William Godwin: his Friends and Contemporaries
Ch. VII. 1806-1811
William Godwin to Mary Jane Godwin, 5 May 1805
“East Dereham, May 5, 1805.
“I found my mother in bed yesterday, but to-day she rose to breakfast.
There is little satisfaction in seeing her: her intellect is exceedingly
slender: she understood that I was one of her children, but she would not own
that she knew more than that, I mean who I was: and her continual talk was that
she wished me ![]()
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to be gone, for
she had nothing, no provisions, nothing at all, to give me. Her speech is very
imperfect; she calls everything by a name of her own, and changes it often. But
she compared my watch, which she asked me by signs to take out of my pocket,
with hers, though I believe she saw nothing, and showed me a letter of my
sister’s, addressed to her, written about eighteen months ago, and a book
in which Joseph had written the names of
all his children. . . . In the description of my mother, which I wished to make
complete, I purposed to have added, that though her thoughts are imperfect, her
speech, when the visible objects to which it relates are before her, is not so.
She said to me at breakfast this morning: ‘Do not wait no more for
me.’ She walks firmly and steadily, and drank her tea three or
four times with her spoon, which she carries steadily to her mouth without
losing a drop.”
Ann Godwin [née Hull] (1723 c.-1809)
The daughter of the shipowner Richard Hull, she married the Rev. John Godwin and was the
mother of the writer William Godwin.
Joseph Godwin (d. 1825)
The younger brother of William Godwin; he married in 1776, worked as a business agent in
London, and died in debtor's prison.
