The first modern anarchist wanted marriage abolished, then married Mary Wollstonecraft
William Godwin argued in print that marriage should be done away with. A few years later he wed the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, and the couple lived in two adjoining houses so each could keep their independence, trading notes by servant. Their daughter grew up to write Frankenstein.
Godwin was born in Wisbech on 3 March 1756, seventh of thirteen children in a strict Calvinist family of religious dissenters. At eleven he became the only pupil of Samuel Newton, a harsh Calvinist whose discipline left him lastingly anti-authoritarian, though Newton's Sandemanian creed of reason and consensus stayed with him. Godwin later mocked him as a preacher who damned ninety-nine in a hundred even of Calvin's followers. At the Dissenting Academy in Hoxton he absorbed Locke, Newton and the French philosophes, and the American Revolution turned him from Tory to republican.
He served as a minister until a dispute over communion in 1782 sent him to London to write. He produced anonymous pamphlets, romances and a satirical review of books that did not exist, and he turned down the editorship of a Whig paper to protect his independence. His friend Thomas Holcroft talked him into atheism. After sixteen months of work, and with a publisher's backing, he issued An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice in February 1793, an assault on political institutions that earned him a place among the earliest utilitarians and the first modern anarchists. Within a year his novel Caleb Williams, an early mystery attacking aristocratic privilege, cemented his fame in London's radical circles.
He had first met Wollstonecraft at a dinner for Thomas Paine and remembered hearing too much of her. Her book on travelling in Scandinavia changed his mind: he wrote that it could make a man fall in love with its author. Reunited in 1796, they married on 29 March 1797 once she was pregnant, a step that cost them friends and exposed Godwin to jibes about his views on marriage.
Their daughter Mary was born on 30 August 1797, and Wollstonecraft died of complications on 10 September. Godwin's frank memoir of her helped fuel conservative attacks on him. He later married Mary Jane Clairmont, whom his daughter loathed, and together they ran The Juvenile Library, publishing children's books. Peter Kropotkin would hail him as a forerunner of anarchist communism.
Source: William Godwin
