In the conservative reaction to British radicalism, Godwin was attacked, in part because of his marriage to the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft in 1797 and his candid biography of her after her death from childbirth.

With his second wife, Mary Jane Clairmont, Godwin set up The Juvenile Library, allowing the family to write their own works for children (sometimes using noms de plume) and translate and publish many other books, some of enduring significance.

[3] Shortly following William's birth, his father John, a Nonconformist minister, moved the family to Debenham in Suffolk and later to Guestwick in Norfolk, which had a radical history as a Roundhead stronghold during the English Civil War.

"[10] In 1771, Godwin was finally dismissed by Newton and returned home, but his father died the following year, which prompted his mother to urge him to continue his education.

[11] At seventeen years old, Godwin began higher education at the Dissenting Academy in Hoxton,[12] where he studied under Andrew Kippis, the biographer, and Abraham Rees, who was responsible for the Cyclopaedia, or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences.

[9] Although Godwin had joined the Academy as a committed Tory,[14] the outbreak of the American Revolution led him to support the Whig opposition and, after reading the works of Jonathan Swift, he became a staunch republican.

[9] He soon familiarised himself with the French philosophes, learning of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's belief in the inherent goodness of human nature and opposition to private property, as well as Claude Adrien Helvétius's utilitarianism and Paul-Henri Thiry's materialism.

[15] Throughout 1783, Godwin published a series of written works, beginning with an anonymously-published biography of William Pitt the Elder,[18] followed by a couple of pro-Whig political pamphlets.

[20] A few months later, during the opening of a seminary in Epsom, Godwin gave a politically-charged speech in which he denounced state power as "artificial" and exalted the libertarian potential of education, which he believed could bring an end to authoritarian governments.

[23] Drawing from John Milton's Paradise Lost, which depicted Satan as a rebel against his creator,[19] Godwin denounced the Christian God as a theocrat and a tyrant that had no right to rule.

[24] As his early works were financially unsuccessful, in 1784, William Godwin hoped John Collins, a wealthy owner of a sugar plantation in St. Vincent would fund his writing.

[28] He subsequently reported on the Pitt ministry's colonial rule in Ireland and India; penned a history of the Dutch Revolt and predicted the outbreak of a revolutionary wave in Europe.

[29] After the death of the Political Herald's editor, Godwin turned down Richard Brinsley Sheridan's offer of succeeding to the editorship, out of concern that his editorial independence would be compromised by a direct financial connection to the Whig Party.

[36] In response to Burke, Thomas Paine published his Rights of Man with the help of Godwin,[37] who declared that "the seeds of revolution it contains are so vigorous in their stamina, that nothing can overpower them.

"[38] But Godwin's voice remained largely absent from the Revolution Controversy, as he had started writing a work of political philosophy that developed on his radical principles.

[39] With George Robinson's financial support,[40] Godwin quit his work at the New Annual Register and committed himself wholly to his magnum opus,[41] which he hoped would condense the "best and most liberal in the science of politics into a coherent system".

[42] After sixteen months' work, while the revolution in France had culminated with the execution of Louis XVI and the outbreak of war, Godwin published his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice in February 1793.

[46] After their marriage at St. Pancras on 29 March 1797, they moved into two adjoining houses in Somers Town so that they could both still retain their independence; they often communicated by notes delivered by servants.

They kept alive family ties, publishing the first book by Margaret King (then Lady Mount Cashell), who had been a favoured pupil of Mary Wollstonecraft.

Charles Gaulis Clairmont[62] ended up as Chair of English literature at Vienna University[63] and taught sons of the royal family; news of his sudden death in 1849 distressed Maximilian.

His literary method, as he described it in the introduction to the novel, also proved influential: Godwin began with the conclusion of Caleb being chased through Britain, and developed the plot backwards.

However, Godwin's own reputation was eventually besmirched after 1798 by the conservative press, in part because he chose to write a candid biography of his late wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, entitled Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, including accounts of her two suicide attempts and her affair (before her relationship with Godwin) with the American adventurer Gilbert Imlay, which resulted in the birth of Fanny Imlay.

However, in its influence on writers such as Shelley, who read the work on multiple occasions between 1810 and 1820,[75] and Kropotkin, Political Justice takes its place with Milton's Areopagitica and Rousseau's Émile as a defining anarchist and libertarian text.

Crowds no longer collect together in great and pestilent cities.... Every house is clean, airy, sufficiently roomy, and in a healthy situation.... And the necessary labours of agriculture are shared amicably among all.

The children are sickly from insufficient food.... No human institutions here existed, to the perverseness of which Mr. Godwin ascribes the original sin of the worst men.

Benevolence had established her reign in all hearts: and yet in so short a period as within fifty years, violence, oppression, falsehood, misery, every hateful vice, and every form of distress, which degrade and sadden the present state of society, seem to have been generated by the most imperious circumstances, by laws inherent in the nature of man, and absolutely independent of it human regulations.

In the second and subsequent editions, however, he wrote that widespread moral restraint, i.e., postponement of marriage and pre-nuptial celibacy (sexual abstinence), could reduce the tendency of a population to grow until distress was felt.

Godwin believed that for population to double every twenty-five years (as Malthus had asserted had occurred in the United States, due to the expanse of resources available there), every married couple would have to have at least eight children, given the rate of childhood deaths.

He therefore concluded:In reality, if I had not taken up the pen with the express purpose of confuting all the errors of Mr Malthus's book, and of endeavouring to introduce other principles, more cheering, more favourable to the best interests of mankind, and better prepared to resist the inroads of vice and misery, I might close my argument here, and lay down the pen with this brief remark, that, when this author shall have produced from any country, the United States of North America not excepted, a register of marriages and births, from which it shall appear that there are on an average eight births to a marriage, then, and not till then, can I have any just reason to admit his doctrine of the geometrical ratio.

Although the belief in such a possibility is consistent with his philosophy regarding perfectibility and human progress, he probably dropped the subject because of political expedience when he realised that it might discredit his other views.