William Godwin's Diary

Project start date: 2007-09

Project end date: 2010-10

The project provides a digital edition of the diary of William Godwin (1756-1836). Godwin’s diary consists of 32 octavo notebooks. The first entry is for 6 April 1788 and the final entry is for 26 March 1836, shortly before he died. The diary is a resource of immense importance to researchers of history, politics, literature, and women’s studies. It maps the radical intellectual and political life of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as well as providing extensive evidence on publishing relations, conversational coteries, artistic circles and theatrical production over the same period. One can also trace the developing relationships of one of the most important families in British literature, Godwin’s own, which included his wife Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), their daughter Mary Shelley (1797-1851) and his son-in-law Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822). Many of the most important figures in British cultural history feature in its pages, including Anna Barbauld, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles James Fox, William Hazlitt, Thomas Holcroft, Elizabeth Inchbald, Charles and Mary Lamb, Mary Robinson, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, William Wordsworth, and many others. Zoomable JPEG files using Google Maps API created from hi-res TIFF files, but hi-res JPEGs also available for download. TEI P5 XML created by the project is available for download in addition to many xHTML views of it and extracted data tables.