HARDY FORUM ARCHIVE  H0016  2/15/00  "HARDY AND GODWIN QUESTION"
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From: Suarky@aol.com
Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 13:52:25 EST
Subject: William Godwin?  

Thomas Hardy makes many references to Percy Bysse Shelley, but I haven't come 
across any mention of PBS's famous father-in-law William Godwin.  Godwin's 
romantic views about the institution of marriage always resonate in my head 
while I read TH's novels.  Is there a connection?  
Also, has anyone noticed a copy of Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political 
Justice at a used book store?  All I need is the store name and location, and 
I can do the rest.  The book has been, unfortunately, out of print for a 
couple of years.  The entire text is on the internet, but it's hardly a 
substitute.  I certainly haven't had any luck in the Iowa City area.  Thanks.

Huzzah,
Travis K

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Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 23:12:14 -0500
From: Rosemarie Morgan <rosemarie.morgan@yale.edu>
Subject: Re: William Godwin?

I apologise if this seems to beg the question, but William Godwin, as a
political philosopher caught up with the rationalist-materialism of the
Enlightenment of the eighteenth century and dead (1836) before the Victorian
era had even yet conceived of itself as The Age of Social and Political
Transition (some would say, "Social & Political Revolution"), had no
knowledge or understanding of that latter period's complex secularisation
and institutionalisation of matrimony. Hardy's issues are not quite the same
as Godwin's: one might even say that Hardy's are anti-Romantic where the
institution of matrimony is concerned!
   I think it might be true to say that Godwin's concept of anarchy could
have been shared by Hardy but the diffusion of these ideas had become
politically re-formulated to such a degree of complexity by the
mid-nineteenth century, when Hardy was reading Fourier and the
Socialist-Anarchists and then, shortly afterwards Comte and the Positivists,
that it's almost like asking Herbert Marcuse to separate the Victorians,
Marx and Freud, in his own complex mid-twentieth-century political formulations.
   "Connections" there have to be, surely! But that Hardy seems nowhere to
mention Godwin (except under the macabre circumstances of recording the
dislocation, by excavation, of the London burial grave), may tell us very
little about literary influence.
   Thinking of it in reverse, and somewhat frivolously (?), we might
consider how many, many, many times Hardy cites biblical sources but
declares himself an agnostic!
   Good luck in your search for Godwin, Travis K. 
   I too am a Godwin admirer, but perhaps more of his wife, Mary
Wollstonecraft and of their daughter, Mary Shelley, of *Frankenstein" fame.

  Cheers,
   Rosemarie

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