Abstract
Citation analysis makes it possible to be more precise about the intensity, timing, and quality of an author’s reception and impact. We examine William Godwin’s citations using two sources, one from the outset of his career to 1966, the other starting in 1900. The earlier source allows investigation of the content of the citations: we divide them crudely into critical and others. Godwin’s peak of citation renown occurs later than might have been expected, in 1801, and is mostly negative at that point. When in deep disfavour, he was highly visible. Godwin’s reputation fell into several different periods, not just one. Overall, it was U-shaped, at its lowest in the 1870s. His flame never went out entirely, and has surged again in recent decades
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Notes
- 1.
William Hazlitt, The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: Dent, 1930–4), XI: The Spirit of the Age; or, Contemporary Portraits (1825), 16.
- 2.
The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), I, 220. Shelley had first written to Godwin in spring 1811, using an assumed name (‘Jennyngs Stukeley’) and requesting an opinion of his pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism (1811), a copy of which he enclosed (Bod. MS Abinger c. 10, fol. 114; for transcription and commentary, see B. C. Barker-Benfield, ‘A Spoof Letter to William Godwin’, Bodleian Library Record, 21 (2008), 112–15).
- 3.
Caleb Williams (the 1794 text), ed. Pamela Clemit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (the 1793 text), ed. Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); The Diary of William Godwin, ed. Victoria Myers, David O’Shaughnessy, and Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford Digital Library, 2010), http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/index2.html; The Letters of William Godwin, gen. ed. Pamela Clemit, 6 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011–).
- 4.
E.g. The Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe, a research project directed by Elinor Shaffer and published by Bloomsbury Academic (formerly Continuum) in an open-ended, multi-volume book series edited by her (https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/series/the-reception-of-british-and-irish-authors-in-europe/); on Godwin’s reception, see Kenneth W. Graham, William Godwin Reviewed: A Reception History, 1783–1834 (New York: AMS Press, 2001).
- 5.
For an overview of citation studies, see Nicola De Bellis, Bibliometrics and Citation Analysis: From the Science Citation Index to Cybermetrics (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2009).
- 6.
Burton R. Pollin, Godwin Criticism: A Synoptic Bibliography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967).
- 7.
De Bellis, Bibliometrics, pp. 181–242.
- 8.
Roger C. Schonfeld, JSTOR: A History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
- 9.
De Bellis, Bibliometrics, pp. 75–140.
- 10.
Samuel Bjork, Avner Offer, and Gabriel Söderberg, ‘Time-Series Citation Data: The Nobel Prize in Economics’, Scientometrics, 98 (2014), 185–96.
- 11.
Pollin, Godwin Criticism, pp. 650–54.
- 12.
On 12 October 2013.
- 13.
Technical details in Bjork, Offer, and Söderberg, ‘Time-Series Citation Data’, pp. 185–8.
- 14.
Technical details in Bjork, Offer, and Söderberg, ‘Time-Series Citation Data’, pp. 187–8.
- 15.
Mark Philp, Godwin’s Political Justice (London: Duckworth, 1986), pp. 58–79.
- 16.
Derek Roper, Reviewing before the ‘Edinburgh’, 1788–1802 (London: Methuen, 1978), pp. 198–203.
- 17.
Roper, Reviewing before the ‘Edinburgh’, 180–1; British Critic, 1 (1793), reprinted in Graham, William Godwin Reviewed, p. 63.
- 18.
On the transformation in reviewing practices in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Britain, see Roper, Reviewing before the ‘Edinburgh’; Jon P. Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), pp. 18–46; Marilyn Butler, ‘Culture’s Medium: The Role of the Review’, in The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, ed. Stuart Curran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 120–47.
- 19.
The collapse of Godwin’s reputation during these years may be traced more fully in The Letters of William Godwin , Volume II: 1798–1805, ed. Pamela Clemit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), passim.
- 20.
M. O. Grenby, The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), passim; True Briton, 12 Apr. 1797, 3; 14 Apr. 1797, 3; 15 Apr. 1797, 3; 18 Apr. 1797, 3.
- 21.
For example, the Mercury and New-England Palladium published 29 articles ridiculing Godwin’s views in 1801 (Pollin, Godwin Criticism, pp. 105–09; see also Clarence S. Brigham, History and Bibliography of American Newspapers, 1690–1820, 2 vols (Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1947), I, 317–18).
- 22.
Henry Richard Vassall, Baron Holland, Further Memoirs of the Whig Party, 1807–1821, with Some Miscellaneous Reminiscences (1854), ed. Lord Stavordale (London: John Murray, 1905), p. 381.
- 23.
The Letters of Charles Lamb, To Which Are Added Those of His Sister Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas, 3 vols (London: Dent, 1935), II, 183.
- 24.
Hazlitt, Complete Works, VII: Political Essays (1819) 98.
- 25.
Peter H. Marshall, William Godwin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 345.
- 26.
Michael Sadleir, XIX Century Fiction: A Bibliographical Record Based on His Own Collection (London and Los Angeles: Constable, 1951), II, 100; Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1957), pp. 274–75.
- 27.
Cf. Metropolitan Magazine, 6 (Jan.–Apr. 1833), 114 (on Deloraine): ‘He who has trod like a king through the walks of feeling and affection, even when his step totters, will have an interest and a dignity about him, that must infallibly command respect’; reprinted in Graham, William Godwin Reviewed, p. 557.
- 28.
Pollin, Godwin Criticism, pp. 187–88, p. 160.
- 29.
‘To the Socialist especially, ‘Political Justice’ opens up a storehouse of argument and illustration which may truly be pronounced invaluable’ (New Moral World, 3rd ser. 4/35 (25 Feb. 1843), 284).
- 30.
Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, ed. Victor Kiernan, intro. Tristram Hunt (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2009), p. 245.
- 31.
See Pamela Clemit, ‘Introduction’, Lives of the Great Romantics III: Godwin, Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley by Their Contemporaries, gen. ed. John Mullan, 3 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999), I, ix–xliv.
- 32.
Clemit, Lives of the Great Romantics III, I, 227–28.
- 33.
Pollin, Godwin Criticism, pp. 267–9, p. 267; see also Heiner Becker, ‘Notes on Freedom and the Freedom Press, 1886–1928’, The Raven, 1 (1987), 4–24, and Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, ed. Candace Falk et al., 2 vols (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003–) II, 551.
- 34.
On the post-First World War rise of English studies, see Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism, 1848–1932 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), pp. 86–108.
- 35.
Manchester Guardian, 9 Mar. 1948.
- 36.
George Woodcock, ‘Introduction to a New Edition’, William Godwin: A Biographical Study (Montreal and New York: Black Rose Books, 1989), p. ix.
- 37.
Herbert Read, ‘Foreword’, Woodcock, William Godwin, p. xvii.
- 38.
Don Locke, A Fantasy of Reason: The Life And Thought of William Godwin (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980); Marshall, William Godwin; William St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys: The Biography of a Family (London: Faber and Faber, 1989).
- 39.
Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 8 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1992) and Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 7 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993); Anarchy Archives: An Online Research Centre on the History and Theory of Anarchism, a research project directed by Dana Ward, at: http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/
- 40.
The sample was taken from the British Academy Directory for 2012–13, and consisted of the first ten distinctive names (to avoid overcounting) in each of the sections H6 (Modern Languages, Literatures and other Media; this includes English), H9 (Early Modern History to c.1800), H10 (Modern History from 1800), H12 (Philosophy), S5 (Political Studies: Political Theory, Government and International Relations). The counts were made on 12 October 2013 in Google Scholar, using Anne-Wil Harzing’s programme, Publish or Perish (www.harzing.com/pop.htm). The highest individual score was 43,139 citations, the lowest was 106, and the arithmetical mean was 4581. British Academy Fellows tend to be near the end of their scholarly careers. Different sections varied widely in citation levels from each other, perhaps because of different scholarly practices in different disciplines, and there was sometimes a large variance within sections as well.
Bibliography
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Barker-Benfield, B. C., ‘A Spoof Letter to William Godwin’, Bodleian Library Record, 21 (2008), 112–15
Becker, Heiner, ‘Notes on Freedom and the Freedom Press, 1886–1928’, The Raven, 1 (1987), 4–24
Bjork, Samuel, Avner Offer, and Gabriel Söderberg, ‘Time-Series Citation Data: The Nobel Prize in Economics’, Scientometrics, 98 (2014), 185–96
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Butler, Marilyn, ‘Culture’s Medium: The Role of the Review’, in The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, ed. Stuart Curran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) pp. 120–47
Brigham, Clarence S., History and Bibliography of American Newspapers, 1690–1820, 2 vols (Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1947)
Clemit, Pamela, ‘Introduction’, Lives of the Great Romantics III: Godwin, Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley by Their Contemporaries, gen. ed. John Mullan, 3 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999), I, ix–xliv
De Bellis, Nicola, Bibliometrics and Citation Analysis: From the Science Citation Index to Cybermetrics (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2009)
Engels, Friedrich, The Condition of the Working Class in England, ed. Victor Kiernan, intro. Tristram Hunt (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2009)
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A version of this essay was first published in Nineteenth-Century Prose, 41 (2014), 27–52. We thank the editor for permission to reprint.
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Clemit, P., Offer, A. (2021). Godwin’s Citations, 1783–2005: Highest Renown at the Pinnacle of Disfavour. In: O'Brien, E., Stark, H., Turner, B. (eds) New Approaches to William Godwin. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62912-0_12
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