William Godwin: his Friends and Contemporaries
Ch. XI. 1824-1832
William Godwin to Mary Jane Godwin, 6 April 1826
“44 Gower Place, April 6, 1826.
“My dear Love,—You are
very wrong in saying I do not want your society, and still more in supposing
Mrs Shelley supplies the ![]()
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deficiency. I see her perhaps twice
a week; but I feel myself alone ten times a day, and particularly at meals, and
after meals, which are the periods at which, from nature or habit, I most feel
the want of a human countenance to look at, and of a human voice with which to
exchange the accents of kindness and sympathy.
“William calls
on me every day. He works for nobody but Stoddart. He is now on Martin’s designs for Milton, of which Septimus
Prowet has requested him to accept a copy. But I do not buy the
papers in which his articles appear. I never know of the papers till
afterwards, and have no opportunity of procuring them.
“There have been no letters from Vienna, or Moscow,
or anywhere else.
“We go on quietly here. I am in good health, and
working. I asked Jane, previous to writing this letter,
how she was, and she answers she is very well now. Everything is smooth; but I
cannot take a frisk, as I used to do with another servant, and give a dinner to
Kenney, or some other fool.
Jane had a visit from Mrs Eamer,
who promises to bring her her things the week after next. She brought you two
presents, a pint bottle of ketchup, and a gallipot of nasturtiums. . . .
“Do not, I intreat you, from any recollection of me,
shorten your visit. It is true, it is not good for man to be alone, and I feel
it so. But I can summon philosophy to my aid, and can have consideration for
some one beside myself; especially when one can take the consolation to
oneself, this will soon be over.” . . .
William Godwin jun. (1803-1832)
The son of William and Mary Jane Godwin; he was a reporter for the
Morning Chronicle who died of cholera.
James Kenney (1780-1849)
Irish playwright, author of
The World (1808); he was a friend of
Lamb, Hunt, Moore, and Rogers.
John Martin (1789-1854)
English landscape and historical painter who illustrated
Paradise
Lost in mezzotint (1825-27).
John Milton (1608-1674)
English poet and controversialist; author of
Comus (1634),
Lycidas (1638),
Areopagitica (1644),
Paradise Lost (1667), and other works.
Septimus Prowett (1747-1867)
London and Worcester bookseller and picture dealer; he founded the London Literary and
Publishing Society in 1826.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley [née Godwin] (1797-1851)
English novelist, daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecaft, and the second wife
of Percy Bysshe Shelley. She is the author of
Frankenstein (1818)
and
The Last Man (1835) and the editor of Shelley's works
(1839-40).
Sir John Stoddart (1773-1856)
Educated at Christ Church, Oxford, he befriended Coleridge and Wordsworth and after
abandoning his early republican principles became a writer for the
Times, and afterwards editor of the Tory newspaper
New
Times in 1817 and a judge in Malta (1826-40). His sister married William Hazlitt
in 1808.
