‘All education is despotism’: William Godwin and the politics of childhood at the turn of the 19th century.
The radical writer William Godwin (1756-1836) is perhaps best known for his 1793 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, in which he advocated the dissolution of all government and the abolition of private property. While his conclusions were radical, he has been criticised for failing to support the social movements that sought to effect social and political change in Britain in the 1790s, preferring the quiet diffusion of knowledge to the tumult of the public gathering. From the late 1790s, as the radical movement faced increasing governmental repression, Godwin looked to children and their education as a source for future political progress. He complemented the parts of the Enquiry Concerning Political Justice that dealt with the subject of education with a series of conversational essays in The Enquirer (1797), and children’s books that he wrote in the first decades of the 19th century.
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