William Godwin: his Friends and Contemporaries
Ch. IX. 1812-1819
William Godwin to Mary Jane Godwin, 30 April 1815
“Manchester, April 30, 1816.
“I received your letter, directed to me at Rydal
Mount, the moment I was going to set off for Kendal. . . . I am all on fire ![]()
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to resume my novel. Would you have the indulgence
for me to have the first volume of ‘Guy Mannering’ in the house against my
return, to serve me, if God so pleases, in the nature of a muse.
“I stopped at Manchester Monday night at the joint
request of Constable and Mr
George Walker, a barrister whom I met at his house, to visit
Thomas Walker, the father of George,
a famous republican of the times of Gerrald, whom I had encountered two or three times at the house
of Horne Tooke about twenty years ago.
This venerable old gentleman lives at Longford, four miles from Manchester, and
I spent a delightful day with him. His wife is not less intelligent, and was
not a less ardent patriot than himself. He was, at the time I refer to, I
believe, the first manufacturer in Manchester, but was ruined in his business
by the party spirit of the period; and Felix
Vaughan, a relation I think of Horne Tooke,
bequeathed him a property, which has improved since so as to render him in his
latter days an independent country gentleman.”
Archibald Constable (1774-1827)
Edinburgh bookseller who published the
Edinburgh Review and works
of Sir Walter Scott; he went bankrupt in 1826.
Joseph Gerrald (1763-1796)
Political radical and member of the London Corresponding Society; born in the West
Indies, he was a pupil and friend of Samuel Parr who was convicted of sedition and died in
Botany Bay.
John Horne Tooke (1736-1812)
Philologist and political radical; member of the Society for Constitutional Information
(1780); tried for high treason and acquitted (1794).
Felix Vaughan (1768 c.-1799)
English barrister educated at the Inner Temple; he was part of the legal team for the
defense in the 1794 treason trials.
Thomas Walker (1749-1817)
Manchester cotton merchant and political radical acquitted of treason in 1794; the police
magistrate Thomas Walker (1784-1836) was his son.
