her rejection of intellectual passivity and the kind of decorous feeling in which Rousseau himself ('the Prometheus of sentiment') patronizingly limited women's perceptions. Maria is also alert to 'the present state of society and government' and to what she sees as the 'enslaved state of the labouring majority'. To her alertness she adds the experience of thraldom within a loveless marriage. The novel opens with her literal imprisonment in a rambling madhouse, Gothic both in its architecture and in its frissons. The unhappy state of her suffering sisters is brought home to her through the melancholy catalogue of male oppression that she hears from her fellow inmates. If Maria's spirits are temporarily raised by the contemplation of Italy and 'the heart-enlarging virtues of antiquity', it gradually becomes clear that she is most inspired by the new virtues of revolutionary France. The judge who systematically reject her pleas for independence and for the enjoyment of her own fortune recognizes that her motivation is, to him, a gross parody of all demands for political change. 'We do not want French principles in public or private life', he asserts in the novel's last completed chapter, 'and, if women were allowed to plead their feeling, as an excuse or palliation of infidelity, it was opening a flood-gate for immorality'.
Wollstonecraft's most effective attempt to prize open the flood-gates remains her highly influential treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), an adaptation and remoulding of French revolutionary theory to the universal needs of women. It is dedicated to a French hero of the moment, the ex-Bishop and singularly devious statesman, Talleyrand. This dedication sets out the nub of the argument of the treatise as a whole: 'If woman be not prepared by education to become the companion of man, she will stop the progress of knowledge and virtue.' 'Who made man the exclusive judge', Wollstonecraft demands, 'if woman partake with him the gift of reason?' Her book is centred on these twin appeals in education and to reason: education to render the further subjection of women indefensible and reason applied to all future questions of gender. The relevance of her argument to contemporary political debate is carefully indicated by comparisons of the particular enslavement of humankind by tyrannical kings to the general enslavement of women by universally tyrannical men. In Louis XIV's France, she asserts in her fourth chapter, a nation and a sex were forced into a subjection which was disguised by a picturesque cloak of chivalric flattery. Similarly, in the ninth chapter, she complains of 'the pernicious effects which arise from the unnatural distinctions established in society', distinctions which divide nations into classes and ranks and which serve to deny both dignity and liberty to the suffering majority. The new order in France, she implies, has a vital relevance to all future attempts to define relationships between class and class, gender and gender.
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