¹ L. G. Mitchell, Charles James Fox (Oxford, 1992), 111.

² J. A. Hone, For the Cause of Truth: Radicalism in London, 1796–1821 (Oxford, 1982), chs. 2–3; Albert Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty (London, 1979), ch. 12.

³ William Wordsworth, Prelude, X. 692–3.

⁴ Brian Barry, Justice as Impartiality (Oxford, 1995), chs. 1 and 9.

⁵ See Zofia Stemplowska, ‘Doing More Than One’s Share’, Oct. 2011, <http://ethicsin-society.stanford.edu/working-papers/Stemplowska-papers>.

⁶ John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays, ed. John Gray (Oxford, 1991), 15, 2.

⁷ See Godwin’s Preface to Political Justice and his account in his ‘Autobiographical Fragments’, in Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, i, ed. Mark Philp (London, 1992), 44.

⁸ See Gayle Trusdel Pendleton, ‘Towards a Bibliography of the Reflections and Rights of Man Controversy’, Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, 85 (1982), 65–103; Gregory Claeys, ‘The French Revolution and British Political Thought’, History of Political Thought, 11/1 (1990), 59–80.

⁹ The Diary of William Godwin, ed. Victoria Myers, David O’Shaughnessy, and Mark Philp (Oxford, 2010), <http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk>.

¹⁰ Godwin, ‘Autobiographical Fragments’, 49.

¹¹ G. M. Ditchfield, ‘The Parliamentary Struggle over the Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, 1787–90’, English Historical Review, 89/352 (1974), 551–77.

¹² Richard Price, A Review of the Principal Questions in Morals, 3rd edn (1787).

¹³ David Hartley, Observations on Man, his Frame, his Duty, and his Expectations (1749); Joseph Priestley, The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated, being an Appendix to the Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit (1777); Jean-Baptiste de Mirabaud [Baron d’Holbach], Système de la nature (1770); Claude-Adrien Helvétius, De l’esprit (1758).

¹⁴ David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford, 1978), ii. iii. 3, p. 416.

¹⁵ David O’Shaughnessy, ‘Caleb Williams and the Philomaths: Recalibrating Political Justice for the Nineteenth Century’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 66/4 (2012), 423–48.

¹⁶ Joseph Addison, Cato: A Tragedy (1713).

¹⁷ Godwin regarded Malthus’ Essay as the most searching criticism advanced against his perspective, and he met and talked to Malthus at length. He also responded to his work in his Thoughts Occasioned by the Perusal of Dr. Parr’s Spital Sermon (1800); in a subsequent letter to the Monthly Magazine, 10 Nov. 1801; and, when Malthus ignored Godwin’s comments and expanded subsequent editions of his Essay (1803, 1817), with his monumental Of Population: An Enquiry Concerning the Power of Increase in the Numbers of Mankind, being an Answer to Mr. Malthus’s Essay on that Subject (1820). Godwin believed that Malthus ignored the prospects for moral restraint, which, once acknowledged, supported limits on population and undermined Malthus’ own case.

¹⁸ William Hazlitt, ‘William Godwin’, in Spirit of the Age (1825).

¹⁹ British Critic and Quarterly Theological Review, 1 (1793), 317.

²⁰ John Barrell, The Spirit of Despotism (Oxford, 2006), ch. 2.

²¹ Mark Philp, Godwin’s ‘Political Justice’ (London, 1986), 66.

²² See ‘Statistics: People by Year’, Godwin’s Diary, <http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/stats/people.html>.

²³ Pamela Clemit and Jenny McAuley, ‘Sociability in the Diary: The Case of John King’, Bodleian Library Record, 24/1 (2011), 51–6.

²⁴ George Woodcock, ‘Introduction’, in W. Godwin: Selections from ‘Political Justice’, [ed. George Woodcock] (London, 1943), 4; H. N. Brailsford, Shelley, Godwin and their Circle, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1951), 68.

²⁵ e.g. Things As They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), vol. ii, chs. xi–xiv.

²⁶ See John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death (Oxford, 2000); John Barrell, ‘11 May 1794’, Bodleian Library Record, 24/1 (Apr. 2011), 19–24.

²⁷ Godwin, ‘Autobiographical Fragments’, 50–1.

²⁸ Thomas De Quincey, ‘William Godwin’, in Biographical and Historical Essays (Boston, 1887), 337.

²⁹ Godwin, ‘The Principal Revolutions of Opinion’, in Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, i. 53–4.

³⁰ John Thelwall, The Tribune, ii/2 (London, 1796).

³¹ Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’, in Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, i. 112–13.

³² Mitzi Myers, ‘Godwin’s Memoirs of Wollstonecraft: The Shaping of Self and Subject’, Studies in Romanticism, 20/3 (1981), 302.

³³ Bodleian Library, MS Abinger Dep. C.21, fo. 57, repr. in The Letters of William Godwin, i: 1778–1797, ed. Pamela Clemit (Oxford, 2011), 66 n. 1; David O’Shaughnessy, William Godwin and the Theatre (London, 2010), p. x.

³⁴ Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, ii, ed. Mark Philp (London, 1993), 170. See also the ‘1796 list’ in which Godwin tries to identify his seminal influences: <http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/diary/1796list.html>.

³⁵ Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (Oxford, 1993), 247; George Crowder, Classical Anarchism: The Political Thought of Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin (Oxford, 1991).

³⁶ <http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk>; Letters of William Godwin, i: 1778–1797.

³⁷ London, 2009.