Text: Burton R. Pollin, “Godwin and Poe,” Discoveries in Poe, 1970, pp. 107-127 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 107:]

7

GODWIN AND POE

IT HAS LONG seemed clear to me that the themes and atmosphere of Poe's tales often resemble those of William Godwin's “nightmare” novels. In many of the tales, the protagonist experiences inordinate curiosity, as in Caleb Williams or St. Leon; manifests jealousy or suspicion, as in Mandeville and Deloraine; indulges in debauchery, as in Fleetwood; or yields to irrational, murderous rage, as in Cloudesley. Often he is isolated from society or finds an unstable adjustment in a doomed marriage, and sometimes, as in the novels of Godwin, he combines the language of rationality with the caprices of madness. It was not a modern study of Poe's works that led me to trace the more exact interrelationship but rather two articles more than a century old. One was by Edouard Forgues in the Paris Revue des Deux Mondes of October, 1846, and the other was in the Edinburgh Review of April, 1858. Since their brief suggestions, however, no attempt has been made to indicate the considerable evidence of Godwin's work and influence in Poe's writings of every type. In contemporary studies of Poe I have found only one brief comment on Forgues's apercu, despite ample acknowledgment of early French contributions to Poe criticism.(1)

Poe himself, it is reported, was much encouraged by the essay of Edouard Forgues in the Revue, published during a particularly despondent period in Poe's career. In 1849 Poe publicized “that justice which had been already rendered me by the ‘Revue Francaise’ and the ‘Revue des Deux Mondes.’ ”(2) Forgues, the French translator of the “Descent into the Maelstrom,” speaks of Poe's characters as “wearing the fantastic livery of Hoffmann or the grave and magisterial costume of [page 108:] Godwin, renewed by Washington Irving and Dickens.” Significantly he rounds off his long article by returning at the end to the connection between Godwin and Poe:

He concludes by referring to common qualities in Poe and Charles Brockden Brown, Godwin's disciple in the novel.(3)

Twelve years later, in 1858, the Edinburgh Review, gullibly accepting the denigrations of Griswold's memoir in the edition of Poe being reviewed, regards the influence of Godwin and Brown as a very dubious benefit to Poe:

It is true that Poe was deeply conscious of the peculiar genius of Charles Brockden Brown, whose inspiration in turn was self-ascribed to Godwin.(5) It is my intention to show that Poe was sufficiently aware of Godwin's many novels and other writings to require no intermediary contact at all, whether it be Brown, Bulwer-Lytton, or others. We shall be concerned chiefly with the long overdue checking of the exact references to Godwin in Poe's writing and the significance of each. We observe, first, that in separate and distinct writings, including tales, criticisms, and letters, Poe alluded to Godwin or his [page 109:] books seventeen times.(6) Many of these are not casual references, but rather the keystones of his criticism, or they are thematic germs out of which develops an entire narrative rationale. They run throughout Poe's mature productions, from 1835 to 1849, and occur in such a variety of works as to demonstrate that Godwin represented for Poe the apex of narrative and stylistic achievement. This was chiefly after Godwin's death in 1836, when he had lost much of his literary credit in England and America, although less in France.(7)

Chronologically — and that will be my approach to this topic — the earliest reference is in the tale “Loss of Breath,” published in the Southern Literary Messenger, September, 1835, although composed much earlier. Poe remarks, “William Godwin, however, says in his ‘Mandeville,’ that ‘invisible things are the only realities,’ and this, all will allow, is a case in point.”(8) It may be assumed that the observation, plucked from the end of Godwin's novel, represents a reading of the entire work by Poe. Echoes of the quotation can be found in “Berenice,” also published in 1835. “Realities of the world affected me as visions ... ” (Harrison, 2.17). The mixture of the real and the unreal, of the world of the imagination and that of detailed, mundane reality, runs through the whole body of Poe's work. It is not surprising to find a strong echo of this very phrase in the preface to “Eureka,” the work that Poe considered his greatest contribution to thought: “To the dreamers and those who put faith in dreams as in the only realities” (16.183). Godwin, too, was a visionary, although he believed in the eventual realization of a different type of dream from those which haunted Poe.

The next item is the review by Poe of the New York (1835) edition of Godwin's Lives of the Necromancers. It was a book of great interest to the British and American public of the day, to judge from extensive reviewing and excerpting and frequent reprints.(9) Poe, with his profound interest in the abnormal and the occult, would naturally have enjoyed reviewing the book and demonstrating some familiarity with works of the same [page 110:] nature. Indeed, his comparison of Godwin's work with Sir David Brewster's Letters on Natural Magic, of 1832, reminds one of his famous examination of “Maelzel's Chess Player,” of April, 1836. Therein Poe was to lean heavily on Brewster's very able presentation of Von Kempelen's device which Maelzel had more recently been displaying.(10)

To my knowledge, no one has given more than passing attention to Poe's review of Necromancers, the last work by Godwin published in his own lifetime. He first remarks:

Here clearly is the implication of wide familiarity with other works of Godwin as well as with critical writing about him. He continues by commenting on his style as having

Poe's interest in style became a trademark of his criticism.(11) It is interesting to speculate whether he knew the essay on style in Godwin's Enquirer (1797), the only portion of the book which Godwin revised in the second edition of 1823.(12) There is no indication that Poe knew about Godwin's Juvenile Library publication of a school text devoted to usage and grammar.

He mentions the “avowed purpose” of Necromancers as being “to exhibit a wide view of human credulity,” quoting Godwin's rationalistic preface, and declares that “we differ with him,” in that “there are many things more curious than even the records of human credulity.” Then he adds that Godwin's [page 111:] fine accounts of the necromancers convince him that human experience has surpassed human credulity in being “curious.” This brief statement suggests one of the fundamental cleavages of purpose in fiction between the two writers and is a reminder that the tracing of hints and inspirational sources does not presuppose an identity of temperament or basic philosophy. He also asserts Godwin's purpose — in which “he has fully succeeded” — to be the display of “the great range and wild extravagance of the imagination of man.” He laments Godwin's prefatory statement that this concludes his literary labor (Necromancers, pp. ‘di — JEW); “The pen which wrote Caleb Williams should never for a moment be idle.” In conclusion, he refers to Godwin's article or chapter on Faustus (Necromancers, pp. 330-358) with an impressive remark that Godwin “very properly contradicted ... the idea that Fust the printer and Faustus the magician are identical.” This pronouncement about an ancient confusion is the sole comment specifically on Godwin's text. It demonstrates Poe's amazing facility in convincingly pretending to more knowledge than was possibly his.

In the same December, 1835, issue of the Southern Literary Messenger, Poe discussed one of the novels of a not inconsiderable dramatist and novelist of the period, Dr. Robert Montgomery Bird, the author of Calvar and The Infidel. In reviewing The Hawks of Hawk-hollow (Harrison, 8.63-73), Poe reveals his awareness of significant traces of Godwin in later works of fiction:

The persecution theme, indicated here, certainly provides enough parallel between the two books to enable Poe legitimately to make the point. It is one which no one, to my knowledge, has made about Bird since this review.(13)

The fourth and fifth references to Godwin concern one book, although widely separated in the dates of publication. In January, 1837, for the Southern Literary Messenger, Poe reviewed Beverly Tucker's George Balcombe (Harrison, 9.243-265), “upon the whole ... the best American novel. Without being chargeable in the least degree with imitation, the novel bears a strong family resemblance to the ‘Caleb Williams’ of Godwin.” This high opinion is borne out in Poe's articles on autography in Graham's Magazine of November, 1841 (Harrison, 15.195), in which he again asserts it to be “one of the best novels ever published in America.” Similarly, he had praised Tucker's “literary character” in a latter to Thomas White, of May 30, 1835 (Harrison, 17.6). Poe's article found the novel to be replete with “ingenuity” and finish of plot (9.265), qualities which he also imputed to Godwin's work. Hence he repeats his basic sentiment about the book, this time summarized as a paragraph for the “Marginalia” in the Southern Literary Messenger of April, 1849 (Harrison, 16.142). This note combines his partiality for Godwin with his antipathy to the Northern critics: “Had the ‘George Balcombe’ ... been the work of any one born North of Mason and Dixon's line, it would have been long ago recognized as one of the very noblest fictions ever written by an American. It is almost as good as ‘Caleb Williams.’ “

In Graham's Magazine of November, 1841, we find a review of Guy Fawkes; or the Gunpowder Treason: an Historical Romance, by William Harrison Ainsworth (Harrison, 10.214222). Here Poe lauds “autorial comment” in a novel, a somewhat [page 113:] surprising view from a writer whose best works embody a clean directness of narration:

Unquestionably, Poe has stressed the quality which has caused Caleb Williams to go into over fifty separate reprints and translations since 1794. This “absorption” of which he speaks is, of course, the element that Poe demanded as the response appropriate to any effective work of fiction and that caused him, eventually, to evolve his theory of the one-sitting work of literature. He is not clear, however, about one phase of the “autorial comment,” in failing to differentiate between novels told in the third person, like those of Ainsworth, and those told in the first person, like all of Godwin's novels and many of Poe's own tales. Since the author and the suffering protagonist are the same, Godwin's comments serve to reveal the underlying motives and heighten the emotional tension of the plot. Ains-worth's remarkable objectivity and clarity of detail, as in the Chat Moss episode of Guy Fawkes, require a technique different from Godwin's.(14)

Yet Poe is right to compare the works of the two authors, even though perhaps for the wrong reason, since Ainsworth's plots involving criminals and pursuits, in a measure, spring [page 114:] from Godwin's novels.(15) Ainsworth might have derived this influence from direct contact with Godwin and Mary Shelley as members of a group often found in Lamb's home, which Ainsworth began visiting in 1825.(16) It is true, however, that Ainsworth's sense of plot construction was markedly inferior to that which Poe attributed to Godwin, even in the opinion of Ainsworth's most adulatory biographers.(17) Poe also deplores Ainsworth's inability to vivify characters who owe their pallid existence, remotely at least, to Godwin's models.

Godwin as a standard of excellence was now firmly implanted in Poe's mind, and one of the last pieces of his writing as editor of Graham's, in the December, 1841 issue, includes a reference to the British author. Poe is reviewing Simms's Confession: or The Blind Heart, a Domestic Story (Graham's, 19.306) and incidentally brings in a more important work by Simms: “ ‘Martin Faber’ did him honor; and so do the present volumes, although liable to objection in some important respects. We welcome him home to his own proper field of exertion — the field of Godwin and Brown — the field of his own rich intellect and glowing heart.” In this item, uncollected by Harrison, Poe shows his association of Godwin not only with the well-constructed novel but also with the novel of strong, even melodramatic emotional tone. Consider the tortured, even grotesque nature of Martin Faber, the novel which evokes this comparison. Poe is quite right, of course, in linking Godwin with his disciples, Charles Brockden Brown and Simms.

Of all the references by Poe to Godwin's works, perhaps the only one which has occasioned any critical notice is that involving the visit of Dickens to Philadelphia in 1842. The story is told in biographies of Poe and Dickens and, in detail, by Gerald G. Grubb.(18) Poe's later use of Dickens's statement about Caleb Williams for the germ of his “Philosophy of Composition” undoubtedly makes it the most significant link between our two authors. Yet even the basic facts of the initial episode have been misinterpreted. The letter from Dickens to Poe, of March 6, 1842, in response to Poe's sending him books and [page 115:]

papers together with a letter requesting an interview, now lost, has become widely known. The last of Dickens's five sentences reads: “Apropos of the ‘construction’ of ‘Caleb Williams,’ do you know that Godwin wrote it backwards, — the last volume first, — and that when he had produced the hunting down of Caleb, and the catastrophe, he waited for months, casting about for a means of accounting for what he had done?” (Harrison, 17.107). Professor Grubb, correctly I believe, surmises that the papers sent by Poe and mentioned by Dickens included the first review of Barnaby Rudge, which Poe had written for the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post, of May 1, 1841, before the final part of the novel had been printed, and that the books sent were the two volumes of Poe's tales. He fails to state, although he implies, that Poe also sent Dickens the long review of Barnaby that had just been printed in the February, 1842, issue of Graham's Magazine, timed for Dickens's arrival. In effect, Dickens's letter includes a specific comment even on the wording itself of Poe's second review. The postulate of Hervey Allen, concerning a fancied similarity between the riots near the end of Barnaby and a scene in Godwin's novel, cited with approval by Gerald Grubb, is not confirmed by an examination of the two works; there is no such similarity.(19) Moreover, it is unthinkable that Poe could have expressed cursory remarks on Godwin in his first note to the literary lion whose aid in publishing his works in England he was planning to seek.

The fact is that even in punctuation and wording, Dickens's letter shows the source of his own reference to Godwin; it lies in Poe's second review which pointedly criticizes Dickens for his lack of power in the “construction” of a novel — a power which Poe preeminently attributed to Godwin. Poe first asserted that “the thesis of the novel [Barnaby] may thus be regarded as based upon curiosity” (Harrison, 11.49). He then pointed out the inconsistency in the maintenance of the mystery and the adventitious use of the riots, which detracted from the horror of the murder story; the reason lay in the lack [page 116:] of a predetermined “particular plot when he began the story.” Its being an example of that misbegotten species, a “periodical novel,” explains this looseness of structure without excusing it, Poe asserts. “Our author discovered, when too late, that he had anticipated, and thus rendered valueless, his chief effect” (11.57). He concludes his long critique by awarding the palm for “construction” to Godwin:

Dickens wrote a gracious response to Poe's rather daring criticism of his narrative approach, in that he refers to God-win's own exposition of how he had sought to preserve the intensity and unity of Caleb Williams. It should be noted that he might have read this explanation in Godwin's preface to Bentley's 1832 edition of Fleetwood, a novel first published in 1805. This was Godwin's first statement. However, Dickens might also have read it in the pages of the very popular Literary Gazette, the periodical of his good friend, William Jerdan.(20) Poe's attention having been called to Godwin's truly startling literary avowal, he could have read it himself in several sources, a few of them more available to him than the English journal. One of them, by its omissions, may have been responsible for a subsequent error in Poe's second presentation of Godwin's statement. We may discount, perhaps, the chance that he might have seen it reprinted in the Paris edition of Caleb Williams, published by Baudry, in English, in 1832. He might have noticed it in the Baltimore Literary Monument, of August, 1839. More likely, after the interview with Dickens, [page 117:] he looked it up in the well-indexed and widely read Museum of Foreign Literature, of Philadelphia, which devoted its pages to reprints of foreign articles and reviews. Strangely enough, the Museum published the London Literary Gazette's reprint of the Fleetwood preface with no explanation of its being a preface to a novel other than Caleb Williams.(21) Poe makes this error as to the novel which bears the preface when he refers to Godwin's account in 1845 and erroneously calls it a preface to Caleb Williams.

Clearly Dickens had stimulated him to considerable thought about Godwin's method of plot construction; Poe contributed a “Chapter of Suggestions” to the annual The Opal, of 1845,(22) in which he says: “Godwin ... has left a preface to his ‘Caleb Williams,’ in which he says that the novel was written backwards, the author first completing the second volume ... and then casting about him for sufficiently probable cause of these difficulties, out of which to concoct volume the first” (Harrison, 14.189). We have seen that the Museum could have misled him about the source of Godwin's statement, but only a careless reading of the letter of Dickens (which refers to the “last volume”) and also of the published account could have made him think that the first edition of Caleb was in two rather than three volumes. Since Godwin's preface actually did make a fine magazine article, in the Literary Gazette, I am inclined to believe that Poe is still working only with Dickens's letter at this time, for he starts his Opal chapter with this statement: “An excellent magazine paper might be written upon the subject of the progressive steps by which any great work of art — especially of literary art — attained completion.” Godwin specifically had told how he had “employed his metaphysical dissecting knife” for the “involutions of motive,” both of his characters and of himself as novelist. It was a preface of respectable length, remarkable for the very objective application of that candor which had been a basic principle of Political Justice. Poe's Opal chapter drives home again Godwin's superiority over Dickens: [page 118:]

Poe could scarcely have linked Godwin with the prolific Bulwer on the basis of Caleb Williams alone. Obviously he had in mind other novels of Godwin, such as St. Leon and Mandeville.

Later in 1844, he reviewed the New York pirated edition of Ellen Middleton by the interesting popular novelist and Catholic philanthropist, Lady Georgiana Fullerton. In his two-paragraph review in the Democratic Review of December, 1844 (Harrison, 16.34), Poe asserts of her work that it has “imagination ... of a lofty order. ... There is much, in the whole manner of this book, which puts me in mind of ‘Caleb Williams.’ “ There is no further explanation of this apparently farfetched comparison, occurring to none of the other critics of the work whom I have read. However, a careful reading of the work itself with Godwin in mind convinces one of Poe's amazing perceptiveness. The contemporaries of this very aristocratic lady — Puseyite in outlook in this strongly theological novel and only two years away from her future conversion to Catholicism — could not dream of such a connection. Yet how Godwinian is the declaration of Henry Lovell, who believes that he controls Ellen's fate through knowledge of her being the accidental cause of the death of her detested young cousin!

Likewise, after he permits her marriage to his cousin: “You lose your victim, but you gain a friend.” Signs of Mandeville's striking ending appear in Ellen's penitent “tears which wash away that fiery mark which has branded so long” her brow, that “mark set on Cain's brows.” This is the smorfia, of Mandeville, which Shelley thought to be one of the strongest effects [page 119:] of the nove1.(23) There is no room to show other very real traces of Godwin in a writer who was well read in the fictions of Scott, Byron, and Maria Edgeworth, in Shelley's poetry, and very likely, in Godwin's novels.(24)

The next reference, unimportant in itself, serves to show how insistently in Poe's mind ran the theme of Godwin's supreme role as an English novelist. In the “Marginalia” of the Democratic Review, also of December, 1844 (Harrison, 16.48), we find a curiously bland quotation about Godwin: “ ‘With all his faults, however, this author is a man of respectable powers.’ Thus discourses, of William Godwin, the London Monthly Magazine, May, 1818.” The very insipidity of the statement convinces one of Poe's entrenched “Godwinolatry,” since he unquestionably coud have found a more entrancing space-filler for his “Marginalia.” Poe is quoting the penultimate sentence of a long sketch of Godwin, originally published in the Monthly Magazine (15.299-302), as Number VI of its “Contemporary Authors” series; it is largely favorable to God-win's originality and “intrepidity,” characteristic praise from the organ of the old “Jacobin,” Sir Richard Phillips, Godwin's publisher. The last part takes exception to Godwin's faults of style, a not uncommon complaint among the contemporary journals, and concludes with the statement quoted by Poe. The quotation makes a tacit assumption that his readers either start out with a prepossession in favor of Godwin or else have read the entire preceding, largely sympathetic article. Poe very possibly did not see it in the Monthly, which he misnames the “London Monthly,” but rather in another of the popular American reprint magazines, the Atheneum, or the Spirit of the English Magazines, published at Boston (3.349-352 [August, 1818]). One suspects that many of the references to the contemporary reviews in Poe's critiques and “Marginalia” come from the two magazines mentioned, although none of his biographers have made this point.(25) Perhaps his regular failure to indicate pages is some slight evidence of that secondary type of extraction. [page 120:]

The importance that Poe attached to Godwin's works may be surmised from his mentioning him three times during the one-year of publication of the Broadway Journal. Of these instances one is at the beginning and another at the end of the weekly series. The first item is in Poe's review of “Poems by Sir Edward Lytton Bulwer, edited by C. Donald Macleod,” in the New York reprint of 1845. Having been initialled by Poe in the Halsey copy, this article was listed by Harrison in his bibliography of Poe's writings (16.372) but carelessly omitted from the text of the Complete Works. My citation comes from the Broadway Journal of February 8, 1845 (1.81):

Now Poe is definite about Godwin's “three or four” novels (in fact, there were six acknowledged by Godwin, plus three early anonymous works). Poe places him in the best company of British authors, including several with whom he will again be linked in 1849. Clearly, he is among the immortals of English fiction, even though the last two names on the list might cause considerable misgiving today. Poe's placement of Godwin directly before Scott might imply his awareness of Godwin as a writer of historic fiction, at least in St. Lean, a book which he had previously mentioned in the review of the Lives of the Necromancers. Perhaps the fourth novel in Poe's mind, beside Caleb Williams and Mandeville, is Cloudesley of 1830, which has several historic elements.

Godwin enters next into a brief review in the August 9 issue of the Broadway Journal (2.74-75), which has been collected by Harrison (12.223-224); it is a discussion of the novel Ettore Fieramosca, or The Challenge of Barletta, an Historical Romance [page 121:] of the Times of the Medici, by Massimo D’Azeglio, as translated from the Italian by C. Edwards Lester, the consul at Genoa. Lester had recently returned to New York City with two works of art that were being displayed at the time with considerable acclaim.(26) After asserting with his usual air of authority and lack of authentication that the novel has been frequently designated by Italian and British critics as “the best romance of its language,” Poe declares it to be “vivacious” but “defective” in lacking “autorial comment.” Again he confirms this by the standard of Godwin:

A careful check in the book itself reveals the justice of Poe's criticism, unless we admit as “autorial” some comments with no psychological depth, which are furnished by D’Azeglio on a few pages.(27)

Poe's third allusion to Godwin in the Broadway Journal of December 27 is one of the last items that he prepared for the magazine, which lasted for only one more issue, probably under the editorship of Thomas Dunn English. Poe here is reviewing the New York reprint of George Gilfillan's First Gallery of Literary Portraits, published in America under the title of Sketches of Modern Literature and Eminent Literary Men: Being a Gallery of Literary Portraits, in “Appleton's Literary Miscellany. Nos. 6 and 7” (BJ, 2.387). The article, which has not been collected by Harrison,(28) deserves complete quotation, especially since Poe himself inserted into the copy that he gave to Mrs. Whitman the marks for special emphasis which are printed in my text below:

Poe's singling out of Godwin is only partly a consequence of the prominence accorded Godwin in Gilfillan's work.(29) The “discriminative criticism” of Gilfillan concerning Godwin declares that he founded a small but distinguished school of writers in England and America. (One wonders whether Poe included himself in this group.) Godwin renounced his more “obnoxious” views before his death in 1836, but will live as a novelist rather than as a philosopher. Surely Poe must have agreed with the characterization of Godwin's fictional personae as “quiet, curious, prying, morbid,” and misanthropical. The second paragraph in Poe's review extols the sketch of Godwin, after he had begun his review with praise of the sketches of Godwin's son-in-law, Shelley, and his friend Byron. As if to highlight Godwin even more for Mrs. Whitman, recipient of the two-volume magazine, Poe side-lines the whole second paragraph of his review and picks out, as for a portrait caption, the last ten words. This is surely a new intensity in his fervor for Godwin.

It was not very long afterward, April, 1846, that Poe expressed a like adulation of Godwin in one of his major critical works. Poe used his indirect rendering of the passage from Dickens's letter on Godwin, which he had put into his Opal “Chapter of Suggestions” in 1844, for the opening of “The Philosophy of Composition.” It is amusing to find Poe inserting into his putative quotation from “a note now lying before me,” a sentence with a few changes which is derived from his own free rendering of the same note in the earlier publication. [page 123:]

This was allowable since he had not acknowledged earlier that he was citing the note from Dickens but had pretended to be citing from Godwin's preface itself. My discussion requires excerpting the first two paragraphs:

The first paragraph obviously almost duplicates Poe's earlier comment save that here it is attributed to Dickens, not to Godwin. It should be compared with Dickens's real statement (see above and Harrison, 17.107), to determine how free was Poe's rendering of the note, despite his initial statement. Most important is his making Dickens say “second volume” instead of “the last volume first,” which implies at least three volumes. Dickens, however, erred greatly in stating that Godwin wrote the book backwards. Poe has by now become disenchanted with Dickens, as letters to Lowell in the spring of 1844 show: for example, “There is an article on ‘American Poetry’ in a late number of the London Foreign Quarterly, in which some allusion is made to me as a poet, and as an imitator of Tennyson. [page 124:] ... Dickens (I know) wrote the article — I have private personal reasons for knowing this.”(30) When Lowell attributed the review to John Forster, the close friend and future biographer of Dickens, Poe stubbornly maintained: “I still adhere to Dickens as either author, or dictator, of the review.”(31) This little episode in disenchantment probably was responsible for Poe's remark, in 1846, that Dickens seems to misrepresent “the precise mode of procedure on the part of Godwin.” Poe is correct, since Godwin specifies it very clearly:

There is a suggestion in Poe's comment on what Godwin “himself acknowledges” that he has once looked at Godwin's statement of procedure; indeed, his further comment on elaborating a plot “to its denouement” before “anything be attempted with the pen” supports this view. Probably he did not have the preface of Godwin's work before him while writing “The Philosophy of Composition” and accordingly devised a somewhat indirect allusion while correcting Dickens in favor of Godwin at the very beginning

This essay Poe regarded as his best “specimen of analysis.”(33) Subsequently, critics have agreed with him, especially because of the clear statement of the need for securing unity through limiting the length of a work; he had, however, approached the idea earlier (Harrison, 10.122 and 11.106). What critics have failed to note is the possibility that not only the whole process of backward composition for the “Raven” can be traced to Godwin's avowal about Caleb Williams but even Poe's emphasis upon unity of effect. Godwin's preface to Fleetwood, [page 125:] of 1832, asserted the advantage of “carrying back” the invention from the conclusion to the beginning. “An entire unity of plot would be the infallible result; and the unity of spirit and interest in a tale truly considered, gives it a powerful hold on the reader which can scarcely be generated with equal success in any other way” (p. viii). To be sure, Poe need not have derived the commonplace idea of the importance of unity of plot from any specific source, but Godwin's preface may have reinforced his conviction and statement.

There is another parallel between the two worthy of attention. After Godwin adds, to the account indicated above, his references to the dedication of spirit in which he wrote Caleb Williams, he apologizes for his “most entire frankness. I know that it will sound like the most pitiable degree of self-conceit. But such perhaps ought to be the state of mind of an author, when he does his best.”(34) Similarly, Poe deprecates the evasive concealment of authors, who prefer the public to think of composition as “a species of fine frenzy,” and he assumes it is perfectly decorous “to show the modus operandi by which one of my own works was put together” (Harrison, 14.195).

Of further specific allusions to Godwin after this major exploitation there were to be two. The first occurs soon after “The Philosophy of Composition,” in a letter to Evert A. Duyckinck, of April 28, 1846, asking whether he or Cornelius Mathews might furnish him with autographs of a number of eminent persons including Godwin and “Mrs. Godwin.”(35) By this last he probably meant Mary Wollstonecraft rather than the relatively obscure second Mrs. Godwin, formerly Mrs. Clairmont. Ostrom suggests that his request was part of his preparation for the “Literati” papers which appeared in Go-dey's Magazine, in May to October, 1846, since the first ten names listed were those of Poe's series. This does not, however, explain the inclusion of those of the deceased Godwin and his wife. Apparently, Poe intended a separate autograph series or a series of literati of the past, among whom Godwin would naturally assume a place.

One final reference to Godwin in 1849, the last year of Poe's [page 126:] life, is chiefly a repetition of the first allusion that he inserted into the Broadway Journal of 1845, when he was reviewing Bulwer Lytton's poems. Now Poe dips into the review for a long entry in the “Marginalia” of the Southern Literary Messenger of May, 1849. The two and a half pages in Harrison's edition (16.156-159) are almost entirely reprinted from the earlier piece with minor changes, mainly to provide transitions; one difference is Poe's elevating Godwin and his literary colleagues above Bulwer, as a novelist, and in associating Godwin with a slightly different set of names. Poe writes: “As a novelist, then, Bulwer is far more than respectable although generally inferior to Scott, Godwin, D’Israeli, Miss Burney, Sue, Dumas, Dickens, the author of ‘Ellen Wareham,’ the author of ‘Jane Eyre, — and several others. Poe has tried to abridge the original review and yet preserve its substance; hence, possibly, the elimination of De Foe, Smollett, Fielding, and Maria Edgeworth. Yet, in those that he includes can be found a significant gauge of how Poe's taste has evolved over a period of four years. For the worthies of eighteenth-century English fiction he has exchanged three new names: Eugene Sue, Dumas, and Charlotte Bronte, only the last of whom offers any real compensation, we are likely to think. We are glad to see Lady Georgiana Fullerton depart and notice that Scott leads the list, one place ahead of Godwin, while Dickens fits between Dumas and Mrs. Sullivan, author of “Ellen Wareham.”

One final point about Poe's great respect for Godwin might be made of an oddly consistent pattern of negative evidence. In all his references to those eminent in philosophy and political economy, Poe unfailingly exempts Godwin from the strictures that he addresses to the utilitarians and the perfectibilitarians, showing that he regarded Godwin as primarily a writer of fiction; even his Lives of the Necromancers has some of the qualities of fictive tales. Thus, despite the fact that after writing Political Justice Godwin was virtually identified with the theory of perpetual progress, Poe, in 1835, scorns as “human-perfectibility” spokesmen Turgot, Price, Priestley, and Condorcet [page 127:] (Harrison, 2.38, “Lionizing”). An allusion is made to the “wild doctrines” of the same four, again without Godwin, in “The Landscape Garden” of 1842 (4.259; also 6.176). Ideas of “universal equality,” “wild attempts at an omni-prevalent Democracy,” and the propriety of the term “improvement” for the “progress of our civilization” are all deprecated in “Monos and Una,” of 1841 (4.200-212), and likewise the idea “of human perfectibility” in the letters of July 2, 1844, to Lowell and of July 10, 1844, to Chivers.(36) Also, in “Monos and Una,” he calls the utilitarians “rough pedants,” following this in 1847 with scorn for Mill as a logician and for his “mill-horse,” Bentham (“Mellonta Tauta,” 6.204). Previously he had called both of them “the most preposterous” among “a priori reasoners upon government” (“Marginalia,” 1844, 16.37). Poe's intense admiration of aristocracy and its chivalric and medieval provenance was also revealed in his unflattering reference to men like Bentham as “worshippers of Mammon” in the age of “joint-stock companies” (14.104).

In short, Poe seems entirely to ignore Godwin's social criticism, even as presented in Caleb Williams: his condemnation of false notions of honor, the advantages over the poor and obscure given by wealth and landed property, and the demoralizing cruelty of legal punishments. Poe's references to Godwin and remarks about his work show clearly that he considered Godwin as a craftsman, whose handling of the plot and atmosphere entitled him to respect. Godwin's use of suspense, morbid psychology, and alienated heroes provides a strong bond between two major writers. It is a bond which is deserving of more thought than has hitherto been given to it.