Full Description
William Godwin's Mandeville was described as his best novel by Percy Shelley, who sent a copy to Lord Byron, and it was immediately recognized by its other admirers as a work of unique power. Written one year after the battle of Waterloo and set in an earlier revolutionary period between the execution of Charles I and the Restoration, Mandeville is a novel of psychological warfare. The narrative begins with Mandeville's rescue from the traumatic aftermath of the Ulster Rebellion of 1641 and proceeds through his early education by a fanatical Presbyterian minister to his persecution at Winchester school, his constant (and not unjustified) paranoia, and his confinement in an asylum. Mandeville's final, desperate attempt to prevent his sister's marriage to his enemy ends with his disfiguration, which also defaces endings based on settlement or reconciliation. The novel's events have many resonances with Godwin's own period.
The historical appendices offer contemporary reviews, including Shelley's letter to Godwin praising Mandeville, material explaining the novel's complex historical background, and contemporary writings on war, madness, and trauma.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction
William Godwin: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Text
Historical Timeline for Mandeville
Mandeville: A Tale of the Seventeenth Century in England
Volume I
Volume II
Volume III
Appendix A: Godwin, "Fragment of a Romance" (1833)
Appendix B: From Godwin, "Of History and Romance" (1797)
Appendix C: Contemporary Reviews
From P.B. Shelley, Letter to Godwin (7 December 1817)
From P.B. Shelley, Letter to The Examiner (28 December 1817)
From Champion (1817)
From [John Gibson Lockhart,] Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (December 1817)
From an Anonymous Response to Lockhart, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (January 1818)
From The British Review and London Critical Journal (1818)
From [James Mackintosh,] The Edinburgh Magazine, and Literary Miscellany (1818)
From Jean Cohen, Preface to French translation of Mandeville (1818)
Appendix D: Historical Background: The Commonwealth, Cromwell, the English Revolution, and the Restoration
From Godwin, History of the Commonwealth of England (1824-28)
From John Thelwall, The Tribune (3 June 1795)
From Godwin, History of the Commonwealth of England (1824-28)
From Gilbert Burnet, History of His Own Time (1724)
Appendix E: Religion and the Politics of Church Government
From John Milton, Of Prelatical Episcopacy (1641)
From John Milton, The Reason of Church Government (1642)
From Godwin, History of the Commonwealth of England (1824-28)
From Samuel Rutherford, Lex Rex (1644)
From William Everard, Gerrard Winstanley, et al., The True Levellers' Standard Advanced (1649)
From Encyclopedia Londinensis (1810)
From Samuel R. Gardiner, History of the Civil War (1889)
From David Hume, "On Parties in Great Britain" (1741)
Appendix F: Ireland
From Laurence Echard, The History of England (1720)
From Godwin, History of the Commonwealth of England (1824-28)
From Godwin, History of the Commonwealth of England (1824-28)
From "Act for the Settlement of Ireland" (1652)
From Godwin, "To the People of Ireland" (1786)
From Godwin, "Ireland" (25 December 1821)
Appendix G: Extreme Phenomena: Cultural, Physical, and Psychic
On War
From Carl von Clausewitz, On War (1832)
On Wounds
From The Complete Dictionary of the Arts and Sciences ... (1764)
From The Works of John Hunter (1835)
On Madness, Dissidence, and Trauma
From Godwin, "Of the Rebelliousness of Man" (1831)
From Philippe Pinel, A Treatise on Insanity (1801)
From John Ferriar, An Essay Towards a Theory of Apparitions (1813)
The Literature of Power
From Thomas De Quincey, Letters to a Young Man (1823)
The Power of the Negative
From G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Nature (1830)
From F.W.J. Schelling, Ages of the World (1815)
From Friedrich Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (1809)
Select Bibliography
