The State, the Teacher, and the Children’s Author

Introduction

William Godwin (1756–1836) is perhaps best known as the husband of Mary Wollstonecraft, the father of Mary Shelley, and the author of the Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (first edition in 1793, revised in 1796 and 1798).1 This radical text has allowed him to become part of the canon of anarchist thought, with Peter Kropotkin describing him in 1910 as having been ‘the first to formulate the political and economical conceptions of anarchism’ (Kropotkin, 1995, p. 238). He is less well known as a radical pedagogical thinker, and perhaps even less as a writer of children’s books and owner of a London children’s bookshop, which he ran from 1805 to its eventual bankruptcy in 1825. This is not to say that the politics of Godwin’s educational thought, or his work as a children’s author, are a complete terra incognita. Godwin’s radical educational theories have been recirculated and celebrated by twentieth-century British anarchists like George Woodcock and Colin Ward (Woodcock, 1946, pp. 123–33; Ward, 1991, chap. 1; Adams & Hansson, 2024, pp. 19–25). Scholars such as Pamela Clemit (1993; 2001; 2009), Janet Bottoms (2004; 2006), Susan Manly (2012), or myself (Hansson, 2020a; 2020b; 2021) have explored both Godwin’s pedagogical theory and his children’s books. Others have focused on either the former (Allen, 2007; Handwerk, 2011), or the latter (Roy, 2009; Anderson, 2011).

In this article, I seek to complement this existing literature by showing some of the continuities that underpin Godwin’s analysis of the intricate operations of power in the production, circulation, and the social and political imposition of forms of knowledge through education. The fact that there are continuities does not, however, mean that Godwin’s thought was static. It varied according to the political, social, and professional circumstances in which he operated. As he moved from the philosophical prose of The Enquiry Concerning Political Justice to the more conversational essays of The Enquirer (1797), and, eventually, to the writing of works for children, Godwin’s way of apprehending the politics and dynamics of the production and circulation of knowledge became increasingly refined, not least because he shifted from theory – as a philosophical author – to practise – as a writer of children’s books. To do so, I will begin by establishing the importance of the relationship between education, power and knowledge in Godwin’s works, from the 1780s to his final contribution to philosophy, Thoughts on Man (1831). I will then tackle the different dimensions of Godwin’s understanding of the politics of education, from the rejection of state education to the negotiation of the tensions inherent to the hierarchies between tutor and child. Lastly, I will look into Godwin’s approach to reading as well as his practices as a children’s book author and bookseller, to discuss how Godwin actualised some of his political commitments with regards to education.

Godwin and the Politics of Education

Godwin’s interest in education and the politics of education, both in terms of micro-level, interpersonal politics, and macro-level national politics, are apparent through the variety of his writings. Education and its methods occupy a significant part of Godwin’s unfinished manuscript autobiography, likely written in the period from 1790 to 1820 (Philp, 1992, p. 58). His narrative comprises recollections concerning his childhood readings, including such volumes as John Gay’s Fables, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and, later, ‘the early volumes of the English translation of the Ancient History of Rollin’ (Godwin, 1992, vol. 1, pp. 12, 22, 37). More importantly, his autobiographical writings also contain analyses of the effects of the interpersonal politics of the tutor-child relationship. In describing ‘the character’ of one of his earliest teachers’, Mrs Sothren,2 a distant member of the family who lived in their household, Godwin wrote:

She was totally ignorant of that admirable art, which turns an admonition or a lesson into a pleasure […]. I remember in one instance, probably in very early life, her pertinaciously insisting upon my eating a morsel I had refused at dinner. Finding no other way to free myself from the importunity, I at least yielded; but I am sure that the disgust and repugnance thus produced in a youthful mind, is a much greater disadvantage than the vice which this sort of strictness was intended to cure. [Godwin, 1992, vol. 1, p. 24]

This passage is representative of some of Godwin’s key concerns in the education of youth: a rejection of models of authority that impose certain types of behaviour by sheer force, preferring freedom and equality, and the idea that it is the preceptor’s role to expose the child to knowledge in a way that is pleasurable. The question of authority in the tutor-child relationship recurs in Godwin’s account of his habit of secretly reading Charles Rollin’s Ancient History in the Norwich home of his authoritarian teacher, Mr Newton. Godwin described his secretive behaviour in political terms: ‘I was under the control of a despot; and I resolved he should not be a despot to me, where I could avoid it’ (p. 37). At the Hoxton Dissenting Academy, Godwin developed a greater taste for free enquiry. This was facilitated by the atmosphere of open debate fostered in dissenting academies generally, but perhaps particularly in more liberal institutions such as Hoxton (Whitehouse, 2015, chap. 2; Schuldt, 2017, chaps 1 and 3). In such an environment, Godwin had the latitude to freely pursue radical arguments, challenge authoritatively received notions, and debate with fellow scholars (Marshall, 1984, pp. 32–45; Godwin, 1992, vol. 1, pp. 42–43).

Upon leaving an unsuccessful career as a minister, Godwin went to London to become a writer. But he also sought an alternative career: he tried to become a teacher. In 1783, he advertised his project for a school in Surrey by publishing his first pedagogical pamphlet: An Account of the Seminary. The pamphlet outlines some of the key elements of Godwin’s thought regarding the nature and politics of education and educational relationships, and therefore of the circulation of knowledge. The essay opens by identifying both ‘government and education’ as ‘the two principal objects of human power’, with the education of children being an endeavour ‘upon which the happiness of multitudes may one day depend’ (Godwin, 1993, vol. 5, p. 5). Furthermore, Godwin highlighted the need to treat the pupil as an independent moral subject with valid opinions. So, after assigning readings to his pupil, Godwin planned to ‘induce him to deliver his fair and genuine sentiments upon every action and character’, and to explain the ‘plain and simple reason for his opinion’ (p. 20). Godwin’s project for a school never materialised and he continued working as a writer in London, navigating Whig circles until the French Revolution shook the whole European political order.

The revolution in France and the polemics that followed in Britain were the occasion of Godwin’s rise to fame and further engagement with the relationships between education, knowledge and power. Godwin’s famous contribution to the British debates about the French Revolution, The Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, engaged with these relationships in at least three different ways. First, it was part of a polemic analysing the legitimacy of both the French Revolution and the British model of government. In this respect, it is to be understood as a contribution to this debate alongside Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791). In one way or another, these were all attempts to produce and circulate knowledge about government, designed to either uphold or challenge existing political structures in Britain.3 Relatedly, it was also part of a long-standing attempt at developing a science of politics concerned with establishing the principles of government. In this respect, it stood aside from immediate polemics and engaged in longer-standing conversations with Rational Dissenters, French philosophes, and other thinkers across Britain and Europe such as David Hume and Cesare Beccaria (Philp, 1986, chaps 1 and 2). Godwin’s radical conclusion here was that Government was, in the final analysis, unnecessary and ought to be dispensed with in time. As I will discuss in detail below, in building his argument, Godwin also asserted that state-controlled educational institutions are illegitimate, and that, where states exist, they should not be in control of education.

Throughout the 1790s, Godwin remained steadfast in his conclusions. He sought to circulate this knowledge to a wider audience than that initially intended by Political Justice. This project took the form of his most celebrated political novel, Things As They Are; or the Adventures of Caleb Williams, which was published in 1794. As the (initially unpublished) preface states, the novel intended to communicate to ‘persons, whom books of philosophy and science are never likely to reach’ some of the key arguments of Political Justice, particularly with regards to the effects of hierarchical social and political institutions ‘in the moral world’, which is to say, in the sphere of human activity (Godwin, 1992, vol. 1, p. 279). As I and others have discussed elsewhere, this novel embodied the format of individual-orientated political education that was more congenial to Godwin, who was famously distrustful of political organisations and mass meetings (Fairclough, 2013, pp. 99–107; Hansson, 2017, pp. 786–89; Mee, 2011, pp. 90–92; Philp, 2011, p. 69). He feared that the power of the speaker in front of a mass audience and the reciprocal power of the audience over the speaker would contribute to the corruption of knowledge rather than its production (Hansson, 2017, p. 786). Caleb Williams, in that way, illustrates Godwin’s understanding of the complexities of the operations of power in the educational relationship.

It is to similar issues of the more micro-level operations of power that Godwin turned in the sections on education in his 1797 collection of essays, The Enquirer. These essays were composed and published in a radically different context than Political Justice. Early British supporters of the French Revolution had to come to terms with the aftermath of the Terror and the ongoing war with France. At the same time, over the course of the 1790s, the state reorganised its own response to the activism of reformists and radicals in Britain, under a repressive regime provocatively compared at the time with French Revolutionary Terror (Hilton, 2006, pp. 65–74). In addition to these discouraging changes in the domestic and international political context, Godwin was stimulated intellectually in the composition of The Enquirer through sustained discussions with fellow theorist, activist, and educationalist Mary Wollstonecraft, whom he would marry in 1797, and who read drafts of the essays he wrote (Godwin & Wollstonecraft, 1977, Letters 9, 34, 53, 86).

All this led Godwin to dissect, in The Enquirer, some of the more individual and emotional dimensions of the politics of the construction and circulation of knowledge, particularly with regards to the education of children. For Godwin, the temporality of reform was no longer the same as that which he had imagined in the early 1790s. He wrote, in the preface to The Enquirer, that following the ‘intemperance’ of the arguments and actions in favour of ‘political innovation’ (including Godwin’s own), he sought to turn to an investigation of ‘the humbler walks of private life’. It is in those, and not least in the longer-term project of the education of children to be free and autonomous citizens, that Godwin saw the seeds for the overall reformation of politics and society, for it was crucial for ‘those who shall be active in promoting the cause of reform’ to ‘be found amiable in their personal manners’ (Godwin, 1993, vol. 5, p. 79). Crucially, as I shall discuss at greater length below, the essays explore through thought experiments the more practical tensions posed by Godwin’s commitment to the moral autonomy of children, their liberty to act as agents of the construction of their own knowledge, and the aspiration to equality between children and adults, even as he recognised that ‘all education is despotism’ (p. 107).

The Enquirer is Godwin’s most sustained work on the theory and politics of education.4 It was not, however, his last foray into the field of education. Mary Wollstonecraft died in 1797, leaving Godwin with the care of Wollstonecraft’s first daughter, Fanny, and their newborn child Mary. Like other reformers and radicals, he continued facing the hostility of the authorities in an increasingly difficult political context, leading him to recede somewhat from public view. In 1801, Godwin met Mary Jane Clairmont, a single mother of two young children, and a woman of letters in her own right, who had connections to the world of children’s literature (St Clair, 1989, p. 284). They were married later that year, and Godwin embarked on the writing of his first work for children: the Bible Stories, published under the pseudonym of William Scolfield in 1802. This was Godwin’s first, but certainly not final, foray into the world of children’s publishing.

Considering the opportunities afforded by children’s publishing and facing serious financial difficulties, the Godwins eventually decided to set up their own children’s bookshop, the Juvenile Library, in 1805. This decision was not only made on the basis of William and Mary Jane’s experience with children’s publishing. As a father, and following his own precepts, Godwin had taken considerable interest in the education of the children under his care, and, if we are to believe a letter he wrote in 1807, he had found pleasure and usefulness in writing original stories for them prior to the foundation of the Juvenile Library.5 As a writer and bookseller, the business would occupy Godwin until the company’s demise in 1825. With the business, he sought, rather unsuccessfully, to stabilise the family’s precarious financial situation and provide for its two adults and five children (Clemit, 2009; Kinnell, 1988; St Clair, 1990). By 1805, then, and as I will show in greater detail in the final section of this paper, Godwin refined his educational theories concerning the necessity of developing the moral autonomy of children by combining them with the practice of writing for children.

Through the Juvenile Library, Godwin constructed an educational programme of his own design. His books were intended primarily, as a recurring phrase in the title pages indicates, ‘for the use of schools and young persons’ (Baldwin, 1806; 1809; 1822), meaning for children capable of reading and up to their early teenage years. His writings for children consisted in eight works, most of which were written in the very early years of the Juvenile Library. Under the name of Edward Baldwin, Godwin began by writing a collection of Fables, Ancient and Modern (1805); a set of classical myths, The Pantheon (1806); three books of history – The History ofEngland (1806), The History of Rome (1809), and The History of Greece (1822); and a brief primer on grammar called the New Guide to the English Tongue (1810). As Theophilus Marcliffe, Godwin added to those two short biographical works: The Looking-Glass (1805), a short biography of the childhood years of the illustrator of the Juvenile Library, William Mulready; and a Life of Lady Jane Grey (1806), who was in a brief contest with Mary Tudor over the throne of England in the early 1550s. Though the extent of these books’ political charge, radical or not, remains an issue of scholarly debate (Anderson, 2011; Carlson, 2007, pp. 239–40; Clemit, 2001; 2009; Grenby, 2003; Hansson, 2020a; 2020b; 2021; Manly, 2012), I highlight below how Godwin engaged with the politics of the circulation of knowledge through his children’s books.

Godwin continued writing about education in later life, dedicating sections of his second collection of essays, Thoughts on Man to the issue. He picked up on themes he had already presented in The Enquirer and in his prior writings on education, highlighting for example the fundamental problem of the ‘arbitrary’ character of the power of parents and teachers over children, which is, furthermore, ‘without appeal’ (Godwin, 1993, vol. 6, p. 50). Likewise, he placed his critique of inequality in the context of an essay on education, focusing on the desirability of better and more equal access to education regardless of social status. He asserted that the hierarchical structures of society led ‘the majority of men [to be] trampled in the mire, made “hewers of wood, and drawers of water”, long, very long before there was an opportunity of ascertaining what it was of which they were capable’ (p. 52).

Having now shown the long-standing and multiple ways in which Godwin sought to engage in his works with the relationship between knowledge, power, and education, I want to turn in the rest of this essay to a closer analysis of two particularly salient elements. The first is Godwin’s understanding of both the systemic and the interpersonal politics of education. I will point out what Godwin thought were educational models that could hinder or help the production and circulation of knowledge, and were therefore conducive to social and political reform. Secondly, I will address the issue of the relationship between theory and practice by paying closer attention to how Godwin conceived of the relationship between the act of reading, the moral autonomy of the child, and the materiality and narrative style of children’s books.

State Education and the Circulation of Knowledge for Individual and Collective Progress

In his analysis of the politics of education as they relate to the possibility of social and political progress, meaning the joint increase of liberty (understood as the ability to act according to the dictates of one’s private judgment, without authoritarian interference) and justice (understood as the maximisation of happiness for the greatest number), Godwin raised a key question: Should education be controlled by the state? In a chapter entitled ‘Of National Education’ in Political Justice, he forcefully argued in all three editions of the text that the state should be prevented from controlling education (1993, vol. 5, pp. 356–59).6 To bolster that claim, Godwin deployed three arguments. The first and third tackle what he saw as the inherent political and institutional problems in the relationship between the state and education, while the second tackles the effects on the individual mind of state education. Though criticised as impractical or even deluded by the otherwise sympathetic Burton Pollin (1962, pp. 133–36), each of the three arguments he deployed to reject schemes of national education illuminates a part of his understanding of the relationship between political power, education, the production and circulation of knowledge, and the conditions for social and political progress. His arguments operate at two levels: that of society at large and that of the individual. Taken together, they bolster his claim that, far from being ‘conducive to public service’, systems of national education ‘conduce to injury’ (Godwin, 1993, vol. 3, pp. 356–57).

At the systemic level, following Godwin’s first main argument, schemes for national education prevent the emergence of new forms of knowledge that would lead to social and political improvement while privileging existing ideas and institutions. This was because ‘all public establishments’, by which Godwin means national institutions, ‘include in them the idea of permanence’: they are liable to a profound conservatism that prevents the emergence and acceptance of new and improved ideas while encouraging the repetition of ‘such tenets as may chance to be previously established’ (p. 357). To illustrate his point, the philosopher took the two examples of universities and Sunday schools. He considered that, in the case of universities, knowledge that ‘is a century behind the knowledge which exists among the unshackled and unprejudiced’, is taught (p. 357). Turning to ‘the petty institution of Sunday schools’, he claimed that children learned ‘a superstitious veneration of the church of England, and how to bow to every man in a handsome coat’ (p. 357). Godwin further fleshed out this set of claims through his third argument, which Pollin has rightly called ‘a special instance of the first’ (1962, p. 135). Godwin underlined the dangers of an ‘alliance’ between education and ‘national government’, which he claimed would be ‘of a more formidable nature, than the old and much contested alliance of church and state’. In particular, he considered that the very nature of government with such centralised power would lead it to use education ‘to strengthen its hand, and perpetuate its institutions’, and overall, prevent the correction of the ‘errors’ that necessarily mar its political model (Godwin, 1993, vol. 3, p. 359).

These arguments are best understood in light of Godwin’s biography as well as the unfolding debates in Revolutionary France. Godwin’s worries about the power of the ‘alliance’ between national government and education, his comparison with the ‘alliance of church and state’, and his rejection of the Sunday school’s tendency to reinforce the doctrines of the Church of England can all be traced back to his Dissenting background. Moreover, as a reporter for the New Annual Register, Godwin had taken an active interest in the debates that had then just taken place concerning the possible repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, which imposed limitations on English Dissenters (Pollin, 1962, p. 164; Audidière, 2008, p. 305; O’Shaughnessy, 2010, p. 52).7 At the same time, schemes for national education were being developed beyond the strictly theoretical across the Channel. Prior to the Revolution, French reformers’ arguments in favour of national education had become increasingly important following the dissolution of the Jesuit Society in 1762 (Gill, 2010, p. 242; O’Connor, 2017, chap. 2). The French Constitution of 3 September 1791 made free public education a constitutional right, and, by the time of the publication of the first edition of Political Justice, specific proposals had been made in Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord’s Rapport sur l’instruction publique (1791) and Nicolas de Condorcet’s 1792 Mémoires sur l’instruction publique (O’Connor, 2017, chap. 4). In this respect, though Godwin’s arguments in Political Justice were primarily built at the abstract level, they were moved by the political urgency to expose the negative consequences of the assumption of power over education by the state. It is perhaps to evolutions in France that Godwin alluded when he concluded that ‘even in the countries where liberty chiefly prevails, it is reasonably to be assumed that there are important errors, and a national education has the most direct tendency to perpetuate those errors’ (1993, vol. 3, p. 359).

But the perniciousness of national education also manifests at the individual level, which is what Godwin drew attention to with this second argument. He outlined the psychological effects of the political power of the state over individuals, and in particular over pupils and students, and thus shifted from a macro- to a micro-politics of power, focusing on the process of learning itself. For him, schemes of national education that impose the format and content of education are founded on an ‘inattention to the nature of mind’, which requires us to take responsibility for our actions, including our education (p. 358). Against reformers such as Talleyrand, who, as Adrian O’Connor put it, aimed, through education, ‘to transform the letter of the new laws [in particular the ideals of liberty and equality] into the spirit of the new society’ (O’Connor, 2017, p. 102), Godwin argued that under a scheme of national education, individuals would remain in ‘a state of perpetual pupillage’ for they would be unable to formulate the ‘desire to acquire’ the knowledge imparted to them. For Godwin, a scheme of national, compulsory education introduces incentives to education that cannot make pupils ‘respectable’ or virtuous, for they engage in an activity that has been assigned to them from authority, and not from their own reason (1993, vol. 3, p. 358).

Curbing the Power of the Teacher

Although their analysis remains underdeveloped in Political Justice, the politics of the process of learning are prominent in The Enquirer, especially in the sections concerned with the dynamics of the tutor-child relationship, on which the circulation of knowledge and the eventual progress of society rely. Godwin’s key question here was: to what extent should power be exerted in this relationship, and what consequences does this have on the modalities of the circulation of knowledge as well as the content of the knowledge to be imparted? To this fundamentally political question, Godwin replied using a political vocabulary indebted to the republican tradition and its criticism of arbitrary power (Skinner, 1998). Graham Allen (2007) has examined this question and the tensions that underpin the tutor-child relationship from the perspective of Godwin’s view of private judgment and literature. I will focus here on the mechanisms Godwin devised to minimise the negative effects of the operations of hierarchy.

In the essay ‘Of Public and Private Education’, Godwin identified the fundamental problem: ‘All education is despotism. It is perhaps impossible for the young to be conducted without introducing in many cases the tyranny of implicit obedience. Go there; do that; read; write; rise; lie down; will perhaps for ever be the language addressed to youth by age’ (1993, vol. 5, p. 107).

Turning to the figure of the instructor in the essay entitled ‘Of the Communication of Knowledge’, Godwin fleshed that problem out further. He noted that ‘nothing can be more pitiable than the condition of the instructor in the present modes of education […]. He is regarded as a tyrant by those under his jurisdiction, and he is a tyrant’ (p. 117). The solution, for Godwin, was to foster the conditions that remove the tyranny of the tutor and the slavery of the child. He concluded the essay ‘Of Manly Treatment and Behaviour’ by asserting that ‘the state of equality, which is the consummation of a just education should for ever be borne in mind’ (pp. 130–31). But this runs into another hurdle, which Godwin described in the essay ‘Of Reasoning and Contention’. Even parents and tutors with the best of intentions, who follow Godwin’s recommendation and ‘act the part of’ the children’s ‘friend, and not their master’, allowing them a degree of autonomy and freedom to argue their position, have de facto large amounts of arbitrary power over children. They can always wield their authority and say: ‘You have not convinced me; and therefore nothing remains for you but to submit’ (p. 122). For Godwin, there is an irresolvable tension between the temptation of the parent to deploy power and a political, ethical, psychological and pedagogical duty for the parent or tutor not to do so.

He suggested provocatively that the politics of such a situation are even worse than certain forms of slavery: not only is the child a slave under the arbitrary power of the tutor or parent, but it has also been placed in a position where freedom appeared to be tangible, but was in fact illusory. ‘This’, Godwin writes, ‘is a torture more exquisite and refined than all that Sicilian tyrants ever invented’ (p. 123). Godwin’s solution here can be understood as an adaptation of a political institution: the law. In an Account of the Seminary in 1783, Godwin made use of markedly republican language and commonplaces, claiming that in education, ‘the laws should speak, and the magistrate be silent’ (p. 13). In The Enquirer, he privileged a slightly different language, but with similar implications. Whatever is to remain within the remit of the ‘peremptory decisions’ of the parent or tutor should – as befits Godwin’s more general and sustained commitment, expressed in Political Justice, to freedom of enquiry and action – be limited in its application to ‘cases of extraordinary emergency’. Moreover, these ‘boundaries’ to the independence of children should be ‘clear, evident and unequivocal’ (p. 123). They ought also to be transparent but should not be open to discussion, as a safeguard against illusory freedom. Lastly, they should be adequately communicated to children ‘with mildness of behaviour, but with firmness of decision’ so that they ‘shall generate no resentful passions in the breasts of our juniors’ (p. 123). Within these limits, the child would be free to act according to his or her own will, and while some amount of arbitrary power is, according to Godwin, ‘for the present at least […], indispensable’, its mode of operation should become clear to the understanding of the child, removing some of the nefarious effects of the intractable hierarchy between tutor and child (pp. 123–24).

These considerations on the operations of the politics of state and interpersonal power in terms of education have consequences for the institutional format governing the circulation of knowledge to children, and the mode of determination of the necessary content of that education. As an advocate for equality between tutor and pupil, for the moral autonomy of the child, and for children’s liberty in their studies, Godwin highlighted the need to ‘communicate knowledge, without infringing, or with as little possible violence, to the volition and individual judgment of the person to be instructed’ (p. 114). In focusing on the judgment of children regarding their own instruction, Godwin developed a model of what is now called child-centred education that went beyond those advocated by both John Locke in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Émile (1762).8 As Clemit has shown, Godwin was particularly critical of Rousseau’s tactics of deception, which provide children with an illusory sense of self-direction (Clemit, 1993, p. 8). Instead, in the essay ‘Of the Communication of Knowledge’, he advocated frankness, openness to discussion and the necessity to reason with the child over the appropriate course of studies. In the end, for Godwin, it is not primarily up to the master to decide what a child should learn, it is ‘the pupil [that] should go first, and the master follow’ (Godwin, 1993, vol. 5, p. 115).

In tackling the issue of the institutional format of education, Godwin entered a broader debate in late-eighteenth-century Britain about the relative qualities of what was then called private and public education, meaning respectively ‘being educated at home’, usually on an individual level, and ‘being educated with other children in school’ (Woodley, 2009, p. 22). As Sophia Woodley noted, most radical educationalists in Britain, following Rousseau’s Émile and Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education, privileged private over public education on the grounds of a Rousseauian ‘mistrust for society’, and an attachment to liberty inherited from both Locke and Rousseau (pp. 23–26). Godwin’s stance in this debate, outlined in the essay ‘Of Public and Private Education’, was more nuanced. Though he came short of being satisfied with public education as it was practised at the time, he concluded that, although ‘all education is despotism’, public education appeared to be less despotic than private education.

This may seem counter-intuitive. Would education with a private tutor not generally be more flexible, more malleable and less authoritarian than education in a classroom? Godwin’s answer was no, precisely because private education is such that the teacher is constantly in control of the child: the child therefore has no real sphere of independence. Shifting to a first-person account, Godwin thus wrote ‘under this slavery the mind pusillanimously shrinks. I am left alone with my tyrant, and am utterly hopeless and forlorn’ (1993, vol. 5, p. 108). In contrast, public schooling allows for independence because the child knows its sufferings to be temporary and limited by ‘the discipline of a public school’, which is akin, Godwin continued, to ‘the inflexible laws of nature and necessity’, over which no individual can have control as they form the basic structure of the physical world. The child can therefore think to itself: ‘I adjust the account in my own mind with my task-master, and say, Thus far you may proceed; but there is a conquest that you cannot atchieve [sic]’ (1993, vol. 5, p. 108). What differentiated public from private education, then, is the nature of the controlling power that is erected over the child.

In the case of private education, the arbitrariness of the master’s power is immediate, raw, tangible. It simply involves two minds, one oppressing, the other resisting oppression. In the case of a public school, however, oppression is shared and divided, and the discipline is (more or less) uniform and repetitive: it becomes a kind of temporary, man-made ‘law of nature’, which all pupils can recognise as such, and loses, therefore, a key part of its arbitrariness. To put it another way, whereas in private education the child is essentially a slave, in public education the child is at liberty to act according to its own will within the bounds of the man-made ‘law of nature’ of the school. The independent mind of the child can, as a consequence, continue to grow without being completely swallowed by the petty control of the private tutor over the child’s every move. Still, for Godwin, neither model was entirely satisfactory. He concluded the essay first by suggesting that ‘a middle way […] neither entirely public, nor entirely private’ might be preferable, before more radically proposing that ‘perhaps an adventurous and undaunted philosophy would lead to the rejecting them altogether, and pursuing the investigation of a mode totally dissimilar’ (p. 109).

Thought into Practice: Reading, the Acquisition of Knowledge, and the Pedagogical Politics of the Juvenile Library

Godwin’s understanding of the politics of education led him to advocate autonomy in reading, something he sought to defend in theory and foster in his practice as the producer of books for children. Unlike Rousseau, who famously rejected children’s reading and called books ‘the plague of childhood’ (Rousseau, 1979, p. 116), Godwin considered reading to be essential to the education of children. It is reading that, in part, allows us to become independent of mind and spirit, and therefore capable of acting for ourselves and improving society (Clemit, 1993, pp. 9–11). In The Enquirer, Godwin insisted that ‘he that loves reading, has every thing within his reach. He has but to desire; and he may possess himself of every species of wisdom to judge, and power to perform’ (1993, vol. 5, p. 95). However, he also noted, in his famous essay ‘Of Choice in Reading’, that a child’s course of reading often runs into the problem of the ‘arbitrary regulations’ set up by parents seeking to prevent children from having access to certain books (p. 136).

The question of reading becomes then a special case of the broader issue of the autonomy of children in Godwin’s political theory of education. Reading is a particular sphere of potential despotism on the part of parents that must be mitigated, even more so given the power of books to lead to social progress. In his analysis and recommendations in ‘Of Choice in Reading’, Godwin reformulated the commitments outlined in the previous section. Restrictions on reading are politically harmful because they are detrimental to the emergence of an equal relationship between the child and whichever adult takes care of them, be they parent or tutor, who risk taking on the role of the ‘jailors’ rather than the friends of their wards (p. 136). Moreover, they invert the consequent desirable pedagogical relationship that intimates that ‘the pupil should go first’ (p. 115) in the process of his or her own education. What followed from this, and Godwin’s broader analysis of the social effects of literature, was a recommendation to increase the autonomy of the child by ‘suffering him in some instances to select his own course of reading’ (p. 142).

Autonomy on the part of children was something Godwin did not only seek to foster through arguments about their choice of reading. Once his career brought him from educational theory to educational practice, this commitment bled through the decisions he made regarding the books he published for his Juvenile Library. This had both material and narrative dimensions. In her pioneering article on Godwin’s Juvenile Library, Clemit has argued that the materiality of the children’s books produced by the company reflected Godwin’s commitments to the autonomy of the child reader (Clemit, 2001). She noted that Godwin’s 1806 History of England (like his other works for children), was ‘published in a duodecimo format (about 8.5×14 cm)’, is therefore ‘small enough to fit into a child’s hands’. In addition, it has ‘clear, well-spaced print’, making it easier to read for a child. For her, this format was intended ‘to encourage independent reading’ (p. 63). These material choices freed the child from the necessity of the intervention of their tutors in their reading and allowed them to have a more personal and immediate relationship with the objects of their study, enlarging the child’s ‘little sphere of empire and discretion’ and ‘appropriate portion of independence’ (Godwin, 1993, vol. 5, p. 119).

It might be argued that the decision to print a children’s book in this way was not unique to Godwin. The duodecimo was not an uncommon format for children’s books regardless of the pedagogical doctrines of their authors, likely due to the fact that such small books could be sold relatively cheaply. But beyond the material choices, Godwin repeatedly identified good quality independent reading as a key concern of his, providing additional evidence that his material choices were not mere accident, but fit within a broader political and social project. In the preface to his Fables, Ancient and Modern (1805), Godwin returned to the issue of the tutor-child relationship by presenting a problematic pedagogical situation:

In the ordinary fable-books every object, be it a wolf, a stag, a country-fair, a Heathen God or the grim spectre of Death, is introduced abruptly: and, as few parents, and fewer governesses, are inclined to interrupt their lessons with dialogue, and enter into explanations, the child is early taught to receive and repeat words which convey no specific idea to his mind. [Baldwin, 1805, vol. 1, p. iv]

Rather than the operation of arbitrary power, what Godwin described here is the immediate consequence of an improper relationship between tutor and child. Here, the child is made the recipient of knowledge that can only be regurgitated and not understood, whereas equality and independence require the active understanding of key concepts (here, ‘a wolf, a stag’). So, while Godwin understands that there is an inherent inequality in levels of knowledge and quantities of experience between children and their tutors, his writing is designed to correct this inequality and thereby oppose submission to authority. By contrast, the pedagogical format which Godwin describes in this preface, and which prevents the child from asking questions and instead insists on the repetition of what has been presented by the teacher leads to the thoughtless reproduction of material that is passed down from a position of authority. Instead of fostering independence of thought, then, this pedagogical model leads to the perpetuation of poorly digested knowledge imposed from the top down, consolidating hierarchies of power rather than contributing to dismantling them.

Godwin continued his preface by arguing that the narrative style of his Fables offered a remedy to this situation, without even requiring the active cooperation of parents or tutors (except as clients)9. He wrote:

I have endeavoured never to forget, that the book I was writing, was to be the first, or nearly the first, book offered to the child’s attention. I have introduced no leading object without a clear and distinct explanation. By this means the little reader will be accustomed to form clear and distinct ideas. […] I have intended, as far as I was able, that this volume should surpass most others in forming the mind of the learner to habits of meditation and reflection. [p. iv]

In the presentation of his practice as a children’s author, Godwin thus emphasised the importance of ‘clear and distinct explanation’ to help the child develop the ability to formulate ‘clear and distinct ideas’ which, in turn, help foster ‘habits of meditation and reflection’ necessary to social and political progress. This can be illustrated with the fable of ‘The Mountain in Labour’. The usual version of the story is that of a mountain from which one hears loud noises, which eventually end when a mouse comes out. Godwin recontextualises the story by providing a scientific explanation for the ‘loud and long noise [that] was heard inside of the mountain’. As an introduction to the fable, Godwin provides a description of ‘mountains, which are called volcanic […], which have a fire for ever burning within them’, and which make ‘a terrible noise’ before eruptions occur (Baldwin, 1805, vol. 2, pp. 143–44). This scientific explanation helps ground the narrative, prevents the unthinking repetition of what may seem to the child to be an impossible occurrence. It leads the child on the path to learning, critical thinking, and the questioning of received authorities (see also Hansson, 2020b, pp. 46–47).

Conclusion

Throughout this article, I have shown the different dimensions underpinning Godwin’s engagement with the relationship between political power, both individual and institutional, and education. While this question was a key theme in his thought from his earlier to his later published works, his approach to it differed based on the more immediate political and professional context in which he operated. Between the 1780s and early 1790s, he shifted from thinking specifically about individual relations between teacher and pupil in the Account of the Seminary to a more systemic analysis of the relationship between state power and the education of children in the Enquiry Concerning Political Justice in the context of the French Revolution. As the possibilities for radical, systemic reform dwindled, Godwin turned, in the late 1790s, to a more micro-political level of analysis, corresponding to his revived emphasis on individual reform. This level of analysis was then further refined when he entered the market for children’s books, and moved from educational theory to educational practice. In this respect, Godwin’s children’s books are not simply to be seen as an illustration of his educational theories, but as part and parcel of the development of those theories, enriched by the new reflections consequent to Godwin’s establishment of a commercial venture.

These engagements show that Godwin persistently grappled with key questions concerning the effects of power on the ability of children to become independent adults, free from the shackles of unmerited authority and unquestioned tradition. He argued that state power over education would lead to the unthinking replication of both present prejudices and imperfect state institutions, both of which would be detrimental to social and political improvement. Likewise, his analysis of the psychological effects of the operations of power in the adult-child relationship and his construction of an egalitarian model based, as far as possible, on friendship rather than authority stemmed from his emphasis on the need to foster the development of fully independent adults. These concerns were transferred into his analysis of children’s reading practices in The Enquirer, and eventually were further developed in the material and narrative aspects of his children’s books. What brings all of Godwin’s endeavours together, then, is a fundamental belief in the possibility of progress based on the emergence of truth through critical analysis, something he had already formulated in the first edition of Political Justice. Seeing the failure of this project because of state repression in the 1790s, he shifted to a longer-term project: that of raising critical, independent children who would become critical, independent adults. The sorts of adults, in other words, who would be able to exercise their private judgment adequately to lead society towards improvement, and the dissolution of all forms of illegitimate power and authority.