William Godwin, English political philosopher, novelist, and essayist, was born at Wisbech, in Cambridgeshire, where his father was a dissenting minister. He was educated at Hoxton, one of the dissenting colleges that had been founded because of the refusal of the established universities to admit nonconformists, and himself entered the ministry in 1778. By 1783, apparently as the result of reading Claude-Adrien Helvétius and Baron d'Holbach, he had lost his faith, and instead took to literature as a means of livelihood. Much that he wrote at this time was hackwork, including three novels, none of which have survived. He did, however, gain some reputation as a political journalist, contributing regularly to such Whig publications as The Political Herald and The New Annual Register.

In 1791 Godwin managed to free himself from hackwork by persuading a publisher to subsidize him while he settled down to a serious...