GODWIN, William.
Fleetwood: or, the new Man of Feeling … In three Volumes …
London: Printed for Richard Phillips … 1805.
3 vols., 12mo., pp. [iii]-xii, 300; [2], 295, [1, blank]; [2], 242, [4, advertisements], wanting the half-titles; contemporary half-calf and marbled boards, a sound copy but spines apparently scorched, wanting one label, bookplates removed.
First edition of Godwin’s third novel, like Caleb Williams a psychological and philosophical tale intended in some measure as a criticism of Rousseau. Casimir Fleetwood announces at the outset: ‘The proper topic of the narrative I am writing is the record of my errors. To write it, is the act of my penitence and humiliation’ (chapter two).
Fleetwood has much to be penitent about. Brought up according to a ‘natural education’ on an estate in North Wales, he leads a life of dissipation at Oxford where a fatal undergraduate prank involves a puppet. On a grand tour he encounters Monsieur Ruffigny (Rousseau), who returns with him to England. A late-in-life marriage to a younger wife proves difficult, and in a vivid, nightmarish passage, he beats to destruction a waxwork image of his supposedly adulterous wife, having been misled by the insinuations of a faithless cousin, Gifford. They divorce and Casimir goes to France, where he narrowly escapes assassination (by the same Gifford), is reconciled to his wife, and retires to life in the Pyrenees.
Contemporary reviewers were not enthusiastic, but by the time of Godwin’s death Fleetwood had been included in Bentley’s Standard Novels series, and has now been redeemed as a penetrating exploration of the influence of society and experience on character, of obsession and marital abuse, and of British patriarchy.
Garside, Raven and Schöwerling 1805: 33.
